Anneli Matsson
About Anneli Matsson
In September 2022, I defended the dissertation The Handshake: To organize silence - A case study on pragmatic workplace mistreatment in working life. The dissertation is a monograph based on an organizational ethnographic case study at a major hospital in Sweden. The thesis brings together 3 research fields: ostracism/organizational politics/social policy. I argue that ostracism is a phenomenon in working life that needs to be studied within social work, as it is partly a problem that leads to exclusion and possibly being outmaneuvered from work, which can then lead to difficulties in making a living depending on stigmatization and difficulties in getting references. For one thing, today, both in research and practice, the problem is usually reduced to an individual problem, which makes it difficult to work with changes in deficiencies in the work environment and organizational-structural problems. The dissertation ends up in a definition of pragmatic mistreatment, which means that when uncertainty in the organization is activated, expulsion processes are triggered to get rid of employees who do not match the organization's politics.
A research interest is above all ostracism as an empirical phenomenon, including such as rejecting, ignoring, making invisible, culture of silence and outmaneuvering. Another area of research interest is policy development in relation to NPM, which tends to make structural problems in working life and in the public sector invisible. A third area of research concerns organizational politics within institutions with a focus on consequences in the form of difficulties in recruiting and retaining trained staff as well as risk regarding third parties. Ostracism research links to a number of relevant social problems such as marginalization and exclusion from working life, asymmetric conflicts, working life crime, inequality, expulsion and violence.
Theoretical influences mainly build on scholars within organisational sociology such as Acker, Boje, Clegg, Costas and Grey, Garfinkel, Pfeiffer and Simmel. Also social psychology scholars as Hogg, O´Reilly and Schabram, Sia, Tuber and Williams.
Before starting research, I worked as a practitioner, mainly in occupational health care for almost 20 years and came to specialize in workplace mistreatment. I have also written 2 pop. sci. books on the subject: Conflicts' life and death (2007; 2017) and Kränkt eller särbehandlad? (2017).
I also has a master in creative writing.