Ph.D. theses (MPP/LPF)
Browse all publications by
Recent submissions:
-
How special groups organize for collaborative creativity in conditions of spatial variability and distanceO’Donnell, Shannon (Frederiksberg, 2013)[More information][Less information]
Abstract: The enormous challenges and opportunities impacting the world community today increasingly require people to practice collaborative innovation effectively both in person and across geographic boundaries. Simultaneously, advances in technology such as social networking tools, digital 3-D representations, virtual worlds, and open source practices are inspiring generations of users to develop new kinds of adaptive collaborative networks and capabilities. But when people work across organizational and geographic boundaries, new challenges arise that make it difficult for groups to achieve the levels of excellence they are capable of achieving together in close proximity. Practitioners need help determining how best to perform collaborative creativity given unique and dynamic work conditions. Meanwhile, as new forms of creative group work emerge at an accelerating pace, researchers struggle to keep up with and develop nuanced understanding of the variations in collaborative processes we increasingly see performed. With this PhD research, I aim to increase our understanding of a particular, specialized form of collaborative creativity called “ensembling.” I investigate this phenomenon by studying it in diverse—including “stretched”—conditions. By stretched, I mean that, literally, groups are stretched apart in space as membership size and spatial distance between members increase and work configurations vary. The groups I study are those both capable of achieving and driven to achieve a peak-performance state of ensemble, and do so via the enactment of an interdependent set of methods that call ensemble into being, a process I call ensembling. In their ideal form, these work methods support the emergence of ensemble and result in the creation of aesthetically coherent and novel outcomes that are particularly responsive to the contexts in which they are made. To investigate the phenomenon of ensemble, I first develop a construct of ensemble based on informant descriptions, and use theory and data to develop a detailed description of how ensembling is performed in natural conditions (i.e., in close physical proximity). Then I look at an extreme example in which a set of expert groups’ ability to ensemble was put under stress by an unprecedented work task. In 2009, multiple string quartets (many considered world class) organized to perform a new musical composition. The composition challenged four quartets at a time to perform as an integrated ensemble while sitting apart, in various configurations, and at spatial distances of up to 70 feet. To help them address the difficulties produced by increased membership and distance, the musicians integrated a simple coordinating technology into their process. To learn how participants made ensemble possible given these new conditions, I engaged multiple qualitative methods for generating data and multiple perspectives for interpretation. I first considered their process as an iterative approach to exploring strategies for addressing constraints, in order to show how the methods of ensembling interacted with conditions of increased group size, increased spatial distance and configurational variability, and to elicit their evolving beliefs about what methods made ensemble more likely to occur given these conditions. Then I performed an alternative interpretation, disrupting this logic and exploring the ways in which participants used methods of ensembling—particularly openness to uncertainty and reconceiving—to create unanticipated potentialities for ensemble to emerge despite constraints. I show how they worked with a coordinating technology called a “click-track” in important new ways that went beyond “merely” achieving synchronous coordination to increasing their autonomy, relatedness, and ability to demonstrate artistic virtuosity, enabling them to engage equally in leadership and participation and to play. Finally, performing a comparative analysis across sub-units of the case, including examples of breakdown in the process, I generated additional insights into what conditions, beliefs, methods and behaviors enable or inhibit processes of ensembling. Integrating learning from analysis and interpretation, I propose a new range of conditions in which ensembling is possible, and a revised and expanded description of the methods by which groups ensemble. Conditions can expand to include larger groups with limited-tenure consisting of enduring-tenure sub-groups, multiple task interdependencies at group and sub-group levels, balanced tenure at sub-group level, a balance between proximity and distance, opportunities to work with and without technological mediation, and self-determined configuration variability. I show that the emergence of ensemble depends on, for instance, a shared purpose to ensemble, and methods such as a “struggle” phase, episodes of close physical proximity, collective leadership, “dueting” in different configurations, reconceiving constraints, living with the paradox of one-and-four, opening the process to uncertainty and to the emergence of consent, and subliminal technology engagement. Ultimately, these groups demonstrated an increasing ability to adapt to new conditions faster and more creatively, making new configurations possible, and suggesting ways in which ensemble might be performed in other kinds of group settings. I summarize findings in the form of a “framework of ensembling” that is meant to serve as a tool to further enrich our yet nascent understanding of this complex phenomenon and to aid in the exploration of ensembling in contexts outside the usual places we expect it to occur. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10398/8653 Files in this item: 1
Shannon_O'Donnell.pdf (7.529Mb) -
En socialpsykologisk analyse af forholdet imellem selvledelse, ledelse og stress i det moderne arbejdslivGroth-Brodersen, Signe (Frederiksberg, 2013)[More information][Less information]
Abstract: Afhandlingen rejser et kritisk perspektiv på individualiseringen af sundhedsfremme ud fra en diskussion af ledelse af selvledelse i det moderne arbejdsliv. Det er karakteristisk for den eksisterende danske og internationale forskning i selvledelse, at der er gennemført en begrænset empirisk udforskning af selvledelsens funktion og virke i arbejdslivets praksis. Det er i særlig grad empirisk underbelyst, hvordan variationer i forholdet imellem selvledelse og ledelse indvirker på forekomsten af stresssymptomer. Et nyere dansk empirisk projekt placerer selvledelse, beskrevet som en særlig form for selvorganiseringskompetence, i en positiv position i forhold til at håndtere det grænseløse arbejdsliv. Det grænseløse arbejdsliv beskrives her som det at have frie grænser i forhold til organiseringen af ’arbejdstid og arbejdssted’. Disse resultater udfordrer tidligere studier indenfor arbejdslivsforskning, hvor man i højere grad har set selvledelse koblet sammen med stress og stigende krav til individet (Phil-Tingvad, 2010; Allvin et. al., 2011, Lund & Hvid, 2007). I den internationale forskning beskrives selvledelse som ’Self-Leadership’. Self-Leadership handler om en særlig form for selvkontrol, hvor individet giver sig selv feedback og er selvmotiverende (Neck & Hougton, 2006; Manz & Neck, 2004). Self-Leadership er en teori, der arbejder med selvledelse uden en konkret kobling til arbejdslivet. Teorien beskæftiger sig derfor ikke med selvledelsens sammenspil med ledelsen og herunder betydningen af ledelse som relevant kontekstuelt parameter. Selvledelse bliver set som en eksistentiel form for egenledelse.... URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10398/8626 Files in this item: 1
Signe_Groth-Brodersen.pdf (1.643Mb) -
Towards Relational Leadership In the Cultural SectorFriis Møller, Søren (Frederiksberg, 2012)[More information][Less information]
Abstract: The thesis is an inquiry into how leadership is performed narratively in the cultural sector. Chapter 1 draws the cultural sector as a narrative landscape, and the reader is invited on a tour around this narrative landscape as seen through the eyes of some of the top guns in the cultural sector. Seen from this vantage, leadership in the cultural sector seems to be predominantly performed by relating narratives with reference to the metanarrative of the Enlightenment. The inquiry, however, draws on Lyotard (1984) to argue that such extralinguistic legitimization is in a crisis of legitimacy, wherefore the inquiry embarks on a problematization of the dominant understanding of leadership in the cultural sector with the activist aspiration of suggesting a postmoderning understanding of leadership in the cultural sector being performatively legitimized. Chapter 2 argues in favor of a relational, non-entitative understanding of narratives and it points to emplotment as a process of finding the best fit. This relational understanding of narratives allows the project to inquire into leadership performed narratively in all kinds of empirical settings, not confining itself to formal leadership contexts. Chapter 3 offers a genealogic approach to what the project has defined as the dominant narrative in the cultural sector, the narrative of art for art’s sake (the AFAS narrative), which the project argues function as an implicit standard. This includes notions of aesthetic autonomy such as suggested by Kant in 1790, artistic freedom and art for its own sake such as claimed by artists in the Romantic era, and the arm’s length principle as the ‘constitution of cultural policies’ in the post WW2 Western world. Chapter 4 provides an overview of alternative voices which have challenged the dominant narrative. These include post colonial studies, cultural entrepreneurial studies and consumer behavior studies which in various ways propose alternative ways to lead and support the cultural sector. Chapter 5 links the discussions in chapter 3 and chapter 4 to leadership studies, notably to discussions of leader-centered orientations versus leading relationally orientations. The chapter concludes by suggesting a new sensibility towards understanding leadership and meditates on how this might be achieved, paying attentions to the possibilities of overcoming the putative crisis of legitimacy the inquiry is placed in. Chapter 6 relates a case-study of Malmoe City Library which endeavors into a difficult, yet very promising process of reformulating what a library may become in a contemporary context. This process challenges the dominant narrative and thus the current understanding of what a library should be, and this deviation from the dominant narrative challenges leadership. Chapter 7 assembles three different approaches to challenges the dominant narrative and to make new interpretive resources available to the understanding of leadership in the cultural sector. First, givrum.nu, a social movement working with arts, second, Mogens Holm, a leader in the cultural sector in a transition phase, and third, Copenhagen Phil, a classical symphony orchestra striving to avoid becoming a parallel society phenomenon. These case studies are conducted as written interviews with the cases, in an attempted un-edited form to also introduce relational processes informed by a power with relation to my own research project. Chapter 8 reflects on the case-studies in chapter 6 and chapter 7 in light of the two approaches to leadership discussed in chapter 5. It does so by linking my study to relational leadership theory in order to see how this theoretical field might inform my inquiry and how my inquiry might inform this field. It equally offers five possible reconstructions of the cases before concluding the research project by summing up contributions to the empirical field and the research fields, as well as by pointing to areas which could be further developed in future research. In line with the aspirations of the relational constructionist framework of the project, the inquiry does not offer a conclusion. Instead it encourages further reconstructions, thus submitting itself to the performative legitimization it argues in favor of. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10398/8590 Files in this item: 1
Søren_Friis_Møller.pdf (1.809Mb) -
(Re)assembling work in the Danish PostMogensen, Mette (Frederiksberg, 2012)[More information][Less information]
Abstract: The well-being of employees is currently a central matter of concern both in public and private companies. If employees do not feel well, in the last instance they might experience a burn out or fall ill from stress and thus add to the highly costly yet ever growing number filling up the statistics of this modern epidemic. In short, well-being is key to productivity. For sure this is not a new story, but at the core of organization and management theory: how to best organize the human resources of production balancing off the need for increased productivity and the preservation of physical and mental resources of the worker? In contrast to classic principles such as Taylor’s scientific management, it seems today generally agreed that well-being thrives when work is organized by principles of ‘flexibility’, ‘learning’, ‘empowerment’ and ‘creativity’. However, at the same time workplaces and organizations are under an enormous pressure towards standardization and optimization. This dissertation investigates empirically competing or intersecting ways of organizing well-being and productivity, with an analytic outset in the work task, departing from historically generated, however still prevalent, dichotomies and normativities of standardization and flexibility respectively. The empirical case of the dissertation is the organization of postal work in a big and formerly publicly run distribution company in Denmark. Based on an ethnographic field work and the employment of an auto-photographic method, the dissertation investigates how the current and simultaneous efforts of standardization and flexibility configure the well-being(s) and productivities of postal work. The theoretical framework is primarily informed by Actor Network Theory and the dissertation attend to a detailed investigation of how well-being and productivity are enacted in the daily work practices and the constant shifting/delegation going on between the inscribed postal worker of work tools, standard procedures and management programs on the one side and the routinized bodies of the postal workers on the other. Most of the time this results in ‘working compatibilities’ silently enacting bodies-with-standards that are both productive and well. At other times, however, controversy and conflicts arise, pointing to the fact that the presence of multiple modes of organizing are not always productive. The empirical chapters departs from selected auto-photographs that prompt different unfoldings of the way postal work is organized – or sought organized – and the way well-being and productivity arise as effects of these organizations. In this unfolding the analysis proceed on a tension between phenomenological and actor-network theoretical readings of empirical material creating a patchwork-like assemblage of postal work. This involves a stitching together of highly mundane, corporeal practices and material such as bicycles and kickstands, personal experiences, the researcher’s interpretations, the technical scripts of electric bikes, the norms of postal workers, the discourse of management and the political-economic developments of European postal markets. Through the empirical chapters, the dissertation depicts postal work not as a story of standardization versus flexibility, but as a constant ‘juggling’ and balancing act between them. This is not a story of humanization or the opposite, it is both at once. It is not a story of stabilization or perpetual change, it is both at once. It is a story of the hanging-togetherness of an organization that displays multiple versions of well-being and productivity as well as multiple controversies as a result of this. Depending on the stakes one has in this complex organizational set-up, whether one is the postal worker, the local manager, the HR consultant or perhaps the customer, preferences will differ, and indeed this is an important discussion. What is the better way to organize postal work? The analysis presented in the dissertation will not deliver the answer to this, but hopefully make the discussion a more qualified one, by displacing old truths. Having as point of departure and final emphasis a heuristics of the work task, the thesis aims to contribute to a specification of organization theory, HRM and work environment theorizing, which otherwise tend to have lost its primary object: work. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10398/8589 Files in this item: 1
Mette_Mogensen.pdf (9.923Mb) -
Managing and Researching Inclusive SchoolsRatner, Helene (Frederiksberg, 2012)[More information][Less information]
Abstract: This thesis examines “reflexivity” as the key theme for understanding how Danish school managers work with the currently influential political vision of including students with special needs in the common school (educating children aged 5-16). Despite repeated attempts to realize the vision of inclusion, the number of students referred to special pedagogical services, and thus segregated from the common school, has continued to grow, especially since 1995. There is a widespread consent that this development is due to the schools’ practices and socially constructed categories of “special needs” and “normalcy.” Pedagogical scholars and recent policy initiatives posit that schools can achieve the much-wanted cultural change towards inclusion if teachers reflect (more) on their mindsets and practices. When advocating inclusion, scholars often refer to school managers as “leaders of meaning construction,” thus emphasizing their importance in facilitating cultural change. Existing knowledge practices are depicted as too “durable” with the unintended side-effects of segregation and budget overruns, and school managers are, following, encouraged making teachers change their practices through (self-) reflexivity. URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10398/8459 Files in this item: 1
Helene_Ratner.pdf (2.848Mb)
