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Svenska förskolor är ålagda att bedriva en verksamhet där alla barn ges likvärdiga möjligheter att lära och utvecklas. För att möjliggöra utveckling av en sådan verksamhet ska verksamheten systematiskt dokumenteras, analyseras och utvärderas (Skollagen, 2010:800; Skolverket, 2018). Syftet med studien är att med utgångspunkt i två kommuners ledarskapspraktiker beskriva och förstå organisering för genomförandet av det statliga uppdraget med systematiskt kvalitetsarbete. Studien genomfördes med en fallstudiedesign i de båda kommunerna, från förvaltningsnivå till verksamheten i förskolan. Studien omfattar brev och anteckningar från processmöten med personalen samt brev, inspelade möten och anteckningar från en grupp kommunala ledare för förskolan i de två kommunerna. Det teoretiska ramverket bygger på didaktisk teori och ledarskapspraktik. Resultatet visar att när didaktiska val på de olika nivåerna av ledarskapspraktikerna saknar en gemensam riktning blir det svårare att skapa en ömsesidig förståelse och en gemensam agenda för kvalitetsarbetets struktur, process och resultat. När däremot alla ledningsnivåer har en gemensam agenda för de didaktiska valen och då innehåll, metoder och processer syntetiserar med varandra, skapas en gemensam riktning i enlighet med uppdraget: att skapa en likvärdig utbildning för alla barns lärande och utveckling. ENGLISH ABSTRACT Didactic Choices in Systematic Quality Work – Opportunities and Obstacles in Two Swedish Municipalities Swedish preschools are obligated to conduct activities where all children are given equal opportunities to learn and develop. To create a basis for this task, the activities must be systematically documented, analysed, and evaluated (Education Act, 2010:800; National Agency for Education, 2018). The purpose of the study is, based on two municipalities´ leadership practices, to describe and understand the organisation for the implementation of the governments assignment with systematic quality work. The study was conducted with a case study design. Our data material contains letters and notes from process-meetings with the staff as well as letters, recorded meetings, and notes from a group of municipal leaders for the preschool in the two municipalities. The theoretical framework is based on didactic theory and leadership practice. The results show that when didactic choices at the different levels of leadership practices lack a common agenda, it becomes more difficult to create a mutual understanding and common agenda for the structure, process and result of quality work. On the other hand, when didactic choices synthesize between all levels, and systematic quality work have a mutual agenda it creates a pathway towards education with high quality for learning and development of all children.

Compulsory schooling in Sweden was introduced in 1842. However, its meaning has changed over time, both in terms of who it applies to, how long it applies and how it can or should be implemented. During the 2000s, compulsory schooling has become synonymous with the obligation to be present in school and attend class. There are students who for medical, mental and social reasons can not go to school and fulfill their school obligation. In order to ensure that these students receive the education they are entitled to, a new chapter was introduced in 2020 in the Swedish Education Act, enabling distance learning. The purpose of the article is to learn more about how the educational policy framework of school attendance and everyone’s right to education can affect the meaning of compulsory schooling, and how this discursive change can have consequences for students, schools, and society. To achieve this, government policy texts on distance education and school attendance published in 2017-2021 are analyzed. The consequences that are perceived to follow from teaching beyond the school area are also discussed here. One consequence that is highlighted is that the school’s democracy mission ends up in danger. The analysis is inspired by Carol Lee Bacchi’s approach WPR (What’s the Problem Represented to be).

All children in Sweden have the right to attend school from the year they reach the age of six. But are all children obliged to be there? Sweden have had compulsory schooling since the end of the 19th century. This means that there is an obligation to be in the school and attend its activities. A changed governance of the school during the last decades of the 20th century, from centralized to decentralized, opened up for the possibility of local school practices to define how the compulsory schooling should be interpreted and applied. In this article we scrutinize whether this has opened for potential inequalities regarding compulsory schooling in Sweden. In doing this we analyze law and policy documents that in different ways prescribe how deviations from school duties, so-called school absence, should be handled and by whom. The purpose of the article is to elucidate the effects of state-formulated guidelines regarding the management of school absence in Swedish compulsory school. Inspired by Carol Lee Bacchis’ WPR (What´s the Problem Represented to be) analysis, we interrogate how departures from compulsory schooling are portrayed as a problem and what meaning are ascribed to compulsory schooling - not least from an equality perspective.

Exploring time loyalty. The interweaving of time and loyalty in faculty administrator’s work strategies This article has an exploring and theorizing approach and aims to explore the function of the notion of time together with the concept of loyalty. The notion of acceleration of time and the new ”flexible” working life has created a duality where bureaucratic and administrative systems exist side by side with a more flexible organization, within which people can organize and plan their work themselves. That creates unregulated spaces, where administrators have to navigate and manage conflicting loyalties and uncertain responsibilities, creating further uncertainty, putting questions about one’s use of time and loyalties in focus. We explore this development by using the concept time loyalty and use that connection to analyze interviews with administrative staff within a university. This article concludes that there are ongoing negotiations regarding what to do, for whom, and when as well as legitimizing actions to justify fail responses to loyalty claims.

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This article analyses the flow of speeches during a ”storytelling evening” in a northern Sweden village, where people had been invited to tell stories about the times and the work when timber and tarbarrels were floated down the river. Focus is on how speakers claim authority and entitlement to have something to say, and how a large-scale hyper-narrative of “the floating epoch” is negotiated. Discussed in William Labov’s terms, although the result tends to give a general description without a clear narrative structure, there is a narrative closure implicit in the theme of the evening: when the floating work ended, the social life described also ended. Furthermore, the relevance of the storytelling is not only to find in the pride of the local history, but also in giving opportunity to comment on the contemporary situation where the hydroelectric power plant regulates the river and affects the landscape and living conditions.

“Narrative studies” is a rich, expanding, multi- and interdisciplinary field, where many definitions and uses of the term narrative flourish. This special issue focuses on narrating. The presented articles explore narrating as means for self-presentation and political struggle; as an activity formed in interplay and dialogue, formed by linguistic practices and situated in a complex web of power.

When doing cultural history research, the researcher can come across already established opinions of what the history is in a field. Aitologies, lists of heroes and masters, turning point anecdotes and written histories are present as more or less taken for granted within a community. This is a convenient starting-point and background material for a researcher, but can also hide more than it shows by confirming contemporary definitions, power relations, inclusions and exclusions. As an example, I analyse tendencies within Swedish Jazz History by going through interviews made at the Centre for Swedish Folk Music and Jazz Research. A conventional attitude would be to accept the collection as fairly representative: the most important musicians have been interviewed and there is a good sample across different decades. However, in a reading “against the grain” by the use of Katherine Galloway Young’s concepts of Taleworld, storyrealm and interview situation, the interviews stand forward as negotiations of what jazz styles, what musicians and what qualities should be included in the Swedish jazz field and what is to be left out. In this case, foreign born musicians and women musicians are marginalized in Swedish jazz history, as well as styles that can seem to be too commercial. The musicians chosen are either stars, or witnesses to the stars. Working against the grain of the emic Swedish Jazz history is to problematize what has been outdefined and how, to ask counterfactual questions on what could have happened if other discourses had dominated, and reflect on new questions to ask, new definitions of the research object, and the need for new and/or revised documentation.

This article proposes intensified studies in “culture life” or “the Arts” by way of an ethnography inspired by Howard Becker’s model of Art Worlds and focusing on how, where and by whom arts are made. This includes the situation where artists, brokers, audiences and critics meet but also the inclusion in criticism, academic education and art grants systems. A focus on situations would take notice of how the premises and present actors in the situation put limitations on but also can be seen as productive forces making art works possible and affecting their formal structures. Furthermore, a comparative perspective on how arts using different media and affecting different senses are put on equal standing within a “high culture” concept is important in order to grasp the position of the arts in society today.

The problem of representing streches of time is discussed with examples from music. The exact chronological time measuring is put in contrast to the concept of experienced time, where in music the establishment of a mood may be relative the unique performance. Other models are briefly mentioned as well.

A Royal Visit to the provinces is a situation where geographical order and regional identities are visualised within an attention economy centering around the king. This study deals with the 22 official visits by the king to the county of Västerbotten during the years 1976-2008, as represented in local press, and analyses what images of the county that are put forward. Strong emphasis is put opon high-technology industrial production, tourism and entrepreneurship, thus answering to current Swedish discourses on tomorrow's society; both as part of this and as independent themes. Nature and the wilderness are also heavily exposed.

The theme of this issue of Kulturella Perspektiv is cultural perspectives on the Swedish royal family. Academic cultural approaches to monarchies and royal families are unusual, maybe because royalties are generally considered to be outdated political symbols. However during the last two decades there has been a growing interest within Nordic research on the royal families' mass media exposure. This is in line with a far more extended tradition in Great Britain comprising studies on the relations between monarchy and media, as well as on ideas on nationalism and national identity. Many of the articles in this issue touches on questions of mass media and nationalism in a similar way. Since studies on monarchies and the royal family are rare even in an international perspective we have found another quite new interdisciplinary field of research that serves our purposes well — celebrity studies. Celebrity studies focuses on both the production and the consuming of celebrities, on how audiences, groups or individuals use and reproduce celebrities. Since royalties are losing in political power they are no turned into high-rank celebrities with unquestionable fame since birth. But how is royal celebrity performed and what kind of values are connected with it? All articles, except one, focus on representations of the Swedish royal family, in painted portraits, an annual tv-show, satire and humour programmes, a theatre play etc. One common theme in the articles is the dichotomy of private/public. Different understandings of private/public is used and/or constructed for various reasons.

Recension av: Dewdney, Andrew & Ride, Peter, The New Media Handbook. Abingdon: Routledge, 2006.

Recension av: Thomas Karlsohn, Passage mellan medier: Vilém Flusser, datorn och skriften. Göteborg: Folkuniversitetets akademiska press, 2006 och Klinkmann, Sven-Erik: På drömmarnas marknad, Ikoner, fantasibilder och klichéer i populärkulturen. Gidlunds förlag, Hedemora, 2006.

Recension av: Margareta Hallberg, Etnologisk koreografi. Att följa ett ämne i rörelse. Nora: Nya Doxa, 2001. Tiina Rosenberg, Queerfeministisk agenda. Stockholm: Bokförlaget Atlas, 2002. Annika Nordström, Syskonen Svensson: Sångerna och livet — en folklig repertoar i 1900-talets Göteborg. Skrifter från Etnologiska föreningen i Västsverige 39, 2002. Dan Lundberg & Gunnar Ternhag, Musiketnologi: En introduktion. Gidlunds förlag, 2002. Elizabeth L. Toth & Linda Aldoory (eds.), The Gender Challenge to Media: Diverse Voices From the Field. Cresskill, New Jersey: Hampton Press, Inc., 2001. Bruno Latour & Peter Weibel (eds.), iconclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion and Art. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002. Sven-Erik Klinkmann (ed.), Popular Imagination: Essays on Fantasy and Cultural Practice. Åbo: NNF Publications 12, 2002.

The author discusses and makes an appeal for the study of the Arts within Swedish ethnology. There is much to gain from such studies. Literature, music, theatre, pictorial art etc. communicate, and give access to, central values within a culture. Expressing oneself through the arts is furthermore a strong means of identity politics. Finally, cultural notions of creativity are channeled, socially constructed, and mythologized through the arts.

This introduction points out some fields of interest concerning music and globalization. Music can be a result of global contact, as well as a focus of new contacts being made. The "postcolonial experience" is often articulated via music. "World music" is seen as a European way of coming to terms with global processes, as well as an opportunity for new states and ethnic groups to achieve international recognition. The ethical responsibilities of ethnomusicologists are pointed out, as well as the political aspects of music.

In this article the author discusses how music is used for constructing concepts of love. In the analysis this is considered a complex interplay between music, experiences of love, narratives of love-experiences which offer models for romantic music, and arranged love-meetings where music is present as a means of ritualizing the event. The images of love present in the narratives or listeners to a radio request programme as well as the answers from a group of students to the question of which music they would choose for a meeting with their beloved, are concrete examples analyzed in the article.

In this issue of Kulturella Perspektiv we want to present some examples of media research with a more qualitative approach than the traditional mass communication research with its quantitative sociological orientation.

Recension av: Christine Geraghty: Women and Soap Opera. A Study of Prime Time Soaps. Andra upplagan. Polity Press, 1992. Jackie Jakubowski (red.): Judisk identitet. Natur och kultur, 1993. Ulf Palmenfelt: Per Arvid Säves möten med människor och sägner. Carlssons, 1993.

The present article begins with a discussion of how "the Sixties" and "1968" became significant ideological concepts in public debate, used in order to contrast ideas concerning the societies of today and tomorrow. Furthermore, this article advocates that the 1960s be considered an object of critical ethnological research, which identifies and emphasizes the long-term changes in cultural patterns which constitute the dynamics of the 1950s, 60s and 70s. Two fundamental questions of a methodological nature are therewith actualized. The first concerns the mass media's place within ethnological research. As ethnologists, we must see the mass media as something which does not simply reflect and/or influence everyday life, but which also constitutes a central component of everyday life. Another question concerns the fact that a study of the 1960s unconditionally implies a study of politics, and thus questions must be posed as to how power is constituted and how "politics" as a concept is constructed.

Recension av: Åke Daun: Den europeiska identiteten: Bidrag till samtal om Sveriges framtid. Stockholm: Rabén & Sjögren, 1992. Ann-Kristin Ekman: Community, Carnival and Campaign: Expressions of belonging in a Swedish Region. Stockholm: Studies in Social Anthropology, 1991 (Diss.). Gunnar Ternhag: Hjort Anders Olsson. Hedemora: Gidlunds bokförlag, 1992. Märta Ramsten: Återklang. Svensk folkmusik i förändring 1950⁠—1980. Stockholm, 1992 (Svenskt visarkivs handlingar 4).