1.
Calvo, Dolores, 1975
(författare)
What Is the Problem of Gender? Mainstreaming Gender in Migration and Development Policies in the European Union
2013
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
This dissertation deals with the analysis of representations and discourses of gender (in)equality contained in policy texts at the EU level. The period under examination is 2005–2010. Following the academic debate, I show that there is certainly agreement on the fact that gender mainstreaming at the EU level has not fulfilled its promise of being a transformative strategy. In this context, my main aim is to contribute to an understanding of why a gender perspective has failed to be introduced into mainstream policy by showing how gender is constructed in policy discourse. I examine how the ‘problem’ of gender (in)equality is represented in policy documents and interviews in the context of the strategy of gender mainstreaming at the EU level in general and within the policy areas of development cooperation and migration in particular. The representation of the ‘problem’ of gender (in)equality as a problem of women’s lack of participation (in the labour market, in political life, and in education) includes two arguments: the usefulness of women as resources for the economy and the right of women to participation. In this representation, the argument of gender equality as an instrument is important, but at the same time, the argument of gender equality as a value or human right is also central. In the same vein, the argument of gender inequality as both a problem for the economy and a moral problem also has an important role to play. Thus, tensions between efficiency or utilitarian arguments and human rights arguments can be identified across all policy texts. By looking at arguments, understandings, and representations of the ‘problem’ of gender inequality, I identify discourses of gender equality at the EU level: efficiency, economic independence–labour market, human rights, and feminist discourses of gender equality. In policy texts at the EU general level as well as at the level of development cooperation and migration policy areas, gender is understood as a fixed category, in terms of the binary male/female. This understanding contributes in part to undermining the conceptualisation and practice of gender mainstreaming itself. To understand gender as an essential characteristic or a fixed trait is unproductive, rather, in terms of any transformation of the gender structure. The process of (re)producing gender hierarchies and understandings entails relations of power and conflict, and its result is never final in that gender as a process is never ending; in policy texts, all of this dynamic is replaced by a dichotomy.
2.
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.
3.
Björk, Lisa, 1981
(författare)
Contextualizing managerial work in local government organizations
2013
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
This thesis is about managerial work in local government organizations. The purpose is to explain important aspects of managerial work with the help of a contextual perspective. The focus is on managers at the operational level of education, health and social care services, and technical services. Two research questions are raised. The first question considers the relationship between context and managerial work: how does organizational context influence managerial work, and how does managerial work influence organizational context? The second question is about contextual variations within the municipal sector: does the organizational context for lower-level managerial work vary between differently gendered municipal services, and, if so, how can this variation be explained? In order to answer these questions, I have used a cross-level and comparative research design. The design is cross-level in the sense that I consider how factors at different analytical levels interact. The design is comparative in the sense that the services have been strategically selected to represent differently gendered municipal contexts. The theoretical framework evolved mainly from management, organization, and gender theory. With the help of Gary Johns’ (2006) framework of organizational context, I outlined a model of how to understand the relationship between context at different levels and managerial work practice. Other central concepts in the thesis are Yvonne Hirdman’s (1988) idea of an omnipresent gender system and Joan Acker’s (1990) notion of gendered organizations. The empirical work of the thesis consists of three quantitative studies (Study I, II and IV) that are based on a two-wave survey of over 400 operations managers in five different types of services, and one qualitative study (Study III) based on eight interviews with managers, politicians and controllers in two different organizations. In the first study, the impact of organizational traits on the unnecessary and unreasonable tasks in managerial work is investigated, using multilevel regression analysis. The aim of the second study was to provide a measure that can be used in order to evaluate and compare organizational conditions for managers in different types of services. The third study is an investigation into how the generic traits of the New Public Management have been implemented in differently gendered local government organizations. Lastly, the fourth study explores variations in organizational conditions in differently gendered services. The first overall conclusion of the thesis is that the relationship between managerial work and context is recursive. Organizations are arenas of conflict in which different stakeholders try to turn their ideas into governing formalities. Managerial work practice is to a large extent governed by the formalities that constitute the organizational context, which would in turn cease to exist if not for the daily work practices of managers and other organizational actors. The second conclusion is that there are systematic differences in organizational conditions between differently gendered services, and therefore a structural approach to gender is an important complement to more individualistic views on differences in male and female managerial behaviour.
4.
Ivarsson Holgersson, Carolina, 1970
(författare)
The Give and Take of Disaster Aid. Social and Moral Transformation in the Wake of the Tsunami in Sri Lanka
2013
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
The act of giving reflects the most basic principles of morality and has therefore constituted a classical anthropological field of inquiry. The importance of giving, receiving and reciprocating for the shaping and consolidation of social relations has long been recognized. This thesis uses these insights to explore the way in which the gift of disaster aid, which derives from outside the community, impacts upon local social and cosmological relations in a village. The main objective is to investigate how the Boxing Day 2004 tsunami and the immense wave of aid that followed it and subsequently receded, affected the local moral economy in a Sri Lankan village. Fieldwork for this thesis was carried out in a coastal community over a period of twelve months. The study asks how the ‘gift’ of aid was understood and valued by donors and recipients and sug-gests that it set in motion or accelerated processes of change that benefited some people and relation-ships but marginalised others, thus evoking disorder and moral uncertainty. Local life-worlds were shattered in multiple ways and the recovery process became caught in the tensions between several, sometimes competing, moral discourses concerning tradition/modernity, the individual/collective and the local/global. The thesis provides a thick description of a community before and after exposure to large scale natural disaster and shows that disaster aid not only had fundamental bearing upon social relations but also impinged on vital human and non-human relations - with the earth, sea and supernatu-ral beings - that were important for recovery and meaning making in the local context. The study finds that the catastrophe not only destroyed and altered physical habitats and livelihoods but it also disrupted the dynamic interplay of local social and cosmological relations. The tsunami exposed some of the power structures that people perceived as problematic in their so-ciety and the wave of aid sometimes fed into these or brought about new disparities. Aid thus not only helped with material recovery but also engendered frustration and fragmentation, particularly of the moral and social order; the tsunami gifts were therefore both (re)constructive and destructive. People did not experience the recovery process as simply restoring their community to its pre-disaster condition nor was it, for them, rebuilt in a way that was unquestionably better. The thesis thus shows that the assump-tion that post-disaster contexts offer a window of opportunity for risk reduction and improved re-development - ‘the build-back better approach’ - depends upon whose perspective is adopted. This thesis contributes to an understanding of how people in the wake of natural disaster use familiar cultural resources to transform experiences of disquiet and powerlessness and it reveals that local morality and cosmology influence how disaster and foreign aid is interpreted and managed.
5.
Naldemirci, Öncel, 1983
(författare)
Caring (in) Diaspora: Aging and Caring Experiences of Older Turkish Migrants in a Swedish Context
2013
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
This thesis investigates Turkish migrants’ aging experiences and their understandings about care by concentrating on the accounts of a group of first-generation Turkish immigrants who settled in Sweden in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The aim is to explore how older immigrants’ lives have been marked by the experience of migration and re-establishment in another country, how the impact of having once lost caring relations affected their decisions and desires about care in old age. This study examines some common patterns about aging in a host country, ideals of care in old age, encounters with medical institutions, interpretations of formal care facilities, and identity and community construction processes. Rather than generalizing and categorizing cultural, ethnic, or even religious expectations in the case of elderly care, it seeks to grasp the complexity of the migrants’ ideals of care and caring relations by focusing on the positions they take in diaspora space. This study is based on ethnographic research which extended over two years (2011–2013). The empirical material consisted of observations and semi-structured in-depth interviews with 20 older Turkish people, 10 women and 10 men, who live in Sweden. By focusing on medical care stories, the study highlights the importance of looking at previous experiences of being cared about and cared for in the deliberation of future care needs and expectations. By elucidating how older Turkish people understand formal care facilities such as home-help services and elderly care homes, the study underlines ambivalent attitudes towards these options. This ambivalence is anchored in ways of perceiving “the Swedish” as modern but uncaring as well as in their understandings of family members as caring others. The study also shows how the Turkish family is imagined and done through three emotions: merhamet (compassion/pity), vefa (loyalty/ faithfulness), and şefkat (concern/affection). Emotionalization of the family is not about reinforcing, but, rather, about negotiating the filial duty towards older parents. Of note is also that these emotions circulate inside and outside the family and that a caring diasporic community is imagined. By exploring older Turkish migrants’ experiences and understandings, this study contributes to the growing research field of care for people with a migration background. It critically assesses older Turkish immigrants’ aging experiences, and their understandings about care options, not through cultural differences that are supposed to be unchanging and homogeneous, but based on the positions that they take in diaspora space. This study contributes by showing that, in order to understand the possible expectations of older migrants when it comes to decisions about and needs for care, it is crucial to consider their experience of having lived and aged in diaspora space. Designing, deliberating on, and deconstructing particular ideals of care become possible only if we take these experiential, mnemonic, and relational meaning-making processes into account.
6.
Petersson, Frida
(författare)
Kontroll av beroende. Substitutionsbehandlingens logik, praktik och semantik.
2013
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
This thesis concerns maintenance treatment with methadone or buprenorhine in Sweden. The general aim has been to contribute to an understanding of the everyday practice of maintenance treatment, how power is exercised and how clients are constructed in a local, outpatient treatment context. The study has been conducted at three clinics in the city of Gothenburg and the empirical material comprises fieldnotes from observations, individual interviews with clients and professionals, as well as two focus group interviews with members of clinic staff. In addition, textual documents used in the everyday work at the clinics have been collected. From a general social constructionist perspective, a micro-sociological approach has been applied to the data. Goffman’s interactionism is a major theoretical point of departure. Interviews, narratives and meeting talk are analysed as discourses, with special attention to accounts for decisions and rule-breaking behaviour. In addition, Foucault’s works on power and the distinction between discipline and border control occupy a central place in the analysis throughout the dissertation. The main findings are that maintenance treatment does more than provides its clients with medication to control their opiate addiction. In their own stories, the clients describe a kind of institutionalization, triggering identity transformations as well as resistance. The combination and interaction of disciplinary, pastoral and sovereign power technologies, as well as accounts for rules, rule-breaking and sanctions, contribute to the construction of institutionally anchored client categories and in the final analysis, either pitiable or blameworthy clients. The thesis exposes a number of tensions and contradictions within Swedish maintenance treatment. First, despite its attributed status of evidence-based practice for opiate addiction, it is constantly questioned and criticized as treatment approach, since it conflicts with the national goal of a drug free society. Secondly, clients experience a tension between treatment as life-saving (in relation to inclusion) and as a danger of life (in relation to exclusion). A third tension is located between the binary client positions blameworthy, manipulative addict and pitiable, worthy patient, and a fourth one is the recurring, unsolved question whether methadone and buprenorphine clients are ”cured” from their addiction or if they are still drug addicts. Fifthly, there are contradictory views on maintenance treatment as a work in itself, and treatment as a secret and an obstacle to a normal life. Finally, there are tensions between sovereign, disciplinary and pastoral power. These forms of power are based on different logics and are exercised in different ways, but meet, merge, coincide and compete in the studied clinics. These identified tensions reflect the inconsistent context of maintenance treatment and are, in turn, mirrored in and managed through the specific practice, semantics and logics of this way of controlling addiction.
7.
Sjöström, Manuela
(författare)
To Blend in or Stand out? - Hospital Social Workers' Jurisdictional Work in Sweden and Germany
2013
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
This dissertation describes, analyses, and compares the means by which hospital social work associations in Sweden and Germany pursue their members’ professionalization through ‘jurisdictional work’. The time period covered by the research is 1989 through 2008. The analysis starts from the observation that jurisdictional work represents an ongoing effort by hospital social workers’ professional bodies to establish and maintain formalized professional jurisdiction, both internally within the profession and externally vis-à-vis outside stakeholders. The research questions guiding the investigation focus on the kind of activities these professional bodies perform, and the way in which they are performed, to promote hospital social workers’ professionalization in the two countries in question. The question will also be asked as to the reasons why hospital social work bodies perform the specific activities under consideration. This dissertation is a cross-national comparative case study on jurisdictional work performed by a social work subgroup operating in organizational settings where social work represents a minority occupation subordinate to other professional fields. The research materials used for the study include, in the first place, various documents obtained from professional hospital social work bodies in Sweden and Germany. In addition, two focus group interviews with board members of two of the associations studied were conducted. The theoretical framework used for the analysis and comparison of the empirical data draws on theories of the sociology of professions (Abbott 1988, 2005), complemented by theorizing on compliance in voluntary organizations (Etzioni 1961) and on social identity (Jenkins 2004). Additionally, argumentation analysis is drawn upon Karlsen (2012). The results obtained show there to have been major differences between the jurisdictional work strategies resorted to by the Swedish and German social work bodies. The differences mainly involved the ways in which these organizations supported their members, related to their social work knowledge base, positioned themselves vis-à-vis their trade union, and concretely sought to advance formal protection. The findings point to both internal (i.e., associational, related to the organization’s size and resources) and external (national context, specific healthcare setting, and degree of subordination to other occupational categories within the professional context and the specific healthcare setting) factors behind the differences in the studied social work bodies’ use of jurisdictional work strategies. Altogether, two different jurisdictional work strategies were found to be used by professional hospital social worker groups operating in subordination in Sweden and Germany. A mimetic strategy was used by the Swedish hospital social workers, to allow them, as a professional group, to better “blend in” with their hospital settings; in this case, similarities between the hospital social workers and their working environment, including other professions present in it, were emphasized, especially as concerns their knowledge base, professional identity, and disciplinary affiliation. In contrast, the German hospital social workers relied on an aposematic strategy stressing differences between the social workers’ and their hospital co-workers’ knowledge base, professional identity, and disciplinary affiliation, so as to make their subprofession “stand out” from its enveloping hospital settings.
8.
Widigson, Mats
(författare)
Från miljonprogram till högskoleprogram - plats, agentskap och villkorad valfrihet
2013
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
This is a dissertation about young people’s experiences of their journeys from a socially marginalized suburb to higher education. Many students from these areas do not continue to higher education, but some do. There is little empirical knowledge about what makes this achievable. The aim of the study is to address the question of how agency is possible and how the hindering structuring conditions associated with place can be understood and overcome. The relevancy of the study stems from a segregating urban development that puts a school system striving for social inclusion in a new situation, where the significance of place becomes of growing importance. There is, if you will, a geography of opportunity. An interview study with nineteen informants was conducted. These informants had a variety of family and ethnic backgrounds. Criteria for the selection were that they had upbringing and schooling in a marginalized suburb and sufficient qualifications to enter higher educational studies. As it turned out, in most cases they appeared to be well on their way to successful completion of studies at university level. The foremost result of the study is confirmation that young people have to deal with how their background from the marginalized suburb is perceived. For them, this is an identity-sensitive question that requires emotional work. This finding helps to understand agency and freedom of choice as structurally conditioned by class, otherization and place. In searching for mechanisms, the study contributes to specify the conditions that made agency possible. In order to address social inclusion, it is important to pay attention to what supported agency: A polycultural experience was seen by the informants as a strengthening specific form of cultural capital. Informants were active in generating groups positive to education within their schools, and these groups in turn had a positive effect on keeping up their high standards of achievement. Those informants without higher education had valued their parents’ taking an interest in learning and providing an encouraging family atmosphere, rather than demanding performance and results. The parents had also been role models due to traits such as endurance and high work ethics. The informants’ goals were not particularly cued to outside motivation and specific ends. Rather, they were characterized by self-worth, social security and perceived future freedom of choice. It was not unusual that goals were of a social character, to some extent fuelled by experiences of social class. It is evident that teacher’s commitment to their students and to learning had a formative significance for students’ concerns. This study has implications for school policy in that a segregated city calls for action to accomplish equity in quality and expectations. A greater awareness of the impact of contextual differences and the importance of place and of identity work are starting points in addressing issues of social inclusion.
