Understanding the Invisibility Bargain

Chapter 2 introduces the concept of the invisibility bargain in order to explain how the informal strategies chosen by migrants to resolve conflicts, participate politically, and gain access to resources respond to the set of unwritten expectations within the host society that govern social relations between migrants and citizens and establish the “rules” by which the host population will tolerate or accept the physical presence of migrants in the country. It traces how the perception of migrants’ valued contribution, combined with their social and political invisibility, is often the price of the host population’s acceptance of their physical presence in the country, and argues that violation of these expectations may lead to social sanctions and a hostile backlash against migrants by the host population. The invisibility bargain lays important conceptual groundwork for the main argument of the book.

Introduction to 2020-2

This issue of Nordic Journal of Working Life Studies compiles five articles that introduce different themes and concerns in contemporary Nordic working life. Rolle Alho’s article ‘You Need to Know Someone Who Knows Someone’: International Student’s Job Search Experiences explores the job search strategies and obstacles that international students meet when they seek to enter the job market in Finland. Through 31 qualitative interviews with international students from Finnish universities, he investigates how the students are embedded in the Finnish community and how they make use of their knowledge and connections to obtain a job in Finland. Both formal and informal strategies are often employed, but the international students are clearly disadvantaged in lacking novel information about job opportunities that are only chan- neled through informal sources. Sectorial differences are significant for the successfulness of the job search; sectors with a shortage of labor leaves better opportunities for international students to enter the job market (...)

Introduction

This introductory chapter illustrates the state of crime and punishment in Belfast. A major by-product of the political and civil conflict in Northern Ireland has been a lack of consensus among the population over who should police ordinary crime and how. This is clearly evidenced among the predominantly Nationalist and Republican inhabitants of West Belfast, who have consistently sought to prevent crime and punish offenders by employing a variety of informal strategies, rather than rely upon the police service. The most notorious of these informal approaches are shootings, beatings, and exclusions by Republican armed groups. The chapter then discusses the research methods and data behind the succeeding chapters.

Security

Chapter 2 is mainly about agency—cooperation, complicity, and resistance—between occupiers and the occupied, reconstructing the informal strategies to police prostitution and venereal disease. It discusses legal debates on prostitution and venereal disease and its control among the occupation’s law divisions, and it closely looks at the enforcement of law by the occupiers’ military police and Japanese police units. It addresses the emergence of unlicensed prostitution after the abolition of licensed prostitution in 1946, in which the streetwalking sex worker surfaced as a new phenomenon in modern Japanese history.

When Worlds Collide: Negotiating Work Ethics on the German–Polish Border

This article is part of the special section titled From the Iron Curtain to the Schengen Area, guest edited by Wolfgang Mueller and Libora Oates-Indruchová. The cooperation between German and Polish border police from the middle of the 1990s to 2007 is characterized by a striking paradox: border guards on both sides claim their working styles are incompatible with one another while in most cases they cooperate very well. Yet, as this article argues, the border guards employ strategies of boundary-drawing and self-staging that help them cope with the asymmetry they encounter when cooperating with the “other.” German and Polish border guards develop informal strategies of action and communication that rest upon a joint professional culture, leading to mutual trust and solidarity and a congruence of subjective professional honor and official mandate. Yet, this win–win situation runs the risk of emphasizing police-cultural aspects that focus on security while leaving the underlying East–West asymmetry untouched.

Protective Strategies of Mothers Abused by Intimate Partners: Rethinking the Deficit Model

Exposure to intimate partner violence is detrimental to children, but can abused mothers protect them, and, if so, what can they do? This study of 350 Canadian abused women represents the first quantitative examination of such protective strategies. The actions that mothers most commonly used and perceived as effective include showing affection and being nurturing to their children. The strategies often suggested by professionals, such as contacting police and obtaining protection orders, were used less and considered less effective than informal strategies. Professionals are urged to ask mothers what strategies they use, especially those who do not involve formal systems.

Bedrooms and beyond: Youth, identity and privacy on social network sites

This article considers young people’s identities and privacy on social network sites through reflection on the analogy of the teenage bedroom as a means to understand such spaces. The notion therein of intimate personal space may jar with the scope and complexity of social media and, particularly, with recent emphasis on the challenges to privacy posed by such environments. I suggest, however, that, through increased use of access controls and a range of informal strategies, young people’s everyday digital communication may not be as out of control as is sometimes inferred. Recent adaptations of the bedroom analogy indicate that social network sites retain intimacy and that their individual-centred format continues to facilitate the exhibition and mapping of identities. Although an awkward fit, I suggest the bedroom may still help us think through how social network sites can function as vital personal home territories in the midst of multi-spatial patterns of sociability.