| 1. |
- Henriksson, Malin, 1971-
(författare)
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Att bygga ett samhälle : Tid, rum och politiska visioner i bostadspolitiken 1901–1947
- 2021
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This dissertation is a study of political modernization in Sweden, focusing on the formation of modern housing policy. The analysis reveals how changing concepts relating to time and space redefine a political and social order, thereby laying the foundation for the welfare state. In the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century Sweden saw rapid industrialization, urbanization and extensive migration in and out of the country, but also problems such as poverty, poor working conditions, overcrowded housing and epidemics. Housing policy did not only express ideas and strategies for how people should live in the modern industrialized world; it was also introduced as a political instrument to create a modern society and a modern population. In the first decades of the twentieth century, government reports and bills on housing presented new ways of constructing political subjects and political community, along with an emerging conviction that political reforms were necessary to create a modern society.The investigation emphasizes the importance of adopting a longer time frame when analyzing political change. It combines Reinhart Koselleck’s research program and method for the study of diachronic conceptual change with Quentin Skinner’s speech-act theory and tools for the synchronic study of political rhetoric. The aim of the dissertation is to analyze conceptual change in Swedish public policy about housing in the period 1901–1947. The aim is specified by the following research questions: How does the construction of political subjects and political community change during this period? How does meaning-making concerning time and space change, and how does such change relate to new ways of conceptualizing political subjects and political community? How do these conceptual shifts contribute to shape the conditions for the welfare state?The dissertation contributes to the scholarly understanding of welfare state formation by demonstrating how temporality and spatiality in conceptual formations contributed to the making of the Swedish welfare state. It demonstrates in empirical detail how time and space were used in the shift from an organically interpreted nation to a modern society, and in the emphasizing and evaluation of political subjects such as the earth-bound and loyal peasant, the transcendent modern worker, the flexible yet stable nuclear family, and the sociable democratic human being.
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| 2. |
- Mc Glinn, Malin
(författare)
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Translating Neoliberalism : The European Social Fund and the Governing of Unemployment and Social Exclusion in Malmö, Sweden
- 2018
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis is concerned with how the governing of unemployment and social exclusion is accomplished through labor market projects that are initiated, tailored, and co- financed by the European Social Fund. The aim is to map and problematize how such projects, as examples of neoliberal programs of government that promote social cohesion and combat unemployment amongst identified “ethnic others,” become operational and legitimized in the Swedish context through multiple acts of translation. By scrutinizing the discursive, calculative, and visual practices that constitute them, the thesis also considers some of the consequences of this way of governing as well as the larger political landscapes in which they function. Ultimately, the political problem that is addressed concerns how certain “truths” about unemployed “ethnic others” in Sweden are facilitated within and co- produced by the European Social Fund and the projects it sets in motion. It thereby calls into question practices that are legitimized in the name of diversity, inclusion, and tolerance. The analysis includes discussions about the multivalent relationship between colonial and neoliberal rationalities of government, as well as how compassion and pity function to legitimize certain practices of inclusion.
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| 3. |
- Alnebratt, Kerstin, 1964-, et al.
(författare)
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Feminism som byråkrati : Jämställdhetsintegrering som strategi
- 2016
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Bok (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Feminism som byråkrati beskriver utvecklingen av svensk jämställdhetspolitik. Främst behandlas idén om jämställdhetsintegrering. En historieskrivning, men också en analys. Från början av 1990-talet fram till idag. Vilka frågor och krav har kunnat ställas inom ramen för denna politik? Och inte minst, vad har gjorts omöjligt?
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| 4. |
- Arvidsson, Viktor, 1984-
(författare)
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Digital transformation : the material roles of IT resources and their political uses
- 2015
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- As IT became ubiquitous, we recognized that IT was everywhere but in our theories. Despite significant efforts, Information System (IS) research is still in desperate search for the IT artifact. Recent reviews show that IS research first and foremost considers IT resources as a socio-technical and managerial concern. Analyses of inertia are restricted to cognitive limitations or technical challenges of IT development and use as separate activities. Hence, IS research assumes that more development resources, extended training, and better management could turn most failures into success. In this thesis, I posit that IS strategy research often treats normal failure as unexpected to maintain the rational idea that managers are in control and that IT does not matter in and of itself. I argue that planned and convergent views of change work well under stable and unitary conditions but in this way fail to account for the complexity of current IS strategy practice. To substantiate this claim, I demonstrate how IS research routinely neglects the material IT use story in the context of digital transformation (DT) studies and social informatics. Political conflict is a constant theme in IS strategy implementation research, yet few studies provided explanation for the apprehension that managers and workers display during the introduction of new IT resources; even as most managers remain men I found also no study that theorized gender politics as related to IS strategy outcomes. I argue in particular that the IS fields routine adherence to borrowed assumptions about the pace, linearity, and sequence of radical change have limited IS scholars to marginally improve on received DT narratives in which IT plays little or no part as IT appears as an agent mostly before and after DT. Though much is said about how IT triggers and enables organizational change, the actual processes and mechanisms that underlies IS strategy change enactments are thus poorly understood. To examine how the material roles of IT resources and their political use can be captured and explained, I summarize and synthesize insights grounded in empirics from four appended research papers. In this way, I chart avenues for material theorizing of micro-affordances and institutions, and develop an IS strategy-as-practice lens that attends IT use as a material practice. After developing this lens, I discuss how material practice perspectives afford deep understanding of the materialities through which actors create, sustain, and transform organizational practice with digital material, and highlight some opportunities to observe the social consequences of IT use in the context of critical studies on men and masculinities and digital gender.
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| 5. |
- Bacchi, Carol, et al.
(författare)
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Feminist Discursive Institutionalism - A Poststructural Alternative
- 2014
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Ingår i: NORA. - : Routledge. - 0803-8740 .- 1502-394X. ; 22:3, s. 170-186
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This paper joins the ongoing conversation about the desirability, or undesirability, of feminists becoming "new institutionalists", which is linked to broader concerns about feminists seeking legitimacy as political "scientists". With "feminist discursive institutionalism" as exemplar, it introduces the argument that paradigms, and hence methodologies, matter politically because they create different realities. To illustrate this proposition it examines the political implications of the different meanings of discourse, and related concepts of power, ideas, and "agency"/subjectivity, in Habermasian-influenced discursive institutionalism and in Foucauldian-inspired poststructuralist analysis. A key issue, it contends, is the extent to which institutions (and other political categories) are conceptualized as discrete entities or as more open-ended "assemblages". This analysis, we suggest, solicits feminist researchers to reflect on the political implications of their theoretical investments.
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| 6. |
- Björling, Nils, 1979, et al.
(författare)
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Politics of the rurban void
- 2023
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Ingår i: Space and Polity. - : Routledge. - 1470-1235 .- 1356-2576. ; In Press
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- City-centric planning in Sweden has led to the dominance of stereotyped visions for both urban and rural areas within policy and planning practice. To challenge such a limited understanding, this study conceptualizes the rurban void. The aim of this article is to operationalize the rurban void as an analytical framework that extends beyond the urban and rural conceptual divide and can clarify how a neoliberal and city-centric planning practice in Sweden de-politicizes the urban and rural outside. The article discusses the potentials of a perspective that challenges urban privilege and opens up opportunities for the re-politicisation of spatial transformation.
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| 7. |
- Brandén, Jennie, 1984-
(författare)
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In the name of safety : power, politics and the constitutive effects of local governing practices in Sweden
- 2022
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In a time of uncertainty and risk, safety has become an increasingly significant concern. In Sweden, a powerful discourse around public safety has developed in recent years, moving it to the top of the political agenda. While safety is often regarded as a prerequisite for a democratic and gender-equal society in Sweden, previous research demonstrates that safety is increasingly linked in public politics to matters of national and individual security, crime, and immigration. Considering this discursive change in relation to the neoliberal transformation of the Swedish welfare state, the centrality of public safety as a political ideal in Sweden raises questions. Why is safety increasingly seen as a self-evident answer to a range of societal issues in Sweden? Why safety, rather than equality, democracy, or justice?Drawing upon a governmentality framework, this thesis examines how, and with what effects, safety is being discursively produced as a political problem in Sweden and how it operates as a practice of governmentality. Three widespread practices of governing safety in Swedish municipalities are examined: community-based safety walks; the safety certification of city centers; and the contracting of private guards to patrol public spaces. The study applies a political ethnography approach and is based on policy materials, observations, and interviews. The overall analysis of these case studies combines to demonstrate that a technical, calculable, and depoliticized representation of safety is produced. Thus, safety is largely reduced to a set of technical details to be measured, fitted into a protocol, ticked off a checklist, or fixed by making changes to the physical environment. This enables the commodification of safety, manifested in the branding of cities as safe and the outsourcing of responsibility for safety to the private security industry. In this context, safety largely becomes a matter of order and uniformity in public space, while those deviating from these normative ideals are marked as unsafety problems. The various societal issues being addressed as “unsafety problems” are in turn marked as individual or community failures. In effect, these issues are detached from their social and political circumstances and understood as problematic primarily due to causing unsafety to others. The analysis shows how the governing of safety in this manner produces a boundary between the familiar, “Swedish”, “us”—to be made safe in public space—and the estranged, “non-Swedish”, “others,” who are marked as problematic and out of place. However, these exclusions are concealed by the depoliticized representation of safety as a technical matter as well as a virtue.The thesis shows how these deeply political acts of deciding who is legitimate or illegitimate in our public spaces, and how altering dimensions of democratic accountability and the monopoly on using force, are enacted through the government of safety as a set of technicalities, largely without political contestation. While safety is often put forward as a democratic tool of inclusion and access to public space, the thesis claims that the government of safety operates through a de-democratizing dynamic of governmental precarization. This means that, despite the centrality of safety as a political ideal, the politics of safety neither challenges nor changes, but rather reproduces and reinforces, prevailing relations of power and the current political order of things. Shadowed by our own demands for safety, we fail to recognize that this order both (re)produces and relies upon a state of unsafety.
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| 8. |
- Brandén, Jennie, et al.
(författare)
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Selling the Safe City? The Politics of Certification and the case of Purple Flag Sweden
- 2019
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Ingår i: Offentlig Förvaltning. Scandinavian Journal of Public Administration. - Göteborg : Göteborgs universitet. - 2000-8058 .- 2001-3310. ; 23:3-4, s. 23-41
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In recent years, bureaucratic and market-based tools such as certifications have become common tools for addressing complex, gendered and power-related issues such as discrimination, gender equality and, in this case, safety. Drawing on a discursive understanding of policy and politics, this paper examines how safety in public space is being addressed and given meaning in nine Swedish cities, working with a safetycertification entitled ‘the Purple Flag’. Our analysis shows that in the work with PurpleFlag, safety is represented as a technical problem, requiring a standardised method, and as a tool for growth, focusing on the commercial potential of safety for the city. These representations position the safety worker as mainly administrative and competitive, while the recipients of safety become visitors and consumers. Purple Flag also gears local safety measures towards urban business areas, rather than towards places with high levels of crime or unsafety, and primarily target those disturbing the order of the market in the city centre as problematic. Our conclusion is that the method of certification creates major difficulties for politicising safety and instead enables an “economisation of the political”,producing safety for the urban market rather than for urban citizens.
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| 9. |
- Bremer Gagnesjö, Signe, et al.
(författare)
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Kollektivtrafikens könstyranni
- 2021
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Ingår i: (O)tryggt? Makt, plats och motstånd. - 9789189077157
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Bokkapitel (populärvet., debatt m.m.)
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| 10. |
- Brännström, Leila, et al.
(författare)
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What is the state of critique today? : A conversation with Anders Johansson, Sharon Rider and Malin Rönnblom
- 2011
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Ingår i: Eurozine. - 1684-4637. ; :2011-10-12
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Tidskriftsartikel (populärvet., debatt m.m.)abstract
- Is what is taken for critique today genuinely self-questioning or merely the confirmation of the moral consensus? In the neoliberal culture of the audit, has critique been deprived of its role as check on ideology? And does preference for impact-oriented research produce political compliance rather than independent critical thought?
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