This article centres on emotions within the Swedish rescue services in terms of the concepts of emotional regime and emotional pasts, partly with a focus on the role of emotional pasts in emotional regimes, partly on how the (re)construction of emotional pasts relates to the organisation of the workplace. The empirical material consists of qualitative interviews with five female and 13 male firefighters in Sweden, aged 28-58. Results show that individual experiences are used as emotional pasts to define work situations in the present and that work teams, through informal conversations and formal debriefing, create stories out of central events, thus constructing shared emotional pasts. All in all, the analysis shows that temporalities and their narrative expressions are a vital part of how emotional regimes are sustained within the rescue services, which has implications for the understanding of the rescue services as an organisation.

Sweden has had a considerably higher excess mortality among the elderly during the pandemic compared to the other Nordic countries. This failure to protect the elderly has highlighted the unreasonable working conditions in elderly care. Despite political commitments to ensure individually adapted care, the enormous socio-political challenge remains while the demands for care are expected to increase and care workers wish to leave their jobs in increasing numbers.

This presentation argues that the adverse situation can be understood in terms of organised insecurity, which is linked to the development towards temporary forms of employment in elderly care.

The trend towards new forms of employment has created uncertain terms of employment for care workers. Our studies show that also non-fixed term employment now involves working conditions characteristic of more precarious types of employment to solve insufficient staffing. As a result, organised insecurity is a central aspect of how work is perceived. The concept includes various employment forms, from being called in at short notice on an hourly basis to non-fixed employment with scheduled hours. Organised insecurity is thus understood as a process of more or less predictability, from organised security to organised insecurity with a range of socially excluding consequences in between.

The gap is widening between the policy discourse about ensuring a dignified elderly care and how this is organised in practice. The failure to reconcile political ambitions with decent working conditions affects not only the quality of care but also the care workers through the process of organised insecurity.

Population ageing and discourses on healthy ageing have led to a growing interest in social dancing for seniors. While senior dance has been described as both common and contributing to good health, the fundamental connection between bodily and temporal dimensions has been fairly neglected. As a result, there is a risk of portraying dance among older adults as a general practice, while at the same time the senior dance's potential to shed light on relations between temporality and ageing is not utilised. Based on qualitative interviews with 25 women and eight men, aged 52-81, in Sweden, whose main leisure activity was dancing, this article sheds light on this knowledge gap by illustrating the pleasurable experiences of senior dance. The results illustrate that the pleasurable experiences of dancing can be understood as three different experiences of temporality: embodied experience of extended present, an interaction with synchronised transcending subjectivities and age identities with unbroken temporality. The results also highlight the central role that temporal aspects play in processes around subjectivities in later life, as well as the close connection between ageing embodiment and temporality. They also illustrate the ability of dance to create wellbeing, not only through its physical elements, but also through the sociality that constitutes the core of dancing. In light of these results, the article argues that the temporal processes relate to individuals' diverse relationship with the world and that they therefore play a central role in subjective experiences of ageing.

Extended working life in Sweden is discussed using the old age pension reform of 2001 and debates and policies following this reform as a starting point. Extended working life is also discussed in relation to flexible work, unpaid caregiving, employers’ attitudes toward older workers and working environment. The implications of different outcomes of an extended working life for men and women and possible health effects are considered. Several issues with gender as well as health implications have to be further analyzed and evaluated to ensure not only financial sustainability of the pension system but also equal opportunities for men as well as for women both in an extended working life and in life after retirement.

Policies supporting longer working lives have to a great extent described older people as the problem. In this chapter we challenge this description by looking critically at some of the assumptions underlying the extending working life agenda. The chapter begins with a discussion about the homogeneous representations of increased life expectancy, where we show that the neglect of growing differences in longevity takes privileged aging as the starting point. Next we discuss the use of the concept of gender equality to illustrate how male life courses are taken as the norm. The chapter then considers how increased individualization and the conditions that work organizations provide frames older people as all the same leading to widening inequalities amongst those in retirement. All taken together, extended working life leads to be an individualization of the risks ofworking life. Based on an analysis of the debates at the country level we further argue that the extended working life agenda is a top-down process and a globally spread implementation of an economically based political project.

This article discusses gender mainstreaming (GMS) as a strategy to implement gender equality in public work organizations by analysing discourse in terms of the theoretical notions of translation and circulation in organizations to shed light on how gender equality and the mainstreaming strategy are formulated in the documents which govern the Swedish fire and rescue services. More specifically, it looks at how the goals regarding gender equality are circulated and translated. The results show that gender equality as a practice is created in the translation of national goals in terms of the local context and its specific gender equality challenges. Furthermore, the article discusses how vague formulations in the documents are stabilized through circulation between the government and the public agency in question. The results indicate the central role played by maintaining stable translations over time and the presence of a double logic of change in the processes, as well as the importance of legitimizing gender equality initiatives.

This article explores the conditions for extended working life from an organising perspective. Based on the idea that temporality makes up a fundamental organising dimension, it discusses conceptions of internal job mobility, and if and when employees are expected to relocate to a different unit at work. The material consists of interviews with 11 men between the ages of 56 and 74, working in manual and managerial capacities at a foundry of a Swedish branch of a large international steel company. The results show that internal work mobility is regulated by normative assumptions of mobility in terms of on- and off-time. This socio-temporal order constructs younger age groups as the age normality while designating the older employees' transitions as a normative breach. It is also shown that the temporal order constitutes a disciplining element steering employees from an early stage to plan for limitations that may arise as a result of ageism and/or physical changes. The result confirms that transition to less-physically demanding tasks is a prerequisite for continuing working in a physically demanding job. These transitions are not, however, included in the socio-temporal order of the company, but are presented as the older employees' individual problem. All together, these results show the need to introduce organisational practices and corporate strategies in the debate on extended working life.