Cyniska vinstmaskiner eller glimrande vårdgallerior? En idéanalys av debatten om privatisering av offentlig sektor.

The aim of this study was to analyze in which ways the issue of privatization of welfare services has been reported and debated in Swedish media. More specifically its purpose was to explore how ideas and arguments were presented, and if the language use reflected ideological conceptions in the debate. The study was based on a selection of articles, collected from three of Sweden’s largest broadsheet newspapers. The articles were found in the Swedish media archives Presstext and Mediearkivet. Relevant quotations were identified in the articles and categorized into subgroups and later into three different themes. One theme focused on the “user/client’s role in the privatization debate, the second one on how the notion of change was discussed in the media reports and debate, and the third theme concerned the concept of quality and how it was used in the selected articles. The theoretical perspective applied in the study was the Gramscian concept of “hegemony”, as operationalized by Kristina Boréus in the dissertation Högervåg, from 1994. The main results indicate that the political move towards a more neo-liberal welfare policy in Sweden was mirrored in the language use of the studied media during this period. The results also showed that the studied privatization debate was politicized to a large extent and that the users/clients of human service organizations were absent in the public debate