Julia Peralta

The employer’s perspective on supported employment for people with disabilities : successful approaches ofsSupported employment organizations

Supported employment (SE) is one of the most prominent of the various methods designed to combat the exclusion of people with disabilities in the workplace. Research on SE has mainly focused on the supply-side rather than the demand-side; the employer perspective regarding the employment of people with disabilities is not as well researched. The aim of this study is to investigate what employers with experience of employing persons with disabilities see as successful support from an SE organization. Fifteen employers and five managers were interviewed. The interviews were analyzed with the help of qualitative content analysis [21]. The results show that the SE organizations played three important roles – as broker, as guide, and as troubleshooter – and that this influenced employers’ willingness to collaborate. The SE organizations were able to respond to the demands and market logic that make up employers’ everyday reality. The approaches employers pointed to as most successful were provision of security, responsibility for the labor supplied, and the cultivation of relationships of trust with employers.

Precursors of the IT Nation: Computer Use and Control in Swedish Society, 1955-1985

This paper is a presentation of a research project that aims at writing the history of computing in Sweden in the mainframe age from a user perspective. Rather than beginning with the history of hardware, this project takes as its point of departure the way in which actors in different sectors of society used computer technology in order to achieve a higher degree of control over crucial processes, whether through electronic data processing systems, process control or technical/scientific computation.

Instruments of Surveillance Welfare: Computerizing Unemployment and Health in 1960s and 1970s Sweden

The object of this paper is the role of computerization in the establishment of a specific form of “surveillance welfare” after World War II. Was computerization used as a technology of mass-welfaring to produce a governable population in the frame of an expanding welfare state? Large-scale welfare practices such as health screenings and databasing of the unemployed seem to have a common purpose: making the population into a governable, partially self-regulating, collective body–a welfare body. The paper analyzes the use of computers in the implementation of regional health screenings in the 1960s and the 1970s and in the transformation of (un)employment procedures in the 1970s as two sites for the exercise of state control in post-WWII Sweden.