Syftet med studien var att undersöka hur vuxna individers erfarenhet av att ha en förälder med diabetes typ-2 påverkat deras sätt att tänka och se på sin hälsa och livsstil. För att besvara studiens syfte genomfördes en kvalitativ undersökning baserad på intervjuer med fem respondenter. De teorier som användes vid analys av resultatet var Pierre Bourdiues teori om habitus och kapital, Berger & Luckmanns teori om primär och sekundär socialisation samt The Health Belief Model. I resultatet framkom bland annat att både hälsosamma och ohälsosamma vanor från uppväxten kunde ha en viss inverkan på respondenterna beteenden även som vuxna. Erfarenheten av att ha en förälder med diabetes typ-2 kunde även det ha viss inverkan på hur de uppfattade risken att själv bli sjuk i framtiden. Respondenterna uppfattdes tillfreds med sin nuvarande livsstil, vilken de själva anser vara tämligen hälsosam. Flera faktorer, förutom föräldrarna, har påverkat respondenternas nuvarande livsstil.

This research addresses how socioeconomic status impacts the ways that students with learning disabilities and their families interact with the school system and the consequences of these interactions. This will inform policy on special education, and college level services and accommodations for students with learning disabilities. In addition to exploring general patterns of college attendance for students with learning disabilities, this research will include an analysis of what factors best predict college attendance and persistence for students with learning disabilities. Specifically, the forms of capital framework including economic, social, and cultural capital along with habitus are used to understand issues of access and success in college. The primary findings of this study include a) the intersection of socioeconomic status and disability create an extreme form of stratification in college attendance for students with learning disabilities, b) each form of capital is significantly related to college attendance, c) measures of habitus are some of the strongest predictors of college attendance, d) forms of capital best predict college attendance at four-year colleges and universities and are less predictive for other forms of post-secondary education, and e) current models of college persistence may not be accurate for this population of students.

This study aims to contribute original knowledge of the identity ofpost-1992 academics to inform the debate surrounding the professionalization of higher education teachers. The setting was a modem university in the East Midlands. Bourdieusian theoretical conceptualizations of the mediated relations between agency and structure (habitus/field theory) were applied to deconstruct/reconstruct the nature of these relations within the university's academic workforce. This investigation revealed disjunctions amongst staff members. The study's findings suggest that these might be addressed through structured training in the logic of practice for recruits. Bourdieu [1930-2002] developed a mixed methods methodology, combining positivist and phenomenological research paradigms to ensure breadth and depth in ethical data interrogations. This approach informed the sequential mixed design of the study. The first phase (survey) elicited profile and benchmarking data and perceptions of field forces and conditions from sixty respondents. Most lacked teaching qualifications or experience on entry. The second phase (fifteen interviews) captured personal narratives for subsequent thematic analysis. Current evaluation of primary data indicates three significant trajectories analyses: effective actionlbehaviour arising from the meaningful convergence of the individual's competences (mapped as habitus), the organizational environment (field) and the job's demands (practice). Data filtration through these lenses uncovered destabilizing divergences. Significantly, most participants eschewed identification as an 'academic'; seeing themselves as first and foremost a teacher. Their key concerns were negative perceptions of management and student demands as threats to personal efficacy, thus an accredited teacher training programme instilling a dual professionalism was broadly welcomed. This study provides timely sociological perspectives on the government's recent positive correlation between funding and new staff accreditation. Institutional reliance upon existing and contract staff, however, suggests their training needs warrant further investigation. This thesis argues for such training to make explicit the science of pedagogy and the art of teaching to all teaching staff through the conscious integration of habitus/field theory in higher education teacher training. In this way, both agent and field are strengthened, to their mutual advantage.

In this thesis, I investigate sense-making processes in financial markets. My focus is on the role of narratives in these routine activities in digital market places or what Cetina and Preda (2007) describe as scopic market systems. I conceptualize narratives told by market professionals in these systems as another form of market device (Callon et al., 2007) which combines different modes of knowing and explanation to cope with flows of data/information and funds, and works to generate value from assets exposed to markets. From a sociological perspective, I argue that the substitution of social network-based information search and face-to-face exchange relationships in financial markets with flow-based and anonymised representations and exchange relationships do not undermine the importance of social networks in shaping sense-making and decision-making in financial markets. However to argue so, I broaden the concept of social network with the help of Bourdieu’s (1997) notion of economic, social and cultural capital. I introduce the notions of field and meta-field of power, habitus, and position-taking by Bourdieu (1997, and Wacquant 1992) to my conceptual discussion of financial markets. In light of this, I describe financial markets as hierarchical and competitive structures inhabited by different groups of investors and intermediaries and shaped by competition and conflict among these groups. I argue that these groups’ position in the field is conditioned by their economic, social, and cultural capital which are generated and sustained within and outwith the field. Consequently, I suggest that these groups’ sense-making and investment activities and their use of market devices including storytelling acts should exhibit distinctive modes in accordance with the specific positions they have voluntarily or involuntarily taken in the field. To substantiate these claims with narrative evidence, I present the case of the Istanbul Stock Exchange (ISE) in Turkey. Opened in 1985, the ISE provides an instrumental case to study the role of sense-making narratives as another form of market device in scopic market systems with a Bourdieusian sociological framework. As gathered from publicly available information and early pilot fieldwork in the ISE headquarters, the ISE as a field has been occupied by three dominant investor types since 1991. These are domestic retail (DRIs), domestic institutional (DIIs), and foreign institutional investors (FIIs). These three groups have a dominant weight in either trading volume or share ownership in the ISE. Drawing on my (participatory) observations between 2008 and 2009 in an asset management company and four brokerage houses which served DRIs and/or DIIs and FIIs, I present evidence on how distinct combinations of economic, social and cultural capitals among these dominant investor-intermediary groups shape their sense-making activities and consequent sense-making stories in the ISE.

The processes of educational decision making and formations of identity lie at the heart of the present thesis that explores the narratives of twenty-three young people with migrant and nonmigrant background. The thesis analyzes the cases of eleven Greek and twelve migrant participants, of Albanian, Georgian, Armenian and Palestinian ethnicities attending two upper secondary Lyceums in Greece, one sub-urban Vocational and one inner-city Comprehensive located in the city of Thessaloniki. The narratives of young people are analyzed as performative acts and as social practices constructed locally and intersubjectively, rather than as expressions of their essentialist realities. The narrative analysis aims more specifically at demonstrating empirically the social conditionings of school choice and the intricate ways that decision-making is cross-cut by and implicated in the processes of identity formation and negotiation. The educational choices these young people are called to make are situated within the broader socioeconomic and discursive milieu and within the structural arrangements of the post-16 institutional landscape of Greece. The issue of youth agency as grappling against the structural limitations of a given milieu, with its cultural particularities is at the backdrop of the present qualitative study. Young people’s identities are conceptualized as being produced, negotiated and contested in a shifting context through the interactions with significant others, namely their peers, teachers and families and through the interplay of identifications, social positions, capitals, transforming individual habituses and the institutional contexts of the two schools. In more detail, the subjectively felt classed, ethnic and gendered positions are analyzed as perceived, invested and discoursively performed by the young participants. Central role is attributed to the notion of habitus as embodying the complex interweaving of dispositions, discourses, collective and individual histories. It is argued that the processes of activation and re-conversion of capitals (economic, social, cultural) in which young people engage, along with the dynamic change of habitus in the face of evolving conditions in the host country, can be a potentially useful conceptual schema for understanding the ways migrant and non-migrant young people experience and make sense of their positioning in social space. The processes of drawing distinctions between perceived others and themselves mediate the ways young people engage in the weaving of their identities through a more or less ascribed, constrained and perpetually negotiated sense of belonging. In addition analytical attention is paid to the parental engagement and in particular the resources and dispositions that young people’s families invest and transmit in relation to their schooling and their academic and occupational future. In this frame the narrated educational choices are embedded in young people’s learner identities and familial histories and are closely linked with their projections and envisioning of the future. To conclude, the decision-making dynamics emerge through a matrix weaved by differing resources, positions and dispositions that grant young people with unequal opportunities for constructing selfnarratives and engaging with school choice.

Arbetet är en etnografisk studie baserad på observationer samt informella samtal med lärare från två kommunala grundskolor i Mellansverige, med skilda socioekonomiska bakgrunder. Syftet med studien har varit att försöka beskriva och förstå formandet av humankapital som en social process som sker i klassrummet, där lärare formar elevers humankapital. Lärarna i klassrummen samt elevernas psykiska och fysiska skolmiljö har varit de centrala faktorer som undersökts. Den teoretiska referensramen har baserats på Pierre Bourdieus teorier om habitus och individers olika kapitalinnehav, med fokus på socialt och kulturellt kapital. Även den dolda läroplanen har använts för att konkretisera olika sociala processer i klassrummen. Det empiriska materialet som har analyserats visar på att det finns stora skillnader i hur lärare och den fysiska samt den psykiska skolmiljön bidrar till formandet av elevernas humankapital.

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal.

While quantitative research has determined that first-generation college students (FGS) are less likely to interact with faculty than are their non-FGS peers, this qualitative study examines how incoming first-year college students, both FGS and non-FGS, perceive faculty-student interaction and whether they consider it important. Addressing different types of interaction with college instructors, both in-class and out-of-class, participants across a range of FGS status shared their views through surveys, individual interviews, and focus groups. Focusing specifically on incoming first year students, this study also explores the motives for, impediments to, and encouragements to faculty-student interaction that students identify. Finally, the study examines the origins of students’ perceptions of such interactions. It finds that FGS and non-FGS come to college with different cultural and social capital pertaining to this, and that non-FGS have a greater familiarity with the field and expected habitus of college. However, FGS demonstrate an ability to access their social capital in order to obtain valuable knowledge that informs their perceptions of college and of faculty-student interaction. Further, in the focus groups, FGS described emerging comfort with faculty over the course of their first months of college. The origins of students’ perceptions often differed, as non-FGS were more likely to describe being influenced by family, while FGS more often explained how they accessed their social capital in order to obtain cultural capital and practical knowledge regarding college and faculty-student interaction. Meanwhile, FGS’ and non-FGS’ motives for interacting with faculty, and the impediments and encouragements they identified, were frequently similar. The motives included their desire to learn and share opinions, as well as their interest in obtaining letters of recommendation in the future, while comfort with classmates and faculty and interest in class were commonly named as encouragements to interact with faculty.

Att vara invandrare beskrivs ofta felaktigt som en egenskap eller ett tillstånd hos individer. Istället för att beskriva det som den händelse det faktiskt är, en händelse föranledd utav en flytt från en plats till en annan. I den här uppsatsen undersöker vi kvinnors upplevelse av hur integrationsarbetet fungerar i det ideella projektet Women on Wednesdays och som vi i vår uppsats förkortar Wow med syfte att spåra hur deltagarna i projektet upplever att sin integration görs möjlig. Wow är ett projekt som enbart riktar sig mot kvinnor och där tanken är att hälften av deltagarna ska vara invandrarkvinnor och hälften svenska. Våra frågeställningar präglas av vilken betydelse projektet har för deltagarna, såväl de invandrade kvinnorna som de svenska, och även initiativtagaren till projektet berörs i vår undersökning då vi är intresserade av att höra hennes upplevelse och tankar om behovet av integrationsarbete i samhället. Vår metod är kvalitativ med en fenomenologisk hermeneutisk ansats och vi utför semistrukturerade intervjuer med både invandrarkvinnor och svenska kvinnor. I vårt resultat framkom att Wow, med sin arbetsmetod utav en jämn fördelning på svenska respektive utländska kvinnor är oerhört nödvändig och banbrytande. Att särskilt inrikta sig mot kvinnor har visat sig vara ett gott koncept för att nå ett tryggt och positivt klimat där invandrarkvinnan kan anamma det svenska samhällets spelregler och nå gemenskap med andra kvinnor med liknande bakgrund samt få inblick och tillträde till i hur den svenska kvinnan lever och tänker.

Studien syftar till att undersöka om personligheten kan tänkas påverka lön och om personligheten i så fall har olika betydelse beroende på socioekonomisk befattning och sektorstillhörighet. I Sverige har det visat sig att lönen generellt är högre i den privata sektorn än i den offentliga, samt att den offentliga sektorn till stor del består av kvinnodominerade yrken. Det har också påvisats i tidigare forskning att en individs personlighet till viss del påverkar utfallet av lön, framför allt i grupper där lönen är högre, men sådana undersökningar har främst skett utanför Sveriges gränser. Utifrån femfaktorteorin om personlighet, humankapitalteorin samt sociologiska aspekter av personlighet teoretiseras det i denna studie kring sambandet mellan personlighet och lön i Sverige där data från Levnadsnivåundersökningen 2010 (LNU 2010) används. LNU 2010 innehåller en kortversion av personlighetsdrag som kan länkas till femfaktorteorins personlighetsdrag; öppenhet, samvetsgrannhet, extraversion, vänlighet och neuroticism. Resultatet från linjära regressionsanalyser visar att det snarare är enskilda personliga egenskaper inom personlighetsdragen som verkar ha ett samband med lön än de index som skapas för att fånga ett helt personlighetsdrag. Resultatet visar dock att variansen i lön bara till viss del kan förklaras av skillnader i personlighet.