To Örebro University

Implementing anti-bullying programs or program components in schools is a complex process affected by personal, organizational, and system factors. Therefore, it is important to understand factors that may affect the implementation process to understand why the effectiveness of different programs or program components may vary. The chapter focuses on the challenges and the lessons that can be learned from implementing tailored bullying prevention components in schools based on a whole-community approach in Sweden. The challenges discussed relate to three types of challenges—lack of resources, the necessity for the initiative to be well anchored, and resistance to change—that affected the outcomes of the project. The results also show that the ways in which the challenges were dealt with affected the outcomes and that the challenges are closely related to each other and must be dealt with taking into account the schools’ unique contextual conditions.

The concept of street-level bureaucracy is central to understanding public administration asit pinpoints the role of individual civil servants in the realisation of policy. Oneissue in need of further illumination is that of knowledge production and reproduction in street-level bureaucracies. This paperseeks to examine these issues by linking street-level bureaucracy with the theory of social representations. Social representations offer a social-psychological understanding of how individuals make sense of their reality in day-to-day interaction. The overarching aim of the paperis to suggest a theoretical synthesis of these two perspectives –a synthesis that connects interaction atstreet-level with common-sense knowledge, as well as knowledge generatedwithin organisationsand among professionals. The synthesis is demonstrated by presenting an analysis of social representations of unemployment among two groups of street-level bureaucrats.