| 1. |
- Isaksson, Anna
(författare)
-
Att utmana förändringens gränser : En studie om förändringsarbete, partnerskap och kön med Equal-programmet som exempel
- 2010
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In this thesis the overall aim is to analyse conceptions of change with the point of departure being texts developed within the framework of three development partnerships financed by the European Social Fund's Equal Programme 2001-2007. The development partnerships, consisting of collaborating parties from both the public and private sector, aimed at developing new methods and ideas in order to counteract discrimination and all kinds of inequality in working life. The thesis poses the following research questions: How are the problems that the development partnerships intended to counteract described? What appears as important to change in order for discrimination in working life to decrease? In what ways are changes aimed at combating discrimination and contributing to increased gender equality and diversity in working life deemed possible? What motives emerge behind the visions of creating a working life without discrimination? How are gender and other social categories constructed and how do these constructions impact on the conceptions of change that emerge? The ideas, perspectives and interests that characterise the understanding of changes in working life in the studied texts, are illustrated with the aid of theories on how society's forms of rule have changed from government to governance and theories on how gender is done. Furthermore, why certain perspectives and ideas emerge and the consequences of them is analysed based on institutional ethnography and concepts such as social relations and ruling relations. The thesis' analysis points to how the consensus-based organisational form of partnership and the politics and principles that are reflected in the Equal Programme together with notions on growth, leadership and gender create limits for the conceptions of change. Limits that in certain respects entail that society's relations of power and inequality, instead of being challenged, are reproduced. Based on the results of the study, the importance is emphasised of continuously taking one's point of departure in identifying and challenging the limits to how one can speak of change, since the dominant conceptions of change may be an expression of the ruling relations.
|
|
| 2. |
- Johansson, Stina, 1967-
(författare)
-
Jakten på ett hållbart arbete – fackliga utmaningar och möjligheter i mötet med lean
- 2017
-
Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Managementkonceptet lean innehar idag en ledande position inom svensk industri alltsedan konceptet fick sin genomslagskraft på mitten av 1990-talet. Trots att konceptet som sådant väcker frågeställningar om dess inverkan på medlemmarnas arbetsmiljö är det omöjligt för fackföreningsrörelsen att stå emot denna trend; istället har de att finna vägar för att hantera lean. Utifrån ett arbetsvetenskapligt perspektiv har jag följt och kritiskt granskat relationen mellan fackföreningsrörelsen och lean. Syftet med denna avhandling är att identifiera och diskutera fackliga utmaningar och möjligheter kopplade till det ökande användandet av lean, här illustrerat av fackförbundet IF Metall. För att styra implementeringen av lean till att bli ett koncept som stödjer, inte motarbetar, fackliga ideologier och medlemmarnas krav på en säker, utvecklande arbetsmiljö och en trygg anställning lanserade IF Metall 2009 strategin ’det hållbara arbetet’. Vilande på tankarna från den sociotekniska skolan och erfarenheterna gjorda i tidigare strategier, ’det goda arbetet’ (Svenska Metallarbetareförbundet, 1985) och ’det utvecklande arbetet’ (Industrifacket, 1995), bygger denna strategi på tankarna om en utvecklad arbetsorganisation. Avhandlingen bygger på kvalitativa semistrukturerade intervjuer med fackliga representanter på olika nivåer och positioner, dokumentstudier, fältanteckningar från informella samtal vid deltagande fackliga aktiviteter samt analyser av tidigare forskning i ämnesområdet. Avhandlingen identifierar och diskuterar de fackliga utmaningarna och möjligheterna kopplade till införandet av lean, detta i termer av kampen om rollen som arbetarnas röst, förändrade industriella relationer, kampen mellan kollektivism och individualism samt en stark jämställdhetsdiskurs i samhället.
|
|
| 3. |
- Wistus, Sofia, 1978-
(författare)
-
Det motsägelsefulla partnerskapet : En studie av utvecklingspartnerskap som organisationsform inom EQUAL-programmet
- 2010
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The aim of the thesis is to describe and analyse development partnership as an organisational form for governing and organising developmental work. The partnerships studied in this thesis are within the EU initiative EQUAL, aimed at combating discrimination and exclusion in working life and the labour market. The empirical material consists of quantitative and qualitative data such as interviews, participant observations and a questionnaire.The theoretical approach is derived from theories on political governing and organisation theory focusing developmental work. Another theoretical orientation is a neo institutional approach to organisation where partnerships are understood as results of complex economic, political and social processes which alter and edit the idea of partnerships.The results indicate that the idea of partnerships, as it is put forward in the EQUAL-programme documents, involves a number of positive values and prerequisites for successful and democratic development work. However, the findings show that partnership is not a quick fix to complex societal problems. Combining top-down and bottom-up strategies, democracy and effectiveness, development and planning and working in equal relations are all dilemmas that become visible when the idea of partnerships is put into practice. These dilemmas are discussed as contradictory elements in the idea of partnership and organising development.
|
|
| 4. |
|
|
| 5. |
- Johansson, Maria, 1982-
(författare)
-
Arbetsmiljö och säkerhet : Praktikgemenskaper på könade byggarbetsplatser
- 2020
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Trots att många insatser genomförs är fortfarande anställda på byggarbetsplatser överrepresenterade i arbetsskadestatistiken. Avhandlingens övergripande syfte är att bidra till kunskap om varför byggarbetsplatser fortsätter att drabbas av en hög andel arbetsskador. Det görs genom att undersöka hur byggarbetare och platschefer tolkar och förstår arbetsmiljö och säkerhet på byggarbetsplatser samt hur arbetsmiljöchefer, arbetsgivar- och arbetstagarparter, företagshälsor och en arbetsmiljöinspektör tänker och resonerar om densamma. Byggbranschen har en lång tradition av samarbete med företagshälsor. Detta samarbete formades inom den dåtida Bygghälsan som, vilket ett av resultaten pekar på, fanns nära det praktiska arbetet och sågs som kompetenta partners i arbetsmiljö- och säkerhetsarbetet. Efter Bygghälsans nedläggning har byggbranschens samarbete med företagshälsor fortsatt, men nu med ett flertal aktörer.Forskningen har en kvalitativ ansats och delades upp i tre delstudier. Den första delstudien, ”Litteraturstudien” var en litteraturöversikt baserad på vetenskapliga artiklar om risker och säkerhetsarbete i byggbranschen. Inom den andra delstudien ”Intervjustudien”, genomfördes 22 semistrukturerade intervjuer med aktörer kopplade till arbetsmiljön och säkerheten på svenska byggarbetsplatser. Den tredje delstudien, ”Korpusstudien”, utgjordes av analyser av internettexter i en undersökning om språket som används om kvinnor i byggbranschen. De forskningsfrågor som har varit vägledande är: Vilka utmaningar avseende arbetsmiljö och säkerhet beskrivs och vad ses som lösningar på dessa? Hur omsätts arbetsmiljö och säkerhet i praktiken på byggarbetsplatser av byggarbetare och platschefer? Vilken roll har praktikgemenskaper för både motstånd och förbättringar i arbetsmiljö och säkerhet? Vilken betydelse har machokultur för motstånd mot förändring och förbättringar i arbetsmiljö och säkerhet? De teoretiska fälten utgörs av hur nya medlemmar socialiseras in i existerande normer och värderingar inom praktikgemenskaper där de lär sig att göra sina arbetsuppgifter samt hur byggarbetsplatser genomsyras av könade processer.Ett resultat är att resonemang om möjliga lösningar på brister i arbetsmiljö och säkerhet tenderar att cirkulera tillbaka till att individen (byggarbetaren) borde ha ett större eget ansvar för att agera i enlighet med regler och riktlinjer för arbetsmiljö och säkerhet. De intervjuade byggarbetarna följer inte alltid säkerhetsrutinerna och en av utmaningarna är att det upplevs svårt för dem att genomföra de förändringar i säkerhetsbeteende som efterfrågas. Istället lyfts förhoppningar om att de kvinnor som förväntas anställas kommer att bidra till god arbetsmiljö och säkerhet. Ett annat resultat är att avståndet mellan företagshälsorna och det praktiska arbetet på byggarbetsplatserna har ökat och att företagshälsorna inte deltar i byggarbetsplatsernas praktikgemenskaper. Det tyder på att deras möjligheter att bidra till arbetsmiljö och säkerhet på byggarbetsplatserna är lägre nu än tidigare. Det är främst företagshälsors kompetens avseende både arbetsmiljö och säkerhet på byggarbetsplatser, samt arbetet som genomförs på byggarbetsplatser mer generellt som ifrågasätts vilket leder till vad som beskrivs som en brist på tillit. Det kan leda till att byggarbetsplatserna går miste om kompetens inom arbetsmiljö- och säkerhetsområdet. Ett resultat indikerar att machokulturen stabiliseras och återskapas genom att arbetet tenderar att utföras på samma sätt som tidigare och det skapar utmaningar för individer att välja andra uttryck för maskulinitet. Samtidigt reproduceras idealen om den kapable byggarbetaren, mannen, som under alla omständigheter kommer se till att arbetet blir genomfört på utsatt tid i praktikgemenskaper vilket skapar motstånd mot förändring, även om det inte är varje individs önskan.Den övergripande slutsatsen är att det är svårt att genomföra förändringar som leder till god arbetsmiljö och säkerhet om för mycket ansvar läggs på enskilda byggarbetare. Det är viktigt att komma närmare praktiken där arbetet utförs för att förstå vad som händer i praktikgemenskaperna på byggarbetsplatserna, samt att rikta mer uppmärksamhet till att förändra hur arbetet organiseras.
|
|
| 6. |
- Keisu, Britt-Inger, 1968-
(författare)
-
Att peka med hela handen : Om arbetsvillkor och kön bland första linjens chefer
- 2009
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Historically, leadership research has focused on managers’ characteristics and behavior, their leadership style and its implications for a business’s success. In contrast, this dissertation examines how working conditions in the workplace affect first-level managers’ everyday work, their possibilities to practice leadership, and consequently their leadership style. The theoretical framework guiding the dissertation is a gender analysis with a doing gender perspective and the methodology is a case study. Two workplace organizations in a Swedish municipality are studied: a male-dominated manufacturing industry and a female-dominated elderly care service. The empirical materials consist of twenty-six semi-structured interviews, primarily with male and female first-level managers, but also with their immediate supervisors. In addition, the materials include a questionnaire and organizational documents. The results show that organizational structure and culture have implications for managers’ working conditions and consequently the leadership style they are willing and able to implement. The sex ratio among employees did not have any implications for which type of leadership informants described in their everyday practices. The ideal leadership and the everyday leadership practices portrayed by informants entail being explicit, controlling and rational managers who are able to make decisions and carry forth extensive structural changes. Their narratives reveal an authoritarian and task-oriented leadership style that has its roots in early industrialism. Leadership is strongly marked by masculinity, and even though women and men describe practicing the same type of leadership in their everyday work, their ideas about gender depict two complete opposites in which women and femininity is subordinated to men and masculinity. This indicates a divergence between the gender we think and the gender we do. Nonetheless, sex ratio among employees has implications for the level of sexism. While informants in both workplace organizations described gender discrimination, only those in the manufacturing industry described experiencing sexual harassment.
|
|
| 7. |
- Nygren, Magnus
(författare)
-
Safety management on multi-employer worksites : Responsibilities and power relations in the mining industry
- 2018
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The focus of this thesis is on the division of legal responsibilities for occupational safety management on multi-employer worksites in the mining industry. The empirical basis is a study conducted between 2013 and 2016 consisting of interviews and observations focusing on primarily managers, supervisors, coordinators and safety specialists from a Swedish mining company and a number of its contractors. Besides this, interviews were also conducted with an inspector from the Swedish Work Environment Authority (SWEA) and workshops were arranged involving industry representatives. Additionally, a document analysis was performed focusing on work organization, safety and regulatory matters. The theoretical framework focuses mainly and broadly on the consequences of inter-organizational complexity and power relations between organizations and between social actors.The results show that three key aspects characterize the division of legal responsibilities for safety management: 1) the main responsibility for managing safety is employer-specific and cannot be shared (e.g. between two separate companies) and entails specific formal tasks that must be performed, 2) everyone involved on multi-employer worksites has an extended duty to communicate and cooperate across companies in safety-related matters, and 3) the responsibility for coordinating work and broader safety measures is connected to one specific employer, usually the main client company itself by virtue of the work being conducted within its facilities. Although seemingly straight-forward in the legal demands being placed on specific actors, the matter of the division of responsibilities and what they should entail in practice had been a specific focus area for the mining company, as well as for the mining industry trade association and SWEA from an even broader perspective. The mining company had also taken a number of initiatives with the ambition to clarify these issues on their own multi-employer worksites in accordance with the legal requirements. As for the relations between the mining company and the contractors, these were characterized by an asymmetry of power with a difference between being affiliated to the company or a contractor in terms of the status and rights each affiliation entailed. This ultimately had an impact on contractor managers’ and supervisors’ ability or willingness to communicate with the client on safety-related issues.The conclusions of the thesis are divided into two main themes. The first theme, undermined conditions for employer responsibility, highlights that the main employer responsibility for managing safety may become eroded on multi-employer worksites, something that can be viewed from three distinct but interrelated perspectives: 1) the core-periphery structure characterizing multi-employer worksites, 2) how the different legal responsibilities relate to each other and the power asymmetry between organizations, and 3) the relations between the social actors involved in formal safety management in practice. The second theme, client company initiatives and blurring boundaries, underlines that the ambition of the mining company to clarify responsibilities meant that other issues related to power relations became downplayed or unaddressed. The dominant position that the company and, by extension, its managers, coordinators, etc., typically had also led to them occasionally intervening in the internal processes of the contractors, highlighting the importance of considering the consequences of blurred organizational boundaries due to longstanding outsourcing arrangements.An overall conclusion can be drawn that the dynamic, unfolding relations between the client and its contractors complicate the division of and adherence to legal responsibilities for safety management. This is a particular challenge facing policy and regulatory development going forward, not only in relation to the mining industry but on multi-employer worksites in general where workplace safety is especially important to consider.
|
|
| 8. |
- Rydström, Klara
(författare)
-
Unpacking Online Retailing : The Organization of Warehouse Work and Inequality
- 2024
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This dissertation studies the organization of warehouse work and inequality in Swedish online retailing. Online retailing relocates the work of providing service to individual customers, usually performed by frontline workers in retail stores, to warehouses backstage. In line with the on-demand characteristics of online retail warehousing, where a fast and smooth goods handling process becomes a competitive advantage for the companies, the manual warehouse work has been shown to be associated with routinization, and a high work tempo and monotony for workers performing it. Little is known about these issues in Sweden. Union reports and news media have shown that online retail warehousing involves a generally poor work environment and low wages. Research-based findings from other geographical contexts explain that the workforce mainly consists of those who cannot find a job elsewhere and whose subordinated position limits their possibilities for resistance against the working conditions. Herein, inequality appears. Inequality is understood in the dissertation as a consequence of the practices that organize the work, which tend to be shaped by gendered and racialized processes. The inequality as such often, but not always, take the form of class relations (Acker 2006). Based on an ethnographic study of five online retail warehouses in Sweden – Homeware, Electronic, Recreational, Pharmacy, and Grocery – the dissertation aims to explore and understand how practices and processes to organize online retail warehouse work relate to inequality, and it aims to contribute with knowledge in this regard. As part of this, the dissertation also aims to make visible the work, workplaces, and workers that online retail warehousing brings about. The methods and materials include interviews with managers, workers, and union and health and safety representatives (n=30); focus groups with workers and pharmacists (n=15 groups, a total of 49 participants); and ethnographic observations (a total of eleven weeks). The dissertation also comprises material from a systematic literature review of 21 articles focused on warehouse working conditions and inequality, and employment data from Statistics Sweden divided into occupations groupings. My ambitions with the dissertation have been empirical – in how I have worked to contribute with knowledge about online retail warehousing, in particular in with regards to the Swedish context – and theoretical – in how I have strived to contribute with perspectives on how we can analytically approach inequality. The results show that the warehouse work was organized in relation to the ‘on-demand’ element of online retailing, wherein flexibility becomes a necessity for online retail warehouses in the strive to fulfil the (over time fluctuating levels of) customer orders on time. While Homeware, Electronic, Recreational, Pharmacy, and Grocery all strived for profit by making warehouse workers provide a fast and satisfactory service for customers, the differences between them with regards to how the warehouse work was organized meant that there were variations in the shape and the degree of the inequality (cf. Acker 2006). This is exemplified in the dissertation with the practices and processes of the division of work tasks, the monitoring of workers’ performance through productivity data, and a Swedish language policy. In addition to inequality expressed in gendered and racialized class relations between managers and warehouses workers, and other groups of employees, the dissertation also found inequality produced by class and shaped by gender and race/ethnicity between groups of warehouse workers. The variations of the inequality seemed to be associated with the differences in the size and spatiality of the online retail warehouses, the size of the workforce, and the extent of technology applied in the goods handling process. Furthermore, the dissertation suggests that there are three analytical points of entry to from where to approach inequality – the workplace level, the field of work level and the worker level – which together help us understand its manifoldness, how the severity of inequality varies and the lived and embodied realities of it.
|
|
| 9. |
- Segerstedt, Eugenia
(författare)
-
Small town, big move : Constructions of place in transiting mining communities
- 2020
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The dissertation accounts for construction of place in mining communities as they undergo a major urban transformation. In the 2010s, urban centres in the northern Sweden mining communities of Gällivare and Kiruna entered a new execution phase of a large-scale transformation precipitated by ground subsidence caused by mining activities, a transformation that continues. The ambition to make the transition socially sustainable and contribute to more attractive communities resulted in research projects focused on these aspects.The aim of this dissertation is to describe and analyse how place is constructed in established mining communities in transition through the following research questions: How is place constructed in dialogues on social sustainability and attractiveness? How do people of different age groups, professions and gender construct place in established mining communities in transition? What are the possibilities and limitations of different research methods in relation to including residents’ perspectives in the transformation process? The overall theoretical standpoint of this dissertation is that place is socially constructed: place is made by people discussing and describing it, by discourses that are produced, reproduced and challenged in social groups beyond individual standpoints. Residents’ thoughts and ideas about place are an important part of what the communities are, were and will become, along with their reflexive relationship with their place of residence and thoughts on their own and other peoples’ future in the respective communities (See Lefebvre, 1991, Halegua, 2020). By reflexive relationship with place I am referring to actions where residents consider risk, think about their future, define what makes their life more meaningful and reflect upon changes in their environment; local community is one of the levels of these thoughts, attitudes and feelings.Five studies were conducted to investigate construction of place in the transiting mining communities of Kiruna and Gällivare using mixed methods: participatory action research in Living Labs, statistical logistics regression analysis, GIS 3D visualisation. This included an analytical review of research on established mining communities, a 3D visualisation of social issues in Gällivare, an analysis of Living Labs with residents of Gällivare and Kiruna as well as a group of commuters to Gällivare, a comparative study of three co-creative processes in Kiruna and a statistical analysis of construction of place in Kiruna over time.The results show that residents, while participating in dialogues on social sustainability and attractiveness, construct the transient communities through contradictory storylines. Bearing themes in construction of place were aggregated through the storylines that residents constructed and reproduced, expressed different attitudes towards and referenced. The established storylines with a long history, such as model community, a town constructed as a new establishment planned to be modern and inclusive; nature and the town, the theme of beautiful natural surroundings valued by residents and visitors, including the mountains, forest, rivers and lakes; big city elsewhere, a big city used in the construction of Kiruna and Gällivare to show what those places are not, as a counterpoint; the secure small town, the storyline of knowing “everyone”, spontaneously meeting, helping each other, were all used to re-establish the sense of stability and reframe the new environment by connecting it to the construction of the communities’ past. The storyline, the conditionally inclusive town, was used to question the character of and conditions for inclusion in the local interconnected context. The storylines of hope of a more inclusive and sustainable future and broken promises of a faster transformation, resulting in bigger changes, were used to process the change to imagined futures of place.There were certain patterns in how people of different age groups, professions and gender construct place in transiting communities. The main difference in the way men and women constructed Gällivare, according to 3D visualisation analysis, was that women were less content than men with the built environment, following similar geographical patterns. Construction of Kiruna as a place to live (or leave) over time has shown that while blue-collar workers were less prone than white-collar workers to consider leaving in 2011, there were no significant differences between social classes in 2016 in that regard. Generational patterns were similar - the younger the respondent, the more prone he or she is to consider leaving - but the gap between the youngest respondents and all other respondents has grown. The effect of social bonds that inhibit the will to move went from insignificant to visible for men and from significant to stronger for women. The hope of a transformed Kiruna, so ubiquitous in 2011, was much less pronounced in 2016.Different research methods had different potential in terms of the potential to understand construction of place and were thus included in the planning process: the statistical method gave representative patterns of factors behind whether residents consider leaving and how the patterns changed over time, but this method was limited in its ability to generate an understanding of the contextual meaning of those patterns, Living Labs provided the opportunity to see how place is constructed in dialogues but was limited in its ability to generate an understanding of preferences and individual standpoints, 3D visualisation provided spatial patterns beyond statistics and means for discussion and communication of those patterns with a broad variety of actors but had limited potential for their interpretation.
|
|
