Swedish Patriarchic Communication Patterns

Abstract

Although there are many forms of organisation and distribution of power and trust, such as kingdoms, democracies, oligarchies, tyrannies, etc. they all have one common feature: they are patriarchies (Erturk, 2009). Western democracies and kingdoms are developed patriarchies. Sweden is known as developed egalitarian society but the patriarchic order is still in tact. This order has been kept for centuries and it is therefore hard to imagine another. As a first step towards the development of an understanding of a non-patriarchic order we study how communication maintains the patriarchic order. For the purpose, we do discourse analysis of group-decision occasions within Swedish institutions. We find that both women's and men's communicative patterns contribute to the long lasting stance of this order and suggest that an interruption of such communicative habits takes us one step away from patriarchy.