Our Divorce Culture: A Durkheimian Perspective

Comparative studies of children from divorced and intact families consistently find that children of divorced marriages have more short- and long-term psychological and social issues than children from intact marriages. This has led to the need for an evaluation of our divorce culture. The purpose of this research is to analyze the general population's attitudes on divorce involving children by gender, race, age, socioeconomic status, and participation in religious activities to see if our opinion of divorce is corresponding to the reality of its effect on children. Research-based divorce education programs have been shown to produce positive results in social and psychological readjustment for both children and adults. The findings of this study allow research-based divorce education programs to identify where to focus their services for children and adults. In addition, these findings support the implementation of policy to mandate the development of research-based divorce education programs in each state.     

Anomic Pressure and Deviant Behavior: A Pilot Study

The hypothesis tested in this pilot study is that the deviant behavior of adolescents referred by juvenile courts to a social agency for group care is related to an anomic situation in the adolescent's previous history rather than to a delinquent syndrome of behavior. A small sample of court-committed adolescent girls was tested by a specially designed Anomic Pressure Rating Scale and compared to a control group. Significant differences between the two groups were found in all categories of the scale, confirming the hypothesis.     

Status and Solidarity: A Reformulation of Early Durkheimian Theory*

Previous scholars have charged that Durkheim provides an inadequate theory of inequality, that the concept of organic solidarity is not well supported, and that egoistic and anomic suicide cannot be adequately distinguished. Although these problems appear distinct, they each arise because Durkheim naturalized inequality and ignored social status. Introducing a concept of status permits a reconceptualization of the types of suicide and creates new analytic connections between The Division of Labor and Suicide. Social solidarity and status hierarchies are presented as variations in the relationship between social integration and social regulation. The interplay between status and solidarity influences the expression of social practice, power, belief, and justice.     

The Elementary Forms of Place and Their Transformations: A Durkheimian Model

Due to the fragmentary nature of research findings and conceptual models, the Durkheimian legacy remains undervalued in contemporary spatial theory. The paper addresses this neglect by proposing a unified Durkheimian model of place which can be applied to case history and comparative analyses. It draws together the fragmented insights of Durkheimian theory to characterize four elementary forms of place: sacred, profane, liminal and mundane. These place/space identities are maintained and transformed through rituals and narratives which depend upon contingent human actions for their sustenance. The paper concludes with an extended case study which deploys the model to explain the changing meanings of the site of the Bastille (Paris, France) over the past two centuries.     

Review article: Comparing the Durkheimian and Marxist traditions

Solidarity and Schism: 'The Problem of Disorder' in Durkheimian and Marxist Sociology , David Lockwood     

The Enhancement Imperative: The Evolutionary Neurophysiology of Durkheimian Solidarity

Durkheimian solidarity, especially in regard to religion, is reanalyzed in terms of recent developments in the neurosciences and evolution. Neurophysiological studies indicate that religious arousers can piggyback on reward circuitry established by natural selection for interpersonal attachments. This piggybacking is rooted in uneven evolutionary changes in cognitive capacities, emotional arousal capabilities, and preconscious screening rules for rewarding arousal release. Uneven development means that only a special class of enhanced arousers embedded in macro social structures can tap some of the reservoirs of expanded arousal release protected by these screening rules. It becomes imperative that part of collective social life offers these special arouser packages. Beginning with religion and inequality, the social construction of enhanced arousers leaves a trail across human history. However, this trail is not quite what Durkheim had in mind.     

Economic and social correlates of regional suicide rates: A pooled cross-section and time-series analysis

This paper uses a cross-sectionally hetero scedastic and time-wise autoregressive technique to examine the pooled suicide rates of 23 cities and counties in Taiwan from 1983 to 1993. A combination of economic and sociological variables were found to account for a significant proportion of the variations in suicide rates across regions and over time. Economic variables appeared to have a greater impact on regional suicide rates than sociological correlates. In particular, the level of income per capita in a region stood out as the most important predictor of the suicide rate. This study has also uncovered gender differences in the effect of some correlates on regional suicide rates, such as the proportion of the poverty population in the region and the presence of a local life-line center.     

Socio-material network analysis: A mixed method study of five European artistic collectives

In this paper, I argue that we can better understand the relationship between social structure and materiality by combining qualitative analysis of practices in shared physical space with statistical analysis. Drawing on the two-mode approach, I treat social and material structures together with the relationship between them as a two-level socio-material network. In a mixed method study, formalized ethnographic data on such networks in five European artistic collectives are subjected to multilevel exponential random graph modelling. It sheds light on how different kinds of interpersonal ties condition the engagement of individuals with similar materiality over time.     

Distributive justice: an ordering of priorities. A comparative analysis of European opinions

As far as distributive justice is concerned, an important issue is to know whether the different principles by which a given distribution of goods is judged fair or unfair are exclusive or complementary. The European Values Survey carried out in 1999 shows clearly the priorities of Europeans in this matter. The first concerns the guarantee that ‘basic needs are met for all’, then comes ‘recognizing people on their merits’ and finally ‘eliminating big inequalities in income’. The consensus on this hierarchy is not altered by national, demographical, social, economic or political divisions. These different divisions do indeed influence opinions on each criterion, but, with very few exceptions, they are not sufficient to upset this order of priorities. Thus, the usual applied principles of distributive justice do not define competing spheres. Their nested (or ‘lexical’) order is compatible with the purely procedural condition of ‘equal liberty’.     

Employment protection legislation and job stability: A European cross‐country analysis

Based on Eurostat data on wage employment for the period 1999–2006, this article investigates the dynamics of job tenure across the European Union. The authors’ analysis shows no generalized decline in job tenure, but a trend towards shorter tenure among young workers (aged 15–24 years) in many European countries. Their regression results indicate that this trend is associated with the weakening of employment protection provided by law and by trade unions. Given young workers’ weak individual bargaining power, the trend towards individualization of the employment relationship may thus affect them disproportionately.     

A comparative analysis of school-to-work transitions in the European Union1

The present paper describes some aspects of ‘school-to-work’ transition by analyzing the employment situation of individuals as a function of the time elapsed since the completion of education or training. Our perspective is interdisciplinary, comparative and dynamic, with special focus on the patterns in southern European countries. In the literature, most of the studies have had the basic approach of constructing indicators based on retrospective information on the time of first leaving continuous education, and current information on status and characteristics of the person's economic activity – expressing the status of activity as a function of the time elapsed since leaving continuous education. In this approach, essentially cross-sectional (though in part retrospective) information is interpreted as if it pertains to real cohorts. Much of this comparative analysis of school-to-work transitions in EU countries has been based on the EU Labour Force Survey, the 2000 round of which incorporated a special module to collect information on the subject. Our basic approach is to use the longitudinal data from the European Community Household Panel to identify, at the time of each wave, the person's most recently completed education and training, and study this in relation to the person's current employment situation and other characteristics as a function of the time elapsed since that completion. Hence, in form at least, our approach is similar to that of earlier studies based on the LFS, though there are considerable differences in substantive content and statistical methodology resulting from the use of different types of data. We also demonstrate how data from a panel survey may be cumulated over time to obtain a more adequate sample size.     

A European perspective: The Nonprofit Almanac and the development of European profiles

Conclusion The Independent Sector approach to measuring the US non-profit sector, as summarised inThe Almanac, provides a valuable and instructive model for European and other attempts to describe and measure the sector. The aim of mappers in those other countries should not be to replicateThe Almanac, but to imitate its broad approach, using it to stimulate and encourage statistical efforts elsewhere. Although the time for whole-Europe mappings has not yet come — in fact, it is very many years away — individual European countries could and should make substantial progress. As I have argued, progress will generally be greatest when an imaginative blend of five main approaches is employed. This is exemplified by the Independent Sector's work, and would-be mimics should endeavour to match both this blending and the energy and zest with which the task has been tackled.Professor of the Economics of Social Care and Deputy Director of the Personal Social Services Research Unit, University of Kent at Canterbury and Co-editor,Voluntas.I would like to acknowledge a number of European colleagues whose comments assisted my preparation of this paper, in particular Edith Archambault, Paulo Barbetta, Andrea Bassi, Rudolph Bauer, Andrew Crook, Jim Jackson, Jeremy Kendall, Éva Kuti, Susan Saxon-Harrold, Wolfgang Seibel, Justin Davis Smith and Tymen van den Ploeg. This paper is lodged in the Personal Social Services Research Unit as Discussion Paper 873.     

Young people's explanations for youth suicide in New Zealand: a thematic analysis

New Zealand has one of the highest youth suicide rates in the developed world and dominant approaches to prevention do not always take into account the views of young people. The purpose of this research was to update our understanding of young people's explanations of suicide in order to inform suicide prevention efforts. Focus groups were conducted with 38 young people, including 30 young women and 8 young men aged 15–22. The data was analysed thematically to identify the range of explanations young people ascribe to youth suicide. Five themes were identified by the analysis including that suicide could be explained by inescapable difficulties, constant pressure, emotional distress and could also be seen as a cry for help. In contrast to these normalised experiences, participants also expressed the view that mental illness might also account for suicide. The findings suggest that young people recognise suicide as a complex problem with multiple causes. While they recognised mental health problems as contributing, youth suicide was primarily understood by young people as a normal response to emotional distress and pressure. Prevention programmes should address the full range of explanations that young people give for suicide in order to promote their engagement in prevention programmes.     

The effect of female participation in the labor force on suicide: A time series analysis, 1948–1980

The impact of female labor force participation (FLFP) on suicide has been debated from two opposed paradigms. From the stand-point of Gibbs and Martin's status integration theory, FLFP creates stress for both husbands and wives, and so should increase suicide due to role conflict and overload. In contrast, from the position of role accumulation/expansion theory, the benefits of FLFP such as higher incomes outweigh the costs and, hence, suicide should be decreased by FLFP. The present paper formulates a third, synthetic view on the effects of FLFP on suicide based on the cultural context surrounding FLFP. Control variables are included from the domestic integration and economic paradigms. A time series analysis finds that given the antipathy towards FLFP in the culture of the 1948–1963 period, FLFP increased both male and female rates of suicide as suggested by status integration theory. In contrast, during the 1964–1980 period, an emancipation era characterized by gender role change and cultural supports for FLFP, there was no relationship between FLFP and female suicide. However, while the role accumulation/expansionist position is supported for the case of contemporary female suicide, it is not supported for male suicide. For the contemporary male it is contended that the costs for FLFP still outweigh the benefits, a situation which contributes to male suicide potential.