Maria Norbäck

Senior Lecturer

Department of Business

Administration

Telephone

+46 31-786 66 64

Mail

maria.norback@handels.gu.se

Visiting address

Vasagatan 1

411 24 Göteborg

Room number

J419B

Postal address

Box 610

405 30 Göteborg

About Maria Norbäck

Maria Norbäck is associate professor in Business Administration and director for the Work and Employment Research Centre (https://we.gu.se/). She studies how people organize work, particularly in the media industries but also in other industries and sectors. In her most recent research project she has been studying how freelance journalists organise their work life. She has also studied professional work in venture capital-backed companies, work intergration social enterprises and professional self-employment. Norbäck has written about the organising of retail work, and how political managers handle their everyday work. In her PhD thesis she studied how programme makers at the Swedish public service broadcaster produced TV programmes together with commercial production companies. She likes to use institutional theory and critical labour studies literature in her research and teaching.

Research projects

Maria is involved in different research projects with a focus on new ways of organising work. Read about each project below!

Movement on the labour market, flexibility and choice in the gig-economy: https://www.gu.se/forskning/rorlighet-val-flexibilitet

Work integrated social enterprises:https://www.gu.se/forskning/forandrade-roller-och-framvaxande-natverk

Gig work and cooperative workforms: https://www.gu.se/forskning/gig-kooperativa-arbetsplattformar

Labour market challenges of green transition: https://www.gu.se/en/research/labour-market-challenges-of-green-transition-in-west-sweden-electrification-and-the-transition-of-the-automotive-cluster

Selected publications

Norbäck, Maria. (2022). Maintaining a Freelance Career: How Journalists Generate and Evaluate Freelance Work. Journalism Studies, 1-19.

Brorström, Sara., & Norbäck, Maria. (2022). Fast fashion: the rapid layering of management fashions in the Swedish city of Gothenburg. Public Management Review, 1-20.

Norbäck, Maria., & Zapata Campos, Maria José (2022). The market made us do it: Public procurement and collaborative labour market inclusion governance from below. Social Policy & Administration, 1– 16.

Norbäck, Maria & Styhre, Alexander (2021) On the Precarity-Spectrum: Exploring Different Levels of Precariousness in Market-Mediated Professional Work.Mrev: management revue. Vol. 32 (3) 266 – 295

Norbäck, Maria. (2021). Back to the future of journalist work? Entrepreneurial subjectivity and freelance journalism in Sweden. Journalism, 14648849211033131.

Norbäck, Maria (2019) Glimpses of resistance: Entrepreneurial subjectivity and freelance journalist work. Organization.

Norbäck, Maria & Styhre, Alexander (2019) Making it work in free agent work: The coping practices of Swedish freelance journalists. Scandinavian Journal of Management, 35(4), 101076.

Norbäck, Maria (2019) Recycling Problems and Modernizing the Solution: Doing Institutional Maintenance Work on Swedish Public Service Television. Journal of Management Inquiry, Vol 27, no 4, (published on-line first 2017, published in print (2019) Vol 28(1), 94–112.)