Anglais: Through a comparative examination of Montreal and Brussels, this thesis considers the way city dwellers shaped the social and cultural significance of urban space in terms of sensorial experiences and bodily practices. The analysis is based primarily on qualitative sources relating to urban life and to the relationship with the city environment during the period 1880-1914, a time when cities underwent intense transformations associated with modernity and industrialisation. The discourses and representations examined in this study were produced by a wide range of urban actors, including elected officials and municipal bureaucrats, industrialists, urban reformers, factory and housing inspectors, workers, doctors, hygienists, writers, artists and ordinary citizens. This was a period in which the city was increasingly conceptualised as a total, organic object. Consequently, the thesis first examines representations, both critical and celebratory, of these cities in their entirety, showing how the discourse about urban space was constructed through experiences with, and perceptions of, its materiality. The subsequent chapters examine, in turn, spaces of industrial production, homes and the streets. In each of these spaces, representations of these changing environments were produced in marked reference to the body and the senses. In a time marked by the rise of scientific and rational thought, the sources consulted demonstrate the centrality of personal and subjective experiences in the construction of understandings of the city. Analysing these specific milieus also affords the opportunity to consider the cultural significance of the body, as well as its place in the social tensions that characterised the period. The comparative approach through which these cities are analysed illuminates the development of similar processes in analogous, yet discrete, contexts. In this way, certain specificities of Brussels and Montreal, as well the commonalities they shared, are brought to light. The principal objective of this bipartite perspective, however, is to demonstrate, in reference to two local examples, how urban dwellers interiorised vast processes of global transformation by means of their bodies, the spaces through which they moved on a daily basis, as well as their immediate socio-cultural context. ********* Français: Se penchant sur les cas de Montréal et de Bruxelles en comparaison, cette thèse examine la façon dont, à travers la perception sensorielle et les pratiques corporelles des citadins, la signification sociale et culturelle de l’espace urbain se construit. L’analyse se base principalement sur des sources discursives témoignant de la vie urbaine et du rapport à l’espace d’une multitude d’acteurs durant la période 1880-1914, traversée par d’intenses transformations liées à la modernité et à l’industrialisation. Les discours émanant des élus et des fonctionnaires municipaux, des industriels, des réformateurs urbains, des inspecteurs d’usines et de logements, des ouvriers, des médecins, des hygiénistes, des écrivains, des artistes et de simples citoyens ont été consultés. S’agissant d’une époque où la ville est de plus en plus conceptualisée dans sa totalité, la thèse aborde, dans un premier temps, les discours, à la fois critiques et élogieux, concernant la ville industrielle dans son ensemble, en montrant comment ceux-ci sont construits par rapport à l’expérience et aux perceptions de la matérialité urbaine. Puis, dans les chapitres subséquents, les lieux de production industrielle, le logement et les rues sont examinés successivement. Dans chacun de ces types d’espace, les discours faisant état de l’intensification des transformations à l’environnement se déclinent, de façon prononcée, en référence au corps et aux sens. Ils témoignent de la place prépondérante des expériences personnelles et subjectives dans la construction du rapport à l’espace urbain, et ce à une époque marquée par la montée de la pensée scientifique et rationnelle. L’analyse de ces milieux permet aussi de mettre en relief la façon dont se construit la signification culturelle du corps, ainsi que la place de celui-ci dans l’évolution des tensions sociales caractéristiques de l’époque. À travers une approche comparative, l’étude de ces deux villes permet d’examiner l’évolution de processus similaires dans deux contextes analogues, mais distincts. Ainsi est-il possible de déceler certaines spécificités de Bruxelles et de Montréal, de même que des traits communs aux deux villes. Cependant, l’apport principal de cette perspective croisée est de montrer, à la lumière de deux exemples locaux, la manière dont les citadins intériorisent de vastes processus globaux de transformation par le biais de leur corps, des espaces qu’ils fréquentent quotidiennement, et de leur contexte socioculturel immédiat.

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Recent research in classrooms has often had its focus on the pupil, the individual, and not on the different groups of students that exist. In a classroom there are normally several different groupings, each one having its own personal attitude towards the current lesson. If there had been more research we would find it easier to understand why pupils sometimes behave the way they do. The purpose of this essay is to analyze how pupils` social relations create groupings. Furthermore I intend to investigate how and why pupils show their belonging to a certain group. The two questions of the essay are: 1. How pupils’ social relations appear in a classroom? 2. What strategies do the pupils use to indicate their belonging to a grouping? My final conclusion is that the pupils’ social relations appear in groupings, in which a certain standard dominates how the pupil should behave during a lesson. The members of a group use the same strategies to show their group belonging. For example, it can be different attitudes to the teacher’s lesson that mark a grouping.

The aim of this study is to analyse the importance of social factors and so­cial relations around food preparation. Methods used: a questionnaire, a food diary kept by the person(s) respon­sible for food preparation in the family and a number of interviews. 348 families from the counties of Uppsala and Umeå with at least one child un­der 18 years of age filled in the formulas. The kitchen is a working-place where women dominate as workers. Class has a considerable effect on patterns of meals, on methods used for food preparation and on the choice of food and dishes. The division of la­bour is auso effected, members of the family are more involved in the pro­cess of food preparation when the mother is a higher non-manual employee or self-employed. Distinctions revealed when reading the diaries with Bourdieu's con­ceptions in mind were of three kinds. One dimension is geografical, an other dimension is that of age. The third dimension is class. Upper-class families distinguished themselves by using more extras and more elaborate ways of labelling the gravy, the vegetables, the dishes themselves. They also had more alcohol with the dinner. Still another dimension is the gen­der power system. The results from the interviews revealed two patterns. One is that women express in various ways that there are conflicting goals involved, hard to cope with satisfactorily. The other is that there is a great variety of ways the couples deal with the gender system - men's open or hidden domination and women's open or hidden subordination. / digitalisering@umu

My dissertation research is interdisciplinary in nature, at the nexus of three areas of scholarly work and actual practices: union renewal and non-unionized workers-rights organizing in Canada and the US; feminist, anti-racist Marxian approaches to class relations as being racialized, gendered and bureaucratic; and, the institutional ethnographic method of inquiry into social reality. My empirical focus is on the Ontario Minimum Wage Campaign (OMWC). The OMWC was a Toronto-based labour-community project to raise the minimum wage to $10 per hour. It was started in 2001 by Justice for Workers (J4W), was carried on by the Ontario Needs a Raise coalition (ONR) from 2003 to 2006, and was re-launched in 2007 by the Toronto and York Region Labour Council (TYRLC) in association with some community groups. The OMWC brought together across time and space activist groups, community agencies and labour organizations, all of whose volunteers, members, clients, educators, officials and staff were the agents and/or targets of the campaign. The apparent victory of the OMWC is quite contested. Local campaign realities were compartmentalized in numerous ways and OMWC involvement met different institutionally specific and coordinated needs. And while coalitions generally arise as vehicles to transcend such institutional separation, the campaign was challenged to materially bridge such compartmentalization. The fragmentation of reality amongst institutions and how it was managed in practice affected how collaboration, participation, and decision-making happened and appeared to have happened in organizing and educational activities. While there were at times transformative intentions, there was generally a pragmatic anti-racist organizing practice and effect. I contend that the complexity of contemporary society poses great challenges for the possibilities for human-agency based labour-community workers-rights organizing with a broad-based, political capacity for movement building orientation. I suggest that this is largely so because the social coordination of what we do and what we understand about what we do turns on at least three components of social reality: an institution-based organization of multi-layered social relations that is generally locally circumscribed but extralocally driven; a conditioned individually-driven orientation to meeting human needs; and an ideological orientation to both the content of ideas and thought, and the process of that reasoning.

My dissertation research is interdisciplinary in nature, at the nexus of three areas of scholarly work and actual practices: union renewal and non-unionized workers-rights organizing in Canada and the US; feminist, anti-racist Marxian approaches to class relations as being racialized, gendered and bureaucratic; and, the institutional ethnographic method of inquiry into social reality. My empirical focus is on the Ontario Minimum Wage Campaign (OMWC). The OMWC was a Toronto-based labour-community project to raise the minimum wage to $10 per hour. It was started in 2001 by Justice for Workers (J4W), was carried on by the Ontario Needs a Raise coalition (ONR) from 2003 to 2006, and was re-launched in 2007 by the Toronto and York Region Labour Council (TYRLC) in association with some community groups. The OMWC brought together across time and space activist groups, community agencies and labour organizations, all of whose volunteers, members, clients, educators, officials and staff were the agents and/or targets of the campaign. The apparent victory of the OMWC is quite contested. Local campaign realities were compartmentalized in numerous ways and OMWC involvement met different institutionally specific and coordinated needs. And while coalitions generally arise as vehicles to transcend such institutional separation, the campaign was challenged to materially bridge such compartmentalization. The fragmentation of reality amongst institutions and how it was managed in practice affected how collaboration, participation, and decision-making happened and appeared to have happened in organizing and educational activities. While there were at times transformative intentions, there was generally a pragmatic anti-racist organizing practice and effect. I contend that the complexity of contemporary society poses great challenges for the possibilities for human-agency based labour-community workers-rights organizing with a broad-based, political capacity for movement building orientation. I suggest that this is largely so because the social coordination of what we do and what we understand about what we do turns on at least three components of social reality: an institution-based organization of multi-layered social relations that is generally locally circumscribed but extralocally driven; a conditioned individually-driven orientation to meeting human needs; and an ideological orientation to both the content of ideas and thought, and the process of that reasoning.

This thesis highlights the importance of social relationships for high school adolescents’ identity in a multicultural school in Stockholm’s suburb. The second purpose of this thesis is to shed light on, if the school sees the students’ cultural background as an asset and how teachers can take advantage and implement it to the way they teach .The theories in the study were developed by Urie Bronnfenbrenner; The ecological theory, Pierre Bourdeau; The three forms of capital and George H. Mead; The significant other, The generalized other and "I" and "Me". The results show that the family is the most important relationship in comparison to relationships with teachers and friends /classmates, according to both high school youth and teachers. The child's identity develops in the primary relationships that is essential for the child's future relationships. In other words it’s in the microsystem which the child's norms and values creates and develops. The result also shows that teachers and students have different opinions regarding the school's approach to students' cultural background as an asset. The students believe that teachers don't take their cultural background into account, while the teachers feel that this is an essence to be able to understand each other and respect each other. But the cultural background should not be a wall that they hide behind.

Syftet med föreliggande studie är att ur ett socialpsykologiskt perspektiv undersöka vilka upplevelser inhyrd personal har på ett visst företag beroende på vilken arbetsgrupp de tillhör. I studien har vi utgått från en kvalitativ metod med nio semistrukturerade intervjuer där urvalet bestod av fem manliga informanter och fyra kvinnliga. Resultatet visar att det finns övervägande positiva upplevelser av att arbeta som inhyrd på det aktuella företaget där sociala relationer och ett gott bemötande är viktiga orsaker till dessa.  Resultatet visar även på skillnader i upplevelser hos den inhyrda personalen beroende på vilken arbetsgrupp de tillhör och vilka grupprocesser som utspelar sig inom denna. Resultatet har vi sedan analyserat med hjälp av ett flertal teoretiker; Moira von Wright, Johan Asplund, Norbert Elias, Georg Simmel, Susan A. Wheelan och Abraham Maslow. Analysen visar bland annat att den inhyrda personalens egenskaper skapas i samspel med de direktanställda och att detta gör att de känner sig som en del av arbetsgruppen. / The purpose of this study is to examining which experiences that temporary workers has on a particular company from a social psychological perspective, and see if the experiences depend on which workgroup they belong. In this study we have used a qualitative approach with nine semi-structured interviews, where the sample consisted of five male and four female informants. The results show that there are generally positive experiences of temporary work on the relevant company in which social relationships and good treatment are important causes. The results also show differences in the experiences of the temporary workers, depending on the working group they belong and which group processes that take place within it. The result, we then analyzed with the help of several theorists: Moira von Wright, Johan Asplund, Norbert Elias, Georg Simmel, Susan A. Wheelan and Abraham Maslow. The analysis shows that the temporary workers characteristics are created in interaction with those directly employed and that this makes them feel as part of the working group.

This thesis presents the analysis of how the social relations shape the situation ofwaste management in developing countries. The towns of Somanya and Agormanya,which are both located in the Eastern Region of Ghana, have been selected as casestudies for this thesis. Qualitative research methods were applied to collect theinformation during the fieldwork. The thesis applies different social science concepts,such as the concept of community, gender relations, corruption and space, to analyzethe social relations among the actors within waste management in the two study areas.The thesis aims to look at waste management from a new perspective and seeks tofind better solutions to deal with the waste situation in developing countries.The results obtained from the empirical work presents the relationships of differentactors in the private space and in the public domain. Relationships between membersof the family are analyzed through concepts of gender and cultural structure withinthe private space. Social relations in the public space involve several actors, such astraditional leaders, local officers, the church community and private companies. Theconcepts of state, community and decentralization are applied to explain how theactors relate to each other in waste management.

I denna studie har jag beskrivit delar av socialarbetares emotionella arbete i mötet föräldrar och/eller barn. Jag undersöker på vilket sätt personer som jobbar i eller i anslutning till socialtjänsten arbetar emotionellt i mötet med sina klienter, samt hur detta påverkar dem. Jag har även undersökt huruvida stöd från kolleger och ledning underlättar det emotionella arbetet. Studien har genomförts med utgångspunkt i emotionssociologisk forskning. De teoretiska begrepp som studien utgår från är framförallt emotioner, emotionellt arbete, tillit samt emotionshantering. Detta för att skapa förståelse för intervjupersonernas emotionella situation på arbetsplatsen. Arbetet har genomförts med hjälp av sex stycken semistrukturerade intervjuer. Intervjupersonerna är personer som jobbar inom eller i anslutning till socialtjänsten, direkt eller indirekt med barn och familjer. De huvudsakliga resultaten visar att socialarbetarna väljer de att försöka trycka bort sina egna emotioner i mötet med klienter. Detta kan de ta igen i efterhand exempelvis genom att diskutera med sina kolleger, och att släppa fram känslor exempelvis genom att gråta. En svårighet de upplever är att inte bara behöver hantera sina egna emotioner, utan även klienternas.Socialarbetarna påverkas av arbetet genom att de har svårt att släppa arbetet på fritiden och har ibland sömnsvårigheter. De upplever ett stort ansvar som kan vara svårt att släppa. De menar trots allt att det egna livet ändå rullar på, vilket gör att de lär sig hantera tankar på jobbet med tiden och mer erfarenhet.Nära relationer till kolleger är viktiga för välmåendet, medan relationer till chefer tycks vara sekundärt i den aktuella studien. Goda relationer på arbetsplatsen tycks underlätta de svårigheter som kan uppstå. De hanterar sina känslor på olika sätt, men att ha avlastning av kolleger och i form av handledning tycks vara två av de viktigaste delarna. / In this study I have described parts of social workers emotional labout i the meeting with parents and/or children. I have studied the way people who work with social services work with their emotions in relations with the clients, and how this effects the social workers. I also studied in what way support from colleagues and manegement can help with the emotion labour. The study has been implemented with the base in sociologic research with emotions in centre. The theoretic concepts that has been used is first and foremost emotions, emotional labour, trust and handling emotions. I have used these concepts to try and create understanding for the inteviewees emotional situation in the workplace. In this study I have done six semi-structured interviews. The interviewees is people who work with or in close contact to the social services, direct or indirect with children and families. The primary results shows that social workers chose to try and hide their own emotions in the meeting with clients. They can compensate this afterward, for example by talking with colleagues, and let their emotions some forward for example by crying. One thing they say is hard is dealing with not only their own emotions, but also the clients.The social workers are affected by their work in the way that they have a hard time to let the work go when they go home for the day, and sometimes they have trouble sleeping. They experience a big responsability that can be hard to let go. Although, they say their own life runs it course, which makes it easier to learn to handle thoughts about work. Time and experience also helps. Close relationships to colleagues are important for their wellbeing, but the relation to manegers seems to be less important in this study. Good relations on the workplace seems to make hardships easier. They handle their emotions in different ways, but support by colleagues and by guidance appears to be two of the most important parts.