Students’ health engagement and affective relations in Danish upper secondary school

To increase our understanding of the dynamics of young people’s embodied engagement in health, this article analyses Danish upper secondary school students’ understandings and practices of health and the role of the school environment in these dynamics. Participatory, visual and narrative data were collected during fieldwork with 37 students aged 16–17. Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy of the body is applied to analyse the affective relations and emerging body-health assemblages within the students’ school life, which generated force and vitality (here conceptualised as health). Through becoming within sensuous, social and political body-health assemblages, the students attempted to curb school stress, sustain social belonging in an individualistic school environment and both reproduce affirming power discourses and subvert their territorialisation. The study proposes an analytical shift in perspective on young people’s health away from an individualistic ‘components approach’ towards a relational understanding, and suggests that students’ health at school relates to collectivity, quality, rhythm and co-produced engagement, rather than individuality, quantity, rules and performance, which increasingly characterise Danish health discourse and school policy.     

Social Problems Work: The Cases of Children and Youth

This article reviews the literature on social problems work concerned with children and young people. Social problems work involves assessing particular people, events and circumstances as instances of social problems. We focus on how social problems work is organized within discourses of childhood and youth, how it is a site for holding children and young people accountable, and how normalization is an aspect of social problems work. Our review brings together analytic themes in the literature on social problems and that on children and young people. We also point to topics that might be elaborated upon in future research on social problems work concerned with children and young people.     

Breakdown of care: the case of Danish teenage placements

This article analyses the breakdown of teenage placements in Denmark from survey data on 227 teenagers placed in care during 2004. We explore frequencies of breakdown, time of breakdown occurrence and factors possibly causing breakdown. These are factors related to (i) the teenager, (ii) the parents, (iii) the care environment and (iv) the casework process. Results show that 26 per cent of the teenagers in the study experienced placement breakdown. Thirty per cent of these breakdowns occurred within the first 4 months of placement. A factor significantly increasing probability of breakdown was emotional problems of the teenager. A factor significantly reducing placement breakdown was the teenager having continuity with the same caseworker throughout the placement. System- and policy-related factors also proved to have an influence on breakdown rates. We discuss possible policy implications of these findings.     

Corporate social responsibility in the board room – when do directors pay attention?

When do board directors pay attention to corporate social responsibility (CSR) issues? Board directors have traditionally focused on maximizing shareholder profit and viewed corporate governance narrowly as a way to meet this goal. They have paid little or no attention to CSR issues because they see CSR as a contrast to profit maximization. We argue in this article that companies can no longer ignore CSR. We propose that three conditions must be met in order for boards to pay attention toCSR. First, the board must have a mindset that considers CSR as contributing value to the firm. Second, the board must have relevant competences that enable members to understand CSR issues. Third, compensation of top-level management should reflect CSR performance. The first two conditions are directly linked to human resource development because, in order to embrace the specific challenges that CSR possesses, board members must develop an understanding of the CSR field and related challenges and opportunities for the company.     

Alternative Formulas for Distributing Parental Incomes at Divorce

The current study applied five formulas for distributing parental incomes at divorce to 414 court case records in Minnesota and evaluated which formulas and actual court orders provided sufficient incomes for male and female-headed households. The study further explored influences of pre-divorce gross income levels, household/genders, and lengths of marriage on the post-divorce income-to-needs ratios (ITN) produced by the five formulas and actual court orders, using MANOVA. Results were interpreted using distributive justice principles of equity, needs, and contributions. Males have higher ITN with each alternative, except the income-sharing formula. The actual court orders and the income-sharing formula produce the largest discrepancy between male and female ITN and the highest percentage of females living below poverty level guidelines.Kathrine C. Daniels, University of Minnesota, 290 McNeal Hall, 1985 Buford Avenue, Saint Paul, MN 55108-6140; e-mail: dani0022@umn.edu.Kathryn D. Rettig, University of Minnesota, 290 McNeal Hall, 1985 Buford Avenue, Saint Paul, MN 55107-6140; e-mail: krettig@che.umn.edu.Robert delMas, General College of the University of Minnesota, 354 Appleby Hall, 28 Pleasant Street SE, Minneapolis, MN 55455; e-mail: delma001@umn.edu.This paper originated from Kathrine Daniels’ doctoral dissertation entitled, alternative strategies of dissolving the economic partnership of marriage. Further, the research was funded by a grant from The McKnight Foundation to the Child Support Enforcement Division of the Minnesota Department of Human Services, and a subcontract to the University of Minnesota Department of Family Social Science. Additional support was provided through a grant from, The University of Minnesota Center for Urban and Regional Affairs’ Faculty Interactive Research Program, as well as a project grant from the Minnesota Agricultural Experiment Station, Project 53–054, Decision-Making Integral to Relationship Transitions in Families, Kathryn D. Rettig, Principal Investigator.     

Broken Interaction Rituals,Struggles for Membership,and Violence among Young Children in Two Danish Schools

Children's conflicts, understood as disagreements involving negative emotional energy, constitute a particularly intense type of social interaction. In this paper, we show that children's conflictual interactions in school differ with regard to interactional dynamics and levels of confrontational tension, which together potentially lead to violence. We discuss how these differences relate to issues of inclusion and exclusion, to levels of interactional resources, and to neighborhood differences. Our conclusions are based on analysis of fieldwork data on children aged five to eight in two Danish schools. The analysis applies Goffman's and Collins's perspectives on interaction rituals and violence and the concept of emotional capital based on Bourdieu's theory of practice.     

Prevalence of Child Sexual Abuse in the Nordic Countries: A Literature Review

This review examined child sexual abuse in the Nordic countries focusing on prevalence rates and victims’ age and relationship to the perpetrator. The results show a prevalence of child sexual abuse (broadly defined) between 3–23% for boys and 11–36% for girls. The prevalence rates for contact abuse were 1–12% for boys and 6–30% for girls, while 0.3–6.8% of the boys and 1.1–13.5% of the girls reported penetrating abuse. The findings suggest an increased risk of abuse from early adolescence. In adolescence, peers may constitute the largest group of perpetrators. The results highlight the need for preventive efforts also targeting peer abuse. Future research should include cross-national and repeated studies using comparable methodology.     

Supply chain contract evolution

This paper draws together theories from organisational and neo-institutional literatures to address the evolution of supply chain contracts. Using a longitudinal case study of the Norwegian State Railways, we examine how firms move through the stages in an inter-organisational process of supply chain contract evolution and how they can cooperate to ensure efficiency and equity in their contractual relationship. The findings suggest that inefficient and inequitable initial contracts can occur, in part, because of the cognitive shortcomings in human decision-making processes that reveal themselves early in the arrangement before learning and trust building can accumulate. We then reveal how parties can renegotiate towards a more equitable and efficient supply chain contract.