| 1. |
- Knechtel, Maricel L, 1968-
(författare)
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Categorization Work in the Swedish Welfare State : Doctors and social insurance officers on persons with mental ill-health
- 2019
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This dissertation contributes to the debate on street-level bureaucracy, which highlights how the decisions made by workers in public bureaucracies effectively become public policy. This debate has paid relatively little attention to the study of how professionals carry out their work by means of institutional categorization, a knowledge gap that this study helps to close. Moreover, this study contributes to the understanding of how persons with mental ill-health are matched with institutional categories.The aim of this dissertation is to shed light on the institutional categorization process involving persons with mental ill-health in two interrelated areas of welfare settings: primary healthcare and sickness insurance. To pursue this aim, 27 in-depth interviews with 30 participants (18 doctors and 12 social insurance officers) were performed. The interviews, which were based on vignettes – short hypothetical scenarios – made it possible to get insight into how doctors and social insurance officers would reason in a situation similar to that depicted in the vignette.This study emphasizes how discretion is exercised when individuals are matched with the institutional categories that doctors in primary health settings and social insurance officers have at their disposal. Ideally, this process is a rational process through which clients’ objective traits are assessed against the criteria that define the various institutional categories. However, the process is not straightforward; thus, different kinds of social mechanisms are linked to the processes of institutional categorization, such as signaling, screening, the logic of appropriateness, moral work, and discrimination. On a more practical level, this study emphasizes the difficulties imbued in the process of institutional categorization. There are multiple reasons for these difficulties. Human complexity is one of them: the interviewed professionals often work with situations that require responses to human dimensions, which are oftentimes too complicated to reduce to standard formats. Another reason for these difficulties has to do with the ambiguity and/or complexity of institutional category schemes. Moreover, the process of institutional categorization takes place in a context of conflicting demands and professional logics, both within a single organization and across the organizations that work together with respect to the same patient/client.Future research concerned with institutional categorization should address how persons with mental ill-health are matched with the institutional categories in other areas of welfare, such as social services and employment services. A deeper knowledge about how the various organizations of the welfare state match individuals with institutional categories, could bring us closer to an understanding of the problems of multi-organizational collaboration.
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| 2. |
- Willander, Erika, 1978-
(författare)
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What Counts as Religion in Sociology? : The Problem of Religiosity in Sociological Methodology
- 2014
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis aims to contribute to the ongoing critical discussion within the sociology of religion by focusing on the seldom considered perspective of methodology. As such, it consists of a theoretical part that problematizes the ways in which religion has been analyzed, and an empirical part that develops how religiosity can be approached in sociological studies. The thesis seeks, in other words, to contribute to how sociologists analyze religion, and addresses a research problem that has gained new relevance in the aftermath of criticism of the secularization paradigm. In the theoretical part, the assumptions underlying the ways in which religion is studied are revisited, as is the impact that these have had as faras the empirical study of religion is concerned in one of the countries often assumed to be secularized – i.e. Sweden. The empirical part of the thesis is comprised of three studies based on the latest European Value Survey, qualitative interviews and the Blogosphere on religion-related content (n=220000 blog posts). The results from these studies are used to reconsider the religiousmainstream, the “package”-like assumptions often made about affiliation, belief and practice, as well as the fact that the study of religiosity tends to be relegated to the periphery of the imagination of sociologists of religion. The thesis proposes that if we want to study religion in a lay people sensitive way we cannot continue to overlook their understandings of the sacred, the ways in which they regard their own religiosity, and the fact that their affiliation,belief and practice do not necessarily fit the expectations of established ways of analyzing religion.
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| 3. |
- Machat-From, Laura, 1982-
(författare)
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Identity, Old(er) Age and Migrancy : A Social Constructionist Lens
- 2017
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- ldentity research in relation to ethnicity and migration has tended to focus an younger people whilst identity research in relation to ageing and old(er) age has not focused an migrants. This inadvertent mutual neglect has led to a lack of identity research that examines the identity categories of old(er) age and migrancy together, a lacuna that this dissertation aims to redress. This dissertation departs from a social constructionist understanding of identity as situationally accomplished in the interplay between how one defines oneself (internally) and how others define one (externally). The questions raised by this perspective and addressed in this dissertation are: When (in what situations) and in relation to whom do old(er) age and migrancy (respectively) seem to become meaningful for identification? How do the identity categories of old(er) age and migrancy seem to be negotiated? The empirical material consists of in-depth interviews with 24 older migrants (13 men, 11 women) aged between 55 and 79 who have been living in Sweden for 18 to 61 years. Interviewees come from 12 different countries that vary in perceived cultural distance from Sweden. The findings suggest that identifications with old(er) age and migrancy seem to be dynamic and flexible rather than necessarily permanently meaningful, thus gaining meaning in specific situations and in relation to particular Others. External definitions furthermore do not always seem to match with internal ones. Regardless of how old(er) age and migrancy are constructed, they seem to be negotiable. This dissertation thus contributes to identity research by studying old(er) age and migrancy together and furthermore sheds light onto how the social constructionist lens allows us to see variability where stability otherwise would be presumed.
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| 4. |
- Wallroth, Veronika, 1978-
(författare)
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Men do care! : A gender-aware and masculinity-informed contribution to caregiving scholarship
- 2016
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In caregiving literature, it is often the female gender that has been the focus of attention, and in particular women’s unpaid labor. Studies also tend to make comparisons between men’s and women’s caregiving, using men’s caregiving experiences to show not only that women face greater burdens, but also that men’s needs can be minimized. This means that while gender analysis is not uncommon in the caregiving literature, gender tends to be equated with womanhood. This is impeding us from moving the debates on care and caregiving forward. The dissertation argues – through a phenomenological analysis of men’s motives, experiences and perceptions of care and caregiving – that much could be gained if we were to rectify the gender bias by bringing attention to caregiving men in the gender-aware and masculinity-informed way that is lacking in the family caregiving literature at present. For this dissertation, 19 caregiving adult sons and sons-in-law were interviewed. The aim of the study is twofold. Firstly, it attempts to contribute to the rectification of the gender bias found in the literature on family caregiving by focusing on men’s caregiving and answering the following research questions: What motivates men to provide care for their elderly parents? How do adult sons experience caregiving? What do adult sons think that care and caregiving are, i.e. what are their perspectives on care? Secondly, this dissertation also aims to explore whether a gender-aware and masculinity-informed perspective can be used to enhance our understanding of caregiving. This study discusses how motives, experiences and perspectives, which have so far been interpreted as unique to women, are also matters that men talk about and consider important in caregiving. Thus, this study shows that a gender-aware and masculinity-informed perspective on care can increase our understanding of family caregiving and contribute to rectify the gender bias that care research suffers from. The study suggests that caregiving men should not solely be regarded as empirically interesting. This is because they are an unexploited and theoretically profuse source of information about caregiving.
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| 5. |
- Ågård, Pernilla, 1982-
(författare)
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Negotiating who the ’Other’ is : Care providers talk about caring for dying patients with migrant backgrounds
- 2020
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Most research at the intersection of ethno-cultural minority patients and end-of-life care has been preoccupied with two types of problems: the underrepresentation of patients with an ethno-cultural minority background in end-of-life care and the challenges that these patients are believed to pose to the deliverance of high-quality and user-friendly care. When scholars have focused on these issues, they have tended to assume that it is ethno-cultural diversity as such that poses these problems. Taking a different stance, this study stresses the importance of designing research in a way that does not assume at the outset that the difficulties depicted in the literature are caused by patients’ ethno-cultural diversity. Drawing upon the social constructionist tradition, this study examines care providers’ understandings of caring for patients with ethno-cultural minority backgrounds, and how they negotiate their understandings in talk. As such, this study differs from previous studies that have focused on professional care providers’ experiences of patients categorized as ethno-cultural minorities, in order to explore what precedes these experiences (i.e. their understandings of ethno-cultural diversity, and the expectations they themselves bring to the table when caring for these patients).Based on an analysis of focus groups interviews with end-of-life care professionals (n=60) in Sweden – a context where people with migrant backgrounds are often assumed to have an ethno-cultural minority background – this study aims to explore professional characterizations of patients with migrant backgrounds.Through its focus on talk – and the way in which understandings are negotiated when the professionals talk with one another about what ethno-cultural diversity means, and what caring for patients with migrant backgrounds is like – this study contributes to research about the implications of ethno-cultural diversity in end-of-life care. Thus, by shedding light on the argumentative side of meaning-making this study’s findings suggest that understandings play a greater role in how ethno-cultural diversity is addressed in end-of-life care. In particular, this study shows that the process through which understandings are negotiated plays a vital part in determining which understandings become legitimate descriptions of these patients, their families and interactions with them. The study highlights that the providers seemed to take for granted that patients categorized as ethno-cultural minorities, their families and the interactions they have with them differ from what they consider to be ‘normal’, i.e. patients categorized as Swedes, their families and the interactions with them. Therefore, this study concludes that the understandings brought to fore are underpinned by the notion of ‘Otherness’, and the assumption that ethno-cultural diversity poses challenges to the deliverance of high-quality and user-friendly end-of-life care even if one’s experience of providing care to patients with migrant backgrounds is limited and/or suggests otherwise.
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| 6. |
- Ginnerskov, Josef, 1989-
(författare)
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Quest for Sociology : Revisiting Prevailing Understandings of a Discipline with Computational Text Analyses of Dissertations
- 2024
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- What is sociology? For centuries sociologists have struggled to answer this question and repeatably proclaimed that their discipline is in crisis. The problem has generated a field of its own, the sociology of sociology, where sociologists of knowledge offer concepts for how the paradigmatic status of discipline and its crisis ought to be understood. Yet, the foundation of these understandings has often been limited to conceptual reasonings, historical exposes, and anecdotes from prominent scholars. Following the increasing availability of digitized texts and the development of computational techniques, new venues have been opened for investigating the empirical bearing of what sociology is. This dissertation offers a synthesis of, and a contribution to, this growing literature at the intersection of the sociology of knowledge and computational social science.The starting point is a review of literature in the sociology of sociology that has found that our discipline is believed to exist in a state of fragmentation, lacks a paradigm, and is conditioned by the context of its production. Akin to the supposed crisis, these conceptualizations are often taken for granted rather than being empirically put to test. This is why this dissertation aims to shed new light on the crisis of sociology by empirically scrutinizing prevailing disciplinary understandings with an interpretative and theory-driven methodological approach to computational text analysis (i.e., word correlation networks, topic modeling, stylometry, and shallow neural networks). To account for textual representations of sociological knowledge that are firmly institutionalized and exist across different local contexts, hundreds of dissertations in this discipline published in Sweden between 1980 and 2019 by five main universities have been digitized to form two corpora – 380 full-texts and 850 abstracts. Using these corpora, the conceptualizations are operationalized to be able to scrutinize, and trace, reoccurring instances where dissertations allude to certain images of sociology, which, drawing on the work of Margaret Masterman, can be regarded as crude replicas of paradigms. The study design allows us to problematize prevailing understandings of what sociology is.In contrast to the notion of fragmentation, the corpora are constituted by a core conditioned by local institutions attuned to different paradigmatic images of sociology. A discrepancy is also found between the two corpora where the abstracts appear to follow a divide between qualitative and quantitative research, and the full-texts are characterized by five paradigms with distinct methodological, epistemological, and ontological positions. These results suggest that the coexistence of multiple paradigms has been conflated with fragmentation and that sociologists tend to present their knowledge along the lines of simplified dichotomies. In response to the crisis, a more fruitful approach might be to embrace paradigm pluralism.As a contribution to the sociology of knowledge, this dissertation is an example of how the methodological divide can be overcome by merging insights from the conceptual strand with a hermeneutical take on computational methods to empirically explore taken-for-granted assumptions behind the production of disciplinary knowledge.
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| 7. |
- Hamed, Sarah
(författare)
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Healthcare Staff's Racialised talk : Examining Accounts of Racialisation in Healthcare
- 2022
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis contributes to the literature on racism in healthcare and the scholarship on racism and racialisation by moving the current focus of healthcare literature from demonstrating the existence of racism to examining accounts of racialisation through analysing healthcare staff’s racialised talk. Drawing from critical ‘race’ and postcolonial theories, the thesis departs from the premise that racism is a structural phenomenon embedded in nation states and institutions, including healthcare across the globe. Through a scoping review ofstudies on racism in healthcare, this thesis maintains that the current literature does not conceptualise racism as structural, and does not attempt to uncover accounts of racialisation. The review argues that the trends uncovered are part of why racism continues to reproduce itself in healthcare, despite equality regulations and policy makers’ efforts to eradicate racism. The thesis posits racialisationas a process situated within the sociohistorical playing out of colonial domination, where in groups of people are stratified somatically and culturally within groups of subordination and supraordination. Societies, institutions, and interactions are viewed as racialised such that an analysis ofracialised talk captures the seemingly subtle racialisation intrinsic tohealthcare. Analytically, the excavation of racialised talk regards talk as reflective and constitutive of the dominant structures within which talk is situated. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 58 healthcare staff in Sweden, the thesis examines how healthcare staff’s racialised talk is used to devalue minority healthcare users and obfuscate racism. The findings of this thesis contradict previous characterisations of racism in today’s society as covert. Racialised talk against minority healthcare users is found to be overt and used to categorise minority users as ‘bad’ users and their health complaints as ‘unworthy’ by labeling symptoms as ‘ethnic’, ‘cultural’ or ‘functional’. The devaluingof minority healthcare users through talk further justifies differential and suboptimal care. Besides demonstrating that racialised talk in healthcare is overt, this thesis proposes that by emphasising healthcare neutrality and equality regulations, blaming minorities for racism, viewing racism as an individual aberration, locating racism outside both national and institutional contexts, healthcare staff manage (albeit inadvertently) to obfuscate racism. It is suggested that obfuscation of racism may serve to allow racism to be perpetuated, resulting in a culture of resignation, where resistance to racism isnegligible.
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| 8. |
- Nettelbladt, Ylva, 1987-
(författare)
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Attityder till barnfrihet : (Icke-)reproduktionens betydelse
- 2019
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis is a study in attitudes towards voluntary childlessness. The specific aim is to investigate attitudes towards voluntary childlessness in a society with pronatalist values: how are they structured and how can the structure be interpreted in the Swedish context? As inspiration and theoretical framework the theory of “the value of children”, that was developed by Lois W. Hoffman and Martin L. Hoffman in the 1970’s USA, was used. In order to fulfill the aim a quantitative survey was conducted on the Internet with 2,283 respondents. The data were factor-analyzed and three main factors were interpreted. These factors were named “The natural parenthood”, “Freedom” and “The personal experience”. They were interpreted as three collective dimensions of thinking about parenthood and voluntary childlessness. The study contributes to our knowledge of pronatalist norms as well as the ways in which attitudes towards voluntary childlessness are shaped. The thesis proposes that pronatalist norms can hide under a supposedly individualistic discourse or under internalized beliefs about naturalness. Positive attitudes towards voluntary childlessness seems to contain, above all, beliefs about freedom.
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| 9. |
- Salmonsson, Lisa, 1978-
(författare)
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The 'Other' Doctor : Boundary work within the Swedish medical profession
- 2014
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis is about medical doctors with immigrant backgrounds who work in Sweden. Based on 15 qualitative interviews with medical doctors with immigrant backgrounds, this thesis explores the medical doctors’ feeling of professional belonging and boundary work. This thesis focuses mainly on the doctors’ experiences of being part of the Swedish medical profession while, at the same time, being regarded as ‘different’ from their Swedish medical counterparts. It starts off with the idea that medical doctors with immigrant backgrounds may have, or could be regarded as having, contradictory social positions. By virtue of being part of the Swedish medical profession, they belong to one of the most privileged groups in Swedish society. However, due to their immigrant background these doctors do not necessarily occupy a privileged position either within their profession or in society in general. This thesis shows that doctors with immigrant backgrounds feel that they are not perceived as full-fledged doctors, which seem related to how they are somewhat ‘othered'. The results show that these doctors cope with being seen as different from doctor with non-immigrant backgrounds, by using the notion of ‘migranthood’ as a resource in negotiations in everyday work life but they also do what they can to overcome the boundaries of ‘Swedishness’. Belonging should therefore be seen as having a formal and an informal side, as getting a Swedish license does not automatically mean that you feel belonging to, in this case, the Swedish medical profession. This seems to put doctors with immigrant backgrounds in a somewhat outsider within position, which seems having to do with boundaries between who is included in the ‘us’ and in the ‘them’. Lastly, these findings indicate that sociologists need to expand the understanding of professional groups to also include boundary work within these groups. In order to do so, this thesis argues that sociological theory on professional groups could be combined with sociological theory about social positions as that is one way to understand the outsider-within position that these doctors (and presumably other skilled migrants) have to cope with.
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| 10. |
- Sépulchre, Marie, 1987-
(författare)
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This is not citizenship. Analysing the claims of disability activists in Sweden
- 2019
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This dissertation aims to contribute to sociology, citizenship studies and disability studies by responding to T.H. Marshall’s ([1950]1992) invitation to examine the development of equal citizenship in a context of structural inequality, and Jenkins’ (1991) call to consider disability as a dimension of social stratification. Based on the analysis of blog posts and debate articles published in daily newspapers and written by Swedish disability activists (n=474), this dissertation argues that disability activism can be considered as a citizenship struggle claiming equal membership and rejecting the structural inequalities caused by disability. The analysis highlights a number of tensions and contradictions between and within the various components of citizenship as well as between and within the claims of the disability activists. These observations correspond to T.H. Marshall’s insight that citizenship is a developing institution full of contradictions, and to the observations of some citizenship scholars, arguing that citizenship claims-making features tensions and dilemmas. Moreover, the dissertation is in line with T.H. Marshall’s insight that the inclusion of previously excluded individuals – in this case, disabled people – as equal citizens brings forward important challenges, with respect to social (in)equality. In particular, challenges regarding recognition (who do we consider and value as full citizens?) and redistribution (how do we redistribute socio-material resources?). Based on the empirical analysis, this dissertation argues that the disability activists’ claims are defensive and proactive because the activists engage in both defending existing social rights and proposing new ways to construct citizenship for disabled people in Sweden. Finally, this dissertation points at different strategies used by the disability activists and at the dilemmas that some of these strategies imply. Among others, the Swedish disability activists highlight the importance of equal rights, while recognising the reality of costs; demand that disabled people be considered as ordinary citizens while asking for the accommodation of their specific needs; and view the state as the protector of equal citizenship while criticising it as a cause of the structural inequalities faced by disabled people. Thus, this dissertation opens new perspectives on citizenship and disability, and encourages future research to continue the analysis of citizenship in relation to structural inequalities.
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