Tore Johansson
Faculty Controller Senior Lecturer
Faculty of Textiles, Engineering and Business (including The Swedish School of Textiles)
— Department of Business Administration and Textile Management
Tore Johansson, LL.B. and PhD in Business Administration, defended his doctoral thesis in Business Administration at the University of Gothenburg with the dissertation Tension in Public Procurement – On the Use of a Strategic Tool (2022). He is a Senior Lecturer in Organisation and Management at the Department of Business Administration and Textile Management, the University of Borås.
Johansson’s research primarily focuses on public procurement, organising and collaboration, as well as learning in higher education. A recurring interest is how organisations and individuals create opportunities for action when they encounter conflicting demands, regulations, different forms of knowledge, or situations that have no simple solution.
A central area of research is public procurement. In his dissertation, Johansson studied how public procurement is used as a strategic tool and what tensions arise when political and strategic ambitions are translated into procurement practice. In his current research, this work is being developed in two closely related directions. One examines how procurement arrangements create comparability between needs, products, and supplier offerings, and what happens when relevant differences do not fit within established forms of comparison. The other addresses how public objectives can be made practically actionable within regulated procurement and how the scope for action is shaped by factors such as market conditions, supplier knowledge, tender formats, and contract follow-up.
A second research area is based on a long-term municipal collaboration initiative for social sustainability. Together with a colleague, Johansson investigates how organisations manage persistent tensions between, for example, broad participation and the need for focus, decision-making, and responsibility. The research examines both how emotional reactions influence the way actors interpret such tensions and which courses of action they perceive as reasonable and legitimate, and how collaborating organisations can create temporary but revisable commitments that enable action without requiring the underlying tension to be resolved.
Johansson also conducts pedagogical research and development within higher education. One ongoing project investigates students’ approaches to feedback and how different forms of feedback literacy relate to students’ use of AI-generated versus teacher-generated feedback. Another line of research studies student learning through role-play. Through enacted organisational dilemmas, the research explores how students learn to relate to tensions that cannot be resolved once and for all and how role-taking can make responsibility, the partial perspectives of different actors, and legitimate competing interests visible.
Johansson also has a growing interest in AI, professional judgement, responsibility, and the organisation of work. He is particularly interested in how AI-integrated work processes affect the distribution of responsibility and the exercise of judgement, and how AI-generated recommendations may shape professional assessments. This forms part of a broader interest in how technology and organisational arrangements change the conditions for human action and decision-making.
As a university teacher, Johansson teaches subjects including leadership, organising, ethics, and the audit society, and supervises degree projects at Bachelor's level and Master's level.