Sektionen Arbeits- und Industriesoziologie und Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Sektionen Kultursoziologie und Stadt- und Regionalsoziologie

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

Unterrichtsqualität an einer besonderen Schule: Videobasierte Evaluation eines Oberstufen-Internats für leistungsstarke und hoch motivierte Schülerinnen und Schüler

Based on theoretical constructs and empirical work on quality of instruction, this contribution reports on the evaluation of a upper secondary boarding school for highly motivated and high-achieving students. The evaluation of instructional processes is based on high-inference video ratings of aspects of instructional quality. Additionally, aspects of cognitively activating teaching that are supposed to tap the full capabilities of the students are assessed as a higher standard for upper secondary teaching. Interviews with the teaching staff show a high level of acceptance of this approach to instruction as a means to cater to the needs of the high-achieving. As expected, comparing the teaching assessments with a reference sample of TIMSS and TIMSS-R videos shows a good quality of teaching in the areas of classroom management and individual learning support. For the different aspects of cognitive activation there are some lessons at a high level, while for some aspects the variation within the school is rather large.     

Playing the Recording Once or Twice: Effects on Listening Test Performances

Much debate surrounds the issue of whether allowing candidates to listen to recordings twice is more desirable in language tests than offering just one opportunity. Using regression models, this study investigates, analyses and interconnects both item difficulty and stimulus length in relation to the frequency of stimulus presentation and its effect on test results. The study involved 1,266 eighth-grade learners with perceived A2/B1 level in English as a first foreign language. The final discussion seeks to offer explanations for the results that clearly indicate the advantages of listening once; likewise, potential implications for listening tests and classroom practice are raised.     

Glaubwürdigkeit – Das Wesentliche wirken lassen,bis es wirkt

Credibility as an actor means credibility as a person. It has much more to do with reality than appearance, and isn’t just about pretending. Credible personalities convince as credible actors do: They draw from within and create a living connection with others. The most important prerequisite is trusting in your own identity by being rooted in authentic experiences, because every performance develops from inside a person regardless of content, form or methodology. The author describes her personal coaching approach where credibility and materiality are at the center. Furthermore, the credibility model proved to be valuable in transfer to other audiences.     

Work–family reconciliation policies without equal opportunities? The case of Austria

This paper explores the main public work–family policies in Austria (parental leave in connection with the Childcare Benefit, parents’ entitlement to part-time work, the extension of the childcare infrastructure) from the perspective of social justice using the normative concepts of gender equality, recognition, and choice. The main results show that for the most part, these policies offer affirmative recognition of maternal care and limited employment of mothers but offer little support for transformative recognition, particularly in terms of increasing the social status of working mothers and fathers as carers. Austrian work–family policies also do little to redistribute incomes and career opportunities from men to women and childcare from women to men; instead, they grant only limited freedom to choose between parental duties and employment, and the (financial) support they do offer is strongly concentrated on early childhood. All in all, the construction of the parental leave system (together with the Childcare Benefit), the entitlement to work part time, shortfalls in public childcare structures, and the lack of awareness of gendered (cultural and material) structures on the labour market and within families do not actively encourage gender equality. Some aspects of these policies even stabilise and deepen gendered structures on the labour market and in families.     

Introduction: Transnational Lesbian Cultures

This special issue examines the transnational shape and shaping of lesbian lives and cultures in and across China, India, the United Kingdom, and the United States. It uses the expression “transnational lesbian cultures” to suggest that despite sometimes radically different sociopolitical and cultural contexts, the lived experiences of same-sex desire and their emotional attachments create particular affinities between women who love women, affinities that reach across the distinct cultural and social contexts that shape them. The articles brought together explore lesbian subcultures, film, graphic novels, music, and online intimacies. They show that as a cultural and political signifier and as an analytical tool, lesbian troubles and complicates contemporary sexual politics, not least by revealing some of the gendered structures that shape debates about sexuality in a range of critical, cultural and political contexts. While the individual pieces cover a wide range of issues and concerns—which are often highly specific to the historical, cultural, and political contexts they discuss—together they tell a story about contemporary transnational lesbian culture: one that is marked by intricate links between norms and their effects and shaped by the efforts to resist denial, discrimination, and sometimes even active persecution.     

Vital Lines Drawn From Books: Difficult Feelings in Alison Bechdel's Fun Home and Are You My Mother?

This article examines the representation of a transnational archive of queer books in Alison Bechdel's graphic memoirs Fun Home and Are You My Mother? for the insights it provides into the role of reading in making sense of the often difficult “felt experiences” of lesbian life. In both memoirs, books serve an important narrative function in the portrayal of Alison's lesbian identification and its complex emotional entanglements with the lives of parents who are trapped—killed even, in the case of the father—in the wastelands of patriarchy and heterosexual expectation. The article argues that in this complex family dynamic in which “sexual identity” itself is a problem and emotions remain largely unspoken, books act as fragile conduits of feelings, shaping familial relationships even as they allow Alison to contextualize her life in relation to historical events and social norms. Reading books allows her to understand the apparently U.S.-specific history of her family in relation to a wider queer history in the West.     

What guides subjective performance evaluation: Incentive alignment or norm enforcement?

This paper investigates the objectives guiding a superior’s subjective evaluation of subordinate performance. In a laboratory experiment, we implement a team production setting under uncertainty, where subordinates contribute to the organization’s output by choosing effort levels, but individual contributions are subject to random shocks. After observing joint output, the superior can invest into additional (perfect or imperfect) information about effort levels. We test two competing hypotheses about objectives guiding a superior’s subjective performance evaluation. The incentive alignment hypothesis states that the superior is guided by the objective to establish financial incentives that align a subordinate’s preferences with the organization’s goals such that it is in the subordinate’s self-interest to provide effort. In contrast, the norm enforcement hypothesis states that the superior has a focus on subordinate behavior and wants to enforce the norm of cooperation by rewarding high and punishing low effort. Our results reject the incentive alignment hypothesis and provide support for the norm enforcement hypothesis.