Review of the Nordic Romani Studies Conference

Public servants’ value dispositions is a central theme of inquiry in Public Administration research. Various trends and reforms in the public sector, New Public Management, the audit society, marketisation and mediatization, for example are expected to affect these values. This article analyses whether, and in what ways, mediatization affects public servants’ values. Drawing on survey data from local government officials, we explore the mediatization thesis at the level of individual public servants using the concept of mental mediatization. Regarding their values, we empirically establish a dominance of organizational professionalism rather than democratic professionalism among local government public servants. We then analyze mediatization at the level of individual public servants in local government, in contrast to previous research which has focused on the mediatization of politics and central government. While finding an interesting gap between strong beliefs in, but little self-assessed impact of, mediatization, the article rejects an expected correlation between mental mediatization and public servants’ value dispositions.

The Covid-19 pandemic made digital oral exams a necessity for most higher education courses in Sweden and elsewhere in the world. Yet, more reflection on oral examination could help understand their utility in contemporary higher education. This paper probes the relationship between learning habits and assessment through an autoethnographic exploration into oral examination in an intermediate quantitative methods class for social science students in Sweden. Drawing on theories on constructive alignment and deep learning, this article makes the case for oral examinations as facilitating deep(er) learning. At the same time, the article discusses the oral examination as a critical way to think about the formal assessment culture brought about by ever tightening teaching budgets and external audits.

Dynamics connected to professionalization are often analysed from an individual perspective highlighting individual professionals’ struggle for recognition as a professional. This paper looks at the organizational context and its effects on teachers’ professional status in the wake of NPM inspired reforms in Finland. Despite the quantitative nature of the Finnish school audit, the design of the evaluation presents a critical translation of the knowledge claims often made in New Public Management audits. By looking at the original research reports and discussions on the audit system, this paper shows how the Finnish school audit conceptualised education as a societal subsystem and school audit as a tool for linking education with other subsystems. The Finnish school audit produces data for educational policy development and the teachers’ own use. The article suggests that maintaining occupational professionalism requires both the presence of knowledge for professional application and the absence of knowledge yielding to market or managerial interference.

Parliamentary talk, despite its central place in politics, has not been the focus of many qualitative studies. The present study investigates how parliamentary talk emerges in a dialogue between different arguments in the parliament. At the same time, this is a study of politics, of how human interaction gives birth to laws that regulate life in two contemporary democracies, Slovakia and Poland. It provides a close-reading of two political debates: on the state language in Slovakia and on gender parity in Poland.

This study draws on hermeneutic and semiotic thinkers such as Gadamer, Bakhtin and Lotman to elaborate a dialogical understanding of language that can provide the basis for a method of textual analysis. The dialogical understanding of language emphasises that text and talk must be studied in the context of an interaction. The unit of analysis is a pair of utterances, a question and an answer. Until an utterance has been interpreted, it carries only the potential of meaning; its meaning is materialised by the responses it receives.

The study further argues that conversation analysis and its tools can usefully be applied to the study of political debate. The method provides for the analysis of the dynamics between micro-scale interaction in the parliament and the macro-scale dynamics of culture. These dynamics assume two different forms that Lotman termed as “translation” and “explosion”.

The study shows that parliamentary debate is characterised by a constantly evolving topic of discussion, namely that the meaning of the bill at the start of the debate and at the end of the debate are really two different bills. This is not because the content of the bill has undergone changes, but because in the course of the debate, the bill has generated new cultural connections. Casting a vote in support of the bill does not approve just the bill itself but a whole set of interconnected political, social and cultural values—what Lotman approached as the semiosphere. This study suggests Lotman’s cultural semiotics can provide for “imperfect hermeneutics” that is sensitive to the dynamic and contested nature of tradition in politics whilst acknowledging the inevitability of culture in mediating political talk. 

This paper shows that contemporary Polish politics under the tutelage of Law and Justice (PiS) can fruitfully be analysed as a biopolitical production of political subjects. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s take on biopolitics, this paper asks how biopolitics and sovereign power materialized in two recent Polish parliamentary debates on EU sanctioned refugee quotas. The paper uses linguistic tropes to operationalize sovereign power and applies them to the analysis. The findings demonstrate the centrality of contingent factors in the ways to which biopolitics materializes in the debates and reveals the radically politicizing effects for a contemporary democratic system.

If public administration is about providing the public with public goods, then transnational public administration implies the organisation and provision of public goods across national borders. Civil servants increasingly need to account for jurisdictions, practices and multiple stakeholder interests emanating from international context and from cooperation with other countries. Similarly, the public services they produce have transnational target groups.

The growing transnational dimension in public administration weakens the prerogative of the state over public administration. Transnational public administration is often practice-driven and builds upon shared problems emphasising bottom-up processes in public administration. Within the EU, the Macro-Regional strategies are a good example of supranational policies that promote bottom-up and practice-driven public administration in the transnational sphere and at the expense of the state. The growing transnational dimension in public administration necessitates new ways of thinking about accountability and democratic anchoring of public administration.

This report comprises three independent parts: first looking at different ways of approaching public administration in its transnational dimension; second developing and illustrating an analytical framework for the analysis of transnational public administration; and third scouting the emerging questions of transnational public administration.

This article shows, through a detailed study of the “Final Debate” of the Swedish 2018 General Elections, the ways in which the current political narratives on health care systems employ the logic of audit culture. Drawing on Yuri Lotman’s cultural semiotics, we show how decontextualised and quantified knowledge, as espoused by audit culture, is present in televised political debates and how necessary it becomes for the emergence and gist of political narratives. One of the consequences of such dependence on the audit culture, we argue, is imposing severe limits to political representation that does not play along its rules.

Recent crisis situations have witnessed a growing number of loosely organised networks (LONs) that deliver welfare services and employ social media platforms to coordinate their actions. Focusing on the 2015 ‘refugee crisis’ in Sweden, we explore the role of LONs in Swedish resilience policy. In the absence of standardised heuristics characteristic of established organizations, the LONs refer to social media for generating a common stance on the policy problem and their relation to the state. The study indicates challenges in governing LONs, showing that although a LON may become co-opted by the state, this co-optation may lead to its demise.

Social media has created new public spheres that provide alternative sources of social and political authority. Such “digital authority” has conventionally been interpreted in metric terms, without qualitative distinctions. Based on Twitter data from four different Swedish state agencies during the first 15 months of the COVID-19 crisis, this paper looks at the different kinds of modes of interaction Twitter enables and their impact on state agencies digital authority. Theoretically this paper applies Valentin Voloshinov's classical theory on reported speech, developed in the 1920s, to the concept of digital authority in the Twitter-sphere of the 2020s. Besides these theoretical contributions to media and communication studies, the main findings are that retweets are generally used to affirm and spread information thus strengthening the digital authority of the origin of the tweet whilst replies and quote-tweets are used to undermine the credibility of the sender and the content of the original tweet, often by resorting to irony. As the COVID-19 crisis prolongs, we observe increasing share of critical commentary and diminishing overall attention to government actors in Sweden. The roles of different state agencies are mirrored by the type of interaction they generate. This article also shows the usefulness of qualitative study of social media interaction in order to reveal the dynamics of digital authority construed in social media.

This paper introduces and elaborates the notion of fundraising as a theatrical event. By exploring the theatrical setup, as well as social context, of two elite fundraising events that took place at almost the same time and place and for the same cause, the authors disentangle different components that are at play in a fundraising event. The paper shows that a fundraising event needs to align sensory, artistic, and symbolic theatrical levels to convey the desirability of the fundraising cause. In addition, not only the economic but also the social and cultural capitals of the hosts of the event may be of relevance to the fundraising.