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The question under investigation in this dissertation is whether the management- and market-oriented reforms of public institutions in Sweden of the 1980s and 1990s have affected municipal politics in the direction of more or less conflict. The analysis takes its point of departure from Arend Lijphart's model of majoritarian versus consensus democracy. Majoritarian democracy refers to a form of democracy in which the central role of electing decision-makers and holding them accountable is emphasized. Majoritarian democracy therefore underlines the importance of conflict in politics. Consensus democracy refers to a form of democracy in which the importance of representing the preferences of political minorities, not only those of the majority, is emphasized. Consensus democracy therefore underlines the concern for consensus between political actors. In this study, four municipalities with different political majorities and reform ambitions within the county of Stockholm were chosen for comparative analysis . The study shows that the reforms in all likelihood have affected the political work in a more majoritarian direction. This applies in particular to the efforts of introducing new forms of management. The political relations have become more conflict-oriented and more coordinated or centralized within each political party and between the parties of a leftist and rightist orientation respectively. The political relations within the municipal committees have also become more conflict oriented, primarily by a more public and pronounced expression of divergent views. These results clearly strengthens the argument in Swedish debate that municipal politics is increasingly becoming more similar to national politics, where it is only the political parties in parliamentary majority that governs public administration. The results of this investigation therefore have implications on the organization of municipal politics in Sweden, as it is currently based on a more consensual form of democracy.

This thesis aims to deepen the understanding of entrepreneurship as an ideal and practice in local government administration. Organization, practices and the roles of civil servants in public administration are all grounded in certain ideals of what a modern public administration should look like. In order to capture the relationship between ideals and practices in local government administration, this introductory essay takes its point of departure in an institutional logic perspective. Entrepreneurial practices are well documented in a public administration context. Both civil servants and organizations can be more or less creative, alert and energetic, in other words more or less entrepreneurial. However, practices such as these are often understood to derive from the motives, driving forces and extraordinary characteristics of the specific actor. By contrast, this thesis aims to contribute to the literature on public administrative trends and reforms, by discussing entrepreneurship in terms of institutionalized ideals and patterns of action, i.e., institutional logics. The analysis is based on empirical studies of local development work in ten Swedish municipalities. The research design is grounded in an interpretative ethnographic approach and the development projects in each of the municipalities were closely followed for three years. Local development work is studied as a policy field where entrepreneurial ideals and practices are likely to arise, making it a suitable subject for studies that aim to deepen the theoretical understanding of entrepreneurship in a public administration context. The thesis demonstrates how an entrepreneurial logic is institutionalized in local government development work and embedded in governance and administrative practices as a natural consequence of certain contemporary reforms and trends in local policy and administration.Through ethnographic studies of local development work, the ideals and practices of the entrepreneurial logic are made visible. The entrepreneurial logic is contrasted to the still prevalent and institutionalized bureaucratic- rational administrative logic. These two logics are in many respects the logical opposite of one another and provide different answers to the question of which administrative practices are appropriate. The thesis makes three contributions to different theoretical discussions. First, the clarification of the entrepreneurial logic helps both researchers and practitioners make sense of and bring conceptual order to the messy practices of local development work. Second, the entrepreneurial logic expands the concept of entrepreneurship in a public sector context by viewing entrepreneurship as an institutional phenomenon rather than a phenomenon that represents a break from traditional institutions. Third, the entrepreneurial logic sheds light on institutionalized administrative ideals and practices that potentially imply major changes in public administration legitimacy, values and norms.

The change in regional governance in Sweden is regularly understood in terms of a shift from 'government' to 'governance', from a redistributive policy to a policy that aims to encourage regional innovation, competitiveness and growth. This shift also includes the adoption of global policy models, such as 'clusters'. In the literature on the global spread of policies it has been argued that a market for global policies has developed. This is not least evident through the expansion of global consultancy firms, international policy organisations as well as a cosmopolitan elite of travelling policy technocrats. Theoretically and methodologically this study contributes to scholarly discussions of how new forms of governance can be analysed, and especially how governmentality studies can be utilised and combined with analyses of the messy political practices of specific policies and programs. The study analyses the discursive shift in regional policy in Sweden: contested elements erased, conflicts concealed and the political order produced. By empirically departing from a 'cluster policy network' lodged within a Swedish region, cluster policy is analysed as an assemblage of global circuits of knowledge, expertise and local relations of power. A broad range of materials for analysis have been generated through interviews, participant observations and documents. The production of policy knowledge is an overarching political rationality of contemporary forms of regional governance, translated into technologies such as benchmarking, regional comparisons, competitions, evaluations and best-practice. Based on the empirical analyses it is argued that the lack of power critique and a hyper-rational representation of knowledge produce an international market for legitimacy. It is further argued that five characteristics of the policy regime ('the regional cluster orchestra') contributes to the reproduction of the policy regime, and relations of domination. ; Baksidestext Avhandlingen tar sin utgångspunkt i vad som har beskrivits som en marknad för globala policymodeller. I Sverige har klusterbegreppet, med ursprung i ekonomisk och geografisk teoribildning, fått stort genomslag i regionalpolitiken. I den samtida regionalpolitiken har också produktionen av olika former av policykunskap utvecklats till centrala styrningsteknologier: benchmarking, best practice, utvärderingar, uppföljningar, mätningar och konkurrensutsatta tävlingar om regionala utvecklingsmedel. Genom kunskap och ständigt lärande ska Sveriges regioner frälsas. I avhandlingen studeras den scen där ett regionalt förankrat policynätverk agerar och den kunskap som produceras. Regionalpolitikens rationalitet innebär att det blir centralt för regionerna att agera som enhetliga aktörer och visa upp en lyckad och framgångsrik fasad. Det argumenteras för att bristen på maktanalys, och en hyperrationell syn på kunskap i regionalpolitiken innebär att regionalpolitikens styrningsteknologier producerar en internationell marknad för legitimitet som i sin tur reproducerar ordningen och döljer dominansrelationer.