Katarina Jacobsson – författare

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781003108436, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.This book argues that the expansion of administrative activities in today’s working life is driven not only by pressure from above, but also from below. The authors examine the inner dynamics of people-processing organizations—those formally working for clients, patients, or students—to uncover the hidden attractions of doing administrative work, despite all the complaints and laments about "too many meetings" or "too much paperwork." There is something appealing to those compelled to participate in today’s constantly multiplying and expanding administration that defies popular framings of it as merely pressure from above. Hidden Attractions of Administration shows in detail the emotional attractiveness, moral conflicts, and almost magical features that administrative tasks often entail in today’s organizations, supported by ethnographic studies consisting of over 200 qualitative interviews and participant observations from ten organizational settings and contexts across Sweden. The authors also question and complement explanations in administration-related research that have previously been taken for granted, arguing that it is a simplification to attribute all aspects of the change to New Public Management and instead taking into account what the classic sociologist Georg Simmel called an Eigendynamik: a self-reinforcing tendency that, under certain circumstances, needs only a nudge in an administrative direction to get going. By applying ethnography to issues of bureaucratization and meeting cultures and by drawing on findings in emotional sociology and social anthropology, this volume contributes to both the sociology of work and the study of human service organizations and will appeal to scholars and students working across both areas.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781003108436, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.This book argues that the expansion of administrative activities in today’s working life is driven not only by pressure from above, but also from below. The authors examine the inner dynamics of people-processing organizations—those formally working for clients, patients, or students—to uncover the hidden attractions of doing administrative work, despite all the complaints and laments about "too many meetings" or "too much paperwork." There is something appealing to those compelled to participate in today’s constantly multiplying and expanding administration that defies popular framings of it as merely pressure from above. Hidden Attractions of Administration shows in detail the emotional attractiveness, moral conflicts, and almost magical features that administrative tasks often entail in today’s organizations, supported by ethnographic studies consisting of over 200 qualitative interviews and participant observations from ten organizational settings and contexts across Sweden. The authors also question and complement explanations in administration-related research that have previously been taken for granted, arguing that it is a simplification to attribute all aspects of the change to New Public Management and instead taking into account what the classic sociologist Georg Simmel called an Eigendynamik: a self-reinforcing tendency that, under certain circumstances, needs only a nudge in an administrative direction to get going. By applying ethnography to issues of bureaucratization and meeting cultures and by drawing on findings in emotional sociology and social anthropology, this volume contributes to both the sociology of work and the study of human service organizations and will appeal to scholars and students working across both areas.

EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence. Human service work is performed in many places – hospitals, shelters, households, prisons, schools, clinics – and is characterised by a complex mixture of organising principles, relations and rules. Using ethnographic methods, researchers can investigate these site-specific complexities, providing multi-dimensional and compelling analyses. Bringing together both theoretical and practical material, this book shows researchers how ethnography can be carried out within human service settings. It provides an invaluable guide on how to apply ethnographic creativeness and offers a more humanistic and context-sensitive approach in the field of health and social care to generating valid knowledge about today’s service work.

Denna bok finns även som e-bok (ISBN 9789151109589) och går att köpa via nätbokhandeln.

Standardiserade dokument och digitala formulär omgärdar socionomens arbete. I boken Socialt arbete och pappersgöra tar författarna med oss till socialtjänstkontoren och undersöker hur det går till när socialt arbete dokumenteras. Hur påverkar dokumentationen mötet med klienten? Vilka blir konsekvenserna? Och varför? Bokens viktigaste budskap är att till synes neutrala dokumentationssystem påtagligt formar och präglar det sociala arbetet. Det påverkar också hur vi ser på världen och vad som betraktas som giltig kunskap. Dagens utveckling väcker nya frågor och kräver nya slags kompetenser hos de professionella. Boken vänder sig till studenter och verksamma inom socialt arbete, liksom andra med intresse för den ökade administrationens följder i offentlig sektor. Den ger både en introduktion till och en sociologisk analys av de dokumentationskrav som finns i yrket, liksom en överblick av de mest centrala lagar, direktiv och myndigheter som är relevanta för socialt arbete.

Elizabeth Martinell Barfoed är socionom och universitetslektor vid Socialhögskolan, Lunds universitet. De senaste forskningsprojekten har handlat om standardisering och dokumentering i socialtjänsten. Katarina Jacobsson är professor vid Socialhögskolan, Lunds universitet. Med en kunskapssociologisk ansats har hon bland annat studerat dokumenteringspraktiker inom sjukvård och socialtjänst.

In this book, ten doctoral students share and discuss a number of methodological concerns they have faced in the process of doing research. In the first part, “Capturing the field,” the contributors grapple over issues regarding how to define and demarcate the field of research, for instance in studies on immigrant organizations, red light districts on the Internet, and telephone interviewing. In the second part, “Relations in the field,” the authors deal with methodological concerns regarding the relationship between the researcher and the researched, adressing for example research on disabled people, children, and people with HIV and AIDS. The third and final part, “Theory as methodology” contains contributions that emphasize methodological implications resulting from theoretical choices, such as the concepts of culture and discourse. This book is the outcome of the course Qualitative Methods offered as an interdisciplinary course within the PhD programme in the social sciences. The contributors come from various disciplines, including Health and Society, Human Geography, Communication and Media, Political Science, Social Work, and Sociology.