Although native–immigrant gaps in tangible labor market outcomes such as wages have been widely studied, people's experiences at work are also crucial for their wellbeing. This article considers two generic sources of native–immigrant differentials in desirable individual workplace experiences, especially job autonomy. Following the occupational segregation literature, the first is that foreign-borns and natives are recruited to do different types of jobs. This results in native–immigrant interoccupational segregation. The second is that, once employed in a particular occupation, natives and immigrants are assigned different tasks and subject to different working conditions. This results in intraoccupational segregation and differences between immigrants and natives employed in the same occupation. The empirical analysis involves large-scale individual-level cross-national survey data and focuses on job autonomy as a chief individual workplace experience. I find strong evidence of both inter- and intraoccupational segregation, with the former being the largest source of the observed immigrant–native job autonomy gap. Results are similar when considering other individual workplace experiences with a quality trait such as job satisfaction. I conclude that the ethnic labor market penalty extends beyond tangible job features to individuals’ experiences in their places of work.
Public support for climate action is essential for advancing climate mitigation efforts. However, despite increasing awareness of the urgency of climate change, support for mitigation actions remains relatively low. Therefore, identifying effective ways to enhance public support for climate actions is a key objective for social science research. Our study aims to contribute to this understanding by investigating whether reminding people of natural disasters, which are becoming increasingly frequent, influences people's willingness to make sacrifices to mitigate climate change. We analyse two survey experiments carried out in the Italian context, testing the effect of priming respondents with two distinct natural disasters – glacier collapse and floods – on the willingness to accept limitations to the standard of living to mitigate climate change. We find that such priming can impact people's willingness to accept sacrifices to mitigate climate change. However, we find that this effect is present when the collapse of glaciers is mentioned, but not when floods are mentioned. We also find support for the attitudinal updating mechanism: the reminder of a glacier collapse enhances the willingness to accept sacrifices to mitigate climate change, especially among people not believing in the anthropogenic causes of climate change, as well as right-wing individuals.
Jürgen Habermas has passed away on 14 March 2026. Habermas was the leading figure in the Frankfurt School's second generation for several decades, leaving behind a legacy that has had an impact across a wide field in social sciences and humanities. What will be remembered most are Habermas’ defense of enlightened democracy, the ideal of public sphere as a room for the free argumentative dialogue, and the “uncoercive force of the better argument.” Habermas succeeded in what earlier members of the Frankfurt School and critical theory failed to achieve: to formulate an explicitly normatively oriented social critical theory, and from there to build a bridge to a larger enlightened public audience.
This article advances a structural sociological diagnosis of contemporary late-modern societies as organized around the systematic reduction of friction. Across healthcare, digital platforms, workplaces, and governance, institutions increasingly treat resistance—understood as temporal limits, relational friction, institutional boundaries, and material constraints—as a design flaw to be eliminated rather than a condition to be negotiated. Drawing on theories of risk (Beck), governmentality (Foucault, Rose), control societies (Deleuze), social acceleration and resonance (Rosa), and liquid modernity (Bauman), the article argues that resistance plays a structural role in sustaining social integration. When external constraints are systematically removed, regulatory labor is not abolished but displaced inward: subjects must generate orientation, limits, and coherence internally, producing hypervigilance, internal overload, and weakened integration. The argument is illustrated through existing research on workplace burnout, the wellness industry, and platform-mediated labor, and is anchored in the Nordic paradox, whereby comprehensive welfare states coincide with rising rates of mental distress. The article reframes burnout, anxiety, and exhaustion away from individual-deficit models and toward a structural account of regulation under conditions of friction reduction, contributing to sociological debates on integration, subjectivity, and the institutional conditions for social coherence.
It has been over 15 years since Savage and Burrows published their influential article about the crisis of empirical sociology. In the meantime, many authors have talked about how the rise of data science weakens the credibility of sociology and its mandate to produce knowledge about social realities in general, and emergent social phenomena in particular. Against that background, the mainstream methodological response from the social sciences has been to explore the bridges between sociology and data science. However, I contend this ongoing effort is marked by significant yet often underestimated epistemological, ethical, and political incongruities. Closing the methodological gap between sociology and computation comes at a cost, especially for the discipline placed in a subordinate position in the production of knowledge. That is why there is an urgent need to explicitly articulate and encourage a wider politically aware agenda for human-driven methods in digital sociology.
Recent academic debates on intimacy emphasise that intimacy needs to be reconceptualised beyond long-term relationships. This study contributes to such reconceptualisation by coining the term intimability and exploring its implications based on interviews with 29 older people about couple dancing in Sweden. We show that older dancers find great pleasure in dancing with others but carefully avoid overt sexual signals or forming obligations outside the dance, such as long-term relationships. We model intimability on Simmel's concept sociability in order to capture how human beings enjoy being intimate and therefore arrange intimacy for its own sake. The concept draws attention to the temporary character of intimacy in dancing and the avoidance of sexual signals or forming obligations beyond the dance context. Similarly to how Simmel wrote about sociability, intimability becomes a world unto itself, and the links to other spheres of life are modulated to sustain the sense of temporary and non-obligational intimacy. We demonstrate how contextual factors are at play to sustain intimability, including the way communities are formed around dance activities and how existing long-term relationships are handled. Although this article examines couple dancing, we propose that the concept intimability can be applied beyond this specific context.
With this article, we want to contribute to a more comprehensive examination of the ways in which bots are constituted, directly or indirectly, in media discourse. Firstly, we map the contemporary news discourse on political bots and the surrounding discursive context in order to create an understanding of how bots, as a concept, are assigned meaning. Secondly, we ask to which political conflict lines such representations are discursively connected and related, thereby investigating the symbolic and rhetorical role of bots in the construction of political conflicts. We do this by analysing a data set consisting of Swedish print news media articles published during 2018 and 2022. Key results following the analysis are that political bots, bundled together with artificial intelligence (AI) and other various manifestations of digital communication technologies, are constructed as an integral part of the social media machinery in terms of a risk to the well-functioning democracy in contemporary society. In Swedish news media discourse, bots, algorithms, AI and their deployment across various social media platforms are portrayed as a clear danger to the capacities of deliberative democracy. Analysing these news media narratives, it could be argued that they bear traits similar to those of a moral panic reaction.
Despite extensive research on gender discrimination in hiring, little is known about how gender biases affect job applicants in older age. This study examines whether and how gendered hiring discrimination persists later in life, focusing on variation by the content of the work performed at the workplace, employer gender, and employer role. Drawing on a factorial survey experiment with 5017 Danish employers and 20,068 applicant evaluations, we assess hireability scores and the probability of being selected for applicants aged 45 to 75, representing later-career job applicants. Overall, gender differences in hireability scores are very small: female applicants are rated only slightly lower than males, and this subtle evaluative bias does not translate into lower selection probabilities. However, some context-specific patterns can be found: In production-oriented workplaces, female applicants receive significantly lower ratings and face a corresponding reduction in the likelihood of being selected. Female applicants are also rated somewhat lower by male employers and by workplace owners in production settings. The study does not find contexts in which male applicants are evaluated significantly lower than female applicants. Overall, we conclude that gender disparities in hiring in later career stages are context-specific and therefore largely similar to those documented in studies among younger, reproductive-age applicants.
This article explores the potential connection between place and school performance. We conducted astatistical analysis of school results encompassing 420 of Norway's 429 municipalities. Based on thisregression model, two socioeconomic similar municipalities were selected for qualitative comparison.In Sunplace, students scored considerably higher than expected; in Woodland, students scored consid-erably lower than expected. Subsequently, we analysed data from two schools'catchment areas, con-ductedfieldwork, and interviewed local experts, students and teachers. Following the most similar casedesign, we sought differences between the two cases. The study is theoretically informed by LaurentTh & eacute;venot's pragmatic sociology, which provides a detailed conceptual framework for capturing people'sdiverse forms of engagement. Ourfindings suggest that Sunplace is a tightly integrated, egalitarian com-munity whose residents take pride in their place. We propose that this pride and what we callconfidentcollectivismextends into the school, which is characterised by discipline, a strong academic-pedagogicalframing and confident students and staff. In contrast, Woodland is more loosely integrated and sociallyand culturally divided. Our interpretation is that there is an absence of pride, and what we callindecisiveindividualismmight influence the school culture which is marked by a weak academic-pedagogical framingand uncertainty among students and teachers.
Although considerable research looks at the effects of mobility on various outcomes, few studies differentiate between changes schools versus changing dwellings, even though the effects are likely to be different in terms of academic performance. In this paper, we rely on a random effects regression model using a longitudinal survey containing roughly 700,000 families over a 16-year period to differentiate between these two types of mobility. First, we look at the impact that family mobility, defined as a move by at least one parent and at least one child, has on the mathematics scores of the child. Second, we differentiate between residential mobility and school mobility. We find that moving schools and/or houses increases the likelihood of having poor mathematics scores. This effect is particularly evident when both a change in residence and switching schools occur concurrently, which has a multiplicative impact on mathematics scores.
Political gender differences have moved to the forefront of debates about politics and democracy. Scholars have documented that women are becoming more likely to vote, while men are more supportive of populist/radical right parties and positions, including elite distrust in mainstream politics. Past research has only been partly successful in explaining these differences, with most work concentrating on labour market-related economic explanations or value-based cultural factors. This paper shifts the attention to the family domain. Specifically, it investigates perceived risk of divorce/separation as a source of distrust in political institutions and actors. Three-wave panel data from Norway suggest this effect may not be strongly instantaneous, following short-term changes in risk. Rather, the effect develops over time and mainly among partnered fathers with persistently high levels of perceived divorce risk. This supports a 'gendered post-divorce realities' interpretation, under which male risks concerning post-divorce parental involvement matter politically among partnered fathers.
We present a system dynamics model (SDM) of woke/anti-woke (WAW) dynamics in Norway, calibrated against Norwegian Citizen Panel data from 2014 to 2023. The SDM synthesizes theories related to WAW dynamics, including Moral Foundations Theory and two contrasting types of sensitivity to injustice (focusing on injustice to self and injustice to others). The simulation's two dependent variables measure the total amount of radicalism (left-wing and right-wing combined) relative to the population, and the amount of left-wing radicalism versus right-wing radicalism. Minimizing ideological polarization calls for minimizing the first output measure, while winning ideological culture wars draws attention to the second output measure. Results exhibit the vital role that homophily-the extent to which people socialize and communicate with those ideologically similar to themselves-plays in exacerbating or ameliorating ideological polarization in a society. High homophily increases radicalism in a relatively balanced way. Unbalanced radicalism can occur, but only at low levels of homophily. This suggests practical interventions: intensify culture wars by increasing homophily through media bubbles and decreasing encounters with unfamiliar others; or reduce polarization by decreasing homophily, encouraging positive encounters with unfamiliar others, and resisting one-sided radicalism when it arises by emphasizing civil virtues.
This article presents a comprehensive sociological conceptualisation of morality which can be used in empirical research, as a basis for further theorisation, and for dialogue with existing studies in sociology and other disciplines. It clarifies, systematises and extends Durkheim's incomplete works on morality, long misinterpreted and overlooked. Morality is conceptualised a system of interrelated concepts, including moral ideal, moral obligation, social attachment to the group, and individual autonomy. Grounded in Durkheim's notion of the social as a symbolic reality irreducible to the individual, 'objective', 'social' morality is shaped by 'sacred' moral ideals which exist in the symbolic domain of collective representations. Social morality is different from mores which are daily practices pertaining to the profane domain where moral rules are applied with 'compromise', and different from individual moralities. Extending Durkheim, moral obligation is elaborated through the subject, matter, addressee, and mechanisms of obligation, consistent with and indicative of the other elements of morality. The concepts of (a) morality produced by the collectivity/society/group (the morality of society) and (b) morality produced by social institutions like the state and media (the moral order) open pathways for analysing the roles of each and their juxtaposition, enabling new interpretations, empirically grounded critiques, and normativity. Together with the concepts of mores and individual moralities, these two types of moralities establish a multidimensional space open to empirical research.
Despite improved access to upper secondary education, social inequalities in skills acquisition have remained pronounced in Germany. However, it is empirically unclear whether the disparities have increased or decreased in the context of educational expansion. Therefore, this study addresses whether social differences in reading skills have increased or decreased in the past two decades, focusing on learning conditions at school and cultural conditions at home. Based on theoretical considerations of the Maximally Maintained-Inequality and the Effectively Maintained-Inequality hypotheses, we distinguish between distributional and correlation effects of learning conditions at home and at school and use the series of Programme for International Student Assessment data to analyse the development of reading skills inequality. Using OLS-regression and KHB-decomposition methods our findings reveal that while inequalities in reading skills persist, the underlying mechanism of these disparities has changed between 2000 and 2022. Inequalities declined markedly in the 2000s but increased again after 2015. The initial decline is largely attributed to more equitable access to upper secondary education. In contrast, the recent increase in disparities appears to be driven less by educational participation and more by the growing influence of cultural resources offered at home.
