Learning Strategies of Highly Educated Refugees in the Netherlands: Habitus or Calculation?

In an analysis of 25 semi‐structured interviews with highly educated asylum seekers and refugees in The Netherlands, we have traced their learning strategies, the stability of their educational and professional career patterns between home and host country, the calculative nature of the choices made in this context and the influence of family ties. In the analysis, we explored the fit of two competitive theoretical perspectives: Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory and the biographical approach. The respondents showed a surprising degree of stability with regard to their career patterns, calculation with regard to educational choices was weak and there was a strong influence of family ties. From these results, it would seem that the field theory shows a better fit than the biographical approach. Longitudinal research is needed to test this hypothesis in more rigorous ways. Moreover, the research has pointed at omissions and ambivalences with regard to the relationship of changes in field structures and habitus change, the relative relevance of mental and material conditions for human agency in the work of Bourdieu. In the analysis, several variables specifically related to the situation of refugees and asylum seekers could be traced that additionally explain the findings.     

Being there

This paper examines the use of the Internet as experienced by people with significant mobility/physical impairments who are accustomed to using computers. The study is based on interviews and focuses on computer usage in everyday action and interaction. In many cases, the possibilities that the computer and Internet offer have meant not only important improvements in quality of life, but first-time occurrences of great personal significance. The analysis is phenomenographic, resulting in main categories and subcategories, illustrated primarily through direct quotations. The three main categories are independence, communication, and learning.     

“Now It's Not School,It's For Real!”: Negotiated Participation in Media Vocational Training

By taking up the strand in Lave and Wenger's writing on situated learning that directs attention to social dynamics and issues of power and positioning, the present article argues for the fruitfulness of including the concept of negotiated participation in approaches to teaching and learning. Based on a fieldwork in vocational media production projects, this study demonstrates the tensions and contradictions that came out of the hybrid nature of these vocational practices in high school. Establishing the professionally relevant modes of participation in the projects was fraught with struggles in which the project members had to bracket institutionalized school routines as well as handle and negotiate particular work life conditions (including cooperation with old timers in the target professions). It is argued that the way institutional contradictions are manifested and negotiated in everyday teaching and interaction can inform our understanding of the premises for multifunctional educational praxis.     

A Review of Theory in Family Business Research: The Implications for Corporate Governance

In recent years, increasing scholarly attention has been directed toward the field of family business research. Based on an exhaustive sample of 235 publications, this article provides a comprehensive review and a critical assessment of the theoretical underpinnings and corporate governance issues in family business research. Three predominant theoretical perspectives, namely principal–agent theory, stewardship theory and the resource‐based view of the firm, have emerged and provide empirical evidence that family businesses significantly differ from non‐family firms in important dimensions such as agency costs, competitive advantages or corporate governance structure. On their own, none of the aforementioned perspectives succeeds in addressing all complexities associated with family businesses and their corporate governance. Accordingly, joint approaches combining different theoretical frameworks can help to improve understanding of the family business. The article concludes by discussing possible directions for future research that might further contribute to building a comprehensive theory of the family business and its corporate governance.     

Moving on or moving back? The temporalities of migrant students’ lived versus imagined school careers

In migration research there has not been much work on temporal dimensions of migration experiences (with the exception of Griffiths in this journal). This article investigates migrant students’ temporal framings of their lived versus imagined school careers, drawing on participant observation and interviews with students in language introduction classes in upper secondary school in Sweden. The findings document student experiences of temporal desynchronies: as seen in reports of slow time and repetition, suspended time, temporal uncertainty and blockage. The analyses highlight the students’ experiences of being temporally out of line (in Ahmed’s words). The narratives of their past and future school lives reveal a discontinuity between the students’ lived school experiences, on the one hand, and imagined school careers on the other, contrasting life as lived with both their own hope and plans and with the school careers of other students. The analyses highlight the importance of including temporal dimensions in the analyses of post-migration school landscapes.     

The language of newcomers: developments in Dutch citizenship education

A new citizenship policy in the Netherlands is intended to provide ethnic minority newcomers with self‐management competencies for their daily lives, further education and employment. The advocates of the compulsory language training that is the main ingredient of this policy argue that it will foster newcomers' chances of getting jobs, accessing education and being incorporated into the mainstream of Dutch society. According to the Scientific Council for Government Policy, no country in Europe has gone as far as the Netherlands in terms of its citizenship policy. In this paper, we evaluate the backgrounds and the consequences of this policy, and we take a critical look at the attempt to present command of the Dutch language as the main road to integration for ethnic minority newcomers.     

Service Provision for an Independent Life

How is an independent daily life possible for disabled people when relying upon professional service provision and the bureaucratic gate-keeping systems of the welfare state? This article discusses this question in relation to an interview study. Eighteen mobility disabled and 20 service providers in one local setting in Norway were interviewed. We point out at least three categories regarding how independence is interpreted among the disabled: the super-normal, the independent living activists, and those experiencing powerlessness and lack of support. The analysis points out how these categories are constructed in relations between the disabled person, professional service providers and the gate-keeping systems of the welfare bureaucracy.     

SHADES OF BROWN AND GREEN: PARTY EFFECTS IN PROPORTIONAL ELECTION SYSTEMS

In proportional representation (PR) systems, political power is typically shared across several political parties. Many parties are small and focused on specific policies, such as environmental policy and immigration. Do these small parties matter for policy? I provide the first systematic evidence for this by developing the first regression discontinuity design tailored specifically for PR systems. With this method, which can be applied in all countries with PR systems, I estimate the causal effect of party representation on immigration policy, environmental policy and tax policy using data on Swedish municipalities. The results show that party representation has a large effect on the first two policies, but not on the tax policy.     

Working environmental conditions as experienced by women working despite pain

OBJECTIVE: This study looked at female hospital cleaners and home help personnel who continued working despite problems or pain in their musculoskeletal system and where there was a risk of increase in sickness absence. The aim was to determine whether supportive intervention for these personnel at the workplace had an effect on the way that they experienced the physical and psychosocial aspects of their working environments. METHODS: The design was prospective with non-rando-mised intervention and reference groups. A selection of 55 questions about physical and psychosocial working environment from a national survey were used. Comparisons were made between intervention and reference groups and with data on a selection of the Swedish population of people in these professions. RESULTS: The results showed that in the hospital cleaners' intervention group the introduction of new cleaning materials and new cleaning methods seemed to contribute to a reduction in workload during the intervention period, which in turn gave them a better chance of taking rest breaks during working time. In the home helps' intervention group the results showed that the group had had a reduction both in workload and in more responsible tasks, and at the same time the psychosomatic stress reactions reduced after the intervention. CONCLUSIONS: The results indicate that effects on the working environmental conditions as experienced could be obtained by a general multi-component support program at the workplace, but the number of variables influenced by the program was very small. The relatively limited effects may be explained by the fact that the impact of a support program depends on how well the remedial measures fulfil the need for such measures either at the workplace, in a work group or among the individual people at the workplace. This emphasises the importance of designing effective analysis tools for judging what remedial measures are needed before the measures themselves are tried out.