This thesis discusses how the informal structures at the medical research university Karolinska Institutet (KI) contributes to increased efficiency. KI has the ambition to become one of the world's leading medical research universities, which they hope to accomplish through, among other things, strong leadership. Since studies are being done at KI about the organisation itself, we wanted to contribute to that, and informal leadership was an phenomenon not yet written about. Through observation of a research group at one of the institutions at KI we gather the empirical evidence that shows that there is an informal structure which allows the organisation to thrive. Previous studies have shown that in small research groups, informal structures contribute to a rise in productivity, efficiency and creativity. The method we use is short term ethnography which is the most useful for us to gather both field notes and notes from ethnographic interviews. That is because we got to apply both our own interpretations to our material, but also apply our informants’ opinions in our data. We mostly use Max Weber's theories about authority with focus on charismatic authority. In the results we draw competing dualities between meritocracy and administration as well as formal and informal structures. The result is that, in the small research group we observed, there is a strong informal hierarchy which acts as a support for the formal leaders and helps make daily tasks more efficient. We conclude that even though we can’t generalize our results, we could find a pattern of the same kind of results if we do this study within other research groups at KI or even at a different research university in Sweden.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:uu-374314 |
| Date | January 2019 |
| Creators | Weckman, Elvi, Schouten, Fleur |
| Publisher | Uppsala universitet, Sociologiska institutionen, Uppsala universitet, Sociologiska institutionen |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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