This essay is a qualitative examination of tayloristic labour processes in Swedish healthcare from 1945 to 1960. It focuses on nurses and explores how they reacted to changes in their working conditions brought about by taylorism through their association journal, Tidskrift för Sveriges Sjuksköterskor. The study has three major themes: what topics were important to nurses, what their views were on changes in working conditions and how their ideals changed. By looking at articles pertaining to these themes the study found that nurses were not averse to changes to their own working conditions. They were positive about the more qualified work and higher status taylorism created. However, they were negative about the possible effect that it could have on the care given to patients.

The aim of this study is to examine the ideal of citizenship as presented in the Swedish Girl Scout movement 1945-1965. Through the examination of periodicals aimed at Girl Scout leaders, the study attempts to elucidate how the presented ideals shifted in the years leading up to, and following, the merger between the largest Swedish Girl Scout and Boy Scout associations in 1960.         As a theoretical background, the model of the Belgian scout researcher Sophie Wittemans is used, according to which citizenship in the scout movement contains both a universalistic tendency, emphasizing and geared towards creating citizens that are equal in an abstract sense, as well as particularizing instruments that aim to mold the singular individual. Wittemans claims that the Girl Scout movement has generally focused on the later aspect.      The concept of citizenship is found to be linked to duty rather than to the freedom of the individual, especially in the sphere of home life. In professional life the individual is afforded a greater measure of freedom. At the time of the merger in 1960, the idea of citizenship is to some extent gendered. The Girl Scout is to be prepared to take part in a society where feminine and masculine values are both needed. There is no consensus, however, on what the difference between the sexes consists of.       Neither sex, nor citizenship, seems to be the main focus of the training of Girl Scouts during the studied period. The cultural and societal tensions are contained by religion, universalizing tools like the scout law, and concepts such as ‘humanity’.       Through the study of a relatively scarcely researched area, this study attempts to shed light upon the Swedish Girl Scout movement in the post-war-era, as well as the larger shift in gender roles in Swedish society during the same period.

While public opinion and previous research on the emergence of the first comprehensive animal welfare law in Sweden in 1944 has regarded it as a natural development of the animal welfare debates around the turn of the century, new research on the subject has problematized this view, instead pointing out the law of 1944 as a discursive break, in which the “animal welfare regime” emerged out of the previous “anti-cruelty regime”. This study focuses on the period of time after this break, from 1944 to 1973, examining this relatively unexplored part of Swedish animal welfare history by turning to the parliamentary debates of the time and looking at which practices were problematized and on which grounds, as well as how the line was drawn between acceptable animal use and unacceptable animal (ab)use. In doing so the study aims to explore the consequences of the aforementioned break in Swedish political discourse. The main argument of the study is that while the debates might seem to be about animal welfare, the main issue was in fact often not animals but humans, and differing conceptions of who was truly a “friend of the animals”, as opposed to a primitive, uncultured, brute. Human animal use as such was thus never questioned, instead the focus lay on specific practices such as recreational hunting and factory farming. In trying to draw a line between these practices, the members of parliament critical of the current state of affairs employed arguments which, inadvertently, could be interpreted as an attack on human animal use as such. In doing so, they activated the discursive mechanisms of control of the animal welfare regime, one of which the study identifies as a reversal of the logic of equivalence used by the reformist members of parliament before 1944.