Julia Carlsson has a PhD in Public Administration and is active as a teacher and researcher in the section for working life and welfare at the University of Borås. She teaches in subjects such as qualitative methods in public administration, governance and management in the public sector, evaluation and sustainable organisation and governance in health care.

Her research addresses issues of management, governance and organisation in the public sector. The processes of change are of particular interest. In her dissertation "När idéer får liv-om intraprenader i tre kommuner" she studies what affects an intraprenad. The study focuses on how cultural interpretation of ideas about change influences whether they become popular or not and thereby achieve vitality in the municipality in which it is introduced. It can be related to the assumption that the viability of ideas is about measurable evidence of its success or that, long since propagated in research, ideas about organisation are a result of what is fashionable at the time. The result shows that what is fashionable has a bearing on what ideas about organisation we use, but also that ideas can become more than fashionable and volatile ambitions of change. They can become valuable and long lasting depending on how they are interpreted where they are introduced.´

Ongoing research is focused on what happens in change processes aimed at creating self-governing and "corporate-like" units in the public sector. In the wake of the criticism directed at privatisation, more or less semi-autonomous units in Swedish welfare have been introduced in recent decades. Such a form of organisation is intraprenad. The organisational form is expected to provide the security that a public owner entails while increasing freedom from "bureaucracy", and management is expected to provide increased efficiency and spur entrepreneurship. In her research, Julia asks questions about what actually happens when units gain an increased autonomy and how the won "freedom" is practiced.

Researcher's publications in DiVA (Digitala Vetenskapliga Arkivet)

Doctoral thesis title

När idéer får liv-om intraprenader i tre kommuner

External Publications

Carlsson, J. (2019). När idéer får liv – Om intraprenader i tre kommuner, akademisk avhandling, Göteborg: Förvaltningshögskolan.