Structure and Agency

This article focuses on the pedagogical beliefs, practices and ideological assumptions of 15 teachers who work with mother tongue instruction in Sweden. Despite support through provisions in Swedish laws, mother tongue instruction is clearly a marginalized subject, not least due to its non-mandatory status, the limited time allocated for it and the fact that the subject and its teachers are often contested in public debate. In this study, the teachers’ narratives center round issues of legitimacy, both for the subject per se and for the teachers’ right to be viewed as ‘real’ teachers. In this paper, we highlight how the teachers link mother tongue instruction to the notion of a ‘common heritage’ and how they see themselves as advocates and role models for the mother tongue. The teachers raise the status of mother tongue instruction in a transformational way, to a subject that is essential and can have a positive impact for a group of students who would otherwise be at a disadvantage in the school system. The undermining of mother tongue instruction was found to affect the pedagogical practices, as the teachers often took into consideration how their teaching would be viewed by parents and colleagues.

The aim of this thesis is to analyse housing access processes and outcomes of self-help housing projects in Tizi-Ouzou, Algeria. As a response to acute housing shortage, self-help housing policies became popular during the 1970s and 1980s in many developing countries. Rapid urbanisation increased housing demand and many governments such as the Algerian were unable to sufficiently increase housing provision. Self-help policies were implemented as a means of increasing housing production with limited state inputs by encouraging household investments. Whereas the state provided sites and services, households were expected to contribute with savings and unpaid labour in building their own homes.
The literature review centres on Turner‟s „housing by people‟ theory which criticises centralised housing supply systems and advocates greater household control over the decision-making process, as well as Rex and Moore‟s housing class theory and Pahl‟s managerial approach which focus on institutions and their managers controlling allocation and influencing housing access inequalities. Finally, Sullivan‟s conception of housing access processes as a macro-micro interface was adopted to investigate the power relations underlying the housing conditions that generate access inequalities.
This study investigates how households access the different components of housing production and how the ensuing processes are influenced by the structural and institutional contexts. Household-level decision-making processes are also examined to explain how human agency influences housing outcomes. Finally, self-help housing is a macro-micro interface that reveals how structure and agency elements interact to create the existing patterns of housing inequality and reinforce or change the underlying power structures of society.
A case study research design is used to explore the multi-faceted research question and includes an in-depth survey of 39 households in two residential areas. The study centres on housing access processes which span over three successive economic periods - state socialist, transition, and market economies- and portray related differences in access procedures and related patterns of inequality. Multiple regression analyses show how inequalities in access to land, building materials, labour and finance are related to household profiles and resulting housing outcomes. A housing pathways analysis, which includes household strategies and housing careers, is used to further our understanding of how advantaged groups benefit more from the formal self-help housing channel and disadvantaged groups increase their life-chances via the informal sector.

Students of social movements dispute the causal weight they should accord political opportunities, political enculturation and human agency in influencing strategic action. They have made little progress advancing the debate on empirical grounds. The authors of this article reviewed English and Arabic newspaper accounts, read organizational histories and documents and interviewed key informants to explain variation in strategic action by the two main Palestinian militant organizations, Fatah and Hamas, during the second intifada or uprising against the Israeli state and people (2000–5). The authors show how perceived political opportunities and political enculturation influenced the strategic action of Fatah and Hamas leaders but find little independent effect of agency leading them to question whether recent claims about the supposed primacy of human
agency in social movement strategic action may be exaggerated.