Generating Dutiful Members in Communities of 'Rational Choice'

The study 'Youth Welfare as Prevention - The reconfiguration of support and control in advanced liberalism' is part of the Graduate program 'Youth Welfare in Transition' funded by the 'German Research Association'. In empirical terms it is based on both interviews with professionals, reconstructive discourse analysis based on documents and programs as well as a secondary analysis of a range of existing studies.

Influences of Discriminatory Incidents on Immigrants’ Attitudes Toward German Society

This article presents findings from a quantitative survey (N = 301) to evaluate the impact discriminatory incidents have on the attitudes of immigrants towards the majority society in Germany.The findings show that there is a strong relationship between experiences of discrimination and a hostile or alienated attitude towards German society. As an attempt to explain this generalization from single incidents to the macro relation between immigrants and autochthonous Germans in general a theory of framing, taken from developments in the field of rational choice theory, is applied. The reasoning is that a generalizing and rather hostile framing in terms of the attitude towards Germans can minimize psychic, emotional and social costs resulting from acts of discrimination.

Violence, Crime, and Violent Crime

I propose a dual conceptualization of violent crime. Since violent crime is both violence and crime, theories of aggression and deviance are required to understand it. I argue that both harm-doing and rule breaking are instrumental behaviors and that a bounded rational choice approach can account for both behaviors. However, while some of the causes of harm-doing and deviance (and violent and nonviolent crime) are the same, some are different. Theories of crime and deviance cannot explain why one only observes individual and group differences in violent crime and theories of aggression and violence cannot explain why one observes differences in all types of crimes. Such theories are “barking up the wrong tree.”