What is sociological about economic sociology? Uncertainty and the embeddedness of economic action

Conclusion This article argues that the problem of uncertainty represents the central limitation of efficiency-based approaches to the explanation and prediction of economic outcomes. The problem of uncertainty reintroduces the Hobbesian problem of order into economics and makes it possible to connect questions of economic decision-making with social theory. The emphasis lies not, as in the behavioral theories of the Carnegie School, in the influence of uncertainty on the actual decision process, but in those social devices that actors rely on in decision-making, i.e., that structure the situation for the agents. If agents cannot anticipate the benefits of an investment, optimizing decisions become impossible, and the question opens up how intentionally rational actors reach decisions under this condition of uncertainty. This provides a systematic starting point for economic sociology. Studies in economic sociology that argue from different theoretical perspectives point to the significance of uncertainty and goal ambiguity. This contribution reflects theoretically why economic sociology can develop a promising approach by building upon these insights. It becomes understandable why culture, power, institutions, social structures, and cognitive processes are important in modern market economies. But it should be equally emphasized that the maximizing paradigm in economics will not be dethroned without a causal theory of the relationship of intentional rationality and social rigidities.     

Deterred by debt? Young people,schools and the escalating cost of UK higher education

Popular commentaries lament that reforms to the financing of Higher Education (HE) in the UK will operate as a significant deterrent to HE participation amongst students from less advantaged backgrounds. This view of debt as a deterrent is powerful and exists not only at a societal level, but also, as we show, is present in schools. Our data reveal, however, that these ‘debt commentaries’ play out very differently across schools according to the nature of their catchment and the sorts of views staff hold about pupils in relation to their fear of debt. Furthermore, students’ views on debt largely contradict these popular ‘debt-as-deterrent’ narratives and instead are often characterised by acceptance, ambivalence and at times positive orientations towards the prospect of debt. These findings vividly illuminate both the regional and institutional specificity of staff and student decision making in relation to ‘debt’, hence they have substantial implications for HE funding policy specifically and debates about widening participation in HE more generally, where ensuring greater equity in the scope of choices young people have when it comes to choosing a university is a pressing concern.     

Increasing inter‐generational social mobility: is educational expansion the answer?

Reforms which increase the stock of education in a society have long been held by policy‐makers as key to improving rates of intergenerational social mobility. Yet, despite the intuitive plausibility of this idea, the empirical evidence in support of an effect of educational expansion on social fluidity is both indirect and weak. In this paper we use the raising of the minimum school leaving age from 15 to 16 years in England and Wales in 1972 to estimate the effect of educational participation and qualification attainment on rates of intergenerational social class mobility. Because, in expectation, children born immediately before and after the policy was implemented are statistically exchangeable, the difference in the amount of education they received may be treated as exogenously determined. The exogenous nature of the additional education gain means that differences in rates of social mobility between cohorts affected by the reform can be treated as having been caused by the additional education. The data for the analysis come from the ONS Longitudinal Study, which links individual records from successive decennial censuses between 1971 and 2001. Our findings show that, although the reform resulted in an increase in educational attainment in the population as a whole and a weakening of the association between attainment and class origin, there was no reliably discernible increase in the rate of intergenerational social mobility.     

What is society? Social thought and the arts of government

Following conservative politicians, neoliberal philosophers and radical critics, different strands of social science, including those using Foucault's governmentality approach, joined the questioning of the salience of 'society' and ideas of 'the social' over the last decades. When the social reappeared, it was often in the moral domains of community and civil society. This argument re-evaluates the contribution of Foucauldian histories, or 'genealogies', of the social to these fundamental questions. Drawing upon them, it attends to their arguments concerning the place of social thought on the modern episteme in relation to economics, the emergence of the idea of 'society' with the modern arts of government of the state, and the formation of the 'social question'. The argument here allows that preconditions of formation of 'society' lie in the legal and political techniques of the territorial sovereign state. However, the literature under investigation indicates the implicit normativity of an idea of 'society' as a 'problematic unity' and the enduring necessity of a social domain in a law-governed state with a relatively independent economic sphere. This discussion thus seeks to contribute to the wider revaluation and redeployment of these terms in today's context.     

Are COVID fatalities in the US higher than in the EU,and if so,why?

Review of Economics of the Household - The COVID crisis has severely hit both the United States and Europe. We construct comparable measures of the death toll of the COVID crisis suffered by US...     

Does higher education make a difference? The influence of educational attainment on women's and men's nonstandard employment outcomes

Some studies suggest that women and the less educated are more likely to be employed in nonstandard work. However, conflicting evidence has indicated that temporary, part-time, and nonstandard self-employment has diffused across different social groups and levels of education. Using pooled data from the 1997–2018 Canadian Labour Force Surveys, this study explores the changing relationship between higher education, gender, and employment outcomes. Taking a multiple logistic regression approach, this study accomplishes three objectives: (1) to examine the relationship between gender and education among different forms of nonstandard employment; (2) to investigate the changes of different forms of nonstandard employment between 1997 to 2018; (3) to analyze the association between men's and women's education and their likelihood of different forms of nonstandard employment are explored. The findings suggest the feminization of employment norms, in which men and women have had some convergence in certain types of nonstandard employment. This result holds across most levels of education, but is more pronounced for women and men with higher levels of education.     

Whither e-learning? Conceptions of change and innovation in higher education

Abstract

E-learning, as an innovation, has been associated with radical change, but many of the accepted organisational strategies for managing such change have failed to deliver the expected benefits and advantages. There is a pressing requirement to understand better the nature of e-learning, as an educational innovation, and to evolve contextually derived frameworks for change which align with organisational culture and practice. This paper proposes a processual change framework for embedding e-learning, derived from a longitudinal study of four Australian universities, each adopting a different approach to implementing e-learning across their respective institutions.     

What,to the law,is the former slave?

This essay examines a subset of Reconstruction-era cases decided in Southern appellate courts that dealt with the legacies of slavery. Drawing on suits that either described emancipation as legal death or considered black civil rights, it argues that judges placed freedpeople into a distinct legal category – the former slave – in order to preserve the antebellum legal status quo. Opinions differentiated free-born citizens from those who acquired rights after emancipation, and marked freedpeople with stains of their previous servitude, which limited their potential for the equal enjoyment of newly acquired civil rights.     

What are they saying? Black faculty at predominantly white institutions of higher education

In the Twenty-first century Black faculty at predominantly White institutions (PWIs) of higher education that are research-oriented or extensive doctoral granting institutions have identified concerns that produce stress, dissatisfaction and a climate of distrust. Using a Delphi panel of twenty-four Black faculty from forty-three PWIs, 13 concerns after three rounds with a Delphi panel were identified and discussed. These concerns established reasons for a lack of presence (underrepresentation) of Black faculty and a lack of success for Black faculty at PWIs.     

Parental unemployment and children's educational attainment: How big is the role of aspirations?

Children exposed to parental unemployment have been found to lag behind in school, but research has struggled to pin down the underlying explanation. One hypothesis is that parental unemployment may dampen children's aspirations to do well and go far in school. Yet, few studies on parental unemployment have relied on actual measures of children's aspirations or devised a formal analysis of this mechanism. Using the UK Household Longitudinal Study (Waves 1–12, N = 1067), I investigate the role of educational aspirations in children's General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) attainment. I compare adolescents exposed to parental unemployment before or only after the typical age at which GCSE exams are taken. In adjusted models, children exposed to parental unemployment before their GCSEs are around 6 percentage points less likely to attain any GCSE qualification by age 17. On average, children have high educational aspirations, although intentions to enrol in college or university are relatively lower among children exposed to an early spell of parental unemployment. Nevertheless, a hypothetical intervention setting these aspirations to the same level for all children only accounts for a modest portion of the educational penalty tied to an early spell of parental unemployment. Several sensitivity and robustness tests support this conclusion. This note seeks to stimulate more research on the mechanisms underpinning the intergenerational effects of unemployment. Findings cast doubts on the idea that children's aspirations, the target of broader policy discourse and interventions, are a crucial part of the equation.     

If the Map is not the Territory,Then What is This?

This paper discusses the influence of figuration in the constitutive discourse of the family therapy movement. In particular it focuses closely on the figurative use of Russell's Theory of Logical Types. A deconstructive reading of the movement's theoretical grounding in this family of figuration is undertaken, based on Wittgenstein's response to the Theory of Types. The essay concludes with some implications for how practice is understood.     

The Feeble Strength of One? Interdependence, Strategic Interaction, and the Decentralization of Collective Bargaining

This paper contributes to research examining class formation processes among capitalists by analyzing the fracturing of multiemployer collective bargaining associations in the U.S. coal mining and steel industries. The paper evaluates three theories of bargaining decentralization and offers an alternative account. Analyzing both the earlier stability of multiemployer bargaining and its subsequent decline, the paper attributes decentralization to changes in relationships of interdependence and power among unionized firms. While broad processes of economic restructuring gave rise to these shifts, social processes involving conflict and negotiation determined the specific direction of institutional change.

What Affects the Strategic Priority of Fundraising? A Longitudinal Study of Art,Culture and Humanity Organizations’ Fundraising Expenses in the USA

Fundraising is a crucial activity for many nonprofit organizations. However, scant research has examined how the strategic priority of fundraising activities may vary across organizations and over time. This study addresses this gap in knowledge by examining how economic and organization-specific financial conditions predict the priority of fundraising in a nonprofit organization. In particular, this study examines the changes in the ratio of art, culture and humanities organizations’ fundraising expenses to their total expenditure during the period of 2005–2012, which includes the great recession of 2007–2009. The findings reveal that, when facing an economic crisis, the ratio of fundraising expense to total expenditure increases, suggesting that fundraising becomes a higher priority under a hostile economic condition. The analysis also reveals differences in nonprofits’ reaction to recession depending on their revenue mix, with donative nonprofits reacting more sensitively than commercial nonprofits.     

What is the force of forced migration? Diagnosis and critique of a conceptual relativization

Theory and Society - Theorizing of forced migration and refugees has been paralyzed by excessive reliance on migration theory. This article suggests the need to transfer conceptualizations of...     

What is learned during the first moments of work?

The supervision of internships is often based on common sense. However, learning processes at workplace and their conditions remain partly unknown: what is really learned and under what conditions? Two studies on the learning of social working have been conducted, based on work analysis theories and methods. 6 experienced social workers and 4 interns in their first year of training have been interviewed according to the method of "explicitation" interview. The results show that professional learning can occur anyplace, anytime, under certain conditions and under certain forms that have been analyzed. These studies try to analyze the first internship as an entrance into a culture, through a psychological perspective.     

What is the role of e-technology in mental health services and psychiatric research?

In this article, the role of e-technology is explored, with an emphasis on the advantages and disadvantages of its use for health care and mental health research. E-technology is broadly understood to include the Internet and related information technologies, and in recent years, its use has grown rapidly. The Internet is a major source of health information, and there is potential to deliver enhanced services through this medium. In addition, e-technology's role in future mental health service delivery and research will continue to expand as increased numbers of consumers, caregivers, health professionals, and the general population go online, particularly as the technology is refined and made even more user friendly.     

What is political about political ethnography? On the context of discovery and the normalization of an emergent subfield

Despite recent interest in political ethnography, most of the reflection has been on the ethnographic aspect of the enterprise with much less emphasis on the question implicit in the first word of the couplet: What is actually political about political ethnography and how much should ethnographers pre-define it? The question is complicated because a central component of the definition of what is political is actually the struggle to define its jurisdiction and how it gets distinguished from what it is not. In this article we aim to show how ethnography can actually lead us out of this conundrum in which the political is paradoxically both predefined and, at the same time, the open question that leads the process of inquiry. We do so by advancing a formal and relational approach that provides us with procedural tools to define the nature and specificity of the political bond not ex ante, but rather during the process of research itself. In the first part of the article we historicize the development of political ethnography as a distinct avenue for inquiry and show what have been the challenges to its normalization. This is followed by the article’s main section, which focuses on the four ways in which what is political has been conceptualized in contemporary socio-ethnographical literature. In the conclusion of the article, we advance a lowest common denominator definition proposal, with examples from other scholars as well as from our own research to illustrate how this approach would work.     

Getting on the right track? Educational choice-making of students with special educational needs in pre-vocational education and training

This paper explores the educational choice-making of students with special educational needs in the context of Finnish pre-vocational training and one of its programmes, ‘Preparatory and Rehabilitative Instruction and Guidance for Disabled Students’. The authors enquire into the kinds of educational choices available for students in the preparatory programme, and how student counselling meets their educational hopes and future plans. The analysis draws on an ethnographic study of special needs education in post-compulsory education in Finland. It shows that students need to reflect on their educational plans within institutional and diagnostic restrictions and guidance. The authors state that educational choices can be negotiable, but more attention must be given to deconstructing the self-evidences and institutional barriers linked to the transitions of young adults with special educational needs.