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This introductory book provides an insight into sociological life course research and informs about its theoretical assumptions, analytical concepts and main results. Sociological life course research - like biographical research - has developed into an independent and fruitful field of research since the end of the 1960s. It is true that half a century earlier, in their famous study of "The Polish Peasant in Europe and America" (1918-20), Thomas and Znaniecki had already used life records to examine the connection between social change, social structures, and the life histories of individuals. However, such a research perspective was supplanted by other methodological-conceptual approaches ...
In the last two decades, research on the life course has successfully combined and integrated different and rather isolated fields of social concerns such as: the labor market, family solidarity, education, employment, retirement, and social policy. It has also developed a special focus on crucial problems of sociological research, which includes the understanding of micromacro phenomena, the dynamics of social change, and international comparisons. Contributors to this volume take an international, comparative approach in applying the life course theoretical framework to issues of work and career. Life course research focuses on the relationship between institutions and individuals across t...
This book reveals the ambivalent repercussions of capitalist culture on interpersonal relationships in the post-communist world. Most observers tend to blame modern corruption, narcissism, and egoism in these new market societies on their communist pasts. This comparative analysis shows how the capitalist present is also squarely responsible.
Nils Witte explores Turkish migrants’ destigmatization strategies and investigates their legal and symbolic motives for naturalisation. Using mixed methods and unique data the author shows that Turkish migrants’ inclination to naturalise would be stronger if they were allowed to retain their former citizenship and if they were recognized as symbolic members of German society. Minority members enjoy expansive rights as permanent residents and many are entitled to hold German citizenship. However, they often experience symbolic exclusion making symbolic membership a rare motive for naturalisation.
This book contains empirical studies of school-to-work transitions from several Western countries.
Work in Transition shows how migrants develop their cultural capital in order to enter the workforce, as well as how failure to leverage that capital can lead to permanent exclusion from professional positions.
Pursuing the dream of a musical vocation—particularly in rock music—is typically regarded as an adolescent pipedream. Music is marked as an appropriate leisure activity, but one that should be discarded upon entering adulthood. How then do many men and women aspire to forge careers in music upon entering adulthood? In Destined for Greatness, sociologist Michael Ramirez examines the lives of forty-eight independent rock musicians who seek out such non-normative choices in a college town renowned for its music scene. He explores the rich life course trajectories of women and men to explore the extent to which pathways are structured to allow some, but not all, individuals to fashion careers in music worlds. Ramirez suggests a more nuanced understanding of factors that enable the pursuit of musical livelihoods well into adulthood.
This book contributes to the theoretical and methodological discussion about how the diverging experiences of generations and their historical memories play a role in the process of national identity formation. Drawing from narratives gathered within the Ukrainian minority in northern Poland and centered on the collective trauma of Action Vistula, where in 1947 about 140,000 Ukrainians were resettled from south-eastern Poland and relocated to the north-western areas, this study shows that three generations vary considerably with regard to their understandings of home, integration, history and religion. Thus, generational differences are an essential element in the analysis and understanding of social and political change. The findings of this study provide a contribution to debates about the process based nature of national identity, the role of trauma in creating generational consciousness and how generations should be conceptualized.
After the collapse of state socialism at the end of the 1980s, young people in Eastern Europe began to play a dramatically different role in society. Once cast as the vital, reinvigorating protagonists of the communist ideal, they emerged as promoters of democratisation and agents of a now hegemonic market system. Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, an event symbolising both the lifting of the Iron Curtain and the end of the Cold War, an international seminar was held in Budapest to discuss how the opening of eastern European societies to western Europe and the world had changed the living conditions and experiences of young people growing up in the region. This ...
In Citizenship Beyond Nationality, Luicy Pedroza considers immigrants who have settled in democracies and who live indistinguishably from citizens—working, paying taxes, making social contributions, and attending schools—yet lack the status, gained either through birthright or naturalization, that would give them full electoral rights. Referring to this population as denizens, Pedroza asks what happens to the idea of democracy when a substantial part of the resident population is unable to vote? Her aim is to understand how societies justify giving or denying electoral rights to denizens. Pedroza undertakes a comparative examination of the processes by which denizen enfranchisement refor...