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PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to analyse everyday practices in e‐government from a labour perspective in order to understand how administrative rationalization and citizen service become connected in the organizational restructuring of the labour process, namely job codification and specification and rule observation.Design/methodology/approachThe analysis applies an organizational e‐government implementation perspective and labour process theory to an analysis of a Swedish municipality's implementation of e‐government, using both qualitative and quantitative data.FindingsThe main finding is the formulation of two distinct types of ideal employee – "monotonized administrators" and "personalized bureaucrats" – who carry e‐government work in different directions according to administrative rationalization and the service offered citizens.Originality/valueThe paper extends our knowledge of everyday practices in e‐government from a labour perspective. It offers practitioners as well as researchers new insights by analysing the transformation of practice as an ongoing process, characterized by micro‐political translation processes amongst actors, actions, and meanings in both rhetoric and practice.

In this article two different analytical aspects of organisational life, the rhetoric of management and the reality of work are used as a context for discussing some implications of the Swedish action plan for eGovernment. Through the lens of these dimensions it becomes obvious that the invisible values within the Swedish action plan for eGovernment are embedded in the rhetoric of management and visible in the reality of work.

Compared to many other countries, Sweden has managed the COVID-19 pandemic with no lockdowns, less regulation and more voluntary action expected of citizens and organizations. In this article, the authors explore media representations of national preventative strategies and how they were anchored in broader discourses. The article aims to analyse the development of crisis narratives and struggles over legitimacy during the first phase of the COVID-19 pandemic in Sweden. Employing a critical discourse analysis, the authors investigate the editorials and opinion articles in Sweden's largest morning newspaper, Dagens Nyheter, during the spring of 2020. The authors combine descriptive analyses of the development of the crisis narratives with discursive analyses of conflicting ideologies in the debate. The study indicates that three crisis narratives dominated the debates: health, the economy and democracy. Within and between these narratives, struggles over legitimacy in the handling of COVID-19 were captured in several conflicting perspectives or paradoxes: Swedish exceptionalism versus the world, centralization versus decentralization and herd immunity versus herd humanism.

At the end of March 2020, international media present Swedish management of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic as soft and irresponsible. Thus, Sweden, which is usually regarded as exceptionally risk averse and cautious, has chosen an unexpected risk management approach. The aim of this article is to reflect on how the Swedish government has managed the Covid-19 pandemic until early April 2020 from two theoretical perspectives, the risk society thesis and governmentality theory. We make a brief review of how previous pandemics have been managed compared to Covid-19 and try to understand the consequences of the Swedish handling of present pandemic with a particular focus on the governance of the pandemic and the exercise of power rather than definite risk management strategies during the pandemic.

The overall aim of this article is to explore the ways in which refugee reception and integration work is storied in the local newspapers of two rural municipalities in northern Sweden. Our results show that the strong emphasis on integration through employment present in national policy regimes is not readily visible in local media portrayals of integration. Instead, integration work is framed as a matter of commitment of individual refugees, volunteers and government administrative staff and, thus, as work with a high level of social support. We argue that the frame of commitment itself needs to be viewed in relation to the growing public support for limiting the resources available for this kind of work, as well as for the limitations for refugees to enter Sweden in the first place.

Drawing from the experiences gained from a research project focusing on gender-based violence (GBV) in rural Sweden, this paper focuses on how government policies aimed at addressing GBV against girls and young women are enacted, translated and contested at the regional and local level. In previous studies the regional level is seldom focused on, and we know very little of the connection between the local and regional levels. The paper is based on analysis of interviews with key policy actors at the regional and local levels, including school personnel. Departing from policy enactment combined with institutional ethnography, the paper explores how policies on GBV are translated into prevention activities, but also how the different actors enact the policy in relation to the institutional setting and professional role. The analysis also shows how the enactment is entangled in understandings of gender, race, equality and traditions. The analysis makes the different power relations visible, and the production of power in policy is better understood, as it highlights how some dimensions are given priority in relation to others.

The so-called freedom of movement granted to EU citizens has made it easier for economically deprived EU citizens to seek their livelihood beyond the borders of their homelands and this has created one of our time's most socially excluded groups. In Sweden, over the recent years they have come to be known as vulnerable EU citizens. This article analyses what happens when there are no unified regulations as to how Swedish municipalities should prevent social exclusion among those who are not Swedish citizens. Our purpose is to study how officials and politicians normalize certain beliefs with regard to the (im)possibility of providing support to socially-excluded EU citizens residing in their municipalities. The material used in the study is interviews with officials and politicians in Västernorrland, a region of northern Sweden. The study shows that in the absence of common guidelines the normalization of Swedish citizenship has taken place as the basis of the rights to welfare. It is Swedish citizenship that provides you with access to the community; at the same time, it is this community which must be guarded. Prohibition of EU citizens is commonly legitimized by a concern for the municipality's citizens as if the closing down of the settlements makes social exclusion seize to exist or at least seize to be a problem for the municipalities. This narrative illustrates that it is the settlements and their flaws, rather than the inhabitants' social exclusion in a broader context that are perceived as problematic.

Translating the urban based national policy of eldercare to a rural context is seen as a key activity for rural policy actors since the fact that rural municipalities face different issues to urban areas is not reflected in the operational plans for eldercare. The aim of this article is to highlight the process by which urban based policies are enacted in rural municipalities by analysing how the home-care principle in eldercare policies is framed and implemented by different actors at various administrative levels in three rural municipalities. It becomes evident how the institutional position is crucial in the enactment process.

AbstractThe overall aim of this article is to explore how the intersectional approach is used in health‐risk research. The concept has been recognized in health‐risk research since the early 2000s, but not as much as in the broader field of health‐inequality studies. However, in the past 5 years, Social Science and Medicine has published a series of review articles that argue for the necessity of bringing intersectional perspectives to the field of health‐risk studies more generally and quantitative health‐risk research in particular. Asking what it means for health‐risk researchers to practise intersectionality shows the implications of translating a theoretical approach across fields and disciplines. When applying intersectional theory in relation to health‐risks, the theoretical conceptualization of health and risk are often very limited and treated as fixed categories – something that becomes problematic when taken within an intersectional framework. This does not mean that this work is unimportant, but rather that the link between theoretically driven intersectionality and empirical‐focused health research is weak. In order to overcome the dividing lines of health‐risk research and intersectionality, we argue for a new approach that echoes the 'doing gender' of gender studies: doing risk.

This paper addresses the challenges to the theories of the political sphere posed by a digital society. It is suggested that this most evident at the intersection between understandings of technology, performativities, and politics that combines empirical closeness with abstract understandings of socio-political and cultural contexts. The paper exemplifies this by reporting on a study of online citizen dialogue in the making, in this case concerning school planning in a Swedish municipality. Applying these theoretical perspectives to this case provides some key findings. The technological design is regarded as restricting the potential dialogue, as is outlined in different themes where the participants enact varying positions—taxpayers, citizen consumers, or local residents. The political analysis stresses a dialogue that lacks both polemic and public perspectives, and rather is characterized by the expression of different special interests. Together, these perspectives can provide the foundation for the development of applying theories in a digital society.