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We explore organisational mechanisms underlying social exclusion in higher education, the latter defined as the underrepresentation of students from lower socio-economic backgrounds. We focus on "decoupling," which is a central concept in organisational institutionalism referring to the construction of gaps between public commitment and core organisational practices, a common phenomenon in organisations worldwide. In the context of social inclusion this implies that universities are often publicly committed to social inclusion whereas their actual practices reproduce social exclusion. Drawing on an in-depth case study of a Flemish university, we identify four possible antecedents of decoupling: institutional contradictions resulting from the neo-liberalisation of higher education, uncertainty about effective inclusive practices, resistance of key constituencies and resource stringency resulting from experiences of lacking public funding.

The article examines trends of social inequalities in educational attainment in the second half of the twentieth century in Italy, comparing two approaches. The traditional approach uses years of education as a dependent variable and implicitly looks at the absolute/nominal value of education. The second approach refers to education as a 'positional good' and it captures its possibly changing occupational value over time. In this article, following this second perspective, two measures are developed and used: the Educational Competitive Advantage Score (ECAS) measures the value of educational degrees on the basis of their incidence in the population (credential inflation perspective). The second is an effect-proportional scale of education based on the average occupational prestige attained by individuals in each qualification (demand-supply balance perspective). Using data with large sample size from three waves of the Istat Multi-Purpose Survey (1998, 2003 and 2009), the article shows that inequalities based both on social class of origin and parental education declined between 1940 and 1980 birth cohorts, but the effect of parental education reduced less and it is stronger than that of social class in recent cohorts. Considering education as a positional good does not change the main findings obtained using years of education as outcome in the Italian case. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The paper asks whether the patterns of educational expansion and inequality were the same in the two parts of Italy: the North, more industrialized and developed, and the more backwards South. This is a theoretically relevant issue as, despite this major socioeconomic heterogeneity, Italy has a centralized school system, whose main institutional features are the same all over the country. By means of an educational transition analysis of the five waves of the Italian Longitudinal Household Survey we analyze school expansion and long-term trends of educational inequality, both in general and at each specific school transition. The main results indicate that there has been increasing divergence between the two areas in educational expansion and in the effect of social background on years of education attained, favouring the North. The main difference between the two areas is found at two transitions, the one from elementary to lower secondary and the one from lower to upper secondary. While the first difference diminishes over time, the second grows over time and is currently crucial. Its reasons are found in the different propensity of the offspring of the working class to enrol in vocational schools, which is stronger in the North.

Previous research suggests that the ongoing educational expansion is a negative development for early school leavers (ESLrs) in the European labour market, since it increases the level and educational attainment of their competition, and in the worst case creates credential inflation. Findings from the 2005 cross-sectional EU-SILC data show, however, that the negative effect of early school leaving on income is reduced by educational inclusiveness at the country level. The explanation, it is said, is that educational expansion decreases the influence of a disadvantaged family background, which accounts for the net interacting effect of educational inclusiveness itself. Results from two-level hierarchical analyses indicate that the influence of family background is indeed conditional upon the level of educational inclusiveness at country level. This is true for all but one of the indicators of family background included in this article.