The aim of this paper is to gain further understanding of the complexity and dynamic of resistance in organizations. This is done by describing and analyzing how a team of workers in municipal home help services in Sweden interpret and make use of their possibilities to act at work. The point of departure for the theoretical framework is power and resistance in accordance with Michel Foucault (1991) and Jon McKenzie (2001). But to grasp the multi-faceted characteristic of resistance, Stephen Ackroyd and Paul Thompson’s (1999) line of thought on organizational

mis behaviour as well as the concept of self-organization is fruitful. James C. Scott’s (1985) work on everyday resistance is particularly important for an understanding of everyday actions and responses as forms of resistance.

The employees in this study are being subjected to a process of change initiated by the management. They are dissatisfied with the process as well as with the intentions behind it. In spite of this they do not make collective and planned resistance; rather their actions and responses can be understood as informal resistance. They act with consent but not cooperation, with irony and other symbolic sanctions as well as a lighter form of sabotage. Above all they have a loyal attitude and loyal way of acting apparent in work situations and it has limiting effects on their resistance strategies.

They also use their loyalty in a selective manner as a way of making resistance. The home helps identity formation and interpretation of meaning as well as scope of action is in this paper seen as intertwined with doing resistance. In the line of Scott(1985) I argue for the use of ethnography in general and participant observation in particular as a fruitful way of grasping this kind of everyday resistance.

In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, people who had never before had cause to worry about losing their jobs entered the ranks of the unemployed for the first time. In Sweden, the welfare state has been radically challenged and mass unemployment has become a reality in what used to be viewed as a model case for a full employment society. With an emphasis on Sweden in the context of transnational regulatory change, Makeshift Work in a Changing Labour Market discusses how the market mediates employment and moves on to explore the ways in which employees adjust to a new labour market. Focusing on the legibility, measurability and responsibility of jobseekers, the expert contributors of this book bring together an analysis of activation policy and new ways of organizing the mediation of work, with implications for the individual jobseeker. Students and researchers of labour market policy, the organization of markets and work and society both in Sweden and abroad will find this book to be of interest. Policy makers will find the empirical examples of policy processes among employees an extremely useful and insightful tool.

This thesis aims to shed light on the dynamics and the complexity in the relationship between power and resistance in labour, from an employee-perspective. This is done by describing and analyzing how a group of employees in municipal home help services interpret and make use of their possibilities to act in relation to a process of change, initiated by the management, involving new technology. Hand-held computers were implemented by the management and the home helps were supposed to use them to register their daily work performance. A theoretical framework based on power and resistance in accordance with Michel Foucault and Jon McKenzie, together with Ackroyd & Thompson’s concept of self-organization, is used. The study has an ethnographic approach. The empirical material is based on a combination of participant observation, interviews and document analysis. Two major periods of observations were conducted. The first period focused on understanding the work performance and its routines. During the second period, the use of (or rather attempts to use) the hand-held computers was in focus. The interviews with 11 home helps focused on the meaning and content of their work with regards to work performance, skills and knowledge, possibilities and limitations and their opinions of the ICT project. Five management representatives, a local councillor, a software consultant and a union representative were also interviewed in order to grasp a management perspective. The results show a pattern in the actions of the home helps. It is a rational way of acting where adaptability, responsibility and reliability permeate thoughts and actions. It functions as a premise for how the home helps interpret their possibilities to act at work. They address their loyalty in several directions: to the care recipients, but also to their colleagues, to the management and to the organization as such. This rationality of loyalty is reproduced by the home helps but also by the management. The home helps are to a certain extent aware of the loyalties in their actions and every so often they use them in a conscious way. They reflect on how strong the loyalty should be and towards whom or what it should be directed. The actions of the home helps at work in general and in relation to the ICT project in particular is characterised by loyalty and consent rather than by formal resistance. The home helps don’t show any formal resistance but they do self-organization. They strive towards a relative autonomy and to maintain their dignity. This way of acting is however related to the rationality of loyalty that has a regulating influence on their informal resistance. Despite the limited and informal character of the self-organization of the home helps, it can be considered subversive. It has a possibility of undermining the exercise of power and it creates an alternative professional identity to the one offered by the management

The implementation of information and communication technologies (ICT) is in line with a general transformation of the work of home help services in Sweden. One strong motivation behind the introduction of new technology was to change the ways of working towards greater efficiency in order to reduce costs and at the same time raise the value of care-giving work. This article discusses the introduction of ICT in home help services as a part of the increasing rationalization of care-giving work and its consequences for the workers. The results of an ethnographic study of the introduction of hand-held computers in a working team in home help services in Sweden shows that the motives for the implementation of ICT run counter to the basic norms that are supposed to govern care-giving work. The technology participates in reproducing the subordinate position of care-giving work as well as that of the front-line workers. The workers act according to personal decision-making ability and show a form of limited resistance to the technology while, at the same time, taking part in their own subordination. © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

The painting trade is dominated by men, both concerning numbers and with regards to how the job as a painter is supposed to be performed. There doesn't have to be a problem with the actual performance of the job. But on the other hand problems arise when gender coded traditions hinder the necessary improvement of the trade and affect the working conditions for painters of all kinds. In daily work situations, men as well as women need to relate to the masculine norms of the trade. They all do it in different ways, consciously and subconsciously. But things are changing. The profession and the trade are in the middle of a transformation where traditional conceptions of gender are challenged. The number of educated female painters is increasing, and they have difficulties finding their place in the trade. There is no fast and simple solution of this gender equality problem, but there are methods available for how serious gender equality interventions can be carried out. Above all the problem demands interruptions of old patterns of thought and behaviour in order to make a change. This text presents results from an ethnographic study of the painting trade and shows how established patterns are defended as well as questioned in the daily work. The aim of the study is to understand how working conditions, competence and know-how, work organisation and division of labour, and management attitudes are related to conceptions of masculinity and femininity.