Bakgrund: Balansen mellan objektivitet och subjektivitet i rekrytering- och urvalsprocesser har diskuterats inom forskningen i över hundra år. Vid offentliga rekryteringsförfaranden får vissa principer inte förbises, bland annat objektivitetsprincipen som innebär att iaktta saklighet och opartiskhet samt beakta allas likhet inför lagen. Om beslut i rekryteringsprocesser baseras på felaktiga grunder riskerar organisationen att en felrekrytering kan ske, vilket resulterar i kostsamma konsekvenser. HR-funktionen har genomgått betydande förändringar under de senaste tre decennierna. Från att ha fungerat som en mer administrativ och underhållsinriktad funktion beskrivs HR numera som en strategisk affärspartner och kärnverksamhetsfunktion. HR-funktionen besitter vanligen expertkunskap inom kompetensförsörjning och kan bidra med att utveckla strategier angående personalhantering inom organisationen. Empirisk forskning visar emellertid att HR-avdelningar, inom specifikt den offentliga sektorn, inte nödvändigtvis lyckats transformeras till att fylla en sådan strategisk position utan främst fortsätter att fylla administrativa funktioner. Syfte: Studiens syfte är att skapa förståelse kring de möjligheter och utmaningar som följer strävan efter opartiskhet i en rekryteringsprocess inom offentlig sektor. Vidare är syftet med studien att undersöka vilken funktion HR-personal fyller i den strävan efter att nå opartiskhet. Studien fokuserar specifikt på olika kommuners rekryteringsprocesser. Metod: Till studien har en kvalitativ metod använts, där nio semistrukturerade intervjuer genomfördes med nio olika kommuner med personal inom HR och rekrytering. Slutsats: Studiens resultat visar på att de intervjuade respondenterna anser att olika metoderoch verktyg, såsom arbetspsykologiska tester och kompetensbaserad rekrytering, kan bland annat bidra till att de sökande blir mer likvärdigt bedömda. Det i sin tur kan förebygga riskenför felrekryteringar samt diskriminering. Objektiva metoder kan dock uppfattas begränsa bedömningen och inte ta hänsyn till de arbetssökandes åsikter och känslor, vilket kan leda till att rekryteringsprocessen upplevs av humaniserad. Därav utifrån studiens resultat kan mänsklig interaktion anses nödvändig och väsentlig, trots dess utmaningar med risken att subjektiva åsikter påverkar bedömningen. Utifrån studiens resultat uppfattas HR-funktionen inom den offentliga sektorn, när det gäller rekrytering, inte fullt ut besitta en strategisk roll utan främst vara en mer administrativ funktion. HR har en central roll som en stödfunktion och anses rikta fokus i beslutsfattandet, från det subjektiva till de mer objektiva faktorerna. / Background: For over a hundred years, research has discussed the balance between objectivity and subjectivity in recruitment and selection processes. In public recruitment procedures, certain principles must not be overlooked, including the objectivity principle, which means observing objectivity and impartiality and considering everyone's equality before the law. If adecision in the recruitment process uses incorrect grounds, the organization risks that the wrong person gets recruited. The consequences of that can be costly. The HR function has undergone significant changes over the past three decades. HR has functioned as a more administrative and maintenance-oriented function. Now HR is described as a strategic business partner and a core business function. The HR function usually possesses expert knowledge in competence supply. HR can contribute to developing strategies regarding personnel management within the organization. However, empirical research shows that HR departments, specifically in the public sector, have not necessarily succeeded in transforming to fill such a strategic position but primarily continue to fulfill administrative functions. Purpose: Creating an understanding of the opportunities and challenges that follow the pursuit of impartiality in a public recruitment process is the purpose of this study. Furthermore, the purpose of the study is to investigate the role that HR staff fills in this quest to achieve impartiality. The focus of this study is specifically on different municipalities' recruitment processes. Method: For this study, a qualitative method where used. With staff in HR and recruitment in nine different municipalities, were nine semi-structured interviews conducted. Conclusion: The results of the study show that the interviewed respondents believe that various methods and tools, such as work psychological tests and competency-based recruitment, can, among other things, contribute to more equally assessed jobseekers. That can prevent the risk of incorrect recruitment and discrimination. However, objective methods can limit the assessment and not consider the jobseekers' choices and feelings. That can lead to the recruitment process perceived as dehumanized. Therefore, based on this study's result, human interaction can be considered necessary and significant, though its challenges with risking subjective choices affect the assessment. Based on this study's results, HR functions in the public sector, when it comes to recruitment, are not perceived to fully play a strategic role without primarily being a more administrative function. HR has a central role as a support function. The role of HR can help the decisionmaking focus from the subjective to the more objective factors.

This dissertation studies the economics of strategic misreporting and the effect of different anti-misreporting approaches based on theoretical, experimental, and quasi-experimental evidence. In Essay 1, I propose a theoretical model to study the efficacy of absolute and relative inspection standards in reducing misreporting when agents are heterogeneous in their reporting cost. I extend from previous theoretical studies by examining explicitly the performance of competitive endogenous audit rule (i.e., tournament audit) compared to the random audit as a function of agent’s heterogeneity parameter. I find that a tournament audit reduces average misreporting and the dispersion of misreporting relative to a random audit, and that the magnitude of the reduction is independent of the degree of heterogeneity among agents. A larger number of audits (presumably delivered by a softer budget constraint), a higher degree of imperfect monitoring, and larger risk aversion among agents reduce the effectiveness of the tournament audit in lowering misreporting. However, the magnitude of the reduction remains independent of heterogeneity in those cases.<div><br></div><div>Theoretical predictions from the first essay are built on a strategic equilibrium concept that relies on rather sophisticated assumptions. Testing these predictions in a controlled environment is thus of empirical importance. In Essay 2, I study misreporting decisions in laboratory experiments, and I test predictions from the first essay. The game played by subjects carefully recreates the environment used to generate theoretical predictions. The experiments have two sources of exogenous variation. The first varies the audit scheme, while the second varies heterogeneity in the cost of reporting. This allows me to test the key predictions from Essay 1 by comparing outcomes across different combinations of treatments. The experimental results largely support the theoretical predictions that a tournament audit reduces misreporting, both with homogeneous and heterogeneous agents. It also supports the prediction that the magnitude of the reduction in misreporting under a tournament audit relative to the random audit is largely independent of the degree of heterogeneity. However, the misreporting reduction is smaller than predicted, as subjects in the experiment tend to misreport less in the random audit baseline. This result is consistent with subjects being risk averse as characterized in Essay 1. Similarly, efficiency gains associated with lower misreporting are smaller than predicted.<br></div><div><br></div><div>In the third essay, I study a reform that conferred Chinese provincial authorities more monitoring power over air pollution performance by cities in those provinces. I use quasi-experimental methods to quantify the effects of this reform on misreporting by local authorities. Implemented in 2016, the reform gave the provincial authorities direct access to local (municipal) pollution monitoring stations, thereby making it harder for local authorities to misreport after the reform. The reform was introduced only in some provinces, many treated and untreated provinces have similar pollution trends before the reform and significant overlap on observable characteristics. These features aid me in establishing a causal effect of the reform on misreporting. The estimation involves two steps. First, I quantify different types of misreporting following recently proposed methodologies. Second, I regress estimated misreporting on the reform indicator using a difference in difference estimator. I found that the reform reduces hard misreporting, which takes place when local authorities interfere with the pollution monitoring facility, both during regular days and during heavily polluted days. The reform does not appear to reduce soft misreporting, which takes place when local authorities tamper with the pollution data. The results are robust to a number of robustness tests, and suggest that through proper institutional reform, the upper-level government can prevent certain types of misreporting at the local level. <br></div><div><br></div><div>This dissertation delivers a characterization of strategic misreporting by heterogeneous agents and studies the impact of different anti-misreporting schemes based on theoretical, experimental, and observational evidence. Results from this dissertation provide evidence that regulators can use mechanisms that: 1) curb misreporting without enhancing monitoring (tournament audits), or 2) that enhance monitoring to ultimately curb misreporting (adoption of monitoring technologies), or 3) a combination of both. This is important given the pervasiveness of misreporting among regulated agents, and substantial heterogeneity among those agents. <br></div>

Disasters such as major floods and heat waves are taking an increasing toll on societies. Like other pressing policy issues, they are complex and cut across sectors, jurisdictions, and professional fields. Addressing these problems requires interorganizational collaboration between heterogeneous organizations and thus, interactions between representatives who may have different professional views and identities. Successful collaboration partly hinges on their capacity to integrate perspectives and develop sustainable working relationships despite differences. This thesis aimed to improve our understanding of the role played by professional differences in perspectives and identities in public-sector interorganizational collaboration. Three specific objectives were pursued in a multilevel approach: 1) To document the role of professional diversity for interorganizational collaboration when considered outside of sectoral or jurisdictional differences; 2) To investigate how salient differences in professional identity affect perceptions and reactions following task disagreement; and 3) To investigate the cognitive and relational pathways by which emotions, conflict perceptions, and information processing can predict decision quality and relationship quality following disagreement. Study 1 examined the experience of interorganizational collaboration in disaster management based on qualitative interviews with professional- and executive-level public servants from relevant Canadian federal organizations. Findings suggested that professional diversity was not by itself a salient issue. The most disempowering type of diversity was differences in mandates, especially when combined with differences in expertise or identities. Study 2 examined whether group composition based on professional identity was associated with differential perception of and reaction to disagreement during interorganizational problem solving. It was based on a small sample of experienced senior risk managers involved in a quasi-experimental simulation. In terms of disagreement perception, nonparametric analyses indicated that interprofessional teams reported more disagreement than homogeneous ones even if observed disagreement did not differ. In terms of reaction, disagreement showed consistent negative associations with reported measures of effectiveness, performance, and relationship quality in homogeneous teams. In contrast, these associations were either positive or nonsignificant in interprofessional teams. Study 3 experimentally tested in a disciplinary-defined university sample whether salient group professional composition affected how people perceived and reacted to a scripted task disagreement. Findings indicated that after experiencing the exact same task disagreement, participants in interprofessional teams were significantly more satisfied with their team than those in homogeneous teams. Path analyses supported the two hypothesized pathways linking emotion following disagreement to integrative decision making and satisfaction: a) a cognitive pathway whereby surprise predicted beneficial outcomes through increased reported task conflict and increased information processing and b) a relational pathway whereby negative emotions predicted detrimental outcomes through increased reported relationship conflict and decreased information processing. As a whole, the thesis improves our understanding of the cognitive and relational roles played by professional diversity in interorganizational collaboration. It provides evidence on the beneficial effects of salient diversity for group cohesion in the face of disagreement. It documents intervening cognitive and relational processes predicting performance and relational quality following task disagreement. Finally, it proposes research avenues whereby social psychology can be leveraged to support the adaptation of public-sector organizations to contemporary challenges in public policy.

(anglicky) This thesis deals with benefits and risks of using cloud computing in public sector institutions. The thesis focuses mainly on the usage of public cloud deployment model. The thesis is divided into 4 main chapters. The first chapter presents definition and basic characteristics of cloud computing. The second part consists of PESTL analysis that describes the impact of macro-environmental factors (namely political, economical, social, technological and legal factors) on the use of cloud computing in public sector institutions. The third part presents SWOT analysis of cloud computing and its use in public sector. The fourth chapter presents a case study of the implementation of cloud computing services at The Faculty of Arts of the Charles University. The results of the conducted analysis tend to positive effects of cloud computing use in public sector institutions, presuming a proper risk analysis is done before implementation begins. Klíčová slova (anglicky): Cloud computing, IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, public sector, PESTL, SWOT, virtualisation

School choice dominated discourses within educational policy in the last year; some have even described 2021 as “the year of school choice.” School choice allows public education funds to follow students to the schools or services that best fit their needs. This is often summarized by its advocates as “funding students over systems.” Generally, school choice allows market forces to influence education by providing more competition in the education market. Teachers’ unions have fought against school choice measures for years, but what impact do they have? This undergraduate thesis compares 49 states to determine if the proportion of public school teachers in teachers’ unions in a given state serves as a proxy to measure the impact of unions and to discover whether teachers’ unions influenced whether a state passed new school choice legislation in 2021. By employing a binary logistic regression analysis, the results provide evidence that as the share of public school teachers who are union members increases, a state’s likelihood to pass new school choice legislation increases. This thesis gives a broad view of the impact teachers’ unions have on school choice at the state level, but more research detailing the ways unions leverage these effects and how politicians respond to teachers’ unions in their states would be valuable.

This study uses information gleaned from a sample of 102 public sector project managers to assess the interrelationships among project manager roles, responsibilities, and competencies in the planning and implementation stages of the project life cycle. The results of confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling revealed that project managers use different subsets of their skills to influence outcomes at these two stages of the project. For example, while the project manager's organizational and technical skills tend to have some influence during the project planning stage, managerial, leadership and people skills appear to have more influence during the project implementation stage. Implications of these and our other findings for the practice of project management in public sector organizations are discussed.

This applied research project draws the practical experience of the authors, projects sponsored by their respective institutions of higher learning and efforts of an alliance of technology-based organisations. In addition, some basic concepts, tools and philosophies which are well-established in previous applied research are utilised. With this in mind, the objective of this paper is to shed some practical light on the role and process of traditional and strategic innovation. To achieve this goal, the authors draw on a series of conceptual frameworks and practical guidelines. These frameworks capitalise on the open system nature of today's dynamic organisations. Although the approach presented in this study applies to large businesses as well as small- to medium-sized firms, especially it is helpful to small- to medium-sized technology-based businesses as they attempt to manage the rapid growth in their demand through innovation and innovative strategies.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to assess the management of public-sector projects in Portugal paying particular attention to the extent to which total quality management (TQM) principles are being utilized in such projects. Design/methodology/approach: Based on an extensive review of the literature, nine propositions are advanced about the interrelationships among seven factors that were identified, in a previous study, as having some influence on the management process in the planning and implementation of public-sector projects in Portugal. Structural equation modeling was used to investigate these propositions using data obtained from 211 respondents to a survey of project managers from municipalities across Portugal. Findings: The results of the structural equation model indicate that the TQM components working in tandem with project-management-specific variables provide a systematic means of managing the planning and implementation stages of projects, with technical items being critical in the planning stage and softer management items becoming important in the implementation stage. Research limitations/implications: Readers should be careful not to generalize the findings in a global context or for private sector projects. However, researchers are encouraged to extend this study by including other planning and implementation variables with a view to discerning what particular characteristics of a project make it more amenable to TQM solutions. Practical implications: The findings are presented to show how the key components of TQM, customer focus, employee involvement and continuous involvement, can be applied during the planning and implementation stages of projects. Originality/value: The sample size of 211 is representative of the underlying population of project managers in municipalities across Portugal and is comparatively large in relation to other empirical project management studies from Portugal, lending credence to the generalizability of these finding to public-sector projects in Portugal.

Allt fler familjer lever med neuropsykiatriska funktionsnedsättningar. Tidigare forskning visar på att många föräldrar till barn med neuropsykiatrisk funktionsnedsättning upplever en hög stressnivå i vardagen på grund av diagnosen / diagnoserna. Detta kan leda till att föräldrar utvecklar tillstånd som depression, utmattningssyndrom och liknande problematik. Författarna till denna uppsats har haft ett intresse av att se vidare på den viktiga roll familjen har för att skapa en hög livskvalitet för personer med funktionsnedsättning. Syftet med denna studie var att undersöka ideella föreningars företrädares erfarenheter av det stöd som finns tillgängligt från den offentliga sektorn till medlemmarna i deras förening. Eftersom författarna har valt att intervjua ideella föreningars företrädare har det varit möjligt att uppnå en bred kunskap om ämnet då föreningarna når ut till personer med funktionsnedsättningar och deras släktingar. Syftet med denna uppsats var också att ta upp frågor om huruvida ett holistiskt tillvägagångssätt tillämpas i insatser riktade mot personer med funktionsnedsättning och deras familjer. Den teoretiska ramen för denna studie är baserad på Goffmans stigmatiska teori samt Hochschilds teori om emotionellt arbete. / An exceeding amount of families today are affected by neuropsychiatric disabilities. Previous research shows that many parents of children with neuropsychiatric disabilities experience a high stress level in everyday life due to the diagnosis / diagnoses. This can result in that parents develop conditions such as depression, chronic fatigue syndrome and similar problems. The authors of this study had an interest to look further into the important role the family has in creating a high quality of life for individuals with disability. The aim of this study was to investigate non- profit associate representatives experience of the support available from the public sector to the members of their organization. Since the authors have chosen to interview non-profit associate representatives, it has been possible to achieve a broad knowledge of the subject as the associations target people with disabilities and their relatives. The purpose of this study was also to raise questions concerning if a holistic approach is applied in interventions aimed at individuals with disability and their families. The theoretical framework for this study is based on Goffmans stigma theory as well as Hochschild's theory on emotional work.

The aim of this study was to explore employees attitudes within the social serviceand non-profit organizations, regarding difficulties and possibilities in a potentialcollaboration between these two sectors concerning individuals with gamblingproblems. The empirical material is based on qualitative methods, thus semistructured interviews were performed with social workers working with individualswith gambling problems in the social service and in one non-profit organization ina city in Sweden. When analyzing the empirical data we applied three theories;Danermark’s collaboration theory, Hasensfeld’s theories about Human ServiceOrganization, Scott’s and Abrahamson & Andersen’s systems theory. The mainresult indicates that difficulties in a collaboration are due to lack of insight into eachothers organizations, different organizational structures and conditions, and also animbalance in the interdependence relationship among the two organizations.Additionally, the study shows possibilities when it comes to exchange ofknowledge and operating as a complement with one and other when supporting thetarget group.