Kerstin Jacobsson

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at University of Gothenburg

In this article, we share strategic lessons from applying a ‘structural field of contention’ approach to a comparative study of housing struggles in Hungary and Romania since 1989. The aim is not to highlight details and specificities, but to show the benefits of looking beyond individual progressive movements in focus of most previous literature,...

The article analyses a new culture of responsibilisation implicated in a recent management reform in the Swedish Public Employment Service. Based on an interview study and organisational documents, it is shown that the reform entails a new form of responsibilisation of jobseekers as well as caseworkers. As jobsee-kers are expected to 'carry their o...

Combining critical management studies and narrative ethnography, this chapter investigates the role of organizational discourse in shaping caseworker subjectivity at the Swedish Social Insurance Agency (SIA). Each management shift in this welfare state bureaucracy has been accompanied by changes in the legitimating organizational narratives. These...

Aktivering är ett av vår tids modeord i välfärdspolitiska sammanhang. Arbetslösa kunde under en period delta i det arbetsmarknadspolitiska programmet Aktivitetsgarantin. Vissa unga personer med nedsatt arbetsförmåga mottar aktivitetsersättning medan arbetslösa varje månad ska aktivitetsrapportera till Arbetsförmedlingen för att kunna få ersättning...

Artikeln undersöker organisationsberättelsernas roll i Försäkringskassans inre styrning, närmare bestämt i normeringen av handläggarna inom sjukförsäkringen och skapandet av det för organisationen önskvärda subjektet. Organisationsberättelserna blir redskap både för att de-stabilisera befintlig roll-och självförståelse och för att tillhandahålla ma...

The chapter introduces the main objectives of the book: (1) to develop an analytical approach able to account for the structural and ideological complexity of contemporary housing struggles, and (2) to illustrate the practical gains of this approach by a comparative study of housing contention in two capital cities in Europe, Budapest and Bucharest...

This chapter provides a historical introduction to the main factors that influenced housing and housing-related contention dynamics in Budapest and Bucharest, from the two cities’ modernization booms through their socialist and postsocialist periods, focusing on the role of urban development in the two countries’ world-economic integration, and the...

This brief concluding chapter discusses the main benefits of the structural field of contention approach, as well as the ways in which its relevance extends beyond the scope of the study, both in terms of the local context (Budapest and Bucharest) and research area (housing contention). The chapter identifies a number of insights gained for underst...

The chapter presents the analytical approach developed in this book, conceptualized as a ‘structural field of contention approach.’ We first discuss the benefits of existing field approaches in the study of social mobilization, as well as their limitations. Deriving inspiration from Nick Crossley’s notion of social movements as ‘fields of contentio...

This chapter traces housing-related tensions and mobilizations across Hungary’s regime change and transition in the 1990s, the debt-driven growth of the 2000s, and the new national conservative hegemony since 2010. It identifies two main areas where housing tensions manifest: housing poverty at the bottom of the housing hierarchy, and the hardships...

This chapter follows the main areas of housing-related tensions—housing poverty and low- to middle-classes’ housing access problem—and the mobilizations linked to them, in the city of Bucharest. It follows them across Romania’s first two decades of privatization started in 1990, the period of post-2008 crisis management, followed by a new growth cy...

This chapter presents our conclusions from comparing housing contention in Budapest and Bucharest, in a way that highlights specific heuristics following from the structural field of contention approach. We show that the main structural areas where housing tensions develop are similar in the two cases, yet the political environment of their politic...

Teamwork is a well-known management technique for eliciting commitment and exerting control in private companies. However, less is known about how teamwork operates as a management tool in welfare state bureaucracies. Tying critical management and street-level bureaucracy studies, this article explores teamwork as a key component in the normative c...

This chapter discusses Durkheim’s contribution to the theorization of social movements. The dominant Durkheimian approaches to social movements have been social disintegration approaches, on the one hand, and collective effervescence and ritual life-inspired analyses, on the other. This chapter suggests that there are other openings in Durkheim’s w...

Byråkratier har ett inre liv och styrning sker inte bara formellt och uppifrån. Styrning sker också informellt genom iscensättningar, regi av sociala processer och organisationsberättelser, vilket belyses i denna etnografiska studie. Ett viktigt organisationsmanus var här att ”vi får inte blir för snälla”.

This article adds to the literature interrogating existing hierarchies in global knowledge production by examining the dominant research on post-1989 Central and East European (CEE) environmentalism. Analyses of CEE environmentalism have predominantly relied on concepts and organizational models generated by research on environmental activism and p...

Artikeln analyserar handläggares syn på ”ett väl utfört arbete” i två välfärdsbyråkratier: Försäkringskassan och Arbetsförmedlingen. Artikeln jämför respektive myndighets handläggarideal och tillhörande strategier i handläggningen av klientärenden. De skilda handläggaridealen gestaltas med hjälp av en husbyggarmetafor: prefabricerade modulhus där s...

Officials in welfare state bureaucracies face the challenge of negotiating their role identities in the context of changeable organizational priorities and managerial styles. Previous studies have found that the professional values may mediate top-down demands and enable the preservation of professional autonomy also under public management reforms...

What can we learn about civil society in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and Russia from studies on activism within the region’s urban spaces? In this article, we argue that studying urban activism in CEE offers useful insights for general theory building about the importance of uneventful protests, the formation of agency and the processes of bec...

Baserad på en etnografisk studie av styrningen av handläggarna inom sjuk-försäkringen reser denna artikel ett antal kritiska frågor om konsekvenserna av den informella styrningen inom Försäkringskassan. Trots självbilden av en formell organisation som fattar "korrekta" beslut i försäkringsärenden visar studien att den informella styrningen-genom so...

This article explores protest tactics in Russian cities, stressing the liminality of spatial contestation practices. In this authoritarian context, spatial contestation typically has a liminal character, where citizens employ strategic ambiguity of their actions vis‐á‐vis (a) legal regulations, (b) official discourse, and (c) transcripts of legitim...

This article considers the practice of disability detection and coding in the Swedish Public Employment Service (PES). By investigating and contrasting the governmental techniques for handling the category of ‘unemployable’ subjects on the one hand, and the self-understanding and ‘work on the self’ by the coded individuals on the other, it research...

This article considers the practice of disability detection and coding in the Swedish Public Employment Service (PES). By investigating and contrasting the governmental techniques for handling the category of ‘unemployable’ subjects on the one hand, and the self-understanding and ‘work on the self’ by the coded individuals on the other, it research...

The Swedish Social Insurance Agency (Försäkringskassan – SSIA) and its frontline staff have a key role in the implementation of activation policy. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted at local offices, this article investigates how the transparency ideal, as an integral part of the organizational governance of the activation policy, is negoti...

The transparent organization: The caseworker and the culture of visibility in the Social Insurance Agency The expansion of ”audit culture” in public sector governance is well documented, including its implications for caseworkers whose performance is constantly monitored. Transparency is an inherent part of the audit culture, yet there are fewer st...

Den transparenta organisationen Handläggaren och visibilitetskulturen i Försäkringskassan 1 The transparent organization: The caseworker and the culture of visibility in the Social Insurance Agency The expansion of "audit culture" in public sector governance is well documented, including its implications for caseworkers whose performance is constan...

The objective of this article is to analyse the ideological influences, main reforms and social inequality outcomes of "the new work strategy", i.e. the former Swedish centre-right Alliance government's work-first approach. By studying government bills and reports, official statistics, and research on welfare and labour market policies, discourses,...

The article offers a study of housing movements in Budapest and Bucharest, with the main focus on the developments since the financial crisis of 2008, stressing the role that both structural and contingent factors play in shaping the dynamics of this “field of contention.” It is argued that a structural view is enlightening for understanding the fa...

In much social scientific literature, Polish civil society has been portrayed as weak and passive. This volume offers a much-needed corrective, challenging this characterization on both theoretical and empirical grounds and suggesting new ways of conceptualizing civil society to better account for events on the ground as well as global trends such...

In much social scientific literature, Polish civil society has been portrayed as weak and passive. This volume offers a much-needed corrective, challenging this characterization on both theoretical and empirical grounds and suggesting new ways of conceptualizing civil society to better account for events on the ground as well as global trends such...

This article offers a comparative study of animal rights and animal welfare activism in Poland and Russia. It investigates how an East European democratic state, on the one hand, and a post-Soviet semi-authoritarian state, on the other hand, steer civic activism and how different state-society relationships affect the forms that activism takes. The...

Social investment (SI) is part of a strategy to modernize the European welfare states by focusing on human resource development throughout the life-course, while ensuring financial sustainability. Recognizing that this strategy was only partially implemented by the EU member states prior to the financial and Eurozone crises, this article investigat...

Much welfare research is based on the assumption that welfare regimes are homogenous entities. Nevertheless, the practice of activation may vary considerably within states. This is especially so in a country such as Sweden where municipalities and state agencies are both involved in activation. This article studies local activation policy and pract...

What can we learn about collective action across Central and Eastern Europe by focusing on activism within urban spaces? This volume argues that the recent resurgence of urban grassroots mobilisation represents a new phase in the development of post-socialist civil societies and that these civil societies have significantly more vitality than is co...

This article considers the strategic choices that radical activists face when a cycle of contention ends. It investigates the reorientation of the autonomous anarchists or left-libertarian activist milieu in Sweden after the riots at the Gothenburg summit in 2001, which ended a cycle of anti-globalization protests in Sweden. The article identifies...

As a consequence of European integration and the EU’s expanded social policy, more citizens’ interests are today organized at EU level. In the case of the women’s movement, there is an umbrella organization—the European Women’s Lobby (EWL)— in place in Brussels coordinating national women’s movements. The EWL demands from its members that they be n...

Becoming an animal rights activist is not just a process of identity change and re-socialization but also implies, as this article suggests, a “re-engineering” of affective cognitive repertoires and processes of “sensibilization” in relation to nonhuman animals. Activists thereby develop their mental responsiveness and awareness and refine their em...

Many scholars have noted that secular belief systems, despite lack of a spiritual base, can possess qualities and display features similar to religion. The most well-known and forceful formulation of this is, arguably, Durkheim's claim that elementary forms of religious life pervade collective life in all societies. This article suggests that anima...

This article outlines a theoretical framework for understanding deviance and deviance-management in a social movement context. Such a deviance perspective is useful because in striving for social change, activists challenge existing social norms and may readily be defined by their environments as “outsiders” or deviants. However, activists also dif...

The debate on global governance points to shifts in the type and nature of regulation as well as in the set of actors involved. The article introduces a novel way of conceptualizing the changes, namely a move towards post-political forms of regulation (see also Garsten and Jacobsson, 2007). Drawing on Chantal Mouffe’s notion of ‘the post-political...

Social movement activism requires emotional motivation and entails emotional costs, and, because of this, activists tend to be deeply involved in the management of emotions – or emotion work – and not just in connection with protest events, but also on an everyday basis. Based on a case study of animal rights activism in Sweden, this article identi...

In Poland, legacies of the communist past interact with contemporary domestic opportunity structures, conditioning and shaping the forms of action of the country’s animal rights movement. The resulting ‘NGO-isation’ of civil society impedes effective collective action, with animal rights activists’ engagement channelled towards ‘animal charity’ and...

Drawing on Durkheim's sociology of morality, which identifies ideals and norms as the key components of morality, this article outlines a theoretical model for understanding how social movements can bring about legitimate social change. Social movement activists, we propose, can be conceptualized as followers and pursuers of sacred ideals. As such,...

Introduction In the 1990s a new approach to economic, employment and social policy emerged in the EU in the wake of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), to respond to low growth, to increase global competitiveness and to meet the challenges of ageing populations and new family patterns. An important component of this new approach was the European...

The article examines the organisational production and distribution of normatively charged ideas for governing transnational business. Based on the United Nations Global Compact Initiative, it is argued that the UN version of ‘corporate social responsibility’ (CSR) builds on a metanarrative of rationality, involving ideals of transparency and legib...

Chapter 6 deals with the labor market policy of the OECD and compares its Jobs Study from 1994 with the re-assessed Jobs Strategy of 2006. The initial Jobs Study recommended a single policy package which was based on a deregulation framework in many respects. The re-assessed strategy, in contrast, recognizes two equally legitimate paths: the libera...

I 30 år har OECD trummat ut sitt budskap om behovet av strukturreformer på arbetsmarknaden. Receptet har varit likartat oavsett patient och ofta tycks förskrivningen ha skett enligt devisen ”ju beskare medicin, desto trovärdigare behandling”. Många blev därför förvånade när OECD, efter en ambitiös översyn av sin jobbstrategi, år 2006 gav upp tanken...

This study regards time as a horizon for action and argues that conception of time has great implication for political self-understanding. In the study, the modern conception of time, with its orientation towards the future, is contrasted with the late modern conception of time, which is characterized by a de-legitimization of utopian thinking and...

In this article, we use the case of a government scandal in Sweden to develop a theoretical perspective by which to understand the moral nature of political scandals. We draw on insights from Durkheim's sociology of morality and point, inter alia, to the ritual character of scandals. However, in contrast to most Durkheimian readings, the perspectiv...

This article addresses the question of legitimacy, both in a general theoretical perspective and more specifically in relation to policy making in the European Union. It is argued that Jürgen Habermas' recent theories of discursive will formation provide a useful frame work for understanding the current problems of legitimacy in European policy mak...