"Soft" and "hard" issues of management: is the Nordic management research divided?

The global competition and demographic changes are causing remarkable structural changes in the economies of Nordic countries and the whole Western world. At the same time the opportunities provided by IT technology have made the work of certain employee groups independent of time and place. Correspondingly also the nature of the work is changing radically. But do our current management practices reflect these phenomena, or are we still stuck in those developed for mass industry 100 years ago? Can we improve productivity without sacrificing quality of working life and work wellbeing? Does the recent Nordic management research recognize these issues? Is there any typically Nordic management research? We try to answer these questions by a quantitative analysis of the current Nordic management research literature from the years 2000 - 2013, and by comparing it to other Western European countries and USA. To identify the relevant publications we made searches in the Elsevier Scopus data base, looking at the articles metadata (titles, keywords and abstracts). Our search strings contained a management/ leadership related term combined either with a working conditions or a productivity related term. The analysis has been performed as part of the collaborative Nordic project "Good Nordic management practices - state of the art and the way forward"