Education and Social Fluidity in Contemporary Italy

Author(s):  
Carlo Barone ◽  
Raffaele Guetto

In this chapter we assess whether changes in educational participation have fostered changes in social fluidity in Italy over the twentieth century. By means of log-linear unidiff models and of multinomial logistic regressions, we show that a significant decline of schooling inequalities during the so-called economic miracle fueled an increase in social fluidity, in a context where the association between education and class destinations weakened only slightly. Direct inheritance also declined to some extent in the postwar period. These equalizing trends occurred for both men and women, but were stronger among women, and involved primarily, though not exclusively, the agricultural classes. However, all these trends have flattened out in the youngest cohorts, where social fluidity is highly inertial. Since the process of occupational upgrading has halted in recent decades, the recent stability of relative mobility involves also the stagnation of absolute mobility.

Author(s):  
Richard Breen ◽  
Ruud Luijkx ◽  
Eline Berkers

The Netherlands is well known for a sustained and marked trend towards greater social fluidity during the twentieth century. This chapter investigates trends in mobility across birth cohorts of Dutch men and women born in the first three-quarters of the twentieth century. During this time there was also a rapid upgrading of the Dutch class structure and marked expansion of the educational. But education played only a limited role in driving the increase in social fluidity: rather it was due mostly to the growing shares of people from nonservice-class origins who lacked a tertiary qualification but nevertheless moved into service-class destinations. An oversupply of service-class positions, relative to the share of people with a tertiary qualification, allowed less-qualified men and women from less-advantaged class backgrounds to be upwardly mobile.


1999 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 463-491 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henryk Domański

This analysis compares the effects on social mobility of the political transformations in Eastern Europe which took place in the 1950s and the 1990s. The author examines absolute and relative mobility rates in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Russia and Slovakia based on data from national random samples taken in 1993 and 1994. Log-linear models are applied to mobility tables for four periods, 1948-52, 1952-63, 1983-88 and 1988-93, to determine change in the strength of association between occupational categories. Searching for the effect of the transition to communism the author compares occupational mobility between 1948 and 1952 with occupational mobility between 1952 and 1963. In order to assess the effect of the transition from communism, mobility between 1983 and 1988 is compared to mobility between 1988 and 1993. It was definitely the transition to communism in the late 1940s that released the more intensive flows between basic segments of the social structure compared to what occurred during the exit from communism in the 1990s. Using both the diagonals and the constant social fluidity models, the author finds no evidence of increasing openness in post-communist countries. Contrariwise, in the 1948-63 period some significant change occurred in relative mobility chances. The conclusion is that the “first transformation” gave rise to a turn in social fluidity on the “genotypical” level.


Author(s):  
Richard Breen

All the country chapters in this volume use the same set of methods, and this chapter explains them in simple and accessible terms. These methods include descriptive statistics for the analysis of absolute mobility, the use of log-linear models for the analysis of relative mobility or social fluidity, and simulations to assess the role played by educational equalization and educational expansion in shaping trends in social fluidity.


Author(s):  
Richard Breen ◽  
Walter Müller

This chapter sets out the main goal of the volume: to examine the role of education in shaping rates and patterns of intergenerational social mobility among men and women during the twentieth century. This is a particularly timely question given the concerns of politicians and policy makers with intergenerational mobility and their belief that the solution lies in education. The chapter explains what we mean by social mobility and the distinction between absolute and relative mobility, and it sets out the reasons why we expect changes to the educational system to lead to changes in both absolute and relative mobility. The chapter discusses the reasons for choosing the eight countries on which we focus: the United States, Sweden, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, and Switzerland. The operationalization of our main variables is explained and the questions to be addressed in each of the subsequent country chapters are set out.


2020 ◽  
Vol 36 (4) ◽  
pp. 495-512
Author(s):  
Erzsébet Bukodi ◽  
Marii Paskov

Abstract In this article, we address two inter-related questions. Are there gender differences in the level and the pattern of intergenerational class mobility? If so, do these differences show up in a uniform fashion in Europe? To answer these questions, we use a newly constructed comparative data set that allows us to examine how far differences between men and women in absolute and relative mobility can still be characterized in the same way as in the last decades of the 20th century. We also examine the effects of women’s heterogeneity in terms of labour market attachment on their class mobility. Our results show that in most countries, women are more likely than men to be found in different class positions to those of their parents’. But we point out that the reasons for this might be quite different in the West and in the East. As regards relative mobility chances, we are able to underwrite the dominant finding of past research that women display greater social fluidity than men only in a certain group of countries. In most countries, we do not find any systematic and uniform gender difference between men and women in the level of their relative mobility rates. But, we do find significant and systematic gender differences in the pattern of relative rates: women’s class mobility appears to be more impeded by hierarchical barriers than by the propensity for class inheritance. And, in this regard, our findings point to a large degree of commonality across European countries.


Author(s):  
Jason Phillips

This conclusion explains how American temporalities changed after the war and sketches how expectations and anticipations of the future have alternated as the dominant view in American culture through the twentieth century to today. This chapter also shows how the short war myth, the story that Civil War Americans expected a short, glorious war at the outset, gained currency with the public and consensus among scholars during the postwar period. It contrasts the wartime expectations of individuals with their postwar memories of the war’s beginning to show how the short war myth worked as a tool for sectional reconciliation and a narrative device that dramatized the war by creating an innocent antebellum era or golden age before the cataclysm. It considers why historians still accept the myth and showcases three postwar voices that challenged it.


Author(s):  
Marlou Schrover

This chapter discusses social exclusion in European migration from a gendered and historical perspective. It discusses how from this perspective the idea of a crisis in migration was repeatedly constructed. Gender is used in this chapter in a dual way: attention is paid to differences between men and women in (refugee) migration, and to differences between men and women as advocates and claim makers for migrant rights. There is a dilemma—recognized mostly for recent decades—that on the one hand refugee women can be used to generate empathy, and thus support. On the other hand, emphasis on women as victims forces them into a victimhood role and leaves them without agency. This dilemma played itself out throughout the twentieth century. It led to saving the victims, but not to solving the problem. It fortified rather than weakened the idea of a crisis.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 443-454

Sons and Lovers (1913) is one of D.H. Lawrence’s most prominent novels in terms of psychological complexities characteristic of most, if not all, of his other novels. Many studies have been conducted on the Oedipus complex theory and psychological relationship between men and women in Lawrence’s novels reflecting the early twentieth century norms of life. This paper reexamines Sons and Lovers from the perspective of rivalry based on Alfred Adler’s psychological studies. The discussion tackles the sibling rivalry between the members of the Morels and extends to reexamining the rivalry between other characters. This concept is discussed in terms of two levels of relationships. First, between Paul and William as brothers on the one hand, and Paul and father and mother, on the other. Second, the rivalry triangle of Louisa, Miriam and Mrs. Morel. The qualitative pattern of the paper focuses on the textual analysis of the novel to show that Sons and Lovers can be approached through the concept of rivalry and sibling Rivalry. Keywords: Attachment theory, Competition, Concept of Rivalry, Favoritism, Sibling rivalry.


2013 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 693-721 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Laite

AbstractThe story of the lorry girl and the lorry driver, the roads they traveled on, and the responses toward them allows for some telling insights into a strange kind of “immoral traffic” in 1930s and 1950s Britain. Whether seeking employment or adventure, leaving the “distressed areas” or absconding from an approved school, the lorry girl was linked to anxieties about women's mobility, unemployment, venereal disease, and delinquency. At the same time, the figure of the lorry driver, both romanticized and marginalized, showed that deviant and commercialized sexuality could be linked to the economic and social inequality of both men and women. Concerns about lorry jumping and hitchhiking in this period also reveal a different kind of narrative in the development of British roadways, which not only were tied to both the health and efficiency of the nation but also were spaces of sexual danger and sites of social delinquency.


Author(s):  
Ishita Pande

This chapter examines attempts to standardize, internalize, and globalize sexual temporality—captured in the conceptualization of the body as clock—in the sexological advice offered to men and women in India in the early twentieth century. It first describes the constitution of “Hindu erotica” during the period and how these English translations gave rise to a set of foundational texts that would become the basis of global/Hindu sexology while filling them up with clock time. It then considers the ways that these texts attached life cycles to the chronological ordering of time by recasting brahmacharya—a prescription for a stage of life devoted to celibacy and learning—as an age-stratified organization of sexual behavior and a schema for sex education. By using the example of bodily temporality, the chapter addresses questions of sexuality and space in relation to globalization and transnational capitalism, colonialism and development.


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