The Institutionalization of Third Stream Activities in UK Higher Education: The Role of Discourse and Metrics

In this paper we examine the institutionalization of a new organizational practice around third stream activities in UK higher education from 1994 to 2008. Employing a longitudinal research design, involving archival, survey and contemporary interview data, we show how a new organizational practice diffused through the use of discourse and metrics around commercialization but over time was threatened on pure economic criteria. In response to the threat we explore how actors worked to institutionalize the new practice, reshaping both discourse and metrics to ensure that they were robust so that they could align with the interests and values of major stakeholders. In addition, actors worked to align discourse and metrics, as any misalignment between the two would have undermined the institutionalization of the new organizational practice.     

Family and Nonfamily Role Configurations in Two British Cohorts

The aim of this paper is to examine variations in the combination of social roles during times of social change. We specify a latent class approach to examine role configurations for individuals in their early 30s, establishing a typology of how work‐ and family‐related roles combine within individuals born 12 years apart and examine their antecedents. Drawing on data collected for two British Birth Cohorts born in 1958 (N = 10,706) and 1970 (N = 11,005), we provide empirical evidence of both consistency and change in life course patterns. Findings are discussed in terms of destandardization, differentiation, and individualization of the life course in times of social change and their implications for family research within a life course perspective.     

A Perturbation Approach to Outlier Detection in Two-Way Contingency Tables

In order to identify outliers in contingency tables, we evaluate the derivatives of the perturbation-formed surface of the Pearson goodness-of-fit statistic. The resulting diagnostics are shown to be less susceptible to masking and swamping problems than residual-based measures. A Monte Carlo study further confirms the effectiveness of the proposed diagnostics.     

Popular Music Cultures, Media and Youth Consumption: Towards an Integration of Structure, Culture and Agency

Youth, media and popular music studies have developed in separate fields of research, resulting in a lack of integration of key areas of enquiry, such as the relationship between the cultural and structural in youth music consumption and the role of media industries in 'framing' such a process. A more recent focus on popular music as a media culture suggest a way forward in exploring links between production, mediation and consumption of music and youth consumer practices. This article reviews three such frameworks: (i) the production of consumption, (ii) production of culture/cultures of production and (iii) cultures of consumption, evaluating their contribution to a more integrated understanding of how youth consume music as a structurally and culturally mediated process. Controversies over youth 'download culture' and evidence of regulatory changes in the global music industry and its impact on how youth consumers can access music media, underlines the need to pursue a research integration agenda, drawing popular music and youth consumption research closer together. Yet it remains the case that both approaches exhibit a structural vs. cultural divide over youth consumption and its relationship to the global music industry, offering optimism and pessimism in equal measure.