| 1. |
- Funke, Michael, 1966-
(författare)
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Regulating a Controversy : Inside Stakeholder Strategies and Regime Transition in the Self-Regulation of Swedish Advertising 1950–1971
- 2015
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis concerns the development of the self-regulation of advertising in Sweden from 1950 until 1971. Self-regulation was initiated in the 1930s due to a business desire to regulate fair competition in marketing, and while it initially was a minor operation, the 1950s and 1960s were characterized by extensive development. When self-regulation was overtaken by state policies in 1971, it included several interlocking systems, of which parts survived the introduction of the state regime. The thesis’ aim has been to analyze how the rapid regime transitions in the self-regulation regime can be understood.The existing literature identifies four major transitions that occurred during the studied time period. To understand them, the thesis has studied the policy processes leading up to these transitions. Focus has been on the business interest organizations that controlled the regime and their regulatory strategies. Theoretically, the analysis has departed from the hypothesis that tensions between these organizations, due to their members’ different market interests and varying levels of exposure to regulation and public badwill, to a significant degree informed their strategic choices as well as policy outcomes.The results show that the policy processes preceding the regime transitions were characterized by internal tensions, whereby organizations representing advertisers, and to a lesser degree media carriers, due to their members’ higher level of exposure to regulation and public badwill, successfully supported stronger market policing, while ad agencies, being less exposed, as well as a peak industry organization for the proliferation of marketing largely opposed such measures, preferring a more lenient regulation. However, due to increased exposure to regulation and bad will, the ad agencies finally abandoned their opposition and took the lead in regulatory innovation through the introduction of an extensive clearance program that survived the launch of the state regime, becoming a key component in the co-regulatory structure that followed.
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| 2. |
- Borghei, Benny Behbood, 1980-
(författare)
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Incumbent Actors in Sectoral Transformations Towards Sustainability : A sociotechnical study of the European heavy commercial vehicles sector
- 2018
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Industrial sectors need to be transformed in response to the increasing demands for environmental sustainability as one of the greatest challenges in the modern times. In social science research, extensive efforts have been made over the recent decades to formulate comprehensive theories about transformation of various sectors such as energy, manufacturing, agriculture, food and transportation. Accordingly, ‘sustainability transitions’ have emerged as a research field dedicated to the study of far-reaching sociotechnical transformations.Understanding sectoral transformations and how different actors can get involved in sustainability transitions are in the heart of these efforts. Of particular importance is the involvement of industry incumbents that hold established positions and considerable amounts of knowledge, resources, and technological competence built upon vigorous structures of the existing industrial setup. This in turn calls for more attention to the role of incumbents to actively participate in the transformation of established sectors towards sustainability.However, despite the potentials to get involved in processes of transformative change, incumbents are often neglected in transition theories, and their role is predetermined to resist the change. Incumbents are widely black-boxed as a homogenous group of actors to the extent that they are conceived as a single entity whose predefined role is to act as the guardians of the existing structures and defenders of the status-quo. While there are legitimate concerns about the power of incumbent firms, such one-sided views do not offer an inclusive approach in formulating multi-actor processes for sustainability transitions. Therefore, the purpose of this thesis is to contribute to a more comprehensive theorization on the role of incumbent actors in sectoral transformations. The main research question is formulated as follows: how can incumbents act to facilitate sectoral transformations towards environmental sustainability?In answering this research question, the thesis offers an alternative perspective to the dominant view about incumbents in sustainability transition theories. It challenges prevailing assumptions by providing empirical evidence from the heavy commercial vehicles sector in Europe. The research findings show that incumbents are able to adopt various technological strategies ranging from incremental innovations with highly coordinated actions for reducing emission levels based on the established technologies, to the adoption of radical technological choices for introducing alternative propulsion technologies in the market. In fact, the strong position of incumbents can sometimes enable them to introduce radical innovations in established markets. The research findings also indicate that incumbents can act as learning agents or knowledge repositories to overcome the problem of isolation for new technological innovations by transferring knowledge and technologies over the boundaries of time and space. Moreover, incumbents can facilitate diffusion of radical innovations and ramp up the adoption of new technologies through standardization at the industry level. In addition, incumbents from a range of different sectors have been recognized as integrators for the development of new technological solutions that span over traditional boundaries. Hence, new industrial sectors can emerge through the integration of knowledge and technologies from various established sectors, and incumbents are at the heart of the integration processes due to their knowledge and familiarity of the established sectors.Finally, the theoretical implications from the thesis invite transition scholars to reconsider the role of incumbent actors in sustainability transitions, while the practical implications suggest that policy-makers need to pay more attention to the diversity of technology strategies of incumbent firms and their alignments for sectoral transformations towards sustainability.
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| 3. |
- Gustafsson, Peter, 1994-
(författare)
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Ships, clouds, and waves : understanding ecosystems in traditional industries
- 2024
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This dissertation builds on a jointly phenomenological and theoretical approach to investigate how traditional industries face challenges related to ecosystem innovation. Phenomenologically, it investigates how innovation within the shipbuilding industry affects the activities performed by firms that have traditionally filled the role of suppliers to shipyards. Innovations in digitalisation threaten to upend long-standing relationships and, as a result, have a substantial impact on the structure of the industry, which has a long history of intense competition, long industry cycles, stable products and services, and dependence on global trade. Theoretically, this dissertation is positioned in the growing literature on ecosystems, which takes a particular interest in how innovation creates new interdependencies between actors, interdependencies that need to be aligned for value to materialise. Through this literature, we have an understanding of how innovation can enable new forms of value to reach end users, how firms can orchestrate such activities, and how new entrants can draw on innovation to threaten established industries. However, we have yet to fully consider how ecosystems emerge and are orchestrated in industries characterised by preexisting interdependencies and latent ecosystem structures and the role of complementors in this process.These issues are examined through four research papers that build on each other to investigate different aspects of the emergence and orchestration of ecosystems in traditional industries. This research follows an abductive approach, meaning that through iteration between data and theory, new results have been generated. The data for the studies are drawn from two case studies within the shipbuilding industry. The papers present four main findings: first, the emergence of ecosystems is significantly impacted by preexisting interdependencies, particularly incentives to innovate and regulatory dependence. Second, these preexisting interdependencies lead to complementors taking a leading role in innovation that spur the emergence of new ecosystems. Third, this is carried out through market and nonmarket strategies as firms must engage with each other and international organisations. Fourth, the preexisting interdependencies also lead to collective orchestration which requires significant internal coordination to successfully perform but allows for market actors to have greater influence in regulatory matters. I arrive at these results by drawing on insights from resource dependence theory, collective action theory, and corporate political activities.
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| 4. |
- Wendell, Joakim, 1976-
(författare)
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Teaching and Learning Historical Explanation : Teacher and Student Cases from Lower and Upper Secondary History
- 2020
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The purpose of this thesis is to investigate and analyse how teachers and students understand the concept of historical explanation in the context of classroom teaching practices. The thesis is made up of four studies that investigate different aspects of understanding, focusing on either teacher or student understanding as expressed in words and actions. The different studies employ differing methods, including classroom observations, interviews with teachers, and analysis of student answers to prompts intended for assessment. The studies include cases from both lower and upper secondary school in Sweden. The four studies provide empirical results that are presented in each individual study, and furthermore subjected to an aggregated analysis in order to find patterns of commonality. The aggregated analysis draws upon Rüsen's theory of historical knowledge, as well as a progression model for historical explanation based on results from previous research. The results of the study show a clear difference between lower and upper secondary school in how students at each stage construct historical explanations, indicating differing expectations of what students are supposed to do with explanations in each stage. Teachers' practices are more varied: while a majority of the included teachers manifest a disciplinary understanding of historical explanation, in line with previous research about historical explanation in educational contexts, other approaches with other emphases are also present. These include an emphasis of learning explanations as sets of facts, as well as approaches that aim for making the knowledge of historical explanation useful outside of the history subject. Examples of such aims found in the study are to enhance empathetic understanding of other people, and helping students to orient themselves in relation to present-day issues.
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