Management trainee - möten med förhinder

Sammanfattning: AbstractPorsfelt, Dan (2001) Management trainee – Möten med förhinder. Written in Swedish with an English summary. ISSN: 1402 – 1544, ISRN: LTU - DT - - 01/24 - - SE, Institutionen för Arbetsveten-skap, Luleå Tekniska Universitet 2001:24.This doctoral thesis in Human Work Science is a study of the participants in a management trainee program, carried out in a large Swedish company in 1997-1998. The aim of the thesis is to formulate theory around the complexity of a secondary socialisation process where organ-isational culture is externalised and internalised and individual self-identities of leaders-to-be in organisations are developed. The thesis is based on an ethnographic description of the entry of six newly graduated economists into an organisation, called ‘Distro’, and their encounters with existing organisational cultures. The data material has mainly been gathered through par-ticipant observation in the everyday life in the organisation, but also in events outside the or-ganisational frame. An official pan-organisational culture with its related stories, cultures of the shop-floor and a managerial culture in the regional organisation are described, as well as the development of the self-identities of the management trainees in relation to these cultures. The partiality of the internalisation of the different organisational cultures and the conscious acting in contrast to aspects of the internalised managerial culture is emphasised and the great complexity of the transition- and socialisation processes in the specific case is pointed at. This complexity is most likely to exist also in similar cases. The complexity is understood as a room of differences or room of relations. A number of circumstances, demands, structures, possi-bilities, values and practices in relation to one another constructs a sort of zone for reflection and as a consequence also development, movement and action. This zone is labelled interspace. Interspace is thus, a theme that, in different forms, can be found in the previous descriptive chapters of the thesis. The interspace simultaneously makes learning and development of both individual and, in the end, the organisation, possible as it may hinder the individual objective career or that of a group. It is, as a consequence, important for individual or groups finding themselves in the interspace to try to manage the impression that the interspace does not exist. Management trainee programs as a social phenomenon is, finally, seen as an aspect of a pro-fessionalisation process on the work place level, and as a modern institution colliding with post-modern values in the elite groups normally recruited to such programs.Keywords: socialisation, internalisation, organisational culture, micro culture, subculture, leadership, management, trainee, management training, management learning, transition, self-identity, pro-fessionalisationDan Porsfelt, School of Social Sciences, Växjö University, SE-351 95 VÄXJÖ, Sweden.E-mail: [email protected]