| 1. |
- Persson Osowski, Christine, 1978-
(författare)
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The Swedish School Meal as a Public Meal : Collective Thinking, Actions and Meal Patterns
- 2012
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The aim of this thesis is to study what role the Swedish school meal has as a public meal in Swedish culture. An additional aim is to study the meal patterns of children, including the school meal.An ethnological questionnaire with 192 informants was used to study people’s perceptions and memories of the school meal. The school meal was seen as part of the Swedish welfare state, but also as a second-class meal, which did not live up to the ideal, which was a meal with the same values as a meal served at home.Observations in school canteens (25 hours), interviews with the school meal staff (six informants) and focus group interviews with children in grade 4-5 (seven groups with a total of 52 children) were carried out at three schools in central Sweden. Firstly, the data was analysed as to how the teachers interacted with the children in relation to the pedagogic meal. The teachers took on three different roles: “the sociable teacher role”, “the educating teacher role” and “the evasive teacher role”. Secondly, the children’s understanding of food and meals in the school meal context was analysed. The results showed that the children used ideas from the adult world among their peers in the school meal situation. This included the implementation of institutional commensality, the telling of stories about food and the classification of foods in dichotomies.A questionnaire covering the meal patterns of the children and intake of some snack foods was also distributed to the children attending grade 4-5 at the three schools and their parents. Matched pairs (n=147) were analysed for agreement. Most children had a regular meal pattern, and there was general agreement between child and parent reports, except for sweets and chocolate.The expectations on the school meal are high. At the same time, there appears to be a social construction depicting the school meal in a negative way. In order to come to terms with the negative public view of the school meal, the social construction of the school meal needs to be addressed.
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| 2. |
- Johansson, Anna, 1975-
(författare)
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Societal risk and safety management : Policy diffusion, management structures and perspectives at the municipal level in Sweden
- 2013
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This compilation thesis investigates risk and safety management at the Swedish local governmentallevel. It sets special focus on municipal implementation of overall international and nationalstrategies and objectives regarding holistic, cross-sectorial and multi-strategic risk and safetywork, and the prevention of accidents and injuries.The overall aim for this thesis have been to empirically map and provide an overview of theadministrative structures for, and the prevailing management perspectives applied in the societalrisk and safety management in Sweden, as well as to study the diffusion of strategic intentions forthis area down to the municipal level.Three different sources constitute the thesis empirical base: two different set of official planningdocuments, written by Swedish municipal officials on commission of the local politiciansand one set of data from a survey investigation with municipal officials representing differentdepartments/functions. The documents were investigated using content analysis, while datafrom the survey were analyzed using statistical measures.This thesis provides through its empirical works an outlook on the general characteristics andarchetypical features of the Swedish local level’s administrative structures and managementperspective on risk and safety management; and proposes a municipal typology and a set of valuecharacters for allocation and institutionalization of risk and safety-tasks. This thesis also suggestsa conceptual framework for overviewing risk and safety management’s systemic steering elementsin its framework report. Based on the findings made, it seems as if the local level’s compliance tothe strategic level’s ambitions for the risk and safety area is hindered by practical implementationdifficulties and that much work remains in order to reach stated strategic objectives regardingholistic, inter-sectorial and multi-strategic management approaches, and preventive risk andsafety work.
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| 3. |
- Kurdve, Martin
(författare)
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Chemical Management Services from a Product Service System Perspective : Experiences of fluid management services from Volvo Group metalworking plants
- 2010
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis analyses fluid management services (FMS) in metalworking industry and determines environmental and economic outcomes of FMS as compared to traditional, in-house, fluid management. Fluid management services, or as it is often called chemical management services (CMS), mean that the suppliers of chemicals are also involved in managing and maintaining the fluids in the use phase. Usually one supplier is responsible for managing all the different fluids on a site, but the management may be restricted to some processes or fluids only
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| 4. |
- Wihlman, Thomas, 1949-
(författare)
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Innovation in Municipal Welfare Services
- 2014
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis investigates, analyzes and discusses innovation efforts and the use and understanding of the innovation concept and related policies in municipal welfare services. There are two main themes in the study, policy and practice. It is based on interviews with employees and managers in four Swedish municipalities. Also, an analysis of related policy documents on both a national and local level was done. Methods used were document analysis, thematic analysis and critical discourse analysis.The results indicate differences between management levels in the view of innovation and what was achieved. Senior managers stressed the importance of innovation, but experienced obstacles in the form of old structures, ways of working, and employees lack of time for innovation. Employee innovations achieved were accordingly not acknowledged.Middle managers and employees experienced opportunities for employee-driven innovation (EDI). However, barriers such as time and lack of internal communication existed. The study suggests that an excessive control, insufficient empowerment and limited autonomy for employees may be of hindrance for innovation.Local authorities stressed the importance of innovation in strategic documents, but the dynamic resources of the municipalities were not used to support and develop innovation.Innovation procurement was prominent in central governmental policies, but concrete elements were otherwise missing. The documents were also influenced by New Public Management, for example on control and efficiency.Research on welfare services innovation is limited. The study contributes with an understanding of the challenges management meet and knowledge of what barriers and opportunities employees experience for their taking part in innovation. It also raises several fundamental questions about innovation in welfare services, such as if a different approach to innovation in welfare services may be needed as compared to other sectors or if innovation is less important in this context.This study develops welfare sector innovation research, from empirical knowledge to concept development and a better understanding of the conditions for innovation in welfare services. Further research is needed, addressing the question how innovation, if at all, ought to be managed within the context of welfare services.
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| 5. |
- Andersson, Mona, 1948-
(författare)
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Välfärdsektorn, en arena för makt och motstånd : Studier av sjukvård och hemtjänst
- 2014
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Today there is a growing interest in research on concrete practice within organizations, which has implications for the understanding of how performance management works. New control ideals are often introduced in an organizational and socially embedded practice, where taken for granted assumptions about what is right and wrong or good and bad actions are already established. Governance can ideally be seen as an interaction between structure and actor, where the former both guides and limits the conduct of the latter. However, in this thesis I can show that local actors can act differently and exhibit resistance in interactions with their superiors, thus they are not as passive as the ideal assumes. The theoretical framework is based on Giddens' structuration theory that stresses there is a dialectical relationship between structure and actor. (New)institutional theory contributes to get insights into the participants' behavior and that meaning is shaped by wider institutional influences.The empirical data in this thesis consists of two studies; an inter-organizational care chain project and a study in assisted living. Both studies were carried out as case studies where qualitative interviews, observations, and various official documents have been used. In the care chain project the aim is to produce knowledge about how a change process has been undertaken to promote the development of a seamless chain of care between different healthcare providers. The assisted living study examines how the interaction between actor and structure manifests at three critical events. Within the work units (the actors) knowledge and practices are established, based on care ideals. Economically administrative ideal (the structure) is based on a hierarchical approach in which goals and metrics are linked to budgets, activities and standards and where decision-making is decoupled from the actual work. This decoupling can make the work more clearly measured, monitored and streamlined, thus keeping players accountable for their actions and achievements. The actors are seen as cogs in a machine rather than as insightful and engaged. Therefore they are assigned to an inconspicuous place in the framework that the financial administrative ideal has determined. This ideal is the cornerstone of New Public Management (NPM) and holds the private sector as a model in terms of management, steering and control of a business. Although local actors can exhibit resistance towards this ideal, they still are limited by its authoritative power of determining the allocation of resources.
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| 6. |
- Backlund Björke, Andreas, 1978-
(författare)
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Waves of fashion : The consuming production of management control
- 2011
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The responsiveness of organizational leaders regarding suggestions related to various managerial techniques has led to the coinage of the ‘management fashion’ idiom. It has been convincingly argued that phenomena like management control systems are prone to trends, and that such trends permeate into the daily life of managers through the use of persuasive rhetoric. This thesis is a theory-generating study of change in management control systems. More precisely, its purpose is to seek an understanding of how fashions within the field of management control emerge through processes of interaction and co-production. By asking the question “how do the forces involved in the shaping of a market for management control systems interact and combine in order to create management fashions?” the thesis seeks to generate a comprehensive conjecture on the management fashion setting process. The thesis is based on an empirical case study completed with extensive literature readings. In order to generate theory, a methodology based on abductive reasoning has been produced. Theoretically, the thesis borrows from micro sociological theory on imitation and co-production but extends also into such fields as psychology, aesthetics, rhetoric and economics; aside from the obvious management control and management accounting themes. The thesis concludes by producing a comprehensive model of the management fashion setting process. The contribution of the thesis can be understood as either providing an alternative to or completing the dominant interpretation of the phenomena. The main difference between the arrived at suggestion and the prevailing interpretation is the role of the actors which is changed from norm following consumers of fashion to creative producers of fashion. This change represents a change in scientific traditions and necessitates the adoption of additional frames of reference when studying management fashion phenomena.
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| 7. |
- Blomberg, Helena
(författare)
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Mobbning, intriger, offerskap : att tala om sig själv som mobbad i arbetslivet
- 2010
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis is a study of bullying narratives, mainly co-produced in a process of ongoing interaction. The focus is on how narrators rhetorically organize their storytelling and identity work by using discursive resources. The empirical material consists of 12 interviews with, and 12 written stories by people who have been exposed to workplace bullying plus information from three websites about bullying, and previous research. The overarching aim of the study is to identify how a bullying discourse is produced, reproduced, challenged and negotiated in bullied persons’ narratives. Specific aims are to determine how bullying is portrayed publicly, how narrators with experience of being bullied build their stories, how the narratives stand in relation to victimization, what makes it possible to talk about vulnerability and what are its limits, and finally to develop a narrative approach.Theoretically and methodologically, the study has its basis in narrative analysis, discursive psychology, conversation analysis, and metaphor analysis. The study shows how the narrators categorize themselves as active, competent, and consensus seeking. They resist being victimized, but by their use of the interpretative repertoire and a standard story of bullying, they nevertheless become indirectly victimized. What’s at stake, in the narratives, is the question of guilt, which they rhetorically evade by the use of different metaphors. These metaphors depict bullying as a mystery, a lifelong source of suffering, a transformation, a learning experience, a battle, a contagious virus, and a trap. The narrators are constrained by the narrative conditions, the interpretative repertoire, standard story, and narrative form and content – a story of good and evil when creating their own story. The narrative conditions at the same time set the limit for expressing oneself in the identity work. This also means we are part of the production and reproduction of the bullying discourse when I, as a researcher, and the narrators use the repertoire and the standard story in mutual understanding.
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| 8. |
- Börjeson, Love, 1973-
(författare)
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Förtroendets Organiseringsmetod : samarbete, svek och dilemman
- 2011
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Firms tend to engage in interorganizational relationships (IORs) to an increasingly large extent. IORs are however problematic. On one hand, they entail expectations of continued possibilities. On the other hand, they entail expectations of complete explicitness – business partners simply expect intentions to be transparent and fixed. Co-workers in IORs manage these expectations with trust: in the context of IORs, trust is both a promise of continued possibilities and explicitness. Continued possibilities require changeable intentions however, making explicitness hard to maintain. The given promise is consequently very hard to keep, and the result is accusations of betrayal. The management method of trust is comprised by dilemmas originating from a complex interplay between strong ideas about what to (and not to) do and the dynamics of IORs. This could be described as an interplay between ideology, cooperative situations and dilemmas of practice. Ideology is investigated using corpus linguistics and functional grammar applied on concordances extracted from academic articles about Trust and the contrasting terms Control and Betrayal. Cooperative situations are investigated using correspondence analysis applied on an indexed interview material. Underlying interviews concern IORs, and informants come from a broad sample reflecting different types of firms, industries and professions. Dilemmas of practice, finally, are represented by in-depth interviews with individuals whom possess rich experience of IORs. The interviews are transcribed in detail and analyzed using functional grammar. Results show that IORs are profoundly dilemmatic and that co-workers use trust as a mean to bridge the dilemmas of IORs. Result also reveals that dilemmas of IORs have an ambiguous quality; dilemmas are not just a problem that needs to be handled, but to an equal extent a resource that can be used for deliberation and decision. In the management method of trust, dilemmas are as inevitable as they are indispensable.
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| 9. |
- Crevani, Lucia, 1977-
(författare)
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Clearing for Action : Leadership as a Relational Phenomenon
- 2011
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Although leadership is deemed to matter, scholars seldom pay attention to the phenomenon itself, as it is happening. Hence definitions abound, but there is a lack of vocabulary for expressing what leadership is about without ending up talking of individual leaders and/or descriptions of abstract “goodness”. Such an idealised and individualistic construct of leadership has consequences, both in theory and practice, in terms of providing a reductionist account, segregating and putting people in hierarchies, reinforcing the dominance of masculinities, and constraining how leadership is to be performed. Therefore, in order to contribute to our still limited knowledge of leadership beyond ideals and individualised conceptions, the purpose of this thesis is to add to our understanding of leadership as a social phenomenon going on at work and to contribute to developing a vocabulary for it.Reading the empirical material more and more closely, produced through an ethnography-inspired approach at two Swedish organisations and consisting of transcripts of interactions and interviews, the initial research question, “how is leadership shared in practice?” is subsequently modified and different strands of theories are applied: shared leadership, postheroic leadership and a radical processual view of leadership. In this way, different understandings of leadership are analysed. As a result, the theoretical concepts of organisational becoming, relational leadership and work practices are combined in an alternative approach. Two leadership practices are thus identified: constructing positions and positioning, and constructing issues. Such an analysis also leads to an alternative way of understanding leadership: leadership as clearing for action. Clearing is both a space, a bounded space, and an action. Therefore it expresses a relational perspective in which there are no stable entities, by suggesting a more dynamic view, at the same time as it also conveys the idea that we are talking about a constrained space.I thus define clearing for action as an emergent bounded aggregate of actions and talks that become possible, making others impossible or less probable. Actors and their worlds are constructed in certain ways that expand or contract the space of possible action. The result is a specific reading of leadership to add to the field of leadership studies. In this reading, leadership is an ordinary, repeated, social achievement at work in which possibilities for action and talk are constructed in constrained terms.
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| 10. |
- Dahlkild-Öhman, Gunilla, 1945-
(författare)
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Att börja tala med barn om pappas våld mot mamma : Radikalt lärande i arbetet med vårdnad, boende och umgänge
- 2011
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis explores the scope for children’s voices offered to children in court mandated investigations regarding custody, residence or contact. The focus is on children who have been exposed to their father’s violence against their mother The aim is to study how the legislators’ intentions concerning children’s participation in this area are implemented in work groups. The assumption is that implementation can be seen as collective learning. Implementation may in this case challenge established relations of power like age and gender orders. Professional discourses on violence have to shift from gender neutral to gendered discourses and discourses on children have to include a participation discourse. Learning which includes a shift in discourses and challenges established power relations is defined as radical learning.The approach is social constructionist and draws on group interviews with social workers specialized in family law.The thesis analyses which discourses of violence and of children are accessible and used at group level. This can be seen as a discursive opportunity structure. The discourses in question are: gender violence, child protection, treatment and family law discourses as well as care and participation discourses. The conclusion is that all these discourses are accessible to the professionals and the effects of the different discourses are discussed regarding the possibilities for creating a safe situation for mother and child during the investigation.The thesis furthermore analyses the organisation of the work groups. These characteristics can be seen as an organisational opportunity structure. The analysis shows different patterns in the groups when it comes to structure and stage of learning process. One group seems to be at the stage where the members are prepared to start talking to the child about the father’s violence.The final chapter presents a discussion of radical learning and the possibilities for radical social change when established power relations are challenged.
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