Browsing Ph.D. theses (ICM/IKL) by Title
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Om kulturel produktion på Roskilde FestivalMunkgård Pedersen, Kristine (Frederiksberg, 2010)[More information][Less information]
Abstract: The dissertation explores how cultural production is unfolding at Roskilde Festival – the biggest music- and culture festival in Denmark. The overall question being adressed is how the festival is assembled. The question is explored through four subquestions related to the cultural expressions, identity and materiality of the festival. The first part of the dissertation investigates the specificity of the festival’s audience- based culture. The symbolic and historical connections between the festival and the 1960s’ cultural activism is argued to be of an importance to the socioaesthetics, performed jointly by audience as well as performers. The dissertation further investigates how the identity of the festival is being negotiated between a number of different commercial and cultural actors: sponsors, volunteers and artists among others. The many different economic and cultural practices and values converge when the festival ground is being transformed from anonymous space to festival space embracing both cultural and commercial content. In this regard the dissertation investigates how the valuebased economic logics of subcultural production is debated and negotiated during the pratices of materializing space. It is argued that the complexity of the festival identity adds to the credibility of the festival and its many different producers. The second part of the dissertation is a socio-material analysis of two festival projects. One is the hybrid festival area Cosmopol, the other is the Orange Stage area. The analyses are based on a research agenda developed by the Actor- Network-Theory (ANT) which explores how ideas are materialised through proceses of interaction, translation and involvement. The explorations explain how subcultural attitudes, practices of transgression and oppositional identity are distributed through an ephemeral network of actors including humans (volunteers, artists, performers) and things (scenes, art works, graffiti, pictures and music) which forge performative alliances with the festival audience. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10398/8058 Files in this item: 1
Kristine_Munkgaard_Pedersen.pdf (17.24Mb) -
The case of travel guidebook productionAlačovska, Ana (Frederiksberg, 2013)[More information][Less information]
Abstract: This thesis focuses on the production of travel guidebooks. Its aim is to explore the mutual coconstruction and entanglement of genres, producers and institutions in cultural production and cultural work. It also examines how authorial and institutional, professional and industrial selfreflexivity exists in and through ambiguous and shifting interrelations with genres and their poetics. To this end, it develops a preliminary theoretical framework for a comprehensive exploration of the complex dynamics of cultural production that is attentive to the cultural objects themselves: here, a down-market, ‘uninventive’ and ‘heteronomous’ genre known as the travel guide(book). The thesis argues that the specificity of the genre is continually contextualized and re-contextualized, qualified and re-qualified, commodified and rendered autonomous, in the daily, local, and intimate practices of guide-making. The argument presented is that the genre is not merely a backdrop for creative agency or a predetermined set of rules, but a complex entity – spatially and temporally dispersed – that affords autonomous opportunities for various modes of action, self-definition, and self-interpretation. Thus, genres are active elements or animating forces of cultural production, rather than merely outcomes of industrial dynamics. What arises from the empirical material is that cultural producers experience ‘autonomy’ in and through the notion of genre which itself is fuzzy, vague, tacit, implicit and often non-formalized. Nonetheless, it is obdurately present in a spectrum of strategies, rhetoric, a sense of responsibility, expertise and professionalism applied by such producers in order to explain, define and justify their practical decisions and evaluations. The first three chapters explore perceived limitations of sociological, anthropological and sociocultural paradigms of cultural production. They also indicate some potential areas for crossfertilization with genre theory, which has conceptualized the notion of genre as social action, cognitive action-schemata, and institutions that mediate between industry, producers, and audiences. The last four chapters follow and trace interpenetrating and interlocking relations between genres and institutions firstly, as they mutually and historically co-produce each other in industrial practice; secondly, as entangled in individual and professional auto-biographies with reference to the genre and its adjacent markets; and third, as embedded in actual production practices - how guidebook producers make use of and interact with the editorial brief (or institutionalized and contractually binding genre specificity) and independent genre trajectories (autonomous logic), while making daily evaluations of their work and their own professional selfreflexivity. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10398/8703 Files in this item: 1
Ana_Alacovska.pdf (2.311Mb) -
Krogh Petersen, Morten (Frederiksberg, 2011)[More information][Less information]
Abstract: ‘Good’ Outcomes – Handling Multiplicity in Government Communication This thesis examines how five Danish government organizations produce and assess communicative solutions in practice, and argues that government communication may be understood as a case of multiplicity. In the practices of producing and assessing communicative solutions it is uncertain what constitutes a ‘good’ outcome of government communication. This uncertainty is grasped by drawing upon analytical resources from the field of multiplicity-oriented ANT analyses. Empirically, the thesis is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted at the five government organizations. Combining empirical observations, theoretical insights, and political programmes, four ‘modes of ordering’ are developed and these are utilized in exploring how the multiplicity of government communication unfurls and how it is handled in practice. The thesis shows how the ordering attempts described by the four modes of ordering coexist and interfere, and it suggests the notions of ‘sequencing’ and ‘singularizing’ for understanding how the multiplicity of government communication is handled in the production and assessment of communicative solutions. The study upon which the thesis reports has been carried out in connection with a larger Industrial PhD project, entitled Measurements you can learn from, that aimed at developing, testing, and implementing new and better communication measurements. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10398/8306 Files in this item: 1
Morten_Krogh_Petersen.pdf (10.91Mb) -
Strand, Robert Gavin (Frederiksberg, 2012)[More information][Less information]
Abstract: In this dissertation I examine the establishment of corporate social responsibility (CSR) bureaucracies at corporations and I come to consider the CSR bureaucracy as a space for reflection within the corporation. In the face of charges that bureaucracies are inherently unethical and devoid of consideration for humanistic concerns, I argue that within the large bureaucracy that is the corporation, the CSR bureaucracy can create a space in which tensions that arise from conflicting values and purposes can be identified, negotiated, and actions coordinated. I position this dissertation within the field of CSR, to which I introduce the Weberian distinction between formal and substantive rationality as means through which to identify and describe tensions that become apparent with the CSR agenda. This dissertation contains four articles, two of which draw from the engaged scholarship approach. One includes findings from a study I conducted as an action/intervention researcher with a U.S. corporation during the period in which a CSR bureaucracy was established. The other includes findings from a study of CSR focused MBA courses I instruct in which reflection is a primary learning objective. The other two articles include findings from studies I conducted to explore the establishment of a CSR position to the top management teams of U.S. and Scandinavian corporations. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10398/8462 Files in this item: 1
Robert_Strand.pdf (3.503Mb) -
Differentiated internationalization strategies of emerging market state-owned enterprisesLi, Ming Hua (Frederiksberg, 2014)[More information][Less information]
Abstract: The rise of globalization over the past several decades has witnessed a surge of cross-border activities by emerging market firms. To a large extent, such acceleration in their overseas venturing has been precipitated by the liberalization of domestic and foreign trade regimes governing foreign direct investment. In order to compete with advanced country multinationals, emerging economy firms have increasingly leveraged a broad array of resources and organizational strategies to springboard abroad. Simultaneously, such firms are subject to dynamic shifts in their institutional terrains triggered by a plethora of heterogeneous reform treatments as their governments endeavor to modernize their economies. The initiation of these potent large-scale reforms associated with transition such as economic decentralization, market liberalization, industrial restructuring and corporate ownership reform undoubtedly exert cross-cutting and transformational impacts on the resource endowments, adaptive capabilities and strategic behaviors of emerging market firms. Given this critical phenomenon, this dissertation is motivated by the primary research question – how does institutional transition and its related change processes operate to reconfigure and alter firm resources and capabilities for internationalization? Since a significant proportion of emerging market firms are owned by governments, this thesis investigates how reforms have transformed state-owned firms’ strategic characteristics for internationalization. The dissertation comprises of three research papers utilizing extensive primary fieldwork and a manually compiled panel dataset of Chinese firms to examine emerging market state-owned firms’ overseas activities. The first paper is a conceptual piece which develops an overarching framework to delineate the reconfigured orchestration of multiple institutional reforms in the emerging economy context can spawn organizational diversity among state-owned firms leading to their differing outward FDI strategies. The second paper builds on this notion of organizational diversity and investigates how corporate ownership reform confers varying levels of institutional competitive advantages to marketized and non-marketized state owned firms to support their overseas venturing. It further examines how the relationship between firm ownership and outward FDI propensity is moderated by state-owned business group affiliation. The final paper studies how hybrid organizational forms arising from institutional transition such as university-run firms can evolve novel organizational features including ‘incubating platforms’ to launch overseas entrepreneurial spin-offs. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10398/9113 Files in this item: 1
Ming_Hua_Li.pdf (2.466Mb) -
Evidence from VietnamPham, Ha Thi Van (Frederiksberg, 2009)[More information][Less information]
Abstract: The thesis revolves around the internationalization of Vietnamese firms - that is, how the international competitiveness of these firms is enhanced in terms of both upstream and downstream value chain activities and the export performance implications hereof. For Vietnamese firms, as well as for other firms from emerging markets, internationalization trajectories may differ considerably from the internationalization patterns portrayed in classical theories (such as the Uppsala Model) based on observations of the internationalization of firms from Western, developed market economies. Classical theories have primarily focused on firms’ marketing & sales and networking capabilities as levers of internationalization – and less on upstream capabilities, such as manufacturing and auxiliary service competencies. Likewise the situation in other emerging markets many Vietnamese firms are inserted in global value chains (GVCs) governed by multinational buyers. For these firms, manufacturing skills may be of equal - or greater - importance to export performance than the mastering of marketing & sales and networking in foreign markets. The thesis presents various theoretical perspectives on firms’ internationalization – perspectives that vary in terms of their focus on either upstream or downstream activities (or, the interrelationship of these two types of activities). The thesis tries to fill out the knowledge gap as to which of these theoretical perspectives fit best the trajectories of Vietnamese manufacturing firms involved in exports. In doing so, the thesis also draws on GVC models, entrepreneurial literature, and studies of economic as well as strategic export performance. Unique survey data covering 226 Vietnamese manufacturers involved in exporting was collected through face-to-face interviews conducted in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. On the basis of these data a set of hypotheses is tested using structural equation modelling as a statistical tool. The empirical study suggests that Vietnamese firms create international competitiveness in relation to both upstream and downstream activities. Furthermore, the study suggests that upstream competitiveness of the sample firms is significantly more attractive in terms of economic export performance (export sales, profitability and growth) than downstream competitiveness. However, when export performance is measured in more far-sighted, strategic terms, there are no significant differences between the two dimensions of competitiveness. The study also reveals some interesting industry differences: for firms in the “low-tech” textiles & garments industry, upstream competitiveness has greater impact on economic export performance than downstream competitiveness. Conversely, downstream competitiveness results in a higher economic return than upstream competitiveness for firms from the “high-tech” industries of electronics and mechanical manufactures In the last part of the thesis, theoretical, empirical, and managerial implications are discussed along with conclusions and suggestions for future research. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10398/7934 Files in this item: 1
Ha_Thi_Van_Pham.pdf (3.762Mb) -
Un estudio sobre emigrantes norteamericanos en un pueblo mexicanoBalslev Clausen, Helene (Frederiksberg, 2008)[More information][Less information]
Abstract: Den traditionelle migrationsforskning betragter Mexico, som et typisk faktor eller transit land, samt har sit fokus på migrationsflowet fra Syd (Latinamerika) til Nord(USA). Dette case studie derimod bidrager empirisk med identifikationen af en ny type immigranter, angelsaksiske noramerikanere, som i stadigt større omfang emigrerer fra Nord(USA) til Syg(Mexico), hvilket som noget nyt også gør Mexico til et pull faktor land..... URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10398/7733 Files in this item: 1
helena_balslev_clausen.pdf (5.975Mb) -
Dirt, aesthetics and inclusion in public service workDahl, Dorte Boesby (Frederiksberg, 2016)[More information][Less information]
Abstract: This dissertation investigates how changing management strategies in the public sector contribute to shaping and developing the ‘parking attendant’ as a certain sort of person in a municipal centre responsible for parking attendance. The job as parking attendant is – just as many other jobs in the public sector – the object of changing management strategies according to changing political agendas. Meanwhile, the job is also a psychologically demanding and stigmatized unskilled job in the public sector. The dissertation analyzes how parking attendants, whose job is increasingly professionalized, interact with changing management strategies by for instance resisting or avoiding them. The dissertation relies on sociological fieldwork among parking attendants and their managers. The fieldwork included shadowings of daily work, interviews, gathering of documents and participant observation at job-interviews. The analytical point of departure for the dissertation is Ian Hacking and Paul du Gay’s theories of how identities are ‘made up’. This sort of analysis is coupled in three articles in the dissertation to other perspectives on the relation between work and identity. These are about how employees handle stigma, which is considered in research on ”Dirty Work”, about how managers and employees draw upon ”aesthetic labour” to meet the public’s scepticism and as a means to bring down the number of assaults and finally how managememt strategies aiming at creating inclusion and diversity contribute to the making up of the parking attendant. All three analysis contribute to expand our understanding of work and identity in the public sector. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10398/9265 Files in this item: 1
Dorthe Boesby Dahl.pdf (4.542Mb) -
On Second-hand Valuation PracticesLarsen, Frederik (Frederiksberg, 2015)[More information][Less information]
Abstract: In this thesis I address the question of how value is created in second-hand markets. Focusing on the role of charity thrift stores I present an ethnographic account of fieldwork I undertook in the Tavern Guild Community Thrift Store in San Francisco. I analyse my ethnographic findings in light of contemporary literature on values and valuations in material culture and reaching back through the anthropological literature on commodities and gift economies I build a framework around David Graeber’s formulation of a concept of social, relational value. In order to structure the analysis I take Mary Douglas’s seminal work on classification as a starting point and argue that the practices of valuation constitute a process of transformation form discard to commodity. To support the analysis I introduce theoretical concepts from the ethnographic literature on values, secondhand markets and valuations. Practices of categorization enable the employees to create value, but disorder is a condition of the process, which hinders the flow as well as provides opportunity for value. I describe thrift, a considered use of resources, as the main ‘infravalue’ that drives the valuations and allows the organization to create economic, social and emotional value. Next I zoom in on the interaction between people and objects on a micro-level. The theoretical framework here brings anthropological theory into play with actor-network theory (ANT) approaches to nonhuman actors, and I introduce the term withdrawal from object-oriented philosophy to address the agency of objects in valuations. By dividing the analysis into two parts I demonstrate in greater detail how objects as part of valuations are given agency through social entanglements, but also how the objects by their mere existence influence valuations beyond this entanglement. Their presence as more than the sum of their social relations has a profound impact on the valuations by resisting as much as partaking in the process of transformation. In the last section of the thesis I present an explorative study of the extended trajectory the objects take through markets and wholesale companies in Thailand. I discuss the role of the thrift store in the global context of second-hand exchanges and offer a critical reflection on the consequences of the proliferation of second-hand markets. The thesis provides a situated approach to the study of human-objects interactions and demonstrates that an understanding of the different forms of value that are at play reveal charity thrift organizations as important players in second-hand markets. Thrift enables the organization to salvage as many objects as possible while providing services to the community. In doing so they are vital in transforming discards into commodities for the other actors in the market. This study highlights the importance of considering materiality, and especially objecthood, in the context of second-hand markets, and suggests a situated framework for understanding the relationship between objects and practices in the broader context of material culture studies. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10398/9182 Files in this item: 1
Frederik Larsen.pdf (4.499Mb) -
Antecedents, processes dynamics and firm-level impactØrberg Jensen, Peter (Frederiksberg, 2008)[More information][Less information]
Abstract: This PhD thesis addresses one of the most intensely debated phenomena over the past decade within the realm of international business: Firms’ relocation of value chain activities to other parts in the network of multinational corporation (MNC) or to external suppliers/services providers in foreign countries (hereinafter referred to as offshoring), often to destination countries with lower cost structures. Whereas the offshoring of manufacturing tasks has existed for several decades, and has been analyzed in the international business literature, the offshoring of advanced services tasks from developed country firms to destination countries such as India, which offer an attractive cocktail of low costs and highly skilled labour, is a more recent phenomenon. The offshoring of this type of services tasks forms the subject of this PhD thesis... URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10398/7741 Files in this item: 1
Peter_d_orberg_jensen.pdf (674.8Kb) -
Nielsen, Michael E. (København, 2008)[More information][Less information]
Abstract: ‘No amount of preparation could have lessened the shock and revulsion I felt on entering a sporting-goods factory in the town of Sialkot, seventy miles from Lahore, where scores of children, most of them aged five to ten, produce soccer balls by hand for forty rupees, or about $1.20, a day. The children work eighty hours a week in near-total darkness and total silence. According to the foreman, the darkness is both an economy and a precautionary measure; child-rights activists have difficulty taking photographs and gathering evidence of wrongdoing if the lighting is poor. The silence is to ensure product quality: "If the children speak, they are not giving their complete attention to the product and are liable to make errors.” The children are permitted one thirty-minute meal break each day; they are punished if they take longer. They are also punished if they fall asleep, if their workbenches are sloppy, if they waste material or miscut a pattern, if they complain of mistreatment to their parents or speak to strangers outside the factory. A partial list of "infractions” for which they may be punished is tacked to a wall near the entrance. It’s a document of dubious utility: the children are illiterate. Punishments are doled out in a storage closet at the rear of the factory. There, amid bales of wadding and leather, children are hung upside down by their knees, starved, caned, or lashed.’ URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10398/7730 Files in this item: 1
michael_e_nielsen.pdf (1.355Mb) -
India's national Oil Company and International Activism in SudanPatey, Luke (Frederiksberg, 2010)[More information][Less information]
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Weller, Angeli Elizabeth (Frederiksberg, 2016)[More information][Less information]
Abstract: In this dissertation, I explore the practices created to manage business ethics and corporate social responsibility in multinational corporations and the relationship between them across three separate but interrelated articles. The first article suggests that these practices are resident in distinct communities of practice, and therefore there are boundaries in both meaning and identity that make alignment between them problematic. The second article looks at the boundaries between these communities by exploring the history of the professional associations in the business ethics and corporate social responsibility field in the United States, as well as their current articulations of knowledge and competence in their respective fields. The third article is a single case study of a company that purposefully aligned ethics, compliance, corporate social responsibility and sustainability practices and managers, and it explores both the enablers of alignment and the learning stages that transformed them into a single community of practice. Theoretically, this work applies communities of practice, an organizational learning theory, within the business and society field, thereby contributing a helpful lens through which to explore responsible business practices and the practitioners that create and implement them. Leveraging this perspective, this research offers a theoretical explanation about why practices are not currently aligned and illuminates both the barriers and enablers to future alignment. Practically, this work shows that boundaries exist between business ethics and corporate social responsibility practices, and calls on scholars and managers who seek alignment to both build intentional bridges between these communities and consider alternate trajectories for the evolution of these practices. Done well, learning across the boundaries between these communities of practice could in turn catalyze managers’ understanding of ethics and responsibility in business. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10398/9352 Files in this item: 1
Angeli Wellern.pdf (2.001Mb) -
A Case Study of Branding and Identity Struggles in a Low-Prestige OrganizationFrandsen, Sanne (Frederiksberg, 2011)[More information][Less information]
Abstract: This dissertation examines the relationship between corporate branding and identity work at organizational and individual levels in the context of a lowprestige corporation. It is based on 17 months of research undertaken as an inhouse ethnographer at MGP, a European based national telecommunication corporation. The study seeks to contribute to integrated corporate branding theory by adopting a critical perspective on the intra-organizational affects of brands and branding. The dissertation contains three papers, each of which contributes to discussions within corporate branding, organizational identity and identification, as well as to literature on management control and employee resistance. The findings demonstrate that the management adopts integrated corporate branding in a hypocritical manner, while employees in response develop a cynical distance to their work. While this may be interpreted as negative consequences, the dissertation argues that these are productive and have certain advantages for the management in the given context. Thus, the findings challenge the integrated corporate branding ideal of coherence between the external and internal dimensions of corporate branding as the only productive way to create a successful corporate brand. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10398/8366 Files in this item: 1
Sanne_Frandsen.pdf (690.4Kb) -
A critical political economy perspectiveBuch-Hansen, Hubert (København, 2009)[More information][Less information]
Abstract: The focus of this thesis is one "component” of EC competition regulation, namely that of merger control. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10398/7729 Files in this item: 1
hubert_buch-hansen.pdf (2.956Mb) -
An implementation and evaluationHalskov, Jakob (København, 2008)[More information][Less information]
Abstract: The research object of this thesis is the so-called knowledge patterns and their usefulness in automatically extracting specic semantic relations from unannotated and uncategorized text on the WWW so as to facilitate semi-automatic updating and extension of existing ontological and terminological resources. The main contribution of the thesis is the implementation of a com- plete ontology extension framework called WWW2REL which is 100% based on a knowledge-poor, domain-independent processing of WWW text snippets and includes the three stages of pattern discovery, pattern ltering and relation instance ranking. Unlike most comparable systems WWW2REL is special in that it is both highly portable, can be applied to any semantic relation type and operates directly on uncategorized WWW text snippets. The system is tested on the biomedical UMLS Metathesaurus for four dierent relation types and manually evaluated by four domain experts. It is demonstrated that high precision in the task of knowledge discovery from a noisy text source can be achieved using a very simple instance relevance measure and two ranking heuristics. In contrast, many comparable systems operate on richly annotated academic text and tend to apply heuristics which are custom-tailored to a specic domain and/or relation type. When selecting the overall best ranking scheme, average system performance across all four relation types ranges between 70% to 65% of the maximum possible F-score by top 10 and top 50 relation instances, respectively. Finally, the thesis experiments also examine the portability of individ- ual knowledge patterns and of the ranking heuristics. It is concluded that synonymy KPs are the most domain independent closely followed by ISA KPs, whereas patterns for "may_prevent" and especially "induces" are more dependent on the domain. Empirical experiments also suggest that a ranking heuristic which penalizes relation instances whose arguments occur frequently in a general language corpus can be highly eective, but may need to be adapted to the domain in question. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10398/7731 Files in this item: 1
jacob_halskov.pdf (1.810Mb) -
Enhancing Social Entrepreneurship and Stakeholder TheoryDacanay, Marie Lisa (Frederiksberg, 2012)[More information][Less information]
Abstract: This thesis develops a framework for understanding how social enterprises engage the poor and address poverty, a pressing global problem of the 21st century. Using casebased theory building, it studies a theoretical sample of three pairs of Philippine-based social enterprises, where the poor were suppliers, workers, and customers. In half of the cases, the poor were also owners. The research studies the roles and role changes of the poor in these social enterprises, how and why these roles changed, or did not change, and the impact of the roles and role changes, if any, on the social enterprises and the poor. Data for the research was gathered mainly from key informant interviews, published and unpublished organizational documents as well as previous studies done by external consultants on the case subjects. Based on a cross case analysis of the data from the theoretical sample, the thesis develops three models of stakeholder engagement among social enterprises with the poor as primary stakeholders or SEPPS, namely: control, collaboration and empowerment. This thesis provides insights and develops propositions about the importance of stakeholder engagement and the power and limitations of these three models in bringing about social inclusion and poverty reduction. These propositions are suggested to be applicable in countries in the South other than the Philippines where systemic poverty and inequality are exacerbated by the failure of state and market institutions to address the needs of the poor. This thesis makes a contribution to social entrepreneurship and stakeholder theory. It does so by sharing a perspective from the South and giving a voice to the poor as stakeholders. The researcher notes that overall, the poor and the South are under-represented in these discourses. On the whole, social entrepreneurship theorizing has been characterized as embryonic as a topic of academic inquiry. Stakeholder engagement is considered an under-theorized area in stakeholder theory. In developing a framework for understanding stakeholder engagement models involving the poor, this thesis makes a first step towards applying and extending stakeholder theory in SEPPS. The thesis likewise enriches social entrepreneurship theory by conceiving of SEPPS as a global social enterprise model that catalyzes South-North cooperation to address poverty and inequality. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10398/8513 Files in this item: 1
Marie_Lisa_Dacanay.pdf (2.477Mb) -
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Abstract: This dissertation provides a critical analysis of transparency in the context of organizing. The empirical material is based on qualitative studies of international cooperative organizations. The dissertation seeks to contribute to transparency and organizing scholarship by adopting a communication centred approach to explore the implications of pursuing ideals of transparency in organizational relationships. The dissertation is comprised of four papers each contributing to extant debates in organizational studies and transparency literature. The findings indicate that transparency, in contrast to being a solution for efficiency and democratic organizing, is a communicatively contested process which may lead to unintended consequences. The dissertation shows that transparency is performative: it can impact authority by de/legitimating action, shape the processes of organizational identity co-construction, and its intersection with new media technologies can create tensions. Thus, the dissertation questions instrumental tendencies which regard transparency as full disclosure, the opposite of secrecy, and a way to achieve a consistent organizational identity. The dissertation provides a framework of organizational transparency which underlines its negotiated, power-infused and paradoxical nature. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10398/8916 Files in this item: 1
Oana_Albu.pdf (1.296Mb) -
An Ethnographic Study of Trust, Distance, Control, Culture and Boundary Spanning within Offshore Outsourcing of IT ServicesTøth, Thomas (Frederiksberg, 2015)[More information][Less information]
Abstract: This PhD dissertation is an ethnographic field study of the collaboration between Berlingske Media, one of the leading media companies in Denmark, and their Indian IT service provider, HCL – one of the largest IT service providers worldwide. The dissertation studies the day-to-day operational collaboration between actors from the client organization and the vendor organization in order to understand how vendor-side actors, as individuals and as a collective, can be constructed as trustworthy collaborators in the eyes of the client-side actors. While trust is the theoretical epicenter of this thesis it is, in acknowledgement of the contextual and dynamic nature of trust, subjected to an interdisciplinary analytical framework. Thus, the four analytical chapters in Part II introduce four different factors that influence the client-side actors’ perceptions of vendor-side actors’ trustworthiness: distance, control, culture and boundary spanning. The analytical conclusions are summarized in Part III of the dissertation. Based on these analytical conclusions a number of practice-oriented suggestions on how the client-side actors’ perceptions of the vendor-side’s trustworthiness can be improved are presented and discussed. Furthermore, the theoretical implications are presented and discussed. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10398/9115 Files in this item: 1
Thomas_Tøth.pdf (3.916Mb) -
Exploring Fashion Industry Business Models and the Circular EconomyHvass, Kerli Kant (Frederiksberg, 2016)[More information][Less information]
Abstract: This dissertation examines post-consumer textile waste from the fashion industry's perspective, and addresses how business model innovation can facilitate reuse and recycling of garments and a transition towards a circular economy of fashion. Focusing on the emerging reuse and recycling practices of fashion brands the study builds upon one explorative and two in-depth case studies of industry pioneers and their endeavors of integrating reuse and recycling activities in their business models. Theoretically the study rests on business models, business model innovation for sustainability and circular economy. The study seeks to provide a unique contribution as it synthesizes the theoretical and empirical insights from the field of business model innovation and circular economy in the context of post-consumer textile waste. By highlighting and extending the idea of business model innovation for circular economy it makes a justification that product end-of-life phases require attention and can include new value propositions that companies can create, deliver and capture. This dissertation contains three articles, each of which contributes to an improved understanding of post-consumer textile waste management in the context of the fashion industry and its related opportunities and challenges. The findings cover both broad industry-level and more specific company-level discoveries. The industry-level findings provide a general understanding of existing practices among fashion companies while the company specific findings identify key issues and challenges of integrating a product’s end-of-life aspects in an existing business model. Collectively, the findings demonstrate that end-of-life management of products is an emerging field among fashion companies and used garments can provide new value propositions for fashion brands. The findings also illustrate that the field is in its infancy and lacks best practices within business models, supply chain infrastructure, technological solutions and consumer engagement. Transition towards a circular economy implies full systemic change, and innovation not only in business models, but also in technologies, society, policies and finance methods as well as consumer behavior. None of these aspects can work in isolation and require that different stakeholders work in tandem. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10398/9282 Files in this item: 1
Kerli Kant Hvass.pdf (3.014Mb)
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