Sweden’s social and labor policy have been influenced by strong labor movements. The role of trade unions is of significance, when speaking of labor market integration of refugee immigrants. This study aimed to examine how the Swedish Trade Union Confederation, LO, supports integration of refugee immigrants on the Swedish labor market. Through semi-structured interviews with representatives from LO, reasons of exclusion of refugee immigrants from the labor market, strategies to integrate refugee immigrants on the labor market and current policies regarding integration of refugee immigrants, were investigated. The empirical data was analyzed using theoretical frameworks of social exclusion, empowerment and Esping-Andersen’s categorization of welfare state regimes. According to the LO representatives, refugee immigrants are excluded from the Swedish labor market due to reasons such as lack of language skills, discriminatory unemployment and segregated housing conditions. The results show that there is a lack of strategies used by LO to integrate refugee immigrants on the labor market, although elements of providing information and forms of influence for conscientizing and empowerment have been identified. Removing administrative barriers combined with protection of collective agreements and the solidary welfare state system are identified as important for a successful integration on the labor market. The findings are related to the shift of Sweden’s welfare state, from a universal to a more liberal one.

Uppsatsen granskar kritiskt Gøsta Esping-Andersens inflytelserika teori om västerländska välfärdsstatsregimer från boken Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism. Fokus ligger på den typologi som presenteras i boken. I synnerhet studeras det så kallade dekommodfieringsindex som Esping-Andersen använder som indelningsgrund. Syftet med uppsatsen är att undersöka om, och i sådana fall i vilken utsträckning, det finns empiriskt stöd för välfärdsstatsregimteorin. Regimteorin testas i uppsatsen genom ett antal olika kvantitativa metoder som fokuserar på regimernas stabilitet och deras interna koherens. Samma typ av data som Esping-Andersen grundade analysen i Three Worlds på används till analyserna i uppsatsen. Resultaten pekar på att huruvida det går att tala om empiriska belägg för välfärdsstatsregimerna beror på vilken detaljnivå som studeras. Om endast aggregerad generositet (dekommodifiering) hos välfärdsstaten är av intresse så erhåller regimteorin stöd i undersökningen. Studeras däremot välfärdssystemen något mer ingående så framstår resultaten som problematiska för teorin. Ett flertal länder har en synnerligen spretig karaktär och är svåra att foga in i de av Esping-Andersen definierade regimerna. Det finns lite väl många interna skillnader bland ländernas delsystem för att en sammantagen indelning i tre generella grupper ska te sig rimlig. Dessutom passar det ersättningssystem som Esping-Andersen menar är av speciell vikt, pensionssystemet, tämligen dåligt in i det förväntade mönstret enligt regimerna. Dessa faktum gör det enligt uppsatsförfattaren svårt att upprätthålla regimteorin i den form som Esping-Andersen förfäktar den i Three Worlds.

This thesis seeks to understand how the restrictive immigration policies – taken by the Swedish Government in 2015 as Europe was facing a huge stream of people seeking refuge – could be justified when research demonstrates that Sweden’s national identity is based on humanitarianism and asserts that Sweden has a great commitment to human rights. The nationalistic act seemed paradoxical – however, previous research displays a disputed understanding of the relationship between the humanitarian discourse and the nationalistic discourse. The thesis uses discourse theory to trace how the Swedish Government through its representation of the decision to tighten immigration constructs and reproduces the Swedish national identity. The empirical analysis displays a shift in the focus of Swedish immigration policy from an international (humanitarian) one to a national one. Even though it is not possible to fully assert an identity change the analysis indicates an identity crisis – the analysis demonstrates how humanitarian values acquires meaning within a nationalistic discourse. The thesis also demonstrates how the Swedish Government represents immigration as a contradiction to the Swedish welfare state. The decision to tighten immigration appears as a measure taken in order to rescue the national identity and its main feature – the welfare.

This thesis is concerned with rights-based justifications for redistribution. Orthodox views are critically examined in three of the chapters. The case against fundamental moral rights to welfare, not derived from other more fundamental moral rights or principles, is pressed in chapter three. Chapter five distinguishes between rights-based and equality-based justifications for redistribution and argues that Ronald Dworkin's idea of a right to equal respect and concern is best understood as an equality-based justification. The enabling model of rights and deprivation is introduced in chapter six. This model says that liberty rights require that others ensure that the right-holder enjoys the means to do what he or she has the right to do as well as not interfere with him or her doing what he or she has the right to do. It is found to break down because it is unable to accommodate the right to do wrong. The other four chapters are concerned with defending an alternative model of rights and deprivation. The groundwork for this alternative model - the development model of rights and deprivation - is laid in chapters two and four. Chapter two presents a person-affecting theory of rights. The two principal conclusions of the development model of rights and deprivation are defended in chapter seven. It is argued, first, that from both of the abstract moral rights to liberty introduced in chapter four flow certain derivative rights against others to have one's needs met and, second, that the state is required to promote and protect particular forms of culture as well as to meet certain sorts of personal needs including special needs, collective needs, and the unmet personal needs that arise when the prevailing methods of meeting those needs breaks down. The final chapter discusses two general issues relating to the development model of rights and deprivation.

<p>This dissertation is a three-part analysis examining how the welfare state in advanced Western democracies has responded to recent demographic changes. Specifically, this dissertation investigates two primary relationships, beginning with the influence of government spending on poverty. I analyze two at-risk populations in particular: immigrants and children of single mothers. Next, attention is turned to the influence of individual and environmental traits on preferences for social spending. I focus specifically on religiosity, religious beliefs and religious identity. I pool data from a number of international macro- and micro-data sources including the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), International Social Survey Program (ISSP), the World Bank Databank, and the OECD Databank. Analyses highlight the power of the welfare state to reduce poverty, but also the effectiveness of specific areas of spending focused on addressing new social risks. While previous research has touted the strength of the welfare state, my analyses highlight the need to consider new social risks and encourage closer attention to how social position affects preferences for the welfare state.</p> / Dissertation

This thesis explores how writers mobilise what I call the “social-scientific imagination” to think through the welfare state during its “golden age.” Given the ongoing rollback of welfare programmes in Britain and elsewhere, the study offers timely insight into the history of the welfare state and its possible future. To that end, the chapters concentrate on postwar writers’ indirect and mediated representations of the welfare state in the form of a “social-scientific imagination” manifested in both cultural ideology and literary style. The term “social-scientific imagination” describes these writers’ engagements with the language and technique of social scientific disciplines like sociology, psychiatry, criminology, sexology and the science of city planning in their fiction, and how they imagine these disciplines as shaping the construction and maintenance of the British “welfare state” and its institutions. The texts I explore here capture the tension between care and control, between freedom and security, that is fundamental to the operation of social welfare programmes and that complicates women’s orientation to the welfare state; it is a relationship characterised by ambivalence, even though, as Jane Lewis has argued, women during the war and since perceived they would be – and have been – the welfare state’s primary beneficiaries. This, then, is the central problem examined in this thesis: that the novels represent welfare policies as integral to women’s security at the same time as they point up their coercive tendencies.

This research explores the political debates surrounding changes in the law regulating citizenship revocation in Canada and how they reflect the tensions in the meaning of citizenship for dual national citizens. Borrowing from citizenship studies and critical criminology, the main argument in this thesis is that Bill C-24 seems to be an attempt on part of the Conservative Party to recalibrate the meaning of citizenship from a more liberal understanding (based on civic rights) to one that is more republican (based on civic duty). This research also demonstrates how this recalibration in the conception of citizenship from a more liberal notion to a more republican one parallels the shift in crime control policies of the state that were geared more toward prioritizing the welfare and equality of all citizens under the law in the 1960s-70s to ones that are presently oriented toward punishment, control and management of “dangerous groups”. The scholarly literature suggests that the modern conception of citizenship tends to draw from the republican and liberal traditions that are complementary but are also in tension, and the recent political discussions surrounding citizenship involves arguing for the best balance between rights and responsibilities of citizens. The analysis of the parliamentary debates surrounding Bill C-24 reveals that, in light of Canada’s current political landscape that is heavily influenced by penal-populist notions of punishing the offender populations and making “responsibilized” citizens, the pendulum of citizenship is generally being tilted toward the republican model (based on restoration of civic duties of citizens to the state and their fellow citizens) more so than the liberal model (based on preserving the welfare, liberty and equality of all citizens under the law).

At a time when welfare regimes in Anglophone countries are being reshaped to reflect neoliberal ideology, there is little by way of empirical, qualitative research which directly addresses the question of how jobless families live or are affected by their circumstances, particularly in regional Australia. This study combines a consideration of questions of social structure as they pertain to jobless families at the theoretical level with an ethnographic journey into their life worlds. It aims to understand the impact of long-term joblessness upon the families and to explore the interconnections between system and life world.I adopt Layder’s (1997, 1998) theoretical and methodological formulations as the most appropriate means to underpin an investigation of this nature. The study is comprehensively situated within a structural context which examines discourses and events that have exerted an influence on our present social arrangements, including an analysis of relevant social policy. Semi-structured, in-depth interviews were conducted with two non-purposive samples and analysed using a modified Grounded Theory approach as advocated by Layder (1998).It was found that the current welfare regime helps to stabilise the capitalist global economy and does at least provide a precarious stability for those excluded from the labour market. Whilst families receiving long-term income support are not a homogeneous group, they are subject to hidden injuries in common. The linkages between system and life world are theorised in terms of the displacement principle, which holds that the displacement of a problem does not solve it, but merely relocates it elsewhere. It is used to explain both large-scale displacements as well as micro processes occurring within jobless families. Long-term joblessness is found often to have destructive consequences for intimacy, though family structure may remain intact. This is partly due to a welfare regime which disrespects its beneficiaries. I argue that social policy must be informed by an alternative discourse which includes social or welfare rights as a part of human rights, based upon recognition of mutual interdependency and an ethic of care. This is vital if future policy directions are to accord equal respect to all citizens.

Translated title: Transnational Care Space Central Europe. Working and Living Conditions of Irregular Migrants in Domestic Care Provision

<p>The aim of this paper is to describe the position of the Swedish welfare state within the shaping of a Swedish national identity. This is done through the study of Mångkulturåret 2006, and its rhetorical context. The point of departure is that history is formed continuously in current speech and a text analytical method has been used. Mångkulturåret was issued by the Department of Culture as an extended perspective of Cultural politics. The rhetoric used in the official document Agenda för Mångkultur is analyzed through a comparison with earlier official documents on the field of multiculturalism and integration. This is done with the aid of a model composed of three rhetorical opposition fields. Charles Taylor’s theory ’Politics of recognitions’ and the criticism towards this theory are the main theoretical references. The politics proclaimed for Mångkulturåret 2006 included elements similar to ”The politics of recognition” and the rhetoric was linked to former documents on the field. The logics of mångkulturpolitiken withheld the idea of national identity through the definite exclusion of immigrants. Although not ethnically or culturally homogeneous they were assumed to have similar interests and a common identity due to their “otherness” (olikhet). The non-ethnics were recognized by their broken Swedish and their different appearance and were to be acknowledged for these traits as well as their assumed geographical location, their suburbness (förortssvenskhet). The rhetorical expression "mångfald” (multitude) was used to withhold a notion of difference between ethnical Swedish citizens and non-ethnics. (“utomsvenskar”)</p>