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De svenska stadsmissionernas sociala arbete har genomgått två generella förändringar under senare år; det har expanderats och breddats och det har kommit att ägnats åt allt svårare social problematik. Stadsmissionernas arbete kan inte längre sägas vara ett komplement till den offentliga sektorn då deras insatser inte kompletterar någon befintlig insats och då de allt oftare utför tjänster inom ramen av ett kommunalt uppdrag. Den här artikeln beskriver en situation där ansvaret för hälsa och omsorg för socialt utsatta allt mer kommit att hamna hos organisationer som stadsmissionerna. I den avslutande diskussionen berörs konsekvenserna av denna utveckling på både samhälles och individnivå. Artikeln är baserad på en empirisk studie av åtta stadsmissioner runt om i landet.

This paper explores the complex conditions for generalized trust in the Indian state of Kerala and the potential role for social work in improving them. Theory on trust and experiences drawn from the international research field on trust and social capital are used to disentangle the social structures and relations that form and shape generalized trust in Kerala. Special attention is given to the significance of social and economic equality, ethnic diversity and justice institutions. It is concluded that Kerala faces several challenges in addressing the low levels of generalized trust but also that there are reasons for a cautious optimism, considering the relatively high levels of trust in institutions and a sub-national identity that supersedes ethnic divisions. Several constructive suggestions are also made regarding the role of social work in relation to generalized trust, addressing among other things the present problems with corruption and the remittance economy in Kerala.

Almost all children in Sweden spend at least some part of their early childhood in organized childcare, primarily in the form of preschools. About 10% of all preschools in Sweden are parent cooperatives, which make the childcare area an anomaly in the Swedish welfare state; no other service area has such a significant proportion of cooperative service providers. The parent cooperatives are initiated by the parents themselves, they are social enterprises created from the bottom-up. Why do parents decide to start a parent cooperative preschool in a welfare state where childcare is considered a social right and a responsibility for the state? This article will explore several different motives for starting parent cooperatives in Sweden, with special attention to the role of the public sector and political decisions. The findings are based on an extensive empiric study performed between the years 2003 and 2007.

Health and elder care in most developed countries faces a complex and partly contradictory mix of financial, social and political challenges. Fiscal strains combined with New Public Management agendas have caused severe cutbacks and calls for greater efficiency in public and elder health care, resulting in a growing concern about service quality. The purpose of this project is to explore a possibility to address these issues from a new perspective that emphasizes greater user participation, based on the idea that the patients and clients can play a more active part in the provision of their own care services. This project proposes to explore how health and elder care services can be provided when professionals and patients/clients act as ‘partners’ and where the two parties co-produce the service through their mutual contributions. Institutions that promote a multi-stakeholder dialog between the staff and clients and those that enrich the work environment can also facilitate better service quality. Japan has a unique health care system with not just one, but two user-owned cooperative health care providers that also provide elder care to their members. Together, these two co-op health care systems have nearly 50,000 hospital beds (or about 5 % of total beds). However, they probably differ from each other and from public hospitals and ‘nonprofit’ hospitals or Medical Corporations (Iryo hojin) in terms of the social values they promote. Their social values will be reflected in their governance model, their relations with the staff and the relations between the staff, the patients and volunteers. This project aims to collect unique empirical data from patients, medical professionals and volunteers at nine different cooperative hospitals across Japan and compare it with similar data from two public or nonprofit hospitals. It will produce an extensive and rich material describing how the health care cooperatives in Japan organize their care according to the principle of

Den svenska välfärdsstaten har under senare år reformerats på ett sätt som skapat omfattande valfrihetssystem för tjänster inom vård, skola och omsorg. Motivet till detta har varit att individualisera tjänsterna på ett sätt som ger ökad personlig frihet och konkurrens som leder till högre effektivitet och bättre kvalité. Men är just valfrihet på kvasi-markander det enda sättet att nå detta mål? Denna artikel undersöker hur medskapande (co-production) kan användas för att nå samma eller liknande mål. Med hjälp av resultat från ett forskningsprojekt undersöks möjligheterna med medskapande med hänsyn till dess olika effekter på produktionen av välfärdstjänster och vad Marshall kallade det sociala medborgarskapet. Resultatet visar att både kvasi-markander och medskapande har sina begränsningar i hur de fungerar – särskilt i relation till marginaliserade grupper – men att medskapande har möjlighet att förena individualisering med social sammanhållning om den politiska viljan finns.

Sweden has in the last 20 years undergone an extensive process of marketisation of its home care sector. Where the public sector once was the only provider of home care services, there is now a wide array of different, private alternatives for older people to choose from, using their publicly funded voucher. The publicly funded home care services in Sweden are, in other words, to a large extent organised according to the principles of a quasi-market. Older people with care needs are therefore now considered to be consumers of home care since they are expected to make an informed choice of home care provider according to their own preferences. This paper studies the extent to which older people with care needs assume this role and how they do it, using Hirschman's well-known theory on ‘exit, voice and loyalty’ and theory on the difference between care and market logic. The study is based on results from a research project using telephone interviews to ask a large number of older people in three Swedish cities about their experience of making this choice. The results show that they had difficulty understanding how to choose and what the purpose of the choice was. The conclusion of this study suggests some possible reasons why policy makers in Sweden continue to favour the freedom-of-choice model in spite of these poor results.

Valfrihet i välfärden synliggör som få andra frågor en spricka rakt igenom den svenska politiska scenen. Valfrihet må vara ett enda begrepp, men det tillskrivs många egenskaper och väsensskilda konsekvenser. Tillsammans med forskarkolleger har Johan Vamstad undersökt hur valfriheten ter sig för de medborgare den gäller. Vi får möta den i praktiken och inte bara i teorin: möjligheten att välja eller låta bli, att välja utförare av tjänsten, att välja innehåll i tjänsten och att välja om. De områden som studerats är hemtjänsten, gymnasieskolan respektive missbruksvården i tre svenska städer med lång erfarenhet av en omfattande valfrihet i välfärden: Helsingborg, Nacka och Västerås. För att jämföra den valfrihet som når medborgarna med politikens avsikt får vi lära känna hur politiker och tjänstemän på kommunal nivå resonerar. En viktig bakgrund ges i definitionen av begreppen ”frihet” och ”valfrihet” och en genomgång av deras politiska historia i Sverige från 60-talet till idag. Vad har man menat med ”valfrihet” och vem har drivit frågan? Stora skillnader visar sig i situationen för personer som väljer de olika tjänsterna, liksom skillnader i hur kommuner förhåller sig till uppgiften. Kapitlet om valfrihet i missbruksvården är skrivet av Kerstin Stenius. Kunskapen boken förmedlar om den nya välfärden kan fylla den stundtals hårda debatten om valfrihet med innehåll och viktiga nyanser., Valfri välfärd – en socialvetenskaplig studie av olika medborgargruppers erfarenheter

Karasak and Theorell's demand/control model for analyzing work environment posits a high degree of both demands and control for active or good working conditions, while stress occurs when demands are plentiful, but there are few possibilities of control. This article addresses a significant increase of work-related demands for the employees of the public sector in Sweden. It also explores the potential contribution of social enterprises to enrich work environment and provide ‘good work’. The empirical data was taken from two separate studies of work environment at Swedish childcare facilities, one from 1994–95 and another from 2006–07. The article shows that work environment conditions changed radically about 20 years ago and that the effects are still apparent today. The results also show, however, that small, social enterprises continue to offer a better work environment than public facilities.

The aim of this article is to explore how charitable giving is structured in a universal welfare state. The article presents new data based on more than 200 national fundraising campaigns in Sweden during the past 60 years. The varying success of these campaigns for different causes creates a historical pattern of charitable giving under a social democratic welfare regime. Which causes are still considered urgent and appropriate for donations in a country where welfare is considered to be a social right, and how have these attitudes developed over time? More specifically, the article analyses differences in the success of campaigns for domestic and for international causes, including several subcategories of campaigns. The results not only show that Swedes give considerably more money to causes not addressed by the state but also that charitable giving in Sweden is increasing for all types of causes.

Att ge pengar till bättre behövande är en handling som nästan alla uppfattar som något positivt men bör det för den sakens skull uppmuntras av staten? Svaret är inte självklart. En avdragsrätt för gåvor skulle sannolikt öka givandet men samtidigt minska de statliga resurser som kan användas till allmännyttiga ändamål. Frågan om avdragsrätt måste också belysas från andra håll: Vilka konsekvenser får avdragsrätt för den ideella sektorn, vad betyder den för den generella välfärdsstaten och ger en avdragsrätt mer i gåvor än vad den kostar i förlorade skatteintäkter? Givandet till allmännyttiga ändamål är oerhört komplext, motsägelsefullt och inte minst ideologiskt laddat. I boken ges samlade erfarenheter från sex länder med olika system för finansiering av allmännyttig verksamhet.

Medborgares erfarenheter i en föränderlig välfärdsstat

The purpose of this paper is to acknowledge the role of civil society in the Swedish welfare society, which is a scarcely debated, yet ideologically charged field of study in Swedish social science. The paper will especially emphasize the level of knowledge and the role of politics in this area. The title of this paper contains two contested concepts. The concept of ‘welfare’ might have a reasonably universal understanding even though it can and should be theorized upon. Civil society is here understood to cover voluntary organizations and their actives but also informal help and care provided by neighbors, friends, colleagues and relatives outside their own household. Included in the civil society concept are also the informal networks in which people participate (Meeuwisse, 1999; Trägårdh, 1999; Jeppsson-Grassman & Svedberg, 2005; Lindberg, 2005). The emphasis in this paper is on the process, the actual efforts or actions performed. Yet the actor perspective, – the importance of organizations and individuals as representatives and opinion leaders – is not disregarded. This paper is partly based on the Swedish findings of the Nordic research overview presented in this publication in concern, and will address the questions at hand through a dual approach. One of the two approaches is a history of the civil society debate from the 1980s to the present day, where some special characteristics will be identified in the general description. The second approach is more directly based on the literature review, where tendencies in the database material as well as the produced scientific knowledge are discussed in correlation with the history of the debate on civil society. The two approaches are mutually reinforcing and work jointly in the text to arrive at the conclusions presented here about both the political and the academic debate on civil society.

This paper analyses the much debated challenges to the Swedish welfare state through the issue of regime change. It is concluded that the traditional Swedish welfare state is still very much intact, in spite of the above mentioned challenges.

This paper analyses the challenges to the traditional Swedish welfare model and put them in relation to the scarcely researched field of Swedish third sector provision of welfare services.This paper is a rough summery of the authors PhD work, aimed primarily for peer review in a wider network of international PhD Student.

This paper evaluates the role of the third sector in the coming challenges to the Swedish welfare state. Childcare provided by the third sector is studied for this purpose. The main conclusion is that little notice by the political leadership istaken of the third sector in considering the future challenges

This paper analyses the debate on civil society in Sweden from the mid-1980's to the present. The paper is based on a literary review of the research field, performed for the nordic project "Citizens' intermediate organisations and governance of the challenges of welfare services in Nordic societies". The main conclusion is that the quality of research is negatively correlated to the ideological interest in the research area.

This paper studies the position of the third sector in the Swedish welfare state and how it is affected by the Swedish preference for large scale welfare service solutions. The conclusion is that the traditional Swedish welfare model hampers the deveolpment of third sector alternatives.

This paper was presented at the EGPA 2004 conference in Ljubljana, Slovenia. The paper takes a theoretical approach to the question of non-public provision of welfare services. The argument is that the Swedish welfare state is dominated by a strong norm for public provision, where non-public providers are reduced to "alternatives" in a two-sided categorization of "public" and "private" providers of childcare. It is suggested that the "private" providers are in fact not a homogenous category but one with very different levels of co-production.

This paper was presented at the ninth annual summer school of local government at the University of Twente in Enschede, the Netherlands. The paper provide an extensive analyse of the role of non-public providers of childcare in the Swedish welfare state, which is well known for its large public sector and universal welfare programs. The conclusions are that the non-public providers of childcare are largely alienated with regard to local governance as well as national policy.

This paper concludes the Swedish segment of the extensive European project on childcare that was performed in eight European countries under the name TSFEPS. The paper presents some of the primary conclusions drawn during the research project, which includes both in-depth interview material as well as more general information about childcare in Sweden.