Formerly Lindellee

My research interest lies in the intersection of the development of welfare state institutions and civil society organizations. My doctoral dissertation dealt with the role of labor unions in shaping the historical and ongoing development of the Swedish unemployment insurance system. As a postdoctoral researcher at the School of Social Work in Lund (from February 2020) I work in the following projects:

Ongoing project

Civil society elites? Comparing elite composition, reproduction, interaction and contestation in European civil societies

The purpose of my postdoc project as part of a larger research program above is to study professional and social backgrounds and networks of people who lead large and influential civil society organizations in Sweden, using prosopographic data. I also contribute to a comparative study of civil society leaders and leadership in different European countries through survey studies.

Sustainble welfare for a new generation of social policy

The aim of the project is to design social policy proposals for sustainable welfare that are anchored in citizens' wishes on how we can satisfy our needs without exceeding our planet's ecological boundaries. The project combines methods such as citizen forum, attitude survey and expert forum.

Dissertation

I defended my doctoral thesis in November 2018 with the title: "Beyond retrenchment. Multi-pillarization of Swedish unemployment benefit provision".
In my dissertation project I studied the changes that the unemployment insurance provision system in Sweden has undergone in recent decades, by studying institutional changes and their distributional consequences.

A central conclusion I draw is that the Swedish system for unemployment benefit provision consists today of several pillars that interact with each other: the public unemployment insurance program where the state-subsidized unemployment insurance funds comprise the core, secondly different collective agreement-based Employment Transition schemes that unions and employer organizations jointly provide, and a third pillar consisting of complementary income insurance schemes mediated mainly by unions. With a historical perspective, the dissertation shows how unions have played a central role in the development of all three pillars. Another important conclusion is concerned with how the changes in the unemployment insurance system have resulted in starkly different degrees of income protection upon unemployment for different groups of employees.

The dissertation contributes to our understanding of how risks and responsibilities for unemployment have been redefined between the state, the unions, the insurance market and individuals - an important discussion related to how the Swedish welfare state is changing, and in particular to the current debate on privatization and the marketization of welfare.

The dissertation was awarded by Research Council of the Swedish Federation of Unemployment Insurance Funds and Vetenskapssocieteten i Lund. The dissertation also received a special honorary mention by Arbetsmiljöhögskolan's award for best dissertation in Sweden 2018 in the research area working life and work environment.

I teach in a graduate level course Social Policy in Europe where I lecture about privatization in welfare services and social insurances and about the topic of sustainable welfare. I lead seminars, supervize and examine students' course papers (in English).

I also teach in following undergraduate courses: Kunskapsproduktion i socialt arbete (Knowledge production in Social Work); Socialt arbete som ämne och profession (Social work as subject and profession); Samhällsvetenskap och socialt arbete (Social sciences and social work) (in Swedish).