Pia Nicoletta Blossfeld provides a long-term longitudinal analysis of the stepwise changes in transitions over the educational careers in East and West Germany using data from the National Educational Panel Study (NEPS). She examines how far reforms aimed to increase the permeability in the German educational system have changed the movements of children, adolescents and young adults in Germany since the last four decades. Her book contributes to the literature of educational sociology by studying the associations between various resources of family background and respondent’s educational histories until final educational attainment. A novelty of her book is the analysis of the role of intercohort changes in social background composition on final educational attainment.

Drawing upon perspectives from across the globe and employing an interdisciplinary life course approach, this handbook explores the production and reproduction of different types of inequality across a variety of social contexts. Inequalities are not static, easily measurable, and essentially quantifiable circumstances of life. They are processes which impact on individuals throughout the life course, interacting with each other, accumulating, attenuating, reproducing, or distorting themselves along the way. The chapters in this handbook examine various types of inequality, such as economic, gender, racial, and ethnic inequalities, and analyse how these inequalities manifest themselves within different aspects of society, including health, education, and the family, at multiple levels and dimensions. The handbook also tackles the global COVID-19 pandemic and its striking impact on the production and intensification of inequalities. The interdisciplinary life course approach utilised in this handbook combines quantitative and qualitative methods to bridge the gap between theory and practice and offer strategies and principles for identifying and tackling issues of inequality. This book will be indispensable for students and researchers as well as activists and policy makers interested in understanding and eradicating the processes of production, reproduction, and perpetuation of inequalities.

Presenting original contributions from the key experts in the field, the Research Handbook on the Sociology of Education explores the major theoretical, methodological, empirical and political challenges and pressing social questions facing education in current times.

The international sociological community has engaged recently in a controversial discussion on social inequality. There is a vigourous debate on whether the traditional concepts of social class and social stratification are still useful. Some researchers argue that social classes still offer a key explanation to social inequalities while others challenge the long-standing tradition of class analysis. New approaches have been proposed to describe recent social changes in the stratification system: vanishing middle class, two-thirds societies, cosmographic inequality, and classless society, among others.

This book uses a combination of comparative analysis and in-depth examination of the experience of 30 countries over the past 30 years, to see whether inequality in incomes, wealth, and education has been widening. It shows how these inequalities are related to social and political outcomes such as poverty, family structures, health, and crime.

Offers a snapshot of key educational stratification issues in East Asian nations, and their evolution in conjunction with changing student populations. This book addresses issues ranging from curricular adaptations to globalization, to persisting and new forms of educational stratification, to new multiculturalism in educational policy.

There has been a remarkable upsurge of debate about increasing inequalities and their societal implications, reinforced by the economic crisis but bubbling to the surface before it. This has been seen in popular discourse, media coverage, political debate, and research in the social sciences. The central questions addressed by this book, and the major research project GINI on which it is based, are: - Have inequalities in income, wealth and education increased over the past 30 years or so across the rich countries, and if so why? - What are the social, cultural and political impacts of increasing inequalities in income, wealth and education? - What are the implications for policy and for the future development of welfare states? In seeking to answer these questions, this book adopts an interdisciplinary approach that draws on economics, sociology, and political science, and applies a common analytical framework to the experience of 30 advanced countries, namely all the EU member states except Cyprus and Malta, together with the USA, Japan, Canada, Australia and South Korea. It presents a description and analysis of the experience of each of these countries over the past three decades, together with an introduction, an overview of inequality trends, and a concluding chapter highlighting key findings and implications. These case-studies bring out the variety of country experiences and the importance of framing inequality trends in the institutional and policy context of each country if one is to adequately capture and understand the evolution of inequality and its impacts.

These essays not only describe the major changes in British society in recent years, but seek to understand and explain what is happening. While there have been rapid changes in overall levels, there have been slower changes in relativities, and this distinction is fundamental to a proper understanding of contemporary society. The book considers the wide variety of mechanisms that underlie these changes, in particular processes of social interaction. The complex and often ill-understood nature of these mechanisms may be a major reason why so much social reform has proved ineffective. The verdict on social reforms in education, gender inequalities and ethnic inequalities is rather negative; sociologists have been concerned about the unintended consequences of social action.

This book is focused on work, occupation and career development: themes that are fundamental to a wide range of human activities and relevant across all cultures. Yet theorizing and model building about this most ubiquitous of human activities from international perspectives have not been vigorous. An examination of the literature pertaining to career development, counseling and guidance that has developed over the last fifty years reveals theorizing and model building have been largely dominated by Western epistemologies, some of the largest workforces in the world are in the developing world. Career guidance is rapidly emerging as a strongly felt need in these contexts. If more relevant models are to be developed, frameworks from other cultures and economies must be recognized as providing constructs that would offer a deeper understanding of career development. This does not mean that existing ideas are to be discarded. Instead, an integrative approach that blends universal principles with particular needs could offer a framework for theorizing, research and practice that has wider relevance. The central objective of this handbook is to draw the wisdom and experiences of different cultures together to consider both universal and specific principles for career guidance and counseling that are socially and economically relevant to contemporary challenges and issues. This book is focused on extending existing concepts to broader contexts as well as introducing new concepts relevant to the discipline of career guidance and counseling.