Search

To what extent have Danish parties and party leadership created new relationship with the electorate by applying relationship marketing via Facebook? Are parties using Facebook? If yes, what characterizes the interaction between party leadership and electorate on Facebook? Danish MPs apply Facebook but the ap- plication seems to be more personally than politically motivated. Only a quarter of the MPs have a site that is electorally adequate. All party leaders have sites but their level of activity varies. Interaction takes place but mainly among friends and fans; not including the party leadership. When parties encourage the electorate to ‘follow us on Facebook’ this is the correct wording; it is not an invitation to dialogue. But party leaders may contribute towards political dialogue if they want, as party leaders seeking dialogue get it.

A major line of conflict cuts across the successful combination of paid work and family life in modern societies. Women are increasingly supposed to be in employment while carrying out the lion’s share of childcare in the home, but men’s behaviour in relation to paid and unpaid work has not changed to the same extent. These social processes are often held to increase the shortage of parental time with children and generate tensions between paid work and family life, in particular for mothers. Such tensions are likely to be particularly manifest in households with young children, who have the greatest care needs.

"Two decades of research into the management of what economists call common-pool resources suggests that, under the right conditions, local communities can manage shared resources sustainably and successfully. These revolutionary findings challenge the long-held belief in the 'tragedy of the commons.' Instead, we have found that tragedy is not inevitable when a shared resource is at stake, provided that people communicate. In many places--from Swiss pastures to Japanese forests--communities have come together for the sake of the environment and their own long-term well-being."

Following the 2006 election, the Swedish earner-carer model of family policy seems to have come to an important crossroads, and questions have been raised about the future course of policies. Will the prototypical earner-carer model in Sweden persist? The separate reforms in cash transfers, services, and tax systems in several respects seem to point in contradictory directions, simultaneously introducing new principles of social care. In this article, past and present reforms and potential outcomes of policies are discussed from an institutional and comparative perspective. Reviewing research on outcomes of earner-carer policies for gendered patterns of productive and reproductive work, class-based stratification, child well-being, fertility, and work–family conflict, the article also contributes to the discussion about future challenges for family policy institutions in Sweden and other advanced welfare states.

Executive summary This study is based on the organizational theory Appreciative Inquiry (AI) that develops organizations by focusing on the strengths and resources available within the organization. The investigation concerns the position bodies have in this type of organizational communication, and the study is placed in the field of interpersonal communication. The empirical basis contains three parts: 1. Observations, video recordings, interviews and field notes from a social constructionist conference. 2. Carrying out a workshop in AI with focus on bodily experiences. 3. Interview with two skilled practitioners within AI. To illustrate the importance of embodiment I have developed a model, which is called IMAGE and a concept that is named Appreciative Embodiment. This forms the basis for a discussion on how the body can be understood. The study concludes, on the basis of theoretical discussions and empirical data, that it can be difficult to provide a discussion of the body in relation to AI and to communicate the message to participants the workshop. On the other hand, the workshop succeeded overwhelmingly concerning the body in practice, since most of the participants could feel their bodies in the exercises. Overall, the study concludes that reflecting and doing the body enrich AI in both theory and practice. Partly because it allows you to settle and integrate the energy that is often created, and partly because it opens up a further dimension in which to experience, acknowledge and communicate.

Forty-eight entire gastrectomy specimens received consecutively at this Department were cut into blocks for histologic examination. Focal or more extended areas of chronic gastritis (i.e. superficial or atrophic with or without intestinal metaplasia) were present in all 48 specimens. In addition, two of the 48 specimens had a large number of lymphocytes in the surface and foveolar epithelium of the mucosa. In the literature the latter is regarded as "lymphocytic gastritis". Lymphocytic gastritis was found in all 156 sections obtained from the two specimens. This lympho-epithelial phenomenon was present even in areas lacking chronic inflammation in the subjacent lamina propria mucosae. From our results it would appear that while chronic gastritis has a focal or a regional topographic distribution, lymphocytic gastritis includes the entire surface-foveolar epithelium of the gastric mucosa.

Men and women’s agency and capabilities to create a worklife balance in diverse and changing institutional contexts

This study analyses children’s entry into childcare and parental assessments of when they ideally would like their children to enter childcare. This is important not least to understand parental attitudes to their own work and the kind of investments in work-life that they are willing to undertake. This information also qualifies the picture of how well the combination of work and children functions. The study uses a survey from 2003 including a random sample of children born in 1993 and 1999. On average children start childcare when they are 1,5 years and we find that parents often wish for a later entry than is the case. Early start seems to increase as children start earlier in 1999 than in 1993, a young mother leads to an early start, and children with older siblings start earlier. It is the children from families with low income that start later and these parents also wish for a later start than other parents. An unequal gender division of economic resources in the family shows the same pattern. On the contrary gender equality measured by father’s parental leave length also leads to a later start.

In Sweden, parents receive a parental-leave allowance of a high percentage of their pre-birth salary for about a year in connection with any birth. (The percentage has changed over time, as has the period for which it is paid. For a birth that appears in 2005, parents get 80% of the salary for thirteen months.) If they space their births sufficiently closely, they avoid a reduction in the allowance caused by any reduced income earned between the births. The gain is popularly called a “speed premium”. After some precursors in legal practice, this rule was made statutory in 1980 and the “eligibility interval” was then set to 24 months. In 1986, it was extended to more attainable thirty months. In previous work we have displayed a corresponding speed-up effect in childbearing for Swedish-born women. This change in behavior is of general interest since it is clear evidence of a causal effect of a policy change on childbearing behavior. In the present paper, we study how this change in behavior was adopted in different social strata of the Swedish population. We examine whether the speed-up of childbearing differed by educational attainment and by country of origin, to see whether some social groups reacted faster or more strongly to the policy change than others. We cannot find any important difference in the reaction to the introduction of the “speed premium” between educational groups of Swedish-born parents. Similarly, we find no important difference in the mode of reaction between Swedish-born women and Nordic immigrants to the country. By contrast, immigrants from non-Nordic countries hardly seem to have reacted to the “speed premium”.

Sweden was the first country to introduce paid parental leave also to fathers in 1974, and this legislation has since then continuously been reformed in order to bring about a more equal parenthood. This study sets out to discuss the Swedish parental leave system and identify achievements, policy dilemmas and reform alternatives in a European perspective. The structure of parental insurance legislation, with earnings-related benefits and a long leave period, is often seen as a main explanation why Sweden has been able to combine relatively high fertility levels with high female labour force participation rates and low child poverty. In the perspective of changing demographic structures in Europe, with declining fertility levels and a growing number of elderly, the strengthening of dual earner family policies, including parental insurance legislation, may mitigate macro-economic and demographic problems by increasing gender equality and decreasing the work-family conflict. Despite the positive consequences, unresolved questions exist in the present parental leave legislation. The flexibility of the Swedish system, which still has extensive transferable leave rights, has the consequence that the lion’s share of parental leave days is still taken by mothers, among other things making it difficult for women to compete on equal terms with men in the labour market. Consequently, the gender-based division of parental leave may contribute to a preservation of traditional gender roles and inequalities. Another problem in the Swedish system is the work requirement for eligibility that excludes students and others with weak labour market attachment from the earnings-related benefits, possibly inflicting on the postponement of parenthood. Raising the minimum benefit could be one solution to enable childbearing among persons with weak labour market attachment, but this would also affect the economic incentives for paid work, and thus weaken the dual earner model.

Der Beitrag untersucht die Frage nach der Bedeutung von Erwerbsmerkmalen schwedischer Manner und Frauen fur den Prozess der Familienentwicklung in Schweden aus paarbezogener Perspektive. Auf der Gr ...

This paper investigates the role of men’s and women’s labor-market attachment in the process of family building in Sweden, taking the perspective of couples. Using register data for the years 1981 to 1999 we estimate event-history models for second and third births. It is shown that income and employment of both partners have a largely independent effect on the propensity to have another child. The effect is of similar size for men and women and points to a generally positive relationship between our employment variables and continued childbearing (which is contrary to assumptions suggested by the ‘New Home Economics’, for example). The finding that a traditional family context tends to hamper higher parity births in Sweden points to a relatively high degree of gender equity in that society.

We link population register data to information on regional child care characteristics in order to estimate the influence of the latter on second and third birth intensities of Swedish couples in 1997-98. Our analysis allows us to distinguish interactions and specific effects of different dimensions of the local day-care infrastructure, namely the provision rate, the child-to-staff-ratio, and the costs of care to parents. However, our results reveal no clear effects of these child care characteristics on Swedish couples’ continued childbearing. We interpret this absence of effects as a reflection of the generally very appropriate level of child care in Sweden, which is complemented by further supportive family policies. In such a context, moderate regional variations in the characteristics of day care may have no decisive impact on parents’ propensity to have another child.