A Paulsson
Biographic Data
| ID | 70344 |
|---|---|
| NAME | A Paulsson |
| GIVEN NAMES | A |
| FAMILY NAME | Paulsson |
| SIGNATURE | PAULSSON A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Lund University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6114-7397 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 34 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 29 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 34 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Cargo mobilities by bike: Urban deliveries and the logics of logistics
Cycle logistics services have re-emerged across Europe in response to urban and environmental challenges and as a sustainable solution for delivering goods. While most studies approach cycle logistics through optimisation and substitution perspectives, this paper offers a critical analysis of how cycle logistics practices navigate tensions between logics of logistical circulation and embodied mobilities. Drawing on interviews with cycle logistics…
Autonomy within limits: Post-growth and social imaginaries of work, education and democracy
Autonomy is central to thinking about democracy and human needs, but the question of how autonomy relates to growth is ambivalent. Is growth necessary to achieve a basic level of autonomy, or is autonomy, in fact, a pre-requisite for post-growth? In this study, we examine this question by focusing on how critical autonomy relates to growth within the domains of democracy, education, and work. Critical autonomy is complex, but in its most fundamen…
Unnatural Causes: Cryptocurrencies, Carbon Credits, and the rise of Neoliberalism from Below
Klima is a carbon‐backed cryptocurrency running as a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). In 2021, it had accumulated 9 million metric tons of digital carbon credits and reached a market value of more than US$1 billion. In 2023, its treasury stored twice as many carbon credits, but its spot price was a tiny fraction compared to 2021. Building on prior scholarship at the intersection of carbon markets and cryptocurrencies, we probe the dev…
Slowing down: Degrowth and the limits to urban mobility
Cities worldwide face immense challenges in transitioning to a sustainable future. While being structurally and politically bound to continuous growth, the striving for a constant increase in production and consumption puts enormous pressure on our planet and its ecosystems. Degrowth has been proposed as a pathway to solving this dilemma. Although scholarly attention to urban degrowth has expanded, a central aspect of cities remains partly unexpl…
Fiscal environmentalism: Carbon arithmetic, objects of taxation, and the epistemic culture of economic expertise
Economic policy instruments are commonly used to address environmental problems. This study examines the historical development of the carbon tax in Sweden. By using the concept of epistemic culture, this study shows how carbon emissions, rather than energy use alone, emerged as an object of taxation. While the leading politicians saw the carbon tax as an innovative instrument for demonstrating climate action, the experts responsible for designin…
Material consequences: The return of inflation and the value of price indexation
Inflation is not merely a shift in the value of money, it is also involving a redistribution of value. While some groups are severely affected by inflation, others profit from it. So, who bears the costs of inflation: corporations, employees, or consumers? And how is this redistribution taking place, by which devices? This study takes a critical look at a central device used in various markets: the price index. Despite its significance in represe…
Making apps, owning data: Digital sovereignty and public authorities’ arrangements to “byte” back
This study tells the story of two public transport authorities (PTA) in Sweden who developed their own apps. Although this might seem trivial and far-detached from the critical issues discussed in organization studies, this story raises questions of great relevance for this field, namely how digital sovereignty is organized. Digital sovereignty refers to governments trying to take or regain power and control over “the digital,” which a small grou…
Craft-orientation as a mode of organizing for postgrowth society
How may a “craft-orientation” facilitate a shift toward an ecologically sustainable economy that does not perceive the pursuit of economic growth as a self-evident good? Responding to this question, this paper is rooted in the argument that efforts to increase economic growth collide with ecological sustainability goals and pose a substantial threat to human prosperity. Drawing on key insights from scholarship on craft, we establish the notion of…
Bio-Efficiency: On the valorisation of innovation in the bioeconomy
This article discusses a concept that institutions from the OECD to the EU increasingly employ in their response to the ecological crisis: The bioeconomy, wherein materials for economic activity would be bio-based and renewable. As a present-day project, the bioeconomy translates the critique of (fossil) carbon into patterns of (material) resource use and (economic) resource allocation, not least through a new valorisation of innovation in the fo…
Tasting the alternative: Plant-based meat, consumer captivation and the capitalization of plants in food markets
How do new companies attempt to captivate customers in a food market they are substantially seeking to transform? Plant-based meat has been marketed as a revolutionary food product that will not only transform markets but also provide better health and reduced environmental harms. Building on conceptualizations of captivation, we analyze video ads from leading brands. Our results highlight four modalities of consumer captivation that we refer to …
Working at the crossroads of alternative currencies and degrowth: Setting a Research Agenda
In this review, we analyze the existing literature on the role of alternative currencies within degrowth . While degrowth emerged in the early 2000s alongside growing awareness of accelerating environmental crises and widening global inequalities, alternative currencies have a longer history. Alternative currencies have served as devices for communities seeking to become less dependent on the dominant economic system, but degrowth and technologic…
Mobilising safety? Public order and the coordination of security guards in public transport in Stockholm
This study contributes to the growing literature on mobile work by examining the coordination of safety practices in public transport in Stockholm. We explore how safety, a critical and evolving theme in mobility studies, intersects with mobile work and its associated coordination challenges. Since the introduction of safety policies, security guards have focused on ‘circulatory maintenance’, a process gaining prominence in Stockholm’s public tra…
Postgrowth welfare systems: A view from the Nordic context
As production and supply chains rely on exploitative extraction of nature and labour, consumption levels (resource use) remain one of the main indicators of inequality, across and within national contexts. In times of ongoing climate crisis and rising levels of inequalities, welfare systems face the dual challenge of transforming economies to reduce their reliance on unsustainable industries as well as maintain and expand equitable distribution o…
Diminishing returns of growth? Economic performance, needs satisfaction and ecological impacts of OECD welfare states
The environmental crisis, increased inequality and an aging population are likely to increase the demand for welfare services in the OECD countries. Economic growth has long been seen as a solution to these problems. However, this is no longer the case. Very few countries have managed to decouple economic performance from ecological footprints and greenhouse gas emissions. Even where this has been achieved, the rates of emission-decline are too s…
The market that could be but is not: Market failure as ontological politics and the reconfiguration of public transport in Stockholm
Market failure is a concept invoked in both economics and public policy to justify governmental interventions in the marketplace. Drawing on more than five years of qualitative research on public transport in Stockholm, this paper explores how market failure, operating as a form of folk theory within public policy, informed a legal reform. This reform aimed to reconfigure an established contractual regime, where competition centered around procur…
Sauver la planète, un burger à la fois: Les stratégies communicationnelles de la viande végétale
Cet article analyse certaines des stratégies communicationnelles de la viande végétale, une innovation alimentaire promettant une expérience équivalente à celle de la viande animale, mais dépourvue de ses conséquences néfastes pour la santé des humain·e·s, des animaux et de la planète. Mobilisant une approche constitutive de la communication, nous retraçons le narratif fondateur de l’entreprise Beyond Meat à travers divers documents afin de repér…
From senses to sensors: Autonomous cars and probing what machine learning does to mobilities studies
Cars are nowadays being programmed to learn how to drive themselves. While autonomous cars are often portrayed as the next step in the auto-motive industry, they have already begun roaming the streets in some US cities. Building on a growing body of critical scholarship on the development of autonomous cars, we explore what machine learning is in open environments like cities by juxtaposing this to the field of mobilities studies. We do so by rev…
Between pace-making and pace-taking: Urban cycle logistics in an accelerated polity
The purpose of this study is to explore the concept of social acceleration by examining how cities are trying to speed up, maintain or slow down the pace of societal change. Through studies of cycle logistics policies and actions in cities in Denmark, Norway, the UK, the Netherlands, and Germany, we show how these balance between acting as pace-makers and pace-takers, as well as what the consequences of this balancing act are for enacting cycle l…
Planned meetings: Multiplicity, boxed-in dialogues, and deliberative bureaucracy as social form
In what ways are meetings a social form? How are meetings organized and how do organizations structure meetings to produce consensus around visions of the future? In this article, planning meetings, which gather representatives from the regional Public Transport Authority and the municipalities involved in public transport planning in Stockholm, Sweden, is probed as a social form. By structuring the meetings as collaborative planning processes, t…
Marketization in Crisis: The Political Economy of Covid-19 and the Unmaking of Public Transport in Stockholm
While measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19 disturbed both global and local markets, some commentators also argued that the pandemic could be seen as the beginning of the end of neoliberalism. Although neoliberal reforms have come under pressure, little is known about the implications of COVID-19 in or across specific sectors. Scaling down the rich theoretical-historical debates about neoliberalism to the regional level, we study the impact …
Bypassing the animal: Plant-based meat and the communicative constitution of a moral market
The food industry occupies a large portion of the plate in the study of moral markets, which would be characterized by higher moral standards set by producers and consumers compared to other kinds of market exchanges. Moral markets for food include fair trade goods, organic products, family farmers initiatives, as well as plant-based meat alternatives, the focus of this article. Driven by a growing concern for animal welfare, sustainability, and …
The end of the line: Envisioning degrowth and ecosocial justice in the resistance to the trolleybus dismantlement in Moscow
The city of Moscow has been going through a transformation of its surface transport network during the past decade as part of a broader policy of urban beautification. Despite a renewed interest in public transport, this policy has led to the dismantling of the trolleybus system. This was met with resistance from various groups. Bringing together scholarly discussions on urban growth coalitions and on degrowth, we repoliticise urban mobility poli…
The policy unconscious: Educational labor, the research-and-teaching relationship and the unquestioned meaning of higher education
Recent developments in higher education have shown that policies that promote employability tend to be at odds with policies that aim to ensure a close relationship between teaching and research. In this article, we explore how university teachers enact a policy demanding a close relationship between research and teaching. Based on a conceptualization of educational labor practices as policy enactment, we show that teachers enact the policy by us…
Resource shifting: Resourcification and de-resourcification for degrowth
Resources are a core concept in debates about socio-ecological transformations and post-growth societies, but as a concept they are rarely problematised. Drawing on a resourcification approach in which resources are understood as outcomes of various social processes, this study analyses how resources are conceptualised and understood in degrowth scholarship. Our study shows that resources are seen in two interlinked ways, first as a critique of t…
The case for ‘public’ transport in the age of automated mobility
Bypassing the animal: Plant-based meat and the communicative constitution of a moral market
The food industry occupies a large portion of the plate in the study of moral markets, which would be characterized by higher moral standards set by producers and consumers compared to other kinds of market exchanges. Moral markets for food include fair trade goods, organic products, family farmers initiatives, as well as plant-based meat alternatives, the focus of this article. Driven by a growing concern for animal welfare, sustainability, and …
Resource shifting: Resourcification and de-resourcification for degrowth
Resources are a core concept in debates about socio-ecological transformations and post-growth societies, but as a concept they are rarely problematised. Drawing on a resourcification approach in which resources are understood as outcomes of various social processes, this study analyses how resources are conceptualised and understood in degrowth scholarship. Our study shows that resources are seen in two interlinked ways, first as a critique of t…
Diminishing returns of growth? Economic performance, needs satisfaction and ecological impacts of OECD welfare states
The environmental crisis, increased inequality and an aging population are likely to increase the demand for welfare services in the OECD countries. Economic growth has long been seen as a solution to these problems. However, this is no longer the case. Very few countries have managed to decouple economic performance from ecological footprints and greenhouse gas emissions. Even where this has been achieved, the rates of emission-decline are too s…
Governing smart mobility: Policy instrumentation, technological utopianism, and the administrative quest for knowledge
This article analyzes administrative practices in relation to the emergence of novel technologies. “Smart mobility” is an umbrella term used to denote the potentially disruptive changes in the transport sector relating to automatization, digitalization, and the platform economy. While this development is largely driven by industry, public administrations are engaging in a number of processes where they seek to obtain knowledge while regulating th…
The city that the metro system built: Urban transformations and modalities of integrated planning in Stockholm
This paper investigates how housing and public transport planning in Stockholm has been integrated during the past 20 years through multi-level collaboration. Drawing upon how Stockholm has been portrayed in the literature on transit-oriented development (TOD), that is, as a successful case of integrated land use, housing and public transport planning, this paper suggests that multi-level collaboration in Stockholm’s urban transformations has had…
Networked authority and regionalised governance: Public transport, a hierarchy of documents and the anti-hierarchy of authorship
This paper is concerned with the authority of written documents and how these artefacts work as governance devices. Networked authority is introduced as a concept to elucidate how documents accumulate formal power in a collaborative process, where several formally independent but informally interdependent organisations together point out the direction of regional public transport planning in the form of one strategic document. Drawing upon recent…
Planned meetings: Multiplicity, boxed-in dialogues, and deliberative bureaucracy as social form
In what ways are meetings a social form? How are meetings organized and how do organizations structure meetings to produce consensus around visions of the future? In this article, planning meetings, which gather representatives from the regional Public Transport Authority and the municipalities involved in public transport planning in Stockholm, Sweden, is probed as a social form. By structuring the meetings as collaborative planning processes, t…
The case for ‘public’ transport in the age of automated mobility
Professionalism between profession and governance: How University Teachers' Professionalism Shapes Coordination
The purpose of this article is to analyze how university teachers’ professionalism shapes the coordination processes in higher education institutions (HEIs). By developing an innovative framework, which combines governance theories and theories about professionalization, we found that university teachers’ roles in coordination with governance actors in HEIs follow two different logics: to comply with decisions, policies and rules; to follow their…
Postgrowth welfare systems: A view from the Nordic context
As production and supply chains rely on exploitative extraction of nature and labour, consumption levels (resource use) remain one of the main indicators of inequality, across and within national contexts. In times of ongoing climate crisis and rising levels of inequalities, welfare systems face the dual challenge of transforming economies to reduce their reliance on unsustainable industries as well as maintain and expand equitable distribution o…
The market that could be but is not: Market failure as ontological politics and the reconfiguration of public transport in Stockholm
Market failure is a concept invoked in both economics and public policy to justify governmental interventions in the marketplace. Drawing on more than five years of qualitative research on public transport in Stockholm, this paper explores how market failure, operating as a form of folk theory within public policy, informed a legal reform. This reform aimed to reconfigure an established contractual regime, where competition centered around procur…
Marketization in Crisis: The Political Economy of Covid-19 and the Unmaking of Public Transport in Stockholm
While measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19 disturbed both global and local markets, some commentators also argued that the pandemic could be seen as the beginning of the end of neoliberalism. Although neoliberal reforms have come under pressure, little is known about the implications of COVID-19 in or across specific sectors. Scaling down the rich theoretical-historical debates about neoliberalism to the regional level, we study the impact …
Introduction: Ahead of time
Networked authority and regionalised governance: Public transport, a hierarchy of documents and the anti-hierarchy of authorship
This paper is concerned with the authority of written documents and how these artefacts work as governance devices. Networked authority is introduced as a concept to elucidate how documents accumulate formal power in a collaborative process, where several formally independent but informally interdependent organisations together point out the direction of regional public transport planning in the form of one strategic document. Drawing upon recent…
Towards a Political Economy of Degrowth
Since the 1970s, the degrowth idea has been proposed by scholars, public intellectuals and activists as a powerful call to reject the obsession of neoliberal capitalism with economic growth, an obsession which continues apace despite the global ecological crisis and rising inequalities. In the past decade, degrowth has gained momentum and become an umbrella term for various social movements which strive for ecologically sustainable and socially j…
Professionalism between profession and governance: How University Teachers' Professionalism Shapes Coordination
The purpose of this article is to analyze how university teachers’ professionalism shapes the coordination processes in higher education institutions (HEIs). By developing an innovative framework, which combines governance theories and theories about professionalization, we found that university teachers’ roles in coordination with governance actors in HEIs follow two different logics: to comply with decisions, policies and rules; to follow their…
Passing on the torch: Urban governance, mega-event politics and failed olympic bids in Oslo and Stockholm
Governing smart mobility: Policy instrumentation, technological utopianism, and the administrative quest for knowledge
This article analyzes administrative practices in relation to the emergence of novel technologies. “Smart mobility” is an umbrella term used to denote the potentially disruptive changes in the transport sector relating to automatization, digitalization, and the platform economy. While this development is largely driven by industry, public administrations are engaging in a number of processes where they seek to obtain knowledge while regulating th…
The city that the metro system built: Urban transformations and modalities of integrated planning in Stockholm
This paper investigates how housing and public transport planning in Stockholm has been integrated during the past 20 years through multi-level collaboration. Drawing upon how Stockholm has been portrayed in the literature on transit-oriented development (TOD), that is, as a successful case of integrated land use, housing and public transport planning, this paper suggests that multi-level collaboration in Stockholm’s urban transformations has had…
Greening higher education? From responsibilization to accountabilization in the incorporation of sustainability in higher education
Purpose This study aims to investigate how sustainability has been incorporated – or mainstreamed - in a school at one university through techniques of responsibilization and accountabilization. Design/methodology/approach Inspired by the extended case study methodology, the authors participated, observed and analyzed two audit-inspired processes, whose aims included ensuring that sustainability was integrated into the educational process. Findin…
Countering corporate violence: Degrowth, ecosocialism and organising beyond the destructive forces of capitalism
Corporate violence is a form of organised violence motivated or caused by material interest, profit-seeking or economic expansion. It is inflicted on human beings or ecosystems. Complementing a Marxist theoretical frame with literature on ecosocialism and degrowth, we examine how corporate violence is inherent to and has been consistently encouraged by the capitalist mode of production. By drawing on the concepts of primitive accumulation and soc…
The end of the line: Envisioning degrowth and ecosocial justice in the resistance to the trolleybus dismantlement in Moscow
The city of Moscow has been going through a transformation of its surface transport network during the past decade as part of a broader policy of urban beautification. Despite a renewed interest in public transport, this policy has led to the dismantling of the trolleybus system. This was met with resistance from various groups. Bringing together scholarly discussions on urban growth coalitions and on degrowth, we repoliticise urban mobility poli…
The policy unconscious: Educational labor, the research-and-teaching relationship and the unquestioned meaning of higher education
Recent developments in higher education have shown that policies that promote employability tend to be at odds with policies that aim to ensure a close relationship between teaching and research. In this article, we explore how university teachers enact a policy demanding a close relationship between research and teaching. Based on a conceptualization of educational labor practices as policy enactment, we show that teachers enact the policy by us…
Resource shifting: Resourcification and de-resourcification for degrowth
Resources are a core concept in debates about socio-ecological transformations and post-growth societies, but as a concept they are rarely problematised. Drawing on a resourcification approach in which resources are understood as outcomes of various social processes, this study analyses how resources are conceptualised and understood in degrowth scholarship. Our study shows that resources are seen in two interlinked ways, first as a critique of t…
The case for ‘public’ transport in the age of automated mobility
Sauver la planète, un burger à la fois: Les stratégies communicationnelles de la viande végétale
Cet article analyse certaines des stratégies communicationnelles de la viande végétale, une innovation alimentaire promettant une expérience équivalente à celle de la viande animale, mais dépourvue de ses conséquences néfastes pour la santé des humain·e·s, des animaux et de la planète. Mobilisant une approche constitutive de la communication, nous retraçons le narratif fondateur de l’entreprise Beyond Meat à travers divers documents afin de repér…
From senses to sensors: Autonomous cars and probing what machine learning does to mobilities studies
Cars are nowadays being programmed to learn how to drive themselves. While autonomous cars are often portrayed as the next step in the auto-motive industry, they have already begun roaming the streets in some US cities. Building on a growing body of critical scholarship on the development of autonomous cars, we explore what machine learning is in open environments like cities by juxtaposing this to the field of mobilities studies. We do so by rev…
Between pace-making and pace-taking: Urban cycle logistics in an accelerated polity
The purpose of this study is to explore the concept of social acceleration by examining how cities are trying to speed up, maintain or slow down the pace of societal change. Through studies of cycle logistics policies and actions in cities in Denmark, Norway, the UK, the Netherlands, and Germany, we show how these balance between acting as pace-makers and pace-takers, as well as what the consequences of this balancing act are for enacting cycle l…
Planned meetings: Multiplicity, boxed-in dialogues, and deliberative bureaucracy as social form
In what ways are meetings a social form? How are meetings organized and how do organizations structure meetings to produce consensus around visions of the future? In this article, planning meetings, which gather representatives from the regional Public Transport Authority and the municipalities involved in public transport planning in Stockholm, Sweden, is probed as a social form. By structuring the meetings as collaborative planning processes, t…
Marketization in Crisis: The Political Economy of Covid-19 and the Unmaking of Public Transport in Stockholm
While measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19 disturbed both global and local markets, some commentators also argued that the pandemic could be seen as the beginning of the end of neoliberalism. Although neoliberal reforms have come under pressure, little is known about the implications of COVID-19 in or across specific sectors. Scaling down the rich theoretical-historical debates about neoliberalism to the regional level, we study the impact …
Bypassing the animal: Plant-based meat and the communicative constitution of a moral market
The food industry occupies a large portion of the plate in the study of moral markets, which would be characterized by higher moral standards set by producers and consumers compared to other kinds of market exchanges. Moral markets for food include fair trade goods, organic products, family farmers initiatives, as well as plant-based meat alternatives, the focus of this article. Driven by a growing concern for animal welfare, sustainability, and …
Postgrowth welfare systems: A view from the Nordic context
As production and supply chains rely on exploitative extraction of nature and labour, consumption levels (resource use) remain one of the main indicators of inequality, across and within national contexts. In times of ongoing climate crisis and rising levels of inequalities, welfare systems face the dual challenge of transforming economies to reduce their reliance on unsustainable industries as well as maintain and expand equitable distribution o…
Diminishing returns of growth? Economic performance, needs satisfaction and ecological impacts of OECD welfare states
The environmental crisis, increased inequality and an aging population are likely to increase the demand for welfare services in the OECD countries. Economic growth has long been seen as a solution to these problems. However, this is no longer the case. Very few countries have managed to decouple economic performance from ecological footprints and greenhouse gas emissions. Even where this has been achieved, the rates of emission-decline are too s…
The market that could be but is not: Market failure as ontological politics and the reconfiguration of public transport in Stockholm
Market failure is a concept invoked in both economics and public policy to justify governmental interventions in the marketplace. Drawing on more than five years of qualitative research on public transport in Stockholm, this paper explores how market failure, operating as a form of folk theory within public policy, informed a legal reform. This reform aimed to reconfigure an established contractual regime, where competition centered around procur…
Making apps, owning data: Digital sovereignty and public authorities’ arrangements to “byte” back
This study tells the story of two public transport authorities (PTA) in Sweden who developed their own apps. Although this might seem trivial and far-detached from the critical issues discussed in organization studies, this story raises questions of great relevance for this field, namely how digital sovereignty is organized. Digital sovereignty refers to governments trying to take or regain power and control over “the digital,” which a small grou…
Craft-orientation as a mode of organizing for postgrowth society
How may a “craft-orientation” facilitate a shift toward an ecologically sustainable economy that does not perceive the pursuit of economic growth as a self-evident good? Responding to this question, this paper is rooted in the argument that efforts to increase economic growth collide with ecological sustainability goals and pose a substantial threat to human prosperity. Drawing on key insights from scholarship on craft, we establish the notion of…
Bio-Efficiency: On the valorisation of innovation in the bioeconomy
This article discusses a concept that institutions from the OECD to the EU increasingly employ in their response to the ecological crisis: The bioeconomy, wherein materials for economic activity would be bio-based and renewable. As a present-day project, the bioeconomy translates the critique of (fossil) carbon into patterns of (material) resource use and (economic) resource allocation, not least through a new valorisation of innovation in the fo…
Political science (21 works) · Sociology (17 works) · Law (14 works) · Economics (13 works) · Politics (13 works) · Business (10 works) · Engineering (10 works) · Sustainability (10 works) · Computer Science (9 works) · Biology (6 works)