he aim of this article is to elucidate and discuss the results of the 2016 Diversity Barometer (Mångfaldsbarometern) and compare these results with those obtained from ten years of the longitudinal Diversity Barometers for 2005?2014. An additional aim is to demonstrate whether and how Swedish people?s experiences of and attitudes toward people with a foreign background and ethnic diversity have changed.A random sample of the Swedish population took part in the annual study, which was carried out in the form of a nationwide postal survey. The results show that negative attitudes toward ethnic and cultural diversity in general, and migrant population in particular, have increased to some extent and with respect to certain issues. Views on diversity in relation to culture and religion ? especially Islam ? were more negative than views on diversity in relation to work. Those who have larger experience of contact with foreigners show a more positive attitude toward diversity compared with those with limited experience and contact. Individuals who have higher education, those who identify themselves as female, younger persons and those living in large cities are more positive than other groups. In our analysis of the empirical data, we proceeded from a social work perspective and applied contact theory and group conflict theories relating attitudes to group position.
The paper uses the concept of recognition to investigate how young people labelled as having ‘complex needs’ experience their encounters with welfare state actors. Semi-structured interviews were held in 2018 with 14 young people, aged 15–22 years, in two Swedish municipalities. The participants have received multiple, long-term interventions from social services and psychiatric care. Research questions are: What aspects in the encounters between welfare state actors and young people may contribute to complexity in their life situations? How can Honneth’s concept of recognition illuminate this complexity? Aspects that have contributed to complexity in young people’s life situations are related to acts of dismissal. These dismissals by welfare state actors are interpreted as forms of disrespect as regards affection, rights or solidarity. Barriers to recognition are also related to the participants’ young age and position as children, and what this implies in a particular society. Our findings show that the difficulties young people face in their encounters with welfare state actors are partly due to the high level of specialization which contributes to an increased organizational complexity. Implications include that, when encountering young people in complex life situations, welfare state actors need to consider the importance of recognition as regards affection, rights, and solidarity. Recognition is central to achieving a positive outcome in working with young people in complex life situations and is expressed in social interactions. Therefore, building relationships needs to be more highly prioritized in welfare state organizations. young people in complex life situations and is expressed in social interactions. Therefore, building relationships needs to be more highly prioritized in welfare state organizations.
The restructuring of human service organisations into more lean organisations has brought increased work demands for many human service professions. Social work stands out as a particularly exposed occupational group, in which high work demands are paired with a large individual responsibility to carry out the job. The objectives of the study were to identify what kind of coping strategies social workers employ to handle the imbalance between demands and resources in work and to investigate how different strategies affect outcomes regarding health, service quality and professional development. 16 individual interviews and four group interviews with another 16 social workers were conducted. The analysis identified five different main types of strategies: Compensatory, Demand-reducing, Disengagement, Voice and Exit. An extensive use of compensatory strategies was connected with negative outcomes in health. Often these compensatory strategies were replaced or combined with different means of reducing the work demands, which in turn influence performance and service quality in a negative way. The results highlight dilemmas the social workers are facing when the responsibility to deal with this imbalance are “decentralised” to the individual social worker. When resources do not match the organisational goals or quality standards, the social workers are forced into strategies that either endanger their own health or threaten the quality of service.
This article explores social insurance administrative officers’ (AOs’) perceptions of the sick-leave process for heart failure clients. The work situation and the sick-leave process for people with heart failure tend to be complex and problematic. The problems are often caused by a lack of understanding from professionals, such as social insurance AOs. The study draws on two focus group interviews with social insurance AOs from two different social insurance agencies. The interviews were guided by an open approach, and analysis was performed on the interviews’ manifest content through a qualitative content analysis. The findings demonstrate that the AOs were concerned about the clients’ ability to return to work, but they were hindered in fulfilling their duties through insufficient collaboration with physicians and unclear sickness certificates. There seems to be a gap between the AOs’ assignment and their ability to make well-founded decisions about their clients’ ability to work. This can have consequences for the individual who lives with heart failure. In the sociopolitical agenda of Sweden, this can have consequences for the development of collaboration between AOs and the medical experts who provide the foundations for decisions about work ability of the client with heart failure.
Care providers for older immigrants in Sweden find themselves in a paradox. Individuals and associations call for culturally sensitive elderly care. However, implementing this comes at the risk of over-culturizing needs and behaviours, drawing a negative picture of ‘the problem of immigrants’ that needs to be solved with special interventions. To find a balance in this paradox, we applied the welfare theory of health to grasp a new understanding of the phenomena and draw a holistic picture of a person’s needs and resources available to achieve good ageing, reaching beyond the cultural paradox. Semi-structured qualitative interviews were conducted with older adults with immigrant backgrounds in Sweden. The interviews were analysed using content analysis. Combining welfare theory of health with immaterial capital theories offered a holistic theoretical approach to good ageing. This took its departure from the agency of older adults, mitigating the gap between their vital life goals and available resources to reach these goals. Although informants wanted caring interventions from close family, we identified distinct responses to mitigate the diminished trust older adults had in the capability of welfare institutions to provide adequate elderly care.
Violence against women and men is a widespread and serious social problem, often with severe consequences for the victims. Even though young men are among those most at risk of exposure to physical violence,men’s victimization is only recognized to a limited extent. The aim of this study is to deepen our understanding of how social workers’ interpretations of the position of males in the gender order affects their understanding of male victimization. The study was designed as a multiple case study witha qualitative comparative approach. Focus group interviews supported by vignettes were used to collect data. Interviews were carried out with professional Swedish social workers working with victimized men and women at centres for young crime victims in Sweden. The results show that even though the social workers express traditional gender beliefs about young men’s experiences of victimization and their inability to identify themselves as victims of violence, they also to some extent resist taken-for granted notions of male victimization. The results also show that the social workers to some extent offer supportive measures that reinforce traditional expectations of masculinity. On the basis of the results it is suggested that one important way of developing social work with young male victims of violence would be to give greater attention to variations between different men and masculinities and how these different forms of masculinity aredifferently connected to crime and violence, and to adapt supportive measures to reflect these differences.
Social work is often presented with new concepts and methods that are taken to heart without much consideration. This study discusses one such new concept – research-minded practitioners – with the aim of investigating its possibilities. This has been done through a critical reading of three texts where the founders describe its building blocks and definition. It is concluded that it may be a viable concept, but it is still in its early days and more studies are needed. The connection between research-minded practitioners and the implied positive link to evidence-based practice is characterized as lacking a foundation. Suggestions are offered for further developing the concept.
The article investigates how over-indebted persons present their case in personal letters attached to debt-reconstruction applications and how their narratives can be argued to contain features that help counteract negative expectations about their identity. The results reveal three types of narratives. These are: negotiating, in which the applicant communicates personal agency in relation to all areas of life, and the promise to start a new life and continue on the path of improvement is invoked as the main reason for being deserving of help; reimbursement-claiming, in which personal agency is communicated in relation to all aspects except for the applicant’s personal economy, and earlier achievements are invoked as the main reason for being deserving of help; and confessing, in which personal agency is communicated as located outside the applicant’s control, and a lack of possibilities to manage one’s own personal economy is invoked as the main reason for being deserving of help. The results also show that, although all three narrative categories can be considered counter-stories, confessing can be argued to have the greatest potential to counteract negative expectations and thereby help to repair the applicant’s identity.
Over-indebtedness has increased in Sweden and other European countries during the past 30 years. It involves great suffering for afflicted individuals and high costs for society, as well as inflicting personal stigma because of their inability to fulfill their moral obligation to pay debts. The aim of the study is to analyse personal letters attached to applications for debt reconstruction as examples of counterstories, paying special attention to the potential for these narratives to provide narrative repair for the applicants, as well as to formulate resistance to master narratives regarding over-indebtedness. The data for the study consists of personal letters accompanying applications for debt reconstruction. Qualitative analyses are made of the three different styles of argumentation that over-indebted persons use in applications for debt reconstruction, negotiation, reimbursement-claiming and confession, using the theoretical framework of counterstories. The results show that negotiation and reimbursement-claiming both have the potential for narrative repair and resistance to the master narrative, while confession does not.
Staff shortage in the social sector is a serious problem in several countriesand the high turnover rate of professional social workers presents a majorchallenge to the professional field. Social workers distinguish themselves asa particularly exposed occupational group, reporting higher workloads andmore difficult demands in comparison with other human service workers.Inspired by psychological contract theory, the objective of this study wasto describe social workers’ turnover processes that lead to a decision to quitafter a perceived violation of a psychological contract. Thirty-one interviewswere conducted with former statutory social workers who had voluntarilyresigned from their jobs during the preceding year. The analysis identifiedfour themes in the turnover processes stemming from perceptions oforganisational failure to fulfil promises concerning the provision of: (1) abalance between demands and resources at work, (2) a balance betweenefforts and rewards, (3) organisational professional ethics, and (4) responsiblehuman resource practices. The results highlight how organisational responsesto work-related dissatisfactions by social workers seem to enhance theirconviction of psychological contract breaches and perceptions of contractviolations, resulting in turnover. An important conclusion is that public sectoremployers need to reconsider their personnel strategies and practices inorder to start rebuilding trust and creating a more positive work climate.
The advent of New Public Management in Sweden has affected thesocial services in terms of increased workload, more conflicting demandsand a reduction in professional autonomy. This study contributes to theunderstanding of how various job demands, job resources and theorganisational factor of openness influence the exit, silence and loyaltystrategies amongst social workers and managers in the Swedish socialservices. Regression analyses of national web questionnaire data gatheredfrom 4,068 social workers and 432 managers have revealed that: (1)role conflicts associated positively with exit and negatively with loyalty,(2) job autonomy was negatively related to silence and positively relatedto loyalty in both groups, (3) openness had a high explanatory value inall of the outcome variables for both groups and (4) openness was apotential mediator between role conflicts and all of the dependentvariables. A conclusion is that if organisations want social workers andmanagers to stop considering exit, want to counteract silence and wantto improve loyalty, management strategies need to be developed thatreduce the conflicting demands and create organisational structures thatfacilitate a continuous and open dialogue between the strategic andoperational levels of the organisation.
There is a need for a stable competence provision in the Swedish publicsector in order to ensure the continuity, quality and stability of the socialservices that are provided to citizens. As the turnover rate of newcomersgenerally reaches a peak between three and six months after entry, it isimportant to understand how organisations can retain their newlyrecruited social workers. From a psychological contract theory standpoint,the aim of this exploratory qualitative case study is to describe the processthat leads to relatively stable psychological contracts amongst newlyrecruited social workers. Three focus group interviews (consisting of fournew social worker recruits, six co-workers and two supervisors from thesame department) were conducted to retrospectively capture theexchange relationship between these agents during the newcomers’first year of employment. The analysis identified two themes in theexchange process that shaped the employment relationship: pre-entryexpectations and post-entry experiences. The results showed that theorganisational promises that were kept over time, mostly by supervisorsand also due to co-worker influences, ultimately resulted in fulfilled andstabilized psychological contracts amongst the newcomers. An importantconclusion is that a co-worker-organisation relationship of a good qualityneeds to have been established in order to enable a successful qualitativenewcomer-organisation relationship. High organisational investment isthus required by an employing organisation that wants to builda trustworthy long-term relationship with all its employees.