The dissertation, titled Making Work One’s Own: Work Orientations and Job Crafting in Nursing, is grounded in ongoing challenges with nurse retention in Sweden. Even within broadly similar and often strained conditions, nurses can experience their work very differently — with some thriving (or finding ways to adapt) while others consider leaving. Erling offers a lens for understanding this variation by examining work orientations and job crafting, focusing on nurses’ own interpretations of their work and how these interpretations are enacted through job crafting. The findings inductively identify three orientations: patient-, integrated team-self-, and self-oriented. Each orientation foregrounds what is taken as meaningful and what feels at stake, and tends to be expressed in distinct crafting patterns.

Through qualitative work in Swedish hospitals, Erling provides an empirically grounded account of work orientations in nursing. Furthermore, she suggests that efforts to support nurse satisfaction and retention can be strengthened by complementing structural improvements with greater attention to the diverse meanings nurses hold, and by creating conditions in which those meanings can be sustained.

At the dissertation, several ideas on expanding and deepening the study were explored together with the opponent, Professor Lotta Dellve (Gothenburg University), and the assessment committee consisting of Professor Susanne Ollila (Chalmers), Professor Roberto Verganti and Associate Professor Constanze Eib (both SSE). 

Alexandra Erling is now exploring the next steps and is open to postdoctoral and research opportunities.