Whatever happened, happened. Some notes on inner logic, especially in organizations
The notion that social events partly arise as a consequence of inner logic, i.e. that patterns and structures emerge outside of, or even in opposition against, plans and goals is a common element in social science. Inner logic is a summary term for social processes developing autonomously, i.e. without any individual or group intending them. Organizations quite often contain inner-logic processes. If, as this author maintains, fruitful organization theory has to build on rationalistic assumptions, how then do we handle instances of inner logic? A first step may be to break up the traditional link between structuralism and functionalism, maintaining the former and rejecting the latter. Organizations are intentionally dynamic, i.e. depend on order and predictability. To the extent that inner-logic processes appear in organizations, they should be analysed as confrontations between opposing rationalities rather than as spontaneous reactions of a ”system” . Also, frequently recurring organizational forms such as hierarchy are more fruitfully regarded as e.g. transaction-cost outcomes rather than as functional responses to system needs. Rationalism and structuralism are compatible, rationalism and functionalism are not.
Max Weber in Freiburg. On migration, disembedding and social change
This article sets out to introduce the central topics in Max Weber’s inauguration lecture in Freiburg. It is argued that the central, but largely implicit, argument in Weber’s lecture concerns the transformation from a patriarchal to a capitalist mode of employment. Upon this interpretation, Max Weber’s objective is to explain specific migration processes in terms of a configuration of causes, where the social disembedding of rural labour is the key factor.
Weber, causality and infinity
While it is widely acknowledged that Max Weber was a neo-kantian of some sort, comparatively little has been done to trace down how this affects other parts of his work. This article argues that Weber’s theory of causality can be viewed as an answer to problems evolving from his neo-kantian framework. The aim of the article becomes twofold. First, to give an exposition of Weber’s theory of causality, and second to use this piece of theory as an example of how parts of Weber’s methodology are designed to solve problems posed by the neo-kantian framework. The neo-kantian framework referred to can be summarized in the theses that (I) reality offers an infinite plenitude, and (II) that there is nothing in reality itself that can present us with its interpretation. Taken together, these theses result in the necessity for the subject to make a selection from the infinite reality. These theses are applied to the problem of selecting causes from the infinite causal chain. In order to solve this problem, Weber takes recourse to the adequate cause theory, a variant of jurisprudential theory founded by Johannes von Kries. The last part of the article gives an exposition of some of the basic characteristics and consequences of adequate cause theory.
Subjugated knowledges and the possibilities of genealogy
The article explores the possibilities of “voicing” marginalized subjects by analyzing letters written by female mental patients in the beginning of the twentieth century. Following Michel Foucault, genealogy is here used as a means to explore and reclaim subjugated knowledges, i.e. knowledges that have been dismissed, distorted, disqualified and put aside by more powerful and ultimately victorious knowledge claims, in this case the psychiatric discourse. Historically oriented research on madness has often explored medical and cultural discourses and representations, as these correspond to sources that can be easily found in archives. This also means that mental patients’ own narratives and texts have been more difficult to trace, partly due to the paucity of available documentation. Herein lies a challenge: how can we represent these subjects, whose stories are inevitably always already captured and filtered by authorities, without portraying them either as passive victims or reducing them to effects of power networks? The article thus ponders research ethics, the question of Otherness and the power of representations. The difficulties in representing female patients’ “own”voices are discussed, yet the article points to the necessity of taking voices that are simultaneously in the margins and in the centre of more powerful discourses, seriously as objects of knowledge. The article argues that “the insurrection of subjugated knowledges”, i.e. bringing back such knowledges as represented here by mental patients’ narratives, opens us otherpossibilities of knowledge. Hence, mental patients’ letters are seen as important “fractures” in the official and legitimized knowledge of madness, offering alternative understandings of both committed individuals and the psychiatric discourse itself.
Partly human, partly organization
In this article the phenomenon of organization is discussed and its consequences for the understanding of human actions and human choices are examined. Affiliation to organizations are found to be both restrictions on and preconditions for most human action. In this connection families are regarded as organizations as well as enterprises, voluntary associations and states. Human action is primarily action on behalf of organizations where individuals are partly human, partly organization. To understand the meaning of action on behalf of organization it is important to realize that people rarely choose their organizational affiliation. People are selected. This means that actions on behalf of organizations cannot be regarded as expressions of individual choices. Actions on behalf of organizations are generally characterized by a dual involvement.
The organization of civil society
The three societal spheres state, market and civil society are compared from an organizational perspective. A state is a certain kind of organization with compulsory affiliation. The state is an empirical category that is fairly easy to describe. A market is made up of the interaction of several organizations in exchange. Most actors on a market are people acting on behalf of organizations. Also states are present in markets buying arms for example, or as employers on the labour market. There are several kinds of organization mentioned in connection with civil society such as voluntary associations, social movements and networks. It is concluded that the organizations of civil society are not very persistent. Moreover the notion of civil society is not more incompatible with the state than with other organizational arrangements. As a conclusion it is argued that it is more relevant to understand social processes in terms of types of organization that in terms of states, markets and civil society.
Who is the economic criminal? A comparison between countries and types of crime
In white collar crime research two particularly competing definitions (Sutherland versus the Revisionists) have dominated the field during the last two decades. Sutherland’s definition states that the sociodemographic profile is homogeneous (entrepreneur with high education and high or regular income), despite type of white collar crime or context. The definition given by the Revisionists states that white collar criminals’ demographic profile is heterogeneous (everyone can be convicted for white collar crime). As a consequence of this divided definitional approach we have a contradictive outcome of who the white collar criminal is. Our purpose is to investigate the qualification of the two definitions by analyzing heterogeneity/ homogeneity based on crime type and national context. The investigation is based on seven countries from the EES 2004 (European Social Survey). We use four types of crime. The results show a rather homogeneous demographic profile but there is also a certain substantial heterogeneity depending on kinds of crime and context. The results altogether indicate that the Revisionists’ definition is more correct in its description of the white collar criminal than Sutherland’s definition. The demographic profile of the white collar criminal seems to be more complex than a profile confined to just one social category would be and the contextual factor has an impact on the variety of the demographic profile. An important task for future research is to hold the door open for further demographic investigations depending on the type of crime and country that the study is based on.
This essay, a revised version of the keynote lecture prepared for Sociologidagarna 18–20 March 2020 in Stockholm, introduces a new, cultural-sociological theory of materiality. Sociology did not metabolize the cultural turn until the 1980s. Even when cultural sociology finally did emerge, moreover, there were powerful pushbacks against it. Neo-Marxism, neo-Pragmatism, neo-institutionalism incorporated this or that cultural concept but resisted the culture turn more broadly, tying meaning to social structure and practice rather than recognizing its autonomy. Cultural sociology has flourished in recent decades, but so have new backlash movements. None has been more persistent than the turn toward the object and its reduction to materiality. Icon theory positions itself again this turn, suggesting that, in society, materiality is invested with imagination and enlivened by performativity. The surface of objects is aesthetically formed, and the meaning of such sensuous experience of outer form is structured by invisibly discursive depth. Durkheim’s sacred and profane must be complemented by Burke’s beautiful and sublime. Informed by background representations, such aesthetic-cum-moral objects are designed by artists and craft-persons; produced by creators with access to material resources; put into the scene by advertisers and PR specialists; and mediated by criticism – before they are embraced or rejected by audiences.
Heredity, environment, or both? A critical realistic critique of the heritability methodology
With heritability methodology researchers using twin studies, and during recent year also DNA studies, have claimed that heredity plays a crucial role in explaining social outcomes. Explaining what causes social outcomes is a strive to explain how reality is constituted, and is thus an ontological question. The purpose of this article is to examine the unspoken ontological assumptions in heritability studies from a critical realistic perspective. First I’ll explain the basics of the heritability methodology, the twin methodology and DNA studies that measure heritability, then I’ll describe the previous criticism of these studies. Thereafter I’ll argue that the heritability studies do not examine the actual causes of social events, but rather that the measures are driven by other underlying mechanisms, which thus are the ones possessing the generative power to influence social outcomes. Against this background, I argue that the studies commit the fallacy of misplaced concreteness and the epistemic fallacy. In conclusion, I argue that concrete social phenomena should be understood as an interplay between different generative mechanisms.
‘The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree’ is an idiom that ultimately is reflected in the reproduction of inequality patterns across generations. Representatives of the child’s own generation, such as siblings and peers, may however play a key role by either reinforcing or counteracting this reproduction. Based on a Stockholm cohort now approaching retirement, we explore whether the inheritance of parents’ misfortunes, here reflected through poverty, varies in strength depending on the cohort members’ position in the sibship or peer group.
More than gender equality. Decisions on parental leave and ideals around motherhood, fatherhood and the best interest of the child
On the basis of 40 semi-structured interviews, this study discusses decision making processes regarding parental leave among nascent first-time middle-class parents in Sweden. We analyze motives and ideas behind the couples’ plans and decisions and how decisions on parental leave were made. We furthermore show how the decision making processes can be discussed in relation to the institutional context. The results show that ideals and norms of gender equality are accompanied by gendered divisions of work and care and a partially traditional view on motherhood and fatherhood. Contrary to previous studies, we do not find a clear link between gender equal ideals and explicit negotiations. An equal division of parental leave is, in some couples, taken for granted to such an extent that the decision on how to divide the leave is taken implicitly rather than explicitly. Decisions on division of parental leave are not isolated processes. Rather, ideals and norms around motherhood, fatherhood, gender equality and not least what is ‘in the best interest of the child’ constitute part of the context in which these decision making processes take place.
This article aims to illuminate certain cultural aspects of the work of an evening newspaper (working style, ways of thinking, assumptions about the business, its objectives, perceptions of the readership) as well as how communication in group situations contributes to the social construction of organizations in terms of objectives, meaning and style. The paper will also address the issues of play, emotions and pleasure on work. It is argued that a situational focus, when studying organizations and other social phenomena, provides a less constrained understanding of the object than predominant systemic approaches. The situation, as studied and discussed here, is a monthly meeting between managers and news bill editors of an evening newspaper where sales and the content of news bills are evaluated. It is concluded that, while the premise for the meeting (the casual relation between sales and news bill layout) guides the conversation, the meeting primarily operates as an emotional arena where excitement and pleasure are produced under game-like circumstances. This allows the participants to address, in a relaxed and friendly atmosphere, questions such as:
Who are we? How do we look upon ourselves? Who are our customers? What ’needs’ shall we satisify? What is important and good? What is central? How do we work? How do we think about certain things?
While some answers are provided and reinforced, the main outcome of the meeting is the possibility, however restricted, to pose these questions and play with them. Thus, the participants manage to establish a zone with considerable degrees of freedom; free from committments but not free from remainders of who they are or ought to be.
Cleaning is a practice with low status. Most people single out cleaning as the least attractive of household chores and the people who clean as a profession are usually badly payed. This article is an attempt to discuss why these practices have such a bad reputation – in everyday life, in work, in popular culture and, not the least, in the feminist movement. Through ethnographic data primarily based on interviews, I investigate the historically imbedded meanings tied to practices of tidying up. Drawing on theories of queer temporality, I highlight what I want to call the temporality of cleaning – the repetitiveness and direction backwards and sideways instead of forward – as a possible answer. The circular practice of taking care of our physical remains remind us of our approaching death, rather than of progress, and thus generates feelings of anger and despair. But instead of ignoring or avoiding this reminder of another time, I argue for a feminist appraisal of the temporality of cleaning. In line with scholars within resistance studies who urge for a sensibility for the temporal aspects of everyday resistance, I propose that a feminist politics that puts cleaning at the center rather than in the margins would acknowledge our mutual dependency and co-living with the material world around us.
Motivated by a recent controversy over handshaking, a survey of the personal networks of young Swedes (n=2244) is used to describe greeting practices across social class, gender, immigrant background, and geographic location. While greeting practices in the sample are fairly uniform, there are also important differences. Handshaking is predominantly used by respondents with an immigrant background, men and women distinguish between greetings depending on the gender of the person they are greeting, and greeting practices differ between northern and southern Sweden as well as between rural and urban areas.
Living and selling a dream: Lifestyle entrepreneurship in the intersection between family, market and political rhetoric
The article focuses on lifestyle entrepreneurship, characterised by a balancing work between personal lifestyle motives and economic motives. It builds on a qualitative study of business owners who have realized a life dream of starting a countryside business in the tourism and hospitality industry in Sweden. Through the notion of ”balancing work”, the analysis focuses on the tension between a personal life sphere and a market. In particular, the analysis highlights how the notion of ”the life dream” emerges as a narrative practice of self-realization, simultaneously as it is offered as an experience product. The analysis demonstrates how the entrepreneurs balance between personal stories of togetherness and marketing practices, between images of right and wrong commodification, and between constraining working conditions and a popular image of the successful entrepreneur, reinforced by a political discourse on rural entrepreneurship. It is concluded that balancing work between personal identities and economic practices is a practice of valuation, offering new insights into working conditions and markets situated in the intersection between markets and personal life spheres.
Successful dying. Later life strategies to cope with the finiteness of life.
This article aims to explore how older people relate to the finiteness of life. Unlike many other similar studies, this study focuses on older people outside palliative care and residential care, those who are still active and engaged in society. When, and in what ways do finiteness of life become apparent to them in their everyday lives? What strategies do they use to manage awareness of the finiteness of life? In 2015, data was collected via six focus group occasions with people aged 69–90. The result show that finiteness of life was something that all respondents were occupied with almost daily and in several ways. In most cases with ambiguity and even fear for the uncertainty of the future, but also with a feeling that the awareness of finitude made the present more valuable. Death was manifested in the respondents’ everyday lives, as something to be postponed, planned and administered by the types of self-disciplining techniques that are significant for successful ageing. I therefore conclude that these norms and techniques of successful ageing have expand into the field of ways of practice dying and thereby, become norms and techniques of successful dying.
Old bastard – rebellion against or a repetition of negative age codes?
In contemporary media and scientific contexts, it has become increasingly popular to launch today’s elderly as different from previous generations of older people, especially emphasized is that today’s elderly will have more attitude and set higher demands on society. The TV-series Pensionärsjävlar is based on this idea of today’s and tomorrow’s elderly as different and more rebellious than previous generations. The purpose of this article is to analyze and discuss how age and age codes are used as a prerequisite for, but also are challenged in the series. The result shows that chronological age is almost absent in the series, instead age coding is performed by physical attributes and verbal acts. Most common attributes are those connected to decreased functionality, such as walker, wheelchair, walking stick etcetera. The most common taboo joked about is sexuality, and other common themes are decreased functionality,child/youth- like behavior and traffic. In the article I discuss how these themes and attributes are negotiated in relation to age.
Boundaries of belonging: transnational adoption and the significance of origin in Swedish official rhetoric
This article explores how the category of ‘transnational adoptees’ in Sweden is constructed in two Official Government Reports (SOU). The article is inspired by poststructuralist perspectives on welfare and social categorization, and draws from a postcolonial and feminist theoretical framework. ‘Transnational adoptees’ as a category is understood as constituted through discourse, and given meaning in different contexts. In the reports, a fundamental importance is attached to the fact that individuals with a background as transnationally adopted have been separated from their birth family and country of birth. It is argued that mental problems and a split identity are consequences to be expected from the separation. (Re)connection to the origin is therefore considered to be crucial for the well-being of the group. The article concludes that this line of reasoning is based on a specific logic of blood and roots, in which ‘transnational adoptees’ are understood as belonging to their countries of birth, rather than Sweden. The logic of blood and roots can be read as a form of racialized othering, but also as a discursive exclusion of ‘transnational adoptees’ from Sweden as an imagined, national community.
Paradigm war and peace: argumentation analysis as a basis for integration
This article shows that argumentation theory can serve as a fruitful methodological basis for empirical research in social science. Choosing this methodological perspective makes it possible to integrate criticism and methods, deriving from opposing positions in the so called paradigm wars, into a rational discourse. This is illustrated by means of an example of social work research concerning traumatic experiences and distinct phases in the process of recovery.
The problem of how to relate to previous research in the research process is severe when normal science has not been established, e.g. as in the case of sociology and as in certain fields of inter-disciplinary research. Yet, this problem has been more or less neglected in methodological textbooks. Under non-normal circumstances the reasoning is often very complex and it may be difficult to determine which literature is relevant to relate to and how this should be done. Thus, an explicit and systematic strategy is needed to make the problem more comprehensible. It is argued that argument analysis (cf. critical thinking) can serve this purpose. In addition, a hypothesis concerning the importance of the cognitive dimension in soft sciences is outlined.
This article sets out to identify a culture of advocacy that has come to characterise Swedish civil society, formed around a long-standing tradition of close and cordial relations between civil society organisations, popular movements, and state and government officials. We argue that Swedish civil society organisations (CSOs) have been allowed to voice critique against public actors and policies and are expected to do so. Based on a large survey of Swedish CSOs, this study contributes unique data on what type of advocacy strategies CSOs practise, and the range of advocacy strategies that organisations employ. The analysis also explores norm-breaking behaviour, such as holding back criticism of public authorities. The results reveal a complex picture of a culture of advocacy: we find patterns of intense political activity among organisations that admit they hold back in their criticism of public authorities and the use of a wide range of advocacy strategies. The article contributes to and challenges established advocacy research and analyses established patterns of organisations’ advocacy activities with the symbolic acts of breaking norms, as an analytical approach for the study of advocacy strategies in general and advocacy culture in particular.
This article is based on a study of advertising and material covering ”existential issues”, such as love, sexuality and the body in a Swedish young women’s magazine ”Vecko Revyn”. The period studied runs from 1942-94.
It’s main argument is that the representation of female identity has gone through three distinct phases: During the 1940-50’s, the subject of these discourses was represented as a ’type’ who was attributed needs for commodities as well as romantic emotions with reference to expectations contained in a certain social role. During the 1960-70:s she was represented as an individual who’s primary concern was to express her own individuality. During the 1980-90:s, finally, she became an authentic ”person” concerned not only with expressing, but also with finding her own subjectivity.
A similar development has been a core assumption of some recent sociological theories particularlyemployed within the field of youth research. There it has been argued that individual identity has become to a lesser extent determined by social structure and to an increasing extent the product of a ”reflexive” process of identity formation, leading to an overriding concern with subjective authenticity. Although the observations presented indeed seem to give some additional credibility to such an assumption, it is argued that these changes - at least as far as advertising goes, might be better explained by innovations in the techniques of representation employed by the advertising industry.
This articel is an introduction to the socialpsychology of Thomas J Scheff. Scheff is a Professor emeritus at University of California, Santa Barbara. His work has not been introduced for a Swedish audience before, and therefore the article concentrates on some general aspects of the theory. It begins with a part where some characteristic aspects of Scheffs theory is outlined in relation to a more conventional socialpsychology. The text continues with a treatment of the central concepts of the theory. Social bond is the most important concept. Social bonds are the forces that keeps people together. In Scheffs view the buildning of bonds is the most fundamental human motive. The status of the social bond can be discovered in different ways. The method Scheff uses includes description, interpretation and analysis of communication, both in the verbal and the non-verbal sence. Scheff argues that strong bonds are built through communication that follows specific forms. The concept attunement is apt to describe these forms. The status of the bond is also dependent on the degree of differentiation in the relation. Secure bonds follows from optimal differentiation. Broken or damaged bonds can be characterized in terms of alienation. Scheff speaks of two main forms of alienation; engulfinent and isolation. A third factor that is important for the status of the bond is the kinds of emotions that operate in its maintenance. Shame and pride is according to this theory the master-emotions in human existence. They play a primary role in human conduct by giving the actors instinctive indications of the status of the bond. The last part of the article deals with what the theory has to say about social relationships in the modem society.
Forms of interaction
In this article, the theoretical notion of forms of interaction is introduced, which comprehends how the network and domain structures provide a background for interaction. This general approach is used to discuss how persons can style their identities. Today’s forms of interaction enable people to hide information in interaction with other people. People can, for example, present themselves as individualized, important and successful in interaction with others. This facilitates the emergence of certain values. Especially individualistic values are studied in this article.