Peter Dobers

Organizing sustainable development : From diffusion to translation

Policy changes towards global sustainable development have important consequences for how these policies are organized. New and alternative models of organizing tend to emphasize indirect control r ...

The Cocoon—A Traveling Space

As a graduation project at a design school in Stockholm, a piece of furniture to be used for retreats in the public space was exhibited. It was named ‘The Cocoon’ and was a reclining chair covered with a bubble-like construction made out of cloth and steel. The exhibition was a starting point for a number of journeys. In the years to come, the Cocoon reached museums, exhibition halls, newspapers and magazines throughout the world. In this article, we track the travels and illustrate the transformations of the Cocoon. We seek to understand spacing activities behind the travels and view the travels from a spatial perspective focusing on the relation between transportation and transformation, of emptiness, form and content.

Who is rating the raters

The growing interest in applying sustainability criteria to investment observed throughout the industrial world has resulted in the creation of numerous sustainability funds. The Dow Jones Sustaina ...

Loveable networks – a story of affection, attraction and treachery

In an increasingly connected age, information technology can be argued to have become more politicized. The attempts to establish network technologies to promote the development of an information society are tokens of an increasingly vested interest that politics has in information technologies. Recognition of the entanglement of politics and technology is crucial in understanding contemporary organizational change. Instead of taking organizational stability for granted, we assume organizational change to be the norm. In this paper, we point to the many organizing efforts needed to prevent technologies from drifting away into non‐existence. We present two cases of IT ventures – one seemingly failed and one seemingly successful. Together, they illustrate the point that technological networks, as stable as they may seem, can only survive as long as they permanently fascinate actors from other techno‐economic networks and thereby attract their unconditional love, affection and commitment.

Editorial: The contribution of sustainable investments to sustainable development

Financial markets play a pivotal role in our economy in that the allocation of resources through these markets determines, to a significant degree, the development of our society. The way we invest today has an effect on the way society will function and produce in the future. Even a small shift in the behaviour of the actors on the financial markets can have significant consequences on other sectors of society, ranging from company operations at the microlevel, to the trends and developments in the international economy at the macrolevel. Recent trends including globalisation, outsourcing, short-term financial gains and so forth have led some to question the ethics and sustainability of existing business models and practices.

Image of Stockholm as an it City: Emerging Urban Entrepreneurship

The city of Stockholm uses its innovative energy to generate images of itself as an information technology (IT) center.In the 1960s, city management focused on urban planning and administration. By the 1980s and 1990s, however, administrators had turned their attention to actively marketing Stockholm as an IT City and Mobile Valley.The aggressive marketing tactics were partially responsible for the proliferation of cutting-edge IT ventures. The recent history of Stockholm suggests that emerging urban entrepreneurship may be a matter of how urban discourses and imaginary narratives can generate entrepreneurial qualities and initiatives.Knowledge-based entrepreneurship, in other words, is not confined to research communities, entrepreneurial teams, and new companies. Instead, it is situated in the imaginary narratives that a city develops and sustains over time.(SAA)