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The purpose of this paper is to investigate how a quality profile can evolve over time and, in particular, how different kinds of interventions can further develop or change an existing quality profile.

Data was collected over a five‐year period, including a literature review, interviews, a document study and observations to capture the quality profile and associated interventions. The study was carried out in a service organisation in the public sector.

This study shows that the quality profile can change over time due to the use of specific interventions. If a company wants to emphasise a specific quality principle, it must target the quality principle with one or more interventions. However, even if a quality principle is targeted, there is no guarantee that the quality principle will show improvement in the quality profile. Also, one main finding is that the quality profile becomes more even over time due to the internal consistency of the quality principles.

This paper sheds light on the need to study the adoption of individual quality principles and the evolution of the quality profile of an organisation.

The results can provide insights for organisations aiming to embark on a quality programme, specifically how to design and develop a quality profile.

This research implies that the quality profile is a recurring, general phenomenon in all quality management improvement programmes. In other words, successful implementation of quality management requires a cohesive quality profile.

Only a small minority of all firms in all the Scandinavian countries use the labour‐market related measures, i.e. incentives to take on more workers. Big firms are more frequent users than small or medium sized firms (SMFs). This is because the number of situations in which it is realistic to use them are few in every SMF. Big differences exist within the SMFs. Industrial firms and those on the periphery are more frequent measure users than others. It is hard to prove that these measures have influenced decisions in any firms, although they are often of great financial importance for SMFs. This study of how the authorities succeeded in reaching SMFs with their offers for aid and support in the labour‐market agenda was requested by a committee under the Council for Ministers in the Nordic countries who are attempting to keep unemployment down. SMFs' aversion towards authorities can be broken by personal, oral, lasting contacts. SMFs can be frequent measure users in that they can integrate the measures into the firm's normal life in a flexible way.

The paper aims to explore the consequences of new public management (NPM) inspired reforms in general and outsourcing of traditional public sector responsibilities in Sweden to private organizations in particular. At centre stage are the roles of entrepreneurs, women‐owned small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and socially constructed paradigms of gender in this process. The paper's aim is to explore, through a local‐level case study, the currently ongoing process of gendering and regendering in a female‐dominated sector. This is done by a qualitative real‐time study of the introduction of a customer‐choice system in elder care in a Swedish municipality.

The formal decision in Spring 2008 to introduce a “customer‐choice model” into home‐based elderly care in the municipality is the formal starting point of the research. The authors are given full access to all relevant information and informants including all questions and suggestions from the potential suppliers who were applying to be “authorized and certified suppliers”. Interviews are the main method but also written material like applications and newspaper articles and “letters to the editor” are studied.

The outcome of the changes are, from the decision‐makers point of view, disappointing. The consequences so far of the customer‐choice system, that have been examined here, can be labelled increased masculinism or even a masculinization of the elderly care sector. Whether the polarization is a presage of the process to come is too early to tell. If so, the masculinization observed in this paper extends along three dimensions: governing logic, leadership and ownership. These gender consequences are not those expected or intended by the leading local actors.

The study is made in an ongoing process. The politicians are making changes aiming at making better working conditions for SMEs and former employees especially women. It is therefore important to follow up what is going to happen in the future. Comparisons with other municipalities and other regimes, nationally and internationally, would also be valuable.

In this case, the practical implications are, almost, the same as the research implications.

The real‐time research design is used focusing on what is happening in practise at the lower organizational levels of an organizational “experiment” of this kind make this paper unusual and valuable both for researchers and practioners.

Design thinking has become something of a buzz word in innovation discussions and has recently also invested occupied education spaces. In this chapter we briefly compare design thinking to problem-based learning (PBL) and enquiry-based learning (EBL) approaches to problem solving in education before focusing on the approach itself and current debates about its meaning and significance. This chapter focuses particular attention on the problem finding aspect of design thinking and its integration of creative methods for solving a range of tame to wicked problems in a variety of spaces. We ground our analysis in three environments of design thinking and five specific cases of application across education sectors from primary through to university. The examples focus on the generative potential of design thinking for all students and especially those from non-design disciplines. It is this capacity of design thinking to complement existing pedagogies and provide inspiration for change and innovation that is the strength of the model.

Chief executive officers (CEOs) are increasingly seen as change agents for gender equality, which means that CEOs have to lead others to achieve gender equality. Much of this leadership is going to happen through talk, which raises the question as to how CEOs talk about gender equality to act as change agents. The purpose of this paper is to understand the arguments of CEOs deploy.

Drawing on interviews with global CEOs, who have publicly supported gender equality work, the article draws on discourse analysis to understand the arguments of CEOs deploy.

The analysis shows that CEOs deploy three arguments. First, CEOs argue that women bring special skills to the workplace, which contributes to a female advantage. Second, CEOs argue that the best person for the job is hired. Third, CEOs talk about how biases and privilege permeate the workplace. The analysis shows that CEOs are often invested in essentialised views of gender while holding onto ideals of meritocracy.

The article suggests that how leaders talk about gender equality leads to continuity, rather than change in regard to gender equality.

Healthcare professionals’ conscious or unconscious norms, values and attitudes have been identified as partial explanations of healthcare inequity. Norm criticism is an approach that questions what is generally accepted as “normal” in society, and it enables professionals to identify norms that might cause prejudice, discrimination and marginalisation. In order to assess norm-critical awareness, a measurement scale is needed. The purpose of this paper is to develop a scale for measuring norm-critical awareness.

The scale-development process comprised a qualitative item-generating phase and a statistical reduction phase. The item pool was generated from key literature on norm criticism and was revised according to an expert panel, pilot studies and one “think aloud” session. To investigate the dimensionality and to reduce the number of items of the scale, confirmatory factor analysis was performed.

The item-generation phase resulted in a 46-item scale comprising five theoretically derived dimensions revolving around function, consequences, identity, resistance and learning related to norms. The item-reduction phase resulted in an instrument consisting of five dimensions and 20 items. The analyses indicated that a summary score on the scale could be used to reflect the broad dimension of norm-critical awareness.

The Norm-critical awareness scale comprises five theoretically derived dimensions and can be used as a summary score to indicate the level of norm-critical awareness in educational contexts. This knowledge is valuable for identifying areas in greater need of attention.

The article introduces selected theoretical approaches to time and temporality relevant to the field of library and information science, and it briefly introduces the papers gathered in this special issue. A number of issues that could potentially be followed in future research are presented.

The authors review a selection of theoretical and empirical approaches to the study of time that originate in or are of particular relevance to library and information science. Four main themes are identified: (1) information as object in temporal perspectives; (2) time and information as tools of power and control; (3) time in society; and (4) experiencing and practicing time.

The paper advocates a thorough engagement with how time and temporality shape notions of information more broadly. This includes, for example, paying attention to how various dimensions of the late-modern time regime of acceleration feed into the ways in which information is operationalised, how information work is commodified, and how hierarchies of information are established; paying attention to the changing temporal dynamics that networked information systems imply for our understanding of documents or of memory institutions; or how external events such as social and natural crises quickly alter modes, speed, and forms of data production and use, in areas as diverse as information practices, policy, management, representation, and organisation, amongst others.

By foregrounding temporal perspectives in library and information science, the authors advocate dialogue with important perspectives on time that come from other fields. Rather than just including such perspectives in library and information science, however, the authors find that the focus on information and documents that the library and information science field contributes has great potential to advance the understanding of how notions and experiences of time shape late-modern societies and individuals.

Media reporting is one of many circumstances that nursing homes have to relate to, because of the reputational risks. The aim of this article is to investigate media representations of Swedish nursing homes in relation to reports on an annual national user survey.

The empirical data consist of 381 Swedish newspaper articles about the survey results. The questions guiding the analysis were: what messages on nursing homes are communicated, and how are claims organized in order to appear factual?

The data show that press reports focus on comparisons of care units' survey results, eldercare representatives' explanations of the results, and what improvements will be made in order to do better in the next year's survey. With their use of truth-making rhetoric, press articles construct survey results as credible and valid, thus mirroring user perceptions and ultimately nursing home quality. The selection of nursing home representatives' comments equally reinforces the validity of claims.

Given nursing homes' problems with demonstrating success, the authors argue that media reports on the user survey is a way for eldercare organizations to achieve results in an otherwise resultless field, and while media reports might be seen as prompting change in nursing home care, what is ultimately achieved is the legitimation of a costly survey with low response rate.

The paper aims to examine, within the context of professional practice and learning, how designers collaboratively working in international teams experience practice-based learning and how such occasions contribute to professional development.

The paper introduces the cooperation project between Tibro Training Centre and Furniture Technology Centre Trust and its workshop context organized as practice-based learning. Participants’ learning context consisted of a mixture of professional practices allowing different logics and different cultures make up an innovative working site. Qualitative analysis of semi-structured interview data suggests that three phenomenographic hierarchical categories constitute the learning process: getting a recognized professional identity; perceiving new elements and expanding knowledge and seeing new aspects of design work and new steps of development in profession.

Cooperative practice-based learning is understood as social practice in a community of practice, and as continuous changes of the learning object due to that new aspects are discerned by the learners. These categories illustrate how participants’ meaning making and understanding of the learning object were expressed in cooperation as doings and sayings, as translation and as situated activities in a community of practice. Accordingly, it contributed to participants’ professional development in spite of their different professional educations and professional experiences.

More studies of practice-based learning environments in work places are needed that could help societies and companies to advance integrative efforts of new employees and new immigrants into an increasingly diverse globalized labour market.

The results suggest that understanding as well as content structure and meaning making of the learning object are intertwined constituent aspects of practice-based learning.

The aim of this article is to discuss how age and entrepreneurship interact in the specific case of older (50+) entrepreneurs. Building on theories on entrepreneurship and theories on age and aging, the authors’ focus is on how such entrepreneurs relate to the building and running of a business organization. The authors discuss how entrepreneurship among the elderly plays out and how older entrepreneurs relate to the narratives on both age and entrepreneurship.

This research comprises quantitative as well as qualitative studies. The authors show that qualitative methods that unfold the process over time are necessary and essential to fully understand how and why entrepreneurs start their own business and/or continue to run it at older ages.

The authors find that the choice to become an entrepreneur at the age of 50+ (or to stay as one) is not a goal in itself, becoming an entrepreneur is a means to stay active in the labor market.

The study findings add to entrepreneurship theory by insights on the link between entrepreneurship and the labor market where the authors argue that becoming an entrepreneur at ages 50+ might be more a question of choice of organizational form than a question on a way of living or occupation. The authors also contribute to theories on age by showing that entrepreneurs aged 50+ choose entrepreneurship as a means to be able to stay in the labor market.