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This paper empirically examines differences in how 50-year-olds imagine their future. It draws on answers to an open-ended survey question in a large British cohort study—the National Child Development Study. Over 6,700 written responses about respondents’ imagined future are examined using text mining methods. Results from a relative frequency analysis and a topic model reveal differences according to gender, occupational class, and educational qualification. The cohort members’ written texts reflect different lifestyles. Men are more likely to mention sport, like golf and football, whereas women are more prone to use words related to family and friends. Respondents with a degree are more likely to write about cultural activities, such as museum or theater visits. Overall, the findings reveal gendered and socially stratified patterns in individual future perceptions, contextualized in relation to leisure, health, and family.
Die ethnografische Feldstudie untersucht die Lebenswege von jungen muslimischen Männern, die in einer armutsbetroffenen und stigmatisierten Hochhaussiedlung in der urbanen Peripherie aufwachsen. Sie vergleicht die Lebenswege derjenigen, die ein Hochschulstudium aufnehmen (college boys) mit der Gruppe derjenigen, die sich in der informellen Ökonomie der 'Straße' mit dem Drogenhandel als wichtigstem Zweig betätigen (corner boys). Die Lebensverläufe der jungen Männer, deren Familien meist im Zuge der Anwerbemigration ab den 1960er Jahren aus Marokko oder aus der Türkei eingewandert sind, werden anhand der Lebensverlaufstheorie (life course theory) von Glen Elder und Janet Giele erklärt. Die ethnografischen Beschreibungen werden methodisch um biografische Interviews mit college boys und corner boys und um Expertinneninterviews mit Fachleuten aus Organisationen wie Kitas, Schulen oder einer Moschee ergänzt. Die ethnografischen Beobachtungen werden auch ins Verhältnis zu Befunden aus der interdisziplinären sozialwissenschaftlichen Literatur gesetzt, die wiederum mit den in der Studie erhobenen und sehr persönlichen Lebensgeschichten von corner boys und college boys kombiniert werden. Der Forscher hatte während der Feldarbeit eine Doppelrolle, da er nicht nur als Ethnograf tätig war, sondern auch für die Stadt als Streetworker bzw. Sozialarbeiter in der Hochhaussiedlung beschäftigt war. Insofern gibt die Feldstudie auch einen Einblick in die staatlichen Unterstützungssysteme der Sozialen Arbeit.
Im Ergebnis entsteht die Geschichte eines sozialräumlich segregierten Milieus seit der Migration der Großeltern nach Deutschland. Sowohl für college boys als auch für corner boys dient die harte Lohnarbeit ihrer Eltern und Großeltern als negative Kontrastfolie. College boys streben nach beruflichem Erfolg und Anerkennung durch Bildungsabschlüsse. Corner boys hingegen leisten Widerstand gegen die Arbeitsethik und andere dominante Normen und wenden sich von der Lohnarbeit im Allgemeinen ab. In den Lebensverläufen von college boys wirken bestimmte Schutzfaktoren, die ihnen einen Bildungsaufstieg trotz armutsgeprägter Lebensverhältnisse ermöglichen. Zu diesen Schutzfaktoren zählen ein stabiler Familienkontext mit engen Bindungen, die Organisation eines strukturierten Alltags in Kindheit und Jugend mit Aktivitäten wie Nachhilfe und Sportvereinen und der praktizierte Islam mit seiner engen Verbindung von Glaube, Bildung und Abstinenz.
Durch die Arbeit entsteht ein Perspektivwechsel auf Hochhaussiedlungen der untersuchten Art. Statt der üblichen symbolischen Abwertung erscheinen sie durch die beschriebenen intergenerationalen Bildungsaufstiege als Orte mit besonders hoher sozialer Mobilität. Auf der anderen Seite wird mit den corner boys aber auch eine Gruppe beschrieben, in der sich Prekarität aufgrund von Ausgrenzungserfahrungen und einer anschließenden Resignation verfestigt hat. Die college boys bekommen Raum zur Entfaltung, während die corner boys metaphorisch gesprochen im Raum der Hochhaussiedlung gefangen bleiben. Die Faktoren, die diesen Unterschied erklären, werden in der Arbeit beleuchtet.
Animal agriculture is responsible for at least 16.5% of global yearly CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent) emissions (Twine 2021: 3) and thus partially causal for the corresponding climate change, and its disastrous consequences for millions (Romanello et al. 2023: 1-2). At the same time, animal agriculture restricts and damages the bodily autonomy of animals regularly (Hampton et al. 2021: 28) which could be unethical depending on the underlying ethical theory. The policy option of veganism by law is, nevertheless, rarely considered. The definitions of veganism range from an individual ethic of the abstention from consuming animal products to a political philosophy calling for the abolition of animal agriculture (Mancilla 2016: 1-3). Because veganism through the cessation of animal agriculture could be the policy solution to the aforementioned issues concerning the rights of present and future generations affected by climate change and the rights of animals, I explore arguments for and against the implementation of veganism by law.
Although a veganized agriculture would provide 52% of the required emission reductions for the 2°C target of the Paris climate accord (Eisen and Brown 2022: 6), and could allow for greater animal welfare, current policies of many governments promote the opposite. For example, 82% of the subsidies of the European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy are routed towards the production of animal products and animal feed (Kortleve et al. 2024: 1-2). Moreover, for American adults the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (2020: 96) promotes the consumption of 720ml of cow milk or other dairy per day and recommends a protein intake through meat and eggs between 652 g and 936 g per week.
In this bachelor thesis I outline the current state of animal agriculture, its emissions and the associated harm towards animals and humans. The empirical findings are dissected ethically with a consequentialist approach and a deontological approach. The ethical analysis concerning the decisions of individuals is then converted into a political philosophy regarding the duties of states towards present and future generations and animals including corresponding policy implications.
The normative argument is mainly based on the example of industrialized animal agricul-ture, the area where most of the interaction between animals and humans occurs. Nevertheless, other sectors where animals are used for human consumption or entertainment are discussed in less detail, in order to analyze the arguments for veganism by law.
In short, using the recommended political argument structure of Abel et al. (2021: 6) the following hypothesis acts as the basis for the political and philosophical discussion and is revised where necessary:
Moral claims: The state should protect present and future generations and animal rights.
Empirical claims: Animal agriculture is a major contributor to climate change and its corresponding effects and violates the wellbeing of animals regularly.
Conclusion: The state should enforce veganism by law.
Am 18. Juni wird Jürgen Habermas, der die Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften der Goethe-Universität nachhaltig geprägt hat, 95 Jahre alt, und dazu sendet unsere wissenschaftliche Community, der er nach wie vor aktiv angehört, die herzlichsten Glückwünsche. Bis heute ist Habermas’ wissenschaftliche und intellektuelle Stimme national und international eine der meistgehörten, und wir wünschen von Herzen, dass es noch lange so bleiben möge.
In this paper, we use the “gender as a social structure” framework to assess macro-, interactional-, and micro-level mechanisms explaining the stalled revolution in gender ideologies. Using the European Values Study 2008 data and latent class analysis, we look at the spread of gender ideologies and examine their association with national levels of gendered ascription of work and care roles, work–family compatibility, social inequality and societal affluence, individual characteristics, and cross-level interactions with gender and education in 36 (post-)industrialized countries. By including a large number of Central, Eastern, and South-Eastern European countries, we provide a new and comprehensive picture of the gender ideology landscapes of Europe, reflected in two unidimensional classes—egalitarian and traditional—and four multidimensional classes, covering more than 60 percent of respondents—family oriented, choice egalitarian, intensive motherhood, and neotraditional. By modeling key features of macro-level variation, we show how the spread of gender ideologies is associated with distinct contextual conditions. We consolidate previous findings on multidimensional gender ideologies, which were based on fewer countries.
Coercion or privatization? Crisis and planned economies in the debates of the early Frankfurt School
(2023)
The 1930s–1940s underwent profound structural economic and political turmoil following the collapse of the nineteenth century liberal market economies. The intellectual debates of the time were dominated by the question of whether Marx’s theory of the tendency of rate of profit to fall was true, or what consequence could be imagined in the survival of capitalist societies. Placed in the middle of such debates was also the reorganization of national productions into war economies. By means of reconstructive analysis, the paper provides a critical overview of the debates that took place within the circle of the Frankfurt School during those years. It also advances an interpretive thesis suggesting that remedies to capitalist crises of the time turned state powers into privatized, illiberal coercive entities. Coercion and privatization reinforced each other. This general tendency is well illustrated by the famous Pollock-Neumann debate. These intellectuals expressed views not only intended to shed light on the historical period of time, but also to formulate long-term considerations on the authoritarian trends embedded in our contemporary democracies. Through historical reconstruction, the paper’s aim is to identify a long-term structural thread of transformation starting from the transformation of the German economy in 1930s and touching upon post Second World War problems of states’ restructuring along privatization/coercion divides.
The paper presents the findings of two recent books on the financial history of the Frankfurt School: Jeanette Erazo-Heufelder, Der argentinische Krösus: Kleine Wirtschaftsgeschichte der Frankfurter Schule, 2017, and Bertus Mulder, Sophie Louisa Kwaak und das Kapital der Unternehmerfamilie Weil. Ein Beitrag zur Wirtschaftsgeschichte der Frankfurter Schule, 2021 (Dutch original 2015). In contrast to the “court histories” of the school, the two authors tell the story of the money that brought the school to life and secured its existence throughout a turbulent period of history. At the center of the books are individuals who have been sidelined until now or even completely ignored by the literature on the Frankfurt School: on the one hand, Felix Weil, who founded and financed the Institute of Social Research and, on the other hand, Erich A. Nadel and Sophie L. Kwaak, two employees of the holding company who managed the accounts of the Weil family and the Institute’s foundations and were responsible for protecting the assets from being seized by Nazis. The books’ thick descriptions induced the author of the present paper to consider an alternative perspective on the Frankfurt School by contemplating Max Horkheimer and Friedrich Pollock as playing confidential games with Weil and others.
Aim: Replicate the analysis conducted by Prof. Dr. Alexander W. Schmidt-Catran (Goethe University Frankfurt), Prof. Dr. Malcolm Fairbrother (Umea University), and Prof. Dr. Hans-Jürgen Andreß (University of Cologne) that was published in a special issue on Cross-National Comparative Research in the German academic journal Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie in 2019. Result: Almost all calculations, tables and graphs from Schmidt-Catran et al. (2019) could be replicated sufficiently well in R.
Recombinant DNA technology is an essential area of life engineering. The main aim of research in this field is to experimentally explore the possibilities of repairing damaged human DNA, healing or enhancing future human bodies. Based on ethnographic research in a Czech biochemical laboratory, the article explores biotechnological corporealities and their specific ontology through dealings with bio-objects, the bodywork of scientists. Using the complementary concepts of utopia and heterotopia, the text addresses the situation of bodies and bio-objects in a laboratory. Embodied utopias are analyzed as material semiotic phenomena that are embodied by scientists in their visions and emotions and that are related to potential bodies and to future, not-yet-actualized embodiments. As a counterpart to this, the text explores embodied heterotopias, which are always the other spaces, like biotechnological bio-objects that are simulated in computers or stored in special solutions.
Das Staatsangehörigkeitsrecht verankert rechtlich Vorstellungen über Zugehörigkeit und bestimmt wer vollumfängliche Rechte in einer Gesellschaft hat und wer nicht. Jahrzehntelang wurde Migration in Deutschland als etwas temporäres betrachtet. Im Staatsangehörigkeitsrecht galt bis zur Reform 1999/2000 weitgehend das „ius sanguinis“, das Abstammungsrecht, das auf einem rassistischen und völkischen Staatsverständnis beruht. Diese Reform bedeutete somit mehr als eine reine Gesetzesänderung. Sie war eine Anerkennung Deutschlands als Einwanderungsland und die Veränderung der Vorstellung deutscher Identität. Als Reaktion entbrannte infolge der Reformpläne eine hitzige, rassistische Debatte in der Öffentlichkeit über ebendiese Fragen, die unter dem polarisierten Schlagwort „Doppelpass“ verhandelt wurde. Es war die lauteste migrationspolitische Debatte dieser Zeit.
Kurze Zeit vor Beginn dieser Debatte war die rechtsterroristische Gruppe „Nationalsozialistischer Untergrund“ (NSU) abgetaucht, um einem Haftbefehl zu entgehen. Der NSU war ein deutsches, neonazistisches Netzwerk, in dessen Mittelpunkt drei Terrorist*innen standen. Sie verübten über einen Zeitraum von zwölf Jahren eine rassistische Mordserie an neun Personen türkischer, kurdischer und griechischer Herkunft sowie drei Sprengstoffanschläge auf migrantische Orte und ermordeten eine Polizistin. Den ersten ihrer Sprengstoffanschläge begingen sie nur einen Monat nach der Unterzeichnung der Reform. Wenige Monate nach dem Inkrafttreten des Gesetzes begannen sie mit dem Anschlag auf Enver Şimşek ihre rassistische Mordserie.
Diese Arbeit untersucht anhand der Struktur der Historisch-Materialistischen Politikanalyse das Migrationsregime um die Staatsangehörigkeitsreform von 1999/2000 und wie der NSU darin verortet werden kann.
Die Kontextanalyse stellt auf der Grundlage einer Literaturrecherche die relevanten historischen und strukturellen Faktoren der Debatte sowie des NSU dar. Im nächsten Schritt werden mithilfe einer Analyse von Zeitungsartikel aus dieser Zeit die relevanten Akteur*innen identifiziert und in die vier Hegemonieprojekte neoliberal, sozial, linksliberal-alternativ und konservativ gruppiert. Darauffolgend wird der Ablauf der Debatte in vier Phasen darstellt und als Aushandlung der vier Hegemonieprojekte rekonstruiert. Dabei zeigt sich, dass kein Projekt sich vollumfänglich durchsetzen und Hegemonie erreichen konnte, sie jedoch unterschiedlich stark in den Medien repräsentiert wurden.
Im letzten Schritt betrachtet diese Arbeit Verbindungen dieser Migrationsregime-Analyse zum NSU. Sie kommt zu dem Ergebnis, dass der NSU kein Akteur im Migrationsregime um die Staatsangehörigkeitsdebatte von 1998/99 war. Aufgrund der geringen Erkenntnisse über spezifische Meinungen des NSU zum Staatsangehörigkeitsrecht, können keine kausalen Beziehungen hergestellt werden. Dennoch zeigt diese Arbeit Gemeinsamkeiten in den Weltbildern, Annahmen und migrationspolitischen Zielen des NSU, des konservativen Hegemonieprojektes sowie Teilen der Bevölkerung auf. Dadurch wird ein Beitrag dazu geleistet den NSU als Produkt und Teil der deutschen Gesellschaft zu begreifen.
Highlights
• Family structure transitions decrease academic school track attendance among children of less educated parents.
• Children of highly educated fathers in single-mother families also have lower outcomes.
• Reduced income and increased exposure to poverty are relevant mediators.
• There is no cumulative disadvantage linked to a further transition to a stepfamily.
• Previous parental separation does not affect educational outcomes for children residing with a highly educated stepfather.
Abstract
Recent research has documented that the effect of parental separation on children’s educational outcomes depends on socioeconomic background. Yet, parental separation could lead to a stable single-parent family or to a further transition to a stepfamily. Little is known about how the effect of family structure transitions on educational outcomes depends on the education of parents and stepparents, and there has been limited empirical research into the mechanisms that explain heterogeneity in the effects of family transitions. Using longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel and models with entropy balancing and sibling fixed effects, I explore the heterogeneous effects of family transitions during early and middle childhood on academic secondary school track attendance, grades and aspirations. I find that family transitions only reduce the academic school track attendance among children of less educated parents living in stepfamilies or with a single mother after parental separation, and among children of highly educated fathers living in single-mother families. The mechanisms that partly explain these effects relate to reduced income and exposure to poverty after parental separation. The findings underscore the importance of considering the stepparent's educational level, indicating that the adverse consequences of parental separation on educational outcomes are mitigated when a highly educated stepfather becomes part of the family. Overall, these findings align more closely with the resource perspective than the family stability perspective.
Research around the “glass escalator” demonstrates that men receive promotions faster than women in women-dominated occupations. However, it remains unclear how overall establishment composition affects the glass escalator. We use German longitudinal linked employer-employee data (LIAB) between 2012 and 2019 to examine how occupational and establishment gender composition shape gender differences in promotions to management. Establishment gender composition moderates the glass escalator, meaning women's mobility disadvantages in women-dominated jobs are most pronounced in men-dominated establishments. We hypothesize that changing occupational status is a central mechanism: When occupations mirror the composition of the establishment, their status increases locally. Higher occupational status offsets lower leadership expectations attributed to women and increases women's promotion odds relative to their male colleagues.
Under pressure? : "Querdenken" - Kollektivierung als Praxisproblem einer Bewegung unter Druck
(2021)
Die vorliegende Arbeit untersucht eine lokale Telegram-Chatgruppe der Corona-Protestbewegung „Querdenken“ hinsichtlich deren Kollektivierungspraktiken. Das Erkenntnisinteresse liegt darin, zu untersuchen, wie die Gruppe in einer Zeit, in der durch häufige Demonstrationsverbote hoher Druck von außen auf sie einwirkt, Gemeinschaft herstellt. Analysiert werden dabei symbolische Grenzziehungspraktiken sowie die Mobilisierung leerer Signifikanten und – um einen Blick auf Kollektivierung als Praxisproblem zu werfen – die Konflikte, die innerhalb der Gruppe herrschen. Dabei zeigt sich eine antagonistische Identitätskonstitutionslogik, die sich anhand der privilegierten Signifikanten Demokratie vs. Diktatur konstituiert. Diese entwickeln ihre identitätsstiftende Kraft vor allem in der Attribution zu verschiedenen Subjektpositionen, von denen ‚die Politik‘ die zentrale Abgrenzungsposition für die Querdenker*innen darstellt. Weiterhin zeigt sich, dass die strategischen Konflikte, die aus dem Druck von außen resultieren, kontextabhängig gleichermaßen zersetzende wie integrative Kräfte entwickeln.
Recent research finds that Muslim girls increasingly have in-group friendships in adolescence, while Muslim boys remain more open to interreligious friendships. This gender gap mirrors established findings of female Muslims’ lower involvement in interreligious romantic relationships, which is attributed to gendered religious norms. In this study, we examine whether gendered religious norms also contribute to the emerging gender gap in Muslim youths’ interreligious friendship-making. Building on the literature on intergroup dating, we identify religiosity, parental control, and leisure time activities as key factors through which religious norms may not only constrain Muslim girls’ intergroup romantic relationships, but also their interreligious friendships. We also examine the contribution of gendered experiences of religious discrimination and rejection by non-Muslims to religious friendship-making. We study 737 Muslim youth from age 11–17 with six waves of longitudinal German data and find that religiosity, parental control, and leisure time activities all contribute to the emerging gender gap in interreligious friendship-making. Religiosity is associated with more in-group friendships, but only rises among Muslim girls in adolescence, not among boys. By contrast, parental control increases among both genders, but it only constrains girls’ interreligious friendships. Muslim girls’ declining participation in clubs also is associated with fewer interreligious friendships. Gendered experiences of religious discrimination and rejection do not contribute to the gender gap. Jointly, these factors explain one third of the emerging gender gap in interreligious friendship-making. This finding suggests that gendered religious norms not only limit interreligious romantic relationships but also interreligious friendships of Muslim girls.
Die Forschungsfrage dieser Arbeit untersucht die Veränderungen in der sicherheits- und verteidigungspolitischen Agenda von Bündnis 90/Die Grünen seit dem Ausbruch des Ukraine-Krieges 2022. Die Analyse zeigt, dass die Grünen ihre Agenda angepasst haben, jedoch ihre politische Kultur beibehalten. Obwohl sie sich neuen sicherheitspolitischen Herausforderungen stellen, bleiben ihre pazifistischen Grundprinzipien erhalten. Es wurde eine Reihe von Veränderungen festgestellt, darunter eine verstärkte Unterstützung für militärische Maßnahmen, jedoch bleibt die Priorität bei nicht-militärischen Ansätzen wie Diplomatie und humanitärer Hilfe. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass die Grünen eine pragmatischere Betrachtung der Sicherheitspolitik angenommen haben, ohne ihre grundlegenden Werte zu verlieren. Die Erkenntnisse dieser Arbeit bieten eine Grundlage für zukünftige Forschungen zur Entwicklung der sicherheitspolitischen Agenda der Grünen und zur öffentlichen Wahrnehmung dieser Veränderungen.
By comparing two distinct governmental organizations (the US military and NASA) this paper unpacks two main issues. On the one hand, the paper examines the transcripts that are produced as part of work activities in these worksites and what the transcripts reveal about the organizations themselves. Additionally, the paper analyses what the transcripts disclose about the practices involved in their creation and use for practical purposes in these organizations. These organizations have been chosen as transcription forms a routine part of how they operate as worksites. Further, the everyday working environments in both organizations involve complex technological systems, as well as multi-party interactions in which speakers are frequently spatially and visually separated. In order to explicate these practices, the article draws on the transcription methods employed in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis research as a comparative resource. In these approaches audio-video data is transcribed in a fine-grained manner that captures temporal aspects of talk, as well as how speech is delivered. Using these approaches to transcription as an analytical device enables us to investigate when and why transcripts are produced by the US military and NASA in the specific ways that they are, as well as what exactly is being re-presented in the transcripts and thus what was treated as worth transcribing in the interactions they are intended to serve as documents of. By analysing these transcription practices it becomes clear that these organizations create huge amounts of audio-video “data” about their routine activities. One major difference between them is that the US military selectively transcribe this data (usually for the purposes of investigating incidents in which civilians might have been injured), whereas NASA’s “transcription machinery” aims to capture as much of their mission-related interactions as is organizationally possible (i.e., within the physical limits and capacities of their radio communications systems). As such the paper adds to our understanding of transcription practices and how this is related to the internal working, accounting and transparency practices within different kinds of organization. The article also examines how the original transcripts have been used by researchers (and others) outside of the organizations themselves for alternative purposes.
Coming of voting age. Evidence from a natural experiment on the effects of electoral eligibility
(2024)
In recent years, several jurisdictions have lowered the voting age, with many more discussing it. Sceptics question whether young people are ready to vote, while supporters argue that allowing them to vote would increase their specific engagement with politics. To test the latter argument, we use a series of register-based surveys of over 10,000 German adolescents. Knowing the exact birthdates of our respondents, we estimate the causal effect of eligibility on their information-seeking behaviour in a regression discontinuity design. While eligible and non-eligible respondents do not differ in their fundamental political dispositions, those allowed to vote are more likely to discuss politics with their family and friends and to use a voting advice application. This effect appears to be stronger for voting age 16 than for 18. The right to vote changes behaviour. Therefore, we cannot conclude from the behaviour of ineligible citizens that they are unfit to vote.
For some years, the German public has been debating the case of migrant workers receiving German benefits for children living abroad, which has been scandalised as a case of “benefit tourism.” This points to a failure to recognise a striking imbalance between the output of the German welfare state to migrants and the input it receives from migrant domestic workers. In this article I discuss how this input is being rendered invisible or at least underappreciated by sexist, racist, and classist practices of othering. To illustrate the point, I will use examples from two empirical research projects that looked into how families in Germany outsource various forms of reproductive work to both female and male migrants from Eastern Europe. Drawing on the concept of othering developed in feminist and postcolonial literature and their ideas of how privileges and disadvantages are interconnected, I will put this example into the context of literature on racism, gender, and care work migration. I show how migrant workers fail to live up to the normative standards of work, family life, and gender relations and norms set by a sedentary society. A complex interaction of supposedly “natural” and “objective” differences between “us” and “them” are at work to justify everyday discrimination against migrants and their institutional exclusion. These processes are also reflected in current political and public debates on the commodification and transnationalisation of care.
Problematisiert wird, dass der Aufsatz von Revers und Traunmüller Erkenntnisinteresse und Positionalität der durchgeführten Forschung verschleiert. Eine Offenlegung wäre notwendig, um die Grundlagen der schwerwiegenden methodischen Probleme, der Fallauswahl und der unbelegten Behauptungen des Aufsatzes verstehen zu können. Im Widerspruch zu der falschen Annahme, dass Meinungsfreiheit grenzenlos sei und auch mit einer Freiheit einhergehe, andere zu diskriminieren, legt meine Replik die Notwendigkeit (siehe Grundgesetz und Gleichbehandlungsgesetz) dar, dass auch an den Universitäten Diskriminierungen aktiv vermieden werden müssen.
Methoden
(2020)
Rezension zu: Akremi, Leila, Nina Baur, Hubert Knoblauch und Boris Traue (Hrsg.): Handbuch Interpretativ forschen. Weinheim, Basel: Beltz Juventa 2018. 961 Seiten. ISBN: 978-3-7799-3126-3. Preis: C 49,95.
Voting advice applications (VAAs) are online tools providing voting advice to their users. This voting advice is based on the match between the answers of the user and the answers of several political parties to a common questionnaire on political attitudes. To visualize this match, VAAs use a wide array of visualisations, most popular of which are the two-dimensional political maps. These maps show the position of both the political parties and the user in the political landscape, allowing the user to understand both their own position and their relation to the political parties. To construct these maps, VAAs require scales that represent the main underlying dimensions of the political space. This makes the correct construction of these scales important if the VAA aims to provide accurate and helpful voting advice. This paper presents three criteria that assess if a VAA achieves this aim. To illustrate their usefulness, these three criteria—unidimensionality, reliability and quality—are used to assess the scales in the cross-national EUVox VAA, a VAA designed for the European Parliament elections of 2014. Using techniques from Mokken scaling analysis and categorical principal component analysis to capture the metrics, I find that most scales show low unidimensionality and reliability. Moreover, even while designers can—and sometimes do—use certain techniques to improve their scales, these improvements are rarely enough to overcome all of the problems regarding unidimensionality, reliability and quality. This leaves certain problems for the designers of VAAs and designers of similar type online surveys.
Das Promotionsvorhaben ist im Bereich der arbeitssoziologischen Forschung angesiedelt. Vor dem Hintergrund der Individualisierung im arbeitssoziologischen Feld, sowie der gestiegenen Bedeutung von Home Office aufgrund der Corona-Pandemie, widmet sich das Vorhaben dem Problemfeld der wahrgenommenen Ambivalenz von Home Office, sowie dem Zusammenhang zwischen Home Office und Individualisierung, und dessen Bedeutung und Auswirkungen für und auf das Individuum.
Als methodisches Verfahren dient hier zur Theoriegenerierung die Grounded Theory. Gegenstand der Analyse ist die mediale Darstellung. Als mediale Daten werden Zeitungsartikel mit der thematischen Fokussierung auf Home Office betrachtet. Die hier gewählte Darstellung des Vorgehens, ermöglicht es, das Vorgehen mit der Grounded Theory kleinteilig und kleinschrittig nachzuvollziehen und verstehen zu können.
Ziel der Studie ist es, Home Office in Bezug zur Individualisierung zu setzen und die grundsätzlichen Zusammenhänge innerhalb der Wahrnehmungen von Home Office und Individualisierung herauszuarbeiten, sowie im medialen Kontext allgemeine Darstellungen und Wahrnehmungen von Home Office zu erkennen und zu verdeutlichen.
Letztlich zeigt sich, dass die Gemeinsamkeit in der medialen Darstellung von Home Office darin liegt, dass eine Aushandlung über die Notwendigkeit von Handlungsvermögen erfolgt. Diese Aushandlung spiegelt sich in den Aspekten der Darstellung von Handlungsmöglichkeiten und Handlungsgrenzen wieder, sowie in der Darstellung der Notwendigkeit von Gestaltungsspielraum und/oder der Notwendigkeit von Grenzen für das Individuum.
Die im Laufe der Auswertung entwickelten Darstellungsformen ermöglichen hierbei, die differenzierten Standpunkte im Hinblick auf die Arbeitsweise Home Office erfassen zu können. Es wurden Formen gebildet, um die verschiedenen Blickwinkel voneinander abgrenzen zu können. Bei Betrachtung dieser Formen wird jedoch ersichtlich, dass sich die exakte punktuelle Verortung des Subjektes zwischen Fremdbestimmung und Selbstbestimmung im Hinblick auf die Zielsetzung des maximalen persönlichen und/oder wirtschaftlichen Erfolges aus medialer Perspektive als schwierig erweist.
Die in der Auswertung entwickelten Darstellungsformen verdeutlichen außerdem die Gleichbedeutung von Arbeitssphäre und Lebenssphäre für das Individuum in der medialen Darstellung. Gleichzeitig zeigen sie den Wunsch nach Freiheit, den Wunsch nach Grenzen, sowie den Wunsch nach Selbstverwirklichung, Gestaltung und Entlastung von Erwartungen auf.
Ausgehend von Scheffers Beschreibung Existentieller Probleme untersucht die Masterarbeit die Problembehandlung solcher. Dabei versucht sich der Autor an einer vorläufigen Begriffsdefinition Existentieller Apparate und untersucht im folgenden, wie sich diese von der Arbeitsweise, ihrer Struktur und anderer Merkmale von herkömmlichen Apparaten unterscheiden. Die Diskussion erfolgt anhand der Problembearbeitungskapazitäten von der Flüchtlingshilfe auf Lesbos, Impfzentren und der Fridays-for-Future-Bewegung, die jeweils für Sich genommen speziell nur im Kontext jeweiliger Existentieller Probleme existieren.
The thesis delves into two research questions, drawing from the 2022 Final Report of the Colombian Truth Commission. It critically examines historical power differentials originating from the colonial period, probing their role in legitimizing and perpetuating violence against ethnic groups, women, and individuals diverging from cisgender or heteronormative norms within Colombian society. Additionally, the research explores the pervasive influence exerted by the colonial legacy on the foundational structures of Colombian societal organization. Employing discourse analysis as its methodological approach, the thesis undertakes the task of deconstructing and reconstructing the Report, thereby elucidating emergent and contingent discursive meanings that situate coloniality within the realms of cognition, language, and affect. Emphasizing the presence of counter-hegemonic knowledge within the Report, the thesis integrates its findings into a robust theoretical and conceptual framework, facilitating a nuanced and systematic comprehension of the underlying causes of violence perpetrated against marginalized groups and the environment. These causes are intricately linked to the intertwined and hybridized power structures that have endured since the colonial era.
Power structures of Eurocentric origin, alongside mental constructs imposed by European invaders over centuries — such as anthropocentrism, racism, internal colonialism, heteropatriarchy, cisnormativity, and classism — were gradually naturalized and institutionalized within Colombian society. This process has been perpetuated through the state's reproduction of these patterns since the inception of Colombia as a nation-state. Consequently, hierarchical discursive constructions, posited as universal and self-evident, have marginalized certain groups and justified environmental degradation. While the internal armed conflict exacerbated these issues, it did not create them; rather, it intensified pre-existing violences, targeting individuals, communities, and their territories.
The thesis also underscores the portrayal of otherness within the modern-colonial world-system, rooted in principles of domination and subalternity, perpetuating colonial patterns of thought and action, reinforcing the hegemonic cosmovision. Notions of superiority and inferiority that predate the establishment of the Colombian nation-state have influenced social categories, subject positions, and identities, resulting in disproportionate, differential, and cumulative harm inflicted upon subalternized population groups. This contributes to a culture of 'justified' violence.
The research underscores the profound entrenchment of coloniality in the structures of Colombian society and the various inherent logics of violence within its conflicts. Coloniality, a comprehensive framework encompassing colonial patterns of thought and action, originating from the invasion and conquest of Abya Yala, continuously shapes the contemporary realities of societies in diverse (re-)configurations, leaving indelible imprints. The effects of these dynamics are manifold, ranging from the imperative of monogamous sexuality according to Judeo-Christian principles as a self-evident norm to the view of nature as a resource rather than a unit comprising both people and environment. In other words, colonial patterns are deeply embedded in all structures of society. A key recommendation emerging from this thesis is to underscore the imperative to recognize and question the persistence of colonial patterns in social and individual lives.
The research urges recognition and interrogation of these persistent colonial patterns in societal and individual structures, advocating for transformative paradigms that challenge conventional thought patterns and foster self-reflection among Colombians. The report, functioning as a political instrument, holds the potential to significantly contribute to the formation of subjectivities that break away from the epistemic schemes of modernity/coloniality. The research and its findings create a political space for questioning the universalist notion of the Eurocentric civilizing project, the scientific rationality of the universal subject, and the presumed neutrality of its forms of knowledge. This opens avenues for questioning, disputing, and transforming entrenched paradigms.
Aktuelle wissenschaftliche Auseinandersetzungen mit dem Sinnerleben Beschäftigter thematisieren vor allem die Problematik eines belastungsbedingten Sinnverlustes. Danach leiden immer mehr Beschäftigte darunter, ihre Arbeit nicht mehr als sinnvoll empfinden zu können. Eine solche Perspektive lässt allerdings die subjektiven Gestaltungsleistungen und Aneignungsformen von Arbeit aus dem Blick geraten. Diesen wendet sich der Beitrag zu, indem er danach fragt, inwieweit sich unterschiedliche Formen der Aneignung von Arbeit identifizieren lassen. Auf der Basis von Interviews mit vierzig hochqualifizierten Beschäftigten werden drei unterschiedliche Aneignungsmodi mit ihren inhärenten Ambivalenzen identifiziert. Jeder Modus steht für eine spezifische Sichtweise auf die eigenen Gestaltungsmöglichkeiten und für eine Form der primären Sinnzuschreibung in der Arbeit. Differenziert werden drei Idealtypen – „progressive Sinngestaltung“, „widerständige Sinnbewahrung“ sowie „pragmatische Sinnbewahrung“ –, anhand derer die Heterogenität und die Ambivalenzen der Aneignung professioneller Arbeit deutlich werden. Der Beitrag liefert so Erkenntnisse über die subjektiven Praktiken des Bedeutsam-Machens von Arbeit und trägt zur Erforschung des Zusammenspiels von Arbeit und Subjektivität bei.
Les Républicains in Frankreich, die Tories in Großbritannien, die österreichischen Christdemokraten: Parteien, die jahrzehntelang als feste politische Größe in ihren Ländern galten, haben einen rapiden Bedeutungsverlust erlebt, manche sind in Richtung des rechten Randes gerückt. Doch eine gemäßigt konservative Kraft rechts der Mitte ist notwendig für eine stabile und zukunftsoffene Demokratie.
Der Beitrag bietet eine Einführung in das Thema „Vertrauen als Topos der Plattformregulierung“. Dazu wird in einem ersten Schritt das allgemeine Verhältnis zwischen dem sozialen Tatbestand „Vertrauen“ und dem Recht als das einer komplementären, wechselseitigen Wirkungsverstärkung beschrieben. Im Hinblick auf die vertrauensfördernde Rolle des Rechts wird in einem zweiten Schritt zwischen der Funktion des Vertrauens bzw. der Vertrauenswürdigkeit als Tatbestandselement einer Vorschrift und den hieran geknüpften Rechtsfolgen unterschieden. Auf der Basis dieser Grundlagen gibt der Aufsatz in einem dritten Schritt einen Überblick über Bezugnahmen auf „Vertrauen“ in der deutschen und europäischen Plattformregulierung seit 2015. Hierzu zählen sektorale Regelungen gegen Hasskriminalität und Desinformation sowie zum Schutz des Urheberrechts, die 2022 in den horizontal angelegten Digital Services Act mündeten, der ein insgesamt „vertrauenswürdiges Online-Umfeld“ gewährleisten soll. Viertens stellt der Beitrag ein abstrakt-analytisches Konzept des Vertrauens vor, das sich gut zur Analyse der aufgezählten Vertrauensbeziehungen und ihrer rechtlichen Regelungen eignet. Ein abschließender Ausblick deutet die Proliferation des Vertrauenstopos als Ausdruck einer Vertrauenskrise im digitalen Zeitalter. Die erstrebte Vertrauenswürdigkeit des Online-Umfelds bildet ein normatives Minimum, das über gesetzliche Verhaltenspflichten und Privilegien für vertrauenswürdige Akteure der Zivilgesellschaft erreicht werden soll. Ob dies gelingt und überhaupt wünschenswert ist, ist freilich offen. Die juristische Auseinandersetzung mit dem Topos des Vertrauens in der Digital- und Plattformregulierung hat gerade erst begonnen.
Ahlhaus, Svenja (2020): Die Grenzen des Demos. Mitgliedschaftspolitik aus postsouveräner Perspektive
(2021)
In the 21st century, the division of housework remains gendered, with women on average still spending more time doing chores than their male partners. While research has studied why this phenomenon is so persistent, few studies have yet been able to assess the effect of gender ideology and socio-economic resources at the same time, usually due to data restrictions. We use data from the pairfam, a new and innovative German panel study, in order to test the effect of absolute and relative resources as well as his and her gender ideology on the division of housework. We employ a life course perspective and analyze trajectories of couples’ housework division over time, using multi-level random effects growth curve models. We find that an egalitarian gender ideology of both him and her significantly predicts more egalitarian division-trajectories, while neither absolute nor relative resources appear to have an effect on the division of housework over time. Furthermore, our results expand the literature by investigating how these processes differ among childless couples and couples who experience the first birth.
The intergenerational transmission of gender: paternal influences on children’s gender attitudes
(2022)
Objective: This study provides the first systematic longitudinal analysis of the influence of paternal involvement in family life—across childhood and adolescence—on the gender-role attitudes of children by the age of 14 or 15.
Background: Recent research suggests that, in post-industrial societies, paternal involvement in family life is increasing. Although previous studies of paternal involvement have considered paternal influences on children's cognitive or socio-emotional development, such studies have not yet addressed paternal influences on children's attitudes toward gender. Relatedly, previous studies on the intergenerational transmission of gender attitudes have analyzed maternal influences, but have neglected the significance of paternal influences. This study engages both strands of the research by analyzing the effects of paternal behaviors on children's attitudes toward gender roles.
Method: Multivariate linear regressions models were estimated on data from the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC); a survey with biannual observations over 10 years for 2796 children born between 1999 and 2000.
Results: Fathers' time spent on childcare during childhood was associated with gender-egalitarian attitudes in children by the age of 14 or 15. The most powerful predictor of children's gender-role attitudes, however, was the amount of time fathers spent on housework during children's adolescence, both absolute and relative to the amount of time mothers spent on housework. Fathers' unpaid labor at home was as relevant for children's gender-role attitudes as mothers' paid labor in the workforce. These results held after controlling for maternal domestic behaviors and for the gender-role attitudes of both parents.
Conclusion: Father involvement in childcare and housework during childhood and adolescence play an important role in shaping children's gender-egalitarian attitudes.
This paper studies the intergenerational effects of parental unemployment on students’ post-secondary transitions. Besides estimating the average treatment effect of parental unemployment on transition outcomes, we identify the economic, psychological or other intra-familial mechanisms that might explain any adverse impact of parental unemployment. Using longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel and propensity score matching estimators we find that paternal unemployment has an adverse impact on the likelihood of entering tertiary education, whereas maternal unemployment does not. We also find that the magnitude of the effect depends on the duration of unemployment. Even though we are unable to fully account for the underlying mechanisms, our mediation analysis suggests that the effect of paternal unemployment is not due to the loss of income, but relates to the negative consequences of unemployment for intra-familial well-being and students’ declining optimism about their academic prospects.
Children from upper-class families have better cognitive outcomes and fewer behavioural problems than those from working-class families. Previous studies highlighted that the class gap in child development is partially driven by differences in parenting styles, but they rarely looked at multiple, more specific dimensions of parenting, i.e., inductive reasoning, parenting consistency, warmth and anger. This study provides a systematic account of how parental social class shapes these four dimensions of parenting, and how these dimensions affect children’s cognitive outcomes and behavioural problems. Using high-quality, longitudinal data, and both hybrid models and the generalized methods of moments, this study reports two main findings. First, upper-class parents significantly differ from lower-class parents in two parenting dimensions, displaying more inductive reasoning and parenting consistency, but no relevant class differences are found in the two emotion-type dimensions of parenting (i.e., warmth and anger). Second, all four parenting dimensions have a strong impact on children’s behavioural problems, while they do not affect cognitive outcomes. An exception is consistency, the only dimension that affects both types of child outcomes. The study underscores the relevance of analysing parenting and child development from a multidimensional approach to better understand how upper-class parents transmit advantage to children.
After a recent spate of terrorist attacks in European and American cities, liberal democracies are reintroducing emergency securitarian measures (ESMs) that curtail rights and/or expand police powers. Political theorists who study ESMs are familiar with how such measures become instruments of discrimination and abuse, but the fundamental conflict ESMs pose for not just civil liberty but also democratic equality still remains insufficiently explored. Such phenomena are usually explained as a function of public panic or fear-mongering in times of crisis, but I show that the tension between security and equality is in fact much deeper and more general. It follows a different logic than the more familiar tension between security and liberty, and it concerns not just the rule of law in protecting liberty but also the role of law in integrating new or previously subjected groups into a democratic community. As liberal-democratic societies become increasingly diverse and multicultural in the present era of mass immigration and global interconnectedness, this tension between security and equality is likely to become more pronounced.
In this article, I question the use of the notion of ‘constituent power’ as a tool for the democratization of the European Union (EU). Rather than seeing the absence of a transnational constituent power as a cause of the EU’s ‘democratic deficit’, I identify it as an opportunity for unfettered democratic participation. Against the reification of power-in-action into a power-constituted-in-law, I argue that the democratization of the EU can only be achieved through the multiplication of ‘constituent moments’. I begin by deconstructing the normative justifications surrounding the concept of constituent power. Here I analyze the structural aporia of constituent power and question the autonomous and emancipatory dimension of this notion. I then test the theoretical hypothesis of this structural aporia of the popular constituent power by comparing it with the historical experiments of a European popular constituent power. Finally, based on these theoretical and empirical observations, I propose to replace the ambivalence of the concept of popular constituent power with a more cautious approach to the bottom-up democratization of European integration: that of a multiplication of transnational constituent moments.