Search results for "Social stratification"

The Rhetoric of Healthcare Inequality in Capitalist Classed Societies: Blomkamp’s and Romanek’s Dystopian Visions

2018

The future of democratic societies has been widely debated among futurologists, including the possible ways medicine could advance, changing the lives of individuals and communities. Yet, what seems a reasonable question to ask is – how the unequal access to healthcare might perpetuate social and economic divisions and turn democracy into tyranny. This paper advances a rhetorical analysis of the reciprocal relations between healthcare and the classed capitalist system as portrayed in two dystopian pictures: Mark Romanek’s Never Let Me Go (2010) and Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium (2013). The realities depicted in these movies, as well as their narratives, vary considerably; however, they both pres…

Face the Hierarchy: ERP and Oscillatory Brain Responses in Social Rank Processing

2014

International audience; Recognition of social hierarchy is a key feature that helps us navigate through our complex social environment. Neuroimaging studies have identified brain structures involved in the processing of hierarchical stimuli but the precise temporal dynamics of brain activity associated with such processing remains largely unknown. Here, we used electroencephalography to examine the effect of social hierarchy on neural responses elicited by faces. In contrast to previous studies, the key manipulation was that a hierarchical context was constructed, not by varying facial expressions, but by presenting neutral-expression faces in a game setting. Once the performance-based hier…

The Phenomenology of Specialization of Criminal Suspects

2012

A criminal career can be either general, with the criminal committing different types of crimes, or specialized, with the criminal committing a specific type of crime. A central problem in the study of crime specialization is to determine, from the perspective of the criminal, which crimes should be considered similar and which crimes should be considered distinct. We study a large set of Swedish suspects to empirically investigate generalist and specialist behavior in crime. We show that there is a large group of suspects who can be described as generalists. At the same time, we observe a non-trivial pattern of specialization across age and gender of suspects. Women are less prone to commi…

Cortisol Awakening Response and Walking Speed in Older People.

2015

In older people, less diurnal variability in cortisol levels has been consistently related to worse physical performance, especially to slower walking speed (WS). The cortisol awakening response (CAR) is a discrete component of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis that has been related to several health problems, such as cardiovascular disease and/or worse performance on executive function and memory. The relationship between the CAR and physical performance in older people is poorly understood. In this study, in 86 older people (mean age = 64.42, SD = 3.93), we investigated the relationship between the CAR and WS, a commonly used measure of physical performance in the older population t…

Black Pete through the eyes of Dutch children

2016

The traditional figure of Black Pete seen during the December festivities around Sinterklaas (the Dutch Santa Claus) in the Netherlands has sparked fierce debates about his racial stereotypical characteristics and his potentially negative effects on children’s opinions about black people. The Black Pete phenomenon has even been discussed by the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, resulting in a report urging the Netherlands to eliminate this form of racial stereotyping. The adult debate about Black Pete is clearly important, but Sinterklaas is essentially a children’s holiday. Surprisingly, there have never been any systematic studies to examine children’s…

The Impact of Population Ageing and Social Stratification: The Case of Latvia

2019

Population ageing and social stratification is widely assumed to have detrimental effects on the economy yet there is little empirical evidence about the magnitude of its effects. The aim of this article is to investigate the relationships between population ageing and social stratification and the state of economy of a small and post-transition economy. We are looking for these relationships and their strength of influence; at what time after shocking these variables reach their original levels. We apply standard Granger (non-) causality tests, VAR (Vector Auto-Regressive), IRF (Impulse Response Function) and the prediction error variance analysis by using quarterly data from 2000 to 2018.…

2015

Does being from a higher social class lead a person to engage in more or less prosocial behavior? Psychological research has recently provided support for a negative effect of social class on prosocial behavior. However, research outside the field of psychology has mainly found evidence for positive or u-shaped relations. In the present research, we therefore thoroughly examined the effect of social class on prosocial behavior. Moreover, we analyzed whether this effect was moderated by the kind of observed prosocial behavior, the observed country, and the measure of social class. Across eight studies with large and representative international samples, we predominantly found positive effect…

Social Inequalities in French Secondary Schools : From Figures to Theories

1996

In spite of the unified type of junior secondary school (the "college") implemented in France since 1975, significant social inequalities of school careers can be observed today. A specific longitudinal study sheds some light on the variety of mechanisms which generate these social inequalities. Difference in academic progress is one mechanism, but parents' strategies are also important. Finally, another aspect of social inequality arises from the school attended, some schools being more selective at the streaming points, these "school effects' being related to the social characteristics of the pupils of the catchment area. All these facts and figures have some relevance with regard to diff…

From rural studies to the analysis of localized social spaces

2014

Urban society seems to have penetrated every corner of France, reducing the object of rural sociology and ethnology to nothing. These disciplines are built on a sharp rural/urban split, reserving the canonical vocabulary of sociology, such as the analysis of social class, for urban settings. Rural studies were founded on an ad hoc conceptualization borrowed from anthropology (peasant society, community, village collectivity, village interconnaissance or everyone knowing each other, notables). The radical development of contemporary rural worlds has swept this conception away. But are today’s contemporary rural worlds the exact equivalents of urban worlds? In this paper we defend the idea th…

Access to Higher Education: An Instrument for Fair Societies?

2019

Access to higher education (HE) has a long history. To offer a view on the current debates and worldwide issues regarding access to HE, this editorial depicts how the control of educational access has historically been used as an instrument of governance at the interface of two processes: social stratification and the territorialisation of politics. Access to HE has remained embedded in these large structural processes even though HE has expanded from a highly elitist institution into mass education systems with equity of educational opportunities having become a desirable goal across societies. Analysing these processes helps understand the complex mechanisms producing inequalities in HE t…