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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 examines the role of the state in the development of French Sociology after 1945. This role was important in the institutionalization of the discipline. It favoured the creation of research teams, resarch centres or laboratories. The State favoured the funding of french sociology too. This funding, in the form of research contracts with various public bodies, has contributed to the emergence of the figure of the expert and, more broadly, to the involvement of sociologists in sectoral policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today Pierre Bourdieu is well known as one of the most important social scientists of the 20th century. One of the outstanding qualities of his work has been his innovative combination of different methods and research strategies as well as his analytical skills in interpreting the obtained data (his ‘sociological gaze’). In this paper, we attempt to retrace the development of an extraordinary way of doing social research and show the benefit of Bourdieu's visual sociology for his empirical fieldwork and sociological theory. The article particularly stresses the significance of his photographic archive, which has long been ignored within the appreciation of Bourdieu's work. Studying Bourdieu's photography gives access to his œuvre in several new ways: not only can we understand how Bourdieu became an unconventional sociologist practicing his craft in the midst of a colonial war. Bourdieu's visual anthropology also offers an insight into the status nascendi of Bourdieu's sociology in all its elementary forms and contents. Through his photography Boudieu demonstrated the concepts of ‘habitat and habitus’, the material and symbolic living conditions of the Algerian population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the author's comment on researcher David Sciulli's paper about the continental sociology of professions. According to the author, Sciulli wanted to set a standard for the study of the professions. It is easy to follow Sciulli's arguments on the deficiencies in the earlier studies on professionalism, and a person can easily grasp what he understands as the shortcomings of this research. Sciulli states that certain European languages, particularly French, have not developed a word for professionalism and that French researchers therefore have not bothered with studies of professionalism. The reason for this omission seems not to be that Sciulli regards the French society to be without professionalism in his sense, as he makes a French institution from the 17th century, the only example of the usefulness of his own definition. Sciulli seems to think that French sociologists neglect the phenomenon--or he thinks that it does not matter if they have opinions if it is not possible to translate them directly into a theory of professionalism.

The article presents a comparative study of the social mobility of women in France and Sweden. One question which will be central to this and to subsequent papers will be that of how far analyses of the mobility of women tend to support, or to require qualification of conclusions that have been drawn with respect to the mobility of men. On the basis of absolute rates of intergenerational mobility for women, Sweden would appear to have markedly more mobility overall than France. The total mobility rate is consistently higher than in France, whether mobility is assessed in terms of our nine-class schema or various collapses of this. The composition of the various occupational classes of women as regards social background is somewhat more similar in Sweden than it is in France. But the striking contrast is that the differences in origin distributions of women by occupational category are much greater as compared to men in Sweden than they are in France. It is in the case of women's outflow mobility patterns-and thus chances of mobility according to social background--that our two societies show the most marked differences, in contrast to results obtained when comparing men's mobility.