In the Storm’s Eye: The Working Conditions of the Youth Care Staff at the Swedish National Board of Institutional Care
Short description
The project focuses on the Swedish National Board of Institutional Care (short NBIC, Swe. SiS), and its frontline staff, the treatment staff at secure youth homes for young people taken into care under the Care of Young Persons (Special Provisions) Act (Swe. LVU) or sentenced under the Law on Young Offenders (Swe. LSU). NBIC is the most locked form of institutional care for young people in Sweden. This, together with the fact that the young people often have complex care needs and sometimes display high levels of violence, makes it urgent to understand the complexity of the work and work environment of staff.
NBIC has faced criticism from its supervisory agencies and has recently undergone a shift in organizational governance in order to improve organizational control and competence supply. The project aims to investigate the consequences of NBIC’s governance for operational management and frontline workers, with a special focus on care workers’ organizational conditions of work. The extent to which staff encounter the organizational conditions required to perform their work according to their perceptions of competence and professionalism is one question at focus, as well as any tensions that may appear between staff and managers' perceptions of this. The project combines theories of organizational governance with that of frontline workers and sociology of professions.
Through studying the interplay between organizational governance, working conditions, and occupational identities of staff, the project provides knowledge useful for addressing challenges related to management, governance and organization, as well as knowledge useful for improving the working conditions for staff working with the young people on a daily basis.
The project has received funding from FORTE and is part of the national program on work life research, specifically the call “Challenges in Working Life 2024”
Project participants:
Kerstin Jacobsson, the Department of Sociology and Work Science (Principal Investigator)
Katarina Hollertz, the Department of Social Work, University of Gothenburg
Kajsa Nolbeck, the Department of Social Work, University of Gothenburg