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[The problem of representation and bureaucracy. Minority administrators' practices of advocacy in public organizations]The issue of (un)equal representation and the politics of presence in political organizations is central to democratic legitimacy. The theory of representative bureaucracy suggests that the diversity in public organizations reinsures that the interests of different groups are represented in decision-making and implementation processes. The purpose of Nazem Tahvilzadeh's article is to enhance the understanding of if and how senior-level public administrators with ethnic minority background advocate groups whom they identify with. Advocacy is defined as the intention to benefit a certain group in order to improve their living conditions. The empirical material consists of 52 qualitative interviews in five Swedish municipalities, public documents and other written sources. The focus is on the narratives of 12 public administrators about their work and the issue of advocacy. The results show that advocacy does occur in public organizations and that it can be categorized in seven different practices targeting individuals or policy issues. The study actualizes the importance of representative public administration as a central quality of representative government.Publication history: Published original.(Published 2 December 2015)Citation: Tahvilzadeh, Nazem (2015) "Till frågan om representation och byråkratin. Minoritetsadministratörers företrädarpraktiker i offentliga organisationer", in Arkiv. Tidskrift för samhällsanalys, issue 4, pp. 121–149. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.13068/2000-6217.4.4 ; Frågan om (o)jämlik representation och närvarons politik i politiska organisationer är central för demokratins legitimitet. Teorin om en representativ byråkrati föreslår att mångfalden i den offentliga förvaltningen tillser att olika gruppers intressen representeras i respektive organisationers beslut och verksamhet. Syftet med Nazem Tahvilzadehs artikel är att öka förståelsen för om och i så fall hur tjänstepersoner med minoritetsetnisk bakgrund i ledande befattningar företräder grupper som de identifierar sig med. Företrädarskap definieras som ett medvetet handlande att gynna en viss grupps levnadsvillkor. Det empiriska materialet består av 52 kvalitativa intervjuer i fem svenska kommuner, offentliga dokument och andra textkällor. I fokus står 12 offentliga tjänstepersoners berättelser om deras arbete och företrädarskap. Resultaten visar att företrädarskap förekommer i offentliga organisationer och att detta kan kategoriseras i sju olika praktiker inriktat gentemot enskilda individer eller gentemot policynivå. Studien aktualiserar betydelsen av representativitet i offentlig förvaltning för representativa styrelseskicks kvalitet.Publiceringshistorik: Originalpublicering.(Publicerad 2 december 2015)Förslag på källangivelse: Tahvilzadeh, Nazem (2015) "Till frågan om representation och byråkratin. Minoritetsadministratörers företrädarpraktiker i offentliga organisationer", i Arkiv. Tidskrift för samhällsanalys, nr 4, s. 121–149. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.13068/2000-6217.4.4

The relationship between actors & structures is an important ontological aspect in social sciences. Today, the notion that this relationship should be seen as categorized by mutual interdependence, & consequently that both actors & structures should be considered primary ontological categories, is not a very controversial one. More controversial, however, is the phenomenon in social as well as natural sciences commonly known as social constructionism (or constructivism). In this article, the actor structure thinking is related to different constructionist conceptions. In connection with this, it is argued that if constructionism is primarily seen as an epistemological approach, it is in fact a natural consequence of the actor structure thinking. From the actor structure perspective then, the constructionist advocacy for contextualism -- ie, the ambition to accentuate the temporally & spatially distinctive character of reality in the analysis -- can be viewed as an important methodological guideline. 1 Table, 1 Figure, 35 References. Adapted from the source document.

This thesis investigates the role of ideas in policy processes. It does so using three theories as a starting point, selected for being alike yet unique in their description of how ideas may "get stuck" in the organization's production and reproduction of policy. The theories are Discourse Coalition Framework, Advocacy Coalition Framework, and Punctuated Equilibrium Theory. These theories have very different emphases but share constructivist traits and an interest in how social processes of meaning making take form in a rather "traditional" organizational setting, thus paying attention to, if not reducing the study to, the institutions of representative democracy. Two theoretical problems are identified within these theories. They concern 1) the mechanism and 2) the object of analysis. The theoretical question addressed in part I is: How are we to understand the proposition that ideas may cause stability in policy processes? What is the underlying mechanism? It is argued that the cognitive mechanism which the theories use should be substituted with a social psychological one. The assumption that stability is created when political actors conform to the ideas of others when they are confronted with apparent unanimity among policy makers, rather than that they internalize these ideas, makes both greater stability and instability in policy processes more plausible. Part II poses the question; if we are to investigate policy stability and instability using the discussed theoretical perspective, what unit of analysis should we use? In other words, what is a policy? It is argued that if ideological stability is seen as an effect of how policy formulation is organized (as is argued in part I), then close attention must be paid to processual factors when it is decided what unit of policy, on what level, might be explained. It is furthermore argued that although we may theoretically form an idea about substantially coherent patterns of policy recognizable as a policy, which should result from stable organizational patterns of communication in the policy process, it remains an empirical question if and where these patterns can actually be found. An analysis of Swedish environmental policy is performed to allow for observations of the degree to which empirical evidence is consistent with the policy patterns predicted by the theoretical assumptions outlined in part one.