Dalarna University's logo and link to the university's website

Sector specific skills in occupational safety and health (OS&H) are crucial for being able to contribute to good work environment and decrease today's high levels of sick absences. Large manufacturing companies are due to tradition good at OS&H and can serve as an interesting context for investigating the knowledge level in the area today, and needs for the future. For this purpose a case study was performed in this sector as a co-operative inquiry, including 10 OS&H professionals (engineers and ergonomists) employed at in-house and external occupational health services (OHS). Professional experiences, good examples from practice and current research were shared jointly within the inquiry. The results show needs to work more preventively than today comprehending aspects as system understanding, integrated work teams, participation, a clear role in change projects plus skills in risk assessments. Skills in how to conduct well-functioning dialogues with stakeholders were also on the agenda.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine and discuss conditions for workplace learning in gender-segregated workplaces in the public sector, how social constructions of gender contribute to (or constrain) the workplace learning conditions within two workplace contexts. Design/methodology/approach: The research was carried out through an interactive approach with data from 12 semi-structured interviews with workers and first-line managers from technical maintenance and home care in a Swedish municipality, validated at an analysis seminar with 27 participations, from both workplace contexts the Swedish Work Environment Authority and us researchers. Findings: The results indicate that gender affects conditions for workplace learning and contributes to an enabling learning environment in the male-dominated workplace context and to a constraining learning environment in the female-dominated workplace context. The identified differences are created in both organisational structures and the organisations’ cultures. Research limitations/implications: When analysing conditions for workplace learning from a gender perspective, the approach of comparative, cross-case analyses is useful. An interactive approach with women and men describing and analysing their work experiences together with researchers is a fruitful way of making gender visible. Practical implications: The theoretical approach in this study illuminates how social constructions of gender operate and affect conditions for workplace learning and contributes to a deeper understanding of underlying causes to unequal conditions in different workplace contexts. Social implications: The findings imply a gender divide which, from the theoretical strands, can be seen as an expression of asymmetrical power relations and where these gendered learning conditions probably also affect the quality of the services. Originality/value: The findings contribute to existing gender theoretical literature by demonstrating that gender is essential to take into consideration when understanding working conditions in different workplace contexts. This study contributes to workplace learning literature by exploring the different ways in which social constructions of gender contribute to enabling and constraining learning environments.

This article suggests that theories of gender should be considered central concerning the future development of systematic occupational safety and health management in theory and practice. Despite extensive research and legislation, there are still considerable shortcomings in working conditions which indicates difficulties in the implementation of systematic occupational safety and health management. In this article, we address the need for critical analysis that complements more traditional research focusing on health or management. The overall aim is to examine and explain systematic occupational safety and health management in gender-segregated work environments in Sweden, based on theories of doing gender in work organisations. A qualitative methodological approach is used, which includes thematically analysed interviews with inspectors and managers at the Swedish Work Environment Authority. By using a gender-critical analysis several examples of how gendered norms and values complicate and constrain systematic occupational safety and health management are identified. The results pinpoint that these norms and values indirectly contribute to circumscribe essential preconditions for systematic occupational safety and health management procedures and risk leading to difficulties in creating safe and healthy work cultures.

The aim of this article is to critically explore how formal and informal work practices interplay with gender in the shaping of homecare service’s work environments. An ethnomethodological view on doing gender is applied in combination with theories about challenges in relational work.The material is drawn from two projects represented by (i) a cooperative inquiry about Swedish homecare service’s work environments, with homecare service workers and first-line mangers (seven included in this article) and (ii) six semi-structured interviews with employees from a national work environment authority. The analytic procedure was qualitatively based using an abductive approach when looking for cohesive themes. Gendered organizational shortcomings that interplayed with the shaping of the work environments were lack of clear work descriptions, boundaries for work, resources for embodied work, and limited knowledge about risk assessment in relational work.

The main purpose of this doctoral thesis is to describe, analyse and initiate processes of change from a gender point of view. In the present field study the focus is on gender-creating processes in and around formal and informal structures at an engineering company´s organisation. The central theme is the implication of gender in relation to industrial organisation and leadership.

The aim of this thesis is i) to identify processes and praxis in the organisation that create both opportunities and obstacles for women who have made an untraditional choice of career as engineers and managers, ii) on the basis of this knowledge and together with practitioners in the organisation initiate processes of change that will increase the proportion of women managers.

The doing-gender approach has been used as a theoretical tool in order to understand the processes surrounding technology, leadership and gender in the organisation. Doing gender allows us to initiate process-thinking about how gender is constructed in different social contexts, such as those in industrial organisations. From a doing-gender perspective the central question is what an individual does and not what he or she is. In other words, the focus is on actions.

The methodological approach is action-oriented, using as its starting point an interactive research perspective. The interactive approach has a democratic basic outlook, it combines theoretical understanding with practical action.

This doctoral thesis helps to elucidate the complexity of gender-creating structures, processes and practices in an industrial organisation. Its empirical method also shows how researchers and practitioners in the organisation can jointly launch processes of change on the basis of a gender-theoretical basis.

The thesis presents a gender-theoretical model for change and analysis that is based on the so-called doing-gender approach. This model has been of importance both as an analytical tool and as a starting point for initiating processes of change. The model has four dimensions and they are dissimilar in character and are more or less demanding of time in bringing about changes. They each have an effect and affect each other in various constellations in the gender-creating processes in organisations.

The viewpoints that the doing-gender approach communicates makes it possible to change existing attitudes and expectations concerning gender, since the construction of gender is a continually ongoing process that differs in different contexts.

One contribution that this thesis makes is to illuminate the complexity of organisation and gender. It contributes to research by providing empirical examples of gender-creating praxis in an engineering company and by showing how we can work on processes of change from a gender perspective. 

The background to this article review is governmental interest in finding reasons why a majority of the employees in Sweden who are on sick leave are women. In order to find answers to these questions three issues will be discussed from a meso-level: (i) recent changes in the Swedish health care sector’s working organization and their effects on gender, (ii) what research says about work health and gender in the health care sector, and (iii) the meaning of gender at work. The aim is to first discuss these three issues to give a picture of what gender research says concerning work organization and work health, and second to examine the theories behind the issue. In this article the female-dominated health care sector is in focus.This sector strives for efficiency relating to invisible job tasks and emotional work performed by women. In contemporary work organizations gender segregation has a tendency to take on new and subtler forms. One reason for this is today’s de-hierarchized and flexible organizations.A burning question connected to this is whether new constructions of masculinities and femininities really are ways of relating to the prevailing norm in a profession or are ways of deconstructing the gender order.To gain a deeper understanding of working life we need multidisciplinary research projects where gender-critical knowledge is interwoven into research not only on organizations, but also into research concerning the physical work environment, in order to be able to develop good and sustainable work environments, in this case in the health care sector.

For being able to meet societal need of increased public homecare service capacity there is a profound need for work environment development that paves the way for gender-equal, attractive and sustainable jobs. The sector is women-dominated and characterised by poor work environments and high rates of sick absences. To illuminate how the gendered norms, gender-creating practices and new public management interplay in the shaping of the work environment goes outside the scope of traditional work environment research. In this chapter, the aim is to provide new insights, mainly from an organisational perspective, on these aspects, as well as identify what kinds of changes that are needed in order to create more sustainable work environments. Data from two action-oriented research projects on homecare services will serve as examples from practice. Three dilemmas are identified that can illuminate the findings and serve as intersections for future change work: (1) organisational imbalances between the management system and the character of the work, (2) the need of going beyond the contexts of prevailing gendered expectations in order to change how organisational resources are distributed and (3) organisational imbalances between the NPM inspired systems’ rationalities and the need of learning and work environment development.

The approach in this article is to study leadership activities from the shop-floor workers’ perspectives during the implementation of a Lean-inspired production concept – an angle of approach that corresponds to a need for a deeper knowledge of the interactions between organizational structures and the physical work environment. The empirical findings are from a national R&D program called the Production Leap and collected through different methods: semi-structured interviews carried out at eight manufacturing companies, the open-ended part of a longitudinal survey, and participative observations. Lean leadership practices at these companies do not enable the possibilities of developing the technical systems or work relationships between the managers and the shop-floor workers. Instead, they provide the means and activities to circumvent coordination problems and create a feeling of participation. The results here indicate that leadership activities and coordination of work do not, as it is sometimes argued by the proponents of Lean, ‘turn the pyramid’ of power upside down. One reason for this is the lack of social structures in the organization.

Det övergripande syftet med projektet har varit att - utveckla fallbeskrivningar för lärande genom en analys av hur det formella och informella jämställdhetsarbetet vid KTH är organiserat och på vilka arenor detta arbete utövas i praktiken, - utifrån fallbeskrivningar iscensätta lärandeprocesser i form av benchlearning om jämställdhetsarbete mellan de tekniska högskolorna i Sverige. En central del i metodansatsen är att jämställdhetsarbetets innehåll och form är kontextberoende. Det är inte möjligt att finna en standard för hur jämställdhetsarbete inom högskolan ska bedrivas, utan här krävs ett utvecklingsarbete som tar sin utgångspunkt i de enskilda organisationernas förutsättningar och behov.Projektet delas in i en intern och en extern fas. Den interna fasen består av en lärprocess om KTH:s eget jämställdhetsarbete och är en metodologisk förutsättning för att kunna utveckla benchlearning i den externa fasen. I projektets externa fas är fokus på att iscensätta ett lärande i form av benchlearning mellan de medverkande organisationerna, utifrån de lärande exempel som beskrivs i rapporten. Målsättningen är att utveckla ett bestående nätverk för lärande och erfarenhetsutbyte mellan de tekniska högskolorna, där empiri från de egna organisationerna kan ligga till grund.