Organisation

Brand orientations in the public sector

Public organisations increasingly follow a brand orientation. They view themselves primarily through the lens of branding, spend resources on communicating what they do, and specifically on creating attractive and legitimate images of themselves.

Our research aims to generate a systematic analysis of organisational and societal consequences – productive as well as destructive – of the processes and outcomes of a brand orientation in public organisations. This is done through qualitative case studies of city organisations in Sweden and in the United States.

Leadership and functional stupidity in organisations

Our researchers study structures and processes in organisations and how these contribute to or against various outcomes, with a specific focus on lack of rationality and thoughtfulness in organisation.

Our research is known by its critical awareness and empirical depth. It adds insights about problems and possibilities in managerial work and leadership. It gives input to better understandings and encourages more reflective managerial and organisational practices.

The concept of functional stupidity and the understanding of this phenomenon ­– limited thinking and acting outside a narrow set of assumptions and prescriptions – can encourage resistance and broader reflection, and lead to more thoughtful organisational work and better performance.

The meaning of work

How is the meaning of work experienced? Which types of meaning do employees see in their jobs? How does it affect employees to work in jobs that are not experienced as very meaningful? These are some of the questions addressed in this field.

In surveys, the meaning of work is usually measured employing a couple of questions whereby many conceptual nuances are lost.

Managing healthcare by numbers

The project ‘Managing Healthcare by Numbers’ investigates what happens in everyday work when it is managed by multiple forms of quantified control. Designed as an ethnographic case study, the project explores how numbers figure in daily work, how control by numbers affects work practices, and the implications for central goals of healthcare, especially quality of care.

Gamification and serious play

The term ‘gamification’ refers to the application of game-elements to non-game contexts, most notably the sphere of work. While incentives, rewards, and competition between employees have long been a part of normal organisational life, gamification involves the implementation of digital platforms to turn mundane business activities in fun, goal-oriented tasks.

Trust, identity and ethics in the financial sector

The purpose of this project is to examine how management and employees make sense of the large scale trust crisis within the financial sector. The past years has propelled an increased interest in institution-based trust, business ethics as well as the role of identity in overcoming crisis, yet we still lack insights to the way management and employees in-situ understands and acts when faces with a crisis of moral character. This project addresses these issues with a longitudinal case study of a bank currently working to re-establish trust toward its key stakeholder after its worst trust crisis to date.

Learning and knowledge provision

A number of research projects relates to this research theme, such as:

• The knowledge strip: The art of communicating and collaborating beyond ivory tower and market stalls through comics.
• Beyond the market stalls and ivory towers: A study on integrated science for sustainable provision of knowledge.
• Learning how to internationalize in practice – a case study of how local national firms from emerging markets acquire large multinational firms.

Trust-based public management

We conduct research on trust as a coordination mechanism and administrative philosophy for the public sector, in Sweden referred to as trust-based public management. This line of research includes studies on professionalism, distributed leadership, psychological safety, employee empowerment and co-creation of public services.

Sociology of science organisation

Science is an important institution in society, yet under strong and growing pressure from the populist questioning of expertise, bureaucratization and politicization, and the influence of business management ideology (including quantitative performance evaluation) on universities.

With basis in institutional theory and a historical view on the science-society interface, this line of research concerns various aspects of the transformation of publicly funded science and its role in society.

Managing, organising, and working at night

In this project, we investigate what is going on in and around organisations when it is getting dark outside. In organisation and management studies, daytime is usually considered the implicit and exclusive standard when developing theory on organising, managing and working. However, working at night is becoming normalized in many areas in our 24/7 societies.