Snow in the Tropics

Snow in the Tropics offers the first comprehensive history of the independent reefer operators, companies that are dedicated to transport refrigerated products by ship, from the early 20th century to the present. Readership: All interested in maritime history, particularly those with an interest in the modern history of the shipping industry

What is this case also a case of? : What are your underlying assumptions in having students go through your cases?

Our own research on cases in management education shows that cases provide heroic, individualistic and uncritical perspectives on leadership and organization, that they have a narrow scope and focus exclusively on the company and its shareholders, and that they are biased towards masculinity, managerialism and American capitalism. I argue here that engineering ethics should carefully scrutinize the underlying ideas that a teaching case is representing. What are your cases also a case of? What are your underlying assumptions in having students go through your cases?Blog post at European Society for Engineering Education (SEFI)</p

Corruption and Hosophobia

This paper discusses the relationship between corruption and purity. It draws on resesarch on corruption in political science and research on hosophobia (fear of the impure) in organization studies. The paper presents a theory of corruption based on failure of separation between the public and the private, and discusses rules of separation, which are crucial for upholding the illusion of public purity. However, this theory of corruption is complemented by the concept of hosophobia to show how organizations have dual relationship to corruption. Drawing on two Swedish cases, the paper intends to show hosophobia in the everyday functioning of and organization, and how occasional cleansing procedures might take place.peerReviewe

The Vicissitudes of Corruption : Degeneration - transgression - jouissance

In a time when corruption is receiving increasing media coverage and when many claim to wage a war on corruption, this book brings up the need for a problematisation and an increased understanding of the different manifestations – the vicissitudes – of corruption and also what measures are taken against it. The book advances the claim that corruption is tightly related to modernity and particularly to a transgression of the public / private dichotomy. It furthermore explores ancient, postmodern and psychoanalytic critiques of the modern understanding of corruption. The ancient perspective stems from theorists arguing that there is an ancient core meaning of corruption, i.e. degeneration. This perspective is also informed by a discussion about virtues based on Alasdair MacIntyre. The postmodern perspective is based on Zygmunt Bauman. It is held that corruption is the remnant of the classification of the world into the public and the private, caused by the inherent ambiguity of reality. The psychoanalytic perspective, based on Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek, deepens the analysis and relates corruption to stolen enjoyment – jouissance. These different understandings of corruption are used to analyse primarily bribery in Swedish public sector procurement. In interviews, project managers responsible for public procurement give their account not only of bribes and gifts, but also about partiality and objectivity in supplier evaluations. Using these interviews and theoretical perspectives, the book problematises corruption and investigates how it is addressed and externalised with clear rules, virtues and rituals separating the public role from the private .QC 2010051

What is this case also a case of? : What are your underlying assumptions in having students go through your cases?

Our own research on cases in management education shows that cases provide heroic, individualistic and uncritical perspectives on leadership and organization, that they have a narrow scope and focus exclusively on the company and its shareholders, and that they are biased towards masculinity, managerialism and American capitalism. I argue here that engineering ethics should carefully scrutinize the underlying ideas that a teaching case is representing. What are your cases also a case of? What are your underlying assumptions in having students go through your cases?Blog post at European Society for Engineering Education (SEFI)</p

Rooting for ro-ro : Exploring how strategic choices by pulp and paper companies contributed to Sweden's specialized maritime export systems, 1960-2015

The Nordic, particularly Swedish and Finnish, pulp and paper (P&amp;P) companies are represented in earlier research as using specialized maritime transport systems - based on roll-on/roll-off (ro-ro) vessels - in long-term collaborations with shipping companies after the Second World War. However, the strategic choices of the P&amp;P companies that led to this development have not been researched. Based on studies of the Swedish P&amp;P companies that developed specialized maritime transport systems during the period 1960-2015, this article sheds light on the reasons for these maritime transport systems. As well as the growth of exports, the expansion of P&amp;P companies through mergers and acquisitions and the increased value of the exported goods, the study shows that the Swedish ro-ro trend, diversified and sensitive products, pressure from customers for frequent and speedy deliveries, and a fairly short distance to stable main markets, were additional factors

Disalienation in the management classroom: lessons from Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game

In contemporary academia, education is often perceived as a supplement to an academic career or a tool to satisfy management through course evaluations and this can alienate academics from teaching. To create inspiration and deepen the understanding of teachers’ alienation as well as disalienation in the management classroom, we draw on Hermann Hesse’s last novel ‘The Glass Bead Game’. The story of Joseph Knecht who escapes an elitist pedagogical province to engage in personal teaching serves as an inspiration through which we discuss the act of resisting alienation in contemporary management education. Alienation, as we learn from Hesse, is not an unchangeable condition and it can be resisted through reinventing personal teaching, re-focusing attention from the demands of academic excellence to the imperfection of human beings, and acknowledging education as a history maker and teaching as a preparation for life and death

The Individual-Care Nexus : A Theory of Entrepreneurial Care for Sustainable Entrepreneurship

Sustainable entrepreneurship has recently been identified as a promising force to push a sustainable business paradigm shift. A key challenge for researchers and practitioners is thus to understand and promote such practices. However, critics have argued that sustainable entrepreneurship research is heavily reductionist, in the sense that it assumes an independent and rational entrepreneur, with an exclusive focus on entrepreneurial individuals and opportunities. In this paper, we problematize these assumptions and offer an alternative theory of sustainable entrepreneurship based on ethics of care. We introduce the individual-care nexus, where individuals are assumed to be dependent, emotional, and relationally connected. This theoretical development leads to new ways to more accurately grasp the nature of motivations, emotions, traits, and practices in sustainable entrepreneurship. We illustrate our theory with an empirical case of a sustainable entrepreneur within the Green IT movement in Sweden between 2012 and 2017. We argue that our theoretical take on entrepreneurship can both advance research in sustainable entrepreneurship and provide sustainable entrepreneurs with a better understanding of their practices and a new vocabulary

Culture as Suture : on the Use of “Culture” in Cross-Cultural Studies in and Beyond Intercultural Information Ethics

Intercultural information ethics (IIE), a field which draws on the limits and richness of human morality and moral thinking in different societies, epochs and philosophic traditions as well as on their impact on today’s social appropriation of information and communication technology, has been argued to lack an adequate theoretical understanding of culture. In this paper, we take a non-essentialist view of culture as a point of departure and discuss not what culture is, but what we (both in our everyday lives, and as researchers) do when we use the concept of culture. To do so, we look for inspiration in the concept of suture, a concept which means the thread which stitches, or the act of stitching, a wound, but has had a long and intricate journey within psychoanalysis and film studies concerning the issue of identification. Three understandings of the use of culture emerge: suture as cultural misidentification, the evil in the cultural suture, and multiple, repeated cultural sutures. We use these categories to diagnose the use of culture in IIE and beyond, and suggest that the use of culture as multiple, repeated sutures—in other words, a recognition that we constantly fail in describing culture or cultural differences, and that each suture is coloured by its conditions of production, and that we cannot but suture with culture anyway—might be a way forward for cross-cultural research