Kristina Tamm Hallström

Mitt i storstaden, där kedjorna tar över, lever fortfarande små specialbutiker kvar. Vissa har funnits i över hundra år. Här möter kunderna inte bara varor, utan också hantverkskunnande, långsiktiga relationer och omsorg - kvaliteter som står i kontrast till samtidens effektivisering och storskalighet. Kampen om stadsrummet tar oss in i tio butiker i Stockholm och Göteborg. Genom möten med ägare, personal, kunder och fastighetsägare skildras butikernas vardag - hur de fungerar som sociala gemenskaper och som lågmält motstånd mot den standardiserade handeln. Vad går förlorat när sådana platser försvinner ur staden? Och kan de visa vägar till mer hållbara samhällen? Boken är skriven av forskare vid Kungliga Tekniska högskolan, Handelshögskolan och Score - Stockholms centrum för forskning om offentlig sektor. Framställningen är rikt illustrerad med fotografier från butikernas vardag.

This article is about small-scale independent single-store retailers that have been in business since the first half of the 20th century - an overlooked group of actors in retail research. Research has mapped the broader structural changes in the retail industry that have benefitted large-scale operations during the last decade. Still, there is an absence of explanations for the continuous existence of small-scale retail businesses with product lines competing with large-scale actors. Retail research tends to take economic profitability and growth as starting points to interrogate the capacity of businesses to successfully compete. Against this background, the longevity of inner-city small-scale independent stores dating back to the early 20th century remains a puzzle, which calls for looking towards alternative theories to find reasons for the persistence of this line of retail. We engage with this puzzle by exploring practices of valuation engaged by store owners in a selection of small-scale, independent stores established in Gothenburg and Stockholm (Sweden) before the 1950s. We draw on understandings of values as produced through social practices and inquire how forms of caring practices figure in the day-to-day maintenance of the stores as means through which they produce value. The article builds on ethnographic fieldwork focusing on in-store interviews with store owners, employees, and customers complemented with observations. We find that care figures in these stores as expressions of attention and presence, of maintenance and of tacit knowledge, and suggest that the retailers' focus on the caring practices identified - rather than on prioritizing growth - is key to their continued, long-term existence. Anchored in an understanding of retail as situated in broader social and political processes, and as such also impacting society at large, we moreover emphasise the importance of attentiveness and valuation of, the caring practices that small-scale store owners engage in.

Purpose
The aim of this paper is to contribute to knowledge about the diversity of credibility arrangements in new audit spaces “in the margins” of auditing and the implications of such arrangements.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper is based on an in-depth qualitative study of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex (LGBTQI) rights certification run by the Swedish Federation for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Intersex Rights (RFSL) during its first decade of operation. We have interviewed employees and studied documents at the certification units within the RFSL. We have also interviewed certified organizations.
Findings
We highlight two features that explain the unusual credibility arrangements in this audit practice: the role of beneficiaries in the organizational arrangements chosen and the role of responsibility as an organizing value with consequences for responsibility allocation in this certification. These features make it possible for the RFSL to act as a credible auditor even though it deviates from common arrangements for credible audits.
Originality/value
The RFSL certification is different in several ways. First, the RFSL acts as both a trainer and an auditor. Second, the trainers/auditors at the RFSL have no accreditation to guarantee their credibility. Third, the RFSL decides for itself what standards should apply for the certification and adapts these standards to the operation being audited. Therefore, this case provides a good opportunity to study alternative credibility arrangements in the margins of auditing as well as their justifications.

Since the 1990s, a new model for market control organized through tripartite standards regimes (TSR), has expanded globally and affected most market exchanges through standard-setting, accreditation, and certification. This article investigates business-consumer relations under this regime, with a specific focus on the functions of accreditation and certification. In our case study of Sweden, a new picture of consumer protection under late capitalism evolves. Seeing it as a form of neoliberalization, the article uncovers a transition between two regimes of control; from one built on a potential conflict between consumer and business interests, to one based on the assumption that business interests are beneficial for all parties. Although business interest was formulated as pleasing the consumer-or the "customer"-by both certification firms and the Swedish Accreditation Authority, in practice consumer interest as something worth protecting was made abstract in the era of the TSR.

This chapter sets out to do two things: to discuss international standards as a form of soft law and to demonstrate the usefulness of organization theory in doing so. International standards have received substantial scholarly attention during the last 20 years, but they have rarely been discussed as a kind of soft law, despite how well they fit the definition. Using insights from organization studies where scholars long have been theorizing about standards, we show how standards tend to dilute responsibility. Standards have a tendency to generate more organization and instead of clarifying or concentrating responsibility, it seems difficult to find anyone responsible in a world of standards. Discussing standards as an example of soft law, the framework for responsibility dilution presented in the chapter speaks to scholars also outside the realm of standard studies specifically.

This paper investigates the role of strategic artifacts in realizing change in two Swedish cities. Drawing from qualitative studies of city development projects we illustrate how ambiguous formulations in vision statements constitute a powerful basis for legitimizing actions. As part of establishing linkages between future-oriented vision statements and concrete actions here and now, we highlight the role of materialization. We provide three examples of how the vision statements studied materialized-into organizational structures, management control systems, and communication efforts-and discuss how such materialization implies that only some parts of broad vision statements are translated into practice.

As the world becomes more and more organized, it seems ever more difficult to find anyone responsible. Why is that? We argue that the extensive external organization of organizations in contemporary society provides the key. Formal organizations are collective orders with great potential for concentrating responsibility on top managers and the organization. But when they are organized by other organizations, this potential is undermined, and responsibility becomes diluted rather than concentrated. We explain this outcome by analysing the communication of decisions as a main producer of responsibility and by defining organization as a decided order. Our analysis draws upon and contributes to research about partial organization, but it also contributes to literatures on global governance and organizational institutionalism.

Procedural planning experiments often attempt to influence how planning actors think through producing physical and social environments that affect how they feel. In this paper such experiments are conceptualized as attempts at generating atmospheric "bubbles" through the engineering of affective atmospheres. Our empirical examples show that purposeful affective engineering is very difficult to achieve - and one cannot expect that their eventual outcomes can be predicted on the basis of the ambitions that underpin them. Therefore, it is crucial to remain attentive to questions concerning the variegated, distributed and often unexpected effects of such endeavors.

This article focuses on how the alleged value of independence in nonprofit organizations should be conceptualized, researched, and advanced. Through the conceptualization of independence as an institutional norm, the article makes several contributions to research on strategies for independence in nonprofit organizations. Rather than focusing on independence as a tangible organizational quality, the article studies and analyzes overarching strategies with which nonprofit organizations promote an image of independence. Recategorizations of results from previous research and illustrations from case studies of Swedish nonprofit ecolabeling serve as the main empirical material. By conceptualizing how nonprofit organizations employ multiple, and sometimes even contradictory, organizational strategies for being perceived as independent, the scope of research is broadened and the roles of institutional contexts and processes are highlighted.

In this chapter we investigate how certification and accreditation organizations put much effort in constructing an image of independence for the outside world to see and endorse. It is difficult for an organization to proclaim its own independence; rather, a fundamental way of convincing others of its independence is through entering dependency relationships with other formal organizations that grant the organization independence, like the dubbing of knights. We analyse the character of organizational dependencies with respect to rules, sanctions, hierarchy, monitoring, and membership and conclude that the search for independence result in the addition of elements to elements, driving more and more organization. We discuss how the adding of elements form a complex system of interdependent organizations, which resembles a rational, authoritative Weberian bureaucracy. Although this bureaucratic system may be understood as organization – a decided and systematized order – it is not a discernible entity. It is partial and as such it lacks a central authority to govern and to which an overall responsibility could be ascribed. Paradoxically, the efforts aiming at ensuring independence resulted in the organizations becoming dependent not only on each other, but also on the decided order surrounding them.