Mid Sweden University

This study explores the governance and implementation of local labor market programs (LLMPs) in Swedish municipalities, analyzing the tension between national mandates and local policy practices. Drawing on institutional ethnography (IE), intersectionality, and emotional labor theories, we examine interviews with politicians and managers from eight municipalities. Politicians frame LLMPs as budget-driven initiatives, depoliticizing local labor market issues to comply with national policies like the January Agreement. This approach prioritizes efficiency, workfare models, and quick labor market entry, often sidelining individualized support. In contrast, managers describe their role as navigating policy constraints while addressing diverse local needs. They emphasize the challenges of aligning "one-size-fits-all" activation strategies with the realities of their participants, advocating for flexibility and adaptation within national frameworks. These contrasting perspectives reveal how LLMPs, although locally implemented, are shaped by textually mediated national policies, which influence local governance practices. Politicians focus on the need to meet national objectives, while managers struggle to reconcile these goals with participant-centered approaches. This study contributes to the understanding of how LLMPs operate within a governance framework that prioritizes efficiency over holistic support, highlighting the limitations of workfare-oriented policies and their implications for labor market integration.

This article proposes a new, critical methodological framework aiming to unearth hidden, forgotten or banished issues inresearch using feminist theory, such as criminology and sociology, synthesising feminist theory and hauntology. By developing aframework for “speaking with ghosts”, we provide concrete tools to theoretically interrogate feminist issues of the past, presentand future using a lens of archetypical imagery in order to prompt ethical as well as political critique. The framework is illustratedby unearthing gendered and feminist spectres of three photographs taken by young women in a recent photovoice studyexploring everyday violence among youth. By applying the framework on the photographs, drawing on conceptual metaphors ofboth the spectral and of fairytales, which are always and already important sites of feminism, the study unpacks how spectresrelating to heteropatriarchy and gendered power orders still haunt the everyday lives of young people and how the use of afeminist hauntology can provide potential for ethical, social and political change. Unlike previous consolidations of feminism andhauntology, this methodological framework is designed to promote political, ethical and social change as well as critique bydelineating concrete ways of teasing out the feminist spectral in late modern texts, thus going beyond previous engagements withthe spectral.

This article explores active labor market policies through a utopian lens, focusing on Swedish municipal activation services. Users of such services participated in visionary workshops and were invited to dream about what could be different in their (working) lives. In the analysis of the participants’ dreams, a tension between the internalization of and resistance to employability narratives, market logics, and capitalist structures emerges. By examining these dynamics, the article demonstrates how utopian thinking, rooted in experiences from the margins of the labor market, can inspire critiques of current labor systems and help in envisioning possible futures.

Local Labour Market Programs (LLMPs) at the municipal level in Sweden is a part of Active Labour Market Policies (ALMP). The LLMPs are aimed at enhancing people considered to be distant from the labour market, with particular complex problematics, opportunities to be self-sufficient and assume a place in the labour market. People with functional variations, immigrants and young people have difficulty entering the labour market, a problem exacerbated by the pandemic crisis. In this article we explore how ableist discourses operates in institutional narratives about work, the worker and abilities in relation to participants in LLMPs. The article is based on interview with managers and local politicians in charge of the LLMP units in eight Swedish municipalities. In the interviews we explore the mechanisms of the LLMPs and analyses them in relation to ableist norms. The managers and politicians’ narratives conceptualize skills and measures of productivity intrinsically excluding people who are not seen as being able to undertake productive work in line with the imposed requirement. The study shows that the LLMPs reproduce disability inequality but at times also create spaces of inclusion by questioning the idea of a ‘real job’.

Using the spectral as a conceptual metaphor, we explore narratives within Sweden’s welfare institutions and policy discourses surrounding vulnerable EU citizens. We aim to provide a new understanding of vulnerable EU citizens as the social ghosts of our time by exploring how the concept of the social ghost and hauntology can be used to perform ethical critique of social injustice. By excavating examples from already gathered material, we explore the unseen within the already seen to critically examine how vulnerable EU citizens are constructed in social welfare narratives. We argue that the terminology of vulnerable EU citizens not only is constructed as uncanny and abject but also as social ghosts, denied a social and political identity and forced to haunt the margins of societal life. Moreover, we argue that the Swedish state becomes a site for necropolitical power, enabling but also perpetuating lingering violent effects on Roma people.