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Language plays a critical role in society. In the Soviet Union, Russian language was leveraged as a key strategy to unify the fifteen Soviet Socialist Republics, while also minimizing the function and significance of the titular and indigenous languages. This interdisciplinary study explores changes to the role of Russian language over time in the Kazakh context. Semi-structured interviews with interviewees (N = 9) were conducted investigating three periods: the Soviet era (1940s–1980s), newly-independent (1990s–2000s), present day (2010–2021). Interview data was analysed using qualitative content analysis in the light of Post-Colonial Studies and the notion of Linguistic Imperialism. The results highlight intensive policy measures to enforce Russian during the Soviet Union, resulting in its dominant use and status across society. The interviewees shared views regarding challenges to embed Kazakh language in society in the early post-independence period, citing intentionally passive policies, low-quality pedagogy and perpetuating Russian culture as hindrances to the use of Kazakh, characteristic of post-colonial scenarios. At present (2021), in parallel to the introduction of Kazakhstan’s trilingual (Kazakh, Russian and English) policy, the attitudes towards Kazakh are more favourable. This current trend reflects greater national pride in being Kazakh. Kazakhstan is facing a new era of language use: colonial ties are giving way to globalization which brings increasing emphasis on English. The extent to which Kazakh may claim the status of lingua franca relies on the effective implementation of the trilingual policy and improvements in the education system.

Reprint of the article:The autonomy of struggles and the self-managementof squats: legacies of intertwined movements by Miguel A. Martínez. Interface: a journal for and about social movements, Vol. 11, No 1 , pp. 178-199, 2019.

A common assumption in the social stratification literature is that the lion’s share of people reaches occupational maturity quite early in working life, i.e., they end up in an occupation/class position and stay there. The conventional view is that career maturity is reached around the age of 35. By using Swedish longitudinal occupational biographies across six birth cohorts from 1925 to 1984, this study challenges this view. Our findings reveal substantial career transitions throughout working life, an increase across cohorts, and a wide variation in the age of the last class transition. This suggests that careers are not in general static positions from a certain age, but fluctuate over time. There are signs of a general slowing down of career transitions across working lives, but this comes later in life and to a smaller extent. These findings suggest that research often based on cross sectional data, e.g. studies on intergenerational mobility and class differences in health, need to incorporate career mobility data. More research is needed to illuminate if the results of Sweden, in terms of a low and decreasing level of occupational maturity can be replicated in other countries.

In this article, we analyse overarching patterns of social stratification in, and quality differences between, Swedish preschools. Drawing on a Bourdieusian social classification scheme, we evidence in what type of preschools different social groups enrol their children in, and to what extent Swedish preschool children encounter different levels of quality at municipal, for-profit and non-profit providers in the preschool market. The analysis employs individual register data from Statistics Sweden covering all families in Swedish preschools for the year 2019. This comprises information on approximately 510 000 children and 122 000 unique families. We use descriptive statistics, looking at over- and under-representation in enrolment patterns of 38 social groups along with quality indicators of different providers in terms of preschool size, teacher and staff ratio and the level of teachers with Swedish background. Results from this total population analysis of Swedish preschool enrolment reveal indicators of particular class practices, where upper- and middle-class families are overrepresented in both for-profit and non-profit preschools in contrast to working-class families. Simultaneously, private providers may not always deliver high standards of structural quality, which clouds the image of how quality is viewed by parents in general, and by upper- and middle-class families in particular.

Swedish healthcare providers must comply with the Patient Act's principles of equal and accessible care and account for patients’ religious backgrounds by offering culturally sensitive care. This chapter explores what characterizes patients’ and their relatives’ expectations in healthcare encounters perceived as religiously discriminatory in the diverse Swedish healthcare system. It analyses perceived religious discrimination in healthcare through the interpretative phenomenological analysis of complaints submitted to the Equality Ombudsman in Sweden from 2012 to 2021, which registered 92 complaints as religious discrimination in healthcare, 66 of which were included in this study's analytical sample. The complaints addressed unfulfilled expectations related to cultural and religious literacy, equal treatment in relation to religious symbols or medical records, affirmative action in medical treatment that takes beliefs into account, and a secular environment that forbids religious symbols in healthcare encounters. One-third of the complaints were submitted by Muslims or individuals presumed to be Muslim. Several complaints concerned healthcare providers’ reactions to patients wearing hijabs or other ethnic or religious attributes. The study indicates that healthcare providers face difficulties in conforming to the partially contradictory ideals of equal treatment and cultural sensitivity, whose relation to religious diversity has not yet been clearly defined.

In contemporary urban areas, a growing ‘generation rent’ is finding shelter in expensive and precarious private rental housing. Tenant organisations and legislative initiatives have been pushing to improve housing conditions for renters, yet have been met with strong resistance. Intense policy and academic debates have ensued. This paper delves into the discourses used by dominant actors involved in legislative changes affecting the private rental sector in Catalonia and Spain. Through a critical discourse analysis of the positions of governments, opposition parties and landlord organisations, we identify three main arguments employed to limit or contest ‘post-neoliberal’ measures favouring tenants: ‘the vulnerable landlord’, ‘the counterproductive effects’ and ‘the violation of property rights’. Each of these arguments is placed under theoretical and empirical scrutiny, revealing important weaknesses. By unsettling dominant discourses, we contribute to advancing the terms of the debates and sketch out the coordinates for a counter-discourse informed by critical theory and the interests of renters rather than rentiers.

This article aimed to provide new knowledge about ethical issues in doctoral supervision by analysing conflicts and roles that are assumed and acted out in supervision practice. This analysis was based on a literature review of various studies from the field of educational sciences, social pedagogy, doctoral supervision in theory and practice, and theories and practice of teaching and learning. The literature review identified several ethical issues relevant to doctoral supervision. These issues mostly arose from disappointed expectations, for instance, in the supervisor’s or doctoral student’s knowledge/competence, cultural viewpoint, roles, participation, language proficiency, and criticism/feedback. This analysis found that conflicts and the roles adopted and acted out during a supervision situation were not static – multiple roles could be assumed simultaneously, and the roles frequently changed. These changes provided opportunities to prevent or remedy ethical issues and conflicts in supervision. Changes could also lead to the creation and replication of a stable relationship between the doctoral student and supervisor. To prevent ethical issues and conflicts, the relationship between a doctoral student and a supervisor should be characterised by mutual respect, responsibility, integrity, and recognition. These components were needed to: (1) create the conditions for successful knowledge development in supervision, (2) complete a third-cycle education programme, (3) qualify the doctoral student to hold a doctoral degree, and (4) prevent ethical issues and conflicts connected with doctoral student supervision, through the constructive alignment of various elements in the third-cycle programme., Future students’ perspectives on higher education. An analysis of described interests and expectations

The aim of this study is to contribute new knowledge about interactions of power and social pedagogical recognition in narratives of students who use alcohol and drugs in an upper-secondary school context. In this context, the student narratives create and re-create a series of images of varied treatment by professional actors (e.g., teachers, student coordinators, counsellors). The reproduced power interactions in narratives describing the practices of professional actors are significant for student learning, teaching, nurturing, inclusion, change, discipline, and identity creation. In these interactions of power, professional actors are portrayed as significant power-wielding others or as rejected power-wielding others, two verbal portrayals that contribute to the verbal production of four analytical categories: 1) social pedagogical identity, which in previous studies has been classified as social identity (e.g., alcohol and drug user, ethnic identity, victim identity), and pedagogical identity (e.g., pupil identity, teacher identity, desired successful pupil identity, desired successful teacher identity, invisible student identity); 2) social pedagogical interactions of power related to verbal representations of situational images, control, monitoring, invisibility, discipline, prejudice, devaluation, victimhood, and the other; 3) varied descriptions, narratives, representations, and reproduction of social and pedagogical aspects of learning, teaching, nurturing, inclusion, change, and discipline; and 4) varied constructions, reconstructions, productions, and reproductions of learning, teaching, nurturing, inclusion, change, and discipline in the social and pedagogical sense. The social pedagogical recognition of the “other party” in the pupil–professional actor relationship is especially important for achieving the aims of including pupils who use alcohol and drugs in a learning context and enacting positive change through the creation and re-creation of social, School as a protection factor. An analysis of achievements, obstacles, collaboration, and identities in senior high school work with students who use alcohol and drugs.

The aim is to increase understanding of representational perceptions of future university students in rural areas regarding university studies. Qualitative interviews create and reproduce meaningful representational perceptions, rendering a private dimension in stories about family and friends and anacademic dimension in stories about the academic environment and research. Representational perceptions in both dimensions are dramatized as an ethno-methodological balance between verbal conflicting interests and downplaying these interests, producing and reproducing involvement ,community, fusion, consensus, and participation in the narrative, rather than a verbal split. This balance reflects social pedagogical recognition relevant to their interest in university studies., Future students’ perspectives on higher education

The aim is to contribute to the development of scientific knowledge regarding linguistic discursive representations by future university students of conditions for further study at the university level. Qualitative interviews were collected and analysed to answer the research question, How do future university students in rural areas describe the conditions for further studies at the university level? Their descriptions create and reproduce a series of significant linguistic representations in two discursive categories: proximity/distance to studies and education offerings. Proximity and distance involved analysed narratives regarding physical distance to studies, commuting by public transport or private car, and moving to the home city of a higher education institution. The category of education offerings involved narratives around the importance of location in education, remote learning, and doubts about pursuing higher education/higher education choices. Linguistic representations in both categories were performed as tense and linguistically balanced between depicted conflict and consensus. This balancing act represents a linguistic means of creating and re-creating cohesion, involvement, integration, participation, unity, and normality in the discourse and can be interpreted as a form of social pedagogical recognition that is important for the actor’s success in the context that the narratives reflect., Future students’ perspectives on higher education

I den här studien undersöks det emotionella lönearbete som gymnasiepersonal i Sverige upplever i sitt arbete med elever som använder alkohol eller droger. Studien utgår från 36 intervjuer med personal från gymnasieskolor om hur de upplever motstridiga krav gällande arbetsuppgifterna och emotionellt engagemang: å ena sidan förväntas de ge emotionellt stöd till elever och säkerställa en god utbildningsmiljö, och å andra sidan förväntas de agera informella poliser eller vårdare för elever som brukar droger eller alkohol. Studien visar att personalens arbetsuppgifter överstiger kraven som är förknippade med en traditionell skolmiljö och att deras roll är en del av en samhällelig social kontroll som utövas utanför rättssystemet. Personalens brottspreventiva roll undersöks i samband med rollkonflikt, rollambivalens, omsorg, samt hög arbetsbelastning och emotionellt utmanande situationer., School as a protection factor

This study examines the consequences of parental job displacement for birth outcomes and investigates how the effects vary with regional unemployment rates. We use Swedish register data and exploit plausibly exogenous variation caused by workplace closure to reduce the bias related to reverse causality and confounding. The differences in birth outcomes between children of parents who experienced job displacement and children of parents who were not displaced turn out to be quite modest. Even in the most disadvantaged regions, with the highest unemployment rates, parental job displacement is not harmful for health at birth. We relate these findings to the institutional setting in Sweden and discuss policy implications for the United States., HEALFAM: The Effects of Unemployment on Health of Family Members

The post-racial discourse that permeates many Western European countries depicts society as having moved beyond race concepts and classifications. This article focuses on Sweden, a country that, in line with the post-racial thinking, declares race to be an offensive and unscientific concept. The article investigates what happens when this post-racial discourse meets clinical research standards that encourage, if not demand, the collection of data on patient race. Through an analysis of the reporting of patient race in 76 multinational trials with at least one study site in Sweden, and a review of the regulatory and medical standards and trial documents that direct the collection of patient race in trials, we show how race classification is kept intact in trials despite conflicting with post-racial norms and conventions. Notably, our findings diverge from the way racialisation is typically assumed to work in Sweden and related countries. We argue this is possible because the two incompatible understandings of race are distributed (Mol, 2002, The body multiple: Ontology in medical practice, Duke University Press) among different social worlds. The distribution, we propose, is upheld through the paucity of major debate on why and how race classification should be carried out in clinical trials in Europe as this allows contradictions to remain unspoken., Funding Agencies|Vetenskapsradet [2019-03310]

This article explores how “the left” meme and the character and emotional reception of taboo-breaking therein via the case of r/DankLeft—a USA-centric Marxist, Anarchist, and Democratic Socialist Internet meme community. It asks: what themes do popular r/DankLeft Internet memes relate to, how does taboo feature within popular r/DankLeft Internet memes, and can any differences in the ways in which taboo-related r/DankLeft Internet memes are received be discerned. In turn, it carries out a thematic analysis of 366 popular memes, a multimodal critical discourse analysis of 41 taboo-related popular memes, and a comparative sentiment analysis of the comments these and other memes have received in r/DankLeft. The article finds that popular memes in r/DankLeft primarily relate to perceived threats to its community of users. It also shows that taboo-breaking does feature in r/DankLeft memes and that when it does correlative patterns emerge in terms of popularity and emotional reception.

Grandparental support may protect mothers from depression, particularly mothers who separate and enter single parenthood. Using longitudinal Finnish register data on 116,917 separating and 371,703 non-separating mothers with young children, we examined differences in mothers’ antidepressant purchases by grandparental characteristics related to provision of support. Grandparents’ younger age (<70 years), employment, and lack of severe health problems predicted a lower probability of maternal depression. Depression was also less common if grandparents lived close to the mother and if the maternal grandparents’ union was intact. Differences in maternal depression by grandparental characteristics were larger among separating than among non-separating mothers, particularly during the years before separation. Overall, maternal grandmothers’ characteristics appeared to matter most, while the role of paternal grandparents was smaller. The findings suggest that grandparental characteristics associated with increased potential for providing support and decreased need of receiving support predict a lower likelihood of maternal depression, particularly among separating mothers.

Background The emergence of the drug user as a political problem in Sweden during the 1960s presented politicians with the problem of how to fit this new character into the existing democratic order. The aim of this article is to examine how Swedish politics sought to regulate democratic participation by establishing norms that conditioned who is recognized as a political subject as well as what counts as political speech and action. Methods The analysis is based on a close reading of parliamentary debates, political motions, and public reports and covers the period 1966–1979. Results During the examined period, Swedish politics constituted the ideal subject of democratic politics, homo politicus, as a subject embedded in a community of active and politically conscious citizens endowed with the capacity to cooperate and engage in the collective formulation of the common good. Drug use therefore posed a threat to the democratic order due to its passivizing effects that inhibited the cooperation needed to uphold the democratic polity. Conclusion The perceived individualism, passivity, and inability of the drug user to engage in cooperation within a politically conscious community of citizens positioned the drug user as a threat to the democratic order. The drug user thereby became a useful figure in the political regulation of the democratic sphere and the constitution of homo politicus, the ideal subject of democratic politics.

Domestic violence is a pervasive global issue that transcends geographical, cultural, and socioeconomic boundaries. In the Fiji Islands, domestic violence is a multifaceted problem deeply rooted in cultural traditions, socio-economic factors, and historical influences. This comprehensive essay explores the intricate relationship between domestic violence, law enforcement, and traditional practices in Fiji. It delves into the prevalence of domestic violence, the role of law enforcement, the influence of cultural traditions, and the complexities involved in combating this issue. By examining the cultural and historical context of Fiji, as well as the legal framework in place, support services, and collaborative efforts with traditional practices, this essay seeks to gain a comprehensive understanding of the interplay of these factors in addressing domestic violence in the Fiji Islands.

I de flesta städer - från minsta småstad i Sverige till megastäder som New York - finns miljöer där brott begås i större utsträckning än i andra. För att kunna förstå brottslighetens natur och agera både brottspreventivt och trygghetsskapande är det viktigt att veta varför brottslighet sker oproportionerligt mycket just i dessa miljöer. Den här boken handlar om vilka stadsmiljöer som koncentrerar brott och presenterar möjliga förklaringar till varför det är så. Här diskuteras också vad det är som får människor att uppleva dessa miljöer som otrygga. Boken ger exempel på systematiska metoder som används för att kunna identifiera platser med hög brottskoncentration samt diskuterar möjliga relevanta situationsbaserade åtgärder för brottsförebyggande arbete i en svensk kontext. Boken vänder sig till alla verksamma inom det expanderande brottsförebyggande och trygghetsfrämjande fältet. Den är särskilt lämplig för kriminologi- och polisutbildning och passar mycket bra för utbildningar inom stadsplanering, geografi och andra samhällsvetenskapliga områden där säkerhet och trygghet betraktas som en dimension av social hållbarhet., QC 20240126

In this chapter, I examine elite integration through the case of involvement in a PTA in a New York City public elementary school I call Bricks School. I show how parents with elite standing outside of their children’s school become elite PTA volunteers within the school. Following the definition of civil society elite motivating this volume, I see PTAs as civil society organizations with significant and increasing control over educational resources and decision-making. The elite parents studied in this research parlay their elite social positions into leadership positions in the PTA. These parents solidify their standing in the PTA and the school by accessing more ‘do good’ capital (Dean, 2020).

Despite its proven societal value, humanities knowledge tends to be marginalized in research policy; this has been a topic of debate for some time. In this chapter, we focus on the valorization of humanities knowledge, with the aim of comprehending the way this process engenders societal impact. We argue that historical impact stories offer an effective methodological approach for a deeper understanding of such valorization and its subsequent impact. Drawing on three humanities research cases from Sweden, we propose that valorization and impacts of humanities knowledge should be seen as processual and as influenced by societal actors who determine the premises and condition the somewhat unpredictable nature of such impacts. We introduce two concepts: (i) acting space, which involves access to collaborators, audiences, and channels that enable knowledge valorization, and (ii) meandering knowledge flows, which provides insight into the uneven and hard-to-predict nature of valorization. Through these concepts, we wish to provide a better and more nuanced understanding of how knowledge valorization in the humanities unfolds. By doing so, we hope to support humanities scholars to find ways of articulating their own modes of mattering., Part of ISBN 978-3-031-48798-9, 978-3-031-48799-6QC 20240102

In this article, we challenge the prevailing assumption about the impact of higher education on attitudes toward racial and ethnic minorities by examining whether educational effects are monolithic or manifold instead. Using data from the General Social Survey (1972-2021), we use a variety of measures of education (years, levels, sectors, and majors) to unpack the relationship between higher education and intergroup attitudes, specifically anti-immigration attitudes among native-born Americans and anti-Black attitudes among non-African Americans. Results show that some higher education graduates hold out-group attitudes that are not much different from those without any higher education. Narrowing our focus to respondents only with higher education, we find significant variation in out-group attitudes across educational sectors and academic majors. These results have implications for how we understand previous scholarship on prejudice and higher education, which may have overestimated the impact higher education has, in general, on prejudice., Originally included in thesis in manuscript form with title: "The Liberalizing Potential of Higher Education: An Analysis of Academic Majors and Prejudice".

There are important gaps in the research on youth political action due to a lack of attention to the roles of place and the experiences of young people in rural places. To address these gaps, this article presents findings from intensive interviews with 15 young people (aged between 16 and 29 years) who identified as politically/socially engaged and lived or had recently lived in a rural place in Sweden. Analysis of their responses, based on constructivist-grounded theory, shows that place dimensions shaped three social processes of young people’s political action: engaging in politics in (rural) places, finding recognition as political actors in (rural) places and negotiating political belonging in relation to (urban) places. By linking these processes with Agnew’s three-dimensional understanding of place, the analysis provides novel insights into how various dimensions of place shape crucial social processes of youth political action.

Academic stress among adolescents can undermine academic achievement and harm mental health. Levels of academic stress vary considerably across countries and education systems, but little is known regarding the causes of this variation. In this paper, I develop a theoretical framework positing that stress will be lower in education systems that reduce the stakes attached to academic achievements, temper competition and high aspirations, and weaken the link between achievements and self-worth. I test observable implications of the framework by analysing if stress is influenced by the degree of external differentiation and vocational orientation of education systems, using harmonised survey data on pupils in more than 30 countries. The empirical analyses largely support the implications of the framework: pupils in more differentiated and vocationally orientated systems report significantly lower levels of stress, also in models adjusting for country fixed effects. Moreover, academic achievement is a less important predictor of stress in differentiated or vocational systems, possibly due to lower stakes attached to achievements. I end by proposing further predictions of the framework that can be tested in future research, and by discussing implications of the results with regard to possible trade-offs between different goals of education policy.

Mattering as a central part of well-being has not been studied in the context of newly arrived young migrants in Swedish schools. Neither have studies on mattering included material and spatial conditions. This article draws on data collected from ethnographic fieldwork to address this. The theoretical contribution is based on the combination of the concept of mattering with Ahmed's feminist and postcolonial theory of orientation and a critical view of lived experience as social and bodily orientation devices. Combining these theoretical frameworks, we explore social, spatial and material conditions for mattering in newly arrived youths' everyday school lives. The overall outcome of our analysis illustrates that mattering is not only a question of social relations but also related to spatial and material dimensions. A conclusion is that Swedishness as an unspoken norm of whiteness is ‘built into the walls’ of Swedish schools and that (in)directly discriminates newly arrived young migrants.

Research shows that peer relationships are associated with students' school adjustment. However, the importance of advantageous and disadvantageous factors for students' educational outcomes may vary by socioeconomic positioning. Drawing on sociometric and register data from a nationally representative sample of Swedish youth (n = 4996, girls 50%; migration background 19%), this study asks if family socioeconomic status moderates associations between youth's peer relationships and their subsequent educational outcomes. Based on preregistered analyses, associations that peer acceptance and rejection at age 14–15 years share with school grades at ~16 years and completion of upper secondary school at ~20 years were tested. The findings showed that positive and adverse peer relationships are most consequential for the educational outcomes of socioeconomically disadvantaged youth., publisher/journal, year, pages (if chapters/books), funders (if any), project it belongs to.

The war in Bosnia and Herzegovina (1992–1995) is the historic background of this paper, as produced in the documents presented during international and national trials concerning war crimes committed during this period. A literature review forms the analytical basis and contains various empirical and theoretical studies from the fields of philosophy, war sociology, and social epistemology. The aim of this paper is to analyse the normative orientations and social values that affect (1) the feelings of moral and social understanding (or non-understanding) after the genocide and the joint criminal enterprise in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the context of legitimizing transitional capitalism, (2) the actions of individuals, organizations, and states as well as the entire social community in the post-war society, and (3) the process of reconciliation and trust in post-war society. The analysis makes evident the usual tendency in a post-war society to deify one’s own ethnic (religious) group, while the consequence of such false self-infatuation with “our” collective is that the “other” that is not ours becomes undesirable. It must be, as evidence of patriotism and unconditional emotional loyalty to “our holy issue”, wiped out for good. Ethnic cleansings, joint criminal enterprises, and genocides thus become a normal means of ethnopolitical—i.e. biopolitical—“management of differences”. At the same time, ethnocorruption and ethnobanditry can erroneously be qualified as the least transparent and, for social and criminological research, the most difficult phenomena (or manifestations) of social pathology. The difficulty lies in the fact that ethnocorruption and ethnobanditry are in many respects related and intertwined with the simultaneous institutional and organizational processes of regulating (or not regulating) the economic and political globalization and transfer of ownership during the transition from socialist self-management to a new type of economy., War anomie

Economic growth is commonly seen as the main driver of poverty reduction in a global perspective, but its impact varies substantially across cases. Meanwhile, the literature has been relatively silent regarding the role of social policy in explaining this variation. In light of an emerging attention to redistribution and social protection in promoting inclusive growth, this article analyses how government cash transfer systems moderate the effect of economic growth on both relative and absolute child poverty across low- and middle-income countries. The empirical analyses compare trends within 16 countries, using data from the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), by means of descriptive analyses and multivariate regression techniques. Findings show that both economic growth and the expansion of government transfer schemes were associated with falling absolute child poverty rates. While the association between growth and relative child poverty was on average more muted, the analyses found growth to be related to reductions in relative child poverty when combined with sufficiently extensive government transfers, while the opposite effect was found in the face of inadequate levels of transfers. The study provides a framework for studying interrelated effects of national institutions and economic processes, with the findings highlighting the fruitfulness of including indicators on social protection policies when inquiring about enabling conditions for inclusive growth in a development context.

Cities are important sites for societal transitions towards sustainability, which is increasingly recognised around the issue of biodiversity conservation and protection. However, cities are often characterised by the need to develop and grow. Furthermore, efforts to promote sustainable development have been criticised as failing to address the fundamental causes of environmental destruction. In this article, based on interviews with bureaucrats and documentary analysis, I explore urban planning and biodiversity protection at four Swedish municipalities. Biodiversity protection has been an official goal in Sweden for 30 years. As such, my research aim is to explore how Swedish bureaucrats represent efforts to balance imperatives to develop cities and protect biodiversity. Taking an institutional approach, I identify what information is included and excluded. In assessing municipal discourse, I utilise the theory of sociocultural viability, which provides an analytical typology of four worldviews. I identify that within respondents' discourse, biodiversity primarily emerges as a product of a hierarchical view of reality, as a measurable object; an indicator; a characteristic; and as a provider that is both engineerable and replaceable. This was despite numerous respondents articulating an egalitarian desire for more holistic interpretations of biodiversity in urban planning, appreciative of its inherent worth. This suggests that biodiversity has largely been integrated into extant hierarchical conceptualisations of public administration. According to cultural theory, addressing wicked policy problems effectively requires insight from several of the typology's worldviews. As such, current practice may reiterate dominant contemporary views on nature rather than innovation towards a radically different society.

In many countries, there are signs of declining migration to high-productivity urban areas due to restrictions in the housing market and increasing regional differences in housing prices. Using detailed population-wide register data for Sweden, we estimate how regional variation in housing prices and homeownership is associated with the individual’s decision whether to accept a job offer in the Stockholm metropolitan region and the interrelated choice between migration and commuting as the mobility mode. Our findings indicate that high relative housing prices in the Stockholm area and homeownership are associated with decreasing total geographical labour mobility to the region. This is pronounced among the young and among highly skilled workers. The negative effects of high relative housing prices and homeownership on migration are partially but not fully compensated by positive effects on commuting to Stockholm.

This paper illuminates how teachers are influenced by age, gender and sexuality in teaching about sex and relationships. In this analysis grounded in feminist theory, age, gender and sexuality are considered to be enacted as doings. Six interviews with teachers working with sexuality education in K-12 schools in Sweden were chosen from of a larger body of material consisting of 21 interviews with professionals engaged in school-based sexuality education. The six interviewees were selected because they explicitly addressed how teachers’ age, gender and/or sexuality come to matter in the classroom. Findings show how male and female teachers organise their teaching in relation to normative expectations of age, gender and sexuality. In sexuality education, the diverse life-courses of (hetero)sexual women offer a wide range of pedagogic possibilities for female teachers to address issues of sexuality, consent and relationships whereas male teachers are constrained to doing safe(r) forms of masculinity by directing attention away from their bodies and experiences. In understanding these results, I argue that the figure of the tant has been key in forming the pedagogic backdrop to Swedish sexuality education, hence embedding a normative ‘who’ in the ‘how’ to teach sexuality education.

The surge in popularity of international schools around the world has extended to the domain of Early Childhood Education and Care. In the past few decades, international preschools have be­come more commonplace in marketised educational contexts. This thesis studies families who enrol their children in international preschools in Stockholm, Sweden, framing the rise of these institu­tions as embedded within two aspects of globalisation: the growing worth of transnational assets and the increasing prevalence of transnational families, encompassing those raising their children in foreign countries and those composed of parents from different national backgrounds. The study, departing from Pierre Bourdieu’s relational sociology, examines preschool choice from two angles. The first inspects the social recruitment of international preschools through sta­tistical analysis of individual-level register data concerning families. This analysis considers social characteristics such as education level, income, and migration histories. Secondly, through interviews with middle-class parents, it explores families’ choice-making processes, examining how they navigate their children’s preschool options and ultimately select international preschools. The results show that international preschools cater to families with strong and weak social positions and those with Swedish and foreign backgrounds, which evidences a widespread belief in the value of transnational attributes. However, differences between international preschools’ spe­cific languages highlighted that some languages are more closely linked with social advantage than others. Preschool choice was found to be shaped by complex dynamics, wherein social class, gender, migration experiences, family structures, and parenting cultures intersected with the local context and supply of preschools, both international and not. This first encounter with institutionalised education emerged as a situation where families renegotiated

Using Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory, this thesis explores the idea of a “world-class university” by analysing the narratives and dynamics that shape this classification in the context of global university rankings. It uses a combination of methods, including historical studies, bibliometrics, multiple correspondence analysis, and social network analysis to examine the socio-historical factors determining world-class status in higher education. The research reinterprets the rise and evolution of global university rankings, framing it as a process of field formation. Influential entities like the IREG Observatory and the Center for World-Class Universities have been instrumental in fostering a global discourse that encourages competition among higher education institutions, leading to the establishment of a worldwide system for evaluating academic excellence. A comparative analysis of institutions, nations, and regions based on ranking results over two decades spotlights the enduring dominance of U.S. and U.K. institutions amidst the rising presence of Chinese. Focusing on 2022 data from the Academic Ranking of World Universities, QS World University Ranking, and Times Higher Education World University Ranking using Multiple Correspondence Analysis. It finds that prestige, heavily influenced by private reputation surveys, outweighs performance or internationalisation metrics in these rankings. The analysis also reveals a contrast between international recruitment and a domestic orientation, with English-speaking institutions attracting more international students and faculty. A dichotomy in scientific recognition emerges, opposing older institutions with award-winning alumni and staff to younger universities excelling in citations per faculty. Euclidean clustering supports these findings, identifying distinct groups of institutions, such as domestically focused Asian institutions and well-rounded Anglo-Saxon universities. Lastly, the thesis examines patterns of acade

What is sociology? For centuries sociologists have struggled to answer this question and repeatably proclaimed that their discipline is in crisis. The problem has generated a field of its own, the sociology of sociology, where sociologists of knowledge offer concepts for how the paradigmatic status of discipline and its crisis ought to be understood. Yet, the foundation of these understandings has often been limited to conceptual reasonings, historical exposes, and anecdotes from prominent scholars. Following the increasing availability of digitized texts and the development of computational techniques, new venues have been opened for investigating the empirical bearing of what sociology is. This dissertation offers a synthesis of, and a contribution to, this growing literature at the intersection of the sociology of knowledge and computational social science. The starting point is a review of literature in the sociology of sociology that has found that our discipline is believed to exist in a state of fragmentation, lacks a paradigm, and is conditioned by the context of its production. Akin to the supposed crisis, these conceptualizations are often taken for granted rather than being empirically put to test. This is why this dissertation aims to shed new light on the crisis of sociology by empirically scrutinizing prevailing disciplinary understandings with an interpretative and theory-driven methodological approach to computational text analysis (i.e., word correlation networks, topic modeling, stylometry, and shallow neural networks). To account for textual representations of sociological knowledge that are firmly institutionalized and exist across different local contexts, hundreds of dissertations in this discipline published in Sweden between 1980 and 2019 by five main universities have been digitized to form two corpora – 380 full-texts and 850 abstracts. Using these corpora, the conceptualizations are operationalized to be able to scrutinize, and trace, reo

This article contributes to research on geographies of consumption and relationality in economic geography by analysing the interconnection of consumption and place in practice, based on ethnographic research. This text focuses on consumption defined broadly to include choice of clothing and lifestyle among young people in a British town characterized as ‘chavs’. The research is grounded in ethnographic field work, including photo elicitation interviews, observations and participant observations. To analyse the ways in which consumption is related to place, this text integrates conceptual frames used in economic, cultural and social geography with perspectives developed in economic sociology and anthropology. The study takes a relational approach in both theory and fieldwork. Our empirical analysis demonstrates that place and style consumption are relationally constitutive through practices of association and dissociation. We thereby show that the meanings attached to a place may derive partly from acts of consumption by those living there, but also that the relationship of meaning construction goes from consumption to the constitution of place. Our analysis presents evidence that style and the value attributed to people’s practices are co-constituted by the inhabitants, as well by other, typically external actors, such as bloggers and the media.

Sweden is known for its high residential mobility rates, especially among families. Moving in childhood may be associated with negative health and educational outcomes in adulthood, and effects tend to be larger for children who move frequently. Moving frequently is more common among children in families experiencing instability, poverty and with a migrant background. This paper is concerned with supermovers, children who move three times or more in childhood, in Sweden. The aim is to examine the extent to which recent cohorts of children are supermovers, and whether the frequency of moves is associated to migrant background, family stability and parental socioeconomic status. We also explore whether supermovers are more likely to move longer distances and move to worse neighbourhoods compared to those moving once or twice, as this might exacerbate the impact on later-life outcomes for these children. We use longitudinal register data, comparing the cohorts of children born in 1990 and 2000, following them from age 0 to 16. We find that it is very common for children to move: more than 70 percent of children moves at least once, while about a quarter of children can be labelled as supermovers across cohorts. Children with a migrant background, especially those from the Middle East, are more likely to be supermovers than other children, and are more likely to move longer distances. Children experiencing parental union dissolution are not only more likely to move but also to move very frequently. Socioeconomically disadvantaged children are more often supermovers, while children with high educated parents more often move a few times. Children move at all ages, but especially so before starting primary school. Most children move to better neighbourhoods, though supermovers are more likely to move to lower income neighbourhoods. Together, there are signs of childhood mobility being stratified by migrant background, family instability and parental socioeconomic status

Immigration to Sweden is dominated by women and men of childbearing age, and many arrive with children. The labour-market integration of newly arrived mothers is of concern, and well directed social policy is crucial. Parental leave is based on residence, and until recently it was granted to all parents of foreign-born children of preschool age. This study uses population and social insurance registers to investigate whether newly arrived immigrant mothers use parental leave upon arrival, and whether use is an obstacle to future labour-market activity. Our results indicate that the majority of the newly arrived mothers do not take any parental leave, but also that there are great differences in uptake in relation to country of birth and reason for residence permit. However, there seem to be only marginal associations between parental leave use and subsequent labour-market attachment. Nevertheless, moderate use is associated with labour-market activity rather than being an obstacle to it. Our results contribute to the debate on the unintended effects of social policy on the integration of immigrants.

This is an open access book which focuses on different aspects of education, employment, and successful integration of migrants in three countries: Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland. The chapters in this book reflect on these issues from micro, meso and macro perspectives; some are based on interviews with migrants and people who work with them, others on documents and literature about migration. There are different pathways for skilled migrants to vocations. Some start working in their previous vocations after arriving in the new environment. Some re-enter their professions but on a lower level. Some can re-train themselves in a new vocation, and some will go to further education, as studies in different chapters of this book suggest. Common for successful integration seems to be several intertwined factors: the target language competence, strong motivation and agency, supporting networks and supporting persons, as well as structural opportunities of the new environment. The book’s editorial board takes an eclectic view, hoping to start an academic debate about what ‘successful integration’ means. While discussions about the integration of migrants tend to focus on integration failures, there are millions of migrants, in different countries, who have successfully integrated into their new societies.

In the wake of deindustrialization, many rural areas in the Global North face challenges such as an ageing population, declining welfare systems and limited job and educational opportunities, problems that have been enhanced by decades of depopulation. Young people have left the countryside for careers in larger cities, contributing to stigmatization of those who stay in rural areas. In Sweden, however, statistics show a slow but steady trend of remigration to rural areas, which is described in municipal and state discourse as positive and necessary to ‘save’ the countryside. This paper examines the perspective of rural youth who feel differently about such counter-urbanization. Based on a yearlong ethnographic fieldwork with youth, the article shows how young men involved in Swedish greaser culture perceived the influx of urban (re)migrators as a threat to their rural lifestyle and the rural place where they wished to stay. This is interpreted as an expression of subcultural, place-based and temporal resistance towards urban and neoliberal ideals that simultaneously reinforce white, masculine values. As these young men will be part of a rural future, they must be considered in the formulation of sustainable politics for rural areas.

This chapter focuses on the concept of integration, which is used in everyday political and academic discussions and has its opponents and defenders. The aim is to explore how it is defined, described and used in studies focusing on skilled immigrants’ integration into the workplace. The chapter is inspired by conceptual analysis and uses conceptual approaches such as everyday, scientific, formal and functional concepts to reflect on the results of the analysis. The results show that integration is not clearly defined in the studies, but assumed that readers know what is meant by it. The process nature of integration is highlighted in the studies, and its many uses such as integration to work community, vocational practices and society. It is concluded that researchers need to be more conscious of their use of the concept of integration and be transparent what do they mean by it.

We studied how individuals’ ethnolinguistic affiliation relates to the ethnolinguistic structure of kinship in contemporary Finland, a society in which Finnish-speaking and Swedish-speaking ethnolinguistic groups have coexisted for centuries and mixed marital unions are common. Using multigenerational data from the population register, we determined how the ethnolinguistic registration of children born in 1990–2015 relates to three generations of ancestors. We created a family tree that links children to their parents, four grandparents and eight great grandparents. Our intention was to both map the ethnolinguistic background of young people and predict a child’s affiliation based on their ancestry. The data revealed that ethnolinguistic affiliation is a more fluid and complex feature than expected when assessed only through child and parental characteristics. We found substantial diversity in ethnolinguistic background within the Swedish-speaking minority group, while most individuals in the Finnish-speaking majority group had a uniform background. We identified three types of bias in the ethnolinguistic affiliation of mixed-origin children: a matrilineal bias, a kinship majority bias and a Swedish ethnic minority bias. The analyses advanced our understanding of how the size of minority groups can shrink even when most couples in mixed unions favour minority group affiliation for their children.

The current study analysed the relationships between socio-economic status, migration background, and non-cognitive factors and PISA reading and mathematics achievement. The results from multi-level analyses on Sweden’s PISA survey from 2018 indicate that both mathematics achievement and reading achievement are affected by SES, migration background, reading abilities, growth mindset, and the ability to master the content. Between-school level differences are explained by reading motivation and the mother’s educational level. Our findings stress the importance of both socio-demographic, socio-economic, and non-cognitive factors such as reading self-concept and growth mindset for both mathematics achievement and reading achievement.

Research suggests that coming from a lower economic background compromises social integration at school, yet the precise mechanisms underlying this link remain unknown. Therefore, this study examined the effect of household income on friendship network dynamics among classmates in a large sample of Swedish youths (n = 4787 from 235 classes, m age = 14.65, 51% girls, and 33% immigrant background), using multilevel longitudinal social network analysis. Over time, students from poorer households were less often selected as a friend by classmates and they less often initiated or maintained friendship ties than students from higher income households. Furthermore, different conceptualizations of income relative to classmates did not impact friendship formation tendencies. The findings indicate that theories of relative income do not extend understanding of students’ friendship formation beyond processes related to absolute income. In addition, this study suggests that the social integration of students from low-income households could be boosted by both promoting their agency in forming friendships and preventing exclusion by classmates.

In recent years, both private and public organizations across contexts have begun implementing AI technologies in their recruitment processes. This transition is typically justified by improved efficiency as well as more objective, performance-based ranking, and inclusive selection of job candidates. However, this rapid development has also raised concerns that the use of these emerging technologies will instead increase discrimination or enhance the already existing inequality. In the present study, we first develop the concept of meta-algorithmic judgment to understand how recruiting managers may respond to automation of the hiring process. Second, we draw on this concept in the empirical assessment of the actual consequences of this type of transition by drawing on two large and unique datasets on employment records and job applications from one of Sweden's largest food retail companies. By comparing the outcomes of traditional and algorithmic job recruitment during this technological transition, we find that, contrary to the company's intentions, algorithmic recruitment decreases diversity. However, in contrast to what is often assumed, this is primarily not because the algorithms are biased, but because of what we identify as an unintended human–algorithmic interaction effect.

The diverging destinies hypothesis predicts that educational inequality increases in contemporary societies because parents with higher levels of education postpone the birth of their children. This hypothesis is supported by empirical evidence demonstrating that advanced parental ages improve children’s educational outcomes. However, the consequences of socioeconomic differences in parental ages for the intergenerational transmission of education also depend on whether the associations between parental ages and child education vary by parental education. To test this hypothesis, we use data from three countries representing different welfare regimes: Germany, Norway, and the United States. In all three countries, children’s educational attainment at the secondary school level increases with higher parental ages more in families with low than in families with highly educated parents. In other words, the intergenerational transmission of education is stronger for younger than for older parents. Consequently, our findings nuance the diverging destinies hypothesis by demonstrating that increasing parental ages in socioeconomically disadvantaged families increases educational mobility more than decreasing parental ages in socioeconomically advantaged families. These findings are qualitatively the same in all three countries, suggesting that diverging destinies also occur in countries outside the United States.

Studies on immigrant fertility typically compare immigrants and natives or different migrant groups at the same destination but rarely immigrants of the same origins in different destination countries. In this paper, we look at immigrants from multiple origins in multiple destination countries simultaneously, using the European Union Labour Force Survey to compare female immigrants from ten areas of origin in eight destination countries in Europe. Our results indicate a strong origin effect. However, they also suggest that when women migrate to a context where the fertility norm is different from that in their origin, they adjust their behaviors accordingly, which indicates that policy and normative context play an important role in shaping migrants’ fertility. From a policy perspective, this is important because it suggests that the fertility of immigrant women, who are exposed to different norms and normative contexts, can resemble that of native women at the destination. Our findings contribute to strengthening the role of destination in shaping fertility behavior and highlighting the importance of looking at all the possible combinations of immigrants coming from and going to different fertility regimes.

Organizational research has revealed considerable variation in immigrant–native pay inequalities across workplace contexts. However, less is known about how broader labor market institutions intersect in the local dynamics of wage setting between employees of immigrant and native backgrounds. We argue that union density and higher shares of employees in licensed occupations in workplaces constrain organizational opportunity structures for unequal pay according to immigrant backgrounds. Our analysis of longitudinal linked employer–employee administrative data for the Norwegian labor market shows that the wage gap between immigrants and natives decreases with increasing workplace unionization, but almost exclusively for immigrants who are union members. Next, licensure raises pay at the individual and workplace levels, although any reduction in immigrant–native pay gaps is contingent on immigrants’ access to licensed jobs. Our findings support the claim that institutional regulation in the workplace reduces the organizational scope of unequal pay based on immigrant status.

Previous research identifies stark socioeconomic disparities in child injuries, yet research on the repercussions hereof on other aspects of children's lives remains sparse. This paper tests whether social gradients in minor traumatic brain injuries (mTBIs or concussions) contribute to corresponding inequalities in children's academic performance. Previous research on this topic is mostly based on small samples and confounded by non-random selection into experiencing mTBIs. We improve on prior research by using high quality, large N, administrative registry data. Further, we control for selection into having an mTBI via comparing the test score progression of children having an mTBI with children who experience an mTBI in later years (staggered difference-in-differences). Based on Danish ER/hospital records and national test score data, we find that children from families with lower earnings and less education are more likely to experience an mTBI and that having an mTBI negatively correlates with reading test scores. However, comparing present with future mTBI cases, we show that having an mTBI within a year before a test does not negatively affect children's reading scores. Our findings suggest that negative correlations between mTBIs and academic performance more likely reflect socioeconomic gradients in mTBI incidents rather than a direct causal effect. Further, socioeconomic gradients in mTBI incidents do not significantly contribute to corresponding disparities in academic performance., Other funders: ROCKWOOL Foundation (1249)

Following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, many countries faced short-term fertility declines in 2020–2021, a development which did not materialize in the majority of German-speaking and Nordic countries. However, more recent birth statistics show a steep fertility decline in 2022. We aim to provide empirical evidence on the unexpected birth decline in 2022 in Germany and Sweden. We rely on monthly birth statistics and present seasonally adjusted monthly Total Fertility Rates (TFR) for Germany and Sweden. We relate the nine-month lagged fertility rates to contextual developments regarding COVID-19. The seasonally adjusted monthly TFR of Germany dropped from 1.5–1.6 in 2021 to 1.4 in early 2022 and again in autumn 2022, a decline of about 10% in several months. In Sweden, the corresponding TFR dropped from about 1.7 in 2021 to 1.5–1.6 in 2022, a decline of almost 10%. There is no association of the fertility trends with changes in unemployment, infection rates, or COVID-19 deaths, but a strong association with the onset of vaccination programmes and the weakening of pandemic-related restrictions. The fertility decline in 2022 in Germany and Sweden is remarkable. Common explanations of fertility change during the pandemic do not apply. The association between the onset of mass vaccinations and subsequent fertility decline indicates that women adjusted their behaviour to get vaccinated before becoming pregnant. Fertility decreased as societies were opening up with more normalized life conditions. We provide novel information on fertility declines and the COVID-19-fertility nexus during and in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic.

I bidraget undersöks nutida och historiska diskurser kring (nyttig) läsning och (hälsosam) rörelse som medborgarskapande praktiker. Detta görs med utgångspunkt i två historiska nedslag: ett urval av de nutida läskampanjer som riktar sig till idrottande barn och ungdomar i Sverige; samt ett urval av kampanjer som fokuserar fysisk fostran under 1930-1950-talets folkhemsbygge.