Youth politics as multiple processes: how teenagers construct political action in Sweden

Alternative approaches to power in youth politics are needed to overcome the conceptual dichotomy between youth political action that is either linked to – or delinked from – state institutions. This paper offers an alternative drawn from a study that sought to empirically explore, and build theory upon, how teenagers construct their political action. Our qualitative study among 10 activists aged between 17 and 19 in a medium-size city in Northern Sweden found that youth constructed their political action as four different processes: moving from consciousness to action, moving from personal experience to shared goals, moving from social activities to political activities, and moving from single to multiple arenas. We integrated these processes in the concept Youth Politics as Multiple Processes. Youth efforts to bring about these processes were not always fruitful because, as their political action gained complexity, youth faced greater constraints for recognizing, addressing and challenging power from age-based exclusion, state-centered definitions of politics, and adult disinterest in youth demands. According to our findings, youth constructed political action based in an approach to power that was not state-centered. We linked our findings to youth politics research and social movement theory that similarly proposed alternative approaches to power.     

Towards Employment: What Research Says About Support-to-Work in Relation to Psychiatric and Intellectual Disabilities

This article presents an overview of research about support-to-work in relation to psychiatric and intellectual disabilities. The overview shows that support-to-work services are multifaceted, and that work can be seen as a tool for individual rehabilitation or as a set of goals to achieve. Providers are presented with specific components, which are characterized by systematic, targeted, and individualized interventions. The overview illustrates a need for long-term engagement and cooperation of and between welfare services and agents within the labor market to dissolve the Gordian knot that the transition from welfare interventions to employment seems to be.     

The labor market costs of conflict: closures, foreign workers, and Palestinian employment and earnings

In this paper, we provide a lower bound estimate of the labor market costs of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The conflict is quantified by the number of overseas foreign workers in the Israeli labor market and the frequency of temporary closures of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. IV estimates, which exploit a source of exogenous variation in the number of overseas foreign workers, yield significant negative effects of the conflict on Palestinian employment rates in Israel and monthly earnings. Our cost-of-conflict estimates are also relevant for the literature on the economics of immigration.     

‘I'll Carry This Experience With Me Throughout My Studies and Future Career’: Practice Tutorials and Students' Views on Social Work in Iraklio,Greece

Active use of postmodern theory, with its lexicon of words like deconstruction, meaning, sign and code, can transform the social work classroom into an extraordinary intellectual center for critical thinking and clinical debate. Perhaps paradoxically, this new classroom also needs guidelines. Guidelines can be organized into a typology, and what is presented in this article is a typology to help social work educators and students clarify how to use postmodern devices. These devices allow for an especially intensive exploration of representations of culture and language, self and other, individual and community, power and marginalization. Developed as a series of tables, this typology contrasts three classroom models: the generic, the traditional and the postmodern view of key segments of the social work curriculum.     

Patterns of working and living conditions: a holistic, multivariate approach to occupational health studies

The objective of the study was to develop a multivariate approach to occupational health studies that is: capable of identifying groups with similar working conditions; relevant for studies of associations between working and living conditions and health; and an appropriate basis for preventive actions. Data at the individual level were obtained through measurements, observations, interviews and questionnaires, and at the organizational level, through interviews with managers. Cluster analyses were applied with the purpose of identifying groups of individuals with small, within-group differences. Eighty work sites and a sample of employees at each site were strategically selected. The study group comprised 203 men and women, and was characterized by large variation. The final analysis produced eight clusters of individuals, denoted according to their best-defining characteristic, i.e. 'decent', 'boundary-less', 'locked', 'exposed', 'heavy and monotonous', 'changed', 'mobile' and 'restrained'. The clusters differed with regard to 'what' characterized working conditions, 'where' on the labour market they were found, and 'who' clustered in these groups. The holistic approach revealed conditions that were important for health and had higher explanatory power in relation to ill-health than applying socio-economic groupings or the demand-control-support model. It showed how psychosocial, ergonomic-physical and occupational hygiene factors combine and interact to create settings with different risks of ill-health. The chosen strategy is recommended for future occupational health studies and is particularly suitable as guidance for preventive actions relevant to specific clusters of working and living conditions.     

Are Received Risk Perception Models Alive and Well?

Two recent papers on risk perception models are discussed. In these papers, quantitative analyses are presented of risk perception in relation to risk characteristics as specified in the Psychometric Model, and to cultural biases according to Cultural Theory. This comment points out that the data quality of these two studies is doubtful, with a very small convenience sample and a very low response rate. More importantly, the analyses show the same low levels of explained variance of risk perception as other researchers have found previously, but the authors still draw optimistic conclusions from their data. Such conclusions are unjustified.     

Aesthetic leadership

We introduce aesthetic leadership as a promising approach in leadership studies. Two current movements in leadership research, the inclusion of followers in leadership models and the exploration of subjective leadership qualities, make taking an aesthetic perspective in leadership especially attractive and timely. Aesthetics relates to felt meaning generated from sensory perceptions, and involves subjective, tacit knowledge rooted in feeling and emotion. We believe the aesthetics of leadership is an important, but little understood, aspect of organizational life. For example, while we know followers must attribute leadership qualities such as charisma and authenticity to leaders to allow for social influence, we know little about how these processes operate. We propose that followers use their aesthetic senses in making these assessments. We relate aesthetic leadership to several current topics in leadership research, and outline the assumptions and methods of aesthetic leadership.