Employers’ Relational Work on Social Media

Given how social media are commonly used in contemporary Nordic countries, social media platforms are emerging as crucial for relational work between employers, employees, and potential employees. By means of a discursive psychology approach, this study investigates employers’ constructs of relational work on social media through the use of two interpretative repertoires: the repertoire of loss of control and the repertoire of ever-presence. The consequences of these interpretative repertoires are a masking of power relations, especially between employers and young employees in precarious labor market positions and those with limited digital knowledge or financial means. Further, the positioning of social media as part of a private sphere of life means the invasion of not only employees’, but also managers’ private time and persona. The result of this study hence calls for the need to understand relational work on social media as part of normative managerial work

A silent cry for leadership : organizing for leading (in) clusters

Leadership research so far has neglected clusters as a particular context for leadership, while research on networks and clusters has hardly studied leadership issues. This paper fills this dual gap in the abundant research on leadership on the one hand and on networks/clusters on the other by investigating leadership in photonics clusters from a structuration perspective. Apart from giving an insight into the variety and patterns of leadership practices observed, the paper addresses the dilemma that regional innovation systems such as clusters usually have a critical need of some kind of leadership, but that neither individual nor organizational actors wish to be led. This dilemma can only be ‘managed’ by organizing for leading (in) clusters in a certain way

Modelling Financing Schemes for Energy System Planning: A Mini-Grid Case Study

Energy modeling has been playing a crucial role in defining solutions for effective energy planning. Bottomup energy system planning models, namely those models characterized by high technological detail, typically present exogenous techno-economic parameters which rely on data gathered by the user, from specific costs to efficiencies. However, poor to no attention has been given to the date to the financial parameters of energy models, which are often assumed and barely justified (e.g., “discount rate equal to 10%”, full stop). Still, model outputs are drastically sensitive to variations of finance-related parameters and must provide the financing structure that a decision-maker should implement for funding the advised energy planning strategies. This results particularly crucial for mini-grid sizing in sub-Saharan African countries, where the challenge of the energy transition entails the construction of massive new capacities to improve energy access rates and tiers of service, demanding an enhanced collaboration between private and public sectors. The case study, applied on an off-grid mini-grid in Mozambique, proposes a comparison between scenarios with increasing financial detail and a possible conceptualization of the hard link between detailed financial modelling and a bottom-up energy model for mini-grid optimization. Different financing schemes are modelled and their impact on the energy modelling outputs assessed. Project finance hence emerges as a useful approach that could upgrade the financing structure of domestic power projects in African countries. This may lead to many benefits: more sustainable and affordable interest rates where corporate finance is missing, improved risk management, diversified funding mix, and facilitated financial support from international institutions

An integrated modelling framework to address the energy trilemma in Egypt and Nile East Basin

Studying the Energy Trilemma in the context of the global energy transition is crucial today because the world is undergoing a rapid shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources. This transformation aims to reduce carbon emissions and combat climate change, but it also presents significant challenges in balancing energy security, equity, and environmental sustainability. Addressing the trilemma is crucial because Energy Security, Energy Equity (Affordability and Access) and Environmental sustainability can sometimes conflict with each other. This study employs an integrated soft-linking framework, combining an Energy system optimization model (ESOM), Model for Analysis of Energy Demand (MAED), and Input-Output Analysis (IOA), to address the energy trilemma in Egypt as a paradigmatic country in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. The application of the Integrated framework combined with four specific scenarios of Analysis Business as Usual (BAU), Renewable Generation Target of 42 % by 2035 (REN42), High Economic Growth (HEG), and Industrial Energy Efficiency (IEE) allows to draw insights for economic and technological pathways of the energy transition in Egypt. From the three-faceted perspective of the trilemma, the results confirm the need for diversification from a natural gas-dominated system to a more balanced energy mix of renewable and conventional sources to enhance energy security and reduce fossil fuel import dependency. The demand simulation reveals that total energy demand will increase due to the economic growth in the country, at least doubling in the most conservative scenario. The role of efficiency in this regard has proved to be crucial, resulting in an annual energy savings of 13 %, that can mitigate the effect of the subsidies that have discouraged such measures in the past and contribute to household affordability and equity. Finally, as far as environmental sustainability is concerned, the results indicate that achieving the REN42 target and avoiding 10 % of accumulated total emissions in the power sector would only increase the total system cost by 2 % compared to the BAU scenario. Trades with Sudan and Ethiopia also play a key role for Egypt, as they can reduce system costs by 1–5%, increase the renewable share to 50–60 % by 2050, and accommodate excess capacity

Organising (for) service innovation: formalisation versus creativity

Abstract In this paper we present and compare two studies on challenges with organising (for) innovation in service-intensive companies. One of the studies reviews the contribution of previous studies to the understanding of managing and organising innovation in service companies. The other is an explorative interview study focusing on how people working in service-intensive organisation in Sweden reason about innovation and the role of co-workers in the innovation process. In both these studies a common and important theme is the potential tension between formalisation and room for creativity. The purpose of this paper is to problematise and discuss this tension between formalised processes and creativity in the context of service-intensive companies. We identify four aspects worth attention in further studies: 1) How can service-intensive companies find a balance between formalisation and room for creativity when organising for innovation?, 2) How does the manufacturing industry influence the service industry in terms of processes, methods and vocabulary related to organising (for) innovation?, 3) How is individual and collective creativity conceptualised and what difference does this have for the organisation (for) innovation in service-intensive firms? and 4) What happens with innovation when the service delivery process is being formalised

Introductory Article: Next Generation of Leadership-as-Practice: Reconceptualizing Change

This special issue features some new studies that are referred to by the editorial team as ‘second generation’ research in the field of leadership-as-practice (L-A-P). Consistent with this journal’s title, Journal of Change Management: Reframing Leadership and Organizational Practice, this issue focuses on those sociomaterial practical accomplishments and turning points that change trajectories within the flow of practice, thus producing leadership. In this second generation of L-A-P studies, writers would begin to establish the boundary conditions that explicitly define the field’s interpretation of leadership, especially its concentration on collective change agency. This essay as well as the accompanying four papers, through the exploration of un- and under-explored areas, thus intend to contribute to further L-A-P theoretical development and application. In particular, the special issue begins to resolve where and when leadership within the flow of practice actually occurs, how it integrates with but also differentiates from other plural leadership traditions, which kinds of applied practices can enhance applications in organizational learning and development, and lastly how agency can be mobilized through the interconnection between current and dispersed chains of activity over time and across space

Institutional leadership—the historical case study of a religious organisation

In this chapter, I discuss institutional leadership vis-à-vis the value of poverty. To do so, I analyse how poverty has been conceptualised within a Catholic religious organisation, the Jesuits. The chapter shows that, in the Jesuit case, poverty is not strictly defined. Instead, poverty results from the constant dialogue between the individual Jesuit and their leader. This means that the understanding of what constitutes poverty is neither explicit nor implicit. The chapter contributes to our understanding of institutional leadership as the promotion and protection of values, as per Selznick’s classical definition. However, we discuss a less known part of Selznick’s work in which the ambiguous character of values is highlighted. In this sense, and after the Jesuit case, we advance the possibility that the promotion and protection of institutional values by institutional leaders does not necessarily imply the definition of what a value is. As values are not defined beforehand but the result of a constant dialogue between the leader and their followers, institutional leadership can be revisited and freed from the heroic view that has long characterised it