Lena Högberg

Lena Högberg is an Associate Professor in Business Administration at Linköping University, affiliated with the Department of Management and Engineering (IEI) and the Business Administration division (FEK). She serves as Programme Director for the Business and Economics Programme. Her research focuses on cross-sectoral collaboration, entrepreneurship, and sustainability within regulated environments, particularly addressing societal challenges like welfare, diversity, and inclusion. She holds a PhD in Business Administration from Linköping University (2010) and a Master’s degree in Business Administration from the same institution (2004).

Her work explores organizational complexities in cross-sector partnerships, such as nonprofit-public collaborations and civil society initiatives, emphasizing reflexivity and adaptability. She studies trust dynamics in customer choice systems and the unintended consequences of public sector transformations. Current projects include sustainability dilemmas in municipal corporations managing water and wastewater services.

Key research themes include boundary spanning in cross-sector collaboration, trust and distrust in institutional logics, and entrepreneurship’s role in public sector reforms. Her articles analyze these themes through cases in Sweden and beyond, contributing to organizational theory and public administration literature. She teaches courses in organization theory, entrepreneurship, and research methodology, supervising master’s theses in these areas.

Lena collaborates with the Centre for Municipality Studies and Industrial Environmental Technology on sustainability projects. Her work bridges academia and practice, addressing real-world governance and innovation challenges in public and hybrid organizations.