Gunilla Mårald

No particular way to go : Careers of young adults lacking upper secondary qualifications

Abstract This article aims to deepen understanding of the trajectories through school and into adulthood of people who did not attain valued qualifications from upper secondary school (‘non-completers’), and explore the fruitfulness of careership theory for such analysis. It is based on interviews with 100 young Swedes: 81 non-completers and 19 who had attended special upper secondary schools catering for young people with mild cognitive disability. Their narratives portray sparse socio-economic resources and difficult family situations, learning problems and marginalisation processes in school. They commonly learned to perceive themselves as failures and ‘different’. Framed by narrow horizons of action, these young people’s careers were mostly characterised by enforced rather than self-initiated turning points. Often leading to unemployment and economic problems, leaving secondary school was less of a turning point than a continuation of failure, even if completing adult education and getting a job were regarded as self-initiated, positive shifts. We conclude that careership theory was useful for analysing and understanding the careers of the young people concerned. However, distinguishing between ‘routines’ and ‘turning points’ became especially difficult when studying lives of these young people hemmed in by sparser resources, fewer choices and less stable career trajectories than their peers.

Local safety policy: The approach of two Swedish cities to urgent safety problems:

This article explores local safety policy (LSP) developed to resolve urgent safety problems in two Swedish municipalities. It shows that local safety actors conceive and construct safety problems in ways that make them manageable, and that LSP evolves as a web of interactions between safety actors in the public and private sectors. The actors use established safety solutions and routines while exploring new ways of managing the problems. The municipalities’ problem-solving structures differ mainly in that different actors and institutions are involved. The policy process and features of LSP correspond well to how policy is portrayed in other cross-sectoral policy domains. Local safety policy development cannot easily be separated from policy implementation, nor can safety policy be separated from safety work, for they evolve together. The implication of this study for governance is that policy workers at different levels and from different organisations create LSP. Although LSP is partly initiated and legitimised at the political–administrative level, it is not from this level that it evolves.