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While job quality is often described in a binary way, this article proposes a configurational approach to account for the interactions between the subjective and objective dimensions and to combine the relations between the micro-, meso- and macro-level variables in a single frame. Based on data from the EWCS (2015) in 29 European countries, this article uses a cluster analysis to identify five configurations of job quality in Europe. This approach renews the study of job quality and reveals differentiated registers of relationships to work, which are dependent on micro-level variables as well as meso-level variables (the context of the respondent's company) and macro-level variables. The perception of job quality differs markedly between high-skilled occupations and low-skilled occupations, but there is also a segmentation of jobs at both the middle and the bottom of the European social space. Belonging to the public sector is a determining factor in the existence of critical relationships to jobs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on social closure by way of marital homogamy within the upper class. It offers new insights into the social structuring of romantic partnerships, while drawing on research on assortative mating and contemporary elite and class analysis. The analysis is based on detailed data covering the entire Norwegian population. Our main point of focus is the upper class, whose patterns of partner choice have been little studied. By drawing on Bourdieu's model of the social space, we move beyond conventional operationalisations of class. The analysis demonstrates that romantic partnerships within the upper class are structured along three dimensions of class: (i) vertical inter-class closure (upper-class individuals are disproportionately more likely to have partners in upper-class positions); (ii) horizontal intra-class closure (a tendency for marrying within the same upper-class fraction); (iii) closure by class trajectory (upwardly mobile newcomers are disproportionately more unlikely to have upper-class partners). We also demonstrate how class divisions intersect with gender divisions. Among the men, there are important differences between the upper-class fractions: the cultural fraction is more homogamous than the other fractions, and the economic fraction is comparatively more likely to have partners from lower down in the class structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses how to explain the rise of a new nationalism in Europe. It begins by problematizing the inconsistencies in the current culturalist, socio-economic, and socio-political approaches. It then makes Pierre Bourdieu's theory of social space fruitful for a sociological explanation of neonationalism by removing it from the conceptional framework of national container societies. It finally shows that the transnational opening of national societies is accompanied by profound processes of symbolic appreciation and depreciation of economic, cultural, and social 'capital' that the inhabitants of the national container possess. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the aim of studying the role of contextual factors for explaining within-country variation in the vote share of the radical right-wing party, the Sweden Democrats, in the 2014 Swedish election, we specify and test hypotheses pertaining to social marginality, ethnic threat, the contact hypothesis, and the halo effect. We study the variation in the electoral share of the Sweden Democrats at two different levels simultaneously by performing multilevel analyses to account for the ways in which voting districts are clustered within municipalities. The main finding from our analyses is the support for the ethnic threat hypothesis, where the vote share of the Sweden Democrats is significantly higher in those areas that have seen an increase in the foreign-born population, and to some extent also in ethnically diverse areas, contradicting previous research on ethnic minority presence in fine-grained contexts. The expectation that the vote share for the Sweden Democrats should be higher in socioeconomic marginalized districts is partly supported, but we find no evidence of a halo effect, where ethnically homogeneous areas that are geographically close to heterogeneous districts were expected to have a higher vote share for the Sweden Democrats. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In post-conflict and segregated societies, overcoming high prejudice between groups is essential for peaceful coexistence. In this paper, we explore the roles of direct contact (face-to-face contact and cross-group friendship) and indirect contact (extended cross-group friendship) in reducing prejudice between Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots living in Cyprus. Moreover, this study further explores whether the effects of direct and indirect contact vary between Turkish Cypriots and Greek Cypriots, as well as across a ten-year period. To explore these issues, we analyze data from different representative samples of Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots at two different time points (years 2007 and 2017). The results suggest that all three forms of contact have significant effects on prejudice. However, they also exhibit some variations by community (but not year of data collection) in the effects of direct (but not indirect) contact on prejudice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is ample evidence that immigrants are at a disadvantage in the labour market. Previous studies show that discrimination and devaluation are important factors in explaining why immigrants are occupationally segregated. Three kinds of discriminatory behaviours can be distinguished: aversions, cognitive biases, and erroneous attributions. The present article is part of the debate on the mechanisms that generate inequality and argues that the attitudinal context (social norm) influences labour market outcomes by moderating the impact of these three discriminatory behaviours. This idea is empirically examined in an analysis of the role of openness towards immigrants on the immigrant-native occupational status gap and in the comparative advantage of their language skills. Data from the Adult Education Survey is modelled together with contextual data from the European Social Survey using country fixed-effects regressions. The results indicate that immigrants are at a disadvantage, although the extent of this disadvantage varies significantly among countries partly due to the influence of openness towards immigrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author reflects on the European social topography. Topics discussed include the basic architecture of the social world, scientific discussions of social status, and the social logic behind processes of cultural production. Also being discussed is the study of class and social structure, and the concepts of capital and habitus.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the logic behind lay people’s ideological position taking and how this is determined by class position. I therefore examine to what extent there exists a similarity between the configuration of the political field and the structure of the space of social classes. The paper includes a brief description of the two most salient political alignments today, namely the old economic alignment and the new cultural alignment, and an explanation of how this two-dimensional political structure pertains to the rise of the new middle class. Directly related to this, I also present a discussion on the importance of the ethical habitus to understand the mechanism behind class determined political position taking. Subsequently, based on survey data and using multiple correspondence analysis, I empirically reproduce this political structure for Flanders (Belgium). Finally, relying on the visualized regression technique, I demonstrate that there exists a clear structural similarity between the political field and the space of social classes, which is a strong indication that the class-engendered ethical habitus is, in fact, the underlying factor that gives structure to the variations in political attitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There have been countless efforts to test and ‘update’ Pierre Bourdieu’s thesis that there is a correspondence between the space of social positions and the space of lifestyles. The best known of these targeting the UK are the Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion project and, more recently, the Great British Class Survey, but their conceptual and methodological limitations mean their findings are questionable and hinder closer investigation of an oft-sidelined piece of the puzzle one of the projects specifically highlighted: the significance of gender in structuring taste. Drawing on the 2012 wave of the British Cohort Study, which included a battery of questions on cultural consumption, and deploying a logic and measure of class closer to Bourdieu’s own, I thus seek to offer an alternative examination of not only the nature and degree of correspondence between the social space and lifestyles but its entwinement with masculinity and femininity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s rethinking of social class to investigate the connection between class and politics in contemporary society. We introduce a new class scheme that incorporates an often neglected hallmark of Bourdieu’s approach, namely the distinction between class fractions based on the preponderance of economic or cultural capital possessed. By relating our two-dimensional concept of class to a two-dimensional political space, we will show that the relationship between class and politics is homological - the systems of class divisions and political divisions exhibit a corresponding structure. The hierarchical dimension of class is associated with the divide between liberal and anti-liberal views on what is sometimes dubbed ‘new’ politics, whereas the capital composition dimension is connected with the classical left vs. right divide in terms of issues of redistribution, social spending and government interventions in the economy. We conclude by discussing whether political attitudes should be seen as a form of taste and as such on par with cultural tastes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the ‘time space’, defined following Bourdieu as a set of distinct and coexisting attitudes toward time related to individuals’ social positions. Based on an ethnographic study of French ‘prep schools’ (classes préparatoires aux Grandes écoles), it sheds light on the specific temporal culture of these schools (the routinization of urgency and ‘temporal panic’) but shows the existence of different attitudes toward time among students. These variations can then be explained by the volume of capital possessed by students, thus differentiating those who can ‘master time’ and those who ‘suffer’ it. But the article also aims at unveiling ‘timestyles’ which, like lifestyles, would be connected to the compositions of students’ capital (economic versus cultural) and not only to its volume. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Claims of the demise of class were in part fuelled by problems facing a class analysis of contemporary politics. Central to this was the emergence of the ‘new middle class’. Debates revolved around whether it would constitute a source of radicalism or conservatism. John Goldthorpe's concept of the service class has proven to be the most enduring contribution to these debates. The service class, Goldthorpe held, would constitute an essentially conservative element in contemporary society. Deviations from this expected conservatism were supposedly an intermittent, transitory phenomenon, devoid of structural basis. In this paper, I investigate the political attitudes of the Norwegian service class. Adhering to Clark and Lipset's insistence on the need for a more complex analysis of both class and politics, I take a multidimensional approach: political attitudes are seen within the two dimensions of economic and ‘post-materialist’ issues, and class divisions in terms of the two dimensions of volume and composition of capital, following Bourdieu. By applying Multiple Correspondence Analysis, I uncover a significant political heterogeneity with a structural basis in the different forms of capital,paceGoldthorpe. The fractions relying on cultural capital are markedly leftist, while their counterparts possessing economic capital constitute a right-wing. Also, service-class members with the most capital are more liberal than their counterparts with less overall capital. I argue that this points to the significance of a multidimensional concept of class, which in turn necessitates further work on how ‘Bourdieusian’ concepts can be synthesised with class analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to understand the way in which social capital resources are incorporated, appropriated and distributed by different social classes in Europe. Its main goal is to produce a conceptual framework by linking the concepts of social capital with the different theoretical assessments made by the sociology of social classes. We use multivariate analysis to work a set of quantitative indicators from the European Social Survey 2008 in order to assess the relationship between these concepts. Our methodological approach combines transnational levels, i.e., it is not an international comparison between European countries but an analysis of individual people and their belonging to social classes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an analysis of changing spatial relations in the Baltic region from an Estonian viewpoint. Changes in spatial relations during the last decade are indicated by the density of personal contacts, news flows, cultural exchanges and trade relations between Estonia and other countries. The empirical analysis is based on statistical data and survey results. Analysis of media content has been conducted to reveal the level of attention given to different foreign countries. The results show that the structure of mediated spatial relations differs from the social space of practical interactions between people. The spaces of direct economic relations and personal contacts in Estonia are centred on the Baltic Sea, illustrated by the dominant roles of Finland and Sweden, an increasing proximity to other EU countries and the weakening role of Russia. At the same time the mediated social space of Estonia is changing following EU enlargement; from the representation of a bi-polar world dominated by political centres located in Russia and USA towards a multi-centred international space, demonstrated in the growing influence of core EU countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]