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The use of criminal records in the recruitment process has increased dramatically in Sweden over the past decade. The article analyses the various vocabularies of motive used to account for the practice in order to examine how it is justified and legitimized by those resorting to it: employers, representatives of employers' organizations and union representatives in the business sector who endorse criminal background checks as part of the employee screening processes. The dominant vocabulary as articulated in the interviews appealed to notions of corporate risk and security. However, it was contested by an alternative vocabulary focusing on an individual's right to privacy and reintegration, and by a third vocabulary centring on the notion of trust. To stress their character as moral actors, employers who checked criminal records avoided relying on the risk vocabulary alone. They tended in addition to incorporate elements of the rights vocabulary to justify their actions against the values embodied in it. Even though the results of the study suggest parallels between the increase in the use of criminal background checks and a shift toward a 'control society' or a 'society of exclusion', they also show that legal rights of the individual still inform the justificatory discourses at least in Sweden.

AbstractIn this article, we draw on Michael Lipsky's work on street‐level bureaucrats and discretion to analyse a real case setting comprising an interview study of 30 Swedish doctors regarding their experiences of changes in clinical work following patients being given access to medical records information online. We introduce the notion ofinvisibilityworkto capture how doctors exercise discretion topreservethe invisibility of their work, in contrast to the well‐established notion of invisible work, which denotes work made invisible by parties other than those performing it. We discuss three main forms of invisibility work in relation to records: omitting information, cryptic writing and parallel note writing. We argue that invisibility work is a way for doctors to resolve professional tensions arising from the political decision to provide patients with online access to record information. Although invisibility work is understood by doctors as a solution to government‐initiated visibility, we highlight how it can create difficulties for doctors concerning accountability towards patients, peers and authorities.

The process of recruiting new employees involves the risk of hiring the 'wrong' person. Systematic and extensive information gathering is therefore used to support objective and rational decisions. Today, the use of cybervetting is part of the recruitment process, but prior research shows that emotions, contrary to the ideals of 'objectivity', are essential for sorting and selection decisions. Based on interviews with 37 Swedish recruiters, this study demonstrates how cybervetting is motivated, restrained and directed by recruiters' feelings about the jobseeker and the practice of cybervetting. The study findings also emphasise that recruiters believe in a 'professional' means of managing emotions, and the notion that certain emotions represent a tacit knowledge with an emotional foundation that is difficult to articulate.