Organizing and Cross-Sectoral Collaboration
My research focuses on organizing and collaboration between organizations that represent different sectors and logics, addressing the challenges that can arise in cross-boundary interactions. I am interested in how these organizational conditions manifest in various contexts, and I have studied them across settings such as customer choice systems, cross-sectoral projects, and civil society-public partnerships. These initiatives all address complex societal issues such as welfare, diversity, inclusion, and sustainability.
In a recent article, I describe the role of boundary spanners and cross-boundary activities in organizing a nonprofit-public partnership, highlighting how meaning-making is a process where reflexivity and adaptability are particularly essential to success.
Entrepreneurship, Diversity, and Inclusion in Public Sector Transformation
I also study entrepreneurship in the wake of public sector transformation and the strategies developed by businesses and public organizations in their interactions. For example, I examine entrepreneurship within home care services in municipalities that have chosen to operate through customer choice systems, where diversity has been a driver of change but has resulted in different consequences for both contractors and providers than decision-makers intended.
In several research projects, I also research dimensions of entrepreneurship related to diversity and inclusion. Alongside researchers from Lund and Birmingham, I have explored the unintended ways advisory services and public support for entrepreneurs segment stereotypes by categorizing and labelling entrepreneurs, as well as the challenges entrepreneurs face when using ethnicity as a strategy in collaboration with municipalities and other societal actors.
Trust, Distrust, and Control in Customer Choice Systems
In several studies of customer choice systems, we highlight the complex conditions for organizing and managing such regulated markets as a matter of trust and control, where distrust can also play an important role.
Addressing Sustainability Challenges in Municipal Corporations
In an ongoing research project, I, along with colleagues from the Centre for Municipality Studies and Industrial Environmental Technology, study the dilemmas and strategies linked to sustainability—economic, social, and environmental—within municipal corporations that manage their water and wastewater services. These hybrid organizations serve as a strategy in themselves, while also creating new challenges for municipal corporations' sustainability work, as the complex water and wastewater sector is characterized by conflicting legislation.
