Research profile

Head of the Organizational Sociology Research Group.

Administrative profile

Head of  the Early Career Researcher Development Program, Institut for Sociologi og Socialt Arbejde, AAU

Research profile

Member of AAU's Health Mission's Management team.

Research profile

Ninna Meier is a qualitative researcher who studies organising, change and leadership & management in public organisations. She has conducted research in public sector healthcare organisations since 2009, where she has studied clinical managerial work, coherency across boundaries, the role of space, materiality and relational aspects of work and leadership.

Through her collaboration with Sue Dopson at Oxford University, she has developed a framework for operationalising and studying the important role of context and its relationship to actions and change:

Ninna Meier and Sue Dopson (eds.) 2019: Context in Action and How to Study It. Illustrations from Health Care. Oxford University Press. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/context-in-action-and-how-to-study-it-9780198805304?lang=en&cc=ee

Ninna Meier & Sue Dopson (2021): What is context? Methodological reflections on the relationship between context, actors, and change. In Managing Healthcare Organisations in Challenging Policy Contexts. (2021). Edited by Roman Kislov, Diane Burns, Bjorn Erik Mork & Kathleen Montgomery. London: Palgrave Macmillan

Since 2019, she has been affiliated as a senior researcher at the Center for Clinical Research at Amager-Hvidovre Hospital, where she works on clinical decision-making and patient safety from an interdisciplinary approach. Moreover, with Kasper Trolle Elmholdt, she currently works on the use of AI technology in emergency medicine services.

Another important theme in Ninna’s research focuses on the significance of relationships for complex organisational change processes and the ways in which different methods can be used to support such processes (see Hajjar, Gittell, Meier, & Gunn 2024 or Meier & Ingerslev 2023). Ninna has also conducted longitudional, ethnographic comparative research into how organisational coherence can be developed across geography, organization, profession, and disciplines, particularly exploring the leadership and coordination practices needed to maintain such structures and relationships over time. With Janne Seemann, Ninna has expanded this work in a project investigating integrative mechanisms in cross-sectoral patient pathways.

Lastly, Ninna publishes on and teaches academic writing as a craft. With Charlotte Wegener and Caitlin McMullin she carries out several PhD courses on academic writing each year (A Writer’s Life + Writing the PhD Dissertation: Structure, Quality and Contribution). Ninna has also given workshops and seminars, e.g. at The Ethnography Atelier https://www.ethnographyatelier.org/workshops and through her affiliation at the Interdisciplinary Research in Health Sciences research group (IRIHS) at Oxford University. With Trish Greenhalgh, Gemma Hughes, and Chrysanthi Papoutsi she has written about the particular challenges that interdisciplinary early career researchers may face when they write across social science and medicine – specifically what can be done to develop and support an interdisciplinary academic environment (Meier, Greenhalgh, Hughes & Papoutsi 2024).

PhD Supervision

I primarily supervise Ph.d. students who work within the field of organisational sociology, especially within theories of organizational change, relational aspects of work, coordination, boundary work, leadership, implementation and the use of technology in decision-making processes. Methodologically, within qualitative methods, e.g., ethnographic-, practice- and process- based approaches.