Mens & Maatschappij - Volume 88, Issue 4, 2013

This study explores the relation between adolescents’ risky online behavior, their parents’ internet mediation and the prevalence of internet use in a country. Using the EU Kids Online dataset, including information on 15,415 adolescents in 25 countries, this study found that adolescents from lower educated and single-parent households are more likely to engage in risky online behavior. Furthermore, parental social internet mediation and especially rules restricting children’s internet use appear to be effective ways to reduce risk-taking by adolescents online. Parental monitoring seems to increase when adolescents are risky online. The level of modernization of a country seems to have no effect on adolescents’ participation in risky online activities. However, in more digitalized societies, parental social mediation seems less decisive in reducing risky behavior of adolescents online. Applying restrictions on internet use in the family home is an effective way to curb young people’s risky online behavior, regardless of a country’s level of internet diffusion.

In this study we investigate whether type and frequency of breach of the psychological contract by supervisors explain deviant workplace behavior. Type of breach refers to the reason why the supervisor did not fulfill the contract, which may be inadvertent, a matter of disruption, or reneging. Frequency means that the breach of the psychological contract can take place once or repeatedly. The impact of type and frequency on deviant workplace behavior, coming late for work, is investigated using a vignette study among 155 respondents. This study generates the following results.

First, employees show more deviant behavior when their psychological contract is breached. Second, reneging leads to stronger responses in terms of deviant behavior than the other two types. Third, repeated failure to fulfill the psychological contract leads to more deviant behavior of employees. The overall conclusion of the study is that the way in which supervisors breach the psychological contract provides an explanation of employee deviance.

This study addresses the question what role social capital plays in the status attainment process of men in the Netherlands in 2000: how important is social capital in the transfer of status from one generation to the next? We derive hypotheses by integrating the social resources theory in the classic status attainment model. To test these hypotheses we perform structural equation modeling on data from the Survey of the Social Networks of the Dutch (SSND). The most important result is that, although social capital is inherited and has a significant effect on one’s status, it plays a minor role in the intergenerational transmission of status. A reason is that the amount of social capital depends mostly on an individual’s educational level, and less so on family background. We further find that social capital actually needs to be activated in order to be of use and only about 30% of the men do so. Moreover, one benefits only from activating social capital if the mobilized person is of high status. Lastly, the role of the tie strength with the mobilized person is not as expected and deserves further attention together with others aspects of the network embeddedness of social capital.

This article compares the pre and post migration position in the labour market of recent migrants to the Netherlands from Poland and Bulgaria, regarding the extent to which migrants have a job, what their socioeconomic status is, and how satisfied they are with their income. The prime question is whether those migrants who found a job in the Netherlands work in a lower socio-economic status job than before migration, with which we test the first part of the U-curve-hypothesis, putting forward that migration results in a loss of job status. We used the dataset ‘Social and Cultural Integration Processes’ (SCIP). This dataset collected information from migrants that registered in the Dutch Municipality Population Registers to a maximum of one and a half year before the start of the survey. We find evidence that almost all Poles have a job in the Netherlands, but, excluding those who were in school in Poland before migration, most had a job in Poland as well. The situation for the Bulgarians is less positive, even though they more often have a job in the Netherlands than they had in Bulgaria. Within both migrant groups the socioeconomic status of the job in the Netherlands is lower than the status of the last job in the country of origin, but less so for family-motivated migrants and higher educated migrants. Income satisfaction has increased substantially for both groups.