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I detta arbete studeras det institutionella samtalet mellan rehabiliteringshandläggare och besökare på försäkringskassan utifrån en samtalsanalytisk och sociologisk ansats. Syftet är att beskriva och analysera generella och specifika aspekter av det institutionella samtalet. Det teoretiska perspektivet utgörs således av samtalsanalysens företrädare från Harvey Sacks till Per Linell och Erving Goffman med sin teori om ”interaktionens ritualer”. De frågeställningar som behandlas är: Vad karaktäriserar mötesarenan? Hur struktureras samtalet i det givna sammanhanget? Hur ser mötets inre dynamik ut utifrån mötets givna förutsättningar? Hur ser maktsamspelet ut? Hur upprätthålls ”dramaturgin”?

Resultatet jag har kommit fram till är att jag kan urskilja fem faser i samtalet som stämmer väl överens med tidigare forskning kring institutionella samtal. Faserna kan variera, men det som tydligt består är förekomsten av en början och ett slut på mötet. Enligt det goffmanianska synsättet har parterna internaliserat hur samtalet går till och accepterar då maktsamspelet mellan dem i den asymmetriska relationen. Den asymmetriska relationen både förstärks och tonas ned genom den fysiska miljön och dess rekvisita och genom handläggarnas bruk av vardagliga ord i samtalet. Handläggarna är den dominerande parten då jag hos dem har urskilt språkmarkeringar som syftar till att styra samtalet. I ett möte sker även en form av disciplinering av en besökare, vilken ifrågasatte regelverket.

Dramaturgin upprätthålls genom att samtalsparterna accepterar sina givna roller i maktsamspelet och lyckas bevara en dramaturgisk disciplin mötet ut. Besökarna uppvisar en rolldistans, som även kan betraktas som en del av trovärdighetsintrycket. Parterna ger olika intryck i sina rollframträdanden till varandra och kommer oftast fram till en gemensam definition av situationen. I ett möte har jag upptäckt en kamp om situationsdefinitionen, där besökaren påverkar handläggaren till en annan definition av situationen. Det sker således en glidning i förhållningssätt hos handläggarna till att anpassa sitt agerande efter besökarnas attribut. Denna glidning innebär att parterna följer uppförandereglerna inom den interaktionella ordningen, vilket visar hur starkt parterna drivs av den moraliska kraften att ge varandra ett passande bemötande. Den moraliska drivkraften visar sig även i parternas sätt att ständigt rädda varandras ansikten i samtalet. Samtidigt som jag kan se hur den interaktionella ordningen fungerar oberoende av den institutionella ordningen, kan jag även se flera kopplingar mellan de två. Resultatet pekar på intressanta tendenser, vilket gör att jag gärna ser en att större studie genomförs på liknande sätt, då denna studie inte är så empiriskt omfattande.

The working conditions of nurses in the Swedish healthcare system are often debated in the news media, where the various stakeholders' (nurses, union, politicians and healthcare managers) versions of events are laid out. By using social media, nurses can participate in the debate and in a political process by drawing on narrative elements as responses to politicians' and healthcare managers' neglect of the nurses' situations. This article reports on a study of 50 topic driven blogs written by nurses from 2013 to 2015 and published on the website of a union magazine for healthcare professionals. Departing from a discursive narrative approach, the aim of the study is to analyse how the nurses narrate their working conditions and what they convey. The study shows that the bloggers create a we-ness by constructing and displaying their professional identity, illustrating unfair working conditions, conveying criticism and negotiating responsibility and blame. Addressing other nurses, the bloggers presume that others in the profession experience similar things in their workplaces and thereby encourage them to take action and make the injustices known. In order to gain credibility for the reported events and the relations, rhetorical resources such as factual accounts, categories, pronouns and a media discourse are used. The media discourse that is (re)produced in the blogs and elsewhere may result in nurses being trapped in their way of talking about their working situation, normalising it and having difficulty finding solutions.

Ett tämligen unikt samverkansprojekt pågår sedan februari 1997 i Torshälla. Under medborgarkontorets tak samlas företrädare för socialförvaltning, arbetsförmedling, försäkringskassa och landsting för att genom nytänkande och samverkan utforma och prova nya vägar till ett meningsfullt arbete åt alla. Genom att tillhandahålla en mötesplats för såväl myndigheternas finansiella och personella tillgångar som berörda grupprs önskningar och mål vill man komma tillrätta med det "revirtänkande" som kan förekomma mellan olika myndigheter. Individen står i centrum. Målsättningen är att besökarna snabbare ska får arbete, utbildning eller annan sysselsättning.

Rapporten behandlar hur projekthandläggarna har arbetat för att lösa samverkansproblematik mellan myndigheter, vilket kan orsakas av enskilda myndigheters organisatoriska lösningar, skilda regelverk och/eller olika kunskaps- och förklaringsmodeller, som kan innebära att människan inte får den hjälp hon behöver.

This article focuses on how the Swedish news media depicts the functioning of the social services and the situation of social workers. The empirical material consists of 586 articles published online during the years 2010–2015. A discursive approach makes up the theoretical and methodological framework. The aims of the article are to identify and categorise media narratives about social services and social workers, how they are portrayed, what is conveyed and how the stakeholders’ (politicians, managers and social workers) negotiate the question of responsibility for the situation in the social services. The study identifies and categorises seven different types of media narrative. In these narratives, social workers are portrayed in various ways, such as unwilling to stay in the profession, concerned, hardworking, etc. Reports on the crisis in the social services tend to dominate, e.g. how the social services fail to follow-up cases of child abuse, social workers’ heavy workload and that legal security cannot be guaranteed. Stakeholders, faced with reported criticism, maintain credibility by taking some responsibility and/or displacing liability by using various rhetorical resources. The media produces a public image of the lack of responsibility for solving the problematic situation. In this respect, the take-action-narratives are central to the debate, which argues for joint action to be taken to find solutions. Although the media is a powerful and scrutinising tool, it also needs to report on the improvements that have been made in order to give a more balanced picture of the social services.

The aim of the article is to problematise and discuss the usefulness of the chronological I as a new analytical approach for studying the doing of identity in storytelling. The chronological I can be both a rhetorical resource for narrators and a new analytical tool for studying the process of doing identity. The article suggests that the chronological I adds a new analytical dimension to different types of narrative analysis. The article takes its point of departure in the understanding of the narrator as using time as a rhetorical resource for telling or doing identity in ongoing interactions. In this discursive narrative approach, narratives are viewed as socially situated actions in a context in which the narrator has to relate to culturally accepted agreements about responsibility and agency. The data for this article is based on interviews with twelve individuals exposed to workplace bullying. As this topic is sensitive, there is a need for narrators to manage their accountability when asked to account for their agency or non agency in the reported events.

The aim of the article is to shed light on the social dynamic that characterizes communicative breakdowns. As a first stage, this has been explored through individual and group interviews with 34 healthcare professionals about situations where they claim there has been a communication breakdown. Based on the professionals’ testimonies, the research question was: how do professionals illustrate their experiences of communicative breakdowns? In terms of theory, the study draws upon an integrated approach to language and social interaction dynamics – for example how actors mediate positions and roles, but also present, negotiate and determine the course of action in patient cases. Findings show: (1) different degrees of severity in communicative breakdowns, and (2) that the professionals have developed and use both explicit and implicit strategies to handle ”delicate relationships” in this kind of interactions.

The right-wing Swedish Nordic Resistance Movement (NRM) is increasingly active on social media. Using discursive psychology, this text explores the rhetorical organization of text and rhetorical resources used on the Swedish online forum Flashback. The aim is to reveal and problematize truth claims about NRM made by antagonists and protagonists. Questions are (1) how and what do NRM antagonists and protagonists convey in Flashback posts about NRM, and its ideology and members? (2) how do NRM antagonists and protagonists make truth claims about NRM in Flashback posts? The empirical material consisting of 1546 Flashback posts analyzed to identify typical discussions on "NMR's true nature"; accomplished social actions stemming from the posts. Findings show that the Flashback thread can be understood as being a rhetorical battle that concerns the "truth" about NRM, where a variety of rhetorical resources are used to render statements credibility and those involved legitimacy.

The launching and establishment of a social problem: An analysis of the debate on Swedish national level gymnastics in Dagens Nyheter 2012-2013

In 2012 Sweden’s largest daily newspaper, Dagens Nyheter, published a number of articles on the state of affairs in Swedish national level gymnastics. In these articles, ex-gymnasts, coaches, parents and physicians stepped forward and testified about recurrent wrongdoings and abuse against young (particularly) female gymnasts. In response to the criticism, the accused coaches and representatives of the Swedish Gymnastics Federation downsized or dismissed the criticism as inaccurate. This being said, and using discursive psychology and a qualitative design, this article sheds light upon this debate – by viewing it as a struggle between a hegemonic discourse of ”the goodness” of sports, on the one hand, a number of unfavorable and negative testimonies of the state of affairs in Swedish national level gymnastics on the other. More concretely, this struggle has been analyzed with regard to the discursive and rhetoric resources the involved parties’ used to pursue their claims about the state of affairs in Swedish national level gymnastics and the impact these resources had for their credibility and legitimacy. Questions were: Who is entitled ”to spell out” their view on the state of affairs within Swedish national level gymnastics? What is mediated and how? How are descriptions and accounts about reality constructed as credible and factual? It is concluded that social problems are launched via co-production; in this process, the gymnastics community, the research community, single individuals, and the media – were co-actors. 

Aim: The aim of the study is to uncover and reveal how nurses as a profession and their working conditions are dramatized and portrayed inSwedish media narratives about the shortage of nurses. Background: The media is an arena where stakeholders can air their views of the healthcare sector in general and the situation for nurses in particular. The focus in this study is the debate in Sweden on the shortage of nurses. Design: Qualitative discursive study. Method: A discourse analysis of media narratives about nurses and their working conditions published in several Swedish newspapers from 2009-2014. 1779 articles were included in the study. A selection (113 articles) of these articles was further analysed using a qualitative discursive psychological approach. Findings: Nurses are portrayed as being good, concerned about and critical of healthcare managers and politicians for not taking action. The accused actors justify their actions by partially accepting or displacing responsibility. The shortage of nurses is framed as a social problem - a threat to patients' safety. Seven different types of metaphorical expression frame the problem as inevitable, beyond control, abstract, an individual and collegial problem and nurses as replaceable. In addition, nurses and patients are dehumanized and no-one is held responsible. Conclusions: This study analyses the role of the media in emphasizing the seriousness or obscurity of the problem and possible solutions to it. Alternative narratives are needed to re-frame the nursing shortage and to find sustainable solutions. 

In 2012 Sweden's largest daily newspaper, Dagens Nyheter, published a number of articles on the state of affairs in Swedish national level gymnastics. In these articles, ex-gymnasts, coaches, parents and physicians stepped forward and testified about recurrent wrongdoings and abuse against young (particularly) female gymnasts. In response to the criticism, the accused coaches and representatives of the Swedish Gymnastics Federation downsized or dismissed the criticism as inaccurate. This being said, and using discursive psychology and a qualitative design, this article sheds light upon this debate by viewing it as a struggle between a hegemonic discourse of "the goodness" of sports, on the one hand, a number of unfavorable and negative testimonies of the state of affairs in Swedish national level gymnastics on the other. More concretely, this struggle has been analyzed with regard to the discursive and rhetoric resources the involved parties' used to pursue their claims about the state of affairs in Swedish national level gymnastics and the impact these resources had for their credibility and legitimacy. Questions were: Who is entitled "to spell out" their view on the state of affairs within Swedish national level gymnastics? What is mediated and how? How are descriptions and accounts about reality constructed as credible and factual? It is concluded that social problems are launched via co-production; in this process, the gymnastics community, the research community, single individuals, and the media - were co-actors.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the participants talk about their experiences as newly graduated nurses, managers and nursing colleagues in the context of "newcomers' establishment in the profession" and to identify how they portray the healthcare organisation in their narratives. Design/methodology/approach A narrative approach is used to reveal and illustrate three perspectives on the topic "new-comers' establishment". In total, 14 interviews are conducted with 4 managers, 4 nursing colleagues and 6 newly graduated registered nurses. The focus of this study is how a healthcare organisation embraces and retains newly graduated registered nurses and how this is perceived. Findings The newcomers' establishment is facilitated by an orientation programme and an orientation period, individual support provided by managers and colleagues, and the creation of trust to boost confidence in nursing situations. The organisation is portrayed as struggling with high workloads, nursing shortages, high levels of responsibility and showing concern and an interest in the newcomer. The parties criticise the university for not teaching the most basic knowledge, thereby revealing the existence of a theory-practice gap. Originality/value The research shows how building trust amongst the organisation's members is essential for creating a satisfying workplace and the retention of newly graduated registered nurses. Empirical descriptions of newly graduated nurses, managers and nursing colleagues experiences of "newcomers establishment" are rare, which is why the description of such "establishment" in this research increases the value of the paper.

How do children (aged 6-12 years) understand and make use of a digital tool that is under development? This article builds on an ongoing interdisciplinary research project in which children, social workers (the inventers of this social innovation) and researchers together develop an interactive digital tool (application) to strengthen children's participation during the planning and process of welfare assessments. Departing from social constructionism, and using a discursive narrative approach with visual ethnography, the aim of the article is to display how the children co-construct the application and contribute with "stories of life situations" by drawing themselves as characters and the places they frequent. The findings show that the children improved the application by suggesting more affordances so that they could better create themselves/others, by discovering bugs, and by showing how it could appeal to children of various ages. The application helped the children to start communicating and bonding when creating themselves in detail, drawing places/characters and describing events associated with them, and sharing small life stories. The application can help children and social workers to connect and facilitate children's participation by allowing them to focus on their own perspectives when drawing and sharing stories.

Objectives

Early parental support, provided by nurses within child health services, aims to strengthen parents in their parenthood. The aim of this integrative review is to describe communication in parental support in encounters between child health nurses and parents in child health services.

Methods

An integrative review was conducted. The databases Cinahl+ , MedLine, Psych Info, and Scopus were searched, 312 articles were screened, and 16 articles were found to be eligible.

Results

The studies included qualitative and quantitative methods, using interviews, focus group interviews, and observations. The findings show an overarching theme: The significance of mutuality in communication in a professional-parental relationship, further described in the following categories, 1) Authoritarian approach: a controlling manner, a neglecting manner, and a teaching manner; 2. Guiding approach: a counselling manner and a compliant manner.

Conclusions

The communication between nurses and parents can be understood as having several layers; the organisational context, the professional skills, knowledge, and experiences, and parents’ knowledge, expectations, and needs. There is a lack of studies of authentic communication between nurses and parents; thus, future research is warranted.

Practice implications:

The authoritarian and guiding approaches in parental support show the required skills a nurse is expected to have, but sufficient organizational prerequisites are also crucial.

An increasingly central part of the scientific debate in sports has come to focus on how neuroscience can help to explain sports performance and development of expertise. In particular, the process of identifying young talents has been increasingly influenced by neuroscientific tests to identify future potential. It has been argued that instead of relying on coaches’ subjective assessments the process of selection should be based on general metrics of the brain through standardized testing. One key neurological function highlighted in the search for talent is cognitive executive functions. In the contemporary debate, studies of brain activity have suggested that children should undergo neuroscientific testing to determine the appropriate cognitive executive functions (CEF) for elite sports.

This paper builds on previous work on the implications of a neuroscientific ontology in sports and Bruno Latour’s work on the construction of scientific facts. Departing from discourse analysis, this paper studies the production and popularization of CEF as scientific facts. The findings illustrate how representations of brain activity are visualized and legitimized and how the out-of-context tests are translated into facts about brain functions. The CEF test results are produced as inscriptions of undisputable facts, claiming that the results show prerequisites for sporting success. We argue that the mind-brain-behaviour relationship cannot be reduced to CEF tests and instead calls for a critical gaze on neuroscientific truth-claims and taken-for-granted facts in the area of sport.

I denna studie identifieras vilka diskurser som dominerat talutrymmet i svensk nyhetsmedia när det gäller pandemin och vaccinering. Data från Mediaarkivet analyserades utifrån hur språket används för att forma diskurser och samhällets medborgare. Nyhetsmedia använder retoriska resurser som väcker känslor; rädsla, solidaritet och ansvar. De identifierande diskurserna; Kriget mot världens osynliga fiende, I solidaritetens namn, I förnuftets kölvatten och Mot en ny värld? innehåller även metaforer som retoriska resurser med en dominans av krigsmetaforer. De medborgare som hävdar att de kan tänka och agera förnuftigt på egen hand, utan att styras av rädsla och rådande diskurser, framställs som obildade och egoistiska och får sällan talutrymme inom traditionell nyhetsmedia. De oönskade rösterna tystas och förpassas till alternativa kanaler och plattformar med allvarliga konsekvenser för åsiktsfrihet och det demokratiska samtalet i samhället.

The COVID-19 pandemic has dominated the global media since 2020. To a large extent, it isvia the news media that the public has learned about the risks, levels of danger, governmentalregulations and mandatory actions. This article highlights the subject positions constructedby the Swedish news media from January 2020 to February 2021 in reports about thepandemic. The result shows that citizens can be active-passive or solitary solidarity, thesepositions appeal to individual accountability, thus potentially shaping and fostering citizensin line with the Swedish government’s wider response to the pandemic. The news media’simages are of self-regulated citizens who govern and discipline themselves and othersaccording to the current discourses, all of which simultaneously evoke fear, togethernessand hope. The ideological dilemmas for citizens are whether to be active-passive or, ifnecessary, switch to the solitary solidarity subject position.

Information and communication technology (ICT) has increased in importance for participation purposes. For young adults with mild to moderate intellectual disability (ID), staff are key support people, especially as difficulties with accessing and using ICT can hinder participation. The aim of the study is to reveal staffs’ way of work with young adults’ with mild to moderate ID independence and participation through ICT. A narrative analysis and interaction theory are used to analyse focus group interviews with staff in a residential care setting. The findings show that ICT is used to increase togetherness between the young adults and as a face-saving strategy that offers independence and can neutralise the asymmetric power relations. In addition, the lack of organisational resources appears to hinder the introduction and use of ICT for participation purposes.

In 2012, the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter (DN) published a series of articles criticising Swedish national level gymnastics for being abusive. This text analyses the subsequent debate by identifying the discursive and rhetorical resources used by the involved parties. The analysis shows how the parties negotiate accountability, manage dilemmas of stake and what the possible social consequences of these are. Five narratives are singled out in the debate: the counter narrative, the victim narrative, the defence-speech narrative, the expert narrative and the ‘not-us-narrative’. In these narratives, the involved parties used rhetorical resources to account for reality. Hence, the gymnastics community, the research community, individuals and journalists are all portrayed as actors co-producing a social problem.

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.

The aim was to study children’s participation in child investigations both when a digital application was used and when it was not used. Theoretically, the children’s participation was explored through positioning- and rhetorical analyses of the documentation. In investigative texts where the digital tool was not used, the children’s perspective was presented, but with a lower degree of agency. Two ways of motivating evidence have been identified. One is to alternate the official text, which contains theoretical concepts such as risk and protection factors, with more general descriptions from the child's situation. In the second approach, the genre of authority has been used together with the child’s own words so that the child is given more agency in the investigative text. The proposals for decisions are in both cases presented from the authority genre and legitimised via “the child's best interest” and “risk and protection factors” as well as through weaving in witnesses as a rhetorical resource, where children’s voices might be used as evidence. When comparing child investigations with or without the use of the digital tool, the assessments have similar illations. However, a digital tool adapted to children’s perspectives can increase participation in terms of their agency and presence in the investigative text.

The purpose of the article is to describe and problematise the practice-initiated idea of developing a digital tool for children in child welfare investigations and whether and how this welfare technology is useful for social workers. The results include interview data and descriptions of the research process. The social workers are of the opinion that the digital application increases the possibilities for children’s participation in child investigations, even though their main focus is to create an alliance with the parents. During the research process the digital tool has developed from an empirical idea to a conversation tool and been tested with different user groups. However, the law on procurement limits the possibilities for data storage if the digital tool is to be used in the future. In sum, in order to develop child protection work further, more practice-based research needs to be conducted so that researchers can develop the practice’s ideas and identify the obstacles, opportunities, organisational conditions and development needs. The social workers in this study believe that the digital tool is useful for accessing children's perspectives and experiences, even though relational work with children is not their main task in child welfare investigations.