41.
Eklund, Lisa
(författare)
Rethinking Son Preference : Gender, Population Dynamics and Social Change in the People’s Republic of China
2011
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
This dissertation explores how son preference is constructed and renegotiated in light of social change in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Based on secondary sources and interviews with women and men in rural Anhui Province as well as key informants, it addresses son preference from conceptual, methodological, empirical and ideological perspectives. The analysis centres around son preference understood as a social institution that is both gendered/sexed and has intergenerational characteristics. The dissertation suggests that in the PRC, son preference is a “double sensitive” issue to study as it has become politically incorrect due to the Care for Girls Campaign, and as it is often perceived by government officials as easily leading to criticising the population policy. It proposes that there are two main approaches to studying son preference, namely the outcome approach, which focuses on how son preference manifests itself, and the causal approach, which zooms in on different factors underpinning the institution of son preference. It argues that accounts about the scope and prevalence of son preference are often informed by an outcome approach, where sex ratio at birth (SRB) imbalance is typically regarded as a proxy indicator of son preference. However, the dissertation challenges the usefulness of using SRB as a proxy indicator and suggests that when put in relation to fertility rates, SRB can be used to model “son compulsion”, which denotes that parents want to give birth to at least one son and take action in order to meet that goal. However, as demonstrated, there is no direct link between son compulsion and the institution of son preference, since son compulsion can be triggered by what is termed the “supply-factor”, i.e. that prenatal sex-selection is becoming more available and morally and socially acceptable. When adopting a causal approach, it becomes clear that the institution of son preference is being renegotiated through a dynamic process of individual and structural factors, which are anchored in a society that is becoming increasingly commercialised and individualised, and which is marked by low fertility levels, an ageing population and large flows of rural-urban migration. Still, due to ideological reasons related to the population policy, the role of the Chinese Communist Party in disciplining social order and ideas about modernity, son preference is often depicted in both official and popular discourses as something essentially “traditional”, “rural”, “backward” and “feudal”. In reality, however, son preference is becoming renegotiated in ways which blur the divide between “rural” and “urban”, and “traditional” and “modern”.
42.
Germundsson, Per, 1956-
(författare)
Lärare, socialsekreterare och barn som far illa : om sociala representationer och interprofessionell samverkan
2011
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
The aim of the thesis is, through use of the theory of social representations, to increase knowledge about the meeting between social workers and teachers, as professional groups, during collaboration with regard to the target group, children at risk. The thesis intends to capture the parties’ perceptions of one another and of that about which they are cooperating, as well as to discuss possible consequences of these perceptions in the context of interprofessional collaboration on children at risk. Empirical data was collected through an association study. The informants consisted of 200 teachers and social workers who had participated in various collaborative projects concerning the target group of children at risk. The study shows that the two professional groups have similar representations of children at risk. The social workers’ representations of the teachers are mostly positive, but the teachers are perceived, in many cases, to lack knowledge about social workers and their field of expertise. Teachers’ representations of social workers are colored to a much greater extent by negative associations. The negative image is primarily related to social services as an organization, not to social workers as individuals. In relation to the specific area of interprofessional collaboration on children at risk, the study indicates that the involved parties’ social representations play a significant role in the collaboration process. The research of this thesis has shown that the theory of social representations provides an effective framework for the study of the collaborating professionals’ group perceptions of one another and of children at risk. A preliminary model that seeks to illuminate the role of social representations, trust, and communication in the collaborative process has been presented.
43.
Gustavsson, Klas
(författare)
Det vardagliga och det vetenskapliga : Om sociologins begrepp
2011
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
This dissertation concerns the relationship between sociology and everyday life and aims primarily to critically evaluate the positions taken in the theoretical discussion on sociological concept formation and its relation to everyday life and social sciences. The main theoretical positions in the debate are summarized in two ideal typological models: (1) The rationalist theory of an epistemological break between everyday life and social science, here represented by the scholarships of Émile Durkheim, Louis Althusser and Pierre Bourdieu; (2) the everyday-life-oriented theory of continuity between everyday life and social science, represented by Peter Winch, Harold Garfinkel and Dorothy E. Smith. By means of an explorative theoretical reconstruction and synthesis, another aim is to propose a pragmatic theory of the break between the everyday and science. This position can be found in an undeveloped version in Herbert Blumer’s idea of sensitizing concepts, but in a more advanced elaboration in Max Weber’s introduction of the ideal type, and in Alfred Schutz’ phenomenological reformulation of Weber’s interpretative sociology. The dissertation develops the pragmatic theory of break between everyday life and social science with insights from the philosophy of the later Wittgenstein.
44.
Iarskaia-Smirnova, Elena
(författare)
Class and gender in Russian welfare policies : Soviet legacies and contemporary challenges
2011
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
The general aim of this thesis is to explore the gendered and classed nature of social work and social welfare in Russia to show how social policy can be a part of and reinforce marginalisation. The overall research question is in what ways class and gender are constructed in Russian social work practice and welfare rhetoric through Soviet legacies and contemporary challenges? In addition, which actors contribute to the constitution of social work values and how this value system affects the agency of the clients? This study focuses on contradictory ideologies that are shaped in discursive formations of social policy, social work training and practice. It is a qualitative study, containing fi ve papers looking at this issue from three different perspectives: policy and institutions, culture and discourse, actors and identity. The data collection was arranged as a purposive–iterative process. The empirical material consists of qualitative interviews with social work practitioners, administrators and clients, participant observations in social services and analysis of documents of various kinds. The results show that modernisation of social life under socialism was concerned with the internalisation of new forms of discipline, standards of everyday life, collectivist values and beliefs in equality which impacted on public and private domains, including social services provision (Paper I), which was of a classed and gendered nature. The post-Soviet welfare policy is characterised by the legacies of conservative thinking and lack of discretion in social work as a profession, excessive institutionalising of children and suppression of the voices of vulnerable people. Low income parents become the objects of governmental control, and existing forms of social policy act towards fastening them in vulnerable position. Additional pressure is on those families who raise children with disabilities and on parents who have disability themselves. Stigma affects a parent on a deep emotional level and has social implications for her and the child. Thus, the politics of exclusion at the institutional level fl ows to the level of personal experience and everyday practice (Paper II). Parenting is a cultural and classed experience by liberal welfare policy, which can reinforce marginalisation through institutional structures and discourses. The discursive and narrative practices are important cultural resources used by the parents to understand their personal lives and by service providers who create their own understandings of social problems (Paper V). The structural context of social work is constituted by inequality in the social order, which is mirrored in the conditions of the labour market. The problems of a client might be an outcome of beliefs in traditional gender roles and traditional family defi nitions, which supposes inequality and subordination of women. In addition, models of social work practice often admit such a defi nition and, therefore, worsen the condition of women (Paper IV). The contemporary situation in social work in Russia is featured by under-professionalisation and thereby a low degree of autonomy, absence of critical refl ection of social work practice, and rigidity of governance (Paper III). This is the background where initiatives to change the existing social order can hardly be seen. However, social workers are gradually acquiring new knowledge and skills to effect social change in a democratic egalitarian mode rather than following the paternalist scheme of thought and action.
45.
Johansson, Mairon, 1956-
(författare)
I dialogens namn : idén om en överenskommelse mellan regeringen och ideella organisationer
2011
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
Many European countries have a model of formal agreements between the state and voluntary organisations involved in the core field of welfare, regarding their relative roles and cooperation. This dissertation analyzes the establishment of a Swedish agreement and how the cooperation leads up to the agreement. The cooperation process, known as the dialogue process, took place during more than a year, with the government inviting around eighty voluntary organisations. The theoretical framework of the dissertation is mainly what is know as institutional theory and a line of thought describing how ideas are not transferred and spread but translated and spread. The theoretical focus is on how original ideas are interpreted and why they gain a foothold in new contexts. With the help of empirical material in the form of documents, observations and interviews the dissertation shows how the idea of an agreement was spread from England to Sweden and how the government and the voluntary organisations acted during this process. One of the study’s conclusions is that the voluntary organisations took the initiative to create an agreement about “the role of game” but that the government transformed the voluntary organisations’ idea of an agreement to justify their own political goals. The Swedish agreement can therefore be seen as a step in clarifying Swedish social policy as regards responsibility for welfare. Voluntary organisations that have signed the agreement commit to contribute to securing welfare production. The dissertation shows that this role is appreciated by some of the voluntary organisations, while others question it.
46.
Kullberg, Karin
(författare)
Socionomkärrriärer - Om vägar genom yrkeslivet i en av välfärdsstatens nya professioner
2011
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
The dissertation is about career in working life – not career solely in the sense of climbing upwards in the organizational hierarchy to management level, but career as the movement that individuals or groups make over time through working life. The focus is on social workers and their professional field. The overall aim is to describe and analyse social workers’ career patterns and careers at the individual level and the motives behind them, and thus to shed light on conditions in the social workers’ field today. Another aim is to describe and analyse how the individual social worker careers interact with gender, with efforts at professionalization at both collective and individual level, and with changes in the organizational conditions for exercising the profession. The empirical material is based on questionnaires distributed to male and female social workers who qualified from the School of Social Work in Lund during the last two decades of the twentieth century and the first years of the twenty-first century. The questionnaires for the male social workers were distributed in 2004. Responses came from 61 men, or 67 per cent of all the men who qualified in 1980–1985, and from 191 men, or 74 per cent of those who qualified in 1993–2003. Questionnaires for all female social workers who qualified from the School of Social Work in Lund in 1983, 1988, 1993, 1998, and 2003 were distributed in 2009. The 352 completed questionnaires meant a response frequency of 70 per cent. The questionnaires elicit career paths by getting the respondents to describe through different variables what they have worked with since obtaining their degree as social worker. Interviews with 18 of the men who answered the questionnaire (11 who qualified about 10 years previously and 7 who qualified 5 years previously) provided a deeper understanding of the male social worker career, of men’s career motives, and of what it is like to be a man in the profession of social worker. The women’s career motives have been studied through a questionnaire extended in relation to the one completed by the male social workers. Besides questionnaires and interviews, official statistics are used in the empirical foundation of the dissertation. The studies show that social workers have a broad field of work with flexible career paths, and that both male and female social workers take advantage of this. What characterizes social workers’ career is thus mobility. The many career opportunities also mean that men, who are a sought-after minority in the social worker profession, can refrain from the traditional management career that men who are a minority in professional life are expected to pursue, and can instead choose a horizontal career in attractive parts of the social worker profession that enjoy high status. Furthermore, the studies show that there is an informal career path in the social worker profession that both men and women follow. This means that the largest field of work for social workers – the social services, chiefly the parts that involve the exercise of authority – are an entrance and transit area. The women’s most prominent career motives are the content of the work; autonomy, independence and discretion; opportunities for personal development and the potential to influence and change. The interviewed male social workers’ career motives resemble the women’s. They want a job with freedom, independence, and personal development, where they themselves can steer without too much influence from managers and politicians, and where they also have scope to have a job and simultaneously look after their children. The motive forces in social workers’ careers are thus not those of the traditional career with externally visible attributes.
47.
Körling, Gabriella, 1980-
(författare)
In Search of the State : An Ethnography of Public Service Provision in Urban Niger
2011
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
This study explores public health and education provision in Niamey, the capital of Niger, by merging the ethnographic study of public services with an anthropological analysis of the state and of local politics. Based on anthropological fieldwork carried out in a group of neighbourhoods in the periphery of Niamey, the study highlights the political dimensions of public service provision in a local arena where international development interventions and national plans meet local realities and where a wide range of actors and institutions, dis-courses, meanings, and practices are mobilized in the offering of and the regulation of access to public services. It focuses on the political, economic, and socio-cultural aspects of public service provision, too often hidden behind contemporary buzzwords of development such as community participation and decentralization that dominate global debates about education and healthcare in developing countries. The study brings forth the strategies of urban resi-dents in dealing with daily challenges in the consolidation of service provision and in educa-tion and health-seeking trajectories. It shows that access to a satisfactory treatment of illness or a successful school career is premised on the ability to navigate on the medical and educa-tion markets, which are made up of a plurality of providers and of official and unofficial costs and transactions. Further, these public services engage different actors such as commu-nity committees, traditional chiefs, local associations, the municipality and elected municipal councillors, emergent leaders, NGOs, and international development aid. The study demon-strates that despite the uncertainty of state support in health and education provision and a widespread dissatisfaction with these public services, the image of the state as service pro-vider is reproduced on a day by day basis through local efforts at securing public services.
48.
Levander, Ulrika, 1973
(författare)
Utanförskap på entreprenad. Diskurser om sociala företag i Sverige
2011
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
Over the last decade the social enterprise has gained recognition, as a social innovation aiming to address diverse societal needs in the post-industrial world. In the contemporary Swedish political discourse, social enterprises are mainly viewed as initiatives operating within the third sector, and adopting a legal organizational form with limited access to profit-distribution. Further, the social enterprise is framed as an effective innovator to combat social exclusion, and to create participation and empowerment among excluded groups. This understanding of the concept can be linked to initiatives referred to as ‘work integration social enterprises’ in a wider European discourse. In the thesis, discourses of the social enterprise are discerned in a Swedish context and related to contemporary changes in the Swedish welfare state. The implications of the welfare solutions advocated by social enterprises are also analysed and discussed. The thesis departs from a social constructivist perspective, using discourse analysis, neo-institutional analysis and perspectives of power and control as a theoretical framework. Empirically, the studies carried out are based on analysis of documents produced by state authorities and other institutionally anchored actors involved in the discourse-production of social enterprise in Sweden. In addition, the analyses are based on documents from, and qualitative interviews with participations, workers and staff in three non-profit organisations that are, or are trying to develop into, work integration social enterprises. Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is the main method of analysis, which is supplemented with other discourse analytical methods. A basic methodological assumption is that each discursive environment constructs, reproduces and confirms particular accounts for institutional purposes. In the rhetoric of the documents, as well as in individuals’ accounts on their everyday practice in the organizations studied, preferred and disparaged frames of understanding the idea of social enterprising are traced. The different use of discourse, interpretive repertoires, and narratives emerging in the empirical material are analysed, compared, and discussed in the light of the theoretical framework used, and ongoing changes of the Swedish welfare state. In analyzing the discourses of social enterprise emerging at an institutional level, the concern with inclusion in the early Swedish social enterprises primarily focused on processes of collective action and democratic governance-structures within the enterprises as a possibility to reinforce the discretion and power of marginalized groups. However, initiatives adopting a more pro-active attitude to labour market integration have emerged in recent years. Here, the social enterprise is framed as an active labour market policy tool aiming to amplify excluded people’s work-abilities in order to include them in society. The results of the thesis suggest that the change in discourse identified is consistent with what Nicolas Rose (1999) points out as typical for the discourse of the third sector in the post-industrialized world; once initiated as a societal critique it has over time become more uniform with overall political objections. This implies an ongoing state colonization of the third space, where the discourse articulated looses ground in the contribution of innovative social change. In mixing principles of the market, the voluntary sector and the public sphere, the idea of ‘social enterprise’ is blending traditionally conflicting understandings of institutional logics and organizational fields. Depending on what kind of institutional rationality that is on stake in specific accounts, various narratives of the social enterprise occurs. As a result, the institutional conditions of the human-service activities carried out by the enterprises are not always perceptible. Who has got the possibility to become an employed social entrepreneur, who is subject to workfare-measures, what participation means and how it formally relates to processes of empowerment ascribed to the social enterprise, are therefore difficult to assess. Consequently, the actions carried out by social enterprises are interpreted as an example of how the visible exercise of power and control in welfare interventions, such as activation and workfare measures, is declining – especially when the activities conducted are carried out by organizations that are perceived as being independent from the state.
49.
Livholts, Mona, 1961-
(författare)
'Women', Welfare, Textual Politics and Critique : An Invitation to a ThinkingWriting Methodology in the Study of Welfare (Republished dissertation originally published 2001)
2011
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
What is the relationship between the social construction of different categories of ’women’ and the making of welfare states in specific moments of textual politics in a Nordic welfare state context? How is it possible to develop a methodology for critical (self)reflective thinking in the process of producing academic knowledge? In this dissertation the themes of ’women’ and welfare are analysed and interpreted within a textual context of Nordic welfare state thinking. How the meaning of welfare takes shape through the category of ’women’ is discussed and critiqued with attention to epistemological and methodological issues. Individual memory work is used as a way of developing crtical self-reflection on the way academisation operates through a female individual. Additionally, creative and reflective writing methodologies such as theatre, dialogue and letter writing is used to explore complex relationships of power in the process of producing knowledge. Livholts original, intellectually stimulating and accessible dissertation is an invitation to readers in social work, sociology, and gender studies, and more broadly of methodological interest for the critical study of welfare.
50.
Ljungwald, Carina, 1975-
(författare)
The Emergence of the Crime Victim in the Swedish Social Services Act
2011
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
This study sought to explain how crime victims emerged as a target group in the Swedish Social Services Act in 2001. The findings, derived from legislative documents, a literature review, and focus group interviews with social workers, showed that the 2001 provisions both duplicated and undermined pre-existing provisions of the Social Services Act. The explicit aim of the reform was to improve services to crime victims. The provisions did not, however, change the legal responsibility of the social services, nor did they strengthen the social rights of crime victims. The social services already assumed responsibility for crime victims according to other provisions of the act. To some degree, the reform can be explained symbolically. Support for crime victims was a complicated issue for the social democratic government. The economic crisis of the early 1990s ruled out reforms that might bring high increased costs. Yet expanding crime victims’ rights at the expense of the offender (e.g. toughening penal law and promoting victim impact statements) was not in line with social democratic ideology. By enacting the 2001 provisions, the government showed its commitment to providing support to crime victims. At the same time, the provisions did not increase costs or strengthen crime victims’ rights. In this way, the provisions solved a political dilemma for the government. Incorporating the 2001 provisions in the Social Services Act may seem to have been a modest reform. Symbolic politics, however, are not empty; rather, they reflect attitudes and beliefs. This study proposed that the reform revealed the state’s increasing concern with violence against women and individual responsibility. Furthermore, the provisions may have constituted a normative reorientation of the Social Services Act, in which individual responsibility increasingly replaced solidarity, the holistic view, and a right to assistance according to need.
