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Municipal companies are important actors in the pursuit of the Agenda 2030 goals and are often formally obliged by their owners to work in this direction. This has however shown to be quite challenging, and managers lack knowledge about how to develop new ways of organizing to meet such responsibilities. The aim of this article is therefore to understand how the work of a top management team in meetings affects the accomplishment of broad responsibility. The analysis, which is underpinned by a communicative constitution of organizing (CCO) perspective, shows how the way specific communicative practices (agendas, minutes, timeslots, turn-taking, and stakeholder voicing) are enacted leads to the re-production of parts of the organization at the expense of the whole, the present at the expense of the future, and profit at the expense of the other dimensions of sustainability. This study contributes to the literature on public management by showing how communicative practices enacted in meetings make certain concerns present and others absent, thereby creating the conditions for the accomplishment of broad responsibility.

Municipally owned corporations are important actors in the pursuit of the Agenda 2030 goals and are often formally obliged by their owners to work in this direction. This has however shown to be quite challenging, and managers lack knowledge about how to develop new ways of organizing to meet such responsibilities. The aim of this article is therefore to understand how the work of a top management team in meetings affects the accomplishment of broad responsibility. The analysis, which is underpinned by a communicative constitution of organizing (CCO) perspective, shows how the way specific communicative practices (agendas, minutes, timeslots, turn-taking, and stakeholder voicing) are enacted leads to the re-production of parts of the organization at the expense of the whole, the present at the expense of the future, and profit at the expense of the other dimensions of sustainability. This study contributes to the literature on public management by showing how communicative practices enacted in meetings make certain concerns present and others absent, thereby creating the conditions for the accomplishment of broad responsibility.

Municipal companies are important actors in the pursuit of the goals of Agenda 2030 and are often formally obliged by their owners to work towards achieving these goals, but without jeopardizing ongoing production and the delivery of vital public services. This has, however, shown to be challenging, and managers are often unsure how to develop new ways of organizing to meet such complex challenges and take on broad responsibility. What has been recognized is the importance of collaboration, which is a beneficial and distinct organizational form of its own that creates value greater than what individual organizations can do separately. Such ways of working are, however, hardly straightforward endeavours, since they usually involve members with contrasting goals and approaches, are inclined to fragmentation, and can sometimes even add to the challenges they set out to resolve. The aim of this thesis is to understand the practical challenges associated with collaborative efforts to manage broad responsibility in a municipal company. In response to this aim, responsible managing is studied both empirically and through a research literature review. The purpose of the literature review is to better understand the challenges of managing broad responsibility and what is currently being done to achieve the goals of Agenda 2030 at the municipal level. To understand how responsible managing is accomplished in practice, the enactment of responsible manging is empirically studied in a municipal company over a total of four years. Particularly, two cases have been studied using a participatory research approach: first, the case of a top management team managing responsibly together and second, the case of responsible managing in interorganizational collaboration in a municipal company. For both cases, a theoretical lens is used, resting on a social constructionist and processual-relational ontology, supported by practice-based studies in the communicative stream. This means that attention is focused on communication (both talk and text) in an approach that views responsible managing as a communicative practice, a form of emergent, relational, and situated practice and the means by which responsible managing emerges, is sustained, and transformed. The overall results show how situated communicative practices are influential for preventing the limitation of broad responsibility, fragmentation of the share responsibility, and the deprioritization of obligations over time. Based on this, a metaphor of dental prophylaxis is proposed. By conceptualizing responsible managing as a situated communicative practice and showing how responsible managing may be enacted, this thesis contributes theoretically to the field of organization and management.

Considering the population density of urban areas, their levels of consumption and emissions, their influence on social equality and inclusion, and the resources and power allocated to urban actors, it is important to examine how municipalities organize work as they proceed to implement Agenda 2030 and to what effect. A systematic literature review is used to analyse 77 articles, published between 2017 and 2022, that examine the sustainability activities of municipal actors in Europe. Two themes are identified and explained: a) a paradigm shift in local government; b) the mobilization of socio-technical approaches (e.g., smart cities and regenerative land use). Also, the limitations of the literature and some areas for future research are discussed: research comparing practices across regions and countries; research analysing the interaction of different initiatives within a municipality; and research examining the role of municipal companies.

The aim of this article is to contribute to research on responsible management by developing knowledge on how managing responsibly together in a Top Management Team (TMT) may be accomplished, thus complementing research in the area that focuses on the work of individual managers. To this end, we mobilize the concept of obligation to characterize what emerges as what a TMT needs to respond to. Having followed the TMT for a municipal company working together in meetings over time, we propose that three accomplishments (making the obligation present, making the obligation enable action and accounting for the obligation) shape how an obligation is made to matter. This is no linear process, but rather it unfolds in a series of materializations of the obligation in text and talk, as the TMT goes about its work. The article thus provides a contribution to research on responsible management but also has practical consequences for developing how a TMT works in order to address the urgent demands for change related to sustainable development.MAD statementIn this article, we develop knowledge on how managing responsibly together may be accomplished in a Top Management Team (TMT). Besides adding to the responsible management literature, we also provide theoretical tools that may be mobilized in order to develop the work practices of TMTs that want to contribute to sustainable development.

This article explores how issues of shared responsibility are negotiated in the realm of managing collaborative efforts between organizational actors for sustainable urban development abiding to the Agenda 2023 – with a particular focus on the rhetorical resources used in such negotiations. Through empirical material from recorded meetings in a one-year project at a municipal company, the article contributes to previous literature on collaborative ways of organizing and managing complex public challenges. With a focus on the discursive construction of shared responsibility, the concept of in-here-ness is introduced to denote accepted and assumed responsibility, which may shift through the use of pronouns: from a narrow ‘I’ or ‘we’ of stakeholders to a wider ‘we’ of collaborating parties. The article further contributes to the empirical field of sustainable development at the municipal level.

Using long panels of industry-specific offshoring information and subjectively reported well-being datasets mainly from Germany, which is also supported by datasets from the UK and Australia, this paper aims to investigate the relationship between offshoring and workers' subjective well-being in the source country. We employ panel data fixed-effects models with time-variant personality measures and industry-specific measures to alleviate the bias stemming from the non-random sorting of individuals in industries. Our findings suggest that offshoring negatively relates to workers' subjective well-being. The result is unexceptionally consistent across Germany, the UK, and Australia, and the effect is larger in business services and among high-skilled workers. We extensively discuss how contextual "fear-factors" prevailing in the source countries interact with the angst generated by the negative framing of offshoring. To single out such angst, we first show that objective and subjective job security concerns, job characteristics, and labor market conditions only marginally relate to the well-being effect of offshoring. Then, we investigate how the effect of offshoring on well-being is amplified by a larger set of contextual factors pertaining to temporary economic shocks, negative narratives about offshoring during electoral cycles, partisan political preferences, and high immigration rates. Finally, we show that a recent skill upgrade significantly diminishes the negative effect of offshoring on well-being.

This study investigates how the different political opportunity structures (POS) are related to NGO mobilization in two Chinese cities, Guangzhou and Hangzhou. Based on 48 interviews from 2016–2019, the study finds that variance in NGO mobilization is related to differences such as rules for NGO registration, more or less open-minded local leaders, and a relatively more independent media. NGO governance in Hangzhou is characterized as coopted participation. A few NGOs are allowed some influence in policy making, but in order to be allowed to mobilize, NGOs must accept a certain degree of cooptation. NGO governance in Guangzhou is characterized as constrained autonomy as the government plays a less active role in mobilizing NGOs, and more initiative for policy influence comes from the NGOs themselves. 

This paper addresses the need for further developing an understanding of leadership as practice in its multimodality by means of theoretically motivated qualitative methods, allowing researchers to come close to the doing of leadership. Empirical studies of this kind are still relatively rare. By articulating a microethnographic approach, we encourage short-term-focused engagements in empirical work and the writing of closed vignettes. Through this, current theoretical developments are connected to recommendations for fieldwork and for writing practices. We thereby articulate one possible coherent and consistent position from which to study the multimodality of leadership and to understand leadership as an accomplishment of direction.

One of the biggest challenges for businesses is how to engage and build long-lasting and deep connections with their customers and other partners (Wiersema, 2013). In recognition of this challenge, the concept of engagement has received growing attention and has gradually gained its momentum within marketing and service literature. Actors’ engagement – i.e., non-transactional actor behaviour that includes active collaboration and genuine interest in a relationship – imply that engaged actors have an active role in the integration of resources (e.g. goods, services, knowledge) and the perceived service outcomes (i.e. the perceived value) (Vargo & Lusch, 2011). The purpose of this qualitative study (including interview data from twenty customer firms and eight provider firms) is to explore the process of actor engagement in B2B relationships. This study thus explores business-to-business (B2B) collaboration in sustainability initiatives, and more specifically follows green leases as a type of a VEPs with aspirations to collaboratively reduce facilities’ impact on the environment, developed as a value proposition from the provider firms towards their B2B customers. Although there is plenty of research that focuses on actor engagement conceptualization (Alexander et al., 2018; Storbacka et al., 2016; Storbacka, 2019), as well as its antecedents and outcomes (Brodie et al., 2019; Hollebeek et al., 2018), the process of engagement has far gone largely unexplored (Ekman et a., 2021; Fehrer et al., 2018) because engagement has been viewed, although iterative, as a relatively static concept. Likewise, research on engagement in and between organizations has established the importance of engagement for successful relationships, but it has not fully explicated how engagement unfolds which thus limits potential insights both for theory and practice. Existing research has also largely assumed that engagement takes place naturally when a contract is in place connecting two or more parties. Moreover, given the complexity of engagement in contemporary knowledge intensive organizations, customers may need to interact with a single provider in long periods of time due to formal contracts, balancing different business logics, value understandings and perspectives over time, making engagement more complex than described in existing literature. Our study highlights that engagement fluctuates substantially and there are differences between surficial engagement (contractual relationship, formal interactions) and substantial engagement (active relationships). The study revealed that the process of B2B customer firms’ engagement with their provider firms could be viewed in three phases in relation to the sustainability value proposition (green lease): (i) initiation, (ii) emergence, and (iii) management offering both theoretical and managerial insights.

Abstract The implications of business actor engagement and industry-specific platform development within business-to-business (B2B) contexts requires more research. While existing literature provides some guidance on common engagement factors and their impact on value outcomes, it primarily focuses on consumer markets, overlooking the complexities of B2B markets. Recent studies highlight the need for mid-range conceptualizations of business actor engagement, emphasizing engagement’s role beyond the customer perspective. Understanding how responding actors perceive initiators in the BAE process is crucial, as it influences the overall engagement and value outcomes. This study addresses this gap by examining how the behavior and perceived role of initiating actors (in the study; Swedish real estate firms developing sustainability services for commercial tenants) impact responding actors’ engagement. Four perceived roles are identified and conceptualized: the diligent, negligent, steward, and dominant initiating actor. The results also offer insights into BAE role dynamics and suggest that digital platform components serve as business actor engagement role amplifier, shaping engagement and platform development

Purpose: This study aims to offer a mid-range theory conceptualization of factors central to understanding and facilitating business actor engagement (BAE). Reports on a study of real estate companies and their sustainable development goal (SDG) driven business initiatives. The aim is to identify the factors that need to be in place to facilitate positive engagement amongst actors in business-to-business (B2B) settings. Design/methodology/approach: A case study of real estate companies (landlords of business premises) and their business customers (tenants of offices and warehouses) – comprising interviews and workshops – offer insights related to the factors that need to be in place to facilitate BAE types and outcomes. Findings: The identified central factors of BAE – needed to understand and facilitate positive engagement to unfold – are the actors’ perception of: willingness (to act), resourcefulness (to contribute and solve issues) and influence (to affect decisions) regarding solutions related to the business initiative at hand. Failing to facilitate these factors may result in negative outcomes of BAE where “engagement” merely constitutes perceived obligations and responsibilities. Research limitations/implications: The study offers theoretical and managerial insights on how to manage the factors needed for BAE. It also sheds light on how actors can use SDG-driven business initiatives to achieve sustainability goals. Originality/value: It contributes to the concept of BAE, by emphasizing the dynamics of engagement, from the motivational and behavioral dimensions specific to B2B settings. It offers insights how to managerially cogovern rather than control BAE. It presents central factors needed to include and capacitate customers, facilitating successful implementations of SDG-driven business initiatives to reduce absent or negative outcomes. 

This thesis is an examination of how digital automation of administrative work unfolds in practice. It sets out to understand how administrative work changes as it is digitally automated and how such changes have wider consequences beyond the performance of specific work tasks. A case study design is used, focusing on digital automation through Robotic Process Automation (RPA) at a Swedish municipality, and the methods to produce data include interviews, observations, and document analysis. The thesis contributes to the body of literature that understands work as practices performed by diverse configurations of social and material elements, a body of literature that spans the fields of organization studies and information systems research. It comprises five papers:Paper I builds a foundation for the thesis by examining the automation process and conceptualizing it as configuring work. This is a dynamic process of mutual reconfiguration of work practice, digital technology, and organizational arrangements through which a new agentive configuration of work is approached. Paper II explores the ways in which a new dichotomy of human and digital coworkers emerges and the role of social responsibility and context for work as a new division of labor emerges. Paper III takes a broader look at the effects of digital technology on the organizing of work and proposes the conceptualization of hyper-taylorization as a way of understanding how the rationale of digital automation technology comes to enhance Taylorism in terms of making work digitally legible, predictable, and controllable. Paper IV shifts the focus again to the ethics of digital automation, utilizing an example from the case study to explore ethical and managerial implications when digitally automating. Paper V is a conceptual paper that aims to conceptualize the thesis's core theoretical contribution, which is to understand digital automation of administrative work as not just a change in how work is performed but a change regarding how knowledge about work is created and the conditions of knowledge creation. Within this framework, “work” is understood as performing an epistemic machineryrelated to the materiality of the configuration that performs work. Thus, The paper concludes that digital automation, at least in technological history, implies an epistemological shift of administrative work towards a more strictly rationalistic way of understanding the world at the expense of a pluralistic set of ways of creating knowledge and understanding the world.The thesis concludes by discussing the implications of this shift and how the political terrain of administrative work comes to be abandoned as it is digitally automated.

This paper aims to develop a conceptual understanding of the epistemic effects on work of digital automation. It does so by developing a performative understanding of an epistemic machinery, a material-discursive configuration which enacts epistemic and ontological boundaries in work. It goes on to conceptualize how the materiality of digital automation, mainly in the form of algorithmic representation, comes to prefigure certain epistemological and ontological boundaries. It then discusses the second order effects of this reconfigured epistemic machinery that is displacement of professional values and the political implications of that. It contributes to organizational theory by providing a conceptualization of how digital technology can change knowledge in work. It also contributes to discussions about the political implications of digital automation and use of algorithmic technologies in organizations.

Workplace technologies today not only support work but also perform it. Whereas the general debate often focuses on quantitative effect in terms of possible jobs lost, what is still largely missing is how workplace technologies impact the quality of employee’s work-life, in particular for office and administrative work. By mobilizing the literature conceptualizing work as accomplished in digital/human configurations, in this article we aim at unpacking how introducing digital automation technologies may lead to repositioning the human worker at work. We study the very start of introducing an RPA in a Swedish municipality with an ethnographic sensibility. Building on close readings of three episodes, we discuss how such the human/digital emergent configuration produced a re-distribution of categories of tasks and responsibilities and, consequently, a dichotomous distinction between human and digital co-workers. This means also a changing fabric of relationships supporting work, which could be characterized in terms of asymmetrical co-workership. 

This chapter makes the case for a processual approach to understanding ethical change leadership in order to develop a more fine-grained understanding of how leadership matters. It starts with a vignette taken from current empirical studies on digitalization, leadership, and organizing. This vignette is utilthere isized as an illustration of the theoretical argument made. The argument is presented in three steps. First, the vignette is reread and some critical questions as posed. Second, it delves deeper into the perspective that leadership may be understood as a process, and what this means for understanding leadership for change. Third, a processual conceptualization of ethics that is not centered on individuals, but focused on what is produced, re-produced, and not-produced in the doing of leadership for organizational change, is presented. This leads to the introduction of the concept of care, and propose the idea of care-ful co-directing change.

The MNE’s proficiency sourcing knowledge across borders is its raison-d’être. The broad knowledge sourcing overcomes the liability of foreignness and facilitates competitive advantage. Understanding the processes of subsidiary learning in local environments and alliance partners and then sharing within the Multinational Enterprise (MNE) is of immense importance to MNE management. This commentary summarizes and critically reflects on two chapters dealing with these issues, Chapter 7 and Chapter 8. The chapters nicely complement each other, one taking a subsidiary perspective and the other a headquarters perspective. Together they span ways of learning through captive, alliance, and market modes from foreign locations. Although there are exciting areas that are not investigated here the two chapters surface many matters for further research and pave the way for a range of urgent projects. MNE innovation performance through foreign knowledge sourcing and cross-border sharing continues to be a vibrant research area and subsidiaries’ roles in innovation processes remain at the centre of contemporary research.

In this paper the authors explore the role of a subsidiary as a centre of excellencewithin the multinational corporation (MNC). It is argued that such a role can bebased on the characteristics of a subsidiary's internal resources, its relationshipswith the rest of the MNC and the business context of which the subsidiary is apart. Based on the perspective of an MNC as a Network the latter aspect is es-pecially focused. Through an analysis of 98 subsidiaries the importance of thesubsidiary's embeddedness, in terms of business relationships with specific cus-tomers and suppliers for its role as a centre of excellence, is investigated.

A conceptual result from this paper is that it offers a framework for analysingthe role of the business context for the subsidiary's role as a centre of excel-lence. Productive relationships with external counterparts in the business envi-ronment can be used by the subsidiary to enhance its role as a centre of excel-lence. An empirical result is that the external embeddedness of the subsidiaryis an important and significant explanatory variable of the subsidiary's possibil-ities to be considered important to the MNC as well as a prerequisite to influ-ence the future behaviour of MNC.

The recommender system has become an intergral part of any online experience. Previous research on recommender systems effects have focused on the user as the single stakeholder by evaluating the utility of the system for end users in a short term perspective. This thesis is building on the current research on recommender systems by expanding the number of stakeholders with the business as an explicit stakeholder and by evaluating the long-term effects of recommender systems on both the business and the customers.

Subscription-based business models are increasing in popularity, outgrowing nonsubscription-based businesses. Many companies want to explain themselves as “a Spotify for X” focusing on highlighting the similarity to the well-known music streaming service. We arguethat there are distinct differences between subscription businesses that need to be articulatedand aim at providing a common language to use when talking about subscription-basedbusiness models. Supported by business model theory, with a specific focus on profitability,we explore and exemplify how customer activity relates to variability in revenues and costs.The subscription typology illustrates meaningful differences between subscription businessesin their variance in customer activity, and to what degree customer activity is linked torevenue and cost. Through the profit equation, customer activity is linked to profitability.Profit variability is shaped by volume- or choice-driven cost variability and upgrade- orinvestment-driven revenue variability. In this study, the expectation that the customerinteract with the product is seen as key for a subscription business. We define subscriptionsas recurring, advance payments for a product or service with which the customer activelyengages, highlighting the customer behavior aspect.

Den här boken är resultat av åtta studenters arbete under en uppsatsperiod på tio veckor. Vi började träffas i mars 2008 och i april satte arbetet igång på allvar. Under perioden gjorde studenterna en enkät, samlade in data och analyserade för att komma fram till hur småbarnsföräldrar funderar kring inköp av artiklar åt sina barn. I slutet av maj var arbetet klart! Det har varit ett nöje att få handleda arbetet och jag känner mig stolt att som handledare få presentera den här boken, vars innehåll är väldigt rikt med tanke på under vilken kort period den skapats. Jag hoppas att den kommer att läsas av studenter i marknadsföring som vill ha inspiration till hur undersökningar om konsumentbeteende kan genomföras, eller som helt enkelt bara vill läsa sig mer om ämnet. Vi vill alla tacka några personer som engagerat sig i att hjälpa till med arbetet, genom att låta sig intervjuas, släppa in oss i sällskap av konsumerande föräldrar eller givit synpunkter på arbetet som helhet. Tack till Linn Söderlund, Nicolaus Eberhardt och Maria Hedlund. Cecilia Lindh, Maj 2008

Strategic management in the public sector has become quite popular in practice and several studies have shown that it has an impact on organizational performance. However, we still know little of how strategic management unfolds in practice. Overall, our message is that there are specific challenges that appear when applying strategic management in a public sector context that need to be handled to enhance the possibility of succeeding with strategy work. We present these challenges in terms of four tensions emerging in strategy work: planned versus emergent strategies, legitimacy versus practicality, administrative management versus innovative approach, and accessibility versus security. Based on these identified tensions, we suggest four propositions that not only have implications for further research, but also practical implications.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to present how my positionality as a researcher alignedwith the works of Latour in terms of methodological inspirations and allowed me to develop acritical vantage point and simultaneously adopt a heterogeneously rather than hierarchicallyinformed approach to ordering the world, which I argue serves as a basis for a more inclusivestudy of management systems.Design/methodology/approach: I reflect over my own positionality as a researcher and sharehow my interpretation of Latour’s ontology through some of his ideas and concepts; particularlysymmetry, power, translation, and agency, allowed me to incorporate and organizeheterogeneous actors depicted in different empirical materials into space-time contexts andsubsequently theorize organizing and management practices as agential, multiple, andbecoming.Findings: A base in Latour’s ontology has equipped me with openness towards empiricalsettings, which I argue retains a democratic approach to theorization, i.e. theorization whichremains mindful of inadvertent assumptions about power, hierarchy or the taken for granted.This approach has also given me a form of personal resilience as a researcher.Originality: The originality of this paper lies in presenting and developing the concept ofmethod as democratizing. I argue that Latour’s approach to the empirical allows for at least twoforms of active democratizing, one relating to the researcher as self and the other in how itincorporates the empirical actors into research making possible the inclusivity of heterogeneityin analyses of organizations and organizing.

Existing theorizations on how the proliferation of market-based technologies within universities come to foster so-called academic performer subjectivities have mainly drawn attention to their coercive and seductive powers. However, while these theorizations help explain why researchers either unwillingly adapt to, or identify with and cherish, their neoliberal ideals, they are less useful to explain recent empirical results showing that many researchers willingly comply yet are very critical of the very same ideals. Drawing upon an interview study of Swedish researchers, we address this theoretical gap in the literature by analytically disentangling three important qualities of the technologies per se, in terms of them producing performance numbers characterized by Specificness, Ongoingness, and Emptiness (SOE). These three qualities do not only have the dual power to interchangeably provoke bitter and sweet feelings, but also to foster the adoption of an academic performer subjectivity. In fact, it is precisely by provoking bittersweet feelings that these qualities break the sharp edges of pure coercion and seduction, thereby fostering a type of low-affective, yet highly persuasive form of reasoning about pros and cons of market-based technologies, which make their neoliberal ideals seem acceptable and reasonable at the end of the day.

To mark the 40th anniversary of the Scandinavian Journal of Management, we explore its becoming in a context where internationalism is used to evidence claims about journal quality. Through an analysis of editorial voices, we show how internationalism positions journals as ‘a view from nowhere’, making them party to a ‘God trick’. Acknowledging the situated nature of all knowledge instead provides a means of disturbing geographies of power that shape how knowledge is created, performed and transformed in journals and expanding the range of others that ‘management’ represents. We trace the beginnings of a feminist new materialist theoretical shift in the journal, which we argue is crucial in providing hope regarding what management can do and engaging with our ethical response-abilities as knowers.

Ett förslag mot bristen på fängelseplatser är privata anstalter. Att överlåtadelar av statens våldsmonopol till marknaden är dock vanskligt, ochekonomiska fördelar finns knappast. Både principiella och praktiska skältalar för att inlåsning av kriminella ska skötas av myndigheter, skriversamhällsvetarna Monika Berg och Tobias Johansson-Berg.

There is a growing pressure for innovation in the public sector. Research on innovation suggests a new role for organizations, from a producer of predefined goods and services to a facilitator of co-creation and new forms of network-based governance. Previous research is mostly focused on the need for organizations to collaborate across sectors (inter-organizational) to promote innovation, less on the need for collaboration across local governments different departments (intra-organizational) but also across smaller units (inter-departmental). The aim is to explore how internal conditions affect a municipality’s innovation capability. 

This is done through a study based on interviews with departmental managers. The study reveals a heterogenic organizational environment where managing is situated and intra-departmental on the expense of inter-departmental and intra-organizational collaborations. The study also reveals that the situation is created by established practices, processes and structures which do not promote inter-departmental collaborations and thus does not build intra-organizational innovation capabilities.

The contribution of this book lies in the historical comparison of infrastructural systems that are normally dealt with separately. The synthesis has been achieved by an extensive literature review of research from a wide range of various fields and by using prime sources. The comparative and long-term perspective allows the discovery of similarities and differences in the development of arrangements around streets, water and sanitation. Using the analytical lens of publicness, the author challenges the common belief that these three areas have always been public concerns or obligations, an assumption based on the fact that presently they are indeed public infrastructural systems. Furthermore, the evolution of municipal streets, water and sanitation has left a historical legacy which is still affecting the way these infrastructural systems are managed today.

The first contribution of this report lies in the historical comparison of infrastructural systems that normally are dealt with separately. The synthesis has been achieved mainly by an extensive literature review of research from a wide range of various fields and by using prime sources to some extent. I have reinterpreted earlier results and brought together research areas that not so often communicate. The comparative and long-term perspective allows me to discover similarities and differences in the development of arrangements around streets, water, and sanitation. By using the analytical lens of publicness I can challenge the common belief that these three areas have always been public concerns or obligations. An assumption that relies on the fact that presently they indeed are public infrastructural systems. The second contribution is that I connect the historical development of these three sectors with research in medical, social, cultural, economic, and political history highlighting the most important contextual factors in society at large that has profoundly affected streets, water, and sanitation. I show how their respective evolution into public infrastructural systems has been strongly influenced by the strong Swedish tradition of local independence, by urbanization, demography, and industrialization, the municipal reform of 1862, and specifically for water and sanitation, the conflict between the private and the public; the social issue (concern for, and fear of, the working class and the poor); high mortality, Cholera epidemics and new perceptions of health and sickness; the Sanitary movement; the national health act of 1874. Finally, using theoretical concepts from the research traditions of Large Technical Systems (LTS, Hughes) I show how the evolution in municipal streets, water, and sanitation has left a historical legacy still affecting the way these infrasystems are managed today.

Water and sewage (WS) systems are, like most grid based infrastructural systems, often centralised and hierarchical and the end user has almost no possibility to influence the technical standards, business models or system architecture. The preferred method for connecting new areas to the grid are underground water pipes and gravity flow for sewage. Thus, the WS system is “tightly coupled”. It is hard to change and conservative in its system culture, exhibiting a strong “momentum” or “path dependence”.

In this article we investigate an unusual case in the development of WS-systems. As a rule, WS-systems, as most infrastructural systems, develop gradually through incremental innovations, and system owners/utilities traditionally build their systems “from the inside out”. In our case, we investigate a situation where the end users took the initiative to connect a residential area, Aspvik, part of the municipality of Värmdö, outside Stockholm, Sweden, to the municipal grid and thus expand the WS-system, not from the inside out, but from the outside in.

Furthermore, we highlight another unusual feature: the role of a resident that acted as the “entrepreneur” in this process of WS-system expansion. The entrepreneur had unique trust building abilities in the local community, which the regime actor (the WS utility), could not match. Historically, inventor-entrepreneurs have been common, acting as “system builders” in the establishment phase of new infrastructural systems. However, entrepreneurs outside the regime are not common in the WS sector.

Although atypical in mature WS systems in developed countries, these types of local initiatives or hybrid solutions are common in developing countries. In this article, we argue that there are lessons to be learnt from our case, when dealing with system expansion processes both inside and outside the Global North.

Firms are increasingly using forms of AI to serve stakeholders across various business functions, resulting in both positive and negative outcomes. Stakeholder theory explains how firms create and destroy value via their stakeholder encounters, making it an ideal foundation for understanding AI deployment on firm-level perfor-mance. As AI continues to evolve, both when it comes to the activities and roles it takes and the stakeholders it affects, the AI-stakeholder framework developed herein identifies and situates key managerial decisions related to the adoption and deployment of AI that drive the firm's likelihood of creating or destroying value through stakeholder encounters. The AI-stakeholder framework focuses on stakeholder justice and is supported by testable propositions about the conditions most likely to affect the outcomes of incorporating AI into business processes. The framework also supports future research and practical managerial guidance by articulating the challenges and potential of AI for managing stakeholder encounters.

Purpose: This study aims to investigate the drivers of political embeddedness and the possible outcome in terms of autonomy and subsidiary unique competences.

Design/methodology/approach: This study draws on resource dependence theory and applies structural equation modeling on a sample of 193 subsidiaries.

Findings: Political embeddedness is confirmed as a source of potential autonomy and the development of competences and is usually boosted by previous existing networks at the internal and external levels.

Originality/value: The authors investigate and discuss how multinational corporations can leverage political resources in host-country political arenas, extending their understanding of the interplay between political activities and market strategies.

Welfare technologies (WT) for older people is a rapidly expanding sector that offers a way to tackle the challenge of an aging population. Despite their promise in terms of advances in care services and financial savings, their use is still limited. Their design and implementation remain problematic, as they require changes in working practices through coordination among a multiplicity of actors. In order to address these challenges, the need for change is often expressed in terms of a lack of working methods appropriate to their scope. This has led to a proliferation of different toolkits, guidelines, models, etc.; however, these methods often imply a linear understanding of an implementation project and thus fail to take into consideration the emergent and situated character of the processes that lead up to the adoption of welfare. The aim of this article is to propose an alternative means of providing support for the introduction of these technologies by initiating a process for organizational change. The term "change" is understood here as something that is produced by practitioners-in collaboration with researchers-and not brought by researchers to practitioners. To this end, using the tradition of intervention research as inspiration, a learning process at the crossroads of different practices and objects was initiated. The center of attention of this article' is the sociomaterial process by which different communities of practitioners interact on the co-creation of a checklist. This is a new working method in which the focus is not the artifact in itself but how it emerges through successive interactions and iterations among different objects, practitioners and researchers, resulting in a joint sociomaterial process that reconfigures power relations and the work objective associated with WT. In other words, a new working method artifact is developed in a process in which practitioners, researchers and contextual objects interact and become one with each another.

The chapter explores how arts-based practices informed by posthuman feminism can contribute to expanding ways of learning and knowing about sustainability. Posthuman feminism relocates agency from the human subject to heterogenous assemblages of humans and nonhumans and anchors subjectivity to the body and materiality. From a pedagogical perspective, this means subverting the traditional approaches rooted in the reproduction of a given area of knowledge and taking all materialities, including the body, into account in the learning process as a way of becoming with the world. The authors set up a workshop in which they mobilise creative dance in order to explore different approaches to urban water, in particular flooding, with students of industrial engineering. The students explore the materialities involved in urban flooding through corporeal interactions and creative tasks. They physically experience becoming bodies of water, encountering and intra-acting with “hard”, protective infrastructures as well as more sustainable solutions under the new paradigm “more room for water”. Through these bodily practices, the students multiply the ways of experiencing connectedness with urban water beyond control and mastery as part of a watery subjectivity. The experiment and methodology also contribute to the conversation on post-qualitative research in the framework of a posthumanist epistemology of practice.

(1) Background: The World Health Organization recommends active commuting as a source of physical activity. Active commuting is determined by various factors, including the socioeconomic status (SES) of families and neighborhoods, distance to schools, perceived neighborhood safety, lifestyles, and availability of walkways and biking paths. This study aimed to assess factors associated with modes of transportation to and from school among adolescents aged 16–19 living in a middle-sized city in Sweden. (2) Method: Three hundred and fourteen students, of whom 55% were females, from schools in the city of Västerås participated in the study. Printed as well as web-based self-administered questionnaires were used to collect the data. (3) Results: Adolescents living in high SES neighborhoods were 80% more likely to bike or walk to school (OR = 1.80; CI: 1.01, 3.20) than adolescents living in low SES neighborhoods. Furthermore, active commuting was associated with higher consumption of fruits and vegetables (OR = 1.77; CI: 1.05, 2.97) and less consumption of junk foods (OR = 0.43; CI: 0.26, 0.71), as compared to passive commuting. (4) Conclusions: Active commuting is a cost-effective and sustainable source of regular physical activity and should be encouraged at a societal level. 

I rapporten ”AI-utvecklingen i Kina – påverkan på svensk tjänstemannasektor” beskriver statsvetaren Mattias Burell och Kina-experten Kristina Sandklef hur både den kinesiska staten och olika företag använt sig av den nya tekniken. Rapporten visar även hur statsapparaten och det styrande kommunistpartiet använder AI  och annan teknik för att kontrollera medborgarna. Genom övervakningssystem är det möjligt att kontrollera en stor del av all mänsklig aktivitet – både online och i det fysiska livet – och med AI och maskininlärning blir det även möjligt för den kinesiska staten att förutsäga vilka medborgare som kan antas vara illojala mot det politiska systemet.

Each of the chapters in this volume, from the introduction to this end(ing), engaged in a conversation about producing knowledge in, about, with "organization studies" at a time when we (us, the human inhabitants of this Earth) are facing calamitous conditions, probably leading to our/its destruction, and (some more than others) are wondering what is to be done. As members of the management and organization studies (MOS) scholarly community, all the authors in this project are deeply concerned about the "knowledge" our common field is producing as "legitimate", for it seems not only inadequate for addressing those calamitous conditions but also that this kind of knowledge may be implicated in reproducing the harms we all decry. The aim here has not been to critique the field on the basis of what it produces but to acknowledge conditions perpetuating the production of those forms of knowledge more generally, and to offer positive alternatives which may make a difference in what is produced, perhaps contributing to a better world‚ over and over again. The message this chapter and all other chapters hope to convey is the possibility of "thinking, saying and doing otherwise". But can we truly question the very notion of "the human" supporting "legitimate knowledge"? Can we truly focus on producing processual knowledge with indefinite aims? In other words, is the becoming of an organization studies produced with feminist new materialisms possible? Responding to those questions, and following the original proposal for this volume, this chapter is the voice of the collectivity articulating 'the-world-and-beyond' as envisioned in each of the prior chapters. Taking this approach resonates as well with new materialisms: "'a doing with' which cannot be a 'doing alone' -more like a world of on-going assembling".

By collecting and analysing survey data from newly employed audit assistants at the largest accounting firms in Sweden, this chapter aims to analyse key aspects of becoming an auditor. The study investigates the characteristics of these audit assistants and to what extent their opinions coincide with the opinions of other highly educated citizens. It also investigates to what extent four value commitments of the new recruits coincide with these of senior auditors. The results show that the ones recruited today are more diverse than their older peers with respect to educational, socio-economical, and geographical backgrounds. While sharing high confidence in the universities, the legal system, and the police, the audit recruits' opinions (i.e. trust in societal institutions like the media) deviate from other citizens with higher education. The similar opinions related to auditing (e.g. professional and client commitments) indicate that the newly recruited auditors seem to already closely reflect the identity of authorised and approved auditors when being employed. They also believe that the reason for their being hired is more related to ‘soft’ skills than to ‘hard’ accounting and auditing knowledge.

This article provides an overview of the discussion animating the track “Doing research in technoscience as affective engagement” organised at the VIII STS Italia Conference. By acknowledging the inheritance of feminist STS scholars in expanding the theoretical scope of care beyond its traditional sites, this session was devoted to exploring knowledge production as a matter of care as well as a form of affective engagement and entanglement with multiple Others while doing research. Two contributions were presented. The first ethnographically investigates Canadian blood donation practices by drawing on Haraway’s SF figure to develop what the speaker calls ‘Sanguine Figuration’. The second presentation relies on research of women’s animist practices amongst horses in Swiss Alps through a filmmaking practice influenced by Haraway’s work on the natureculture continuum and situated knowledge. Both studies embody efforts to develop non-representational research practices and experimental approaches showing the affective entanglement between researchers and researched, subject and object. Further, these contributions have highlighted the importance of conceptual creativity and imagination in building an apparatus that enables accounting for affective engagements in doing research in STS.