Struggling for One’s Name: Defense Narratives by those Accused of Small-Time Corruption

ABSTRACT

Under scrutiny (what we term a “bribery gaze”), many interpersonal exchanges in work contexts are perceived as bribes rather than gifts, tokens of appreciation, or mundane favors. Current Swedish bribery laws are strong, and the media keep a vigilant eye out for suspicious activities. From a wide set of qualitative data, we selected 13 interviews with formally-accused middle managers and low-level officials in Sweden who claimed to be innocent of small corruption. We discovered that they were more concerned with defending their honor than with job losses, material losses, or legal repercussions. The interviewees used a contrast structure: While they defined the humiliating accusations and disproportionate measures as turning points, they narrated their moral struggles and claimed their innocence by retelling significant events. These personal narratives from those accused of corruption showed that honor remains very important in contemporary society.     

After a Cycle of Contention: Post-Gothenburg Strategies of Left-Libertarian Activists in Sweden

This article considers the strategic choices that radical activists face when a cycle of contention ends. It investigates the reorientation of the autonomous anarchists or left-libertarian activist milieu in Sweden after the riots at the Gothenburg summit in 2001, which ended a cycle of anti-globalization protests in Sweden. The article identifies five strategies by which this activist milieu attempted to reconstruct collective agency, build a new alliance structure, and renew the repertoire of contention: (1) rescaling and targeting of micro-politics; (2) moving from secluded to open communities; (3) rethinking collective agency with the help of a new movement theory; (4) reversing dominant discourses and opening up discursive space; and (5) redefining militancy and shelving of violent confrontation. The study builds on activist interviews and ethnographic research in Stockholm and Malmö.     

When Norms Collide: Learning under Organizational Hypocrisy

Most conceptualizations of organizational learning are generally underpinned by some notion of unitarism. Theories typically assume shared visions, values, conceptions or identities. This paper, however, considers the dilemmas faced in organizations where identities and visions are not shared, and where conceptions and ideologies are diverse and possibly in conflict. Such organizations, here called hypocrisies, are characterized by divergent norms and stakeholder identities. Seeing learning as changes in shared conceptions between actors at different levels, a case is presented of change in a multi–norm white–collar trade union. This shows the difficulty of promoting unitaristically conceived notions of organizational learning from the centre and that learning is problematic where power is dispersed within the organization. This challenges the view that learning organizations can be associated with empowerment. The paper concludes by arguing for the setting–aside of unitaristic assumptions of organizational learning and, instead, conceiving interventions in terms of local learning arenas for democratic dialogue in a context of organizational diversity.     

Development of an instrument for assessing workstyle in checkout cashier work (BAsIK)

Checkout cashier work consists of handling a large number of items during a work shift, which implies repetitive movements of the shoulders, arms and hands/wrists, and a high work rate. The work is associated with a high prevalence of disorders in the neck and upper extremity. The concept of workstyle explains how ergonomic and psychosocial factors interact in the development of work-related upper extremity disorders. The aim of the project was to develop an instrument for the occupational health services to be used in the efforts to prevent upper extremity disorders in checkout cashier work. The instrument is based on the workstyle concept and is intended to be used as a tool to identify high-risk workstyle and needs for interventions, such as training and education. The instrument, BAsIK, consists of four parts; a questionnaire about workstyle, an observation protocol for work technique, a checklist about the design of the checkout and a questionnaire about work organization. The instrument was developed by selecting workstyle items developed for office work and adapting them to checkout cashier work, discussions with researchers and ergonomists, focus-group interviews with cashiers, observations of video recordings of cashiers, and studies of existing guidelines and checklists.     

Genetic and environmental effects on sexual excitation and sexual inhibition in men

The Sexual Inhibition and Sexual Excitation Scales (SIS/SES) measure the propensity for sexual inhibition and excitation in men. According to the theoretical model underlying the SIS/SES, sexual response and associated behavior depend on dual control mechanisms in the brain involving the balance of excitatory and inhibitory systems which impinge on sexual response. Previous research with the SIS/SES has indicated one higher-order excitatory factor and two higher-order inhibitory factors affecting sexual response. The present study analyzed the item structure and the psychometric properties of the instrument in a population based sample of Finnish male twins (N = 1,289), and, including 37 out of 45 items of the original scales, estimated the heritability of and the environmental influences on the excitatory and inhibitory mechanisms. The twin correlations and the structural equation modeling suggested modest heritability for both inhibitory mechanisms. Sexual excitation, in contrast, was not influenced by genetic effects and similarities between twins for this mechanism seemed to be caused by the common environment of the twins.     

Methodological challenges in the implementation and evaluation of social welfare policies

As social reality is quite elusive, even regarding seemingly well-recognized everyday concepts and objects, there are always methodological challenges underlying assessments and evaluations of implementation policies. The present article addresses this area of concern by presenting the results of a rereading of an empirical study of elderly home care services. Our results reveal the emergence of a dissolution of common and professional key concepts and objects in these welfare services to a degree that challenges both the implementation policy and the evaluation of policy. We claim that this has methodological implications for evaluation of implementation policies in general.     

Narratives of ICT and Organizational Change in Public Administration

In the last decade the implementation of computerized technology and advanced information systems in public administration has gathered speed. The purpose of this article is to explore the ways in which these changes might be gendered by analysing different narratives of digitalization and organizational change in public administration. The empirical findings indicate that resistance to information and communication technology is explained away by managers as reflecting women's low computer maturity, while the narratives of the case‐workers themselves reflect their resistance to deskilling and simplified work specifications, as well as their experience of a shift in the work object — from working with human beings to working with electronic information. The findings indicate that the increased use of information technology genders resistance to degradation as a feminized fear of technology and low computer maturity.     

Women under protection – in hiding from violent men

In Sweden in 2007, 11,047 people, out of a population of around nine million were living under at-risk conditions requiring protective measures for their safety. Sixty per cent were women, most of them hiding from men who had battered them and were still threatening and stalking them. In this research and intervention study, a group of women in hiding were given different kinds of support and 23 women were interviewed. These women struggle to make a living, work or study, and their finances are extremely strained. Their social networks/interactions are nonexistent. Living under constant threat and insecurity has an adverse impact on the women's health. The community is obliged, for economic and security reasons, to support battered women. There are still severe shortcomings with regard to security. One recommendation is the institution of personal protection officers, i.e. specially trained social service caseworkers able to support the woman once protection measures have been decided.     

Harnessing the Theoretical Foundations of the Exponential and Beta‐Poisson Dose‐Response Models to Quantify Parameter Uncertainty Using Markov Chain Monte Carlo

Dose‐response models are the essential link between exposure assessment and computed risk values in quantitative microbial risk assessment, yet the uncertainty that is inherent to computed risks because the dose‐response model parameters are estimated using limited epidemiological data is rarely quantified. Second‐order risk characterization approaches incorporating uncertainty in dose‐response model parameters can provide more complete information to decisionmakers by separating variability and uncertainty to quantify the uncertainty in computed risks. Therefore, the objective of this work is to develop procedures to sample from posterior distributions describing uncertainty in the parameters of exponential and beta‐Poisson dose‐response models using Bayes's theorem and Markov Chain Monte Carlo (in OpenBUGS). The theoretical origins of the beta‐Poisson dose‐response model are used to identify a decomposed version of the model that enables Bayesian analysis without the need to evaluate Kummer confluent hypergeometric functions. Herein, it is also established that the beta distribution in the beta‐Poisson dose‐response model cannot address variation among individual pathogens, criteria to validate use of the conventional approximation to the beta‐Poisson model are proposed, and simple algorithms to evaluate actual beta‐Poisson probabilities of infection are investigated. The developed MCMC procedures are applied to analysis of a case study data set, and it is demonstrated that an important region of the posterior distribution of the beta‐Poisson dose‐response model parameters is attributable to the absence of low‐dose data. This region includes beta‐Poisson models for which the conventional approximation is especially invalid and in which many beta distributions have an extreme shape with questionable plausibility.