Lena Andersson Högberg

Categorising and labelling entrepreneurs: Business support organisations constructing the Other through prefixes of ethnicity and immigrantship

This article demonstrates how Swedish support organisations approach and target immigrant entrepreneurs in terms of categorisation and labelling. In their strategic positioning, and as a result of framing and communicating specific target groups for their activities, organisations simultaneously produce and reproduce categories of clients. We argue that despite its emancipatory intent, the process of categorisation runs the risk of reproducing an inferior Other. Adding prefixes in labelling entrepreneurs may replicate the societal hierarchies that business support initiatives were designed to counteract. This article questions the basis of business support for minority entrepreneurs and is a contribution to wider debates concerned with exposing the constructed nature of entrepreneurship.

Contextualising the coevolution of (dis)trust and control – a longitudinal case study of a public market

ABSTRACT Research into the dynamics of trust–control is still inconclusive. In this paper, we offer an in-depth understanding of how (dis)trust and control coevolve as embedded in multiple dimensions of context. The paper focuses on public markets, a context which is underrepresented in extant studies on trust and control. Our analysis is based on a longitudinal case study of interorganisational relationships (IOR) between boundary spanners representing purchaser and providers on a customer choice market for home care in a midsized municipality in Sweden. We identify, narrate and analyse critical incidents during seven years of the process. A conceptual framework contextualising the trust–control nexus of a public–private IOR is developed and utilised. We find that while the public–private IOR context requires control, control only enables deterrence trust from the municipal officers and only in individual providers. Interferential rather than symbiotic coevolution of trust and control is the dominating pattern. In addition, we find what we denote as mixed coevolution, where control simultaneously has positive and negative impact on trust. In our case in point, control enables trust in specific providers but this trust is not reciprocated due to experienced distrust on the category level.

New forms of organization : new ways to organize

Organizations are central to our way of organizing society and understanding the phenomenon of organizing within and between organizations is hence important. In this chapter we focus on dimensions ...