The COVID-19 pandemic, the surge of populism, the climate crisis and many other destabilizing factors in our time, all point at the expectation of trustworthy knowledge and reliable organization devoted to knowledge production and dissemination. However, universities remain enmeshed in economic liberalization and ensuing cultural struggles where their funding, governance and practices reflect market imprints – even academic ideals such as originality, or social ideals such as relevance have been transformed into measurable units and thereby risk losing their historical sway. This predicament is the focus of this book.

The book explores the rise of neo-liberalization in academic system in a highly unlikely place: Sweden, a country with a strong social democratic tradition and a long history of state regulation of higher education. As an advanced welfare state with a powerful labour movement and a large public sector, market ideals and practices have been carefully curtailed historically. This notwithstanding, a neoliberal university model has evolved there, reshaping notions of academic identities, institutional directions and notions of quality. This edited collection will be of value to researchers, academics and students with an interest in organizational studies, governance, management, higher education, sociology and politics.

This article presents my experiences of studying Djursholm as Sweden’s ”Leader Community” during 2010 through 2015. I address the relative lack of studies of the economic elite, which is a problem both for the sociological literature, and for public debate. The reason to why relatively few studies have been made of the economic elite, particularly in Sweden, has amongst others to do with a reputation of it as being hard to study, not at least due to this group's often social closure. By proposing examples from my own study, I try to describe how studies of the economic elites can be done with a view of generating more research of this anonymous yet inf luential group.

As a result of their learning techniques, organizations tend to generate dominant behavior of either exploitation or exploration making a balanced attention to them hard to achieve. But how can the process through which this undesirable phenomenon develops be made more complicated? Largely this problem remains a neglected one in organizational learning theory. It is important to better understand how organizations can take measures to reduce the pathological effects that learning breeds. In this article I explore the idea of 'complicating the organization' in order to constrain organizations from becoming swiftly locked in learning behavior of excessive exploitation or exploration. I suggest that contemporary organizations should complicate their learning through various interorganizational collaborations. In interorganizational learning activities, organizations have the potential to learn slowly because of being poorly focused in their attention to their experiences. Hence, they may remain open to reflect upon their current operations. They will be learning, but not in a too simpleminded and myopic way by reducing the speed through which competency traps of exploitation and exploration develop.

In this article I report observations from an ethnographic study of a Swedish economic elite community, including interviews with residents and service staff, and participant observations in various social contexts stretching over a period of five years that can contribute to an understanding of how elite communities respond to potential social deviance among its members, such as feelings of insufficiency and stress, thus trying to avoid any 'desecration' of their social and cultural capital. Specifically, I examine how the practices through which desecration is avoided, for example the exclusion of unwanted members, interplay in the further consecration of the communities, thus maintaining and strengthening elites' status and standing, Studying the problems and difficulties experienced by elites in their neighborhood settings, and how they try to manage them, is potentially an important step forward to better analyze and understand the way powerful groups in contemporary society maintain and strengthen their privileges and power.

Sociologists theare paying increasing attention to the business and financial elites that control today's global economy; indeed, there's a great need to understand who these elites are, what they do, and what makes m tick, as individuals, and as a class. But we also need to understand how the economic elites aremade in the current social and economic system, and one significant way of doing this, is by examining elite business schools, that is, the institutions that aim to train and prepare people to assume important leadership and decision-making positions in business, finance and related sectors of critical importance to the management of modern capitalism. Based on the notion of consecration, I empirically examine how the student union of Sweden's premier business school, The Stockholm School of Economics, offers its members a learning environment partly separated from the school, and how this semi-independent organization contributes to making undergraduate students socially, morally and esthetically meritorious for elite jobs in primarily management consulting and finance; a process that is largely shaped by corporate actors that participate formally and informally in the student union activities. The paper contributes to the sociological literature on business schools and higher education and elites, both theoretically through the twin notions of meritocracy and consecration, and empirically through its unique focus on student union activities in an elite business school setting. 

In the past decades work-site health promotion has become an increasingly popular strategy through which corporations and other employers are said to exercise social responsibility. Not only does this practice promise better health and wellbeing for employees; it can also contribute to generating sustainable and responsible organizations. As with all organizational activities we need, however, critically analyze the potential risks for single individuals and societies alike with comprehensive health promotion programs. Any activity of corporate social responsibility (CSR) can potentially be seen as an expression of organizational control through which all the more aspects of an organization's environment come to be enacted by the organization in a way favorable to the organization's aims and perspectives. By clothing an activity as ""socially responsible"", and more specifically as ""health promotion"", organizations may accomplish an essential task in a very sublime and efficient way: that of managing its environment in terms of desired and appropriate human behaviors. This unanticipated consequence of health promotion deserves attention in order to even better understand the potentials and pitfalls of modern CSR. 

A critical notion in contemporary neoliberal society is “employability”, i.e., the set of skills, competencies and abilities that make an individual able to compete successfully on national and international labour markets. As is well-known, one of the most important instruments for creating employable persons is higher education, i.e. education offered by universities and similar academic institutions. Universities have for long time been expected to be “relevant” by making students well adapted to societal demands and requirements; in other words, producing “employable students” has always been a critical mission, not only in the narrow, vocational sense but also in the behavioural and aesthetic meaning of the word. As a testimony to this, modern universities have gradually embraced a corporate model for managing its operations, for instance, by implementing “performance management” indicators for evaluating faculty, and by offering students courses that stress the development of social rather than intellectual abilities that are said to be critical for their employability. The corporate ethos that has come to define society more and more has also come to colonize the university world. The market-liberal development of universities can most vividly be seen in the exceptional growth of management education offered by universities or independent business schools, where tomorrow's corporate elites are being educated and trained. In many ways, business schools have come to dominate higher education, not only in terms of the number of students being graduated but also ideologically: business schools seem to offer a version of higher education that is relevant for today's demands and can in this respect be seen as “model institutions”. As a result, the ways business students are constructed and socialized therefore constitute an interesting area of examination. In this chapter, the author critically examines how students at Sweden's premier business school, the Stockholm School of Economics (SSE), are made employable for elite jobs in Swedish and international industry. The SSE is Sweden's only private university and is sometimes described as a model institution for how all higher education should be conducted in the country. Relative to other universities in Sweden, the SSE is a “free” institution, without any strong formal bonds to the state, which is said to promote an ability to swiftly adapt to circumstances and offer their students a “timely” education, resulting in a high degree of competitiveness. Indeed, the SSE has close connections to the corporate world that offers the institution guidance in how to promote student employability, and can boost excellent records in making their students attractive to elite employers, even in the public sector.

This article addresses a largely neglected area of study in sociology, namely the consecration of people in elite communities. Through the notion of 'consecrating exclusion', I explore how Sweden's foremost elite community Djursholm was founded in 1889, and how its aura and character as an exclusive neighbourhood are maintained today. Data come from historical material and a five-year ethnographic study consisting of field observations, interviews and archival material. I analyse how Djursholm was created as a sanctuary for the economic elite in Sweden and that its foremost purpose has been to socially elevate its residents, making them appear honourable and morally superior. I report how the community has defended its borders by various practices of exclusion, and how Djursholm aims to present itself as a role-model, a 'shining city upon a hill' which is critical to its social standing and status. The study contributes to the sociology of elites in three ways: (a) theoretically through the notion of 'consecrating exclusion', by synthesizing ideas on social and moral distinction with ideas on symbolic boundaries and moral hierarchies; (b) empirically by presenting in-depth qualitative data on the construction and maintenance of a peculiar elite community, noting that few studies have reported data from a neighbourhood designated as 'elite' from the start; and (c) methodologically by drawing on a mix of methods including historical documents, interviews and participant observation in order to examine both historical and contemporary aspects of 'consecrating exclusion'.

This paper reports on how the National Employment Office in Sweden creates the disabled person by recruiting them to work-for-the-disabled programs. As a rule, job applicants who are classified as “disabled” do not consider themselves as such, but they are encouraged to become disabled by adopting the organization's norms, rules and routines, which specify what is expected of them as disabled if they are to be assisted to find a job. Disability is, in other words, a learned social role enacted in a particular organizational context. It is argued that the full implications of a radical constructionist approach to the problem of disability have not yet been tapped in the standard sociological conversation on disability. The potential of society to formally enact anyone as disabled, irrespective of his or her medical and biological condition, raises a number of important social and political questions.

Based on a longitudinal case study of the work offered by a Swedish sheltered work organization that can be regarded as ‘dirty’, in the sense that it stigmatizes those people that do it, in this paper I analyze how ‘dirty work’ can be seen as an important yet so far neglected source of the social construction of disability. Specifically, the aim of the paper is to suggest how an individual can become a ‘disabled person’ by doing dirty work. By working on ‘tainted tasks’ people (irrespective of their mental or physical condition) may come to be regarded and even officially labeled as ‘disabled’, i.e. incapacitated and impaired for any ‘normal’ and ‘clean’ character of work.

This project explores the community of Djursholm that is situated some 10 km north of Stockholm as an example of an ‘executive community’. A key argument of the project is that the ideals and norms of contemporary ‘executive behavior’ can no longer be sought within the world of professional bureaucracies only. Since August 2010 I have been conducting an ethnographic study of Djursholm. I have approached this community inductively where my theoretical ideas on the construction of executive values-in-use have informed my preliminary research questions. Based on my observations Djursholm appears to be a good environment to explore the phenomenon of executive community in terms of nurturing or resisting an executive culture expressed through such phenomena as responsibility, discipline, organization and order; not only because there is a relatively large number of executives living there but primarily because it appears to be a community that is intensely the subject to the ideology of management.

Ever since the first elite business schools were founded in Europe and the United States during the late 1800s and early 1900s, they have enjoyed an intimate relationship with economics. Despite some notable analyses of economics' importance for the successful institutionalization of business schools, an understanding of the relation between economics and elite business schools requires further development. As such, this paper focuses on 'economics as symbolic capital' for the consecration of business schools as elite settings, with particular emphasis on the symbolic aspects of economics' cultural and social capital. Consecration can be seen as critical to the institutionalization of elite business schools; in contrast to the primary focus of previous studies on the material significance of economics in business schools, my chief concern is the discipline's symbolic power and importance for business schools' status as elite institutions in many countries today. Data from a study on Sweden's elite business school, The Stockholm School of Economics (SSE), were based on both historical and contemporary sources, including archival material, biographies, statistics, participant observations, and interviews with faculty and students. The SSE is one of the world's oldest elite business schools where economics has played a critical role ever since its establishment; the SSE's economics faculty has a unique relation to the ultimate source of capital for contemporary global economics, namely, The Nobel Prize in Economics, which exerts a significant influence on the discipline's general standing and status today.

Social scientists are paying increasing attention to the business and financial elites: There’s a great need to understand who these elites are, what they do, and what makes them tick, as individuals but also as a class. By examining elite business schools, the institutions that train and prepare people to assume important leadership and decision-making positions in business, finance and related sectors, we may also learn how the economic elites are made. A key argument in this book is that elite schools are known to create powerful groups in society, offering them the intellectual and analytical means to act as leaders, but, most importantly, the social, moral and aesthetic skills that are deemed necessary to exercise power; in all essential respects elite schools consecrate people. By dominating much of higher education today, and by doing so in a way that creates and reproduces a market-based organization and control of society, elite business schools represent certain interests and ideologies that affect the lives of most people. In understanding how the modern economy is run, elite business schools, therefore, represent critical study objects.

This book, based on an in-depth study of the Stockholm School of Economics (SSE), offers a sociological analysis of the world of elite business schools. Specifically, this book examines the consecration of SSE’s students from a number of perspectives and in a number of situations, focusing on student union activities, school culture, faculty behavior, teaching, courses and alumni events, noting the symbolic importance of economics and particularly the school’s unique relation among the world’s business schools to the Nobel Prize.

The book addresses the topics with regards to the sociology of elites, management education and organizational studies and will be of interest to researchers, academics, and students also interested in business history, higher education studies, and sociology of education.

One group of elites that often escapes attention among sociologists are royals, who seem to be regarded as uninteresting and irrelevant study objects for the analysis of elites' reproduction and power in contemporary society. Still, as suggested by, for instance, the death of the British Queen Elizabeth II in 2022 and the installation of the Danish King Frederik X in 2024, royals enjoy extraordinary attention among the general public and media, which testifies to their potentially important social, moral and political functions and roles. Based on an extensive examination of the longest reigning monarch in the world today, the Swedish King Carl XVI Gustaf, I suggest how he, through media, has been constructed as 'Sweden's leader'; by idealizing such neoliberal virtues as activity, entrepreneurship, positive thinking, self-management and similar expressions of 'leadership'. A key concept for my analysis of the fabrication of the King is 'image-making', which derives from Ervin Goffman's work on the 'presentation of self'. Essentially, the King aspires to be seen as a role model in contemporary Sweden, a country that has become all the more market-oriented during the last 50 years, which is critical to understanding his legitimacy, and hence ability to exercise power.

All around the world there are elite suburban communities: Palo Alto, California, and Greenwich, Connecticut, in the U.S.; Paris's Neuilly; and Oxshott outside London. These wealthy suburbs are home to the economic and social elites who work in the world's global cities. Stockholm's suburb Djursholm is one such place. It is full of large houses, winding lanes, and is surrounded by a beautiful landscape. Its residents prize physical fitness, healthy eating, fine art, and education. Despite Sweden's reputation for egalitarianism, Djursholm is representative of global mechanisms of privilege and its perpetuation.

Organizations are increasingly dependent on various forms of partnerships to developand to perform. These organizational partnerships may become potential learning arenas,broadening the learning capacities of the alliances involved. Thus far, the literature on learning inorganizations has chiefly been concerned with how traditional and integrated organizations learn.Consequently, a unit of analysis has not been developed to highlight how a collection of actors maylearn and create value. To address this issue, I will discuss how ``imaginary organizations'' canprovide an arena for actors to build knowledge on a joint basis. This type of partnership formsmetasystems that integrate various partner organizations in order to share resources, poolcompetencies, and gain flexibility. As an empirical illustration, learning processes within theimaginary organization of Scandinavian PC Systems (SPCS) are described.

Based on qualitative data of an upper-secondary school in Sweden's primary elite community, Djursholm, I propose how medical diagnosis of students as dyslexics contributes to consecrating them by offering a short cut to successful performance, while at the same time reproducing differences between social classes. The study suggests how students that do not score top can be labeled dyslexic and the social and moral consequences of that. I introduce the concept of consecrating medicalization in order to discriminate between the effects of medical diagnosis of members of different social classes. In this way, this paper contributes to further examining some key problems in medical sociology and the sociology of elites, by offering a framework of synthesis and integration.

This article reports qualitative data on how the Swedish Public Employment Service classifies unemployed individuals as 'occupationally disabled' in order to transfer them to various labour market programmes. The article draws on a framework of medicalization, arguing that the individualization of the social issue of unemployment into a personal trouble of disability is a neglected yet important phenomenon that has interesting implications for theory and policy. By classifying some people as disabled in order to explain their unemployment, medicalization can be seen as an important yet so far neglected mechanism in understanding how this individualizing enterprise comes about. It is concluded that by medicalizing unemployment, the target for society's intervention to fight the spectre of unemployment is primarily individuals' personal troubles rather than any social issues.

This paper reports the findings of a longitudinal case study of sheltered employment for activating so-called occupationally disabled people in Sweden. Data consist of interviews, archival studies and participant observation on how occupationally disabled people's employability is to be promoted and the consequences of such activities. It is argued that those that, for one reason or another, are unable to live up to the norms of being a 'normal' and hence fully active citizen, are objectified as passive and unemployable persons through the same principles that aim to make them active. Through its emphasis on ability, strength, and competence, the 'active society' may raise the bar of employability higher than ever before. As a result, an increasing number of people risk disablement and indeed end up as 'disabled'.

Today most countries rely on formally organized welfare programs - in some cases to the extent that they are labeled "welfare states". These programs, which have been constructed over the last decades, make up a larger national and international system of good intentions. Overall, it appears inconceivable to imagine "civilized society" without a comprehensive organizational system of social welfare. Social welfare has become a "holy cow" in many societies; an institutionalized aspect of modern life. But how does the institutionalization of social welfare occur through the concrete activities it enacts; and why does the institutionalization of social welfare appear to be so particularly successful in relation to other institutionalizing phenomena? These are central problems for any sociological analysis of contemporary society "s organization and are the main locus of attention of this book. Holmqvist explores how a social welfare organization becomes a self-evident phenomenon by "medicalizing" its environment: a way of "solving" social problems by viewing and treating them as medical problems. This study generates new understandings of how institutionalization of organizations comes about and contributes fresh insight to the area of social welfare policies.

This paper proposes a qualitative study of Work Site Health Promotion (WHP) at the large Swedish producer of trucks and buses, Scania. While the concept of WHP implies that it is employees’ improved health at work that is strived for, we suggest that its main area of intervention is neither the work environment, nor what employees do at work, but employees’ lifestyles. To capture the potential of WHP for the management of organization, we introduce the concept of “neo-paternalistic organizational control.” By this term we want to draw attention to how WHP shares paternalistic approaches’ tendency of disregarding the professional-private divide, while also drawing attention to how this extra-professional control dimension is at once less intrusive and more discriminatory than what is traditionally referred to as paternalism in the literature on managerial control.

The corporate management has come to take an active role in health promotion programming for employees, offering health education, screenings, therapy, and even leisure initiatives. This title argues that this narrow focus, and the typical uncritical standpoint towards initiatives which are taken in the name of employees' health, is inadequate.

This article studies the formation and regulation of individual identities among a group of people who after long periods of unemployment are put in a specialized work program for so called ‘occupationally disabled’ individuals. In contrast to its official aim to activate and rehabilitate participants back to the labour market, the study suggests that the work program constitutes the participants as passive and unable to meet the criteria of employability on the labour market. The term ‘occupationally disabled’ emerges not as a medical label referring to already existing, inner characteristic of the individuals concerned, but as an identity that they take on as they pass through the work program. The article contributes to existing research of the formation and regulation of individual identities in organizations in two regards: first, by showing how medicine participates in the formation and regulation of individual identities in organizations, and second, by relating the formation and regulation of individual identities to broader societal issues concerning neoliberal government. Our study suggests that there is a tendency in neo-liberal societies to combine medical and economic expertise into a ‘medico-economic discourse’ within which issues concerning individuals’ activity and agency are transformed into matters of illness and disability. That is, whereas active and self-governing individuals are governed as parts of a high-performing segment of the working population, our study suggests that passive and dependent individuals tend to be governed not just as parts of a low performing segment of the working population, but also as a disabled segment.

'Elite communities' are the areas where the wealthy, and even 'superrich', live, socialize and raise their children as future economic and financial elites; they are the places where a few lead socially and economically privileged lives. Earlier studies have concentrated on the inner dynamics of these settings, focusing on the way residents are constructed and socialized as elites through their social, communicative and aesthetic abilities that are perceived as exemplary in contemporary neoliberal society. In this paper, we broaden the perspective, by exploring how these areas contribute to polarization, that is, how they generate distinctions based on money, morals and manners that are peculiar to neoliberalism's idealization of 'entrepreneurship', 'self-management', 'leadership' and the pursuit of an 'active lifestyle'. Our data come from two major ethnographic studies: one conducted between 2010 and 2015 of Sweden's wealthiest community, Djursholm, that is populated by the country's business and financial elites; the other conducted between 2016 and 2019 of three of Australia's most prestigious and economically privileged suburbs, Toorak (Melbourne), Mosman (Sydney) and Cottesloe (Perth).

Corporate growth is often viewed as being either internally generated or externally achieved through mergers and acquisitions (M&As). During the last decade, strategic alliances have become an increasingly popular third alternative to either internal or acquired growth. Alliances can be cheaper, more flexible, and faster than internal or M&A growth. However, they suffer from a major drawback that makes many practitioners wary, namely the difficult issue of sharing control. One of the comparative strengths of Swedish corporate culture is the ability to cooperate laterally through sharing control. Several Swedish multinational corporations such as IKEA and H&M have turned this national trait into a successful strategic growth virtue. In this article, we discuss how some important Swedish organizational, leadership, brand, and career characteristics have been combined into a powerful international growth recipe. The Swedish "growth cocktail" of combining brand-driven, forward, internal growth with resource-saving supplier alliances with minimal loss of control can be deployed by other companies of different nationalities. These complementary forward and backward expansion forms can be enhanced through matching the external brand image and internal brand identity. Pluralistic career management is also essential to sustaining such international growth combinations

Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) are increasingly prevalent, powerful and risky corporate events. The resistance or support of people in the integration of two previously separate organizations plays a key role for their success or failure. In this paper we present a Career Concept approach to better understand and manage sources and incentives for individual contributions and reactions to M&A. As ‘merged’ corporations integrate previously separate organizations, they can often dis-integrate individual careers with lay-offs, reduced advancement opportunities, upset or changed career plans, and other resistance-generating changes. This is the poorest means of mobilizing motivation, experience, commitment and competence, all of which are usually seen as critical justifications for M&A in the first place. Organizations face opportunity to select new combinations and integrate work in ways that individual careers can be re-integrated into the goals of the M&A with the goals and motivations of participants affected by it, by recognizing and effectively supporting different motivational and competence profiles.

This paper analyses literature and studies of work place health promotion. It draws on human capital theory to develop the thesis that over and above its ambition of furthering employees' bio-medical health, work place health promotion seeks to make up employees that are able to self-manage their lifestyles and selves as human capital. As such, the paper suggests, work place health promotion emerges as an important source of authority and power in contemporary working life, which has largely been overlooked by the majority of studies of organisational health. While the ambition to further employees' health is basically positive, the paper suggests that WHP is still a potentially precarious activity because it tends towards subordinating not only work, but also life in general to principles of management and performance.

In contrast to the largely functionalist and apolitical literature which dominates organisational scholarship on exploitation and exploration after March, this paper seeks to complement this view of exploitation and exploration with a Marxist reading which is unwittingly implied by these terms. More specifically, we combine neo-Marxist and paleo-Marxist arguments to more fully understand the conflictual relations that underpin exploitation and exploration in the management of firms. This enables us to address both the objective and subjective dimensions of exploitation and exploration which firms and workers are involved in through the contemporary capitalist labour process. We illustrate this by drawing on a case study of a large Swedish manufacturing firm which sought to improve lean production by systematically helping employees to explore their own lifestyles and possibilities for a healthier and happier life.

Two themes characterize the organizational learning literature: one focuses on intraorganizational learning processes, and another focuses on inter organizational learning processes. This article stresses the need to cross-fertilize these themes of organizational learning by proposing a dynamic model of organizational learning within and between organizations. This cross-fertilization is important in order to understand how organizations may cope with the fundamental organizational learning problem of addressing exploitation and exploration, i.e., to create both reliability and variety in experience. In this article it is proposed that exploitation and exploration occur both within and between organizations and that they are deeply interlaced through intra-and interorganizational learning processes.

This article examines a fundamental characteristic of modern organizations: the dynamics of exploitation and exploration in intra- and interorganizational learning processes. Exploitation is about creating reliability in experience, and thrives on productivity and refinement. Exploration is concerned with creating variety in experience, and thrives on experimentation and free association. The findings of a case study on product development within a leading Scandinavian software producer and its interorganizational collaborations with business partners suggest how experiential learning processes of exploitation and exploration within the organizations concerned generate interorganizational exploitation and exploration. Conversely, the data suggest how exploitation and exploration between the organizations generate intraorganizational exploitation and exploration. A conceptual framework describing the nature of such learning dynamics is proposed. This framework emphasizes that experiential learning is a driving force behind much intra- and interorganizational change in the form of transformations between exploitation and exploration.

The organisational learning literature has so far focused primarily on intraorganisational learning processes. However, during the last 10 years or so, a growing number of organisational learning studies have focused explicitly on interorganisational learning. So far this literature has concentrated on the requirements for such learning. Little attention has been devoted to examining the potentially unique dynamics of interorganisational learning processes. Consequently, few if any studies have examined whether interorganisational learning processes differ from traditional intraorganisational learning and, if so, in what respects. The purpose of this paper is to make an empirical comparison between intra- and interorganisational learning processes by drawing on a longitudinal qualitative case study of experiential learning processes within and between a business organisation and its partners, continued over a period of 3 years.