The internet has revolutionized the way we socialize, and as a consequence the way to love. The new communication technologies have facilitated intercultural relationships. Nowadays family relations are one of the major factors in immigration to European countries. Family relations means persons who arrive as family dependents and in accordance with laws regulating family reunification. This thesis aims to apply the classical assimilation theory stated by Milton Gordon (1964), which formulates a series of assimilation stages through which an individual must pass in order to be completely assimilated. In accordance with this theory, marriage is the final phase for a newcomer to fully incorporate into the host society. Thus, based on this presumption and other contemporary theories, the present study has analysed how women who get involved in intercultural marriages based on internet meeting experience these assimilation stages and evaluated the resources used by respondents to incorporate themselves into Swedish society. The main goal of the study was to determine if jumping to the last stage of assimilation does assure the incorporation in the social or/and labour spheres and the findings demonstrate that even though husbands are a valuable resource for assimilation, several cultural issues in Swedish society make it difficult to assure success for the newcomers. On the other hand, Sweden is a country with a strong national sentiment and the assimilation of immigrants still is an important issue to deal with. The Swedish Integration Board has disappeared and major projects for integration have been left in the hands of the municipalities or the Migration Board, institutions that still do not know how to deal with this dilemma.
Fackliga organisationer menar på att tidsbegränsade anställningar har skapat fler osäkra jobb. Svenskt näringsliv menar däremot att de tidsbegränsade anställningarna inte har ökat någonting under de senaste 15 åren, vilket statistiska centralbyrån (SCB) bekräftar i en rapport. Rapporten visar att en viss minskning av de tidsbegränsade anställningarna har skett under andra kvartalet 2019 den visar dock också på att de tidsbegränsade anställningar som finns har blivit osäkrare än tidigare. Den här studien utfördes i Falun kommun och syftet med studien var att undersöka hur vikarier inom äldreomsorgen och LSS upplever deras arbetssituation som smsanställd och hur de upplever det sociala sammanhanget på arbetsplatsen. Vi undersökte även om deras anställningsform har inverkan på deras sociala liv utanför arbetet. Sju semistrukturerade intervjuer har utförts i samband med studien. Studien använder sig utav en tematisk analys där fyra teman har identifierats: kritik, sammanhållning, privatliv och trygghet. Genom dessa teman så används tre teorier, Guy Standings teori om prekariatet, Antonovskys teori om KASAM och Karasek och Theorells modell om krav och kontroll. Studien har visat på att smsanställningen är en prekär anställning som kan leda till problem för den anställde. Men den visar också att om den anställde har skyddsnät i form av en annan inkomstkälla eller att personen har valt anställningen så kan den ge stor frihet och hjälpa till att lösa livspusslet.
This thesis is about the social body in sociology, represented by the classical sociologist Max Weber. Traditional sociology has not taken the body into account. The body has been considered to belong to the realm of the natural sciences. Sociology has seen the body merely as an instrument or a tool for social action. The mind/body dichotomy, homo duplex, prevails in sociology. The purpose of this investigation is to show that Weber does not totally neglect the social body. I claim that the body is “absent but present” in Weber’s texts. The above-mentioned view that the body is ignored by sociology must, in other words, be modified. I claim that Weber’s texts imply a conception, although rudimentary, of the social body. This conception co-exists, however, with Weber’s tendency to see the body as a natural object. This is in accordance with the general picture of the way sociology treats the body. To examine the question of the social body I turn to philosophy. I believe that some philosophers have been interested in viewing the body as a social rather than a natural object. Plato, René Descartes, Friedrich Nietzsche, Immanuel Kant and finally Maurice Merleau-Ponty have all tried to come to terms with the relationship between the mind and the body. The above-mentioned philosophers, with the exception of Kant, are all therefore concerned with the body as more than simply a biological organism. They try to reconcile the dualistic difference between body and mind. They are, however, mainly concerned with finding a philosophical answer to how mankind can attain knowledge about the object. They are concerned with epistemology and ontology. Sociology, on the other hand, is more concrete and its corresponding concepts are “subject” and “structure”. Sociology fills these concepts with a more non-epistemological and ontological content. He has been described as a subjective sociologist or a micro sociologist, but I claim that this does not give the whole picture. Weber also sees individual intentions and purposes as determined by objective and structural constraints. I divide the works of Weber into two parts. I have named the subjectivist approach “the empowered individual”. Here Weber works at the level of the individual subject. He focuses on the subject’s own experience. The ethically shaped, and therefore systematically self-controlled, body becomes a vehicle for being in the world. The body is subjected to the governing ascetic ethic. The feelings and desires of the body become rationalised into a method and a system. In this way a far-reaching rational discipline is created, a so called “ethical conduct of life is created”. In the writings of Weber the “conduct in life” is described by the concept “habitus”. However, Weber is classical in the sense that he considers habitus as a mental attitude. Other works by Weber include a discussion of the constraining structural surroundings, but Weber prefers to use the concept “life orders” rather than “structures”. Weber describes a number of different life orders which he says form the specific cultural habits adopted by individuals in society. Life orders are the disciplinary apparatus that organize the mind and the body of the individuals. Weber asserts that as a consequence of the power of the life order, a specific everyday habitus of the body and mind is created, i.e. a aesthetic lifestyle.