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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 is about some Swedish organizations that are connected to the labour movement and their actions to cope with the new hegemony around market liberalism. After the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 90-ties, the liberal order, meaning market economy and democracy reduced to the election of elites, has become totally domineering both in the western and in the former communist world. Even left wing oriented organizations have adopted their operations and activities accordingly, especially in their internal governing structure. The organizations that I have studied, mainly the Swedish Tenants organization at its local level of Stockholm, developed during the 70-ties and the 80-ties a participatorier member structure. The "Swedish model" of consensus/corporative decision-making and agreement, used by them on the national level for decades, was during that period introduced also on local and regional levels. In the 90-ties these organizations, according to earlier studies, have instead adapted a more costumer-oriented and elite-democratic way of operating and governing. These later changes could be seen as contradicting both the development of the 80-ties and the basic values of those organizations. My questions are therefore how these changes became possible and my aim is to study how the active members have contributed to this development. Using a constructionist theoretical perspective and discourse analysis, I am showing how this potential conflict between a participatory and an elite-democratic model can be reconciled by a discursive construction. The active members have in fact been able see these changes just as a modernization of their organization. From their point-of-view their organization still works in a participatory democratic way. My analysis shows how this ambiguousness and potential paradox became possible thru internal discourses and under influence from the liberal hegemony.