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Political participation is socially distorted: Socio-economic resources affecting the probability of individuals becoming politically active question the principle of political equality. Such inequality in participation based on social stratification is well documented for elections, while research on inequality in referendum participation is still scarce. Based on the observation that such inequality varies between referendums, this paper explores referendum-specific contextual factors that may affect socially distorted referendum participation. We leverage information from an original dataset covering 1788 districts in 35 German municipalities for 68 local referendums held between 2000 and 2019. The results of our multilevel models indicate that concurrent first-order elections boost referendum turnout and decrease social stratification, while the closeness of the decision increases turnout but does not affect stratification bias. Moreover, we find a curvilinear relationship between turnout and stratification, with stratification only diminishing from participation levels above 40–50%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a qualitative analysis of decisions of 64 community-college students in seeking a transfer in Hong Kong. In weighing a number of educational options and then offers, with a similar level of desirability in some cases, in order to achieve their transfers, advantaged-class and disadvantaged-class respondents struggled with different logics of reasoning and negotiated anxiously with their changing structural realities. This qualitative analysis addresses the contextual, processual and emotional aspects of their decision making and provides a more convincing illustration of how the secondary effect of social stratification operates against a changing landscape of higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, Chinese college graduates have faced a challenging employment situation, calling for an analysis of the social stratification function of higher education. This paper used linear regression to analyze factors influencing the occupational status attainment of college graduates. The social stratification function of higher education was found to be significant. Educational factors were essential for occupational status attainment. Nevertheless, new graduates' occupational status could also be affected by individual and family factors. On the whole, college graduates achieved stratum promotion. Men had higher occupational status and longer mobility distance than women, and rural graduates had higher occupational status and longer mobility distance than urban graduates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on key features of the use of sex and gender in titles of articles about women, science, and engineering over an important forty-six-year period (1965–2010). The focus is theoretically and empirically consequential. Theoretically, the paper addresses science as a critical case that connects femininity/masculinity to social stratification; and the use of sex and gender as an enduring, analytical issue that reveals perspectives on hierarchies of femininity/masculinity. Empirically, this article identifies the emergence, development, and stabilization of published articles about women, science, and engineering that use sex and gender in their titles. The distinctive method involves search, retrieval, and review of 23,430 articles, using intercoder reliabilities for inclusion/exclusion. This results in a uniquely specified and comprehensive set of articles on our subject and the identification of titles with sex and gender. Findings point to (1) the growth of gender titles, (2) their increase in every field, (3) differing concentrations of sex and gender titles in journals, (4) a span of telling topic areas, and (5) higher citation rates of gender, compared to sex, titles. Broader implications appear in reasons for the growth of gender titles, meanings of topic areas that occur, insights into social inequalities and science policies, and emerging complexities of nonbinary categories of sex/gender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article offers a new framework for understanding the early East European post-war that introduces and conceptualizes the idea of "Void Communities." The core of the argument is that the disappearance of various groups of Others—ethnic, religious, and class—was one of the most important consequences of the Second World War for Central and Eastern Europe, and particularly for Poland and Ukraine. The Void left by those who had disappeared could be described on several levels, such as physical absence, social and economical dysfunctionality, transformation of the social structure and stratification, property transfer, decline of moral values and norms, and changes in local culture and traditions. Based on an extensive oral history research (of more than 150 interviews) and in-depth reading of ego documents, the article prioritizes the first-hand perspective of witnesses and centres on those who remained in the post-war Void Communities after their neighbours had been murdered, deported, resettled, or encouraged to leave semi-voluntarily. While the paper primarily focuses on the historical region of Galicia, now divided between Poland and Ukraine, the source material used to analyze the framework for Void Communities includes documents associated with the entire pre-war Polish Second Republic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite decades of research on residential mobility and neighborhood effects, we know comparatively less about how people sort across geography. In recent years, scholars have been calling for research that considers residential selection as a social stratification process. In this paper, we present findings from work our team has done over the last 17 years to explore how people end up living where they do, relying in large part on systematically sampled in‐depth narrative interviews with families. We focus on four key decisions: whether to move; where to move; whether to send children to school in the neighborhood; and whether to rent or own a home. We found that many residential mobility decisions among the poor were "reactive," with unpredictable shocks forcing families out of their homes. As a result of reactive moving, housing search time frames became shorter and poor parents employed short‐term survival solutions to secure housing instead of long‐term investment thinking about neighborhood and school district quality. These shocks, constraints, and compressed time frames led parents to decouple some dimensions of neighborhoods and schools from the housing search process while maximizing others, like immediacy of shelter, unit quality, and proximity to work and child care. Finally, we found that policies can significantly shape and better support some of these decisions. Combined, our research revealed some of the processes that underlie locational attainment and the intergenerational transmission of neighborhood context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In spite of the fact that Argentina has experienced a process of high sustained growth that created four million jobs, income distribution did not register substantial changes. The aim of this paper is to analyze the relationship between growth, employment, and income distribution; to clarify under what conditions a virtuous cycle of growth and employment may come to not have substantial impacts on income distribution; and to address the challenges that the working class will face in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of the impact of structural changes in sports organizations on the nature of fan cultures have been an important part of the sociology of sport in recent years, and such studies have come to rely on the concepts of class, commodification, and consumption. This paper suggests that although such concepts are indeed important, their contentiousness and complexity are not always acknowledged, and that the concepts may therefore acquire an overgeneralized and taken-for-granted set of meanings. The paper uses examples from studies of football fan cultures in Britain to highlight some of the potential problems with this, before going on to outline some additional and alternative approaches to these terms, and to make suggestions as to how these might be incorporated into future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The most widely used measure for studying social, economic, and health inequality is the Gini index/ratio. Whereas other measures of inequality possess certain useful characteristics, such as the straightforward decomposability of the generalized entropy measures, the Gini index has remained the most popular, at least in part due to its ease of interpretation. However, the Gini index has a limitation in measuring inequality. It is less sensitive to how the population is stratified than how individual values differ. The twin purposes of this paper are to explain the limitation and to propose a model-based method—latent class/clustering analysis for understanding and measuring inequality. The latent cluster approach has the major advantage of being able to identify potential “classes” of individuals who share similar levels of income or one or more other attributes and to assess the fit of the model-based classes to the empirical data, based on different cluster distributional assumptions and the number of latent classes. This paper distinguishes class inequality from individual inequality, the type that is better captured by the Gini. Once the classes are estimated, the membership of estimated classes obtained from the best fitting model facilitates the decomposition of the Gini index into individual and class inequality. Class inequality is then measured by two relative stratification indices based on either the relative size of the Gini between-class components or the relative number of stratified individuals. Therefore, the Gini index is extended and assisted by model-based clustering to measure class inequality, thereby realizing its great potential for studying inequality. Income data from France and Hungary are used to illustrate the application of the method. INSETS: Figure 1. Gini indices and Lorenz curves for income data...;Figure 2. Empirical income distribution of France in 1990...;Figure 3. Income clustering in France, 1990.;Figure 4. Income clustering in Hungary, 1992. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a theoretical framework and an empirical example of the relationship between the civic stratification of immigrants in the United States, and their access to healthcare. We use the 2007 Pew Hispanic Center/Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Hispanic Healthcare Survey, a nationally representative survey of U.S. Latinos (N = 2,783 foreign-born respondents) and find that immigrants who are not citizens or legal permanent residents are significantly more likely to be excluded from care in both the United States and across borders. Legal-status differences in cross-border care utilization persisted after controlling for health status, insurance coverage, and other potential demographic and socioeconomic predictors of care. Exclusion from care on both sides of the border was associated with reduced rates of receiving timely preventive services. Civic stratification, and political determinants broadly speaking, should be considered alongside social determinants of population health and health care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After 1989, class appeared to be everywhere and nowhere. The messy consequences of the emergence of new classes and new types of economic inequalities were plain for all to see, but no one uttered the term "class." The concept appeared illegitimate because of associations with the old regime, even though it always had more success explaining developments in the capitalist world east Europe was entering than the state socialist world it was leaving. The media and academy adopted a discourse of "normality" instead: New rules resulted not from policy choices empowering certain groups at the expense of others but from necessity, and people just had to adapt. Because the economic collapse nevertheless elicited much anger and frustration, the absence of class talk contributed to a proliferation of nationalist talk, and thus had political consequences. The paper rehearses reasons for the decline of class analysis in the region, and notes the post-1989 fascination with the "middle class." It explores the evolution of class analysis during the communist period, culminating in the embrace of a stratification theory that resisted discussion of power, which made sense at the time but became a burden after 1989. Several critical class analyses of state socialism, from the 1930s to today, are then introduced, demonstrating both their relevance and their unfortunate absence from debates. New types of class analyses promoted by younger scholars and activists are emerging, however, and are discussed in the summaries of the other essays in this collection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper argues that discredit pertains not only to individuals, but also to the implements of aid that discredited persons use to overcome their situation. Focusing on the mobility aids of blind people, the paper demonstrates that as a consequence of the diffusion of discredit, the users of guide-dogs and long-canes mould their usage practices in particular ways. Namely, according to norms which the users conceive to be unobjectionable to sighted people. Thus cane-users considered the sound that their canes emitted to be embarassing, and tried to avoid causing it. Also guide-clog usage was inhibited as a result of traditional Middle-Eastern attitudes towards dogs. In concluding, the ambiguity of blind people toward their mobility aids is juxtaposed with their accepting attitude toward television sets in their homes. The latter are conceived by blind people as a natural element of the material culture of the sighted environment. Consequently, even blind people for whom television sets are manifestly unsuited introduce them into their lives. This leads to the conclusion that material artifacts are conceptualized in society generally, according to practices that are attuned to the dominant social stratum. The data are drawn from observations made in the course of ethnographic field-work in a population of blind people in Israel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over recent years a series of 'ankles has appeared, the aim of which has been to demonstrate an unjustifiable neglect of women in social stratification theory and research and, in turn, to level charges of 'intellectual sexism' against sociologists active in this area. The central concern of the present paper is to address certain of the major substantive issues which are raised in this literature, and to argue that they have not so far been adequately treated from either a theoretical or an empirical standpoint. In Pan I of the paper, an attempt is made to distinguish between two lines of theoretical argument on the position of the family within the system of social stratification which, in recent critiques, appear to have been unduly confined. These are the arguments of (i) structural-functionalists of mainly American provenance, and (ii) mainly European exponents of class analysis. In Pan II, empirical data are then presented, by reference to which the stance adopted by the latter can be illuminated and, moreover, substantially supported. In Pan III, an attempt is made to show, on the basis of the foregoing, that certain conceptual and methodological developments that have been proposed in order to adapt class analysis to the increased labour market participation of women, and especially of married women, entail serious difficulties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By bringing together a set of papers in the broad social structure and personality tradition of social psychology, this issue of SPQ seeks to manifest its centrality to social psychology, and vice versa. The papers illustrate the utility and necessity of incorporating more careful and more explicit analyses of macrosocial and psychological processes into the study of the relationships of macrosocial structures and processes to the thoughts, feelings, and behavior of individual actors. Relationships between social stratification (by socioeconomic, gender, racial/ethnic, or age status) and the individual and intersections between the domains of work and family emerge as central problems in the study of social structure and personality, and of social psychology, sociology, and psychology more generally. These and other analyses could benefit from increased interplay among the different faces or branches of social psychology and of social psychology with emerging developments in the parent disciplines. The reemergence of the study of personality in psychology, especially from a cognitive perspective, the new concern of sociology with micro-macro links, increased intersections of biology with sociology and psychology, and the increased use of life course perspectives and longitudinal data in psychology and sociology are all developments that could contribute to, and benefit from, future advances in the study of social structure and personality. Each of these trends suggest the need for more attention to the interrelationships between individuals and macrosocial structures or processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is intended as a contribution to the formal theory of stratification systems. The paper has five sections. In Section I, a method for analytically inducing an order over a multi-dimensional status is discussed. It is believed that such a technique can aid in the specification of conceptual tasks within stratification theory, as well as serve as a baseline in actual measurements. It is subsequently employed in the axiomatic work of Sections 3 and 4. In Section 2, there is a brief discussion of the axiomatic method as a prelude to the system developed in the following two sections. In Section 3, the axioms are stated. In Section 4, various elementary consequences of the axioms are shown; most importantly, various concepts which are intuitively important in stratification theory are shown to be definable (e.g., a class system with a determinate number of classes). Finally, in Section s, there is a concluding discussion of the picture of stratification which emerges within this work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

IN A RECENT paper Mr. Runciman concludes by inviting replies to his argument that it is logically and conceptually useful to employ the tripartite distinction between `class' `status' and `power' in the analysis of social stratification. Mr. Runciman does not, of course, deny the existence of links between these three dimensions, but suggests that such links must be seen contingent empirical relationships and not necessary logical ones. I hope that the following paper will provide such a reply. It must be clear that the following criticism is directed, in the main, to those parts of the paper in which Mr. Runciman is concerned with the logical and conceptual problem. The essay in question also contains a clear and valuable assessment of the problems encountered in any attempt to measure the three types of inequality. In the first part of the paper I propose to give a critical assessment of certain central aspects of Mr. Runciman's argument and, in the second part, I will put forward a very brief formulation of what I consider to be a more meaningful alternative view of the relationships between class, status, and power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analyses of the 2008 National Study of the Changing Workforce demonstrate that job pressure is associated with greater anxiety and job dissatisfaction. In this paper we ask, What conditions protect workers? The conventional buffering hypothesis in the Job-Demands Resource (JD-R) model predicts that job resources should attenuate the relationship. We test whether the conventional buffering hypothesis depends on socioeconomic status (SES). Support for conventional buffering is evident only for job dissatisfaction—and that generalizes across SES. When anxiety is assessed, however, we observe an SES contingency: Job resources attenuate the positive association between job pressure and anxiety among workers with lower SES, but exacerbate it among those with higher SES. We discuss the implications of this SES-contingent pattern for theoretical scenarios about “resource reinforcement,” “resource substitution,” and the “stress of higher status.” Future research should consider SES indicators as potential contingencies in the relationship between job conditions and mental health. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper opens up the issue of how to relate culture to class in the UK. First, problematizing the conflation of class with status - inherent to stratification models like the GBCS - we theorize culture as 'world-making' rather than limit culture to artistic or individual possession. Second, exploring culture in the wake of reforms aimed at local and institutional 'cultures' that are said to hold back economic growth, we examine power relations between class and culture. After clarifying how Weber's analysis of stratification keeps economic relations underpinning class distinct from the cultural mores of status groups, we point to a third dimension in his emphasis on parties - those groupings locked in the struggle for dominance across all levels and modes of life - as the 'house of power'. Contrary to his supposition of homogeneity, however, we suggest legitimation today requires contesting parties, including factions and interest groups, to recruit from across class and status groups. Arguing recruitment to parties is enhanced by a mood of endless reform - in which modernity appears bent on tearing up its own foundations - we indicate how the resulting sense of precariousness is augmented by the stratifying technologies of grading and ranking. The pertinent question is: Who benefits from endless reform? And if the answer is no more than to recognize how benefits are skewed to an 'elite' working on behalf of owners of capital, then it is time to put aside stratification for an analysis of class relations that pointedly attends to wider notions of culture by asking: Who gets the say in world-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This general introduction locates the GBCS papers on the elite, and their respondents, within a context. It emphasizes some of the key points made by the respondents in order to intervene in a discussion about what is at stake in doing sociological research on class. It draws attention to the differences between on the one hand status and stratification, and on the other class struggle perspectives, and hence the difference between a hierarchical gradational analysis and a relational one based on the struggle between groups over value. I begin to answer a question raised by many of the respondents in this special issue: 'what is the question that the analysis of class is designed to answer?' I also draw attention to some of the problems with Bourdieu's 'structuring architecture', showing how the partial reproduction of Bourdieu presents fundamental problems, leading to a Great British Stratification Survey ('GBSS') rather than a GBCS. The different trajectories in class analysis that confusingly merge over the concept of culture in the present are briefly mapped, showing very different intentions in analysis. I argue that to understand class we need to understand the processes of classification: exploitation, domination, dispossession and devaluation, and their legitimation. Overall this special issue extends the sociological debate on class into a larger political frame about injustice, classification and value. It develops arguments from anthropology that maintain that it is the ability to define what value is (through culture) that is the ultimate difference in politics and power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper analyses trends in the location of commercial, industrial, and different residential land uses in the four largest metropolitan cities of South Africa over the past decade. Recent development patterns show strong decentralisation trends of away from core cities to the metropolitan fringes despite proactive containment policies. Elements of the differential urbanisation model are used to explain heterogeneous migration patterns within a rapidly urbanising South African population. Indications are that strong centrifugal patterns in the cities are linked to both local decentralisation and deflected urbanisation at the regional level. This results in continuing social stratification in all four agglomerations and the continuation of the 'post-apartheid city.' The persistent movement of populations and commercial and industrial land uses to the urban fringe has resulted in the strengthening of the multicentric urban framework of the four metropolitan cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Reefer madness," a spurious psychiatric affliction that was widely promulgated in the United States during the 1930s, is rarely mentioned today as a possible sequela of acute cannabis consumption. Because reefer madness (RM) was questioned and generally dismissed in the West by the 1940s, I was surprised to find that it was still widely accepted as a genuine psycho-pharmacological affliction in the Eastern Caribbean country of St. Vincent and the Grenadines in the 1990s. This paper describes and analyzes the reasons for this discontinuity between the West and the Rest by referring to the multiplicity of factors supporting the Vincentian RM syndrome: a generalized tropical "intellectual backwardness" and associated moral apathy; the real and alleged behavioral-psychological effects of acute cannabis ingestion; the peculiarly Caribbean character of Vincentian RM and the way it differs from its American counterpart; the types of people promoting the affliction; the larger anti-marijuana context that includes opposition to any involvement with the substance; and, most importantly, the national system of racial and class stratification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I contend that gender is of crucial importance, not only in assigning people to 'places' in the division of labour, but also in the very definition of occupations, and thereby in shaping the division of labour as a whole. The social relations of gender[2] are central to the labour process. As such, gender must be included as a central feature of any analysis of social stratification, whether it is concerned with the social characteristics of people in particular occupations or whether it seeks to analyse the social relations in which they engage. The present discussion will be confined to the realm of paid work, although (as I have argued elsewhere) the scope of stratification studies must eventually be broadened to include unpaid work also, before the sexual division of labour and the social relations of gender can be given due importance.[3]. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increasing scale of transnational migration is sociologically one of the most interesting features of contemporary life, not least because of the analytical challenges posed by the complexity of this phenomenon. The aim of this paper is to explore the contradictions inherent in policy approaches to migration in the EU -- the logic of the market is weighed against welfare protectionism; welfare and labour market regulation against demands for cheap labour; national resource concerns against transnational rights. The outcome is presented in terms of an increasingly complex system of civic stratification, which raises a further set of contradictions; discriminatory exclusion alongside assertions of equal treatment. The implications of these cross-cutting pressures for a sociological understanding of migration are considered throughout, and doubt is cast on the validity of any single overarching perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides the first detailed study of lower white-collar workers in Soviet society. It traces the historical development of this social category during the Soviet period, gives a general social profile of the stratum now and locates it in the Soviet system of social stratification. Comparisons are made with equivalent strata in Western society, and both divergences and commonalities are identified. The former are explained by reference to the different economic, political/ideological and cultural factors which have shaped the system of social stratification and movement within it. Similarities are seen to be a consequence of the fact that the same division of labour characteristics both types of society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research into social stratification has tended to concentrate on working-class men; there has been little on the middle classes, and even less on women. This paper looks at the class position and class images of 342 working married women in social grade Cl, drawn from a national survey of class images conducted between 1981 and 1984, to assess the extent to which these women's class identification is determined by the occupation of their husbands and the way in which the middle and working classes are perceived by women in same-class and cross-class marriages. It is concluded that a woman's class identification is determined at least in part by her own characteristics rather than her husband's, with education being a particularly important variable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues there is a new theoretical current in Western sociology - `game- theoretic Marxism'. It situates the current in what seems to be a more general paradigm shift from the mid-1970s, that is, from a focus on structure to an emphasis on agency. In this context we consider the debate between the new theory's foremost proponent Jon Elster and G. A. Cohen, advocate of functional explanation. It is shown, then, how this new theory of collective action draws on Mancur Olson's formulations of the mid-1960s, after which its central tenets are developed in a discussion of two significant variants of it. Finally, the shortcomings of game-theoretic Marxism are analysed and an alternative notion of explanation by collective agency is proposed: one that centres upon the `causal powers' of social classes and breaks with both Cohen's functionalism and Elster's intentional explanation. This alternative version (1) can account for non-intentional causation and (2) considers social classes (and other collective actors) as possessed with organizational and cultural resources. It is argued that this alternative version is more fruitful for the understanding of social processes and that it contributes to the attempts to supersede the strict dichotomy of structure versus agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper traces the contours of current, practical explanatory problems in stratification theory showing the similarity of issues in apparently diverse approaches, both Marxist and non- Marxist. There are two related purposes. The first is to show the specific nature of the current crisis, locating paninular explanatory failures. The second is to illustrate the more general issue of the way in which the central epistemology of self-conscious social science derives from and describes failures in social scientific practice. This is well illustrated in the response to current problems. Both purposes are served by Laying bare the procedures by which attempts are made to convert the contradictions inherent in explanatory failures into contradictory features of social experience which could be explained by consistent theories. Contradiction is thus, apparently, removed from its role in specifying the need for theoretical development, to encapsulating the processes by which current social arrangements are reproduced. However, we show that despite initial plausibility such attempts merely displace explanatory contradictions rather than solve them. The attempts are justified by an explicit or implicit action frame of reference which, though it is central to abstract discussions of the nature of social science, is invoked in practical social science only in circumstances of explanatory failure in an unproductive attempt to insulate the theories from the consequences of their failure. Productive social science is the resolution of contradictions in the transformation of theoretical objects and relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociology of social stratification and labour market economics have developed in isolation from one another. The present paper attempts to bring these two traditions closer together. The starting point is a critique of the very notion of social 'stratification'. A return to Max Weber's idea of `class situation as market situation' and to his concept of `social closure' is advocated. On this basis, a conception of structured social inequality in advanced capitalist societies is developed which is open for conceptual innovations to be taken from labour market economics. A number of approaches to labour market analysis are discussed, and the special significance of several recent contributions related to the so- called 'dual labour market theory' is emphasized. This leads up to the construction of a typological model supposed to supersede the traditional notion of social inequality as a system of hierarchically superposed strata. This model comprises eight levels of labour market structuration characterizing structured social inequality in advanced capitalist societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that books by Warner and Low and Selznick on the sociology of organizations have been misinterpreted and that a reassessment is overdue. This is undertaken via an analysis of both the original texts and the process of misinterpretation. One implication is that organizational sociology is, in part, a product of those bureaucratic and labelling processes that it affects to describe and that the agenda of issues with which it deals has been unduly delimited as a result. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The nature of West Indian political mobilization in Britain is discussed. A number of processes-cultural ambivalence, individualism and island parochialism are examined as contributory factors to the paucity and ephemerality of localized West indian political associations in the metropolitan society. Particular emphasis is placed on the importance of, for example, changes in religious and family organization and how these relate to localized stratification systems within West Indian settlements in Britain. The utility of historical and comparative frameworks is stressed throughout the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social Mobility in Britain has been a key work for theories of mobility and social stratification, but its basic data on the occupation of fathers and sons is open to question. Arguing from evidence (mainly from the Census) about occupational transition and differential fertility, this paper suggests that the 1949 study appears to have an implausible number of middle-class fathers. When this critique is related to the peculiarities of the data already separately reported by others such as Ridge, Hope, and Noble, a strong case can be made for the rejection of the Glass findings. It follows that the conventional sociological wisdom that Britain has a low rate of mobility must be reconsidered, and also that those theories of stratification which have drawn too uncritically on Social Mobility in Britain must now be re-examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A common phenomenon in sociology (and in other disciplines presumably) is that of the 'taken_for-granted reference'. This is typically an original empirical study, the findings of which become accepted and thereafter acknowledged as valid evidence in support of argument or for the generation of new hypotheses or counter hypotheses without presentation of critical re-evaluation. The extent to which this occurs and how and why it does occur are largely uninvestigated. In this paper, one case of the taken-for-granted reference, which is widely used in studies of social mobility, is subjected to critical re-evaluation in the light of original empirical research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The gay disco has an important function within the gay cornmunity. It is a place where lesbians and gay men can meet and socialise with other rnembers of the gay community, in a fairly closed environment that offers seclusion and sheher from the outside (mainly heterosexual) world. This paper examines the way in which potential patrons of a gay disco, that is, those who were not known as regular patrons to the doorman and bouncers, were screened in an attempt to determine sexual identity. to ensure that as few heterosexuals as possible were allowed entrance into the club. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous designs for the analysis of the mobility effects hypothesis do not incorporate explanatory variables other than origins, destinations, and mobility, and most designs fail to parametrize the effects of origins and destinations in a substantively defensible fashion. Sobel (1981) proposed a class of models for the analysis of mobility effects that parametrizes the effects of origins and destinations in a sociologically meaningful fashion, but his models do not allow for the introduction of explanatory variables other than mobility. This paper shows how to incorporate covariates into the models proposed by Sobel, thereby allowing for a better assessment of the mobility effects hypothesis. Estimation of the new models is discussed, and the relationship between social mobility and fertility as previously considered by luau and Duncan (1967), is reexamined. Although this reexamination largely confirms the negative results obtained by Blau and Duncan (1967) on mobility effects. the models proposed here also yield previously unobtainable conclusions about the relative import of various origin and destination categories in the acculturation process and the differential impact of various explanatory variables. The relative impact of origins and destinations on fertility depends upon origin status; for example, origins and destinations are equally important among those with farm origins, but origin status is more central than destination status among those with higher white-collar origins. Also, the impact of the explanatory variables on fertility interacts with origin status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years the rank-dimensional approach to the analysis of social stratification has become increasingly prominent. One of its advocates, Johan Galtung, has made relations between nations his major point of empirical reference. The present paper applies rank-dimensional analysis to the deprived nations of Africa and Asia (or the so-called Third World) in an attempt to grasp the degree of rank homogeneity within the group and to relate its rank characteristics to the more privileged nations in the global system. This exercise demonstrates that there is a linear relationship between total rank and rank disequilibrium in the Afro-Asian group; a finding which has a number of significant theoretical ramifications. The major theoretical innovation in this connexion is the concept of rank divergence-defined as the degree to which a unit in a system of stratification diverges from the typical relational pattern holding between the unit's total rank and rank disequilibrium scores. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Australian school context has been something of a failed test case of trying to organise schooling around the tenets of the market as a regulating mechanism. The result has been an intensification of social stratification as the already ‘disadvantaged’ miss out yet again in education. This short paper argues that what is needed to interrupt and puncture this unfortunate policy trajectory, is to begin to include the desires, wishes, lives and experiences of young people − and the way to do this is through the promotion of policy approaches that are informed by and celebrate ‘student voice’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]