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This thesis studies how sick leave legitimacy is managed in interaction and develops an empirically driven conceptualization of 'legitimacy work'. The thesis applies an ethnomethodological framework that draws on conversation analysis, discursive psychology, and membership categorization analysis. Naturally occurring interaction is examined in two settings: (1) multi-party meetings at the Swedish Social Insurance Agency, in which participants assess and discuss the 'status' of the sick leave and plan for work rehabilitation; (2) peer-based online text-in-interaction in a Swedish forum thread that gathers people on sick leave. The thesis shows how mental states, activities and alternative categories function as resources for legitimacy work. However, such invocations are no straight-forward matter, but impose additional contingencies. It is thus crucial how they are invoked. By detailed analyses of the interaction, with attention to aspects such as lexicality and delivery, the thesis identifies a range of discursive features that manage sick leave legitimacy. Deployed resources are also subtle enough to be deniable as legitimacy work, that is, they also manage the risk of an utterance being seen as invested or biased. While legitimate sick leave is a core concern for Swedish policy-making, administration, and public debate on sick leave, previous research has for the most part been explanatory in orientation, minding legitimacy rather than studying it in its own right. By providing detailed knowledge about the legitimacy work that people on long-term sick leave do as part of both institutional and mundane encounters, the thesis contributes not only new empirical knowledge, but a new kind of empirical knowledge, shedding light on how the complexities of sick leave play out in real-life situations. Traditional sociological approaches have to a significant extent treated legitimacy as an entity with beginnings and ends that in more or less direct ways relate to external norms and cognitive states, or that focus on institutions, authority or government. By contrast, the herein emerging concept 'legitimacy work' understands legitimacy as a locally contingent practicality – a collaborative categorially oriented accomplishment that is integral to the interactional situation.

This article uses discursive psychology and conversation analysis to examine a Swedish online forum thread in which participants, who present as women on long-term sick leave, make gender equality relevant when discussing housework. Doing housework can challenge the legitimacy of the sick leave, and as a woman, one risks being categorized as a "housewife." Such a categorization can work to undermine sick leave legitimacy and is also problematic given norms of gender equality in Sweden. In the studied data, such inferences are managed by invoking a (male) partner in accounts for housework or by humorous and ironic gendered categorizations. The analysis focuses on how this is done in the fine details of the interaction, showing how sick leave legitimacy is managed within a normative framework of gender equality. The study provides a practically oriented approach to the gendered aspects of sick leave legitimacy and sheds light on the delicate interplay between gender equality and sick leave in everyday life.

Talk about gender equality in relation to parental leave is pervasive in Sweden. The state encourages families to share parental leave and has recurrently tasked the Swedish Social Insurance Agency (SSIA) to promote gender equality. As theories and applications of street-level bureaucracy have emphasized, how policy is practically realized in social interaction with clients is an important question, specifically whether gender equality discourse also permeates such encounters. We use conversation analysis to examine how equal sharing of parental leave is raised in interactions between parents and practitioners at the SSIA. The data consist of 300 telephone calls, 378 email exchanges, and 642 Facebook exchanges. Our analysis indicates that the talk of equal sharing is not as omnipresent as previous research might suggest. When parents orient to equal sharing, they tend to describe parental responsibilities, while practitioners connect equality to regulations that in themselves work to promote equal sharing. Equal sharing is also a resource for negotiating the citizen–state relationship, as parents complain about state interference while practitioners in response must balance provision of personalized support with the state imperative to promote sharing. The study highlights the complex work of practitioners in the "feminist welfare state" and sheds light on nuanced notions of equality promotion.

AbstractSwedish welfare organisations have a long history of promoting gender equality and inclusivity, involving implementation of more gender‐inclusive language (e.g., non‐gendered terminology). This study analysed the use of non/gendered expressions at the Swedish Social Insurance Agency, as state policy is realised in conjunction with personalised service in textual interaction in screen‐level bureaucracy. We drew on conversation analysis and membership categorisation analysis to analyse 378 email interactions between clients and social insurance officers, focusing on gendered institutional terminology and gendered person references. The findings suggest that social insurance officers avoided a heteronormative language, in line with Swedish official public language policy, but that a gender‐neutral language may come at the cost of formality, standardisation, and de‐personalisation. The study brings new knowledge on the ways in which street‐level bureaucrats manage responsiveness and standardisation in digital text‐based interaction with clients.

AbstractThis article investigates how mental health counsellors on helplines in Sweden deal with racism from callers who self‐categorise as non‐racialised. Previous studies have identified racism as a problem in health care interactions, but there is limited knowledge about the features of racialised talk and how staff respond. In this study, we use conversation analysis and membership categorisation analysis to examine racialised talk in 17 audiorecorded calls, a subset of 458 calls to suicide preventive helplines. The analysis shows that racialisation functions as a resource for callers to make sense of their mental health difficulties. This speaks to the complexity of responding to racism in a mental health setting, as counsellors must see to callers' needs, and calling out racialised talk may alienate callers. Call‐takers manage this problem in three ways: (1) questioning racialised talk, (2) supporting the callers' stance in a way that makes it ambiguous if call‐takers are coproducing racism or affiliating with callers' lives being difficult and (3) supporting callers' problems as mental health issues while resisting a potentially racist trajectory. The study offers direct insight into the workings of racism in health care and how practitioners can balance health care users' needs for support with an antiracist position.

Abstract
This study examines recent changes in Swedish regulations for child maintenance in relation to post-separation families with experiences of either intimate partner violence (IPV) or conflict. The reform limited the possibility to rely on the state for maintenance in cases of cooperation difficulties. For IPV cases, the Swedish Social Insurance Agency (SSIA) can function as an intermediary between parents, but such exceptions are made upon assessment and require disclosure of IPV. This study investigates consequences of the maintenance reform and the ways in which it may re-actualize conflict and IPV between separated parents. Data consist of 649 recorded phone calls (~ 55 h) to the SSIA concerning maintenance. Disclosures of post-separation conflict or IPV were found in 132 of these calls; these calls were analyzed using thematic analysis. The maintenance reform's requirement to reinstate contact with a former partner can re-actualize experiences of parental conflict as well as IPV by (a) re-surfacing physical or psychological abuse; (b) continued or accelerated cooperative difficulties; (c) renewed financial control; and (d) 'paper abuse' and new possibilities to display diligence or exert camouflaged control. This can take the form of explicit acts of abuse, anxiety or concern caused by the renewed contact, or being forced to deal with difficult memories. We argue that the Swedish maintenance reform ignores the reality of parental conflicts and IPV by re-actualizing such experiences in a range of ways.

Welfare organisations across the world are becoming more streamlined with less time for building relationships with clients, rendering non-governmental organisations increasingly important for welfare provision. In this paper, we investigate an understudied area in social work: the small talk through which volunteer organisations conduct social work tasks in interaction with clients. The data consist of 108 phone calls to a helpline that offers social contact to older people, recorded in 2020 in Sweden. We use conversation analysis to investigate how callers and call-takers rely on and produce informal sociability in providing support for clients. Specifically, we show that talk about the weather, a prosaic small talk topic, is interwoven with institutional work. By allowing or preventing outdoor activities, weather is a conduit for call-takers and callers to introduce and navigate norms of remaining active as an older adult. Cultural understandings and concerns about good or bad weather allow participants to move between reproducing client/service-provider asymmetries and reaching affiliative affective stances. Thus, the supposedly banal topic of the weather, known as a resource for sociability amongst the unacquainted, is, in this setting, used in ways particular to social work practice.

Denna artikel undersöker hur äldre människor begripliggör sin situation i telefonsamtal till en stödlinje några månader in i covid-19-pandemin. Genom att använda ett vardagssociologiskt ramverk för att analysera inringares olika sätt att i samspel med stödlinjens volontärer förstå krisen, nyanserar artikeln nuvarande kunskap om äldre människors situation. Den tematiska analysen visar att inringarna begripliggör krisen i förhållande till sociala relationer på ett personligt, anonymt och abstrakt plan. Inringarnas sätt att bemöta avbrott i sina vardagliga rutiner – genom anpassning eller kritisk omvärdering – är kopplade till olika former av tillit: basal tillit till en social verklighet som delas med en annan person eller reglerande tillit till en samling normer som är oberoende av denna andra. Medan samtalen visade få exempel på positiva anpassningar i personliga relationer, synliggjorde de att anonyma och abstrakta relationer fungerar som viktiga tillgångar för att både bibehålla och omvärdera vardagslivet när det är kris. Även om bristen på trygga personliga relationer under pandemin pekar på äldres utsatthet, demonstreras inringarnas styrka i och med deras aktiva arbete för att behålla och bygga viktiga anonyma och abstrakta relationer.

Given the emphasis on communication in social work, the empirical study of social work interactions is an important area for research. By examining recordings of naturally occurring social interaction and analysing participants' practices in close detail, conversation analysis (CA) provides rigorous resources for understanding the practical challenges and opportunities of professional intervention. Since the origins of CA in the 1970s, this approach has been used for investigating interactions in a wide range of institutional domains. Based on articles published in peer-reviewed journals in English, this scoping review maps the development of CA in social work research. The review gives an overview of the institutional contexts, professional groups and client groups that have been investigated using CA methods, as well as how their interactional practices have been examined. We show contributions of CA to understanding social work in terms of specific interactional practices, how practitioners accomplish challenging institutional activities in interactions and how theories and ideals about interactions relate to social work practice. The review highlights research gaps concerning clients' resources for pursuing agendas, embodied conduct in social work, contributions to the cumulative body of CA research and implications for practice. We discuss these findings in relation to CA as a relatively new approach in social work research and the challenges which CA may need to address to become a more integrated part of social work research and practice.