1.
Andersson Malmros, Robin
(författare)
Translating grand challenges into municipal organizing : Prevention of terrorism, extremism, and radicalization in Scandinavia
2022
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
This thesis investigates why and how municipalities organize to address grand challenges. Previous research shows that municipalities have increased their policymaking and organizing in relation to grand challenges, often without any national regulations forcing them to do so. The rationales, processes, and mechanisms underpinning this type of municipal voluntarism are understudied. The research is based on the case of Scandinavian municipalities and their efforts to prevent terrorism, extremism, and radicalization (TER). From playing a miniscule role in Scandinavian counter-terrorism policies until the 2010s, municipal employees such as teachers, social workers, and youth workers have in current practice become the backbone of the fight against TER. Municipalities generally have little or no strategic or practical experience of preventing TER, resulting in extensive uncertainty and ambiguity as to how to organize the relevant efforts. In this thesis, the process leading from grand challenge to municipal organizing is framed as a translation process. The analysis uses concepts from sociological institutional theory and social movement studies, and is informed by data from newspaper articles, municipal policies, interviews, and observations. The findings are presented in four papers. This thesis shows how the decentralization of a grand challenge from being an international or national to a municipal responsibility is a multi-layered, highly discursive translation process that is dependent on reframing a challenge as a local one. Regarding TER, the local frame was based on a new institutional vocabulary, triggered and legitimized by critical events, which elite actors used to localize the grand challenge. Once localized, institutional pressure was exerted on municipalities to organize preventive efforts. While institutional pressure caused rapid organizational activity, it also led to the ambiguous translation and editing of concepts and preventive approaches with unintended, paradoxical, and problematic consequences. Many of the observed organizing activities centered on rhetorical efforts to legitimize the challenge and its associated concepts and practices. This was a consequence of the grand challenge being contested locally, since it introduced a new institutional logic that conflicted with those dominating the local institutional context.
2.
Bajqinca, Nuhi
(författare)
Mother Tongue Education - The Interest of a Nation. A policy study in Sweden 1957-2017.
2019
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
This doctoral thesis is a policy study about mother tongue education policies as they have developed historically in Sweden.The overall aim of this thesis is to investigate the policies of mother tongue education from 1957 to 2017, focusing on how Swedish nation-state politics and societal change characterized the status and positioning of mother tongue education in the Swedish school system.
3.
Puaca, Goran
(författare)
Educational choices of the future : a sociological inquiry into micro-politics in education
2013
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
This thesis investigates how students’ practical considerations for future choices in education and occupations correspond to policy objectives of socially productive educational choices. This is conveyed through the primary aim of analyzing the correspondence between on the one hand educational policy intentions and on the other hand students’ educational choices and the social and cultural conditions that structure them. These concerns are addressed with specific aims in four different articles. However, the following research questions have been of central guidance for framing the main issue: (1) How are economic, political and social processes brought together on a policy level for motivating and regulating individuals’ educational choices (Article I)? (2) How do students’ educational choices correspond with policy intentions and the assumptions of rational choice that the latter are founded on (Article I-II)? (3) How are students’ educational choices shaped by wants and identities (Article II-IV)? (4) What is the relationship between students’ want formation and relevant social and cultural conditions (Article II-IV)? The empirical material consisted of interviews and semi-structured questionnaires with young people in secondary education and higher education, and interviews with school staff in secondary education. Empirical inquiries were also conveyed via a semiotic content analysis on recent policy: specifically the Swedish Long-Term Surveys from 2008 and 2011. In comprehensive terms, the rationality of choices from both how choice is practiced and what is desired has been of primary interest. These concerns are addressed by the following emphases in the different investigations. In Article I the form of government that aims to shape actors’ wants and decisions in relation to productive educational choices in the Long-Term Surveys is investigated. The forms of rationality in general, and the suggested implementation of rational choices in particular, are here analyzed through a critical semiotic analysis. The result of the study lifts forward critical distinctions of ontological and epistemological assumptions in how to delineate social and economic claims for the righteousness, reasonableness and necessity of choices. Article II focuses on how students’ wants and choices are formed in a vocational (vehicle maintenance program) and a theoretical (social science program) upper secondary education. By examining students’ want-lists complemented by interviews with students and school staff the study argues that it is important to view wants in an organic totality based on individual and collective experiences. The results show a pragmatic rationality in students’ decision-making, which challenges instrumental rationality in educational choices. This is importantly about how structural support guides students’ decisions over the future under conditions of the radical uncertainty that marks decisions in open social systems. In article III the analysis of vocational and theoretical upper secondary students’ want formations are further developed in relation to their educational environment. Through analysis of interviews with students, teachers, principals and student counselors the article pays particular attention to institutional school effects and school habitus. The results showed that different forms of school habitus in the investigated programs could be empirically attributed to how students form their wants. Article IV investigates identity work via a semi-structured questionnaire and group interviews with students from a Swedish Human Resource program in higher education. What in particular was investigated was how symbolic signification of education and occupations occurred within education. The actual meaning students attributed to education rested importantly on collective sense-making. Indicated in the results is that the meaning of being a student incorporates an awareness of social status and an ability to form relatively autonomous personal projects related to social forces. The result of the thesis points to a lack of correspondence between, on the one hand, political notions of how rational and utility maximizing choices should be made based on effective matching of education and working life and, on the other hand, how young people form their paths into the future in practice through education choices. Students often make their educational choices due to a lack of better alternatives and are often uncertain about where their choices will take them in life. These results show that there is a need for concrete support in schools in order to turn students’ insecurity about the future into useful strategies for educational and occupational paths.
4.
Hansson, Niklas, 1977
(författare)
Nätverkspolitik - Organisering, öppenhet och kontroll i Göteborgs Sociala Forumprocess 2003 - 2005
2008
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
Abstract Ph.D Dissertation at Göteborg University, Sweden, 2008 Title: Nätverkspolitik. Organisering, öppenhet och kontroll i Göteborgs Sociala Forumprocess 2003 – 2005. Title: Network Politics. Organizing, openness and control in Gothenburg Social Forumprocess 2003 – 2005. Author: Niklas Hansson Language: Swedish, with an English Summary Department: Department of Ethnology, Göteborg University, Box 200, SE-405 30 Göteborg The purpose of the thesis is to analyze the production of network politics, using the Gothenburg Social Forumprocess as an example. Concepts collected from theories of social movements; the resource mobilization theory and the new social movements-theory, are brought together within the conceptual framework of assemblage theory. Assemblage theory is a theory of society reconstructed by distinguished philosopher Manuel DeLanda’s from out of late French philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s concept of assemblage, a concept describing social entities as the non-stable result of historical processes. The analysis highlights the internal dynamics of network politics, with a focus on process before stable product, putting an extra effort into explaining everyday political organizing as something highly un-predictable, as organized outcomes (network organization) cannot start with a notion of networks as a collective or community acting in unison. The study rests on solid ethnological and ethnographic ground, and is based on a long-term participant observation within the local Gothenburg Social Forumprocess, e-mailing list material, interviews with social forum-organizers, websites, and alternative media press. The empirical focus of the study is mainly on the period 2003 – 2005. Throughout the empirical chapters the local social forumprocess is analyzed via its links to other levels within the World Social Forumprocess. The World Social Forumprocess is described as a self-organizing system with constantly interacting local, regional, national, and global levels, and as an emerging network of social forum-organizations interacting via feedback processes resonating through the system. The empirical chapters highlights different parts of the production of network politics and the local social forumprocess: diffusion of the forum-model as a successful organizing format within the global justice movement, decision-making and consensus building, ground rules for interaction between political organizations, forum-organizers, individual activists and groups, the role of the Internet within network politics, selection of social categories as temporary points of convergence between different political actors (organizations), the method called merger process which reflects the forum-organization as a broker-device between organizations, power-relations within network politics, and finally, a résumé-like chapter presenting glimpses from within a local social forum-event. In the conclusion I state how the social forums could be examined as political meeting-places within a “leaderless social movement”. Keywords: social forum, networks, assemblage, territorialization, coding, social movements
5.
Wolmesjö, Maria
(författare)
Ledningsfunktion i omvandling : Om förändringar av yrkesrollen för första linjens chefer inom den kommunala äldre- och handikappomsorgen
2005
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
During the 1990s many of the local authorities have been forced to reduce expenditure on the care of the elderly and people with disabilities, and many organisational changes have been carried out. New problems and their solutions are often related to leadership and management. This dissertation deals with three trends in the development of the organisation: The first trend is a market orientation, one example of which is the attempt to increase effectiveness and efficiency by utilising a purchaser/provider model in the organisation. Here the needs assessment model is studied. The second trend is the response to the pressed situation due to heavy workloads that staff members and their managers express, exemplified by self-managing work teams and a year-based working hour system. Here called flexible work organisations. The third trend focused in this dissertation is the decentralisation of social services. It is connected to increased demands on involvement in, and participation from those who use the services, i.e. the elderly and people with disabilities. The aim of this dissertation is to shed light on how politicians and managers view, experience and describe management and leadership in three types of local authority organisations. The focus is on the demands on managers and how the working conditions for managers are described in the different organisations. The material includes three different empirical methods. The first is a questionnaire to politicians and local authority officials, mainly managers at different levels in the care of the elderly and persons with disabilities. The second method consists of qualitative interviews with politicians and managers. The third method involved a document study of local authority documents, e.g. official guidelines, plans and evaluations. The method of analysis, a ?qualified content analysis? is inspired by discourse analysis and focuses on a comparison between the different local authorities, between politicians and managers and between women and men. This dissertation shows that the organisational changes brought about unexpected consequenses for management and that the demands differ between politicians and managers and between different organisations. Politicians and higher-level management expect the managers to manage the organisation, and employees expect them to lead. The solution seems to be a high level of competence, but which competence is needed? There are two different ideals for leadership. One is associated with focus on effectiveness and efficiency and the other associated with focus on communication. The dissertation highlights the conditions of a management, which is currently being pushed further down in the organisation. The dilemma of leadership ? being a manager or a leader will not disappear. Somewhere in the organisation the perspective of effectiveness and efficiency and the perspective of communication have to meet. It might be seen as a dilemma that will not go away ? only be placed in different levels in the organisation.
6.
