Schulqualität, Schulerfolg und Gesundheit. Ergebnisse aus der österreichischen „Health Behaviour in School-Aged Children“-Studie

Based on the question, how school quality, academic achievement and health are linked to each other, the paper presents a research model that regards students’ health as a central educational resource that mediates between school quality and students’ academic achievement. The empirical test is based on the most recent data of the “Health Behaviour in School-aged Children” (HBSC) survey by using a structural equation model. The results indicate, that school quality influences students’ academic achievement as well as their health. According to our model, students’ health acts as a mediator between the quality of schools and students’ academic achievement.     

Transnationale Projektarbeit. Berufsbiografische Strategien der Sicherung von Autonomie, Zugehörigkeit und Identität

The article intends to broaden the discussion about the globalization of management by analyzing an intermediate, operative level of management in the context of transnational project work. In contrast to Kanter’s (1996) thesis of the emergence of a “world class of management” the identity concepts, career strategies and social embeddedness of this level of management clearly show the contradictions and ambivalences peculiar to this kind of work. Drawing on group discussions as well as problem-centred interviews three types of biography politics in the context of transnationalization are discerned. By more or less intentionally unfolding these politics in the course of their biographies, the subjects are struggling for autonomy, affiliation and individual history.     

„Politische Religionen“ (Eric Voegelin und Raymond Aron) — ein Begriff zur Differenzierung von Fundamentalismen?

The concept of ?political religion“ has been introduced in the late 1930s by Eric Voegelin and Raymond Aron in order to analyze the ?religious character“ of the new totalitarian political mass movements, i. e. Fascism, National Socialism and Communism, as ?collective religions of salvation“ from a critical perspective. Both abandoned the term later and replaced it by ?modern political gnosis“ or ?ersatz of religion“ (Voegelin) and ?secular religion“ (Aron). In this paper the concept and history of the term ?political religions“will be reconstructed, and the author examines the question, if it can be considered an appropriate tool of differentiation in the discussion of socalled fundamentalisms. This will be accomplished by using the example of ?radical Islamism“.     

„Nem Kind nun vorzumachen, du kriegst’ ne Lehrstelle, ist für mich unrealistisch.“

Subject of this contribution are the strategies of action and the practices of social binding under the condition of precarious employment relations. In the case of a young retail saleswoman I want to explore the question if and how situations of insecurity and uncertainty produce specific habitual changes and acquisitions. Which significance do discontinuous life courses have on biographical self-construction? How do the practices of everyday life and the relation to an uncertain future differ between the younger generation and their parents? And finally: which consequences do the pragmatic use of chance and contingency have on lived gender arrangements?     

„Guten Tag, hier spricht Ihr Bürgerservice, was kann ich für Sie tun?“

The aim of this article is to examine a specific aspect of restructuring in the public sector: the implementation of call centres in customer service and its effects on job quality. The trend to organise customer service through call centres gained worldwide importance back in the 1990s. In the public sector it emerges only recently in connection to strategies of ‘new public management’. The article presents five international case study organisations from the public sector from Austria, Italy, Great Britain, the Netherlands and Sweden. The article concludes that the implementation of call centres or the outsourcing of customer service to private service providers has severe consequences for the quality of employment in the public sector and in the new — female dominated — service sector jobs. This concerns in particular the following three aspects: fragmentation of employment, qualification versus standardisation and interest representation.     

“So Tight in the Thighs,So Loose in the Waist”

While a wide range of research documents how media continue to devalue female athletes, negatively affecting female body image and perceptions of female athletic ability, new media technologies are allowing athletes to potentially challenge these representations. This essay focuses on @SoccerGrlProbs, the Twitter handle of an anonymous group of soccer players, and their interaction with over 180,000 followers. Examining how @SoccerGrlProbs constructs female athletic identity, it considers how this identity is taken up by girls and young women in their own self-constructions as athletes. It argues that @SoccerGrlProbs enables young female athletes to negotiate the conflicting demands of emphasized femininity and athleticism by inspiring self-constructions that allow them to claim athletic “somebodiness” while simultaneously subverting sports discourses emphasizing self-mastery and female athletes' (hetero)sexual attractiveness.     

Professional women “rebalancing” in retirement: Time,relationships, and body

ABSTRACT

This is an interview-based study focused on how professional baby boomer women negotiate and narrate postretirement lives. This group came of age in the 1960s and represents a socially privileged segment of the baby boomer generation, a cohort that created new gendered pathways in employment. Today, these retired professional women are attempting to make sense of their multilayered complex and changing realities. In their accounts, the most salient themes are shifting identity, embodiment, and relationships. By using what we call a relational lens, we will show how many aspects of postretirement life, for these professional women, are mediated by changing relationships—relationships to time, work identity, friends and family, and body. Through these individual and relational contexts we see how female professional baby boomer retirees grapple with liberation and loss, autonomy and control, ongoing gendered work, and rebalancing in a new chapter of life. Perhaps most importantly, we see how learning about self in this stage of life, and perhaps across the life course, takes place largely in the context of relationships.