I am professor of social work at Stockholm University (Department of Social Work). My fields of interest are welfare state reforms in Sweden and in European countries with a special focus on social assistance schemes and activation policies from a governance perspective. I am in particularly interested in questions related to social inclusion and poverty with a focus on institutions and organizational solutions.

Projects
I participated in several international research projects and networks such as "The role of Social Assistance as a means of Social Inclusion and Activation" (SocAss), the Project on Rescaling of Social Welfare Policies, the RECWOWE Network of Excellence, and the Nordic network "Countering Globalization: Education, activation, and social exclusion in the Nordic countries". Anohter EUropean projekt was INSPIRES (Innovative Social Policies for Inclusive and Resilient Labour Markets in Europe) a long-term project co-funded by the European Commission under the Framework Program 7.

A more recent project was on Youth, not in Employment, Education and Training (NEET) (Forte 2017-00457). The risk of belonging to the NEET group varies substantially across Sweden’s local authorities, while at the same time scientific evidence on the content of the different measures, their governance and functioning is lacking. One way of contributing with systematic knowledge regarding the character and importance of the measures is to use local authorities which given their structural conditions have a high or low share of NEETs as a starting point and examine which measures have been provided at the local level and how the measures have been designed and governed.

I am the leader of a project (VR 2023-01311) where we intends to co-create new knowledge about practices for workplace inclusion (WI) for longterm social assistance recipients (LTSAR), and study practices across regions with different labor markets. We aim to a) analyze local WI practices targeted at LTSAR in different labor market contexts and b) to develop and improve WI practices for LTSAR together with municipal social workers, local employers, and representatives of the National Council for Coordination Associations (Nationella Råd FINSAM).

A further project I participate (VR 2023-01587) focuses on to what extent different political and administrative structures in Swedish municipalities meet the needs of vulnerable groups with complex and cross-sectorial problems. More specifically, the purpose of the project is to analyze how political and administrative structures at the municipal level affect resource allocation to youth not in education, employment or training (NEET). This is a group with multifaceted problems that is subject to great policy concern, and the Swedish government has transferred substantial responsibilities to municipalities.