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This article employs cultural repertoire theory to investigate how 84 Muslim men in Norway make meaning of adopting or rejecting political violence. Previous studies have addressed political violence among Muslims, but little attention has been paid to how its adoption and rejection involve self-ascription and ascriptions by others. The participants made meaning by drawing on stories about their past, exclusion and belonging, in addition to religious worldviews and political knowledge, including boundaries of class, crime, violence, race, religion and gender. Muslims are informed by mainstream ascriptions of them as extreme others and inherently radicalized in their meaning-making. This finding has important implications for how Muslim radicalization should be understood and countered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do people in different countries understand and frame the principle of meritocracy differently? This question is the starting point for this cross-national analysis of the moral repertoires of meritocracy in four countries: Germany, Norway, Slovenia and the United Kingdom. The authors pursue a mixed methods approach, using data from the European Social Survey 2016 and qualitative data from group discussions. In these discussions, citizens openly talked about issues like inequality and social policy, which allows us to study their understandings and framings of meritocracy. The authors show that the issue of unequal rewards does not only find different levels of support, but also that people – corresponding to the context they live in – have different understandings of which merits should count. The authors identify a 'market success meritocracy' in the UK, a work-centred understanding in Germany, a 'common good meritocracy' in Norway, and non-salience of this issue in Slovenia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines men’s attitudes towards women in the Norwegian and US armed forces. The military is one of society’s most gendered institutions, and this study investigates how men in the armed forces feel about serving alongside women. Building on interviews with 34 men in the Norwegian and US air forces, the article finds that men in both countries have a positive attitude towards female service members, and that the majority prefer to serve in gender-mixed units. When discussing their attitudes on more concrete topics, however, the participants employed two different concepts of equality. The Norwegian men argued for the importance of equal treatment of men and women, while the American men thought it was more important to create equal opportunities for women in the armed forces. These different understandings are embedded in the two national cultures, which provide the men with the different cultural resources they relied on to frame their opinions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article approaches work talk, a neglected but vital object of sociological inquiry, as a possible key to unlocking the mystery of the contemporary work ethic as it appears among male professionals living and working in the United States and Western Europe. This analytical task is carried out through a close examination of the contrasting rhetorics, scripts, and vocabularies anchoring French, Norwegian, and American forms of hard work talk. This comparative exercise capitalizes on material from over one hundred in-depth interviews with comparable French, Norwegian, and American male business professionals working in finance, law, consulting, engineering and other professional fields. Scrutinizing the scripts that members of these three groups use to address their motives for working hard in demanding jobs, this article maps a legitimation divide between the American respondents and their French and Norwegian counterparts. The hard work commentaries of the French and Norwegian respondents feature script repertoires that focus exclusively on the stimulating and enriching character of their work activities. By contrast, the commentaries of the American respondents incorporate overachievement scripts addressing both the extrinsic rewards of work and the personality traits that make hard work a natural expression of personality. These hard work commentaries invoke career success and moneymaking as inducements to hard work. But they also invoke personality traits such as drive and the innate aversion to leisure. This transatlantic divide reflects the greater cultural resonance of self-realization in the two European contexts and the fact that the French and Norwegians have embraced a more Maslowian approach to working life. As I argue in the article's conclusion, these transatlantic differences in script repertoires can be viewed as the product of the societally specific cultural configurations at work in the three countries. Such cultural configurations define what it means-in terms of status and authenticity-to work hard in a remunerative and rewarding job. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]