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- Ahlström, Karin
(författare)
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Managing broad responsibility together in a municipal company : Communication as prophylaxis
- 2024
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Municipal companies are important actors in the pursuit of the goals of Agenda 2030 and are often formally obliged by their owners to work towards achieving these goals, but without jeopardizing ongoing production and the delivery of vital public services. This has, however, shown to be challenging, and managers are often unsure how to develop new ways of organizing to meet such complex challenges and take on broad responsibility. What has been recognized is the importance of collaboration, which is a beneficial and distinct organizational form of its own that creates value greater than what individual organizations can do separately. Such ways of working are, however, hardly straightforward endeavours, since they usually involve members with contrasting goals and approaches, are inclined to fragmentation, and can sometimes even add to the challenges they set out to resolve. The aim of this thesis is to understand the practical challenges associated with collaborative efforts to manage broad responsibility in a municipal company. In response to this aim, responsible managing is studied both empirically and through a research literature review. The purpose of the literature review is to better understand the challenges of managing broad responsibility and what is currently being done to achieve the goals of Agenda 2030 at the municipal level. To understand how responsible managing is accomplished in practice, the enactment of responsible manging is empirically studied in a municipal company over a total of four years. Particularly, two cases have been studied using a participatory research approach: first, the case of a top management team managing responsibly together and second, the case of responsible managing in interorganizational collaboration in a municipal company. For both cases, a theoretical lens is used, resting on a social constructionist and processual-relational ontology, supported by practice-based studies in the communicative stream. This means that attention is focused on communication (both talk and text) in an approach that views responsible managing as a communicative practice, a form of emergent, relational, and situated practice and the means by which responsible managing emerges, is sustained, and transformed. The overall results show how situated communicative practices are influential for preventing the limitation of broad responsibility, fragmentation of the share responsibility, and the deprioritization of obligations over time. Based on this, a metaphor of dental prophylaxis is proposed. By conceptualizing responsible managing as a situated communicative practice and showing how responsible managing may be enacted, this thesis contributes theoretically to the field of organization and management.
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| 2. |
- Ahlström, Karin, et al.
(författare)
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Managing Responsibly Together : How an Obligation is Made to Matter in Top Management Team Work
- 2023
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Ingår i: Journal of Change Management. - : ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD. - 1469-7017 .- 1479-1811.
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The aim of this article is to contribute to research on responsible management by developing knowledge on how managing responsibly together in a Top Management Team (TMT) may be accomplished, thus complementing research in the area that focuses on the work of individual managers. To this end, we mobilize the concept of obligation to characterize what emerges as what a TMT needs to respond to. Having followed the TMT for a municipal company working together in meetings over time, we propose that three accomplishments (making the obligation present, making the obligation enable action and accounting for the obligation) shape how an obligation is made to matter. This is no linear process, but rather it unfolds in a series of materializations of the obligation in text and talk, as the TMT goes about its work. The article thus provides a contribution to research on responsible management but also has practical consequences for developing how a TMT works in order to address the urgent demands for change related to sustainable development.MAD statementIn this article, we develop knowledge on how managing responsibly together may be accomplished in a Top Management Team (TMT). Besides adding to the responsible management literature, we also provide theoretical tools that may be mobilized in order to develop the work practices of TMTs that want to contribute to sustainable development.
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| 3. |
- Alvehus, Johan, et al.
(författare)
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Micro-ethonography : Towards An Approach for Attending to the Multimodality of Leadership
- 2022
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Ingår i: Journal of Change Management. - : Routledge. - 1469-7017 .- 1479-1811. ; 22:3, s. 231-251
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This paper addresses the need for further developing an understanding of leadership as practice in its multimodality by means of theoretically motivated qualitative methods, allowing researchers to come close to the doing of leadership. Empirical studies of this kind are still relatively rare. By articulating a microethnographic approach, we encourage short-term-focused engagements in empirical work and the writing of closed vignettes. Through this, current theoretical developments are connected to recommendations for fieldwork and for writing practices. We thereby articulate one possible coherent and consistent position from which to study the multimodality of leadership and to understand leadership as an accomplishment of direction.
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| 4. |
- Andersson, Christoffer
(författare)
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Digital automation of administrative work : How automating reconfigures administrative work
- 2023
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis is an examination of how digital automation of administrative work unfolds in practice. It sets out to understand how administrative work changes as it is digitally automated and how such changes have wider consequences beyond the performance of specific work tasks. A case study design is used, focusing on digital automation through Robotic Process Automation (RPA) at a Swedish municipality, and the methods to produce data include interviews, observations, and document analysis. The thesis contributes to the body of literature that understands work as practices performed by diverse configurations of social and material elements, a body of literature that spans the fields of organization studies and information systems research. It comprises five papers:Paper I builds a foundation for the thesis by examining the automation process and conceptualizing it as configuring work. This is a dynamic process of mutual reconfiguration of work practice, digital technology, and organizational arrangements through which a new agentive configuration of work is approached. Paper II explores the ways in which a new dichotomy of human and digital coworkers emerges and the role of social responsibility and context for work as a new division of labor emerges. Paper III takes a broader look at the effects of digital technology on the organizing of work and proposes the conceptualization of hyper-taylorization as a way of understanding how the rationale of digital automation technology comes to enhance Taylorism in terms of making work digitally legible, predictable, and controllable. Paper IV shifts the focus again to the ethics of digital automation, utilizing an example from the case study to explore ethical and managerial implications when digitally automating. Paper V is a conceptual paper that aims to conceptualize the thesis's core theoretical contribution, which is to understand digital automation of administrative work as not just a change in how work is performed but a change regarding how knowledge about work is created and the conditions of knowledge creation. Within this framework, “work” is understood as performing an epistemic machineryrelated to the materiality of the configuration that performs work. Thus, The paper concludes that digital automation, at least in technological history, implies an epistemological shift of administrative work towards a more strictly rationalistic way of understanding the world at the expense of a pluralistic set of ways of creating knowledge and understanding the world.The thesis concludes by discussing the implications of this shift and how the political terrain of administrative work comes to be abandoned as it is digitally automated.
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| 5. |
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| 6. |
- Andersson, Christoffer, et al.
(författare)
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Infrastructuring for remote night monitoring : Frictions in striving for transparency when digitalising care service
- 2018
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Ingår i: ECSCW 2018 - Proceedings of the 16th European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work. - : Springer.
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- The question of how to organise for the introduction of a new service involving the interaction of humans and technologies is both crucial and challenging. Convergence between the community of practice using the technology and the design of the technology is crucial for the technology to become meaningful and usable. While processes of convergence are challenging in themselves, they become more complex if several communities of practice are going to use and collaborate around/through the technology. The co-presence of different communities of practice is a common situation when delivering public welfare services. In particular, the development of welfare technology is a context rich in potential frictions, making convergence challenging. By mobilising the concept of transparency, we analyse the process of implementation of remote night monitoring and highlight how transparency is related to different aspects. Such analysis reveals that processes of convergence are related in this context not only to frictions shared with other settings, but also to specific frictions related to matters of concern in welfare services. This leads us to discuss whether digitalised care services can be argued as still having a human side or not.
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| 7. |
- Andersson, Christoffer, et al.
(författare)
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LEADERSHIP AS CARE-FUL CO-DIRECTING CHANGE : A PROCESSUAL APPROACH TO ETHICAL LEADERSHIP FOR ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE
- 2023
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Ingår i: Organizational Change, Leadership And Ethics. - London : Taylor and Francis. - 9781000776164 - 9780367477493 ; , s. 83-96
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Bokkapitel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This chapter makes the case for a processual approach to understanding ethical change leadership in order to develop a more fine-grained understanding of how leadership matters. It starts with a vignette taken from current empirical studies on digitalization, leadership, and organizing. This vignette is utilthere isized as an illustration of the theoretical argument made. The argument is presented in three steps. First, the vignette is reread and some critical questions as posed. Second, it delves deeper into the perspective that leadership may be understood as a process, and what this means for understanding leadership for change. Third, a processual conceptualization of ethics that is not centered on individuals, but focused on what is produced, re-produced, and not-produced in the doing of leadership for organizational change, is presented. This leads to the introduction of the concept of care, and propose the idea of care-ful co-directing change.
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| 8. |
- Andersson, Christoffer, et al.
(författare)
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Our new digital co-workers : How introducing an RPA changes the relational fabric of work
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Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Workplace technologies today not only support work but also perform it. Whereas the general debate often focuses on quantitative effect in terms of possible jobs lost, what is still largely missing is how workplace technologies impact the quality of employee’s work-life, in particular for office and administrative work. By mobilizing the literature conceptualizing work as accomplished in digital/human configurations, in this article we aim at unpacking how introducing digital automation technologies may lead to repositioning the human worker at work. We study the very start of introducing an RPA in a Swedish municipality with an ethnographic sensibility. Building on close readings of three episodes, we discuss how such the human/digital emergent configuration produced a re-distribution of categories of tasks and responsibilities and, consequently, a dichotomous distinction between human and digital co-workers. This means also a changing fabric of relationships supporting work, which could be characterized in terms of asymmetrical co-workership.
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| 9. |
- Bruzzone, Silvia, Senior Lecturer, et al.
(författare)
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Supporting and Studying Organizational Change for Introducing Welfare Technologies as a Sociomaterial Process
- 2022
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Ingår i: Frontiers in Psychology. - : Frontiers Media S.A.. - 1664-1078. ; 13
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Welfare technologies (WT) for older people is a rapidly expanding sector that offers a way to tackle the challenge of an aging population. Despite their promise in terms of advances in care services and financial savings, their use is still limited. Their design and implementation remain problematic, as they require changes in working practices through coordination among a multiplicity of actors. In order to address these challenges, the need for change is often expressed in terms of a lack of working methods appropriate to their scope. This has led to a proliferation of different toolkits, guidelines, models, etc.; however, these methods often imply a linear understanding of an implementation project and thus fail to take into consideration the emergent and situated character of the processes that lead up to the adoption of welfare. The aim of this article is to propose an alternative means of providing support for the introduction of these technologies by initiating a process for organizational change. The term "change" is understood here as something that is produced by practitioners-in collaboration with researchers-and not brought by researchers to practitioners. To this end, using the tradition of intervention research as inspiration, a learning process at the crossroads of different practices and objects was initiated. The center of attention of this article' is the sociomaterial process by which different communities of practitioners interact on the co-creation of a checklist. This is a new working method in which the focus is not the artifact in itself but how it emerges through successive interactions and iterations among different objects, practitioners and researchers, resulting in a joint sociomaterial process that reconfigures power relations and the work objective associated with WT. In other words, a new working method artifact is developed in a process in which practitioners, researchers and contextual objects interact and become one with each another.
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| 10. |
- Clegg, Stewart, et al.
(författare)
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Changing Leadership in Changing Times
- 2021
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Ingår i: Journal of Change Management. - : ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD. - 1469-7017 .- 1479-1811. ; 21:1, s. 1-13
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This leading article is setting out to Make a Difference (MAD) through catalysing the further exploration and development of leadership theory and practice by facilitating the reimagining and reframing of challenges and solutions ahead. It does so by integrating the academic concerns of the current literature with the issues raised by recent events marked by the cataclysmic end of the Trump presidency in the United States.
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