The study suggests pre-migration factors but also post-migration conditions such as perceived discrimination, social support and Nordic language proficiency as important factors for the mental health, education and employment outcomes of young refugees in the Nordic countries. Further Nordic comparative research and studies focusing on the relationship between health, education and employment outcomes are needed.
Teachers play a critical role in providing social and emotional support for newly arrived migrant and refugee learners. Such care ordinarily takes place in the classroom, raising questions about the impact of the 2020 COVID-19 school closures on their care work. In this article we analyze qualitative data from phone interviews with eight teachers in Danish preparatory classes, paying particular attention to the challenges they faced staying in contact with, and supporting, migrant and refugee learners during the school closure. The interviews were coded and thematically analysed, revealing significant changes in the teachers' care work. We draw on the concepts of caringscapes and carescapes to unravel how the shifts in space, from physical copresence in the school classroom to distance learning, affected their care work. Despite many efforts, teachers reported difficulties staying in contact with the learners remotely due to their limited access to virtual communication platforms and language barriers. These communication difficulties and the lack of bodily copresence not only made teaching highly challenging, but interrupted their care work, including maintaining daily schedules and facilitating social closeness between learners. Furthermore, the teachers expressed concern about their inability to link and refer the most vulnerable learners to external support services, which were temporarily closed due to the societal lockdown. Our study highlights how COVID-19 induced school closures constrain the care work of teachers of migrant and refugee learners. The concerns and struggles raised in this article not only stress the importance of the physical school space and closeness in facilitating care for newly arrived migrant and refugee learners, but signal the vulnerabilities of this group of children during times of crisis.
Many of the refugees who have recently arrived in Denmark and other European countries are young people. In order to support refugee youth, it is important to understand how institutions and initiatives in the receiving countries may best facilitate their social inclusion. Drawing on the concept of social capital, this article explores school practices supporting refugees through a qualitative case study of a Danish folk high school—an informal residential college for young people. At the school, participant observation, 10 interviews (with school management, four refugee students and four majority ethnic Danish students) as well as two focus groups (with majority ethnic and refugee students, respectively) were carried out. We discuss the school resources that help create a setting in which students and teachers may work collaboratively to support the integration of young refugees, highlighting four key dimensions: (i) intensive instruction in the local language, (ii) a commitment to nurturing positive inter-ethnic relationships, (iii) a sense of collective responsibility and (iv) an inclusive school ethos. We conclude with a discussion on how lessons from our case study can inform a wider conceptualization of a ‘refugee-competent school’ setting.
This article examines corporate governance arrangements and the adjustment paths of British Telecom and Deutsche Telekom. Both firms have been facing similar adjustment pressures, stemming from the globalization and liberalization of telecommunications markets, privatization, and technological progress, but are situated in the most differing corporate governance systems in Europe. Convergence theory suggests that these similar pressures translate into similar behaviour at the firm level, whereas the 'varieties of capitalism' approach argues for different adjustment paths depending on the wider institutional environment in which firms operate. The paper shows that the strategic behaviour of British Telecom and Deutsche Telekom differs significantly, although to varying degrees, in the areas of organizational change, internationalization, employment policy, and restructuring owing to different institutional contexts and their impact on company decision-making and priorities. Although the evidence is much closer to the 'varieties of capitalism' approach, institutionalist approaches should be complemented by systematic firm-level research in order to understand firm behaviour.
This chapter explores differences in the coordination mechanisms of coordinated market economies (CMEs). The VoCs perspective argues that national institutions, which are linked through complementarities, shape company strategies and the resulting economic specialisations of countries. To examine these links, this chapter compares the two CMEs with the most similar product market specializations: Germany, the prototypical CME, and Switzerland. Both countries have comparative advantages in industries characterised by incremental innovation patterns and diversified quality production (DQP). The comparison shows that Germany and Switzerland have significantly different corporate governance frameworks. In several subsystems, Swiss corporate governance is much closer to patterns found in liberal market economies. The chapter argues that Swiss firms can pursue DQP strategies nonetheless thanks to two enabling conditions. First, the structure of the training system — based on the coordination capacities of employers — supports the development of firm- and industry-specific skills, and creates a qualified and specialised workforce for Swiss firms. Second, management enjoys protection from capital market pressures due to concentrated ownership patterns and the absence of a market for corporate control, which enables coordination for firms that wish to pursue DQP strategies. These features mean that despite differences between the Swiss and German institutional frameworks, Swiss firms can create the institutional conditions for DQP production at the industry and company levels. Coordination is more informal and voluntary in nature, making the corporate governance system more differentiated than its German counterpart. This implies that different institutional paths can be taken to achieve the same results. Hence, institutions can be coupled more loosely than the VoC perspective would expect.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.