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Do members of the committees under the Open Method of Coordination (OMC) find that there are coalitions of specific member states in these committees? If so, then what kind of side payments hold these coalitions together? For the first time in scholarly literature, and based on an empirical investigation, the findings in this paper document that two opposing coalitions – with the United Kingdom and France as the respective leaders – exist in OMC committees where mutual learning is the raison d’etre. In the existing theory on this subject in the EU, it is claimed that consensus decision-making leads to a weakening of coalition-building. All three committees analysed in this paper build on consensus decision-making, which is achieved after intensive meetings between all the members. However, it is contended that the ‘argumentative contest’ working method of the OMC committees leads to more – not less – coalition-building. On the basis of a test, it is also shown that these committees are primarily ...

In the context of successive global crises and rising household food insecurity in wealthy European countries there is renewed attention to the role of school meals as a welfare intervention. However, little is known about the extent to which school meals are a resource for low-income families living in different contexts. Drawing on a mixed methods study of food in low-income families in three European countries, this paper adopts a realist ontological stance and an embedded case study approach to address this question. The research concerns low-income families with children aged 11–15 years in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis in the UK, Portugal and Norway. Based on a comparative, multi-layered analysis of macro-, meso- and micro-level contexts, we argue that publicly funded, nutritious school meals protect children from the direct effects of poverty on their food security, whilst underfunded and weakly regulated school food provision compounds children’s experiences of disadvantage and exclusion. The paper concludes with recommendations for public policies that conceptualise school meals as a collective resource, like education, to which young people as bearers of the right to food are entitled.

Schools are an important setting wherein different identity dimensions are made available to youth. This paper argues that European identity can be a relevant unifying collective identity in ethnically diverse contexts. We study whether (or not) students who are confronted with a European and/or a multicultural dimension in their school curriculum, identify more strongly with a European identity. More specifically, we analyse whether the importance of these dimensions for European identification differs between a sample of ethnic majority and ethnic minority students. The results show that both the European and the multicultural curriculum predicted a stronger European identity for both groups. The effects of both dimensions on European identity were similar for ethnic majority students, while the multicultural dimension had significantly stronger effects on European identity for ethnic minority students. The paper thus highlights how curricula contribute to changing patterns of identification in a diversifying society.

The coronavirus pandemic, which first impacted European societies in early 2020, has created a twofold crisis by combining a health threat with economic turmoil. While the crisis has affected all European societies very significantly, its impact varies across countries, social groups, and societal domains. In an effort to provide a first overview of the effect of the coronavirus crisis, in this editorial we discuss contributions of 58 papers published as part of this special issue. These early research papers illustrate the varied impact of the pandemic on various areas of social life. The first group of studies in this special issue analyzes the effect of the pandemic on social inequalities with respect to gender, ethnic otherness, education, and work. A second stream of research focuses on the psychological consequences of the pandemic, especially with respect to wellbeing and resilience. Thirdly, the crisis is discussed on a societal level, in regard to welfare states, social policies, and approaches to crisis governance. In a fourth line of inquiry, several studies have analyzed the impact of the pandemic on social solidarity and cohesion. A fifth strand of research is devoted to examining the role of culture and lifestyles. This review ends with a discussion of areas for future research trajectories. published

The wide-reaching government restrictions in the fight against COVID-19 are compelling religious communities in Switzerland to modify their ritual practice in order to comply with the state's stipulations. With a focus on religious authority following Bourdieu, this paper researches the ritual modifications in the Roman Catholic Church and an Islamic organisation via the three categories of change, shift, and cancellation. Modifications were implemented to avoid the cancellation of public rituals which highlights their importance. As it finally became inevitable, the decision-makers within the two communities were confronted with the need to justify their compliance to state rules within the community and towards the secular outside world. This paper shows that the constitution of religious authority in response to ritual restrictions is dependent on the degree of establishment within the societal context and the division of religious labour in the community.

Although Christian migrant groups make up a sizeable part of the immigrant population in Europe, little is known about their religiosity. This paper studies patterns of intergenerational change and proposes and tests hypotheses that specify when and why changes across generations are stronger. Using data from the European Social Survey (2002–2018) on 33 European countries, it is found that there is a strong pattern of intergenerational decline in the level of religiosity among Christian migrant groups in Europe. This process of religious decline is by no means universal. Results show that children from two foreign-born parents are much more religious than children from intermarried (foreign-born and native) couples. We also observe that intergenerational decline is much less pronounced in European countries that are more religious. Finally, when Christian migrant groups belong to a religious minority group, this is associated with higher levels of religiosity in both the first and second generation. It is argued that these insights can explain the ‘puzzling’ strong intergenerational religious transmission among Muslim migrant groups in Western European societies.

In the last decade, Europe has been affected by several crises, which had and still have detrimental consequences for the life of many people, suffering from unemployment, poverty and social exclusion. The special issue seeks to explore how these crises have challenged and promoted solidarities within and between European countries. In the introductory paper, first a typology of different types of solidarity – social, political and welfare – is developed to account for the varied meanings and uses of the term. Second, the origins and scopes of the different types of solidarity and their link to crises are discussed. After introducing the special issue papers, five contributions to the understanding of crises and solidarities are highlighted, namely: the meanings of solidarity are varied and discursively contested; different types of solidarity merge and interact; crises are a necessary, but not sufficient condition for solidarity to emerge; crises alter the scope of solidarity; economic shocks can have long-term effects on solidarity. Thus, crises have led to a reconfiguration of solidarities in Europe. published

The aim of this paper is to investigate the logic behind lay people’s ideological position taking and how this is determined by class position. I therefore examine to what extent there exists a similarity between the configuration of the political field and the structure of the space of social classes. The paper includes a brief description of the two most salient political alignments today, namely the old economic alignment and the new cultural alignment, and an explanation of how this two-dimensional political structure pertains to the rise of the new middle class. Directly related to this, I also present a discussion on the importance of the ethical habitus to understand the mechanism behind class determined political position taking. Subsequently, based on survey data and using multiple correspondence analysis, I empirically reproduce this political structure for Flanders (Belgium). Finally, relying on the visualized regression technique, I demonstrate that there exists a clear structural similarity between the political field and the space of social classes, which is a strong indication that the class-engendered ethical habitus is, in fact, the underlying factor that gives structure to the variations in political attitudes.

This paper addresses the tensions arising from the intersection of norms and practices of support in situations in which intergenerational support is the main household strategy for coping with precariousness in Romania. This paper describes competing meanings of solidarity and reveals gendered experiences of ambiguity with respect to the sustainability of help exchanges within the context of economic vulnerability. Romania displays high public acceptance of intergenerational support, while the country’s deficient social welfare system prompts families to intensify their help exchanges. Findings based on in-depth interviews suggest that private arrangements are compounded by unbalanced help exchanges among generations. With the state and the community support directed towards lower social strata, these arrangements give rise to many tensions. Parents become excessively burdened by the constant obligation to help their adult children, while the children’s dependence upon their parents limits the op...

When explaining participation in undeclared work, the dominant theorisation views undeclared workers as rational economic actors participating in undeclared work when the benefits exceed the expected costs of being caught and punished. An alternative theorisation views participants’ in the undeclared economy as social actors driven into undeclared work by their lack of vertical trust (in governments) and horizontal trust (in others). To evaluate these perspectives, this paper reports data from 27,565 interviews conducted for a 2019 Eurobarometer survey on undeclared work in 28 European countries. This reveals that raising the expected costs of being caught and punished has no significant impact on the likelihood of conducting undeclared work. However, greater vertical and horizontal trust have a significant impact on preventing participation in undeclared work, and vertical and horizontal trust also moderate the effectiveness of using penalties and detection to deter engagement in undeclared work. The implication for theory is that a social actor perspective is advocated. The result is a call for a policy shift away from the dominant deterrence approach that increases the penalties and risks of detection, and towards a policy approach focused on improving vertical and horizontal trust.

International survey results reveal that Turkey is an extreme example of a distrustful society. A very high level of distrust in the country is not only a bottleneck for its socio-economic development but also for a healthy dialogue between different groups in the society. This paper studies micro-level survey data from 2012 to analyze the determinants of different trust types – namely, interpersonal, group and political trust, with respect to various individual characteristics, identity preferences, ethnic background and voting behaviors of respondents. The analysis suggests that political behavior has an impact in polarizing the society. Moreover, ‘citizenship of Turkey’ is seen as not a proper overarching identity, as it does not have a positive impact on either group or interpersonal trust. When the effects of other individual characteristics are analyzed, it is observed that the level of income and education are significant factors in determining all types of trust discussed in this paper.

Most cross-country studies on educational systems aim at identifying the net effects of single institutional aspects on students’ outcomes. In this paper, I argue that educational systems are best conceived as configurations of interconnected elements. The aim of this paper is to provide a systematic assessment of how selected features of the educational system and of the immigration context combine in countries where second-generation immigrants severely underperform their native peers, net of socio-economic differentials. Using PISA data from 2006 and 2009, I compare the relative mathematics achievement of students with and without an immigrant background in 17 Western-European educational systems. The empirical results, based on fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis, point to the existence of functional equivalents and institutional complementarities. Equally severe disadvantages can be found in the rigidly tracking systems of German-speaking and Dutch-speaking countries, but also in the h...

The academic interest on skilled migration patterns has increased at the same time as the flows of skilled migrants around the world. Despite this tendency, there is still a lack of knowledge regarding the migratory projects of particular ethnic communities or in specific receiving contexts. The current paper examines the migratory experiences of Romanian professionals and the extent to which the incorporation into the Spanish labor market represents a turning point or a transition in their overall life trajectory. Based on a qualitative design, the paper highlights how some profiles are more sensitive to sending and receiving contexts (structural elements), display strategies through mobilization of universities or social networks and shape disrupted trajectories. Others, respond to globalized dynamics, mobilize corporations and finally develop smooth labor transitions. The main elements explaining these patterns are tackled and explained in three profiles of professionals: those who arrive to Sp...

This analysis uses the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions data for 2006–2011 to examine whether there is an identifiable relationship between public and private provision of financial assistance and whether increased public support is associated with receiving more or less private support. In line with previous research, the findings suggest that households in receipt of certain public financial assistance are more likely to receive financial assistance from their friends and family. Yet the paper goes further and argues that the effect is dependent on the nature of the policy. Specifically, active policies not related to previous labour market participation appear to be associated with greater financial assistance from friends and family compared to traditional, passive forms of welfare assistance which themselves show no effect. The paper therefore concludes that the association between private and public financial assistance is dependent upon the type of public assistance that is being considered.

This paper argues that Covid-19 has produced a set of social characters during the corona crisis and that these characters represent different approaches toward control. Social characters emerge as...

The paper is concerned with the spatial dimension of the coronavirus crisis and the tensions it created in multilevel governance in the Polish–German border region. Regarding the spatial dimension ...

This paper presents the preliminary results of the ‘Pandemic Diaries’ research project, carried out by a 5-member team of Polish researchers under a form of open diary writing competition. Its aim ...

This paper addresses the impact of COVID-19-induced uncertainty on union formation intentions in Italy. We acknowledge that decisions made in uncertain conditions rely on personal narratives of the...

This paper provides a timely evaluation of whether the main COVID-19 lockdown policies – remote work, short-time work and closure of schools and childcare – have an immediate effect on the German p...

In this paper, we conceptualize EU policy-making as a vital field of professionalization and depict the emergence and various dimensions of an area of professional work nowadays labelled ‘EU Affairs’. Thus, we argue that the EU constitutes more than just a supranational layer of decision-making, but is at the same time a pertinent and influential producer of expert knowledge and sets the stage for the emergence of specialized job profiles, professional careers, and working contexts. While usually acting ‘in the shadow’ and ‘in the back doors’ of EU policy-making, specialized groups of professionals make use of recognized expert knowledge. Drawing on social field theory and current approaches to professionalism and professionalization, the paper scrutinizes the transnational scope of EU Affairs professionalism in a topological manner by distinguishing different arenas and types of professional involvement in EU Affairs. In this way, we aim to go beyond prevailing bureaucracy- and governance-centred...

This paper addresses the main pathways through which households avoid slipping into poverty in Romania by employing a life-course approach. Recent researches on social stratification found that in every country we can delineate a particular social layer composed of households living just above the poverty threshold, whose members struggle to reach a more secure prosperity while facing constant threats of downward mobility. Drawing on recent precarious prosperity research, and based on in-depth interviews carried out in 2013 with 25 households situated in between poverty and prosperity from a Romanian city (Cluj-Napoca), we use a life-course approach in order to account for the main routes into precarious decency of our sampled cases. We found evidence that opportunities for agency in order to overcome precariousness are contingent on household's type, its gender composition and members’ interlocking life trajectories. Life-course approach allows us to understand household situation in time perspective and to account for the influence of changing structural context framing individuals’ life-course patterns. At the same time, individuals’ life courses are increasingly de-standardised within the current post-communist context. The transition from state planned to market economy, coupled with the minimalistic welfare state, and with the low social and institutional trust altering the solidarity of communities are joint factors leading to declining opportunities to rely on other resources than those provided by household members. Interviewed households vary according to their composition, history and assets, further affecting the odds of slipping into poverty. Therefore, our paper raises concerns for policy-makers.

The purpose of this paper is to explore whether the returns to attending a prestigious higher education institution have increased in Norway for students who graduated in 1975 to students who graduated in 1999. A handful of published studies find that the returns to attending prestigious institutions have increased in the last decades. However, they all study the USA, which has a decentralized wage bargaining system. The results in this paper shed light on whether a centralized wage bargaining system, typical for many west-European countries, prevents the returns to attending prestigious institutions from increasing. I find that attending prestigious institutions pays off economically in Norway and that the returns have increased throughout the investigated period. Another aim of this paper is to investigate whether the returns have increased more at the top of the earnings distribution than at the bottom. I find that the returns are highest at the top of the earnings distribution and have increas...

This paper addresses the main pathways through which households avoid slipping into poverty in Romania by employing a life course approach. Recent researches on social stratification found that in every country we can delineate a particular social layer composed of households living just above the poverty threshold whose members struggle to reach a more secure prosperity while facing constant threats of downward mobility. Drawing on recent precarious prosperity research and based on in depth interviews carried out in 2013 with 25 households situated in between poverty and prosperity from a Romanian city (Cluj Napoca) we use a life course approach in order to account for the main routes into precarious decency of our sampled cases. We found evidence that opportunities for agency in order to overcome precariousness are contingent on household’s type its gender composition and members’ interlocking life trajectories. Life course approach allows us to understand household situation in time perspective and to account for the influence of changing structural context framing individuals’ life course patterns. At the same time individuals’ life courses are increasingly de standardised within the current post communist context. The transition from state planned to market economy coupled with the minimalistic welfare state and with the low social and institutional trust altering the solidarity of communities are joint factors leading to declining opportunities to rely on other resources than those provided by household members. Interviewed households in vary according to their composition history and assets further affecting the odds of slipping into poverty. Therefore our paper raises concerns for policy makers.

The recent COVID crisis has had many consequences on social life. This paper focuses on potential effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on fertility intentions. We employ a theoretical approach, analysi...

The current pandemic has generated many conspiracy theories (CTs). In this paper, we investigate several determinants of COVID-19 CTs using survey data from Romania. Some of our findings are consis...

This paper offers an explorative analysis of the online social practices of livestreamed concerts as one of the most popular cultural outlets during the COVID-19 imposed ‘lockdown’ in Europe. Ritual theory is used to investigate the potential of these virtual concerts in generating a collective consciousness, and the related feelings of social solidarity and resilience, specifically important in times of physical isolation. Through a thematic content analysis of the comments (n = 1501) posted during livestreamed techno concerts in the Netherlands, we find that both old and new ritual actions are used to form online communities. While these ritual activities mark participation and remind members of a previous collective feeling, the omission of visceral elements of a physical audience hampers the establishment of a renewed sense of social solidarity.

The COVID-19 outbreak and the far-reaching lockdown measures are having direct and indirect effects on complex social domains, including opportunities for crime offline and online. This paper presents preliminary analyses about the short-term effect of COVID-19 and lockdown measures on cyber-dependent crime and online fraud in the UK. Time series analyses from data about crimes known to police between May 2019 and May 2020 are used to explore the extent to which cybercrime has been affected by the COVID-19 outbreak. More specifically, we examine whether cybercrime has suffered an increase during the months with the strictest lockdown restrictions, as an effect of the displacement of crime opportunities from physical to online environments. Results indicate that reports of cybercrime have increased during the COVID-19 outbreak, and these were remarkably large during the two months with the strictest lockdown policies and measures. In particular, the number of frauds associated with online shopping and auctions, and the hacking of social media and email, which are the two most common cybercrime categories in the UK, have seen the largest increases in the number of incidents. The increase in cyber-dependent crimes has mainly been experienced by individual victims rather than organisations.

In post-conflict and segregated societies, overcoming high prejudice between groups is essential for peaceful coexistence. In this paper, we explore the roles of direct contact (face-to-face contac...

This paper measures both individual- and contextual effects of generalised trust on Europeans’ attitudes towards immigration. Our data come from round 7 of the European Social Survey (ESS) with whi...

This paper analyses the willingness of individual citizens to show solidarity in the context of the Eurozone crisis. Taking a cost-sensitive approach to solidarity, we assessed the extent to which ...

This paper discusses how to explain the rise of a new nationalism in Europe. It begins by problematizing the inconsistencies in the current culturalist, socio-economic, and socio-political approach...

The major influx of refugees to Europe, especially in 2015, has led to immense solidarity, but also hostility among European citizens. In the wake of the so-called 'refugee crisis' country differences in the willingness to help displaced people have become a salient issue of European integration. In this paper, we explain country differences in the public support for helping refugees across Europe at a critical time-point - spring 2016 - just after the influx of displaced people had peaked. Theoretically, we base our explanation of country differences on economic threat, inter-group contact, welfare state, and political framing theories. Using data from a Eurobarometer survey across the 28 EU member states, we show that solidarity with refugees varies significantly between countries. Controlling for individual characteristics of respondents and utilizing a multilevel design, we find that solidarity with refugees is highest in countries with an extensive welfare state and a historically high share of immigrants, whereas there is no effect of countries' economic situation or strength of right-wing parties. On the individual level of respondents, however, we find that people with a more precarious economic background, little institutional trust, and a right-wing political orientation express lower solidarity with refugees.

The major influx of refugees to Europe, especially in 2015, has led to immense solidarity, but also hostility among European citizens. In the wake of the so-called 'refugee crisis' country differences in the willingness to help displaced people have become a salient issue of European integration. In this paper, we explain country differences in the public support for helping refugees across Europe at a critical time-point - spring 2016 - just after the influx of displaced people had peaked. Theoretically, we base our explanation of country differences on economic threat, inter-group contact, welfare state, and political framing theories. Using data from a Eurobarometer survey across the 28 EU member states, we show that solidarity with refugees varies significantly between countries. Controlling for individual characteristics of respondents and utilizing a multilevel design, we find that solidarity with refugees is highest in countries with an extensive welfare state and a historically high share of immigrants, whereas there is no effect of countries' economic situation or strength of right-wing parties. On the individual level of respondents, however, we find that people with a more precarious economic background, little institutional trust, and a right-wing political orientation express lower solidarity with refugees.

Given the importance of trust and confidence for the individual consumer's well-being and societies' overall consumer conditions, this paper intends to conceptualize, investigate and map European consumer markets' trust regimes. Based on statistics from DG Sanco's Consumer Condition Scoreboard 2012, trust dimensions in 29 European countries (EU27 + Norway and Iceland) are reanalyzed and compared. The material reveals large differences in consumer markets' trust regime levels across Europe. This paper suggests that one way people evaluate consumer market institutions, is by their perceptions of food and product safety. The concluding discussion gives attention to possible discrepancies between consumer markets' trust regimes and consumer institutions' trustworthiness.

This paper explores cross-national variations in the impact of education on labour market outcomes using the risk of unemployment and occupational status as the key dependent variables. The study a...

The paper is aimed at understanding how collective action has been organised, sustained and transformed in the wake of the 2008 economic crisis by looking at three different Italian cases of Sustai...

This paper argues that private regulation has been essential to the making of the common European market. The distinction between negative and positive integration, usually used to understand the making of the common European market, only gives us part of the picture, as it focuses on public authorities and the regulation issued by them, and tends to ignore private authorities. A focus on private regulation is suggested to enlarge the focus on positive and negative integration, and this is used in an analysis of EU's removal of barriers to trade from 1958 to 2000. The paper shows that private regulation in the form of technical standardisation has become essential to European market making.

This paper examines the determinants of family migration from a post-socialist country, the former German Democratic Republic (today, the eastern part of reunified Germany), to a western country, West Germany. The paper seeks to answer the following questions: (1) How does the migration behavior of married and cohabitating men and women differ from that of individuals who live alone? (2) What factors influence family migration? (3) Are there gender-specific differences in the factors that influence migration? Hypotheses are derived from theories of gender roles, household economics, and bargaining to investigate the migration of individuals and families. Data from the Socio-Economic Panel Study covering the period 1992 to 2007 are analyzed using logistic hierarchical regression models. The results show that the male partner's education level is the most important determinant of migration, whereas the female partner's education is of secondary importance. The results generally support the predictions of gender role theory. Despite their egalitarian views and socialization in a socialist country, couples from East Germany exhibit a traditional orientation toward gender roles when making migration decisions.

Labor market prospects for youth have deteriorated significantly in many OECD countries over recent decades. While the extent and consequences of falling youth employment are commonly studied, attempts at understanding its causes have been much more limited. The present paper attempts to fill this explanatory gap. We suggest that the secular decline in youth employment can be accounted for by the structural change of skill. This process of structural change has two interrelated components: (a) one part where skill supply (individual educational attainment) and skill demand (educational requirements of jobs) grow together in what can be called matched upgrading and (b) another part where excess skill supply leads to mismatch and crowding-out. These components of skill growth have commonly been treated separately and incompletely in the literature. We build on both of them in developing our account of why the labor market for youth has weakened. Using data on 10 European countries from the EU Labor Force Surveys over the period 1998 to 2015, we estimate associations between the structural change of skill and youth employment decline. The main conclusion is that both matched skill upgrading and overeducation are strongly and negatively linked to young people’s employment chances.

This study examines the relationship between the provision of informal care and three specific feelings important in later life – loneliness, meaningfulness of life, and overload. The paper contrib...

The European Union has been constructed through common ontologies of a world composed and divided on spatial scales. This paper elaborates on this point and examines anthropologically some of the key notions that have been called on to construct the EU, notably that of ‘culture’. It is suggested that we might profitably take ‘culture’ out of our own analytical tool-kits and treat it instead as an interesting but problematic invention. Drawing on the author's own fieldwork inside European institutions, the paper explores relevant aspects of life inside the Commission and what it is to be ‘European’. The paper sets out some of the negative and positive ways in which ‘culture’ is lived or understood in the Commission, and it outlines some of the problems of ‘culture’ as an analytical tool, from its earlier history to the stereotypes it still encourages, and in so doing points to aspects of the practical imagination and difficulties of the EU project more generally. We see that Europe may respect cul...

This paper illustrates how the study of literature can inform sociological research on racism and antisemitism by sharpening our perception of the commonalities and differences between the respective stereotypes and of their functions for the construction of collective self-identities. Drawing on the case study of Gustav Freytag's best-selling novel Soll und Haben (Debit and Credit, 1855), the paper argues that antisemitism and racism frequently represent complementary reactions to the experience of capitalist modernisation.

This paper discusses the relationship between antisemitism and Islamophobia, focusing on debates in Arab newspapers in the wake of the Second Intifada and 9/11 and then in response to two issues of contention for Muslim communities in Europe, the Danish cartoon crisis in 2006 and the Swiss referendum on building minarets in 2009. The paper relates these debates to major UN and EU resolutions for combating racism, Islamophobia and antisemitism. The aim of this paper is to explore how far discussion of antisemitism and Islamophobia in the Arab world is dominated by those who see Islamophobia as the real danger in today's Europe and antisemitism as a Zionist ploy, and how far antisemitism and Islamophobia have become two competing terms relating to two communities that perceive themselves as victims of prejudice and racism and also of each other. The paper seeks to qualify this image. It acknowledges that the entanglement of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict adds a political aspect to the discussion ...

This paper deals with the ambivalent position of Turkish nationalism vis-a-vis the Alevi ethno-religious identity. The Alevi are the largest ethno-religious minority in Turkey. Via a critical pluralist stance, the authors argue that the debates revolving around the origins and nature of the Alevi identity disclose the cultural –and, to a lesser extent, romantic – characteristics of Turkish nationalism and its relative inability to accommodate a fully civic and pluralist notion of national identity. The paper argues that the Alevi question is one of the litmus tests that reveal Turkish nationalism's uneasiness with adopting the idea of an ethno-religiously plural society. Two hegemonic branches of Turkish nationalism conceptualize the Alevi identity through ethno-cultural and religio-cultural lenses. This leads to the Alevi being coded as ‘ambivalent citizens’. This ambivalent status creates a bifurcated yet intertwined process of belonging and non-belonging, authenticity and stigmatization. The p...

On the basis of inter-cohort comparisons, this paper describes patterns of intra-generational occupational mobility in Germany and their long-term trends since World War II. It also presents conceptual links between individual mobility and developments of inequality along the life course, with a special focus on the question of the extent to which employment careers are characterised by specific forms of cumulative advantage and disadvantage. Finally, it is asked how intra-generational developments are related to inter-generational social mobility. The paper also discusses how mobility patterns can be linked to specific institutions which – together with labour market conditions – are crucial determinants of the development of inequality within a cohort. In its empirical part, the paper presents evidence from cohort-specific analyses based on life-course data from a broad range of West German birth cohorts.

The current paper is aimed at contributing to the ongoing debate about divergence and convergence of family patterns in Europe. By adding several Eastern European countries and using several additional background indicators of cohabiting unions, the paper explores previous considerations of unmarried cohabitation. The main conclusion is that, as a universal trend, cohabitation is spreading across Europe and that while acquiring a normative value in a country it starts to develop its internal diversity. Besides convergence (with reference to universalistic approach), there is a noticeable trend towards divergence of the cohabitation patterns in Europe. The analysis is based on the European Social Survey, Round 2, 3 and 4 (2004, 2006 and 2008 respectively) and includes the data of 15 European countries (Belgium, Switzerland, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Sweden, France, Slovakia and Slovenia).

Upper classes and elites are usually exclusive circles which are hard to enter. In this paper we approach one such group using a focus group interview: a group from the Swedish-speaking upper class in officially bilingual Finland. Our paper addresses Bourdieu's idea of distinction by cultural or taste distinctions. In comparison to some international studies on elites and upper classes, our group was surprisingly keen on expressing disgust towards other tastes and lifestyles and therefore other classes and/or social groups. One might be surprised at how efficiently distinction works in the Swedish-speaking old upper class and how politically incorrect its outspokenness about cultural superiority is. In this specific group, there is a double-distinction: not only are Finnish speakers looked down upon regardless of their class position, almost any other group is, too. In this sense, this is more or less a case par excellence of Bourdieu's theory of distinction.

Although scholarly interest in family migration is increasing, along with attention to the role of women and children in migration processes, this aspect of mobility continues to be poorly understood, particularly in the European context. Research on migration has tended to focus on primary migrants and to pay less attention to whether migrants arrive with families, resulting in a restricted picture of the impact of migration. This paper examines the presence and participation of families and children in the process of migration. It does so within the specific context of intra-European labour migration. Based on a qualitative study of migration and the integration of Polish families and children in Scotland, the paper explores changes in family structures and migration patterns that result in diverse new household migration behaviours. It argues that the locations of migrants within the European Community have become more fluid, with families being increasingly likely to inhabit more than one res...

This paper considers the societal consequences of the coronavirus crisis through the lens of critical social theory, advancing a social-theoretical perspective as its main contribution. The central argument is that the question of post-pandemic societal transformation be examined in terms of the pre-existing legitimation crisis of neoliberalism. This is developed through three steps. First, a theoretical framework is outlined for considering social transformation in terms of discursively mediated collective learning processes. Then, two loci of the legitimation crisis of neoliberalism are explored, the political crisis and the climate crisis, to delineate a series of antagonistic fronts shaping the contestation of this model. From this, two broad social movements contending for control of societal development emerge: radical-pluralism and reactionary-populism. Finally, the coronavirus crisis is briefly considered in terms of its interaction with this cleavage.

The COVID-19 outbreak and resultant economic crisis has led to governments in Europe taking extraordinary action to support citizens. Bodies such as the International Labour Organisation (ILO) recommend such measures should include targeted support for the most affected population groups. Women form one of these groups, with disproportionate impacts on their employment and economic resources already documented. Although the disruption brought about by the COVID-19 crisis has the potential to reshape gender relations for everyone’s benefit, there are concerns that the crisis will exacerbate underlying gender inequalities. Though these impacts are likely to be felt globally, public policy has the potential to mitigate them and to ensure a gender-sensitive recovery from the crisis. This paper introduces a gendered lens on the employment and social policies European countries have established since the crisis, with a brief comparative analysis of short-time working schemes in four countries – Germany, Italy, Norway, and the UK. Ongoing research seeks to extend the comparative, gendered analysis of the design, access and impacts of COVID-19 employment and social policies across Europe.