I started my PhD at the School of Economics and Management in March 2009. Before that I did a “stagiaire” at the European Commission DG Environment in Brussels, and I also worked for an international language school based in Switzerland, managing relationships with customers in the Middle East. My university education includes masters degree in history, political science and business administration, all from Lund University.

My dissertation, The Arena and the Entrepreneurial City, deals with the city’s organizing in general and with public-private collaboration in particular, in the context of building new sports arenas. Private-public collaboration has traditionally been described as a win-win strategy, but here a slightly different history emerges. Private-public collaboration is described as emerging in an institutional gray zone where politicians and private entrepreneurs establish personal contacts and build mutual trust with the help of intermediaries and gifts. Within the city’s bureaucracy, the private-public collaborations are treated as exceptional projects. As these projects are exceptions from the ordinary rules and routines, they disclose how power is exercised in the relations between politicians and civil servants, and between these and the private entrepreneurs. The dissertation challenges the notions previously used for characterizing the entrepreneurial city's organizing, and it contributes with new knowledge on how to understand private-public collaborations.