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?

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.

This paper describes headmasters’ perceptions of digital school administration in terms of whether it is productive, destructive or irrelevant for the school. Their accounts are then analysed by relating them to theoretical categories, illustrating the differences between practitioners’ view and a theoretically founded understanding of what that is productive, destructive or irrelevant. Intuitively, we may expect that headmasters’ ideas of how digital school administration affect school work corresponds to the schools’ capacity to interact with students. The presented idea is that such a correspondence exists, although the links are not as straightforward as expected, rather counter-intuitive, which is also the main point for practitioners.

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?

Georgian debt enforcement has transformed from a centralized activity conducted within the walls of the Ministry of justice to a quasi-market over ten years time (2008-2018). How has this transformation played out and what are the features of such a change process? This article aims to describe and analyze the development of Georgian debt enforcement from 2008 until todays system. Debt enforcement is a policy area mainly inhabited by economists and law scholars, why a more interpretive reform perspective, as presented in this article, enables an illuminating perspective on the process. We ask: How has the reform process in Georgian debt enforcement developed since the National Bureau of Enforcement (NBE) became an independent agency? We approach this question through a qualitative case study. Drawing on documents and interview material from a strategic selection, we are able to map the process and suggest a stepwise development. The process has brought shifting roles for NBE and various new situations in debt enforcement.

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.