Karina Mayland defends her PhD thesis
Karina Mayland defends her PhD thesis "Governing Complexity in Uniform - Institutional Logics in Policy Design and Implementation In a Military Bureaucracy".
The defence is public, and everybody is welcome.
Follow the defense online via Zoom >
Department of Social Sciences and Business will host a small reception afterwards.
Supervisors and assessment
Assessment committee:
- Lena Brogaard, Associate tt备用网址, Department of Social Sciences and Business, Roskilde University, Denmark (chairperson)
- Carsten Greve, tt备用网址, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark
- Hege Hofstad, Research tt备用网址, Oslo Metropolitan University, Norway
Supervisors:
- Jacob Torfing, tt备用网址, Department of Social Sciences and Business, Roskilde University (Main supervisor)
- Anne Obling, Associate tt备用网址, Royal Danish Defence College (Co-supervisor)
Leader of defence:
- Tine Rostgaard, tt备用网址, Department of Social Sciences and Business, Roskilde University
Abstract
This dissertation investigates how governance mechanisms shape policymaking in risk-oriented military organizations. While military bureaucracies are expected to maintain predictability and control, they also face growing external and internal pressures to adapt to complexity, foster learning, and support inclusive policymaking. Drawing on public governance, institutional, and policy theory, the dissertation analyzes how governing mechanisms influence opportunities for learning and adaptation, especially when policy problems diverge from formal routines and structural logics.
Empirically, the dissertation is based on a qualitative case study of two administrative policies in the Danish Defence: performance management and harassment prevention. It examines how policymaking processes unfold from design to implementation using a multi-method approach combining document analysis, semi-structured interviews, and embedded fieldwork. The study analyzes formal governance instruments and how they are interpreted and enacted in practice.
Although policies formally promoted learning and flexibility, they were implemented through mechanisms that emphasized control and execution. This created challenges of sensemaking, translation, and ownership across organizational levels, where actors lacked interpretive space and structured support. The absence of downward accountability limited leaders’ responsibility for fostering learning, reducing their responsiveness to organizational actors, and leaving little room to navigate the complexity of evolving implementation contexts.
The study contributes to governance and policy theory by integrating these perspectives to explain how adaptation and learning are constrained not by individual resistance but by embedded governance mechanisms and institutional logics. In particular, it refines theoretical understandings of how learning and inclusion are framed and how formal mechanisms (e.g., training, performance tools) are often reshaped to align with existing command, control, and compliance logics.
Methodologically, the dissertation contributes to process-oriented institutional research by showing how policymaking unfolds through structurally conditioned interactions and constrained interpretive practices. The study gained access to formal and informal policy processes through embedded fieldwork in a closed, rank-structured organization, allowing for a rich, practice-based analysis of governance as it occurs in everyday organizational life. This was combined with theoretical anchoring and critical reflexivity to avoid “going native” while maintaining sensitivity to internal norms, informal expectations, and situated meaning-making.
Overall, the dissertation advances our understanding of how learning, adaptation, and policy development are shaped—and often constrained—by the institutional and governance conditions that characterize risk-oriented public organizations such as the military.
The dissertation will be available for reading at the Roskilde University Library before the defence (on-site use). The dissertation will also be available at the defence.