View related articles View Crossmark data Citing articles: 3 View citing articles Gendered debta scoping study review of research on debt acquisition and management in single and couple households Könad skulden översikt av forskning om hushålls skuldsättning och hantering av skulder

Over-indebtedness has become an increasingly common issue in Europe and a growing concern for social work. In Sweden, budget and debt counsellors are the main actors guiding over-indebted individuals towards financial well-being. This study analyses how budget and debt counsellors rhetorically make sense of and justify their service provision. The research data consist of interviews with thirty-nine counsellors, supported by vignettes. The analysis shows that counsellors make sense of their service by constructing two guiding principles: to promote financial agency, centred on upholding the client’s autonomy and self-determination in solving the debt problems, respectively, to promote financial change, centred on providing the advice, guidance and practical support required to alleviate the client’s debt problems. These two guiding principles construct the client’s capability and responsibility to deal with their debt burden differently and motivate the counsellors to take different courses of action in relation to the client. Counsellors’ sense-making talk can thus be said to both reproduce and challenge predominant policy discourses emphasising citizens’ personal responsibility for creating welfare. The findings are discussed in relation to their implications for social work policy and practice.

Brazil plays a very peculiar role in global value chains (GVC): the country imports high technological goods in general while going through early deindustrialization and relying mainly on basic goods for its exports. Even after developing a broad, diversified industrial framework and becoming one of the countries that has received more foreign direct investments since the 1990s, Brazil has been struggling to occupy a more technologically oriented place in GVCs. This paper examines the conditionings of this pattern of insertion by characterizing the country's quantitative and qualitative model of integration into GVCs and by analyzing the elements that can explain this performance.

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In parallel with increasing levels of household over-indebtedness, dominant discourses position debt problems mainly as resulting from financial mismanagement and character failings on the individual level. The 'fiscal identity' of over-indebted is thereby constructed in opposition to current ideals of financial competence and rationality. This article seeks to investigate how these dominant discourses interact with notions of gender in the debt-managing institution of Swedish budget and debt counselling. The aim was to examine the fiscal identities that are constructed in budget and debt counsellor's talk and written documentation about male and female clients, and the implications these constructions may have for the help-giving technologies implemented. The empirical material consists of 11 focus group interviews with budget and debt counsellors and analysis of documentation. The results show that gendered fiscal identities are constructed, with masculinity being associated with financial competence, autonomy and less need of emotional support and femininity with a lack of financial competence and a need for comprehensive counselling contacts. These gendered constructions implicitly motivate different help-giving technologies for women and men, although the counsellors claim that gender does not influence the help they provide. Age and ethnicity are found to affect these gendered constructions to varying degrees. The results are discussed in relation to the ideals that are (re)produced through the construction of these gendered fiscal identities and help-giving technologies and how debt-managing welfare institutions contribute to the making of the indebted woman and man.