Rörelsens ledare: Karriärvägar och ledarideal i den svenska arbetarrörelsen under 1900-talet

Abstract

ABSTRACT Petra Pauli, Rörelsens ledare. Karriärvägar och ledarideal i den svenska arbetarrörelsen under 1900-talet, Avhandlingar från Institutionen för historiska studier, (Göteborg 2012) Written in Swedish with an English summary (The Leaders of the Movement – Career patterns and leader-ideal in the Swedish labour movement during the 20th Century). ISBN 978-91-628-8486-4

The overall purpose of this thesis is to analyse the leader-ideals and career paths within the Swedish labour movement, particularly in relation to the tension between leader and movement that could arise if the leaders became bourgeoisified in their new roles and social environments. The point of departure for the thesis’ theoretical position is taken from the German sociologist Robert Michel’s study On the Sociology of Political Parties in Modern Democracies (1911), in which Michel’s argues that the risk for embourgeoisement of the elite of the labour movement came from two directions: the recruitment of academics and officials from bourgeois backgrounds, and also the embourgeoisement of the labour leaders that would occur in their transition from the status of physical labourer to that of office holder. The result shows that the embourgeoisifying tendencies of the Swedish labour movement pertaining to the increasing bureaucratization and professionalization in the 1910s came to an end. A characteristic aspect for the recruitment- and career patterns that arose thereafter was that the leaders, like the members, came almost exclusively from working class backgrounds, and that they were recruited from the labour movement’s suborganisations. In order to avoid the embourgeoisement of the leaders in their new environments, a leader-ideal developed which’ norm structure was formed by class-consciousness, loyalty, and idealism. Whosoever departed from this norm structure was unable to be taken up into the leader strata. An important conclusion is that the movement as a conscious strategy throughout the 20th Century continued to sustain these career strategies and leader-ideals through the unspoken yet pronounced aim to keep the leaders from becoming bourgeois.

Keywords: Swedish labour movement, Social Democracy, SAP, LO, class consciousness, Iron law of oligarchy, embourgeoisement, career patterns, ideology, class, gender, feminism, political elite, trade union elite.