Diss. (sammanfattning) Linköping : Univ., 2003. / Härtill 4 uppsatser.

Based on Coopey's critical review of the terms 'Utopian sunshine' and 'Foucauldian gloom' with regard to the earning organization (Coopey, 1998), this article explores the learning organization from two opposing perspectives. While researchers agree that the learning organization concept is an important one for organization science, two seemingly irreconcilable research communities are arguing about whether the learning organization is a dream or a nightmare for its members, particularly with regard to three critical dimensions: control, ideology and potentially painful employee experiences. The purpose of this article is to review and critically examine both the optimistic view of the learning organization as positive ideal and the more critical view of the learning organization as negative ideology. Based on this examination, the article aims to synthesize a new middle-ground perspective on the learning organization, referred to as the 'fluorescent light' view, incorporating elements from both optimistic and critical views in hopes of generating a dialog between them that will provide new research questions on control, ideology and potential pain in learning organizations.

<p>As projects play a key role in implementing strategy, organizations of all kinds implement projects. Further, as the importance of the projects grow, management of the same also becomes crucial in terms of monitoring and controlling. However, as non-project based organizations lack distinctive project management approach, their project are controlled and monitored by the inherent management control system. While, several studies have highlighted that different organization control mechanisms are exercised at varying degree, there is a dearth of study done in project context. However, one recent study done by Nieminen and Lehtonen (2008) in a program context focusing only in organizational change revealed three organizational control mechanisms and 23 control tools being exercised as varying degree in four case programs. As several studies in the project management context highlight the need to tailor the approach according to the project types, this study focuses on understanding how the control mechanisms vary across different types of projects executed by non-project based organizations employing the project classification developed by Turner and Cochrane (1993).</p><p>A qualitative study employing semi-structured interview was conducted with eight project managers of respective projects implemented by seven companies from China and Nepal. Based on the feedback given by the concerned project managers, the study revealed distinct organizational control mechanisms dominated distinct project types in rolling out a successful project, even though there was presence of all types of organizational control mechanisms in the sampled projects. Further, the application of the control tools within the control mechanism varied even across projects of similar type.</p>

As projects play a key role in implementing strategy, organizations of all kinds implement projects. Further, as the importance of the projects grow, management of the same also becomes crucial in terms of monitoring and controlling. However, as non-project based organizations lack distinctive project management approach, their project are controlled and monitored by the inherent management control system. While, several studies have highlighted that different organization control mechanisms are exercised at varying degree, there is a dearth of study done in project context. However, one recent study done by Nieminen and Lehtonen (2008) in a program context focusing only in organizational change revealed three organizational control mechanisms and 23 control tools being exercised as varying degree in four case programs. As several studies in the project management context highlight the need to tailor the approach according to the project types, this study focuses on understanding how the control mechanisms vary across different types of projects executed by non-project based organizations employing the project classification developed by Turner and Cochrane (1993). A qualitative study employing semi-structured interview was conducted with eight project managers of respective projects implemented by seven companies from China and Nepal. Based on the feedback given by the concerned project managers, the study revealed distinct organizational control mechanisms dominated distinct project types in rolling out a successful project, even though there was presence of all types of organizational control mechanisms in the sampled projects. Further, the application of the control tools within the control mechanism varied even across projects of similar type.

Pris en étau entre une hausse continue de leurs dépenses et une stagnation de leurs ressources financières, les établissements publics de santé sont depuis longtemps confrontés à un problème de gestion de la rareté. Pour faire face à ce problème, beaucoup d'entre eux ont mis en œuvre un contrôle de gestion, avec les difficultés que représente une telle démarche dans une organisation traditionnellement qualifiée de « professionnelle ». Dès l'origine principalement orienté vers la maîtrise des dépenses, le contrôle de gestion hospitalier est en train de subir une profonde remise en question avec l'arrivée de la tarification à l'activité et de la mise en place de pôles d'activité médicale. Désormais, la fonction contrôle de gestion ne doit plus se cantonner à ce rôle qui lui était traditionnellement reconnu mais doit contribuer activement à l'augmentation des recettes de l'hôpital. Cette dynamique nouvelle - qui accorde une place beaucoup plus marquée aux concepts fondamentaux du contrôle de gestion - est aussi novatrice en raison de l'importance qu'elle confère aux producteurs de l'activité médicale. La mutation de la fonction contrôle de gestion dans le domaine hospitalier est un phénomène majeur pour les praticiens mais aussi un sujet particulièrement riche sur le plan théorique. Elle remet en cause les représentations traditionnellement admises du contrôle de gestion dans l'organisation professionnelle qu'est l'hôpital et donne l'occasion aux chercheurs d'utiliser de nouvelles grilles de lecture théorique. / Caught between a continuous rise in spending and a stagnation of their financial resources, public hospitals have long been faced with a problem of managing scarcity. To address this problem, many of them have implemented management control, with the difficulties of such an approach in an organization traditionally described as "professional." From the beginning mainly oriented toward expenditure control, management control in hospitals is undergoing a deep challenge with the advent of prospective payment system and the implementation of clinical directorates. Now the management control function should no longer be confined to this role which was traditionally recognized, but must actively contribute to the enhancement of the hospital's revenue. This new dynamics - which gives greater importance to fundamental concepts of management control - is innovative because of the importance it gives to producers of medical activity. The mutation of the management control function in the hospital sector is a major phenomenon for practitioners but is also particularly from a theoretical point of view. It challenges the traditionally accepted representations of management control in the hospital organization and gives an opportunity for researchers to use new theoretical frames.

A sector affected by a constant rate of organizational growth is the healthcare sector. Consequently, the increased demand for healthcare services underline the importance to have a well-functioning organizational control that pushes towards continuous improvements to enhance the quality of care. This requires high standards regarding the formulation of objectives that are shared by the workforce and efficiently integrated into the organizations day-to-day operations, with the help of technological solutions.The purpose of this study was to investigate how the organizational control in the healthcare sector could be improved, in order to enhance the work towards the achievement of the objectives among the employees. To achieve the purpose, the research was conducted as a case study at the infectious disease department at Danderyds University Hospital, where the findings were derived from both qualitative and quantitative methods. To address the department’s objective areas, interviews with representatives from the management were conducted. A questionnaire was then distributed to gain insight in how the department’s operational activities are anchored, in relation to the employees’ respective profession.The findings showed a considerable gap between the employees’ awareness and their understanding of the objective areas, resulting in a misalignment of how each profession contributes towards the achievement of the objectives in their day-to-day operations. By analyzing the findings in relation to the selected theory of organizational control and change management, four improvement measures were identified: (1) visibility of the effects and outcomes of goal fulfilment, (2) establishment of incentives in relation to goal fulfilment, (3) formulation of well-defined internal key performance indicators related to each objective and (4) providing continuous feedback regarding the progress of each objective area. These areas need to be integrated into the department’s current information technology system in order to further streamline their operational work in reaching objectives. With the help of a strong coalition to initiate the change, the improvement areas can be found to affect the employees’ understanding and attitude toward the fulfilment of the objectives in the healthcare sector.

De nombreux travaux marketing décryptent l’effet des marques sur le consommateur, mais rares sont ceux qui étudient leur rôle à l’interne des organisations. Cette recherche-insider s’appuie de façon originale sur les travaux en théorie des organisations, et précisément sur ceux du courant des « Brands at Work » qui aborde la marque comme une nouvelle forme de contrôle au sein des organisations, pouvant affecter l’identité des employés. Cette recherche qualitative (59 entretiens longs) étudie empiriquement le rôle de la marque dans les processus de régulation identitaire (RI) des managers, à la fois producteurs et récepteurs de son discours, dans le cas spécifique de l’industrie du luxe. Nos résultats montrent l’existence d’un langage-type managérial inspiré du discours marketing, visant à masquer des pratiques de management et de production, le luxe pouvant être théorisé comme une « storytelling industry ». Nous caractérisons comment le management utilise la marque comme outil de RI ; la marque pouvant soutenir les pratiques de RI - cas que nous labellisons « la marque fait management » - ou cristalliser les tensions, brouiller les pratiques; « défaire management ». / While brands are traditional topics for the marketing research, they do not retain much attention from organization studies. This thesis originally draws upon the recent « Brand at Work » trend that considers brands as an internal organizational resource affecting identity, a tool for organizational control. Drawing on an insider-research in the luxury industry and on rich empirical material (59 interviews), we show the existence of an archetypal managerial discourse, deeply infused by the marketing discourse, brand being both used as a management tool, and a way to disguise the reality of practices; turning the luxury into a “storytelling industry”. Looking at managers, both producers and receivers of the brand message, we reveal the role of the brand in their identity regulation (IR) processes. We found that the brand can either support their IR practices, managers willingly buying into the brand, or crystallize tensions, corrode IR and act as a dis-connecting mechanism between identity (re)formation and regulation processes. We show the centrality of brand in managers’ identity regulation processes.

Organizational control is a fundamental process which ensures organizations achieve their goals. The importance and difficulty increase when the organization is a law enforcement agency. Control within an organization can be implemented in several different ways. Regular rotations and transfers of personnel is one of the control mechanisms employed by organizations to direct, motivate and encourage employees to adhere to organizational standards and objectives. The Turkish National Police (TNP) rotates and transfers police officers geographically while providing security services throughout the country. Geographic personnel rotation (GPR) is a human resource management policy of the TNP which bans home city deployment and obligates officers to transfer regularly for various deployment periods and in differing regions. The research examines geographic personnel rotation policy as an organizational control mechanism. To help better understand GPR's impact on control, the study examined data collected from interviews with human resource managers and police chiefs who implement the policy, from participant observation, and from documents and archival records. GPR is a distinct control mechanism the TNP employs to maximize personnel performance and minimize police deviance. More significantly, GPR allows the TNP to reward and punish employees depending on their performance, as well as detect and reduce deviation from organizational norms. GPR also affects the formation of police identity, which may increase or decrease commitment to the organization based on the perceived fairness of the practice. / Ph. D.

Cooperative multi-agent systems (MAS) are finding applications in a wide variety of domains, including sensor networks, robotics, distributed control, collaborative decision support systems, and data mining. A cooperative MAS consists of a group of autonomous agents that interact with one another in order to optimize a global performance measure. A central challenge in cooperative MAS research is to design distributed coordination policies. Designing optimal distributed coordination policies offline is usually not feasible for large-scale complex multi-agent systems, where 10s to 1000s of agents are involved, there is limited communication bandwidth and communication delay between agents, agents have only limited partial views of the whole system, etc. This infeasibility is either due to a prohibitive cost to build an accurate decision model, or a dynamically evolving environment, or the intractable computation complexity. This thesis develops a multi-agent reinforcement learning paradigm to allow agents to effectively learn and adapt coordination policies in complex cooperative domains without explicitly building the complete decision models. With multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), agents explore the environment through trial and error, adapt their behaviors to the dynamics of the uncertain and evolving environment, and improve their performance through experiences. To achieve the scalability of MARL and ensure the global performance, the MARL paradigm developed in this thesis restricts the learning of each agent to using information locally observed or received from local interactions with a limited number of agents (i.e., neighbors) in the system and exploits non-local interaction information to coordinate the learning processes of agents. This thesis develops new MARL algorithms for agents to learn effectively with limited observations in multi-agent settings and introduces a low-overhead supervisory control framework to collect and integrate non-local information into the learning process of agents to coordinate their learning. More specifically, the contributions of already completed aspects of this thesis are as follows: Multi-Agent Learning with Policy Prediction: This thesis introduces the concept of policy prediction and augments the basic gradient-based learning algorithm to achieve two properties: best-response learning and convergence. The convergence property of multi-agent learning with policy prediction is proven for a class of static games under the assumption of full observability. MARL Algorithm with Limited Observability: This thesis develops PGA-APP, a practical multi-agent learning algorithm that extends Q-learning to learn stochastic policies. PGA-APP combines the policy gradient technique with the idea of policy prediction. It allows an agent to learn effectively with limited observability in complex domains in presence of other learning agents. The empirical results demonstrate that PGA-APP outperforms state-of-the-art MARL techniques in both benchmark games. MARL Application in Cloud Computing: This thesis illustrates how MARL can be applied to optimizing online distributed resource allocation in cloud computing. Empirical results show that the MARL approach performs reasonably well, compared to an optimal solution, and better than a centralized myopic allocation approach in some cases. A General Paradigm for Coordinating MARL: This thesis presents a multi-level supervisory control framework to coordinate and guide the agents' learning process. This framework exploits non-local information and introduces a more global view to coordinate the learning process of individual agents without incurring significant overhead and exploding their policy space. Empirical results demonstrate that this coordination significantly improves the speed, quality and likelihood of MARL convergence in large-scale, complex cooperative multi-agent systems. An Agent Interaction Model: This thesis proposes a new general agent interaction model. This interaction model formalizes a type of interactions among agents, called {\em joint-even-driven} interactions, and define a measure for capturing the strength of such interactions. Formal analysis reveals the relationship between interactions between agents and the performance of individual agents and the whole system. Self-Organization for Nearly-Decomposable Hierarchy: This thesis develops a distributed self-organization approach, based on the agent interaction model, that dynamically form a nearly decomposable hierarchy for large-scale multi-agent systems. This self-organization approach is integrated into supervisory control framework to automatically evolving supervisory organizations to better coordinating MARL during the learning process. Empirically results show that dynamically evolving supervisory organizations can perform better than static ones. Automating Coordination for Multi-Agent Learning: We tailor our supervision framework for coordinating MARL in ND-POMDPs. By exploiting structured interaction in ND-POMDPs, this tailored approach distributes the learning of the global joint policy among supervisors and employs DCOP techniques to automatically coordinate distributed learning to ensure the global learning performance. We prove that this approach can learn a globally optimal policy for ND-POMDPs with a property called groupwise observability.

Bakgrund och problem: Mindre företag är en viktig del av Sveriges ekonomi, därmed blir frågan om mindre företags överlevnad och tillväxtproblem relevant att se till. Studien undersöker därmed hur och varför företagsstyrning utvecklas i små företag, och hur förändrad företagsstyrning förebygger ytterligare tillväxt. Syfte: Rapportens övergripande syfte är att visa på vilket sätt ett företags ekonomistyrning, organisationsstyrning och strategistyrning förändras under tillväxtprocessen, samt redogöra för de bakomliggande orsakerna till varför styrningen förändras. Studien undersöker även vilken påverkan dessa faktorer har haft på företagets tillväxt. Metod: Baserat på studiens frågeställning och syfte ansågs fallstudien vara det mest lämpade metodvalet. Därmed valdes enfallsstudien ut. Det empiriska materialet samlades in genom semistrukturerade intervjuer, med kompletterande information från ytterligare dokument och tidningsartiklar. Slutsats: Tillverkningsföretaget AD-Trä har genomgått en framgångsrik tillväxtprocess sedan början av 1990-talet. Denna studie söker att finna hur strategistyrningen, ekonomistyrningen samt organisationstyrningen har förändrats under tillväxtprocessen, samt lokalisera de bakomliggande orsakerna till varför styrningen har förändrats. / Background and problem: Small business enterprises is a substantial part of the Swedish economy, therefore is it relevant to research what makes smaller enterprises survive on the market how smaller enterprises must adapt during economic growth. This study examines how and why control systems is developed, and used, in small business enterprises and how they change during economic growth. Purpose: The overall purpose of the study is to show how a company’s management control system, organization and strategy change during economic growth, and why it changes. The study also examines the impact that these factors have on the company’s growth. Method: Based on the framing of question and the purpose of the study a case study was considered the best option, where one company was specifically selected. The empirical material was gathered through semi-structured interviews, which was supplemented with secondary documents and articles. Conclusion: The manufacturing company AD-Trä has gone through a successful period of economic growth since the beginning of the 1990s. This study examines how strategic, economic and organizational management control has changed during this growth, and also locate the reasons behind why the control systems has changed. <img src="file:///page8image14280" />