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This paper elucidates how Swedish child welfare social workers manage complexity co-occuring in the families with which they work and the organisational contexts of practice. Focus groups were held with social workers in three municipalities in Sweden who described work processes generally and in response to a fictitious vignette. The vignette was constructed as a complex family situation to explore how social workers approach complexity when faced with a family with complex needs. Findings showed that social workers are challenged in their everyday work where they are aware of the many needs in a family. They focus on immediate conditions for children while recognising that some problems are less amenable to being solved. However they try to manage complexities related to families as well as the structural conditions of work by sorting, prioritising and oscillating between a child focus and a family service orientation. This paper serves as a necessary reminder of the complexity of social work in the broader area of child welfare and raises further questions about the use of comparative typologies to explain social work practices.

Alternative approaches to power in youth politics are needed to overcome the conceptual dichotomy between youth political action that is either linked to – or delinked from – state institutions. Th ...

Book Review: I. Harslof & R. Ulmestig (2013) Changing social risks and social policy responses in the Nordic welfare states. Houndmills, Palgrave Macmillan.

Data from Swedish court judgments of all 124 women convicted of homicide during 20 years was analyzed. The typical pattern was an abused woman who kills her intimate partner at home with a knife, often with alcohol involved. A subsample (n = 66) was analyzed qualitatively, with a focus on intimate partner relationships. The findings indicate that female homicides usually take place after a long progression of violence and reflect women’s subordinate gendered position. Situational triggers finally lead up to the killing event. Gender equality and the so-called woman-friendly welfare state in Sweden do not appear to reduce women’s volatility in violent relationships.

This paper aimed at examining the barriers to and facilitators of disseminating and utilizing the results of a local Swedish school survey. Interviews with 21 school district managers/principals we ...

Looking After Children (LAC) is an approach (care philosophy and working tools) used to assess the psycho-social development of children being cared for by child welfare agencies. It is an internat ...

This study examines discursive representations of Thai-Swedish couples in the Swedish daily press. The sample studied includes 17 articles. The study shows that the couples are constituted as inher ...

The issue of discretion in social work has been a central topic for social workers and social work educators ever since Michael Lipsky's seminal study was published, first as a journal paper and la...

Due to social policy reforms in Sweden, professionals with a social and a medical education work together. Reported conflicts within municipal elderly and disabled care, related to professional tra ...