Röster från socialtjänsten

The aim of this study is to analyze how the Social Services personnel interpret, define and perceive, on the one hand, the project “Motverka Våld och Gäng” meaning “Counteract Violence and Gangs”, and on the other hand the role of the Coordinators employed in this project. Heads of units and Social Secretarys were interviewed, as well as observed and recorded at meetings. The personnel of the Social Service often state that the project came “from above”, from the state, and they construct the project as pointing out the Social Service as incompetent of handling juvenile care. Both appreciative as well as criticizing voices were heard about the Coordinators and their role. The criticism deals with the Coordinator portrayed as a controller and competitor when representing the young ones. Positive comments deal with the mediating role of the Coordinator, in contacts with the young one and the parents, as well as their administrative contributions

Hidden Attractions of Administration

This book argues that the expansion of administrative activities in today’s working life is driven not only by pressure from above, but also from below. The authors examine the inner dynamics of people-processing organizations—those formally working for clients, patients, or students—to uncover the hidden attractions of doing administrative work, despite all the complaints and laments about "too many meetings" or "too much paperwork." There is something appealing to those compelled to participate in today’s constantly multiplying and expanding administration that defies popular framings of it as merely pressure from above. Hidden Attractions of Administration shows in detail the emotional attractiveness, moral conflicts, and almost magical features that administrative tasks often entail in today’s organizations, supported by ethnographic studies consisting of over 200 qualitative interviews and participant observations from ten organizational settings and contexts across Sweden. The authors also question and complement explanations in administration-related research that have previously been taken for granted, arguing that it is a simplification to attribute all aspects of the change to New Public Management and instead taking into account what the classic sociologist Georg Simmel called anEigendynamik: a self-reinforcing tendency that, under certain circumstances, needs only a nudge in an administrative direction to get going. By applying ethnography to issues of bureaucratization and meeting cultures and by drawing on findings in emotional sociology and social anthropology, this volume contributes to both the sociology of work and the study of human service organizations and will appeal to scholars and students working across both areas

Meetings or Power Weeks? Boundary Work in a Transnational Police Project

Meetings are common in contemporary working life, but they are often overlooked in academic studies and sometimes defined as empty or boring by employees. Yet, the meeting society is being reproduced again and again. There seem to be hidden ways to incorporate meetings into today’s working life without arousing critique about pointless activities and deviations from what should really be done. One strategy was illustrated in a study of a transnational police project. Police culture celebrates visible crime fighting, which is associated with action, physical toughness, and capturing criminals. The police officers involved in the project emphasized the need to avoid “a lot of meetings,” but de facto constructed their project as meetings. Nonetheless, the project was declared a success. We analyze this paradox in terms of boundary work concerning meetings; the police officers turned some meetings into “real police work” by discursively and practically removing them from the category of bureaucracy and its associations with formalities, rigidity, and documentation. The most important example is how an “operational action group meeting” was renamed “power weeks,” eradicating the very word “meeting” from the term. This was closely associated with increased informality and multi-tasking during these gatherings

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Intet resum

The Merry-Go-Round of Meetings : Embracing Meetings in a Swedish Youth Care Project

Modern society has been called “a society of organizations,” and meetings are considered indispensable. However, a recurring cultural theme in contemporary working life is complaints about excessive and time-consuming meetings. The present article analyzes a contrasting case concerning a Swedish youth care project that employed a set of “coordinators” to maintain close contact with young people and their parents. Over time, these coordinators adopted an exceedingly administrative approach in which meetings with other professionals became more and more central. This article explores how an expanding meeting culture with strong social commitments can be generated from within interorganizational contexts, such as “projects,” and successfully competes with other concerns. Thus, the administrative orientation represents an example of the type of social interaction process that Simmel discerned as Eigendynamik or autonomous processes of social interaction

Doing Ambivalence: Embracing Innovation – at Arm’s Length

This article considers the social organization of responses among human service staff to changes in public policy, using a study of a Swedish treatment center for juveniles as an illustration. The stance towards a new treatment ideology, “family-work,” was not one of either accepting or rejecting the new policy; the staff conveyed both embracing and distancing. Policy innovations, it is argued, create conditions that work as a catalyst for “doing ambivalence,” an accommodative rhetoric that integrates the new and delicately express reservations