Comment by M_Bakhtiari
9 years ago
> Could you confirm that first statement?
Yes, and as you can see from one of the comments below, the same is largely true of neighbouring Norway.
> That is, when I visited Sweden for a consulting job about 15 years ago, there was definitely a secretary for the group I visited. She helped organize the paperwork for the visit, booked my hotel and taxi, etc.
Notice that I talked about cultural views on secretaries, not the existence of secretaries within the country's borders. It's a downwards trend, I expect they're even more thinly spread now than 15 years ago.
It's not unexpected that the secretary-general of any organisation, even in Sweden, has a secretary. And of course theirs will be the last to go, with modern universities favouring administration over faculty, as it's the former that brings the cash, the latter only cost money (with that attitude, why not fire the faculty altogether?).
He's seeking research or data supporting your claims and conclusions, not for you to repeat your claim again.
For example, it would be useful to provide supporting evidence of secretaries declining in numbers/ratios related to cultural preference, not technology advances.
>He's seeking research or data supporting your claims and conclusions, not for you to repeat your claim again.
Culture isn't really very quantifiable, if anecdotal evidence coming from living and working in that particular society is unsatisfactory, feel free to disregard the argument.
>For example, it would be useful to provide supporting evidence of secretaries declining in numbers/ratios related to cultural preference, not technology advances.
But that's not what I claimed. I think that's what's happening, but I never claimed to know how strong the cultural component is compared to the technological and economic ones.
I wasn't seeking research data.
I wanted to know the source of your conclusions. Are you Swedish? Have you lived in Sweden for decades? Are you a sociologist of workplace cultures?
Or have you heard it third hand, or have you based it on your predictions of what Sweden is like.
Here you imply that you have lived and worked in Sweden, but you aren't clear about how long or how well you understand the history of the transition? (Eg, was it a big topic like the "Ni" question was in the 1960s?)
But really, how do you know if the transition in Sweden is any different than the transition in, say, the US? (As you write "organisation" instead of "organization", I assume that you are not from the US, and may not have the experience in that culture to make a solid comparison. Feel free to use another low-power-distance but not ultra-low-power-distance culture instead.)
BTW, you originally wrote: "the idea that anyone, no matter how important, is ever entitled to an assistant or secretary is almost anathema [in Sweden]." You then wrote "It's not unexpected that the secretary-general of any organisation, even in Sweden, has a secretary."
I interpret your original statement to mean that it is unexpected that the director of a university has a secretary.
If not, where would you place the boundary for where it is expected, and what makes Sweden's "ultra-low power distance" a significant contributor to that?
Because it seems to my non-Swedish eyes that in my limited experience in Sweden it didn't seem much different than my experience in the US.
For what it's worth, I plugged "sekreterare" into the job search at what I think is the Swedish employment agency. One of the results was https://www.arbetsformedlingen.se/Tjanster/Arbetssokande/Pla... . Google Translate says:
> As a secretary, you will assist a friendly, impulsive and simple person with; • write different investigations. • Create documents, such as in excelfiles. The workplace is located in Hornstull and you start your assignment with an introduction. The role can eventually be expanded and become more than the 60% as it is today.
That doesn't sound like a career which is "almost anathema".
I would expect that "maid" is something which is almost anathema, at least in the US. It looks like the Swedish word for that is "hembiträde", and there are no matches for it on that job site.