Domestic violence is a major problem in the society. How policies and other important documents are framed lays the foundation for how the social work is structured. The objective of this study is to scrutinize documents covering the course of actions in cases of domestic violence in six different municipalities. More precisely, the study aims to investigate how the proposed policies constructs and describes domestic violence from the perspective of the abused and the abuser but also its impact on practical social work. For this purpose, the study adopted a qualitative summative content analysis to examine the policies from themes occurring in previous literature. Themes identified and used are as follows: municipalities explanations and definitions for domestic violence, production of domestic violence relative to gender, especially vulnerable groups and lastly the support in the social work. After that, themes were put into the perspectives of the feminist structural theory as well as the system theoretical view, also named the family violence perspective. The findings of this study suggest that when the municipality explains violence in close relationships with the gender neutral conception domestic violence, both men and women can take the role of the abuser. However, if violence instead was formulated as men’s violence against women, results assumed the man to be the abuser and the women to be abused. From this, various understandings and explanations resulted in different courses of action and who would be subject to this support. Moreover, noticeable was that in all documents scrutinized the woman was assumed to be abused regardless of theoretical perspective.

This study is a qualitative exploration of the gendered discourses of South African women in middle management. It explores the locations and perspectives from which middle management women speak, the institutions and traditions that inform their discourses and the challenges to dominant discourses on gender present in their talk. It is conducted from a social constructionist framework. The broader South African context is fraught with a contradiction between policy and practice. South Africa’s progressive constitution does not erode women’s tenuous and vulnerable position as is seen in the high incidence of violence against women, sexual harassment and women’s specific vulnerability to and rates of HIV infection. This contradiction is also evident in the labour market where South Africa echoes a global tendency of the continuation of gender stratification in the workplace. This is characterised by a tendency towards gender traditional occupations, a continuing wage gap, discontinued career paths for women, gender stratification of task division at work and unequal work division on the home front. This results in continued gender stratification of management and executive management positions. Women make up approximately 50% of the global, economically active population yet they have not been successful in entering the management world with the same proportion. Using social constructionism and a focus on discourse, this study examines the discursive construction of the gender stratification of the workplace. It starts by exploring how available literature on the topic constructs the problem as related to internal and individual matters, societal and social factors or organisational and institutional processes. It further explores the developments in the field of gender, discourse and organisations. Interview data from semi-structured interviews with women in middle management are analysed using discourse analysis. Different and contradicting discourses emerge from this analysis illustrating different discourses and associated identity positions available to women. The discourse analysis shows how different and contradicting discourses support the status quo by structuring certain subject positions into desirable explications of femininity but also how these contradictions allow space for resistance. The study argues that establishing a feminine identity remains vital to participants and that this requires ‘identity footwork’ within complex and contradictory discursive positions. / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2009. / Psychology / unrestricted

I denna studie studerar vi hur kvinnor som är entreprenörer gestaltas på Minc Startup House sociala medier, mer specifikt deras LinkedIn, Facebook och Instagram. En kvantitativ innehållsanalys har gjorts på inlägg som publicerats under ett års tid. Vi har studerat resultatet med hjälp av teorin om sociala konstruktioner som huvudteori. Till denna har vi sedan applicerat representationsteori, samt ett feministiskt perspektiv med inriktning av könskonstruktivism och intersektionalitet. Vi kan konstatera att Minc genom sin kommunikation gestaltar män och kvinnor som är entreprenörer olika. I kommunikation riktad till kvinnor appliceras kvinnliga stereotyper och benämningen kvinnlig entreprenör används ofta. Inga stereotyper av manlighet förekommer och orden man och manlig används endast i ett sammanhang, vilket har ett negativt syfte. Studiens resultat visar även att entreprenörer som inte har ett nordeuropeisk utseende är representerade i låg utsträckning. Detta gäller även för personer som är i åldern 50 år och uppåt. / In this thesis we are studying how women entrepreneurs are portrayed in Minc Startup House’s social media, more specifically their LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. A quantitative content analysis has been made on posts from a one-year time period. We have analysed the results with the help of the theory of social constructions as main theory. We have then applied the theory of representation, and a feministic perspective, more specifically the theory of constructions of gender and intersectionality. We have come to the conclusion that Minc through their communication are portraying women and men entrepreneurs differently. In communication created to reach women, female stereotypes are used, and the term female entrepreneur is often used. No male stereotypes are used, and the words man and male only occur in one context, which has a negative purpose. The results in the thesis also show how entrepreneurs without a north European appearance are represented to a low extent. This also regards people who appear to be in the age of 50 and above.