Karin Jonnergård

The inclusion of female PhD students in academia: A case study of a Swedish university department

The article introduces a framework for understanding womens entry into the academic world and how it interacts with internal departmental structures and practices. It presents three specific strategies applied by a group of women to gain a doctorate and acceptance in their department. Few previous studies have stressed womens strategies to cope with the organizational setting in academia. The article draws on previous research on women in academia and how organizational characteristics influence womens careers. It is based on a case study of a Swedish university department. Sweden is often recognized for creating favourable working conditions for women. Yet the Swedish academic world is very male-dominated at the top and even the medium level. It is also more common than in many other Western countries that academics stay on at the department where they graduated. Therefore, a PhD is often a first step in a career within that department.

Developing Codes of Conduct: Regulatory Conversations as Means for Detecting Institutional Change

The introduction of a new corporate governance code in Sweden, modeled after prevailing Anglo-Saxon norms of corporate governance, offers the opportunity to investigate global regulatory convergenc ...

Included or Excluded? The Dual Influences of the Organisational Field and Organisational Practices on New Female Academics.

A number of measures have been taken by the society to ensure gender equality in higher education. Nevertheless, women still face great difficulties when pursuing an academic career. Our aim is to increase the understanding of how the society, conceptualised as the organisational field, interacts with organisational factors and personal actions as women try to establish themselves within academia. We followed a group of female PhD students and their struggle to graduate at a Swedish, traditionally male‐dominated, university department. The paper analyses how actors and regulations in the society interact with the department’s gendered structures and practices. Three processes that influenced the women’s career opportunities have been identified – a process of integration, liberation and legitimatisation. We also show that women can get accepted and realise their short‐term objective, based on support from the society, while not necessarily being included by the department in a longer‐term perspective.

Variations in professions' adaption of quality reforms: The cases of doctors and auditors in Sweden

This article investigates variations in two professions’ adaption of quality reforms. The adaption of reforms is viewed as a part of the professions’ legitimacy and identity processes. Literature in the area suggests that the adaption of reforms is influenced by the profession’s knowledge base, professional norms, organizational belonging and organizational field. The two cases here on how doctors and auditors adapt to quality reforms show that the influences of these factors are, however, moulded by the professions’ strategies and the salience of the different aforementioned factors. A general conclusion is that compatibility between the bases of knowledge and the professional norms are vital for the adaption of reforms and that organizational fields are important for setting the agenda. Organizational belongings, on the other hand, seem of less importance for adaption of quality reforms.

Explaining Transnational Rules : Discourses and Material Conditions When Implementing the Swedish Corporate Code of Conduct

An understanding of how regulatory reforms are explained and put into action is vital for understanding the diffusion as well as the effects of transnational rules. In this chapter we claim that two processes of interpretation take place as a rule is transferred from the international scene and implemented into a specific national context: first, a process to make the import of the rule understandable and, second, a process in order to explain the content of the rule and to apply it in the local context. In this chapter we focus on the first of these processes and investigate how a transnational device for regulating corporate governance, corporate governance codes, gets on the regulatory agenda and is explained as appropriate on a national level through appealing to international discourse of how problems should be defined and solved.

The Regulatory Effect on the Performance of Financial Analysts : Time Series from Two different Legal Systems

The focus of this paper is the relationship between regulatory settings and financial analysts’ performance, which is examined by studying the level of shareholder protection and the performance of financial analysts in two countries with different legal origins. By using a newly constructed index to measure shareholder protection, we are able to analyze how changes in shareholder protection over time can affect analysts’ performance. By comparing two countries with different legal traditions (the United Kingdom (UK) and Sweden), we are also able to assess whether the underlying legal origin is an influential factor. The results show that increased shareholder protection improves forecast accuracy in both the UK and Sweden, supporting the idea that stronger shareholder protection regulations improve analysts’ performance whether the legal context is rooted in common law or Scandinavian civil law tradition. The findings also indicate that strengthened shareholder protection decreases forecast dispersion in Sweden and forecast bias in the UK, further supporting the idea that stronger shareholder protection improves analysts’ performance even though the results differed across legal contexts. We did, however, find a substitution effect in both countries: Strengthened shareholder protection makes analysts’ services less valuable to investors, thus leading to a reduction in the number of analysts. Our main conclusion is that changes in shareholder protection affect the performance of analysts irrespective of the country’s legal origin, i.e. common law or Scandinavian civil law. However, legal origin seems to have an impact on the magnitude of analysts’ performance based on changes in shareholder protection.

Gender-based career differences among young auditors in Sweden.

Purpose - The purpose of this study is to examine whether or not gender-related differences affect the likelihood of promotion. Design/methodology/approach - The research is done on a unique dataset on the Swedish audit industry, an industry with a well-defined and well-known career ladder. We apply an ordered probit model to take all steps in the career ladder into consideration simultaneously. Findings - Females are on average less likely to be promoted. Separate regressions for males and females identified that the estimated promotion probability increases for males as an effect of having a child, but decreases more for males than females if males are highly involve in the care of these children. Thus, females who are involved in childcare are penalised by lower probability of promotion; however, males who are highly involved in childcare have much more to lose in terms of promotion than females do. For a family, this becomes a question of how to lose the least. Originality/value - Having access to unique data, from a policy perspective our study gives some new insight into the uneven distribution between genders of career interruptions related to childcare.

Do auditor and CFO gender matter to earnings quality? Evidence from Sweden

Purpose This study aims to examine the association between auditor and chief financial officer (CFO) gender and earnings quality, utilising data from Sweden. This study also aims to examine whether interactions between auditor and CFO, which may affect a firm’s earnings quality, are associated with their gender. These aims are inspired by the notion that gender differences will be overruled by the rewards and socialisation into the occupational roles as suggested by the structural approach to gender. Design/methodology/approach This study uses a multivariate regression model to test its hypotheses. The sample consists of 976 firm-year observations covering the period 2008 to 2013. Findings The results show that gender of the auditor and CFO is not associated with earnings quality, and the interactions between auditors and CFOs, which may affect earnings quality, are not associated with their gender. Consequently, the results give tentative support for the structural approach in gender studies in the accounting and auditing field. Research limitations/implications This study indicates that future research in gender studies should consider the structural approach based on the argument of gender similarities. This approach contends that work-related behaviour of women will more resemble men, and this is caused by the socialisation process into the occupational role and the structure where they work (e.g. organisational and professional culture, work conditions, a compensation scheme, national culture, etc.) instead of gender. Originality/value This study contributes to the understanding whether gender – auditor and CFO gender – is associated with firms’ earnings quality and standing whether the interactions between auditor and CFO are associated with their gender, something that, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, has not been tested previously. It also re-introduces the structural approach within the gender research in the accounting and auditing field.

Doxa of Shareholders and Owners: On the Threshold of Financialization

Abstract Following financialization, there has emerged an understanding of what it implies to be a shareholder based on the shareholder value perception. However, as this shareholder value perception spreads internationally, it clashes with traditional perceptions. In this paper, we apply the language developed by Bourdieu to a Swedish public debate on equal treatment of shareholders in connection with the reform of the Swedish market for corporate control. Using Bourdieu’s conceptual framework, we describe how a global development interacts with the persistence of national practices. We conclude that in Sweden, local institutional investors have allied themselves with international institutional investors to enhance their positions in the restricted field of Swedish corporate control. Shareholder value is then used by these local actors as an argument to strengthen their position. At the same time, some of the controlling shareholders depart from their traditional position as industrial entrepreneurs and embrace a more financial approach to ownership, thereby altering both the power constellations and the capital, in Bourdieu’s sense, of the field.