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Based on research undertaken as part of the EU funded EPPIC project, this paper aims to update and elaborate on the relationship between drug use and offending behaviours by exploring variations within a cross-national sample of drug-experienced young people in touch with criminal justice systems. Adopting a trajectory-based approach, interviews were undertaken with 198 young people aged 15–25 in six European countries (Austria, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Poland, and UK). Data were analysed by applying the Bennett and Holloway categorization of the drugs-crime link, with a focus on the concept of social exclusion as developed by Seddon. Three main types of mechanisms (economic, pharmaceutical, and lifestyles) are used to interpret the data, showing how the relationship between drugs and offending can vary according to type of substances and over time. Furthermore, it can be associated with very different degrees of social exclusion and needs. The results suggest that while economic inequalities still play key roles in explaining drug use and offending, both behaviours can originate from a state of relative deprivation, resulting from the contradictions inherent in 'bulimic societies' that raise aspirations and desires while providing young people scarce opportunities for self-realisation and social recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Austria legally recognized Islam in 1912 and has thus been characterized as a “liberal” country regarding the inclusion of Muslims. But when the law was revision in 2015, it was largely criticized as discriminatory, anti-constitutional, and authoritarian towards the Muslim minority. The paper asks how a number of different social movement organizations and networks have framed their political participation, protest, and activism. It asks what demands were expressed regarding justice, criminalization, alienation, discrimination, and other contested issues. The paper also ponders the implications of political inclusion versus distance from the system for Muslim agency, as the protest movement ranged very widely from state-affiliated institutions to state-independent individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While Nursing Informatics competencies seem essential for the daily work of nurses, they are not formally integrated into nursing education in Austria, Germany and Switzerland, nor are there any national educational recommendations. The aim of this paper is to show how such recommendations can be developed, what competency areas are most relevant in the three countries and how the recommendations can be implemented in practice. To this end, a triple iterative procedure was proposed and applied starting with national health informatics recommendations for other professionals, matching and enriching these findings with topics from the international literature and finally validating them in an expert survey with 87 experts and in focus group sessions. Out of the 24 compiled competency areas, the relevance ratings of the following four recommended areas achieved values above 90%: nursing documentation (including terminologies), principles of nursing informatics, data protection and security, and quality assurance and quality management. As there were no significant differences between the three countries, these findings laid the foundation of the DACH Recommendations of Nursing Informatics as joint German (D), Austrian (A), and Swiss (CH) recommendations in Nursing Informatics. The methodology proposed has been utilized internationally, which demonstrates the added value of this study also outside the confines of Austria, Germany, Switzerland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Stalin plaque in Vienna is one of the last memorials dedicated to the Soviet dictator in Europe to endure until today. It was unveiled upon the initiative of the Austrian Communist Party (KPÖ) on 21 December 1949. Numerous petitions to remove it remain unheeded, but a second, explanatory plaque was added in 2012. This paper looks back at the early post-war years in order to understand the origins of this memorial. It discusses how the complex relationship between the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), the KPÖ and the Austrian Socialist Party (SPÖ) in the early post-war years influenced the history of the Stalin plaque. Austria's defiance of complete de-stalinization is the result of local and national politics of memory and diverting interpretations of foreign policy developments. In political debates and in press reports about the non-removal of the plaque different reasons are offered. Arguments pointing to the peculiarities of Austrian politics of memory regarding controversial issues and also local (Viennese) priorities are dissected in this article. Another often quoted explanation for the memorial's longevity is the alleged indifference of Viennese locals towards Stalin. These propositions are explored and contextualized in the political conflicts of memory in Austria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In times of growing commercialisation and digitisation, it is often assumed that traditional mass media react to growing economic pressures by providing more entertaining, more trivial and oversimplified content. This supposed development—also known as tabloidisation—seems to be caused by media structures, particularly the competitive pressures of tabloid newspapers and commercial television. However, to date only very few studies have explored systematically how coverage (micro level) is shaped by media structures (macro level) and the strategies of the media companies (meso level). The present study investigates, based on the industrial economic Structure–Conduct–Performance (SCP) model, whether the degree of tabloidisation (performance) of German and Austrian national market-leading quality papers and tabloids can be explained by market structures and individual newspapers' self-images (conduct). A theoretical model of tabloidisation by Reinemann et al. is empirically tested for the first time, resulting in a categorisation of four dimensions of tabloidisation: topic, focus, visual style and verbal style. Altogether, the study shows a rather weak influence both of structure and conduct, explained by reverse “tabloidising effects” of a high market share of tabloids in Austria and of commercial television in Germany. Nevertheless, it finds some remarkable differences between the four newspapers. While both quality papers are rather weakly tabloidised and the GermanBildis quite strongly tabloidised, the AustrianKroneis surprisingly somewhat less tabloidised than the quality papers, presumably due to its “peoples' newspaper strategy”. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The increasing research on international organisations’ education policy lacks analyses of the relation between international organisations and nation states. This paper aims to analyse the power of nation states in international education policy. Focusing on the new degree system in higher education in Europe, partly from Foucault's governmentality perspective, the paper suggests that nation states retain power while operating in international settings. The study's conclusions argue that the nation states’ power might be a chance for further participation of affected people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growth of a societal base of xenophobia in Europe poses a challenge for the Muslim minorities to alter power relations in the society. In the light of the previous and the current research as well as established theoretical insights, this paper suggests that racial discourse now strategically allows a particular form of pluralism in society, a dominant pluralism, which occludes the possibility for the Muslims to be involved equally in the public and political life. The results of the qualitative analysis, based on interviews conducted with groups holding xenophobic ideas in Austria, Bulgaria and Italy, confirmed earlier observations on contemporary racism, which suggested incommensurability of Muslim minorities with the European culture; their non-assimilative adaptation to society; their expulsion if this adaptation fails and advocating populism. Space is a crucial aspect of exclusion in this discursive frame because minorities are excluded from public and communicative spaces. The discourse is supported by the conceptual sources of a dominant form of pluralism that are found in Michel Foucault and master–slave relationship in philosophy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article discusses the thesis that popular music in early twentieth-century Germany was Americanised by shifting the focus from the meaning and reception of music to the way it was produced and disseminated by professionals, from music publishers and composers to bandleaders and critics. Firstly, it stresses a key difference in the way the music business was modernised on both sides of the Atlantic around 1900. While in the US the sheet-music trade became ‘Taylorised’, the music business in Germany, as elsewhere in Continental Europe, was transformed into a rights industry. Secondly, the paper highlights the prominence of Austrian music producers and their repertoire in Germany and suggests that, at least in a business sense, popular music in Germany was Austrianised rather than Americanised. Thirdly, it proposes that ‘Jazz’ after the First World War was hardly a straightforward import of American culture, but a site where incumbents and newcomers to the music profession struggled for position. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Germany's apprenticeship system is and has always been considered to be the major sub-system of VET. In this context, the debate circling around the European and German Qualifications Framework (EQF and DQR) has become one of the central issues of VET research and policy. Tasks take on a concrete shape if (a) a serious approach is adopted towards the ideas underlying the European Qualifications Framework; and (b) if consideration is given to the 'construction sites' typical for the German VET system as a whole. This paper intends to sharpen VET policy awareness for the problem of dealing with those unresolved German VET issues within the context of the development of the DQR. A comparative view includes Austria and France as two countries with diverging learning cultures in VET from the German case, but obviously with more 'European' imprints within their respective VET systems. It can be shown that there is an interrelation between the attention apprenticeships as such receive against the background of European ideas such as 'progression', 'permeability' and 'lifelong learning' (LLL), including the implementation and use of 'hybrid qualifications'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 1990 draftees of the Austrian army have been stationed at the border to Hungary, and later to Slovakia, as a reaction to both the system change in Eastern Europe as well as the expected increase in cross-border crime. This so-called 'support deployment' was initially planned to last no longer than 10 weeks, but soon it became apparent that the military's border security deployment could also serve other ends than mere security goals. Since then it has been prolonged numerous times. In scrutinising the strategies of the various actors involved, the paper shows that the support deployment can be considered an act of securitisation and is as such almost entirely decoupled from the actual policing of the Schengen internal border. Furthermore, it argues to 'bring the audience back in' and to recognise the audience's agency in the analysis of securitisation processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the early 1990s, the social rented sector has developed in different directions across Europe. This paper studies the role that the Austrian social rented sector plays at the crossroads of housing choices at different stages in the people's life-cycles. It highlights the risks facing the Austrian middle classes that social renting may have to address in the future, and asks how the institutional setting of Austrian social renting can adapt to these changing risks in society. The approach is to view housing choice as a tenure sequence over the life-course. This includes not only the transition from renting to owning but also other potential switches, in particular the movements into and out of social renting. The tenure sequence is modelled using an econometric model of tenure choice based on cohort analysis, with Austria census data that cover the years from 1991 to 2003. This allows us to evaluate the factors arising from social change in the longer term, and how they may contribute to tenure choice in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]