| 1. |
- Basic, Goran, 1972-
(författare)
-
Samverkan blir kamp : En sociologisk analys av ett projekt i ungdomsvården
- 2012
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In this dissertation a collaboration project in Swedish youth care is analysed. The aim of the project was to enhance coordination between the Social Services and the Swedish National Board of Institutional Care in order to make the efforts more efficient. The project also employed a number of coordinators. The overall purpose of this dissertation is to analyse conflicts, alliances and comparisons identifiable in interviews and observations. The analytic findings are put into an overall “collaboration context” represented by earlier research on the social phenomenon of “collaboration”. In this way the dissertation tries to contribute to a sociological understanding of a contemporary widespread phenomenon. The empirical materials of the study consist of recorded conversational interviews with 147 project participants (youngsters, parents and various professional categories) as well as observations of meetings, informal get-togethers and visits to institutions, Social Services offices, the head office of the National Board of Institutional Care and coordinators. The material was analysed using the analytic perspectives of Georg Simmel (1950/1964), Theodore Caplow (1968) and Erving Goffman (1959/2004). The analysis shows that the project manifested and led to struggles between organizations involving representatives from the Social Services, the National Board of Institutional Care and the project, as well as to several interpersonal conflicts between representatives from various categories of involved professionals, and the youngsters and their parents. The study also shows that the client, in such human service organizations, faces a significant risk of being marginalized. Professionals who appreciated the collaboration often drew their conclusions based on their interaction with other professionals, but the collaboration did not guarantee a successful treatment of the client. Conflicts concerning the roles of the coordinators and their written documents (“the agreements”) emerged and were actualized through the creation of the project. The coordinators and their “agreements” can be seen as the project’s most visible representatives and symbols, which during the project become both themes for conflict and actualize already established conflict patterns. The youngsters and their parents appreciated the projects’ coordinators who appeared as personally involved and able to make concrete changes. However, many of youngsters and their parents criticized the coordinators and even portrayed a victim identity in relation to the project. The coordinator’s relationship with the youngsters and their parents was mostly characterized by passivity. This is clearly apparent in the analysis of the administrative and/or passive coordinator. Different alliance constellations became visible in these presentations. When the coordinator roles were altered in the description, the alliance constellations change. It is a common strategy for clients in human service organizations to try to enter into alliances with professionals involved in their cases and, in so doing, try to alter the situation to their own advantage. The fact that these alliances are often sought by the client indicates, among other things, the client’s will to fight against the situation in which he/she finds him/herself. I believe that this can be seen as something productive rather than problematic.
|
|
| 2. |
- Ekström, Veronica, 1975-
(författare)
-
Det besvärliga våldet : Socialtjänstens stöd till kvinnor som utsatts för våld i nära relationer
- 2016
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- I avhandlingen analyseras hur våldsutsatta kvinnors behov tolkas, omförhandlas och anpassas för att kunna hanteras inom socialtjänstens organisation. Avhandlingens övergripande frågeställningar fokuserar på insatser och behov, betydelsen av socialtjänstens organisering och betydelsen av socialarbetarnas handlingsutrymme. Avhandlingen baseras på kvalitativa analyser av statliga propositioner, intervjuer med socialarbetare och med kvinnor som varit utsatta för våld i nära relationer. Det teoretiska ramverket bygger bland annat på Frasers (1989) teoretiska perspektiv som tar sin utgångspunkt i samhällets tolkningar av människors/gruppers behov av stöd, nyinstitutionell teori och teorier om gatubyråkrater. Avhandlingen visar att socialarbetares tolkningar är centrala aspekter av förhandlingen om hur våldsutsatta kvinnors behov och rätt till stöd ska förstås. Ett viktigt resultat i avhandlingen är att stödet till våldsutsatta kvinnor blir så pass olika. Avhandlingen ger inga svar i kvantitativa termer på hur olikheten är fördelad, men den ger exempel på hur olikheten tar sig uttryck. I kommuner där specialiseringen innebär att socialarbetarna på socialkontoret i första hand utreder behov och fattar beslut om insatser, måste det också finnas adekvata insatser att besluta om. Saknas det så erbjuds inte heller något stöd. Stödet till kvinnor som utsatts för våld i nära relationer blir också olika eftersom socialarbetare ställer olika krav eller sätter upp olika trösklar för att kvinnor ska få stöd. Avhandlingen visar att både gemensam kunskap och gemensam syn på sociala problem är centralt för att samarbetet inom den specialiserade socialtjänstens ska fungera och i längden också för vilket stöd människor kommer att erbjudas.
|
|
| 3. |
- Svensson, Malin, 1976
(författare)
-
Hoppet om en framtidsplats. Asylsökande barn i den svenska skolan
- 2017
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The thesis explores how accompanied refugee and asylum-seeking children experience everyday life in Sweden. During the asylum process, as part of a policy for promoting ‘normal life’, these children have the same right to education as permanently resident children. An ethnographic approach brought out data from combining interviews with participant observation and visual material produced by children. Methodological inspiration was sought in the new sociology of childhood and in its potential to make an eclectic analysis of the empirical data. Study I explores how spatial and temporal dimensions theoretically may guide dialogue with refugee children and interpretation of their visual material. The findings point to how children negotiate opportunities for the future where everyday life takes place, and how conditions for education are perceived in relation to their future prospects. Inquiring into the meaning of school, Study II explores the sense of possibility as perceived by asylum-seeking children, and shows how school is a social place that provides structure, a sense of belonging and a learning environment. Paradoxically, schools’ limited attention to the children’s predicament risked accentuating the ambivalent social position of being an asylum seeker and thus weakening the benefits of their right to education. Study III examines the challenges teachers face, as street-level bureaucrats, in catering to the needs of asylumseeking pupils and demonstrates how conflicting goals of education policy and asylum policy conditioned teachers’ work and risked undermining the compensatory pedagogical task. In sum, through analyses that encompass how an unsecured residence permit does not prevent children aspiring to their futures, as envisioned in the present, creating a home can be understood in terms of hope. While the asylum process conditions ideas of the future, the thesis contributes to an understanding of how it also shapes how children and teachers, as social actors, construct what is considered to be ‘normal life’ during the asylum process.
|
|
| 4. |
- Vesterberg, Viktor
(författare)
-
Ethnicizing Employability : Governing the Unemployed in Labour Market Projects in Sweden
- 2016
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The dissertation analyzes labour market projects co-financed by the European Social Fund (ESF) targeting unemployed migrants and ethnicized groups. The analysis is qualitative, discourse-oriented and based on Foucault’s concept of governmentality. More specifically, it is highlighted how the target groups are ethnicized through discourses of employability and learning. The thesis consists of four articles. In the first three articles, focus is mainly on how the projects present themselves through their project descriptions in the ESF project bank and the fourth article is mainly based on ethnographic material. Overall, this dissertation highlights different aspects of inclusion work directed towards migrants and ethnicized target groups that can be seen as problematic and sometimes contradictory. Tendencies to individualize unemployment and thus positioning the unemployed project participants as responsible for their situation is interrogated in the thesis. Further, it is analyzed how culture and ethnicity is used in ways that are likely to strengthen the target groups ‘Otherness’ in relation to a ‘Swedishness’ that often become synonymous with what is perceived as normal and thus widening the gap between ‘us’ and ‘them’ when the stated goal is the opposite. This dissertation can serve as a starting point to reflect on how inclusion efforts and labour market projects seeking to produce social inclusion and employability may be at risk to categorize people in different ways, which can sometimes be problematic in relation to what the efforts seek to achieve.
|
|
| 5. |
- Machat-From, Laura, 1982-
(författare)
-
Identity, Old(er) Age and Migrancy : A Social Constructionist Lens
- 2017
-
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.
|
|
| 6. |
- Wennerhag, Magnus
(författare)
-
Global rörelse : Den globala rättviserörelsen och modernitetens omvandlingar
- 2008
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- A basic premise of this dissertation is that social movements are political and social actors expressing the centrality of autonomy in modernity. To grasp the nature of the relation between politics and social movements, the latter has to be related to the profound transformation in the forms of politics implied by the breakthrough of modernity, and the subsequent transformations within modernity. Following Peter Wagner’s theory and periodization of modernity, a central premise of this dissertation is that the tension between liberation and order—or between liberty and discipline—is to be conceived of as a foundation for the cultural self-understanding as well as the transformations of modernity. When the premises for this tension is challenged and renegotiated during the crises of modernity, social movements have often played a prominent role, in creating solutions, drafting utopian projects, making social experiments and bringing forward new values and forms of action. The dissertation is divided in two parts. The first is oriented towards social theory and social movement theories, while the second part is more empirically oriented, studying the contemporary global justice movement, the activists of the movement and one of its primary forms of mobilization: the social forum. The empirical data primarily concerns the Swedish part of the movement, using activist interviews and survey data, but similar survey data from other countries is also used in order to make a comparative analysis possible. In the first part of the dissertation I offer a survey of various social movement theories since the conceptualization of the emerging worker’s movement during the mid-19th century, to the theories on new social movements created from the 1960s onwards. In particular, the theories of Lorenz von Stein, Gustave Le Bon and Alain Touraine are focused. From these discussions, I derive three persistent problématiques that I consider to be central in the study of social movements, when it comes to grasping their relation to politics and autonomy, making either mediation, collective action or creativity the explanatory basis for understanding the evolvement and political role of social movements. Using the perspective established in the first part, I focus on the global justice movement in the second part of the dissertation. Here, I show that the global justice movement is characterized by a complex relation to institutionalized politics, by a global perspective on issues about democracy and social justice, by its organizational and political diversity, by its creation of new political spaces (especially the social forums) and its transgression of the national political context. At large, it is claimed that the global justice movement can be said to embrace a “participatory democratic” view of politics, rooted in the institutional transformations created by globalization and the cultural changes connected to the individualization of our time.
|
|
| 7. |
- Wolmesjö, Maria
(författare)
-
Ledningsfunktion i omvandling : Om förändringar av yrkesrollen för första linjens chefer inom den kommunala äldre- och handikappomsorgen
- 2005
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- During the 1990s many of the local authorities have been forced to reduce expenditure on the care of the elderly and people with disabilities, and many organisational changes have been carried out. New problems and their solutions are often related to leadership and management. This dissertation deals with three trends in the development of the organisation: The first trend is a market orientation, one example of which is the attempt to increase effectiveness and efficiency by utilising a purchaser/provider model in the organisation. Here the needs assessment model is studied. The second trend is the response to the pressed situation due to heavy workloads that staff members and their managers express, exemplified by self-managing work teams and a year-based working hour system. Here called flexible work organisations. The third trend focused in this dissertation is the decentralisation of social services. It is connected to increased demands on involvement in, and participation from those who use the services, i.e. the elderly and people with disabilities. The aim of this dissertation is to shed light on how politicians and managers view, experience and describe management and leadership in three types of local authority organisations. The focus is on the demands on managers and how the working conditions for managers are described in the different organisations. The material includes three different empirical methods. The first is a questionnaire to politicians and local authority officials, mainly managers at different levels in the care of the elderly and persons with disabilities. The second method consists of qualitative interviews with politicians and managers. The third method involved a document study of local authority documents, e.g. official guidelines, plans and evaluations. The method of analysis, a ?qualified content analysis? is inspired by discourse analysis and focuses on a comparison between the different local authorities, between politicians and managers and between women and men. This dissertation shows that the organisational changes brought about unexpected consequenses for management and that the demands differ between politicians and managers and between different organisations. Politicians and higher-level management expect the managers to manage the organisation, and employees expect them to lead. The solution seems to be a high level of competence, but which competence is needed? There are two different ideals for leadership. One is associated with focus on effectiveness and efficiency and the other associated with focus on communication. The dissertation highlights the conditions of a management, which is currently being pushed further down in the organisation. The dilemma of leadership ? being a manager or a leader will not disappear. Somewhere in the organisation the perspective of effectiveness and efficiency and the perspective of communication have to meet. It might be seen as a dilemma that will not go away ? only be placed in different levels in the organisation.
|
|
| 8. |
- Svensson, Kerstin
(författare)
-
I stället för fängelse? : En studie av vårdande makt, straff och socialt arbete i frivård
- 2001
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The purpose of this thesis is to gain a deeper understanding of the relationship between support and control. The purpose is reached by a study of the probation service as an organization and the practical side of its work The thesis is based on two empirical studies. One is a study of records and published texts from the period 1820-2000. The second is an interview study, in which twenty probation-service clients, twenty probation officers and ten layman supervisors have contributed their stories of the probation service. Assisted by Charles Tilly's (2000) explanations of categorical inequality, Michel Foucault's (1980; 1987) explanations of disciplinary power, and Erving Goffman's (1998) dramaturgic perspective, it has been possible to explain the patterns and the variations that are presented. During the first, disciplinary, period from the early 19th to the early 20th century, philantropic organizations tried to find work for offenders who wanted to lead a steady life. During the second period, from the turn of the century to the 1940s, the demands on the offenders had been specified and special officials were employed. The third period, from the 1940s to the end of the 1980s, was characterized by an idea of psychosocial work with individuals in a manner concurring with the work performed by the municipal social services. The fourth period, from the 1990s, is characterized by a "management" idea, in which the increasingly professionalized officials of the probation service administer the clients' problems rather than help solving them. The probation service is still presented in terms of "alternative", but the meaning of the words has changed. From their previous meaning of "something other than", they now mean "another form of". Complementing the prison, the social services and other human service organizations, the probation service has a strengthening effect Probation officers and clients vary in their attitude towards their common task.When the parties' attitudes towards each other are similar, their positions are congruous, and when their attitudes differ, their positions are discrepant. Congruous positions accumulate stories of the probation service's supportive aspects. When the positions are discrepant, the parties describe the action by the controlling aspects. The probation service changes its shape in every relation and will be interpreted differently depending on who is describing and who is interpreting. In this way, the disciplinary power will function and avoid the pronounced resistance. By that, it is also possible to individualize the support so as to help each person in the way most appropriate to him.
|
|
| 9. |
- Ekholm, David
(författare)
-
Sport as a Means of Responding to Social Problems : Rationales of Government, Welfare and Social Change
- 2016
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Sport has been increasingly recognized in social policy as a means of steering social change and as a method for responding to diverse social problems. The present study examines how rationales of social change are formed through ‘sport as a means of responding to social problems’. Four research questions are posed: (1) How is it that sport can be thought of and articulated as a means of responding to social problems? (2) How are sport practices assumed to operate as a means of responding to social problems? (3) How are social problems represented when sport is promoted as a means of response? (4) What conduct, subjectivity and citizen competences are shaped within this regime of practice? The study focuses on the government of subjects’ conduct, the formation of community and delineation of domains subjected to social change. The gradual shifts in the governmental rationality of the Swedish welfare state provide a framework for the study. Two kinds of empirical material are investigated. Initially, scientific knowledge is analysed; after this, a sport-based intervention, conducted in cooperation between a social entrepreneur, municipality and local sport clubs, is examined. In relation to scientific discourse, research on sport for social objectives would benefit from more theoretically driven constructionist perspectives related to welfare state transformations. In scientific discourse, rationales of social change in sport are conceived of as individual attainment of skills, competences and powers that are presumably transferable to other social spheres. Such discourse represents problems as individual problems. With respect to the sport-based intervention, individual change is promoted by representatives of the social entrepreneur in terms of providing subjects with motivational powers, which are shaped by role models and applied in “choosing the right track”. By representing problems as risks, avoidance is formed as an individual opportunity. This positions subjects as being responsible for their own welfare and inclusion. Municipal policy makers view the intervention as a way to form community and social cohesion in response to tensions in society. They present sport (and the social entrepreneur) as a way to mobilize and activate civil society – which is associated with the potency of voluntarism, authentic leadership and personal relations based on common identity. Consequently, responsibility for responding to social problems is spread and elements of de-professionalized social work are imposed. To conclude, sport is conceptualized as a means of responding to social problems because sport practices are associated with individual agency and with an active civil society and moral community. The technologies and rationality of social change point out ‘the self’, ‘the community’ and ‘the place’ as locations where social change is possible, rather than the whole of society. For instance, the technologies of social change are based on activation and responsibilization of ‘the self’ and of ‘the community’. These rationales of social change are based on a critique of welfarist governmentality and of the idea of governing from ‘the social’ point of view. Arguably, such discourse obscures more profound social reform. The study provides some empirical explorations illustrating how a range of tendencies and mutations in the governmental rationality of the welfare state and of social work are manifested in ‘sport as a means of responding to social problems’.
|
|
| 10. |
- Nordh, Jonas
(författare)
-
Social citizenship and people with dementia : Designing social care policies in Sweden
- 2016
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- People with dementia are commonly in need of some form of social care from the social services in order to manage their everyday situations. However, social services are shaped by the construction of policy targets. The aim of this dissertation is to explore the social citizenship for people with dementia. Social citizenship for people with dementia is explored by studying how people with dementia, in policy documents, have been constructed as a target group and also by studying how policies are enacted in practice by care managers, in their work and in their meetings with people with dementia. This is illustrated by studying policy documents from national level which range over nearly 40 years and 19 interviews with care managers. It is shown that, if and when, people with dementia are visible in policy documents, they commonly have a negative construction based on their cognitive and communicative abilities, as a burden, disturbing and incapable. It is further investigated how street-level bureaucrats, in this case care managers, experience meeting with people with dementia when they apply for social services. It is shown that care-managers experience difficulties concerning this group comprised of the exchange of information between care managers and people with dementia, refusal of social services by the person, the influence of relatives and other professions as well as moral dilemmas, such as the relations between the person with dementia and their relatives. The study shows that care managers have little support from policies, e.g. legislation and guidelines, in how to handle these dilemmas, and must thus create their own local ways of handling these situations. Care managers are thus influential policy actors concerning the policy target group of people with dementia. The policy processes which this dissertation illustrates, affect the social citizenship of people with dementia. It is shown that they, to an extent, have difficulties in influencing their own everyday situation concerning social services. Finally, the policy processes, will affect their possibility to influence their social citizenship.
|
|
