Att leva och sälja sin dröm : Livsstilsföretagaren mellan familjeliv, marknadoch politisk retorik

Living and selling a dream: Lifestyle entrepreneurship in the intersection between family, market and political rhetoric The article focuses on lifestyle entrepreneurship, characterised by a balancing work between personal lifestyle motives and economic motives. It builds on a qualitative study of business owners who have realized a life dream of starting a countryside business in the tourism and hospitality industry in Sweden. Through the notion of ”balancing work”, the analysis focuses on the tension between a personal life sphere and a market. In particular, the analysis highlights how the notion of ”the life dream” emerges as a narrative practice of self-realization, simultaneously as it is offered as an experience product. The analysis demonstrates how the entrepreneurs balance between personal stories of togetherness and marketing practices, between images of right and wrong commodification, and between constraining working conditions and a popular image of the successful entrepreneur, reinforced by a political discourse on rural entrepreneurship. It is concluded that balancing work between personal identities and economic practices is a practice of valuation, offering new insights into working conditions and markets situated in the intersection between markets and personal life spheres.

Den skickligt inkompetente chefen

The skilled incompetent manager Based on a critical interpretation of a leadership seminar we illustrate how the performance of the managers involved skilled incompetence. It expresses itself through a non-critical attitude, easily-made solutions and pseudo-communication, which together fuel a kind of knowledge flexibility. This uncritical, somewhat shallow and pragmatic attitude towards knowledge (e.g. management concepts), ought not to be understood as just dysfunctional, but also as a more or less unaware but adjusted competence, that in some situations works as a social lubricant in bureaucratic organizations.