Browsing by Author "Villberg, Elina"

On a global scale, bullying has been a problem for a long time. This is supported by the fact that bullying has been a popular research topic since the 1970s. Even though solutions and different interventions for bullying have been developed, the subject emerges almost regularly in both local and international media. The meaning of this research is to form an understanding of the agencies that are formed within bullying and find out what factors affect them. My goal is to touch the normative reality behind the phenomenon through interviewing people with experiences related to bullying. I’m also interested in how these people talk about bullying. The sample of this research consists of four women whose bullying experiences I have tried to get a hold of through a themed interview. I have approached the material with discourse analysis, which I‘ve conducted with the help of four central concepts: bullying, agency, norms and experience. On the basis of the analysis, bullying appears to be a multidimensional and subjective phenomenon that is seen as a normal mode of acting in school. In relation to bullying, the agency of an individual is affected by the norms of the school community, the age, personality and “coolness” of the individual, the physical surroundings of the bullying situations and the form and duration of bullying. Traditionally bullying has been seen as originating from the individual pathology of a person, but according to the research in hand bullying is actually a ubiquitous mode of acting in the social reality of the school, something that anyone can “grab” onto. In this framework the bully is seen as person who guards the group’s conventional social order. This notion is supported by the data, according to which social pressure, an understanding of the bullied being somehow different from others and the changeability of the role of the bully are all key factors in bullying. The cultural cliché that emphasizes individual pathology as the starting point of bullying should be forgotten if we really want to get rid of the phenomenon. Instead we should concentrate on the normative discourses at play in school. Opening these discourses to conversation is the first step toward change, and research can help in doing that.