It is a common view in higher education to make clear distinction between theory, what you learn in school, and practice, what you learn in the workplace. Work integrated learning (WIL) is an approach in higher education that problematizes this distinction and that supports the understanding of an integrated view of theory and practice. In this paper we report from a study in which we investigate how students become increasingly ready for working life during a course. We explore “the process of learning to be ready for working life”, that we herein call ‘Work Integrated Learning’ (WIL) and we explain how WIL can be supported by ‘the methods used to enhance readiness for working life’, which we refer to as Work Integrated Education (WIE). The first aim of this study is to better understand how students develop readiness for working life. A second aim is to shed light on the distinction between WIL and WIE in order to understand how different types of knowledge sources for students can support the feeling of being ready for working life.The study is conducted at the bachelor’s degree programs ‘Digital Media’ and ‘3D-animation and visualisation’, at University West, Sweden. During the fifth semester, students have the opportunity to carry out internships in a workplace. The internship is conducted as a course at the university that gives higher education credits. The time spent on the course is split between the workplace (80%) and the university (20%). Every second week the students write down reflections on a given topic related to experiences in the workplace. Topics can be for instance custom relations, professional roles and ethics. The reflection texts are shared openly on the learning management platform so that all students can read each other’s reflections. Thereafter the group meet with faculty teachers in a seminar to discuss each other’s reflections. In the end of the seminar the teachers present a matrix including dimensions related to the topic discussed and the students are given the task to place the organisation they are practicing at in the matrix. The purpose of the shared reflection texts, discussions and work with the matrix is to give the students the opportunity to compare each other’s working experiences and to shed light on aspects of the experience that can help them to feel prepared for working life.The study is a mixed methods approach and consists of three sets of data: group interviews, online surveys and students' written reports. The research questions we seek answers to are:- How do the work of writing and discussing experiences from the workplace contribute to students’ personal understanding of what kind of workplace they search for in work life?- To what extent can both academic theoretical goals and students practical goals be combined during Internship?Preliminary results show that the student learn something on top of the course curricula. In the seminars discussing and reflecting upon each others experiences from different workplaces, they start to construct a vision for a future workplace of their own. A set of preferences on company size, the way the creative process is conducted, values, type of clients and other factors that define the company where student make internship.

Self-efficacy and Self-esteem of readiness are important factors for students to succeed in an internship. These factors affect how an individual handles new situations and possible threats. By testing their theoretical knowledge in a practical context, the internship can have a positive effect on the student's experience of being successful in working life.Work integrated learning is one approach that may support students progression towards increased readiness for working life. What characterizes work readiness and how can it be achieved?The study was conducted at the bachelor's degree programs ‘Digital Media’ and ‘3D-animation and visualisation’, at University West in Sweden. During the fifth semester students have the opportunity to carry out internships in a workplace. These internships are conducted as a course at the university which also gives higher education credits. The time spent on the course is split between the workplace (80%) and the university (20%). Every fortnight the students meet with faculty staff at a seminar to discuss a given topic. The purpose of the course is to give the student the opportunity to integrate theory from the university studies with practical experience in a workplace.The students spend the majority of the time in the workplace however every second week they meet in a seminar on campus, in which they discuss their experiences in the workplace. As a preparation for the seminar, the students are given different thematic questions to reflect on. Based on all students answers, in the seminar the students reflect on similarities and differences in each others’ texts. Additionally, a supplementary summarizing question is given to the students during the seminar.Prior to the start of the course, the students make their own estimation of how ready they feel they are for working life on a scale from 1-10. After the course, the estimation is revised along the same scale. In addition to this estimation, conversations are conducted between the students, regarding readiness for working life.The study is a mixed methods approach and consists of three sets of data: five group interviews á three hours with 7-15 participants in seminars, two online surveys and 50 written reports from all together 15 students.In the paper we report on how students gradually increase their feeling of being more sure of what type of work tasks they prefer to do in the future, which skills they already have or need to develop further, and what type of workplace they want to work at related to for instance: level of creative freedom, level of collegiality, type of governance etc. These insights, we argue, are vital characteristics of students’ experience of ‘readiness for working life’. We discuss how these characteristics are important aspects of self efficacy and how they are related to the design of the course and ultimately a work integrated learning approach to teaching and learning within higher education.

With an increased use of external online platforms, digital government logics are gradually intertwined with external, algorithmic, crowd-influenced value logics of social media platforms. This new scene especially affects administration, which can no longer neutrally deliver public service, but becomes involved in processes of consideration and judging what rules and traditions seem most appropriate in the situation.Through deep interviews and workshops with municipal communicators, we examine this balancing act when communicators use social media for external communication. We use a practice perspective to characterize and conceptualize an emerging approach to public service.

Since 2002 University West, Sweden has had a mission from the Swedish government to develop methods for work integrated learning (WIL). WIL is thus a “trademark” of the university and the university is continuously developing teaching models to enhance a synergy between theory and practice with the goal to improve education and students’ lifelong learning. A challenge in such work is a decreasing engagement among students to participate in seminars at campus, especially during periods of internship. In the study underlying this paper we therefore explore a new teaching and learning method that aims to stimulate students to come to campus and to discuss their experiences with peer students and teachers during their internship.The internship and the seminars are organized as a ‘WIL course’ in the fifth semester of the candidate program ‘Digital Media’. As part of the course the students spend four days a week in a workplace where they contribute substantially to the work at the workplace. One day a week they spend at campus to reflect, write and discuss topics related to the work and organization at the workplace e.g. organizational culture, how a work day is organized, how design work is organized, and how the workplace treats its customers. The students and teachers meet once every second week for a seminar where they discuss the above-mentioned themes. The reflections made at the seminars and the conversations are important for the learning goals at the course. However, the teachers experience a moderate interest from the students’ side to participate and the students tend to be ill prepared.To increase the value and learning for the students, a new approach for better structure and engagement has been introduced, where students in beforehand writtenly reflect on questions about their workplace in relation to the theme of the week. They write in open and shared documents so that all students before the seminare can take part of each others reflections and as such come to the seminar with a wider perspective on the particular theme. The seminar is then held at the campus where the themes are discussed and workplaces compared with help of a shared matrix where the students can place their workplace regarding level of structure, formality, creativity etc . As such the seminar has a ‘flipped’ character and the ICT tools for learning used are open and editable over time for all participants.The empirical material is based on 24 hours participant observations, 10 students’ written reflections and the course curricula. The findings show that the flipped and open approach to the seminars has made the students more engaged in reflections about their workplace, not only during the seminar at campus but also during their work at the workplace. The shared document stimulates reflections of differences between workplaces that has not been so clear before, and the matrix has helped the students to take the reflections to a higher level by reflecting over organizational culture and workplace conditions. By comparing each other’s experiences from a spectrum of different aspects/themes they get a more nuanced picture of the skills and competences needed in the workplace, and they get more strengthened in their professional role. The recurrent discussions over time during the course therefore contribute to make the students more experienced than they would had been by only having got the experience from their own workplace.

Autonomous cars are the first major examples of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in everyday life. When cars are transformed into platforms,new service relationships emerge between car companies and the car users. These relationships generate gains and catches for both parts related to how physical and non-physical resources are exchanged in the sharing economy; how integrity is negotiated; and how responsibility is delegated when AI enables the car to take over most of the driving. With a "car as a platform approach", in this paper, we present a design fiction on ethical implications for citizens' daily lives with autonomous cars

Governments are in need to innovate public service. They struggle with complex societal problems, decreased citizen trust and the work of adapting to new demands related to how service should be delivered to fit contemporary living. Inspired by success stories from the private sector's "open innovation" approaches, governments are complementing internal competence with knowledge resources of external actors such as citizens. One increasingly growing strategy for knowledge expansion beyond government boundaries has been to use social media platforms, e.g. Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. This strategy has been shown to be especially effective at a local government level (henceforth municipality) where citizens are geographically close to the government and where government manages activities that citizens rely on in their daily lives.

Despite an expansive rise of social media use in municipalities, and efforts to see beyond a traditional and New Public Management approach to public service, there is little knowledge about the participatory and innovative capacity of social media in a government context. This knowledge gap is reflected in researchers' and municipal administrators' uncertainty as to how to make use of social media for improvement of public service and how to handle tensions about what is possible to do with social media and what is legitimate to do as a public servant.

The aim of the thesis is thus to map, unpack and conceptualize social media practice by municipal communicators to understand how tensions and dynamics between social media mechanisms and government rationales are shaping the practice and how new emerging practices can be understood as public service innovation. The research questions of the thesis are: RQ1: How are social mediamechanisms supporting different public service rationales?; RQ2: How is public service enacted in the social media practice by municipal communicators?; RQ 3: How can social media practice by municipal communicators be understood as public service innovation?

With an engaged scholarship research approach, related research on social medialogic, e-government, e-governance and digital public service innovation, and with the help of the theoretical perspectives "service innovation," "practice perspective" and "sociomateriality," the thesis contributes extended insights into how social media platform mechanisms support different government rationales in processes of sociomaterial service, and how such practice can be understood as creative processes towards public service innovation.

As a practical contribution I propose that both communicators and managers in government engage together in networks of others working with social media and to discuss for instance the mission of the government in relation to the aim of using social media, what tensions arise in the social media practice and why, and how algorithms are shaping the social media practice.

The aim was to investigate whether there is a relationship between degree of e-government in Swedish municipalities and perceived satisfaction among citizens generally. This is a large-scale quantitative study based on validand reliable Swedish national surveys. Based on these surveys, a new comprehensive index for measuring "degree of digitalization" was constructed. Citizen satisfaction was measured using established indices covering three dimensions:satisfaction with living in the municipality, satisfaction with performance of government activities (delivered services), and satisfaction with transparency and influence. The results show that there is a relationship between the degree of digitalization in a municipality and the perceived satisfaction among its citizens. The degree of digitalization is related to all three dimensions of citizen satisfaction. Additionally, this study indicates that the strength of this relationship is in parity with or even stronger than the relationship between citizen satisfaction and other crucial factors such as educational level and median income

The digitalization in the public sector poses challenges for the professionals that have previously not been using digital tools as a part of their everyday practice. Building on three qualitative research projects this study shed light on contradictions and tussles, as well as possibilities re-lated to professionalism in the public sector. The three cases involve different professionals: cancer rehabilitation nurses, municipality communicators, and resident physicians. The paper aims to gain a better understanding of the impact of digitalization efforts on everyday work practices, and the emerging opportunities and challenges of using digital artifacts as a part of professional work. Our findings show how the transition toward digital work practices is pushing the professional boundaries of rooted professionalism in the public sector. The meaning of work and what it means to be a professional profoundly changes. The process of tuning professionalism in the public sector is not straight forward.

The use of social media in the public sector changes the professionals' everyday work practice. This paper sheds light on the emerging challenges of using social media as a part of work, based on the analysis of three contexts within the public sector in Sweden and through the lens of sociomateriality and affordances. The approach is interpretive field studies with a narrative analysis, where we interpret and analyse key elements of the storylines, focusing on the transition to social media use among professionals (nurses, municipal communicators, and physicians) in the three contexts. Social media enables an open work environment where information is visible and potentially spreadable to an unknown audience. The process of interacting with an unknown audience and finding a professional tone is analysed here as context collapse. The unknown, and at times imagined complex audience, makes it hard to balance the seesaw between friendliness on the one hand and an authoritative tone on the other; a tonality which leaves most of the potential audience unreached. The interplay between social media and the professionals shapes the professionals' practice. We analyse this interplaying practice more specifically, as sociomateriality in action.