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There is a conception that contemporary work lives become ever more complex. Pioneering research has indicated that work lives have indeed become more complex, yet at a modestly increasing pace. This paper uses Swedish registry data across an exceptionally long time period, including cohorts born from 1931 to 1983. The following conclusions are drawn using state-of-the-art methods of measuring sequence complexity. For early-careers, an increasing complexity trend is evident between the 1950s and 1960s birth cohorts, yet complexity fluctuates around a stable trend for the 1970s birth cohorts and onward. For mid-careers, which are considerably more stable on average, complexity has decreased among women born between the 1930s and the early-1950s. However, the opposite trend holds true for men, resulting in a gender convergence in work complexity. We observe a subsequent standstill of the mid-career complexity trend across both genders, followed by a modest decline for the last observed cohorts. Analyses point to educational expansion as an important driver of the initial increase of early-career complexity. Taken together, this study affirms an initial shift to more work life complexity in the twentieth century, yet we find no unidirectional trend toward more complexity over the last decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Upper classes and elites are usually exclusive circles which are hard to enter. In this paper we approach one such group using a focus group interview: a group from the Swedish-speaking upper class in officially bilingual Finland. Our paper addresses Bourdieu's idea of distinction by cultural or taste distinctions. In comparison to some international studies on elites and upper classes, our group was surprisingly keen on expressing disgust towards other tastes and lifestyles and therefore other classes and/or social groups. One might be surprised at how efficiently distinction works in the Swedish-speaking old upper class and how politically incorrect its outspokenness about cultural superiority is. In this specific group, there is a double-distinction: not only are Finnish speakers looked down upon regardless of their class position, almost any other group is, too. In this sense, this is more or less a case par excellence of Bourdieu's theory of distinction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main question this paper seeks to tackle is whether men and women, as some argue, commit themselves to employment differently or for different reasons. The focus is thus on the mechanisms behind non-financial employment commitment (such as the possible effect of family situation, occupational position, and of different work-related preferences and experiences). The question is comparatively investigated in Sweden and Great Britain, where, in spite of many similarities, the existence of different societal/cultural contexts with relevance for gender and work has been suggested. The results in this paper suggest that the most important motivator for non-financial employment commitment is interesting work, which was found to have a positive effect both as a work goal and as experienced in the workplace. Although women and men in both countries displayed quite similar patterns, some country and gender differences appeared in the way occupational position and degree of education relate to this type of commitment. Higher occupational position and education where more clearly related to higher degrees of commitment for British women than for British men, while the Swedish gender pattern was reversed. In the concluding discussion, possible explanations and implications are discussed, and avenues for further research are suggested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Attitudes towards redistribution, and their links to political trust, are compared in Sweden and Norway using data from the International Social Survey Program (ISSP). Attitudes towards redistribution are quite similar in both countries at an aggregate level, but class differences and differences between left and right party sympathizers are larger in Sweden than in Norway. Levels of political trust and personal political efficacy are clearly higher in Norway, but in neither of the countries are there any links between political efficacy and trust on the one hand and attitudes towards redistribution on the other. It is concluded that arguments about such a link may be wrong in putting emphasis on political trust as a determinant of attitudes towards redistribution. A possible alternative interpretation of the findings in this paper is that they are specific to the Scandinavian countries, where welfare state intervention has been institutionalized to a higher degree than elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do separate factors of the social background – parental education, social class, social status and earnings – affect educational attainment independently of each other and to what extent is the association between these background factors and educational attainment transmitted via cognitive ability? Close to 28,000 randomly selected Swedish school children participated in a test of cognitive ability at age 13. Information on the four origin factors and on the children’s highest level of education was collected from Swedish registers with few missing data. The data were analysed by means of ordinary least squares regression. Parental education and social class are more highly associated with educational attainment than parental status and earnings, but all four factors have an effect on level of education independently of each other and of cognitive ability at age 13. Between 16 and 19 percent of the variance in education is accounted for by the social origin factors. Around one third of the effects of the origin factors is transmitted via cognitive ability. The paper ends with a short discussion of possible mechanisms, other than cognitive ability, that link social background with education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper proposes a methodology for using survey data to understand the composition of elites, through analysing the pool of potential members. An occupational-based measure of ‘potential power elite’ (PPE) is created and compared with other measures of occupational advantage. It is argued that this measure can be utilised to explore if the processes causing certain social groups to be under-represented in elite positions are around selection or the population recruited from. We provide analysis of elite positions in the UK and Sweden, demonstrating differences in terms of the potential pool of elite members and the occupational histories of people of those employed in roles associated with elite recruitment. We argue that understanding the composition of the PPE provides a more nuanced analysis of the processes of meritocracy in accessing positions of power and social influence. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper reports the findings of a longitudinal case study of sheltered employment for activating so-called occupationally disabled people in Sweden. Data consist of interviews, archival studies and participant observation on how occupationally disabled people's employability is to be promoted and the consequences of such activities. It is argued that those that, for one reason or another, are unable to live up to the norms of being a 'normal' and hence fully active citizen, are objectified as passive and unemployable persons through the same principles that aim to make them active. Through its emphasis on ability, strength, and competence, the 'active society' may raise the bar of employability higher than ever before. As a result, an increasing number of people risk disablement and indeed end up as 'disabled'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the role of social capital in the status attainment process and examines the link between the hiring process and the potential pool of social capital embedded in a person's network. The analysis is based on a sample of people newly employed by the municipal services in Malmö, the third largest city in Sweden. Jobs in this sector of labour market are mainly low-paid, and are dominated by women and immigrants. The position generator method is used to measure social capital, understood as assets captured by individuals in social networks. The findings demonstrate that access to social capital is positively related to work experience, a higher educational level, having a partner, and active membership of voluntary associations. It is also apparent that being an immigrant is associated with a substantial social capital deficit. Regarding the return on capital, the results show that both human capital and social capital were rewarded with higher wages and more adequate jobs. Furthermore, we found that social capital is associated with better labour market outcomes, whether or not respondents reported that they obtained their current jobs using informal job-search methods. Results also show similar returns on access to social capital for natives and immigrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the outset of the coronavirus crisis, Sweden has been heavyily criticized for its exceptional pandemic mitigation policy. Sweden is often accused pursuing an abnormal and 'disastrous strategy' that puts its citizens' lives at risk. In this article, we analyze the most widespread criticisms of Swedish 'exceptionalism', in order to identify and describe the prevailing implicit norms on which the criticisms are based. While the explicitly proclaimed norms assert that the anti-pandemic measures are aimed at keeping the number of infections below the maximum capacities of the national health systems, the implicit norms turn out to be significantly different, i.e. primarily about the number of coronavirus-related deaths. Moreover, we point out that this norm is not about protecting lives in general, but only about protecting people from dying with a coronavirus infection. We argue that this implicit norm is asymmetric and therefore not tenable, because it implies that a death from the coronavirus is considered more important than a death from another infection. Against this backdrop, we conclude by discussing possible future developments of this norm and call for an international public debate about how much protection against infectious diseases society should provide in general – not only against one particular disease. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We analyze occupational attainment and career progression over the life course for Swedish men and women, born in 1925-1974. Careers progress (measured as improvements in occupational prestige) fast during the first 5-10 years in the labour market, and flatten out afterwards (approximately between 30-40 years of age). This is in line with the occupational status maturation hypothesis. Both class origin and educational attainment affect occupational attainment. The effects of educational attainment vary more over the career, but depend on the educational attainment level in question. Successive cohorts of women gain higher occupational prestige, and continue to gain in occupational prestige longer across their careers. We also find that cohorts that entered the labour market in times of economic downturns and restructuring (the oil crisis years and the early 1990s) had more difficulties in establishing their careers. Returns to education generally increase across cohorts, while class background differences decrease, as has been reported in earlier research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies on divorce have found consistent empirical evidence that a negative association exists between marital disruption and children's wellbeing, life chances and intergenerational relations. However, there are relatively few studies on the long-term effect of divorce on parent-child contacts. Furthermore, contemporary research is confronted with two declining effect hypotheses. Firstly, it has been argued that the negative effects of divorce may possibly decrease as children's age at time of divorce increases; secondly, it has been suggested that the consequences of divorce might be less severe the more frequent marriage dissolution is in a society. By using data from Sweden, Denmark, Belgium and France from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe, we analyze the existing relation between parents' divorce and the intensity of parent-child contacts. Furthermore, we provide some empirical evidence on the two declining effect hypotheses. Our findings show that divorce has long-term negative effects on the intensity of intergenerational relations. The results do not provide any evidence in favor of either the individual or the collective declining effect hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The principle aim is to analyse care policies and mothers' employment patterns in Austria in comparison with The Netherlands and Sweden. While Sweden fosters a Universal Breadwinner Model, Austrian policies set incentives for mothers to organize private care for their children for a relatively long period of time, similar to the Caregiver Parity model. The Netherlands, approaching the Universal Caregiver model, support part-time integration into the labour market, combined with private part-time caring facilities for the children. The cross-national comparative approach has been adopted throughout the description of care policies and the data analysis, using the European Social Survey. Drawing on the strong cross-national differences in policies and employment patterns, we outline the main principles of a Universal Care Course (UCC). The model addresses questions about how to achieve the ideal of a smooth transition between work and care in a gender-sensitive way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is widely recognised that a work activity can be undertaken in a variety of socio-economic relations. However, the ways in which work and non-work are differentiated, or intersect, are under-specified in existing research. This article takes the social care of older people as a field through which to explore the articulation of work and non-work. It analyses the nature of the boundaries between what counts as work, and what counts as non-work; the intersections of work and non-work, and what forms this embeddedness takes; and the variation of this articulation across different European countries (Italy, The Netherlands, Sweden, and England). Three dimensions of articulation of work and non-work emerged from the analysis: (1) love or money; (2) morality versus instrumentality; and (3) from professional demarcations to embeddedness in everyday life. The article sets out how these vary by country. Overall, the research makes a general contribution to the sociology of work, and to our understanding of cross-national variation in the labour and provision of eldercare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International business travellers are sometimes described as a cosmopolitan elite, with a strong international orientation but a low preference for local involvement and local obligations. This article uses Swedish survey data to investigate these claims, by comparing the orientations of persons who frequently travel abroad at work with the orientations of other workers. Frequent international travellers generally have more cosmopolitan orientations than others, but the local ties are not significantly weaker among frequent travellers than among occasional travellers or non-travellers. In some respects, notably social networks and associational activities, international travellers tend in fact to be more involved than non-travellers in all the four examined spheres - locally, regionally, nationally and internationally. Concerns among social theorists that highly mobile, locally disconnected elites are undermining social cohesion may therefore be exaggerated. Theoretically, the study suggests that localism and cosmopolitanism should not be treated as necessarily opposite and mutually exclusive phenomena, but that mobility in various forms may be used to combine local and cosmopolitan resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the personal spatiality of people with different economic and cultural backgrounds, using Estonia as an example of a 'new' EU country and Sweden as an example of an 'old' one. On the basis of survey data, the contacts, interest and feeling of cultural closeness of different cultures and the connections of these with socio-demographic variables, societal trust, and regional identities are analysed. The results show that personal spatiality is spread homogeneously over social groups in Sweden. In Estonia, personal spatiality differentiates socio-demographic groups and is related to general social trust. The society is separated into a personally 'globalised' group and a group that feels uncertainty in connection with EU enlargement and globalisation. In the new member states of the EU, cultural adaptation without overcoming transition trauma may cause cultural isolation, even xenophobia. Avoiding resistance against transcultural communication patterns contributes to the development of common values and interregional economic cooperation between EU member states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditionally, employee control has been considered a buffer against stress, but debate about the transformation of work raises new questions. Can individual control really counteract the high demands in downsized organisations? Or does it make flexible work even more difficult to define and delimit, physically and emotionally? This article, based on survey data from 800 Swedish employees, studies the effect of job control on work hours, work-family conflict and psychological wellbeing. The results show that high job demands are associated with longer work hours, more work-family conflict and lower wellbeing, while control has positive effects, even when demands are high. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this study is to understand and explain what I shall call aesthetic markets. A particular market of this kind is analysed, namely the market for fashion photography in Sweden. To understand and analyze a market from a sociological perspective, I argue, one primarily needs to perceive the construction of meaning within the market. The actors in this specific market construct what may be called 'aesthetic values'. The market also distributes status of identities as a result of the interactions between producers and consumers. Photographers develop personal styles, and when a style intersects with status an identity is constructed in the market. The status distribution also structures the prices in the market. The conclusion of the article is that aesthetic markets can be conceptualized as status distributors of identities. The conclusion also suggests that this approach to aesthetic markets may be useful for studies of other markets as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cross-national studies of occupational sex segregation have shown not only that industrial countries are markedly segregated by sex, but also that the level of sex segregation varies substantially between countries. The overall aim of this article is to study any association between patterns of cross-national variation in levels of sex segregation and the structuring of welfare states. It represents a new approach to comparative studies of occupational sex segregation as it uses log-linear modelling and comparable micro data from the Luxembourg Employment Study (LES) to describe patterns of sex segregation in the labour market. The results presented here demonstrate some cross-national variation in levels of sex segregation. However, considering substantial cross-national differences in the structure of the welfare state, the relative distribution of women and men in the occupational structure largely follows the same pattern in the Western countries included. Cross-national variation in the structure of the welfare state seems therefore to be of primary importance for understanding the cross-national variation in sex segregation between unpaid labour in the home and paid labour in the market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the complex meaning of ethnicity and identity in the multicultural society of today with reference to Swedish society. Sweden, a pronouncedly multiethnic society, is today undergoing division along ethnic lines. Social inequalities tend to be understood in terms of cultural difference. This development seems to be characteristic of most European countries. Culture is usually connected with ethnicity and race and understood as pure, as an 'essence', as related to sonic original and eternal ethnic core. In this way important aspects of cultural dynamic in multicultural society are left unobserved. What is usually not recognized are cultural crossings and the emergence of composite identities. Within the framework of multicultural society new cultures, identities ant ethnicities are created. Departing from some general features of the dominant discourse on ethnicity, its historical roots and its relations to culture and multiculturalism, I discuss problems of cultural essentialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]