| 1. |
- Blomquist, Tomas, 1963-, et al.
(author)
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Ekonomisk styrning för förändring : en studie av ekonomiska styrinitiativ i hälso- och sjukvården
- 1998
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Since the end of the 1980’s Swedish county council managers has been preoccupied with planning and implementing organisational change in order to alleviate the financial problems and to create more efficient production systems. Many of these efforts to change have implied changing the systems for management accounting and control, changes that have been inspired both by market-oriented ideologies and by the governance principles of large corporations in the private sector. Literature on management accounting and control indicates however, that management is unintentionally contributing to the creation of organisational inertia and conservatism. This contradiction is formulated as a change dilemma; ”How can managerial principles that make organizations subject to bureaucratization and inertia be used as important strategies for organizational change?” The purpose of the study is thus to analyze the use of management control systems as organizational change strategies in health care, employing a change perspective on management control.When used as a change strategy, management accounting and control becomes manifest as management control initiatives. Actors handle these control inititatives by organising themselves around the issue at hand. This organising process ends or fades away when there are no need for further attention to the control initiative.Empirical studies were made in the councils of Västerbotten, Sörmland and Uppsala counties. Management control initiatives investigated were performance-related pay, quality improvement work, systematic planning procedures, provider/purchaser-models, downsizing projects and profit center systems.The systems for management accounting and control appeared to structure health care organisations in terms of spatial structuring temporal structuring and actor categorization. The management control initiatives introduced were structured as extraordinary organising processes delimited in terms of space, time and involved actors. Actors in the administrative norm system participated with the intention to change the organisation, while those in the medical norm system aimed at just handling the initiative.Management control initiatives can therefore be seen as passing opportunities to change, passing in the sense that the organising processes are temporary by nature, opportunities in the sense that temporary re-coupling can be used to achieve long-term change. One such opportunity is the formulation of control initiatives; the possibility of using simple and standardized change strategies can be useful, but only if they are also linked to the medical norm system. A second opportunity is the temporary organising processes; if the project form of organising change can also be conveyed to the medical norm system, management control initiatives could result in short, intense courses of events that actually change things. The third opportunity s the recurrent cyc ica pro perties of management accounting and control systems, enabling recurrent activities around the same themes, thereby keeping them alive.
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| 2. |
- Eriksson, Jessica, 1972-
(author)
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Branschinteraktion och institutionell förändring : Omvandling i två livsmedelsbranscher
- 2004
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Studien tar sin utgångspunkt i de senaste decenniernas trend mot avreglering, marknadsintegration och andra politiska åtgärder som syftar till att skapa bättre förutsättningar för konkurrens. Konkurrens antas skapa dynamik och ge olika positiva effekter såsom innovationer, förnyelse och mångfald. Denna studie belyser hur försöken att skapa mer konkurrens inte bara handlar om att ändra formella regelsystem, eftersom även institutionaliserade normer, olika föreställningar om hur man bör interagera, samt beroenden av olika slag, också påverkar interaktionen. Detta betyder att den institutionella förändringen i branscher, utöver formella regler, är av betydelse för att förstå branschomvandling. Analysen baseras på förändringar i två svenska livsmedelsbranscher. Teoretiskt utgår studien från sociologisk institutionell teori. Studien belyser vad branschinteraktionen betyder för institutionell förändring i branscher genom att lyfta fram fyra förändringsprocesser, institutionalisering, anpassning, experimentering och politisering. Särskilt fokus läggs på hur förändringstryck i form av politiska åtgärder leder till dessa processer. Med hjälp av de fyra processerna kan branschomvandling såväl som institutionell förändring beskrivas. Resonemangen leder vidare fram till en dynamisk paradox. Paradoxen utgår ifrån det välkända behovet av både stabilitet och förändring som grunden för dynamik. Politiska åtgärder handlar ofta om en strävan efter förnyelse och mångfald. Detta leder dock till en situation där olika nya produkter, processer med mera konkurrerar om legitimitet. Denna konkurrens leder till försök att skapa legitimitet för det nya, och därmed reducera osäkerheten, både för de konkurrerande företagen och för konsumenter och andra aktörer, vilket ofta understöds av nya politiska åtgärder. Detta begränsar i sin tur fortsatta utrymmet för experimentering. Det kan därför sägas vara svårt att vidmakthålla en kontinuerlig förnyelse och mångfald i branscher till följd av politiska åtgärder. En annan slutsats som dras är att det är kombinationen av konkurrens och samarbete som är av intresse för att skapa ”önskvärd” dynamik, snarare än konkurrens eller samarbete i sig.
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| 3. |
- Larsson Segerlind, Tommy, 1964-
(author)
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Team Entrepreneurship : A Process Analysis of the Venture Team and the Venture Team Roles in relation to the Innovation Process
- 2009
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- New ventures are rather often founded by more than one person. Still, we do not know much about how these venture teams are formed, develop and finally dissolve. The manner in which the venture team roles develop when there is more than one owner is also a neglected area in the entrepreneurship research. It is argued in this thesis that the most prolific way of studying the venture team process and the venture team roles process is in relation to the innovation process. The over-all aim of this thesis is to explore what kinds of theoretical, conceptual, empirical and methodological insights are achieved by studying innovation processes in new ventures in a transformative institutional context, from the team-level of analysis. The empirical materials are a pilot-case (Tetra Pak) and an in-depth extended case-study from the publishing sector in Poland (Proszynski i S-ka, from 1985 to 2003). The method used in the thesis is a retrospective process approach with a phasic analysis of the polyphonical narratives of the experiences of key persons as well as data from archives. In the final analysis, a number of propositions are presented that relate to how the venture team process and the venture team roles process develop over extended time periods and in relation to the innovation process. The conclusions are that the team as a level of analysis helps us to theoretically understand and explain phenomena such as periods of divergence in the innovation process; the process of social commitments in the venture team; and how a venture team develops over time to a balanced and experienced expert leadership team. Methodologically, it is claimed that the polyphonical data collection gives more comprehensive, valid and reliable measurements of the innovation process. Finally, this thesis contributes with a story of the transformation of the Polish society and economy described in an unusual way via employing the team as a level of analysis.
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| 4. |
- Wåhlin, Nils, 1955-
(author)
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Näringslivsledares arbete i nätverk : identitetsskapandets dynamik
- 1994
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This thesis is concerned with the work of business leaders. The interest lies in the holders of positions as Chairpersons, Boardmembers and Managing Directors. This study, however, goes beyond the position holder to consider the actions of actors, as they operate within networks with concurrent multiple business activities. The purpose is to generate knowledge and understanding of the activities and relations of multibusiness leaders involved in managing small and medium-sized companies.Major schools of thought on the manager's job are described. The review relates the scientific debate about different schools and emphasises the need for more inductive research. The call for processual and contextual analysis leads to an epistemological position grounded in understanding through interpretation. The method used in this study adopts such an approach, and thus aims to discover qualities of the studied phenomenon based on social constructivism. Empirical reality is approached by means of intensive studies of a few cases.Case descriptions of the work of multibusiness leaders in the National, Regional, Intermediary, Independent, and Developing Networks are undertaken, where the interaction processes of the different actors are described according to the working life history of the actor, and to the networking and work activities carried out.The analysis is based upon four themes (the actor's 'task legitimacy', 'economic legitimacy', 'idea development' and 'network'). The first two themes have been given the generic term 'legitimacy concept', not only to reflect the interactive and changeable aspects of work, but also to illustrate how work in itself is intimately interwoven in an institutional context. The creation of 'task legitimacy' and 'economic legitimacy' of the leaders is analysed. The analysis of the actors' idea development results in a description of differing visions in the individual networks. This description takes up visions covering long-term industrial leadership, regional co-operative leadership, restructuring leadership, flexible market-adaptive leadership and network-based leadership.In a survey of the existing literature, the role of a leader is seen as one of many managerial roles, a view that is based upon the work of Mintzberg (1973). This study contrasts with the above picture, by discussing a reciprocal dependency between the leader's leadership role and his/her other roles. This reciprocity and concurrency is dealt with by introducing the concept of identity as a theoretical aid, thus reflecting in a more appropriate way the complex and interactive actor.The social identity concept (Tajfel, 1982) is used, in order to answer more profoundly the research questions. As leaders are reciprocally dependent on a network for their own existence, we must both look inward in order to be able to understand at a deeper level the actors' motives, and look outward to be able to look at identity creation in a wider industry context. What I have termed näringslivsledaridentitet (the Identity of Multibusiness Leaders), is a substantial part of this study's findings. The concept is used in order to be able to describe how the actors' inner and outer motives merge in identity creating processes. The actors' different patterns of interaction are absorbed into a composite whole.
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| 5. |
- Nilsson, Ola, 1968-
(author)
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Förtroendeperspektiv på aktiebolagsrevision
- 2016
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- This dissertation is motivated by the circumstance that theoretical discussions of statutory auditing are dominated by the principal-agent perspective. The effect of this has been so pervasive that general assumptions characterising the principal-agent perspective may have become regarded as true. On this basis, there are fears that important decisions, for example, could be made on erroneous grounds, as principal-agent perspectives essentially lack external validity. Critics have pointed out that the basic assumptions of the principalagent theoretical perspective – that individuals always act out of self-interest and that there is a constant risk of opportunism – become too general and need to be made more nuanced. It has been argued that trust, which may be regarded as a contrasting concept to self-interest and opportunism, might be integrated to support external validity. It may also be noted that this term – trust – has become a catchword for describing the significance and role of auditing in the practical discourse. These arguments support the relevance of this dissertation, where the overall purpose is to elaborate on a theoretical perspective on the statutory auditing including trust. This will contribute to explaining and understanding statutory auditing in a way that balances the currently dominant theoretical perspectives on auditing.The dissertation accomplishes this in three related ways building on three parts. The first of these aims to substantiate a theoretical proposition based on trust theory. It focuses on clarifying various dimensions of trust which may contribute to analysing the role and significance of auditing. The second is an empirical study aimed at elucidating auditing from a systems perspective and contains a historical analysis in which texts are used to reproduce and analyse some of the developments on the basis of the theoretical framework. The third is an empirical study which concerns auditing from an investors perspective. It is based on a survey of equity investors in companies listed on the Stockholm stock exchange, and also based on the theoretical framework. The two empirical studies contribute to substantiating the proposition that trust is a concept that should be integrated in theories explaining the role and function of auditing.
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