Social capital and local development in Swedish rural districts

This paper studies local social capital in two Swedish rural districts. It concentrates on the relations between local political/public bodies and local development groups. The political bodies have acted somewhat differently towards local development initiatives in the two districts. This has resulted in differences in the number of development groups and in the social capital of local culture, leisure and service environments. There are, however, few examples of social capital in these environments spreading to changes in production environments, in the form of e.g. attitudes to entrepreneurship, risktaking, etc. The study supports the view that private and public actors can change local social capital. Local organizations who act as intermediate nodes between the local groups and the political bodies seem to be of special importance. However, our results suggest that changing local social capital is a long-term mission that demands sustainable work.

Organisational characteristics and psychosocial working conditions in different forms of ownership

The main aim of this thesis has been to compare psychosocial working conditions in workplaces with different forms of ownership, i.e. public, private and cooperative. A second aim has been to study how organisational characteristics of relevance for psychosocial working conditions (in terms of management control strategies and prerequisites for management) are manifested in these ownership forms. The empirical data is based on structured interviews with managers at 60 workplaces within the service sector and on a questionnaire to all employees working in the participating workplaces, resulting in a set of 1384 individuals. An additional seven interviews with first-line managers within geriatric care were also conducted for the last study. The results show that employees in cooperatives perceived that they had better opportunities to influence decisions concerning the workplace as a whole, although there were also results showing advantages for public and private employees. Regarding opportunities for employees to influence their own work situation, there were no differences between the ownership forms. Differences were found in the prerequisites for first-line geriatric care managers. As a result of an earlier organisational change, the public managers were now further away from the strategic level and had to focus on daily, operative work tasks, while simultaneously also being responsible for keeping within the budget. The private managers, on the other hand, having group leaders to deal with the daily work concerning personnel and operations, could focus more on strategic work related to financial results in terms of planning and follow-up of the budget. One conclusion is that there are certain differences in both psychosocial working conditions and organisational characteristics between the ownership forms, but when the comparisons were restricted to only one type of service, in this case the provision of care, it is rather the similarities within the care organisations, regardless of ownership form, that are most pronounced