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Hur är en socialarbetare?

Nilsson, Jacob LU (2012) SOPA63 20121
School of Social Work
Abstract (Swedish)
In this paper I have investigated the construction of the professional social worker in Swedish journals and newspapers. My empiric material is a collection of major articles published in Sweden between 2002 and 2012. The thirteen articles analyzed in this paper is a selection from 1250 relevant articles found between these years. When analyzing the empirical material I have been working with a discourse based method based on the discourse theoretic model developed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. Technically I seperated the articles into smaller pieces of articulations and reassembled them into discourse systems which were organized around a few major nodal points. The goal of the analysis was to discover how these discourse systems... (More)
In this paper I have investigated the construction of the professional social worker in Swedish journals and newspapers. My empiric material is a collection of major articles published in Sweden between 2002 and 2012. The thirteen articles analyzed in this paper is a selection from 1250 relevant articles found between these years. When analyzing the empirical material I have been working with a discourse based method based on the discourse theoretic model developed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. Technically I seperated the articles into smaller pieces of articulations and reassembled them into discourse systems which were organized around a few major nodal points. The goal of the analysis was to discover how these discourse systems fought about defining the floating signifiers in the construction process.
I was able to discover three major discourse systems: “The social worker as a lazy bureaucrat”, “the social worker as an overworked victim” and “the social worker as a competent academic”. In the paper I found that these three systems fought about the power to define who the professional social worker is. The one who owns this definition also owns the power to define the problems in social work, and thus what to change in order to fix these problems. Even though there were a lot of points they could agree upon, it is my conclusion that they had major differences on most key points. The implication of this is that whatever system gets to dominate the construction of social work, will also have a major impact on social policys future in Sweden. In addition to this main theme I discuss how different groups of social workers are constructed differently depending on the context. Some titles are used to increase the status and professionalism of the social worker, while others have the opposite effect. The major conclusion of the paper is that there is no objective “best solution”, nor is there any objective “problems” that when solved will fix all issues in social work. The problems we see is dependent of our discourse based understanding of the subject. (Less)
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author
Nilsson, Jacob LU
supervisor
organization
alternative title
En diskursiv analys av socialarbetarens professonsidentitet i media
course
SOPA63 20121
year
type
M2 - Bachelor Degree
subject
keywords
Discours, Discourse analysis, Discourse theory, Floating signifiers, Nodal points, Social construction, Social worker. Diskurs, Diskursanalys, Diskursteori, Flytande signifikanter, Nodalpunkter, Social konstruktion, Socialarbetare.
language
Swedish
additional info
Examiner: Hans-Edvard Roos
id
2628730
date added to LUP
2012-06-24 13:00:51
date last changed
2012-06-24 13:00:51
@misc{2628730,
  abstract     = {{In this paper I have investigated the construction of the professional social worker in Swedish journals and newspapers. My empiric material is a collection of major articles published in Sweden between 2002 and 2012. The thirteen articles analyzed in this paper is a selection from 1250 relevant articles found between these years. When analyzing the empirical material I have been working with a discourse based method based on the discourse theoretic model developed by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. Technically I seperated the articles into smaller pieces of articulations and reassembled them into discourse systems which were organized around a few major nodal points. The goal of the analysis was to discover how these discourse systems fought about defining the floating signifiers in the construction process. 
I was able to discover three major discourse systems: “The social worker as a lazy bureaucrat”, “the social worker as an overworked victim” and “the social worker as a competent academic”. In the paper I found that these three systems fought about the power to define who the professional social worker is. The one who owns this definition also owns the power to define the problems in social work, and thus what to change in order to fix these problems. Even though there were a lot of points they could agree upon, it is my conclusion that they had major differences on most key points. The implication of this is that whatever system gets to dominate the construction of social work, will also have a major impact on social policys future in Sweden. In addition to this main theme I discuss how different groups of social workers are constructed differently depending on the context. Some titles are used to increase the status and professionalism of the social worker, while others have the opposite effect. The major conclusion of the paper is that there is no objective “best solution”, nor is there any objective “problems” that when solved will fix all issues in social work. The problems we see is dependent of our discourse based understanding of the subject.}},
  author       = {{Nilsson, Jacob}},
  language     = {{swe}},
  note         = {{Student Paper}},
  title        = {{Hur är en socialarbetare?}},
  year         = {{2012}},
}