Browsing by Author "Jonsson, Emelie"

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Är det här en kulle att dö på? -Om socialsekreterare, etisk stress och new public management
(2022-02-08) Jonsson, Emelie; Karlsson, Erik; Göteborg University/Department of Social Work; Göteborgs universitet/Institutionen för socialt arbete
Sweden’s social services are often the subject of media scrutiny. The critique is often about the low quality of the services provided and that the orders carried out by professionals aren’t firmly established within the law that determines its framework. This is often explained by professionals lack of experience and qualification, or that the social services lack resources. The Swedish social welfare system has during the last decades undergone major organizational changes, mainly due to new public management reforms. The aim of this study was to examine if and, if so, how social workers within the Swedish social services experience moral distress related to the shortcomings of the Swedish welfare and the organizational conditions under the current forms of control which attach importance to efficiency and measurability of results, and how this affects their work and their clients. The method chosen for this study was qualitative interviews with four social workers operating within the Swedish social services. The interviews were analyzed with theories about moral distress and new public management. Results show that social workers experience moral distress based on their commitment to their clients and because of the organisational framework not letting them perform their work in accordance with their professional judgement.
Imagining a Place in Nature: Using Evolution to Explain the Early Evolutionary Imagination in Literature
(2017-10-19) Jonsson, Emelie
After Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, Victorian literature overflowed with images of man’s new place in nature. Those images can be explained by modern research that builds on Darwin’s theory: the evolutionary social sciences and evolutionary literary theory. Humans are predisposed to focus on the human life cycle and the threats and rewards that most commonly attend it. Our cosmic stories about ourselves—from world religions to tribal mythologies—tend to depict the universe in terms of human life trajectories and social relationships. Thus, Darwinian evolution is a unique challenge to the human imagination. Unlike the pagans who transitioned to Christianity, the Victorians did not exchange one compelling human story for another. They faced an abstract theory that dwarfs human concerns in an amoral cosmos. Authors responded by engaging evolution in allegorical battle, by drawing heroes and villains from evolutionary history, by personifying the impersonal natural forces, or by taking the imaginative challenge itself as their topic. I argue that the evolutionary myth-making of late-Victorian authors served a purpose rooted in universal psychological needs. According to a prominent hypothesis in evolutionary art theory, humans create art as a way to orient our minds to the world, guiding behavior that is partially detached from instinct. Darwin’s non-mythological origin story replaced illusions of an anthropocentric world with illusions of a hostile world robbed of coherence. Previous literary scholarship has offered purely cultural explanations of the Darwinian influence on literature. One tradition, going back to the middle of the 20th-century, has simply described the influence from one text to another. A more recent tradition has appropriated Darwinism to poststructuralist theories, seeing it as a narrative complicit in or resistant to ideologies. Neither of these traditions registers the unique psychological nature of the influence. This evolutionary interpretation includes case studies from the most widely accessible adventure story to the most stylistically complex existential meditation: from Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Edward Bulwer Lytton to Jack London and Joseph Conrad. Understanding these literary responses of the past can help illuminate our current responses to an imaginative problem that has been passed down to us unsolved.