<p>The aim of this thesis was to study the strategies that Kamraterna (‘the Comrades’), an association for Stockholm’s policemen, and the Swedish Policemen’s Union employed in order to solve the issue of women in police service in the years 1957-1971. I have dealt with the attitudes they had to women in police service and the conceptions of gender that were expressed. The trade unions’ way of trying to solve the issue of women’s service and position in the organisation and Kamraterna’s actions vis-à-vis their female members have also been in focus. Finally, I have also studied the way in which the police profession was made masculine and feminine and how this could be used as a part of the strategies. </p><p>Women’s entrance into the police profession on the same terms as men created and made visible the gender structures in the police force. The male police officers saw their rights threatened, if the female labour could be judged differently and hence be promoted more rapidly. This conflict made conceptions of male and female qualities visible, and above all in Kamraterna, a struggle was started to maintain male police officers’ privileges and rights. </p><p>The unions emphasised that women would have to be employed on equal terms and that equal pay must imply equal work. Women were however considered to be best suited for social police work and work with women and children, while men were chiefly associated with the parts of the profession involving physical strength and violence. It was difficult to implement the principle of equal terms in practice, since there was a basic idea that women were different. Both Kamraterna and the Swedish Policemen’s Union used dual closure in order to solve this dilemma. Kamraterna’s usurpation was intended to influence the police commissioner and to unite the members, including the women, thereby creating a collective unity about the issue of the female police officers’ posts and work. They tried to remove the women from foot patrol work by having them relocated to other departments with civil duties. In this way they endeavoured to keep the patrol work as an exclusively male area by resorting to exclusion. When the National Police Board started experimental work in 1969 with female police officers being stationed in special units with civil duties, the Swedish Policemen’s Union supported this effort and tried to see to it that the instructions were followed. The Policemen’s Union thus employed exclusion. Excluding women from parts of the profession meant that the unions used a demarcationary strategy resulting in a gendered division of labour being created rather than the women being entirely excluded from the police profession. The patrol work was the part of the police profession that women ought not to have access to, and this was linked to masculine qualities and symbolism. Words like physical strength, strenuous service and violence were related to the patrol work. The uniforms and weapons underscored the masculine connotations of the patrol work. A hegemonic masculinity was created here, which could be used as a means for excluding female police officers. The women’s uniforms looked different and their weapons were not the same, which should have made it more difficult for them to be regarded as real police officers. </p>

The aim of this thesis was to study the strategies that Kamraterna (‘the Comrades’), an association for Stockholm’s policemen, and the Swedish Policemen’s Union employed in order to solve the issue of women in police service in the years 1957-1971. I have dealt with the attitudes they had to women in police service and the conceptions of gender that were expressed. The trade unions’ way of trying to solve the issue of women’s service and position in the organisation and Kamraterna’s actions vis-à-vis their female members have also been in focus. Finally, I have also studied the way in which the police profession was made masculine and feminine and how this could be used as a part of the strategies. Women’s entrance into the police profession on the same terms as men created and made visible the gender structures in the police force. The male police officers saw their rights threatened, if the female labour could be judged differently and hence be promoted more rapidly. This conflict made conceptions of male and female qualities visible, and above all in Kamraterna, a struggle was started to maintain male police officers’ privileges and rights. The unions emphasised that women would have to be employed on equal terms and that equal pay must imply equal work. Women were however considered to be best suited for social police work and work with women and children, while men were chiefly associated with the parts of the profession involving physical strength and violence. It was difficult to implement the principle of equal terms in practice, since there was a basic idea that women were different. Both Kamraterna and the Swedish Policemen’s Union used dual closure in order to solve this dilemma. Kamraterna’s usurpation was intended to influence the police commissioner and to unite the members, including the women, thereby creating a collective unity about the issue of the female police officers’ posts and work. They tried to remove the women from foot patrol work by having them relocated to other departments with civil duties. In this way they endeavoured to keep the patrol work as an exclusively male area by resorting to exclusion. When the National Police Board started experimental work in 1969 with female police officers being stationed in special units with civil duties, the Swedish Policemen’s Union supported this effort and tried to see to it that the instructions were followed. The Policemen’s Union thus employed exclusion. Excluding women from parts of the profession meant that the unions used a demarcationary strategy resulting in a gendered division of labour being created rather than the women being entirely excluded from the police profession. The patrol work was the part of the police profession that women ought not to have access to, and this was linked to masculine qualities and symbolism. Words like physical strength, strenuous service and violence were related to the patrol work. The uniforms and weapons underscored the masculine connotations of the patrol work. A hegemonic masculinity was created here, which could be used as a means for excluding female police officers. The women’s uniforms looked different and their weapons were not the same, which should have made it more difficult for them to be regarded as real police officers.

Utopian thinking can be understood as an exploration of desires beyond current realities. Seeing ecovillages as spaces for utopian practices, the aim is to investigate what space exists for gender equality and how the utopianism can be used to challenge unwanted patterns. Grounded theory is used to build knowledge from women’s experiences gathered through qualitative interviews. By mapping desires in relation to utopia, it is found that while visions of the sustainable life are seen as attainable, attaining gender equality through equal division of household work is hindered by lack of visions, examples and spaces for discussion of alternatives.

Family policies are a recognised instrument to improve gender equality by encouraging fathers to increase their participation in the private sphere. Previous research has found that attitudes about how paid and unpaid labour should be divided between partners differ between countries by varied support for traditional male breadwinner models and sharing models. On the other hand, behavioural studies have found that parenthood tends to modify gender relations by making them more traditional. This study aims to analyse if there are similar differences in attitudes between parents and individuals without children or if there is a dissonance between behaviour and attitudes. The importance of institutional context is taken into account by comparing these groups in an egalitarian and traditional policy context. The analytical strategy includes using quantitative data from the International Social Survey Programme from 2012, comprising 5385 respondents from Norway, Sweden, Germany and Poland. The association between attitudes about the division of paid and unpaid work and parenthood is analysed by applying multiple linear regression. The results are that parenting has a conservative effect on attitudes in a traditional policy context as parents with small children have a lower probability of egalitarian attitudes. In the egalitarian policy context, no such differences are found. Instead, gender seems to partly modify the association between parenthood and attitudes as mothers with toddlers have a higher probability of egalitarian attitudes than fathers with children between school age and 17 years old. Therefore, institutional contexts seem highly relevant for attitudes about the gendered division of labour. In the traditional policy context, institutional structures and norms seem to result in individuals correcting a discrepancy between attitudes and behaviour to reduce dissonance. On the other hand, the findings in the egalitarian countries point to contextual mechanisms which allow a dissonance between attitudes and behaviour to exist without individuals needing to correct the inconsistency.

How were work identities of female and male shop assistants in the clothing departments at NK constructed, and how did this change over time? The starting point of this thesis has been that identities are contextually constructed. Focus has been set on trying to understand how the process of ‘making’ identity has been done in a historical perspective for shop assistants in clothing departments at the department store NK, AB Nordiska Kompaniet, in Stockholm. Shared narratives are crucial in the process of making collective identities. This thesis analyses narratives on relations between shop assistants and the company, the trade union and the commodities that were sold. The results show that the constructions of work identities, besides from being an ongoing process, have been characterized by a constantly ongoing struggle about expectations on their nature. The perspective is both discursive and materialistic. NK had approximately 2000 employees. All these people could not have personal relations to each other. To create an imagined community and a sense of collective identity, common narratives were important. The employees were in the company’s internal narrative named the ‘NK-ists’. It was said to be important to work in the ‘NK- spirit’. Narratives outside the NK-collective did effect the imagined community within, sometimes causing the collective to join closer together and sometimes dividing it. Work identities and the gendered division of labour are connected. Notions of gender and of what kind of work that is considered to be suitable to men or women at different times and in different places colour the narratives that construct work identities. The narratives dealt with in this thesis originate in existing events and in myths about the department store NK, and the shop assistants working at NK had to relate to these. The employer had picked one group of employees for whom this was especially true: the shop assistants. They were told: “You are NK”.

This thesis is about the organisation, character and change of labour relations in expanding capitalist wool farming in the Cape between 1860 and 1950. It is an attempt to analyse labour in wool farming within a transnational framework, based on an expansion of capital from core to periphery of the capitalist world-economy. Wool farming in peripheries like the Cape was part of capitalist production through the link to primarily the British textile industry. This relationship enabled wool farmers to invest in their farms in sheep, fences and windmills. They thereby became agents of capital expansion in the world-economy, which was a prerequisite for a capitalist expansion. Although wool production in the Cape was initially an imperial division of labour, that relation changed during the twentieth century as Britain’s leading role as textile producer was challenged by other capitalist core countries. Capitalism as a transnational production system, based on commodity chains from periphery to core, became the most crucial structure for wool farmers in the Cape, who could increase their exports. The thesis also shows that the pre-capitalist generational division of labour among black peasants, through which farmers acquired labour, especially shepherds, was both discarded and intensified. Shepherding was intensified along with fencing during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century due to threat from jackals and lack of sufficient water supplies. Those farmers who invested in technology in the form of jackal-proof fences and windmills managed to change production from herding to rotational grazing in camps, which meant that shepherds were replaced by camp walkers, who controlled fences instead of sheep. Those farmers who did not invest were forced to exploit the pre-capitalist relations more intensively and hire shepherds in order to be able to produce and sell wool to textile manufacturers in capitalist core areas. As the young adult males disappeared from farms to the mines, the role of children and youths as shepherds became increasingly important. By the 1940s almost all the shepherds were children or youths, but they were about to be made redundant, as the number of shepherds decreased during the 1930s and 1940s.