Educating new generations of physicists is often seen as a matter of attracting good students, teaching them physics and making sure that they stay at the university. Sometimes, questions are also raised about what could be done to increase diversity in recruitment. Using a discursive perspective, in this study of three introductory quantum physics courses at two Swedish universities, we instead ask what it means to become a physicist, and whether certain ways of becoming a physicist and doing physics is privileged in this process. Asking the question of what discursive positions are made accessible to students, we use observations of lectures and problem solving sessions together with interviews with students to characterize the discourse in the courses. Many students seem to have high expectations for the quantum physics course and generally express that they appreciate the course more than other courses. Nevertheless, our analysis shows that the ways of being a ''good quantum physics student'' are limited by the dominating focus on calculating quantum physics in the courses. We argue that this could have negative consequences both for the education of future physicists and the discipline of physics itself, in that it may reproduce an instrumental ''shut up and calculate''-culture of physics, as well as an elitist physics education. Additionally, many students who take the courses are not future physicists, and the limitation of discursive positions may also affect these students significantly.

In this study we explore the work and the cooperation of academic and industrial supervisors concerning single graduate students in so called industrial research schools, which are financially supported by a national research foundation and involve universities and industrial enterprises. Academic and industrial supervisors of totally eleven graduate students have been interviewed with focus on their cooperation. This cooperation entails negotiating the contract and monitoring the progress of the research project and the student. When students have problems this cooperation is particularly important. The places new demands on both the academic and industrial supervisors. In our study these demands were dealt with differently by different academic supervisors, depending whether their main orientation was towards industrial projects or traditional academic research. The way the industrial supervisors dealt with the new demands depended on their previous acquaintance with academic research, basically whether they had a doctoral degree or not. Another important finding was that academic knowledge had a strong position while the supervisors from the industry accepted a minor role. The main findings of the study are that industrial graduate students often require joint engagement in a way that differs from other forms of knowledge transfer between the academy and the industry. To explain the features of this type of knowledge transfer, we use the analytical concepts boundary subject and phronesis.

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Academic achievement is regarded an indicator of the success of individuals, schools, universities and countries. 'Success' is typically measured using performance indicators such as test results, completion rates and other objective measures. By contrast, in this article we explore students' subjective understandings and constructions of success, and discourses about 'successful' students in higher education contexts that are renowned for being demanding and pressured. We draw on data from 87 semistructured interviews with students and staff on law, medicine and engineering physics programmes in a prestigious university in Sweden. We focus particularly upon academic expectations, effort levels, and programme structures and cultures. Achieving top grades while undertaking a range of extracurricular activities was valorised in all contexts. Top grades were especially impressive if they were attained without much effort (especially in engineering physics) or stress (especially in law and medicine); we introduce a new concept of 'stress-less achievement' in relation to the latter. Furthermore, being sociable as well as a high academic achiever signified living a 'good life' and, in law and medicine, professional competence. We discuss the implications of the dominant constructions of success, concluding that (upper) middle-class men are most likely to be read as 'successful students' , especially in engineering physics.

Nurses increasingly interact with health information systems (HIS) in their daily work. This article examines how the problems that they confront in that interaction can be understood through the theoretical concepts of technical rationality and an ethic of care. The findings are based on a qualitative study of nurses in one Swedish hospital. They suggest that HIS did not support the holistic care of patients, and were not adapted to the varied and often urgent situations that nurses faced in their daily work, leaving them feeling isolated with their problems. In summary, HIS were found to serve the administrative aims of a hospital organisation, based on technical rationality, rather than supporting patients' needs as seen from an ethics of care perspective. The contribution of the study is to show how the use of these two conceptual tools connects nurses' daily problems with HIS to more fundamental issues about the values upon which healthcare is grounded.

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This article describes the Swedish initiative of municipal technology centres from a gender point of view. These centres provide after-school technology education for children aged 6-16. By means of an ethnographic study, the effects of the use of single-sex groups in increasing the interest of girls and boys in technical activities have been studied at one of the centres. The importance of the gender of the teacher relative to the gender of the pupils is also considered. The results show that single-sex groups meant different things to boys and girls, and that the teachers' way of "doing" femininity and masculinity, respectively, in the different groups was of some importance. The results indicate that single-sex groups alone do not break down gender barriers. However, there are lessons to be learnt from a leisure-time activity that provides a different setting from that of singlesex science education in ordinary schooling