Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/208959 
Year of Publication: 
2016
Series/Report no.: 
PhD Series No. 2.2016
Publisher: 
Copenhagen Business School (CBS), Frederiksberg
Abstract: 
This dissertation investigates how changing management strategies in the public sector contribute to shaping and developing the ‘parking attendant’ as a certain sort of person in a municipal centre responsible for parking attendance. The job as parking attendant is – just as many other jobs in the public sector – the object of changing management strategies according to changing political agendas. Meanwhile, the job is also a psychologically demanding and stigmatized unskilled job in the public sector. The dissertation analyzes how parking attendants, whose job is increasingly professionalized, interact with changing management strategies by for instance resisting or avoiding them. The dissertation relies on sociological fieldwork among parking attendants and their managers. The fieldwork included shadowings of daily work, interviews, gathering of documents and participant observation at job-interviews. The analytical point of departure for the dissertation is Ian Hacking and Paul du Gay’s theories of how identities are ‘made up’. This sort of analysis is coupled in three articles in the dissertation to other perspectives on the relation between work and identity. These are about how employees handle stigma, which is considered in research on ”Dirty Work”, about how managers and employees draw upon ”aesthetic labour” to meet the public’s scepticism and as a means to bring down the number of assaults and finally how managememt strategies aiming at creating inclusion and diversity contribute to the making up of the parking attendant. All three analysis contribute to expand our understanding of work and identity in the public sector.
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
ISBN: 
9788793339699
Creative Commons License: 
cc-by-nc-nd Logo
Document Type: 
Doctoral Thesis

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