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Collaboration between the state and the defense industry has long been seen as critical for national security. Nonetheless, scholarly studies on state defense industry relations (SDIR) are still limited in the field of public policy and administration. This article provides an empirical analysis and national case study of SDIR. Through process tracing methods and analysis of official documents and interviews transcripts, the case study investigates how the issue of ammunition security of supply (SoS) became prominent on the Swedish government’s agenda. The case is examined with a Multiple Streams Analysis (MSA) offering insights into policymaking and agenda-setting. The study makes at least three contributions: It addresses the need for bridging public policy and defense and security studies; it adds more empirical research on SDIR to defense and policy studies; and it offers lessons on how states can navigate security concerns in volatile times.

The return to geopolitics in the formulation and execution of defence policy brings with it a need for the study of state-defence industry relations (SDIR) and insights into how governments prioritize when engaging with the defence industry. This article seeks to develop understanding of how the state assesses SDIR. Presenting a case study of the Swedish government’s changing priorities in its engagement with the defence industry as it implements national defence policy, this article addresses recent calls for public policy and administration theory to be incorporated into the field of defence studies. The study employs qualitative content analysis of official documents and interviews with defence industry representatives. A theoretical framework based on Hood’s politico-administrative values is used to derive values from the data and to make sense of government policy. The study concludes that the Swedish government has prioritized frugality, fairness, and security differently over time. Of these values, fairness is most consistently addressed. The field of defence policy, we find, is a field like many others where traditional administrative principles apply; it is not a unique policy field ruled by politics of exception. Showing that armed forces, superiors and subordinates, follow traditional administrative modes of working and public values, the findings are important for theory and practice alike.

The purpose of this article is to use prior public policy and administration research on policy learning in relation to crises to assess the Swedish government's learning in response to COVID-19. To make sense of the learning processes at play, the pandemic is framed as a creeping crisis. The analysis is temporally organized according to conceptualizations of inter- and intracrisis learning and post crisis reform, and further focused by known challenges to crisis learning from previous research. The study underscores the importance of shedding light on challenges to crisis learning in order to be better prepared when future crises occur. More specifically, the analysis shows how internal disagreements on the objectives of the response strategy and polarisation on how to handle the crisis restrained the Swedish government's ability to learn from crisis experiences (intercrisis learning). Although instances of policy learning during the crisis (intracrisis learning) are observed, prerequisites for reform are limited due to interorganisational collaboration difficulties, politicisation of the crisis management initiative as a whole, and emerging challenges crowding out the agenda.

This article addresses a gap in crisis research regarding scientifically produced knowledge on performance measurement during crisis for practitioners, by developing eleven crisis performance indicators from a content analysis of 40 interviews with Swedish crisis professionals. Using these as a point of departure, the article offers a critical take on the current mode of crisis inquiry by suggesting the term contingency as an alternative lens to benefit crisis theory and practice. Our empirical analysis shows that crisis performance evaluation leans toward rationalized control rather than contingent thinking. In the discussion, we critically assess the performance indicators from a contingency perspective, highlighting their inherent ambiguities and emphasizing the need to advance ways of thinking about crisis management beyond rules and standard procedures. The study underlines the importance of recognizing limits of human agency and integrating contingency in the mindset of crisis professionals. This would enable crisis professionals to act beyond anticipated and perceived practices and regulations when adapting to unexpected events and provide them with more purposeful indicators to be evaluated against.

Crisis management research is a young academic field, and organisational crisisinduced learning has been relatively neglected in the literature. Based on previous research and Moynihan’s conceptualization of inter- and intracrisis learning, this essay aims to discuss factors that affect public sector organisations’ ability to learn from crises in general, and the Swedish government’s lesson drawing from the COVID-19 pandemic in particular. Internal disagreements regarding the objectives of the response strategy and polarisation on how to handle the crisis has limited Swedish public sector organisations’ ability to learn from past experiences (intercrisis learning). Although instances of organisational learning during the crisis (intracrisis learning) have been observed, interorganisational cooperation difficulties and politicisation of the crisis management initiative as a whole seem to be affecting the learning process. There is a risk that both inter- and intracrisis learning processes in the wake of COVID-19 are impacted negatively due to the national and international politicisation of Sweden’s management of the pandemic.

Projection of strategic narratives to gain competitive advantages is a central feature in the global competition for status and power. This article presents a comparative narrative analysis of how the Russian state sponsored news platform Sputnik narrates Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden 2014–2019. The objectives are to uncover what negative work strategic narratives can perform and to decipher how adverse narratives are constructed. The findings suggest that Sputnik uses a mix of standard strategies and tailor-made narratives, working to destruct, direct and suppress the Nordics. The analysis exposed distinct differences as Sputnik narrated Sweden and Denmark more negatively than Norway and Finland. The narratives can serve to divide and weaken the Nordics and the EU, and undermine international reputations of each state. The strategy of division through narratives is particularly problematic as polarization challenges Western democracies and the EU. The article furthers narrative research by testing a recently crafted analytical framework and by presenting findings that indicate a need for a broadened research agenda. Whereas previous research has primarily centred on how malign information influence can harm democracy, our results indicate that narratives can cause a broader variety of harms.

Crises shake societies and organizations to their foundation. Public authorities, private companies, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and members of the general public all have a role to play in managing crises. From a public administration perspective, however, responsibility clearly falls on politicians and strategic decision makers in public authorities. The task to manage crises is getting increasingly challenging, with more actors and sectors involved, unclear lines of accountability, and close connections between risks, organizations, networks, and interests. This means that the fundamental opportunity to improve structures for crisis management and preparedness, which requires learning from previous experiences, is increasing in salience. Previous research into the political dimensions of crisis management holds that learning is a key part of crisis management and a fundamental challenge to crisis leadership. The criteria that set crises apart from day-to-day work—that is, core values at stake, time pressure, and substantial uncertainty—also challenge the learning parts of crisis management. Learning in relation to crisis is essential for earnest investigation into what went wrong and why the crisis occurred, and, moreover, to make sure that it does not happen again. As organizations play a key role in crisis management, organizational learning is a useful concept to explore learning in relation to crises. Furthermore, the concept of crisis-induced learning has proven salient in bridging the literatures of crisis management and learning. Crisis-induced learning is understood as purposeful efforts, triggered by a perceived crisis and carried out by members of an organization working within a community of inquiry. These efforts, in turn, lead to new understanding and behavior on the basis of that understanding. The concept of crisis-induced learning can help add clarity to what learning is in relation to crises and who the learning agents are in these processes. Other important theorizing efforts in bridging crisis and learning include categorizing learning into its cognitive and behavioral aspects as well as its temporal aspects including inter- and intra-crisis learning. Finally, relating to issues of methodology, it is useful to distil ways to measure and analyze learning and to explain how crisis-induced learning is distinguished from other types of experiential learning.

This study aims to deepen the understanding of processes that affect collaboration between professions and organisations in the crisis preparedness domain from a gender perspective. A total of twenty-three Swedish duty officers participated in the study. The analysis of the interviews show that collaboration can be understood as (a) the militarisation of civil crisis management actors, which means that many of the work processes and cultures that originate in military organisations can now be found in the security and crisis management sector; (b) the masculinisation, which means that when male dominance appears to prevail, active strategies are used against women, civilian personnel and also inexperienced colleagues and (c) organisational exclusion which emerges particularly in situations where collaboration between female-dominated and male-dominated organisations are required. The findings are important for crisis preparedness research and practice and should work in favour of evening out asymmetries in collaborative crisis management.

This study applies an institutional profession perspective on a significant crisis management actor in an aim to deepen the understanding of collaborative crisis management work and practices. The study argues that a professions perspective holds a key to approaching interagency gaps in status and influence, which tend to affect collaborative crisis management negatively. Empirically the study is based on 19 interviews with local crisis communicators in Sweden. Findings indicate that, in terms of internal collaboration, limited knowledge among organizational members about the role and skills of crisis communicators require communicators to spend time and resources on ‘promoting’ their competence within the organization. Regarding inter‐organizational collaboration, the study shows that the closer a communication officer works to the spatial place of the crisis and to the rescue service, the higher the status of the communication officer. Interestingly enough, relations seem to go both ways as emergency service personnel can also be empowered by becoming more skillful communicators.

The purpose of this study is to examine, explain and interpret concepts of gender in relation to information management, crisis communication and collaboration within the framework of (crisis) communicator tasks. Since the crisis management realm is malecoded and the communications profession is female-coded, there is reason to gain more knowledge of how these relate to each other. The ambition is to contribute to an underdeveloped area of theory. A total of nineteen participants joined the study. All the interviews were processed according to the guidelines for the thematic analysis method. Analysis showed that three themes are central to understanding the role of communicators in the crisis management system. These are a) crisis communication as a temporary organization; b) requirements imposed on, and expectations from, the role and the individual and c) organizational greed. Results are discussed theoretically from a gender perspective, and practical implications are given as well as proposals for further studies.