Johan Bergström

Dear readers, I survived Friday's dissertation defence and am now a Doctor of Philosophy (that is the only time that you will see me use that title). What this means is that I now have my academic drivers licence (to quote dear colleagues). 
The defence was quite an experience. It is indeed hard to come up with proper answers to critical (and really hard) questions on the fly with 70 people watching the ritual. It was sort of fun, but I can actually tell you I was kind of overwhelmed by the pressure that I felt during the last week before the defence. 
So the procedure itself lasted for a couple of hours: First I had 30 minutes to present my work. Then the faculty opponent, Erik Hollnagel, had one hour to make my life hard with tricky questions connected to the thesis. And he did. Really good (but hard) questions with openings for many kinds of answers and follow-up questions. After that hour the word was given to the three members of the decision committee (who are invited to ma…

Tomorrow is D-day. D as in Dissertation. D as in Defence. So, maybe it is actually DD-day tomorrow! Time for the dissertation defence and time for getting the possibility to give a 30 minutes presentation of the 4 years of work that lie behind the words of the thesis document.

And of course I have prepared a Prezi presentation for the DD-day, and of course I would like to share it with you dear readers before giving it to the audience in Lund tomorrow. The presentation is basically my mind-map of how the research process has evolved. The basic idea is to show how three research themes were selected and based on the same research rational, research approach and theoretical framework; all aiming at exploring organisational resilience in escalating situations. Coupled to the research themes are specific research questions and they are in turn coupled to the different studies in which they are addressed. The main findings for each of the different studies are presented and finally some s…