Risks and Responsibilities? The Individualisation of Youth Transitions and the Ambivalence between Participation and Activation in Europe

This report provides insight on the situation facing young people in contemporary European societies in their transitions to work and citizenship. On the one hand, risks of exclusion have increased, while on the other, responsibilities for coping with such risks have been individualised, a state of affairs reinforced by the trend towards activation labour market policies. Drawing on the findings of a EU-funded study across nine European regions, the report gives evidence of the resulting biographical and policy dilemmas. Furthermore, it explores if and under what conditions the concept of participation may open new ways of reconciling systemic imperatives and individual needs in the social integration of young people.

Analyzing online communication from a social network point of view: questions, problems, perspectives

This programmatic paper investigates the possibilities, chances, and risks of analyzing personal and professional online communication from the point of view of interactional sociolinguistics combined with modern social network analysis (SNA). Thus, it has two complementing goals: One is the exploration of adequate, innovative concepts and methods for analyzing online communication, the other is to use online communication and its ontological and functional specificities to enrich the conceptual and methodological background of SNA. The paper is organized in two parts. It begins with an introduction to recent developments in sociolinguistic social network analysis. Here, three interesting new concepts and tools are discussed: latent versus emergent networks (Watts 1991), coalitions (Fitzmaurice 2000a, Fitzmaurice 2000b), and communities of practice (Wenger 1998