| 1. |
- Ghita, Cristina, 1986-
(författare)
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Technology in Absentia : A New Materialist Study of Digital Disengagement
- 2022
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The rhetoric associated with society-wide digitalisation promises benefits such as increased quality of life, democracy, or sustainability, which point towards normative trajectories of increased automation and digitalisation of nearly all aspects of society. Meanwhile, there is evidence of a disenchantment with digital use, forming a movement that challenges the pervasiveness of digital artefacts such as the smartphone. This kind of scepticism towards digital technologies is currently informing and changing how we assume, understand, and conceptualise technology in our professional and private lives, leading to an emerging trend of volitionally reducing or postponing the use of digital devices – a practice often labelled as digital disengagement. In this dissertation the research lens is directed towards how the disengagement from ubiquitous digital devices unfolds and to what results. Thus, it investigates the productive potential of technology intentionally made absent, repositioning the traditional approach of articulating such absence as a deficit.Drawing on a new materialist perspective of technology use which combines assemblage theory with agential realism, this dissertation explores the search for meaningful technological encounters through a multi-sited ethnographic approach. More specifically, it combines autoethnography, a diary study, interviews, participatory observations, and netnography in which moments of disconnection are observed in order to understand experiences of digital disengagement at individual and collective levels. Through this lens, the performativity, temporality, and productivity of digital disengagement are made visible and analysed. Results show that digital disengagement is not an insular practice, including in its composition a myriad of external components. Digitalisation is shown to be in direct dialogue with practices of digital disengagement through their mutual dichotomic logics. Further analysis of such dichotomies suggests new manners of engaging with technology in which digital use and non-use are entangled, resulting in a novel type of technology engagement called diffractive digital use
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| 2. |
- Glöss, Mareike, 1983-
(författare)
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Technology Encounters : Exploring the essence of ordinary computing
- 2016
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- As computing technology has become a vital part of everyday life, studies have increasingly scrutinized the underlying meaning of computational things. As different devices become interwoven with daily practices and routines, there is a growing interest in understanding not only their functional meaning in computational terms but also their meaning in relation to other non-computation artefacts.This thesis investigates how people relate to artefacts and how their individual values and attitudes affect this relationship. The analysis is based on four ethnographic studies, which look at the richness of ordinary interactions with technology to understand the impact of technology upon practice and experience.The process through which humans develop a relationship to artefacts is framed as a continuous series of encounters, through which the individual constantly reshapes their relationship to things. Artefacts are seen as lines in the mesh of everyday life, and the encounters are the intersections between lines. This approach–grounded in phenomenology and paired with an anthropological understanding of everyday life–reconceptualises understanding of the processes of adaption, meaning-making, disposing and recycling. The work reveals how human relations to all kinds of things–in the form of meaning–is continually transforming. Core to this understanding is the cultural relative essence that becomes perceived of the artefacts themselves. This essence deeply affects the way we encounter and thus interact with technology, as well as objects more broadly. In the daily interaction with computing devices we can observe that computing technology alters the mesh on a different level than non-computational artefacts: digital interfaces pull our lines together, bundle experiences an affect how we encounter the material and the social world. This enables computing devices to have meanings distinct from non-computing technology. To go further, computing is itself a mode of existence – a crucial difference in things that helps us understand the complexity of the material world.
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| 3. |
- Strand, Cecilia
(författare)
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Perilous Silences and Counterproductive Narratives Pertaining to HIV/AIDS in the Ugandan, Lesotho and Namibian Press
- 2011
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Research on Western mainstream media’s framing of HIV/AIDS in the 1980’s, showed that media narratives influenced audiences’ understanding of the epidemic, as well as society’s responses. Subsequently, by analyzing a society’s mass media and its framing of HIV/AIDS, it is possible to explore what understandings are given preferential treatment in that society, as well as explore what social change those narratives indirectly or directly facilitate. Such an analysis is particularly important in Sub-Saharan Africa, the continent most affected by HIV/AIDS and which has struggled to reverse the course of the epidemic. This dissertation has in five separate articles, not only identified and described media narratives on HIV/AIDS and the closely related topic of same-sex sexuality in three countries hard-hit by the epidemic –Lesotho, Namibia and Uganda – but also discussed the potential effects of persistent silences, as well as narratives that are counterproductive to the countries’ ability to respond to their epidemics. The research uses a combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches: content analysis of independent and government-controlled print media products, semi-structured interviews with media practitioners and representatives from organizations that seek to influence the media agenda, as well as analysis of legislative and policy documents.The articles discuss a range of persistent silences and counterproductive narratives on HIV/AIDS in the three countries. Overall, the media is found to largely fail in providing its readers with narratives that contain many of the particular factors – economic, social, cultural, biological, as well as those related to stigma and discrimination –that fuel their epidemics. The research however also finds differences between the countries and the types of media. In particular privately-owned media is found to play important role in terms of acknowledging the existence of same-sex sexuality as well as relevance in relation to HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment services in Namibian and Ugandan.
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| 4. |
- Svensson, Emma, 1982-
(författare)
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Mind the Mind : Strategic Communication in the Swedish Green Party
- 2016
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- An increasingly complex environment and pressure from external publics on organizations to speak consistently challenge contemporary organizations. Strategic communication has been portrayed as offering a method for organizations to handle these complexities and is characterized not only as a rational way to handle problems organization face by centralizing, planning, and controlling, but as inevitable.Contrary to the conventional understanding of strategic communication as being a micro-level action, I recognize in this thesis that organizations’ strategic communication making is socially embedded. Thus, taken for granted ways of engaging in strategic communication play a vital role for what activities are conducted and how. Hence strategic communication is viewed to also constitute a macro-level phenomenon (a ‘strategic communication mind’) that reciprocally interacts with how participants engage in strategic communication making at the micro-level.Using a practice theory lens and an ethnographic approach, I explore how the strategic communication mind and strategic communication making reciprocally interacted in the Swedish Green Party’s 2014 election campaign making by focusing on how the national organization and a local branch, organized for the election campaign, engaged in planning and controlling.In generalized terms, my findings suggest that even though the national organization and the local branch’s campaign making interacted with the strategic communication mind, these interactions were not always reciprocal. Rather, many of their micro-level activities diverged from what both campaign groups’ members expected and desired to do, as well as what the strategic communication mind prescribes. I suggest that it was the organizational and election campaign contexts in which the campaign making transpired that made participants unable to follow the strategic communication mind to the letter. Hence, participants’ invocation of the strategic communication mind in campaign making led to a number of tensions: between centralization and internal democracy, planning and situational coping, strategist control and inclusion, and control and flexibility. Although these tensions challenged the strategic communication mind by hindering a reciprocal interaction, the mind was never deliberately critiqued or challenged by participants of the campaign groups or rank-and-file members, but the tensions kept lingering on.
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| 5. |
- Dahlin, Maria, 1972-
(författare)
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Tro, hopp och IT : Stora och små berättelser från ett förändringsprojekt
- 2008
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Information technology (IT) is often assumed to be a prerequisite for the modern and developed organization, even though IT projects are described as problematic in practice. Starting with this paradox and using a narrative method, this study focuses on how, through their stories, employees of an organization ascribe different meanings to IT.The study, which entailed following an IT project at an insurance company, illustrates how the employees of the organization actively ascribe various and contradictory meanings to IT. On the one hand, preference is given to one grand narrative of IT as a tool in the service of the organization. This grand narrative ascribes the meaning of achieving management, control, and change, which is supposed to help the organization on its way toward a more successful future. Great responsibility is transferred to the technology for attaining the desired impact in the organization, which can backfire, especially against project management as they are hit with demands to fulfill the expectations for IT. On the other hand, employees wrestle to control the project, which they describe as unwieldy and unmanageable. The desired management, control, and change are described as elusive.The IT project has in this way come to be developed in a field of tension between contradictory meanings, where problems and solutions are constructed over time. The employees thus become, to an extent, victims of the meanings they have reproduced, something that can be described as double-edged power. The employees who were the keenest advocates of IT are also those who have the greatest difficulty accepting the failure of the technology to live up to expectations. In parallel, the study illustrates the employees’ opportunities to actively engage themselves in storytelling that complement and challenge the dominating meanings in the organization.
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| 6. |
- Hedman Monstad, Therese, 1973-
(författare)
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Attempts to Bridge the Gaps : Opportunities and Challenges in the Communicative Constitution of Organizations
- 2015
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Globalization and technological advancements continue to challenge contemporary organizations’ aims to balance stability and change. As a response to this challenge, organizations often turn to empowerment and participatory processes. Current research emphasizes the need for enhanced communication in these processes. However, there is a lack of research studying how organizations practically enact this idea that these processes require more communication.This dissertation is aligned with the Montreal School’s CCO perspective and departs from communication theory seen as a dialogic of conversation and text, thus directing attention to coorientation and how organizational members coordinate in organizing processes. Based on this theoretical framework, the study aims to contribute to a better understanding – empirically as well as analytically – about the variety of texts that are a part of communicative initiatives aiming at enhancing communication, encouraging participation and empowerment processes.The empirical material is based on how two organizations explicitly emphasized communicative initiatives throughout each organization’s empowerment process attempts. One organization mainly used workshops to provide opportunities for communication, while the other organization incorporated an interactive video website for the same purpose.This dissertation acknowledges that managers and subordinates are not equally capable of discursively constructing the organization. However, enhanced communication through empowering processes has been shown to facilitate members’ abilities to contribute to the organizing process. Hence, the study combines two theoretical frameworks, the empowerment process model and the Montreal School’s CCO perspective, extending both and thereby accentuating the communication-power relationship.To further explore how conversations and text interact in the case organizations, the study enacts a tension-centered approach, arguing that tensions are produced, co- and reproduced and enacted through organizations’ wills to empower their members through communication. The findings indicate a recursive and reflexive relationship between the empowerment process, coorientation, tensions and participation. In practice, this means that organizational members who have the opportunity to engage in conversations about matters of concern while perceiving themselves as taking part in an empowerment process tend to more actively identify and co-produce tensions. Tensions increase participation and lead to new insights. As members realize the value of their input, this further enhances the empowerment process.
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| 7. |
- Löfström, Anette, 1965-
(författare)
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Implementing a Vision : Studying Leaders’ Strategic Use of an Intranet while Exploring Ethnography within HCI
- 2014
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis investigates an Intranet based leadership strategy. The aims are to follow, describe and analyse an Intranet based leadership strategy through a broad, dynamic and cultural perspective, and to carry out an ethnography-based research process and thereby explore the potential uses of ethnography within human-computer interaction (HCI). The empirical material is gathered from three qualitative investigations in the municipality of Stockholm. The material is interpreted and analysed through the concepts of culture, lifeworld, sensemaking, sense unmaking and trust. Some aspects of leadership are studied as well. The theoretical toolbox is framed by phenomenology and a hermeneutic writing process paired with methods of semi-structured interviews, participative observations, open unstructured questionnaires and the snapshot method. Cultural analysis of empirical results from an ethnographic fieldwork has shown that the time spent in the field can be shortened when ethnography is utilised within HCI. Furthermore, other contributions from ethnography to technology development are the possibility to point out explicit versus implicit symbolic communications and cultural pitfalls for technology developers as well as to support the transformations of cultural values and the content of steering documents into technology development. Ethnographers within HCI can promote designing for trust by exploring how intended users think about this issue. Some recommendations for organisations that aim to use the Intranet as a leadership strategy are also presented as an additional outcome of the results in the study. It is argued that it is of importance to discuss usability versus diversity; that developers of the Intranet tools investigate influential circumstances at local workplaces and that they study the impact of work routines on cultural identification in order to avoid ‘we’ and ‘they’ thinking within the organisation. Moreover, it is important to put a wider effort into the discussion of what happens when the content of a steering document meets practice. It is also questioned whether a vision is the right way to go forward, and it is suggested that it should be clarified what quality development actually means.
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| 8. |
- Löfström, Anette
(författare)
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Intranet use as a leadership strategy
- 2011
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis presents results from an investigation of a virtual leadership strategy, which is utilised in the city of Stockholm. The Intranet is used as a strategic tool to implement a steering document in a similar way among all employees in the organisation. In this frame, features like sensemakings of the distributed information, influences of experienced lifeworlds, circumstances at local workplaces, cultural aspects and technological issues are explored.The investigation is fully qualitative. Interviews have been processed, recorded and transcribed. A survey with open and unstructured questions has broadened empirical results.The aim is to explore opinions towards and driving forces behind taking part of an Intranet based leader strategy and to investigate what circumstances at local workplaces affect the potential success of such a leader strategy.A new interpretation of Geert Hofstede’s work is suggested in future works. This is framed in a cultural model.
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| 9. |
- Lövgren, Daniel, 1983-
(författare)
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Dancing Together Alone : Inconsistencies and Contradictions of Strategic Communication in Swedish Universities
- 2017
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Organizations increasingly use communication as a strategic function to maneuver in a challenging, complex, and demanding social landscape. Based on assumptions of centralized control and planning, the strategic communication concept aims for coordination and consistency of communication. Implied is a view of actors as intentional, rational, and deliberate decision makers. Such a conventional view on strategic communication, however, cannot satisfactorily explain the underlying characteristics of communication practices in contemporary organizations. Nor does it explain how organizational members in their everyday work interpret and relate to such practices.This thesis adopts neo-institutional theory and the translation approach to study how strategic communication operates along an institutionalized recipe for communication that through various translations is reformulated to fit local organizational contexts and preferences of the people occupying these contexts. To illustrate the process of both following and adapting the institutionalized recipe of strategic communication, qualitative and quantitative material on the role of social media in sixteen Swedish universities are examined. The material is generated and gathered through an ethnographically inspired approach and includes: interviews, a six-month observation period, the study of documents, and a content analysis of Vice-Chancellor blogs.The findings show that work with social media is pervaded with inconsistencies and contradictions, but simultaneously relating to a shared recipe for communication. Shared elements for communication at the universities include the purposes for communication, notion of one university and integration. However, in translations people rely on local organizational conditions, personal values, ambitions, and experiences. This produces tensions between: control and independence, centralization and decentralization, and one voice and multiple voices. The findings suggest that translations differ across universities and between communicators on different levels, some being more “true” to the recipe than others. Thus, differences are inevitable, underscoring the issues of managing and controlling communication in the conventional approach of strategic communication. As a result, the empirical and theoretical concept of strategic communication benefits from acknowledging its social embeddedness and local recontextualization.Strategic communication is like dancing to music. Everyone hears the music, but the dance varies with each dancer ́s experiences, ambitions, and opportunities.
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| 10. |
- Svensson, Göran, 1958-
(författare)
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Att förstå mediekritik : Begreppsliga, empiriska och teoretiska studier av svensk mediekritik 1998-2013
- 2015
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Media criticism is studied as a concept, as critical expression and as a force for social change. The concept of media criticism is developed in relation to different forms of critical practice, theory about criticism and critique and as a part of theories about media accountability. Media criticism as a force of social change is approached by exploring concepts for the analysis of social and cultural forms of media criticism.Four kinds of media texts published in Sweden between 1998 and 2013 were analysed to investigate critical expression: television columns, reflective books on journalism written by journalists, debate articles and letters to the editor. They were studied in terms of how they address actors, content and forms of critique and responsiveness. The methodology used was reflexive interpretation mainly driven by insight, but also with an emancipative intention. Qualitative text analysis was the major method used, combined with quantitative content analysis.The concept of media criticism is developed on three levels as normative and institutional, focused on established norms and values, norm shaping and formative, focused on establishing new norms and values and openness and practice, making it possible for many people to contribute to critique. Media criticism can further be specified in three dimensions comprising its intentions, the object of critique and the process of critique. Taken together they establish different forms of criticality in which a communicative intention is seen as essential. The dissertation shows that media criticism should be given a more independent role in relation to the media accountability frame. Critical cultures and practices should be analysed in their relations to accountability cultures and practices. The concepts of institution, formative and formation were used for analysing the social and cultural forms of media criticism, where institutions are understood as the stable forms of media criticism, formatives as the changeable forms and formations as the combination of the two. Criticism and critical practice potentially have an important role to play for change in the media, journalism and society by addressing issues in an open and reflexive way. The approach to media criticism developed in the dissertation is termed critical institutionalism and aims to bridge the gap between critical social science, the sociology of critique and institutional analysis as applied in media studies.
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