Suchergebnisse

Changes in social openness and social exclusion: a view on the past and the future In contemporary societies, the likelihood to obtain attractive positions differs between men and women, between natives and migrant groups, and between people from different social backgrounds.
Societies are not completely 'open'. It is often thought that this was even more the case one or two centuries ago. Research on long term changes in social openness and social exclusion is however relatively scarce. This article gives an overview of recent studies on this topic
and presents new questions that the results of these studies trigger off.

In this study, we examine how the influence of the family on occupational success fluctuates when studying different points across individuals' lives (i.e., from career entry to midlife). Resource theories propose that individuals with more parental resources will continue to profit as they get to later life-stages, increasing their advantage over others. In contrast, signaling theories predict that parental resources will lose their importance when children advance in their career, since employers will increasingly select on actual worker productivity, not social background. To shed some light on these theories, we use data from the German Socioeconomic Panel Survey (SOEP). Multilevel SEM sibling models are applied in which individuals (N = 12,443) are nested in families (N = 7,766). These models assess the extent to which siblings are similar with respect to occupational status as opposed to individuals to which they are not related, enabling the estimation of a broad measure of family and community effects. We divide this broad measure into direct impact and indirect impact via education. Our results indicate that the indirect family impact increases after the child's career entry up to the ages 30 and 35, stabilizing thereafter. The direct effect shows a similar yet more stable pattern, as the effect as well as the variations with age are much smaller. Finally, the proportion of family-level variance explained by measured family indicators increases over the life-course.

Summary Twenty years later …In 1996, a group of Utrecht and Nijmegen based sociologists compiled a study on social segmentation in the Netherlands in 2015. In their contributions, they formulated testable predictions for 2015, based on the most up-to-date
theories, models, and data. In this issue of Mens & Maatschappij, authors look back at and test these predictions, using data collected since 1996. Key findings are summarized in this contribution.