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The concept of “participation” has become a buzzword in contemporary public governance models. However, despite the broad and significant interest, defining participation remains a debated topic. The aim of the current study was to explore how participants perceived and interpreted the meaning and scope of participation.

This study is part of a four-year (2019–2022) longitudinal research project investigating stakeholder participation in the context of developing and establishing a strategic regional plan in Region Skåne in southern Sweden. The research project has a qualitative approach and uses interviews with different stakeholder groups such as municipal politicians and public officials and a survey as empirical material.

The authors developed a participation spectrum including eight types of participation: to be open, to be informed, to be listened to, to discuss, to be consulted, to give and take, to collaborate and to co-create. The authors also identified four different purposes of participation: creating a joint network, creating a joint understanding, creating a joint effort and creating a joint vision. The spectrum and the purposes were related through four characteristics of participation, i.e. involvement, interaction, influence and empowerment.

The study rests on a single case, and so the results have limited transferatibility.

Researching participation in terms of the participants' perceptions contributes a new perspective to the existing literature, which has commonly focussed on the organizers' perceptions of participation. Moreover, in order to clarify what participation meant to the participants, the study puts emphasis on untangling this from the why question of participation.

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.

The purpose of the paper is to examine the gender composition and structure of the board of directors in not‐for‐profit organisations and their relation to firm‐level entrepreneurship.

Data were collected through a survey sent to Swedish riding schools. The paper focuses on not‐for‐profit associations and the analysis is based on 60 respondents. The data were analysed by multivariate methods.

The overall gender composition of boards had no influence on firm‐level entrepreneurship. However, a high proportion of women in powerful positions were found to have a positive influence on one of the study's two dimensions of firm‐level entrepreneurship, i.e. strategic opportunism. No influence concerning gender in powerful positions was found on risk taking, the other dimension of firm‐level entrepreneurship.

The attention to gender composition not only focuses on the board at large, but also highlights the specific positions of the chairperson, secretary and treasurer in the board structure. Another valuable insight concerns firm‐level entrepreneurship, here treated as a two‐dimensional concept, consisting of strategic opportunism and risk taking, which finds support in the analysis. Further, the empirical data were collected from an industry that includes a high proportion of women on the boards, i.e. the Swedish riding school industry. The study contributes to the debate concerning the gender composition on the board of directors where a high proportion of women in powerful positions is positively related with strategic opportunism.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how internationalisation of corporate governance mechanisms influences firm performance.

The paper is based on the data collected from annual reports of the year 2004, from all 239 Swedish corporations listed on the Stockholm Stock Exchange, on which a quantitative analysis was performed.

The findings suggest that internationalisation of corporate governance does not have a straightforward influence on firm performance, which can be due to: the fact that mechanisms with governance functions have several functions, of which governance is but one; and the fact that governance mechanisms cannot be analyzed in isolation, since they are included in a coherent corporate governance strategy.

The paper is the first to investigate the corporate governance mechanisms' internationalisation issue.

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 investigate ethical implications of surveillance by means of the care software “I‐Care” in the Swedish home‐help service sector.

A small‐scale interview study on home helpers' experiences of and reactions to the implementation of the care software “I‐Care” in their workspace has been conducted. The interview serves as the starting point for an ethical analysis of the impact of the care software “I‐Care” on key values within ethics: privacy, autonomy and equality.

The implementation and use case of surveillance capable technology in a home‐help service sector is assessed from the perspective of ethics. It is concluded that employees' level of awareness, access to sufficient and relevant information, as well as their chances of influencing surveillance conduct, are significant for their acceptance of the surveillance regime.

Surveillance in the home‐help service setting has been investigated from the perspective of ethnology and organizational studies but not, as here, from the perspective of ethics. Conditions for the ethical acceptance of workspace surveillance are suggested.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate an unexplored part of advertising history; namely, the education of a large, mundane, nonelite group of advertising professionals, so-called advertising technicians and the knowledge they acquired. Examining correspondence courses in the technology of advertising, we focus particularly on the production of technified knowledge and mass personas.

The study is based on a qualitative analysis of course material from Sweden’s two largest correspondence schools in the 1930s and 1940s. Two theoretical concepts guide the analysis: the concept of market devices and the notion of personas, both of which we use to show how the courses crafted a particular kind of advertising professional as well as knowledge.

The study shows that courses created a template-based persona of the advertising technician, who possessed what we call bounded originality characterized by diligence, modesty and rule-governed creative imagination. Similarly, the courses created a body of knowledge that was controllable and highly practice-oriented. The advertising technician was expected to embody and internalize the advertising knowledge, thus, becoming an extension of this knowledge on the market.

By directing the searchlight at the cadre of ordinary, middle-class advertising professionals instead of the high-profile “advertising creatives” and innovators, the paper brings to the foreground the nonelite level of the advertising industry. These practitioners went to work in the business world to produce the everyday advertising that was not necessarily groundbreaking but was needed in a growing mass-consumption society.

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.