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This article aims to deepen understanding of the trajectories through school and into adulthood of people who did not attain valued qualifications from upper secondary school ('non-completers'), and explore the fruitfulness of careership theory for such analysis. It is based on interviews with 100 young Swedes: 81 non-completers and 19 who had attended special upper secondary schools catering for young people with mild cognitive disability. Their narratives portray sparse socio-economic resources and difficult family situations, learning problems and marginalisation processes in school. They commonly learned to perceive themselves as failures and 'different'. Framed by narrow horizons of action, these young people's careers were mostly characterised by enforced rather than self-initiated turning points. Often leading to unemployment and economic problems, leaving secondary school was less of a turning point than a continuation of failure, even if completing adult education and getting a job were regarded as self-initiated, positive shifts. We conclude that careership theory was useful for analysing and understanding the careers of the young people concerned. However, distinguishing between 'routines' and 'turning points' became especially difficult when studying lives of these young people hemmed in by sparser resources, fewer choices and less stable career trajectories than their peers.

Introduction: This article explores how intentions and knowledge shape two Swedish cities' local safety policy (LSP). Method: The applied framework is derived from the integration of governance and implementation research and the theory of knowledge and its use. Results: The study shows that LSPs are shaped by amix of intentions and different kinds of knowledge, and intentions and knowledge interplay and intertwine in many ways. Key-persons construct LSPs when they work out solutions to urgent safety problems and take departure in the local context, its pre-conditions, and their experience-based and professional knowledge. The state governs LSP softly through management by objectives in the background, butmore often key-actor intentions and commitments, local safety problems, and events initiated and influenced LSPs. Conclusions: The article contributes to a better understanding of conditions for LSPs in multi-level governance. Practical applications: The article can be used to improve governance, identify implementation problems and knowledge needs that will improve LSPs and the overall safety situation in the community. The study has implications for how LSPs should be evaluated; many different evaluation criteria can be appropriate, such as relevance, legitimacy, achievement of key actors' objectives, sustainability of policy solutions, and creation of a local safety culture.

This article explores local safety policy (LSP) developed to resolve urgent safety problemsin two Swedish municipalities. It shows that local safety actors conceive and constructsafety problems in ways that make them manageable, and that LSP evolves as aweb of interactions between safety actors in the public and private sectors. The actorsuse established safety solutions and routines while exploring new ways of managing theproblems. The municipalities’ problem-solving structures differ mainly in that differentactors and institutions are involved. The policy process and features of LSP correspondwell to how policy is portrayed in other cross-sectoral policy domains. Local safetypolicy development cannot easily be separated from policy implementation, nor cansafety policy be separated from safety work, for they evolve together. The implication ofthis study for governance is that policy workers at different levels and from differentorganisations create LSP. Although LSP is partly initiated and legitimised at the political–administrative level, it is not from this level that it evolves.