People-positive organizing: Proposing an alternative perspective on “new organizational forms”

Doktorsavhandling, 2025

Given the ubiquity and power of current-day organizations, innovating how we organize collective effort—developing "new organizational forms"—is a key lever for addressing society’s greatest challenges. Drawing interest from practitioners and researchers alike, the discourse about "new organizational forms" is marked by heated debates between proponents and critics. Proponents regard stories of new form "pioneers" like W.L. Gore, Buurtzorg, and Morning Star as illustrative of the superiority of "less-hierarchical", "self-managing", and "agile" organizing in today’s age. Critics, however, question the newness and benefits of these forms, pointing to coordination issues in new form experiments and the persistence of traditional bureaucratic rules and hierarchical structures in most contemporary organizations.

This thesis aims to propose an alternative perspective for understanding "new organizational forms" in more nuanced, imaginative, and practically relevant ways. This aim is addressed through three studies: (a) a deep case study of Zenseact, a Swedish software company designed to be "less-hierarchical", "self-managing", and "agile"; (b) a literature review on "new organizational forms"; and (c) a study of the practitioner discourse about new forms.

This thesis contributes by advancing a "people-positive" perspective on organizing. People-positive organizing is grounded in assumptions about human beings—a Menschenbild—that views humans as inherently social, capable, and trustworthy beings rather than as boundedly rational self-interest maximizers. Accordingly, people-positive organizing is about people doing things together to achieve common goals based on the shared assumption that they can trust each other to solve problems locally through collaboration. As argued in this thesis, a people-positive perspective reveals often-overlooked differences among "(new) organizational forms" in their assumptions, purposes, principles, and practices, and nuances differences in structural features that are often overstated. Relatedly, this thesis opens avenues for coordinating and conceptualizing "new organizational forms" differently. It offers a conceptual language to examine, imagine, and design new forms not so much in terms of the structural features they are moving away from—think less-hierarchical, self-managing, de-centralized—but rather in terms of the Menschenbild, sensemaking devices, and situated purposes, principles, and practices they are moving towards.