Ulrika Westrup

Ulrika Westrup, Associate Professor at the Department of Service Management and Service Studies. My research primarily focuses on public sector organisations where my emphasis has been on studying welfare services. For many years, I’ve been conducting practice-centric research together with representatives of social services, education, and children’s and adolescent psychiatry. For me, practice-centric research is important due to the goal of creating knowledge to be shared by practitioners and researchers. 

My three most recent research projects deal with: (1) service innovation in social services and education, (2) producing a model for calculating the time and cost of collaboration between social services and education, and (3) the integration of unaccompanied asylum-seeking refugee children. Among other things, I am a co-author of the books Gänsöverskridande chefskap: Arbete över organisatoriska gränser i människonära tjänsteverksamheter [Boundary-spanning leadership: Work across organisational boundaries in human service organisations] and Tjänstelogik i välfärden: En modell för samskapande mellan professionella med barnet i fokus [The service logic in welfare: A model for co-creation between professionals with the child in focus]. One ongoing project deals with how coordination associations guarantee innovation processes on the basis of a service perspective. During these processes, educational administrations, social services, care administrations, primary care units, psychiatry, the Public Employment Service, and the Social Insurance Agency are tasked with jointly facilitating young adults in need of coordinated support that enables them to create their value, e.g. achieving increased wellbeing, commencing studies, entering working life. 

What drives me as a researcher is wanting to contribute towards the development of public sector organisations with the aim of showing and understanding how these organisations can improve as regards making use of extant resources. There is a major need to enhance the possibility of developing the service processes and innovations of public sector organisations which have the value creation of both their users and society in focus.

I am active at Centrum för ledning av offentliga organisationer (CLOO) [Centre for Management of Public Sector Organisations] (http://www.ch.lu.se/samverkan/centrum-foer-ledning-av-offentliga-organi…).