The aim of our study was to increase the awareness of the importance of implementation when a policy document is widely introduced. We wanted to examine how a political decision was implemented on different levels in a social care administration. We also wanted to examine the discretion related to the decision on different levels in the organisation, and if the work is followed up. The theoretical frame of reference in our study is Vedung?s implementation model and Lipsky?s theory about street-level bureaucrats.

The implementation problem refers to the situation when political decisions are not implemented as intended by the decision makers. In this thesis I examine how one part of the new school reform GY11 has been implemented in Social Science in high school in Sweden. The part that interests me is entrepreneurial learning. Using implementation theory, and the actor properties understand, can and will, as described by Lennart Lundquist, I have interviewed five high school Social Science teachers in Malmö and Lund. The result was that they all understood the concept of entrepreneurial learning.

In our paper we chose to study care management in the old age care. According to the law for the social services the needs of elderly should govern the assistance they are granted. But research has shown that municipal guidelines govern the assistance and that the elderly have to adjust their needs to them. Thus there is a discrepancy between law and practice. The aim of this study was to understand how care managers relate to municipal guidelines, laws and the requests of elderly when the application for assistance is established.

The purpose of this study was to examine social workers apprehensions about institutional placement of youths and what determines when these proceedings are used. When research not always shows that institutional placements lead to positive changes for youngsters, we wondered how social workers act on their assessment to institutional placement. We wanted to find out if the social workers meet any dilemmas along the way. To find out about that we used qualitative interviews with ten social workers, who worked in social service and came from different places in the southern parts of Sweden. To analyze our material we used the theory of human service organization and street-level bureaucrats work situation.

The aim of this study was to reach a deeper understanding of the process that occurs within the social services after receiving a notification according to Chapter 14, section 1, The Social Services Act. More specifically the focus of this study was to illustrate how social secretaries reason about children?s participation in the process, as well as to examine whether the legislative change, Chapter 11, section 1 a, The Social Services Act, has affected the process in any way. The study?s results reflect interviews with five social secretaries who are active in four different municipalities in southern Sweden.

Malmö, like many other bigger cities in Europe, faces a double undertaking when facing the challenges the future. Not only must the municipal be able to provide its citizens with welfare and a high standard of living, it must also establish a level of economic growth that allows the city to act as catalyst for the surrounding area. In order to provide the population with welfare and the economy with a qualified working force, these two challenges have been combined into one plan for the future called Welfare for Everybody. As part of this plan, new organisations have been created with the purpose collaborating with the social services office and support people in their transaction from welfare recipients to self-providing workers. The purpose of our thesis is to build on Michael Lipsky's classic work "Street-level Bureaucracy" and by conducting interviews with a number of front line workers study how they view their role, the client group and how they motivate the working line.

This study discloses Swedish human service organizations and their methods of integrating unaccompanied children into the Swedish society. The purpose of the study is to investigate how social workers at HVB-homes for unaccompanied children depict their experience in and knowledge of how the unaccompanied children are integrated into Swedish society. The method of investigating the questions raised by the purpose of this thesis has been qualitative analysis of answers derived from interviewing personnel at HVB-homes for unaccompanied children. In doing so we have made use of a semi-structured method of interviewing the above-mentioned personnel. The data derived from these interviews has thereafter been analysed and filtered through the concept of integration and the theoretical formations human service organizations and street-level bureaucrats.

This study is about state officials who handle applications for sickness benefits and about municipal officials who handle applications for financial assistance. The purpose of this study is to explore the differences between the two professional roles regarding their conception about their exercise of authority, in terms of flexibility, individual adjustment, empathy and legal security.The study has a qualitative approach and is based on structured interviews with two state officials and two municipal officials. The questions that this study aims to answer are:- Is there a difference between state officials and municipal officials regarding their experience and use of flexibility? - Is there a difference between state officials and municipal officials regarding their perceptions of legal security, individual adjustment and empathy in their exercise of authority? - What kind of bureaucracy can you find in the two organizations?The results show that the state officials in this study have very limited flexibility due to legislation which makes their exercise of authority neither empathic nor individual. The municipal officials in this study state in their turn that the law entails broad flexibility and the opportunity for them to be empathic and to make individual decisions.

This Master's thesis examines segregation between Swedes and immigrants in school, and more specifically segregation between the two elementary schools Vikingaskolan and Tunaskolan in Lund. This case provides a particularly interesting puzzle, since Lund doesn?t have any pronounced immigrant districts, and was also recognized nationally as best municipality for its schools (2004). In this thesis we try to understand the segregation between the two schools in Lund as an implementation dilemma.The theoretical framework applies a model designed by Lennart Lundquist, which includes three potential causes for implementation problems: the implementer doesn?t understand the decision, the implementer can?t apply the decision, the implementer doesn?t want to carry out the decision.

The North-American sociologist Michael Lipsky has characterized social workers as street-level bureaucrats with a substantial discretion in the relationship between the welfare state and its citizens. Within Lipsky´s theoretical framework social workers appear as a powerful group that socializes the citizens to uphold certain expectations towards the welfare state and its (re)distributional programs. From this point of view, it is important to learn more about social workers and the attitudes they express towards the welfare state. The aim of this study is to analyze how the welfare-political attitudes of future social workers are affected by their social background (e.g. class background and ancestral homeland).

This study is about job training for people with psycho-social problems without income. The purpose with this sort of job training is to bring these people back to the regular labor market as well as the experience of having a job. In the labor market situation in Sweden today there?s no guarantee that the individual will return to the labor market after having undergone job training. The aim of this study is to understand how supervisors at job training activities experience that the organizations of the activities and resources affect their work.

The essay is an evaluative study of student democracy in the Swedish high school, its departure point being the 1994 national curriculum for the voluntary school forms (Lpf 94). We adopted an interview method, the survey units consisting in a number of high school teachers. The analysis has two principal theoretical departure points, involving democracy theory and implementation analysis, respectively. The former is utilized to help identifying what sort of democracy permeates the governing document and high school daily life, the latter to explain actual outcomes.The study concludes that the 94 curriculum is characterized by a strong democracy with emphasis on participatory democratic processes, whereas in practice there is a thin democracy in both classroom and formal student government contexts. Representative processes are given plenty of room although few attempts at participatory democratic components can be identified.A deeper analysis of the result reveals implementation problems traceable to elements of symbolism in the goals.

The aim of this study is to examine how social workers and pree-school teachers resonate about their experiences of cooperation with each other, in relation to maltreated children and the duty to report. Several studies show that there is a difference between how many children that is suspected of maltreatment and how many that are reported to social service. In Sweden, pre-school staff are obliged to notify the suspicion of child abuse according to 14: 1 SoL, but previous research indicates that the obligation to declare is not used to the extent that it should. One reason for the low notification rate is  the interaction between preschool and the social services shortcomings.Therefore, we believe it is relevant to examine how the cooperation really looks like between the organizations, when the child is being abused or at risk of suffering. The results of the study are based on qualitative semi-structured interviews with four preschool teachers and four administrators.

Because of the situation around the world with war and poorness many people need to leave their homeland and find safeness in other countries. A big amount of this group is children without company of an adult, so called unaccompanied children. The numbers of unaccompanied children who seek safeness in Sweden grow every year. The aim of this study was to investigate how social workers in four municipalities in south of Sweden experience their work with investigating the needs of unaccompanied children. The aim was also to investigate how the social workers experience their opportunities to meet the children?s needs with personalized interventions.

The purpose of this essay is to examine how administrative officers at the Swedish social insurance agency experience and deal with the goal conflicts they may experience. Furthermore, the purpose is to gain a greater understanding on how they perceive their role in the implementation process, and their position as the link between the citizens and the state. Two potential conflicts are examined; between quantitative goals and performance measures and those more qualitative and hard to measure; between economic values such as cost efficiency and productivity and democratic values such as the rule of law. The other conflict examined is that between implementing and following the laws set forth, take into account the individual needs and interests of the citizen. The theoretical framework consists of Lundquist?s theory on public officers as the guardians of democracy, which means that they should not only implement laws and rules according to political intentions, but also make sure that the democratic values and principles are followed in the relationship between state and citizen.