To Örebro University

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.

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.

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.