Markets are intertwined. If a certain market is perceived as being unorganized or inappropriately organized for neighbouring markets, sellers or buyers in those adjacent markets may step in as organizers. In this chapter, I use the case of the Swedish taxi market as it developed from around 1990 until 2015 to demonstrate how hotel companies and owners of travel terminals haveassumed organizer roles in the taxi transport market. This account is based on a qualitative analysis of three cases of participant observation and eight interviews with key stakeholders. The interviews and the first two observations were conducted in the autumn of 2013, and one additional observation was conducted in the spring of 2015. In addition, the chapter is informed by a broad base of documents: previous research, industry reports and company policies, newspaper articles, and public reports.

This paper contributes to the understanding of hybrid organizations by refining the concept of decoupling as a strategic response to conflicting objectives and institutional expectations (Meyer and Rowan in Am J Soc 83:340–363, 1977). In today’s popular responsibility discourse one notes a hopeful “win–win” ideal that invites attempts, by companies in particular, to realize and balance conflicting values and to strive to fulfil both profit objectives and responsibility objectives. Although institutional theory has long acknowledged the strategic response of decoupling in organizational contexts, the potential of exploring and refining how this concept may be used to analyse strategic responses in the contemporary era of market-embedded morality has yet to be explored (Shamir in Econ Soc 37:1–19, 2008). There are good reasons to do so as the present-day discourse on the relation between the economy and morality offers a new set of options and challenges for legitimately responding to institutional demands. This paper draws on an explanatory, rich ethnographic and longitudinal case study of a Swedish fully state-owned company operating in the post 1990s gambling market. We suggest that contemporary hybrid organizations positioned at the crossroads of bureaucratic and market schemes of organizing, may find themselves in a particularly tight spot and seek legitimacy by decoupling—not only by adopting certain legitimizing structures, but also and increasingly with reference to market-embedded morality, a commoditizing of responsibility in their contested market setting. Based on the case findings, we suggest a distinction between organization-based decoupling and market-based decoupling and propose that market-based decoupling may be attractive to hybrid organizations owing to it being less sensitive to scrutiny and accountability claims. But at the same time, our findings indicate that market-based decoupling poses a risk to hybrid organizations, as it does not offer the same degree of legitimacy with key stakeholders/the general public as organization-based decoupling does.

Although market organization is typically directed at organizations, it is common to legitimize it with reference to individuals. Because clever and active consumers constitute an often-assumed precondition for well functioning markets, there is much ado about maintaining this ideal. Thus reorganization aimed at increased competition and a greater supply of goods is encouraged, because the consumer is assumed to have free choice—to be willing and able, when faced with a range of options, to decide what to buy and from whom tobuy it. To date, the hopes of maintaining the fragile pipe dream of the clever and active consumer, so fundamental to much of market organization, has taken little advice from scholars demonstrating that real individuals lack the capacity to anticipate all possible options and evaluate all available information (Simon 1982; March and Simon 1958). As this chapter demonstrates,however, the discrepancy between these highly held ideals and humbler human capacities is contributing to a broad range of organizations engaging in efforts to shape ‘proper consumers’. Through a chronological historical account of a century of these efforts (c.1900–2015), we provide insights into the development of consumer guidance in Sweden. Beginning in 1900, pioneering attempts at shaping proper consumers targeted members of established organizations and offered basic knowledge on ways to save money and make informed choices between product categories—not to spend one’s daily wages on alcohol, for example, but to save and invest in a new harrow. In the state-centred, post-WWII period, beginning in the mid-1940s, there were increased standards and monitoring aimed at guiding consumers to choose not only between but also within product categories—how to calculate the price/quality ratio of different kinds of hosiery, for example. This era also saw the establishment of many specialized organizations aimed at consumer guidance. The contemporary global era, beginning in the 1990s, has seen a sharp increase in standards, labels, and consumer guidance. In the late 1990s, a third and somewhat unexpected type of advice went a step beyond the choice among and within product categories to provide advice among consumer guides. We offer a wide range of empirical examples of consumer guidance, organizedby such diverse market organizers as agricultural societies, savings banks, cooperatives, municipalities, government agencies, businesses, and bloggers. The content of the advice is analysed and, most important for this volume, we exemplify the range of market elements and information and technology usedby those engaged in the task of upholding the fragile construction of the active and clever consumer. Our account is based on three sets of empirical data collected primarily in 2012: (a) relevant secondary data from historical research and (b) our qualitative content analyses of historical and contemporary materials related to Swedish consumer guidance, such as stakeholder documents and information made publicly available through archives and the media. In addition, (c) three key informant interviews contributed to our general understanding of the contemporary Swedish field of consumer guidance (Alexius and Löwenberg 2012). In all, we see an overwhelming number of attempts to shape consumers during a period of more than one hundred years.

Förändringsarbetet mot mer tillitsfulla relationer i den kommunala förvaltningen i Borlänge initierades 2008 och pågår fortfarande aktivt ett decennium senare. Studien belyser centrala förutsättningar för att bygga och underhålla tillitsfulla relationer inom den kommunala förvaltningen. Teoretiska utgångspunkter är dels teori om medarbetarskap och ömsesidigt ansvar genom ”förpliktigande samspel”, dels teori om förändringsarbete som vardagsrutin. Metodologiskt har dokumentstudier, deltagande observationer, intervjuer och fokusgruppsintervjuer genomförts. En fördjupning har gjorts till upplevelser hos personalen på Individ- och familjeomsorgen (IFO) inom socialtjänsten. En central slutsats är att tillitsfulla relationer tar tid, både att utveckla och att underhålla. Ambitionen att minska misstro och öka tillit kräver både uthållighet i en kultur- och organisationsförändring över tid och en mellanmänsklig tillgänglighet i vardagen. I Borlänge har ett framgångsrikt värdegrundsarbete skapat goda förutsättningar för detta.

How can buyers know what they are buying? In many markets this is no trivial problem, particularly for ambitious, contemporary consumers who care about the way a product has been produced and its effects on health or the physical environment. Buyers have little choice but to trust sellers’ descriptions of the origins and effects of the product, which, in turn, evokes the question of how the buyers can trust the sellers. We describe how the problem of trust has justified the production of new formal organizations, such as certification organizations, accreditation organizations, meta-organizations for the accreditation organizations, and meta-meta-organizations for these meta-organizations. In order to create trust in organizations at one level, a new level of organizations has been created for monitoring the lower level. We argue that such a ‘macro-organization’ is unlikely to represent a stable solution, but has inherent tendencies for further growth.

In this article, we analyze the specific tools used to organize global food governance: standards, certification and accreditation, to develop and enhance the discussion regarding Tripartite Standards Regimes (TSR). The dynamics and implications of TSRs are discussed through an in-depth process study of the organization of a Swedish eco-label and the two TSRs of which this labeling organization has been a part of between 1985 and 2016. Using the theoretical concept hyper-organization, the article shows the development of four and five-fold organizational layers of control. Two implications of the hyper-organized TSRs are highlighted: (1) Public authorities play a much greater part in global food governance than previous research has acknowledged. The role of the state, in turn, has implications for how legitimacy and responsibility are sought. (2) In the complex organization of standards, certification and accreditation, responsibility is diffused and very hard to locate. Surprisingly, as the role of public authorities in TSRs becomes clearer and more articulate, the system grows more complex, making responsibility even harder to locate.

A dilemma for market organizers is created by the fact that sellers want to know as much about buyers as possible, whereas buyers rarely want the seller to have that information—not least for privacy reasons. This dilemma is affected by market organization, and market organization may also be used to try to change imbalances in the conflicting information interests. In the market for personal insurance, insurance sellers require in-depth information about the buyer’s health conditions, in order to make an accurate categorization. As this information is sensitive to buyers, however, and can potentially exclude them from the market, many buyers are concerned about sharing it. This chapter demonstrates how sellers have spent considerable resources trying to organize buyers. However, the considerable imbalance in favour of the sellers’ interests triggered buyers and their advocates to call for market reorganizations. Eventually the state reacted and reorganized the market, but only modestly so.

This chapter focuses on the core of the Swedish capitalist class, owners of “large-scale” capital, from 1914 to 2006. To investigate this class, a key assumption in the works of Marx and Weber is utilized: the dominant capitalist class of property holders is internally divided. It contains “active” members (engaged in the production and circulation of goods) and “thinking” members (engaged in the production and circulation of ideas); it contains “entrepreneurs” (producing new capital) as well as “rentiers” (living off inherited capital).

One result is that large portion of the wealthiest individuals are professionally active in other fields than the economic field, i.e. in other positions than as leaders of large capitalist corporations. This pattern in the social composition of the capitalist class has been remarkably stable during the twentieth century, unaffected by economic crises as well as the emergence of the Swedish Social Democratic welfare state. Another result is that the proportion of rentiers is greater in the thinking fraction than in the active fraction. The results illustrate the need to combine research on economic elites and studies of the reproduction of the top stratum of the capitalist class.

This study traces the development of the management accountant (MA) role at the Swedish Social Insurance Agency (SIA). In 2012, the agency began a reformation by implementing the Lean management system in hopes of increasing customer trust. The results of this study show that the authority of the MA rests on decentralization and the proximity of MAs to managers, as previous research has shown, and more specifically on a definitional and a moral prerogative that may or may not be awarded to MAs enabling them to act as de facto managers. The study shows how the role of the SIA's operative level MAs changed into a helpdesk function with the role of assisting other groups to help themselves, in this case operative-level teams that had begun performing management accounting tasks. Thus, this study bears witness not to the expansion and hybridization of existing MA roles, but to the reduction in authority and de-hybridization of the MA role, from business partner to a pedagogical role on a consultative basis.

Background: By tradition, the Swedish health care system is based on a representative and parliamentary form of government. Recently, new management forms, inspired by market principles, have developed. The steering system is both national and regional, in that self-governing county councils are responsible for the financing and provision of health care in different regions. National and local documents regulating Swedish health care mention several ethical values, such as equity in health for the whole population and respect for autonomy and human dignity. It is therefore of interest to investigate the status of such ethical statements in Swedish health care management. Method: The aim of the present study was to investigate perceptions of the status of ethics in the daily work of politicians, chief civil servants and Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) from care-giver organizations in the county council of Stockholm. A qualitative method was used, based on inductive content analysis of individual interviews with 13 health care managers. Results: The content analysis resulted in four categories: Low status of ethics; Cost-effectiveness over ethics; Separation of ethics from management; and Lack of opportunities for ethical competence building. The informants described how they prioritized economic concerns over ethics and separated ethics from their daily work. They also expressed that they experienced that this development had been enforced by the marketization of the health care system. Further, they described how they lacked opportunities for ethical discussions, which could have helped develop their ethical competence. Conclusions: In order to improve the status of ethics in health care management, ethical considerations and analyses must be integrated in the regular work tasks of politicians, chief civil servants and CEOs; such as decision-making, budgeting and reform work. Further, opportunities for ethical dialogues on a regular basis should be organized, in order to improve ethical competence on the management level. New steering forms, less focused upon market principles, might also be needed, in order to improve the status of ethics in the health care management organization.

Through its specific rhetorical potential that is distinct from verbal text, visual material facilitates and plays a pivotal role in linking novel phenomena to established and taken-for-granted social categories and discourses within the social stock of knowledge. Employing data from the worldwide news coverage of the global financial crisis in the Financial Times between 2008 and 2012, we analyse sensemaking and sensegiving efforts in the business media. We identify a set of specific multimodal compositions that construct and shape a limited number of narratives on the global financial crisis through distinct relationships between visual and verbal text. By outlining how multimodal compositions enhance representation, theorization, resonance, and perceived validity of narratives, we contribute to the phenomenological tradition in institutional organization theory and to research on multimodal meaning construction. We argue that elaborate multimodal compositions of verbal text, images, and other visual artifacts constitute a key resource for sensemaking and, consequently, sensegiving.

Sweden was the first country in the world to introduce a prohibition against parental physical punishment of children, in 1979. The aim of this ban was to change attitudes, not to criminalise parents. Since then, studies have shown remarkable changes, in terms of both parental attitudes and the decreasing use of physical punishment. However, violence against children is still a problem in Sweden today. There are challenges connected to becoming a more multicultural society where negative attitudes cannot be taken for granted and where a tough-on-crime rhetoric is increasingly on the political agenda. A central question is how the ban, with its educational and proactive aim, is interpreted and implemented in this context. This question is analysed here from a socio-legal perspective, based on both legal sources and interviews with child protection representatives evaluating cases of violence against children. Results show that these professionals make use of two different and conflicting logics–one prospective logic, which is in line with socialwork ethics and the aim of the Social Services Act, and one retrospective, being influenced by the tough-on-crime political agenda. The conclusion is that there is a risk of the retrospective logic taking over–not least in a multicultural context, where trust and cooperation between the Social Services and families can be more difficult to achieve. Our study shows a need to attain a balance between the two logics without losing the strength of the message and aim of the 1979 ban.

Around 2010, a shift in the EU-understanding of austerity took place – from a future-orientated vision based on concepts of solidarity, cohesion and subsidiarity, to a crisis-driven present shaped around the imperatives of immediate fiscal discipline and debt repayment. This has had contradictory effects, producing widespread divisions, disunity and rising nationalism across Europe on one hand, and new forms of social solidarity and resistance on the other.

Corruption narratives, like witchcraft accusations, offer a lens for analyzing social relations, economic interests, and hidden structures of power. Developing this theme, I examine discourses of corruption in the context of growing concerns about fraud prevention and anti-corruption in universities. Moving beyond critiques of university administrations as bureaucratic, self-serving entities whose interests are increasingly antithetical to the academic mission of the university, I ask, What is corruption in academia and how does this assumed problem relate to academic capitalism and the rise of audit culture? The empirical context for my study is the extraordinary increase in institutionalized fraud prevention programs, particularly those offered by the Big Four accountancy firms. Taking as my case study the introduction of a whistle-blower hotline at one Australasian university, I examine the politics and interests behind such schemes. The increasing involvement of accountancy firms in nonauditing work, including anti-corruption services, illustrates how corruption narratives operate as market-making strategies. I examine how commercialization, risk management, and auditing proliferate anti-corruption initiatives and how audit firms collude in the risk and corruption that they claim to ameliorate. I conclude by assessing the implications for the anthropology of corruption of the growing penetration of universities by an increasingly commercially focused tax industry that, some argue, cannot even be trusted to regulate itself.

The focus of this article is Lean management action-plan documents and the type of knowledge and values they project when used in Swedish public preschools. The Lean model, also called the Toyota model, originated in the car industry. Two key features of the model were eliminating waste and ensuring that there was a system for continuous improvements in the work processes to render them as efficient as possible. The article explores the absurdities of transplanting a scientific management model and planning from the car industry to preschool, where rigid planning is not conducive to flexibility or the urgent meeting of human needs.

This study aims to identify how uncertainty and insecurity in the post-2008 period have reshaped risk management in the university systems. The study scrutinises internal control in the contexts of the English university system and the State University of New York (SUNY) system. It utilises the concept of 'risk' by exploring 'risk society' theses. The paper argues that uncertainty, anxiety and distrust following the 2008 financial crisis did not reshape the risk management mechanisms in England and the SUNY system. The adaptive reactions of these university systems against the crisis were immediate responses to fiscal shortage, rather than reforming of their internal control mechanisms. This suggests that the uncertain environment may thrust the universities into a reflexive mode; however, it is not necessary to bring about substantial structural changes.