Anne Roelsgaard Obling

Presentation

My research addresses the organization of work, tasks, professionals and public sector organizations. I’m interested in how and in what particular ways reforms and reform attempts transform our classic bureaucracies (the hospital, the army, the central administration, and so on) and how this affect the tasks and conduct of professionals (doctors, officers, public servants, and so on). In my current work, I explore an educational program for General Staff Officers in the Danish Royal Army to address some of the fundamental arguments about disciplined comportment, training and its relationship between techniques and methods in modern professional armed forces. This work is part of the Velux research program ‘Office as a vocation’ – for more information see here   

Previously, I investigated the development of so-called emotion agencies in the public sector. I understand emotion agencies as organizational entities that are created for the purpose to supplement contemporary standardized ‘hard’ transactions in the public sector with some softer deliveries, such as entities working within the psychosocial realm in which values and ideas of intimacy, authenticity and whole-person philosophy are promoted. Empirically, this research involved hospitals, recreation- and rehabilitation facilities, and various forms of intervention, such as educational health and well-being programs, mindfulness therapy and group supervision.

In my PhD thesis (published in 2012), I looked into how intimate relations are organized in accelerated cancer trajectories and what this entails for hospital doctors, patients and others involved. The research pointed at how socio-economic and institutional changes in public health services govern the intimate care work of individuals and groups. It hereby contributed to a growing literature on emotions and organizations and emotions and health/medicine, trying to understand some of the problems concerning emotional injunctions to professional work and in changing organizational contexts.

Anne Roelsgaard Obling will chair a stream at the EGOS Conference at Copenhagen Business School in 2017, alongside Thomas Lopdrup-Hjorth and Haldor Byrkjeflot, on the topic of '' Organization, Professionalism and Office as a Vocation’.

Please see below for the official call for abstracts.

For more information on the conference, please visit the EGOS website here.

Primary research areas

• Work, tasks, professionals, public sector organizations   
• Reforms and transformations of ‘classic’ bureaucracies 
• Training and conduct in the military
• Health care, medical rationality, care relations
• Social theory in relation to training and formation
• Social theory in relation to human relations
• Classic and contemporary organization- and management theory
• Qualitative research; case studies