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Abstract
Despite concerns about negative consequences for clients and permanent staff, temporary agency workers (TAWs) are frequently employed to manage staff shortages in personal social services (PSS) in Sweden and elsewhere. Drawing on qualitative interviews with thirty-four TAWs, managers and permanent social workers, this article aims to enhance our understanding of how TAWs are utilised in the PSS and the impact this has on (i) the preconditions for TAWs and (ii) the work environment for permanent employees. The findings suggest that TAWs are mainly contracted for core tasks, and often for heavy-duty work. In order to meet demands for expedient case administration, the supportive aspects of social work are sometimes deprioritised. Permanent staff report that positive effects of the use of TAWs include relief of workload and an influx of new knowledge, whereas negative effects include stagnated work development, deteriorating group dynamics and additional work. Moreover, it is shown that TAWs often reside in the periphery of the organisation and that they typically are contracted on an ad-hoc basis and during times of crisis. It is suggested that the organisational conditions that TAWs are contracted to help remedy paradoxically are unlikely to create the best preconditions for a successful use.

The personal social services in Sweden have undergone major changes during recent decades, partly due to the reforms caused by the influence of New Public Management (NPM) and partly due to the trend towards greater specialisation. These changes have had consequences for both social work management and for social work practice. The consequences for practice have gained attention both from research and from the field, but the consequences for managers have rarely been discussed. In this thesis therefore, the attention is directed towards the managers. Inspired by a mixed methods approach, this thesis aims to explore the personal social service managers' perceptions of their organisational conditions and the content of their everyday work, as well as to interpret the managers' experiences against the background of NPM influence, increasing specialisation and the specific circumstances that come with managing politically governed organisations. The results show that the personal social service managers in general were former professionals with extensive social work experience. The managerial work was to a great extent perceived as reactive, entailing constant interruptions and acute situations. The managers experienced a heavy workload that appeared to prevent them from engaging in strategic work and leadership to the extent that they would have liked. Substantial proportions of managers were dissatisfied with their own levels of influence compared to that of politicians and, in general, the managers perceived themselves to have more influence regarding aspects that were operational (such as methods and working procedures) compared to aspects related to organisational structure. Through the managers' descriptions of their relations with politicians, it was revealed that the roles could be muddled, and that both managers and politicians could have difficulties in distinguishing between politics and administration, or politics and profession. Several changes that could be attributed to the influence of NPM were described by the managers. Some changes had consequences for the more technical side of management, e.g. decentralised budget responsibility, increased focus on cost effectiveness and downsizing of support functions. Other changes were more related to the overarching concept of management, which had consequences for the choice of managerial training, the expectations placed on the managers, and to some extent the managers' own views on what good management should be. Despite the many indications of changes that may be attributed to NPM, an important result in this thesis is that NPM does not appear to have permeated social work to the degree that might have been expected. Rather, there are clear indications of a remaining professional identity among managers on all managerial levels, as well a continuing bureau-professional regime within the personal social services.

AbstractSocial services in the welfare sector consist of women‐dominated jobs generally characterised by arduous working conditions, including exposure to client violence. Although there is a rather extensive research base on client violence in institutional social services, less is known about how client violence is handled in noninstitutional social services. Using longitudinal data obtained from the Swedish Work Environment Agency's register on work injuries caused by workplace violence, we examined the effects of organisational factors and employee characteristics on the reporting of client violence in noninstitutional social services. We found that most of the reports about work injuries caused by client violence are filed by public employers and that most reports concern occupational groups performing direct care services in clients' homes. Moreover, although most reports include female employees and incidents of physical violence, reports concerning male employees are comparatively more likely to include physical violence, and reports concerning female employees are comparatively more likely to include threats. Taken together, our findings point to a much‐needed improvement of health and safety measures for care workers in noninstitutional social services in Sweden.

Knowledge regarding the needs of parents whose children are placed in out-of-home care is still limited and studies focusing on interventions targeting this group are scarce. This article explores birth parents' views on their needs and perceptions of support delivered by two different interventions: one offering support to individuals and the other providing a parental group. The methodology comprised a thematic analysis of 14 qualitative interviews. Parents' expressed needs revolved around five issues: participation and influence in the relations with child welfare services; their emotional needs; their social needs; their relationship with their child; and practical and financial arrangements. The results revealed that the two interventions had overlapping as well as specific supportive functions and that these met some of the identified needs. Both programmes provided an opportunity for parents to speak openly about their grief and experiences of stigma and to receive help to cope with it, thus functioning as empowering and stigma-relieving practices that provide emotional support. The intervention that offered individual support contributed to a reduction in parents' feelings of powerlessness when negotiating with child welfare services and functioned as an equalising practice by facilitating participation and influence. The parental group succeeded in reducing parents' social isolation, providing social support and functioning as a normalising practice. However, neither intervention was explicitly perceived as helpful for improving parent–child relationships or practical and financial arrangements. The study highlights how the parents benefitted from receiving different types of support and contributes to knowledge about a group that has been neglected in practice and research.

The field of residential care for children and youth in Sweden is often termed unstable and turbulent. During recent decades the field has been subject to many changes. In this study, the development and changes in the field of residential care for children and youth in terms of ownership structure and treatment ideas will be analysed. The study is particularly focused on the changes in ownership structure that have taken place during the 2010s. It also analyses changes in treatment ideas, and discusses how these may relate to transformations of ownership structures as well as to dimensions of institutional logics, such as legislation and other types of normative pressure from the environment. The result reveals that of the approximately 450 treatment oriented residential care units (excluding homes for refugee children), close to 80 % are today run by private companies and to a growing extent by large for-profit corporations. Parallel – and possibly related – to the changes in ownership structure, the dominant treatment ideas have changed over time. The changes in the field can be summarised as a transformation from small-scale establishments with a family logic, to large-scale establishments with a professional logic, or more specifically from a domination of small family run units with milieu therapy to big business and a focus on evidence based interventions.

AbstractResearch concerning outcomes for children who have been placed in out‐of‐home care has indicated that the care may have unwanted consequences. However, there has been no coherent terminology for differentiating between different types of such unwanted consequences. In this article therefore, we attempt to disentangle different aspects of potentially harmful care for looked after children, as well as to discuss potential pathways to more systematically approach and report adverse events for this group. In this endeavour, we turn to two adjacent disciplines, medicine and psychology, where these issues have received more interest. The applicability of the concepts used in these fields is discussed, and it is concluded that although they provide some help in categorizing different aspects of harmful care, the complexity of out‐of‐home care makes existing models difficult to adopt without adjustments. This has consequences for the possibility of evaluating care in research, as well as for monitoring adverse events in practice. Importantly, the causality will often be unknown. We therefore suggest that it is essential to shed more light on how decisions should be made about when to intervene or not in out‐of‐home care, despite limited information.

AbstractIn what has become quite a turbulent quasi‐market for residential care for children and youth, providers now compete for public contracts. To create visibility and attract customers, many providers use marketing activities to project the desired impression of themselves to maintain or strengthen their market position. In this article, we analyse how companies that provide residential care for children manage the impressions they project on their websites and in advertisements. The results reveal that residential care providers use a range of impression management strategies to enhance their organizational image and to respond to potentially damaging or threatening images. The information providers choose to disclose leaves customers—in this case, the social workers responsible for choosing and purchasing care on behalf of clients—with rather limited opportunities to evaluate the quality of care. This is a significant problem considering other, more reliable, sources of information are difficult to access.