Soziologie - Sociology in the German-Speaking World

Special Issue Soziologische Revue 2020

Betina Hollstein, Rainer Greshoff, Uwe Schimank, Anja Weiß, Betina Hollstein, Rainer Greshoff, Uwe Schimank, Anja Weiß

• Publisher: De Gruyter Oldenbourg
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9783110623512
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book provides the first systematic overview of German sociology today. Thirty-four chapters review current trends, relate them to international discussions and discuss perspectives for future research. The contributions span the whole range of sociological research topics, from social inequality to the sociology of body and space, addressing pressing questions in sociological theory and innovative research methods.

TOC:

Introduction

Culture / Uta Karstein and Monika Wohlrab-Sahr

Demography and Aging / François Höpflinger

Economic Sociology / Andrea Maurer

Education and Socialization / Matthias Grundmann

Environment / Anita Engels

Europe / Monika Eigmüller

Family and Intimate Relationships / Dirk Konietzka, Michael Feldhaus, Michaela Kreyenfeld, and Heike Trappe

(Felt) Body. Sports, Medicine, and Media / Robert Gugutzer and Claudia Peter

Gender / Paula-Irene Villa and Sabine Hark

Globalization and Transnationalization / Anja Weiß

Global South / Eva Gerharz and Gilberto Rescher

History of Sociology / Stephan Moebius

Life Course / Johannes Huinink and Betina Hollstein

Media and Communication / Andreas Hepp

Microsociology / Rainer Schützeichel

Migration / Ludger Pries

Mixed-Methods and Multimethod Research / Felix Knappertsbusch, Bettina Langfeldt, and Udo Kelle

Organization / Raimund Hasse

Political Sociology / Jörn Lamla

Qualitative Methods / Betina Hollstein and Nils C. Kumkar

Quantitative Methods / Alice Barth and Jörg Blasius

Religion / Matthias Koenig

Science and Higher Education / Anna Kosmützky and Georg Krücken

Social Inequalities?Empirical Focus / Gunnar Otte, Mara Boehle, and Katharina Kunißen

Social Inequalities?Theoretical Focus / Thomas Schwinn

Social Movements / Thomas Kern

Social Networks / Roger Häußling

Social Policy / Birgit Pfau-Effinger and Christopher Grages

Social Problems / Günter Albrecht

Social Theory / Wolfgang Ludwig Schneider

Society / Uwe Schimank

Space. Urban, Rural, Territorial / Martina Löw

Technology and Innovation / Werner Rammert

Work and Labor / Brigitte Aulenbacher and Johanna Grubner

List of Contributors

Index

Social Inequalities―Empirical Focus

Gunnar Otte

Mara Boehle

Katharina Kunißen

Abstract

Social inequalities constitute one of the largest research fields of sociology in the German-speaking countries. This field has been successfully institutionalized and internationalized in recent decades. Today, it rests on a rich data infrastructure and a large body of cumulative research. The article traces this advancement in terms of shifting theoretical paradigms, methodological innovations, and the establishment of the current data infrastructure. It particularly highlights recent developments in four core areas of inequality research: educational inequality and returns on education; employment and the labor market; income, wealth, and poverty; and social mobility.

Keywords: Social inequality, social stratification, social change, data infrastructure, Germany

1 Introduction

Ever since sociology emerged as a scientific endeavor in the era of industrialization (the “social question”), social inequalities have been at the heart of the discipline. In the German-speaking countries, as in many others, inequality research is one of the largest and most advanced fields of sociology. For this and other reasons, reviewing the publication output since the turn of the millennium is anything but an easy task. First, inequality research is constituted of, or is related to, several subfields of research, such as education, work/labor, social policy, health/aging, demography, the life course, family, migration/ethnicity, and gender. The demarcation of the field is therefore blurry and the relevant literature vast. Second, one of the most striking developments over the last two decades is the internationalization of inequality research. Many eminent scholars from the German-speaking countries are well known to an international audience through conferences and English-language journals. This raises the question of what represents inequality research among the German-speaking countries: Is it research done by scholars residing in these countries or by the scientific community working on these countries? For our review, we define Germany, Austria, and parts of Switzerland as the German-language area. The substantial exchange of scientific personnel and sociological discourse between these countries justifies an overall review. However, these countries’ structures of inequality are, alongside several commonalities, shaped by national pathways in culture, politics, the welfare state, and the economy. For our survey of the literature, we have attempted to consider the sociological community that publishes on social inequalities in the German-language area, but we have placed special emphasis on empirical findings from Germany as the most populous country. A third observation, closely connected to the internationalization of this field, is the trend towards research being increasingly produced cumulatively within standardized paradigms by teams (instead of single authors) and in journals (instead of books). Altogether, when we took stock of the research on social inequalities in the German-speaking countries, we found ourselves mapping a broad field with vague boundaries that is heavily internationalized and shows a specifically national orientation only in parts.

Blurred boundaries notwithstanding, there is broad consensus in German-language textbooks on what constitutes the core of social-inequality research (e. g., Bacher et al., 2019; Huinink and Schröder, 2019; Klein, 2016; Rössel, 2009; Schwinn, SOCIAL INEQUALITIES—THEORETICAL FOCUS, this volume). Following this literature, we define social inequalities as the unequal distribution of valued resources, opportunities, and positions among the members of a population in a given space and time. Because educational qualifications, monetary resources, and labor-market positions are key for an individual’s life chances in modern societies, most scholars agree that educational inequalities, labor-market structures, social-mobility processes, as well as income, wealth, and poverty distributions are at the heart of inequality research. Our main focus is therefore devoted to these topics (sections 4 to 7).

To map the field, we chose three strategies beyond our own personal knowledge.¹ We began by compiling the themes of the biannual meetings of the Social Inequality section of the German Sociological Association (DGS) from 2000 to 2018. This gave us an overview of the major discourses in German-language inequality research. We also used Google Scholar to determine the number of citations of all current members of the DGS Social Inequality section in order to identify influential scholars and publications. We broadened the coverage by searching for sociologists who reside in Austria or Switzerland or mainly publish in English. Third, we identified all articles on social inequalities that were published in the most influential German sociology journals, the Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie (KZfSS) and the Zeitschrift für Soziologie (ZfS), from 2000 to 2018. On the basis of the abstracts, these papers were coded by their main topics.² Table 1 is a condensed representation that indicates the changing importance of research themes over time, with the shaded topics being the ones that appeared to gain in importance.

In the 1990s, inequality research in Germany was dominated by two major debates: the transformation of East German society after reunification in 1990 (Krause and Ostner, 2010) and the thesis of a dissolution of class society, which was inspired by Beck’s individualization thesis (Beck, 1992), Bourdieu’s notion of lifestyles (Bourdieu, 1984), and models of socio-cultural milieus (Schulze, 1992). While German inequality research could be characterized as somewhat exceptional at the end of the millennium, as our predecessors noted in their review twenty years ago (Allmendinger and Ludwig-Mayerhofer, 2000), this diagnosis no longer holds true in light of the trends toward internationalization mentioned above. As Table 1 indicates, several shifts in research foci have taken place.³ General debates on theories, models, and methods of inequality research as well as articles on cultural inequalities, still prom...