This research study explores how ten Eritrean refugees living in Pretoria, South Africa, make sense of their refugee identity in individual interviews. Discursive analysis was employed as a methodology to capture the different ways of talking (interpretative repertoires) about their institutionally-ascribed refugee identity, their experiences as refugees and alternative identities which the refugees discursively constructed in their interaction with the researcher. The study was motivated to provide the refugees, as a marginalized social group, a platform for expressing their agency. Six men and four women were recruited for the study using a convenience sampling technique. Analysis resulted in the identification of five dominant and two less dominant interpretative repertoires. The dominant interpretative repertoires were as follows: ‘we have rights’ repertoire; ‘accept who you are’ repertoire; ‘they target you’ repertoire; ‘I am secure: they can’t deport me’ repertoire and ‘we are misunderstood as criminals’ repertoire. The two less dominant repertoires were: ‘our refugee identity is transient’ repertoire and ‘I am lost; I don’t have a country any more’ repertoire. The findings of such varied, contradictory and inconsistent ways of talking by the participants about their refugee identity demonstrate a challenge to previous empirical studies conducted on the experiences and identities of Eritrean refugees in different settings which treated participant accounts as consistent and coherent. Furthermore, the results of the study defy dominant discourses about refugees which describe them as voiceless and without agency. / Dissertation (MSocSci)--University of Pretoria, 2014. / am2014 / Sociology / unrestricted

Issues concerning gender equality are today an integral part of Swedish society. Because of this, even traditionally male-dominated actors are forced to incorporate a focus on gender equality. What kind of tensions may this provoke, and how are these tensions visible in the gender equality policy making of traditionally male-dominated organizations? Against this background, the aim of this dissertation is to analyse how issues of gender equality are “problematized” by three organizations that originate from masculine environments; Män för jämställdhet, IF Metall  and Rikpolisstyrelsen. I wish to analyse the meaning that these actors incorporate into the issue of gender equality and from which discourses these meanings are derived. This focus entails a specific theoretical standpoint. Thus, another aim of the study is to discuss the advantages of a post-structuralist approach to the study of public policy. More specifically, I want to develop the use of a range of discourse analytical modes of analysis and to evaluate their utility in capturing the dynamic of problematization processes. The empirical focus of the dissertation is on the years between 2000 and 2008. The research material consists of both formal and informal documents. The analysis shows that questions of gender equality can be problematized in a number of ways. Issues concerning gender equality can be tied to issues of men’s hegemony, men’s gender-specific problems, class-based problems and organizational problems. This wide array of problematizations also illustrates ways in which there still seems to be an underlying conflict over the meanings tied to the concept, even though nobody openly challenges the importance of gender equality reform efforts. I call this situation a “conflictual consensus” and point to the importance of deconstructing this supposed unity and illuminating the kind of power relations that lay hidden beneath it.

The strive for control over employees has developed throughout the years. This paper has its focus on how normative control can work as a powerful method to create and uphold a sought for behavior. Many companies have found an interest in a higher moral stance to get competitive advantages, and offer their customers and partners a more ethical product. This phenomenon has in Sweden resulted in a sphere of companies who has earned the R-licens. The R-licens is earned by companies if they fulfill ethical and cultural criteria. This paper explores how a telemarketing company reinforce these ethical guidelines and how the company use normative control to reassure what they consider ethical behavior. The paper has a social constructionist view and the data was gathered by semi-structured interviews. The data was analyzed via discourse analysis.The conclusion is that the normative control effectively has created an environment of a ethical perspective in the company. The control is due to a dualistic surveillance (horizontal and vertical) and that the employees take a stand against external conceptions of how telemarketing works and how competing companies operate. Their beliefs and trust in their moral standings and methods of selling is better and more honest (compare to their competition) makes them justify and reinforce the culture and its surveillance over them. Their shared beliefs are so strong that actions outside the culture are unacceptable and may result in lay-offs. The contribution of this paper is a window of observation, how normative control works to ground the ethical phenomenon on the company.

Background. The research on management in Swedish home care has been conductedmainly from sociological perspectives where structural conditions have been of interest (see for example Hagerman et al., 2013; Andersson, 2014; Österlind, 2013). The conditions impacting on management are described as differing ideals where the main ideals are the care perspective and the cost perspective (see for example Andersson, 2014; Österlind, 2013). The conflict between ideals create tensions between ideology and practice and different expectations (Antonsson, 2013) and may also create problems, dilemmas and paradoxes (Österlind, 2013). The rules impacting on the home care activities are bureaucratic rules stemming from the state and municipality. However, Trydegård (2000) argues that at the same time there is room for autonomy and path-dependence in the home care units. Purpose and research approach. There seems to be a lack of studies on management control in home care, and more especially no study combining a discourse, structures and theories on management control. The purpose of this thesis is to explore management control in home care in the relation between structures and managers’ interpretative repertoires in a social-constructionist perspective. The purpose is also to create a prototype model for further research. The ontological positioning and theoretical framework are building on Giddens’ structuration theory (1979, 1984) in which structures are seen as both the medium and outcome of social interaction and rules are important. The units of analysis are the managers’ accounts on management control in semi-structured interviews. The accounts are analysed in a so called case cluster analysis (McClintock et al., 1979) in the software program NVivo. The codes are building on Ouchi’s theory of management control (1979) as ‘input control’, ‘behaviour control’, ‘output control’ and ‘clan control’, and also building on Giddens’ structuration theory (1978, 1984) defined as 8 characteristics of rules, ‘normative sanctions’, ‘signification of meaning’, ‘authoritative’ or ‘allocative resources’. Findings. The findings reveal that home care is highly bureaucratic in input and output control by the use of formal rules stemming from municipality or state. In behaviour control home care has a medium-low degree of bureaucracy if exercised through ‘signification of meaning’ and medium-high when exercised through ‘authoritative resources’. In clan control home care has a low degree of bureaucracy and can either be positive or negative depending on how informal leaders in the unit impact on cooperation between care personnel and if there is trust and a good communication between manager and care personnel. Two main patterns of structuration appear: creation of structures for an efficient process flow of home care to increase efficiency, and co-creation of new rules for behaviour to increase cooperation. Managers focus on different situations of management control depending on conditions in the home care unit and own interpretations. Two interpretative repertoires are identified; the discourse on hard matters is created in relation to matters that are more rigid in structure, such as legislation and municipal goals and that are difficult to interpret differently, whereas soft matters are created in discourse around dilemmas and human or relational aspects of control.

Hiphopen har i alla dess tider varit en mansdominerad musikgenre och bransch men detta har under de senaste åren kommit att förändras, inte minst inom den svenska kontexten. Svensk hiphop karakteriseras idag av en utpräglad feminism, då till exempel det kvinnliga kollektivet Femtastic har växt fram. Att kvinnor idag har en minst lika stor roll som män inom den svenska hiphopen och att denna har en stark relation till feminism, visar på att den sexism vänd emot kvinnor som har präglat många raptexter skrivna av män här har kommit att förlora sin popularitet. Vi har genom att använda Edleys kritiska diskurspsykologi undersökt hur svenska kvinnliga rappare uttrycker sig och positionerar sig själva och andra i sina låttexter utifrån aspekterna kön och sexualitet, aspekter som manliga rappare ofta har använt vid beskrivning av kvinnor. Vi har med hjälp av tolkningsrepertoarer, subjektspositioner, ideologiska dilemman och Judith Butlers begrepp subversivitet kunnat urskilja olika mönster i konstruktioner av kön och sexualitet och funnit att artisterna i fråga många gånger agerar på ett sätt som bryter eller frångår köns- och sexualitetsbundna normer. Vi har även kunnat uttyda hur artisterna använder språkliga resurser som ett verktyg för att till exempel framhäva en kvinnlig styrka, såväl individuell som kollektiv. / Hip hop has throughout the years been a male dominated music genre and industry but this has recently come to change, not least within the Swedish context. Today Swedish hip hop is largely characterized by its pronounced feminism, partly because of the development of the female collective Femtastic. The fact that women today have an at least equally clear role in the Swedish hip hop industry as men indicates that sexism, which has been a frequently reoccurring theme in male rap lyrics, has come to lose its popularity. We have, through the use of Edleys critical discourse psychology, examined how Swedish female rappers express gender and sexuality and how they position themselves and others with regard to these aspects, aspects that male rappers often have used to describe women. By using interpretative repertoires, subject positions, ideological dilemmas and Judith Butlers term subversivity, we have been able to distinguish certain patterns in the constructions of gender and sexuality. We have found that the artists frequently express themselves in ways that digresses from stereotypical norms of gender and sexuality and distinguished how they use linguistic resources as tools with which they, among other things, accentuate female strength, individual as well as collective.

Pedagogical documentation is a certain procedure for documenting that, in recent years, has been embraced in several Swedish preschools. Teachers document children’s actions and conversations usually by photos or video recordings. This documentation is to be used for a pedagogical purpose. However, studies and governmental inspections have shown that pedagogical documentation gives rise to many questions among preschool teachers. The purpose of this study is to gain insight into what is being expressed when preschool teachers discuss pedagogical documentation, focusing on themes of content and on the participants’ expressions of their points of view. The data is comprised of transcriptions from audio recordings of discussions conducted in a research circle. The participants are eight preschool teachers that met over the course of one year. Each meeting focused on the documentation provided by a different participant. In that way the contents of the discussions were framed by the teachers own questions and narratives. Theoretically, the study departs from Social Constructionism and Discursive Psychology. The preschool teachers’ utterances have been analyzed using concepts of interpretative repertoires and ideological dilemmas. The results show the main themes to be: Knowledge content in a preschool setting, children’s learning, the teacher’s role and implementation of pedagogical documentation. The participants’ joint position is that the knowledge content at the preschool level is defined by the curriculum for the preschool. Concerning children’s learning and the teacher’s role, two main standpoints are disclosed. Ideologically those standpoints derive from two opposing theories of education. Based on how the standpoints have been expressed I have called them ”predetermined learning” versus ”non-predetermined learning”. One main distinction between the standpoints is that predetermined learning emphasizes the results of learning, while non-predetermined learning emphasizes the processes of learning. The participants’ utterances show that teachers tend to subscribe to the idea that there is only one acceptable way of working with pedagogical documentation. This sometimes creates performance anxiety and feelings of not succeeding and has led to arguments advocating an alternate approach; pedagogical documentation can be done in many ways. The ideological dilemmas within the discourse can be perceived as resources by which the participants argue about knowledge, learning, teaching and about the implementation of pedagogical documentation. / <p>Licentiatuppsatsen har författats inom forskarskolan "Utforskande lärprocesser och literacy: förskolebarns lärande i språk, matematik och naturvetenskap" som genomförts i samarbete mellan Stockholms universitet, Uppsala universitet, Umeå universitet och Högskolan i Dalarna.</p>

This thesis set out to study the debate on circumcision of boys in Sweden. The study concerns itself with how categories and positions become rhetorical resources in the debate and how categories andpositions thus are made relevant. In order to get at what is made possible through the use of theserhetorical recourses this study has analyzed debate articles, official Swedish governmental documentsand the United Nations Conventions on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). Three interpretativerepertoires surfaced as distinct in this material and they are; Religious identity and belonging,medicine and the UNCRC. The analysis will therefore be structured and guided by these repertoires.As the debate is centred around the Human Rights Paradigm there is an ingrained ideological dilemmain the debate that can be explained as the tension between a Universal and a Cultural relativisticinterpretation of Human Rights. This tension will be discussed throughout the study. Severalconclusions can be drawn from the analysis: The various and contradictory positions allowed for bythe use of the UNCRC makes it an elusive tool in both theory and practice. The ideological dilemmatends to coerce the participants into opposing positions and even question the rhetorical tools utilizedin the debate. The child surfaces in various categories and at the end of this thesis the question remain;Is it a religious child or is it a child of religious parents?

Background Within trauma teams, effective communication is necessary to ensure safe and secure care of the patient. Deficiencies in communication are one of the most important factors leading to patient harm. Time is an essential factor for rapid and efficient disposal of trauma teams to increase patients’ survival and prevent morbidity. Trauma team training plays an important role in improving the team’s performance, while the leader of the trauma team faces the challenge of coordinating and optimizing this performance. Aim The overall aim of this thesis was to analyse how members of trauma teams communicated verbally and non-verbally during trauma team training in emergency settings, and how the leaders were positioned or positioned themselves in relation to other team members. The aim was also to investigate the use of a communication tool, closed-loop communication, and the time taken to make a decision to go to surgery in relation to specific factors in the team as well as the leader’s position. Methods Eighteen trauma teams were audio and video recorded and analysed during regular in situ training in the emergency room at a hospital in northern Sweden. Each team consisted of six participants: two physicians, two nurses, and two enrolled nurses, giving a total of 108 participants. In Study I, the communication between the team members was analysed using a method inspired by discourse psychology and Strauss’ concept of “negotiated orders”. In Study II, the communication in the teams was categorized and quantified into “call-outs” and “closed-loop communication”. The analysis included the team members’ background data and results from Study I concerning the leader’s position in the team. Poisson regression analyses were performed to assess closed-loop communication (outcome variable) in relation to background data and leadership style (independent exploratory variables). In Study III, quantitative content analysis was used to categorize and organize the team members’ positions and the leaders’ non-verbal communication in the video-recorded material. Time sequences of leaders’ non-verbal communications in terms of gaze direction, speech time, and gestures were identified separately to the level of seconds and presented as proportions (%) of the total training time. The leaders’ vocal nuances were also categorized. The analysis in Study IV was based on the team members’ background data, the results from Study I concerning the leader’s position in the team, and the categorization and quantification of team communication from Study II. Cox proportional hazard regression was performed to assess the time taken to make a decision to go to surgery (outcome variable) in relation to background data, the leader’s position, and closed-loop communication (independent variables). Results The findings in Study I showed that team leaders used coercive, educational, discussing, and negotiating repertoires to convey knowledge and create common goals of priorities in work. The repertoires were used flexibly and changed depending on the urgency of the situation and the interaction between the team members. When using these repertoires, the team leaders were positioned or positioned themselves in either an authoritarian or an egalitarian position. Study II showed that closed-loop communication was used to a limited extent during the trauma team training. Call-out was more frequently used by team members with eleven or more years in the profession and experience of trauma within the past year, compared with team members with no such experience. Scandinavian origin, an egalitarian team leader and previous experience of two or more structured trauma courses were associated with more frequent use of closed-loop communication compared to those with no such origin, leader style, or experience. Study III showed that team leaders who gained control over the “inner circle” used gaze direction, vocal nuances, verbal commands, and gestures to solidify their verbal messages. Leaders who spoke in a hesitant voice or were silent expressed ambiguity in their non-verbal communication, and other team members took over the leader's tasks. Study IV showed that the team leader’s closed-loop communication was important for making the decision to go to surgery. In 8 of 16 teams, decisions on surgery were taken within the timeframe of the trauma team training. Call-outs and closed-loop communication initiated by the team members were significantly associated with a lack of decision to go to surgery. Conclusions The leaders used different repertoires to convey and gain knowledge in order to create common goal in the teams. These repertoires were both verbal and non-verbal, and flexible. They shifted depending on the urgency of the situation and the interaction within the team. Depending on the chosen repertoire, the leaders were positioned or positioned themselves as egalitarian and/or authoritarian leaders. In urgent situations, the leaders used closed-loop communication as part of a coercive repertoire, and called out commands and directed requests to specific team members. This repertoire was important for making the decision to go to surgery; the more closed-loop communication initiated by the leader, the more likely that the team would make a decision to go to surgery. Problems arose if the leaders were positioned or positioned themselves as either an authoritarian or an egalitarian leader. The leaders needed to be flexible and use different repertories in order to move the teamwork forward. It was notable that higher numbers of call-outs and closed-loop communication initiated by the team members decreased the probability of making the decision to go to surgery.

Abstract  Pedagogical documentation is a certain procedure for documenting that, in recent years, has been embraced in several Swedish preschools. Teachers document children’s actions and conversations usually by photos or video recordings. This documentation is to be used for a pedagogical purpose. However, studies and governmental inspections have shown that pedagogical documentation gives rise to many questions among preschool teachers. The purpose of this study is to gain insight into what is being expressed when preschool teachers discuss pedagogical documentation, focusing on themes of content and on the participants’ expressions of their points of view. The data is comprised of transcriptions from audio recordings of discussions conducted in a research circle. The participants are eight preschool teachers that met over the course of one year. Each meeting focused on the documentation provided by a different participant. In that way the contents of the discussions were framed by the teachers own questions and narratives. Theoretically, the study departs from Social Constructionism and Discursive Psychology. The preschool teachers’ utterances have been analyzed using concepts of interpretative repertoires and ideological dilemmas. The results show the main themes to be: Knowledge content in a preschool setting, children’s learning, the teacher’s role and implementation of pedagogical documentation. The participants’ joint position is that the knowledge content at the preschool level is defined by the curriculum for the preschool. Concerning children’s learning and the teacher’s role, two main standpoints are disclosed. Ideologically those standpoints derive from two opposing theories of education. Based on how the standpoints have been expressed I have called them ”predetermined learning” versus ”non-predetermined learning”. One main distinction between the standpoints is that predetermined learning emphasizes the results of learning, while non-predetermined learning emphasizes the processes of learning. The participants’ utterances show that teachers tend to subscribe to the idea that there is only one acceptable way of working with pedagogical documentation. This sometimes creates performance anxiety and feelings of not succeeding and has led to arguments advocating an alternate approach; pedagogical documentation can be done in many ways. The ideological dilemmas within the discourse can be perceived as resources by which the participants argue about knowledge, learning, teaching and about the implementation of pedagogical documentation. / Forskarskola för förskollärare "Utforskande lärprocesser och literacy:Förskolebarns lärande i språk, matematik och naturvetenskap"

‘Corporate social responsibility’ (CSR) and ‘socially responsible investment’ (SRI) have become predominant frameworks connecting business to society that have spread across the globe. They comprise a shared set of ideas and practices, such as those promoted in global reporting standards and by international organisations such as the UN Global Compact. Nonetheless, both are constructed and reproduced by companies in relation to context-specific social institutions, including norms and conventions shaping company engagement in social issues. Using a neo-institutionalist theoretical framework, the thesis examines constructions of social responsibility in discourse and within institutional contexts, across regions that are not often compared in the research terrain: two West European welfare states (Sweden and the UK) and two emerging African economies (South Africa and Mauritius). The purpose of the thesis is to add to the literature on CSR and SRI with a sociologically informed perspective that is comparative and connects institutional theory with social constructionism and a Foucauldian perspective on power. The thesis analyses how perceptions of CSR and SRI are constructed in relation to the social institutions that encase companies’ engagement with social issues, such as national level welfare configurations and the institution of financial investments. The main argument in this thesis is that CSR and SRI need to be seen as contextually constructed, in discourse and practice, in ways that draw the boundaries and set the conditions for company engagement with social issues. The thesis comprises three articles. Article 1 is a content analysis of company self-reporting on CSR and the article examines how the content given to CSR relates to broader welfare configurations and as such differs in four national settings across the divide between emerging African economies and Western welfare states. Article 2 is a discourse analysis that examines interpretative repertoires occurring in company self-reporting across the same set of four countries. The interpretative repertoires are analysed as discursive practices where power intersects with the production of knowledge on CSR. Article 3 focuses on SRI and examines responsible investing as a form of institutional work that institutional investors engage in. Based on an interview study with institutional investors in Sweden, the article analyses institutional work as a process that has the effect of both institutional creation and maintenance and it connects these institutional processes to the construction of meaning on SRI. In its entirety the thesis contributes a sociological perspective on how prevailing understandings of corporate social responsibility come into being and are reproduced. / Uppfattningar om företags samhällsansvar har begreppsliggjorts i huvudsak genom idéer om ’corporate social responsibility’ (CSR) och ’ansvarsfulla investeringar’. Under de senaste decennierna har dessa begrepp utvecklats till att bli vanligt förkommande och har spridits över världen. Som globala koncept medför de en gemensam uppsättning av idéer och metoder, såsom de som förs fram i internationella standarder för företags CSR rapportering, och utav internationella organisationer såsom FN:s Global Compact. Ändå skiljer de sig åt mellan olika kontexter och är konstruerade och återges av företag i förhållande till sociala sammanhang. Begreppen ges mening i relation till sociala institutioner i form av normer och konventioner som redan omger företag och sociala frågor. Baserat på nyinstitutionell teori undersöker avhandlingen konstruktioner av samhällsansvar och ansvarstagande, i diskurs och i institutionella sammanhang, över regioner som inte ofta jämförs i forskningen kring skillnader i företags samhällsansvar: två Västeuropeiska välfärdsstater (Sverige och Storbritannien) och två tillväxtekonomier i södra Afrika (Sydafrika och Mauritius). Syftet med avhandlingen är att bidra till litteraturen kring CSR och ansvarsfulla investeringar med ett sociologiskt perspektiv som är jämförande och för samman institutionell teori med social konstruktionism och Foucaults perspektiv på makt. Avhandlingen analyserar hur föreställningar om CSR och ansvarsfulla investeringar konstrueras i förhållande till de sociala institutioner som omger företags engagemang i samhällsfrågor, och belyser speciellt vikten av samhällets välfärdssystem och konventioner kring finansiella investeringar som betydelsefulla för dessa begrepp. Huvudargumentet i denna avhandling är att CSR och ansvarsfulla investeringar måste ses som kontextuellt skapade, i diskurs och praxis, på ett sätt som drar gränserna och skapar förutsättningarna för företags engagemang i samhällsfrågor. Avhandlingen omfattar tre artiklar. Artikel 1 är en innehållsanalys av företags självrapportering om CSR och artikeln undersöker hur innehållet som ges till CSR i självrapporteringen relaterar till hur samhället i övrigt hanterar välfärd och sociala frågor. Artikeln visar på hur CSR på så sätt skiljer sig åt mellan fyra olika länder där två är tillväxtekonomier i södra Afrika och två är Västeuropeiska välfärdsstater. Artikel 2 är en diskursanalys som undersöker språkliga repertoarer (interpretative repertoires) som förekommer i företags självrapportering om CSR, i samma uppsättning av fyra länder. Repertoarerna analyseras som tillämpandet av diskurs och de synliggör hur makt är av betydelse i skapandet av diskurser kring CSR. Artikel 3 fokuserar på ansvarfulla investeringar och undersöker detta som en form av aktivt skapande och återskapande av samhällsinstitutioner. Baserat på en intervjustudie med institutionella investerare i Sverige analyseras ansvarfullt investerande som en process som på samma gång innebär både skapande av en ny social institution, ansvarsfulla investeringar, och återskapande av en existerande institution, finansiella investeringar. Skapandet av nya idéer inom ramarna för en existerande institution påverkar innebörden i ansvarsfulla investeringar. I sin helhet bidrar avhandlingen med ett sociologiskt perspektiv på hur uppfattningar om företags samhällsansvar skapas och återskapas. / <p>At the time of the doctoral defense, the following papers were unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 1: Manuscript. Paper 2: Manuscript. Paper 3: Manuscript.</p>