Anders Ryom Villadsen takes up post as professor

On Thursday 2 February, Anders Ryom Villadsen will hold his inaugural lecture together with Michael S. Dahl. They will both talk about their career paths from their PhD programmes to being appointed professors and will provide a few indications of their future research plans.

The title of Anders Ryom Villadsen’s inaugural lecture is “Organisation and management in the public sector”. Read more about Anders’ research below.

The title of Michael S. Dahl’s inaugural lecture is “Individuals, organisations and entrepreneurship”. Read more about Michael’s research via this link.

Management in public organisations vs the private sector

Anders’ primary research area lies within public organisation and management as well as in the relationship between companies and the state. At his inaugural lecture, he will talk about two overall topics.

The first topic concerns public management. Here Anders has examined the effects of new management and looked closer at how it affects an organisation if it chooses internal promotion or hires via external recruitment. Another area of interest that Anders has worked with is the composition of municipal management teams, and he has examined how they affect the municipalities’ financial results.

The other overall topic is the interaction between the public and private sector. Here Anders has looked at the differences among public and private managers. A more recent survey, however, is about the composition of staff in public workplaces, more specifically what it means to public workplaces when they recruit employees with a background in the private sector. Results indicate that employees with several years of public work experience have a greater tendency to seek employment elsewhere when the organisation recruits new employees from the private sector. This indicates that there is still a need for more knowledge about how to establish effective relations between the public and private sector.

Diversity in management and among employees

Anders is currently working on a research project on employee diversity and discrimination and wants to conduct more surveys.

How do you create a diverse organisation and avoid discrimination in recruitment processes? Preliminary results indicate that discrimination against ethnic employees occurs and that it takes place equally as much in the public sector as in the private sector.

Research in the US and China

For the majority of his career Anders has primarily collaborated with Danish researchers, but in recent years he has also spent time abroad - including in China, where he stays once or twice a year. The stays have given him the opportunity to get to know China better and provided him with insight into how the Chinese collaborate when they conduct research. Additionally, Anders has worked in the US on several occasions. All stays abroad have been extremely useful and educative and have provided Anders with inspiration for how to work academically with his research.

You never know where your research leads you

As a researcher, Anders has been good at seizing the opportunities that have presented themselves during his career ever since his PhD programme. As such he ended up doing a much more quantitative analysis than initially planned. Since then his interest in data sets and unconventional data has shaped his research projects, and he has used several types of data that are unconventional within the research tradition in which he operates. Anders likes to throw himself into research that he does not know where will lead him. He believes that exciting results emerge when you do not know the answer in advance.

About Anders Ryom Villadsen

Today, Anders Ryom Villadsen is professor at the Department of Management at Aarhus BSS. He is married to Nadia, who is a teacher. They have four children.