Social class in Europe Rose, David; Harrison, Eric; Pevalin, David ...
2009, 2010, 20140404, 2009-10-22, 2014-04-04, 20090101, Letnik:
10
eBook, Book
This timely volume introduces a new social class schema, the European Socio-economic Classification (ESeC), which has been specifically developed and tested for use in EU comparative research. Social ...Class in Europe aims to introduce researchers to the new classification and its research potential. Since socio-economic classifications are so widely used in official and academic research, this collection is essential reading for all users of both government and academic social classifications. While primarily aimed at researchers who will be using the ESeC, the book's contents will also have a wider appeal as it is suitable for students taking substantive courses in European studies or as a supplementary text for undergraduates studying the EU, Sociology and Economics. Because of its inherent methodological interest, the book should prove a valuable tool for undergraduate and graduate courses that discuss how social scientists construct and validate basic measures. It will also be required reading for policy makers and analysts concerned with social inequality and social exclusion across Europe.
After more than a century of convergence, the economic fortunes of rich and poor regions of the United States have diverged dramatically over the last 40 years. Roughly a third of the US population ...now lives in metropolitan areas that are substantially richer or poorer than the nation as a whole, almost three times the proportion that did in 1980. In this paper I use counterfactual simulations based on Census microdata to understand the dynamics of regional divergence. I first show that regional divergence has primarily resulted from the richest people and places pulling away from the rest of the country. I then estimate the relative contributions to regional divergence of two major socioeconomic trends of recent decades: the sorting of people across metro areas by income level and the national rise in income inequality. I show that the national rise in income inequality is sufficient on its own to account for more than half of the observed divergence across regions, while income sorting on its own accounts for less than a quarter. The major driver of regional economic divergence is national-level income dispersion that has exacerbated preexisting spatial inequalities.
Classical and recent accounts of education posit that education legitimately, and authoritatively, classifies individuals to positions of lower or higher status. However, despite these general ...theoretical claims, empirical evidence that provides an in-depth picture of the relationship between educational attainment and social status remains scarce. In this paper, based on a dataset of 31 countries (International Social Survey Programme), we investigate the extent to which education is related to subjective social status, the degree to which this is seen as legitimate, and how this relationship varies between countries. We contextualize this relationship with the influence of the centrality of education in countries (operationalized as the share of higher educated). Results showed that education is an important source of subjective social status for individuals across all countries, and is seen as relatively legitimate and uncontroversial among all educational groups. Moreover, among those who perceive education to be more important for status, subjective status differences between educational groups are larger. Additionally, in countries with larger shares of higher educated, educational differences in subjective social status correlate more strongly with whether or not people obtained a degree of higher (tertiary) education. Lastly, the relationship between education and subjective social status in these countries is more independent from other sources of status, such as income and gender. It therefore seems to be that as higher education becomes more central and widely shared in a society, rather than leveling social differences, ironically it also becomes more distinctive and diagnostic in distinguishing people along group lines.
We studied the impact of an individual’s family and community background on their voting propensity in the 2015 Finnish parliamentary elections by employing a sibling design on an individual-level ...register-based dataset. The results showed that a quarter of the total variance in voter turnout was shared between siblings. Considering the dichotomous nature of the turnout variable, this implies that background has a strong effect which is almost comparable to sibling similarity in education. Parental socioeconomic position and voting, in turn, are equally important factors by explaining one-third of this shared part of the likelihood of voting. Mothers and fathers make roughly equal contributions. The results suggest that future studies of inter-generational effects in political participation, whenever possible, should use information from both maternal and paternal characteristics and multiple indicators of parental socioeconomic position simultaneously. We conclude by underlining that as people cannot choose their background, voting propensity is strongly influenced by factors beyond an individual’s own control, which is problematic for the functioning of inclusive democracy and equality of opportunity.
Job mobility offers opportunities for workers to obtain wage increases, but the returns on job changes differ considerably. We argue that part of this inequality results from a trade-off between ...occupational and regional mobility. Both mobility types offer alternative strategies for improving one's labor market position; however, each type also has unique restrictions. The high costs of regional mobility can thus induce occupational changes, even though the resulting human-capital devaluation leads to lower wage increases. We use linked retrospective life-course data for Germany (ALWA-ADIAB) and apply competing risks models to show that restrictions on one type of mobility drive individuals toward the other type of mobility. Using fixed-effects regressions, we then show that regional mobility yields higher wage improvements than occupational mobility does. We argue that restrictions on both types of mobility thus not only determine which type of mobility is chosen, thereby helping explain differential careers, but also contribute to inequality in wage trajectories due to differential returns on job mobility. The trade-off has explanatory power for the inequality between certain actors with different sets of mobility restrictions, such as parents and non-parents or employees in jobs with different skill demands, and it may also contribute to our better understanding of broader patterns of inequality—for instance, that caused by between-nation differences in job mobility.
Some previous studies of the relationship between women's labor force participation and household income inequality indicate that the promotion of the former has an equalizing effect on the latter; ...other studies insist that the promotion of women's labor force participation has a widening effect on household income inequality by way of the tendency toward assortative marriage. Hence, the relationship between women's labor force participation and household income inequality is unclear in the literature. This study aims to clarify the mechanism through which the interaction between household income and marriage produces social inequality by using mathematical and simulation-based approaches. The presented findings suggest that the promotion of women's labor force participation has a temporary widening effect on household income inequality, but an attenuating effect in the long run. They also state that assortative marriage itself has no widening effect on household income inequality, but rather an accelerating effect on widening inequality. Finally, by applying the model of that mechanism to Japan, I examine changes in household income inequality in that country.
Abstract
The slogan “Breast is Best” has been popularized by medical organizations and parenting networks to extoll the benefits of breastfeeding, yet the causal effects are widely debated. Our study ...contributes to the debate by examining whether breastfeeding has differential effects based on the propensity to breastfeed, which is also known as causal effect heterogeneity. Prior studies attempt to isolate the causal effect of breastfeeding by netting out confounding characteristics, but we argue that the effects of breastmilk are unlikely to operate in a vacuum. The social forces that promote or constrain breastfeeding among different populations in American society can also shape its effects. Using rich intergenerational panel data from the NLSY79 Child and Young Adult cohort (n = 7902), we evaluate heterogeneous treatment effects in the relationship between breastfeeding and child development from ages 4 to 14 using stratification-multilevel propensity score models. We find that breastfeeding is associated with small benefits for behavioral development, math scores, and academic ability among those with the highest propensities to breastfeed. By contrast, its small benefits for reading comprehension and vocabulary are concentrated among children with the lowest propensities to breastfeed. Our findings suggest that the social process of selection into breastfeeding cannot be fully disentangled from its estimated effects. The social context not only shapes who breastfeeds in American society, but also who benefits most.
In the Caribbean colony of Grenada in 1797, Dorothy Thomas signed the manumission documents for her elderly slave Betty. Thomas owned dozens of slaves and was well on her way to amassing the fortune ...that would make her the richest black resident in the nearby colony of Demerara. What made the transaction notable was that Betty was Dorothy Thomas's mother and that fifteen years earlier Dorothy had purchased her own freedom and that of her children. Although she was just one remove from bondage, Dorothy Thomas managed to become so rich and powerful that she was known as the Queen of Demerara.
Dorothy Thomas's story is but one of the remarkable acounts of pluck and courage recovered inEnterprising Women. As the microbiographies in this book reveal, free women of color in Britain's Caribbean colonies were not merely the dependent concubines of the white male elite, as is commonly assumed. In the capricious world of the slave colonies during the age of revolutions, some of them were able to rise to dizzying heights of success. These highly entrepreneurial women exercised remarkable mobility and developed extensive commercial and kinship connections in the metropolitan heart of empire while raising well-educated children who were able to penetrate deep into British life.
Recent research suggests that participation in organized extracurricular activities by children and adolescents can have educational and occupational payoffs. This research also establishes that ...participation is strongly associated with social class. However, debate has ensued—primarily among qualitative researchers—over whether the association between class and activities stems exclusively from inequalities in objective resources and constraints or whether differing cultural orientations have a role. We address this debate using a nationally representative sample of children's time diaries, merged with extensive information on their families, to model participation in, and expenditures on, organized activities. While we cannot directly observe cultural orientations, we account for a substantially wider array of resources and constraints than previous studies. We find that, above and beyond these factors, maternal education has a consistently large effect on the outcomes we study. We discuss the plausibility of a cultural interpretation of this result, as well as alternative interpretations.
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