When neighboring disciplines fail to learn from each other: the case of innovation and project management research

As knowledge production becomes more specialized, studying complex and multi-faceted empirical realities becomes more difficult. This has created a growing need for cross-fertilization and collaboration between research disciplines. According to prior studies, the sharing of concepts, ideas and empirical domains with other disciplines may promote cross-fertilization. We challenge this one-sided view. Based on an analysis of the parallel development of the neighboring disciplines of innovation studies and project management, we show that the sharing of concepts and empirical domains can have ambivalent effects. Under conditions of ideological distancing, shared concepts and domains will be narrowly assimilated − an effect we call ‘encapsulation’ - which creates an illusion of sharing, while promoting further self-containment. By comparison, reflexive meta-theories and cross-disciplinary community-building will enable a form of sharing that promotes cross-fertilization. Our findings inform research on research specialization, cross-fertilization and effectiveness of interdisciplinary collaboration

Social networks and organizational similarity: an analysis of similarities in chairperson remuneration among Sweden's publicly traded firms

This article argues that information about di!erent social networks can supplement more economically based explanations oforganizational conduct, thus yielding more precise predictions about organizational behavior. This study "nds that "rms tend to remunerate their chairpersons more similarly when the "rms are part ofthe same social network. Furthermore, the results show consistently that multiple networks operate as channels ofsocial in#uence that a!ect organizational behavior. The implication ofthe "ndings is that social embeddedness is a factor that has to be taken seriously in any attempt at explaining the rationale for a "rm's conduct in a group of "rms belonging to the same system.The research reported here is supported by funds from the project “Structural Dynamics and Diffusion Processes in Swedish Business Life”, financed by the Bank of Sweden's Tercentenary Foundation. I am also grateful to the Swedish Foundation for International Cooperation in Research and Higher Education (STINT)

Divergent Organizational Change in Hospitals: Exploring how hospital leaders and employees can contribute to successful outcomes.

This thesis consists of three papers that aim to increase our understanding of how divergent changes to organizational structures and management systems in hospitals may be handled by leaders and employees in order to achieve outcomes that contribute towards organizational goals of service quality improvement. Reforms, new policies and the continuous large- and/or small-scale changes aiming for service quality improvement that they manifest in within hospital organizations have been identified as a move away from professional dominance and autonomy, and a move towards a health care system where managerial and market logics are influential. These changes have challenged the organizing principles of professional power in decisions regarding hospital organizational structures and management systems, and professional services are increasingly subject to organizational reform, budgetary control and managerial supervision. Organizational changes that break with existing institutions in a field of activity are defined as divergent. Despite decades of managerial logic initiatives, health care organizations are still heavily influenced by the professional logic. Introducing changes that are based in a managerial or market logic into the work of health service professionals could therefore be considered as divergent, and potentially conflictual, organizational change which would be met with resistance rather than readiness for change and willing participation. We know from previous research that quality improvement initiatives in hospitals very often fail to produce the intended results. We also know that involving health care professionals in processes aimed at improving hospital services is widely considered as a critical factor for achieving goals of quality improvement. However, the most widely documented reaction to divergent change from clinical staff is resistance or active opposition to new arrangements, and this is often identified as the reason for failure in achieving the improvements that change projects aim for. There are few studies of successful outcomes of divergent changes in health care organizations. There are also few empirical studies of professional engagement in such organizational change efforts. This means that there is an identified need for studies that shed light on how successful outcomes occur in a variety of contexts and related to a variety of different types of changes, as well as for more in-depth research on how divergent changes may be handled by hospital leaders and employees in order to achieve outcomes that contribute towards organizational goals of service quality improvement. This thesis raises the two following research questions: How are frequent organizational changes in hospitals and middle manager change-oriented leadership related to organizational and employee outcomes relevant to hospital service quality? How can hospital leaders and employees contribute to processes of implementing divergent changes to organizational structures and management systems in order to achieve outcomes that contribute towards organizational goals of service quality improvement? The first question is answered by Paper 1, titled “Changing to improve? Organizational change and change oriented leadership in hospitals.” The second question is answered by Papers 2 and 3, and an overall discussion of the findings from all three papers

Reduced working hours and stress in the Swedish social services

Background: Since a financial crisis in the 1990’s employees in the Swedish public sector have suffered from work stress and related consequences such as long-term sick leave. Reduced working hours has long been debated in Sweden as a possible way of improving psychosocial health, and was therefore empirically evaluated in a large, quasi-experimental trial in four public sectors; care and welfare, call centers, technology, and the social services. Working hours were reduced by 25 percent and workload reduced in proportion to this, and employers received financial compensation in order to be able to hire temporary extra staff. Social work in Sweden has been identified as a particularly exposed and vulnerable part of the public sector, subject to problems with employee retention and stress-related disorders. Therefore a specific study was made of social workers during the trial, in order to contribute to the scant body of research on interventions that may reduce work-related stress in social work. Aims: Study I explored the effect of reduced working hours on stress, symptoms of exhaustion syndrome, and related work-characteristics, in the participating social workers. Study II studied the impact of reduced working hours on stress, stressful situations, work and free-time stress, coping behaviour, situational reactivity, and burnout symtoms, at one of the participating social work agencies. Study III explored the experience of the social workers at the same agency, in relation to work-life balance, social work and everyday recovery choices. Study IV evaluated the impact of reduced working hours on stress and sleep in all four participating public sectors, with a particular focus on sleep. Study V examined employee time use, and the effect on total workload and time for recovery, in all four sectors. Methods: Studies I-V all used data collected during the reduced working hours trial, which had three measuring points: one at baseline, and two whilst participants in the intervention group were in the reduced working hours condition. Two extensive surveys were administered at each data point, covering a vast array of measures examining psychosocial health, both in terms of individual dimensions and the work environment itself. One of the surveys was constructed in in a diary format, where respondents filled out the same measures for seven consecutive days. Study I used multiple regression to analyse the social workers that remained per protocol at the end of the trial (n = 127), using both the questionnaire data and the diary survey data. Study II used concurrent mixed-method, collecting data both in the form of structured interviews based on principles from cognitive behavior therapy (n = 15), and two surveys only administered at the particular social work agency studied (n = 29), the MBI-HSS and ELSS. Study III used structured interviews (n = 12), performed at the same agency, and analysed with qualitative content analysis. Study IV used multilevel mixed models (n = 580) and the survey diary data from the trial to analyse stress and sleep in all four participating public sectors. Study V also used multilevel mixed models (n = 636) and diary data to analyse time-use in all four sectors, reported by respondents in a half-hour format that covered time awake and asleep. Results: Study I found positive effects of reduced working hours in social workers on demands, instrumental manager support. Work intrusion on private life, restorative sleep, stress, memory difficulties, negative emotion, sleepiness, fatigue and exhaustion improved on both workdays and weekends, and sleep quality on weekends. Study II found positive effects of reduced working hours in social workers in burnout, specifically reduced emotional exhaustion, and reduced reactivity in stressful situations. The interviewed described stressful work situations centered on lack of time due to high caseload; emergencies, practical setbacks, deadlines, client aggression, managerial interactions and managerial stress. The stressful home situations described also centered on lack of time; meeting friends, household chores, childcare, practical setbacks, experiencing burnout symptoms. In study III the interviewed social workers to varying degrees described a variety of positive experiences, such as feeling more positive anticipatory emotions when going to work, and going home, improved relationships with colleagues, clients, children, romantic partners, siblings and parents, reduced worry over work and private life, perceived lower risk for burnout, and more time for recovery activities. Study IV found improved sleep quality, reduced sleepiness, stress, worry and stress at bedtime on workdays and days off, in all four public participating sectors, and increased sleep duration in the intervention group during workdays. Study V found that all participants in the four participating public sectors that reduced work hours increased the time they used for relaxing hobby activities and domestic work during workdays, and for free-time activities on days off. Their total workload also decreased and more time was spent recovery activities on workdays, regardless of gender or family status. Conclusions: Stress was reduced, and sleep and work-life balance improved, in all studies that examined these aspects. A daily recovery pattern common to all four public sectors was found, fully compatible with the recovery strategies the social workers described in their interviews. Regardless of public sector, reduced working hours seemed to alleviate stress. This is theoretically supported by well-established theories, which suggests that the intervention reduced stress through reduced demands, reduced workload, reduced exposure to stress, decreased allostatic load, increased control over private demands, improved recovery, more informal social support and positive changes in work-life balance, recovery, mood and sleep. As for social workers, symptoms of exhaustion syndrome improved, as well as work-life balance, but few organizational dimensions. Professional coping behavior in social work was described as effective and problem-focused at both full-time and during reduced working hours. Stressful social work situations were described as improved due to reduced exposure to work stressors and improved recovery, rather than changes in work content or context, and all time conflicts off-work as resolved. The social workers’ experience of work-life balance focused on improved mood and recovery. Reduced working hours seemed to function as a preventive intervention for social workers, which seemed to affect quality of care, facilitate emotion work, and support professional longevity. For on-work recovery to improve, the high caseload described by the interviewed social workers would likely need to be reduced, which future studies of reduced working hours in social work should explore

Participatory Instructional Design: a contradiction in terms?

This dissertation is an inquiry into the apparent absence of participatory approaches in instructional design (ID). It explores the question what happens when ID becomes participatory? with the help of three articles. The first article proposes a new approach in ID called Participatory ID, which incorporates principles and techniques of participatory design (PD), a software design approach that calls for genuine user involvement in the design, development, implementation, and maintenance of educational technology. Article 2 explores the feasibility of such an approach in higher education by studying an authentic case of participatory design and development of an electronic portfolio system by its users, namely, by Ph.D. students and faculty members. The design team consisted of 8 Ph.D. students, 1 faculty member, and 1 systems analyst at a large Midwestern US university. The study used qualitative methods to identify activities and processes invented by the design team members to satisfactorily complete their design task. The study also explored ways in which these activities reflected PD principles. Findings indicated five key factors that characterized the design process: (1) maintaining transparency of work processes, (2) continued invoking of the design ethos, (3) maintaining a sense of community, (4) embedding design in user context, and (5) recursive design. Article 3 presents a microanalysis of the participatory ID process described in article 2. It studies the use of language in user-designer conversation during design work. The goal of this article was to understand how design team members used language to negotiate power differences that typically arise when multiple stakeholders participate in a design project. The study used Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) (Fairclough, 1995), a research approach from sociolinguistics and influenced by critical theory, to examine user-designer conversation from the first year of the electronic portfolio design project. Analysis indicated a strong use of modality (words such as would, could, need to ), cohesion ( and, therefore, then ), and intertextuality (repeating or revoicing other people\u27s utterances), which seems to have helped create a non-threatening atmosphere and support a critical, democratic, and constructive environment for creative design work

How Firms Shape Income Inequality: Stakeholder Power, Executive Decision Making, and the Structuring of Employment Relationships

Focusing on developed countries, I present a model explaining how firms help determine rates of income inequality at the societal level. I propose that the manner in which firms reward individuals for their labor, how they match individuals to jobs, and where they place their boundaries contribute to levels of income inequality in a society. I argue that the determinant of these three processes is due, in part, to the effect of systems of corporate governance on the power and influence of different organizational stakeholders, resulting in variance in the types of employment relationships that predominate in a society. I conclude with a discussion of the research implications of emphasizing employers and employment practices as key determinants of societal-level income inequality

Theorizing in the qualitative study of mergers & acquisitions

This paper focuses on theorizing in the study of mergers and acquisitions (M&As), a globally significant inter-organizational phenomenon. We analyze 76 qualitative papers on M&As published in leading management journals between 1966–2016. We identify five modes of theorizing in the study of M&As. We find that M&A scholars make theoretical contributions using different theoretical positioning and research design strategies. The majority of the papers offer a contribution to middle-range theorizing (i.e., the literature on M&As), while a third of the papers also contribute to higher-order, or grand theories in management. In closing, this leads us to call for a rejuvenation of middle-range theorizing in management research.</p

Creativity: can artistic perspectives contribute to management?

Today creativity is considered as a necessity in all aspects of management. This working paper mirrors the artistic and managerial conceptions of creativity. Although there are shared points in both applications, however deep-seated and radically opposed traits account for the divergence between the two fields. This exploratory analysis opens up new research questions and insights into practices