To Örebro University

Cross-sectoral governance has become a prominent feature of contemporary public sector reform. Across policy areas such as sustainability, integration, unemployment, and crime prevention, public organizations are increasingly expected to assemble governmental and non-governmental actors into collective responses to societal challenges. In these arrangements, dispersed actors with fragmented mandates, uneven capacities, and no single center of authority are nonetheless expected to act collectively, assume responsibility, and respond to an expanding range of societal problems.

Drawing on world society theory and an interpretive synthesis of four studies of Swedish cross-sectoral governance networks, this thesis develops the concept of cross-sectoral actorhood. Cross-sectoral actorhood denotes the institutional process through which cross-sectoral governance arrangements come to be attributed and to sustain the qualities of a purposeful, capable, and morally responsible actor. Cross-sectoral actorhood is not an inherent property of such governance arrangements, but an ongoing institutional accomplishment, expressed and sustained through ambiguous institutional scripts, ceremonial infrastructures, and distributed enactments that render them recognizable as legitimate actors within a rationalized cultural order.

The central contribution of the thesis is to reframe cross-sectoral governance not as a neutral mode of problem-solving, but as a cultural stage: a site in which what counts as a pressing societal challenge and who counts as a responsible actor are continuously shaped. This theoretical move opens a critical space for examining not only how cross-sectoral actorhood is institutionally accomplished, but also its normative and political consequences. It shows how responsibility can be made visible and attributable while remaining distributed and unsettled, and foregrounds the political ordering processes through which particular configurations of problems and actors become actionable and legitimate, selectively privileging certain interpretations against a background of apparent consensus.

This article advances a discourse-theoretical reconceptualization of societal grand challenges. In organization studies, grand challenges have become a privileged vocabulary for engaging urgent societal problems such as climate change, global health, and sustainable development. While this expanding literature has generated insights into how such problems may be addressed, less attention has been paid to the processes through which grand challenges are constructed, framed, and legitimized as shared objects of concern. Drawing on Laclau and Mouffe's discourse theory, I argue that grand challenges derive their organizing force from their operation as empty signifiers, discursively open terms whose indeterminacy enables them to gather heterogeneous meanings and defer closure. As empty signifiers, they evoke a shared social imaginary that organizes collective action in response to what is perceived as absent or lacking in society. In this view, the articulation of a grand challenge is a political project in which hegemonic ordering takes place, selectively privileging certain interpretations and shaping legitimate action against a backdrop of apparent consensus. To theorize how grand challenges acquire meaning, I develop a triadic model of signification that conceptualizes them as empty, floating, and partially fixed signifiers. The article's primary contribution is to reconceptualize grand challenges as hegemonic projects constituted through articulatory practices. The discussion derives three analytical implications for grand challenges scholarship: (1) approaching problem articulation as a political process, (2) reorienting empirical inquiry toward tracing situated partial fixations, and (3) making explicit the epistemic assumptions underwriting solution-oriented research.

Based on a critical appraisal of current literature on Collaborative Governance, this article addresses the predominant way of dissociating public networks and bureaucracy as opposing forms of organizations. Drawing upon data collected from three governance networks in Sweden, the study displays how the studied actors seek to establish hierarchical relations, formal interaction channels, and designated offices to enable and facilitate collaborative governance networks in response to what is perceived as irrational and ad-hoc organizing. The analysis outlines how and why governance networks need not inevitably be transcending bureaucracy, but constitute a distinct and deliberate declaration of just that: The Networked Bureaucracy.

In light of current debates on 'protective' and 'connective' professionalism, this article explores a new type of occupational position that is emerging within the Swedish public sector: the cross-sector strategist. The growing presence of this intermediary occupational position is seen as attempts to formalize and institutionalize the imprecise roles and governance of 'wicked' policy problems, and the job of these strategists is focused on supporting other jurisdictions to meet and act. By pursuing connective strategies in the form of triggering, selling, bridging, brokering, and forming accountabilities, cross-sector strategists seek to establish embedded workspaces where strategic action and decisions can be produced jointly and across jurisdictional boundaries. The study illustrates how calls for changes in professional action towards connectivity are now part of the formal organizational structure of public sector organizations, confirming the incapability of professional actors to connect in the absence of intermediary support functions. In the concluding discussion, we consider the relevance of 'connective professionalism' as a descriptive theoretical device applied to work settings understood as increasingly complex and interdependent, with calls for inter-professional collaboration and intensifying engagement in preventing problems rather than simply treating them.