Doctoral Theses / Doktorsavhandlingar Förvaltningshögskolan

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Strategiska samarbeten – roller, relationer och risker i mellankommunala samarbeten
(2024-08-22) Meltzer, Isabell
In the Swedish public sector, there is an ongoing strategic discussion about the need for larger contexts. These discussions often point in one direction—more collaboration between municipalities. Strategic collaborations are based on the idea that there are many benefits to creating larger operational entities: reduced vulnerability, secured competence supply, increased cost-efficiency, and improved quality. These benefits are welcomed by municipalities in Sweden, especially the smaller ones that struggle to recruit competent staff and maintain good public services. Smaller municipalities are often considered vulnerable. Strategic collaborations are interesting from a governance perspective because they challenge hierarchical structures. Therefore, a relevant question to ask is: how are these types of collaborations governed? In the literature on inter-organizational relationship, several researchers have focused on this overarching question. A large portion of the literature has addressed the question using reductionist approaches. They have both examined the risks and problems that exist and used established governance techniques to explain how collaborations are managed and controlled. However, several researchers, including myself, have pointed out the importance of answering the question with approaches that focus on the relationships between actors. I align with the group of researchers who have emphasized that governance is a process and something that must be created and maintained within a relationship. By focusing on concepts from market creation theories, I assume that actors in the relationships need to agree on several aspects (such as goals, roles, what services to deliver, and at what cost) for the relationships in the collaboration to function. In this dissertation, I show the expectations associated with collaborations, as well as how roles are created and formed, but I also highlight what actors do to create stability and how relationships are destabilized. I demonstrate how actors engage in activities of refinement, re-establishment, and repair to stabilize the relationship. I also highlight several conflicts that can be understood in terms of strategification, standardization, and iteration. A central conclusion of the dissertation is that roles cannot be organized straightforwardly and therefore struggle to achieve stability. This is because they need to maintain and negotiate interfaces. Furthermore, the dissertation shows that it is easy for actors to establish contracts and shared understandings of roles, overarching goals, and resource distribution models. However, it becomes apparent that much smaller, detail-oriented issues cause all of this to be reconsidered. When asked why these relationships are so challenging to govern and control, one answer is that detailed issues often lead to conflicts when they are tied to more strategic directions.
En berättelse om att (få) vara kvar- En studie i att skapa utrymme för samverkansuppdrag i offentlig sektor
(2024-01-22) Hellgren, Hanna
This thesis explores the intricacies of novel collaboration among diverse actors working towards the common goal of organizing labor market integration for foreign-born individuals. The research endeavors to understand how novel collaborations emerges and stabilizes within the public sector spotlighting the collaborative practices that develops during this evolution. Taking inspiration from Czarniawska's framework, which accentuates the translation of ideas into practice with the interplay of time and space this study employs this framework to create understanding for the multifaceted dynamics of collaboration, identity construction, and legitimacy within the context of collaboration for labour market integration. It unveils how collaborative endeavors not only address immediate challenges but also form the very essence and character of the undertaken missions. By focusing on actions and patterns of actions, the study unveils how these initiatives emerge and stabilize within the public sector. Expanding upon these insights, it underscores the significance of the practices that emerge and their role in sustaining these missions and ensuring their continued existence. These practices, encompassing mobilization, recruitment, and negotiation, collectively constitute what this study terms "space-creating collaborative practices." The study also probes into why specific missions and collaborative practices endure over time, drawing from the identified “spatial-creating collaborative practices” and the efforts expended to guarantee their persistence—referred to in this study as "Spatiotemporal work." Ultimately, the study concludes that these endeavors attribute identity and sufficient legitimacy upon the initiatives, granting them the resilience to endure. This unveils that persistence to endure does not hinge solely on the formation of a formal organization or a fixed position within a predefined organizational structure. It can also manifest as the perpetuation of practices, conceptual frameworks, or the emergence as a central actor in addressing particular questions. Furthermore, the study underscores how ambiguities in mission formulations stimulate openness to change. Initiatives persist but not always in their original form or with identical objectives due to often broadly outlined missions, affording room for interpretation and adaptation during the process of organizing the tasks at hand. In summary, this study offers valuable insights into the intricate realm of novel collaborative endeavors within the public sector. It underscores the dynamics of relations in the emergence of collaborative practices and how it can lead to enduring collaborative spaces beyond the ideas of organizations and structures, but also how these evolve in tandem with the ambitions and interests of collaborative actors causing changes from the original ideas in the missions.
Desirable Victims: Systems of Refugee Selection in Swedish and Canadian Migration Governing
(2024-01-09) Asplén Lundstedt, Andreas
This thesis explores how states try to govern refugee migration by classifying and ordering its subjects. It argues that a unifying construct of state migration control is selection: to maintain a system that offers protection to wanted people and keeps out unwanted people. This in turn requires an administrative machinery which efficiently renders people as cases. While the Refugee Convention provides a baseline definition of what a refugee is, there is widespread variation in its application across countries. In recent years, there has been a growing interest in classification in migration studies, but the dominant theories on migration control tend to assume that ”refugee” is a neutral construct. This study challenges that assumption by seeing refugeehood as a status which comes about through its regulation. Its aim is to contribute to theoretical development on how states make refugees governable through classification and contribute to a better understanding of how people processing differ across countries. This is conducted through a comparative case study of Sweden and Canada. The thesis builds a framework from historical institutionalist theory and writings on government classification to study classification systems as institutions. The data consists of documentary and archival material left by policymakers, officials, and administrative courts. The study is divided into two parts. Part I, set in the mid-1960’s to the early 1990’s, details the historical origins and institutionalization of a new type of migration governing, which centered on the idea of actively molding migration through making its subjects administratively legible. Part II studies the judicialization of migration control by unpacking the contemporary application of these control systems in administrative courts. This part questions the widely held hypothesis that courts protect migrant rights. Here, it is compared how Canadian and Swedish courts assess individuals from Afghanistan during the 2000’s, where issues such as age and nationality are made governable through law. The study makes contributions to both migration studies and public administration and policy. The results show how similar regulatory frameworks for processing refugees in Sweden and Canada were animated by enduring differences in immigration tradition, welfare models and administrative-legal traditions. This in turn gave rise to different moral vocabularies of what deserving refugee is. The result also show how enduring legal traditions lead to judicialization having different implications in different contexts. The conclusions point to how the sorting of people for purposes of governing over them has increasingly moved from a means to an end in itself. This implies a shift from an ideal of control as the flexible choosing of deserving victims, to one of control as the precise sorting of people into rigid legal frameworks. The concluding discussion outlines future avenues of research into comparative people processing.
Projects as interaction in context: Managing public health issues within public sector organisations
(2023-05-15) Söderberg, Erik
The increasing use of projects has been one of the most important developments in the public sector over the past decades. In tandem with the proliferation of projects, the traditional view of projects as demarcated from their environment using the four concepts of task, time, team and transition has, without attracting much attention, also trickled down to public sector organisations. This traditional view may be suitable for projects in an industrial or commercial context, where they are often designed for well-defined problems and in order to deliver a technical installation. However, public sector projects are often more value-driven, with the aim of creating ideological change. An ex-ample of this is public health initiatives to promote physical activity and healthy eating habits. The aim of this thesis is to contribute to the understanding of value-driven public sector projects by focusing on what characterises the interaction between a value-driven project and local public sector organisations in developing and embedding public health issues into everyday organising. Different theoretical concepts have been used in the thesis’s four papers to understand what characterises the interaction between a public health project and two local public sector organisations. Paper I uses the theoretical frame-work of Multiple Streams Theory to analyse the policy process, following the project´s task. In Paper II and Paper III, boundary work is used to analyse the interaction between temporary and permanent organising. Paper II focuses on the interaction at the local level, at schools, while Paper III focuses on the project team´s boundary work in different arenas. In Paper IV, the concept of frame is used to study how the policy was implemented. The field material consists of interviews, observations, field note documentation from meetings and activities, as well as textual documents illustrating the course of the project at different organisational levels during the three years. The papers’ findings demonstrate how important it is that value-driven projects in a public sector context are continuously engaged in interactions throughout the entire project as a way to achieve transition. This is in contrast to trying to demarcate projects in relation to the surrounding environment, and developing and embedding results at the end of the project. This leads to the conclusion that transition, instead of constituting a single concept, is also an important mean within the concepts of task, time and team. In fact, the results of the papers show how transition, through interactions between actors in the project organisation and actors in organisations involved, occurs through each of the three concepts of task, time and team. This perspective on creating transition by means of value-driven public sector projects requires another view of projects in interaction with their context, which can be an important consideration when planning and managing projects.
Planering på gränsen och gränsen för planering - En studie av gränsöverskridande samhällsplanering
(2023-04-27) Ernits, Heiti
This exploratory thesis aims to describe and analyze how boundaries emerge, affect planning practices, and how boundaries are managed over time in order to achieve integrated planning processes. This thesis is particularly interested in how the interplay between boundary-spanning and boundary-crossing activities in relation to the organization of strategic spatial planning can be understood from an institutional perspective. The overall research question was sub-divided into three further research questions: How do boundaries emerge, and how are they managed, when planning is organized? What boundary arrangements emerge over time for the managing of boundaries? How can the choice of boundary arrangement be understood in relation to institutional orders? The thesis involves a case study of two urban planning projects and an organizational planning reform. Using a qualitative research approach, empirical data were collected through participant observations when planners collaborated, shadowing planners in their work environment, conducting semi-structured interviews with planners, hosting focus group discussions, and analyzing relevant documents. The findings of the present study demonstrate that planners face multiple challenges related to boundaries, which in turn encourages continuous transformation processes. Negotiations are revealed to play a crucial role in managing and modifying boundaries. More specifically, different and conflicting views on how boundaries should be drawn and desired characteristics of the boundaries converge in negotiation processes. Drawing on the institutional theoretical framework of the study, the organizing principles of egalitarianism and hierarchy are positioned in opposition to one another. Negotiations ultimately result in an egalitarian approach to boundary management, which involves preserving formal boundaries and organizing planning work across boundaries. An informal planning organization emerges alongside the formal planning organization, and specific boundary arrangements and approaches to organize collective action in a polycentric planning environment become institutionalized. This development, however, gives rise to new problematic boundaries between the formal and informal planning organization, which in turn leads to further negotiation and incremental changes to boundary arrangements and planning practices.
Accounting, Professions, and Performativity: Exploring the limits of accountingisation in professional organisations
(2022-08-18) Firtin, Cemil Eren
This thesis explores the practice of calculations and their consequences in different professional contexts. Specifically, it aims to extend the discussion on the relationship between accounting and public sector professionals by elaborating on the concept of accountingisation using a performative approach. Accountingisation has been discussed in the literature in terms of the colonising and transformative effects of accounting on professionals. This concurs with observations that expansion of calculative practices in public sector organisations brings about economisation and the perception of accounting as performative. This is a one-sided depiction of accountingisation. However, a gap remains in that professionals’ agency has been overlooked in this relationship. Such a gap consequently necessitates further research in order to refine the argument that accountingisation is not only a one- way effect of accounting on professionals per se, but rather rooted within the mutual relationship between them. This thesis attempts to fill such a gap by focusing on the concepts of performativity and accountingisation in a range of professional contexts. Empirically, the study consists of four case studies illustrating calculative practices unfolding between accounting and professionals in each individual context. These are (I) pay determination for teachers in Swedish schools, (II) performance measurements within an emergency unit in a Swedish hospital, (III) cost-benefit analyses in a social care organisation in a Swedish municipality, and (IV) medical professionals’ reactions in pandemic initiatives in Turkey. In these studies, data has been collected from interviews, observations, and documents, and analyses have been conducted qualitatively by focusing on (counter-) narratives framing descriptions of the empirical phenomena. Based on the findings of these individual studies, this thesis draws its conclusions that (1) accounting can be both performative and counter-performative in shaping professional organisations, and such differentiation depends on the way in which the constellation between professional and accounting calculations is organised; (2) professions are found to be performative in relation to accounting in their shaping of the ways that things are done through their own calculations, such as professional standards measuring and assuring the quality of work, and ethics and norms valuing the good/bad conduct of work; and (3) accounting is not always necessarily imposed on the professional contexts, but professionals may also voluntarily engage in its construction by bringing forth (counter-) accounts. (4) A final finding shows that accountingisation manifests differently in terms of the different organisation of professional and accounting calculations in different professional contexts. In the light of these findings, this thesis extends the overall discussion of accountingisation by shifting focus from considering it as a one-way effect of accounting on professionals and public sector organisations to diverse and mutual performative relations between professionals and accounting.
Translating grand challenges into municipal organizing: Prevention of terrorism, extremism, and radicalization in Scandinavia
(2022-04-25) Andersson Malmros, Robin
This thesis investigates why and how municipalities organize to address grand challenges. Previous research shows that municipalities have increased their policymaking and organizing in relation to grand challenges, often without any national regulations forcing them to do so. The rationales, processes, and mechanisms underpinning this type of municipal voluntarism are understudied. The research is based on the case of Scandinavian municipalities and their efforts to prevent terrorism, extremism, and radicalization (TER). From playing a miniscule role in Scandinavian counter-terrorism policies until the 2010s, municipal employees such as teachers, social workers, and youth workers have in current practice become the backbone of the fight against TER. Municipalities generally have little or no strategic or practical experience of preventing TER, resulting in extensive uncertainty and ambiguity as to how to organize the relevant efforts. In this thesis, the process leading from grand challenge to municipal organizing is framed as a translation process. The analysis uses concepts from sociological institutional theory and social movement studies, and is informed by data from newspaper articles, municipal policies, interviews, and observations. The findings are presented in four papers. This thesis shows how the decentralization of a grand challenge from being an international or national to a municipal responsibility is a multi-layered, highly discursive translation process that is dependent on reframing a challenge as a local one. Regarding TER, the local frame was based on a new institutional vocabulary, triggered and legitimized by critical events, which elite actors used to localize the grand challenge. Once localized, institutional pressure was exerted on municipalities to organize preventive efforts. While institutional pressure caused rapid organizational activity, it also led to the ambiguous translation and editing of concepts and preventive approaches with unintended, paradoxical, and problematic consequences. Many of the observed organizing activities centered on rhetorical efforts to legitimize the challenge and its associated concepts and practices. This was a consequence of the grand challenge being contested locally, since it introduced a new institutional logic that conflicted with those dominating the local institutional context.
The Profit of Prevention. A study of Social Investments in a Swedish Region
(2022-03-08) Lagström, Cristian
This thesis aims to deepen the understanding of the use and implications of accounting technologies in the governing of public services. It explores social investments, a proliferating public sector management technology based broadly on the idea to govern long-term public goals “by numbers”. The core of social investments is to calculate the socio- economic profitability of preventative measures. As such, it reflects the complexities and capacities of governing towards long-term goals in a changing public landscape. Building on a view of accounting and economic ideas as mutually constitutive, the thesis focuses the processes and practices of rendering social investments operable in practice. The research question which guides the study is: How is social investments realized in an organizational setting? The study is carried out in a Swedish region. Guided by Actor Network Theory (ANT) and its constructivist approach to study things in the making, the study follows the actions and actors by which social investments is created as a management technology. Field material consists of interviews, observations and documents and was generated between 2014 and 2018. The findings of the study are presented in four papers. The first paper takes the long-term thinking associated with the social investment perspective as its empirical focus. The second paper focuses the role of calculative practices in a changing public landscape and analyses the process by which social investments was introduced as a means of handling the wickedness of social problems, and turned into practice. The third paper engages with the concepts of hybridity and hybridization arguing for a deeper understanding of the constitutive role accounting play in the formation of hybrid settings. In particular the paper suggests acknowledging processes of de-hybridization. The fourth paper develops further the theorization of hybridity and introduces the concept of multiple translation points in order to understand how social investments was translated differently across different nodes of the actor-network. Based on the findings of the papers this thesis concludes that social investments went through multiple transformations in order to be rendered operable in an organizational setting. Calculations of long-term impact came to play a marginal role, still an inter-organizational space for dialogue about the profit of prevention was created.
New Public Professional Organisationalism Towards new professional, managerial and cliental roles as exemplified in Swedish schools
(2021-08-26) Eklund, Sanna
This thesis aims to deepen our understanding of public professional organisationalism. Whereas new professionalism is an established concept used to describe changes in the roles of professionals, there is a lack of studies on organisationalism that include the roles of managers and clients. In this thesis, it is argued that new roles for professionals in the studied organisations are accompanied by new roles for managers and clients. To capture this ‘newness’, insights from this thesis are abstracted into the ideal type of New Public Professional Organisationalism (NPPO), which consists of seven components: the interconnectedness of domains, hybridisation of logics, de-hybridisation of tasks, dispersed autonomy, distributed control, co-constructiveness and interrelational trust. NPPO serves as a contrast to how relations between professions, managers and clients are often portrayed in the literature by emphasising harmony rather than conflict between actors. Empirically, this thesis focuses on school organisations in Sweden where first teachers have been introduced. This, it is argued, has led to elite positions for some teachers, which has created a hierarchy in the profession where first teachers are involved in more domains and engaged in managerial work to a larger extent. In this thesis, such stratification is considered to have intensified a movement where professional, cliental and managerial roles are evolving. The thesis is part of a larger research project studying the “first teacher reform” and consists of a compilation of the introductory chapter and four published papers. The first paper addresses how the introduction of elites affects the division of labour. The second paper centres on how first teachers inhabit their new role and highlights their agency in shaping this role in relation to their managers and colleagues. The third paper elaborates on various first teacher types and outlines how these affect the teaching profession from a wider perspective. The fourth paper investigates the role of first teachers in strengthening professional control vis-à-vis clients. Since first teachers are connected to different domains within their organisations, the relationships between professionals, managers and clients can be illuminated by focusing on this group. Based on the findings of the aforementioned papers this thesis concludes that professional, managerial and cliental roles generally became more intertwined, which is an observation that has not been coherently captured in the existing literature and motivates the creation of NPPO. The thesis uses a qualitative approach and is based on in-depth studies of seven different schools in three municipalities in Sweden. The research techniques used include interviews, observations and shadowing.
När idéer får liv - Om intraprenader i tre kommuner
(2019-04-04) Carlsson, Julia
In the early 2000s an idea regarding how to organise the Swedish public sector, called internal contracts, attracted attention from many different public authorities in Sweden. Organising in the form of internal contracts means that units within a public authority are given more autonomy to run their own affairs. A distinct feature of the internal contracts model is that it is said to combine characteristics from both public and private organisations, combining the best of both worlds. However, the popularity of internal contracts was short-lived, and just a few years later it seemed to be out of fashion. A few municipalities, however, constitute examples of where internal contracts were subscribed to and supported for a longer period of time. These municipalities showed that theories relating to fashions for ideas, and what causes fluctuations in fashions, are not sufficient to explain variations in the lifecycles of ideas. There are variations in the life cycles of fashionable ideas, with some seeming to disappear as soon as they arise while others remain influential over a longer period of time. Why is this? The popularity and use of ideas is not only the result of gaining legitimacy in an institutional environment, as has long been suggested, but also the result of individual interpretations of ideas, in the context in which they are introduced. Ideas are changed and modified, or translated, as they travel in and between organisations. In turn, translations affect the ways in which ideas are perceived and whether or not they are considered legitimate and supported by the people who receive them. The fate of ideas thus lies in the hands of people, each of whom may accept, modify or deflect them, as well as add to them or let them drop. The study suggests a model for how the life-cycle of ideas can be understood based on how, by whom, when and where they are translated. It illustrates how (1) the receiver of ideas, (2) the carrier of the ideas and (3) characteristics assigned to ideas affect translations and thereby, whether their life-cycles are to become short or long. The study also highlights the fact that ideas are often revivals of earlier ideas rather than new ones, suggesting that ideas seldom die, but are instead given more or less attention in different times and spaces. In addition, in studying the process, not just the ups and downs in popularity, the study shows that what makes ideas come to life, and stay alive, is the result of continuous work. People need to be convinced on a continuous basis that ideas are attractive. Finally, the study contributes to further understanding institutionalisation. What affects translation also affects whether actions are repeated, and over time become taken for granted in an organisation.
Jämställdhetspolitik och styrformens betydelse. Europeiska socialfonden i svensk och spansk förvaltning
(2019-02-06) Carlsson, Vanja
The EU´s regional policy is one of the world's largest in terms of budget size and geographical range. The regional policy promotes project activities across Europe funded by structural funds, of which the European Social Fund (ESF) is one. Its goal is to increase employment, competitiveness and growth, as well as gender equality. Throughout the history of the EU, there has been a tension between formulation of gender equality policy and economic and social issues. However, scholars make the case that the Commission approaches ESF gender equality from a neoliberal perspective. The ESF’s gender equality policy is implemented through administrative processes in national and regional public administration. While public administration plays a central role, scholars know less about how these processes are being played out in practice, and what their significance is for defining a gender perspective in the member states. Variations in member states’ implementation have not been extensively studied. Drawing on the debate of the last decades on changes in public sector governance, and a conceptualisation of ideological processes in implementation, this dissertation analyses differences in implementation of the ESF’s gender equality policy in Sweden and Spain. A network-oriented model was applied in Sweden, whereas in Spain a hierarchical/bureaucratic model was applied. The empirical material is based on interviews and policy documents at EU-level as well as at national and regional level. Through analysis of the relationship between governing and substantive interpretations of political objectives, the purpose of this dissertation is to analyse whether organisational and working practices in Sweden and Spain reinforced or challenged the EU's interpretation and implementation of gender equality. The theoretical research questions are I. Under what conditions do forms of governance reproduce or change substantive interpretations of policy objectives? II. Under what conditions do substantive interpretations of policy objectives affect forms of governance? I argue that there are mechanisms inherent in administrative processes which have ideological consequences, i.e. which affect local interpretations and set limits for discretion in multilevel governance. Unlike previous feminist studies of bureaucracy, I argue that, in comparison with the network model, the bureaucratic model is beneficial for potential policy change in relation to issues of informal power structures, gender equality for example. The paper will also contribute to a discussion on ideological consequences of gender equality policies when private actors are involved in the implementation process, as in the network-oriented model. The results also highlight the need to distinguish between organisational forms and management techniques when operationalising the concept of governing. Such a distinction contributes to a nuanced discussion of the consequences of governance. One conclusion is that, as an organisational form, the network tends to be dominated by bureaucratic management techniques in cases where there is no substantive definition of policy.
Political conflicts - Dissent and antagonism among political parties in local government
(2019-01-09) Skoog, Louise
Political conflicts arise out of, or are at least nourished by, divisions and tensions in society over how resources are distributed between citizens and social groups. In the parliamentary arena, these conflicts are manifested by political parties representing the interests of their voters. However, even though we may agree that political conflicts are essential for politics and democratic systems, there is no consensus on what political conflicts are, what causes conflict and what their effects are. This thesis develops a theoretical framework for political conflicts that is productive in relation to studying causes and effects of political conflicts in local governments. A multi-method approach is applied in the studies. The first three papers and a literature review that is included in the introductory text focus on causes of political conflicts. The literature review, as well as the first paper, centres on structural and organisa-tional explanations. The literature review focuses on the research question: How did Swedish local governments develop into party politicised forms of government, with the first paper dealing with the research question: What are the causes of political conflicts identified by earlier scholars and what effects do they have on local politics? The second paper focuses solely on organisational explanations and examines the research question: How does the organisation of political systems affect how and where political conflicts are expressed? The third paper uses explanations at the individual level and deals with the research question: How do ideology, partisanship and trust affect how political conflicts are perceived? The fourth and final paper focuses on the effects of conflicts and answers the research question: To what extent does party political conflicts affect the influence of political leaders? The findings show that there are at least two forms of political conflict of relevance for parliamentary arenas – political dissent and antagonistic behaviour – and that it is important to distinguish between them. They have different characteristics, are caused by different factors and produce different effects. Manifestations of political dissent clarify differences between political actors and are thus of great importance to a democratic system. However, an overinflated amount of antagonistic and disrespectful behaviour, on the other hand, will create a problematic political working environment. When antagonism turns ugly, democratic institutions and the actors working within them may lose their legitimacy.
(R)evolutionära idéer: Förändring i svensk sjukförsäkringspolitik 1995-2015
(2018-12-12) Börjesson, Angelica
Since the post-war period, the Swedish welfare state has largely been based on the principles of emancipation and economic security for individuals. Some refer to this as the idea of progressive individualism. However, major changes in the Swedish sickness benefit system came about in the noughties. Reforms were implemented that weakened the ‘loss of income’-principle, which meant that a large proportion of the population lost their right to economic compensation. The sickness benefit system changed from being a sort of social insurance system to more of an adjustment insurance system. Formerly based on the idea of progressive individualism – where the state should liberate the citizens from the market – the system came to rely on the idea of morality paternalism with a new paradoxical purpose: the state should save the citizens from the state. This change did not occur as a result of a new political regime and the implementation of the change was not characterized by compromises or conflicts. The initial proposals were introduced by the Social Democratic government but most of the reforms were brought into effect by the center-right government in 2007. How then did this retrenchment policy in the Swedish sickness benefit system come about? In this study a theoretical argument is put forth on how to understand and conceptualize how social policy can be changed from within and occur without any critical junctures. The study will illustrate how gradual but profound institutional change of the Swedish sickness benefit system occurs through an ideational evolutionary process. The book especially calls our attention to the manner in which previously dominant ideas are never entirely supplanted by newer ideas that gain traction. Indeed, it demonstrates that previous ideas play a considerable role in the process of limiting the scope of new ideas that may be candidates for adoption and in the process of social policy change. Ideas consist of different components in the form of norms and values, linked through events, concepts and information. This means that ideas may rely on their own contradictions as the world around them changes and has to be dealt with. However, when ideas end up contradicting, this does not always create a lacuna ready to be replenished with new “fresh” ideas, as is often stated in previous research. Instead, this study show that it is the very complexity, ambiguity and composite nature of ideas that enable them to lead directly to the next idea. Norms and values that previously had lower priority, or were taken for granted, are reactivated and repeated. Therefore, ideational change can come about without the occurrence of a major crisis and without political regime changes or major structural transformations. On the contrary, change can be triggered by what seems to be rather minor events. At the same time the study also highlights how social policy institutions are primarily building on normative rather than distributional tensions. In the studied case, the state institutionalizes an idea of quid pro quo: material benefits should be offered in exchange for moral behaviour and the obedience of common norms. Therefore, to understand how and why social policy change we need to investigate the ideas that have been institutionalized in earlier phases, and how such ideas create norms and moral expectations which, in a higher degree than interests and structural factors, are the guiding forces in creating new social policy.
Cross-Sector Strategists. Dedicated Bureaucrats in Local Government Administration
(2017-11-29) Svensson, Petra
It is argued that political-administrative organizations are becoming increasingly complex with more horizontal governance required. In Swedish municipal administration, there is a group of administrators assigned the task of monitoring and promoting strategic topics that should be integrated horizontally within the organization. Examples of strategic topics are sustainability, safety/security, diversity, children/youth, public health, human rights, and gender equality. In the thesis, these administrators are called cross-sector strategists. The purpose of this dissertation is to explore how cross-sector strategists become a part of the political-administrative organization when representing, enacting, and reflecting on values in the undertaking of their formal posts. They are situated between the tradition of vertical governance, with formal procedures and hierarchy as its foundation, and the tradition of horizontal governance, with informal networks and deliberation as its foundation. Previous research has shown that this is likely to give rise to value conflicts, and the question is if cross-sector strategists experience value conflicts, and if so, how they cope with them. The cross-sector strategists are studied in this thesis from the perspective of situated agency – focusing on both the contextual expectations of the cross-sector strategists and on their internal reflections to solve value conflicts – in order to explore their process of becoming a part of the local government administration. A mixed-methods design is applied, containing analysis of job advertisements for cross-sector strategists, public managers, and social workers; in-depth interviews with cross-sector strategists; and a survey of professional networks for cross-sector strategists. The results show that cross-sector strategists are subjects to ambivalent and often-contradictory contextual expectations. Cross-sector strategists use the ambivalence of their work for their strategic purposes, and such ambivalence allows them to reframe their topics, their methods, their arguments, and their identity according to current situation in order to increase the impact of their assigned topics and diminish the inner conflict of wanting to be both a responsive bureaucrat and an active lobbyist. Combining these two dedications requires them to be highly reflexive and flexible actors. The outcome of cross-sector strategists’ coping with value conflicts can be interpreted in two ways: 1) as if the cross-sector strategists are a formal tool to safeguard crucial democratic and ethical values due to the cross-sector strategists’ method of sneaking the strategic policy areas into the organization. Or 2) as a to democracy risky administrative behavior in the long-term due to the disguising of value conflicts and diminished possibilities to process these value conflicts.
Locked-in collaboration
(2016-12-05) Andersson, Johanna
Collaboration, employed in defining a problem, finding a solution, and implementing it, has been proposed as a solution to a range of problems framed as wicked or complex. Collaboration can be justified based on instrumental, normative, and value-based reasoning. All approaches start in what collaboration is not: it is not demarcated, silo-based organization, but instead endeavours to achieve comprehensive and holistic perspectives and measures of service delivery. This has resulted in a great deal of research taking a normative and evaluative ap- proach to collaboration. In contrast, this thesis contributes to the growing critical stream of collaboration research. The overall aim of the thesis is to explain how collaboration has come to be a taken-for-granted solution and the possible consequences of this. The material was generated through a study of legally regulated inter- organizational collaboration (referred to by the acronym “FINSAM”) in the Swedish public sector implemented through local coordination associations. The coordination associations implement regulated collaboration between the Swe- dish National Employment Agency, the National Social Insurance Office, county councils, and municipal councils. Each local coordination association has a joint board and a pooled budget, which is to be used to finance measures targeting individuals in need of coordinated rehabilitation. The study was conducted through fieldwork in two local coordination associations, as well as in confer- ences and seminars addressing FINSAM in general. The findings indicate that collaboration in local coordination associations is organized in a project-like way alongside ordinary organizational practice. Two different approaches to organization were identified: the coordination association as either an actor or an arena. Depending on approach the coordination association will be more or less demarcated from ordinary organizational practice. De- marcation is strengthened through the construction of accountability. When local coordination associations are held accountable they are treated as hierarchical organizations with only vertical, but no horizontal, responsibilities. Horizontal practice and outcome are downplayed when accountability is constructed. The findings also indicate that the values attributed to this collaboration, together with its ordering narratives and its impact on legitimacy, create a dynamic result- ing in reduced need and latitude to problematize collaboration, which is taken for granted as the solution. This perceived decreased need for problematizing is connected to the pooled budget and the way the collaboration is understood: as something unique and better suited to handling the identified problems. The conclusion is that collaboration has become locked in within project-like organizations and organizing, and locked in as a solution through the rationalized myth of collaboration. The law governing FINSAM and specially allocated reources in pooled budgets strengthens this lock-in.
Organisering av standarder, certifiering och ackreditering som en global styrregim
(2016-09-26) Gustafsson, Ingrid
En studie över hur standarder, certifiering och ackreditering används som verktyg för att styra organisationer och hur dessa verktyg skapar en global styrregim där alla är styrda men ingen styr alla.
Företagare eller politiker?
(2016-04-14) Svärd, Oskar
Today municipally owned companies are an established part of the Swedish local organisation. Municipally owned companies are situated in the boundary between the public and private sectors and that leads us to ask what effect this has on the work of their boards. It is not just the operations that is converted into a company, but also the political representation. Company boards are no ordinary political committees and do not act solely according to the public sector's legislation and logic. The work of company boards is regulated by the Swedish Companies Act and is linked to the market as the municipally owned companies are precisely companies which conduct their operations via the market. This provoke the question: what functions do these boards have, and on which grounds do they perform these functions? The first result in the study are that politicians don't usually act as either politicians or businesspeople when sitting on boards. They are neither loyal to their parties nor to the owners, but rather they develop an institutional logic where they instead identify with the company itself. However, certain members do still act as politicians when sitting on boards. The second result is that boards in municipally owned companies perform three important functions: they control the operation, they link the company to important stakeholders and they provide political advice to the CEO. That they perform these functions, but not others, is due both to the fact that they have unique knowledge about political processes, and contacts with important stakeholders. The study simultaneously reveals that these conditions are not sufficient for us to understand what the members do and why they do it. We also need to bring the members' institutional logic into the analysis. To enable the boards to control the operation, constitute a link to stakeholders and provide advice the board also need to consider it appropriate to perform these functions.
De granskade. Om hur offentliga verksamheter görs granskningsbara
(2012-10-09) Ek, Emma
During recent decades audits have taken on a more prominent role in governance, in Sweden and in the Western world as a whole. Audit is used in this context as an umbrella designation for control methods such as inspection, auditing, evaluation, accreditation and certification. What these control methods have in common is that they entail external, (presumably) independent authorities or companies inspecting and assessing various phenomena. A number of auditing bodies scrutinise and provide assessments, and in so doing govern organisations at a distance. This dissertation is about audit in the making. It describes what takes place when operations are made the object of auditing and what happens in organisations while being audited. The question that is answered is: how is auditability achieved? In distinction from many other studies on audits, the auditees have a prominent position in answering this question. The auditing that is at the centre of the study is state inspection within schools and elderly care. In the dissertation episodes and events in the realisation of these audits are described. The analysis is based on ethnographically inspired fieldwork. Building on Miller and Rose’s perspective on governmentality, the study has as its starting-point the technologies and the varying contexts in which these are manifested: in reports, on websites, in everyday routines and meetings between the auditors and the auditees etc. The study shows that being the subject of audit requires extensive work. Auditability is achieved through a large portion of predictability where each step in the process is acknowledged. This predictability entails much more than providing advance notification of audits. It is a way of organising and executing the audit, where the auditees are not just a part of the object being audited, but also the extended arm of the audit authority. They supply the representations that the audit authority needs in order to describe and assess the operation. In achieving auditability the auditees do more than deliver information about the organisation. Auditability also entails making the audit meaningful and useful (it is for our benefit). This is done mainly by (re)interpreting the auditing as an educational opportunity which also normalises the process (it is nothing to be afraid of). Technically auditability is a question of how the object being audited and the benchmarks used are made comparable. The study shows that auditability is achieved through the construction of an object that is defined on the basis of benchmarks and is consequently comparable. In the audit studied there is no formalised report that can be e-mailed to the audit authority, printed out, submitted or put in an envelope. Rather, describing and defining the operation is an important aspect of auditing. The description is undertaken for a specific purpose, namely to act as underlying data for the assessment. It is therefore not surprising that the object and the benchmark are comparable, as the object is defined precisely for this purpose. What the study contributes to previous research is, firstly, bringing the auditees into the debate on how auditability is created. The study also contributes to a less static picture of how organisations are made receptive to auditing: that receptibility entails much more than installing systems that continuously supply the information about the organisation that the auditors need. The study also contributes to problematise the division into auditors and audited by showing that the boundaries are by no means always clear-cut. Finally the study shows that how auditability is achieved partially explains what is being auditable.
Anteciperande förvaltning: tjänstemäns makt i kommunala policyprocesser om vindkraft
(2012-03-29) Bengtsson, Mats
Auditing the African State. International Standards and Local Adjustments
(2012-01-09) Gustavson, Maria
Norms for how to create accountability within the public sector have long historic roots in organizing the democratic society, where auditors are particular public servants controlling the rest of the public sector performance. Significant divergent understandings of the establishment and development of such accountability mechanisms within states in Sub-Saharan African countries however exists within two different bodies of literature. Due to negative historic experiences and failures of public administration reforms in Sub-Saharan Africa, several scholars within the development literature argue for the necessity of developing unique administrative structures that encompass the specific character of their societies. Due to lack of legitimacy and due to significant differences between Western countries and Sub-Saharan Africa, Western models are regarded to not be appropriate in these contexts. In contrast, in a strand of the organization literature, scholars claim that an observed behavior among organizations is their desire to become legitimate within their field of similar organizations, which in turn leads to homogenization among organizations, in structure and in practice, regardless of the geographical location. The thesis presents a study of the public audit arenas in Sub-Saharan Africa and of the Supreme Audit Institutions in Namibia and Botswana, where the above presented theories are tested. The results reveal a strong professional identity among African auditors, where they constantly reform their organizations to better encompass the requirements in the internationally described norms for auditing. Local circumstances were regarded by the auditors in general as obstacles, which they strived to overcome in order to achieve more legitimacy within their organizational field. The results of the study contrasts to much in the contemporary development literature describing African public sector organizations, and provides new insights on how to understand public sector reforms in Sub-Saharan Africa.

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