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At the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, health care was at the centre of the crisis. New demands made existing organizational practices and services obsolete. Primary health care had a great deal of responsibility for COVID-19-related care. The pandemic demanded effective leadership to manage the new difficulties. This paper aims to explore experiences and perceptions of managers in primary health care in relation to their efforts to manage the COVID-19 crisis in their everyday work.

The authors used a qualitative approach based on 14 semi-structured interviews with managers in primary health care from four regions in Sweden. The interviews were conducted during September to December 2020. Data were analysed using conventional qualitative content analysis.

Data analysis yielded three categories: lonely in decision-making; stretched to the limit; and proud to have coped. The participants felt lonely in their decision-making, and they were stretched to the limit of their own and the organization’s capacity. The psychosocial working conditions in primary care worsened considerably during the pandemic because demands on leaders increased while their ability to control the work situation decreased. However, they also expressed pride that they and their employees had managed the situation by being flexible and having a common focus.

Looking ahead and using lessons learnt, and apart from making wise decisions under pressure, an important implication for primary health-care leaders is to not underestimate the power of acknowledging the virtues of humanity and justice during a crisis. Continuing professional education for leaders focusing on crisis leadership could help prepare leaders for future crises.

This paper aims to identify and elaborate on the various interpretations and implications of e-government as a process of public policy-making and as an act of information systems (IS) project management. The paper contributes to the search for a theoretical conceptualization by bridging policy project management and policy-making in public sector organizations at a crossroad of e-government to improve sustainable e-government research.

The research design of this paper focus on a model balancing the two research fields; public policy-making and analysis, and project management in the IS field. Through this model, four critical aspects of the processes are identified: objective, incentives/motivation, input/trigger and coordinative actor. These critical aspects are illustrated through findings from four case studies that are re-analyzed here. The cases show how the conceptual model through different dimensions can balance the two perspectives to reach a more sustainable outcome of e-government.

The paper shows that the two perspectives on e-government – public policy-making and project management – can be balanced and thereby reach a more sustainable outcome at this crossroad. The case studies re-visited in this paper are compared and serves as illustrations of these perspectives and different configurations of them in search for the crossroad.

A main contribution of the paper is that e-government projects should be studied in, and taking both public policy-making and IS project management into account to be sustainable and successful. Even if the case studies have been conducted in Sweden, the conceptual results in this paper can be analytically generalized into other setting. However, there is a need for more comparative and conceptual studies in the field of e-government to shed light on the multi-faceted crossroads illustrated in this paper.

The paper offers new insights on how to integrate, bridge and even balance the two aspects of e-government policy aspects and projects management to achieve more sustainable and successful e-government.

The paper contributes to the literature by shedding light on the crossroad of policy aspects and IS project management approaches in the e-government field. The paper points at the need to further develop the understanding and design of e-government at the crossroad of information system models and political science concepts.

The purpose of the paper is to examine how the cartelized Swedish advertising industry contributed to the development of brands in Sweden in the early twentieth century. Specifically, a nationwide campaign for branded goods in 1925 is studied.

The paper is based on a study of primary sources from the Swedish advertising agencies, manufacturers and retailers, which are analyzed using a hermeneutic method.

The paper shows that the unique organization of the main Swedish advertising agencies and the limited size of the market pushed the agencies into promoting and selling the idea of brands to consumers, retailers and manufacturers, which was done by exploiting established social sentiments in combination with American advertising techniques. It is also found that the Swedish advertising agencies described and conceptualized brands using widely known social ideals rather than the so-called brand personality aspect of branding.

Although limited to the Swedish case, this paper suggests that research could benefit from taking different markets’ unique contexts into more consideration when studying the development of brands and advertising. In this paper, especially the organization and size of the advertising market together with the specific social and cultural values available to advertising professionals when creating brands, have been highlighted.

The paper emphasizes the size of the advertising market together with the organization of the advertising industry as important factors for the historical development of brands in Sweden. It also shows how brands were conceptualized using social ideals rather than the brand personality aspect of branding.

Given the parallel processes of stress development and organisational changes towards increased managerialism, the purpose of this paper is to understand the way in which employees’ stress is perceived and managed in female- and male-dominated sectors, characterised by new management-oriented steering methods.

The paper is based on a thematic analysis of interviews with managers and employees at one Swedish female-dominated work setting and one male-dominated work setting. The paper offers an analysis of how managerial approaches to stress mediate the ways in which employees may come to govern their own subjectivity through stress-management practices. Drawing upon Foucault’s and Rose’s work on governmentality and freedom, these practices are understood as implicated in the everyday exercise of power over the self.

The main finding is that a logic emphasising proactivity was more prevalent at the female-dominated workplace, while a logic emphasising trust was most prevalent at the male-dominated workplace. Both logics perceive self-management and self-realisation as ways to manage stress, but in the proactive regime, self-management and self-realisation tend to turn into new modes of exploitation. Approaches to stress management in the proactive regime in fact seem to further diminish levels of discretion and control, which, according to previous research, are typically already low in female-dominated work.

Based on these findings, the study argues for the importance of combining a self-managerial approach with trust in order to avoid turning the individualisation of work into a source of stress at female-dominated workplaces.

The paper contributes to a more complex understanding of women’s work stress by highlighting its interconnection with a proactive stress management regime.

This paper aims to add to the theorization of family dynamics and women’s entrepreneurship by examining women’s influence on decision-making in family businesses. Business decisions in family firms, in particular, are not free from family influence in terms of goals and strategies, and the role of women in decision-making processes is of particular interest. Consequently, the role of women entrepreneurs in family firms and their influence on business development requires a more fine-grained analysis of the family dynamic within the family and the business.

This study draws on a qualitative study and focuses on the life story narratives of nine women in rural family businesses in rural communities of Småland province in Sweden to empirically examine the decision-making processes. This region is known both for its entrepreneurial culture and traditional gender order. Based on the narrative accounts of women entrepreneurs in family businesses, the data analysis method is thematic, using a Gioia-inspired method.

The complexity of decision-making in rural family firms is further complicated in part due to a closeness with the rural community. Thus, a typology of three decision-making modes in family firms emerges an informal family-oriented mode, a semistructured family/employee consensus mode and a formal board mode with at least one nonfamily member. Moreover, the advantages, disadvantages and strategies that women use to influence decisions within the respective mode are outlined.

This work contributes to the study of women’s agency and its implications in family business and entrepreneurship in the rural context. The study implies that women’s agency shapes the (rural) entrepreneurship context and, likewise, the (rural) entrepreneurship context influences women’s agency. Hence, the author challenges the view of women as only caregivers and sheds light on the practices and processes behind the scenes of entrepreneurial family businesses.

This paper aims to add to the theorization of the gender dynamic in rural areas by investigating the motives of women who join their family firm (or their spouse's family firm) and thereby defy the demographic trend of rural flight. The context of this study is the depopulation of rural areas with the closing of basic services and relocation of the younger population, and educated women in particular, to urban areas. Consequently, rural family businesses risk failing to find successors and suffering forced closure or relocation. The empirical site of the study is rural family firms in Sweden, a context characterized by a high level of gender equality in legislation and culture but gender-conservative business structures in rural regions.

The empirical case in this paper builds on a qualitative study of nine (9) life course narratives of women entrepreneurs in a rural region of Southern Sweden who have returned to rural areas to join their family business. The authors follow the view established by gender scholars that women are active agents in navigating their lives, and their life story narratives offer insight into the considerations that inform their choice to stay or return to rural locations. In Sweden, the setting for the study, gender equality is widely supported by legislation, policy and institutional frameworks and popular understanding of gender relations. In contrast to the gender-progressive policies of Sweden at large, women's entrepreneurship in rural regions of Sweden tends to follow traditional gender hierarchies and face similar constraints as in rural areas of other countries. The juxtaposition of these competing sets of ideals makes Sweden an important and interesting place to study and draw insights from the experiences of women entrepreneurs.

The findings reveal that women who choose to join rural family firms view them primarily in a positive light and see this choice as aligned with their need for professional flexibility and assertiveness, rewarding relationships, and a calm, secure, well-balanced life. Theoretically, the study implies that women choosing to engage in rural family firms seek non-material benefits, such as work–life balance and social support, and may be driven in part by a sense of psychological ownership that extends to the rural community.

The findings provide novel insights on women as active agents in navigating their lives and the intrinsic (e.g. alignment of personal values) and extrinsic (e.g. community support) motives that inform their decisions. The study also raises questions regarding how women perceive themselves as “fitting in” to rural settings and to what extent the sense of security within these settings that the women describe may be contingent upon factors such as their families' embeddedness within the community as well as their conformity to the local social norms.

The purpose of this paper is to explore board functions and their location in family firms.

Through structured induction in a four-case study of medium-sized Swedish family firms, the authors demonstrate that board functions can be located in other arenas than in the common board and suggest propositions that explain their distribution.

(1) The board is but one of several arenas where board functions are performed. (2) The functions performed by the board vary in type and emphasis. (3) The non-family directors in a family firm serve the owners, even sometimes governing them, in what the authors term “bidirectional governance”. (4) The kin strategy of the family influences their governance. (5) The utilization of a board for governance stems from the family (together with its constitution, kin strategy and governance strategy), the board composition and the business conditions of the firm.

Being a case study the findings are restricted to concepts and theoretical propositions. Using structured induction, the study is not solely inductive but still contains the subjectivity of induction.

Governance agents should have an instrumental view on the board, considering it one possible governance arena among others, thereby economizing on governance.

The institutional pressure toward active boards could paradoxically reduce the importance of the board in family firms.

The board of a family company differs in its emphasis of board functions and these functions are performed with varying emphases in different governance arenas. The authors propose the concept of kin strategy, which refers to the governance importance of the structure of the owner and observations on bi-directional governance, indicating that the board can govern the owners.

This paper aims to unveil how sustainability is integrated into the courses/programmes of higher education institutions. The research question addressed is: how do academics representing different disciplines cooperate and engage in the work of integrating sustainability into their teaching programmes.

This paper draws upon the notions of practise variation and institutional work from institutional theory and empirically focusses on the case of Kristianstad University (Sweden). This case is based on an autoethnographic approach and illustrates the experiences shared by six colleagues, representing different disciplines, engaged in implementing sustainability in their courses/programmes.

The findings highlight how academics representing different disciplines, with specific traditions and characteristics, face the sustainability challenge. Despite being bound by similar sustainable development goals, differences across disciplines need to be acknowledged and used as an asset if trans-disciplinarity is the ultimate goal.

Although the intrinsic motivation of individuals to work with sustainability might be a strong driver, the implementation of sustainability within courses/programmes and across disciplines requires joint efforts and collective institutional work.

By highlighting how academics engage in the work of integrating sustainability, this study emphasizes that managers of higher education institutions need to account for the time and additional resources needed to ensure that academics effectively cope with sustainability. Intrinsic motivation may not last if organizational structures and leadership are not supportive on a practical level and in the long run.

With the successful implementation of a holistic approach to sustainability, students will have better insights and understanding of both themselves and the surrounding society, laying the ground for an inclusive future society.

This paper emphasizes the gradual approach to be followed when sustainability becomes part of an organization-wide discourse. Dialogues within and across disciplines are needed to overcome silo thinking and stimulate cooperation within a trans-disciplinary approach.