Myten om det rationella flödet : en studie av hur organisatorisk ledning formas genom omvärldsanalys och underrättelsearbete i kunskapsintensiva företagsmiljöer

Sammanfattning: The myth of the rational flow - A study of how environmental analysis and intelligence work create organizational direction in knowledge intense business milieus The unit of study, organized intelligence work, is known under several names like business intelligence, competitive intelligence, and business environment analysis; in this study viewed as dedicated activities that are carried out inside an organization to manage insights into the relationship between the organization and its environment. The author argues that the prevailing research tradition is scientifically underdeveloped as it is biased towards a practical tradition - limiting understanding of the subject to issues mainly of efficiency. The tradition thus fails to address questions that would help us to better understand what this phenomenon actually does to organizations and the people involved, not to mention business and society as we know them. The circumscribed theoretical foundation has called for an explorative study with strong inductive characteristics, in the pursuit of fulfilling the research objective to describe and make visible the phenomena of organized intelligence work and investigate how these activities relate to questions of organizational management and decision-making. The major contributions of the thesis are empirically grounded descriptions and analysis of organized intelligence work, a complementary model of the intelligence generating process, a thorough empirically and theoretically grounded critique of today’s favored theories and concepts, and finally a description of how organized intelligence work creates organizational direction as agents for an ideal organizational thinking. The thesis ends with an English summary over ten pages.