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In this article, the prevailing official view of supervision as a regulatory instrument is examined as it applies to the social services sector in Sweden. The study is based on a comparison of the views expressed on the design of supervision as a regulatory instrument by two government commissions, the Supervision Commission and the Commission on Supervision within the Social Services (UTIS), and on the positions taken by the Government regarding the definitions of the concept of supervision proposed by these commissions. The view of supervision as a regulatory instrument expressed in these policy documents is analysed with the help of a theoretical framework describing the components, their functions and the governance characteristics of control systems. In the framework separate interrelated characteristics of the components are identified and summarized into two models of control systems. The analysis shows that supervision in the Swedish social services sector can be described in terms of both a disciplinary and non-disciplinary system. By its system theoretical basis and the identification of interrelated characteristics the study contributes to a broadened understanding of the construction and functions of supervision as a regulatory instrument and of how supervision within the Swedish social sector is meant to be designed.

Inspection has increasingly been regarded as a safeguard for promoting quality of social services. Little attention has, however, been given to the impact of standards used in inspections, i.e. the written norms, rules and principles used for identification and judgment. The aim of this study is to empirically contribute to an improved understanding of how standards in inspection of social service are designed, and to what extent the design is adjusted in relation to different kind of social services. We employ a systematic and comparative analysis of the content (in terms of input, process, output and outcome aspects) and precision (low, medium and high) of 186 paragraphs derived from legislation and referred to as standards in inspection decisions concerning two types of social work: Investigation, Assessment and Decision-Making (IAD); and Treatment Intervention (TI) in Sweden 2012. Contrary to expectations based on an inspection ideal, our findings show that paragraphs covering outcome aspects are not more commonly referred to as standards in TI than in IAD inspection. The analysis of the precision also indicates that the standards used in inspection of TI are not more adjusted to complex and subjectively experienced aspects than are the standards used in IAD. Our overall results indicate that the policy instrument is primarily adapted to IAD inspection rather than to TI inspection.