Mens & Maatschappij - Volume 88, Issue 1, 2013

Onlangs stuitte ik op Mark Granovetters artikel The problem of embeddedness, dat in 1985 verscheen in The American Journal of Sociology. Voor sociaal wetenschappers is dat probleem er al lang niet meer. Het behoort tot de leerstellingen van de sociale wetenschappen dat al het handelen is ingebed in sociale relaties. Zie nou dit nummer van Mens & Maatschappij: twee artikelen gaan over de rol van familierelaties in belangrijke sociale processen. Een derde artikel borduurt voort op die andere grootmeester van de sociale inbedding, Pierre Bourdieu. Daar heeft de redactie geen hand in gehad; het is een willekeurige steekproef uit de Nederlandstalige sociale wetenschappen. Klassen, sociale structuren, instituties en organisaties: uiteindelijk blijven ze in stand, doordat mensen elkaar kennen of niet; elkaar vertrouwen of wantrouwen; iets gunnen of ontzeggen. En die processen spelen zich grotendeels af binnen en door de persoonlijke relaties die mensen met elkaar hebben. Je bent wie je kent.

Who benefits from government investment in childcare?.

The case of Sweden and Belgium (Flanders) Childcare is promoted at the national and European level as a policy instrument par excellence to simultaneously reconcile work and family duties and increase female employment rates. As a consequence, European governments increasingly deploy resources to subsidise childcare services. The main goal of this paper is to unravel who benefits from this government investment on childcare. First, we look into the social distribution of childcare use in European countries. Second, we depart from these results to analyse which income groups are the main beneficiaries of government investment in childcare in two countries (Flanders/Belgium and Sweden), and how the policy design contributes to the outcomes. We find that in almost all European welfare states childcare use is biased against the lowest income groups. Moreover, our case studies learn that the policy design plays a crucial role in these distributional outcomes. In Flanders, government investment disproportionally benefits the higher income families while the opposite is true for Sweden.

Gender differences in professional health service use in 25 European countries A study on the impact of medicalisation attitudes and gender stratification.

In this paper we investigate the impact of gender stratification on the gender gap in both medicalisation attitudes and professional health care use. Furthermore, we examine to what extent medicalisation attitudes explain the gender gap in professional health care use. Using data from the second wave of the European Social Survey (N = 42028), we find that women report more positive attitudes towards medicalisation than men, explaining a small part of the gender gap in professional health care use. No association was observed between gender stratification and the gender gap in medicalisation attitudes or health care use. However, respondents living in societies characterized by a lower level of gender stratification, position themselves more independently towards physicians, while they use professional health care more frequently.

Cultural consumption and the habitus: The role of knowledge and aesthetic dispositions.

The habitus is a crucial concept in Bourdieus theory of taste. In this article, we assess the relations between cultural taste or participation and two measured elements of habitus: aesthetic dispositions and domain-specific knowledge. To his end, we have analyzed a sample of 2,500 Flemings in 2003-2004. Active culture lovers attach more significance to the form of cultural products than to their function and are more interested in serious societal issues such as science and politics, but also in lifestyle topics. The results further show that these indicators of elements of the habitus greatly increase the explanatory power of the models for predicting cultural taste and consumption while their addition to the models diminishes the impact of more general socioeconomic background characteristics.

The influence of mothers’ labor force participation and mother-child time on the problem behavior of school-aged children.

This study examined whether mothers’ labor force participation was associated with children’s problem behavior and, more particularly, whether this association was mediated by mother-child time. We derived hypotheses from theories from sociology and psychology, such as social capital theory and attachment theory, hereby covering multiple viewpoints. Analyses were based on 1,276 children and their mothers from the American Child Development Supplement of the Study of Income Dynamics of 2002 and 2007. Results indicated that the direct influence of mothers’ labor force participation on children’s problem behavior was negligible. Moreover, although employed mothers reported fewer mother-child activities, overall they spent the same amount of time with their children.