Den offentliga förvaltningen ägnar sig allt mer åt administration och de högre lärosätena utgör inget undantag. Administration är nödvändigt för alla organisationer, samtidigt som dess omfattning och karaktär också handlar om kostnadseffektivitet, implementering av politik, och den akademiska professionens autonomi. 

När professionella lärare och forskare ägnar sig åt administrativt arbete i för stor utsträckning riskerar möjligheterna för dem att göra sitt jobb att trängas ut, samtidigt som de är amatörer på att administrera. 

Den här rapporten överbryggar diskussioner om resurser och antal anställda när administration och kärnverksamhet diskuteras genom att fokusera på de administrativa arbetsuppgifterna – vem gör vad, och vad tycker de om de administrativa arbetsuppgifterna?

Agencification – the process of creating autonomous agencies from central government units – is intended as a means of achieving political decentralization in the post-communist transitional context. However, the present article argues that, in the case of Georgia’s debt enforcement, agencification has become a means of developing a market (economic decentralization). Georgian debt enforcement has changed from being in-house, within the Ministry of Justice, to being the joint responsibility of a public agency (National Bureau of Enforcement; NBE) and private debt enforcement officers. The article reconstructs the reform process by drawing on documents and interview material from various stakeholders in the debt enforcement system. By describing and analyzing the development from 2008 to 2019, we show how the process has resulted in shifting roles for NBE and in various set-ups of debt enforcement. Theoretically, we stress the interplay between mechanisms for institutional change and argue that, while change may be tangible on a superficial level, this serves stability in a commitment to a pro-market agenda. Through the present analysis, we contribute to the agencification literature by showing how the creation of an agency shapes the resultant administrative set-up.

The present report examines the academic literature on ‘organizational space,’ which addresses the built dimensions of organizations. The review has both descriptive and analytical components. The aim was two-folded, first to describe the theoretical perspectives, methodological approaches, and empirical findings of a core sample of publications. Second, to scrutinize how the built environment is used to manage organizations. The findings of empirical studies are analyzed through a structure-agency lens that is identified as a central debate in the field, and the final discussion emphasizes how future research may benefit from establishing what is managed, how it is managed, and who is managing it when studying the role of the built environment in management and organization.

This dissertation contributes to street-level and public administration research by showing how digitalisations bring temporal structures for street-level bureaucrats, and what consequences that has. It analyses what digitalisation(s) means, and what consequences it has in public sector street-level work. ‘Digitalisation’ is seen as a solution that aims to resolve various problems in the Swedish public administration. This is especially prominent in the Swedish school system, which therefore serves as the empirical context of the study. Despite the hope for digitalisation to solve problems, the term is unspecific in general public policy, the Swedish school context and in public administration research. To address that uncertainty, this dissertation lets teachers define what digitalisation means. From using this approach, four dimensions has emerged: social media use; Learning Management Systems (LMS, tools for administration, documentation and communication); digital teaching practices (one-on-one, learning programs, remote teaching and digital teaching materials) and digitalisation as management tools at organisational and political level. The empirical analysis shows how these different types of digitalisations impact teachers work in various respects. In street-level research on digitalisation, it is acknowledged that digitalisation shape work in various ways. However, few studies deal with digitalisations’ temporal aspects. Time is generally regarded as a fixed and objective phenomenon in the stream of research that address temporality in street-level work. It is remarkable how little attention temporal aspects have received, despite calls within the broader paradigm of public administration research to consider time to a greater extent. A theory of social acceleration is used to analyse digitalisations from a temporal perspective. A benefit from using such a perspective is that the subjective experience of time is acknowledged. The theoretical analysis shows how digitalisations bring both accelerating and decelerating mechanisms that are connected with processes of alienation and coping for street-level bureaucrats. The border between alienation and coping is however quite blurred and together with an intertwined web of temporal structures, this creates a dissociated situation for street-level bureaucrats.

Offentlig förvaltning är ett jämförelsevis nytt akademiskt ämne inom den svenska högskolevärlden. På Södertörns högskola inrättades ämnet formellt 2017.

I den här rapporten diskuteras vad ämnet Offentlig förvaltning egentligen är. En inledande uppsats och en efterföljande seminarieutskrift vrider och vänder på ämnet.

Vilka teman beforskas? Vad innebär det att använda idéer från många andra discipliner? Vilken relevans har ämnet för samhälle och politik? Hur ser framtiden ut? Tillsammans kan svaren på dessa frågor utgöra svaret på rapportens övergripande fråga: Vad är Offentlig förvaltning för ämne?

This article presents accounts regarding Digital School Administration (DSA) from Polish and Swedish principals and analyse them from a conceptual and a contextual perspective. The accounts were categorized in productive, destructive or irrelevant representations of impact on schools, and first analysed using concepts from a Human Service Organization (HSO) perspective; professional capital, entrepreneurial role and decoupling. From this first analysis, a counter-intuitive rather than straightforward pattern between the principals’ native view and the conceptual view is made visible. The second round of analysis was based on the context of the principals, comparing features of the Polish and Swedish school systems, and relating these features to the results of previous analysis. The article concludes that school system marketization and whether principals teach themselves are key factors for if DSA works productive, destructive or irrelevant for schools.

Public servants’ value dispositions is a central theme of inquiry in Public Administration research. Various trends and reforms in the public sector, New Public Management, the audit society, marketisation and mediatization, for example are expected to affect these values. This article analyses whether, and in what ways, mediatization affects public servants’ values. Drawing on survey data from local government officials, we explore the mediatization thesis at the level of individual public servants using the concept of mental mediatization. Regarding their values, we empirically establish a dominance of organizational professionalism rather than democratic professionalism among local government public servants. We then analyze mediatization at the level of individual public servants in local government, in contrast to previous research which has focused on the mediatization of politics and central government. While finding an interesting gap between strong beliefs in, but little self-assessed impact of, mediatization, the article rejects an expected correlation between mental mediatization and public servants’ value dispositions.