Lisa Bäckvall

Lisa Bäckvall is an Assistant Professor (Universitetslektor) at the Department of Supply Chain and Operations Management (SCOM), School of Engineering (JTH), Sweden, at Jönköping University (JU).  

Lisa Bäckvall has been active in various roles and on different levels, as a student (first-, second- and third-cycle), member of the student union board, entrepreneur (part of education), teacher (at JIBS and JTH) and researcher (CeFEO and SCOM) at Jönköping University since 2003. Already in 1997, she was intrigued by the recently formed profile of entrepreneurship and internationalization by the Jönköping University Foundation.  

In 2022 she was awarded Ph.D. in Business Administration from Jönköping International Business School (JIBS) with the thesis "The coexistence of Family, ownership and business: Conceptualizing entanglement and business family ownering” with supervisors, firstly, Ethel Brundin (JIBS) and Leif Melin (JIBS), and, secondly, Leif Melin and Anna Larsson (University of Skövde). Opponent for the defense was Prof. Robin Holt (Copenhagen Business School), and the examining committee: Prof. Denise Fletcher (University of Luxembourg), Prof. Jonas Gabrielsson (Halmstad University), and Assoc. Prof. Marie-Léandre Gomez (ESSEC Business School, Paris).  

Lisa Bäckvall holds a Ph.D. and M.Sc. in Business Administration from Jönköping International Business School (JIBS). She also studied at Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia, and India Institute of Management Bangalore, India, in 2006. During her research education at JIBS, she has been a visiting PhD Candidate at ESADE Business & Law School, Barcelona (2011), and ESSEC Business School (2012), Paris. Bäckvall's social origin is from Arjeplog (Lapland), and she has work experience in Ireland, France, Austria, and New Zealand.  

Research 

Bäckvall has worked in the applied global research project on successful transgenerational entrepreneurship practices, the STEP project. The project focused on the ‘new’, i.e., how families generate new opportunities through business models, processes, products, companies, and entrepreneurs. The aim was to facilitate family businesses worldwide to understand the entrepreneurial requirements for long-term growth and productivity that could generate prosperity for many generations. 

Bäckvall has experience researching gender, strategy, succession, and ownership (corporate governance) in the empirical context of family business using primarily qualitative but also quantitative approaches. The long-term goal is: ‘Play the world sustainable’. The future research aim is to develop further the assumption of business family ownering and governering by exploring these novel and alternative concepts (Bäckvall, 2022) in various industrial production decision contexts toward generating resilient structures for organizing sustainable work. Research interests are, for instance: 

·         Relational governering (the conceptual foundation of corporate governance)

·         Gender

·         Business family contexts

·         Research methods (structural reflexive interpretivism)

·         Power

With a historical path of co-creation with researchers and practitioners in the STEP project, Bäckvall strives via co-creation towards co-knowing or co-(k)enabling together with forward-oriented social actors in the exploration of (what if) revised long-term sustainable business assumptions. 

For her research article: “Family business women in media discourse: the business role and the mother role” she was awarded, Highly Commended, by the Emerald LiteratiNetwork.  

At the School of Engineering (JU), she is teaching Leadership and Project Management, Practitioner Oriented Research (third cycle level) and supervising and examining thesis work at the undergraduate level. She is currently the examiner and course responsible for Vetenskapligt arbetssätt och kommunikation (research methods). 

Bäckvall is a certified member of company board work (Certifierad ledamot för små och medelstora företag) av StyrelseAkademin (a non-for-profit organization with the aim to increase competencies of professional work in company boards in Sweden).