Conference presentations (Public)

In this paper we explore how data on the use of time might be used to investigate the multi-level connections between family-related policies and fathers’ child care time in a cross-national context. We present a case study analysis of ‘fathering strategies’ in which empirical findings from time use data are compared with detailed policy information from Norway, Sweden and the United Kingdom. These analyses show that time use data can indeed shed light on the nuances of the effects of specific policies in different national contexts. However, they also point to the need to consider the complexity of multiple policies and their adoption in specific national contexts across time. To date, cross-time analysis has been stalled by lack of suitable data combining detailed policy information with good comparable measures of the time spent in family work from successive time use surveys. We describe the development of a cross-national, cross-time database which combines time use data with relevant social and family policy information, with the aim of providing a multi-level research tool to those interested in exploring further the relationships between policy and family work

The focus of this paper is on the relationships between social origin, participation in tertiary education (enrolment, drop-out, enrolment at second level and post-tertiary education) and occupational outcomes of degreeholders (unstable job, overeducation) in a recent period of university and labour market reforms (the “Bologna process” and the flexibilization of employment contracts). In the first part of the paper we review these institutional reforms and previous research on this topic in Italy. In the second part we analyse data from several cross-section waves of the Upper Secondary Graduates Survey and the University Graduates Survey which cover both pre- and post-reform cohorts of students. Results from logistic regression models show a slight decline in the effect of parents’ education on enrolment in tertiary education, while a reduction and again a new increase of inequality in drop-outs. We find smaller effects of parents’ education on the risks of having unstable or overeducated jobs and they are stable over time. Our conclusion is that some traits of inequalities connected to tertiary education processes are changing in the direction of a slight reduction of the social origins weight, but these shifts seem mainly due to general macro trend and not to the specific reforms occurred in Italy.

The Polish education system has recently undergone a number of reforms leading to substantial expansion and differentiation of tertiary sector. New forms of higher education institutions have been introduced, which have lower entrance requirements and provide shorter and less intensive study programmes. In parallel, there was no clear strategy for reforming the VET system, the role of the state in supporting cooperation between vocational schools and employers declined and currently only few students can receive firm-based training. These developments call for detailed examination of labour market outcomes of graduates, who currently obtain different degrees within Polish education system.

This paper provides the first evidence on the timing of entry into employment, the job quality and duration among young people, who obtained different degrees in Polish education system. The results of this study show that graduates from vocational schools, who participated in firm-based training, have significantly higher transition rate of entry into first job than graduates who completed the same type of school, but received school-based training only. The divergence in occupational status and job duration within group of graduates from vocational schools with and without firm-based training is much more limited, though. The results of this study suggest pronounced differentiation of employment chances among graduates with tertiary education. The graduates from the traditional, most selective and challenging study programmes constitute the most advantaged group in terms of all labour market outcomes. Although young people, who obtained ‘second tier’ tertiary education degrees have advantage over graduates with secondary education, their chances are clearly inferior as compared with graduates from traditional higher education institutions.

A well-established and quasi-universal finding of empirical research is that gender inequalities in educational attainment have been decreasing in recent decades. At the same time, there is also robust evidence that the distributions of men and women within educational levels have remained considerably uneven. This applies also to tertiary graduates: indeed gender segregation in higher education mediates between 30% and 50% of the wage gender gap. However, drawing on modernization theory as well as on world-polity institutional analysis, some scholars argue that a significant trend towards desegregation of higher education can be discerned, while others emphasize the prevailing stability of the association between gender and field of study (FOS, henceforth) at the tertiary level. A second source of disagreement relates to cross-country variations in the overall strength and in the qualitative pattern of this association, although the few large-scale comparative analyses conducted so far point to significant differences between nations. In this paper, I argue that gender segregation in higher education exhibits a very high degree of constancy across time and space. I employ loglinear models to analyze the Reflex data on young tertiary graduates in eight countries (Germany, Austria and Holland, Norway and Finland, Spain, Italy and Czech Republic) characterized by a high variety of educational systems and labour market institutions. I conclude that the association between gender and college major displays a very similar strength across nations. Moreover, also important qualitative similarities are apparent, over and above the well-know gender scientific divide. Hence, I develop topological loglinear models to show that we can account for these similarities by reference to a second (and even more important) gender divide, which involves fields of study that lead to skilled care jobs, either as a main destination or as a second-best option. These two divides account for more than 90% of the net association between gender and college major, controlling for marginal distributions. Furthermore, I am able to replicate successfully these topological models on the EULFS data for the same countries, and I can show that these divides prove remarkably resilient across the last three decades. Finally, I suggest that cultural and structural factors behind these two gender divides display high stability across time and space, which may well explain the observed noticeable degree of constancy of gender segregation in higher education.

This work analyzes the evolution of career mobility in Italy over the 20th century. First, we want to quantify the amount of career mobility and to identify the main flows between occupational classes across different birth cohorts. It is well-known that career mobility is generally low in Italy, but here we want to assess whether it is at least increasing over time. Our second research issue concerns the relationship between intra- and intergenerational mobility. We will assess whether the influence of family background and of educational qualifications on occupational attainment is confined to labor market entry or extends to work-life mobility. As mentioned above, it is well-documented that social origins display a marked influence on entry class and that this influence is largely, though not exclusively, mediated by educational attainment, but what happens to this initial allocation? Does it become more or less unequal over the life course with regard to the conditioning of social origins, and what is the role of education in this respect? In other words, our concern is whether individuals originating from the upper classes benefit from any additional advantage in the occupational attainment process other than that ensured by their parents at the beginning of their careers. Our third research question connects the previous two. In other words, the relationship between origins, education and career progression will be studied across different birth cohorts, in order to assess whether changing dynamics of career mobility contribute to a greater or lower social openness of the Italian society.

This paper compiles the results of international compartive research on well-being and the correlation between well-being and social inequality. It is a draft version of an entry for the Handbook “European Societies” edited by Immerfall and Therborn. Some of the more important findings are: European countries differ widley in their living conditions. Dimensions of social inequality are important for peoples subjective evaluation of their living conditions. Materialistic dimensions of social inequality seem to be of smaller importance in richer countries.

Educational attainment and social background have crucial impact on individual labour market outcome

and explain part of the differences in hourly earnings of Dutch males and females in their thirties (cf.
Traag et al. 2006). However, actual earnings will not only depend on one’s earnings capacities but also on
the family situation that has an impact on both the labour supply decision and the type of job one chooses.
In this paper, we analyse the relationship between educational attainment, social background, and spouse’s
resources on the chance to have a paid job and on earnings. The labour division within the household is
partly due to cultural factors and individual preferences but will also depend on the earnings capacity of
both partners. It is expected that the relative importance of the partner’s earnings capacities and cultural
factors varies with educational background.
For our analysis we use data from Statistics Netherlands (CBS). The basis builds the Secondary Education
Pupil Cohort (SLVO) that started in 1982 with 16.813 pupils who were in their last year of primary
education. These pupils were followed until the moment they left full time education. Tests of school
performance and non-verbal intelligence were administered in the first year of their secondary education,
as well as socio-economic background information about the nature and quality of their families of origin.
The dataset has been enriched by register data of the labour market position, income situation, family
composition and neighbourhood information from 1999 to 2005. As proxies for the individual and
partner’s earnings capacity we consider the actual hourly earnings, hourly earnings before cohabitation
and the income and wealth positions of siblings, parents and parents in law.
We find that for women the chance to have a paid job strongly depends on the earnings capacity of their
partner. The higher the earnings capacity of the partner the lower is the chance to have a paid job. The
number of hours does not depend on the husband’s earnings capacity, but on the number and age of
children in the household. For men the opposite is true; the chance to have a paid job does not depend on
his wife’s earnings capacity. Both for men and women earnings, the chance to have a paid job and the
number of hours worked increase with the level of education. The impact of the partner’s earnings
capacity does not seem to vary with educational background, however. For both men and women actual
hourly earnings are positively correlated with the wealth of the father in law, suggesting that there is
positive assortative mating with respect to unobserved earnings traits.

The naming practice of immigrants is studied as an example of their emotional identification with the host society and with the society of origin. Since first names can be chosen freely and at no cost, they are a good indicator for the parents’ desired form of acculturation. With data from the project “Preschool Education and Educational Careers among Migrant Children” it is analysed if Turkish parents in Germany choose a first name for their child which is common only in Turkey, only in Germany or in both countries. This first name choice represents a separated, an assimilated or an integrated emotional identification of the parents. Most of the parents choose a Turkish name for their child, but girls are more frequently given names that are common in both cultures than boys, while German names are only rarely chosen. Intermarriage strongly decreases the probability for separation in naming and especially increases the probability for the integration option, while the presence of a parent with the German citizenship enhances assimilation stronger than integration. More traditional and religious families tend to choose rather a Turkish name. The results of the first name choice are compared to analogous analyses of the respondents’ identity, which is the usual indicator of immigrants’ emotional identification. In principle the effects are similar, but the proportion of integration is considerably higher in the identity choice than in the name choice.

Many studies have demonstrated a disadvantageous position for children of Turkish immigrants in the German educational system. This paper analyses whether an intergenerational assimilation process can be detected regarding the cognitive skills and German language skills of young children of Turkish origin in Germany. A ‘forms-of-capital’ model is applied that assumes that the families’ endowment with various sorts of capital strongly affects the next generation’s skill development and educational attainment. A detailed differentiation of children’s generational status is used including second and third generation immigrant children as well as the 2.5 generation and children of intermarriages with natives. The data of the project ‘Preschool Education and Educational Careers among Migrant Children’ show large differences between native German children and all groups of migrant children with regard to German language skills. Also substantial differences with regard to cognitive skills are found for all children of Turkish origin except for those with one native German parent. Second and third generation children do not differ from each other on both tests while especially children with a first generation mother and a second generation father score worse than all other groups. All differences between the generational groups (including the difference to the Germans) regarding children’s cognitive skills can be explained by the families socioeconomic status and educational resources while significant generational differences remain regarding children’s German language skills. This latter skill is very specific for the receiving society and all remaining generational differences within the sample of Turkish children can be accounted for by the parents’ endowment with receiving country specific resources (e.g., parental German language proficiency). The results contradict the notion of a straight-line assimilation of Turkish immigrants in Germany.

Children start school with differing levels of skills. Thus, children of different social origin have different probabilities of educational success right from the start of their school career. This paper analyses how the gap in language abilities of children with different class background develops from age three to five. A focus lies on the question whether preschool education can help to close this gap. The data of the UK Millennium Cohort Study (MCS) show that children’s score on a standardized vocabulary test strongly depends on their parents’ social class. These class differences remains stable or even increase slightly over the two-year period. Using fixed effect models, it is demonstrated that children of higher class families can improve their vocabulary more strongly than children whose parents have either a lower or middle class position. Participation in an early education institution positively affects the vocabulary development of middle and lower class children while there is no significant preschool effect for children of higher class parents. The results indicate that preschool attendance does not lead to a catching up process of lower class children. But without preschool attendance, the gap between higher and lower class children widens even further.

We discuss how a schooling system’s structure may imply that private school enrolment leads to worse subsequent performance in further education or in the labour market, and we seek evidence of such phenomena in Italian data. If students differ not only in terms of their families’ ability to pay but also in terms of their own ability to take advantage of educational opportunities (“talent” for short), theory predicts that private schools attract a worse pool of students when publicly funded schools are better suited to foster progress by more talented students. We analyze empirically three surveys of Italian secondary school graduates, interviewed 3 year after graduation. In these data, the impact of observable talent proxies on educational and labour market outcomes is indeed more positive for students who (endogenously) choose to attend public schools than for those who choose to pay for private education

Previous studies have shown that the elite in the Swedish labour market consists mainly of late middle-aged men. Moreover, despite a reputation of being a relatively gender equal country, earlier studies suggest the business elite in the Swedish labour market to be more male dominated than the business elite in the United States and the United Kingdom. Assuming that the labour market elite is one important recruitment channel for e.g. board members in large corporations, compositional changes will indicate the extent to which changes over time will be observed at the very top of the corporate pyramid. Thus, the purpose is to study gender differences in the elite of large Swedish private business corporations 1995 to 2003 using national registers from the STAR database. We define the elite as the top salary employees in large firms. Our access to data covering the whole nation gives us a unique opportunity to link register data to individuals. Thus, although we work with a select group of individuals, the elite is still large enough to study.

The analyses show that women’s proportion of top salary employees in large Swedish private companies has increased since the early 1990s. Even so, men are still markedly over represented in this group of employees. The tendency towards gender equalisation over time is most salient in older cohorts born in the 40s. However, the overall gender difference is less pronounced among those born in the 1960s compared to older cohorts born in the 1940s and 1950s.

Conventional political wisdom has it that educational expansion reduces socioeconomic inequalities of access to education by increasing equality of educational opportunity. The counterarguments of Maximally Maintained Inequality (Raftery and Hout 1993) and Effectively Maintained Inequality (Lucas 2001), in contrast, contend that educational inequalities persist despite expansion because those from more advantaged socioeconomic backgrounds are better placed to take up new educational opportunities afforded by expansion (MMI) and to secure for themselves qualitatively better kinds of education at that level (EMI). This paper elaborates on the theoretical arguments posited by MMI and EMI; offers a critical review of existing empirical research; and tests the predictions of each theory against empirical data for the case of British higher education. The empirical results presented in the paper show that, despite a ten-fold expansion of higher education in Britain between 1950 and 1995, quantitative inequalities between socioeconomic groups in the odds of higher education eligibility and attendance have proved remarkably persistent, as have qualitative inequalities in the odds of participating in prestigious degree-level rather than sub-degree level programs and in Old rather than New universities. In other words, despite expansion, socioeconomic inequalities of access to higher education in Britain have been both maximally and effectively maintained.

This paper studies changes in the timing of marriage and first childbirth between post-

WWII Italian generations. In particular, it analyses how macro-level changes, such as
processes of regulation and de-regulation of the Italian labour market and their effects on
the individual work trajectories, affect the time of transition to parental roles.
Standing at the core of this paper is the idea that, given the characteristics of the subprotective
Italian welfare and the insider scenario boomed by the 80s-90s partial and
targeted labour market deregulation, to be a young and instable worker or, more generally,
a marginal or secondary labour market participant produces a delay in the transition to
adulthood particularly for what a delay in marriage and childbirth for the last cohorts of the
Italian population are concerned.
This question becomes even more central if we consider that non-standard or unstable
work experiences as traps from which is hard to escape while hampering the transition into
better employment conditions – which, in the context of an insurance-based welfare,
directly translate in social rights. The negative effects of these processes regard mainly
youngest cohorts, approximately individuals born from the second half of the Sixties on. In
particular, individuals poorly endowed with personal and familiar resources are those who
experiment this situation to a greater extent, enhancing in this way the role of the well
known factors affecting social inequality. These people, “disembedded” from the “fordist”
welfare guarantees, do not manage to catch the opportunities offered by the new “flexible”
labour market and post-fordist productive environment.
The analysis will be conducted on ILFI (Longitudinal Survey of Italian Families), a
prospective panel survey that includes retrospective information on education, work career
and family dynamics. As regards to methods, duration EHA models are employed.
Results show how the combination of the mentioned institutional factors produces
additional risks of social exclusion that are strongly cohorts-biased and that are adding to
the pre-existing structural factors of social stratification and inequality.

Sociologists have long considered inequality in educational attainment to be a major cause of inequality between people in their chances of occupying a more advantageous class position. However, there is some dispute as to whether or not educational inequality according to social class background declined during the 20th century. What is not in doubt is the marked expansion of education in the advanced economies during this time, and several authors have pointed to educational expansion as a mechanism by which inequalities in social mobility chances may be reduced. I measure the magnitude of such an effect and compare it with the impact of educational equalization on social mobility in Britain, Sweden and Germany during the twentieth century. I find that in all three countries educational expansion has had a positive effect in promoting greater social mobility.

In their widely cited study, Shavit and Blossfeld report stability of socioeconomic inequalities in educational attainment over much of the 20th century in 11 out of 13 countries. This article outlines reasons why one might expect to find declining class inequalities in educational attainment, and, using a large data set, the authors

analyze educational inequality among cohorts born in the first twothirds of the 20th century in eight European countries. They find, as expected, a widespread decline in educational inequality between students coming from different social origins. Their results are robust to other possible choices of method and variables, and the authors offer some explanations of why their findings contradict Shavit and Blossfeld’s conclusions.

Using data for seven European countries we analyse trends among women in class differences in educational attainment over the first two-thirds of the 20th century. We also compare educational attainment between men and women; we ask whether class differences among the two sexes are similar or not; and whether trends in class differences over birth cohorts have differed between men and women. We find that, as expected, over the 20th century, inequalities between men and women in their educational attainment declined markedly. More importantly, changes in class inequalities in educational attainment have been similar for both men and women, although, in some countries, women displayed greater inequality at the start of the 20th century and have shown a somewhat greater rate of increase in equality. Patterns of class inequality were also largely similar for both sexes, though in some countries daughters of farmers and the petty-bourgeoisie did relatively better than their brothers. While some of these results reinforce what has long been believed, our central finding of a decline in class inequality in educational attainment for both men and women contradicts the ‘persistent inequality’ in education that earlier scholars claimed existed.

In this paper I investigate the extent to which the Irish higher education system promotes inclusion or diversion in relation to social selectivity. In doing so, stratification processes are examined for two educational outcomes: inequality in the type of higher education institute attended (institutional differentiation) and the level of qualification pursued at higher education (qualification differentiation). The paper considers the individual level and school level influences on these two educational outcomes and concludes that the Irish system is inclusive, but class disparities remain in terms of institutional differentiation and qualification differentiation. Class disparities are largely mediated through educational attainment at the individual level and diversion is particularly evident in relation to the non-manual and skilled manual groups. Furthermore, school effects have a particular influence on those who do not obtain their preference of higher education course.

In Ireland, as elsewhere, bullying has been firmly established as a significant issue for contemporary workplaces, and the public sector in particular where research suggests that workers are more likely to report bullying than in the private sector (Hoel & Cooper, 2000; Zapf et al. 2003; O’Connell & Williams, 2002; O’Connell et al., 2007). Bullying is often perceived as primarily an interpersonal conflict and not a ‘normal’ industrial relations issue. However, recent research problematises this assumption by increasingly highlighting the importance of job and organisational factors, such as job intensification and organisational change, on the likelihood of a person reporting bullying. In addition, a comprehensive understanding of bullying, like industrial injury, must arguably take account of its social production and broader institutional context (Nichols, 1997). This paper investigates along three main lines of enquiry in order to address this central research question: why are workers in the public sector more likely to report bullying than those in the private sector? First, research has increasingly found that bullying is more likely to be reported in organisations undergoing change (O’Moore et al., 1998; Hoel & Salin, 2003; O’Connell & Williams, 2002; Harvey et al., 2006). Research in Ireland attests to the greater perception of organisational change in the public sector, compared to the private sector (O’Connell et al., 2003) and this may be one possible explanation as to the higher reported levels of bullying in this sector. Second, the paper explores the importance of the institutional framework, for example, formal policies and procedures, in influencing the extent to which bullying is recognised as a legitimate grievance in the workplace (McCarthy & Mayhew, 2004). The public sector by virtue of its proximity to Government is likely to well-developed policies and greater sensitivity to bullying than the private sector. Research has shown that familiarity with legislation on workplace bullying and the likelihood of having both informal and formal policies is greater in the public sector (O’Connell et al., 2007). The present paper suggests that there are therefore important differences in how bullying is recognised as a legitimate type of workforce harassment in the public and private sector which may therefore effect reporting rates. Third, whether the expected differences in job mobility, and job security, in the public and private sector affect the reporting rates in these sectors. Researchers have suggested that it is the job characteristics within the public sector, for example, permanent contracts and longer tenure, which may explain the higher reported levels of bullying (Zapf et al., 2003). Public sector workers may be less likely than private sector workers to seek alternative employment elsewhere if they perceive inappropriate behaviour in the workplace. To explore why workers in the public sector are more likely to report bullying than in the private sector, I draw on a cross-sectional, nationally representative survey of workers in Ireland specifically addressing the issue of workplace bullying. In addition, I also draw on a nationally representative survey of Irish employers in both the public and private sector. Both surveys were conducted in 2007

Problematic debt situations in Belgium: Indicators and Profile of the population at risk Sarah Carpentier & Karel Van den Bosch Centre for Social Policy Herman Deleeck – University of Antwerp Equalsoc Summer School 2008. The study of debt situations and problematic indebtedness is highly relevant in relation to poverty and social exclusion. This is also stated by the Joint report on Social Protection and Social Inclusion. However, until now this dimension has not been included in the commonly agreed indicators of the Open Method of Coordination on Social Security and Social Inclusion. With this paper we have three aims. Firstly, we explore which indicators may be valid and reliable indicators on problematic indebtedness based on the Belgian SILC 2004, which has some interesting additional Belgian questions. Secondly, we make an assessment of differences in the profiles of risk groups, compared to common indicators of deprivation and poverty. Thirdly, we examine the relationship between having credit (mortgage and consumer credit), problematic debt situations and social exclusion and poverty. We find seven indicators of problematic debt situations can be developed. We retain two of them as valid, reliable and with a clear significance. The first one is the percentage of the population living in a household having at least two arrears for basic provisions such as bills of electricity, gas or water, healthcare, or rent or mortgage. The second indicator is the percentage of persons becoming poor or poorer after the payment of consumption credit. These indicators reveal also a different profile of risk groups. Elderly have a very low risk. By the contrary, families with children have a high risk. Moreover, we find that persons in households having only consumer credit have a high risk of overindebtedness, while the major part of people in indebted households (with arrears for basic provisions) has no credit at all. We can conclude that indebtedness is an important dimension to integrate in the measurement of poverty and social exclusion.

The choice made at the end of compulsory school represents a crucial moment in the life of an individual, which will shape both his/her professional career and quality of life. In tertiary societies long-term education has spread throughout the social classes. Nevertheless the uncertainty connected to the increasing precariousness of the labour market could either reinforce or weaken the orientation to risk that is normally connected to investment in education.

On the one side children of the working class are supposed to be much more involved in the high school experience than before (on account of the democratisation of educational opportunities, but also of the increase in the credentials needed to enter the labour market). On the other side, especially when the conversion of the economy from the industrial to tertiary phase is low and incomplete, some good reasons for families in keeping a low profile of education, especially for the working class, could persist.
The research explores the conditions (analysed at micro level) that reduce or maintain the gap between the educational choices of working and middle class during a period of great uncertainty about social mobility and life chances. Is the aversion to risk, traditionally assumed an exclusive propriety of the working class, still exclusive to this group?
Data are provided by a survey (based on CATI method interviews) carried out in 2007 and concerning the school choices and first career steps in secondary school of 1127 children of working and middle class families living in Turin.

The educational choices of adolescents between family constraints and context effects by Giulia Maria Cavaletto This paper presents the initial results of research on the educational choices made by adolescents in Turin after compulsory schooling, realized in 2007 on a sample of over one thousand families with children at secondary school. The project involved a quantitative stage, entailing a questionnaire distributed using the CATI method and a subsequent qualitative analysis through interviews with a sub-sample of families, the aim of the latter being to probe deeper into the decision making processes within families. At present, are available the results of the quantitative part with the relative explanatory model, while the analysis of the qualitative interviews is underway. For the research has been selected a sample of urban working class families (COU, Schizzerotto, 2002; Pisati, 2000), and a control group composed of middle class families of white collar employees (CMI) and of independent middle class (CMA), each of which with at least one child aged between 15 and 18. The aim of the research was not only to explore differences between classes but also differences within classes and to observe the effect of the presence/absence of phratries in decisions regarding education and the family’s investment in human capital. The literature of the past ten years on inequalities in educational opportunities has confirmed the role that several ascribed characteristics continue to play in the choices of educational paths after compulsory schooling (Schizzerotto, 2002; Pisati, 2000, 2002; Shavit and Blossfeld, 1993). Back in the 70’s, Boudon emphasised how inequalities in opportunities to acquire education were the most impervious to change within advanced industrial societies (Boudon, 1973). This trend, although not as marked, is still present today in highly developed countries such as Italy, where there is a general tendency to continue education after compulsory schooling (Checchi, 1999, 2000), but in different ways depending on the family of origin (Checchi and Ballarino, 2006; Schizzerotto and Barone, 2006) If, therefore the first bifurcation (Gambetta 1990) between continuing to study or stopping and entering in the labour market regards an increasingly small number of individuals, the array of choices that direct some towards one path of study and others towards a completely different one is still highly diversified. These trends then show further developments with relation to the more recent attempts to reform the education system, particularly those regarding upper secondary school, first with the Moratti law and then with the Fioroni decree. This research looks at the theory of rational choice considered in its more recent forms (Elster, 1986; Boudon, 2000; Goldthorpe, 2000). In particular, an approach of analytical sociology was adopted, therefore defining scholastic choices as phenomena to be explained by means of “individual (and family) decision making processes that may (or may not) sustain reproductive forces (of class)” (Gambetta, 1987). What are the mechanisms that act without the knowledge of the actors involved in educational choices (“necessarily”, Gambetta, 1996), with respect to intentional ones (“for love”, Gambetta, 1996) and how important are they? In the theoretical model, elements that influences differences in the quantity and quality of education acquired in a reference population have been defined as factors. The economic and financial situation of the family, the social and cultural capital possessed by the family and school performance (talent in Checchi and Ballarino, 2006; Checchi, 2000) of the children are considered endogenous factors. On the other hand, the supply of institutional education in the area and the situation of the labour market, in terms of positions and professional skills requested, as well as sectors in expansion at local level, are considered exogenous factors. Preference systems, opportunities (Gambetta, 1996) the educational styles of the family of origin towards their children (Kellerhals and Montandon, 1996), strategies for the allocation material and symbolic resources to family members and the past schooling experience of parents were then defined as generative mechanisms. The sample selected for the research was obtained from the records of the Studio Longitudinale Torinese (SLT), which contains individual and ecological records of the resident population of Turin, cross-referencing censor data updated as of 2001 with records of the registry office of the city of Turin. The SLT is composed of a system of longitudinal records, both retrospective and prospective, which integrate databases of registry, censor and national health information. At present, the Study involves, to varying degrees of coverage, depending on the records, the entire population of the city of Turin, from 1st January 1971 to 31 December 2005. The tool used to gather information was a closed-answer telephone questionnaire, divided into sections: personal details on the household, previous and current school career of the children, jobs and income, housing and district and health of children. A total of 1127 interviews were conducted, of which 750 COU cases, 273 CMI and the remainder CMA. The data gathered in this way were first analysed through the construction of two versions of a multinomial logit model: the school attended at the time of the interview was used as a dependent variable in the first; the scholastic performance of children attending secondary school at the time of the interview was used as a dependent variable in the second. Evaluations were then made of the effects of context, through a comparison with secondary data from the past ten years, particularly concentrating on periods in which elements of change, such as the Moratti reform, were introduced to the Italian secondary school system. The model was constructed starting from the assumption of the continuing influence of social class on educational choices, but with a growing attenuation of the influence exercised by variables such as the level of economic stability of the family of origin and the sex of the children. Other micro variables observed, such as scholastic performance/achievement and the past educational curriculum, the willingness of the adults to invest in human capital and the presence of the influence of peers within a phratry may have an explanatory importance when choosing secondary school. Lastly, it was shown how the “social class” variable is more important the more one highlights on one side its internal heterogeneousness by position in the labour market, whether referring to the urban working class (no longer comprised of blue collar workers alone but also by white collars) or to the middle class (freelance or employed); on the other hand, its internal organisation based on the position of the family members (cross class families, dual-income families in which the parents belong to the same social class but hold very diverse position in the labour market).

The choice made at the end of compulsory school represents a crucial moment in the life of an individual, which will shape both his/her professional career and quality of life. In tertiary societies long-term education has spread throughout the social classes. Nevertheless the uncertainty connected to the increasing precariousness of the labour market could either reinforce or weaken the orientation to risk that is normally connected to investment in education.

On the one side children of the working class are supposed to be much more involved in the high school experience than before (on account of the democratisation of educational opportunities, but also of the increase in the credentials needed to enter the labour market). On the other side, especially when the conversion of the economy from the industrial to tertiary phase is low and incomplete, some good reasons for families in keeping a low profile of education, especially for the working class, could persist.
The research explores the conditions (analysed at micro level) that reduce or maintain the gap between the educational choices of working and middle class during a period of great uncertainty about social mobility and life chances. Is the aversion to risk, traditionally assumed an exclusive propriety of the working class, still exclusive to this group?
Data are provided by a survey (based on CATI method interviews) carried out in 2007 and concerning the school choices and first career steps in secondary school of 1127 children of working and middle class families living in Turin.

Abstract

The choice made at the end of compulsory school represents a crucial moment in the life of an
individual, which will shape both his/her professional career and quality of life. In tertiary societies
long-term education has spread throughout the social classes. Nevertheless the uncertainty
connected to the increasing precariousness of the labour market could either reinforce or weaken the
orientation to risk that is normally connected to investment in education.
On the one side children of the working class are supposed to be much more involved in the high
school experience than before (on account of the democratisation of educational opportunities, but
also of the increase in the credentials needed to enter the labour market). On the other side,
especially when the conversion of the economy from the industrial to tertiary phase is low and
incomplete, some good reasons for families in keeping a low profile of education, especially for the
working class, could persist.
The research explores the conditions (analysed at micro level) that reduce or maintain the gap
between the educational choices of working and middle class during a period of great uncertainty
about social mobility and life chances. Is the aversion to risk, traditionally assumed an exclusive
propriety of the working class, still exclusive to this group?
Data are provided by a survey (based on CATI method interviews) carried out in 2007 and
concerning the school choices and first career steps in secondary school of 1127 children of
working and middle class families living in Turin.

It has been suggested that new interventions, as the time goes by, may

initially increase socioeconomic inequalities to decrease afterwards, the so called
inverse equity hypothesis. The dynamics of trends in inequalities is not well
understood yet. Our objective was to describe and explore trends in
socioeconomic gaps in oral health in Brazil and Sweden. This study is a time trend
analysis of cross-sectional studies designed to assess the prevalence of oral
health and other population characteristics. In Sweden we have data available for
the years 1968, 1974, 1981, 1991 and 2000. In Brazil data was available for 1986
and 2002. Trends in complete or partial edentulism are shown, as well as trends
in no missing/good teeth. There was on average an annual decline in absolute
disparities of 0.5% (95% CI= 0.1-0.8) in Brazil and 0.7% (95% CI= 0.5-0.9) in
Sweden. Results concerning no missing teeth (Brazil) / teeth in good conditions
(Sweden) were mixed. In Brazil the absolute and relative disparities in the
prevalence of no missing teeth has increased, while in Sweden there was a
statistically non significant decrease in disparities in the prevalence of those with
teeth in good conditions. At least, since 1991 in Sweden and 2002 in Brazil, we
found that, in the age group of 35-44, there are no significant socioeconomic
disparities in edentulism either in absolute or relative terms. However, lower
socioeconomic groups have not reached the same level of oral health as richer
groups. This dynamics may suggest that, when major improvements in edentulism
started in the lower economic groups, the majority of people in the richer groups
had already improved their oral health and reached good oral health first.

Studies have shown that women receive lower wage returns to attained occupational prestige than do men. Studies also show that family responsibilities affect men and women differently which may be one major cause of women’s wage penalty.

In this article I examine if the gender difference in wage return for attained occupational prestige can be explained by diverse family obligations for men and women and if gender differences in work characteristics, which are difficult to combine with family duties, account for some of the gender wage gap in returns for attained occupational prestige.
If women’s family obligations are one major cause of women’s drawback the negative interaction between women and occupational prestige with regard to wages would be larger for mothers and married/cohabiting women than for single women without children.
Results show a gender wage gap between married/cohabiting men and women with children which grows with occupational prestige. However, this interaction between gender and prestige is insignificant among single women and men and for couples without children. Further, when controlling for time consuming work the gender wage gap for couples with children according to occupational prestige narrows, especially in occupations with high prestige.

The generational sustainability of welfare regimes is of central importance to most long-term analyses of welfare state reforms (see for example: Esping-Andersen et al., 2002). There are strong interaction between welfare regime and intra cohort inequalities (Mayer, 2005). A complement to these analyses shows that changes in intra versus inter cohort inequalities are major outcomes or consequences of the trajectories of the different welfare regimes. Previous comparative research papers show the difference between France and the United-States, since the American intracohort inequalities have increased strongly for the last three decades, when the French case show less intracohort inequalities and more intercohort imbalances at the expense of younger generations of adults (Chauvel 2006). Here, we propose a comparison between the British, Finnish, French, and Italian dynamics of distribution of after tax and transfers equivalised income by age, period and cohort, to assess how different welfare regimes faced different trade-offs between intra and inter cohort inequality. The Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) data are used to analyze the transformations of the intra cohort inequalities (based on interdecile ratios) and the changes in the cohort life chances (with age-period-cohorts models of analysis of divergence to the linear trends). The main result is that the conservative and the familialistic welfare regimes are marked by more inter-cohort inequalities to the expense of young social generations, when the social-democrat and the liberal ones show less inter-cohort redistribution of resources, and more intra-cohort inequality, particularly in the case of the UK. Is it the result of a logics of communicating vessels : the stronger is the “socioeconomic solidarity between family generations toward the generation of children”, the weaker the “social welfare based solidarity between social generations for the integration of the social generations of young adults”.

Earlier studies disagree over whether differences in the human capital configuration or employer discrimination explain second-generation migrants’ disadvantages when entering German labor markets. While the human capital explanation has been tested extensively, less convincing research explores employer discrimination. Furthermore, past research understood the successful completion of a vocational education as part of the human capital configuration and identified it as the major predictor of a successful transition into the labor market. This disregards, however, that for the most part companies are the providers of access to vocational education in Germany, and hence discrimination may occur when companies make their enrollment decisions for these programs. Importantly, this suggests investigating an earlier time point in the process when discrimination may occur than previous studies have considered. Therefore, using data from the German Socioeconomic Panel Study, we analyze the transition from secondary school into the labor market in two steps: first, the transition into vocational education, and second into employment. The GSOEP allows a comprehensive specification of human capital and testing of corollary hypotheses derived from statistical discrimination and taste discrimination.

Using discrete event history models for access to and completion of vocational education programs we find significant and substantial ethnic residuals especially for young Turkish men, even when controlling for receiving country specific capital. This raises serious doubts in specifying vocational education as part of human capital. For the second part of the process, the actual transition into regular employment, we use hybrid estimation modeling. This allows the simultaneous estimation of fixed and random effects, i.e. the estimation of the full set of theoretically relevant predictors. Human capital, including receiving country specific resources, such as German language abilities or the ethnic composition of networks, does not fully explain the ethnic penalties young males with Turkish migration background experience. Finally, interaction models show that a completed vocational education pays off less for Turkish as compared to Germans, again the effect is pronounced for Turkish men. The latter finding is direct evidence for statistical discrimination. Regarding taste discrimination we find no evidence, although, this is conducted through an indirect test. In conclusion, the inclusive human capital measures available in the GSOEP do not fully explain Turkish second-generation migrants’ disadvantages; partly it can be attributed to statistical discrimination.

Part-time employment, overwhelmingly taken up by women, is advocated as a means of achieving work-life balance. British, German and US panel data are used to test competing hypotheses regarding the effect of married women’s employment on divorce risk across countries representing different earner-carer and part-time work regimes. Results provide no support for the independence hypothesis; where effects are significant, wives’ part-time or full-time employment predicts more stable marriages as compared with wives out of the labor force. The optimal mix, however, varies across the countries. West German couples where the wife (but not mothers) works part-time are significantly more stable, whereas UK couples where the wife works full-time are most stable. Divorce risk in both countries begins to rise, however, as wives’ relative earnings increase, suggesting persistent tensions between economic necessity and traditional gender roles. Only in the US did a mother’s (not wives’) part-time employment significantly decrease divorce risk. So only in the country with no policy support for work-life balance did the reduced-hours strategy predict more stable marriages for parents. The differences across contexts indicate minimal reinforcement of a male breadwinner model allows modern families to balance economic and familial pressures more successfully.

p<>. The sociology of lifestyles is dominated by Bourdieu’s view on consumption and lifestyles. People’s tastes are seen as channeled by their position within the class structure (Bourdieu, 1979). Structural homology and habitus are the key concepts. The Distinction model establishes a systematic correspondence between the space of practices and consumptions on the one hand and the space of social positions on the other. This theoretical construct has inspired much criticism. Some postmodernist or radically individualistic arguments deny the social dimension of taste and lifestyles. The “omnivore/univore” hypothesis, which was originally proposed by Di Maggio (1987) and systematized in a seminal article by Peterson and Simkus (1992) on the musical tastes of contemporary Americans, supports the idea that the main social distinction today is a matter of cultural diversity rather than one of highbrow or lowbrow taste. The paper will deal the structural homology aspect of Bourdieu’s thesis. To what extent is it effectively possible to draw a correspondence between a space of positions

and a space of lifestyles? Is the highbrow/lowbrow dimension the main principle organizing the life-styles? What kind of positions could be associated to these life-styles? Answering these questions will imply an operational definition of the two spaces and a statistical assessment of the correspondence between them. This work will be carried out from the survey entitled Permanent Survey on Living Conditions (EPVC) and conducted during 2003 about cultural and sport activities in France.

p<>. The theoretical model of The Distinction is a basic reference in the sociology of lifestyles (Bourdieu, 1979). This model is fundamentally structured by two concepts, structural homology and habitus. Habitus are cultural structures that exist in people’s bodies and minds and shape a wide variety of their behaviours, beliefs and thoughts. Structural homology is the assumption that social class structure is linked to the structure of aesthetic preferences through a one-to-one correspondence, an isomorphic relation. People’s tastes are seen as channelled by their position within the class structure, which is defined by their volume of capital and its “composition” and are organised in line with a “highbrow/lowbrow” opposition. Here, we will focus on the structural homology aspect and limit ourselves to analysing to what extent it is possible to univocally relate kinds of activities the French do with their social positions. We shall empirically examine the principles of organisation of the activities, just as they were described throughout a survey on cultural and sports practices of the French, and then evaluate to what extent a structural homology between practices and social positions is still observable.

In sociology, the appropriateness of national approaches for understanding social

inequality in today’s societies is being increasingly questioned, and EU-wide ap-
proaches are advocated instead. In this paper, we link the growing debate about
national or EU-wide approaches to reference group theory, investigating whether
comparisons with foreign countries influence levels of individual life satisfaction.
Our results indicate that, on the one hand, more people can be assumed to have
a national frame of reference than a broader international one; on the other hand,
among those who do have an idea of how average people in other countries live,
cross-border comparisons certainly influence people’s satisfaction with life. Upward
comparisons in particular are important: The more people feel personally deprived,
relative to other countries, the less satisfied they are with their lives. In contrast,
the feeling of relative gratification has a much smaller impact on life satisfaction,
and often no impact at all. This leads us to conclude that EU-wide approaches to in-
equality do make sense, but that there is also no need to jettison national approaches
completely.

In the context of the ageing of the population, society cannot afford to ignore the working potential of older people in order to sustain economic competitiveness. However, the employment rate of workers older than 50 years is low in the Czech Republic and is the result especially of the above-average unemployment rate of this age group and the frequent use of early retirement schemes. This study views the social problem of the low employment rate of older people as a complex issue with a range of different causes and consequences and suggests the following differing reasons for people older than 50 years , who have not yet reached retirement age, exiting the job market early: a) the inability of older people to keep a job or find a new one due to the low level of human capital, b) age discrimination, negative stereotypes and lack of demand for this group of workers leading to social exclusion from the job market and c) a lack of motivation of older people to work. In conclusion, political initiatives have been put forward for the promotion of the employment of older workers in the Czech Republic.

Over the past two decades, all European societies have experienced continued and increasing migrations, albeit with very different intensities and characteristics. Our focus is on new immigrants — those who have come from abroad in the past 15 years — in both old and new receiving West European countries. Comparative analyses on this issue are rather weak as the literature on immigrant integration in the labour market is well-established in the old receiving countries, but is just beginning to be developed in the newer receiving ones. The article aims at introducing the articles collected in this special issue, which present the results of a research project that concerns six European countries — Italy, Spain, United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Germany, and Denmark. Our focus is on inequalities between immigrants and natives with respect to the risk of unemployment and to the access to highly qualified occupations. After having highlighted similarities and differences across those countries, we tried to draw some general conclusions concerning the main factors that may have shaped new immigrants’ incorporation into West European labour markets. In particular, the role played by the nature of immigration and by the labour demand seems to be crucial.

The gap between unemployment rate of immigrants and that of natives varies across West European countries. This article aims at explaining these differences by taking into account economic and institutional characteristics of labour markets and by adopting a dynamic perspective, that is, disentangling the risk of being unemployed into two different risks: that of entering unemployment and that of remaining in long-term unemployment. From the analyses of yearly transitions to/from unemployment, less immigrant penalization results in those countries where the employment protection legislation is stricter, the labour demand is more biased towards low skilled jobs and the welfare state is less generous for the unemployed. Furthermore, the article summarizes the main results of five country studies also focused on labour market transitions of immigrants and natives.

While recent research on class mobility in Britain has found no change in the association between fathers’ and children’s class positions, research on income mobility suggests that the association between parental income and children’s earnings increased between the birth cohorts of 1958 and 1970. In this paper we have started out from these divergent findings from analyses of the same data-sets.

We show, first of all, that the contrasting findings are not the result of the researchers concerned working, on account of missing data, with different subsets of respondents from the two data-sets. Secondly, we have shown that for both cohorts alike there is a stronger association between father’s class and child’s class than between family income and child’s earnings, although this difference is much reduced from the 1958 to the 1970 cohort.
Thirdly, we have examined the relationship between class and income, as present in the data that we have used in our analyses of mobility, and find that this relationship is generally stable except where family income is involved. For the 1958 cohort there is a much weaker linkage than for the 1970 cohort between family income, on the one hand, and father’s class, child’s class and child’s earnings, on the other. And, fourthly, we show corresponding relationships between father’s class, parental income and child’s highest education,
Thus, rather than searching the explanation to the observed increase in the association between family income and children’ earnings in specific conditions for the 1970 cohort, we would rather focus on the weakness of this association in the 1958 cohort. In this regard, we suggest that it may be that the apparent decrease in income mobility is at least in some important part the result of the family income variable for the later cohort providing a better measure of permanent income than that for the earlier cohort.

McIntosh and Munk (forthcoming) claim that the class schema developed by Erikson and Goldthorpe lacks validity and should not be taken as a basis for studies of intergenerational social mobility. Their paper is founded on a serious misconception of why the schema is in fact used by sociologists in mobility research and, for this reason, their test of its validity is essentially misdirected. In addition, the test itself is not carried out in an appropriate way, nor, it would seem, with data of adequate quality. Given these shortcomings we suggest it unwise to take seriously any of the results of McIntosh and Munk’s analyses.

Inequality of educational opportunity (IEO) depends on two separate mechanisms: children from advantaged social backgrounds perform better at school – primary effects – and tend more than others to choose to continue in education – secondary effects. IEO in the transition from compulsory to upper secondary education has earlier been shown to have decreased in Sweden since the middle of the 20th century. In the present paper we investigate whether this change can be accounted for by changing primary or secondary effects, or perhaps by both. The analysis is based on longitudinal data for six cohorts of children, the oldest born in 1948 and the youngest in 1982. Primary and secondary effects are separated both by grade point averages and cognitive test results. The estimation of the effects is based on the comparison of actual and counterfactual transitions among children from different social classes. Results show that the decrease in IEO overall seems to be related to corresponding changes in the primary and secondary effects, that is, we do not find that either of the two effects has been crucial for this observed decrease. Secondary effects are greater when the separation is based on cognitive ability tests rather than grades and we end by discussing the consequences of this observation for the separation of primary and secondary effects.

Aims The death rate of medical doctors was one of the highest among the professions in England in the late 19th century, while the death rate of the clergy was the lowest. We here present relative death risks of clerics, doctors and other educational groups in Sweden today, and make a comparison to 19th-century England.

Methods Relative death risks from Cox regressions are reported for 12 occupational or educational groups in the ages 30-64.
Results Those with a theological exam show higher risks of dying during the follow-up period compared to others with a similar educational level. On the other hand, medical doctors have relatively low death risks, although professors in medicine deviate by having high risks. Professors in other subjects experience the lowest death risks of all identified groups.
Conclusions The death risk pattern among clerics and doctors seems to be reversed in present-day Sweden compared to England a hundred years ago. This may reflect changes in working conditions as well as the prestige of the occupations.
Keywords: Mortality, occupations, education, health inequality

Background Previous studies have shown that causes of death differ in their relationship with social class, but we lack a more comprehensive description of this variation. The present study provides a detailed and extensive list of social class differences for a large number of specific causes of death.

Methods Swedish population data on all deaths between 1991 and 2003 were linked with census information on household social class from 1990. Relative death risks in groups of causes according to European Shortlist were estimated separately for men and women in eight classes using Cox Regression. In total 2,924,617 persons in the age range 30-59 in 1990 and 129,694 deaths were included in the analyses.
Results A clear mortality gradient among employees was found for the majority of the causes, from low relative death risks among higher managerial and professional occupations to relatively high risks for the unskilled working class. However, there is considerable variation in the strength of the association, from causes such as malignant melanoma, breast cancer and transport accidents among women, where no clear class differences were found. At the other extreme, mental and behavioural disorders, endocrine, nutritional and metabolic diseases and diseases of the respiratory system all show steep slopes for both men and women in comparison with the total mortality gradient. Excess mortality in cardiovascular disease or cancer – the number of deaths over that which would occur if all classes had the same death rate as the highest class –accounts for around 20% off all deaths among men and and around 15 percent among women.
Conclusions Exceptions to the general pattern – i.e., causes of death in which higher social classes are exposed to greater death risks or in which there is no mortality gradient – are practically non-existent. There is nevertheless a significant variation in the strength of the class differences in specific causes. In research on the social mechanisms of health inequality, this variation needs to be taken into consideration.
Key words: Mortality, social class, cause of death, socioeconomic differences.

A critical aspect of social protection has always been the trade-off between the adequacy and equity of benefits and their promotion of dependency and distorted work incentives affecting individuals’ general work orientations. Previous findings indicate how commitment to paid work is stronger in coordinated production regimes and more encompassing welfare states, but analyses of trends over time in broader comparative perspective are still lacking, as is also simultaneous assessments of important aspects of job quality. The purpose of this study is therefore twofold. Firstly, trends in employment commitment since the late 1980s are evaluated. Secondly, we examine the role of welfare state institutions for explaining cross-national patterns in employment commitment in thirteen mature welfare states while also taking into account job quality. Preliminary analyses show how most attitude change took place in the earlier period between 1989 and 1997, when employment commitment increased in the encompassing welfare state of Norway but decreased in the two basic security countries Great Britain and the United States. During the later period between 1997 and 2005, for which a larger number of countries were compared, the picture is one of stability rather than change. Finally, results from hierarchical regressions combining survey data with new institutional data, confirm previous findings – employment commitment is still decidedly stronger within more generous welfare regimes, also when job quality is accounted for.

This project studies how dual earner heterosexual couples negotiate and decide about the division of paid and unpaid work in the household, and how these processes and outcomes differ across welfare regimes. We combine currently available quantitative data on the division of paid and unpaid work, with a qualitative longitudinal approach, focusing on dual-earner couples who are having their first child. The change in the division of work around the time of first birth is crucial for gender inequality in the household. It also has long-term consequences for gender inequalities in the labour market (e.g. Mandel and Semyonov 2005; Ruhm 1998). Quantitative analyses of gendered employment transitions are used to identify national patterns of earning and caring around fist birth, and to compare them cross-nationally, with specific focus on the role of national institutions. With the quantitative data, we can also verify and generalize the findings from the qualitative study as well as extend the analysis in place – over welfare regimes – and time. The qualitative data will show how individuals subjectively frame conditions and decisions in various contexts and indicate the degree to which different theories such as the doing gender approach, the relative resource/bargaining perspective and specialization strategies (translated into various arguments used in the negotiation process in the household) may influence different decisions in different institutional settings.

This international research project includes Sweden, Germany and the Netherlands. These countries symbolize different welfare state regimes where Germany and the Netherlands symbolise the conservative and Sweden the social-democratic welfare state (Esping-Andersen 1990; 1999). After a more detailed description of the project, we will present some preliminary findings from the German qualitative part. In addition, we will present results from a quantitative event history study of career related consequences of women’s time out on family leave for Germany, Sweden, and the U.S. (Aisenbrey, Evertsson & Grunow, forthcoming).

This article provides an analysis of employment and occupational attainment of recent immigrants to Spain. We use data from the Spanish labour force surveys for the years between 2002 and 2007 and compare the probability of being active versus inactive and that of being employed versus unemployed among immigrants and native-born Spaniards, using logistic regression models. The paper then moves on to investigate the quality of the occupation achieved by means of multinomial logistic regression models. We find evidence that immigrants are not at a disadvantage in comparison to native-born Spaniards regarding the risk of unemployment. This is true even after controlling for differences in socio-demographic characteristics between immigrants and Spaniards and, in particular, after accounting for the duration of time spent in the labour market. On the other hand, a strong and persistent disadvantage even after controlling for socio-demographic characteristics is confirmed for immigrants as far as their access to skilled occupations is concerned. Furthermore, this disadvantage does not disappear as time spent in the host country increases. Our findings, thus, go against the assimilation hypothesis that predicts that immigrant’s occupational attainment should progressively converge to that of natives.

Cross-sectional literature has shown that in Switzerland as elsewhere immigrants are more penalized than the native-born population both considering the unemployment risk and their position in the employment structure. Using a longitudinal framework, the present article focuses on a comparison between male immigrants and natives in the Swiss labour market, analysing two risks: the risk of unemployment and the risk of entrapment in unskilled occupations. In the first part of the article, using a dynamic random effect models, we show that immigrants present less state dependence than natives considering both unemployment and the risk of entrapment in unskilled positions. In the second part, using Heckman selection models, we show that less state dependence of immigrants corresponds to a higher mobility towards the skilled working class that is limited to the secondary labour market. We explain these differences with the interplay of Swiss labour market characteristics, in particular, the need for high flexibility and the positive selection of immigrants whose access to the Swiss labour market is generally realized through the bottom of employment structure.

This paper aims to develop and empirically verify, through theoretical references and a secondary data analysis, an hypothesis about the relation between the economic globalization and the generalized trust in people – this latter as an important aspect of macro social capital concept – for the OECD countries.

As a first step the globalization phenomenon will be analyzed, stressing the importance and the impact of the economic significance and the fact that this element has consequences also at a sociocultural and political level, becoming an explosive trend in regard to the first modernity social milieu.
The social capital concept will be later briefly introduced in its three possible analysis levels, focusing on the meaning of the concept as a feature that inheres to a macro social system, like the national one; the elements of this macro dimension, especially the trust in the generalized other, will be highlighted.
After this outline of the theoretical framework, a secondary data analysis will be proposed to allow a comparison among the thirty OECD nations, in order to evaluate how the trust in generalized other in 2000 is related to a different economic globalization rate in 1995; there will be also an evaluation of the national wealth and industrialization influence on the above mentioned relation.
If data about generalized trust in people in 1990 and economic globalization in 1985 will be available, the same regression model will be studied.
Finally some reflections on the results, on their limits and on their possible interpretations will be suggested and a future research work will be proposed

Aim of the paper

The main objective of this paper is to examine whether differences in institutional context within which part-time work developed led to significant differences in the quality of part-time work. The focus is on countries that provide relatively strong institutional contrasts – such as the Scandinavian countries on the one hand, which have been characterized as having inclusive employment systems, and Britain, on the other, which is often taken as the exemplar of a liberal or deregulated employment system. The nature of change in the quality of part-time work between the early 1990s and the mid 2000s within these countries is studied. While at the beginning of the period, the characteristics of part-time work were determined primarily by national institutional systems, by the end of the period they are likely to have been increasingly affected by European regulations. Other factors that might have acted as a driving force to changes in the quality of part-time work over time could for example be increased levels of education and a potential rise in employers’ demand for flexible labour. These questions are examined using the Swedish Level of Living Survey (LNU) and the Swedish Living Condition Survey (ULF), respectively the British Skill Survey and the Employment in Britain Survey (EIB).

In this paper we analyse the health effects of fixed-term contract status for men and women in West-Germany and Spain using panel data. This paper asks whether changes in the employment relationship, as a result of the liberalisation of employment law, have altered the positive health effects associated with employment (Goldsmith et al. 1996; Jahoda 1982). Using information on switches between unemployment and employment by contract type we analyze whether transitions to different contracts have different health effects. We find that unemployed workers show positive health effects at job acquisition, and also find the positive effect to be smaller for workers who obtain a fixed-term job. We also establish surprising differences by gender and country, with women less likely to report positive health effects at job acquisition. For West-Germany, this was found to be a function of the dual-burden of paid and unpaid care within the home.

A large number of studies have shown that parental divorce affects children’s living conditions on a number of dimensions. Less is known, however, on whether the magnitude of the impact has changed over time. This is mainly due to a lack of data, i.e. repeated cross-sectional or longitudinal data. Meta-studies analysing research conducted across several decades conclude, however, that the impact of parental divorce generally declined between the 1950s and the 1980s and increased again in the 1990s. A problem with meta-studies, though, is the lack of comparability between included studies. In this paper we use data from the three waves of the Swedish Level of Living Survey, conducted in 1968, 1981, and 2000, to analyze the impact of parental divorce on the psychological adjustment of adult children of divorce. Preliminary results indicate that the association has constantly weakened over time for severe psychological problems, i.e. later cohorts are not as severely affected by their parents’ divorce as earlier cohorts. Instead respondents from dissolved families are now (2000) slightly more likely to suffer from mild psychological problems than respondents who grew up with both their biological parents.

While a considerable body of research about tertiary education expansion and its labour market returns exist for western industrialized countries, far less is known concerning Eastern European countries. However, especially the rapid tertiary education expansion seen there in recent years demand research on the specific conditions governing school-to-work transition among tertiary education graduates. In this respect, Ukraine is an interesting case because of its massive expansion in tertiary educational attainment in recent years. This expansion has been accompanied by an increased differentiation of higher education institutions.

In previous research we have shown that even relatively inferior tertiary tracks still have better payoffs compared to secondary education in terms of different labour market outcome dimensions such as the speed at labour market entry and the occupational status attained. The central research question of this contribution is, however, whether we can identify differences between graduates of various tertiary education institutions. From a theoretical point of view, we expect to find large heterogeneity within the group of tertiary graduates in terms of labour market prospects due to differences in self-selection mechanisms, signalling capacities, skill acquisitions, and closure processes. Furthermore, the strong tertiary education expansion might have outpaced the demand for high-skilled and led to a certain degree of occupational mismatches among tertiary graduates.
Our analyses are based on retrospective micro-data data from unique, high-quality, large-scale Ukrainian school-leaver survey, which is representative for the whole country. The data allow for a differentiated view at the level of higher tertiary education in the light of its remarkable expansion such as different nationally standardized levels of institutional accreditation, differences between public and private higher education institutions, tuition and non-tuition based institutions, part-time and full-time students as well as field of study differences.
We investigate the performance of graduates from different higher education institutions in a multidimensional evaluation looking at the pace of labour market entry and, especially, the matching quality of the first significant job attained. The matching quality is measured by subjective assessments of the respondents whether and how much their educational level deviates from the education required for the specific job they perform. Furthermore, we use an objective approach of measuring occupational matching by analyzing the transition probabilities to specific skill segments in the labour market.

A review of existing sociological literature on the relation between educational attainment and fertility decisions reveals that most empirical studies focus on characteristics of the female spouse. The role of the partner is neglected for the most part. Yet, most children are fathered and raised in an existing relationship. Hence, we assume that the influence of both partner’s education has to be regarded as an important determining factor for childbirth. From a theoretical perspective using bargaining models family formation can be seen as a collective decision mutually agreed upon by both spouses and therefore characteristics, resources and attitudes of both partners have to be considered. In our paper, we use this approach to examine fertility decisions, taking into account both partners as actors and couples as the unit of analyses. Hence, we look at each partner’s educational attainment and the couple’s educational constellation, i.e. if both partners have the same educational level or if one partner is higher educated than the other.

Furthermore, from a life course perspective we apply a dynamic perspective. Regarding education, we are interested in both, in educational attainment and as well as the time since having left the educational system. In particular we are interested in how these individual characteristics are mediated by the partner’s and how these develop with the partnership’s duration. We thereby combine aspects of the individual life course of women and men with couple’s life course characteristics.
Our empirical analysis is based on the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) that allows us to model partnership formation and duration as well as childbirth simultaneously.

At the beginning of this century several authors including ourselves highlighted the marked differences in employment rates among women which are associated with variations in educational level. Especially among mothers there existed large gaps between lowly skilled women and highly skilled women and these proved to be considerably larger in the continental welfare states.

This paper provides an update of the previous analyses showing that, on the one hand, the relative laggards within the European Union have caught up, but on the other hand, a considerable skill gap remains. Consequently, our previous conclusion on the selectivity of dual earnership remains firmly in place, including the associated poverty effects.

To document causes for this continuing duality in the labour market we focus on two groups of explanations. First we compare the labour market opportunities for low skilled people between countries with relatively good outcomes and those with continuing large skills gaps. Second we link employment and income outcomes to the differences in provisions for the combination for work and care, both regarding the availability of childcare facilities and concerning workplace regulations. We conclude with several policy suggestions.

This article aims at analysing the trajectories of immigrants in the Italian labour market, focusing on yearly transitions from unemployment to employment and vice versa. Regression models show that, controlling for age, educational attainment and region, immigrant workers lose their jobs more often than natives but, once being unemployed they have more probabilities of finding a job than natives. As the probabilities of both transitions can be affected by characteristics of the initial status as well, the two transitions have been analysed separately. For the risk of losing a job, the segregation of immigrants in the secondary labour market seems to be the main reason of their penalization, but also the main reason of their advantage in job seeking, since their unemployment spells are shorter than those of natives, although at the cost of accepting worse working conditions. Analyses are based on the yearly transition matrices of Italian Labour Force Surveys, from 2005 to 2008.

The article analyses the incorporation of immigrants into the Italian labour market and the difficulties they encounter in accessing both employment and qualified occupations. The analysis is based on the Italian Labour Force Survey and highlights the fact that the great majority of immigrants entering Italy are hardly disadvantaged in comparison to Italians as regards the risk of unemployment, but, in contrast, they are highly disfavoured as regards the socio-professional status of their jobs. Unlike what would happen with the old European immigration, nowadays the segregation of immigrant workers in the lowest ranks of the occupational ladder is not due to their poor education. On the contrary, their disadvantage increases if educational attainment is taken into account. The leading role of low-skilled labour demand and underground economy in shaping immigrants’ integration in the Italian labour market is confirmed by the fact that they have fairly easy access to unskilled and semi-skilled manual jobs, whereas they experience serious difficulties in entering self-employment and in obtaining non-manual jobs.

Objectives Traditional approaches studying smoking focused primarily on individuals. Nowadays there is a shift from individual-level models towards models that incorporate contextual effects. This research project takes place in this trend. The purpose of this specific analysis is to investigate the influence of household on smoking practices, in order to determine if the household is a relevant unit to study smoking. Is there evidence for an household effect on smoking? In other words, do household factors (both observable and unobservable) affect individual probabilities of smoking, all other individual characteristics being equal? Is the household effect sensitive to the national context? Materials and methods Data from the European Community Household Panel (ECHP) were used. All individuals aged more than 16 years are interviewed within the selected households. The probability to be a daily smoker is explained by variables at the individual level and at the household level. We take into account a possible specific effect of the household by implementing a random effects probit model. Results This study brings to light a phenomenon of clustering of smoking habits within households, which is modulated by the composition of the household. Preliminary results seem to show that the longer the sitory of tobacco consumption in the country, the more sensitive the concordance.

Conclusions This research gives evidence for clustering of smoking practices in household, the effect being different according to the context of the household and the country. Research about health concordance overwhelmingly suggests evidence for clustering of health status and health behavior. This offers room for a deeper understanding for the causes of health concordance. Next step would be to determine the reason for concordance (is it due to ex-ante correlation or ex-post convergence?).

The idea of an education-based meritocracy (EBM) has evident political attractions. It suggests a basis on which the objectives of social efficiency, social mobility and social justice might be reconciled. However, the question is raised of its sociological viability. Three processes of change are identified, concerning the association between individuals’ social origins, their educational attainments and their social destinations, each of which should be observed in any society that is moving towards an EBM. Results of analyses based on several different data-sets are then presented which indicate that in Britain these changes are not in fact in train. Similar results from other modern societies are noted. It is then argued that the barriers to the realisation of an EBM to which these findings point are of more than a transient kind. There are features of modern market-based economies and societies that are not consistent with the principles of an EBM and that could be modified, if at all, only through rather radical policy interventions.

Abstract

Cultural resources are central strategic means for families to promote their children’s school success. Cultural resources become particularly relevant in micro-interactional processes between parents and their children as well as between parents and school agents in order to ensure the child’s success. Two mediating ways that possibly affect children’s school carrier are of analytical interest here: first, via frequent and qualitatively high contact between parents and school agents, and second, via regular school related exchange between parents and their child (Coleman, 1988). Parents’ motivation and initiative are potential ‘soft’ factors of success that, as one piece of the puzzle, might contribute to the explanation of systematic ethnic differences in the educational outcome (Lareau & Weininger, 2003). Migration is predominantly believed to at least in part devaluate innate resources (e.g., strategic knowledge or skills) of migrants which at the same time lack resources specific to the receiving country (Esser 2006, Kalter 2003). In contrast, ‘soft’ factors such as educational motivation and engagement are rather context independent resources that might have a positive impact on academic achievements. Educational aspirations of certain migrant groups are known to be remarkably high (Kao & Tienda 1995). For school agents, these factors might as well be a signal of high educational motivation in the migrant family. Consequently, the following assumption can be made: If interactions of parents, both with the child and with school agents, are characterized by high educational interest and school involvement, the probability of a favourable positioning in the educational system increases when controlling for achievement test scores. This article investigates types of exchange that can enhance children’s achievements and favour teachers’ recommendation for the transition to the secondary school level; in Germany, this early transition is quite decisive for child’s entire educational carrier. Furthermore, this article looks at differences between migrant groups in Germany and asks whether these ‘soft’ factors account for varying positioning of the respective groups in the educational system.
The analysis are conducted using longitudinal data from the project Immigrants’ Children in the German and Israeli Educational Systems (n=3014). The groups of interest are Ethnic Germans from the former Soviet Union and the offspring of immigrants from Turkey compared to natives who attend grade four in the German educational system, which is right before the transition to the secondary school system. The dependent variables are competence levels and teachers’ recommendation; explaining variables are quality and quantity of parents’ contact with school agents and their involvement in the child’s school issues.

In this study, we analyze occupational attainment and career progression over the life course for Swedish men and women, born in 1925-74. We find that careers progress (measured as improvements in occupational prestige) fast during the first ten years in the labour market, and flattens out afterwards (approximately between 30-40 years of age). This is in line with the occupational status maturation hypothesis.

Both class origin and educational attainment affect occupational attainment, but the effects of educational attainment vary more over the career, depending on the educational attainment level in question. Successive cohorts of women gain higher occupational prestige, and continue to gain in occupational prestige longer across their careers. We also find that cohorts that entered the labour market in times of economic downturns and restructuring (the oil crisis years and the early 1990s) had more difficulties in establishing their careers. Returns to education generally increase across cohorts, while class background differences decrease, as has been reported in earlier research.

The paper uses data on 33 countries from the 2002 wave of the International Social Survey Programme to study cross-national variation in the housework time of women and men from income-rich and income-poor households. Income-poor households are generally defined as those belonging to the bottom and income-rich households as those belonging to the top decile of the country-specific distribution of household income. The analysis shows that women in income-poor households do more housework than women in income-rich households in most countries. These rich-poor differences are attenuated, but remain sizable when differences with respect to paid work time, gender ideology, the woman’s relative income, and other variables are controlled. The main part of the analysis shows that cross-national variation in rich-poor differences can partly be accounted for by economic development and economic inequality. Providing a cross-national reinterpretation of arguments from the historically-oriented time-use literature, this is attributed the association between economic development and the diffusion of labor-saving technologies and to the association between economic inequality and high-income households’ consumption of domestic services. The former interpretation is backed by regressions that replace economic development by estimates of washing machine penetration for a subset countries.

This study investigates whether the mechanisms why education is rewarded vary across countries. Do educational institutions affect the likelihood that support for a particular mechanism is found? Combining IALS survey data and OECD statistics on educational institutions, it was shown that the effect of measured skill on earnings – controlled for educational attainment – is lower in countries where educational institutions produce work-relevant skills through the vocational system. This indicates that the human capital perspective on education works particularly well in vocationally oriented educational systems, as the skills generated in education are strongly overlapping with the skills that are rewarded. An alternative mechanism sees education as a positional good. Under this model, education is used for selection into the organization, after which directly observable skills are determining wages. Assuming that a strongly tracked educational system makes sorting easier, it was hypothesized that strongly tracked systems lead to stronger skill effects. Support for this hypothesis is mixed.

The present study is based on the work of Beckfield (2006) who assesses the impact of European Integration on income inequality and furthermore on the work of Alderson and Nielsen (2002) who assess the impact of globalization on income inequality. The aim of the present study is a) to duplicate and control both studies with more recent data from the ECHP and EU SILC and b) to check if the effects of European Integration, as found by Beckfield (2006) hold a test by the globalization measures used by Alderson and Nielsen (2002). Our results show that both economic integration as well as migration as well as FDI outflow (commonly used as measures of globalization) have a significant and independent impact on income inequality

Unemployment insurance (UI) sanctions in the form of benefit reductions are intended to set disincentives for UI recipients to stay unemployed. Empirical evidence about the effects of UI sanctions in Germany is sparse. Using administrative data we investigate the effects of sanctions on the reemployment probability in West Germany for individuals who entered UI receipt between April 2000 and March 2001. By applying a matching approach that takes timing of events into account, we identify the ex post effect of UI sanctions. As a robustness check a difference-in-differences matching estimator is applied. The results indicate positive effects on the employment probability in regular employment for both women and men

Earlier studies disagree whether differences in the human capital configuration or employer discrimination explain second generation Turkish migrants‘ disadvantages when entering the labor market. This research understood the successful completion of an occupational education as part of the human capital configuration and identified it as the major predictor of a successful transition into the labor market. However they disregarded that access to occupational education in Germany is for the most part provided by companies, and hence discrimination can occur already when companies decide whom to take in for their occupational education programs. We therefore analyzed the whole secondary school to labor market transition using data from the German Socioeconomic Panel Study. Human capital variables, including receiving country specific capital as e.g. German language abilities or ethnic composition of networks, did not fully explain the ethnic penalty Turkish migrants experience when entering vocational education. Analyzing who starts and who manages to complete a vocational education, significant residuals for Turkish remain. Estimating labor market entry models, we find vocational education to be one of the strongest predictors of a successful transition into paid labor. Finally, interaction models show that a complete vocational education pays of less for Turkish migrants. The latter finding is direct evidence for statistical discrimination. Our conservative conclusion is that the available human capital measures do not fully explain Turkish migrants‘ disadvantages.

This paper examines the labour market integration of immigrants who have entered Germany since 1990, and compares their situation with that of their predecessors. The analyses based on the cumulative micro-census data reveal that recent immigrants into Germany are on average better-educated than their earlier counterparts, and some ethnic groups are even better- educated than the national average. Despite their high levels of formal education, these immigrants coming mostly from Eastern Europe, Africa and the Middle East face severe integration problems in the German labour market. Thus, after taking into account the value of human capital represented by these immigrants, their ethnic disadvantages appear to increase. This stands in sharp contrast with the disadvantages faced by “classic” immigrants who arrived in Germany during the 1960s and 1970s, for whom lack of human capital had been identified as the main obstacle to labour market integration.

This article attempts to answer the question to what extent recent reforms aimed at flexibilizing the German labour market affected immigrants and how this explains the (in)stability of their employment paths. Based on the 1996–1999 and 2001–2004 German micro-census panels, we focus not only on transitions from employment to unemployment and vice versa, but also on the type of employment, either open-ended or fixed-term. Dynamic random effects models explore the effects of the employment status in the preceding year on the employment status in the subsequent one for various groups of immigrants. Results confirm the more precarious nature of immigrant employment with a more frequent mobility in and out of unemployment, a more pronounced incidence of fixed-term employment and a higher instability of open-ended jobs.

First draft – please do not cite or quote!

Abstract

In Germany as in many other industrialised countries participation rates of women in higher education have markedly increase and enrolment rates of men and women are nowadays almost equal. The increase of participation in higher education among women has affected both, graduation from higher institutions (universities) and lower tier institutions (Fachhochschule). Regarding changes of inequalities in education due to social background, previous research has shown that in spite of expansion and differentiation of higher education inequalities have not disappeared. For example, working class children more often opt for the less costly and risky Fachhochschule whereas children from higher social classes prefer universities. Although both aspects gender and class differences have already been examined broadly in previous research, only a few studies go into more details by e.g. concentrating on the effect of social class background among the increasing share of female graduates. In this paper I will look at women only and examine changes in the effects of family background on women’s participation in higher education. In the empirical analyses I use pooled data of four Germany surveys: the German general social survey (ALLBUS 1980 – 2006), ZUMA Standarddemographie (ZUMABUS) 1976 – 1982, German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) 1986, 1999 and 2000 and German Life History Study (GLHS) I to III.

The Theory of Relative Risk Aversion (RRA) stipulates that students make educational decisions with the aim of minimizing the risk of downward social class mobility. According to the RRA theory, actors reach their optimal educational level just prior to the point where the costs of more education (cognitive, monetary, opportunity, etc.) outweigh the utility of more education (with respect to avoiding social class mobility). In a previous paper we have formulated and tested a dynamic RRA model of educational decision making (Holm and Jæger 2008). In this paper we extend this model in two important regards. First, we allow for actors to update information on their academic ability at several points during the educational career. Thus, we allow for people to learn “how smart they are” as they move along in the educational system and to act on this new information. Second, we allow for heterogeneous RRA effects, i.e., for the possibility that not everyone adopts RRA behavior and that some actors may act “irrationally” when making educational decisions. We test our new dynamic model of RRA behavior using data from the National Child Development Study.

This book introduces social networks to a general audience, from novices in all kinds of fields to experts wanting to catch up, and from academics on the one hand to practitioners in consultancy, management, policy, and social work on the other hand. Sophisticated models are lucidly explained and comprehensible without math (which is put in boxes, footnotes, or references), and are illustrated with network diagrams and examples ranging from anthropology to organizational sociology. A free and easy to use software tool – R’s igraph package – is explained in the final chapter so readers themselves can depict and analyze networks of interest to them. It includes a Graphical User Interface (see brief manual) that can perform a limited subset of igraph’s options in a simple and user friendly way.

This study contributes to earlier studies aimed at the question of whether the welfare state

crowds out social capital or not by examining to what extent the welfare state affects the
value of social capital. This article investigates the effects of three sources of social capital
on occupational prestige and tests whether these effects are moderated by welfare state
effort in terms of social spending. Multi-level analyses based on European Social Survey
(ESS) 2002/03 and International Monetary Fund (IMF) data, including 39,299 people from
24 European countries, provides evidence that welfare state effort decreases the value
of social capital.

Detecting communities in complex networks accurately is a prime challenge, preceding further

analyses of network characteristics and dynamics. Until now, community detection took into account
only positively valued links, while many actual networks also feature negative links. We extend an
existing (spin glass) approach to incorporate negative links as well, resulting in a method similar to
the clustering of signed graphs, but more accurate and more general. To illustrate our method, we
applied it to a network of international alliances and disputes. Using data from 1993{2001, it turns
out that the world can be divided into six power blocs similar to Huntington’s civilizations, with
some notable exceptions.

We ask how the advantages and disadvantages of ‘second-generation’ immigrants’ educational careers in Sweden are produced, making a theoretical distinction between mechanisms connected with school performance on one hand, and educational choice on the other. Using a new data-set, covering six full cohorts of Swedish-born 9th-graders in 1998-2003 (n=563,087), with matched school-Census information, we show that the grades of children to immigrants generally lie 0.2–0.4 standard deviations below children of natives. In addition, they more often have incomplete grades in core subjects, which force a sizeable proportion – 10-20 percent among the ‘new’ (mostly non-European) second generation – into non-meritorious tracks or lead them to leave school. Given grades, pupils of immigrant origin make much more heterogeneous choices at upper secondary education. While many do not enrol in upper secondary education, among those who do the propensity is high that they choose academic studies before vocational, while the ‘old’ (chiefly Nordic) are similar to the majority group in their equal preference for vocational and academic tracks. All in all, relatively poor academic performance and high-aspiring choices combine to make second generation immigrants a polarized group.

Trends in paid work time and unpaid work time derived from the Multinational Time Use Study indicate a slow and incomplete convergence of women’s and men’s work patterns over the last 40 years in OECD countries. The evidence seems to suggest that 2009 represents an approximate mid-point in a 70-80 year process of gender convergence in work patterns.

Nevertheless, analysing UK data from a life course perspective reveals some remaining barriers to gender equality. Although men and women have more or less the same amount of total work time, women increase their proportion of unpaid domestic work to all work steadily over the conventional life course. Men’s paid work time, by contrast, remains relatively stable and constitutes the major share of their work time. Furthermore, gender segregation in domestic work persists. Women are responsible for both routine types (e.g. cleaning and cooking) and non-routine types of domestic work (e.g. childcare, shopping and gardening). In contrast, men spend little time on routine housework. Their increases in domestic work time over the life course concentrate mainly on care and other non-routine types of domestic work.

The overall results may suggest a “lagged adaptation” in the division of labour between men and women. That is, the gender ideologies established in childhood are challenged by observation and experience of gender roles that are inconsistent with those inherited assumptions. This may lead in turn to partial adaptations in the ideologies transmitted to the next generation. Gender equality is most difficult to achieve in traditionally feminine types of domestic work.

Trends in paid work time and unpaid work time derived from the Multinational Time Use Study indicate a slow and incomplete convergence of women’s and men’s work patterns over the last 40 years in OECD countries. The evidence seems to suggest that 2009 represents an approximate mid-point in a 70-80 year process of gender convergence in work patterns.

Nevertheless, analysing UK data from a life course perspective reveals some remaining barriers to gender equality. Although men and women have more or less the same amount of total work time, women increase their proportion of unpaid domestic work to all work steadily over the conventional life course. Men’s paid work time, by contrast, remains relatively stable and constitutes the major share of their work time. Furthermore, gender segregation in domestic work persists. Women are responsible for both routine types (e.g. cleaning and cooking) and non-routine types of domestic work (e.g. childcare, shopping and gardening). In contrast, men spend little time on routine housework. Their increases in domestic work time over the life course concentrate mainly on care and other non-routine types of domestic work.

The overall results may suggest a “lagged adaptation” in the division of labour between men and women. That is, the gender ideologies established in childhood are challenged by observation and experience of gender roles that are inconsistent with those inherited assumptions. This may lead in turn to partial adaptations in the ideologies transmitted to the next generation. Gender equality is most difficult to achieve in traditionally feminine types of domestic work.

Der Beitrag untersucht für Deutschland die sozialen Disparitäten beim Besuch

des Gymnasiums und beim Erwerb der Hochschulreife in ihrer langfristigen Entwicklung
seit dem ersten Drittel des 20. Jahrhunderts bis in die jüngste Gegenwart. Er diskutiert theoretisch
den Wandel der institutionellen und strukturellen Bedingungen, aus denen Veränderungen in den
primären und sekundären Disparitäten nach sozialer Herkunft zu erwarten sind. Auf der Grundlage
von Daten aus zahlreichen repräsentativen Bevölkerungsumfragen und einer langen Reihe
von Mikrozensuserhebungen zeigt er dann, wie beim Erwerb höherer Bildung die Abhängigkeiten
von der sozialen Herkunft in verschiedenen historischen Perioden für Männer und Frauen geringer
geworden sind. Dabei zeigt sich, dass in jüngster Zeit bei den Frauen die Bildungsbeteiligung
weniger von der sozialen Herkunft abhängt als bei den Männern. Dies erklärt zu einem nicht unwesentlichen
Teil den inzwischen von den Frauen gegenüber den Männern erreichten Vorsprung
im Erwerb höherer Bildung.

The sense of justice is one of the crucial features that distinguishes human beings from other creatures. The existence and satisfaction of this particular feeling is one of the basic conditions of societal existence. In practice the sense of justice, rather than requiring unconditional equality among individuals, implies ranking of inequalities: considering some of them fair and the others unfair. There are several crucial questions regarding the sense of justice as legitimate ranking of inequalities: what is the source of these evaluations? Do they change from one individual to another or do they remain constant within societies? To what extent sense of justice is shaped by institutional conditions of societies?The empirical work on the determinants of sense of justice as legitimate ranking of inequalities has developed across two lines: first, there are studies which scrutinize the way in which individuals judge the fairness of earnings, second, there is a literature on individual attitudes towards redistribution policies. One may use both of these fields to scrutinize the sources of justice evaluations. However, the outcome of research on attitudes towards redistribution policies seems to be based on assumptions which implicitly imply that the sense of justice prevailing in a society is aggregation of individual attitudes whose source either remain unexplained or considered to be indirectly and accidently determined by decisions of some elites for whom, however, determinants of sense of justice remains obscure. Thus, the research on redistribution attitudes does not provide any analytical tool or conceptualization besides considering the characteristics of individuals as exogenous variables to be used in the scrutiny of sense of justice prevailing in a society. On the other hand , research on individuals’ judgment about earnings’ distribution points out existence of a societal normative consensus on justice which guides individuals. Findings suggest that although this consensus may differ, to some extent, across subgroups, it still remains influential for the entire societies, thus the implicit suggestion is that the prevailing sense of justice in a society, rather than being a mere aggregation of individual attitudes, might be generated by ‘external conditions’ to which all members of the society are exposed. This , of course, points out another analytical perspective than the one implied by redistribution attitudes research: the sense of justice is not mere aggregate of individuals’ judgments, there is a societal consensus on justice, which seems to be not entirely determined by individuals’ characteristics while influencing individuals’ justice evaluations. Therefore, instead of using individuals’ characteristics to account for the sense of justice in a society, one may scrutinize the sources of societal normative consensus on justice in order to explain justice evaluations of individuals. In other words, explaining the source of societal consensus without referring to individuals’ characteristics would allow us to account for the source of justice evaluations at individual level. This goal of our paper.

This article explores the possible impact of three institutional structures (education system, labor market institutions and social policy arrangements) on the public opinion on educational pay differentials by using cross national aggregate data (OECD countries). First it examines the hypothesis that so long as education system provides the opportunity to acquire the competencies that are valued in the market, and, social policies provide sufficient protection from market failures, individuals would accept educational pay differentials as a fair outcome which would, in turn, lead to the majority to have a favorable opinion on these differentials. The alternative hypotheses, on the other hand, emphasizes the impact of the nature of the wage determination on the formation of the public opinion by claiming that unless pay determination is centralized and possibilities for skill upgrading are provided (i.e. unless the necessary conditions for internalizing the systemic pay outcome are created) the public opinion on pay differentials would not be favorable regardless of the qualities of the education system and social policy. The implied micro mechanism is that so long as pay is largely determined by low level bargaining (i.e., enterprise, factory, individual) people would be inclined to evaluate the emerged outcome negatively despite the opportunities offered by the education system and risks covered by the social policy. By revealing the strengths and weaknesses of (and overlaps between) these two hypotheses the paper tries to account for the institutional determinants of public opinion on pay differentials. In the conclusion section, possible juxtapositions of these three institutional structures (education system, wage determination, social policy) would be revealed and the impact of particular ideal case institutional settings on legitimization of pay differentials is discussed.

This paper is the concluding chapter of the book manuscript that explores the role of the education system in the process of labour market integration in ten CEE countries (Eastern Germany, Czech Republic, Hungary, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Poland, Estonia, Ukraine and Russia). This book is a first systematic comparative study on the consequence of system transformation on young people’s educational attainment and labour market integration which moves beyond simple contrasts of socialism vs. capitalism as modes of social organization by putting into focus the institutional diversity in post-socialist societies, in which stratification processes are embedded.

For the ten CEE countries we analyze, we can document educational expansion and differentiation of tertiary education at a speed hardly ever observed in Western societies, with substantial variations across countries in the role of market-based financing of higher education. At the same time in many countries, we observe a decline in the role of vocational schools at the secondary level, which had formed a crucial part of skill supply under the socialist production regime. While these post-transformation trends are general, their dynamics and consequences differ depending on the national historic and institutional context.

Our results of the educational attainment show that the expansion of tertiary education has benefited children from the middle classes. We further show whether and how expansion, stratification and diversification of higher education as well as the changing significance of vocational education have altered educational attainment and labour market entry. While more favourable performance of tertiary graduates in terms of speed of entry and quality of the first job is observable in all CEE countries, the relative advantage of tertiary graduates varies with the degree of expansion and differentiation of the tertiary sector. Nevertheless, even relatively inferior tertiary tracks still have better payoffs compared to secondary education in the majority of countries. In countries with shrinking vocational secondary education vocationally-oriented lower tertiary tracks provide a functioning substitute.

The role of vocational degrees is highly differentiated depending on the country-specific institutional arrangements. In countries that inherited or re-established a German-Austrian tradition of strong vocational orientation at the secondary level and adhered to vocationalism and apprenticeships as a key pathway into the labour market, vocational education still provides a viable alternative to tertiary education. In the absence of an institutional framework supporting effective vocational education, however, vocational programs have become a last-choice option for disadvantaged youth.

This paper is the concluding chapter of the book manuscript that explores the role of the education system in the process of labour market integration in ten CEE countries (Eastern Germany, Czech Republic, Hungary, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Poland, Estonia, Ukraine and Russia). This book is a first systematic comparative study on the consequence of system transformation on young people’s educational attainment and labour market integration which moves beyond simple contrasts of socialism vs. capitalism as modes of social organization by putting into focus the institutional diversity in post-socialist societies, in which stratification processes are embedded.

For the ten CEE countries we analyze, we can document educational expansion and differentiation of tertiary education at a speed hardly ever observed in Western societies, with substantial variations across countries in the role of market-based financing of higher education. At the same time in many countries, we observe a decline in the role of vocational schools at the secondary level, which had formed a crucial part of skill supply under the socialist production regime. While these post-transformation trends are general, their dynamics and consequences differ depending on the national historic and institutional context.

Our results of the educational attainment show that the expansion of tertiary education has benefited children from the middle classes. We further show whether and how expansion, stratification and diversification of higher education as well as the changing significance of vocational education have altered educational attainment and labour market entry. While more favourable performance of tertiary graduates in terms of speed of entry and quality of the first job is observable in all CEE countries, the relative advantage of tertiary graduates varies with the degree of expansion and differentiation of the tertiary sector. Nevertheless, even relatively inferior tertiary tracks still have better payoffs compared to secondary education in the majority of countries. In countries with shrinking vocational secondary education vocationally-oriented lower tertiary tracks provide a functioning substitute.

The role of vocational degrees is highly differentiated depending on the country-specific institutional arrangements. In countries that inherited or re-established a German-Austrian tradition of strong vocational orientation at the secondary level and adhered to vocationalism and apprenticeships as a key pathway into the labour market, vocational education still provides a viable alternative to tertiary education. In the absence of an institutional framework supporting effective vocational education, however, vocational programs have become a last-choice option for disadvantaged youth.

The Theory of Segmented Assimilation has become a popular framework for explaining the

adaptation of the children of the post-1969 wave of immigration to the United States. These are
assumed to experience divergent outcomes depending on the way they are received by US
society, their access to social capital through ethnic communities and the exposure to the
oppositional cultures of marginalised domestic minorities. The article critically reviews those
arguments and provides a test in the area of school performance. Based on data from the regional
Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study, my analyses show that indicators of communitybased
social capital can indeed account for a considerable extent of inter-ethnic differences in
school performance. However, my results challenge the notions that ethnic communities are
generally supportive of the school performance of the second generation, while contact with the
oppositional cultures of domestic minorities is the main cause of lower-than-average
achievement. Instead, they support a conditional view of ethnic communities. According to this
view, the extent to which immigrant families’ insertion into ethnic communities can support the
school performance of their children depends on the communities’ socio-economic profile and
level of aspirations.

This paper addresses the issue of job search methods and over-education incidence across 8 fields of study available in EULFS data. Self-selection into fields as well as into employment is controlled for using Heckman selection methods.

Part time work is a direct product of globalization. More dynamic and competitive labor markets require new forms of employments that are flexible, increase efficiency and stimulate competitiveness. This explains why part time work as such has become more diffuse in many Western European countries, including also Italy in the later years.

At the micro level, part time work offers flexibility and adaptability to employers but is also attractive among workers and among workers, notably among women. The reason for the latter is its role in the reconciliation of the “conflict” between work and family, which mostly affects women given that they are responsible for home matters despite working. Indeed, part time work enables an individual to manage the time more effectively and balance better between the two aspects of privatelife. However, it is also true that part‐time jobs are often limiting because they are concentrated in certain sectors, might offer comparatively worse career prospects and might belong to the category of “lower importance” jobs. This is exactly why it is difficult to provide a clear cut on the topic.

But, rather than focusing on advantages and disadvantages of part time work in comparison to full time, based on objective evaluation, this paper intends to provide a comparison of different perceptions of satisfaction that are experienced by female employees prforming these jobs.

Several main hypotheses are tested; the hypothesis that women who work part time will experience higher satisfaction with the division of their time within and ouside of the family was confirmed in the data. Similarly, the hypothesis that part time workers experience better time management was in accordance with the final results. The hypotheses on life satisfaction, however, were not fully justified with the data. Socio demographic characteristics bring changes in patterns of life satisfaction but not always in the expected direction. Overall, women who work part time are less satisfied with their life when compared to full‐time workers.

The aim of the project is an empirical investigation regarding the determinants of fluctuations in the personnel structure of firms. For example, determinants could be the age distribution of firms or the institutional arrangement on the industry level as well as the size of a corporation or management policies on the firm level. The conceptual starting point is the idea of a (macro-institutionally modified) historical path-dependency of the development of personnel structures. This historical path-dependency on the organizational level may prevent corporations from adapting their personnel structure flexibly to the needs and expectations of their current environment. For example, they are restricted in their ability to adapt to ongoing demographic developments in the labor force. The empirical part of the project is based on data of German corporations and their employees, the linked-employer-employee-dataset of the “Institut für Arbeitsmarkt- und Berufsforschung” (IAB). Empirical indicators for fluctuations in the personnel structure of firms are job entries and exits differentiated by age, gender and education. The paper is of twofold interest for this summer school: First, an unequal distribution of employment chances is the prime factor of (re-)producing problematic social inequalities in modern employment-based societies. Second, a sustainable demographic shift within populations which is redistributing employment chances between different cohorts of these populations is currently being observed in all OECD countries. Hence, the empirical analysis of determinants of changes in the personnel structure of firms advances our understanding of the dependency of unequal employment opportunities on macro-structural processes

This paper analyses the extent to which individual and workplace characteristics and regional policies influence the use and duration of parental leave in Spain. The research is based on a sample of 125,165 people, and 6,959 parental leaves stemming from the ‘Sample of Working Life Histories’ (SWLH), 2006. The SWLH consists of administrative register data which include information from three different sources: Social Security, Municipality and Income Tax Registers. We adopt a simultaneous equations approach to analyse the use (logistic regression) and duration (event history analysis) of parental leave, which allows us to control for endogeneity and censored observations. We argue that the Spanish parental leave scheme increases gender and social inequalities insofar as reinforces gender role specialization, and only encourages the reconciling of work and family life among workers with a good position in the labour market (educated employees with high and stable working status).

An important cause of economic inequality in contemporary advanced societies is the variation in wages across occupations. We examine the extent to which this variation is captured by commonly used schemas of occupational rank, in particular social class (in its EGP or ESeC form) but also occupational prestige (in its SIOPS form). In addition, we ask what underlying positional factors determine the strong empirical relations between class, occupation and wages. Four such factors are distinguished on the basis of previous research: skill requirements, authority, autonomy and scarcity. The empirical results, based on data from eleven countries in the European Social Survey (ESS) 2004, show (a) that class explains a very large proportion of the occupational variation in wages, and (b) that skill requirements are much more important than other factors in accounting for the class-wage gradient. In fact, the empirical association between class, prestige and wages, on the one hand, and authority, autonomy and scarcity, on the other, is almost completely due to the variation in the skill content of work across occupations. These findings are highly similar in all countries examined. Existing theories should be accordingly revised.

We analyze equality of opportunity for earnings acquisition in France between 1973 and 1993 conditional on the father earnings in the earnings distribution using two waves of the French data set FQP. First, using stochastic dominance tools, we find that inequality of opportunity has remained stable when conditioning on the earnings level of the father, while it has diminished when conditioning on his rank in the earnings distribution. The former result is explained by the stable intergenerational earnings elasticity. The latter by the decreasing wage inequality in the previous generation. Then, we decompose the evolution of inequality of opportunity using the mean logarithmic deviation and the results of regressions of descendants’’earnings on their parents earnings. It is shown that the main reason beneath the reduction of inequality of opportunity lies in the decrease of earnings inequality taking place in the eighties.

The US black-white wage gap is an issue that has attracted thorough investigation, but so far the corresponding gap for fringe benefits has not received sufficient attention. Although ethnic differences in fringe benefits could affect wage differences, previous analysis of ethnic wage gaps in the vast majority of cases has not taken fringe benefits into account. In order to fill that gap in the existing literature, this article estimates the black-white gap for both wages and fringe benefits on the basis of US data. Data from the 2004 section of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 has been used in this analysis. Our results indicate that when controlling for various individual and job characteristics, there remains a wage gap in favour of whites, and for several fringe benefits, there is an unexplained gap in favour of blacks. This result means that the ethnic wage gap overestimates the ethnic compensation gap. We also argue that fringe benefits are used to compensate blacks for their lower wages.

The aim of this paper is to find out how ethnicity influences labour market entry in Estonia. Paper focuses on ethnical Estonians and Non-Estonians first job quality in period 1991-1997 and 2001-2006. The main question is to what extent ethnicity and Estonian language skill influence youth occupational status in their first job. The data to be used is the Estonian Labour Force Surveys conducted in years 1995, 1997 and 2002-2006. Results from linear regression analysis indicate that both ethnicity and Estonian language skill effect significantly occupational status in first job. Non- Estonians who speak Estonian attain somewhat lower initial occupational status than Estonians. Investment in country specific human capital is more useful in period 1991-1997, whereas in years 2001-2006 Estonian proficient Non-Estonians reach considerably lower occupational status in their first job than Estonians even in case of similar educational level. In general, education is very significant resource that has an effect on youth first job quality.

We analyse ethnic stratification in the Estonian school system focusing on track chosen in secondary education and on the transition to higher education. We investigate if educational transitions of the second generation are related to differences in educational and social origin. First generation of immigrants arrived to Estonia during the Soviet Union period. They differed from classic labour migrants in many other Western countries as their educational level and labour market opportunities were rather similar to natives. Also the situation in Estonian educational system is very different from western European countries. In soviet period due to parallel educational systems, which divided population on the basis of language of instruction (Russian or Estonian) the Estonian society became highly segmented in terms of structural integration. Russians still have their own separate educational system (until higher education). It means that many explanations for ethnic stratification formulated for western European societies cannot account for situation in Estonia.

We use data from Estonian TIES survey, which is a part of The Integration of the European Second Generation project. This survey was conducted among second generation immigrants in two Estonian cities. In most western European countries second generation of immigrants experience less disadvantages than generation of their parents. In Estonia, contrary, differences between educational attainment of second generation Russians and natives have grown compared to their parents’ generation. Results show that Russians tend to continue studies less often in general secondary and higher education. Although parental resources are important, ethnic differences in educational decisions are not explained by differences in social background. Advantageous social background is more essential for Russians. On the other hand, parents’ Estonian language proficiency and citizenship does not influence educational decisions of young Russians. We suppose that changed institutional conditions have had important impact on the second generation’s educational attainment. Up to secondary education it is possible to study in Estonian or Russian school, while studies in public higher education are in Estonian.

We analyse ethnic stratification in the Estonian school system focusing on track chosen in secondary education and on the transition to higher education. We investigate if educational transitions of the second generation are related to differences in educational and social origin. First generation of immigrants arrived to Estonia during the Soviet Union period. They differed from classic labour migrants in many other Western countries as their educational level and labour market opportunities were rather similar to natives. Also the situation in Estonian educational system is very different from western European countries. In soviet period due to parallel educational systems, which divided population on the basis of language of instruction (Russian or Estonian) the Estonian society became highly segmented in terms of structural integration. Russians still have their own separate educational system (until higher education). It means that many explanations for ethnic stratification formulated for western European societies cannot account for situation in Estonia.

We use data from Estonian TIES survey, which is a part of The Integration of the European Second Generation project. This survey was conducted among second generation immigrants in two Estonian cities. In most western European countries second generation of immigrants experience less disadvantages than generation of their parents. In Estonia, contrary, differences between educational attainment of second generation Russians and natives have grown compared to their parents’ generation. Results show that Russians tend to continue studies less often in general secondary and higher education. Although parental resources are important, ethnic differences in educational decisions are not explained by differences in social background. Advantageous social background is more essential for Russians. On the other hand, parents’ Estonian language proficiency and citizenship does not influence educational decisions of young Russians. We suppose that changed institutional conditions have had important impact on the second generation’s educational attainment. Up to secondary education it is possible to study in Estonian or Russian school, while studies in public higher education are in Estonian.

Vocational education and training (VET) has grown in many countries

in recent decades. According to Eurostat statistics, more students
take part in vocational than general/academic upper secondary
education tracks in Europe. And yet, the discussions about the benefits
of such programmes are highly controversial. The European Commission
and their advisers hold that Vocational Education and Training is vital
for Europe‘s future competitiveness and innovation. The Commission sees
it as an essential part of its education policy and tries to push Member
States to strengthen the provision of VET.1 Others, in contrast, argue:
Europe has too much vocational training at the expense of general education.
Vocational education was appropriate for the manufacturing age,
but with the scientific, technological and communication revolution since
then, jobs have become more knowledge intensive; they require more analytical
and communication skills. In this new world, education with an
emphasis on general competences is more efficient than vocational qualifications
that are too narrow and too specific. Krüger and Kumar (2004)
explicitly conclude that it is because of the now outdated emphasis on
vocational education in Europe that up to the 1970s Europe had similar
or higher economic growth rates than the US while since then the rates
of growth in Europe are smaller than in the US.
What is the evidence of benefits and costs of VET that gives rise to
such contrary assessment? In this contribution, two issues are addressed.

First, what do we know about the individual and social returns to VET
on the labour market? Second, what is the contribution of VET to educational
and social inequality? Needless to say: both issues are crucial.
To relate them is interesting because benefits and costs in the two dimensions
might differ.
Various other aspects of VET must be neglected, such as how different
forms of education might influence competences of individuals
in everyday life, or their values, attitudes, civil engagement or political
participation; also the pedagogical questions, such as whether the direct
application of the teaching content in practice facilitates learning. Do
students understand an idea or problem more easily when it is taught
in connection with practical application rather than in an abstract theoretical
way or are students motivated to try harder when they see the
immediate practical utility. Also, the focus will be on initial education
and training and neglect recurrent education in later stages of life.

Participation in higher education in the Republic of Ireland has expanded dramatically since the early 1990s. This expansion has taken place in both sectors – universities and institutes of technology . This paper uses a rational choice framework to explore the patterns of higher education entry by social class over this period. It uses School Leavers’ Survey data over the period 1980 to 2006 to consider the extent to which differentiation is evident between the university and institute of technology sectors in terms of the gender, social class background and prior attainment of entrants. The paper concludes that social class differentiation in higher education participation can only be properly understood by taking a gender perspective.

The paper investigates the process of school progression at three stages, from primary to secondary level, from secondary to post-secondary level and to tertiary level. Father’s class is the main predictor variable to determine these odds. The institutional context is based on taking tracking in the school system into account. The existence (or non-existence) of tracking is a major characteristic of the educational systems and affects the way how these systems are shaped and how students progress over the stages of the school system. Regarding the European societies, countries analyzed in the paper are grouped into an early tracking and a late tracking cluster and USA is a third case for expanding the scope of comparability.

The paper uses the merged data file of the European Social Survey (ESS), Round 1, 2 and 3 from 2002, 2004 and 2006 and the GSS data for the same period. As cases for early tracking countries Belgium, Germany and Hungary were chosen, while the late tracking countries are investigated on the examples of Norway, Sweden and Finland. The general hypothesis is that the later an education transition the lower the social background effect. The pattern is expected to be present in the USA above all. Furthermore it is assumed that societies where tracking is less strong and occurs at a later age and stage in the school system, social origin will show smaller impact, while school progression is influenced by family background in the early tracking countries at most. For testing these hypotheses and estimating the impact of father’s class on the chances of school progression, binary probit models are used.

The analysis shows that the role of social origins differs in the context of early tracking and late tracking school systems in Europe. The hypothesis that the importance of social origin declines with later transitions is not fully confirmed for the European societies, particularly not for the early tracking ones, but holds more for the USA.

In this paper, the international comparative literature on the effects of educational differentiation (early selection and vocational orientation) on inequality is reviewed. Inequality is conceptualized in two manners: inequality as dispersion of educational performance and inequality of educational opportunity by family background, sex, and immigrant status. First, an institutional perspective is offered through which to see the Netherlands in international comparison. The institutional perspective rests on four main characteristics of educational systems: stratification, standardization, vocational orientation, and track mobility. Second, the most promising theoretical and empirical insights in the international literature are analyzed. Third, our theoretical assumptions are tentatively tested with the most recent PISA (2006) data. It is concluded that Dutch students’ test scores are more equal (lower variance) than the Netherlands’ education system’s institutional characteristics would suggest. Measures of inequality of opportunity in the Netherlands, however, match the assumptions derived from the institutional perspective.

By Manuela Naldini and Teresa Jurado

A scrutiny of the long period of family changes in southern countries (Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal), shows that most of the demographic changes (fertility decline, increasing divorce rates, and so on) occurred 10-15 years later than in other European countries.

Is there a process of convergence toward similar family patterns across European states? Are the changes in the Southern European family different?

This paper argues that most of the demographic trends and family changes in Southern Europe since the 60’s have been different not only in their timing but also in the pattern and in the trajectories of family changes observed in the region. The existing theoretical perspectives cannot explain the persistence of family particularities in the South, nor the cross national differences in family trends. To overcome these theoretical problems, in this paper we take an institutional perspective and posit the existence of a Southern European Family Model which is deeply rooted in a particular southern configuration between family, state and market relations.

The paper is divided into two parts. The first part illustrates, from a comparative perspective, changes and continuities in family formation, living forms pluralisation and family solidarity. These changes are related to women’s silent educational revolution, to their increasing employment and to the slow weakening of patriarchy. The second part deals with the relationship between state and family and its evolution over time. The nature of this relationship is captured through the analysis of the division of responsibility between the family and the state in the area of reproductive and care work, and the way in which this division of responsibility has been codified by social policy and laws.

Teresa Jurado-Guerrero, U.N.E.D. – Departamento de Sociología II

Naldini Manuela, Università di Torino – Political Science

María José González, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain

Women in Western nations have notably achieved higher educational and occupational positions. The most outstanding socio-demographic issue, however, is not so much related to the new role of women but men’’s reluctance to change. Women have progressively increased the amount of hours devoted to paid employment, but this process has seldom been translated in a more equal gender division of labour. Different explanations are provided to this resistance to change: the persistence of traditional values, women’’s relative economic disadvantage, women’s need to demonstrate her ‘’motherhood skills’’ while being in full time paid-work, socialisation-gender roles attitudes, lack of state support to dual-career couples or lagged men’s adaptation to women’’s changes.

This paper uses a multi-level approach which places special emphasis on the institutional context (i.e. women’s options to exit relationships and women’s empowerment) in contrast to gender preference theory. We analyse men’s participation in domestic activities across EU countries, controlling for relevant institutional and composition effects, such as education or marital instability at the country level, and including both data on values and material constraints. In line with some pioneering research within this perspective, we advocate for embedding the analysis of the gendered division of domestic work in the cultural, demographic and economic context. We test three main hypotheses:

1) In countries with a low degree of marital instability and consensual unions (proxies for “women’s options to exit relationships”) men will have less incentives to renegotiate traditional ‘gender roles’;

2) The national index of female empowerment is a better predictor for men’s participation in domestic work than “national gender cultures”;

3) Couples’ characteristics (e.g. earnings, working-time) are a better predictor for men’s domestic work than preferences.

The study is mainly based on The European Social Survey (2004) which provides information for 15 countries and applies a multi-level analysis to predict men’s participation in domestic work according to individual, couple and country characteristics.

In this paper we explore whether the increasing emergence of cohabitation instead of or before marriage weakens family ties and intergenerational solidarity as suggested by previous research, based however, on a not clear distinction between different forms of cohabitation. We study the extent to which the partnership form entered by adult children (cohabitation vs. legal marriage) affects the frequency of contacts and visits between them and their parents. With empirical evidence from the Multiscopo survey (2003) for Italy and the British Household Panel Study (2001), we test the hypothesis that marriage might provide a more favourable locus for solidarity, exchange and emotional support between generations than cohabitation, as suggested by the, not well developed, literature. According to this literature, explanation of this phenomenon may be of two kinds: a) cohabitation goes along with a higher degree of individualisation, therefore of weakening of traditional family obligations; b) cohabitations are more vulnerable to breaking up, a phenomenon that also in marriage tends to weaken at least partly (along the gather-child line) intergenerational contacts and solidarity. A third explanation rather points to the fact that cohabitations are internally heterogeneous and involve a large quota of young cohabitants, that is of individuals and couples in a specific phase of establishing themselves as individual adults. This in turn explains both the higher vulnerability of cohabitations to break ups and the lower degree of involvement with family and kin. If long-term cohabitations were compared with marriages, and the age of partners controlled for in both situations, results might differ. We will test these hypotheses in two countries – the UK and Italy – in which cohabitations are differently developed. We will use multilevel analysis in acknowledgment to the nested nature of family ties.

According to Boudon’s (1974) well-known micro-theoretical model of educational transitions, educational inequality stems from two sources: primary effects – which are all those that are expressed by the association between social origin and academic performance; and secondary effects – which are transition propensities differing between families of different social origin – even at the same level of performance. The evaluation of the relative importance of primary and secondary effects is the aim of a growing body of literature. I contribute to this line of research by firstly evaluating the relative importance of these two effects at the transition to upper secondary school in Germany and secondly assessing whether the substantive federal state (‘Länder’) differences in the transition regulations affect the relative importance of these effects. Employing nationwide panel data (years 2002-2005) developed by the German Youth Institute (DJI), primary and secondary effects can be decomposed through counterfactual analysis. Results indicate that secondary effects are the main source of educational inequality, accounting for 59% of the total inequality. They are especially strong for children with medium (as opposed to very high or very low) grades. Furthermore, the relative importance of secondary effects is higher when parents can freely choose a secondary school track and lower when the parents’ freedom to choose is restricted because teachers decide instead of them. Theoretical and policy implications are discussed.

Trend statistics reveal a striking reversal of a gender gap that has once favoured males: girls have surpassed boys in many aspects of the educational system. At the same time, the share of female teachers has grown in almost all countries of the western world. There is an ongoing, contentious debate on whether the gender of the teacher can account, in part, for the growing educational disadvantage of males. Findings have been mixed, so the issue remains unresolved. In this study, we use

large-scale data from IGLU-E, an expansion of the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) in Germany, to estimate whether there is a causal effect of having a same-sex teacher on student outcomes. The students in the sample were tested and interviewed at the end of fourth grade and have been taught by the same teacher for at least 2 years up to 4 years. This is a major advantage, because it can be assumed that substantial teacher-gender effects only occur after a certain
time of exposure to a same-sex or other-sex teacher. We estimate effects for typical ‘female’ subjects and typical ‘male’ subjects as well as for different student outcomes (‘gender-blind’ test scores and more subjective teacher’s grades). We find virtually no evidence of a benefit from having a same-sex teacher, neither for boys nor for girls. These findings suggest that the popular call for more male teachers in primary school is not the key to tackle the growing disadvantage of boys.

This paper brings together two research fields: on work-related training and high performance work practices (HPWP), respectively. We estimate models of both the determinants and the impact of training. Our models of the determinants of training confirm previous research: age, education, contract, tenure, and firm size all influence training. Several components of HPWP are associated with a higher probability of training, specifically, general (non-firm-specific) training. Participation in general training is associated with higher earnings, as is involvement in highly participative and consultative working arrangements, and performance reward systems. These patterns of training, and returns to training, are broadly consistent with HPWP approaches and represent a challenge to human capital theory.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the impact of women’’s employment on the household income distributions in EU countries and the US. As a first step we display the trends in women’’s earnings and employment patterns by the distribution of husbands’’ earnings . One key issue here is to address the underlying selection with regard to couple formation and dissolution. Thus, we also explore the distribution of union formation and dissolution across income quartiles over time. We then, run a number of simulations to isolate the effect of a change in the labour supply of women on the household income distribution while taking into account the mentioned non-random nature of the changes in the household structure.

The transition of post-socialist countries into democratic and liberal societies has brought about both, privileges and burdens. Estonia together with a fast modernization process and excellent performance on an international level (membership of NATO and European Union in 2004) is often characterized as a country that has gone through a ‚successful transition’. On the other hand, empirical studies have shown overwhelming dissatisfaction among the public with the outcomes of reforms concerning social justice, employment opportunities, and the general living standard. The latter poses threat to a stable development of democracy and causes a socalled ‚deficit of legitimacy’. Current paper evaluated the perceived social justice and legitimacy of the stratification system in Estonian society. The data is from the International Social Justice Project of 1991 and 1996, and from the Estonian Social Justice Survey carried out in 2004. The results indicate that people have negative attitudes about the way distributive justice works in the society throughout the whole transition period. Thus people think there are no equal opportunity, no fair reward for input and peoples’ basic needs are not satisfied. However, from 1991 to 2005 there is a positive trend – people perceive more social justice. It appears that the legitimacy of stratification order is to a large extent predicted by individual characteristics. Groups of people that support capitalistic principles and hold higher positions in the society are the ones more likely to have more positive perceptions about social justice. The opposite holds for people from lower social positions who oppose capitalistic viewpoints. Interestingly, the cleavage between different groups with regard to perceived social justice has changed over the years. This indicates that the variability of life-chances that is brought about by the transition period (due to the growth of income inequality for instance) has somewhat changed the disparity in the perceptions of social justice among different social groups.

In European welfare states, minimum income schemes act as a last safety net when all other benefits have been exhausted or contribution records are insufficient. As the generosity of core systems of European welfare states decreases in several respects, more people may become dependent on minimum income protection systems. I will present first results of a project where we combine an analysis of welfare state institutions with an analysis of public attitudes towards these institutional patterns. The paper, however, focuses on the first part of the project and provides institutional indicators that capture those characteristics of social assistance schemes that are most important for the public perception of both the system and its beneficiaries. The rationale behind this perspective is that tax-financed and strongly selective schemes are prone to cutbacks, as the majority of the population finances the system without ever profiting from it. Thus, public opinion on the minimum income protection is important for its further development. Among the most important underlying institutional dimensions are access, generosity, and reciprocity. The second part of the paper describes preliminary country groupings based on cluster analyses run on the indicators proposed and makes a tentative connection to attitudes on income redistribution and the poor.

Women tend to concentrate in jobs that require lower investments in specific skills and this has negative consequences for their earnings. This paper proposes a supply-side model with macro-level effects to explain why this is the case. The job-allocation decision is modeled as a discrete choice between two ideal job-types, one that requires high investments in the job and one that does not. Individuals consider the tenure-reward profiles of each job-type and choose rationally on the basis of their expected job tenure. Women’s tenure expectations are influenced by individual-level characteristics, including their gender attitudes and preferences, but also by two types of social structures from which information is drawn: 1) macro-level distributions —in particular, the presence of professional women and housework-cooperative men in women’s region of residence—, and 2) past family experiences —in particular, the employment histories of women’s own mothers. This model is tested using data from 17 industrialized European societies comprising 165 different regions. Results are consistent with the model predictions.

John Goldthorpe (2007) based his “Outline of a Theory of Social Mobility” on the assumption of cross-national similarity and temporal stability in (relative) mobility rates. In his theory, he argues that all individuals try to reach at least the same class position as their parents and that individuals do so by using class-specific resources and following class-specific investment strategies “from below” and from “above”.

Goldthorpe’s explanandum, however, is no longer in accordance with recent empirical findings. As, for example, Breen and Luijkx (2004) have shown, there is a considerable amount of cross-national variability and – for many countries – an increasing trend in social mobility. These findings cannot be addressed with the existing theoretical outline by Goldthorpe. Instead, we need to find out what accounts for these variations.
In my paper, I will argue that it is necessary to contextualize Goldthorpe’s main ideas of his outline of a theory of social mobility. It is not sufficient to look at different pathways for social mobility per se (set out by the “OED triangle”), but to bring in institutional and other macro-structural effects that have an impact on a) investments in education; b) returns to education; and c) direct inheritance effects. In the empirical part of the paper, I show for seven European countries, that institutional and other structural effects indeed have an impact on levels as well as on trends in social mobility. Much of the changes and differences in social mobility can thus be related to different contexts in which social (im-)mobility processes operate.

The paper examines the extent to which employees vary in the preferences for extrinsic, intrinsic, and social aspects of a job, and whether this variation is systematically related to the institutional structure of the labour market. Furthermore, it examines whether indicators of precariousness on the labour market affect work motivations differently in contexts that vary with regard to income inequality, employment protection and unemployment protection. To this aim the paper uses European Value Study (EVS) data, which has an extensive list of issues that people find important in a job, and data of the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) on labor market characteristics, for 16 countries over two time periods. Multi-level models are used to test the influence of individual and institutional characteristics on work motivations. The results show that individual characteristics best explain differences in job preferences. Especially the educational level influences preferences. The labour market characteristics have a more modest effect on job preferences. The social job aspects are the aspects that are most affected by the institutional characteristics. The level of income inequality has a negative effect on preferences for the social aspects of a job, the unemployment rate also has a negative effect on these preferences and the replacement rate effects them positively. The job preferences of employees in precarious positions – the lower educated and lower paid employees – are not differently affected by the labour market institutions then those of higher educated and higher paid employees.

This paper explores to what extent changes in outcomes to tertiary compared to vocational training qualifications in Germany influence educational decisions of students that are eligible to enrol in tertiary education. The core hypothesis of the paper is that students from different social backgrounds should react differently to changes in returns on education. To this end, a unique dataset consisting of large scale surveys of university qualified students from the German Higher Education Information System Institute is used. The surveys were conducted at five different points in time between 1983 and 2004. All analyses are run separately for men and woman and average state unemployment and income ratios for tertiary degree holders and apprenticeship graduates for each survey year were matched to the micro data to assess the effect of changes in labour market outcomes on educational decisions. Contrary to many previous findings, the results of the paper suggest that variations in relative income ratios do not seem to affect educational decisions of school leavers while variation in unemployment seems to have significant effects on postsecondary decisions for women only. Furthermore, female students from lower class backgrounds seem to be more responsive to changes in unemployment ratios than their higher class peers.

The study of integration processes, specifically focusing on the educational field, has reached a

crucial stage with the emergence of the second generation. Also in a recent immigration country as
Italy, knowledge of the strategic importance of schools facing immigration and the shaping of Italy
as a multiethnic society has been gained. In this paper, I will present the main findings of
qualitative research (5 focus group with teachers and 30 in depth interviews with migrant pupils,
16-24 years old) held in Turin (Italy) on the integration of migrant youth and both their education
and job possibilities. Turin is characterized by a high rate of migrant pupils at school, by a huge
number of measures promoting their school enrolment and supporting their school attendance and a
lack of policies for their integration in the labour market.
The goals of the research were two: 1) to outline the current schooling situation of migrant students;
2) to identify, using some indicators, the best practices for solving key issues emerging in the
national (and international debate) on migrant school – and subsequent labour market – integration:
lack of language proficiency, differences in school curricula, difficulties in school-parent
relationships, teaching of languages of origin.
The main findings of the research regard 1) the design specific sub policies (sub practices) aimed at
the different immigrant groups; 2) care to better support foreign families and promote the
potentially crucial role they play in furthering their children’s education; 3) discrimination in access
to the labour market.

While much stratification research has focused on understanding the patterns and consequences of differentiation, previous studies have not considered similarly important variation in students’ trajectories through higher education, and particularly their participation in the labor market. Results from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth of 1997 (NLSY97) indicate that entering and succeeding in a differentiated system of higher education is related to students’ employment patterns. Students with extensive commitment to the labor market during high school are more likely to begin their postsecondary journeys in community colleges as opposed to four-year institutions. Once in higher education, employment is more consequential for students attending community colleges: students in community colleges are more likely to work at high intensities as well as experience more negative consequences for extensive participation in the labor market. Employment also mediates some of the effects of family background on degree completion among community college students. These results highlight the importance of examining the relationship between differentiation and students’ employment patterns for developing a comprehensive model of educational attainment.

The expansion of higher education over the course of the 20th century has provided more opportunities for access, but it has not reduced socioeconomic inequality. Students from less advantaged family backgrounds continue to lag in all areas of higher education, from entry into postsecondary institutions and access to more selective colleges and universities, to degree completion (for recent reviews see Baker and Velez 1996; Gamoran 2001; Walpole 2003). Stratification scholars have proposed several macro-level explanations for these trends, such as a lack of saturation of the upper classes (Raftery and Hout 1993) and limited political mobilization (Karen 1991; Rubinson 1986). More micro-level studies on the other hand have explored how students’ skills, knowledge and predispositions, in the form of academic preparation and social and cultural capital, shape educational outcomes. While these micro-level explanations provide a rich account of class differences, they cannot fully explain inequality in higher education. One of the key limitations of the previous accounts of inequality in higher education is that they focus on the bundle of skills and predispositions that students bring to higher education but fail to consider how schooling fits in the broader context of students’ lives. Being a student is a social role, and for students in higher education, that role is often combined with other social roles, such as being a worker, a spouse/partner, or a parent (Pallas 1993). The transition to adulthood has become increasingly “demographically dense” (Rindfuss 1991), with transitions taking place within a short amount of time and often overlapping. Moreover, there is much variability in sequencing and timing of different life course transitions, with a decreasing proportion of individuals following what might be considered the traditional sequence: finishing schooling, getting a full-time job, getting married and having children (e.g., see reviews in O’Rand 2000; Pallas 1993; Shanahan 2000). To the extent that social roles are intertwined, and that their combination varies by social class, considering how students combine schooling with other life course transitions can provide new insights for understanding inequality in higher education. Drawing on the life course tradition, I broaden the theoretical lens of the status attainment model, which underlies much of the research on class inequality in educational outcomes. I break with the implicit assumption that schooling precedes other life course transitions and thus that inequality in student outcomes is only a product of interactions with the educational system. Although skills, knowledge, and predispositions embedded in the student role are undeniably important, they are not the sole basis of inequality in educational outcomes. Being a straight A student who performs well on standardized tests and has the “know-how” to navigate the educational system is certainly advantageous in entering and completing higher education. But what if that student is working full-time, or gets married, or has a child? With the prolonged participation in schooling, transitions into adult roles of full-time work, marriage, and parenthood are not unusual occurrences in higher education. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY 1997), I examine social class inequality in two educational transitions: entry into higher education and completion of a bachelor’s degree. Even net of a range of commonly used controls, students from more advantaged socioeconomic backgrounds are more likely to successfully complete both of these transitions. However, students from less advantaged backgrounds are also more likely to make other life course transitions, including working-full time, getting married/cohabitating, and having children. Do these life course transitions help to explain class inequality in higher education? Making a transition into the adult roles of worker, spouse/partner and parent during high school does not account for class inequality in entry into higher education among high school graduates. However, these transitions, and particularly employment patterns, explain class inequality in bachelor’s degree completion among students who enter higher education. Thus, while focusing on the student role may be adequate for studying entry into higher education, it is not for understanding inequality in completion. Considering educational transitions as a component of the life course provides an alternative understanding of the patterns of class inequality in higher education.

The paper argues that due to the increased labour market participation of women in part-time

jobs, work norms have changed. It has become less evident who should work how many
hours, and this is a main cause why Dutch citizens show less support for the norm that work is
a prime social obligation. We argue that the social mechanism for the norm change is to be
located in adjustment processes in the households. We elaborate hypotheses on the basis of
this argument, and test these hypotheses by applying multi-level regression analysis on the
OSA Labour Supply Panel surveys for the period 1988-2002. The results of these tests show
that in the traditional breadwinner-families both partners, the breadwinner and the housewife,
show strong support for the norm that work is a social obligation. Working women and men
with working partners show less support for the norm. Due to the increase of the share of
working women, support for the norm has decreased. The results show that every new cohort
shows less support for the norm. The general picture is that in the Netherlands, partly due to
the growth of part-time work, the traditional work ethic is declining. For younger generations,
with both partners participating in the labour market, work is increasingly becoming only an
instrumental value. Nevertheless, because the instrumental value of work is high, there is only
a slow and limited decline of labour supply.

New stylised facts on the incidence of low pay among employees and earnings mobility for

13 European countries and US are presented for the first time. The incidence is shown to be a
good measure of wage inequality in the lower half of the earnings distribution. Analysing
level and composition and mobility of workers out of low pay across countries sheds new
light on inequality. Descriptive differences are strong and are confirmed in multivariate
analysis: young age, low skills, female gender, part-time employment, and work in retail
trade, hotels, catering and personal services, generally contribute significantly to the risk of
being low paid and reduce the chances of escaping. Countries seem to combine these
characteristics into low-wage employment in different proportions. However, important
international differences are found. Two extreme cases – Denmark and the US – show very
stable low-wage incidence while incidence has grown rapidly in the UK, Germany and the
Netherlands.
The new knowledge is still insufficient for a full analysis of economic and institutional
implications and explanations of low pay. Instead a look is taken at these separately in an
attempt to refresh the research agenda. No direct link is found to aggregate employment nor to
the employment rate of the low skilled. The industrial structure of employment has little effect
on the aggregate incidence of low pay. However, differences between low-wage production of
goods and services are important. Potential effects of low pay on productivity growth are
signalled and so is the role of consumer demand. Both are important issues for further
research. ‘Inclusive’ labour relations – working via high collective bargaining, with or
without support of mandatory extension or a national minimum wage – seem to help
containing low-pay incidence. An important potential determinant, requiring more research,
of such relations seems the membership rate of employer associations. The optimistic
conclusion is that countries have some leeway in ‘choosing’ low-wage incidence, but that it is
not an easy choice.

The aim of this paper is to examine differences in batterers’ patterns of violence within the couple between an Australian and an Italian National sample of women who have suffered physical or sexual violence. I attempt to identify abusers types using 4 descriptive dimensions (i.e., severity of physical or sexual violence, severity of psychological violence, alcohol use, generality of violence). Latent class analyses is used to identify subgroups of violent men; the violence patterns and prevalence of subgroups are then compared across countries’ samples. Australian data is drawn from the International Violence Against Women Survey (IVAWS, 2003). The sample consists of 6,677 women and 1,709 violent men were found; Italian data is drawn from the Indagine sulla Sicurezza delle Donne, Istat (ISD, 2006). The sample consists of 25,065 women and 2,536 abusers were investigated. The main result is the identification of three types of batterers (family only, FO; borderline, BD; and generally violent-antisocial, GVA) in each sample. This typology is consistent with previous results from batterers’ non-representative samples researches. FO men show a low severity level of violence; BD men reveal higher level of violence severity and point out a higher level of alcohol use; GVA men achieve a high level of violence combined with alcohol abuse, and criminal behaviour. Despite uniformity in typology found across countries, there are notable sample differences in class prevalence. FO batterers, for example, are widespread in the ISD, on the contrary BD are rampant in the IVAWS. On the one hand these findings highlight the utility of latent class techniques for understanding men’s use of violence within the couple. On the other these results show that a consistent abusers typology is likely to be identified also using the victims’ point of view

In this article we investigate social inequality at the transition to tertiary education in Germany by drawing on Boudon’s well-known distinction between primary and secondary effects of social class origin. Primary effects describe class differentials that are related to academic performance, secondary effects comprise class differentials in educational choices, given the same performance levels. In order to generate estimates on the relative importance of primary and secondary effects in the creation of class differentials in tertiary choices and their development over time, we apply a procedure which has recently been developed by Jackson et al. (2007). For our analyses we rely on a series of datasets from the German Higher Education Information Systems Institute (HIS) on students who have gained eligibility for tertiary education in 1983, 1990, 1994 and 1999. Our results show that class differentials in the transition to higher education in Germany are mainly due to secondary effects. While the relative importance of primary vs. secondary effects does not change over time, overall class effects seem to be generally more pronounced for women. In the second part of the analyses we relate the secondary effects to explanatory factors, such as motivational differences or cost-benefit expectations in order to gain more insight into the underlying mechanisms.

Reference:

Jackson, M., Erikson, R., Goldthorpe, J. H. and Yaish, M. (2007) ‘Primary and Secondary Effects in Class Differentials in Educational Attainment: The Transition to A-Level Courses in England and Wales’, Acta Sociologica 50(3): 211-229.

In this paper we investigate social selectivities in access to higher education in Germany and, unlike most previous studies, explicitly devote attention to semi-tertiary education such as the universities of cooperative education. Drawing on rational choice models of educational decisions we seek to understand which factors influence upper secondary graduates from different social backgrounds in their choices of diverse tertiary institutions in Germany.

Educational attainment is a core social background variable covered in each and every single social survey. Cross-national surveys are particularly vulnerable to sub-optimal measurement of education. In this paper, the cross-national measurement of educational attainment is evaluated using data of the European Social Survey (ESS). After discussing some theoretical background of the comparable measurement of education generally, the most commonly used comparable measures are introduced. A brief overview over previous evaluations is given. In the main part of the paper, the implementation of a simplified version of the International Standard Classification of Education 1997 (ISCED–97) in the ESS is discussed and evaluated in several ways: By looking at the consistency of the reclassification of national education variables into the comparable variable; at how the comparable variable is distributed, how much explanatory power of educational attainment is lost by harmonising the national variables (using occupational status as the criterion), and which steps of the harmonisation process affect the results most strongly in the single countries. Finally, an alternative way of simplifying ISCED–97 is proposed, which could improve the measure’s comparability and predictive power.

in Schneider, Silke L. (Ed.) 2008: The International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED-97). An Evaluation of Content and Criterion Validity for 15 European Countries. Mannheim: MZES, chapter 15 (pp. 281-300).

http://www.mzes.uni-mannheim.de/buch_d.php?tit=isced97.html

in Schneider, Silke L. (Ed.) 2008: The International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED-97). An Evaluation of Content and Criterion Validity for 15 European Countries. Mannheim: MZES, chapter 3 (76-102).

http://www.mzes.uni-mannheim.de/buch_d.php?tit=isced97.html

The quality of educational attainment measures lies at the heart of many cross-national micro-sociological research projects and inter- national education statistics. This study aims at validating cross-nationally comparable measures of educational attainment, among which are the International Standard Classification of Education 1997 (ISCED 97) and years of education. Following a conceptual discussion of what educational attainment means, the most common ways of measuring educational attainment cross-nationally as well as previous evaluations thereof are reviewed. Then, the implementation of ISCED 97 in cross-national surveys is examined by looking at both the resulting educational attainment distributions in three European surveys as well as the data generation and harmonisation process. Finally, a number of cross-national measures of educational attainment are compared with country-specific measures with respect to their information content by firstly examining the dispersion of educational attainment, and secondly the predictive power when explaining the core social stratification outcomes, occupational status and social class attainment, by educational attainment. The main results of the study are that the measurement of educational attainment in cross-national surveys is affected by a number of avoidable weaknesses which adversely affect the validity of claims based on analyses of these data: 1. Countries and surveys are inconsistent in the way they measure educational attainment and apply ISCED 97 to national data; and 2. actual years of education and the one-digit version of ISCED 97 distort measures of association to differing degrees in different countries, making cross-national comparisons using these measures highly problematic. Therefore, some amendments to the implementation of ISCED 97 in cross-national surveys and coding for statistical analyses are proposed. As part of the latter, an alternative simplification of ISCED 97, optimised for European survey research, is developed and validated. Moreover, suggestions for data collection procedures are made to improve the measurement of educational attainment nationally and cross-nationally.

Educational attainment is a core social background variable covered in each and every single social survey. Since educational qualifications are difficult to compare across countries, cross-national surveys pose a particular challenge to the measurement of educational attainment. In this paper, a number of cross-national measures of educational attainment—two versions of the In- ternational Standard Classification of Education (ISCED–97) and years of education —are evaluated using data from the European Social Survey. To begin with, the distributions of ISCED–97, simplified to the main levels of ed- ucation, are examined for the different countries. Since this reveals a number of weaknesses of ISCED–97 as implemented in the ESS, an alternative way of simplifying ISCED–97 is proposed. In a next step, using linear regression models, it is shown how much explanatory power educational attainment loses when comparable variables are used, rather than country-specific categories. The outcome variable used for this validation is social status as measured by the International Socio-Economic Index. The results suggest that harmonisa- tion always entails some loss of explanatory power. Moreover, the adequacy of years of education as well as the levels-only ISCED–97 differs strongly across countries. Of all measures tested, the proposed alternative simplification of ISCED–97 fares best: it shows the lowest relative loss of explanatory power and the lowest variation of losses across countries. Some recommendations on how to implement cross-national measures of educational attainment in international surveys are made.

Origins of the modern career: Individual determinants of career mobility during modernization The example of the Netherlands ca. 1840– 1940 Word count: 231 This paper studies the origins of the modern career, more specifically we will test to what extent current theoretical explanations of career mobility hold in a long term perspective, i.e. the 19th and 20th century. The emergence of the modern career is frequently dated back to the mid to late nineteenth century and it has been assumed that careers have become more predictable and successful ever since. Individual characteristics such as parental status, demographic characteristics, gender and being a migrant are thought to be important factors which shape occupational careers. We will analyze in how far the impact of individual characteristics changes over time and may lead to more predictable and successful career patterns. Thereby we contribute to specifying the general conditions which shape careers, especially in times of societal changes (e.g. modernization or globalization). The period under study is an excellent testing ground as it was characterized by major socio-economic changes such as industrialization (mechanization of labor), urbanization and the rise of modern means of transport, leading to tremendous changes in the educational and occupational system. We will make use of newly released unique Dutch data. The Historical Sample of the Netherlands (HSN) is based on birth, death and marriage certificates, and population registers. It includes information on social background, household composition (e.g. marital status, number of children) and the occupational life history of individuals born between 1812 and 1922.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the role of corporate governance in explaining cross-national differences and trends in earnings inequality in a sample of OECD countries between 1979 and 2000. It is argued that since corporate governance is fundamentally a question of in whose interest corporations are run, as a result it will have important consequences for how the returns from production are distributed among the parties with a stake in the corporation, such as shareholders and labor interests. The paper is divided into four parts. The first part summarizes the main cross-national differences and trends in wage inequality in the OECD countries, as well as giving a brief account of the main theoretical approaches to explaining these differences and trends. The second part outlines an institutional approach to corporate governance and its cross-national variation, whereas the third section of the paper formulates the causal mechanisms whereby corporate governance may influence earnings inequality. Basically, it is argued that emphasis upon shareholder value – which involves frequent corporate restructuring, including hostile takeovers and downsizing, active and liquid capital markets and dispersed ownership – will have important consequences for earnings inequality. The last section of the paper assesses the empirical relevance of institutions relating to corporate governance in explaining cross-national differences and trends in earnings inequality (as measured by the p90/p10 ratio). It is shown that these institutions, or more specifically the role of the stock market in channeling capital to corporations, the extent of mergers and acquisitions, ownership dispersion, and the importance of bank-based financing and the protection of minority shareholders, are all significantly related to cross-national differences and trends in earnings inequality. The conclusion is that corporate governance institutions and their respective managerial practices can make a significant contribution to our understanding of fundamental stratification processes.

It is a well-established fact that over the last fifty years in all advanced countries women have increasingly entered the labour market and remained in it throughout the period of family formation. Yet, most research on women’s employment changes has been based on cross-sectional or time-series data. When longitudinal data have been used, the attention has typically gone to single cohorts, or, in case of comparison across cohorts, to single countries or to specific crucial phases in female life courses, namely on transitions around the birth of first child. By contrast, this paper compares two countries, Italy and Great Britain, and, by drawing on the BHPS and the ILFI up to 2005, it uses event history data and methods to explicitly analyse changes across four subsequent birth cohorts in the effect of marriage and children on women’s transitions between paid market work and unpaid family-care work. Moreover, it looks at a wide span of women’s life courses (from the time they leave full-time education to their forties) in order to capture also exits and re-entries occurring at later ages and to see to what extent and for whom the timing of interruptions has been postponed from the period around marriage to the period around first or second childbirth, while the timing of re-entries has been anticipated. My findings show that both in Italy and Great Britain women from younger cohorts are more attached to the labour market, but that the type and causes of such increasing attachment differ importantly. In Great Britain women’s employment has gradually expanded from exiting the labour market when marrying and re-entering at the end of childrearing, to exiting when having the first child and re-entering more often between births and more quickly after childbearing. Moreover, the employment of married women and mothers has become more accepted but, in turn, also more differentiated by education, social class and work experience. In Italy women’s employment has grown but “compositionally”. Ceteris paribus, in Italy the influence of education, marriage and children has remained fairly constant across cohorts, with education being more important than motherhood. Women still appear polarised in a “opt-in opt-out” participation pattern: either they remain lifelong housewives, never entering paid work or interrupting it around marriage or childbirth without never re-entering, or they remain lifelong workers, although discontinuous careers have slightly increased in the last decade. Such findings are largely explained by differences between Italy and Great Britain in their cultural and institutional contexts, and in the way they have changed from the 1950s to the 2000s.

This study examines employment access, class attainment, and earnings among native-born and first-generation immigrants in Denmark using Danish administrative data from 2002. Results suggest large gaps in employment access between native-born Danes and immigrants, as well as among immigrant groups by country of origin and time of arrival. Non-Western immigrants and those arriving after 1984 are at a particular disadvantage compared to other immigrants, a finding not explained by education differences. Immigrants are more likely to be employed in unskilled manual jobs and less likely to be employed in professional and intermediate-level positions than native-born Danes, although the likelihood of obtaining higher-level positions increases as immigrants’ time in Denmark lengthens. Class attainment and accumulated work experience explain a significant portion of native-immigrant gaps in earnings, but work experience reduces native-immigrant gaps in class attainment for lower-level positions only. The Danish “flexicurity” model and its implications for immigrants living in Denmark are discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate what role networks play when it comes to differences between Swedish men and women in their access to social support. I use data from the Swedish Level of Living Survey from 2000, which contains information about a number of concrete situations where respondents are asked to judge if, when needed, they can muster practical, emotional and material help. Using information about the size and composition of individuals’ networks, it is found that having larger and heterogeneous networks increase the likelihood of receiving social support. Swedish women are found to have greater access to social support although they have smaller and more homogeneous networks on average. The study complement case studies with survey-based network measures and analyze the extent to which important compositional characteristics of networks increase our understanding of gender differences in welfare outcomes.

In the tradition of the Wisconsin-School, it has been argued that educational aspirations are of causal significance for explaining educational outcomes. Furthermore, effects of families’ socioeconomic background are assumed to be explained by respective differences in academic ambitions. In testing these assumptions barely all studies failed to differentiate between two different aspiration concepts. Whereas realistic aspirations are merely forecasts about the likely educational career, taking all relevant and known factors influencing educational success into account, idealistic aspirations refer to (self-)obligations to reach certain educational credentials. Since only idealistic aspirations can be assumed to have motivational significance and both kinds of aspirations are likely to be associated, only the net-effect of idealistic aspirations, controlling for the effect of realistic expectation, provides evidence for differences in ambitions to explain educational outcomes. Despite the Janus-faced nature of the aspiration concept, barely all available studies tested the effect of single aspiration measures on educational outcomes. Thus, it is unclear to what extend the observed effects express motivational differences due to idealistic wishes or only the anticipation of opportunities and constraints. In the present article we propose separate measures for both aspiration concepts and test their net-effects on the decision between secondary school tracks in Germany. Firstly, we found realistic rather than idealistic aspirations much more affected by the students’ level and temporal development of grade-point average. This supports the assumed differences in the nature of the two aspiration measures. Secondly, realistic aspirations were substantially associated with educational decisions. This effect was considerably reduced when controlling indicators for the children’s academic competencies. Thirdly, although controlling school achievement and realistic aspirations, the parents’ idealistic wishes were found to have a substantial additional net-effect on educational decisions. This confirms the assumed independent effect of aspirations. However, the effect of idealistic aspirations is found to be dependent on the discrepancy from realistic expectations: the more both differ, the less high idealistic aspirations motivate a decision for the most ambitious secondary school track.

Keywords: Educational Aspirations, Educational Decisions, Inequality.

This paper aims at explaining the perception of social inequalities and the support for an education-based meritocracy (EBM) among individuals. The level and type of education impact has been closely investigated – at a macro and micro level –, as education is theoretically supposed to influence the support for dominant ideologies. To this end, the third wave of Issp survey dataset has been used, as well as the results of a survey conducted in France among tertiary students attending different tracks and fields of study (Sts, Iut, Classes préparatoires and University). This research shows that education influences the representations of meritocracy at both micro and macro levels. From an individual point of view, it has been established that people with higher degree and lower degree tend to perceive more often their society as meritocratic (“U” curve effect of education on representations), and that more educated people defend more the importance of diplomas than the others. In addition to this relative effect of diploma, it has been evidenced, at a more macrosocial level, that the school system organization and development also has an effect on the representations of meritocracy: the educational stock of a country, measured by the percent of persons attending tertiary education, increases the justification of social inequality, while the percent of social science students decreases it. The French case has been specifically examined. In France, the criticism of diplomas seems to derive from its incapacity, according to students, to reflect one’s competencies or merits.

The increase in European divorce rates over the past decades was accompanied by several changes in divorce laws. Yet for European countries, research on the effects of divorce law on the divorce rate is scarce. Most of the existing studies are based on data from North America and provide numerous, but inconsistent, results. We use fixed‐effects regression models to examine the impact of the introduction of unilateral divorce on the divorce rate in Western European countries. We find that de facto unilateral divorce practices led to a sustainable increase in the divorce rate, whereas legal rights to unilaterally divorce had no long‐run effects.

This paper analyses the relationship between unexplained racial/ethnic unemployment and wage differentials and the segregation of social networks, as measured by inbreeding homophily. Our analysis is based on both U.S. and Estonian surveys, supplemented with Estonian telephone communication data. In the case of Estonia we consider the regional variation in economic performance of the Russian minority, and in the U.S. case we consider the regional variation in black-white differentials. Our analysis finds a strong relationship between the size of the differential and network segregation: regions with more segregated social networks exhibit larger unexplained wage and unemployment differential.

In many analyses of social inequality in health, different dimensions of social stratification have been used more or less interchangeably as measures of the individual’s general social standing. This procedure, however, has been questioned in previous studies, most of them comparing education, class and/or income. In the present article, the importance of education and income as well as two aspects of occupation – class and status – are examined. The results are based on register data and refer to all Swedish employees in the age range 35-59 years. There are clear gradients in total death risk for all socioeconomic factors except for income from work among women. The size of the independent effects of education, class, status and income differ between men and women. For both sexes, there are clear net associations between education and mortality. Class and income show independent effects on mortality only for men and status shows an independent effect only for women. While different stratification dimensions – education, social class, income, status – all can be used to show a “social gradient” with mortality, each of them seems to have a specific effect in addition to the general effect related to the stratification of society for either men or women.

The migration has characterized the social and economic development of Italy since the end of the 19th century. The history of Italian migration is long and complex, if we think only of the many different destinations of the Italians during the years: United States and Latin America, in the first two decades of the 20th century; continental Europe, since the second post-war period; the industrialized areas of the northern Italy, being continually chosen in the course of last 60 years.

The internal migration, which has seen thick flows of workers from South to the North, especially in the years between the 1955 and 1975, seems is reviving in the latest years.
In this study we intend to describe the differences between the current internal migratory movements and the one of the 60s-70s. We focus on the features of the “new” southern people who move to the north (gender, age, education, occupation).
Furthermore, the main focus of the research will be the benefits resulting from migrant experience. To measure the social benefits of the Italian migrants we will perform an analysis of their social mobility.
The objective is to verify if a geographical mobility corresponds to a social mobility, in other words if the geographical mobility is a channel able to ensure greater social mobility and give a contribution to the reduction of the inequalities both of distributive and relational order.
The analysis will deal with intergenerational mobility and will be made on the Istat data (Indagine Multiscopo “Famiglia e soggetti sociali” 2003) that is based on a 24,000 families’ sample (approximately 50,000 people).

The relation between higher education and work has been extensively studied by sociologists and economists. While most of these research focus on the work after higher education, less attention has been devoted to the experience of working during higher education. Interest in this topic is growing in the United States and Great Britain because of the rising costs of attending higher education. Up to now, research on this topic has obtained contradictory results. In Italy the topic has not been so widely analysed despite its relevance. The importance of this issue relies on several considerations. First, employment during university studies is quite spread regardless of low tuition fees and the small number of students who study far from home. Second, there is not a formal distinction between full-time and part-time students and there are no part-time courses for adult learners and for employees. Third, the amount of drop-outs and graduations behind schedule is very high and it has been raising quickly in the youngest cohorts. Fourth, still nowadays there are inequalities in the rates of graduation among different social categories. Thus it is interesting to understand whether and to what extent students’ employment affect the probability of dropping-out and having a delayed graduation (i.e. the consequences of students’ employment). Looking at the equity side, it’s also important to determine whether social origins affect the decision of working during university studies (i.e. the antecedents of students’ employment). In this paper I examine the role of student employment – i.e. working during university – in the reproduction of social inequality in academic outcomes in Italian Higher Education during the 20th century. In the first part, I review previous research results in the US, UK and Italy and discuss several competing hypotheses. In the second part, I use data from the Italian Longitudinal Household Survey (ILFI) to study a) the relation between student employment and academic outcomes; b) the relation between social origin and student employment, and c) the mediating effect of student employment in the relation between social origin and academic outcomes. Bivariate analysis and multinomial logistic regression models show that full-time students are more likely to graduate on time than working-students, but only high-intensity work has a detrimental effect on dropping out. Social origin affects the probability of being a high-intensity worker, but not the likelihood of being a low-intensity worker. Finally, results from a non-linear decomposition analysis suggest that the overall role of student employment in the reproduction of inequality in higher education is low while the most important variable is the type of high-school attended (especially lyceum vs non-academic).

Despite some similarities in the social situations of the descendants of Turkish immigrants in Germany and those of North-African immigrants in France, the two groups are not subject to the same institutional, economic, or symbolic processes of social distancing. This study uses micro-data from France and Germany (SOEP and Enquête Histoire Familiale EHF) to show that these young people develop different modes of participating in the labour market. It stresses the influence of particular institutional and economic regulations and constraints on their modes of participation: First, the French and the German labour markets do not present the same opportunities and constraints to working class young people. Second, the “Other” is used differently in the French and German conceptions of integration, leading to different effects in institutional, political and symbolic terms. The results on educational achievement indicate that while young people of Turkish origin in Germany experience severe exclusion at school, young people of North-African origin in France experience polarization between those who manage to reach higher education and those who don’t. The result for the Turkish youth is a situation of relegation to specific positions in the labour market and of “quasi-invisibility”. In contrast, the better educational attainment of the descendants of North-African immigrants in France leads to their higher visibility at the different levels of the social hierarchy, making them more subject to discrimination as practice of social distancing. Paradoxically, however, their inclusion as French citizens does not lead to a better or more stable work situation. The adoption of the French universal principles among the youth of North-African origin and their belief in the Republican promise of equality leads precisely to their frustration. This experience presents a stark contrast to the early and ongoing experience of “Otherness” among the young people of Turkish origin in Germany. The societal consequences of these processes of social distancing thus differ markedly between both countries.

The children of mixed couples – defined here as the persons whose parents were born in different countries, one of them being France, and had a different nationality at birth one from each other – were culturally integrated in France, if we suppose that they were schooled in a French school. But, this “cultural integration” does not have for direct consequence their "structural integration " , that is their success at school. It is true that mixed children are from families of social categories superior to those of the mononational families of their group of origin. But, the analysis of the survey "Histoires de vie. Construction des identités " (INED, INSEE, 2003) tends to show that mixed children do not attend university in the same numbers as individuals who were born in France and whose parents were born in the same foreign country, ceteris paribus. So, if we control for two variables, the age of the investigated and the social category of the father of this one, we notice that descendants of immigrants are more successful than people having two French parents, Foreigners and Mixed individuals, which is significant. The question is then how to explain this phenomenon. A first hypothesis would be that mixed couple parents invest less in their child’s schooling than foreign parents. Previous research indeed have shown that, ceteris paribus, the descendants of immigrants are more successful in their studies than French people, which can be explained by the immigrant family’s hope that they might gain social ascent through their child’s success at school . A second hypothesis would be that some Mixed, the Half-bloods, are victims of discrimination because of their mixed parentage . The third hypothesis would be that some mixed couples are “cacogamous” , marginalized because of their mixed union with regard to their communities of origin. Their children would thus make fewer bonds within their communities than the descendants of immigrants .

We estimate a collective time allocation model, where two-earner households behave as if the spouses maximize a household utility function, and where one-earner households, where only the man works, behave as if the spouses maximize a household utility function, conditional on the zero job-hour choice

of the woman.

We find that the shape of the individual indifference curves are mainly influenced by leisure and the household income. For one-earner households, also household production is important and this is because there are relatively more children in these households. Differences between one-earner and two-earner
households seem to reflect the difference in specialization behavior of the spouses. Women in one-earner households have more bargaining power than their partner, and we find the opposite for two-earner households. The bargaining position in two-earner households is determined by the individual wages, while for one-earner households, it is determined by the wage rate of the man, the
number of children and age.

Finally, we evaluate how one extra hour of female labor supply influences the household and the individual utility levels, assuming that the labor supply of women may be non-optimal for both oneand two-earner households. An increase of the woman’s labor hours would be a Pareto improvement for
two-earner households. For one-earner households, we find that an extra hour of labor is beneficial for the household and for the woman, but not for the man.

In this paper my concern is the analysis of the connection between social cohesion and social inequalities at European level. The paper is build around three main issues. The first one regards the definition and measurement of the concept of social cohesion. The second problem consists in the identification of the factors that shapes the overall level of social cohesion. Finally, the last issue is about the comparative analysis that will be introduced following the welfare regime approach. More specifically, the core of my work consists of two main hypotheses: the first one argues the existence of a direct negative association between economic inequality and social cohesion. The second one states that this connection is influenced by other factors which include the individuals’ position in the stratification system. Turning to the comparative analysis, I suppose that welfare state is relevant because it influences both the relationship between social class and economic inequality and the link between social cohesion and economic inequality. In the first case, it is consider as a set of formalised social policy arrangements that protects against the risks related to the uneven distribution of material rewards. In the second case, following the moral economy approach, welfare state institutions comprise also collective patterns of institutionalised solidarity and social justice beliefs. Data from the “European Quality of Life Survey” carried out by the European Foundation in 2003 have been analysed by means of structural equation models in order to obtain a measurement of social cohesion and in order to estimate the direct and indirect effects exerted by the different dimensions of inequalities.

Key words: Social cohesion, poverty, social class, welfare regimes, Europe.

This article aims to contribute to the understanding of the conditions under which the social capital from strong ties impacts on the first decision of internal migration. The existent literature assumes three different mechanisms: (a) ties to relatives are locationspecific assets which deter migration over time; (b) relatives can be regarded as financial resources which have a positive impact on individual migration at young ages, independently of their location of residence; © spurious association due to selectivity of migrants. We analyze these hypotheses studying different dimensions of ties to relatives and applying hazard models to a large data set for West-Germany (i.e. GSOEP). Following residence careers since age 15 we are able to identify a significant negative effect of the size of ties to relatives, which may be associated to value orientations of attachment to community. To live further away from ties exert a higher propensity towards migration, which grows when we control for regional heterogeneity, meaning that less dispersed ties to relatives may be found in settlements with higher migration propensity, like some rural areas with less economic opportunities. Living near parents and siblings impact negatively on migration, but parent’s resources have a positive effect. Last, we also find that the individuals with lower labor market opportunities are more likely to stay constrained by the social capital embedded in the location of residence. To sum up, ties to relatives affect importantly migration propensities, which imply that future trends in family relationships are likely to change migration patterns.

This article looks at the impact of citizenship acquisition on the labour market position of immigrants in Belgium. Citizenship is open to all immigrants with a sufficient period of legal residence, without any language or integration requirements. In that respect, this study is an important complement to existing studies which have mostly focused on countries with strict acquisition rules. Based on Labour Force Survey data for 2008, this study uses probit regression to estimate the static and dynamic employment probabilities and unemployment risks. We find that citizenship acquisition is associated with better labour market outcomes for non-Western immigrants in general. This effect remains after controlling for years of residence since migration, indicating the existence of a citizenship premium in Belgium.

Can welfare states decrease gender inequalities? From earlier answers largely in the

affirmative, in recent years sociologists and labor economists have underlined what they see
as serious unintended negative consequences of gender egalitarian policies, consequences
including increasing occupational segregation, intensified employer statistical discrimination,
and decline of women’s career ambitions. Pointing to major methodological problems for
these interpretations, we re-examine potential effects by unpacking welfare state policies into
a multi-dimensional typology of gender-relevant institutional policy structures in 18 countries.
The broad spectrum of dependent variables includes occupational and work segregation,
motherhood penalties, as well as gender gaps in access to paid work, top earnings, managerial
positions, corporate boards, and influential roles in democratic politics. Our gender policy
typology identifies major differences in outcomes among countries, but fears of perverse
effects of egalitarian policies can not be verified.

Can welfare states decrease gender inequalities? From earlier answers largely in the

affirmative, in recent years sociologists and labor economists have underlined what they see
as serious unintended negative consequences of gender egalitarian policies, consequences
including increasing occupational segregation, intensified employer statistical discrimination,
and decline of women’s career ambitions. Pointing to major methodological problems for
these interpretations, we re-examine potential effects by unpacking welfare state policies into
a multi-dimensional typology of gender-relevant institutional policy structures in 18 countries.
The broad spectrum of dependent variables includes occupational and work segregation,
motherhood penalties, as well as gender gaps in access to paid work, top earnings, managerial
positions, corporate boards, and influential roles in democratic politics. Our gender policy
typology identifies major differences in outcomes among countries, but fears of perverse
effects of egalitarian policies can not be verified.

Previous research as shown that social origin affects educational attainment. In the light of increasing participation in tertiary education, there has recently been growing interest in social selectivity at the tertiary level and how these differences are conditioned by educational institutions.

In this paper we examine a particular feature of educational careers in postsecondary education, namely labor force participation before final graduation comparing Germany and the US. We analyze two different aspects of discontinuities in education: First we look at tertiary graduates asking who – in terms of social origin and other individual characteristics – has achieved the final degree ‘in one go’ and who has interrupted education. Second, we are interested in the decision process of returning to education being in the labor market and examine the influence of social origin on re-enrollment.
To explain the micro processes we build on theories of educational decisions, for comparing differences in social origin effects in Germany and US we use a characterization of each country’s ‘transition regime’ of higher education. We expect that working class children more often interrupt their educational career and that this effect is weaker in the US. At the same time, once in the labor market service class children are expected to be more likely to return to education, in particularly in the US.
Our empirical analyses only partly confirm our hypotheses: Although there are some class differences at first sight, these are small and almost disappear if we take other variables into account. Hence on both – patterns of interrupted educational careers and the decision to return to higher education – parental class has only a marginal influence. Rather, individual characteristics such as gender and ability and institutional factors such as having attended lower tiers of higher education or having achieved a vocational degree are the main variables of influence. Comparing Germany and the US, class differences are slightly stronger in the US, but here “ability” explains most of the class differences in re-enrolment rates.

In this paper, using the EU-SILC 2006 data-set, we seek to explore the extent to which a consideration of welfare regime and socio-economic differences in poverty levels and patterns and variation in the consequences of poverty for economic stress can assist us in making informed choices between alternative poverty indicators. Poverty in the EU is normally defined in terms of income thresholds defined at the level of each member state. However, the enlargement of the EU and the consequent widening of the gap in living standards between the richest and the poorest member states has had the consequence that a country such as Ireland perform poorly in comparison with a number of the New Member States (NMS) despite enjoying obvious advantages in terms of material living standards. Such paradoxical findings have produced a number of different but interrelated responses. The first focuses on the limitations imposed by an entirely national frame of reference. An alternative critique takes as its starting point the fact that low income is an unreliable indicator of poverty. In this paper we seek to explore the strength of both critiques by comparing the outcomes associated with measuring being ‘at risk of poverty’ and consistent poverty at both national and EU levels. Our analysis suggest that it is possible to develop an approach that would allow us to achieve the stated EU objective of assessing the scale of exclusion from minimally acceptable level of standards of living in individual countries while also measuring the extent to which the whole population of Europe is sharing in the benefits of high average prosperity.

In this paper we seek to put Irish poverty rates in a comparative European context. We do so in a context whereby the Irish economic boom and EU enlargement have led to increasing reservations being expressed regarding rates deriving from the EU ‘at risk of poverty’ indicator. Our comparative analysis reports findings for both overall levels of poverty and variation by household reference person characteristics for this indicator and a consistent poverty measure for Ireland, the UK and five smaller European countries spanning a range of welfare regimes. Our finding demonstrate that the distinctiveness of Ireland’s situation lies not in the overall levels of poverty per se but in the very high penalties associated with being in household where the household reference person is a lone parent or excluded from the labour market.

A joint concern with multidimensionality and dynamics is a defining feature of the pervasive use of the terminology of social exclusion in the European Union. The notion of social exclusion focuses attention on economic vulnerability in the sense of exposure to risk and uncertainty. Sociological concern with these issues has been associated with the thesis that risk and uncertainty have become more pervasive and extend substantially beyond the working class. This paper combines features of recent approaches to statistical modelling of poverty dynamics and multidimensional deprivation in order to develop our understanding of the dynamics of economic vulnerability. An analysis involving nine countries and covering the first five waves of the European Community Household Panel shows that, across nations and time, it is possible to identify an economically vulnerable class. This class is characterised by heightened risk of falling below a critical resource level, exposure to material deprivation and experience of subjective economic stress. Cross-national differentials in persistence of vulnerability are wider than in the case of income poverty and less affected by measurement error. Economic vulnerability profiles vary across welfare regimes in a manner broadly consistent with our expectations. Variation in the impact of social class within and across countries provides no support for the argument that its role in structuring such risk has become much less important. Our findings suggest that it is possible to accept the importance of the emergence of new forms of social risk and acknowledge the significance of efforts to develop welfare states policies involving a shift of opportunities and decision making on to individuals without accepting the “death of social

class” thesis.

In this paper we address the question of the relative importance of within and between country differences in income and material deprivation in the European Union in the context of recent suggestions that insufficient attention has been paid to the latter. In particular, we respond to the argument that the ‘state bounded’ relative income approach obscures the significanceof EU-wide reference groups. Making use of EU-SILC 2004, we have sought to quantify the magnitude of relevant within and between country differences and their relative impact. Overall, our analysis supports the view that the predominant frame of reference is a national one. The limited impact of European reference groups observed in our analysis does not require explanation in terms of the emergence of a European social stratification system. Furthermore, the significance of such comparisons depends not only on the expectations of those affected by European inequalities but on the degree of legitimacy afforded to ensuing demands. While an EU-wide income-threshold can provide information regarding progress of the Union towards greater social cohesion, its usage for this purpose does not require a strong sense of European identity. Given, the current status of the European Social Model it would seem unwise to attribute an undue degree of policy relevance to the relatively modest impact of EU-wide reference groups revealed in our analysis.

In this paper we take advantage of the recent availability of EU SILC data relating to a wide range of EU countries to contribute to the recent debate relating to the Europeanization of reference groups. Our analysis addresses both weak and strong versions of the thesis. The former proposes that notions of an acceptable level of participation in one’s own society come to be influenced significantly by knowledge of conditions in other societies. The latter argues that people increasingly perceive themselves as part of a larger European stratification system. Our analysis leads us to reject both versions of the thesis. Rather than material deprivation having a uniform effect on subjective economic stress across national boundaries, its impact is highly dependent on national context. The impact of consumption deprivation declines in a proportionate manner as the level of national deprivation increases. An assumption of uniform effects across the EU would lead us to miss people in richer societies experiencing genuine exclusion from their societies while counting substantial numbers in such societies who are not experiencing such exclusion. In a context where the Europeanization of inequality is raising issues relating to both national and transnational forms of legitimacy, it is important to understand that there is no necessary relationship between such Europeanization and the Europeanization of reference groups.

This paper uses new data from EU-SILC for twenty-six European countries to examine the structure and distribution of material deprivation in the enlarged EU. We identify three distinct dimensions of material deprivation relating to consumption, household facilities and neighbourhood environment, and construct indices of these dimensions for each country and the EU as a whole. The extent of variation across countries and welfare regimes is shown to depend on the dimension on which one focuses , as does the strength of the association with household income and subjective economic stress. The index of consumption deprivation has by far the highest correlation with income, provides a highly reliable measure in itself, and allows segments of the population to be identified that are sharply differentiated in terms of their multi-dimensional deprivation profiles. On the basis of this evidence we make some suggestions as to the manner in which the measurement of material deprivation in the European Union should be developed through the proposed special module of deprivation which will form part of the 2009 wave of EU-SILC.

The life cycle concept has come to have considerable prominence in Irish social policy debate. However, this has occurred without any systematic effort to link its usage to the broader literature relating to the concept. Nor has there been any detailed consideration of how we should set about operationalising the concept. In this paper we argue the need for ‘macro’ life cycle perspectives that have been influenced by recent challenges to the welfare state to be combined with ‘micro’ perspectives focusing on the dynamic and multidimensional nature of social exclusion. We make use of Irish EU-SILC 2005 data in developing a life cycle schema and considering its relationship to a range of indicators of social exclusion. At the European level renewed interest in the life cycle concept is associated with the increasing emphasis on the distinction between ‘new’ and ‘old’ social risks and the notion that the former are more ‘individualised’. Inequality and poverty rather than being differentially distributed between social classes are thought to vary between phases in the average work life. Our findings suggest the “death of social class” thesis is greatly over blown. A more accurate appreciation of the importance of new and old social risks requires that we systematically investigate the manner in which factors such as social class and the life cycle interact.

Sociologists have long been interested in the changing occupational structure and its link with changes in globalisation and technology. Following the continual gradual shift in employment toward service

work and a retreat in manufacturing, some have painted pictures of what this new kind of work will look like with images of “knowledge work”. Such accounts emphasise the role of information technology, the rising number of graduates entering the labour market, and the need for new skill sets that are differentially rewarded in the labour market. As average wages have grown in real terms, the distribution of wages has become more unequal: the log 90/10 differential has grown by 48 percent since 1975 in the UK. Others, argue that service work is in fact highly segmented, so its growth does not necessarily improve pay for all those employed in it. Changes in supply and demand of occupations may not change the rank-position of pay between them. Moreover, growth in an occupation might lead to a dispersion of pay within that occupation, contributing to overall inequality. In this paper, I use data from the General Household Survey and the Labour Force Surveys for the years 1972-2007. The paper has two main aims. First, trace out changes in the occupational structure in terms of employment, and second, to examine changes in the “hierarchy of pay” in terms of rank-position of the occupational group by median pay. We might expect occupations relating to information technology and “symbolic analysts” to jump up in the pay league. I define occupations at the three-digit level using the SOC80 classification. There are several interesting findings. They broadly support the polarization thesis. First, in terms of employment, there has been a growth in high paying jobs such as software engineers (as theories of technological change would predict). Yet, there has also been a growth in low-paying jobs as well such as care assistants (which the technological change theories would not predict) as these cannot be offshored. Moreover, there has been a marked decline in jobs that are in the middle of the income distribution such as clerical work. The decline of middle paying jobs is shown to have led to a growth in overall wage inequality. I present evidence that suggests people that once worked in the middle occupations have since been forced into low paying occupations as middle paying occupations have declined. A second finding is that despite these changes in the numbers of people working in certain kinds of occupations, there has been a remarkable stability in the wage structure year on year between occupations in terms of rank-positions of median pay. The absolute distance between occupations is becoming more dispersed in places (with occupations at the top of the distribution pulling away from the rest). This finding is especially true when one or two-digit specification is used. Even though occupations in the middle have declined in terms employment, they still rank in the middle of the pay distribution. Third, when we look at dispersion within occupational groups (at the three-digit level) the stability of the hierarchy of occupations changes a bit. There is more dispersion within high paying occupations relative to low paying occupations, so looking at just median pay for each occupational group might be misleading. It seems that this dispersion is increasing for the top occupations. A growth in the number of those employed in occupations where pay is highly dispersed is found to be a key driver behind the rise in overall pay inequality. Finally, I am able to predict to what extent the growth in overall inequality has been due to growth of dispersion within occupational groups or whether between occupational group has been more important. I find more support for the between group thesis.

There has been a ‘grateful slaves’ paradox in the job satisfaction literature. Women, although argued to be in a relatively disadvantaged position in the labour market, are more satisfied with their job than men. This paper approaches this paradox from a work orientations perspective. Using data from two British nationally representative surveys, the analysis yields three major findings on gender difference in job satisfaction. The first is that women, either in full-time or part-time employment, do present significantly higher levels of job satisfaction. Secondly, there are some differences in ‘taste’ that shapes job satisfaction between male/female full-time workers and female part-time workers. Finally, and most importantly, the differences in work orientations between male workers, female full-timers and female part-timers can completely account for the observed gender satisfaction differential.