The purpose of this thesis is to study how the Swedish welfare state formulated a question of shorter work hours, 1919—2002. During the 1900s, several official reports were published in order to produce knowledge about this issue and construct a manageable inquiry about shorter work hours. The aim of this thesis is to examine what were formulated as problems and solutions and which arguments and beliefs emerged from these formulations. Official state reports are regarded as instruments of knowledge production by the state. This intelligence was required to justify the possibility and desirability of the reform that shaped the question of shorter work hours in the welfare state.   The aim of the official reports was to create knowledge, which determined the value of working time reduction. Leisure as welfare meant that the state interpreted the citizens’ needs and formulated working-time reduction as either a possible or impossible reform. Working hours have never been justified as a reform that simply gives more leisure and less time for work. The reform was instead considered possible and desirable because it was interpreted as helping to reproduce the labour force or capitalism as a whole. It was thought impossible and undesirable when considered to be a threat to this reproduction.   However, there were two major reformulations of the question of shorter work. In the middle of the selected period, the matter moved from the sphere of production to a consumption sphere, meaning that the issue became less conflicted. The state’s responsibility to push the reform was deemphasized. Another reformulation is when flexibility was formulated as a solution, and thus made regulation of working time undesirable and unnecessary. This study shows how the conception of a question of shorter work hours was a process requiring formulations and reformulations and how these expressions fundamentally changed over time, although the basic premises remained.

Immigration and its impact on aggregate welfare state preferences and welfare state reform has been the subject of numerous academic and political debates. Despite prolonged attention to these issues, however, empirical research has yielded mixed results concerning what effect, if any, immigration has the structure and generosity of the welfare state. This issue is further exacerbated by the absence of concerted conceptual cross-germination between the various theoretical literatures that examine immigration's effect on various social, economic, and political outcomes, making it difficult to identify the mechanisms through which immigration may shape the welfare state. To address these issues, I draw on social psychological research, theories of the welfare state, research on radical right-wing parties, and case studies from the United States to argue that changes in both the volume and characteristics of immigrants entering Western Europe might: 1) undermine the cross-class alliances necessary for maintaining the welfare state, 2) reduce public support for welfare programs, and 3) provide politicians on the far-right with a symbolic resource that can be used to justify cutting/restructuring welfare state programs believed to benefit immigrants. Empirical examinations of these arguments using a wide range of data sources indicate that immigration may be directly and indirectly related to welfare state spending. With regard to the former, the data indicate that the influx of migrants from less-developed countries into social and Christian democratic countries has contributed to rising program demand and corresponding increases in expenditures on more reactive welfare state programs (i.e., unemployment benefits). With regard to the indirect impact of immigration on the welfare state, analyses of voting and public opinion data demonstrate that changes in immigration have contributed to the electoral success of predominantly neoliberal, far-right, nationalist parties and contributed to rising levels of anti-immigrant sentiment over time. These factors, in turn, resulted in: 1) declines in popular support for those social and Christian democratic parties that are dedicated to the maintenance and/or expansion of the welfare state, and 2) reductions in average levels of support for welfare state programs designed to address issues of unemployment, making the welfare state more vulnerable to future retrenchment.

This thesis investigates how family–employment reconciliation issues associated with single motherhood affect women’s employment careers. The study fills a gap in the literature, which rarely considers single motherhood and employment as processes in the life course, much less in a cross-country comparative perspective. Patterns of employment trajectories during and after single motherhood are examined as the outcome of individual and institutional circumstances. Great Britain and West Germany are used as contrasting cases that represent relatively different contexts of labour market structures and family policy. Longitudinal individual-level data from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) and the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) are analysed, looking at the period between and including 1991–2008. The thesis develops a theoretical model that assumes differential career outcomes for experiencing single motherhood at different life stages. Higher difficulties of family–employment reconciliation are predicted for women experiencing single motherhood at a young age compared to later stages. The acquisition of marketable resources, which stands in the context of education systems, is assumed to be one of the central mechanisms mediating the relationship between age at single motherhood and employment. Moreover, policies directed at single parents affect reconciliation, shaping opportunity structures on which women can draw in single motherhood. Compared to the German context, Britain provides little institutional support securing labour market attachment for women in single motherhood, particularly when their children are young. Although providing more generous family policy measures in comparison, West German maternity leave regulations are often not applicable to women in single motherhood, and childcare is mostly granted on a half-day basis. The findings from three steps of empirical analysis provide new insights and highlight specific facets of established facts. First, fixed effects logistic regression is used, which exposes a negative association between single motherhood and entering full-time employment. No differences are observed between partnered and unpartnered mothers, but effective childcare arrangements support women’s transition in both Britain and West Germany. The second step of the analysis explores employment career patterns during and after single motherhood using sequence analysis. The emerging typical patterns are observed to different degrees in the two country contexts. On average, more employment trajectories dominated by non-employment are observed in Britain and by part-time employment in West Germany. In the last step, these findings are used in an explanatory framework, the results of which provide evidence for the life stage hypothesis. The analysis demonstrates that not only social class but also mother’s age, children’s age and skill levels seem to foster employment stability and labour market attachment during and after single motherhood.

published_or_final_version / Urban Studies / Master / Master of Social Sciences

<p>This dissertation takes a step towards providing a better understanding of post-socialist welfare state development from a theoretical as well as an empirical perspective. The overall analytical goal of this thesis has been to critically assess the development of social policies in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania using them as illustrative examples of post-socialist welfare state development in the light of the theories, approaches and typologies that have been developed to study affluent capitalist democracies. The four studies included in this dissertation aspire to a common aim in a number of specific ways.</p><p>The first study tries to place the ideal-typical welfare state models of the Baltic States within the well-known welfare state typologies. At the same time, it provides a rich overview of the main social security institutions in the three countries by comparing them with each other and with the previous structures of the Soviet period. It examines the social insurance institutions of the Baltic States (old-age pensions, unemployment insurance, short-term benefits, sickness, maternity and parental insurance and family benefits) with respect to conditions of eligibility, replacement rates, financing and contributions. The findings of this study indicate that the Latvian social security system can generally be labelled as a mix of the basic security and corporatist models. The Estonian social security system can generally also be characterised as a mix of the basic security and corporatist models, even if there are some weak elements of the targeted model in it. It appears that the institutional changes developing in the social security system of Lithuania have led to a combination of the basic security and targeted models of the welfare state. Nevertheless, as the example of the three Baltic States shows, there is diversity in how these countries solve problems within the field of social policy. In studying the social security schemes in detail, some common features were found that could be attributed to all three countries. Therefore, the critical analysis of the main social security institutions of the Baltic States in this study gave strong supporting evidence in favour of identifying the post-socialist regime type that is already gaining acceptance within comparative welfare state research.</p><p>Study Two compares the system of social maintenance and insurance in the Soviet Union, which was in force in the three Baltic countries before their independence, with the currently existing social security systems. The aim of the essay is to highlight the forces that have influenced the transformation of the social policy from its former highly universal, albeit authoritarian, form, to the less universal, social insurance-based systems of present-day Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. This study demonstrates that the welfare–economy nexus is not the only important factor in the development of social programs. The results of this analysis revealed that people's attitudes towards distributive justice and the developmental level of civil society also play an important part in shaping social policies. The shift to individualism in people’s mentality and the decline of the labour movement, or, to be more precise, the decline in trade union membership and influence, does nothing to promote the development of social rights in the Baltic countries and hinders the expansion of social policies. The legacy of the past has been another important factor in shaping social programs. It can be concluded that social policy should be studied as if embedded not only in the welfare-economy nexus, but also in the societal, historical and cultural nexus of a given society. </p><p>Study Three discusses the views of the state elites on family policy within a wider theoretical setting covering family policy and social policy in a broader sense and attempts to expand this analytical framework to include other post-socialist countries. The aim of this essay is to explore the various views of the state elites in the Baltics concerning family policy and, in particular, family benefits as one of the possible explanations for the observed policy differences. The qualitative analyses indicate that the Baltic States differ significantly with regard to the motives behind their family policies. Lithuanian decision-makers seek to reduce poverty among families with children and enhance the parents’ responsibility for bringing up their children. Latvian policy-makers act so as to increase the birth rate and create equal opportunities for children from all families. Estonian policy-makers seek to create equal opportunities for all children and the desire to enhance gender equality is more visible in the case of Estonia in comparison with the other two countries. It is strongly arguable that there is a link between the underlying motives and the kinds of family benefits in a given country. This study, thus, indicates how intimately the attitudes of the state bureaucrats, policy-makers, political elite and researchers shape social policy. It confirms that family policy is a product of the prevailing ideology within a country, while the potential influence of globalisation and Europeanisation is detectable too.</p><p> The final essay takes into account the opinions of welfare users and examines the performances of the institutionalised family benefits by relying on the recipients’ opinions regarding these benefits. The opinions of the populations as a whole regarding government efforts to help families are compared with those of the welfare users. Various family benefits are evaluated according to the recipients' satisfaction with those benefits as well as the contemporaneous levels of subjective satisfaction with the welfare programs related to the absolute level of expenditure on each program. The findings of this paper indicate that, in Latvia, people experience a lower level of success regarding state-run family insurance institutions, as compared to those in Lithuania and Estonia. This is deemed to be because the cash benefits for families and children in Latvia are, on average, seen as marginally influencing the overall financial situation of the families concerned. In Lithuania and Estonia, the overwhelming majority think that the family benefit systems improve the financial situation of families. It appears that recipients evaluated universal family benefits as less positive than targeted benefits. Some universal benefits negatively influenced the level of general satisfaction with the family benefits system provided in the countries being researched. This study puts forward a discussion about whether universalism is always more legitimate than targeting. In transitional economies, in which resources are highly constrained, some forms of universal benefits could turn out to be very expensive in relative terms, without being seen as useful or legitimate forms of help to families.</p><p> In sum, by closely examining the different aspects of social policy, this dissertation goes beyond the over-generalisation of Eastern European welfare state development and, instead, takes a more detailed look at what is really going on in these countries through the examples of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. In addition, another important contribution made by this study is that it revives ‘western’ theoretical knowledge through ‘eastern’ empirical evidence and provides the opportunity to expand the theoretical framework for post-socialist societies.</p>

In this study, attitudes towards female employment and the division of labour between men and women in Germany, Italy and Sweden are explored. Using a quantitative approach, the first objective is to examine how political ideologies and welfare political models are reflected in or accompany attitudes towards female labour market participation among different groups in the three welfare states. Welfare policies significantly influence women’s choices to enter and remain in employment and to achieve individual social rights. Based on a more qualitative approach, the second aim is to study policy dynamics in relation to changing value orientations, and to track the emergence of alternative policies and their intended target groups. For this purpose local political implementers in each country were interviewed. The overall conclusion is that that the ways in which certain patterns of gender relations occur are closely related to the designs of national welfare policies. Still, within the groups of women and men factors such as age, educational attainment levels and family status are important or even decisive for attitudes towards female labour market participation. In addition, the extent to which attitudes correspond to actual female labour market behaviour seems largely to be a matter of public policy. While all three studies point at important national differences in welfare policies at the same time as patterns of value orientations converge, especially among women, the comparison of local policy levels reveals important withincountry variations. These variations concern the quantity as well as the quality of policy measures, that is, the political implications for gender on socio-economic situation, alternative political majority and historical and cultural heritage. Variations in local policy formulations are large in Italy and less pronounced in Germany and Sweden, and they illustrate the different political emphasis placed on the preservation, modification or transformation of what is defined as gender equality and as local or national cultural traditions. Local social and labour market policies depict quite different approaches. The degree of state control versus local autonomy is relevant for the outcome of local social policies on gender and both national and local policy formulations are important in determining whether the normative emphasis should be placed on the maintenance, reinforcement or alteration of gender relations. While such choices and decisions also include the acceptance or rejection of national, and even local differences in definitions of citizenship rights, they point at the inherent relativity of the concept and as a result, its gendering effects on social, economic and political equality.

This thesis explores the political struggles that followed after the appearance of irregular migrants in Sweden. The analysis starts from the assumption that the group’s precarious circumstances of living disrupted the understanding of Sweden as an inclusive society and shed light on the limits of the welfare state’s inclusionary ambitions. The overarching analytical point of entry is accordingly that the appearance of irregular migrants constitutes an opening for contestation of the demarcation of the welfare state. The analysis draws on two strands of theory to explore this opening. Citizenship theory, first, provides insights about the contradictory logics of the welfare state, i.e. the fact that it rests on norms of equality and inclusion at the same time as it is premised on a fundamental exclusion of non-members. Discourse theory, furthermore, is brought in to make sense of the potential for contestation. The study approaches these struggles over demarcation through an analysis of the debates and claims-making that took place in the Swedish parliament between 1999 and 2014. The focal point of the analysis is the efforts to make sense of and respond to the predicament of the group. The study shows that efforts to secure rights and inclusion for the group revolved around two demands. The first demand, regularisation, aimed to secure rights for irregular migrants through status, i.e. through the granting of residence permits, whereas the second demand, access to social rights, aimed to secure rights through turning the group into right-bearers in the welfare state. The thesis concludes that the debates and claims-making during the 2000s resulted in a small, but significant, shift in policy. In 2013, new legislation was adopted that granted irregular migrants access to schooling and health- and medical care. I argue that this was an effect of successful campaigning that managed to establish these particular rights as human rights, and as such, rights that should be provided to all residents regardless of legal status. Overall, however, I conclude that there has been an absence of more radical contestation of the citizenship order, and of accompanying notions of rights and entitlement, in the debates studied.

The aim of this thesis is to study whether the Swedish state’s efforts to govern the professional practice of social workers (SWs) by knowledge to achieve an evidence-based practice, address the difficulties that SWs encounter in their practice. The Swedish state’s ambition is to govern the practice of social work by ideas and methods originating from medicine. The thesis therefore compares, through four different studies, the professional practice of SWs with general practitioners (GPs) as the most comparable sub-profession in medicine. The research questions that the thesis seeks to answer are: What situations are perceived as problematic and non-problematic by SWs and GPs? How does the professionals’ relationship with clients affect the performative aspects of these occupations’ enactment of their practice? How do SW and GPs experience the state’s efforts to govern their professional practice by knowledge? What problems can arise when the Swedish state builds its knowledge governance of social work practice on a comparison with medicine, even though these professional fields exhibit a number of important differences? The empirical material in the first and second studies consists of 52 narratives, written by SWs and GPs on problematic and non-problematic situations. The third study is based on vignette-based focus group interviews with 25 SWs and GPs. And the fourth study is based on a literature review, consisting of 54 articles about SWs’ and GPs’ practice. A first finding is that professionals rarely describe lack of knowledge or difficulties with knowledge use as problematic. A second finding is that non-problematic situations are connected to professionals’ control of the intervention process. SWs gained control of the relationship with the client either by use of coercive means or by the client’s active co-operation. GPs gained control of the intervention process by the use of professional knowledge. A third finding is that an understanding of professional practice as a linear process consisting of diagnosis, inference and treatment reflects GPs’ practice but not all aspects of SWs’ practice. A fourth finding is that both professions hold ambivalent positions towards evidence-based risk reductions technologies. The responses towards organisational risk reductions technologies differ in that GPs are sceptical, whilst SWs take a more pragmatic view. A main conclusion is that the Swedish state’s efforts to govern the performative aspects of SWs’ practice by knowledge, runs the risk of becoming a insufficient strategy since they tend to exhibit two main blind spots. The first is that these efforts tend to ignore that the relationship with the client has a crucial affect on and conditions SWs’ and in problematic situations also GPs’ knowledge use. The second is that the efforts also tend to ignore that control of the intervention process is not always maintained through control of knowledge use. For SWs control of the relationship with clients represents another mode of professional control of the intervention process. / Hur använder socialarbetare och allmänläkare kunskap i praktiken?, FAS/FORTE dnr 2009-0251

This thesis addresses two key questions: First, how did those involved in the provision of public housing in twentieth-century England conceptualise the people who they were providing houses for? Second, how did their ideas change over time? These questions are important and need answering because, although there has been a great deal written about the history of public housing in England, there has up until now been very little thought given to the manner in which the council estate tenants themselves were actually identified and conceptualised as subjects in need of state-funded housing. My thesis begins to redress this imbalance by providing an overview of the changing forms and practices through which prospective tenants were conceptualised and acted upon by those in positions of power in England between 1920 and 1970. Using records from local authority archives, sociological surveys, architectural and town planning journals, central government publications, Mass Observation reports and tenant handbooks, and focusing primarily on council estates in London, Manchester and Sheffield, it shows how ideas about what prospective tenants needed from their homes changed dramatically over the course of this period, with the narrowly sanitary and biopolitical approaches of the 1920s and 1930s increasingly being challenged and complemented by a host of new ideas and discourses which placed far more emphasis upon the prospective tenant’s emotional, social and personal needs. As such, this thesis not only adds substantially to our understanding of the changes that took place in the English public housing sector between 1920 and 1970, but also adds to the burgeoning literature on questions of governmentality; contributing in the process to our understandings of modern modes of power.

After the enlargement of the European Union in 2004, large numbers of Central and Eastern Europeans moved to work in Western Europe. The aim of this thesis is to use the case of migration after the enlargement to further our understanding of the relationship between immigrant group size and natives’ attitudes. Recent scholarly debates raise questions about how immigration affects European societies and the political durability of European welfare states. This research puts forward two questions: Does an increase in Eastern European immigration after the enlargement explain differences in civic attitudes in Western Europe? And second, does this relationship (if any) depend on national contextual factors? The relationship between immigration and three categories of public attitudes are examined: attitudes towards immigration, attitudes towards welfare and attitudes of trust. This thesis draws on ethnic competition theory, which postulates that group competition over resources provokes the natives to perceive immigration as a threat to their own or their group’s interests. To test this theory, this study uses data from the European Social Survey from 2002 to 2010 to build multi-level pooled time series models. The results find only partial support for ethnic competition theory. When a greater proportion of E-8 migrants live in the country, individuals tend to have more positive views about immigration. The results also show that this positive relationship is weakened when national economic conditions are more precarious. Additionally, the results do not find that E8 migration is negatively related to Western European attitudes regarding trust or welfare. This implies that as more immigrants arrive, Europeans can potentially acknowledge immigration’s economic and cultural benefits. Moreover, these results challenge pessimistic scholarly predictions that immigration erodes trust and support for welfare in Europe. This thesis offers two academic contributions. First, it considers the case of E8 migration, which has been ignored by existing comparative attitudinal studies about immigration. Second, focusing on post-enlargement migration helps this thesis to overcome common empirical obstacles such as cross-country differences in immigrant composition and admission criteria.