| 1. |
- Eriksson Tinghög, Mimmi, 1973-
(författare)
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Mission Impossible? Universal Alcohol Prevention at Workplaces in Sweden
- 2013
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Since the mid 1990s, alcohol policy in Sweden has undergone major changes and the restrictive policy instruments have been weakened. Alternative and compensatory preventive measures have been sought and the workplace is repeatedly referred to as an important and appropriate arena for prevention. Universal methods, such as disseminating information and education programs, are seen as crucial in order for individuals to be able to make informed choices about their alcohol consumption.The overall purpose of this thesis is to analyze the prerequisites for and the possibilities and barriers associated with alcohol education programs at workplaces. The first paper investigates the general interest in alcohol prevention at workplaces where no interventions had been undertaken. The second paper is an effect study which investigates the effects of a short alcohol education program provided to those employed at a company in Stockholm. In the third paper, the effects of a day-long alcohol education program provided to all persons employed by a municipality are studied. The fourth paper is an interview study, in which the aim is to analyze how the participants in alcohol education programs view their participation and the content and legitimacy of the intervention.The findings suggest that interest in prevention at workplaces is low among employers. In addition, there are difficulties linked to implementation and evaluation, and in achieving and registering any substantial effects. The effect studies noted a significant increase in alcohol-related knowledge and that binge drinking decreased among those who drank the most. The employees found the education programs interesting and valuable but mostly for others, i.e. those who drink too much. Taken together, the studies suggest that it is not reasonable to believe that workplace-based prevention will become a common and effective measure or that it will compensate for the weakened alcohol policy in Sweden.
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| 2. |
- Jönsson, Elin, 1993-
(författare)
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Hardened Responsibility? : Contestations and Contradictions in the Regulation of Corporations
- 2024
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Throughout the last decades, the social responsibility of corporations has undergone significant changes. From revolving around self-regulation, voluntariness, and soft law, the regulatory landscape has expanded to involve harder demands on corporations, such as mandatory sustainability due diligence. This thesis considers these changes as a hardening of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), and explores such hardening as an outcome of contestation and struggle. In doing so, it echoes critical scholars’ call for criminology to direct attention toward the harms committed by powerful entities – in this case, large corporations in the global context – and the interests that frame the regulatory response to such harms. Three papers are included in this thesis, focusing on key actors that participate in the contestation and struggle under study: politicians (Paper I), corporations (Paper II), and non-governmental organizations (Paper III). The first two papers consider struggles for and against regulatory hardening, and shed light on the contradictory dynamics that permeate these struggles, while the third paper explores how organizations struggling for justice in the wake of corporate harm seek to alter the contours of the existing regulatory landscape. Taken together, the papers offer insight into how social actors articulate demands for change, or resist such change, and their underscoring interests or ambitions.This thesis situates these findings in previous research on the regulation of corporate social and environmental responsibility, considers the papers’ methodologies, and develops the theoretical lens through which the findings can be understood. The final analytical discussion considers the hardened regulations as solutions, with the problem at hand being the paradigm of self-regulation and voluntariness that has long characterized CSR. This problematization is interpreted as an articulation of internal critique, in which social actors strive for consistency between practices and normative expectations. Thus, new regulatory practices, which conform to these expectations, have been proposed. The analysis then traces this problematization, and the contestation around it, to fundamental contradictions. Drawing attention to the inherent contradictoriness of CSR as a social formation, it argues that this should be understood as the driving force behind contestation and thus the hardening trend itself. In addition, the analysis considers the transformative potential in actors’ struggles, suggesting that some may go beyond an adjustment of regulatory practices to an existing normative framework.All in all, the thesis contributes to criminological research on corporate responsibility by highlighting the dynamics of conflict and contradiction involved in contemporary regulation. Moreover, by understanding hardening as a solution to a problem, revolving around the shortcomings of CSR – which was itself introduced as a regulatory solution in the 1990s – the thesis situates the regulation of today in a historical development. By doing so, it draws attention to both continuity and change in this regulatory landscape.
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| 3. |
- Stenström, Anders, 1981-
(författare)
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The Plural Policing of Fraud : Power and the investigation of insurance and welfare fraud in Sweden
- 2020
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- There is a vast literature on plural policing and the ways in which non-governmental actors now have and are assuming more responsibility for crime control. This literature argues that the connection between policing and the state is being eroded, questioned and sometimes abandoned in favour of networks in which the state acts as one actor among many others. This thesis examines the Swedish policing of insurance and welfare fraud via an analysis of the ways in which power is organized and articulated by actors in the private insurance industry, and at the Swedish Social Insurance Agency and police authority.The three articles included in the thesis contribute to a field that has received comparatively little attention, particularly in Sweden but also internationally. The existing literature has primarily been interested in the control of street-level criminality and the operations of uniformed security actors. Investigation practices in general and the plural policing of white-collar crime in particular have received far less attention. In Sweden, studies of policing are primarily state-centred, and the interactions between the police and other policing actors require further consideration. When examining insurance fraud, scholars have not considered the ways in which the insurance institution controls fraud; instead, this literature focuses on the characteristics of fraudsters. Thus the current thesis furthers our knowledge of a field of policing about which we currently know relatively little.The thesis takes as its general assumption the view that this form of policing is marked by a basic ambiguity between on the one hand being responsibilized and assuming responsibility for crime control, and on the other being responsible for other goals, such as promoting trust in, and the legitimacy and survival of the insurance institution. Existing research suggests that this ambiguity is resolved by simply denying compensation, adjusting premium levels, and cancelling policies or social benefits. My research shows that there is no Swedish exceptionalism in this sense.Based on a Foucauldian understanding of power, the thesis furthers our understanding of how the insurance institution is organized to tolerate fraud. The uncertainty between crime control and additional organizational goals is embedded in attempts to police the policing actors themselves, which is reflected in forces that make the policing of fraud a professional risk for the policing actors. The thesis argues that power relations provide opportunities to ensure that organizational goals are not endangered, while at the same time maintaining the public image that crime is being controlled. In contrast with existing research, the thesis shows that the law and the state – analytical categories that existing research, and particularly post-Foucauldian approaches, tend to reject or avoid – are critical to the plural policing of fraud. It is further suggested that scholars need to pay more attention to the way different technologies of power shape relationships between the actors involved in plural policing and their definitions of their own roles. In particular, scholars need to consider the role of the state and the legal framework in such arrangements.
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| 4. |
- Törnqvist, Nina, 1980-
(författare)
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Att göra rätt : En studie om professionell respektabilitet, emotioner och narrativa linjer bland relationsvåldsspecialiserade åklagare
- 2017
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- I likhet med många andra länder har våld i nära relation, sexuellt våld och våld mot barn uppmärksammats mer och mer i Sverige de senaste fem decennierna. I takt med att kunskapen om våld i nära relation har ökat har det också vuxit fram en kritik mot brister inom rättsväsendet, i synnerhet när det gäller att ge skydd och upprättelse till de som utsätts för dessa former av våld. Genom denna utveckling ställs det idag andra krav på de rättsliga aktörerna gällande kunskap och bemötande. Syftet med denna avhandling är att utforska hur relationsvåldsspecialiserade åklagare förhandlar om sina professionella identiteter i relation till de förändrade diskurserna om professionalitet inom rättsväsendet.Studien bygger på kvalitativa intervjuer med 32 relationsvåldsspecialiserade åklagare på åtta åklagarkammare runt om i Sverige. Utifrån en narrativ och emotionsteoretisk ansats belyser avhandlingen hur dessa åklagare iscensätter en respektabel professionalitet i relation till möten med målsägande, tilltalade och rättsliga aktörer samt i relation till särskilda arbetsuppgifter, så som att leda förundersökningar, fatta beslut om åtal samt vara part i rätten. Avhandlingen synliggör de normativa motsättningar och spänningar som åklagarna upplever och hanterar i sitt arbete. I sina narrativ rör de sig mellan, och förenar, positioneringar kring objektivitet-engagemang, rationalitet-magkänsla, skepticism-lyhördhet, auktoritet-ödmjukhet, distans-närhet och iscensätter på detta sätt en komplex professionell respektabilitet.En av avhandlingens centrala slutsatser är att den professionella respektabiliteten iscensätts genom en prövande och ambivalent hållning till den auktoritet och makt som arbetet bygger på. Genom berättelser om tvivel och maktlöshet, snarare än genom berättelser om ofelbarhet och autonomi, konstrueras professionalitet som ett lärande, reflexivt projekt. Inom en professionell kontext där känslor kan anses vara särskilt nedtystade, bidrar analysen av åklagarnas tal om emotioner med ett viktigt perspektiv. Analysen visar att tal om känslor tänjer den diskursiva uppdelningen mellan ett professionellt respektive ett privat jag och fungerar som ett narrativt element som både bekräftar och utmanar gränserna för den professionella respektabiliteten.Som helhet, bidrar avhandlingen till det kriminologiska forskningsfältet i de nordiska länderna genom att synliggöra en central rättslig aktör, åklagare, och bidrar till fältet om våld i nära relationer genom att belysa varför strukturer och praktiker som har kritiserats under så lång tid består men också hur de kan förändras.
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| 5. |
- Evertsson, Nubia, 1967-
(författare)
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Legal bribes? : An analysis of corporate donations to electoral campaigns
- 2013
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In this research I analyse how the existence of regulations that allow private funding of election campaigns have created opportunities for crime. Three specific questions are addressed here: 1. Do electoral donations increase political corruption? 2. Why do companies give electoral donations? 3. How are electoral donors compensated? To address these questions, I adopted a nested analysis. This sequential, mixed method brings together the strengths of both regression analysis and case study research, while conducting a validity check—triangulation—by convergence of results via different methods and theoretical approaches. I first conducted a cross-national comparison of 78 countries; then, I conducted a survey of 302 private companies in Colombia; and finally, I documented one case that described how campaign contributions affect the political decision-making process.The main conclusion of this research is that electoral law creates opportunities for crime, because it legalizes the entrance of interested money into politics, disqualifies donors as perpetrators, and introduces regulations with null or limited deterrent effect on the delivery of undue reciprocities. Indeed, I demonstrated that electoral financing is used as a legal bribery by private corporations. The legal character of this political instrument is perverted when undue compensation is delivered to donors. This is not a crime with a single perpetrator; rather, donors and incumbents are equally involved. However, donors are protected by electoral law, because the money delivered as corrupt incentive is classified as legal. This suggests that the law is being used as a mechanism that neutralizes donors as perpetrators. This perspective points to the manipulative use of electoral law, or creative compliance, as the term is used by McBarnet (2006).
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| 6. |
- Hörnqvist, Magnus, 1966-
(författare)
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The Organised Nature of Power : On Productive and Repressive Interventions Based on Considerations of Risk
- 2007
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Four interventions are analysed: the activity guarantee for long term unemployed, the customs control of border crossers, the cognitive skills training program and the conditions of incarceration among prison inmates. The interventions are performed by state organisations, based on considerations of risk and involve the exercise of power in a productive or repressive form. The study therefore raises conceptual issues concerning the nature of the power being exercised, its organisational embeddedness, and the role of the state. I argue that the way power is usually conceptualised within the Foucauldian tradition must be modified. The emphasis on “technologies of the self” must replaced by a more complex notion of productive power, which covers interventions that appeal to desires while imposing objectives and governing both at a distance and at close range. The legal paradigm of repressive power, according to which the use of force proceeds from the law and presupposes decision-making, is also questioned in an account that considers the organising role of norms and techniques that circumvent agency. The organisational embeddedness of both productive and repressive power is elaborated using two concepts: strategies and risk. The deployment of interventions is understood as a strategy, with a specific language of risk connecting the stages of setting the target, targeting and staying on target. The analysis of power is essentially Foucauldian. But it is supplemented and made compatible with Marxist state theory. On this reading, the nature of the capitalist state is such that all its repressive use of power is separate from the process of capital accumulation whereas some of its productive use of power is integral to this process. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which discipline produces wage labour, thereby challenging basic assumptions both of Marxist theories on penality and Foucauldian theories on governmentality.
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| 7. |
- Westfelt, Lisa, 1975-
(författare)
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Migration som straff? : Utvisning på grund av brott 1973-2003 med fokus på flyktingskydd
- 2008
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Deportation due to criminal activity is often viewed as a neutral administrative practice and has to date received little research attention. This study views the phenomenon as part of a broader field focused on regulating people’s mobility. It also looks at the balance between the state’s interest in deporting non-citizens who commit crime and the goal of protecting refugees. Deportation due to criminal activity is first discussed from five perspectives: as alien control, as punishment and the spatial separation of criminal “others”, as migratory movement and forcible repatriation, in relation to human rights and as a “second asylum hearing”, and as border practice. The study then examines deportation in district courts between 1973 and 2003, via a quantitative study of all convictions involving deportation. Deportation practice differs between persons who are and are not registered as residents. Residents are deported for more serious offences than others and increasingly often over time for crimes against the person and drug crime. The number of non-residents deported increases greatly from 1985, which cannot be explained by an increase in convictions or by legislative changes. The study finally examines the reasoning of courts on possible impediments to deportation when the person convicted had refugee or equivalent status. The court collected an opinion from the Swedish Immigration Board in 80 percent of such cases. The opinions are very brief, often identical for different individuals and seem to be based on general guidelines for different countries rather than the individual’s fear of persecution at sentencing time. In the other cases the court makes its own assessment of impediments to deportation, but the risks faced by those convicted are rarely discussed in the court judgements. In 17 cases, the individual was deported despite the Board’s opinion noting a risk of persecution.
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| 8. |
- du Rées, Helena, 1963-
(författare)
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Miljöbrott, myndighet och marknad : En studie om miljöstraffrätt och allmänprevention
- 2004
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Penal law has long been of central interest to the political debate on environmental regulation. The objective of this dissertation is to examine the role of penal law as a means of controlling environmentally hazardous economic activities. The focus of the work is directed at the general preventive effects of the threat of penal sanctioning. The role of penal law is studied by means of a questionnaire distributed to super¬visory agencies, police and prosecutors in 1999, and by means of interviews conducted in 2002 with representatives from both public and private sector organisations. An additional analysis has been carried out of material collected by means of a questionnaire distri¬buted by the Prosecutor-General to supervisory agencies and public prosecutors’ offices in 1998, and another distributed by the National Police Board to police authorities also in 1998. Supervisory agencies constitute the first link in the judicial chain associated with the prose¬cution of environmental crime. These agencies’ resource levels, combined with the num¬ber of organisations they have to inspect, their working practices and their ambiguous role vis-à-vis these organisations, may produce a situation where the likelihood of uncovering envi¬ronmen¬tal offences is small and where the propensity to report such offences is negatively affected. The officials working at the agencies in the study felt that police and prosecutors constituted the weakest links in relation to the likelihood that environmental offences would be sanctioned. A large proportion of the problems experienced by police and prosecutors may be understood as a result of the unique character of this particular area. These crimes are often technically complex, both as regards the offences themselves, the legislation and also the question of responsibility. This is related to a need for relevant expertise at the investigating agencies. Despite the risk of discovery associated with environmental crime being deemed to be low, and the sanctions awarded often being deemed very lenient, those interviewed felt that envi¬ron¬mental offending could not pay over the longer term. The attitudes expressed by the inter¬viewees can be understood on the basis of a control theoretical perspective. The study con¬cludes that environmental penal law probably has the greatest deterrent effect on those organi¬sations that have most to lose in terms of investments in their good name, in relation to envi¬ro¬n¬mental protection for example. Further, it appears that the more dependant an organisation is on other actors with conven¬tional values, such as collaborative partners, public sector agen¬cies or employees, the less likely it will be to risk its reputation by committing offences. The costs involved are not in the first instance associated with judicial sanctions, but are rather “punishments” associated with the market. Thus criminal justice system regulation may constitute a judicial core that produces additional social consequences.
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| 9. |
- Nyberg, Tove, 1989-
(författare)
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Justice for children? : A socio-legal study on Colombia’s responses to children associated with armed violence
- 2021
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The aim of this thesis is to examine how criminal justice policy practices arose and persist in light of the international victim-centred legal framework for children associated with armed groups. The study explores the gaps between how children are treated in law versus empirical practices of criminalisation in a particular domestic setting (Colombia), which has been riddled by internal armed conflict and hybrid forms of violence. The study centres around how judicial and other actors in Colombia experience policy reform and how they perceive the boundaries of victimisation and criminalisation in relation to children associated with armed violence. The research incorporates insights from youth justice studies on transformation and entrenchment in criminal justice, and various (and difficult) conceptions of victims from victimological studies, especially from the contexts of armed conflicts and peacebuilding. The study employs the qualitative method of interviews with state and government officials, judicial practitioners, and various other organisational actors as well as analyses of relevant policy documents and reports. This research increases our knowledge of criminological and socio-legal processes pertaining to children involved with different types of armed actors, including smaller community-based armed groups like gangs. The main conclusions concern the various complexities surrounding the process of children being recognised as victims in light of common criminalisation practices. The paradoxes inherent to the victim-offender overlap are central to our understanding of entrenched and unsettled practices with regards to children in the peacebuilding and the criminal justice systems.
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