Narratives and Performance - The Case of Stock-broking

The performance of individual stockbrokers differs. This paper aims at explaining these differences, or at least at making some sense of them. In a study of fourteen stockbrokers, the high performing brokers described their working life in a systematically different way, compared to the low performing brokers. The high and low performing brokers gave fundamentally different accounts of what, from an outsider’s viewpoint, seemed to be very similar work and working conditions. The brokers’ different accounts are interpreted and reconstructed into two opposing narratives of stockbrokers’ world of working. In an ideal typical sense these two narratives explain, or at least make sense of, the stockbrokers’ different levels of performance.narratives; performance; stock-broking; phenomenography; competence; work; interaction; alienation

Boundaryless Management - Creating, transforming and using knowledge in inter-organizational collaboration. A literature review

Current literature on organizations often argues that firms are becoming increasingly dependent on knowledge residing outside their own boundaries requiring organizations to increase their entrepreneurial abilities and make their boundaries more flexible and permeable. This paper reviews the literature on what might be called interorganizational knowledge work. Implied in this focus is an assumption of clear organizaitonal boundaries. Rather than taking these boundaries and their importance for granted, the current review, however, aims at relativizing these boundaries. By focusing the empirical phenomenon of collaboration between individuals in different organizations, four different streams of literature with different constructions of the organizational boundary and its importance were identified: the literature on learning in alliances and joint ventures, the literature on collaboration in industrial networks, the literature on social networks and communities of practice and finally the literature on geographical clusters and innovation systems. The above four streams of the literature are reviewed with a special focus on the following three questions: 1. What is the role of (organizational) boundaries in interorganizational knowledge work? 2. What do we know about how these boundaries can be overcome? 3. What are the implications for managing interorganizational knowledge work spelled out in the literature?Interorganizational collaboration; Knowledge Management; Literature review

Steps and catalytic reactions: CO oxidation with preadsorbed O on Rh(553)

Industrial catalysts are often comprised of nanoparticles supported on high-surface-area oxides, in order to maximise the catalytically active surface area and thereby utilise the active material better. These nanoparticles expose steps and corners that, due to low coordination to neighboring atoms, are more reactive and, as a consequence, are often assumed to have higher catalytic activity. We have investigated the reaction between CO and preadsorbed O on a stepped Rh(553) surface, and show that CO oxidation indeed occurs faster than on the flat Rh(111) surface at the same temperature. However, we do find that this is not a result of reactions at the step sites but rather at the terrace sites close to the steps, due to in-plane relaxation enabled by the step. This insight can provide ways to optimize the shape of the nanoparticles to further improve the activity of certain reactions

Appreciating Stockbroking: Constructing Conceptions to Make Sense of Performance

The performance of individual stockbrokers differs. This paper aims to make sense of these differences. In a study of 14 stockbrokers, the high performing brokers described their working life in a systematically different way, compared to the low performing brokers. The brokers gave different and conflicting accounts of what, from an outsider's viewpoint, seemed to be very similar work and working conditions. The brokers' different accounts are interpreted and reconstructed into two opposing conceptions of stockbrokers' world of working. In an ideal typical sense these two conceptions make sense of, and maybe even explain the stockbrokers' different levels of performance. Copyright Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2004.

Dataportabilitet – en utmaning i en era av GDPR

I och med införandet av EU:s nya dataskyddsförordning (GDPR) kommer rättigheten till data-portabilitet bli verklighet. Dataportabilitet syftar till att användare fritt ska kunna plocka ut sina personuppgifter från IT-miljöer och ha dessa till eget bruk eller överlämna till andra tjänster eller IT-miljöer. GDPR har sett till att verksamheter kommer få ta ställning till utmaningarna som det nya dataportabilitetskravet medför genom flera olika aspekter. I studien undersöker vi vilka tekniska och organisatoriska utmaningar verksamheterna ställs inför för att kunna bemöta det nya dataportabilitetskravet. Detta via kvalitativa intervjuer med informanter inom olika sektorer som har erfarenhet inom förändringsarbete mot GDPR och dataportabilitet. Det visar sig av studiens resultat att merparten av verksamheterna stött på flertalet tekniska och organisatoriska utmaningar. Några svårigheter är att identifiera och extrahera per-sonuppgifter ur sina system men också att förstå och motivera syftet bakom kravet samt hos vem ansvaret ligger. Dock anser verksamheterna inte dataportabilitetskravet som något väl-digt aktuellt för just deras verksamhet då de räknar med att hantera ett fåtal dataportabilitets-begäran. Därav har dataportabilitetsfrågan nedprioriteras i verksamheterna och endast ett fåtal verksamheter har vidtagit åtgärder för att möta dessa utmaningar