Högskolan i Skövde

This paper explores how family influences the entrepreneurial orientation (EO) process in immigrant family business. To fulfill the purpose, we employ inductive multiple case studies with in-depth interviews.  We rely on seven cases of immigrant entrepreneurs of Chinese, Icelandic, Turkish, Cameroonian, Mexican and Lebanese who established firms in Sweden. Our results suggest that EO development trajectories vary in regard to first and second immigrant entrepreneurs, low and high-tech sectors and host and home countries. Thus, family dynamics facilitates the development of entrepreneurial orientation over time through transforming, translating and transferring across generations and contexts. Our study indicates that, through family dynamics, EO is developed as a (1) transferring process of the founders’ proactiveness between the family in the home and host country; (2) translating process of risk-taking between the family companies in the home country to immigrant family company in the host country and (3) transforming process of innovativeness between the home and the host country.

This article reports on the involvement of nurses and physicians in improvement work, with a special focus on the drivers. The purpose was to describe how the nurse and physician groups understand involvement drivers for improvement work and to explain the differences in how they understand involvement. The study was conducted at 2 Swedish hospitals, and a total of 20 nurses and 10 physicians were interviewed. The theoretical framework, developed by an interpretative approach, identifies and describes a number of involvement drivers. On clustering the drivers into larger involvement factors, the study shows clear differences and profiles in terms of the 2 groups' perception and understanding of the involvement—drivers. Each group's profile was then analyzed on the basis of concept of professional culture.

Purpose – Clinical governance and leadership concepts can lead to more or less successfulimplementations of new clinical practice. The purpose of this paper is to examine how Fiery Spirits, asinstitutional entrepreneurs can, working in a team, implement sustained change in hospital clinicalpractice.Design/methodology/approach – This paper describes two case studies, conducted at two Swedishhospitals over a period of two years, in which changes in clinical practice were implemented. In bothcases, key-actors, termed Fiery Spirits, played critical roles in these changes. The authors use aqualitative approach and take an intra-organizational perspective with semi-structured in-depthinterviews and document analysis.Findings – The new clinical practices were successfully implemented with a considerable influenceof the Fiery Spirits who played a pivotal role in the change efforts. The Fiery Spirits persuasively,based on their structural and normative legitimacy and the adoption of learning processes, advocated,and supported change.Practical implications – Fiery Spirits, given flexibility and opportunity, can be powerful forcesfor change outside the trajectory of management-inspired and management-directed change.Team members, when inspired and encouraged by Fiery Spirits, are less resistant to change and morewilling to test new clinical practices.Originality/value – The paper complements literature on how the Fiery Spirit concept aligns withconcepts of clinical governance and leadership and how change can be achieved. Additionally, thefindings show the effects of legitimacy and learning processes on change in clinical practice.

Previously, improvement work in healthcare has mainly been medically related and driven by medical research, but NPM implies that management-initiated improvement work targeting organizing, productivity, efficiency, work flow etc. has become more and more common. Management-initiated improvement work has a high failure rate, and in general it seems difficult to motivate co-workers to actively participate. In all processes of organizational change, trust in the initiator of a change project is an important prerequisite to enable change take place. In this article, our purpose is to investigate how trust in management influences management-initiated improvement work. In a qualitative study we investigate improvement work at three Swedish hospitals. Our theoretical framework is based on a view of management as being both the people who manage and the system of management. This distinction is important since we can trust people and we can have confidence in a system, but these processes are different. Consequently, it is possible to trust individual managers, but as long as we do not trust management as a system, management-initiated improvement work will face considerable problems.  To analyze trust we use a model that identifies three important antecedents for one person (the trustor) to consider another person (the trustee) as trustworthy: ability, benevolence and integrity. Using social system theory, we extend this model to on the one hand describe trust in specific persons (specific managers), and on the other hand describe confidence in a system (management in general, which the system-specific managers are parts of). The results indicate that there in general is a lack of trust between healthcare personnel and healthcare management.

We were able to find certain managers who were found trustworthy by the personnel, but despite these trust-relations the personnel did still not have confidence in management as a system. To the contrary, these managers were perceived as exceptions, and did not change the perception of management in general. The consequences for management-initiated improvement work were that most personnel at best were ignorant to it, and at worst resisted it openly. However, there were examples when trusted enthusiastic managers succeeded in initiating improvement work, but then the continuation and success was directly connected to this person, and if s/he left, the improvement work stopped. Furthermore, some work groups seemed to very clearly separate “real” improvement work, which they initiated themselves, from “phony” improvement work initiated by management, which only stole time from more important tasks.

I denna artikel fokuserar vi på användandet av industriellt baserade produktionssynsätt (IBP) inom vården i avsikt att arbeta systematiskt med förbättringsarbete. Tidigare forskning har visat att det är svårt att få nya arbetsmetoder att få genomslag i den dagliga praktiken. I denna artikel fokuserar vi på om det går att se indirekta effekter såsom hur förbättringsarbetet organiseras beroende på vilka IBP olika sjukhus väljer att arbeta med. Undersökning är genomförd genom fallstudier på tre sjukhus som har valt att arbeta med tre olika metoder: six sigma, processorientering och mikrosystem.

Studien visar att de olika logikerna bakom de olika metoderna ger fundamentalt olika sätt att organisera förbättringsarbetet vid de tre sjukhusen. Six sigma-sjukhuset valde ett centraliserat förbättringsarbete i hög grad drivet av experter på förbättringsmetoder, processsjukhuset

hade en expertavdelning som var mer av bollplank och utbildare för verksamhetens förbättringsarbete och mikrosystem-sjukhuset valde ett decentraliserat förbättringsarbete där förbättringsarbetet var både lokalt initierat och drivet.

Operations performed by a maintenance service provider (MSP) can include the entire maintenance function or select activities; these need to be well-balanced in terms of utilisation rate of own resources, maintenance cost incurred and the uptime of the customers’ production systems. MSPs face challenges due to the task of planning several non-associated plants and with a frequent lack of reliable information. In this research work, an agent-based decision support system of service-related maintenance has been developed. Research shows that this approach can improve the understanding of the problem domain and also generate a basis for decision-making and structural changes.

European manufacturers have enlarged their manufacturing networks to Asia. Also, the growing demand in Asia as well as in Russia creates challenge for supply chain solutions. This research presents survey research results, targeted on the largest manufacturers and retailers in Finland and Sweden. We estimate how transportation modal split (road, sea, railway and air) will evolve in the future, and how traffic flows will develop between Europe, Russia, and Asian countries. We also present an estimation of the future transportation costs development. In the analysis phase, it is also considered how large volumes could be shifted to favour railway connection.