Combatting the Causes of Inequality Affecting Young People Across Europe

Off the Beaten Track? Selectivity, Discretion and Path-Shaping in Swedish Public Housing

“…Actors are treated as structured -agency is not predetermined but potentially constrained and enabled by structures. But as structures are made by relations, actors are also seen as structuring social relations -thus contributing to the reproduction of the social structure (Stigendal 2018;Jessop 2015). As actors and structures presuppose each other and are dependent on each other to become actualized, they must be analysed as a "dialectical duality" (Jessop 2005, 50), instead of -as Giddens suggest -studied by temporarily ignoring, "bracketing", either structure or agency.…”

“…Actors make strategic choices by taking advantage of the opportunities and constraints. However, how successful they are in doing so depends on their own underlying powers, which are crucial for their ability to "make a difference" (Stigendal 2018). Thus, agential selectivity refers to the "differential capacity of agents to engage in structurally oriented strategic calculation" (Sum and Jessop 2013, 217), as some actors are more skilled in the arts of rhetoric and argumentation than others.…”

“…While some studies have used SRA to analyse societal transformations at the international, state and local levels (Stigendal 2018;Sum 2015), there have been few -if any -attempts to apply SRA to housing studies. It could be argued that SRA with its foundation in critical realism has advantages over historical institutionalism and contrasts institutional isomorphism (Powell and DiMaggio 1983) as it highlights how institutions develop differently due to spatio-temporal contingent conditions and how such conditions affect actorial discretion.…”

Drömmar och röster : en antologi om barns och ungas livsvillkor i Malmö

“…Det problemorienterade förhållningssättet har alltså en grundläggande betydelse för det narrativ om ungdomars situation som vi idag möter i olika sammanhang men också, menar vi, i konkreta satsningar och åtgärder för att komma tillrätta med "ungdomsproblem". En mångfald exempel på detta förhållningssätt fann vi i det europeiska forskningsprojekt, Citispyce, som vi båda var engagerade i mellan åren 2013 och 2015 och där vi samarbetade med forskare och praktiker från tio städer runtom i Europa (Stigendal, 2018). Syftet med Citispyce var att skapa kunskap om den ojämlikhet som ungdomar drabbas av och hur den kan bekämpas.…”