A New Professional Landscape: Entangled Institutional Logics in Two Swedish Welfare Professions

Previous research has made three parallel but incompatible observations on the contemporary development of welfare professions: loss of professional autonomy, hybridization, and maintained autonomy. Yet, research providing contextual understanding of the simultaneous occurrence of these three observations is lacking. The aim of this theoretical paper is to identify and explain seemingly contradictory coexisting features of modern welfare professions through a comprehensive reading of current literature on the health care and teaching professions in Sweden. The literature has demonstrated entangled institutional logics, in which simultaneous but differing effects occur, thereby developing a new professional landscape

Collective leadership dynamics among professional peers: Co-constructing an unstable equilibrium

Professional service firms (PSFs) are characterised by contingent and contested power relations among an extended group of professional peers. Studies of such firms can therefore yield important insights for the literatures on collective leadership and leader–follower relations. Yet to date PSF scholars have neglected the topic of leadership,and leadership scholars have neglected the context of PSFs.Based on 102 interviewsacross the consulting, accounting, and legal sectors, we identify three relational processesthrough which professional peers co-construct collective leadership:legitimising, negotiating, and manoeuvring. We demonstrate how the relational processes taken together constitute an unstable equilibrium, both in the moment and over time, emphasising how leadership in PSFs is inherently contested and fragile. Our model contributes to theories of collective leadership and leader–follower relations by foregrounding the power and politics thatunderlie collective leadership. We highlight the significance of the individual leader within the collective. We challengeassumptionsconcerning the binary nature of leadership and followership,by showing how colleagues may grant leadership identities to their peers without necessarily granting them leadership authority, and without claiming follower identities for themselves

Riskabelt att skapa låtsasmarknader i välfärden

Vinsterna bland företagen i välfärdssektorn kan bara hämtas hem genom att krympa kostnaderna. Men att låta företag agera på låtsasmarknader, där nedskärningar är det enda sättet att gå med vinst på kort sikt, är en riskabel väg i välfärdsbyggandet