Full Description
Research into social stratification and social divisions has always been a central component of sociological study. This volume brings together a range of thematically organised case-studies comprising empirical and methodological analyses addressing the challenges of studying trends and processes in social stratification. This collection has four themes. The first concerns the measurement of social stratification, since the problem of relating concepts, measurements and operationalizations continues to cause difficulties for sociological analysis. This book clarifies the appropriate deployment of existing measurement options, and presents new empirical strategies of measurement and interpretation. The conception of the life course and individual social biography is very popular in modern sociology. The second theme of this volume exploits the contemporary expansion of micro-level longitudinal data and the analytical approaches available to researchers to exploit such records. It comprises chapters which exemplify innovative empirical analysis of life-course processes in a longitudinal context, thus offering an advance on previous sociological accounts concerned with longitudinal trends and processes. The third theme of the book concerns the interrelationship between contemporary demographic, institutional and socioeconomic transformations and structures of social inequality. Although the role of wider social changes is rarely neglected in sociological reviews, such changes continue to raise analytical challenges for any assessment of empirical differences and trends. The fourth theme of the book discusses selected features of policy and political responses to social stratification. This volume will be of interest to students, academics and policy experts working in the field of social stratification.
Contents
1: Introduction; I: Measuring Social Stratification; 2: Stratification Research and Occupation-Based Social Classifications; 3: Measures and Dimensions of Occupational Stratification: The Case of a Relational Scale for Italy; 4: A Relational Occupational Scale for Russia; II: Social Stratification Over the Life Course; 5: Cumulative Inequalities Along the Life Course: Long-Term Trends in the German Labour Market; 6: Family Background and the Life Cycle Effects of Father's Class and Income; 7: Social Stratification and Cognitive Ability: An Assessment of the Influence of Childhood Ability Test Scores and Family Background on Occupational Position Across the Lifespan; 8: Intergenerational and Intragenerational Social Mobility in Britain; III: Demographic, Institutional and Socio-economic Changes; 9: Ethnicity and Skilled Work in the United States; 10: Occupation and Pay Across the Generations: The Labour Market Experience of Four Ethno-Religious Groups in Britain; 11: The Labour Market Earnings of Minority Ethnic Groups in Great Britain and the USA (1990-2000); 12: The Relationship Between Social Stratification and First Birth in Scotland; 13: Stratification, Work and Early Parenthood; 14: Labour Market Returns to Tertiary Education in Post-Socialist Countries; IV: Political and Policy Responses to Stratification; 15: Labouring Under a Misapprehension: Politicians' Perceptions and the Realities of Structural Social Mobility in Britain, 1995-2010; 16: Security or Equality? The Difficult Reform of the Italian Welfare State; 17: Gender Inequality, Modernisation and Development in South and Southeast Asia
