Young people is at the center of many of the rapid changes taking place in contemporary society and has to deal with the uncertainties that follows. One uncertainty is linked to the transition between leaving full time studies and entering employment were unemployment has become a natural step in becoming an adult. Hence the "becoming" has become a longer period of time in young people’s lives. The economic crisis in many European countries in recent years are the cause of many problems young people experience today. In relation to this brief background the thesis examines how social problems i.e. unemployment, deprivation, dependent on social welfare, low education and disability (affecting a person’s ability to work) is accumulated over time. The thesis point of departure is what Merton (1968) described in terms of The Matthew effect according to the Gospel of St. Matthew: For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath. It is the last part of this “effect” that is the center of attention. The research questions are: is there such a thing as the Matthew effect and if so how this process can be understood. Theoretically the study at hand elaborates the accumulation process by drawing on the concept of marginalization and social exclusion. By analyzing changes over time (3 years) in the five social problems described above (unemployment, deprivation etc.) for 64236 young people in the age of 19 to 25 years living in Sweden it is possible to describe patterns of social problem and how and why one specific problem or social problems in combination may lead to the accumulation of problem over time. These results are also combined with data from in-depth interviews whit young people that have accumulated social problem over time. It is argued that the combination of research methods gives a better understanding to the phenomenon at hand. The theoretical contribution relates to a better understanding of the process of accumulation of social problems for young people and to a better understanding of different steps in the accumulation process as well as central fault lines in this process. These findings can be used in practice for pinpointing groups of young adults in need of more as well as less support in handling and overcoming social problem and the transition from school to work.

This dissertation critically explores the governance of disability, social marginalization, and spatial exclusion in highland Ecuador. Since the 1990s, disabled Ecuadorians have moved from a state of social neglect and physical isolation to wider societal participation, fueled in part by national campaigns aimed at promoting disability rights. Many have joined grassroots organizations through biosocial networks based on the collective identity of shared impairment. However, their incorporation into the labor market, educational systems, and public sphere has been uneven and impeded by underlying spatial and cultural barriers. Based on twelve months of ethnographic research I conducted among people with physical and visual disabilities in the city of Cuenca, this research analyzes narratives of disablement within the local disabled community. I focus on the consequences of living with embodied differences considered to be anomalous within environments designed for nondisabled citizens. The study extends current scholarship on the social context of disability to a Latin American country with significant ethnic and economic hierarchies, exploring disability as an important dimension of social stratification that is both produced and remedied by the state. In Ecuador, the social category of people with disabilities has emerged through historical processes and campaigns that emphasize the prevention of impairment and chronic disease, promotion of equal rights, and inclusive labor markets - all of which are part of a broader aspiration toward modernity. I argue that disability is often an overlooked but important, cross-cutting form of bodily and behavioral difference that creates multiple marginalities. Emphasizing social practices and structural dimensions of disability shifts the attention away from approaches that foreground individual, psychological, or medical aspects of disablement and instead contributes to wider anthropological understandings of disability as socially produced, constructed, managed and enacted. In analyzing disability as a cross-cutting category, this research reframes disability as contingent on local constructions of normativity, highlighting how bodies come to be recognized as "abled" or "disabled" within particular productions of space and systems of un/marked subjects.

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The aim of this studyhas been to capture preschool children's strategies, when they include and exclude each other in play. My aim was also to find out how children choose to integrate into an already existing game. My questions were: What strategies are used by the children at the preschool when they want to exclude or include each other? How to integrate the children when they want to be involved in an ongoing game and how they will be received during the time of play? My theoretical starting points are from Vygotsky's theory of proximal development zone, and Michel Foucault's perspective on power, and also research on the subject. The empirical study was conducted using the observations at two preschools. The children I observed were between four to five years old.The results show that children used different strategies, and when the strategy did not work so the child could switch to another. It also showed that children, who could not get into the game, got the help of other children who were already in play or a preschool teacher.Sometimesthe children received no help at all and gave up the hope to get into the game, or got into it by himself.

This thesis provides a critical understanding of the size and relative position of the Cornish in Cornwall, a county in the south-west of the UK. Cornwall is a region which has experienced increased levels of disadvantage for a prolonged period of time. The indigenous people, whilst seeing a rise in their inclusion in ethnicity variables in the region, have remained under-researched in terms of their socio-economic position relative to the non-Cornish in the same geographic area. This thesis addresses this gap in the literature and represents the first in-depth examination of the group. The 2001 Census included an option to ‘write-in’ a Cornish ethnic identity, however whilst accurate in the responses it recorded the result was almost certainly an under-enumeration due to the lack of a dedicated tick-box selection. This thesis is a rigorous examination of the Cornish, starting with these data, estimating their size and socio-economic position (in terms of social exclusion) relative to non-Cornish individuals. Three stages of primary analysis sought to; analyse, adjust and extend the 2001 Census result to broadly estimate the size, links with exclusion and the causal processes behind these links. Firstly, an accurate picture of the size of the Cornish population was estimated using an innovative weighting strategy, developed to collate all other data referring to the Cornish and to derive weights for application to the raw Census data. Secondly, a stage of primary survey research examined this group more directly for links with social exclusion factors; and thirdly, a stage of qualitative interviews with knowledgeable individuals in the region lent depth to the findings and provided a more coherent explanatory framework. The results indicate that the Cornish are certainly more numerous than the 2001 Census had indicated. The proportion of individuals self-identifying as Cornish is likely to be closer to a quarter of the population rather than the 6.7% indicated in the 2001 ii data. There was some discrepancy in the data between the belief amongst the group of social exclusion and the reality. In order to explain the discrepancy, a model was used which explores the difference between personal-level experience and group level discrimination (Taylor et al 1990). The results of this thesis highlight the complex and multi-dimensional processes inherent in, firstly, the methodological and practical process of ethnicity measurement and, secondly, its use as an explanatory variable for social exclusion experience. Overall, this thesis represents the first and most comprehensive examination of the indigenous people of Cornwall and their relative lived experience compared to non-Cornish in the same area.

Over the last few decades the interests of statistical physicists have broadened to include the detailed quantitative study of many systems - chemical, biological and even social - that were not traditionally part of the discipline. These systems can feature rich and complex spatiotemporal behaviour, often due to continued interaction with the environment and characterised by the dissipation of flows of energy and/or mass. This has led to vigorous research aimed at extending the established theoretical framework and adapting analytical methods that originate in the study of systems at thermodynamic equilibrium to deal with out-of-equilibrium situations, which are much more prevalent in nature. This thesis focuses on a microscopic model known as the asymmetric exclusion process, or ASEP, which describes the stochastic motion of particles on a one-dimensional lattice. Though in the first instance a model of a lattice gas, it is sufficiently general to have served as the basis to model a wide variety of phenomena. That, as well as substantial progress made in analysing its stationary behaviour, including the locations and nature of phase transitions, have led to it becoming a paradigmatic model of an exactly solvable nonequilibrium system. Recently an exact solution for the dynamics found a somewhat enigmatic transition, which has not been well understood. This thesis is an attempt to verify and better understand the nature of that dynamical transition, including its relation, if any, to the static phase transitions. I begin in Chapter 2 by reviewing known results for the ASEP, in particular the totally asymmetric variant (TASEP), driven at the boundaries. I present the exact dynamical transition as it was first derived, and a reduced description of the dynamics known as domain wall theory (DWT), which locates the transition at a different place. In Chapter 3, I investigate solutions of a nonlinear PDE that constitutes a mean-field, continuum approximation of the ASEP, namely the Burgers equation, and find that a similar dynamical transition occurs there at the same place as predicted by DWT but in disagreement with the exact result. Next, in Chapter 4 I report on efforts to observe and measure the dynamical transition through Monte Carlo simulation. No directly obvious physical manifestation of the transition was observed. The relaxation of three different observables was measured and found to agree well with each other but only slightly better with the exact transition than with DWT. In Chapter 5 I apply a numerical renormalisation scheme known as the Density Matrix Renormalisation Group (DMRG) method and find that it confirms the exact dynamical transition, ruling out the behaviour predicted by DWT. Finally in Chapter 6 I demonstrate that a perturbative calculation, involving the crossing of eigenvalues, allows us to rederive the location of the dynamical transition found exactly, thereby offering some insight into the nature of the transition.

Om en ungdom varken har arbete eller studerar kan den här personen leva i ett utanförskap. Att leva i utanförskap innebär att leva i en marginaliserad ställning i samhället. Det finns flera former av utanförskapet. Ekonomiskt utanförskap, där individer saknar ekonomiska resurser. Politiskt utanförskap, där de är i utanförskap på grund av att de tillhör en marginaliserad grupp. Socialt utanförskap, är när en individ saknar kontakt med resten av samhället. Syftet med denna uppsats har varit att undersöka hur Västerås stad arbetar mot ungdomars utanförskap. Vi har utfört en kvalitativ fallstudie där fallet har varit Västerås stads arbete mot ungdomars utanförskap. Material vi har baserat denna uppsats på, har vi samlat in genom ett antal intervjuer som vi har utfört med olika medarbetare inom Västerås stad som arbetar med ungdomar i utanförskap. Vi har även använt oss av ett stort antal olika officiella dokument som på något sätt innehåller utanförskap eller hur arbete organiseras.  Vi har använt oss av ett antal organisationsteorier i vår analys. Vi finner att det finns tydliga kopplingar mellan Brunsson och Ahrnes teori och hur Västerås stad organiserar arbetet mot ungdomars utanförskap. Arbetet mot ungdomars utanförskap är uppdelat på ett stort antal olika aktörer som alla har olika arbetsuppgifter. Detta leder till att det främsta verktyget mot utanförskap hos ungdomar är samarbete och samverkan.

Thesis advisor: Ruth McRoy / Creating gender equality in situations of perceived organization exclusion-inclusion (OEI-the degree to which individuals feel a part of critical organizational processes such as access to information and influencing decision making processes) is a critical social and organizational justice concern (Mor Barak, 2011). Given the lack of understanding about gender differences in OEI, this study investigated this issue, as well as, the determinants of OEI, and the sources of gender differences in OEI across multiple worksites in different countries. Job status, work- and family-role investments, perception of work-family culture and gender-role beliefs were hypothesized as the main determinants and sources of gender differences in OEI. Data collected by the Sloan Center on Aging and Work for the Generations of Talent Study (GOT) in 2010-2011 were used to investigate the gender differences in OEI. Bivariate statistics, multivariate fixed effects models, and Blinder-Oaxaca regression decomposition analyses were used to test the hypotheses. Findings suggest that women's sense of OEI is significantly lower than that of men. This difference, although smaller, remains statistically significant after accounting for job status, work- and family-role investments, perception of work-family culture, gender-role beliefs, worksite variances, and control variables (age, race/ethnicity, optimism). Of these factors, job status and work-role investment differences between men and women are the greatest sources of the gender gap in OEI. No support was found for the influence of gender differences in family-role investments, gender-role beliefs, and perception of work-family culture on the gender OEI gap. Finally, women's more optimistic outlook on life, compared to men, attenuated the gender OEI gap. Guided by these findings, potential policy and/or practice interventions should be aimed at advancing greater gender equity in job status and supporting women's work-role investments. However, interventions aimed at changing women's work attitudes should not promote conformity to gendered organizational norms. Future research should aim to better understand the relationship between contextual factors and gender differences in OEI, and to examine the role of positive psychological characteristics (e.g. optimism) in OEI and the consequences of gender differences in OEI. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2013. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Social Work. / Discipline: Social Work.