To Örebro University

The latent potential for every military actor, as well as for the resources controlled by military organizations, to be sacrificed by the state for political or existential purposes constitutes the central collective signifier of military existence. This potential is not merely vague fears and premonitions of a possible future but also a real mode of operation, most often distant, sometimes imminent, and on rare occasions, a reality. This looming possibility does not, however, imply simple or immediate consequences. It makes up an ever-present collective imagination – both shared and contested – and infused with collective emotions such as fear, pride, and a sense of duty. More formally, it could be described as a central imaginary signification, articulated in countless ways that ascribe meaning to the military as a social practice. The institutional specificity of the military is a deeply ingrained transformative capacity, not hierarchy, uniforms, or lethal weapons. There is nothing, literally, that is military per se. Military institutional specificity is thus a state of becoming – a potential in which anything within military organizations can be enrolled as part of a war machine. The perceived proximity to this war machine is ‘the shadow of war’: a simultaneously elusive and overwhelming source of meaning within all military organizations. The paper explores the becoming of military institutional specificity through the concepts of institutional transversality, affinity, and specificity.

Vad vet om militära organisationer? Väldigt mycket skulle många säga. Men den samhällsforskning som finns i ämnet har främst fokuserat på det som anses vara det mest typiska för militär verksamhet, som formalisering, rollstyrt beteende och opersonliga relationer. Vi vet desto mindre om militära organisationers inre liv. Den här boken syftar till att problematisera den förenklade och endimensionella bilden genom att undersöka militära professionella praktiker ur ett kulturellt perspektiv. Författaren beskriver hur social struktur och materiella arrangemang - från personlig utrsutning till byggnader och tekniska system - flätas samman på olika sätt och hur delade idéer och föreställningar utvecklas i tid och rum.

Boken har ett brett empiriskt fokus, med studier av militära professionella praktiker inom armén, flottan och flygvapnet. En explorativ ansats har valts eftersom så litet egentligen är känt om de stora och mångfasetterade verksamheter som moderna försvarsmakter utgör.

Responding to Soeters and Talbot and Fischer, we clarify our position that learning in military organizations is highly contingent on established organizational frameworks, vocabularies, and understandings and constrained by existing power relations. The danger present in military operations increases the importance of minimizing internal frictions and constrains local experimentation and the application of different solutions. Thus, while there is learning in military organizations, the latter are less prone than large, civilian organizations to venture into the use of new and unproven solutions. The present debate about learning in military organization reflects the different basic assumptions about formal organizations in management studies as opposed to the field of organizational sociology.

Skolan antas forma elever som i sin tur formar samhället på lång sikt. Lärarkåren är därför ofta en måltavla för politiska reformer, vilket den också varit i Sverige under lång tid. Men hur formas då lärarutbildningen av reformer, av vilka och med vilket fokus? I Professionalisering av lärarutbildningen analyseras den svenska lärarutbildningen, hur den har förändrats över tid samt vilka ideal och aktörer som ligger bakom utvecklingen. Här jämförs också den svenska lärarutbildningen med den finska. Vid en ytlig betraktelse ter de sig närmast identiska, men som boken visar är de diametralt olika i en rad avseenden. Boken vänder sig till samhällsforskare, lärarutbildare, lärarstuderande, lärare och rektorer, politiker och alla andra som intresserar sig för skolfrågor.

Educational reforms are attempts to transform and reconstitute conceptions of knowledge, the practice of teaching and the forms of subjectivity associated with being a teacher, pupil, and parent. We will investigate a particular aspect of the extensive changes that have swept across the landscape of Swedish education over the last decades. We will show how the grading system has come to fulfill a mediating role between progressivist educational ideas and neo-liberal notions of individual choice and entrepreneurship, by way of adjudicating and mediating educational performance for individual pupils, schools, and the education system at large. The aggregated output of the grading system is used for instrumental purposes such as performance management, quality management, and bench marking in the school system. Grading and its associated practices extend throughout the entire school system, defining success and failure from individual classrooms to the national level as the dominant form of representing school performance. The grading system was initially intended to reshape the inner workings of education in Sweden but subsequently became the "gold standard" deployed in various managerial practices. Our analysis demonstrate the performative powers when seemingly innocent techniques are put to use in public sector reforms and new worlds are made and unmade by complex constellations of seemingly mundane techniques and ideational frameworks.

This article argues that military organizations display a more rigorous form of collective sensemaking than ordinary bureaucratic organizations. Military organizing is predicated on the rigorous modes of thinking and acting that follow from the particular military propensity to impose order on chaos. This trait is antithetical to modern notions of “the learning organization,” in which exploring variety and experimenting and testing out unproven methods are central. We identify two sets of structural conditions that constitute the sociocognitive landscape of military organizations and discuss how the military logic of action might be enacted in different sociocultural contexts. Our framework is brought to bear on recent research on international military missions, and in the concluding section, we summarize our arguments and discuss their wider implications in terms of trade-offs between adaptability and other capabilities in the design of military forces.

Studien belyser hur gymnasielärare retrospektivt uppfattar att de förberetts för sitt yrke under lärarutbildningen. Enkätsvar från 1554 gymnasielärare kategoriserades efter den tidsperiod då de examinerades. Frågan om hur väl förberedda de nyexaminerade lärarna var för sitt yrke kopplas till de nationella reformer som styrde lärarutbildningen under den period som läraren studerade. Medan utbildningen i praktisk yrkeskunskap uppfattas ha försämrats över tid, har andra områden förbättrats. Lärosäte hade inte något samband med respondenternas svarsmönster. Slutsatsen är att utbildningsreformerna har samband med förändringar i utbildningens måluppfyllelse, att förbereda lärarstudenter för sitt yrke, samt att utbildningens anpassning till yrkets krav försämrats över tid.

Agency and institutions are essential concepts within institutional theory. In this Perspectives issue, we draw on a select group of Organization Studies articles to provide an overview of the topic of agency and institutions. We first consider different ways of defining agency and institutions and examine their implications for institutional theory. We then analyse the relationship of actors and institutions through four lenses – the wilful actor, collective intentionality, patchwork institutions and modular individuals. Our analysis leads us to dissociate agency from individuals and view it as a capacity or quality that stems from resources, rights and obligations tied to the roles and social positions actors occupy. Roles and social positions are institutionally engineered. It is social actors qua occupants of roles and positions (not individuals) that enter the social ‘stage’ and exercise agency.

In Swedish emergency departments, various initiatives have been introduced in order to reduce long waiting times for patients: lean methods, targets for waiting times related to revenues, interprofessional teams, and different forms of triage systems. This study focuses on the physicians’ views on dilemmas related to these interventions. The study is based on the interviews with 14 physicians in four emergency departments. The interviews have been analysed thematically and presented in the form of brief narratives. The study follows changes from clinical practice to the national policy level. The changes appear to be ineffective or counterproductive—waiting times are rather getting longer, but the measures have a number of other effects. Decisions are taken at a central level and are carried out by means of rules, incentives, and projects and end in the medical profession being displaced from the central position they have held in the working processes of health care.

In this article we analyze public sector change as a profoundly constructed phenomenon – as performative reforms. Public sector reforms, of which policy processes are an integral part, are constituted and realized through long chains of interventions.Communicative–discursive interventions posit and constitute problemsas real and important, while technocratic interventions, such as plans, analyses, and schemes construct new imagined worlds for possible and attractive instrumental solutions. Our empirical results display circular movements of three modes ofchange, making up a continuous policy cycle in the transformation of Swedish health, reiterated on different levels of the system, indifferent scales, and with different actors involved.

The continuity of the reforms is to a large extent the result of a successful institutionalization of the policy cycle and its content. It is stabilized as a set of discourse and social technologies, distributed throughout the entire healthcare system and almost impossibleto question.