The aim of this study is to go into depth and analyze the identity ”immigrant” (invandrare) and how it is constituted in Dagens Nyheter, Svenska Dagbladet and Sydsvenska Dagbladet. An investigation (SOU 2006:21) by Swedish authorities concludes that immigrants are portrayed in an unfavorable way in Swedish media, whilst Gunnar Sandelin in a debate article in Sweden’s biggest morning newspaper (Dagens Nyheter) meant that Swedish media lies about immigrants, creating an image of them that is too favorable that is not in touch with reality. This gives this thesis momentum to further investigate the identity immigrants are given in Swedish media. The theory and method used in this thesis is Laclau’s and Mouffe’s discourse theory. Discourse theory is well suited for revealing a certain group’s identity using chains of equivalence or chains of analogy. The discourse theory is sprung out of Marxist ideologies, especially Gramsci’s theories. Social antagonism, hegemony and identity are key concepts in discourse theory. The study shows that the word ”immigrant” only appears in articles that concern different problems in the society. No articles underlining the positive aspects of immigrants were found in the study and none of the journalists identified themselves as an immigrant. The newspapers in this study labels individuals ”immigrant” if they are in need of resources and help from the Swedish society. Immigrants were also not able to constitute their own identity though the constituting power was in the hands of the Swedish morning press.

<p>The aim of this study is to go into depth and analyze the identity ”immigrant” (invandrare) and how it is constituted in Dagens Nyheter, Svenska Dagbladet and Sydsvenska Dagbladet. An investigation (SOU 2006:21) by Swedish authorities concludes that immigrants are portrayed in an unfavorable way in Swedish media, whilst Gunnar Sandelin in a debate article in Sweden’s biggest morning newspaper (Dagens Nyheter) meant that Swedish media lies about immigrants, creating an image of them that is too favorable that is not in touch with reality. This gives this thesis momentum to further investigate the identity immigrants are given in Swedish media.</p><p>The theory and method used in this thesis is Laclau’s and Mouffe’s discourse theory. Discourse theory is well suited for revealing a certain group’s identity using chains of equivalence or chains of analogy. The discourse theory is sprung out of Marxist ideologies, especially Gramsci’s theories. Social antagonism, hegemony and identity are key concepts in discourse theory.</p><p>The study shows that the word ”immigrant” only appears in articles that concern different problems in the society. No articles underlining the positive aspects of immigrants were found in the study and none of the journalists identified themselves as an immigrant. The newspapers in this study labels individuals ”immigrant” if they are in need of resources and help from the Swedish society. Immigrants were also not able to constitute their own identity though the constituting power was in the hands of the Swedish morning press.</p>

This thesis seeks to understand how collective identity is formed in the comment section on Twitter. A comparison between the Nordic Resistance Movement (Nordiska Motståndsrörelsen) and Human Rights Campaign has been made with social antagonism as a starting point. The Nordic Resistance Movement is a Swedish organization with Nazi values and Human Rights Campaign is an American organization fighting for equal rights for LGBTQ-people. social antagonism states that collective identity is created when an antagonistic relationship exists. The thesis aims to answer the research question; how are collective identities, for the Nordic Resistance Movement and Human Rights Campaign, created in the comment section on Twitter? This question is answered using Social antagonism theory and Social Movement Theory as a theoretical framework. 1000 comments from each groups comment section has been collected and analysed with thematic content analysis. The study showed that collective identity is strengthened by the fact that there is an antagonistic relationship. We found that the collective identity of each group fought back whenever someone made a negative comment towards their beliefs. It also showed that the collective identity, of the followers and members in the comment section, doesn’t necessarily correlate with the identity of the organization. This study will help further the research on collective identity and how people are affected when joining a movement. It will hopefully inspire further research within social antagonism, collective identity and social movements.

For rational theories of organisational change, organisational dysfunctionalities are nothing more than the inadequacy of organisations to maximise on their goals or lack of co-ordination of different types of inputs and processes. Usually, such observations are made in exclusion of the analysis of organisational realities and the experiences that are part of their daily realities. This thesis explores the experiences of organisational change in a single case of the provincial department of education, namely the Eastern Cape Department of Education (ECDE). Using the qualitative and exploratory methods of interviews and document analysis, it asks how and why the department was perceived to be in a state of crisis in terms of service delivery, eight years after its initial transformation. To explore these questions, the thesis looked at the interplay between context, organisational design and internal skills and capacities, as the triad of processes that influenced the patterns for organisational change in this context. Broadly, the findings revealed that issues of organisational efficiency and service delivery cannot be debated and analysed outside of the political processes that influence them. The ECDE revealed that it was caught in endless politics of networks of coalition which influenced the pattern of service delivery. As a result this thesis concluded that organisational change and service delivery debates have to extend beyond the rational inputs and outputs paradigms to look at the complexities of networks that were a coincidence of transitional politics. It therefore proposes a focus on relational and network analysis of organisations to unravel their politics and pattern of influence on service delivery.

This thesis is empirically grounded in New Zealand's restructuring of unemployment and taxation policy in the 1980s and 1990s. Theoretically it is inspired by a post-Marxist discourse analytical approach that focuses on discourses as political strategies. This approach has made it possible, through an analysis of changing citizenship discourses, to understand how the neoliberalisation of New Zealand's citizenship regime proceeded via debate and struggle over unemployment and taxation policy. Debates over unemployment and taxation in New Zealand during the 1980s and 1990s reconfigured the targets of policy and re-ordered social antagonism, establishing a neoliberal citizenship regime and centring political problematic. This construction of a neoliberal citizenship regime involved re-specifying the targets of public policy as consumers and taxpayers. In exploring the hegemonic discourse strategies of the Fourth Labour Government and the subsequent National-led governments of the 1990s, this thesis traces the process of reconfiguring citizen subjectivity initially as 'social consumers' and participants in a coalition of minorities, and subsequently as universal taxpayers in antagonistic relation to unemployed beneficiaries. These changes are related back to key discursive events in New Zealand's recent social policy history as well as to shifts in the discourses of politicians that address the nature of the public interest and the targets of social policy. I argue that this neoliberalisation of New Zealand's citizenship regime was the outcome of the hegemonic articulatory discourse strategies of governing parties in the 1980s and 1990s. Struggles between government administrations and citizen-based social movement groups were articulated to the neoliberal project. I also argue that in the late 1990s, discursive struggle between the dominant parties to define themselves in difference from each other reveals both the 'de'contestation of a set of neoliberal policy prescriptions, underscoring the neoliberal political problematic, and the privileging of a contributing taxpayer identity as the source of political legitimacy. This study shows that the dynamics of discursive struggle matter and demonstrates how the outcomes of discursive struggle direct policy change. In particular, it establishes how neoliberal discourse strategies evolved from political discourses in competition with other discourses to become the hegemonic political problematic underscoring institutional practice and policy development.