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- Knechtel, Maricel L, 1968-
(author)
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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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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)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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| 5. |
- Hellström, Ingrid, et al.
(author)
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The “not yet” horizon : Understandings of the future amongst couples living with dementia.
- 2016
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In: Dementia. - : SAGE Publications. - 1471-3012 .- 1741-2684. ; 15:6, s. 1562-1585
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- The way in which persons with dementia and their spouses regard the future could influence how they experience the disease itself. This study aims to explore how the future is understood by couples living with dementia. The analysis reveals different ways in which couples understand the future. The findings show that persons with dementia describe the here and now in ways that take the gloomy future they dread as a point of reference, and as a result of this, they operate in what we term the not yet horizon. But while they take for granted that there is a horizon that they have not yet reached, their spouses always seem to focus on the horizons that they have already crossed. The article discusses the findings in relation to ideas such as critical periods, existential coordinates and possible selves, and problematizes the implicit assumptions about the future that dementia researchers tend to operate from.
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| 6. |
- Kania-Lundholm, Magdalena, 1980-, et al.
(author)
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Ideology, power and inclusion : using the critical perspective to study how older ICT users make sense of digitisation
- 2018
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In: Media Culture and Society. - : SAGE Publications. - 0163-4437 .- 1460-3675. ; 40:8, s. 1167-1185
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Critical Internet and media scholarship has primarily focused on contributing to theoretical debates within the field of media and communications but few empirical studies have applied this theoretical approach. This article uses data on older active ICT users’ understandings of digitisation. It draws inspiration from Boltanski’s pragmatist sociology of critique and the notion that people’s own take on their situation are fruitful sources of information in the quest for emancipation. It employs the notions of ideology, power and inclusion – which are central to critical scholarship – to make sense of older active ICT users’ understandings of digitisation. In doing so, it explores the fruitfulness of the critical lens for studies of ICT users while bringing attention to older active ICT users’ critical capacities.
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| 9. |
- Kania-Lundholm, Magdalena, 1980-, et al.
(author)
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Keeping up with the information society: how active older users negotiate inclusion and participation
- 2015
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- This paper builds on an on-going project that aims to contribute to the scholarly debates on the “digital divide” and “digital inclusion” by bringing to fore the complexities of older people’s understandings and usage of digital technologies. Older people are often considered one of the vulnerable groups and are among the key targets of the digital inclusion policies, which tend to focus on user-centered solutions on the micro-level. The critical approach employed in this paper allows reconsidering the normative, inclusionary, micro-level foundations of digital inclusion discourses that often inform the policy. The paper builds on the analysis of focus group interviews with 30 older adults (65+) who are active internet users in Sweden, the country often considered as one of the leading IT nations worldwide. We analyze how active older users construct, reproduce and negotiate ideological notions of participation, inclusion and their privileged position of (active) users as imperatives and prerequisites of “keeping up with the (information) society”. Additionally, the analysis suggests that discourses on digital inclusion need to acknowledge the divide that older people themselves create as they discursively position themselves against non-users when describing when, how and why they engage with digital technologies.
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