How do parenthood and publishing contribute to gender gaps in academic career advancement? While extensive research examines the causes of gender disparities in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) careers, we know much less about the factors that constrain women's advancement in the social sciences. Combining detailed career- and administrative register data on 976 Danish social scientists in Business and Management, Economics, Political Science, Psychology, and Sociology (5703 person-years) that obtained a PhD degree between 2000 and 2015, we estimate gender differences in attainment of senior research positions and parse out how publication outputs, parenthood and parental leave contribute to these differences. Our approach is advantageous over previous longitudinal studies in that we track the careers and publication outputs of graduates from the outset of their PhD education and match this data with time-sensitive information on each individual's publication activities and family situation. In discrete time-event history models, we observe a ∼24 per cent female disadvantage in advancement likelihoods within the first 7 years after PhD graduation, with gender differences increasing over the observation period. A decomposition indicates that variations in publishing, parenthood and parental leave account for ∼ 40 per cent of the gender gap in career advancement, suggesting that other factors, including recruitment disparities, asymmetries in social capital and experiences of unequal treatment at work, may also constrain women's careers.
{"title":"Getting ahead in the social sciences: How parenthood and publishing contribute to gender gaps in academic career advancement","authors":"Mathias Wullum Nielsen, Jens Vognstoft Pedersen, Julien Larregue","doi":"10.1111/1468-4446.13088","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1468-4446.13088","url":null,"abstract":"<p>How do parenthood and publishing contribute to gender gaps in academic career advancement? While extensive research examines the causes of gender disparities in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) careers, we know much less about the factors that constrain women's advancement in the social sciences. Combining detailed career- and administrative register data on 976 Danish social scientists in Business and Management, Economics, Political Science, Psychology, and Sociology (5703 person-years) that obtained a PhD degree between 2000 and 2015, we estimate gender differences in attainment of senior research positions and parse out how publication outputs, parenthood and parental leave contribute to these differences. Our approach is advantageous over previous longitudinal studies in that we track the careers and publication outputs of graduates from the outset of their PhD education and match this data with time-sensitive information on each individual's publication activities and family situation. In discrete time-event history models, we observe a ∼24 per cent female disadvantage in advancement likelihoods within the first 7 years after PhD graduation, with gender differences increasing over the observation period. A decomposition indicates that variations in publishing, parenthood and parental leave account for ∼ 40 per cent of the gender gap in career advancement, suggesting that other factors, including recruitment disparities, asymmetries in social capital and experiences of unequal treatment at work, may also constrain women's careers.</p>","PeriodicalId":51368,"journal":{"name":"British Journal of Sociology","volume":"75 3","pages":"322-346"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2024-03-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1468-4446.13088","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140319865","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Research on the influence of family background on college graduates' earnings has not considered the importance of the match between parents' and children's field of study. Using a novel design based on within-family comparisons, I examine long-term earnings returns to reproducing parents' field of study in Denmark. I find that individuals whose field of study matches that of a parent have earnings that are 2 percent higher than those of their siblings with college degrees in different fields, on average. Earnings returns to field inheritance are highest in the fields of law (9 percent), medicine (6 percent), and engineering (4 percent) and are driven mainly by income from self-employment. I find no direct evidence of nepotism as the earnings advantage does not arise from inheritance of parents' firms or employment in parents' occupational network. My findings indicate that, although a college degree generally equalizes family background differences in economic outcomes, there are additional payoffs to field inheritance, particularly in traditional fields characterized by a high degree of social closure and self-employment.
{"title":"Economic returns to reproducing parents' field of study","authors":"Jesper Fels Birkelund","doi":"10.1111/1468-4446.13090","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1468-4446.13090","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Research on the influence of family background on college graduates' earnings has not considered the importance of the match between parents' and children's field of study. Using a novel design based on within-family comparisons, I examine long-term earnings returns to reproducing parents' field of study in Denmark. I find that individuals whose field of study matches that of a parent have earnings that are 2 percent higher than those of their siblings with college degrees in different fields, on average. Earnings returns to field inheritance are highest in the fields of law (9 percent), medicine (6 percent), and engineering (4 percent) and are driven mainly by income from self-employment. I find no direct evidence of nepotism as the earnings advantage does not arise from inheritance of parents' firms or employment in parents' occupational network. My findings indicate that, although a college degree generally equalizes family background differences in economic outcomes, there are additional payoffs to field inheritance, particularly in traditional fields characterized by a high degree of social closure and self-employment.</p>","PeriodicalId":51368,"journal":{"name":"British Journal of Sociology","volume":"75 3","pages":"303-321"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2024-03-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1468-4446.13090","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140289501","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Issue Information - List of Books Reviewed","authors":"","doi":"10.1111/1468-4446.13087","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.13087","url":null,"abstract":"<p>No abstract is available for this article.</p>","PeriodicalId":51368,"journal":{"name":"British Journal of Sociology","volume":"75 2","pages":"141-142"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2024-03-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1468-4446.13087","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140063838","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Review of Left Feminisms: Conversations on the personal and political. By Jo Littler, London: Lawrence Wishart. 2023. pp. 271. £16. ISBN: 9781913546083","authors":"Laura Clancy","doi":"10.1111/1468-4446.13086","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1468-4446.13086","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51368,"journal":{"name":"British Journal of Sociology","volume":"75 3","pages":"372-373"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2024-02-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139954316","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Family Life in the Time of COVID: International Perspectives. By Twamley, K., Iqbal, H., Faircloth, C., 2023. London: UCL Press. 328 pages, ISBN: 9781800081741","authors":"Rosalind Edwards","doi":"10.1111/1468-4446.13085","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1468-4446.13085","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51368,"journal":{"name":"British Journal of Sociology","volume":"75 3","pages":"369-371"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2024-02-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139775360","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
<p>I am pleased to contribute to the long-standing debate about the relationship between descriptive and causal strategies in sociology. This familiar question goes to the heart of understanding the purpose of social science itself and forces us to think through, at a fundamental level, what we are trying to achieve. My aim here is not criticise causal analysis as such, which undoubtedly has a vital role to play, but to defend descriptive sociology for two linked reasons. Firstly, strategically, in the early 21<sup>st</sup> century, descriptive social science has great public as well as academic resonance. If we exclude descriptive social science from our baggage, we lose vital, critical, contributions to contemporary debate. Secondly, this capacity of descriptive social science comes from its capacity to be ‘world-making’—to open up vistas of wonder, concern, empathy and horror which are vital for renewing the sociological imagination—and for engaging wider publics. Descriptive assemblages open up new worlds to academic and non-academic audiences, shatter older assumptions shattered and disclose new possibilities. Causal analysis, by contrast, is forced to manipulate different pre-defined conditions in order to infer relative causal relations and lacks this world making capacity.</p><p>My unease with the mobilisation of ‘causality’ as superior to ‘description’, is in some ways a gut feeling, tied to Pierre Bourdieu's (<span>2000</span>) critique of the ‘scholastic point of view’. One of my worries when social scientists invoke the primacy of ‘causality’ is that research becomes locked—mostly inadvertently—into an academic politics of closure, in which group of experts winnow better (causal) from worse (descriptive) ways of addressing any given topic. The term ‘descriptive’ is routinely deployed as secondary to the prized ‘causal’, and being able to adjudicate these boundaries ultimately becomes bound up with claims to scholarly excellence—whether this is staged through statistical sophistication, theoretical acumen, political proclivities, or some other way. In this game of academic closure, those who can claim to conduct ‘causal’ analysis become better able to command the high ground of the ‘scholastic point of view’ itself. But following not only Bourdieu but a host of writers who insist on the need to position ourselves from the subaltern point of view, we cannot take this claim at face value—it needs to be exposed as a strategy of empowerment.</p><p>This line of argument means that I do not need to address directly the philosophy of social science, where the analysis of causation has a huge and venerable literature which I can't do justice to here. In fact, for what it is worth, I have always been inspired by critical realism, which to my mind offers a convincing defence of the value of establishing causal relations in a deep and rigorous way. Therefore, I have no interest in challenging causal analysis as such. Rather, my reflections are ro
吉尼系数是经济学的主流工具,它将不平等简化为介于 0 和 1 之间的单一数字,与之形成鲜明对比的是,百分位数收入细分可以用灵巧的火花线进行图形排列。世界不平等实验室的网站可以让非专业人士轻松获取全球大部分地区不平等趋势的描述性信息,这些信息使用各种指标,以极具吸引力的可视化方式呈现,可以开放下载。我在下文中举了一个例子(见图 1),该图显示,南非近年来收入不平等现象发生了巨大变化,而法国则保持相对稳定。当然不可能是因为它与有效的因果分析挂钩。在这方面,皮凯蒂的各种建议褒贬不一。他在《资本与 21 世纪》中提出,资本净回报率超过增长率的 r > g 是 "资本主义的核心矛盾",因为这意味着经济增长将加剧而非调节经济不平等,最终导致不可持续的不平等。这是一个可爱的、简洁的解释模型。皮凯蒂(2020)在其近期出版的《资本与意识形态》一书中,从r > g的明显决定论中回过头来,强调政治会带来变化,而且一些偶发因素会或好或坏地改变不平等状况。这就为政治制度主义解释打开了大门,在这种解释中,不平等趋势并不是潜在的 "资本主义矛盾 "的产物,而是取决于不同类型政治动员的有效性(见 Savage & Waitkus, 2021 中的讨论)。但在最近出版的《平等简史》一书中,皮凯蒂(2021 年)再次转向,认为长期的历史趋势是走向更大的平等--从表面上看,这与《21 世纪资本论》完全不同。他的理论现在似乎是社会学反身性理论的一个版本。要取得 "真正的进步.....,我们就必须接受商议、不同观点的交锋、妥协和实验"(第 11-12 页)。虽然他没有提到杜克海姆、韦伯、吉登斯或贝克,但他对 "学习和集体参与"(第 13 页)的强调与现代性社会学理论有一些显著的相似之处。总之,皮凯蒂的因果分析完全是一团糟。在不到十年的时间里,他的论点从经济决定论到政治制度论,再到现在半生不熟的进化反身性社会学理论,前后不一。因此,这套描述性著作之所以如此强大,并不在于它成功地传达了清晰的因果分析,而在于它具有 "创造世界 "的能力--提供新的视野和视角,从而带来启示。通过将仅占人口 1%,有时仅占人口 0.1%、0.01%,甚至 0.001%的特权精英等极少数社会群体纳入视野,这项学术研究揭示了一个与众不同的世界,一个为极少数人的无度财富揭开面纱的世界。以往占主导地位的社会科学框架(如基尼系数所体现的分配中心趋势)被打破了以往的霸权地位,揭示了另一个世界。在缺乏令人信服的因果分析的情况下,我们是否应该把这类非凡的数据组合扔进垃圾桶?这样做是否会抹杀我们在 21 世纪看到的社会科学最有力的政治动员之一?我怀疑许多社会科学家--无论他们多么坚持因果分析的原则--会走到这一步。让我举第二个例子,威尔金森和皮克特的《精神水平》。这本书出版于 2009 年,因其声称不平等社会也存在更多系统性社会问题而闻名。这一论点通过直观排列的相关性得到了佐证,因此很容易看出,那些收入最不平等的国家--如美国--在许多生活机会和福祉指标上的得分也更差。相比之下,收入不平等程度较低的国家--如日本以及斯堪的纳维亚国家--得分要高得多。 正是《精神层面》的这一描述性方面引起了人们的兴趣,因为它提出了一系列变量之间的联系,而这些变量以前并没有被广泛地放在一起考虑过。然而,按照 "相关性并不意味着因果关系 "的俗套说法,《精神层面》显然无法建立起具体的因果联系机制。作者们显然有因果关系的主张,并倾向于将与羞耻感和耻辱感有关的心理机制视为推动这些关联的重要因素(见 Pickett & Wilkinson, 2015)。然而,尽管他们最近的有趣研究成果《内在水平》(The Inner Level)沿着这些主题提供了一些有趣的见解,却很难确立其因果关系基础。毫无疑问,它在引发公众讨论、重新激发关于健康和不平等的辩论方面起到了巨大的推动作用。它甚至促成了一个强大的运动组织--"平等信托 "的成立,该组织在强调健康不平等的系统性方面做了大量工作(见 Savage & Vaughan, 2024 中的更广泛讨论)。精神层面》的 "创造世界 "特质再次脱颖而出。它巧妙地利用了视觉组合,为主流的现代化范式提供了反常现象,这些范式认为经济增长会带来更好的健康和福祉。在排列另一种数据组合时,一个新的视野被打开了,新的联想、可能性和想法可以被揭示出来。这些例子展示了描述性社会科学 "创造世界 "的能力,但它们并不是经验主义的,即任何 "事实胜于雄辩 "的天真信念。相反,这两个项目都深刻意识到数据构建的政治性,意识到有必要制定其他衡量标准,并将其研究成果作为批判性干预措施,指出与正统社会科学框架预期的差异。它们绝不是数据挖掘活动。描述性社会学需要谨慎和严谨。正是这种谨慎的组合给传统观点带来了反常现象。在上述两个案例中,数据的排列与优先考虑经济增长的现代化理论不一致。简而言之,好的描述性工作需要有理论依据和目的性。我们可以将这种描述性项目视为类似于库恩关于范式如何黯然失色的论点--不是通过对立观点之间的争论,而是通过阐述描述性发现如何无法在传统模型中得到正确理解。这种打破范式的过程让新世界变得清晰可见。在这里,与美学的类比再次起到了帮助作用。艺术干预很少依赖于对现象的简单化 "现实主义 "渲染,也不寻求说教式地坚持特定的因果联系,好像观众需要掌握某些潜在的信息,或者他们遗漏了什么。它们提供了一种新的观看、阅读、聆听和感受方式,使人感到不安、唤起、吸引、挑衅和参与。与复杂的因果模型,包括那些已成为时尚的因果推理模型和随机对照试验形成鲜明对比。这些方法依赖于能够分离出一系列因素,从而明确其因果效应。在医学试验中,需要确定具体的 "治疗方法",例如比较试验药物和安慰剂的效果,然后使用标准化程序在可比样本中明确测量不同的效果。这一切都很好。但是,这些分析只能在 "已有 "因素的基础上进行,而这些因素的测量规程已经确立:我们无法对一种尚不存在的药物进行随机对照试验。总之,我为社会学中的描述性复制品的愿景辩护,认为它是一门变革性的、强大的学科。唤起新美学、新想象力和新可能性的描述性策略可以让社会学 "创造世界"。通过提出新的联想、模式和展示,可以打破旧的范式和假设。这并不是要贬低因果分析,因果分析也有其重要作用。但这是在更广泛的社会学调色板上重新强调审美和惊奇感的论点。现在,我们比以往任何时候都更迫切需要这样做。
{"title":"In defence of sociological description: A ‘world-making’ perspective","authors":"Mike Savage","doi":"10.1111/1468-4446.13083","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1468-4446.13083","url":null,"abstract":"<p>I am pleased to contribute to the long-standing debate about the relationship between descriptive and causal strategies in sociology. This familiar question goes to the heart of understanding the purpose of social science itself and forces us to think through, at a fundamental level, what we are trying to achieve. My aim here is not criticise causal analysis as such, which undoubtedly has a vital role to play, but to defend descriptive sociology for two linked reasons. Firstly, strategically, in the early 21<sup>st</sup> century, descriptive social science has great public as well as academic resonance. If we exclude descriptive social science from our baggage, we lose vital, critical, contributions to contemporary debate. Secondly, this capacity of descriptive social science comes from its capacity to be ‘world-making’—to open up vistas of wonder, concern, empathy and horror which are vital for renewing the sociological imagination—and for engaging wider publics. Descriptive assemblages open up new worlds to academic and non-academic audiences, shatter older assumptions shattered and disclose new possibilities. Causal analysis, by contrast, is forced to manipulate different pre-defined conditions in order to infer relative causal relations and lacks this world making capacity.</p><p>My unease with the mobilisation of ‘causality’ as superior to ‘description’, is in some ways a gut feeling, tied to Pierre Bourdieu's (<span>2000</span>) critique of the ‘scholastic point of view’. One of my worries when social scientists invoke the primacy of ‘causality’ is that research becomes locked—mostly inadvertently—into an academic politics of closure, in which group of experts winnow better (causal) from worse (descriptive) ways of addressing any given topic. The term ‘descriptive’ is routinely deployed as secondary to the prized ‘causal’, and being able to adjudicate these boundaries ultimately becomes bound up with claims to scholarly excellence—whether this is staged through statistical sophistication, theoretical acumen, political proclivities, or some other way. In this game of academic closure, those who can claim to conduct ‘causal’ analysis become better able to command the high ground of the ‘scholastic point of view’ itself. But following not only Bourdieu but a host of writers who insist on the need to position ourselves from the subaltern point of view, we cannot take this claim at face value—it needs to be exposed as a strategy of empowerment.</p><p>This line of argument means that I do not need to address directly the philosophy of social science, where the analysis of causation has a huge and venerable literature which I can't do justice to here. In fact, for what it is worth, I have always been inspired by critical realism, which to my mind offers a convincing defence of the value of establishing causal relations in a deep and rigorous way. Therefore, I have no interest in challenging causal analysis as such. Rather, my reflections are ro","PeriodicalId":51368,"journal":{"name":"British Journal of Sociology","volume":"75 3","pages":"360-365"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2024-02-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1468-4446.13083","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139698889","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
<p>Sociologists have long argued that explanation, as a form of knowledge, has serious limitations when it comes to understanding society. The case against explanation is one of the field's founding ideas, it is literally a foundational idea. It was by rejecting causalist forms of explanation that had been developed in the natural sciences that 19th century scholars and activists that we today call sociologists succeeded in articulating a distinctive realm of reality with relative autonomy from the state, the economy and the family: society (Wagner, <span>2000</span>). Key to their achievement was the argument that the phenomenon of society is fundamentally different from nature. Scientists at the time expected nature to obey eternally valid laws, but society has a number of features that challenge this assumption. Social actors formulate norms and rules to justify their actions and to make sense of social reality. This means that norms and rules themselves may play an active role in the transformation of social reality. Society, in other words, is marked by reflexivity. Of course, a lot has happened since the 19th century and this very notably includes unrelenting efforts by social scientists to create forms of explanation that are capable of taking reflexivity into account. Yet problems with explanation have continued to make themselves felt in the social sciences and humanities. The problem, in a nutshell, is that explanation sets up the relation between social science and its object, society, in terms of <i>representation</i>, but the relation between knowledge about society and social reality is fundamentally an <i>interactive</i> one: the creation of knowledge about society far more often than not involves intervention in society.</p><p>The creation of social scientific knowledge can rarely, if ever, by considered a purely representational affair. This obtains for practically all forms of knowledge about society - and as we shall see, about nature as well - but it causes specific problems for the explanation of social phenomena. Let me give an example from contemporary social science, broadly defined. Some years ago computational social scientists published research that showed that the high levels of political polarization that can be observed among communities on Facebook cannot be explained by the role of social media algorithms in the promotion of content. As they put it: “individual choices, more than algorithms, limit exposure to attitude-challenging content” (Bakshy et al., <span>2015</span>, p. 1131). Such a claim asks us to accept a number of assumptions, most notably, that it is possible to disentangle the influence of individual user choices on news consumption on Facebook from the influence of platform settings such as the structure of news feeds.<sup>1</sup> This assumption may or may not ultimately be methodologically convincing. But in grounding its main finding in this distinction, this study distracts attention from a more
{"title":"Articulation, or the persistent problem with explanation","authors":"Noortje Marres","doi":"10.1111/1468-4446.13084","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1468-4446.13084","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Sociologists have long argued that explanation, as a form of knowledge, has serious limitations when it comes to understanding society. The case against explanation is one of the field's founding ideas, it is literally a foundational idea. It was by rejecting causalist forms of explanation that had been developed in the natural sciences that 19th century scholars and activists that we today call sociologists succeeded in articulating a distinctive realm of reality with relative autonomy from the state, the economy and the family: society (Wagner, <span>2000</span>). Key to their achievement was the argument that the phenomenon of society is fundamentally different from nature. Scientists at the time expected nature to obey eternally valid laws, but society has a number of features that challenge this assumption. Social actors formulate norms and rules to justify their actions and to make sense of social reality. This means that norms and rules themselves may play an active role in the transformation of social reality. Society, in other words, is marked by reflexivity. Of course, a lot has happened since the 19th century and this very notably includes unrelenting efforts by social scientists to create forms of explanation that are capable of taking reflexivity into account. Yet problems with explanation have continued to make themselves felt in the social sciences and humanities. The problem, in a nutshell, is that explanation sets up the relation between social science and its object, society, in terms of <i>representation</i>, but the relation between knowledge about society and social reality is fundamentally an <i>interactive</i> one: the creation of knowledge about society far more often than not involves intervention in society.</p><p>The creation of social scientific knowledge can rarely, if ever, by considered a purely representational affair. This obtains for practically all forms of knowledge about society - and as we shall see, about nature as well - but it causes specific problems for the explanation of social phenomena. Let me give an example from contemporary social science, broadly defined. Some years ago computational social scientists published research that showed that the high levels of political polarization that can be observed among communities on Facebook cannot be explained by the role of social media algorithms in the promotion of content. As they put it: “individual choices, more than algorithms, limit exposure to attitude-challenging content” (Bakshy et al., <span>2015</span>, p. 1131). Such a claim asks us to accept a number of assumptions, most notably, that it is possible to disentangle the influence of individual user choices on news consumption on Facebook from the influence of platform settings such as the structure of news feeds.<sup>1</sup> This assumption may or may not ultimately be methodologically convincing. But in grounding its main finding in this distinction, this study distracts attention from a more ","PeriodicalId":51368,"journal":{"name":"British Journal of Sociology","volume":"75 3","pages":"354-359"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2024-02-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1468-4446.13084","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139673585","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Agents of reform: Child labor and the origins of the welfare state. By Elisabeth Anderson, Princeton (NJ), Oxford: Princeton University Press. 2021. pp. 384. $32.00/£28.00. ISBN: 978-0-691-22089-5","authors":"Matty R. Lichtenstein","doi":"10.1111/1468-4446.13082","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1468-4446.13082","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51368,"journal":{"name":"British Journal of Sociology","volume":"75 4","pages":"668-670"},"PeriodicalIF":2.7,"publicationDate":"2024-01-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140472967","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
We analyze 391 news reports in Israeli newspapers between 2013 and 2015, covering murders of women and their family members by other family members and intimate partners. We compare articles where the perpetrators and victims are Jewish to those where the perpetrators and victims are Palestinian citizens of Israel (henceforth PCI). We found that articles tend to provide much more details about Jewish culprits than about PCI ones. As for ascribed motives, most murder cases by Jews were framed as an outcome of individual personality or the pathology of the culprit. Conversely, when Palestinian citizens were the killers, culture and tradition were invoked as the main motives. We suggest that the routine work of narration that the Israeli media preform when covering femicide is a case of political use of cultural stereotypes to gain moral ground in the intractable conflict between Jews and Palestinians.
{"title":"Symbolic boundary work: Jewish and Arab femicide in Israeli Hebrew newspapers","authors":"Eran Shor, Ina Filkobski","doi":"10.1111/1468-4446.13080","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1468-4446.13080","url":null,"abstract":"<p>We analyze 391 news reports in Israeli newspapers between 2013 and 2015, covering murders of women and their family members by other family members and intimate partners. We compare articles where the perpetrators and victims are Jewish to those where the perpetrators and victims are Palestinian citizens of Israel (henceforth PCI). We found that articles tend to provide much more details about Jewish culprits than about PCI ones. As for ascribed motives, most murder cases by Jews were framed as an outcome of individual personality or the pathology of the culprit. Conversely, when Palestinian citizens were the killers, culture and tradition were invoked as the main motives. We suggest that the routine work of narration that the Israeli media preform when covering femicide is a case of political use of cultural stereotypes to gain moral ground in the intractable conflict between Jews and Palestinians.</p>","PeriodicalId":51368,"journal":{"name":"British Journal of Sociology","volume":"75 3","pages":"290-302"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2024-01-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1468-4446.13080","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139576861","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Scholars of social mobility increasingly study the role of family background in shaping attainment throughout the entire life course. However, research has yet to establish whether the family characteristics influencing early career attainment are the same as those influencing late career attainment. In this research note, I apply an extended sibling correlation approach to analyze brothers’ life cycle earnings and family income, using data from the U.S. National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979. My analysis reveals a near-perfect correlation in the family characteristics that affect attainment at early, mid, and late career stages. This finding has significant implications for how mobility scholars conceptualize the impact of family background across a career. It suggests that family background forms a single, consistent dimension in determining attainment throughout the life course. Further analysis also indicates that the imperfect relationship between current and lifetime income is exclusively driven by within-family processes.
{"title":"Family background consistently affects economic success across the life cycle: A research note on how brother correlations overlap over the life course","authors":"Kristian Bernt Karlson","doi":"10.1111/1468-4446.13081","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1468-4446.13081","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Scholars of social mobility increasingly study the role of family background in shaping attainment throughout the entire life course. However, research has yet to establish whether the family characteristics influencing early career attainment are the same as those influencing late career attainment. In this research note, I apply an extended sibling correlation approach to analyze brothers’ life cycle earnings and family income, using data from the U.S. National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979. My analysis reveals a near-perfect correlation in the family characteristics that affect attainment at early, mid, and late career stages. This finding has significant implications for how mobility scholars conceptualize the impact of family background across a career. It suggests that family background forms a single, consistent dimension in determining attainment throughout the life course. Further analysis also indicates that the imperfect relationship between current and lifetime income is exclusively driven by within-family processes.</p>","PeriodicalId":51368,"journal":{"name":"British Journal of Sociology","volume":"75 3","pages":"347-353"},"PeriodicalIF":2.1,"publicationDate":"2024-01-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1468-4446.13081","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139572020","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}