Institutional characteristics of education systems and inequalities: Introduction II

The second special issue of International Journal of Comparative Sociology (IJCS) on the role of education systems as institutional settings on the reproduction of inequalities includes three papers that focus on stratification of the education system as key driver of educational inequalities, the role of digital inequalities in the school and beyond, as well as how students navigate through the institutional setting of the Taiwanese education system. While we already elaborated on the research program, conceptual framework, and methodological challenges in the first introduction (published in January 2021), we will deal with the current state-of-research in this second introduction.

Armed Conflict and Religious Adherence Across Countries: A Time Series Analysis

A fundamental question in the comparative sociology of religion is: What are the drivers of cross-national differences in religiosity? The existential insecurity argument raises the expectation of higher levels of religiosity in contexts of social crisis. We test this argument against countries’ armed conflict experiences, employing global longitudinal data on religious adherence over almost half a century. We did not find evidence of religious revival when measuring the consequences of armed conflict with a 5-year lag, indicating that armed conflict-related social crises do not tend to lead to sudden changes in the religious adherence of a country. However, we did find more consistent indications of a higher proportion of religious people when using accumulated measurements of armed conflict, highlighting the importance of investigating the armed conflict history of a country when assessing its religious consequences. Our results show that countries with a more devastating experience of armed conflict tend to present higher proportions of religious adherence in comparison with countries with a less devastating armed conflict history. We concluded that armed conflict tends to partially drive religious persistence in societies that have experienced it, and that the pace at which this takes place is gradual rather than immediate.

Space, Marginality, and Youth in Urban Spaces: Pedagogical Practices in the Quartieri Spagnoli

The Quartieri Spagnoli (QS) in Naples represent a central urban area of the city affected by extreme levels of disadvantage. The area is characterized by crime, together with high unemployment and school dropout rates, and virtually no social integration in the wider urban landscape. With the highest population density in the city, the area is low in services and green spaces, and its spatial arrangements are characterized by narrow streets and restricted accessibility. In this chapter, I aim to present an account of children’s lived experiences and self-perceptions of space, power, and violence in an urban space that is facing a process of change due to recent capitalist developments such as deepening deprivation and marginalization in advanced capitalist societies (Wacquant, Urban outcasts: a comparative sociology of advanced marginality. Polity, Cambridge, 2008), and expulsions (Sassen, Expulsions: brutality and complexity in the global economy. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2014). Moreover, I focus on teachers’ perceptions of their role as pedagogical actors in a marginalized urban space.

FEATURES OF THE USE OF COMPARATIVE METHODS IN TEACHING THE DISCIPLINE «COMPARATIVE SOCIOLOGY»

The article examines the features of the discipline of comparative sociology. In the process of mastering the discipline, first of all, the author expresses the opinion that the discipline is taught with a deep understanding of its features. In many fields of science, especially in the natural, social and human sciences, special attention is paid to the specifics of the comparative method, which is first used in research. In particular, the author will try to reveal the features of the application of J.S. Mill’s method of gauche induction in sociology. The author emphasizes that before embarking on a research, a research scientist must first analyze what and how to analyze a given problem. The author points out that comparative research in the social sciences is much more difficult. A researcher of social problems must pay attention to the volatility of society, which means that the object of research also changes. Mill’s research methods are consistent with experiments in experimental sciences. It’s application in sociological sciences leads to some difficulties in work. Because society is always changing, and with it the way of life. The fact social change is also reflected in social progress is likely to mean the instability of the research subject.

Food and social change: Culinary elites, contested technologies, food movements and embodied social change in food practices

In this introduction, we have asked a very classical sociological question and brought together interdisciplinary efforts to critically approach it, focusing on a basic issue: food. We briefly reconstruct the main approaches to social change in sociological theory and then identify main themes with which food studies have contributed to this debate. If, to avoid normative and formal approaches, theories of change require contextualization in order to keep their explanatory value, this volume brings historical and geographical context to provide an analysis of social change through the lenses of food. Methodologically, articles offer diverse approaches to food, allowing different kinds of perspectives on change. While statistical analysis or historically comparative sociology will provide correlational snapshots and structural transformations, ethnographies necessarily deal with change happening in the everyday. The articles in this monograph have been organized into four broad groups: (1) national cuisines as elite projects of social change; (2) science and technology as contested tools for social change; (3) social mobilization and food movements as agents of social change; and (4) micro- and macro-level change and beyond: culinary subjectivities, embodied social change and food transition.

Living in Utopia in the 19th Century

Concrete utopias have received little international comparison. In order to contribute to a comparative sociology of such social experiments, this article is interested in the case of France and the United States in the 19th century. To mirror concerns that were important at that time in both of these countries (the “social question” and the “question of women”), attention is focused on local experiments where work and gender were the subject of some notable innovations. After highlighting the form, importance and dynamics of abstract and concrete utopias in France and the United States, two communities inspired by C. Fourier are compared: the Familistère de Guise (France), and the Oneida Association (United States). If both learn about the Fourierist utopia, they put it into practice differently, in particular because of issues specific to each of the two countries.