Gender Equality as Institutional Work: The Case of the Church of Sweden

During the last decade, the populist radical nationalist party, the Sweden Democrats (SD), has gone from being a minor party to become Sweden’s third largest party in parliament. In this article, the author shows how the category of Christianity has come to play a pivotal role in the party’s political identification. Drawing on Ernesto Laclau’s analysis of populism, the author argues that Christianity should be understood as a projection surface for fantasies of an ethnically and culturally superior homogenous nation vis-à-vis constructed national others. In a populist logic, Christianity has thus become a way to distinguish the SD from its articulated external (e.g., Muslims, immigrants) and internal (liberalism, feminism) political foes. By appropriating Christianity, the SD articulates itself as the guardian of true Christianity, the future savior of a Church allegedly hijacked by external and internal foes, and in the long run, the Swedish nation.

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Hidden Ecclesiology: How Statistics Shaped the Church of Sweden

Studia Liturgica ◽

10.1177/003932071504500103 ◽

2015 ◽

Vol 45 (1) ◽

pp. 16-28

Author(s):

Marie Rosenius

Keyword(s):

Church Of Sweden ◽

The Church

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The Failure of Gender Equality Initiatives in Academia: Exploring Defensive Institutional Work in Flemish Universities

Gender & Society ◽

10.1177/0891243220914521 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 34 (3) ◽

pp. 467-495 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Hannelore Roos ◽

Jelle Mampaey ◽

Jeroen Huisman ◽

Joost Luyckx

Keyword(s):

Critical Discourse Analysis ◽

Gender Equality ◽

Gender Inequality ◽

Critical Discourse ◽

Institutional Work ◽

Temporal Dimension ◽

Discursive Strategies ◽

Gender Policy ◽

Fundamental Process ◽

Gender Change

Although a large number of studies have explored the main causes of gender inequality in academia, less attention has been given to the processes underlying the failure of gender equality initiatives to enhance gender representation, especially at the professorial level. We offer a critical discourse analysis of recently promulgated gender policy documents of the five Flemish universities, and demonstrate that defensive institutional work is a fundamental process underlying resistance to gender equality in the academic profession. That is, powerful organizational actors resist gender change by (un)intentionally deploying a combination of discursive strategies that legitimate what we describe as non–time-bound gender equality initiatives: The expected outcomes are undetermined in time, and they delegitimate concrete, time-bound measures that define specific outcomes against well-defined deadlines. By explicitly bringing a temporal dimension into our analysis, we argue that defensive institutional work deflects questions regarding what ought to be achieved when, and contributes to the slow pace of gender change in academia.

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Postfeminist, engaged and resistant: Evangelical male clergy attitudes towards gender and women’s ordination in the Church of England

Critical Research on Religion ◽

10.1177/2050303220952868 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 205030322095286

Author(s):

Alex Fry

Keyword(s):

Gender Equality ◽

Narrative Analysis ◽

Church Of England ◽

Structured Interviews ◽

Gender Differentiation ◽

Women's Ordination ◽

Perceived Change ◽

Conservative Evangelical ◽

The Church

Despite the introduction of female bishops, women do not hold offices on equal terms with men in the Church of England, where conservative evangelical male clergy often reject the validity of women’s ordination. This article explores the gender values of such clergy, investigating how they are expressed and the factors that shape them. Data is drawn from semi-structured interviews and is interpreted with thematic narrative analysis. The themes were analyzed with theories on postfeminism, engaged orthodoxy and group schism. It is argued that participants’ gender values are best understood as postfeminist and that the wider evangelical tradition, as well as a perceived change in Anglican identity with the onset of women’s ordination, shape their postfeminism. Moreover, whilst evangelical gender values possess the potential to foster greater gender equality within the Church of England, gender differentiation limits this possibility, a limitation that could be addressed by increasing participants’ engagement beyond the Church.

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Jacob Tengstrom, First Archbishop of Finland

Church History ◽

10.2307/3164035 ◽

1975 ◽

Vol 44 (3) ◽

pp. 336-351

Author(s):

Toivo Harjunpaa

Keyword(s):

Sixteenth Century ◽

Church Of England ◽

Protestant Reformation ◽

Church Of Sweden ◽

The Reformation ◽

The Church

The Reformation of the sixteenth century dealt a heavy blow to the historic episcopal government of the church. Only two of the national churches which embraced the Protestant Reformation succeeded in retaining their old primatical sees and episcopal polity: the Church of England and the Church of Sweden-Finland. For centuries before the Reformation, the Finnish church had been ecclesiastically part of the province of Uppsala (an archbishopric since 1164) just as Finland itself was politically part of the Kingdom of Sweden. Thus there was no need to establish a Finnish archdiocese while union with Sweden continued. But with Napoleon's concurrence (the Tilsit pact of 1807), the Russians invaded Finland in 1808 and met with such success that all Finland was ceded by Sweden to Russia in 1809.

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