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Monica Lindgren has been appointed a member of the Employment Committee of KTH Royal Institute of Technology. The Committee is led by the Dean of Faculty and consists of nine representatives, one from each of the nine KTH schools. The three main tasks of the Employment Committee are: (1) promotion matters; including both preparation and decisions on these; (2) teacher recruitment matters; including both preparation and decisions, and (3) administering KTH´s quality development effort regarding teacher recruitment, as well as follow-up of this. Monica is the representative of the School of Industrial Engineering and Management (ITM), and hold her position from the onset of September 2015.

The 8th Making Projects Critical Workshop will be hosted by Newcastle University January 21-22, 2016. Organised by Neil Alderman, Chris Ivory, Damian Hodgson, Svetlana Cicmil, Monica Lindgren and Johann Packendorff, the workshop will inquire into ways in which a richer, creative dialogue between critical perspectives and the conventional rationalistic view of project management can be developed. In order that the various critiques of the conventional project management body of knowledge can be made meaningful and useful to those such as project managers who work closely with, and struggle with the demands of, project-based organisation and who are trying to find fairer, more acceptable and participative/democratic ways of coping with their roles, we invite authors to consider the implications of their analyses for practice and practicing project managers. What are the reactions of practitioners to the ‘making projects critical’ agenda?

Download the Call for Papers here!

The article ”Leadership, not leaders: On the study of leadership as practices and interactions”, published by Lucia Crevani, Monica Lindgren and Johann Packendorff, is now the most cited article in the Web-of-Science-ranked Scandinavian Journal of Management, according to the journal’s homepage. Published in 2010, the article suggests a perspective within leadership research that has an analytical focus on leadership as it is practiced in daily interaction, rather than on individual leaders.

Johann Packendorff has been appointed Director of Research at the Dept of Industrial Economics and Management. His main task is to be Programme Director for the KTH PhD Program in Industrial Economics and Management. The programme offers doctoral training within two subjects at the third educational cycle (Industrial Engineering & Management, and Economics) and has about 90 enrolled PhD candidates. He holds the position from the onset of December, 2014. Read more about the program.

Monica Lindgren has been appointed Head of the Unit for Organisation and Management at the Department of Industrial Economics and Management, KTH Royal Institute of Technology. The Unit is responsible for teaching and research related to organisation & organizational change, leadership, gender & diversity, project management and HRM. Read more at the unit homepage. An interview with Monica on the ambitions with the new position can be found here. She hold the position from the onset of September 2014.

Erika Lokatt, Monica Lindgren, Johann Packendorff and Charlotte Holgersson participated in the standing work group on Reconceptualizing Contemporary Public Services Organizations at the 30th EGOS Colloquium at ERASMUS University, Rotterdam, Netherlands. We presented a paper titled ”Physicians, nurses and leadership work: A study of managerialism and leaderism in the reconstruction of professionalism in Swedish health care”, which is based on on-going research in Swedish health care organizations.

In new paper published in Web-of-Science ranked Project Management Journal, Johann Packendorff, Lucia Crevani and Monica Lindgren inquire into what a process ontology as applied to leadership studies may imply, theoretically and methodologically. Drawing on the current research in general leadership, the paper propose that a process ontology is relevant and rewarding for project leadership studies. We argue that project leadership can be studied as the ongoing social production of direction through the construction of actors’ space of action, involving continuous construction and reconstruction of (1) past project activities and events; (2) positions and areas of responsibility; (3) discarded, ongoing, and future issues; and (4) intensity, rhythm, and pace. Through an ethnographic case study of an organizational change project, we show how space of action and hence the project direction are in constant flux and becoming. Read more on the article homepage!.

The emotions associated with project-based work has been given only scant attention in scholarly literature. In a new article published in the international top-ranked journal Human Relations, Monica Lindgren, Johann Packendorff and Viviane Sergi explores the emotional processes that take place as the project management discourse is invoked in daily work in theaters and opera houses. More about the article can be found at the journal’s homepage.

We hereby issue a Call for papers for an upcoming special issue in New Technology, Work and Employment (NTWE) on project work in technology-intensive settings. Monica Lindgren and Johann Packendorff are guest editors together with Svetlana Cicmil (Univ of the West of England) and Damian Hodgson (Manchester Business School). Deadline for first submissions is Nov 28th, 2014, and the publication is scheduled for the middle of 2016.

NTWE is published by Wiley since 1986 and ranked with impact factor in Web of Science. It is a grade-3 journal in the 2010 ABS journal guide. The full call for papers can be downloaded here.

Johann Packendorff was keynote speaker at Leadership Day 2014, an annual event for the highest managers in the Stockholm Municipality. The title of the speech was ”From co-workership to co-leadership”, and pointed at cultural values and practical measures needed to involve employees in the leadership of organisations. The event was held in the Globe Arena Annex in Stockholm. #ledarskapsdagen