| dc.description.abstract | In 1969 the Swedish school physician Peter-Paul Heinemann published an article in a Swedish journal about a certain behaviour he had observed in the schoolyard where he worked. He named the behaviour 'mobbing' from the English word 'mob', later translated back into English as 'bullying'. Heinemann explained bullying as group harassment and/or isolation of a single child due to some sort of deviancy. Bullying as a phenomenon was old, but the concept was new. Since the 1970s, psychologists and educationalists have tried to find out what causes school bullying, what can be done to prevent it and what one can do when it is already a problem. This research has led to numerous books and articles on the subject, and a number of prevention programmes. Traditionally, research on bullying has been carried out by psychologists and educationalists and the last decade also by sociologists and philosophers, among others. So far, research on bullying has not been an issue for historians. As research on bullying is uncharted land for the history of science, the thesis takes a rather broad approach to the field. Several different theories and methods have been used to analyse different approaches to the bullying problem. The first part of the thesis discusses the problem of problematisation and consolidation of the concept and its content. Why did Heinemann problematise this specific behaviour in 1969 and not earlier or later? The image of children and childhood changed profoundly during the 20th Century, as did society itself. Swedish children around 1970 spent more time with their peers in kindergarten and school than ever before and children's relations became increasingly interesting for researchers. In addition, Heinemann linked bullying to contemporary Swedish problems such as the growth of suburban areas and big schools, immigration and xenophobia. The concept of bullying captured many of these modern concerns in contemporary Sweden and might explain why the concept caught on so quickly in schools, the media and society as a whole. The concept's content changed during the 1970s, when the Swedish psychologist Dan Olweus entered the scene. Heinemann had originally defined bullying as an 'all against one'-behaviour, but Olweus' main focus was on individual aggressive boys and the stability of aggression over time. To make bullying fit his existing research on aggressive boys, he also included individual bullying in the concept and succeeded with this subtle reformulation of the concept. Olweus was the first researcher that published an empirically based study on bullying and he is normally regarded as the founding father of bullying research. His work has had a profound impact on Scandinavian and international research on bullying. Several researchers describe it as paradigmatic, with reference to Thomas Kuhn. During the 1970s, bullying came to be regarded as one of the major social problems in Norwegian schools. Media and many researchers considered the decennium a break with the past, as the modern way of life was profoundly different from the traditional rural life. Many, especially politicians on the right, saw bullying as a symptom of a "moral recession" due to the Norwegian Labour party's unsuccessful educational policy, according to the same politicians. In 1983 bullying was to become even more politicised when three Norwegian children aged 10-13 committed suicide after being bullied. The newly elected Minister of education from the Conservative Party was eager to show initiative and initiated a nationwide anti-bullying campaign and survey. Both Dan Olweus and the Norwegian educationalist and researcher Erling Roland were members of the campaign committee, and Olweus was responsible for the survey and analysis of the data. A few years later, both Olweus and Roland developed bullying prevention programmes based on the same campaign, and these programmes are among the most used programmes in Norwegian schools today. In his book, Ways of knowing. A New History of Science, Technology and Medicine {2001), the British historian of science John Pickstone presented five different ways of knowing. One of these ways is technoscience, described by Pickstone as "a way of knowing and a way of making". This is a fruitful perspective that enhances the different interests connected to the development of prevention programmes: research on bullying, {political) preventive action and evaluation of the prevention programmes. The thesis' analysis shows that one of the reasons for Dan Olweus' success as a supplier of terms within the research field of bullying, was the fact that he was the first to publish empirical studies on the problem. Since his was the first study in the field, more or less all findings in the early studies on bullying were compared with Olweus' results. In addition, the nationwide campaign and survey in 1983 provided him with a huge empirical material that hardly any other study could match. Besides, in several studies he found about 50 % reduction of bullying related problems by using his prevention programme. Put together, this led to what has been called a paradigmatic position within the research field. In Norway both Dan Olweus and Erling Roland dominated the research on bullying in different ways. First as developers of prevention programmes and second as advisors for politicians in repeated efforts to deal with the problem of bullying in Norwegian schools. Politicians needed the researchers' competence and at the same time the researchers benefitted from this relationship as the national school authorities recommended all Norwegian schools to use an approved prevention programme, among these, Olweus and Roland's prevention programmes. These close ties with the political power enhanced Olweus and Roland's dominant position in the research field of bullying. Since the turn of the millennium it has been more and more obvious that the research centre at the University of Stavanger founded by Erling Roland is the centre of gravity in Norway when it comes to developing new theories on bullying. In spite of this, Norwegian bullying research is limited to a rather narrow field of interest compared to the development in Sweden and Denmark. In Sweden research on bullying has been more critical to the existing bullying research and at the same time has broadened the field by introducing sociological perspectives. Danish research on bullying claims to produce research within a second paradigm of bullying research by presenting new theories and new perspectives. Time will show whether these new perspectives are fruitful. | en_US |
