Immigration and internal mobility in Canada

We analyse the impact of temporary foreign workers (TFWs) and permanent immigrants on interprovincial mobility in Canada. Empirical results are analysed through the lens of a theoretical model that incorporates a job-matching framework in a migration model à la Harris and Todaro. The effect of the inflow of TFWs in interprovincial mobility is negative, substantial and significant. This is not the case for the inflow of permanent immigrants selected through the Canadian point system. The robustness of these empirical results to issues of endogeneity is assessed through a classical instrumentation approach as well as through a diff-in-diff analysis taking advantage of a pilot project facilitating the admission of TFWs in two Western provinces over the 2007–2010 period. Our paper suggests that, in general, the impact of immigration on labour market conditions depends critically on the way immigration policy is set.     

Klassen messen

The article investigates whether Austrian sociological research empirically addressed social class conceptions between 1945 and 1990. Contrary to the German reception, we find that, indeed, during the whole period scientific publications analyzed social relations and social change from a class perspective with an empirical approach. We embed this research in its historical context in order to work out the implicit explanations given concerning the existence of social inequalities. Moreover, we work out if post-World War II Austrian class analysis did link its work to the Austro-Marxist tradition that flourished between the two World Wars. The empirical focus of the article lies on scientific publications with an empirical approach to social classes and social change.     

Marxistische Theoriearbeit in der Krise

The economic as well as political and ideological crises and transformations of capitalist social formations have created a crisis for Marxist approaches. This affects their assumption about the necessity, desirability and possibility of social transformation, but also about the actors fighting them out and their activities. Thus, a far reaching reformulation of its fundamental epistemological and theoretical assumptions is necessary. This contribution argues that the crisis of Marxism demands a self-reflective engagement with conditions of Marxist theoretical work. The acknowledgement of the fundamental openness and incompleteness of Marxist social critique as well as its contested production is indispensable to avoid authoritarian forms of politics and to be implicated into the legitimation of domination again. The encompassing character of the crisis tendencies of capitalist social formations and the multiplication of fields of conflict demands to overcome a monistic interpretation of social dynamics. To conceptualise capitalist social formations as relation of relations is an indispensable precondition for the analysis of the connections between different social structures and relations of power and dominance. Furthermore, the ability of capitalist social formations to change, which has been shown by the recent crises and transformations, demands a fundamental dynamisation of the Marxist concept of reproduction. The dynamisation of relative surplus production in knowledge based capitalism moves the adaptability of the subjects and their capacity to work centre stage. Only against this background can the plurality of perspectives for emancipation and social struggles come into view for Marxist theoretical work.     

Living with parents and educational outcomes in developing countries: empirical evidence from PISA Thailand

Family is a fundamental determinant of children’s welfare outcomes, not only in terms of good or bad behaviour, but also in terms of child development, comprising emotional, social, and cognitive skills. Family structure is even more important in a developing country in which educational achievement tends to lag. Using a national sampling from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) conducted in 2009 and 2012 in Thailand as a case study for a developing country, this paper quantifies impacts the effects of family structure on cognitive skills and learning performance among Thai students. The findings reveal that family structure, especially for those living with both father and mother, can positively affect the academic achievement of Thai students compared to those who do not live with both parents. Thus, strengthening family structures should be another necessary policy to could promote positive educational outcomes in this developing country.     

Rethinking the effectiveness of family planning in Africa

For the past 50 years there has been a near global consensus that the demands of development necessitate that couples reduce their fertility as a critical act which would jump start economic growth. This consensus heralded the era of the One Child policy and over 90% of least developed states continue to run programs which seek to induce lower fertility rates in their populations. However, a growing body of literature is questioning both the validity and utility of these interventions. This article seeks to contribute to the rethinking of family planning programs. Using new data on family planning scores from forty two African states this article shows that rates of fertility are unlikely to be affected by the strength of family planning programs at lower levels of development. However, at moderate levels of development, family planning programs may contribute to accelerating the decline in fertility initiated by exogenous factors. These findings offer a fresh perspective on the wide spread adoption of family planning policy that permeates the developing world.     

Sociology and Science: The Making of a Social Scientific Method

Criticism against quantitative methods has grown in the context of “big-data”, charging an empirical, quantitative agenda with expanding to displace qualitative and theoretical approaches indispensable to the future of sociological research. Underscoring the strong convergences between the historical development of empiricism in the scientific method and the apparent turn to quantitative empiricism in sociology, this article uses content and hierarchical clustering analyses on the textual representations of journal articles from 1950 to 2010 to open dialogue on the epistemological issues of contemporary sociological research. In doing so, I push towards the conceptualization of a social scientific method, inspired by the scientific method from the philosophy of science and borne out of growing constructions of a systematically empirical representation among sociology articles. I articulate how this social scientific method is defined by three dimensions – empiricism, and theoretical and discursive compartmentalization –, and how, contrary to popular expectations, knowledge production consequently becomes independent of choice of research method, bound up instead in social constructions that divide its epistemological occurrence into two levels: (i) the way in which social reality is broken down into data, collected and analyzed, and (ii) the way in which this data is framed and made to recursively influence future sociological knowledge production. In this way, empiricism both mediates and is mediated by knowledge production not through the direct manipulation of method or theory use, but by redefining the ways in which methods are being labeled and knowledge framed, remembered, and interpreted.     

Economics as a Multi-Paradigmatic Science: the ‘Best Kept Secret’ of Irrational Choice

The article reexamines the prevailing perception of traditional economics as the science of rational choice among contemporary economists and sociologists, especially rational choice theorists. It proposes that conventional economics is not exclusively the theory of rational choice but also one of irrational choices in the economy. The article aims to contribute toward a fuller understanding and appreciation of classical and neoclassical economics, especially among sociologists, as composite rational choice-irrational choice theory and in that sense a multi- rather than single-paradigm science, thus no different from sociology and other social (and physical) sciences. This may be relevant or interesting to sociologists given that their rational choice colleagues, like economists, extol the “virtues" of conventional and modern economics as a single-paradigm, theoretically unified science around “rational choice” and criticize the “vices” of sociology as plagued by competing paradigms and theoretical disunity. The article supports many economic sociologists’ view or intuition of conventional economics as complex rational-irrational choice theory and multi-paradigm science, and disconfirms rational choice theorists’ interpretation and generalization of it as “rational choice theory” only and single-paradigm unified science.     

How Role Replaced Personality as a Major Category of Sociology

Try to imagine sociology being without the role concept. The thought experiment will strike us as impossible. And yet, through the early decades of the 20th century, remarkably few sociologists thought of social agents as incumbents of social roles and as performing roles in their day to day lives. This article addresses a set of related questions. How did sociologists manage without the concept social role? How did they describe the social agent and his agency? When and in what circumstances was the term social role initially formulated and when did it enter the vocabulary of social science? Ralph Linton’s The Study of Man (1936) is identified as the key text in this history of the concept social role, foreshadowed in writings of Robert Park, E. A. Burgess, and Kimball Young. Linton introduced his role idea in the midst of disciplinary change with boundaries between sociology and psychology (particularly social, and personal, psychology) being redrawn.     

“With Whom no White Scholar can Compare”: Academic Interpretations of the Relationship between W.E.B. Du Bois and Max Weber

Max Weber (1864–1920) is considered one of the canonical founders of sociology, while W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963), author of The Philadelphia Negro (1899), The Souls of Black Folk (1903), and Black Reconstruction (1935), has only recently been included in the sociological canon. We provide a historical review of what we know of their relationship in order to first ask, what did Du Bois say about Weber, and second, what did Weber say about Du Bois? We then analyze the extant scholarly discourse of published English-language academic journal articles that substantively mention both Weber and Du Bois in order to address a third question: what did other scholars say about their relationship? We provide an analysis of the variation of scholars’ perceptions on the relationship between Du Bois and Weber to illumine the dominant assumptions about founding figures and the origin story of American sociology writ large. We argue that three mechanisms of white group interests configured the marginalization of Du Bois from both mainstream and sub-disciplinary sociological theory: (1) reduction or “knowing that we do no know and not caring to know” (when knowledge is perceived as irrelevant to white group interests), (2) deportation or “not wanting to know” (when knowledge is systematically exiled), and (3) appropriation or “not knowing that we do not know”) (when dominant knowledge usurps or assimilates challenges to that knowledge).