Malin Akerstrom
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 220693 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Malin Akerstrom |
| NOMBRES | Malin |
| APELLIDO | Akerstrom |
| FIRMA | AKERSTROM M |
| AFILIACIONES | Lund University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9780-7569 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 40 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 101 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 38 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 2 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1986 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 5 |
Fostering Remuneration and Unlawful Deductions Foster Care and Money
This thematic issue explores the complex and often controversial intersection of foster care and financial compensation. While foster care is often seen as a more inclusive and family‐oriented alternative to institutional care, the role of money in caregiving remains morally and socially sensitive. Drawing on sociological theories, particularly Viviana Zelizer’s concept of “hostile worlds,” the articles examine how economic and intimate spheres a…
The social career of foster parents – the ambivalent meanings of money in the commitment process
This article examines how the meaning of financial compensation may be redefined over time in the lives of Swedish foster parents. Drawing on forty qualitative interviews, I demonstrate that while foster parents may initially downplay or disregard the monetary aspects of fostering, they can later come to depend on this income, not necessarily out of self-interest, but as a means of deepening their engagement and sustaining long-term care commitme…
A Sharp Ethnographer for Swedish Researchers
Bob Emerson's influence on Swedish sociology is wide-ranging and multifaceted. Bob presented this ethnomethodological approach to ethnography on several occasions to a Swedish audience. Our loose network of cultural criminology in Lund developed into what is now the Crime, Control, Culture group at our department, a successful research community consisting of BA and MA courses, researchers, lecturers, postdocs, and graduate students involved in a…
Why Meetings Matter
This innovative book argues that meetings are a crucial feature of modern organisations, demonstrating that, contrary to popular belief, meetings are what define, represent and maintain organisations. Through an in-depth analysis of ethnographic case studies, Patrik Hall, Malin Åkerström and Erika Andersson Cederholm illustrate the inner workings of meetings, exploring phenomena such as meeting chains, meeting escapes, the digitalisation of meeti…
The double-edged sword – abused women’s experiences of digital technology
Technology has become a vital part of people’s lives. Mobile phones, smart phones, social media platforms, apps and other internet-connected devices and software have changed our way of interacting with each other, as well as managing everyday tasks. In this article, the use of such technology is discussed in relation to its integration in the lives of women who are victims of domestic violence. The study is based on interviews with 21 Swedish wo…
Ambivalent and Consistent Relationships
Social networks are usually considered as positive sources of social support, a role which has been extensively studied in the context of domestic violence. To victims of abuse, social networks often provide initial emotional and practical help as well useful information ahead of formal institutions. Recently, however, attention has been paid to the negative responses of social networks. In this article, we advance the theoretical debate on socia…
Sensitive Stuff and Expressive Caution
Questions related to crime and migration are delicate matters, potentially because of associations with ethnicity, racism and oppressive politics and ideology in both the past and the present. The delicate nature of issues of crime and deviance may result in expressive caution exercised by both researchers and those studied. In this article, we discuss these dynamics in the research process in terms of access, data collection, writing and discuss…
Meetings or Power Weeks? Boundary Work in a Transnational Police Project
Meetings are common in contemporary working life, but they are often overlooked in academic studies and sometimes defined as empty or boring by employees. Yet, the meeting society is being reproduced again and again. There seem to be hidden ways to incorporate meetings into today’s working life without arousing critique about pointless activities and deviations from what should really be done. One strategy was illustrated in a study of a transnat…
"Producing People" in Documents and Meetings in Human Service Organizations
This thematic issue is devoted to how human service work may be influenced by accentuated administrative processes, as well as reinforced by digitalization, in contemporary society. The public sector has expanded the requirements of documentation, auditing and evaluation practices. Policy, problems and persons are shaped and enacted in meetings and documents. Meetings and documents comprise the forum for making highly important decisions for the …
Ruled by the calendar
This paper discusses modern organizational meetings in the public sector, with a focus on time, specifically the planning and scheduling of time among managers. In this qualitative analysis, data were gathered through an ethnographic study of managers in several public organizations, all in Sweden. During interviews and field observations, managers told about their time work involving strategies for dealing with their fully booked calendars, or f…
Emotion Management Where Emotions Shouldn't Be
The Merry-Go-Round of Meetings
Modern society has been called “a society of organizations,” and meetings are considered indispensable. However, a recurring cultural theme in contemporary working life is complaints about excessive and time-consuming meetings. The present article analyzes a contrasting case concerning a Swedish youth care project that employed a set of “coordinators” to maintain close contact with young people and their parents. Over time, these coordinators ado…
Suspicious Gifts
Gifts have been given and received in all eras and societies; gifts are part of a universal human exchange. The importance of creating and sustaining social bonds with the help of gifts is widely acknowledged by social scientists, not only from anthropological but also from economic, sociological, and political science perspectives. Contemporary anti-corruption campaigns, however, have led gifts to be viewed with ever-increasing suspicion, becaus…
Betrayal And Betrayers
Betrayal has a deep fascination. It captures our imagination in part because we have all betrayed or been betrayed, in small or large ways. Despite this there has been little serious work on the subject. It was this absence that inspired this book.As Akerstrom notes, betrayal is something that most people have encountered at some point in their lives. She defines betrayal as a breach of trust, when information is shared beyond an agreed upon boun…
Struggling for One’s Name
Under scrutiny (what we term a “bribery gaze”), many interpersonal exchanges in work contexts are perceived as bribes rather than gifts, tokens of appreciation, or mundane favors. Current Swedish bribery laws are strong, and the media keep a vigilant eye out for suspicious activities. From a wide set of qualitative data, we selected 13 interviews with formally-accused middle managers and low-level officials in Sweden who claimed to be innocent of…
With a little help from my friends
The present article analyses the indistinct boundaries between formal and informal economic exchanges, with a focus on friendship and work relations. To illustrate these intersections, we present a study of Swedish lifestyle entrepreneurs who run small-scale horse-related enterprises. The specific characteristics of this form of business – in which the horse farm owners/operators, customers, employees and voluntary workers share a leisure interes…
The Crisis Model
The model of “crisis” is a culturally shared and widespread idea of human reactions to misfortunes such as accidents, diagnosis of disease, divorces, becoming a parent of a disabled child, and so on. The crisis model conveys the idea of coming to terms with unwanted experiences while advancing through various phases, for example, of denial, processing, and acceptance. The language of crises is integrated into Western emotional culture, particular…
Case history discourse
In numerous social control settings, staff routinely write case histories on clients to assist colleagues and authorities in treatment decisions. In this article, we examine how such institutional writing constructs ‘working versions’ of youngsters, portraying their objects of care as personally troublesome. Simultaneously, the institution is portrayed as facelessly, uniformly and collectively remedying their behaviour. Using material from a cent…
Introduction to the Special Issue “Policing Ethnicity
On the one hand European countries talk the humanitarian and cosmopolitan politics of inclusion of ethnic minorities with a battery of integration policies, on the other hand these same societies practice the policies and practices of exclusion. In this special issue we address this disjuncture and what we refer to as the European moral dilemma, in much the same way that Gunnar Myrdahl, in his influential study from 1944— The American Dilemma— po…
Didier Fassin, Enforcing Order
Most incidents of urban unrest in recent decades - including the riots in France, Britain and other Western countries - have followed lethal interactions between the youth and the police. Usually these take place in disadvantaged neighborhoods composed of
Curiosity and Serendipity in Qualitative Research
This presentation argues that we seldom speak of our findings in qualitative research as serendipitous, although we have splendid possibilities to make surprising findings. In order to enhance the chances and sharpen our analyses we have to read broadly but also pay attention to details in our data. We should avoid societal or scholarly conventionality, even be disobedient to recommendations, if this blinds us to new meanings of our findings. The…
Interviewees with an agenda
Social constructionists consider interviews as mutually co-constructing meaning. But what if the interlocutors do not seem to agree on what they construct? What if the interviewee has a particularly strong agenda, far from the intended research topic? Are these 'failed' interviews? We address this issue using a 'deviant' interview in a study of 'being a neighbour'. First, we add to the discussion of interviewees' category representativeness by ac…
Balancing Contradictory Identities-Performing Masculinity in Victim Narratives
Modern sociological identity analysis argues that people perform a preferred identity, rather than revealing an essential self. But what if a given situation necessitates performance of apparently incompatible identities? Earlier research seems to suggest that people will resist one identity and foreground another. Here, the authors present another strategy of delicately balancing the performance of conflicting identities. Their interviews of Swe…
Expressing and Examining Morality in Everyday Life
Social comparisons, seeing oneself in relation to others, are universal, common, and perhaps even necessary. In a study of parents of deaf children, intense, open, and mutual examinations were voiced in parental groups, meetings between parents and professionals, and interviews. These comparisons were generated in a specific situation created by successful claims for separate milieus advocated by the Deaf movement. The local culture, “the deaf wo…
Between Worlds
Slaps, Punches, Pinches-But not Violence
This article presents an analysis of boundary work in the context of care for the elderly, where violence appears to be widespread but is still relatively unacknowledged. Talk about aggressive patients was formulated in a particular way among workers in a nursing home. Nursing home staff described how the elderly residents sometimes slapped, pinched, or hit them. Although staff members could describe these acts as intentional, although they could…
Waiting-A Source of Hostile Interaction in an Emergency Clinic
In a study of a Swedish emergency clinic, it was found that patients' waiting produced different forms of hostile interaction between staff members and patients. A patient's hostility was interpreted as being not only a result of waiting per se but also-and predominantly-due to some features inherent in the relevant situation: the semiotics of space and the organization of waiting. Emotional and interactional responses to patient hostility includ…
Inventing Criminology
Outcasts in prison
The literature on prisoners is extensive but tends to neglect the "outcasts among outcasts." This article discusses how two such groups of outcasts—informers and sex offenders—are viewed by other inmates. It is argued that there is a qualitative difference in the moral condemnation of the two. This is shown in their different victim status and in that responsibility and motives are attributed differently. Furthermore, excuses can be considered fo…
Interviewees with an agenda
Social constructionists consider interviews as mutually co-constructing meaning. But what if the interlocutors do not seem to agree on what they construct? What if the interviewee has a particularly strong agenda, far from the intended research topic? Are these 'failed' interviews? We address this issue using a 'deviant' interview in a study of 'being a neighbour'. First, we add to the discussion of interviewees' category representativeness by ac…
The double-edged sword – abused women’s experiences of digital technology
Technology has become a vital part of people’s lives. Mobile phones, smart phones, social media platforms, apps and other internet-connected devices and software have changed our way of interacting with each other, as well as managing everyday tasks. In this article, the use of such technology is discussed in relation to its integration in the lives of women who are victims of domestic violence. The study is based on interviews with 21 Swedish wo…
With a little help from my friends
The present article analyses the indistinct boundaries between formal and informal economic exchanges, with a focus on friendship and work relations. To illustrate these intersections, we present a study of Swedish lifestyle entrepreneurs who run small-scale horse-related enterprises. The specific characteristics of this form of business – in which the horse farm owners/operators, customers, employees and voluntary workers share a leisure interes…
Introduction to the Special Issue “Policing Ethnicity
On the one hand European countries talk the humanitarian and cosmopolitan politics of inclusion of ethnic minorities with a battery of integration policies, on the other hand these same societies practice the policies and practices of exclusion. In this special issue we address this disjuncture and what we refer to as the European moral dilemma, in much the same way that Gunnar Myrdahl, in his influential study from 1944— The American Dilemma— po…
Snitches on snitching
The Merry-Go-Round of Meetings
Modern society has been called “a society of organizations,” and meetings are considered indispensable. However, a recurring cultural theme in contemporary working life is complaints about excessive and time-consuming meetings. The present article analyzes a contrasting case concerning a Swedish youth care project that employed a set of “coordinators” to maintain close contact with young people and their parents. Over time, these coordinators ado…
Balancing Contradictory Identities-Performing Masculinity in Victim Narratives
Modern sociological identity analysis argues that people perform a preferred identity, rather than revealing an essential self. But what if a given situation necessitates performance of apparently incompatible identities? Earlier research seems to suggest that people will resist one identity and foreground another. Here, the authors present another strategy of delicately balancing the performance of conflicting identities. Their interviews of Swe…
Doing Ambivalence
This article considers the social organization of responses among human service staff to changes in public policy, using a study of a Swedish treatment center for juveniles as an illustration. The stance toward a new treatment ideology, “family-work,” was not one of either accepting or rejecting the new policy; the staff conveyed both embracing and distancing. Policy innovations, it is argued, create conditions that work as a catalyst for “doing …
Curiosity and Serendipity in Qualitative Research
This presentation argues that we seldom speak of our findings in qualitative research as serendipitous, although we have splendid possibilities to make surprising findings. In order to enhance the chances and sharpen our analyses we have to read broadly but also pay attention to details in our data. We should avoid societal or scholarly conventionality, even be disobedient to recommendations, if this blinds us to new meanings of our findings. The…
The social construction of snitches
The norm against snitching is emphasized in criminal groups. However, before punishing the culprits, they need to be identified. This article describes how Swedish inmates in a prison situation try to find out who the snitches are and whether they have informed outside or inside prison. This includes a process of searching for information, such as discerning which inmates receive otherwise unearned privileges or who talk to guards or have motives…
Case history discourse
In numerous social control settings, staff routinely write case histories on clients to assist colleagues and authorities in treatment decisions. In this article, we examine how such institutional writing constructs ‘working versions’ of youngsters, portraying their objects of care as personally troublesome. Simultaneously, the institution is portrayed as facelessly, uniformly and collectively remedying their behaviour. Using material from a cent…
Villains, Fools and Heroes
During the last two decades, the teaching of deaf students in Sweden has been characterised by a change of ideology. The aim of this study is to elucidate the consequences of this alteration on teachers of deaf students. Teachers whose training took place a good many years ago and is now held to be 'wrong' are working alongside younger colleagues, who were trained according to an instruction method rooted in the ideology now considered to be 'rig…
Ambivalent and Consistent Relationships
Social networks are usually considered as positive sources of social support, a role which has been extensively studied in the context of domestic violence. To victims of abuse, social networks often provide initial emotional and practical help as well useful information ahead of formal institutions. Recently, however, attention has been paid to the negative responses of social networks. In this article, we advance the theoretical debate on socia…
"Producing People" in Documents and Meetings in Human Service Organizations
This thematic issue is devoted to how human service work may be influenced by accentuated administrative processes, as well as reinforced by digitalization, in contemporary society. The public sector has expanded the requirements of documentation, auditing and evaluation practices. Policy, problems and persons are shaped and enacted in meetings and documents. Meetings and documents comprise the forum for making highly important decisions for the …
Struggling for One’s Name
Under scrutiny (what we term a “bribery gaze”), many interpersonal exchanges in work contexts are perceived as bribes rather than gifts, tokens of appreciation, or mundane favors. Current Swedish bribery laws are strong, and the media keep a vigilant eye out for suspicious activities. From a wide set of qualitative data, we selected 13 interviews with formally-accused middle managers and low-level officials in Sweden who claimed to be innocent of…
Outcasts in prison
The literature on prisoners is extensive but tends to neglect the "outcasts among outcasts." This article discusses how two such groups of outcasts—informers and sex offenders—are viewed by other inmates. It is argued that there is a qualitative difference in the moral condemnation of the two. This is shown in their different victim status and in that responsibility and motives are attributed differently. Furthermore, excuses can be considered fo…
Crooks and Squares
Crooks and Squares
The social construction of snitches
The norm against snitching is emphasized in criminal groups. However, before punishing the culprits, they need to be identified. This article describes how Swedish inmates in a prison situation try to find out who the snitches are and whether they have informed outside or inside prison. This includes a process of searching for information, such as discerning which inmates receive otherwise unearned privileges or who talk to guards or have motives…
Snitches on snitching
Betrayal and Betrayers
Betrayal has a deep fascination. It captures our imagination in part because we have all betrayed or been betrayed, in small or large ways. Despite this there has been very little serious work on the subject. Betrayal is a breach of trust, when informants share beyond an agreed upon boundary of relations, whether that boundary is a pair of friends or a nation. Taking as a point of departure Simmel’s work of on secrets and secrecy, categories of b…
Betrayal and Betrayers
Inventing Criminology
Sociologisms and Sarcasm in Swedish Shelters
In a study of women shelters in Sweden, the collective view of battered women evinced by shelter workers was found to be remarkably similar to the one reported from American shelters. Various “sociologisms” and “psychologisms” with regard to the specialness of these women were outwardly expressed, though in public discourse shelter people emphasize the normality of women subjected to abuse. Descriptions common to both countries depict women as be…
Villains, Fools and Heroes
During the last two decades, the teaching of deaf students in Sweden has been characterised by a change of ideology. The aim of this study is to elucidate the consequences of this alteration on teachers of deaf students. Teachers whose training took place a good many years ago and is now held to be 'wrong' are working alongside younger colleagues, who were trained according to an instruction method rooted in the ideology now considered to be 'rig…
Waiting-A Source of Hostile Interaction in an Emergency Clinic
In a study of a Swedish emergency clinic, it was found that patients' waiting produced different forms of hostile interaction between staff members and patients. A patient's hostility was interpreted as being not only a result of waiting per se but also-and predominantly-due to some features inherent in the relevant situation: the semiotics of space and the organization of waiting. Emotional and interactional responses to patient hostility includ…
Police persuasion
It is a common theme in sociological literature on ‘domestic violence’ that the police do not consider it as proper police work. A study of Swedish police, however, did not support this unambiguously. Rather, the police engaged in various strategies to construct a formal case where women were said to have been abused. Since some women were reluctant to co-operate, the police applied interactional persuasion techniques in cases which were thought …
Slaps, Punches, Pinches-But not Violence
This article presents an analysis of boundary work in the context of care for the elderly, where violence appears to be widespread but is still relatively unacknowledged. Talk about aggressive patients was formulated in a particular way among workers in a nursing home. Nursing home staff described how the elderly residents sometimes slapped, pinched, or hit them. Although staff members could describe these acts as intentional, although they could…
Sociologin som försvann - en uppvisning av missvisande urval
Sociologisk Forsknings digitala arkiv
Doing Ambivalence
This article considers the social organization of responses among human service staff to changes in public policy, using a study of a Swedish treatment center for juveniles as an illustration. The stance toward a new treatment ideology, “family-work,” was not one of either accepting or rejecting the new policy; the staff conveyed both embracing and distancing. Policy innovations, it is argued, create conditions that work as a catalyst for “doing …
Between Worlds
Expressing and Examining Morality in Everyday Life
Social comparisons, seeing oneself in relation to others, are universal, common, and perhaps even necessary. In a study of parents of deaf children, intense, open, and mutual examinations were voiced in parental groups, meetings between parents and professionals, and interviews. These comparisons were generated in a specific situation created by successful claims for separate milieus advocated by the Deaf movement. The local culture, “the deaf wo…
Balancing Contradictory Identities-Performing Masculinity in Victim Narratives
Modern sociological identity analysis argues that people perform a preferred identity, rather than revealing an essential self. But what if a given situation necessitates performance of apparently incompatible identities? Earlier research seems to suggest that people will resist one identity and foreground another. Here, the authors present another strategy of delicately balancing the performance of conflicting identities. Their interviews of Swe…
Curiosity and Serendipity in Qualitative Research
This presentation argues that we seldom speak of our findings in qualitative research as serendipitous, although we have splendid possibilities to make surprising findings. In order to enhance the chances and sharpen our analyses we have to read broadly but also pay attention to details in our data. We should avoid societal or scholarly conventionality, even be disobedient to recommendations, if this blinds us to new meanings of our findings. The…
Interviewees with an agenda
Social constructionists consider interviews as mutually co-constructing meaning. But what if the interlocutors do not seem to agree on what they construct? What if the interviewee has a particularly strong agenda, far from the intended research topic? Are these 'failed' interviews? We address this issue using a 'deviant' interview in a study of 'being a neighbour'. First, we add to the discussion of interviewees' category representativeness by ac…
Introduction to the Special Issue “Policing Ethnicity
On the one hand European countries talk the humanitarian and cosmopolitan politics of inclusion of ethnic minorities with a battery of integration policies, on the other hand these same societies practice the policies and practices of exclusion. In this special issue we address this disjuncture and what we refer to as the European moral dilemma, in much the same way that Gunnar Myrdahl, in his influential study from 1944— The American Dilemma— po…
Didier Fassin, Enforcing Order
Most incidents of urban unrest in recent decades - including the riots in France, Britain and other Western countries - have followed lethal interactions between the youth and the police. Usually these take place in disadvantaged neighborhoods composed of
The Crisis Model
The model of “crisis” is a culturally shared and widespread idea of human reactions to misfortunes such as accidents, diagnosis of disease, divorces, becoming a parent of a disabled child, and so on. The crisis model conveys the idea of coming to terms with unwanted experiences while advancing through various phases, for example, of denial, processing, and acceptance. The language of crises is integrated into Western emotional culture, particular…
Case history discourse
In numerous social control settings, staff routinely write case histories on clients to assist colleagues and authorities in treatment decisions. In this article, we examine how such institutional writing constructs ‘working versions’ of youngsters, portraying their objects of care as personally troublesome. Simultaneously, the institution is portrayed as facelessly, uniformly and collectively remedying their behaviour. Using material from a cent…
Struggling for One’s Name
Under scrutiny (what we term a “bribery gaze”), many interpersonal exchanges in work contexts are perceived as bribes rather than gifts, tokens of appreciation, or mundane favors. Current Swedish bribery laws are strong, and the media keep a vigilant eye out for suspicious activities. From a wide set of qualitative data, we selected 13 interviews with formally-accused middle managers and low-level officials in Sweden who claimed to be innocent of…
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