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| 2. |
- Alvinius, Aida, 1979-
(författare)
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Bridging Boundaries in the Borderland of Bureaucracies : Individual Impact on Organisational Adaption to Demanding Situations in Civil and Military Contexts
- 2013
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The purpose of this thesis is to reach a deeper understanding of how boundary spanners are bridging boundaries between uniformed bureaucratic organisations and their environment, characterised by demanding conditions.The main part of this thesis is based upon empirical data gathered through 71 interviews with Swedish civil and military informants from several uniformed organisations. Four articles have been included in this thesis in order to address the overarching aim.The results show that boundary spanners are crucial to the adaption of uniformed organisations to demanding conditions. A number of aspects that are included in the process of organisational adaption have been identified. One of the tasks is to balance between structuring and improvisation where much is at stake. The other task is to create confidence among the involved actors and contribute in different ways to create a sense of symmetry between partners. Finally, the third task for boundary spanners is to recognise improvised roles such as spontaneous links in order to maintain stressful conditions and bridge a gap in the bureaucratic organisation. The present thesis contributes to sociological theory of emotions, disaster management and military studies through a common denominator, namely the demanding context. Taken together, the findings increase awareness of how organisations act towards their environments and how individuals, especially boundary spanners, adapt the organisation to its environment. For leaders and managers, it is important to make decisions, provide mandates and authorisation, as well as invest confidence in boundary spanners. The hierarchical chain may remain in existence, but it can be made shorter and more transparent through this kind of knowledge.
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| 3. |
- Bergman Blix, Stina, 1971-
(författare)
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Rehearsing Emotions : The Process of Creating a Role for the Stage
- 2010
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis takes as its starting point the dramaturgical metaphor of the world as a stage, which is used in sociological role theories. These theories often presume what stage acting is about in order to use it as a simile for every day acting. My intention is to investigate how stage actors actually work with their roles, in particular how they work with emotions, and how it affects their private emotions.The thesis draws on participant observation and interviews with actors during the rehearsal phase of two productions at a large theatre in Sweden. The results show that the inhabiting of a role for the stage is more difficult and painstaking than has been assumed in role theories so far. Shame and insecurity are common, particularly in the start up phase of the rehearsals. Interestingly, these emotions do not disappear with growing experience, but instead become recognized and accepted as part of the work process.The primary focus is the interplay between the actors' experience and expression of emotions, often described in terms of surface and deep acting, concepts which are elaborated and put into a process perspective. Analysis of the rehearsal process revealed that actors gradually decouple the privately derived emotional experiences that they use to find their way into their characters from the emotions that they express on the stage. Thus private experiences are converted to professional emotional experiences and expressions, triggered by situational cues. When the experience has been expressed the physical manifestation can be repeated with a weaker base in a simultaneous experience, since the body remembers the expression. It is important though, that the emotional expression is not completely decoupled from a concomitant experience; then the expression looses its vitality. The ability to professionalize emotions makes the transitions in and out of emotions less strenuous but can infiltrate and cause problems in the actors' intimate relations.
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| 4. |
- Dahlberg, Caroline, 1976-
(författare)
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Picturing the Public : Advertising Self-Regulation in Sweden and the UK
- 2010
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Across the globe, people are everyday audiences of advertising images, which have become integrated in our life worlds. Advertising images are entangled with interesting moral conflicts. This study analyses the decision-processes of advertising self-regulators, who are in the midst of such moral conflicts, with the purpose of showing how and why they decide if advertising images are acceptable or not.Two organizations based in different countries are included in the study; The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) in the United Kingdom and The Trade Ethical Council against Sexism in Advertising (ERK) in Sweden. The empirical material consists of interviews with 38 people, images and text documents, from the two mentioned self-regulatory bodies, and some (participant) observation. The study focuses on cases of potentially offensive advertisements. The material is primarily analysed using the theory of worlds of worth, developed by Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot.The thesis argues that advertising self-regulation is about ascertaining, and making compromises between, conventions of morality. The study demonstrates the pattern of how the contextual circumstances influence the moral decisions that are made. It is shown that a decisive feature of the decisions is to conceptualize the general public in a justified way. This means that decision-makers picture the public as types of people who hold one or a combination of moral logics, and assume that they use these to interpret and evaluate advertising images. How these publics are defined depends on how the settings of the different advertising images are collectively interpreted by the decision-makers.The thesis argues more generally that to understand people’s values we must look at conflict situations in which current morals surface, such as the ways they appear in relation to advertising images.
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| 5. |
- Florén, Thomas, 1969-
(författare)
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Talangfabriken : Om organisation av kunskap och kreativitet i skivindustrin
- 2010
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The purpose of this dissertation is to describe, explain and understand how record companies identify and develop new music and new talent. The analysis is carried out on three levels: individual, organizational and sector level. In a record company, this task formally goes to A&R (Artist and Repertoire). This dissertation takes its point of departure in how the capacity for discovering new talent can be understood in terms of knowledge, creativity and competence and how this capacity is affected in the meeting between the record company and the industry.The theoretical framework of the dissertation spans two sociological fields: the sociology of organizations and the sociology of knowledge. While it takes its organizational starting point in the Knowledge Company Approach, it employs a practice-based approach to discuss knowledge. I argue that within the Knowledge company approach there are two contrasting ways to understand knowledge; a distinction is made between knowledge- and creativity-intensive enterprises. The results show that the record industry’s polarized structure can be seen as a result of the Knowledge Company’s typical problems.The A&R’s work is described as including two phases, one intuitive and one analytical. The intuitive assessment is direct, unconscious and without reflection. This ability has been described as "intuition" and "gut feeling". The analytical phase adds analysis and reflection based on knowledge. The results from the interviews with A&R’s reveal the limit of formal and explicit knowledge not only in the choice of music but also in the marketing strategies.The overarching picture is one in which record companies move in a space characterized by tension between dichotomous forces – art and commercialism, creativity and knowledge, culture and economy, chaos and order, but where opposite poles are not mutually exclusive but complementary.
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| 6. |
- Forsberg Kankkunen, Tina, 1969-
(författare)
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Två kommunala rum : Ledningsarbete i genusmärkta tekniska respektive omsorgs- och utbildningsverksamheter
- 2009
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The aim of this study is to describe and partially explain how management is shaped in female-dominated social care and education services and male-dominated technical services, and how this contributes to creating and reproducing a gender system in municipal organizations. This was achieved by interviewing male and female operative managers in social care and education services and technical services. The managerial work of operative managers was also problematized in relation to activities at other organizational levels – the operational versus the strategic. The theoretical fields used in the study are primarily those having to do with organization and gender. I describe how power structures like sex and gender influence the construction of management; for example, genderized environments generate managerial action patterns, resources, and organizational prerequisites. The analytical results show that managerial work in social care and education services differs in practice from managerial work in technical services. Social care and education services have poorer organizational prerequisites for social interaction among organization levels than do technical services. The discrete prerequisites for managerial work make it more difficult for operative managers in social care and education services to support and interact with staff at the operative level than it is for operative managers in technical services. Operative managers in social care and education services also find it more difficult to actively influence the decision processes than do operative managers in technical services. When operative managers in social care and education services are cut off from strategic decisions and prevented from showing and explaining their needs and activities, the gender system in municipal organizations can be reproduced in the shadows.
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| 7. |
- Fuehrer, Paul, 1963-
(författare)
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Om tidens värde : En sociologisk studie av senmodernitetens temporala livsvärldar
- 2010
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This dissertation explores the relationship between people’s conceptualisation and use of time in everyday life against the background of the political economy of the late modern welfare state. The main focus lies upon their evaluation of different time-uses in order to approach a better understanding of the moral economy of time. Special consideration is given to the role of commodification of time and the experience of time scarcity. Another topic investigated is the association of time with the striving for ecological sustainability in everyday live.The study is based upon three empirical materials. The first one consists of a subset of Statistic Sweden’s time-use database for inhabitants of Stockholm. The other two materials are qualitative interview studies. One was conducted with 85 unemployed people in Sörmland and Jämtland, the other with 45 inhabitants of Stockholm. The interviewees in the latter study were asked to consider two options for the future of welfare politics in Sweden: increasing wages combined with the same work hours as today or a substantial decrease in working hours accompanied by stagnating wages.Many interviewees consider time scarcity to be an important issue that needs to be integrated into the traditional concept of welfare. Time conflicts in everyday life, also regarding the choice of sustainable options, are solved with a certain moral flexibility still dominated by work ethics. Some interviewees try to articulate counter-images to the commodified concept of time by challenging traditional conceptions of the value of time and envision an ecological sound time use. These attempts draw attention to the importance of temporal commons such as vacations and also the need for a conscious time-politics in order to strengthen temporal welfare.
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| 8. |
- Haglunds, Magnus, 1969-
(författare)
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Enemies of the People : Whistle-Blowing and the Sociology of Tragedy
- 2009
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Enemies of the People is a book that examines whistle-blowing—i.e., the unauthorized conveyance of sensitive information to mass media and authorities—and the social responses this performance provokes. The book develops a fresh view of this phenomenon by framing the trend of events according to a couple of fundamental elements found in tragedy.The book also includes a critical appraisal of the perspectives that set the tone in the existent whistle-blowing research. The prevalent one-sidedness found in this field of research is reviewed and contrasted with the contributions delivered in the present study.The analysis is based on three famous whistle-blowing cases that received a lot of attention in mass media: Ingvar Bratt and the Bofors affair; Odd F. Lindberg and the Norwegian seal hunting affair; and finally, Paul van Buitenen and the Leonardo-affair in the European Commission.The author claims that by studying the sociology of tragedy, it is possible to develop a new way of examining social processes where the final outcome is the excommunication of the appointed culprits through, for example, expulsion or avoidance. This purgatorial process is treated as a social status degradation, where the offender experiences a thorough social identity transformation that turns his or her social position to a lower social rank than initially held.The title of this book alludes to a stage play written by the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. His dramatic piece An Enemy of the People, written in 1882, plays a prominent part in this study.
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| 9. |
- Scaramuzzino, Gabriella, 1979-
(författare)
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Sexsäljares och sexköpares kollektiva handlande på internet : En svensk "fuckförening"?
- 2014
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis aims to understand and explain the importance that prostitution forums have for the exercise of power and influence in the area of prostitution. It also seeks to clarify how these forums developed and were able to occur within a Swedish context. Sweden was the first country to legislate to criminalise only the buying, but not the sale, of sexual services. Social work provisions aims to get people out of prostitution. The thesis is based on an ethnographic study of the three largest Swedish prostitution forums during a two-year period. The empirical material consists of both quantitative participant and content analysis and field notes from observation of the interactions on the forums. The theoretical framework is based mainly on A Theory of Fields by Neil Fligstein and Doug McAdam. It focuses on the collective action on - and between - fields and how institutions are reproduced and changed. The results show that most of the content was published by a smaller group of actors. The interaction can be divided into the following subjects: social shims; information; negotiations and rules; advice and support; viewpoints on the forum as well as discussion on prostitution and its regulation. Moreover, the study shows that the forums enabled both sex service providers and sex clients to meet collectively, pursue common interests and discuss which rules should prevail in the prostitution market. Providers also pursued self-organised harm reduction social measures. This form of self-help was also sanctioned by a municipal prostitution unit, which can be interpreted as if it acted in a contrary direction to the government’s prostitution policy. The actors in the forums perceived themselves to be stigmatised by society, where sex service providers to a greater extent than sex clients, described a form of stigma. In the forums they could, however, feel a sense of belonging. The actors perceived themselves to be monitored by the Swedish state and they collectively self-regulated the interaction. Sex service providers and sex clients also co-operated, on occasions, with the Swedish state in order to jointly combat child prostitution, human trafficking and organised crime.
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| 10. |
- Yazdanpanah, Soheyla, 1963-
(författare)
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Att upprätthålla livet : Om lågavlönade ensamstående mödrars försörjning i Sverige
- 2008
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This dissertation is about the experiences of low-paid single mothers in sustaining their families in Sweden in the early 2000. The investigation builds upon interviews with twenty low-paid single mothers living and working in Stockholm. Ten of the women are Swedish-born and the other ten are Iranian-born but have been residing in Sweden for several years. A majority of the Swedish-born women belong to the working class, while most of the Iranian-born mothers are from a middle class background. This study is based on an extended definition of sustenance that encompasses support for livelihood and meeting the family needs that conform to socially accepted norms. Sustenance requires incomes to cover expenses and care work. The informants sustain their families mostly from wage work. However, they also seek allowances from the social security system to buy goods and services that they combine with care work to sustain the family. The care work for younger children demands much time and physical work, while caring for older children requires more mental and emotional work. Sustenance for these mothers implies fulfilling all these demands and also to ensure that the children’s’ needs are met. Several factors influence the mothers’ sustenance. Low wages and the single responsibility for children means less money and more time devoted to care work. Few fathers take significant responsibility for their children’s sustenance. The mothers get support from their social networks, often from other women and from the welfare system. Ethnic background negatively affects sustenance for the Iranian-born mothers mostly in the form of reduced cultural and social capital. Children are the highest priority among all the families. However, the priorities may differ among the families and are connected to the mothers’ class, ethnic background and their access to cultural capital.
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