Search results

The purpose of this study is to explore the impact of deviant workplace behavior on digital transformation in the public sector. This contributes to the current literature on public sector digital transformation as well as to that of deviant workplace behavior in public sector contexts.

The authors conduct a qualitative case study of a digital transformation initiative in a Swedish municipality.

The authors identify three types of institutional drift related to digital transformation, i.e. decelerating digital transformation, maintaining infrastructural stability and accelerating digital transformation. The authors categorize mediators for said drift and theorize on the role of deviant workplace behavior as a strategic driver for digital transformation in public sector organizations.

With the study being a qualitative case study, it is limited in terms of generalizability and transferability. Through this study, the authors sensitize the notion of digital transformation and show how deviant behavior results in strategic polyphony. Future studies are informed through offering a new perspective to public sector digital transformation strategy.

Practice should view deviant workplace behavior as simultaneously constructive and destructive in lieu of planned digital transformation, as well as see its presence as a potential sign of subpar prerequisites for digital transformation in the public sector.

Through this study, deviant workplace behavior is highlighted as a source of strategic polyphony and hence an important aspect of public sector digital transformation strategy.

Through being the first paper, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, to apply the theory of institutional drift to digital transformation settings as well as identifying the impact of deviant workplace behavior on digital transformation, the study offers novel insights.

The purpose of this paper is to attempt to investigate farmer’s positional concerns in rural China, and how the positional concerns correlate with household expenditures on visible goods.

The authors conduct a survey-based experiment to measure farmers’ positional concerns, and employ econometric models to examine the determinants of the degree of positional concern and how the positional concern affects household expenditures on visible goods.

The authors find that Chinese farmers have strong positional concerns for income, and high-income households are more concerned with relative position. Furthermore, there is a significant difference between males and females with respect to correlation between degree of positionality and household expenditures on visible goods. For females, there is a positive correlation between degree of positionality and household expenditures on clothes, restaurants, and mobile phones, respectively. For males, there is a positive correlation between degree of positionality and household expenditures on mobile phones.

The government policy thus should pay attention to the positional goods, and the relevant consumption tax by increasing the prices of visible goods could be considered or suggested in the future even in the rural areas.

This paper provides complementary evidence on Chinese farmers’ positional concerns, and how the degree of positional concern relates to household expenditures on visible goods.

The purpose of the paper is to produce new knowledge about the positions that public libraries both take and are given in the conflicts over politics and identity that play out in contemporary cultural and library policy debates. Using conflicts over drag story hour at public libraries as case, the study seeks to contribute to an emerging body of research that delves into the challenges that public libraries as promoters of democracy are confronting in the conflictual political landscape of today.

The paper presents an analysis of debates reported in news articles concerning Drag story hour events held at Swedish public libraries. Utilizing the analytical lenses of discourse theory and plural agonistics, the analysis serves to make visible the lines of conflicts drawn in these debates – particularly focusing on the intersection of different meanings ascribed to the notion of the reading child, and how fear is constructed and used as an othering devise in these conflicts.

Different imaginings of the reading child and the construction and imagination of fear and safety shapes the Drag story hour debates. The controversies can be understood as a challenge to the previous hegemony regarding the direction and goals of Swedish cultural and library policy and the pluralistic democratic society these policies are meant to promote.

The paper offers new insights into the consequences of the revival of radical right politics, populism and societal polarization, and the different responses from public libraries.

This article explores how public librarians understand and perform the democratic mission of public libraries in times of political and social turbulence and critically discusses the idea of public libraries as meeting places.

Five group interviews conducted with public librarians in southern Sweden are analyzed using a typology of four perspectives on democracy.

Two perspectives on democracy are commonly represented: social-liberal democracy, focusing on libraries as promoters of equality and deliberative democracy, focusing on the library as a place for rational deliberation. Two professional dilemmas in particular present challenges to librarians: how to handle undemocratic voices and how to be a library for all.

The analysis points to a need for rethinking the idea of the meeting place and offers a rare example of an empirically based argument for the benefits of plural agonistics for analyzing and strengthening the democratic role of public libraries.

The aim of this study has been to explore learning experiences from the two first years of the implementation of value-based healthcare (VBHC) at a large Swedish University Hospital.

An explorative design was used in this study. Individual open-ended interviews were carried out with 19 members from four teams implementing VBHC. Qualitative analysis was used to analyse the verbatim transcripts of the interviews.

Three main themes pinpointing learning experiences emerged through the analysis: resource allocation to support implementation, anchoring to create engagement and dedicated, development-oriented leadership with power of decision. Resource allocation included the need to set aside time and administrative resources and also the need to adjust essential IT-systems. The work of anchoring to create engagement involved both patients and staff and was found to be a never-ending task calling for deep commitment. The hospital top management’s explicit decision to implement VBHC facilitated the implementation process, but the team leaders’ lack of explicit management mandate was experienced as obstructing the process. The development process contributed not only to single-loop learning but also to double-loop learning.

Learning experiences drawn from implementing VBHC have not been studied before, and thus the results of this study could be of importance to managers and administrators wanting to implement this concept in their respective organizations.

The purpose of this paper is to explain how different emergency services adopt and adapt the same hospital-wide lean-inspired intervention and how this is reflected in hospital process performance data.

A multiple case study based on a realistic evaluation approach to identify mechanisms for how lean impacts process performance and services’ capability to learn and continually improve. Four years of process performance data were collected from seven emergency services at a Swedish University Hospital: ear, nose and throat (ENT) (two), pediatrics (two), gynecology, internal medicine, and surgery. Performance patterns were linked with qualitative data collected through realist interviews.

The complexity of the care process influenced how improvement in access to care was achieved. For less complex care processes (ENT and gynecology), large and sustained improvement was mainly the result of a better match between capacity and demand. For medicine, surgery, and pediatrics, which exhibit greater care process complexity, sustainable, or continual improvement were constrained because the changes implemented were insufficient in addressing the higher degree of complexity.

The variation in process performance and sustainability of results indicate that lean efforts should be carefully adapted to the complexity of the care process and to the educational commitment of healthcare organizations. Ultimately, the ability to adapt lean to a particular context of application depends on the development of routines that effectively support learning from daily practices.

The objective of this paper is to generate further knowledge about strategic management accounting (SMA) in the public sector context. The authors attempt to do this through a study of SMA work in a public sector agency (PSA), the Swedish Transport Administration (STA). The paper elaborates on the formation of the agency's strategies and the challenges the agency's SMA work had to deal with, and focuses its analysis on the interplay between SMA and the characteristics of the public sector as well as how it is constitutive of strategy.

The empirical material was gathered between 2013 and 2015 and consists of documents that include the STA's appropriation, mandate, strategic and operational plans, and balanced scorecard, as well as interviews with 35 civil servants at various levels of the STA.

The study finds that, depending on the performances of PSAs in their specific environment and the influences from the environment's constituents, SMA may function as an instrument that makes or breaks strategies. The characteristics of the public sector context may therefore affect SMA, and by extension, strategy, in several ways. First, the present case shows that the inherent reduction that the focus of SMA techniques entails, and their inability to deal with the complexity of a PSA's context, places them at constant risk of becoming strategically irrelevant in the eyes of knowledgeable local managers in a PSA. Second, interventions from the government may override a PSA's SMA and in effect make a PSA's strategic focus ambiguous. Third, outside monitoring performed by such actors as the National Audit Office and the mass media may influence a PSA's SMA work both directly and indirectly when the agency and the government are responsive to the agenda set by such scrutiny.

The paper broadens the scope of earlier SMA research in the public sector by including the specific characteristics of the public sector in the analysis and how accounting techniques may come to compete for strategic placement as they are propelled from within and from without the organization.

This paper studies a Swedish municipality that wants to go beyond its own operations, involving the local industry in saving energy to improve the environment. The paper aims to analyse the experiences and practical implications of using policy networks for implementing energy-efficiency measures in private industrial companies.

The researchers closely followed a Swedish municipality and its work to engage the local industry in energy-efficiency activities. Participatory observations of meetings and workshops and semi-structured interviews with involved actors were conducted.

The study examines a Swedish municipality that has started addressing energy efficiency in local businesses by creating a network involving 60 companies. This network was tested in relation to four hypotheses on how policy networks develop. The study finds that the network has too broad a problem definition, which does not help unify the involved actors. The companies’ involvement is based on passive participation in which they are receivers of information. The network has been unable to use a social control mechanism because there have been few company-to-company meetings. In conclusion, for a network to be an efficient policy tool, its structure is as important as the ideas for action and clear goals.

This case study of one Swedish municipality allows for analytical but not statistical generalization.

The paper uniquely calls for reflection on whether municipalities and local authorities have enough competence to drive industrial energy efficiency.

The purpose of this paper is to extend the knowledge of how identity is connected to information sharing activities in social media during pre-school teacher training.

An ethnographic study is performed where 249 students at a Swedish pre-school teacher-training programme are followed through participant observations from November 2013 to January 2014, and from September 2014 to January 2015. The material produced includes 230 conversations from a Facebook Group used by 210 students and several teachers, field notes and transcribed interviews with nine students. Comparative analysis is used to analyse the Facebook conversations to identify ways of positioning identity and engaging in information sharing activities. Interviews with students are analysed to contextualise and validate the findings from the online interactions.

Three identity positions are identified: discussion-oriented learner, goal-oriented learner and customer-oriented learner. The way a student commits to others, to ideas and to a career choice affects their identity positions and information sharing activities. Results suggest that information sharing with social media should be understood as a powerful device for identity development in pre-school teacher training.

This study is designed to provide detailed accounts with high validity on the expense of a high degree of representativeness.

No previous library and information science-studies have been presented that explore the relationship between the identity of learners and the information sharing activities in which they engage, in the context of social media or in relation to teacher training.