To Örebro University

Young people not in employment, education, or training (NEET) often face complex and overlapping challenges, yet the welfare services intended to support them are fragmented across organisational boundaries. This article contributes to the literature by exploring how street-level bureaucrats in a Swedish municipality understand and navigate this paradox, using a qualitative case study informed by wicked problems theory. The findings show how structural complexity in the form of interconnected needs and limited knowability interacts with stakeholder complexity, where fragmented knowledge, divergent institutional framings, competing organisational priorities, and diffuse authority shape how support is organised and delivered. Practitioners described how coordination across sectors was difficult to sustain, particularly when support relied on partial information, narrow mandates, and systems that prioritised measurable outputs over meaningful progress. The study confirms the analytical value of wicked problems theory, while also extending it by highlighting the temporal instability of coordination processes. While the typology helps explain why coordination and collective action are difficult in fragmented welfare systems, the findings show how joint efforts are difficult to sustain over time in the face of staff turnover, shifting mandates, and short-term initiatives. For policy and practice, the findings underscore the importance of governance arrangements that facilitate flexibility, cross-sectoral collaboration, and continuity of support.

Neighbourhoods with low social capital and bad reputations are becoming even more deprived, with increased homelessness, poverty and gang violence. In Sweden, and internationally, there is a need for knowledge of ways to stimulate positive regeneration of neighbourhoods with a bad reputation. This ethnographical case study explores regeneration factors in a neighbourhood that was transformed over 14 years from one with low social capital and a bad reputation to one with higher social capital and a good reputation. Three key factors in this positive regeneration and de-stigmatization process of a neighbourhood with an undesirable reputation were identified: the engagement of private sector actors with place branding and spatial anchorage skills; collaborative co-creation; and home-love with emotion-based building. The findings regarding this successful case highlight the importance of collaboration and including actors with re-branding skills when rewriting the narrative of a stigmatized neighbourhood.

The aim of this paper is to analyse how Swedish grade three children are discursively positioned as pupils when they are taking national tests in mathematics and when they reflect on the testing situation afterwards. With support from theories about affective-discursive assemblages, we explore children’s body language, emotions, and talk in light of the two overarching discourses that we believe frame the classroom: the ‘testing discourse’ and the ‘development discourse’. Through the disciplinary power of these main discourses children struggle to conduct themselves in order to become recognized as intelligible subjects and ‘ideal pupils’. The analysis, when taking into account how affects and discourses intertwine, shows that children can be in ‘untroubled’, ‘troubled’, or ambivalent subject positions.

Background: Most studies about young motherhood have focused on identifying how young mothers can be supported or on how notions of young motherhood are produced. However, there is still limited knowledge about the maternal identity work of young mothers. The overarching aim of this thesis was to explore the maternal identity work of young mothers and, as part of this, to study young motherhood in relation to different forms of parenting support.

Method: For the first three papers, 17 young Swedish mothers aged 13–25 were interviewed 1 or 2 times each (in total 31 interviews). The interview conversations were analysed from the perspective of discursive psychology. For the fourth paper, three Facebook groups that offered parenting support online to young mothers were studied. Data from the three Facebook groups were analysed through network analysis, online ethnography, and telephone interviews with two administrators. The ethnographical data and interviews in this particular substudy were analysed through thematic content analysis.

Theoretical perspectives: The identity work of the interviewed young mothers was analysed in relation to theories and debates about parenting and the life course, the risk society, and the notion of “good motherhood”.

Findings: The findings of the thesis suggest (Papers 1, 2, and 3) that whether the interviewed young mothers followed or deviated from their expected life course seemed to have an impact on the degree to which their mothering was seen as “risky”. Furthermore (Paper 2), the mothers appeared to be discursively divided into three different levels of riskiness in their social contexts: less risky mothers, high risk mothers, and mothers seen as too risky for mothering. The mothers’ level of presumed riskiness seemed in turn to have meanings for which dominant and/or alternative motherhood discourses they could access and draw upon in a trustworthy way (or which motherhood discourses they lacked access to) when presenting their maternal positions and making sense of their maternal identity in relation to the world around them. Two emerging motherhood discourses were identified: youthful motherhood (Paper 1) and common-sense motherhood (Paper 2). Support from the young mothers’ own mothers (Paper 3) had contradictory meanings for their identities and functioned as a form of guidance into motherhood while at the same time limiting the young mothers’ possibilities to take on the position as the “main-mother” of her child. Young mothers seemed to prefer peer-parenting support online (Paper 4) in closed Facebook groups above participating in governmental expert-guided face-to-face support groups.

In this paper, we explore meanings of adulthood and youthfulness in relation to notions of life course, good motherhood, and girlhood among young mothers in Sweden. Our analysis was informed by a discursive psychological approach and was based on interview conversations with 17 mothers who were 13–25 years old at the birth of their first child. In our analysis, we identified two repertoires – the ‘social age’ repertoire and the ‘chronological age’ repertoire. The interviewees invoked the two repertoires to position themselves and others as either responsible adult mothers or as responsible youthful mothers. Meanings of adulthood are central within the idea of motherhood, and by deviating from their expected life course young mothers are often understood as non-adults who are incapable of fulfilling the developmental task of motherhood. Our work suggests that the maternal identity work of young mothers takes place within discourses of both adulthood and youthfulness.

Today, many countries spend a great deal of money and effort on programs for expert-guided parenting support to be carried out in face-to-face groups. One goal of such support is to target, help, and educate “risky” groups of parents, such as young parents. It is striking, however, that young parents have a conspicuously low degree of participation in this type of parenting support. Drawing on the assumption that many young parents go online to seek, give, and receive peer parenting support, this paper presents a case study of activities within three Facebook groups. Using a combination of social network analysis, online ethnography, and interviews, we analyze how social network relationships and discussions differ depending on whether the analyzed Facebook group in question is administrated by professionals or peers, what the role of professional experts is, and how young parents might use social media to take control of their own support needs. Our results indicate that some of the affordances provided by Facebook might contribute to a challenging of the roles of “skilled” professionals versus “risky” young parents.

Within the western understanding of a nuclear family and the idea of good motherhood, the need for grandparental support is commonly viewed as an expression of deficient motherhood. Young mothers are often seen as incapable of maternal practices and as being in need of support from their extended family. An alternative view is that too much support might result in the grandmothers taking on the role of mother. This paper explores research around the ambivalent meanings of grandparental support in young Swedish mothers’ narratives. In this research, we identified three repertoires: inhibiting, being-there-no-matter-what and responsibility. Mothers who were following their expected life course achieved a subject position as a ‘‘real mother’’ within a functioning nuclear family. Mothers deviating from their expected life course achieved a subject position as either a ‘‘mother in becoming’’ with a functional and supportive extended family or as a ‘‘real mother’’ with a dysfunctional and non-supportive extended family. In the case of young mothers who are seen as insufficient, motherhood might become negotiable and fluid between the biological mother and the young mother’s own mother.