Professor
University of Gothenburg
Sweden
Bengt Johansson, PhD, is a professor in journalism and mass communication at the University of Gothenburg. He is also the chair of the steering group for the SOM-institute (www.som.gu.se), member of the election committee for the Faculty of Social Sciences and has extensive experience on various positions in academia such as: head of department, director of the PhD program, member of the Research grant evaluation committee at the Swedish National Research Council, Audit of education programs in journalism and media and communication studies in Norway and Denmark.
He has been a member of the staff at the Department of journalism, media and communication at University of Gothenburg since 1991 and has developed and given courses in crisis communication, political communication, strategic communication, national media systems and quantitative research methods. He teaches at both graduate and undergraduate levels and has been the main supervisor for three PhD-students and assistant supervised three more.
Johansson got his PhD in 1998 on thesis on local media and local opinion formation. His research interest has since then mainly focused on different aspects of political communication (election news coverage, political advertising and opinion formation), journalism (professional identities, news evaluation and sociology of news) and crisis communication (political scandals, news media and crisis reporting, citizen’s crisis response, public authorities and social media). He is currently working with different projects funded by the Swedish Contingency Agency on risk and crisis communication and together will colleagues at University of Gothenburg developing a project using citizen panels to be able to measure opinion changes and crisis reactions.
Among his latest publications are Struggling for the upper hand. News sources and crisis communication in a digital media environment (Journalism Studies, published on-line January 2017), the edited volume Election Posters around the globe (with Christina Holtz-Bacha, Springer publishers, in press). The Complexity of Public Relations Work PR Managers in the Public and Private Sector in Sweden. (with Larsåke Larsson in Nordicom Review, 2015). The Dynamics of Professional Identity Why journalists view journalists working with PR as a threat to journalism. (with Magnus Fredriksson in Journalism Practice, 2014). Policy failure or moral scandal? Political accountability, journalism and new public management. (with Monika Djerf-Pierre & Mats Ekström in Media Culture and Society, 2013).