Maria Norbäck

Professor

Department of Business Administration

Telephone

+46 31-786 66 64

Mail

maria.norback@handels.gu.se

Visiting address

Vasagatan 1

41124 Göteborg

Postal address

Box 610

40530 Göteborg

About Maria Norbäck

Maria Norbäck is a professor of business administration with a focus on management and organization, and the director of the Centre for Research on Work and Employment/Work and Employment Research Centre (https://wexsus.se/forskning/centrum-for-forskning-om-arbete-och-sysselsattning-we). She researches how work is organized, often work that is organized in the intersection between the market and organizations, as work in the post-industrial society increasingly takes place between and outside formal organizations. Her research has often focused on the media industry, but she has also studied work in other sectors and contexts, work that is both high- and low-skilled.

Maria is project leader for a research project on worker-owned cooperatives in the cultural sector. She also participates in research projects studying flexibility, mobility, and choice in the labor market; labor-integrating social enterprises; and labor market consequences of the green transition of the automotive cluster in Western Sweden. She has previously studied film and TV-production; freelance journalists and other professional freelancers; professional work in venture capital-financed companies; city development managers and their work; as well as the organizing of work in the retail sector. She often uses institutional theory and what is commonly referred to as "critical labor studies" literature in her research and teaching. In her teaching, she also enjoys using art and other cultural forms to promote learning.

Research Projects

Maria is involved in various research projects focusing on new ways of organizing work. Read about each project below!

Mobility, choice, and flexibility in the gig economy: https://www.gu.se/en/research/mobility-choice-flexibility

Labor-integrating social enterprises: https://www.gu.se/en/research/women-4-integration-co-producing-an-inclusive-working-life-in-social-enterpriseskvinnor-for-integration

Gig work and cooperative work forms: https://www.gu.se/en/research/gig-cooperative-work-platforms

Labor market challenges of the green transition: https://www.gu.se/en/research/labor-market-challenges-of-the-green-transition-in-western-sweden-electrification-and-the-transition-of-the-automotive-cluster

Selected Publications

Brorström, Sara., & Norbäck, Maria. (2024). Fast fashion: the rapid layering of management fashions in the Swedish city of Gothenburg. Public Management Review, 1-20.

Norbäck, Maria. (2023). Back to the future of journalist work? Entrepreneurial subjectivity and freelance journalism in Sweden. Journalism, 14648849211033131.

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

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 – 29.

Norbäck, Maria (2021) 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.)