Investigating the Social

Abstract: The major trade unions in Sweden have departments of investigation that gather information and write reports on issues relating to their members. This thesis is an examination of how one such trade union, Kommunal, has investigated the issue of temporary and precarious employment over the last several years. Reports and interviews with the authors of reports are described from a sociology of science or actor-network theory perspective. This study treats the investigations on the subject of precarious employment as a series of translations that leads to different versions of precarious employment, and that assembles the individual members of the trade union to social groups with interests and qualities. Both the differences and the relative stability of the groups investigated by Kommunal are discussed in this thesis.