På gränsen till bostad. Avvisning, utvisning, specialkontrakt

Sammanfattning: This thesis examines exclusion from the housing market, its justifications, and the resulting public images of the excluded. It is based upon a study of discourses within three different forms of social housing in Sweden; the poorhouse of the 19th century, the public housing sector of the 1980s and 1990s, and the housing currently supplied by the local social authorities. My emphasis is on the latter, the "secondary housing market", in which flats are subleased to homeless clients by means of special contracts , which may involve individual work-plans, extremely short periods of notice, and compulsory supervision and training by social workers. The empirical material mainly consists of a survey and a longitudinal case-study. Qualitative as well as quantitative methods are employed within the framework of a constructionist perspective. The behaviour and qualities of individuals referred to or excluded from the secondary housing market are bracketed, and instead I focus on how social workers and public landlords describe their clients/tenants, as well as on their accounts of their practice and decisions. The concepts of border control and discipline are used as tools of analysis, and are elaborated as ideal types which represent distinct strategies for controlling a territory or an organisation, such as a housing project. Border control deals with problematic individuals through rejection or expulsion, while discipline involves resolving or controlling problems in lieu of exclusion. Landlords typically employ border control, whereas discipline is the predominate practice in social work. When social authorities are landlords, however, they utilise both strategies. In border control, expulsions and rejections are justified by reference to the harmfulness of the excluded, e.g., that they are "disturbing neighbours". Discipline, on the other hand, is warranted by reference to common interests and to clients' "real needs". The intertwining of the two strategies in the secondary housing market entails that its exclusions are legitimised in both ways. As a result. homeless people are constructed as "incapable of independent living", which is shown to have the double implication of "unwanted" and "not wanting" housing.