Doing business or leading care work? Intersections of gender,ethnicity and profession in home care entrepreneurship in Sweden

This article critically explores assumptions underpinning Swedish elder care policies that the introduction of market practices in publicly funded eldercare services advances women's entrepreneurship. We argue that gendered privileges and disadvantages are being recreated on tax‐funded home care markets; furthermore, gendered inequalities intersect with ethnicity and profession in the management of small‐scale care companies' dealings with authorities governing home care services and standards for home care work. However, we find that the salience of categories depends on the context in which they emerge. While gender and profession are dominant in management, gender and ethnicity influence interactions with authorities. Only in standards for home care work do all categories simultaneously shape the business approaches of care entrepreneurs. Our analysis, based on data on size and growth of home care companies and interviews with small‐scale care entrepreneurs, suggests that regulations and practices privilege big companies and care entrepreneurs who echo the white, masculine gendering of entrepreneurship as ‘doing business' and disadvantage small‐scale entrepreneurs focusing on leading care work to produce quality care.     

Religious Social Identities in the Hybrid Self‐presentations of Sikh Businesspeople

This paper explores the identity work practices of Thai Sikh businesspeople. The paper focuses on two important social identities in participants’ self‐presentations – those derived from religious (Sikh) and western business discourses – and identifies powerful tensions in their hybrid identity work. Conducting discourse analysis on identity work practices within interview settings, the authors explore how participants resolve, accommodate or reject these discursive tensions while attempting stable and coherent hybrid self‐presentations. They identify several different forms of hybridity, including what they term ‘equipollence’, which occurs when two equally powerful, contradictory discourses are incorporated in self‐presentations, producing potentially irresolvable intersections and leading to a lack of coherence. Contributions are made to the literatures on religion and work, hybrid identity work processes and social identities.     

Women's entrepreneurship,neoliberalism and economic justice in the postfeminist era: A discourse analysis of policy change in Sweden

Since the early 1990s, there has been investment in women's entrepreneurship policy (WEP) in Sweden, which continued until 2015. During the same period, Sweden assumed neoliberal policies that profoundly changed the position of women within the world of work and business. The goals for WEP changed as a result, from entrepreneurship as a way to create a more equal society, to the goal of unleashing women's entrepreneurial potential so they can contribute to economic growth. To better understand this shift we approach WEP as a neoliberal governmentality which offers women ‘entrepreneurial’ or ‘postfeminist’ subject positions. The analysis is inspired by political theorist Nancy Fraser who theorized the change as the displacement of socioeconomic redistribution in favour of cultural recognition, or identity politics. We use Fraser's concepts in a discourse analysis of Swedish WEP over two decades, identifying two distinct discourses and three discursive displacements. Whilst WEP initially gave precedence to a radical feminist discourse that called for women's collective action, this was replaced by a postfeminist neoliberal discourse that encouraged individual women to assume an entrepreneurial persona, start their own business, compete in the marketplace and contribute to economic growth. The result was the continued subordination of women business owners, but it also obscured or rendered structural problems/solutions, and collective feminist action, irrelevant.     

Through a filtered lens: unauthorized picture-taking of people with dwarfism in public spaces

People with dwarfism often encounter discrimination in their daily interactions with strangers. Staring, harassment and infantilization are some of the behaviours they have reported to encounter. Through two qualitative research studies conducted in 2013 and 2015/16 it was revealed that people with dwarfism also experience strangers taking unauthorized pictures of them. This article explores this phenomenon in depth, utilizing the perspective of individuals who have experienced it first hand and analysing the relevant socio-historical influences. These include the history of the photographic exploitation of ‘abnormal’ bodies, and the cultural construction of a ‘dwarf’ as an object of entertainment. This article engages gaze theories in gender and race and ethnicity studies as well as a discussion of Foucault’s interpretation of the ‘panopticon’, positing that the advent of the cell-phone camera in the twenty-first century has altered how ‘abnormal’ bodies are recorded within oppressive ideological beliefs.     

Individualism and Marriage: Ideal Types for Making Sense of the Relationship between Self and Sacrifice

The question of how the individual and group relate is one that has long interested social theorists. Changes in family form and structure in the contemporary West resituate this question in a contentious public debate regarding how the prevalence of new family forms may contribute or be deleterious to the well-being of individuals and families. Sociological discourse on marriage and the family generally tends to mirror this debate by dichotomizing individualism and commitment and self and marriage, resulting in an obfuscation of our understanding of the forms and styles in marriage. In order to clarify and advance this discussion, we show how individualism and commitment are mutually required in a modern world. We follow this by outlining a logically-derived typology that, along with a committed individualist and a group conformer, includes two intermediate types: a self-regulator and a relationship negotiator. We empirically demonstrate the utility of these types by showing how they correspond with the ways that interviewees talk about marriage in six local congregations, and we suggest various social factors that may particularly impact the development of local marriage cultures. These types provide a theoretical frame for understanding how individualism and commitment are intertwined and require each other.     

Correlates of perceived effectiveness of the Safe Schools/Healthy Students Initiative

A three-level growth-curve model was applied to estimate perceived impact growth trajectories, using multi-year data from project and school surveys on outcome and program implementation collected from 59 sites and approximately 1165 participating schools in the Safe Schools and Healthy Students Initiative. Primary interest is to determine whether and how project-level and school-level correlates affect schools’ perceptions of the Initiative's effectiveness over time when the effects of the pre-grant environmental conditions, grant operations, and near-term outcomes are considered. Coordination and service integration, comprehensive programs and activities for early childhood development, and change in school involvement were found to be significant predictors of school-perceived overall impact when the effect of poverty was considered. Partnership functioning, perceived importance of school resources, and school involvement were found to be significant predictors of school-perceived impact on substance use prevention when the effect of poverty was considered.     

Relational Aggression in Peer and Dating Relationships: Links to Psychological and Behavioral Adjustment

We examined the contribution of relational aggression in adolescents' peer and dating relationships to their psychological and behavioral adjustment. In the Fall and again four months later, 1279 (646 female) grade 9 students reported on relational aggression perpetration and victimization in their romantic and peer relationships, depression/anxiety symptoms (psychological adjustment) and delinquency (behavioral adjustment). Using hierarchical regression analyses, controlling for Time 1 adjustment/behavior, peer relational aggression perpetration predicted depression/anxiety. Dating relational victimization also predicted depression/anxiety, but only for girls. Furthermore, girls who were perpetrators of relational aggression in both peer and dating contexts were most likely to show increases in delinquent behavior. We conclude that dating and peer relationships are not redundant, but make independent and additive contributions to adolescent adjustment. Girls, in particular, may be at greatest risk for poor outcomes when they have relationally aggressive relationships. Results also highlight the need for greater awareness of the complexity and significance of adolescent dating relationships.     

Political leaders in the SYMLOG space: Perceptions of right and left wing leaders by right and left wing constituencies

Systematic Multiple Level Observation of Groups (SYMLOG) was applied to studying images of political leaders. Three left wing and three right wing Israeli leaders were evaluated by left and right wing voters along the SYMLOG's three dimensions—friendliness, task orientation, and dominance. It was found that right wing voters rated right wing leaders higher on friendliness and task orientation than left wing leaders. In a similar fashion, left wing voters viewed left wing leaders as more friendly and task-oriented than right wing leaders. Leaders of the right were viewed as more dominant than leaders of the left by left and right wing voters alike. Right and left wing voters assigned different SYMLOG types to right and left wing leaders. The dimension that distinguished between the various images was the dimension of friendliness. Whereas for right wing voters, all images of right wing leaders included a component of friendliness, none of these three images included an accented component of friendliness when rated by left wing voters. In a similar fashion, left wing voters saw two out of the three left wing leaders as including a component of friendliness, whereas none of the three left wing images included this component for right wing voters. Respondents from the right and the left rated their “ideal leader” as reflecting values of “dominance”, “friendliness,” and “task-orientation”. However, respondents saw leaders affiliated with their own political camp as closer to their image of the ideal leader on friendliness and task-orientation than leaders of the opposite political camp. Both right and left wing voters saw all political leaders as equally similar to their image of “ideal leader” on the “dominance” dimension regardless of that leader's political affiliation.