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- Magnusson, Charlotta, 1978-
(författare)
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Mind the Gap : Essays on Explanations of Gender Wage Inequality
- 2010
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The gender wage gap is accounted for to a substantial degree by the sex composition of occupations. The present thesis examines the mechanisms that produce this pattern. In particular, the theory of devaluation, currently the most widely accepted sociological explanation, is tested. The empirical findings, reported in three self-contained essays, question this line of explanation. All results are based on Swedish data: the Level of Living surveys (LNU; essays I and II) and administrative labour market registers (essay III).In Essay I the association between occupational prestige and occupational sex composition is examined. The association is non-linear, with gender mixed occupations having the highest prestige. Further, care work does not have lower prestige than other kinds of work. These results are inconsistent with expectations derived from devaluation theory. The analysis also shows that the wage returns to occupational prestige are lower for women than for men.Essay II examines why women receive relatively low returns to prestige. Family related factors are shown to be crucial. The gender difference in pay-off to prestige is thus marked among married/cohabiting employees with children but insignificant among singles as well as among childless married/cohabiting women and men. The gender wage gap in high-prestige occupations is largely due to differences between women and men in work characteristics difficult to reconcile with family duties.In essay III the functional form of the relation between wages and occupational sex composition is investigated. In the cross-section gender mixed occupations have the highest wages. Panel data tend to confirm this pattern: mobility from strongly male or female dominated occupations to more gender mixed occupations is associated with relatively high rates of wage growth. Further, there is a wage premium for care work but a wage penalty for other service work. These findings do not support devaluation theory.
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| 2. |
- Ye, Rebecca, 1985-
(författare)
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The Aspirants : How faith is built in emerging occupations
- 2018
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Anticipating future demands in skills and workforce development has been a longstanding practice and challenge for governments and policy-makers. While such developments are examined closely at the national and regional levels, an even more pressing issue is to advance our understanding of how people who take on jobs in new and emerging fields embark on and persist in their occupational pathways. A striking feature of these occupations is their weakly defined and unstable nature. How do individuals traverse career trajectories with these characteristics? What drives and enables them to take the road less travelled? To address such questions, this research project set off from a distinctive occupational school in Sweden that prepares individuals for emerging occupational roles in digital work. Using an interpretative, longitudinal, and multi-method approach, this study focuses on a group of aspirants who were being trained to become specialists in extracting, analysing, and using digital data for the growth and profit of organisations. These individuals can be viewed as experiencing a double “not-yet” situation, since not only are they at the stage of aspiring to certain work roles, but the occupations to which they aspire are also in a nascent, not yet fully defined stage. This study accompanies them through significant events over the years: from when they are in training, to when they search for jobs, and, finally, when they are in work.The monograph contains three empirical sections that are sequenced by the aspirants’ school-to-work pathways. The first section examines the processes of socialisation into the occupational school; the second analyses their efforts to meet the labour market; and the final one investigates the ways in which they persist in their occupational trajectories. Following these stages reveals how a strong school culture, coupled with a strong labour market, facilitates the building of “faith” into weak-form occupational pathways. Through the ceremony of being selected into the educational organisation and performing everyday rituals that engender confidence in their individual and collective futures, the analysis reveals types of “scripts” that are fashioned into the school’s methodology as well as the expectations of future hirers. It becomes apparent that aspirants generally accept these scripts as necessary and adhere to them to navigate the constantly changing demands of the labour market. However, when these interpretive schemes fail to help them cope with their unclear occupational futures, uncertainties of worth, and the unstable normative logics they encounter at work sites, the aspirants are compelled to deliberate and adapt conceptions of what is possible and permissible through individual and collective projections. In all, the empirical findings form the basis for a sociological model that offers a perspective on how to treat temporality, anticipation, and the “not-yets”, particularly in the context of education to work transitions.
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| 3. |
- Backlund Rambaree, Brita, 1977-
(författare)
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Contextualising Constructions of Corporate Social Responsibility : Social Embeddedness in Discourse and Institutional Contexts
- 2016
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- ‘Corporate social responsibility’ (CSR) and ‘socially responsible investment’ (SRI) have become predominant frameworks connecting business to society that have spread across the globe. They comprise a shared set of ideas and practices, such as those promoted in global reporting standards and by international organisations such as the UN Global Compact. Nonetheless, both are constructed and reproduced by companies in relation to context-specific social institutions, including norms and conventions shaping company engagement in social issues. Using a neo-institutionalist theoretical framework, the thesis examines constructions of social responsibility in discourse and within institutional contexts, across regions that are not often compared in the research terrain: two West European welfare states (Sweden and the UK) and two emerging African economies (South Africa and Mauritius). The purpose of the thesis is to add to the literature on CSR and SRI with a sociologically informed perspective that is comparative and connects institutional theory with social constructionism and a Foucauldian perspective on power. The thesis analyses how perceptions of CSR and SRI are constructed in relation to the social institutions that encase companies’ engagement with social issues, such as national level welfare configurations and the institution of financial investments. The main argument in this thesis is that CSR and SRI need to be seen as contextually constructed, in discourse and practice, in ways that draw the boundaries and set the conditions for company engagement with social issues.The thesis comprises three articles. Article 1 is a content analysis of company self-reporting on CSR and the article examines how the content given to CSR relates to broader welfare configurations and as such differs in four national settings across the divide between emerging African economies and Western welfare states. Article 2 is a discourse analysis that examines interpretative repertoires occurring in company self-reporting across the same set of four countries. The interpretative repertoires are analysed as discursive practices where power intersects with the production of knowledge on CSR. Article 3 focuses on SRI and examines responsible investing as a form of institutional work that institutional investors engage in. Based on an interview study with institutional investors in Sweden, the article analyses institutional work as a process that has the effect of both institutional creation and maintenance and it connects these institutional processes to the construction of meaning on SRI. In its entirety the thesis contributes a sociological perspective on how prevailing understandings of corporate social responsibility come into being and are reproduced.
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| 4. |
- Dean, Lauren, 1983-
(författare)
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The Social Roles of Buildings : An Account of Materiality and Meaning in Urban Outcomes
- 2017
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The dissertation explores the roles of buildings in urban social life. Buildings, as both a methodological tool and a research site, are valuable for understanding society. As a method, buildings allow access to various urban contexts. As a research site, the material and the social are integrated, where buildings and society are shown in continual construction. The overarching case shows how a new building type is born in a society and what buildings do, as both materiality and meaning, to help bring about outcomes. The study follows a single building type through history and analytical levels in the city of Santiago, Chile where three empirical studies emerge. The first traces a process of late 19th century urbanization to show the entrance of new residential building types into a city and how the physical and social landscape is reshaped in the process, emphasizing how one urban form emerges and is defined. Intercontinental connections bring new architecture and new language, stabilizing the link between form and name in the city. The resulting spectrum of buildings within the type shows how the diversity of residents shapes material outcomes. As the new buildings become fixed in the urban landscape, so too do social categories. How buildings change definitions both between and within societies, as well as start to take on meanings, is explored.Once definitions and form are established, the following studies explore the roles of the buildings in contemporary urban life. Photos analysis is employed to examine uses of shared space (a patio) in a residential building where buildings are theorized as material structures that contribute to patterned activities. It addresses how the building creates opportunities for observed everyday uses of private collective space. Using published comparison cases demonstrates that practices appear to differ between buildings of the same type when income of residents differs. It is hypothesized that opportunity is created not by the existence of the space per se, but by its gated enclosure, which separates the public street from the private space. The building is understood as a bound that simultaneously fosters interaction and exclusion. In addition, activities in these spaces, over time, contribute to new cultural understandings of the building type, showing how use can generate meaning.The last empirical study examines the reuse of residential buildings for commercial purposes in one neighborhood. The goal is to illuminate roles buildings play in contemporary neighborhood transformations. Rather than understanding transformation through reuse itself, modes of material conversions are examined. The differences between older conversions and newer ones in the area highlight the role of visible characteristics in the newly reused buildings. The material maintenance of residential facades on new conversions locks in the visual of a residential neighborhood, where intended function is built into form, even under commercial reuse. This is valuable in line with a constructed narrative about the place that focuses on the past. The building type under investigation is further redefined as reused buildings take on visual and spatial similarities to housing models from a past era that were not involved in changes in the neighborhood, but appear as if they were. This study relies on participant observation and analysis of marketing materials, as well as other documentary sources.
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| 5. |
- Weidenstedt, Linda, 1982-
(författare)
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A Sociology of Empowerment : The Relevance of Communicative Contexts for Workplace Change
- 2017
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Empowerment has been a popular concept in management and leadership practice and research for more than forty years. The intentions behind empowerment at the workplace are positive: empowered employees should experience a greater degree of influence, decision-making latitude, and meaningfulness. This is achieved through transfers of power, such as increases in autonomy and responsibility. Although empowerment efforts have often been shown to successfully result in empowered and highly involved employees, there has also been research that shows the opposite: the so-called paradox of empowerment is a well-known problem that refers to failed empowerment efforts through which beneficiaries feel disempowered rather than empowered.This thesis comprises three papers intended to contribute to empowerment research and practice within a sociological framework that offers a better understanding of implicit assumptions between employer and employee and the unintended consequences these can have on the outcome of empowerment change efforts. The analyses utilize a communicative approach in line with sociological and social-psychological theories of communication and interaction.The first two papers are theoretical analyses, one examining the general concept of empowerment (Paper I), the other focusing more specifically on empowerment in workplace contexts (Paper II). Paper III is an empirical analysis that investigates some of the theoretical assumptions made in Papers I and II.The first paper analyzes empowerment from a sociological point of view and identifies possible mechanisms behind the paradox of empowerment. It is argued that such paradoxes may evolve from discrepancies between approaching empowerment from a purely economic and structural perspective versus a communicative and relational one. It concludes with the observation that, although their agency may be increased on a structural level, empowerees may experience a parallel decrease of agential options on a communicative level.The second paper deals with empowerment at the workplace as a management or leadership technique. Focusing on relational aspects, a “basic communicative structure” is identified. This is analyzed as comprising a contractual and a communicative context that should be taken into consideration by empowerers in order to avoid misunderstandings in the recipients’ sensemaking processes. Paper II concludes by arguing that the way recipients make sense of their roles and situations as defined by employment and/or psychological contracts might not necessarily be in line with the communicative meanings they ascribe to the change agents’ actions, and vice versa.The third paper analyzes employees’ orientations and attitudes toward empowerment and the relevance of their attitudes for the success of empowerment efforts. These issues are explored by means of survey data from 268 employees in the Swedish retail sector. Results indicate that age and work intensity (part-time vs. full-time), as well as cohabitation status may have significant impacts on how empowerment efforts are approached and received by employees.The thesis as a whole provides insights into sociological issues of empowerment, both generally and particularly in management and leadership contexts and concludes that the communicative context of empowerment interactions plays a significant role in employees’ empowerment orientations.
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