Editing hip-hop within youth work activities: an actor-network theory analysis

Debates concerning hip-hop have tended to centre on controversy. For example, critics of hip-hop have focused on its association with bads such as violence, misogyny and drug use, gangsta culture, and the vandalism associated with graffiti art, while hip-hop’s defenders have celebrated the enactment of goods such as youth expression and empowerment. Increasingly, practitioners and educators have sought to mobilise particular forms or activities of hip-hop in order to draw on the potential of hip-hop in youth work. This article draws on an ethnographic study that explored how hip-hop activities were produced across a range of youth work sites in Christchurch, New Zealand. Using Actor-Network Theory (ANT) the study traced how hip-hop controversies were negotiated within youth work sites of practice, illustrating the collective editing work that was undertaken in order to handle these controversies (bads). The ANT approach to consider what is sometimes referred to as the ‘mess’ of social reality [Law 2004, 230 After Method: Mess in Social Science Research. New York: Routledge] was well suited to the study’s goal of understanding the complexities involved in using and assembling hip-hop in youth work contexts. This paper provides ‘snapshots’ of the study’s findings, to reveal the collective work in the editing of hip-hop music to avoid hip-hop bads.     

Exploring drivers of demand for child protection services in an English local authority

This paper reports on an empirical study of child protection services in a local authority where rates of investigations and interventions rose to unprecedented levels during the course of a single year. The aim of the research was to explore explanations for this rise in demand among the providers of children's social care in the area. Using an interpretative qualitative design, a series of focus groups and interviews were carried out with practitioners and managers (n = 25) from statutory services and Early Help. The findings identified a combination of long‐term and short‐term drivers of demand. Long‐term factors emphasized the impact of rising levels of deprivation combined with cuts to community‐based services for children and young people. Short‐term factors ranged from a more proactive approach to child neglect to more effective multi‐agency partnerships and joint decision making. The interaction between these factors was found to be accentuating an underlying shift to “late intervention” across the sector. The findings are contextualized in relation to contemporary debates about the crisis of demand for children's social care and the complex relationship between prevention and protection.     

Women,age, and the managerial career in postwar Britain: Exploring the roots of the barriers to women’s opportunities in management

This essay explores how the assumption that hierarchical position should be linked to a position-holder’s age acted as a barrier to women advancing into management positions. The close and unquestioned association between an individual’s age and what was considered an appropriate place on a bureaucratic hierarchy is one of the less often acknowledged barriers to women’s upward mobility. The study focuses on Britain in the years following the Second World War, because the increased participation of women in the workforce during the war had engendered optimism about women’s opportunities for long-term gains and advancement. Many women came out of the Second World War with a high degree of organizational capital that should have seen them advance into managerial positions. But as this study shows, through evidence gathered from archival as well as published historical documents, in the reality of the postwar world being the wrong age for the job constituted a significant barrier to women’s advancement. She holds an MA, MPhil, and PhD in Modern European History from Columbia University. Her current research focuses on changes in office work in the second half of the twentieth century.     

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Identifying male college students' perceived health needs, barriers to seeking help, and recommendations to help men adopt healthier lifestyles

Seven focus groups at a university campus were formed to identify college men's health concerns, barriers to seeking help, and recommendations to help college men adopt healthier lifestyles. Content analysis was used to identify and organize primary patterns in the focus-group data. Results of the study revealed that the college men were aware that they had important health needs but took little action to address them. The participants identified both physical and emotional health concerns. Alcohol and substance abuse were rated as the most important issues for men. The greatest barrier to seeking services was the men's socialization to be independent and conceal vulnerability. The most frequently mentioned suggestions for helping men adopt healthier lifestyles were offering health classes, providing health information call-in service, and developing a men's center. Implications of the results are discussed.     

Problem Gambling and Comorbid Psychiatric and Substance Use Disorders Among Drug Users Recruited from Drug Treatment and Community Settings

Little is known about gambling rates of drug users recruited from drug treatment compared with those recruited from the community. We use the Diagnostic Interview Schedule (DIS) to provide lifetime prevalence estimates of problem gambling (i.e., at least one gambling problem) and DSM-III-R pathological gambling (i.e., at least four gambling problems) and describe the association between gambling and psychiatric disorders for drug users recruited from drug treatment settings (n = 512) and from the community (n = 478). We also report the relative risk of being a recreational and problem gambler in this sample. The sample was first interviewed in 1989–90 as a partof two NIDA-funded St. Louis-based studies. The prevalence of problem gambling in the overall sample was 22% and the prevalence of pathological gambling was 11%. There were no statistically significant differences in problem and pathological gambling rates for subjects recruited from drug treatment and those recruited from the community. The conditional prevalence rates, that is, the rate of problem and pathological gambling only among gamblers were 27% and 13.5%, respectively. Major findings indicate that problem gambling was associated with Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD), even after controlling for recruitment source and socio-demographic characteristics. In fact, when examining the temporal order of these disorders, we found that pathological gambling was always secondary to ASPD, occurring on average 11.4 years after the onset of ASPD. Problem gamblers, compared with everyone else, were more likely to be male, African-American, recruited from drug treatment, have ASPD and be dependent on illicit drugs. Multinomial logistic regression analysis predicted the relative risk of being a recreational and problem gambler (compared with a nongambler) in this sample according to socio-demographics, ASPD, and dependence on illicit drugs. Results imply that screening for gambling problems will need to be broad-based among drug users.     

On the scale of global demographic convergence, 1950-2000

The second half of the twentieth century saw global demographic change of unprecedented magnitude, with pronounced falls in both mortality and fertility in many developing countries. This article assesses the extent to which these changes have led to the convergence of demographic patterns around the world. It considers not just the levels of fertility and mortality in each country at different points in time, but also the size of each population. It also disaggregates China and India into their constituent provinces and states in order to provide estimates for units more typical of the size of the populations of other countries. The note presents proportions of the world's population according to the levels of life expectancy and total fertility they experienced in the early 1950s, the late 1970s, and around 2000. The graphs and tables thus produced give a convenient and novel way to view the scale and nature of demographic convergence over the last 50 years.