En förändring i bemötandet gentemot utomstående forskning har uppstått hos Kriminal­vården. Den är inte lika öppen längre, skriver forskarna Anders Bruhn och Odd Lindberg. 

At the same time as the number of child and youth placements in foster care is increasing in Sweden, some serious deficiencies have been highlighted, such as instability in placements and shortcomings in the social services' monitoring. Because the child welfare workers are ultimately responsible for these children's situation, understanding how they handle their multi-dimensional occupational role is crucial. The aim of this article is to study child welfare workers' individual and collective experiences of and expectations about their occupational role and responsibilities in their administrative and relational work with children and youth in foster care. Individual interviews with child welfare workers from a previous evaluation of a national pilot project, and two focus groups with child welfare workers, constitute the empirical basis. Theoretically the article explores central concepts such as sub-roles, dilemmas, professionalism, and functional specificity. The results show that the child welfare workers are burdened by a heavy workload, but that the prerequisites and the obstacles they face also must be understood in relation to prevailing contradictions and dilemmas in their occupational role. Even though the child welfare workers stress that professionalism is about putting relational work first, their activity is dominated by administrative tasks and functional specificity.

En väl fungerande relation mellan socialarbetare och klient är ett nödvändigt villkor och ett grundelement i allt professionellt socialt arbete. Men trots att relationsarbete är svårt, så problematiseras det sällan i texter som rör det sociala arbetets kärna och karaktär.

I den här boken tar vi oss an just den uppgiften. Några exempel på frågeställningar som boken tar upp:

• Vad kännetecknar ett gott relationsarbete på det sociala arbetets fält?
• Hur kan en väl fungerande relation etableras mellan den professionelle tjänsteutövaren och en klient i ett mer eller mindre utsatt läge?
• Hur och under vilka villkor kan ett gott relationsarbete utföras av socialarbetare inom olika verksamhetsområden?

Bokens kapitel inrymmer både teoretiska fördjupningar och praktiska exempel och kan därför användas såväl inom utbildningar för socionomer och på angränsande fält som inom praktik på olika sociala yrkesfält.

The question of whether the Swedish social services are fulfilling their obligation to monitor and support children in foster care is attracting increasing attention. The importance of closeness and trust between children and their child-welfare officers has been highlighted in particular. The aim of this article is to study foster children's experiences and expectations concerning the role of the child-welfare officer, and how these constitute prerequisites for, and possible obstacles to the officers developing close and trustful relationships with the children under prevailing institutional conditions. Data from our evaluation of a national pilot project with supervision representatives provide the empirical basis. Our theoretical point of departure is that the relationship between the child and the child-welfare officer is affected by the officer's rolea role that is negotiated under the prevailing institutional conditions and in interaction with the children's experiences of and expectations about that role. The results show that most children emphasize that the relationship with their officer is negatively affected by a lack of time, availability, and trust. It is also weakened by the children's general expectation that child-welfare officers only act in their official role, a role that is associated with a formal and distanced relationship.

Prison officers are a key group of civil servants in the criminal justice system. Based on a comparative study of the systems for vocationaleducation in Sweden and Norway, this article compares policies andstrategies for developing the prison officer occupation. Differencesin this domain are analysed against the backdrop of theories aboutprofessionalization and growing differences between these countriesconcerning the ends and means of prison policy in general. Datacome from interviews and documents collected in 2013–2014, aswell as a rereading of data from two earlier prison-research projects.Results show that Norway is adopting a strategy quite similar to theone behind the birth of the so-called welfare professions duringthe heyday of the social-democratic welfare state. In Sweden, thecontinuing division of labour is leading to enhanced skills amongsome specialized subgroups, such as security and programme staff,but a reduction in qualifications for the majority. The study should beof interest in relation to different strategies for developing the workof prison officers as well as of other categories of public servants.It points to growing differences between two welfare regimes thatused to be quite similar, not least concerning the prison policy field.

In a research project – Practices of Frontline Interactions in the Swedish Social Insurance Agency (SSIA) – we are studying how goals and rules are shaped and handled in conversations between officials and clients. A central aim is to develop knowledge about what kind of room these officials have to develop policy in practice and how they make use of it. This is done by a multi-level research approach combining analyses on an institutional and interactional level (Bruhn & Ekström 2017). Data are collected via mixed methods: recorded interactions (official–client), qualitative interviews, and documents. In this paper, except for some minor changes identical with a paper originally presented at the 2nd Conference on Street-level Bureaucracy in Copenhagen 2017, we discuss officials’ room for and use of discretion when assessing work ability in investigations about sickness compensation (previously called sickness pension). To get sickness compensation the individual’s work ability must be permanently reduced (i.e. he/she shall not be able to take part in  working life anymore). Work (dis-)ability is a diffuse and contested concept. It is a core concept not only for officials here in focus, but for several other organisational actors in the field of labour market and health insurance issues as well. Many actors with different missions and interests are recurrently involved in negotiations about how to interpret and take actions on the basis of this concept. The diffuseness of the concept often puts the investigating official – the Street Level Bureaucrat – in a position of having quite lot of room to assess and affect the outcome of the investigations at hand. Internal SSIA statistics also point to quite wide variations in outcome of investigations between different units in the organisation. At the same time there is also internal pressure on the investigators to “keep figures down”. The magnitude of such pressure is related to changes in pressure upon the authorities on the political level. This leads to fluctuations between different fiscal years. Last year (2016), 70% of the applications for this benefit were rejected. This is an increase from earlier years, and a hint of a growing restrictiveness in assessments of what is seen as permanently reduced work ability. In this paper, we discuss the work ability concept in relation to the room for assessment – the discretion – of these sickness compensation investigating officials. It is based on earlier research, official documents, qualitative interviews and speech recordings.

This study develops a multi-level approach on frontline interactions in the public sector. Previous research suggests that detailed analyses of frontline interactions are essential to our understanding of how welfare services take shape when policies and rules are applied and negotiated in individual cases. The dynamics and performances of real-time interactions have, however, rarely been analyzed as such. This study shows how the methods developed in the field of Conversation Analysis can contribute to this research. Our multi-level approach integrates analyses of the policy- and institutional transformations that shape conditions for frontline interactions; and analyses of how policies and rules are evoked, negotiated and reshaped in the turn-by-turn organization and performances of interaction. The approach is applied on an analysis of how rules regarding financial aid are applied in an authority highly affected by changes in welfare policy towards standardization and detailed regulations. The empirical case is the Swedish Board for Study Support. The empirical study includes analyses of documents, interviews and analyses of taped telephone conversations. The study shows how institutional arrangements of standardization, detailed regulations, monitoring and depersonalization, structure the frontline work and shape narrow frames for officials’ discretion in interactions with clients. The study also shows how rules are invoked and negotiated in recurrent practices in the interaction: in the careful design of decisions; in the investigations of alternatives and exceptions from the rules in order to find solutions to the client’s problems. The analyses of concrete interactional practices clearly indicate that also a rule-governed work dominated by task discretion involves recurrent negotiations, flexibility and local policy-making.