Search results

Discusses the process of imitation using the vocabulary of translation, taking as an example the temporary organization Stockholm – Cultural Capital of Europe 1998. Describes the process of change in an organizational order that can be characterized as (con)temporary. The description reveals several paradoxes typical of today’s organizing and focuses in particular on a temporary organization’s struggle for immortality.

The Kingdom of Sweden is the largest of the Scandinavian countries, with a sparsely distributed population of 8.5 million inhabitants. Stockholm, which was founded in 1252 and became Sweden's capital and administrative centre in 1523, has 670,000 inhabitants in the city itself and about 830,000 in the metropolitan area. Built on 14 islands linked together by 50 or so bridges and situated between the fresh water of Lake Mälaren and the salt water of the Baltic Sea, Stockholm has a strategic location which accounts for its also having become the dominant municipality in central Scandinavia. Significant migration to Stockholm from Sweden's rural areas did not begin, however, until the second half of the 19th century when the Industrial Revolution finally reached the country, the city's population mushrooming to 300,000 by 1900 and peaking at 810,000 in 1960. Today, Greater Stockholm has more than 1.5 million residents, who constitute about 18 percent of Sweden's total population. Fifty‐one percent of Stockholm's households consist of one person and, 30 percent, of two persons. Moreover, only 16 percent have children under age 16, which helps to explain the fact that 22 percent of Stockholm's population is over 65 years of age. Thus, it is not surprising that only 11 percent (41,110) of Stockholm's 380,000 dwellings are one‐ and two‐family houses; 89 percent are apartments (City of Stockholm 1989).

The aim of this research is to understand the relationship between cultural buildings, economic powers and social justice and equality in architecture and how this relationship has evolved over the last hundred years. This research seeks to identify architectural and urban elements that enhance social justice and equality to inform architectural and urban designs and public policies.

The author explores the relationship between case studies of museums, cultural centers and libraries, and economic powers between 1920 and 2020 in Stockholm, Sweden. The author conducts a historical analysis and combines it with statistical and geographically referenced information in a Geographic Information System, archival data and in situ observations of selected buildings in the city. The author leverages the median income of household data from Statistics Sweden, with the geographical location of main public buildings and the headquarters of main companies operating in Sweden.

This analysis presents a gradual commercialization of cultural buildings in terms of location, inner layout and management, and the parallel filtering and transforming of the role of users. The author assesses how these cultural buildings gradually conformed to a system in the city and engaged with the market from a more local and national level to global networks. Findings show a cluster of large public buildings in the center of Stockholm, the largest global companies' headquarters and high-income median households. Results show that large shares of the low-income population now live far away from these buildings and the increasing commercialization of cultural space and inequalities.

This research provides a novel image of urban inequalities in Stockholm focusing on cultural buildings and their relationship with economic powers over the last hundred years. Cultural buildings could be a tool to support equality and stronger democracy beyond their primary use. Public cultural buildings offer a compromise between generating revenue for the private sector while catering to the needs and interests of large numbers of people. Therefore, policymakers should consider emphasizing the construction of more engaging public cultural buildings in more distributed locations.

Today three out of four Europeans live in towns and cities. Urban areas are concentrated with most of the environmental challenges facing our society, but also bring together the commitment and innovation needed to resolve these challenges. The European Commission has long recognised the important role that local authorities play in improving the environment and their high level of commitment to genuine progress; in this regard, it launched the European Green Capital Award (EGCA) in 2009 as an initiative to promote and reward cities making efforts to improve the urban environment and move towards healthier and sustainable living areas. The EGCA is given each year to the city deemed to be most deserving on the basis of 10 environmental parameters: the local contribution to global climate change, local mobility and passenger transport, the availability of local public open areas, the quality of local ambient air, noise pollution, waste production and management, water consumption, waste water treatment, environmentally sustainable management of the local authority and sustainable land use.

This chapter has been composed on the basis of materials found in the literature and on websites, and thanks to contacts created with some departments of the municipalities considered.

Stockholm, Hamburg and Copenhagen represent the winning cities in 2010, 2011 and 2014, respectively. This chapter focuses on the successful experiences of these cities, which show how the convergence of the environmental and economic development is important in order to reach sustainable development.

This chapter shows that environmental protection must not be thought of as a cost for our society. On the contrary, it illustrates how it can support economic development in urban contexts if well planned, managed and participated in at a municipal scale.

During the 1940s and 50s, distribution research in Sweden focused mainly on distribution costs and prevailing market relationships (e.g., market structure and competition, price/performance and resale price maintenance). Later on, distribution research shifted emphasis and now focuses on the provision of consumer goods and services, as well as other consumer issues.

Reports findings on the perspectives of Swedish physicians since the introduction of the Stockholm model. Subjects were asked to describe their work, how long they had been working and whether they were familiar with the Stockholm model. Questions also focused on professional autonomy, use of diagnostic‐related groups (DRGs), quality of care and competition among health‐care providers. Most of the physicians interviewed reported that the Stockholm model had the advantage of increasing efficiency and productivity, that economic incentives influenced their medical decisions, and medical treatment appears more patient‐focused than before. Finally, primary care physicians report an enhanced status within the medical profession.

The purpose of this paper is to enhance understanding of the conceptualisation and operationalisation of public value in practice by applying Moore's (1995) strategic triangle as an analytical framework to study strategic management and management control practices in relation to public value.

The paper uses an interpretative longitudinal case study approach including qualitative methods of document studies and interviews between 2017 and 2019.

In the strategic triangle, the three nodes of authorising environment, public value creation and operational capacity are interdependent, and alignment is a necessity for a strategy to be successful. But this alignment is vulnerable. The findings suggest three propositions: (1) strategic alignment is vulnerable to management control practices having a strong focus on performance measurements, (2) strategic alignment is vulnerable to standardised management control practices and (3) strategic alignment is vulnerable to politically driven management control practices.

With the strategic triangle as a base, this paper tries to understand what kind of management control practices enable and/or constrain public value, as there has been a call for this kind of research. In this way it adds to earlier research on public value, to the growing interest in the strategic triangle as an analytical framework in analysing empirical material and to the request for more empirical studies on the subject. The strategic triangle also embraces political factors, government agendas and political leadership for which there has also been a call for more research.

Seeks to identify physicians' perceptions of possibilities and obstacles prior to implementing a computerised drug prescribing support system. Details a descriptive, qualitative study, with semi‐structured individual interviews of 21 physicians in the Accident and Emergency Department of South Stockholm General Hospital. Identifies four descriptive categories for possibilities and obstacles. Concludes that gaining access to patient drug history enables physicians to carry out work in a professional way – a need the computerised prescription support system was not developed for and thus cannot fulfil. Alerts and producer‐independent drug information are valuable in reducing workload. However, technical prerequisites form the base for a successful implementation. Time must be given to adapt to new ways of working.

By mobilizing the empirical setting of a megaproject, this study problematizes public budgeting as participatory practice. The authors suggest that megaprojects are prone to democratic legitimacy challenges due to a long history of cost overruns, which provides stakeholders with a chance to dramatize a budgetary controversy.

Through article and document data, the authors reconstructed a controversy that emerged around the budget of Stockholm/Åre’s candidature for the Olympic Winter Games 2026. The authors used Boltanski and Thévenot's (2006) orders of worth to systematically analyze the justification work of key stakeholder groups involved in the controversy.

This study illustrates that a budgetary controversy was actively maintained by stakeholder groups, which resulted in a lack of public support and the eventual demise of the Olympic candidature. As such, the authors provide a more nuanced understanding of public budgeting as a controversy-based process vis-à-vis a wider public with regard to the broken institution of megaprojects.

This study suggests more attention to the disruptive power of public scrutiny and the dramatization of budgeting in megaprojects. In this empirical case, the authors show how stakeholders tend to take their technical concerns too far in order to challenge a budget, even though megaprojects generally provide an ill-suited setting for accurate forecasts.

While studies around the financial legacies of megaprojects have somewhat matured, very few have looked at pitching them. However, the authors argue that megaprojects are increasingly faced with financial skepticism upon their approval upfront.