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In Sweden, the care of older people and people with disabilities is increasingly carried out by informal carers, often family members, who are unpaid and outside a professional or formal framework. While there is an increasing awareness of the role of carers within service systems and their own needs for support, their involvement in research is underexplored. The purpose of this paper is to explore carers’ views and experiences of involvement in research and development (R&D) work.

A qualitative study was conducted, consisting of 12 individual interviews with carers from different local Swedish carer organizations.

Core findings included carers’ discussions of the perceived challenges and benefits of their involvement in research, both generally and more specifically, in the context of their involvement in the development of a national carer strategy.

Limitations included the relative lack of male carer participants and the convenience sample.

Authentic carer involvement in research demands a high level of engagement from researchers during the entire research process. The provided CRAC framework, with reference to the themes community, reciprocity, advocacy and circumstantiality, may help researchers to understand and interpret carer involvement in research and provide the prerequisites for their involvement.

There is a dearth of studies that systematically examine carer involvement in research. This paper attempts to redress this gap by providing a nuanced analysis of carer involvement in R&D work from the perspective of carers themselves.

This chapter introduces the theoretical and political-practical underpinnings of this volume. It also gives an outline of the editorial organisation of the book and the various chapters. The chapter examines the literature on rural-urban relations, city-near rural areas and current challenges and problems identified in these areas. We identify huge sustainability and resilience problems in current rural-urban relations and metropolitan ruralities. We also relate to writings about a transition from the current carbon-based economy and society to a post-carbon society with reduced ecological footprints. The contributions in this volume are based on the current situation and provide ideas to develop the debate on rural-urban relations, metropolitan ruralities and post-carbon transition.

This chapter summarizes the theoretical perspectives and empirical studies in the volume and draws up some final conclusions. The methodology is meta-analysis of the chapters in the volume. The main conclusions are that ordinary citizens, professionals, and administrators alike generally are willing to reform urban and rural-urban policy into a more sustainable direction but that the affected political and governance systems have difficulties in responding to this. The editors’ advice is to further develop collaborative governance involving a broad range of stakeholders and perhaps also to start using the wide range of economic incentives available to decision-makers today to further a more sustainable development in rural-urban catchments. We hope that this concluding analysis will feed the debate on these critical issues.

Departing from an ideal interpretation of the collaborative governance approach, the authors analyse the integrative and collaborative capacities of project-based regional development actions in spatially diverse city regions in Finland. Scrutinizing the relevance of collaborative ideals and their institutional prerequisites becomes all the more salient given the strong emphasis on collaborative approaches to regional diversities throughout Europe. The results show that the integrative potentials are related to specific types of areas. They also call the facilitating capacities of politico-administrative institutions into question. The results are interpreted in terms of an institutional duality that strongly corresponds to the public-private divide.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how new public management (NPM) reform from the national level is implemented as practice in a local unit within the police sector in Sweden.

A qualitative case‐study approach is applied using semi‐structured interviews, participant observations and analysis of documents.

The paper illustrates different kinds of resistance at the organizational level. The dominant form of resistance was found to be cultural distancing. The paper demonstrates a tendency among police officers to deal with a changing and more complex work context by embracing a traditional work role.

The paper shows that reforms that add complexity may fail because of potential contradictions and the limited capacity and motivation of employees to deal with the complexity in the manner prescribed by NPM.

The paper shows that the popular trend to adopt multi‐dimensional forms of control (for instance the balanced‐scorecard approach) may fail if there is a lack of consensus about what goals and measurement are important and/or there is a lack of dialogue about how the new goals should be implemented in practice.

Research about NPM‐reforms in the police sector is rare. The original contribution of this paper is to study NPM‐reforms with a focus on the role of complexity in relation to resistance.

The differences of urban and rural as social spaces, their functions in society, as well as their mutual dependence have been a subject of scientific thinking since the antique times. This chapter revisits the topic from a sociological point of view, studying the evolution of the functions of rural in relation to urban, and how this evolution was reflected in the basic streams of rural research. The text ends by discussing rural research in relation to present social, economic and ecological tendencies. It is argued that the post-productionist phase of rural studies is losing its plausibility, because of the return of material functions for the countryside, during such recent trends as the global food crises and the greenhouse effect. This chapter discusses the prognosis made by the three founding fathers of rural sociology, Pitirim Sorokin, Carle C. Zimmerman and Charles J. Galpin (1932) that the society is melting together into a ‘rurban’ society, and takes distance from this prognosis for several reasons, for example because ecological tendencies seem to renew rather than diminish the differences between rural and urban. It is further argued that ecosystems have increasing impacts on societies in the form of adapted ‘greenhouse rationalism’. Such changes place rural research in a crossroads, posing the question whether to pay attention to increasingly important impacts of ecosystems on society, or not.

The purpose of this short paper is to introduce the special issue and outline its major themes.

The control‐resistance literatures are described, and the necessity for field‐led empirical accounts is amplified, as a precursor to introducing the contributions to this special issue.

Forms of control co‐mingle and the old imprints the new. Theories of control, resistance, agency and consent can most usefully be expanded by engaging with empirical accounts, resisting duality, and embracing multidimensionality.

This paper offers a review of the state of debate about control and resistance within organisation studies, and calls for field‐informed accounts and fresh perspectives.

The paper aims to identify and address matching problems in leader development and to propose how these problems can be dealt with.

Based on previous research, traditional leadership development (LD) is criticized and alternative approaches are suggested.

This research identifies two major matching problems in traditional LD – between participant and development effort and between development effort and realities of managerial work. A context-sensitive and emergent view of LD is suggested to address these matching problems.

The paper illustrates the need of leader development that is addressing the complex nature of managerial work in a more holistic way and to help participants to understand how such complexities can be dealt with.

An alternative view of leader development is identified. It matches managers’ diversities and the realities of managerial work better than traditional leader development does.