Mellan kontroll och autonomi: Algoritmiska ledningssystem i svenska banker

Sammanfattning

Algorithmic management (AM) increasingly shifts previously human management functions to software-based systems. Existing research is dominated by gig-economy studies in AngloAmerican contexts and rarely captures both employees' and managers' perspectives on the same system. This study examines how AM systems are described and experienced in Swedish banks' advisory and customer service operations. The study is a qualitative multiple case study based on ten semi-structured interviews across three Swedish banks: eight frontline employees and two managers. The analysis applies a fourlens framework (why, how, what, where) drawing on Foucault, Power, Adler and Borys, Czarniawska, and Thoroughgood and Padilla. Five tensions emerge between employees' and managers' descriptions: management's stated intent versus employees lived experience; the reach of measurement versus the qualitative core of the work; centralized power versus local counterweights; professional judgment versus organizational visibility; and the translation of new metrics into everyday practice. The study concludes that these tensions are not determined by the technical design of AM systems, but by how the systems are translated into local practice and by the counterweights built into that translation.