Margaretha Järvinen
Biographic Data
| ID | 95059 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Margaretha Järvinen |
| GIVEN NAMES | Margaretha |
| FAMILY NAME | Järvinen |
| SIGNATURE | JÄRVINEN M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Copenhagen |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2038-0747 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 45 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 263 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 44 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1993 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
The Silent Standpoint: How Professors Explain Gender Disparities in Academia
Based on 77 qualitative interviews with professors in higher education, this article explores the interviewees' opinions on how gender disparities in academia should be explained. We show that male professors relate women's career barriers to family factors and women's own interests and preferences. In contrast, female professors favour explanations at the university level, for example lack of recognition of women, implicit bias in evaluations, m…
‘Looking back, I don’t quite recognise myself’: Narratives of the past in prostitution
This paper uses George Herbert Mead’s theory on time and the self in an analysis of qualitative interviews with sex sellers in Denmark. We show how exit from prostitution is associated with a gradual change of participants’ conceptions of commercial sex, bringing them in alignment with a ‘social problems’ approach to prostitution. From being conceptualised as a predominantly positive phenomenon, associated with ‘easy money’, power/self-affirmatio…
Turning Social Capital into Scientific Capital: Men's Networking in Academia
Universities have changed in recent decades with the introduction of various performance measurement systems, including journal ranking lists. This Bourdieu-inspired article analyses three types of strategies used by male associate professors in response to journal lists: building social capital at conferences and during stays abroad; marketing of research papers to potential reviewers and journal editors; and tactical co-authorship. Drawing on 5…
Gaming and Performance Metrics in Higher Education: The Consequences of Journal Lists
This article analyses 'gaming' in higher education as a response to performance metrics. It shows how scholars react to performance measurement systems in the form of journal lists that define appropriate outlets for their research. Two types of gaming are identified: the adaptation of research methods and topics to align with the perceived ideals of top US journals, and strategic networking with editors and potential reviewers before submitting …
Giving and receiving: Gendered service work in academia
Deploying the perspective of 'relational work', this article investigates the mechanisms behind the gender-unequal distribution of academic service. The concept of relational work is used to analyse how men and women in academia balance collective against individual interests when agreeing or disagreeing on service tasks. Four types of relational work are identified: compliance, evasiveness, barter and investment, with compliance being more commo…
At the heart or on the periphery: Gender, (in)visibility and epistemic positioning in academia
This article analyses barriers for women’s careers in higher education from a theoretical perspective focusing on epistemic positioning and gendered (in)visibility. The study is based on 96 qualitative interviews with associate professors in economics, political science and sociology in Denmark. Epistemic positioning is operationalised as four distinct processes of marginalisation: reproduction of men’s privileges from cohort to cohort of academi…
Self-casting and alter-casting: Healthcare professionals’ boundary work in response to peer workers
Within mental health services, the recovery model has been a guiding philosophy over the past decades. This model stresses ‘person-centred care’ and focuses on assisting service users to live a meaningful and hopeful life even if their illness has not been cured. As part of the recovery orientation, ‘peer workers’ (PWs), i.e. people with lived experiences of mental illness, are increasingly employed within mental health services. In this article,…
Displaying family at a women's refuge
This article explores the family relationships of mothers and children living at a women's refuge because of intimate partner violence. Theoretically, the article contributes to the sociological literature analysing family relationships in terms of 'doing' and 'displaying' rather than 'being' a family. Empirically, it is based on ethnographic fieldwork and semi-structured interviews with children living at a refuge in Denmark. The article shows t…
Moderate stable, fling or chronic high: Alcohol trajectories among young people in an intoxication-oriented drinking culture
Aims The aim of this study was to examine the development in drinking patterns in a Danish cohort of young people from the age of 15 to 25/26. The cohort (born in 1989) is one of the first to be involved in the recent decline in youth drinking across Western countries.Methods Data (2463 individuals) included longitudinal survey data (three waves) on alcohol consumption and administrative data on family background and educational engagement. Data …
Sociological Ambivalence: Relationships between Birth Parents and Foster Parents
Inspired by Merton and Barber's sociological theory on ambivalence, this article analyses 'co-parenting' between foster parents and birth parents as prototypes of ambivalent relationships; that is, relationships based on incompatible role requirements. This incompatibility is rooted in the conflicts between (a) the professional role of foster carers and their emotional involvement in the child in their care, and (b) the status of birth parents as…
Controlling intimacy: Sexual scripts among men and women in prostitution
Inspired by sexual scripting theory, this article analyses intimacy and control in prostitution. The authors identify two strategies for maintaining control among male and female sex sellers. The first strategy is to restrict prostitution to relationships with as much sexual reciprocity as possible. The other is to maintain sexual/emotional distance from customers - yet often acting the opposite. The article questions prevailing stereotypes about…
Maturing out’ as normative standard: Qualitative interviews with young adult drinkers
Framed within a life-course perspective, this paper analyses the contents of the phenomenon ‘maturing out’ of adolescent drinking. We identify five dimensions of change that young adults’ drinking habits are expected to undergo when they reach their mid-twenties: using alcohol to maintain and develop existing relationships instead of building new relationships; drinking in differentiated ways instead of always to get drunk; controlling one’s into…
Playing the game or played by the game? Young drug users’ educational trajectories
This article analyses the relationship between cannabis use and educational trajectories among 42 young drug users, recruited at addiction treatment centres in Denmark. Quantitative research shows regular cannabis use to be associated with poor school performance and drop-out. However, these studies do not pay much attention to differences between educational tracks or to the links between the educational field and other fields. Drawing on a Bour…
More risky for some than others: Negative life events among young risk-takers
In this article, we examine how early risk behaviours are related to subsequent negative life events among young men and women from different socioeconomic backgrounds in Denmark. We draw on data from a survey on 15-year-olds’ drinking, smoking, cannabis use and early sexual debut and administrative register data about negative life events such as not being in education, employment or training (NEET), crime convictions and hospitalisations betwee…
Out of sync: Time management in the lives of young drug users
The paper analyzes young cannabis users' experiences of time from two different perspectives, one looking at how their everyday life is related to social time structures and another looking at their actual time management strategies. The paper shows that intense drug use is a reason behind the interviewees' underinvolvement in interaction time, institutional time, and cyclic time. Yet, drug use may also be an attempt at solving problems with time…
From wanting to willing - controlled drug use as a treatment goal
Sympathy and misery in families with drinking problems
Sympathy is an emotion that connects people in trouble with those around them. This paper uses Candace Clark's sociological theory on sympathy-giving to explore the emotional relationships between adult children of alcoholics (ACOAs) and their parents. Three dimensions are singled out as being central to sympathy-giving. We show, first, that the 'sympathy accounts' of alcoholic parents are related to the degree to which they live up to standardiz…
Social Constructionism Turned Into Human Service Work
Studies of applied constructionism are opportunities for scholars to explore how social constructionism is a resource used by claims-makers in describing and justifying their orientations to professional practice. The present paper expands sociological constructionism by analyzing applied constructionism in social problems work in Copenhagen, Denmark. Based on interviews with staff members in narrative drug treatment, we explore two themes: the r…
Understanding Addiction: Adult Children of Alcoholics Describing Their Parents’ Drinking Problems
Based on qualitative interviews with adult children of alcoholics, this article analyzes three different ways of conceptualizing drinking problems: alcoholism as disease, alcoholism as volitional behavior, and alcoholism as a socially conditioned phenomenon. The interviewees (13 women, 12 men, average age 39 years) were recruited among employees at a large workplace who in a preceding survey had classified their parents as having 'alcohol problem…
Explanations and expectations: Drug Narratives Among Young Cannabis Users in Treatment
This article analyses how young people enrolled in drug addiction treatment in Copenhagen, Denmark, explain their cannabis careers and how they view their possibilities for quitting drug use again. Inspired by Mead and narrative studies of health and illness, the article identifies four different drug use 'aetiologies' drawn upon by the interviewees. These cover childhood experiences, self-medication, the influence of friends and cannabis use as …
Selections of reality: Applying Burke's dramatism to a harm reduction program
Cannabis careers revisited: Applying Howard S. Becker's theory to present-day cannabis use
Turning Troubles into Problems: Clientization in Human Services
"Human service professionals deal with a wide range of problems, from child abuse, parenting issues, and elderly care, to addictions, mental illness, sexual assault, unemployment, and criminality. These must be constructed as problems for professionals to appropriately respond to them. Human service provision starts from there. But in the everyday experience of service providers and users alike, there is a parallel world of ordinary troubles that…
Drinking successfully: Alcohol consumption, taste and social status
The paper analyses the relationship between social status, alcohol consumption and taste, using a Danish company as empirical case. Methodologically as well as theoretically, the paper is inspired by Bourdieu. A social space tied to socioeconomic status and gendered work positions is constructed using specific multiple correspondence analysis. Hereafter, a range of variables measuring alcohol-related practices and preferences are analysed, showin…
A will to health? Drinking, risk and social class
This article explores risk conceptions related to alcohol use among Danes who drink ‘too much’ (based on the National Health Board’s standards for safe drinking). It analyses drinking patterns and risk management strategies among interviewees from different socio-economic backgrounds, and explores the differences between the behaviours and conceptions of these individuals and the risk advice and definitions provided by health agencies. The articl…
The Biographical Illusion: Constructing Meaning in Qualitative Interviews
This article deals with qualitative interviews in a research project on alcohol abusers and with some of the negotiations-about the cause and effect, guilt, and responsibility-involved in these interviews. The aim of this article is to show that interviews are sites of knowledge production and that interviewees fashion their stories according to more or less distinct interpretive frameworks. To illustrate the processes of assigning competence to …
Accounting for Trouble: Identity Negotiations in Qualitative Interviews with Alcoholics
This article combines a narrative approach on life histories, inspired by Paul Ricoeur, with the symbolic interactionist approaches of George Herbert Mead and Erving Goffman. It focuses on 'negotiations' in qualitative interviews with alcoholics, that is, narrative sequences in which the interviewee's line comes into conflict with the line of the interviewer. From a larger study of drinking careers among alcoholics in Copenhagen, two interviews a…
Life histories and the perspective of the present
The purpose of the article is to suggest a development of the narrative life history tradition along the lines represented by George Herbert Mead and Paul Ricoeur. This theoretical approach is presented as an alternative to both subjectivist approaches, that continue the search for the solitary, true self behind the life histories, and to structuralist approaches, in which the self and its past experience disappears. In the article a theoretical …
Cannabis careers revisited: Applying Howard S. Becker's theory to present-day cannabis use
Negotiating Strangerhood: Interviews with Homeless Immigrants in Copenhagen
The results from a study on homeless immigrants in Copenhagen are analysed in this article. Based on 25 life-history interviews with male immigrants living in institutions for the homeless, my focus of concern is the interviewees' self-presentations and their attempts to handle their stigmatized position. Two theoretical approaches are combined. First, the narratives are analysed as representations of the immigrants' marginalized status in their …
From recreational to regular drug use: Qualitative Interviews With Young Clubbers
This article analyses the process of going from recreational use to regular and problematic use of illegal drugs. We present a model containing six career contingencies relevant for young people's progress from recreational to regular drug use: the closing of social networks, changes in forms of parties, intoxication becoming a goal in itself, easier access to drugs, learning to recognise alternative effects of drugs and experiences of loss of co…
Teenage Drinking, Symbolic Capital and Distinction
This article analyses alcohol-related lifestyles among Danish teenagers. Building on Bourdieu's reasoning on symbolic capital and distinction, we analyse three interrelated themes. First, we show that alcohol-related variables (drinking patterns, drinking debut, experience of intoxication, etc.) can be used to identify some very distinctive life styles among groups of Danish teenagers. Second, alcohol experience is analysed as a form of symbolic …
Explanations and expectations: Drug Narratives Among Young Cannabis Users in Treatment
This article analyses how young people enrolled in drug addiction treatment in Copenhagen, Denmark, explain their cannabis careers and how they view their possibilities for quitting drug use again. Inspired by Mead and narrative studies of health and illness, the article identifies four different drug use 'aetiologies' drawn upon by the interviewees. These cover childhood experiences, self-medication, the influence of friends and cannabis use as …
Out of sync: Time management in the lives of young drug users
The paper analyzes young cannabis users' experiences of time from two different perspectives, one looking at how their everyday life is related to social time structures and another looking at their actual time management strategies. The paper shows that intense drug use is a reason behind the interviewees' underinvolvement in interaction time, institutional time, and cyclic time. Yet, drug use may also be an attempt at solving problems with time…
Sociological Ambivalence: Relationships between Birth Parents and Foster Parents
Inspired by Merton and Barber's sociological theory on ambivalence, this article analyses 'co-parenting' between foster parents and birth parents as prototypes of ambivalent relationships; that is, relationships based on incompatible role requirements. This incompatibility is rooted in the conflicts between (a) the professional role of foster carers and their emotional involvement in the child in their care, and (b) the status of birth parents as…
Approaches to methadone treatment: Harm Reduction in Theory and Practice
The paper analyses methadone treatment in Copenhagen - as it is described by methadone users and staff at different outpatient centres. The starting point is a theoretical model distinguishing between two different approaches to methadone treatment: 'palliative' and 'curative'. Included in the model are three dimensions (1) treatment goals at the methadone centres (abstinence vs. stabilisation) (2) treatment focus (focus on addiction vs. focus on…
Drinking Rituals and Drinking Problems in a Wet Culture
Giving and receiving: Gendered service work in academia
Deploying the perspective of 'relational work', this article investigates the mechanisms behind the gender-unequal distribution of academic service. The concept of relational work is used to analyse how men and women in academia balance collective against individual interests when agreeing or disagreeing on service tasks. Four types of relational work are identified: compliance, evasiveness, barter and investment, with compliance being more commo…
Methadone Maintenance as Last Resort: A Social Phenomenology of a Drug Policy
Drawing on qualitative interviews with drug addicts in Copenhagen, Denmark, this article offers a phenomenological reading of a methadone maintenance program. The program is set within the principles of harm reduction, meaning that its aim is not to cure the participants’ addiction but to keep them stable on substitution medicine and slow the deterioration of their lives. We analyze the program’s implications for participants’ sense of agency and…
Controlling intimacy: Sexual scripts among men and women in prostitution
Inspired by sexual scripting theory, this article analyses intimacy and control in prostitution. The authors identify two strategies for maintaining control among male and female sex sellers. The first strategy is to restrict prostitution to relationships with as much sexual reciprocity as possible. The other is to maintain sexual/emotional distance from customers - yet often acting the opposite. The article questions prevailing stereotypes about…
Drinking successfully: Alcohol consumption, taste and social status
The paper analyses the relationship between social status, alcohol consumption and taste, using a Danish company as empirical case. Methodologically as well as theoretically, the paper is inspired by Bourdieu. A social space tied to socioeconomic status and gendered work positions is constructed using specific multiple correspondence analysis. Hereafter, a range of variables measuring alcohol-related practices and preferences are analysed, showin…
Dangers and pleasures: Drug attitudes and experiences among young people
This is a study of young people's conceptions of illegal drug use as dangerous and/or pleasurable and an analysis of the relationship between attitudes to drugs, drinking, friends' reported drug use and own experience with drug use and drinking. The article applies a mixed methods approach using both survey data and focus group interviews. The main statistical method is Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA), which constructs a social space of yo…
Playing the game or played by the game? Young drug users’ educational trajectories
This article analyses the relationship between cannabis use and educational trajectories among 42 young drug users, recruited at addiction treatment centres in Denmark. Quantitative research shows regular cannabis use to be associated with poor school performance and drop-out. However, these studies do not pay much attention to differences between educational tracks or to the links between the educational field and other fields. Drawing on a Bour…
Maturing out’ as normative standard: Qualitative interviews with young adult drinkers
Framed within a life-course perspective, this paper analyses the contents of the phenomenon ‘maturing out’ of adolescent drinking. We identify five dimensions of change that young adults’ drinking habits are expected to undergo when they reach their mid-twenties: using alcohol to maintain and develop existing relationships instead of building new relationships; drinking in differentiated ways instead of always to get drunk; controlling one’s into…
Sympathy and misery in families with drinking problems
Sympathy is an emotion that connects people in trouble with those around them. This paper uses Candace Clark's sociological theory on sympathy-giving to explore the emotional relationships between adult children of alcoholics (ACOAs) and their parents. Three dimensions are singled out as being central to sympathy-giving. We show, first, that the 'sympathy accounts' of alcoholic parents are related to the degree to which they live up to standardiz…
Understanding Addiction: Adult Children of Alcoholics Describing Their Parents’ Drinking Problems
Based on qualitative interviews with adult children of alcoholics, this article analyzes three different ways of conceptualizing drinking problems: alcoholism as disease, alcoholism as volitional behavior, and alcoholism as a socially conditioned phenomenon. The interviewees (13 women, 12 men, average age 39 years) were recruited among employees at a large workplace who in a preceding survey had classified their parents as having 'alcohol problem…
Governing Adolescent Drinking
This article examines the relationship between the drinking habits of Danish adolescents and the upbringing ideals and alcohol rules of their parents. It is based on three different data sets: a survey of 2,000 Danish young people born in 1989, a survey with the parents of these young people, and two waves of focus group interviews (in all 28) with adolescents aged 14 to 16. The study demonstrates that there is a sharp contrast between the views …
Turning Social Capital into Scientific Capital: Men's Networking in Academia
Universities have changed in recent decades with the introduction of various performance measurement systems, including journal ranking lists. This Bourdieu-inspired article analyses three types of strategies used by male associate professors in response to journal lists: building social capital at conferences and during stays abroad; marketing of research papers to potential reviewers and journal editors; and tactical co-authorship. Drawing on 5…
At the heart or on the periphery: Gender, (in)visibility and epistemic positioning in academia
This article analyses barriers for women’s careers in higher education from a theoretical perspective focusing on epistemic positioning and gendered (in)visibility. The study is based on 96 qualitative interviews with associate professors in economics, political science and sociology in Denmark. Epistemic positioning is operationalised as four distinct processes of marginalisation: reproduction of men’s privileges from cohort to cohort of academi…
Self-casting and alter-casting: Healthcare professionals’ boundary work in response to peer workers
Within mental health services, the recovery model has been a guiding philosophy over the past decades. This model stresses ‘person-centred care’ and focuses on assisting service users to live a meaningful and hopeful life even if their illness has not been cured. As part of the recovery orientation, ‘peer workers’ (PWs), i.e. people with lived experiences of mental illness, are increasingly employed within mental health services. In this article,…
Of Vice and Women: Shades of Prostitution
Makt eller vanmakt
In this artide, certain key issues in the Foucault-inspired research on gender, power and sexuality are discussed. One such theme is the relation between Foucault and the established "classics" of gender research. The awareness of gender and sexuality as social constructions is not new, it belongs to the history of feministic research. Another main thente is Foucault's concept of power. What implications does a multiple theory of power like Fouca…
Om Bordieus reflexiva sociologi
The aim of this article is to translate some of Bourdieu’s abstract reasoning on reflexive sociology into concrete recommendations of how such a sociology can be practised. The main focus is on the relationship between practical knowledge and theoretical knowledge. Firstly, Bourdieu’s “objectified objectification“, and the fundamental conflict between practice and discourse on practice, is discussed. Secondly, the construction of the object, and …
Immovable magic - Pierre Bourdieu on gender and power
The goal of the article is threefold. First, the gender theoretical reasoning in Pierre Bourdieu's sociology is reviewed and interpreted. Second, Bourdieu's gender perspective is related to his most important theoretical sources of inspiration, above all Durkheim and Weber. Third, some critical remarks about Bourdieu are presented. With his strong emphasis on self-reproducing power mechanisms, Bourdieu becomes nearly defeatist in his descriptions…
The Biographical Illusion: Constructing Meaning in Qualitative Interviews
This article deals with qualitative interviews in a research project on alcohol abusers and with some of the negotiations-about the cause and effect, guilt, and responsibility-involved in these interviews. The aim of this article is to show that interviews are sites of knowledge production and that interviewees fashion their stories according to more or less distinct interpretive frameworks. To illustrate the processes of assigning competence to …
Accounting for Trouble: Identity Negotiations in Qualitative Interviews with Alcoholics
This article combines a narrative approach on life histories, inspired by Paul Ricoeur, with the symbolic interactionist approaches of George Herbert Mead and Erving Goffman. It focuses on 'negotiations' in qualitative interviews with alcoholics, that is, narrative sequences in which the interviewee's line comes into conflict with the line of the interviewer. From a larger study of drinking careers among alcoholics in Copenhagen, two interviews a…
Drinking Rituals and Drinking Problems in a Wet Culture
Negotiating Strangerhood: Interviews with Homeless Immigrants in Copenhagen
The results from a study on homeless immigrants in Copenhagen are analysed in this article. Based on 25 life-history interviews with male immigrants living in institutions for the homeless, my focus of concern is the interviewees' self-presentations and their attempts to handle their stigmatized position. Two theoretical approaches are combined. First, the narratives are analysed as representations of the immigrants' marginalized status in their …
Life histories and the perspective of the present
The purpose of the article is to suggest a development of the narrative life history tradition along the lines represented by George Herbert Mead and Paul Ricoeur. This theoretical approach is presented as an alternative to both subjectivist approaches, that continue the search for the solitary, true self behind the life histories, and to structuralist approaches, in which the self and its past experience disappears. In the article a theoretical …
Mötet mellan klient och system - om forskning i socialt arbete
Margaretha Järvinen: The meeting between clients and the system: on research in social work This article is based on the inaugural lecture by the first professor of social work in Denmark. Although coming later than in many other countries, the professorship symbolizes the fact that the field of social work is about to develop into a scientific field of research. The article focuses on social work as a meeting between clients and social welfare i…
Constructing maturity through alcohol experience–Focus group interviews with teenagers
Danish 14- and 15-year-olds are at the top of the European list when it comes to drinking and drunkenness. The aim of this article is to demonstrate how the struggle for social recognition–with alcohol as the central marker–transpires in groups of teenagers in Denmark. This article shows how alcohol experience and positive attitudes towards drinking are related to popularity and influence in the peer group. The function of alcohol in teenagers’ s…
Teenage Drinking, Symbolic Capital and Distinction
This article analyses alcohol-related lifestyles among Danish teenagers. Building on Bourdieu's reasoning on symbolic capital and distinction, we analyse three interrelated themes. First, we show that alcohol-related variables (drinking patterns, drinking debut, experience of intoxication, etc.) can be used to identify some very distinctive life styles among groups of Danish teenagers. Second, alcohol experience is analysed as a form of symbolic …
Approaches to methadone treatment: Harm Reduction in Theory and Practice
The paper analyses methadone treatment in Copenhagen - as it is described by methadone users and staff at different outpatient centres. The starting point is a theoretical model distinguishing between two different approaches to methadone treatment: 'palliative' and 'curative'. Included in the model are three dimensions (1) treatment goals at the methadone centres (abstinence vs. stabilisation) (2) treatment focus (focus on addiction vs. focus on…
Governing Adolescent Drinking
This article examines the relationship between the drinking habits of Danish adolescents and the upbringing ideals and alcohol rules of their parents. It is based on three different data sets: a survey of 2,000 Danish young people born in 1989, a survey with the parents of these young people, and two waves of focus group interviews (in all 28) with adolescents aged 14 to 16. The study demonstrates that there is a sharp contrast between the views …
Social capital as norms and resources: Focus groups discussing alcohol
The aim of this article is to analyse the relationship between peer-group social capital and the use of alcohol among young people – as this relationship is expressed in focus group interviews. The main point to be made is that social capital affects alcohol use in two different ways: it incites some forms of drinking (‘controlled drunkenness’) while restricting others (drinking alone, drinking ‘for the wrong reason’, losing control often). Furth…
Methadone Maintenance as Last Resort: A Social Phenomenology of a Drug Policy
Drawing on qualitative interviews with drug addicts in Copenhagen, Denmark, this article offers a phenomenological reading of a methadone maintenance program. The program is set within the principles of harm reduction, meaning that its aim is not to cure the participants’ addiction but to keep them stable on substitution medicine and slow the deterioration of their lives. We analyze the program’s implications for participants’ sense of agency and…
The normalisation of cannabis use among young people: Symbolic boundary work in focus groups
This paper analyses ‘techniques of neutralisation’ among young people discussing cannabis in focus group interviews. The paper is based on data from focus group interviews with young Danes followed from when they were 14–15 years old in 2004 until they were 18–19 years old in 2008. In this period, the participants’ attitudes towards cannabis undergo a radical change from being negative and sceptical into being predominantly positive and accepting…
Self-governance, control and loss of control amongst drink-drivers
Dangers and pleasures: Drug attitudes and experiences among young people
This is a study of young people's conceptions of illegal drug use as dangerous and/or pleasurable and an analysis of the relationship between attitudes to drugs, drinking, friends' reported drug use and own experience with drug use and drinking. The article applies a mixed methods approach using both survey data and focus group interviews. The main statistical method is Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA), which constructs a social space of yo…
From recreational to regular drug use: Qualitative Interviews With Young Clubbers
This article analyses the process of going from recreational use to regular and problematic use of illegal drugs. We present a model containing six career contingencies relevant for young people's progress from recreational to regular drug use: the closing of social networks, changes in forms of parties, intoxication becoming a goal in itself, easier access to drugs, learning to recognise alternative effects of drugs and experiences of loss of co…
A will to health? Drinking, risk and social class
This article explores risk conceptions related to alcohol use among Danes who drink ‘too much’ (based on the National Health Board’s standards for safe drinking). It analyses drinking patterns and risk management strategies among interviewees from different socio-economic backgrounds, and explores the differences between the behaviours and conceptions of these individuals and the risk advice and definitions provided by health agencies. The articl…
Turning Troubles into Problems: Clientization in Human Services
"Human service professionals deal with a wide range of problems, from child abuse, parenting issues, and elderly care, to addictions, mental illness, sexual assault, unemployment, and criminality. These must be constructed as problems for professionals to appropriately respond to them. Human service provision starts from there. But in the everyday experience of service providers and users alike, there is a parallel world of ordinary troubles that…
Drinking successfully: Alcohol consumption, taste and social status
The paper analyses the relationship between social status, alcohol consumption and taste, using a Danish company as empirical case. Methodologically as well as theoretically, the paper is inspired by Bourdieu. A social space tied to socioeconomic status and gendered work positions is constructed using specific multiple correspondence analysis. Hereafter, a range of variables measuring alcohol-related practices and preferences are analysed, showin…
Selections of reality: Applying Burke's dramatism to a harm reduction program
Cannabis careers revisited: Applying Howard S. Becker's theory to present-day cannabis use
Sociology (35 works) · Psychology (34 works) · Social Psychology (26 works) · Social science (23 works) · Political science (14 works) · Social Psychology (14 works) · Medicine (13 works) · Qualitative research (13 works) · Substance Abuse Treatment and Outcomes (12 works) · Epistemology (10 works)