Belonging to a criminal gang often strongly influences members’ identities, particularly their self-perceptions and social roles. Entering or leaving a gang may challenge members’ understandings of the meaning and structure of their lives and threaten their sense of control. The aim of this study was to explore how members narrate these transitions and whether such stages may be seen as liminal passages. This article draws in particular on the theory of possible selves, which suggests that people change through experiencing their present selves as incomplete versions of their anticipated selves. We analysed data from two qualitative research projects on gang exits using content analysis from interviews with clients and employees in one Swedish exit programme and clients at correctional facilities or probation services. In addition, data consists of interviews with employees from these. The analysis suggests that while gang members narrate entry as a continuation towards understanding themselves and their potential place in the world, leaving the gang implies entry into a liminal terrain with fewer role models and possible projective imaginings of their future selves. Such liminal passages are analytically linked to a need for role models and experienced guides to manifest a way forward and support defectors in the process of leaving. Gang leavers need ‘ceremonial masters’, in this case professionals with experience of exiting processes, to support them in imagining and creating new lives and new selves outside of the gang. 

Sweden is among those countries traditionally ranked highly in international comparisons of children’s well-being and conditions for development. However, in recent years a development towards greater inequality in health has occurred. The general welfare model’s capacity to safeguard both the universal provisions for the general population’s standard of living and targeted support for those in need has also been doubted. System-related deficiencies such as collaborative breakdown, inadequate effectiveness and lack of clarity concerning how to uphold the best interests of the child are cited as examples, and several calls for policy reformations have been raised. The Scottish model for supporting child well-being, Getting It Right for Every Child (GIRFEC) has garnered keen interest in Sweden and is an example of how ideas for policy reformation flow both between and within countries, and thereby undergo more or less radical transformations. This article analyses the first-phase implementation of GIRFEC in a Swedish county. It emerges that although there is a great deal of enthusiasm for the original model, the intention is to implement an adapted version. What similarities and differences would be realized is not clarified from the start, but is left for the implementation process. The positive reception is understood as arising from a perceived familiarity of the model, based on current practice and discourse. GIRFEC can therefore be regarded as part of a pendulum swing in which ideas are borrowed and lent between countries and contexts.

The Wellbeing Wheel is a tool used for early detection, assessment, and planning around children. This study examines how this artefact has been translated from Scotland to Sweden and what that process involved in relation to transformation from the original ideas when travelling from one specific context to another. The analysis was based on three graphic wheels and their supporting documentation, interviews, and field notes. The results reveal great similarity in the overall ‘spirit’ of the work performed to introduce the Wellbeing Wheel to the Swedish context, but on several points significant differences can also be noted, with some content being removed or relocated, and new content being added. These changes were conscious and intentional in some instances, while others arose spontaneously and ad hoc during the development processes.

The aim of this study is to analyze how and when the professional actors within the Swedish child welfare system portray successful cooperation and determine which discursive patterns are involved in the construction of this phenomenon. The empirical basis for this study is formed by 147 recorded interviews with institution-placed youths, their parents, and different occupational categories within the social services and the Swedish National Board of Institutional Care. Analytical findings with the following themes are presented: (1) coherent vision triad, (2) coherent rhetorically accepted triad, and (3) coherent exclusive triad. The personal interactive aspect of cooperation among professional actors in the care of children is important for successful collaboration. This aspect also appears to be significant for producing and reproducing joint collaboration identities. However, joint collaboration identities and the coherence triad can limit the sphere of cooperation to the entities involved in the care of youths and the juvenile or his/her parents are left out.

Previous research has emphasized the institutional racism in total institutions. Researchers have highlighted the importance of narratives but have not focused on narratives about ethnic monitoring and social control. This article tries to fill this gap by analysing stories related to descriptions of ethnic monitoring and social control as told by juveniles of non-Swedish ethnicity in Swedish juvenile care institutions. A juvenile’s ethnicity was highlighted by drawing attention to the staff’s monitoring and social control. Interviews elucidated the victimhood that non-Swedish juveniles portrayed in relation to the staff and/or Swedish juveniles. When juveniles of non-Swedish ethnicity described ethnic monitoring and social control, they generally distanced themselves from staff behaviour and portrayed a victim identity. In constructing their identity, juveniles sometimes used their ethnic background rhetorically when describing everyday situations in the institution. The juveniles portrayed a humiliated self through dissociation from the staff and through the descriptions that they were treated differently than Swedish juveniles.

In Sweden, personal assistance is one form of support for persons with certain functional impairment. The aim of personal assistance is to give compensatory support to individuals so that they can enjoy the right to live a life like anyone else. This article explores what kind of support parents who have functional impairments and apply for personal assistance may need when they have underage children. The article is focused on the following: What support needs in parenting are expressed in personal assistance applications and by whom? How are the expressed needs in parenting met by the intervention personal assistance, i.e. how do the decisions correspond with the expressed needs? The article is based on qualitative and quantitative document-analyses of 100 randomly selected applications for the right to personal assistance submitted to the Swedish Social Insurance Agency by applicants who were parents with children 0–17 years of age, during the years 2014–2017. The central concepts resulting from the analyses of the empirical material were support and care. The results show that in many cases the children were invisible in the material studied. In several investigations, there was no information at all about the applicant’s children. Many applications for assistance were refused. Few parents received assistance in their parenting role. In the documents, we found the following themes in statements about needs for support related to the role as a parent: practical support, care and supervision, support with communication, emotional support and safety, and support to be involved in the children’s lives.

In the global and national discourse, schools are made responsible for providing high quality education in core subject knowledge, but also for working with physical and mental health promotion and risk prevention. This study analyses local interpretations and dissemination of health promotion and risk prevention in official websites from Swedish municipalities and schools in disadvantaged areas, with particular focus on school social work and how the counsellor’s (skolkurator) role comes across and how children and parents are addressed. The results show great variation in how the tasks of the school health services and the role of the counsellor are defined and explicated, which indicates difficulties in translating policy into practice. In the websites, the services that the school counsellor can offer often come across as abstract and/or distant from the potential needs of children and parents. Moreover, very few sites address children and/or the parents – the stakeholders are not ‘spoken to’. This goes against previous studies that stress the importance of providing information about the support that the school can offer children and parents, and of addressing the stakeholders. Decision-makers and school leadership must better identify and communicate what health promotion and risk prevention mean, and the role of the school counsellor, and inform families through the official websites about the support that the schools offer.

Background: In Sweden, the National Guidelines for Substance Abuse Treatment includes new recommendations concerning integrating a user perspective. From 2009 to 2014, the Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare supported and financed the development of organizations serving regional users. The programme was evaluated, and the results showed a development of user influence in substance use treatment services in 20 out of 21 regions by 2014. The implementation of user organizations’ influence was evaluated in 2018 for this follow-up study.

Aim: The aim of this four-year follow-up study was to evaluate whether user organizations continued existing once national support ended, and whether their influence in social services and health care, at both organizational and individual levels had been implemented.

Method: A questionnaire was dispatched to 20 regional user organizations. It included information and questions focused on their situation, and on participants’ experiences of the influence of user organizations in health care and social service.

Results: The results obtained from the questionnaire show that 14 out of 20 user organizations still existed and reported a developed influence in social services and health care at organizational and individual levels. National support was perceived as necessary for the ongoing development of user organizations and to continue increasing their influence.

Conclusions: Support at the national level initiated the development of user influence in Sweden, which has increased at both organizational and individual levels in the context of social services, as well as in health care for persons with substance use disorders.

Since the 1990s, social work has been subject to requirements for monitoring and quality assurance. Here we examine one of the monitoring systems: Open Comparisons (OC). Gradually expanded and published online by a national agency, the OC now has around 350 indicators that cover major areas within social work in Sweden. We use program theory to clarify the operational idea in which OC is based. To do this, we analyse domestic violence data gathered from two social service organizations, from the regional level and from governmental agencies. The results show a strong normative support for OC within national level. However, OC is time consuming, its data are questionable, and its reliance on name-and-shame seems dubious. OC represents a trend in social work that may influence changes in routines and provide new kinds of performance measurements that affect how social work is organized.

In this article I reflect on research relationships in a qualitative longitudinal (QL) project from a relational perspective, understanding agency as interdependent and evolving. My reflections are based on a study involving repeated interviews over eight years with young people who have experienced secure care, which is the most intrusive form of intervention for troubled youths in the Swedish child welfare. Research using a QL methodology requires a delicate balance in maintaining professional boundaries in relationships between the researchers and participants and emphasizes how time and place are embedded in relations. I explore the complexities of research relationships over time and the effect of repeated research encounters on understandings of time. My reflections are grouped into three themes: emotional footing, intersections of time and place, and evolving research agencies. While emotions from early encounters became a resource for my reflections as a researcher, return interviews turned me into an embodiment of time, producing linear-time narratives of progress, and the agencies of both me and young people evolved within and beyond the research project. I offer some conclusions for qualitative social work research regarding the effects of emotional, temporal and spatial dimensions on researcher vulnerability and research relationships over time.

In Sweden, young people are assessed in institutions at the request of the social services, a situation that can be described as being in limbo, in a state of uncertainty. Using the concepts of self-presentation and institutional processes in total institutions, this research aims to analyse young people’s perceptions of being assessed in secure accommodation. The empirical material consists of repeated interviews with 16 adolescents assessed in secure accommodation. Three situations were identified in which the young people felt that their self-presentations were in some way in or out of their control: the placement situation; the assessment situation and the assessment-outcome situation. The youths perceived their self-presentations to be influenced by the setting (i.e., the institution). In addition, there were two parts to being in limbo: being on site in the institution and being distant from the social services. The young people’s experience of being assessed in an institution was characterized by feelings of a loss of control over self-presentation and of their perceptions of themselves.

This paper aims to provide an analysis of a project-based activation programme, called the Vista project, under the authority of the social services and run in a local community in Sweden. Research has shown that people with a migrant background, in all age groups and especially women, are overrepresented in unemployment rates. The argument presented in the paper is that an anti-racist framework is of great relevance for these provisions and would provide a strong theoretical foundation with clear implications for practice. The Vista projectâs main objective was to find new matching strategies to increase labour market integration and to increase the number of people engaged in a full-time activity, such as employment, education or field practices. The findings show that the flexibility that characterizes this kind of organization has a negative impact on clearly defining its identity and work processes, something that could undermine its legitimacy. This study exemplifies how the flexibility leads to ambiguity and struggles in mediating a clear picture of the purpose of the project. Some core values of anti-racist practice are included in the foundation of the Vista project, for example, the resources addressed to a so-called disadvantaged group. Projects such as the Vista contribute to racial oppression, just as other more traditional social work organizations do. However, the form of the post-bureaucracy may create possibilities to both make such structures visible and find ways to give the participants exposed to the program greater influence on its design and to define their own needs.

In focus of this article are two selective parenting programs, both developed locally by Social Services and by a Women´s Shelter organisation in Sweden. Parents with a foreign background is the target group. Their needs are formulated in terms of `change values based on patriarchal beliefs in honour´. In the article the programs are described in relation to universal evidence-based parenting programs and a also a three-part dilemma of 1; offering preventative but also normative interventions to 2; selected target groups and 3; based on the idea that migrant parents have special needs due to cultural differences. The aim is to investigate in what ways the practices of conducting parenting programs for this target group could be framed as cultural imperialistic practices or democratic practices in social work. Cultural imperialism leads to oppression while democratic practices are emancipatory. A conclusion is that both practices are apparent and concurrent. Yet the dualism dismantles the risk of reproducing oppression of the selected target group. Another conclusion is that instead of defining parents with foreign backgrounds as culturally different the target group could be defined as a group with migration experience e. g. experience of leaving the home country and family and finding ways of resettlement in a receiving country. Selective parent programs are relevant but an alternative definition would promote democratic practice, where authorities and social workers meet the demands of the participating parents on their own terms, and with the goal, not to change ‘unwished cultural differences’ but to support empowerment.

The aim of this article is to write against normative discourses and interpretations of 'integration' by nominating social workers and social work as the main subject of 'integration' and find ways to overcome exclusionary and discriminating social work practices. To do that, we use material collected when observing public service interpreters giving lectures to social workers about their experiences from encounters in social work settings. In a critical analysis, we found two 'integration' problems, that is, certain problems that social workers have in making themselves accessible and where they risk reinforcing exclusion and discrimination. One problem is 'the failure of handling perceptions that social services take children'. The other is 'the failures of (re)producing bureaucratically driven social assistance'. These problems might lead to exclusionary practices towards migrant families, often with disastrous outcomes. The analysis shows that these problems appear due to social workers' lack of institutional self-awareness, language competencies, and emphatic ability. To overcome these shortcomings, the interpreters emphasized the impact of encounters that social workers were already involved in during their everyday work. The interpreters recognize that social services are unknown to most families who are newly arrived in Sweden and point out the importance of making more efforts to be clear, rephrasing questions, explaining, avoiding abbreviations, and becoming proactive in dialogue outside of the offices, i.e. recognizing that social work is language work.

This article investigates how ‘unaccompanied children’ in Sweden experience one part of the reception system – the social workers – in the context of their everyday life. The aim is to describe and analyse how these young people view and experience social workers and their relation to them, as well as their perceptions regarding the social worker’s nature. The article is drawn from a research project where 20 ‘unaccompanied children’ participated for over two years. During this period, the researchers have met with the young people continuously doing interviews, observations and informal conversations once a month. The results indicate that the social worker tends to become something of a bystander, a representative of the authorities who has played no active role in the young people’s everyday life, except for when they ‘pop up’ to make a decision affecting their everyday life. The social worker becomes a bystander with power. This is discussed in relation to situational ethics and the importance of building relationships and trust to service users in general and to ‘unaccompanied children’ in particular.

Decisions about child protection and interventions in families are one of the most difficult responsibilities of welfare states. The aim of this article is to describe and analyse the commonalities and differences in the child protection decision-making systems in Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Denmark. We focus on the actors involved, especially the laypersons, and their role in the decision-making process when deciding on out-of home placements, both on voluntary and coercive grounds. 

The study is based on a comprehensive analysis of official documents, legislation, guidelines, and reports about child protection in each country together with a review of recent research in the area. This is complemented by 12 interviews with key informants with knowledge about the child protection systems in their respective countries. 

We found that there is an expanding influence from external experts and dwindling influence from laypersons. We discuss the organisation in terms of three different decision-making models – a professionalised decision-making model in Finland, a hybrid decision-making model in Norway and Denmark, and a layperson decision-making model in Sweden. One conclusion is that all of the countries aim for children to be involved and for decisions to be made in compliance with the rule of law, but this is realised quite differently when it comes to which actors should be given the authority to make the decisions. Which model is the best would have different answers depending on which perspective the models are evaluated from. However, the consequences of decisionmaking models for children need to be studied further. 

The aim of this article is to explore the opportunities of using theoretical concepts as way of gaining a shared language for people participating in an active labour market program (ALMP). The investigated programme offered vocational education preparing for work in eldercare to unemployed individuals. Data was collected through interviews with ten participants and two teachers, and through observations. All participants had experienced social problems such as homelessness, indebtedness, criminality. Half of the group had Swedish as their first language. In the other half of the group, several languages were spoken. Some spoke Swedish without difficulties, whereas others had big difficulties speaking, reading, and understanding Swedish. The programme included an introduction to Aaron Antonovsky's theory Sense of Coherence (SOC). This article reports from, and reflects on, the acquisition of a theoretical vocabulary serving as a pedagogical short-cut for the participants. By filling the concept of SOC with meaning, participants got access to a new language, a language that was surely not 'plain Swedish', but rather a language of abstract theory. The pedagogical work created literacy - and a shared platform for increased understanding of one's own life story and current situation. Using the empirical case of an ALMP serves as an attempt to cross-fertilize the theory of SOC and educational ideas in a way that is not conventional in social work research. We suggest that introducing a theoretical language relevant for one's own personal story might enhance well-being and thus prime learning in social work interventions.

Ways of producing local systematic knowledge in social services have gained attention. In Sweden, individual-based systematic follow-up (ISF) has emerged as a way to follow-up on interventions and produce local knowledge. Practitioners are responsible for collecting and compiling as well as interpreting and taking action based on ISF results. This article aims to understand how knowledge is produced within the ISF practice by looking at when and how practitioners reflect on ISF results. The research was conducted within social service units providing non-institutional interventions for children and families in two Swedish municipalities, with experience from working with the models LOKE (Local Evidence) and FIT (Feedback-Informed Treatment). The material consists of 8 observations, 45 documents, and 21 interviews with family therapists, heads of units and departments, executive directors, and development officers. The findings show how individual and collective reflections are central in producing knowledge from ISF results and why conditions for reflection need to be organizationally facilitated. It is oriented towards sense making within the context of practitioners’ daily work in relation to their knowledge and experience. Collective reflection on ISF results, undertaken with colleagues or service users, suggests a co-production of knowledge. However, depending on the ISF model, certain perspectives become more or less prominent, for example the degree of service user involvement. This is important to take into account when choosing an ISF model to implement in practice.

Violence against women and men is a widespread and serious social problem, often with severe consequences for the victims. Even though young men are among those most at risk of exposure to physical violence, men’s victimization is only recognized to a limited extent. The aim of this study is to deepen our understanding of how social workers’ interpretation of the position of males in the gender order affects their understanding of male victimization. The study was designed as a multiple case study with a qualitative comparative approach. Focus group interviews supported by vignettes were used to collect data. Interviews were carried out with professional Swedish social workers working with victimized men and women at centres for young crime victims in Sweden. The results show that even though the social workers express traditional gender beliefs about young men’s experiences of victimization and their inability to identify themselves as victims of violence, they also to some extent resist taken-forgranted notions of male victimization. The results also show that the social workers to some extent offer supportive measures that reinforce traditional expectations of masculinity. On the basis of the results it is suggested that one important way of developing social work with young male victims of violence would be to give greater attention to variations between different men and masculinities and how these different forms of masculinity are differently connected to crime and violence, and to adapt supportive measures to reflect these differences.

This article examines how representatives of Swedish civil society organisations (CSOs) reflected on and acted to provide daily functional social work to people living precarious lives during the early phase (March-April 2020) of the Covid-19 pandemic in Sweden. The empirical material consists of 20 qualitative interviews with representatives of CSOs. The results highlight how the CSOs, and their venues, constituted a safe place where visitors were considered grievable and that working face-to-face with the visitors was deemed necessary. However, the pandemic posed challenges for how the CSOs were used to organise their social work, while many visitors lacked other alternatives. When Covid-19 hit, it meant adapting and responding to deliver well-functioning social work and a place for people lacking other alternatives despite the pandemic. The measures taken implied possible challenges to the relationship between the CSOs and their visitors. Still, there were indications that the visitors saw the measures as a protection, as rituals of grievability. However, not all measures were welcomed by the representatives or visitors. Turning people away or prioritising among visitors were challenging and cannot always be said to frame people as grievable. Regardless, it seems that the challenging measures taken during the pandemic were already embedded in everyday practices where the visitors were treated relationally and considered grievable before the pandemic. This embeddedness made it possible to extend grievability throughout the pandemic, even when social distancing measures were used, thus emphasising the importance of places of grievability being accessible to people before societal crises occur. © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

In the early days of professionalism, occupations were characterised by decision-making freedoms and strong jurisdictional rights. Since then, several ways of controlling and monitoring professionals have been introduced alongside the rise and reformulations of the modern welfare state. Professions have been challenged by, bureaucracy, market solutions and demands for transparency. These are examples of systematically developed counterforces to professional autonomy. A much less studied way of controlling and monitoring professionals is the institution of laypersons, which finds its legitimacy on the grounds that non-experts play the superior role to professionals. Through layperson committees, Swedish child protection advocates have extensive rights when deciding upon some of the most intrusive decisions that the state can make against families, namely, whether children are to be removed from their parents. This article analyses how laypersons challenge the authority of professionals in Swedish child protection. It is based on observations of layperson committees and semi-structured interviews with committee members. The results show that the jurisdictional boundaries are constructed in relation to groupthink, where the laypersons can be the cure for social workers developing unprofessional behaviours and remain as outsiders to the professionals. Another important finding of the study is the ambivalence and paradoxes that arise when it comes to understanding the layperson’s role in relation to at least five topics: formal training; identity as a professional, theoretical knowledge; the normative field laypersons should relate to; and the layperson’s impact. The ambivalence of the ideological boundaries can be seen as a weakness for the layperson.

Today’s ambition to adapt and individualize welfare delivery poses a challenge to human service organizations at the same time seeking to standardize clients, with consequences for street-level bureaucrats. In this article, the implementation of an instrument for standardized assessment of income support (IA) in Swedish social services is used to investigate what strategies street-level bureaucrats use to cope with tensions between standardization and individualization. Results from six focus groups in two organizations show how job coaches cope by individualizing their practice towards the client, while caseworkers equally often cope through standardization, which could work towards or against the client, in order to keep their discretion and handle organizational demands. Results point to a loose coupling between IA as an organizational tool for legitimacy, and as a pragmatically used questionnaire. Conflicts and contradictions are left to street-level bureaucrats to deal with.

In the last decade, digitalized automated decision-making (ADM) has been implemented in many Swedish municipal social services to achieve values such as legal security, client empowerment and time efficiency. The paper aims to understand how ADM policy is legitimized and performed through time efficiency, by a comparison of ADM policy in two Swedish municipalities’ social assistance agencies. It builds on 17 interviews with managers and professionals in two Swedish municipalities’ social assistance units. Findings show ADM is legitimized through arguments of activation and relationships, and performed by handling more applications or increasing time spent with clients, rather than being perceived as increasing the quality of social assistance services. This highlights the significance of organizational goals regarding how street-level bureaucrats perform tasks within their discretionary powers.

Standardisation and standards are common in the modern world, including in social work. This article focuses on social workers who implement the assessment tool Children’s needs in focus (Barns behov i centrum BBIC) in Swedish social work with children and families. Inspired by ‘siblings’ in the UK, the National Board of Health and Welfare has developed and supported the implementation of the BBIC. From the start, the implementation strategy was to engage well-educated and experienced social workers as educators. The article studies these educators (standardizers) as mediators between national imperatives and local practice during the implementation of the BBIC in the social services. Based on interviews with 10 BBIC educators, three standardizer roles were identified: the instrumental, the adaptive and the transformative. These roles affect the practice of social work in potentially different ways.

This article focuses on the complexities of using a new intervention when parents are suspected of child physical abuse. Children leaving a child forensic interview due to suspected child physical abuse are often handed over to their parents, who sometimes are the suspected perpetrators. The Efter barnforhoret (EB) [After the child forensic interview] intervention was developed to aid children in this stressful situation by providing professional support from child welfare services to the child and parents. The article is based on interviews with 11 respondents working with EB. Narratives reveal how respondents use their discretionary space to navigate different institutional logics. In the themes Focusing on the child, Getting parents motivated, The challenges with organizational boundaries and Demand trumps resources, respondents argue that EB, despite organizational challenges, is considered an important intervention that meets the needs of children and families after the disclosure of child physical abuse.

Objectives: Several studies have pointed at a co-occurrence between severe mental problems and relative poverty. Also users refer to their strained financial situation as one of their main problems. We lack knowledge about how persons ‒ still characterised in diagnostic manuals as having difficulty with their sense of reality and their ability to carry out goal-oriented actions ‒ manage the ‘double trouble’ of having a strained financial situation and mental problems. Method: Sixteen persons diagnosed with severe mental illness were interviewed about how they managed poverty in their everyday life. The interviews were tape-recorded and analysed using the thematic analysis method. Results: The overarching theme that emerged was ‘managing a life on the margin’, with three sub-themes: ‘staying within limits’, ‘widening the boundaries’ and ‘indulging in the unnecessary’. The ways the interviewees coped with their strained financial situation are similar in many respects to those found in poverty research among people who do not have severe mental health problems Conclusions and implication for practice: Professionals should strive to take the individual’s social context into consideration, both when examining each person and in practicing share decision-making. Adopting a contextual approach would help us to see the user as an agent and better understand the onset and development of severe mental problems. Phenomena considered as symptoms might then be better understood as rational coping with the reality of poverty. 

This article is based on an interview study with thirteen survivors of domestic violence and ten social workers within the social assistance system. This article aims to understand how applications for social assistance from survivors are handled between the discretionary powers of the social workers, the organization’s fixed categories and the survivors’ need for support. Theories of street-level bureaucracy and human service organizations was used in the analysis. The results show that social workers state that they treat survivors with respect and generosity. Survivors said they wanted to meet a committed social worker, which was not the case for many of the survivors interviewed. Categorizing the ‘right’ kind of survivor is of great significance for being eligible to social assistance.

Living with dementia, care and social care systems The aim of this article is to find out what impact national guidelines have on municipality dementia care. Furthermore, the aim is to compare organization of social care to the local adaptation of nationally invoked values. This article is connected to Living with dementia, care and social care systems , an interdisciplinary project between Health Sciences at Lund University and Social Sciences at Linnaeus University. The national guidelines for care and services to people with dementia recommend specialized units, and professional specialization in dementia care. Based on values of self-determination, integrity, accessibility, equity, rights and safety, they are meant to guide the dementia care in the community. In this article the organization of care is compared to how nationally invoked values are discussed in local policy documents in nine municipalities. These two aspects of dementia care are central to the national guidelines. The organization of care was explored by a mapping study of 19 municipality services. Type of organization was determined based on when, throughout the progression of the disease, services were made available, the existence of specialized dementia care units, and level of professional specialization. Information about values in local policies was examined by utilizing policy as discourse analysis of local policy documents. Four types of relationships between organization and value implementation were found. Eight out of nine municipalities failed to adapt to both aspects of the national guidelines.