The aspect of relationships has been underlined to be of substantial significant within B2B contexts, particularly within consultancy, all alongside the importance of trust within the clientsupplier interaction. An element that has been claimed to derive directly from the client-supplier experience and voiced to be of key in order to reach success. It has been stated that the behaviour of consultants can be generalized to the corporate brand, individual demeanours and actions declared to be of essential influence of affecting customer perception of the company and its brand. It has been remarked that, “employees are the public face of the organization, and their performance affects customers' interpretation of the brand”. Public procurement has been described as a process for the purchase of goods and services made by the public sector, procurements regulated by LOU, i.e. special laws and regulations. All member states of the European Union are subjective to procurement directives, injunctions regulating each procurement. In service marketing, traditionally, clients have relied on long-term relationships or been guided by recommendations from external parties when selecting supplier. Public procurement regulations have enclosed such use of informal selection bases, whereas instead requirements for supplier are obliged to be based on objective criteria and non-personal sources. The restriction of non personal-relationships between client and supplier derived the problem question of potential consequences the regulation might bear. Thereupon, the purpose of this study was to examine the corporate brand image of a knowledge- intensive service firm operating within the public sector. The empirical findings for this study were collected through semi-structured interviews with 5 Swedish customers of Ecenea Väst, a consultancy firm operating within the public sector. The role of the theory were of abductive view, were theory was developed, refined and adjusted throughout the process. The findings of the interviews where analysed using a content analysis approach. The empirical investigation of this study confirms previous studies arguing for the importance of relationship and trust within service marketing, particularly consultancy. It also concluded that it is the behavior of the consultants that influence the client's perception of the company’s image and brand.

Lean has during the past two decades grown to become a worldwide management concept. The purpose of lean is mainly to create value for customers and reduce the downtime for organizations. It origins from the automotive industry and was firstly introduced by Toyota. The concept eventually caught on and spread to other industries, service businesses and most recently to the public sector. A few years ago municipalities in Sweden introduced lean in their organizations and used it as a solution to many of their operational challenges. However, research suggests that the knowledge within the field of lean in the context of municipalities is limited. The study was designed as a single case study of the municipality Södertälje which was one of the first municipalities to adopt the concept of lean. Data was collected through semi-structured interviews with key individuals in Södertälje municipality who had been a part of the introduction of lean or in some way influenced the process. In addition, interviews were held with middle managers who were currently working with lean. Furthermore, text documents such as decisions, objectives and budget documents provided by Södertälje municipality were also analyzed. To get a better understanding of how lean can be used in the context of municipalities the aim of this study was to examine how Södertälje municipality introduced lean, how it was applied and which forms the concept has taken. More specific the study has used institutional and translational theory to investigate how lean has been transferred and translated from the private- to the public context. The empirical data was analyzed through two phases. The first phase was decontextualization which was used to understand how lean was differentiated from the private context by the municipality. The second phase was contextualization which has been used to see how Södertälje municipality introduced lean in their organization and how they interpreted the concept. The findings suggest that the municipality had a problem-oriented approach where lean was considered a possible solution. To transfer lean, Södertälje municipality first recruited Robert Kusén, an executive from Scania, to “carry out” his knowledge and experience from working with lean. Second, the management of the municipality visited Scania and the social district in Copenhagen to “bring in” knowledge about the lean concept. Therefore, the municipality partly used organizational arenas in the same sector and partly organizational arenas in a different and more distant sector than the municipality. The study conclude that the contexts included in the transfer of a concept affects the translation. To translate the concept of lean, Södertälje municipality applied “the translation hierarchical chain” with few exceptions. Further, the municipality developed their lean philosophy and what they thought about lean by what they call “Växthuset”. By doing this and by interlocking lean with their existing vision and values, enrollment rules were used to establish lean in the local context. Using pilot projects also helped creating local references to the idea. Furthermore the municipality used specific rules for translating and reshaping lean. The mainly emphasized instrument was imitation, but there have also been indicators of addition and subtraction. This was expressed through the political context which narrowed the use of long-sightedness and instead resulted in a focus on democratic aspects. The municipality’s use of lean was from the beginning intended to include the entire organization but had instead mainly been practiced by the social welfare department. The poor adaption was largely caused by a lack of interest from the personnel and because key stakeholder had left the organization or had been replaced.

This thesis presents new data on the work motivation of Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) constables. It offers data from two surveys: a snap-shot of the attitudes and behaviours of constables with seven years' service; and a survey of new recruits over their first fifteen months of service. It is perhaps the most comprehensive study undertaken of motivation to work hard and remain in a UK police force and includes a critical review of the motivation literature with specific reference to its relevance to the job of police constable. A provisional model is proposed to explain variance in the dependent variables - motivation to work hard (effort) and motivation to remain in the organisation (intention to stay/leave). New construct variables operationalise effort, reality shock, career frustration, organisational citizenship behaviour, socialisation and performance. Pre-existing scales are used for organisational commitment, management support, intention to leave, self efficacy, higher order need strength, organisational identification, intrinsic motivation and job satisfaction. The model met with a reasonable level of success: up to 46 per cent of the variance in intention to leave and up to 26 per cent of the variance in effort were explained. The effect of the model in explaining the outcomes of two organisational changes on the work motivation of experienced constables is also examined. Following the data analysis, a revised model is proposed. Motivation theories were shown to have validity and contribute to our understanding of work motivation. Variables explaining the work motivation of MPS constables were found to be similar to those in empirical research on other workers. However, probationary constables as a group were shown to have very unrealistic career expectations. Self-reported levels of effort decreased and levels of intention to leave increased over the socialisation period.

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During the first decade of the twenty-first century, the Swedish civil service underwent some extensive changes, such as the relocations of public sector jobs, initiated by the government in 2005. This thesis follows an ethnological tradition of focusing on employees’ perspectives as a way of exploring power relations and changes in society. In this study, I draw attention to the fears, joys, anxieties, hopes, and dreams of employees in the Swedish civil service at a time when their workplace was being relocated from one city to another. The study especially focuses on the fact that a decision to relocate initiates processes that change employee’s images of their work life and future. They become forced to rethink life and work and re-identify with professional positions. Such processes are described in this thesis as processes of professional identification. The aim of the study is to analyze professional identification among employees during the relocation of a government agency. It is based on four articles that highlight different aspects of the relocation and the conditions under which research was conducted. The overarching question that runs through the thesis is: what did processes of professional identification mean in relocation practice? I argue that such processes should be taken into account as pivotal to civil service practices such as relocation work. Such knowledge could also be used as a tool for thinking about work life change in a wider sense. Because relocations entail moving people’s entire lives, points of interest are formulated that tell stories of how social norms and rules are formed, maintained, and contested. The results in this thesis could also serve as a departure for discussing the localization of knowledge-intensive institutions. The case study builds on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2005 and 2009 at a government agency that moved from the capital of Sweden to a smaller town in the north of Sweden. The ethnographic source material was analyzed using discourse analysis. The analysis centres on a discussion of how processes of professional identification became conditioned by social structures in terms of gender, age, and social class in relocation work. I furthermore discuss the ways in which images of geographies and emotions could be regarded as social categories that conditioned professional identities and had implications for how the move of the agency was organized and conducted, for example for the transferring of competency, travelling on business, and setting up new work practices.  The establishment of professional identity positions functioned to stabilize the social environment during the move - a time when many things at work seemed to be in turmoil. At the same time the positions worked to privilege some ways of professional identification and exclude others. Attention should be drawn to the ways in which agency staff became enmeshed in power structures, norms, ideals, images, and plans for the future that limited their actions in various ways. It is therefore important that the features of professional identification in this relocation process should be further discussed, not primarily as individual concerns of particular individuals, or even a particular agency or location, but as a vital issue of the greatest concern to the welfare state. / Decentralization of government agencies, work force mobility and rural development

Literature on entrepreneurship has been criticised on several grounds including a strong bias to examine masculine traits, being deeply rooted in the private sector, limited to economics, conceptualised as a specialist skill pertinent only to non-public entities, overly positivist, single causal and with a tendency to downplay the relevance of both the social and human sciences. The relatively few studies of female entrepreneurs in the public sector have been criticised on the grounds of privileging structure over agency and for ignoring new research perspectives. The literature calls for the generation of alternative viewpoints on entrepreneurship and specifically towards those that pay greater attention to the level of the individual within an institutional setting and that embraces like interaction with multiple sociological variables. To generate research outside these biases, a dynamic relational model consisting of four interactive variables (structure, agency, networks and context) was developed and then used to guide a case study on women entrepreneurs within a male dominated institution - the United Kingdom’s (UK) Armed Forces. A critical realist research methodology was used. Interviews were conducted with a stratified sample of 52 female, uniformed officers drawn from all three services (Navy, Army, Airforce). The findings revealed how women use structure, agency, networks and context to create the necessary leverage to bring about entrepreneurial institutional change based on individual goal realisation strategies. The originality of this research is threefold. Firstly, it examines female entrepreneurs in a male dominated public sector institution. Secondly, it uses a critical realist research methodology. Finally, the research develops a dynamic relational model that has wider utility. The overall net result of this research approach is to provide a richer understanding of the complex, multi-causal nature of public sector entrepreneurship that has the potential for far broader application.

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The municipality and county administrations of Uppsala are planning a project for coordination of transports to their institutions and services across Uppsala County, which are today done separately. This report aims to analyze what the profits of such coordination might be, in terms of environmental care, economic and social aspects, given the resources available today. This is done by creating optimization models for both separate and coordinated transports, based on previously completed order tables, and comparing the results. The final results show at best a 13% improvement in driving distance and a 7% improvement in driver work time, which transfers into 172 000 SEK savings yearly and significant reductions in CO2-emissions while easing workload during high intensity days. Changes in the transport fleet might increase this to up to 272 000 SEK while possibly further reducing emissions but without creating significant increase in workload for drivers.