Danish and Norwegian hospital social workers’ cross-institutional work amidst inter-sectoral restructuring of health and social welfare

Starting in the 2000s, Denmark and Norway have undergone extensive restructuring of their health-related social benefit programmes, including how they are governed. Several reforms have sought to enhance inter-sectoral collaboration. Aiming at ensuring patients’ faster return to work, policy-makers have instituted economic incentives to both individuals and the health and welfare organisations who handle them. Through an institutional logics approach, this paper explores how hospital social workers in these countries are experiencing these changes. The ‘social’ part of post-treatment care and rehabilitation receives more attention in the Norwegian institutional set-up than in the Danish, and whilst challenges are experienced in both countries, in group interviews Danish social workers in particular express concerns about the implications of the accelerated return-to-work focus. In both countries, they report increasing difficulties in ‘making their way through’ the state-municipal bureaucracy. However, by drawing on the formal health knowledge derived from medical settings and the symbolic capital it bestows on them, they often manage to negotiate the work-and-welfare services, thereby transforming the social context for the patients.     

Science of Selection: Social Technologies in the Norwegian Educational and Vocational Fields 1910–1940

This article analyses how applied psychology redefined societies' views on abilities and disabilities during the early twentieth century. It studies the making of this new knowledge as two interrelated processes: first, the experimental laboratory developments of scientific knowledge, and second, the translation of quantitative techniques for measuring intelligence and aptitudes into real‐life situations for political reasons. The two unified processes ‘scientification’ and ‘politicisation’ point to how abilities and aptitudes were redefined due to scientific and political authorities and interests. This article aims to give a critical overview of the international innovations of applied psychology analysed as ‘social technologies’, and how these technologies transformed the Norwegian educational and vocational systems. The main empirical sources are seminal professional and political texts.     

Children and Careers: How Family Size Affects Parents’ Labor Market Outcomes in the Long Run

We estimate the effect of family size on various measures of labor market outcomes over the whole career until retirement, using instrumental variables estimation in data from Norwegian administrative registers. Parents’ number of children is instrumented with the sex mix of their first two children. We find that having additional children causes sizable reductions in labor supply for women, which fade as children mature and even turn positive for women without a college degree. Among women with a college degree, there is evidence of persistent and even increasing career penalties of family size. Having additional children reduces these women’s probability of being employed by higher-paying firms, their earnings rank within the employing firm, and their probability of being the top earner at the workplace. Some of the career effects persist long after labor supply is restored. We find no effect of family size on any of men’s labor market outcomes in either the short or long run.     

Negotiating deficiency: Exploring ethnic minority parents' narratives about encountering child welfare services in Norway

Evaluating the participatory opportunities for service users within social welfare institutions is a pressing issue. In this article, we explore a group of ethnic minority parents' experiences with child welfare services (CWS) in Norway. A strong narrative theme was deficiency positioning—how lacking a Norwegian normative set of knowledge and skills challenged the parents' opportunities to participate. We analysed how deficiency positioning was perceived, negotiated, and contested in the parents' accounts, and 4 themes emerged: (a) learning to parent, (b) contesting expert knowledge, (c) learning to be a client, and (d) constructing CWS deficiency. Nancy Fraser's concept of “participatory parity” was applied to explore how current institutional structures may enable and limit parents' participation. The analysis provides insight into agencies and informants' sense‐making processes as well as the diverse resources and strategies that parents draw upon in the CWS encounter. Furthermore, we argue that an interplay between a strong focus on “parenting skills” and bureaucratic and economic structures positions ethnic minority parents as deficient, thus providing powerful mechanisms for marginalization. Implications for case work and institutional levels are discussed.     

Developing criteria for healthy organizational change

Abstract

The objective of this study was to identify criteria for healthy change in organizations and to develop practical guidelines for intended change. We aimed to explore how change processes at the shop floor level can be better informed by consultants and labour inspectors. A total of 180 interviews were conducted with managers and employees in 90 units of public and private organizations in Norway. The interviews were analysed through four steps representing an expansion of grounded theory, and converted to qualitative analysis using QSR and N6 software. We found that organizational change processes were better managed by more attention to awareness of the local norms and diversity among employees in the perception and reactions to change efforts. An inspector or consultant should be aware of these phenomena in any change effort and tell the organization how to deal with them. The other three factors identified were early role clarification, manager availability, and using constructive conflicts to deal with change. They are all important coping mechanisms at the organizational level that will bring change processes onto a more optimal track if correctly managed. A healthy process empowers individuals instead of making them insecure and defensive in times of change. This will help them restore perceived control and promote job security, which benefits both them and the organization.     

Lifetime risk of pregnancy-related death among Zambian women: district-level estimates from the 2010 census

The aim of this study was to examine district differentials in the lifetime risk of pregnancy-related death among females aged 15–49 in Zambia. We used data on household deaths collected in the 2010 census to estimate the lifetime risk of pregnancy-related death among females in Zambia. Using all-cause age-specific death rates, we generated female life tables for 74 districts and estimated person-years of exposure to all-cause mortality at each age. We then applied age-specific pregnancy-related mortality rates to the person-years of exposure to obtain estimates of adult lifetime risk that took account of competing causes of death. We used the ArcGIS software to analyse clustering and the spatial distribution of risk. A female aged 15 in Zambia had a 3.7 % chance of dying a pregnancy-related death before the age of 50. At district level, the lifetime risk ranged from 1.7 to 7.7 %. The Global Moran’s I was 0.452 (z-score 5.8, p value <0.01), indicating clustering of districts with similar risk levels of pregnancy-related mortality. Clustering of high-risk districts was found in Western province while clustering of low risk districts was found in Lusaka and Muchinga provinces. The level of adult lifetime risk was more positively associated with pregnancy-related mortality than with fertility. Females in Zambia have a high lifetime risk of pregnancy-related death overall but this risk varies greatly across the different districts of the country. The observed diversity is larger than when merely studying differences between provinces and is only weakly linked to differences in fertility levels. The identification of districts with varying levels of risk should enable evidence-based and focused delivery of maternal health services in districts where risk of death from maternal causes is greatest.     

Bureaucratic power in note‐writing: authoritative expertise within the state

What produces the power of senior civil servants at ministries of finance, positioned at the top of the bureaucratic hierarchy? Max Weber has claimed that a hierarchical organization, meritocratic recruitment and procedural work provide bureaucracies with legitimacy. In particular he insisted on the role of Fachwissen (disciplinary knowledge) obtained through formal education. However, he also argued for the role of Dienstwissen, forms of knowledge and skills stemming from the experience of service in itself. Weber did not elaborate on this concept in detail, and few analysts of governmental expertise have examined this notion. We draw on the practice‐turn in sociology, combining the study of governmental expertise with micro‐sociological studies of administrative practices. By analysing interviews with 48 senior civil servants at the British, French and Norwegian ministries of finance about their daily practices, this article demonstrates that bureaucratic note‐writing and the procedural evaluation of such notes constitute a key form of expertise that yields authority. The study provides an analytical framework for understanding what administrative expertise consists of, how it is integral to procedural work, the forms bureaucratic hierarchies take in practice and how these three dimensions provide authority.     

Parenthood wage penalties in a double income society

We estimate how parenthood affects hourly wages using panel data for Norwegian employees in the years 1997–2007. Though smaller than for most other OECD countries, we find substantial wage penalties to motherhood, ranging from a 1.2 % wage reduction for women with lower secondary education to 4.9 % for women with more than four years of higher education. Human capital measures such as work experience and paid parental leave do not explain the wage penalties, indicating that in the Norwegian institutional context, mothers are protected from adverse wage effects due to career breaks. We do however find large heterogeneity in the effects, with the largest penalties for mothers working full time and in the private sector. Contrary to most studies using US data and to previous research from Norway, we find a small wage penalty also to fatherhood. Also for men, the penalty is greater for those who work full time and in the private sector. A substantial share of the fatherhood wage penalty is explained by paternity leave.