PhD Defence: Cristine Dyhrberg Højgaard

In order to obtain the PhD degree, Cristine Dyhrberg Højgaard has submitted her thesis entitled:

The emergence and endurance of civic action in fluid forms of organizing
A practice-oriented exploration of flexible forms of volunteering in loose organizational attachments

The thesis explores fluid forms of organizing volunteering characterized by fussy group boundaries and lateral governance where participants self-define or self-select tasks. These forms accommodate temporarily limited and individualized volunteering patterns, which have been critiqued for hampering the durability and diluting the civic quality of volunteering. For this reason, the thesis asks how civic action emerges and endures over time in fluid forms of organizing. It provides conceptual and methodological lenses for conceiving ‘individualized’ volunteering as collective endeavors, which is rarely captured in volunteering research given its applied objects and levels of analysis. Arguing that these foci are caused by the literature’s assumption of inherently existing unitary actors pre-equipped with specific intentions, the thesis evades such assumptions by applying theoretical lenses that approach phenomena such as aims, decisions, and organizational actorhood as emergent properties of complex relational processes. To capture this the thesis analyzes patterns of interaction captured ethnographically by studying a critical case of emerging civic action amongst urban dancers and an extreme case of enduring civic action in a COVID-19 crisis response. Being a practice-oriented research project, the thesis situates itself in civil society professionals’ current debates on fluid forms of organizing and discusses its implications for these debates.

The thesis will be available from  research.cbs.dk

Primary Supervisor:

Associate Professor Liv Egholm
Department of Business Humanities and Law
Copenhagen Business School

Secondary Supervisors:

Associate Professor Julie Uldam
Department of Management, Society and Communication
Copenhagen Business School

Assessment Committee:

Professor Dennis Schoeneborn (Chair)
Department of Management, Society and Communication
Copenhagen Business School

Associate Professor Noomi Weinryb
Department of Social Sciences
Södertörn University

Professor Johan Von Essen
Department of Civil Society and Religion
Marie Cederschiöld University

Date: 22 October 2024
Time: 14:00-16:00

Location: Porcelænshaven 20 (Råvarebygningen)
Room: PHRs20
Reception: Lobby outside PHRs20

*The CBS PhD School will host a reception, which will take place immediately after the defence