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Bildtgård, Torbjörn, 1970-
(författare)
Hur maten blev en risk: Medicinens bidrag till regleringen av det svenska ätandet
2002
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
The aim of this dissertation is to historically study the medical and political regulation of swedish eating, with a special focus on the contribution of medicine to such a regulation. In a first theoretical part the study is placed within a "sociology of food" tradition. It is argued that in order to understand modern eating a historical approach needs to be taken. It is also argued that the role of medicine and politics in shaping modern eating is often overlooked in sociology. For this purpose a Foucaultian method of discourse analysis is choosen to look at how food and eating has been problematised in medical and political documents over the last two centuries and what strategies, techniques and apparatuses have been developed to solve these problems.The empirical part consists of three interrelated studies. In the first study three qualitatively different historical medico/political approaches to food and eating are identified: an economising approach, a "hygienic nourishment" approach and finally a risk-management approach. It is argued that nutritional science has been been closely involved in setting the agenda for as well as legitimising a number of political concerns for more than a century. The second empirical study looks closer at how medicine has been involved in the regulation of eating at a micro-level. This is done through a study of how overeating/obesity has been problematised within medicine and how disciplinary background effects the way in which overeating is constructed as well as the techniques developed to treat it. Finally, the third study looks closer at how risk became a central category in the medical discourse. This is done by looking closer at the hypothesis that dietary fat was an important risk factor behind atherosclerotic heart-disease and the process it had to go through in order to reach medical concensus or near-concensus.Finally it is argued that we have to understand the modern concern with food risks not as a reaction to an essential state of the modern world but as a discursive effect to a large extent generated by the medical discouse around food.
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Boström, Magnus, 1972-
(författare)
Miljörörelsens mångfald
2001
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
In the thesis, the conditions, possibilities, and limitations for Swedish environmental organisations to influence other actors — state agencies, political organisations, enterprises and the Swedish public — are analysed. The focus is on their practice in the nineties, implying a context in which different actors, to a greater extent, have accepted the significance of environmental issues, demand knowledge of and solutions to environmental problems, and with new conflicts continously arising. Against this background, four main interrelated themes are developed. Firstly, focus is set on the diversity and internal relations of the movement itself. Heterogeneity, variation and internal relations are analysed through the use of concepts such as social movement, collective identity, and niche. The diversity of the movement is regarded as a source of strength even though it also produces limitations. Secondly, how environmental organisations act politically and in what political scenes they appear, are analysed through the use of concepts such as political opportunity structure, subpolitics, lifepolitics, risk definition struggle, and intermediary link. The use of combined strategies, as well as the relation between diversity and political action, are highlighted. Thirdly, the cognitive practice of environmental organisations is analysed. This entails analysing how they try to persuade other actors with the help of frames. The extensive use of frame bridgings as well as tendencies towards the use of more cooperative strategies — captured by the concept ecological modernization — provide opportunities but also imply threats against autonomy and critical distance. However, the study shows that the organisations have the capacity to preserve their cognitive autonomy. Fourthly, the importance of organisation for cognitive practice, autonomy, and resource mobilization is stressed, and variations in form are analysed. Certain organisational tendencies such as growth, routinization, and professionalization are highlighted. The study is based on intensive comparative case studies of five Swedish environmental organisations: Swedish Society for Nature Conservation, World Wide Fund for Nature, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and the Natural Step. Different kinds of data are used: interviews with keypersons in the organisations, analyses of different kinds of documents produced by the organisations, and different kinds of secondary litterature.
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Abiala, Kristina, 1948-
(författare)
Säljande samspel : en sociologisk studie av privat servicearbete
2000
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
Interaction between people can be seen as a distinctive feature of 'post-industrial society'. In this study I investigate some of the conditions for this encounter in private service work in Sweden. I start by discussing some important concepts: service, service encounter and emotional labour. Three parties in an interactional triangle can be perceived: the service enterprise, the service worker and the customer.The service encounter is embedded in organisational frames. Recruiting for social competence and training for selling interaction are two facets of these frames. In interactive service work, control is complicated by the fact that a third party, the customer, is involved and that the borders between worker, work process and result are somewhat indistinct. Indirect forms of control can be used to affect workers' attitudes and thinking, as well as behaviour.Service work can be described as a form of acting. Different service workers will identify differently with their work role. In my study I observe both positive and negative experiences of work. A majority report that they sometimes are so tired of people that they want to be alone after work.I distinguish two dimensions of interactive service work: type of interaction and sales situation. Interaction can be more or less important, and the sales situation can be more or less concealed. Based on these dimensions I suggest a typology to illustrate some differences between different service occupations. Four types are suggested: (1) Work first, and customer later; (2) Personalised services; (3) Routine selling; and (4) Persuasive selling. In the second group we find the experts of interaction, but also the strongest signs of social strain.
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Aidukaite, Jolanta
(författare)
The Emergence of the Post-Socialist Welfare State - The Case of the Baltic States : Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania
2004
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt) abstract
This dissertation takes a step towards providing a better understanding of post-socialist welfare state development from a theoretical as well as an empirical perspective. The overall analytical goal of this thesis has been to critically assess the development of social policies in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania using them as illustrative examples of post-socialist welfare state development in the light of the theories, approaches and typologies that have been developed to study affluent capitalist democracies. The four studies included in this dissertation aspire to a common aim in a number of specific ways.The first study tries to place the ideal-typical welfare state models of the Baltic States within the well-known welfare state typologies. At the same time, it provides a rich overview of the main social security institutions in the three countries by comparing them with each other and with the previous structures of the Soviet period. It examines the social insurance institutions of the Baltic States (old-age pensions, unemployment insurance, short-term benefits, sickness, maternity and parental insurance and family benefits) with respect to conditions of eligibility, replacement rates, financing and contributions. The findings of this study indicate that the Latvian social security system can generally be labelled as a mix of the basic security and corporatist models. The Estonian social security system can generally also be characterised as a mix of the basic security and corporatist models, even if there are some weak elements of the targeted model in it. It appears that the institutional changes developing in the social security system of Lithuania have led to a combination of the basic security and targeted models of the welfare state. Nevertheless, as the example of the three Baltic States shows, there is diversity in how these countries solve problems within the field of social policy. In studying the social security schemes in detail, some common features were found that could be attributed to all three countries. Therefore, the critical analysis of the main social security institutions of the Baltic States in this study gave strong supporting evidence in favour of identifying the post-socialist regime type that is already gaining acceptance within comparative welfare state research.Study Two compares the system of social maintenance and insurance in the Soviet Union, which was in force in the three Baltic countries before their independence, with the currently existing social security systems. The aim of the essay is to highlight the forces that have influenced the transformation of the social policy from its former highly universal, albeit authoritarian, form, to the less universal, social insurance-based systems of present-day Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. This study demonstrates that the welfare–economy nexus is not the only important factor in the development of social programs. The results of this analysis revealed that people's attitudes towards distributive justice and the developmental level of civil society also play an important part in shaping social policies. The shift to individualism in people’s mentality and the decline of the labour movement, or, to be more precise, the decline in trade union membership and influence, does nothing to promote the development of social rights in the Baltic countries and hinders the expansion of social policies. The legacy of the past has been another important factor in shaping social programs. It can be concluded that social policy should be studied as if embedded not only in the welfare-economy nexus, but also in the societal, historical and cultural nexus of a given society. Study Three discusses the views of the state elites on family policy within a wider theoretical setting covering family policy and social policy in a broader sense and attempts to expand this analytical framework to include other post-socialist countries. The aim of this essay is to explore the various views of the state elites in the Baltics concerning family policy and, in particular, family benefits as one of the possible explanations for the observed policy differences. The qualitative analyses indicate that the Baltic States differ significantly with regard to the motives behind their family policies. Lithuanian decision-makers seek to reduce poverty among families with children and enhance the parents’ responsibility for bringing up their children. Latvian policy-makers act so as to increase the birth rate and create equal opportunities for children from all families. Estonian policy-makers seek to create equal opportunities for all children and the desire to enhance gender equality is more visible in the case of Estonia in comparison with the other two countries. It is strongly arguable that there is a link between the underlying motives and the kinds of family benefits in a given country. This study, thus, indicates how intimately the attitudes of the state bureaucrats, policy-makers, political elite and researchers shape social policy. It confirms that family policy is a product of the prevailing ideology within a country, while the potential influence of globalisation and Europeanisation is detectable too. The final essay takes into account the opinions of welfare users and examines the performances of the institutionalised family benefits by relying on the recipients’ opinions regarding these benefits. The opinions of the populations as a whole regarding government efforts to help families are compared with those of the welfare users. Various family benefits are evaluated according to the recipients' satisfaction with those benefits as well as the contemporaneous levels of subjective satisfaction with the welfare programs related to the absolute level of expenditure on each program. The findings of this paper indicate that, in Latvia, people experience a lower level of success regarding state-run family insurance institutions, as compared to those in Lithuania and Estonia. This is deemed to be because the cash benefits for families and children in Latvia are, on average, seen as marginally influencing the overall financial situation of the families concerned. In Lithuania and Estonia, the overwhelming majority think that the family benefit systems improve the financial situation of families. It appears that recipients evaluated universal family benefits as less positive than targeted benefits. Some universal benefits negatively influenced the level of general satisfaction with the family benefits system provided in the countries being researched. This study puts forward a discussion about whether universalism is always more legitimate than targeting. In transitional economies, in which resources are highly constrained, some forms of universal benefits could turn out to be very expensive in relative terms, without being seen as useful or legitimate forms of help to families. In sum, by closely examining the different aspects of social policy, this dissertation goes beyond the over-generalisation of Eastern European welfare state development and, instead, takes a more detailed look at what is really going on in these countries through the examples of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. In addition, another important contribution made by this study is that it revives ‘western’ theoretical knowledge through ‘eastern’ empirical evidence and provides the opportunity to expand the theoretical framework for post-socialist societies.
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