Women and Underachievement at Work: A Study of the Internal Labour Market of the Civil Service

This article describes some of the major results of a study¹ which examines the complex problem of women's underachievement in paid work. Through an investigation of female clerical staff and their experience of one major Civil Service department, an analysis is made of the internal organization and processes and their effect on women's promotion success. The conclusion is that the internal labour market of the Civil Service is structured to men's conventional employment patterns and both formal and informal factors combine to keep the majority of women at a disadvantage in paid work. The very few women who do achieve have to accept and adopt conventionally male characteristics in both their work situation and their family life.     

The (mis)acquisition of gender identity among transsexuals

Transsexualism suggests questions for sociologists who study gender. Is gender identity always a precursor to role behavior or might it result from the social reactions to deviant behavior? This article considers several theoretical explanations for the (mis)acquisition of gender identity among transsexuals: biological hypotheses, psychoanalytic theories, social learning, and role theory. The author concludes that gender role and gender identity are confounded in past research and that the issue inflexibility of identities needs to be treated more systematically.     

Biography as historical sociology

Conclusion William Fielding Ogburn was located on and helped to create the cutting edge of developments in twentieth-century American sociology — particularly its increasing emphasis on statistics and objectivist methodology. His life, which spanned the period within which the changes he advocated were institutionalized, can be seen as having significance as a marker of a transition. From this perspective, studying well-chosen individual lives has the same heuristic value as studying particular historical events. They can, to quote Philip Abrams, mark decisive conjunctions of action and structure;... moments of structuring at which human agency encounters social possibility and can be seen most clearly as simultaneously determined and determining. My analysis of Ogburn's advocacy of scientific sociology — one that differentiated science from both emotion and politics — reflected and reinforced his solutions to problematics in his personal life. His response to the separate spheres that defined gender relations in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America, helped to construct a reflection of them in twentieth-century American sociology. It is in this way — through concrete social action within specific historical conditions — that personal life and gender shaped the intellectual and professional culture within which he lived and worked.Ogburn's life story suggests that action, particularly advocacy, is grounded, at least in part, in a personal agenda, but that personal agendas, just like any others, need to be understood sociologically. Ogburn's problem was not idiosyncratic. Indeed, it is because it was shaped by social conditions, rather than uniquely individual ones, that his solutions were more likely to be recognized, accepted, and institutionalized by his mostly male audiences. Tracing these connections within a concrete historical case, within a single biography, demonstrates how personal life is connected to action and, thus, needs to be included in any sociological theory of human agency.Ogburn's life coincided with a set of opportunities that made it possible for sociologists to gain a more prominent place in national affairs and to develop sociological knowledge in a particular direction. This development was, in turn, accompanied by the creation of a language and practice in which the scientific authority of sociology became associated with it being devoid of an appearance of politics and emotion. The emergence of this language and practice, and the beliefs on which they were based, however, cannot be explained solely by the circumstances that fostered them or the career opportunities that they made available. They reflect the practical actions of human agents within historically specific settings. But these agents must be recognized as gendered and the problematic of gendering must be incorporated into the history of American sociology.As Steinmetz has argued, the stories that we tell are important for what we do — and what we do not do — because they structure social consciousness and social action. As long as we write the history of American sociology as an ungendered narrative, we will not only misrepresent that history but we will also limit our capacity to understand and affect changes in it. Differentiation was (and is) a strategy more available to men than women and the norms and organization of professional life that embody that strategy need to be understood not as general but rather as gendered.There is a gender dimension to the history of American sociology to which more attention could usefully be given. Although the impact of political and professional interests has been widely recognized in this history, the impact of personal life in general and gender relations in particular have not been systematically incorporated into accounts of this process. Yet gender relations — and the meanings and actions that are shaped by them — are an important part of the story being told here and an important source of the energy that institutionalizing social change entails. Biography provides access to these personal and gendered dimensions of our professional history in ways that can more adequately acknowledge the complexities of the structuring process.

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Religious intermarriage in Switzerland, 1969–72 and 1979–82

Patterns of marriage between Protestants and Roman Catholics in Switzerland during 1969–72 and 1979–82 are investigated using magnitudes of marriage attraction, measures that reflect the propensity to marry independent of population composition. The results show high levels of intermarriage, with religious differences becoming less salient in marriage choice. There is no evidence that the propensity to intermarry is influenced by minority group effects.Les modalités de mariage entre protestants et catholiques romains en Suisse sont analysées à l'aide d'une mesure de l'importance de l'attraction matrimoniale, qui reflète la propensité au mariage éliminant l'effet de la composition de la population. Les résultats montrent des niveaux élevés de mariages mixtes, tandis que les différences deviennent moins importantes dans les choix matrimoniaux. Il n'est pas évident que la propensité au mariage mixte soit influencée par des effets dus au fait que certains groupes soient minoritaires.     

Mixed marriages. Some key questions

The author discusses various aspects of intercultural or mixed marriage. Factors considered include trends in different countries; determinants of mixed marriage; cultural and social class differences; and mate selection. (SUMMARY IN FRE AND SPA)     

A proposal for a new screening paradigm and tool called Exercise Assessment and Screening for You (EASY)

The Exercise Assessment and Screening for You (EASY) is a tool developed to help older individuals, their health care providers, and exercise professionals identify different types of exercise and physical activity regimens that can be tailored to meet the existing health conditions, illnesses, or disabilities of older adults. The EASY tool includes 6 screening questions that were developed based on an expert roundtable and follow-up panel activities. The philosophy behind the EASY is that screening should be a dynamic process in which participants learn to appreciate the importance of engaging in regular exercise, attending to health changes, recognizing a full range of signs and symptoms that might indicate potentially harmful events, and becoming familiar with simple safety tips for initiating and progressively increasing physical activity patterns. Representing a paradigm shift from traditional screening approaches that focus on potential risks of exercising, this tool emphasizes the benefits of exercise and physical activity for all individuals.