This thesis explores how young resisters and desisters in their teenage years maintain their resistance to and desistance from offending and asks to what extent they are agentic in the process. The term ‘resister’ refers to those who, according to a self-report survey, have never offended, and the term ‘desister’ to those who have offended and then ceased for at least twelve months. By situating desisters analytically adjacent to resisters, I have moved towards conceptualising desisters as current non-offenders. Desisters may have shared a past with persisters, as they have both offended. However, desisters share their current experience, that of maintaining non-offending, with resisters. It is this obvious, yet largely ignored, link between young resisters and desisters which underpins the thesis. Two qualitative methods, both of which elicited young people’s own perspectives, were employed between 2003 and 2005. Secondary analysis of 112 qualitative interviews with resisters and desisters in their teenage years was conducted and peer led focus groups (in which a young peer, rather than an adult researcher, acted as the facilitator) were held with 52 teenage resisters. Young people’s resistance to offending does not feature prominently in the literature. When it does, it is often associated with a state of innocence or passivity, while young desisters are said to ‘grow out of’ offending. This emphasis on an absence of offending, rather than on actively attained resistance, reflects an adult oriented view. The thesis challenges this by drawing on the sociology of childhood, a theoretical perspective which has not previously been applied to young people’s resistance to and desistance from offending and which emphasises young people as agentic. Their agency is evidenced by the findings. Chapters Four and Five report how young people employ numerous strategies of resistance and desistance and Chapter Six how that they face trials and tribulations in maintaining their nonoffending, while Chapter Seven focuses on the ‘being’ rather than the ‘doing’ of sustaining non-offending. It is the work of Derrida that enables the argument to be taken a step further. Derrida’s (1981) assertion is that binary oppositions are rarely neutral, but that one is the dominant pole. For example, in Western society the first of the following binary oppositions are usually regarded as the dominant or privileged pole: white/black, masculine/feminine, adult/child. In respect of the binary opposition at the heart of the current thesis, namely offender/non-offender, the non-offender is – from an adult perspective at least – the dominant pole and the non-offender is hailed as the norm. By contrast, several findings in the thesis point to the fact that the dominant pole in the binary opposition for young people is the offender rather than the non-offender. First, the discourse of young resisters and desisters suggests a view of the offender rather than non-offender as the norm. Secondly, many resisters and desisters face trials and tribulations, such as bullying, relating to their nonoffending status. Yet, if it were the case that the non-offender was the dominant pole and was privileged by young people (as it is in the adult population), resisters would not be penalised in such ways for not offending. Thirdly, some of the strategies used by resisters, such as involvement in anti-social behaviour, signify an attempt to compensate for their non-offending status. Again, if the non-offender was the dominant pole in the binary opposition, far from resorting to mechanisms to compensate for their non-offending behaviour, this behaviour would be encouraged, as it is by adults. This inverted world has implications for young resisters and desisters. Their resistance is to be understood in the context of an expectation of offending, rather than non-offending. Contrary to the notion of the pull of normality bringing desisters back to a non-offending state, the pull of normality among young desisters – and many resisters – is better understood as being towards offending. Resistance, evidenced by the strategies and trials and tribulations of resisters and desisters, is against this pull. Moreover, as non-offending is the modus operandi in the adult world, to be an adult non-offender requires less effort. For a young person, being a non-offender is more challenging than it is for adults and maintenance of resistance constitutes a struggle not previously reflected in adult representations. Adults, not having taken account of the different modus operandi of the young person’s world, have not attributed agency to resistance and have underestimated young people’s struggle to maintain resistance. The strategies demanded of resisters and desistcrs to maintain non-offending and the trials and tribulations which they face when they do have heretofore been overlooked.

Few studies have examined the social skills problems of victims of bullying. Thus, the general aim of this thesis was to assess social skills problems and peer victimisation in Junior School pupils. A Peer Nomination Inventory (PNI) was developed to assess social skills problems, peer victimisation and friendship/peer acceptance. In addition, a number of psychosocial adjustment variables (i.e. depression, anxiety, self-esteem) were assessed, using self-report. 449 children (aged 9 to 11 years) completed the measures at three time points over the course of an academic year. Using the data collected at Time 1 and Time 3 (N=449) concurrent and longitudinal associations between social skills problems, peer victimisation, and friendship/peer acceptance were investigated (‘Study One’). Study One found that social skills problems predicted an increase in peer victimisation over time, and that this relationship was weaker for those children with lots of friends, and for those children with a ‘popular’ best-friend. On the basis of the data collected at Time 1, 28 children were selected to take part in a Social Skills Training Programme for victims of bullying. Using the data collected at all three time points, it was possible to evaluate the effectiveness of this intervention (‘Study Two’). Study Two found that there was an increase in ‘global self-worth’ (i.e. self-esteem) for the experimental group (compared to the control group). However, there were no other significant improvements, e.g. in terms of social skills problems or victim status. These findings have important implications for interventions to tackle the problem of bullying in schools.

Workplace bullying has been increasingly reported amongst a range of commentators as an organizational phenomenon that is on the increase. Narratives and accounts of workplace bullying have appeared from a range of sources that might lead some observers to suggest that bullying is a product of the activities of moral entrepreneurs or is the result of the workplace being perceived as a place of increased risk. This thesis is based on a triangulated pan-Wales study of full and part-time lecturers working in further (FE) and selected higher education (HE) institutions in Wales. The study encompasses unstructured interviews with lecturers who have been bullied; semi-structured interviews with human resource managers and trade union representatives; and a postal questionnaire survey of members of a trade union representing the further and higher education sectors. The study has sought to investigate how lecturers working in FE and HE in Wales have constructed certain behaviours as workplace bullying. By comparing the accounts of victims, ordinary lecturers and key informants such as human resource managers and trade union representatives, we find multiple interpretations and repertoires for bullying in work. For some, bullying is organizational and/or managerial while for others, bullying is the product of individualised conflicts. The lack of direct exposure to accounts of bullying for some participants has resulted in collectivising and shared paradigms, while for others, bullying is perceived as something more akin to school playgrounds. The evidence in this study points to a rejection of bullying at work as a product of moral entrepreneurs and other external labelling sources. Instead, the main finding from this study is that workplace colleagues’ play a central and pivotal role in the social construction processes for workplace bullying. The activities of work colleagues are consistently shown to be at the heart of bullying experiences at work. This is most likely to be in a validating or affirmatory role where they help label managers and the activities of the organization in the localised social constructions of bullying.

This ethnographic study exposes hidden, sex differentiated messages conveyed to boys and girls in Israeli Jewish schools. The analysis of classroom interactions, the school culture, school documents, extra curricular activities, and teachers’ reflections about sex roles and their pupils’ sexuality, all render valuable information about the powerful undercurrents present in the Israeli educational system, that is officially committed to equal opportunities. The observations conducted over a full academic year in three schools, are read within their cultural context. References to those social constructs that both generate the subtle sexist practices observed, and explain their deeper meanings and far reaching implications, make this study significant to the understanding of the specific Israeli scene. In addition, the disparity recorded between the teachers’ stated commitment to equality, and their explicit and implicit gendered expectations, suggests a line of enquiry relevant to other educational systems too. The incompatability between traditional Jewish values, social constructs of modern Israel, and recent feminist critique, results in an ambivalent attitude to sex equity. This in turn leads to the resort to the most circuitous manner of preserving traditional values, that actually contradict the egalitarian ethos of each of the schools studied. Hence, the teachers’ belief in the complementarity of the sexes, their interest in the pupils’ patterns of heterosexual pairing, the insensitivity noted to subtle forms of sex discrimination, to sexual harassment and to double standards in evaluations, all suggest an agenda hidden from the teachers themselves. The gendered interactions and the hidden messages conveyed through them, are most pronounced in extra curricular activities. The conclusion is that whether or not the Israeli national curriculum contains or encourages sexist practices, the schools, in their unique ways, convey traditional messages about sex roles, in extremely subtle manners.

This thesis is concerned with the interactions between staff and interactions in the classroom in regard to bullying among pupils in primary schools in Norway. The main investigation comprised 22 primary schools. A total of 2002 pupils, grades 4-6, and 279 teachers participated. Information was obtained through the use of one questionnaire developed specifically for pupils, and one developed for teachers. Only two of 15 selected schools were significantly different from each other on both Bullying Others (BO) and Being Bullied (BB). The school low on BO and BB also had significantly better scores than the other school on all staff related variables. Information from all 22 schools, comprising 118 classes, was used in a class level study of the relationships between classroom management, social interactions between the pupils in the class and class level estimates of BO and BB. Both high scores on classroom management and high scores on social interactions between the pupils were strongly and negatively related to bullying others, and negatively but more weakly related to being bullied. To consider the problem of causality more closely, a small-scale field experiment was conducted with two groups of first grade teachers, each group consisting of 20 teachers and their classes. Two groups of control classes were included. The teachers in the field experiment were offered four one-day seminars plus group counselling during the first school year. At the end of their first school year, the pupils in the two experiment groups and those in the two control groups were compared. The pupils in the experiment groups scored significantly better than the control groups on bullying others, and being bullied, as well as on all other 8 variables studied. The thesis concludes with a discussion of the results, and a theoretical model is suggested.

Although there are an abundance of studies which have addressed the relationship between clothing and youth identity, few have attempted to place it in the context of the various structural issues that help frame it. Such an undertaking is deemed important because any difficulties young people may experience in putting together a peer-approved clothed appearance is considered likely to carry profound implications, both socially and psychologically, in terms of the bullying, and social exclusion that can often result (e.g. Edwards, 2000). In thus seeking to develop a fuller understanding of how a range of young people perceive and practically enact their various clothing agenda, this investigation aims to privilege the subjective meanings and lived experiences of a diverse group of teenagers aged 14 to 17. A set of informal, semi-structured interviews and focus groups were conducted with teenagers drawn from a diverse range of social backgrounds, which allowed a wide array of structural factors to be accommodated. The evidence collected indicates firstly, that young people’s clothing agendas are not as identity-oriented as most consumption-based theories of postmodernity and ‘post-subculture’ are inclined to suggest. Instead, they tend to be focused more squarely on a more mundane and modest goal, that of mere peer acceptance into the immediate social networks to which they belong, or aspire to join. In fact, given the severity of the consequences of failing to achieve this objective, the clothing projects of many youth are perhaps best conceptualised as exercises in ‘survival’.Crucially, teenagers’ prospects of accomplishing this goal of survival, and /or using clothing to choose from the range of identity-options that are available are mediated in critical ways by their structural locations, and their attendant access to important resources of economic, cultural and social capital.