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- Erlandsson, Ann
(author)
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Det följdriktiga flockbeteendet: : en studie om profilering på arbetsmarknaden
- 2005
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Despite ample research showing the importance of corporate reputation in recruiting, knowledge about how companies work with employer branding is still limited. This first academic study in this topic is based on a comprehensive empirical data set systematized to a description of employer branding using a grounded theory approach. The description illustrates a process with three phases: brand input, brand support, and brand evaluation. Each phase is related to the messages enclosed in the brand. A comparative analysis of the empirical description and marketing literature shows that the underlying reasoning in branding at the labor market is quite similar to branding at the customer market. However, several important differences were also highlighted, indicating that employer branding is a multi-disciplinary phenomenon. The most surprising difference is a widespread homogeneity in the companies’ employer branding. This contrasts the emphasis on uniqueness in the marketing literature. A further analysis of this finding generated four homogenizing dimensions: time, industry, geography and corporate demographics. Each contains a number of corporate populations with companies similar in the dimension’s point of reference. Since the dimensions are not specific for the labor market a further analysis of the theoretical arguments for heterogeneity and homogeneity was motivated. This shows that there are economic as well as social arguments for both homo- and heterogeneity. From an economic perspective a heterogeneous employer branding creates a cost advantage, because with an attractive unique reputation a company can pay lower salaries than competitors for a given position. On the other hand a homogeneous branding generates cost advantages when the company benchmarks competitors or respects the institutional norms. From a social perspective a heterogeneous branding contributes to a distinct corporate identity, while a homogenous branding avoids social isolation. Consequently, homogeneity provides advantages that heterogeneity does not and vice versa. Companies therefore level the arguments. The balance is more likely to lean towards homogeneity when 1) the companies belongs to the same corporate population in one or many of the homogenizing dimensions and 2) a branding component relatively easily can be benchmarked or is connected with explicit and strong institutional norms. The balancing act signifies that a homogeneous branding is not a product of institutional determinism, but that the corporate populations give rise to different social identities and that the companies according to a logic of appropriateness act in a way that is rational given their specific situation and context. Thus, this logic creates coherent cohorts.
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| 2. |
- Iveroth, Einar, 1976-
(author)
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Leading IT-Enabled Change Inside Ericsson : A Transformation Into a Global Network of Shared Service Centres
- 2010
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The purpose of this thesis is to explore—from a managerial perspective—how IT-enabled change is designed, led, and sustained from-within an organisation. This is an issue of central concern because there is a considerable lack of research that directly incorporates IT in management and organisational change studies. In addition, earlier research has recurrently focused on abstract theorising, aggregated perspectives, and exploring organisational change from the outside, from-without. Consequently, the present body of research provides limited knowledge of how organisations in practice lead large-scale IT-enabled transformations. The thesis herein sets out to explore this question, and does so by following the change designers and agents of the telecommunications company Ericsson, that transformed its finance and accounting unit from a highly decentralised structure into a shared service centre structure (SSC) entitled: “The Global F&A Transformation Programme”. The formal transformation lasted three years, was enabled by an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, and was driven in the majority of Ericsson’s sub-units situated in more than 140 countries. Theoretically, this thesis addresses the research question: how do actors and structures influence large-scale IT-enabled change? The principal finding of the thesis is a four-stage analytical framework built on the concepts of common ground, common meaning, common interest, and common behaviour: The Commonality Framework for IT-enabled Change. The value of the framework is that it depicts the interplay between actors and structures on a micro-level. In doing so, the framework explains the different levels of complexity in a transformation and how they require different structures to be used, different activities to be performed, different skills to be applied, and different roles to be played. The framework can be used by both academics and practitioners to develop, assess, and improve IT-enabled change projects. In a broader perspective, the findings further suggest that change comes about as an upward spiral, within which the moving targets of IT and organisation are intimately interconnected. This reciprocal interconnectedness between IT and organisation across time implies that if changes are done to technological properties, this necessitates changes to the organisational properties, and vice versa. Organisations at the hands-on-level more or less have to change to make use of the IT-enabled advantages. Thus, successful IT-enabled change is more than the technology artefact per se, and requires thoughtful attentiveness not only to the technological and material side, but also to the organisational, social and human side of change. The theoretical contribution of this thesis is the in-depth exposition of different aspects and interplays between the properties of actors and structures from-within the organisation. The empirical contribution is the description of how contemporary multinational organisations initiate, lead, and sustain large-scale IT-enabled change.
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| 3. |
- Börjeson, Love, 1973-
(author)
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Förtroendets Organiseringsmetod : samarbete, svek och dilemman
- 2011
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)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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| 4. |
- Hansson, Jörgen, 1943-
(author)
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Köp av tjänster för ledningskompetens - en polyfonisk process
- 2010
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The thesis´ aim is to deepen the understanding about what shapes and characterises the purchase process for management advice services. Such externally, acquired services have increased substantially, and in relation to the services´ impact on management decisions the theoretical and practical understanding of the purchase process is lagging behind. The thesis´ analyses, interpretations and conclusions are founded on empirical data collected by use of focus groups, and based on activity theory. The findings show that the purchase process is influenced by many actors who see themselves as subject in the process. They have similar but also conflicting objects that they want to fulfil. The outcome of the purchase process is influenced by contradictory opinions among the actors about how to organize and supervise the process. The main contradictions are influenced by the actors´ different objects and how they interpret the context of the purchase process. The context is shaped by such as leadership style, social rules regarding management of change and opinions about division of labour in the purchase process. The impression of the purchase process´s character is that commonly used supply chain models do not work as a characterization. The purchase process´s phases do not follow on each other and the glue that links the phases is not a rational procedure following one, firm route. The findings show that procurement, integration and follow-up phases overlap, are concurrent and integrated in each other. The purchase process reproduces the execution of polyphonic music in which different voices, each with its own melody, create a rich texture of sounds. In a similar way the purchase process is coined by actors who bring their own objects and competence into the process. It produces dissonance, as in polyphonic music. It mirrors the services character of competence development and shapes the purchase process as polyphonic rather than a rational, step by step process.
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| 5. |
- Vaigur, Peter, 1978-
(author)
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Samarbete mellan individualister : Reklamproduktion i prat och praktik
- 2014
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The focus of this dissertation lies in the complicated power struggle between supplier and client in knowledge work; the orchestration of the collaboration’s interaction process in a socially and politically relevant way; and the construction, management and maintenance of various images of collaboration – “the asymmetrical”, where one of the parties dominates, and “the symmetrical”, where both parties are on equal footing. The dissertation shows when, where, how and why the orchestration of the interaction process works.In order to answer the research questions, the development of advertising campaigns is examined, creating an example of contemporary work and knowledge work. More particularly, one of Sweden’s larger advertising agencies (Reklambyrån) is examined, when they produce advertising together with three of their clients (Dagligvaran, Kapitalvaran and Klädföretaget). The various types of data material consist of forty-one (41) interviews (or talk about), eighty-six (86) meeting observations (or talk in) and twenty-five (25) shadowings (or practice). The data collection was conducted over a time period of 70 weeks.The dissertation considers knowledge work in general and advertising production in particular as a balancing act between distance and proximity. One creates advertising, but also – or perhaps mainly? – one manages the relationship with both the co-workers and the counterpart in terms of distance and proximity; with the co-workers in terms of individual-collective and with the counterpart in terms of asymmetrical-symmetrical. The examined work is, as implied in the title of the dissertation, a collaboration between “individualists”, in other words people who maintain an arm’s length between themselves and both their co-workers and their counterpart, at least in theory/talk. A theory/talk that is hard to maintain in practice.“The individual” in relation to the co-workers and “the asymmetrical” in relation to the counterpart, in other words the distance, is created for legitimacy reasons, whilst “the collective” in relation to the co-workers and “the symmetrical” in relation to the counterpart, in other words the proximity, is created for efficiency reasons. The advertising, in turn, is created in the stress field between these two forces.
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