Adapting ‘The Normal’ – Examining Relations between Youth, Risk and Accidents at Work

People between 18 and 24 years of age are more exposed to accidents at work than anyone else. This article examines how safety is experienced and practiced among young employees. The aim of the article is to examine relations among youth, risk, and occupational safety. The article offers an insight into young employees’ narratives of risk situations at work. It examines the ways young employees in different organizational contexts talk about – and relate to – dangerous situations at work that they have experienced themselves. Safety is according to Silvia Gherardi considered as a product of situated ‘activity of everyday practices’ in organizations. Parallel to this, the article draws on Diane Vaughan’s theorizing about organizational production of ‘acceptable risk’ and organizational deviances in socially organized settings. The article shows how young employees position themselves – and are positioned – in organizations within different discourses of risk and safety because they are young and as a part of practicing youth

Sexual Harassment of Newcomers in Elder Care. An Institutional Practice?

Sexual harassment is illegal and may have very damaging effects on the people exposed to it. One would expect organizations, employers, and institutions to take very good care to prevent employees from exposure to sexual harassment from anyone in their workplace. And yet, many people, mostly women, are exposed to sexual harassment at work. In care work, such behaviour is often directed toward their female caregiver by elderly citizens in need of care. Contemporary Nordic studies of working life and work environment have primarily investigated the interpersonal dimensions of sexual harassment, thus focusing on the relation between elderly citizens in need of care and their professional caregivers. In this article, we argue that sexual harassment from the elderly toward newcomers in elder care should also be seen as an effect of institutional practices. Based upon a Foucauldianinspired notion of practice-making, the article carries out a secondary analysis of three different empirical studies in order to explore how sexual harassment is produced and maintained through institutional practices in elder care. The term institution in this perspective includes three dimensions; a political, an educational (educational institutions in health and elder care), and a work organizational dimension. By examining elder care in these different dimensions, we identify how sexual harassment of professional caregivers is produced and maintained through institutional practice-making in elder care. The article thus contributes to our knowledge on working life by expanding and qualifying the understanding of the problematic working environment in care work, and by offering an alternative theoretical and analytical approach to the study of sexual harassment. Together, these insights suggest how elder care institutions might act to prevent sexual harassment toward caregivers

Young Workers on Digital Labor Platforms: Uncovering the Double Autonomy Paradox

Drawing on interviews with 12 young adults in the Danish digital labor market, this article investigates how young workers on digital labor platforms experience the tension between ‘algorithmic management’ and autonomy. Digital labor platforms promise autonomy to workers, but the study shows that the platforms in varying degrees exert control over the labor process in different stages of the work. The inherent non-transparency of the algorithmic management systems makes it difficult for the young workers to understand the underlying mechanisms of the platforms. While the young workers’ autonomy in some important ways is restricted by the algorithmic management systems, the young workers have all chosen the platform work because they feel that it allows them to control where and when they work. We propose the conceptualization ‘the double autonomy paradox of young workers’ to describe this phenomenon

Without a Safety Net: Precarization Among Young Danish Employees

Precarisation’ is one of the concepts that has become important in efforts to explain how neoliberal politics and changed economic conditions produce new forms of marginalization and increased insecurity. The aim of this article is to examine how subjectivity is produced among young Danish employees through socio-material processes of precarization at workplaces and employment projects. Drawing on ethnographic observations and qualitative interviews with 35 young employees and young people ‘Neither in Education, Employment or Training’ (NEET), the three case examples show how processes of precarization, rooted in global economic and political conditions, can be understood as situated contextual practices. It is demonstrated how being positioned as an easily replaceable source of labor is shaping young people’s processes of subjectification

Exploring and Expanding the Category of ‘Young Workers’ According to Situated Ways of Doing Risk and Safety—a Case Study in the Retail Industry

Young adult workers aged 18–24 years have the highest risk of accidents at work. Following the work of Bourdieu and Tannock, we demonstrate that young adult workers are a highly differentiated group. Accordingly, safety prevention among young adult workers needs to be nuanced in ways that take into consideration the different positions and conditions under which young adult workers are employed. Based on single and group interviews with 26 young adult workers from six various sized supermarkets, we categorize young adult retail workers into the following five distinct groups: ‘Skilled workers,’ ‘Apprentices,’ ‘Sabbatical year workers,’ ‘Student workers,’ and ‘School dropouts.’ We argue that exposure to accidental risk is not equally distributed among them and offer an insight into the narratives of young adult workers on the subject of risk situations at work. The categorizations are explored and expanded according to the situated ways of ‘doing’ risk and safety in the working practices of the adult workers. We suggest that the understanding of ‘young’ as an age-related biological category might explain why approaches to prevent accidents among young employees first and foremost include individual factors like advice, information, and supervision and to a lesser degree the structural and cultural environment wherein they are embedded. We conclude that age cannot stand alone as the only factor in safety prevention directed at workers aged 18–24 years; if we do so, there is a risk of overemphasizing age-related individual characteristics such as awareness and cognitive limitations before structural, relational, and hierarchical dimensions at the workplace

“Det får mig til at føle mig hjemme”: Når unge flytter hjemmefra, og hvordan de skaber tilhørsforhold et nyt sted

Youth is a life phase characterised by many transitions. Leaving home is one of the most crucial transitions in youth. Based on the concept of belonging, this article examines how young people develop a sense of belonging to the place they are moving to when leaving home. The article examines the ways in which young people are constructing a sense of belonging to a place through different social and material resources. The point of departure for the article is that belonging to a place is a performative act. The article is based on a longitudinal interview study with 36 Danish young people between the age of 17 and 25, whom the authors have followed for 12 months during their transition from living with their parents to living on their own. In the interviews, it is examined which challenges young people encounter in this transition, and which strategies they apply to meet these challenges. The article shows how young people through their affective and ambiguous interactions with places, materialities and social relations produce a sense of belonging to the place they are moving to. In particular, it focuses on how young people’s sense of belonging to the childhood home affect the ways in which they actively create a relationship with a new place. The article nuances the notion of belonging by showing how young people’s ways of connecting with a new place can be considered a performative act, which is largely connected to the experiences of attachment, or lack of attachment to the childhood home which they carry with them into adulthood.Ungdommen er en livsfase, der er præget af mange overgange. Et eksempel på en sådan overgang er, når unge flytter hjemmefra. Med udgangspunkt i begrebet “belonging” (at høre til/ tilhørsforhold) undersøger denne artikel, hvilke forhold der har betydning for, at unge etablerer en oplevelse af at høre til – eller ikke at høre til – det sted, hvor han/hun flytter hen efter flytning fra barndomshjemmet. Udgangspunktet for artiklen er, at oplevelsen af at høre til et sted, eller i livet som sådan, ikke er givet, men derimod er “performativt” (Bell, 1999; Cuervo & Wyn, 2017).Det empiriske udgangspunkt for artiklen er et longitudinelt interviewstudie med 36 danske unge mellem 17 og 25 år, som forfatterne har fulgt igennem 12 måneder under deres overgang fra hjemme- til udeboende. I interviewene fortæller de om den periode, hvor de flytter fra deres barndomshjem, og om de følelser og tanker, de gør sig i den forbindelse. Artiklen undersøger de unges affektive og flertydige relationer til steder, materialiter og mennesker, der får betydning for de unges oplevelse af at høre til – eller ikke at høre til – det sted, de flytter hen. I artiklen sætter vi særligt fokus på den betydning, som unges forhold til barndomshjemmet har for de måder, de unge aktivt forsøger at skabe et tilhørsforhold til et nyt sted. Artiklen nuancerer i forlængelse af dette begrebet om “belonging” ved at pege på, at unges måder at skabe tilknytning til et nyt sted er performativt og i høj grad skabes med afsæt i de oplevelser af tilknytning, eller mangel på tilknytning, til barndomshjemmet, som de bærer med sig ind i voksenlivet