The rapid growth of the financial system and its dominance over the non-financial economy has given rise to ample re-regulation on a national and supernational level, across the globe. This "financialisation" is a process in which the economy is increasingly shaped by the practical logics and dynamics of financial markets. In the project, knowledge of policy relevance is sought through empirical study of the relationship between the non-financial and the financial sectors of the economy.

Read more about this project here.

Digitalization is currently reshaping industries and organizations and work as we know it. So far, this development has been most salient in industries like retail, entertainment, and finance. Today, however, also knowledge-intensive professional service firms offering expert advice are being affected by digitalization and its potential threat of disruption. As more and more of expert tasks that were previously reserved for human experts can be automated or performed by robots or artificial intelligence, these firms need to rethink both their knowledge-base and the role for their human experts. The project explores how incumbent professional service firms as well as tech-based professional service firms strategize to adopt digitalization and avoid disruption. Thus, it examines incumbents within auditing, consulting, and law, and tech-firms within fin-tech, reg-tech, legal-tech, etc.

Read more about this project here.

In her dissertation project, PhD Student Cecilia Fredriksson is studying harmonisation efforts (i.e. homogenisation) and the re-organisation of independent auditing in a European perspective. This is studied in the context of European accreditation auditing, where one homogenisation effort took place in 2008 with the form of a new legal framework.

Read more about this project here.

While most organizations may easily be divided into generic categories, such as company, state or civic organization, others may not. They simultaneously face and incorporate institutional logics from different spheres of society, with the effect of organizational hybridity. This project studies both hybrid organizations per se, as well as the encounter of organizations from different societal spheres. In both cases, the perceived challenges and the attempts to manage them are focused.

Read more about this project here.

While social science has a long tradition of making a sharp distinction between organizations and markets, this project promotes another perspective. Markets and organizations share at least one generic characteristic: they are both organized. The project – also a research theme at SCORE (Stockholm Centre for Organizational Research) – studies the organization of markets, with theoretical aims of both markets and organization.

Read more about this project here.

Academic knowledge and expertise play important roles in policymaking today and are often used as political tools to lend academic legitimacy to political and/or ideological claims. While this is not new, recent decades have witnessed a significant increase in the number of organisations that seek to influence policy by producing research and using it as leverage in the public debate. This project focuses Swedish think tanks whose mission includes both research and policymaking and thus harbours the conflicting institutional logics of knowledge production and ideology production.

Read more about this project here.

There is a widespread notion that organizations cannot be trusted. Organizations that audit other organizations claim to have a solution: through audits we may expect transparency of organizations that we assume we cannot fully trust. Auditors’ image as independent parties acting without outside influence, is however threatened by the fact that the auditor has a business relationship with the auditee. This project examines how auditing organizations work to convince relevant stakeholders about their independence.

Read more about this project here.