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The purpose of this paper is to examine the challenges that arise when introducing an electronic identification (eID) card for professional use in a health-care setting.

This is a case study of an eID implementation project in healthcare. Data were collected through interviews with key actors in a project team and with eID end users. The authors viewed the eID card as a boundary object intersecting social worlds. For this analysis, the authors combined this with an electronic government initiative challenge framework.

The findings of this paper illustrate the interpretative flexibility of eID cards and how eID cards as boundary objects intersect social worlds. The main challenges of implementing and using eID cards in healthcare are usability, user behaviour and privacy. However, the way in which these challenges are interpreted varies between different social worlds.

One of the implications for future practice is to increase our understanding of the eID card as a socio-technical artefact, where the social and technical is intertwined, at the same time as the eID card affects the social as well as the technical. By using a socio-technical perspective, it is possible to minimise the potential problems related to the implementation and use of eID.

Previous research has highlighted the need for more empirical research on identity management. The authors contextualise and analyse the implementation and use of eID cards within healthcare. By viewing the eID card as a boundary object, the authors have unveiled its interpretative flexibility and how it is translated across different social worlds.

Drug sales facilitated through digital communication on the surface web and on darknet cryptomarkets have increased during the past two decades. This has resulted in an increase in drug law enforcement efforts to combat these markets and a subsequent increase in judicial sentencing of people selling drugs online. The aim of this study was to analyze how Swedish courts describe sentenced sellers and how the courts apply case law.

The empirical material consists of 71 sentencing documents produced by Swedish courts in cases of online drug selling between January 1, 2010 and January 1, 2020. In total, 99 sentenced persons occur in the documents. Using a qualitative research design, the authors analyzed the material through thematic text analysis.

Overall, in their descriptions of online drug sale operations, the courts’ characterizations of the concepts of street capital and digital capital show a dichotomy. These forms of capital are situationally described as both aggravating and mitigating aspects in the application of case law, indicating that it may be fruitful to view both street and digital capital as resources used on contemporary drug markets in general.

Very little research exists into how judicial systems describe and perceive the developing phenomenon of online drug sales. Using a relatively large sample from a decade of sentencing, the authors provide an analysis of how Swedish courts view and valuate capital forms in the online drugs trade.

This article examines the use of mobile telephones by teenagers in Norway. The data for this study are based on two sources; first they draw on qualitative interviews with a sample of 12 families with teenagers in the greater Oslo area. In addition, they use a quantitative study of a national sample of 1,000 randomly selected teenagers. The data show that it is boys, most often those who work, that own mobile telephones. The qualitative analysis shows that the motives for owning mobile telephones are accessibility, safety and micro‐coordination. In addition, the mobile telephone serves as a symbol of emancipation. Metaphors surrounding the telephone allow for discussions of status construction and identification.

Many doctoral students never obtain a doctoral degree, and many do not finish their studies in time. To promote aspects of effectiveness and efficiency in doctoral studies, the purpose of this paper is to explore a project perspective, more specifically how doctoral students experience their studies in terms of key dimensions of projects.

Written reflections concerning a project perspective in doctoral studies, based on 18 students at a Swedish university, have been categorised and analysed by the means of the qualitative research software NVivo.

Main findings are reflections on the project manager role including both the supervisor and the doctoral student, and different views on project control parameters and the concepts goal-seeking and goal-orientation. A more comprehensive picture of project planning is presented, compared with the Individual Study Plan, including different project methods and tools that can be suitable in a doctoral project.

The study is based on a limited number of doctoral students; however, the aim has been to give examples of project perspectives. The findings could be valuable for increased understanding of doctoral studies and of the project management field in general.

The study can induce awareness among doctoral students and supervisors of a project perspective in doctoral studies, promoting aspects of efficiency and effectiveness.

Compared to previous research, this study explicitly tries to understand how doctoral students make sense of their doctoral studies from a project perspective.

There are limited studies of continuous improvement (CI) from the perspective of a project-based organization (PBO). Hence, the purpose of this paper is to explore challenges that PBOs may encounter when applying CI.

An exploratory and qualitative approach has been used, involving six management teams in six different PBOs, using focus groups interviews as data collecting method.

A high degree of autonomy among project managers seems to limit a collective approach to project management in PBOs. As a consequence the overall PBO performance becomes subordinate to the individual project performance—an approach opposite to that of CI. Further, the management teams themselves seem to uphold a project focus, also complicating improvement initiatives from a PBO-perspective.

The management teams have been the unit of analysis, where the PBOs mainly conduct projects in an engineering and construction context, and are located in the same country and region. This approach enables the thorough study of a phenomenon, while preconditions for generalization are limited. However, the findings could be used by researchers as a basis for more in-depth studies of specific challenges, and for making surveys to obtain generalization of results.

The results can induce awareness and understanding of different challenges if applying CI in a PBO, hence a starting point for finding ways to overcome these challenges.

The article contributes to an increased understanding of challenges that PBOs may encounter when applying CI, confirming and presenting additional findings compared to previous studies.

Value-based health care (VBHC) argues that health-care needs to re-focus to maximise value creation, defining value as the quota when dividing the outcomes important for the patient, by the cost for health care to deliver such outcomes. This study aims to explore the perception of value among different stakeholders involved in the process of implementing VBHC at a Swedish hospital to support leaders to be more efficient and effective when developing health care.

Participants comprised 19 clinicians and non-clinicians involved in the implementation of VBHC. Semi-structured interviews were conducted and content analysis was performed.

The clinicians described value as a dynamic concept, dependent on the patient and the clinical setting, stating that improving outcomes was more important than containing costs. The value for non-clinicians appeared more driven by the interplay between the outcome and the cost. Non-clinicians related VBHC to a strategic framework for governance or for monitoring different continuous improvement processes, while clinicians appreciated VBHC, as they perceived its introduction as an opportunity to focus more on outcomes for patients and less on cost containment.

There is variation in how clinicians and non-clinicians perceive the key concept of value when implementing VBHC. Clinicians focus on increasing treatment efficacy and improving medical outcomes but have a limited focus on cost and what patients consider most valuable. If the concept of value is defined primarily by clinicians’ own assumptions, there is a clear risk that the foundational premise of VBHC, to understand what outcomes patients value in their specific situation in relation to the cost to produce such outcome, will fail. Health-care leaders need to ensure that patients and the non-clinicians’ perception of value, is integrated with the clinical perception, if VBHC is to deliver on its promise.

This paper aims to investigate how congruent keywords are used in information security policies (ISPs) to pinpoint and guide clear actionable advice and suggest a metric for measuring the quality of keyword use in ISPs.

A qualitative content analysis of 15 ISPs from public agencies in Sweden was conducted with the aid of Orange Data Mining Software. The authors extracted 890 sentences from these ISPs that included one or more of the analyzed keywords. These sentences were analyzed using the new metric – keyword loss of specificity – to assess to what extent the selected keywords were used for pinpointing and guiding actionable advice. Thus, the authors classified the extracted sentences as either actionable advice or other information, depending on the type of information conveyed.

The results show a significant keyword loss of specificity in relation to pieces of actionable advice in ISPs provided by Swedish public agencies. About two-thirds of the sentences in which the analyzed keywords were used focused on information other than actionable advice. Such dual use of keywords reduces the possibility of pinpointing and communicating clear, actionable advice.

The suggested metric provides a means to assess the quality of how keywords are used in ISPs for different purposes. The results show that more research is needed on how keywords are used in ISPs.

The authors recommended that ISP designers exercise caution when using keywords in ISPs and maintain coherency in their use of keywords. ISP designers can use the suggested metrics to assess the quality of actionable advice in their ISPs.

The keyword loss of specificity metric adds to the few quantitative metrics available to assess ISP quality. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, applying this metric is a first attempt to measure the quality of actionable advice in ISPs.

Social sustainability is a concept frequently referred to in public debates concerning how to construct the governance of future societies. The interpretations of its meaning, however, are ambiguous, and practices often dubious. Confronting top-down technocratic governance structures, this paper aims to argue for for tripartite collaborations between residents, higher education institutions (HEIs) and local government, as an approach toward social sustainability that involves residents’ interests in local governance.

This study argues that a specific time-spatial method of analysis can benefit the co-creation of knowledge as it passes through the spectrum of resident–HEI–local government. It provides a way for resident perceptions to become structured knowledge that originates from the residents, effectively engendering a bottom-up governance structure.

This study shows how to include residents in policymaking and implementation processes as co-creators of knowledge, and thereby displays the possibility of examining knowledge and competence within municipal projects for social sustainability.

The model developed in this study can be used as a methodological instrument to analyze and expand resident participation in local social sustainability work. It thereby provides a toolbox for inclusive policymaking and strategies.

This article explores how public librarians understand and perform the democratic mission of public libraries in times of political and social turbulence and critically discusses the idea of public libraries as meeting places.

Five group interviews conducted with public librarians in southern Sweden are analyzed using a typology of four perspectives on democracy.

Two perspectives on democracy are commonly represented: social-liberal democracy, focusing on libraries as promoters of equality and deliberative democracy, focusing on the library as a place for rational deliberation. Two professional dilemmas in particular present challenges to librarians: how to handle undemocratic voices and how to be a library for all.

The analysis points to a need for rethinking the idea of the meeting place and offers a rare example of an empirically based argument for the benefits of plural agonistics for analyzing and strengthening the democratic role of public libraries.