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In 13-14 April 2016, the first ever international Symposium on Projectification of the Public Sector were held at Malmö University, organized by Mats Fred and Dalia Mukhtar-Landgren. Monica Lindgren and Johann Packendorff were invited, and contributed with the presentation ”Projects as a mode of justification: On the discursive fabric of projectification”. Read more (in Swedish)

In an article in the special issue on the politics of projects in technology-intensive work in New Technology, Work and Employment, Svetlana Cicmil, Monica Lindgren and Johann Packendorff examine how the discourses related to project-based work and management are drawn upon in the organising of contemporary work, and the implications they have for project workers. We are interested in how project workers and projectified organisations become vulnerable to decline, decay and exhaustion and why they continue to participate in, and so sustain, projectification processes. The critical perspective taken here, in combination with our empirical material from the ICT sector, surfaces an irreversible decline of the coping capacity of project workers and draws attention to the addictive perception of resilience imposed on and internalised by them as a condition of success and longevity. Under those circumstances, resilience is made sense of and internalised as coping with vulnerability by letting some elements of life being destroyed; thus re-emerging as existentially vulnerable rather than avoiding or resisting the structures and processes that perpetuate vulnerability. Read more on the journal homepage!

Damian Hodgson, Monica Lindgren, Johann Packendorff and Svetlana Cicmil has co-edited a a new special issue on ”The politics of projects in technology-intensive work”. Published in well-ranked New Technology, Work and Employment journal, the special issue contains four original articles on various aspects of project work. Read more in the editors’ introduction and in the journal table of contents!

Johann Packendorff has been appointed full professor of Industrial Economics and Management at KTH. He will hold the new position from the onset of March, 2016. Read more at the KTH website! 

In a recently published article in well-ranked Entrepreneurship and Regional Development journal, Karin Berglund, Johan Gaddefors and Monica Lindgren discuss entrepreneurship in a depleted community in transition. The purpose is to develop knowledge about how discourses are used in the positioning of identity in regional development. The concept positioning illustrates how identities are provoked, challenged, negotiated and moved into identity positions that break away from the idea of imitating successful and wealthy regions; instead, locality, place and history emerge as important resources from where local actors obtain agency and recognize new opportunities. Results show how rural change was conditioned by discourses and how entrepreneurship challenged and reframed dominating structures through interaction between entrepreneurship and community. Four discourses, expressed as dichotomies available to people in this depleted community, illustrate the interactive process of positioning: change vs. traditions, rational vs. irrational, spectacular vs. mundane and individual vs. collective. The results support research emphasizing perspectives that acknowledge interaction between entrepreneurship and context as well as discursive aspects of regional development. Read more!

The 8th Making Projects Critical workshop was arranged at Newcastle University Business School, UK, 21-22 January. Organized by Neil Alderman, Chris Ivory, Svetlana Cicmil, Damian Hodgson, Monica Lindgren and Johann Packendorff, it gathered scholars from three continents for presentations and discussions on cutting-edge critical project studies. Read more

In a new article in International Journal of Public Leadership, Lucia Crevani, Marianne Ekman, Monica Lindgren and Johann Packendorff explore the concept of leadership culture and analyse how leadership cultures are produced in higher education reforms, in a hybridised discursive context of traditional academic values and emerging managerialism and leaderism. Building on a perspective on leadership as a cultural phenomenon emerging in processes in which societal, sectorial and professional discursive resources are invoked, the study adds to earlier studies on how notions of leadership are involved in the transformation of higher education organisations. To this end, the method combines a traditional qualitative study of change initiatives over a long period of time with participative observation. Focusing on two vignettes, the analysis centres on how several discursive resources are drawn upon in daily interaction. The paper emphasises how hybrid cultures develop through confirmation, re-formulation and rejection of discursive influences. Read more

Johann Packendorff and Erika Lokatt has been interviewed in Sunt Arbetsliv, a national practitioner journal focusing on work life and health issues. Read more (in Swedish)

Anders Broström, Marianne Ekman Rising, Monica Lindgren, Johann Packendorff and Lars Geschwind has received a grant from The Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences (Riksbankens Jubileumsfond) on 12,1 MSEK for the research programme ”Performance-based governance in Academia: Professional practices and identities in transformation”. In the programme, fundamental mechanisms determining how core professional practices in academia are studied, and how they are affected by the introduction of organisational level systems for performance-based allocation of funding. With academic staff employed at research-intensive Swedish higher education institutions in focus, we study the identity construction of academics in relation to ”economistic” forms of organizational governance, and how these interdependent processes affect the behaviour of individuals. The program will run 2016-2020 and is led by Dr Anders Broström at the Dept of Industrial Economics and Management, KTH. Read more!

Monica Lindgren has been included in the editorial board of the WoS-ranked Scandinavian Journal of Management, published by Elsevier. Monica was Associate Editor of the journal 2012-2015.