The main issue of the essay were to create a picture of how the Swedish Armed Forces is and are supposed to be controlled with documents within the field of personnel management. The documents that are at hand in the essay´s field of problem, ”personnel idea” and ”personnel policy”, does not show a unitary or apparent picture of how control are meant to be executed; for which reason an explorative examination turned out to be important. Data was collected with interviews as a method. The persons interviewed have had different roles in the essay´s field of problem. The choice of theoretical background were primarily Henry Mintzberg´s coordinating mechanisms and the HRM-concepts two variants: the Michigan respectively Harvard school.
The result in summary are:• The concept of ”personnel idea” are not defined sufficiently enough for the Swedish Armed Forces.• The ”personnel idea” of the Swedish Armed Forces has a inclination towards the coordinating mechanism standardization of outputs. The ”personnel idea” has a inclination towards the Harvardschool.• The ”personnel policies” of the Swedish Armed Forces has no apparent inclinations towards any particular coordinating mechanism, those which appear in some sence are direct supervision and standardization of outputs respectively norms. The ”personnel policies” cannot be said to have any inclination towards one or other of the two schools within the HRM-concept.