‘Persistence of the social’: The role of cognitive ability in mediating the effects of social origins on educational attainment in Britain – Reply to Gary Marks

2019 ◽  
Vol 61 ◽  
pp. 24-25
Author(s):  
Erzsébet Bukodi ◽  
Mollie Bourne ◽  
Bastian A. Betthäuser ◽  
John H. Goldthorpe
2018 ◽  
Vol 26 (53) ◽  
pp. 25-40
Author(s):  
Fabio Perocco

Abstract During the last two decades of rising anti-migrant racism in Europe, Islamophobia has proven to be the highest, most acute, and widely spread form of racism. The article shows how anti-migrant Islamophobia is a structural phenomenon in European societies and how its internal structure has specific social roots and mechanisms of functioning. Such an articulate and interdependent set of key themes, policies, practices, discourses, and social actors it is intended to inferiorise and marginalise Muslim immigrants while legitimising and reproducing social inequalities affecting the majority of them. The article examines the social origins of anti-migrant Islamophobia and the modes and mechanisms through which it naturalises inequalities; it focuses on the main social actors involved in its production, specifically on the role of some collective subjects as anti-Muslim organizations and movements, far-right parties, best-selling authors, and the mass-media.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erzsebet Bukodi ◽  
Mollie Bourne ◽  
Bastian Andreas Betthäuser ◽  
John H Goldthorpe

The aim of this Summary Report is to show how social origins, when viewed in a comprehensive, multidimensional way, affect the educational and labour market attainments of individuals whose cognitive ability at a relatively early stage in their educational histories is at a similar level. The main findings of the report are: (1) Children of similar cognitive ability have very different chances of educational success, depending on their parents’ economic, socio-cultural and educational resources; (2) For children born in the early 1990s, parents’ economic resources are somewhat less important while parents’ socio-cultural and educational resources are more important in affecting their educational attainment than for children born in the late 1950s or the early 1970s; (3) About half of the difference in educational attainment between children from advantaged and disadvantaged parental backgrounds is due to a difference in their cognitive ability, while the other half is due to other factors. (4) Obtaining formal qualifications is only one channel for upward mobility for high- ability individuals of disadvantaged backgrounds; there are other channels that are more directly related to cognitive ability, such as job training programmes, promotions or becoming self-employed in higher-level occupations.


2011 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 251-264 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cristina Iannelli

For over a century, the goal of reducing class inequalities in educational attainment has been based at least in part on the belief that this would help to equalise life chances. Drawing upon the main findings of three ESRC-funded projects, this paper reviews the empirical evidence on trends in social class inequalities in educational attainment and the role of education in promoting social mobility in Scotland. The findings show that in the second half of the twentieth century, despite the increase in overall levels of attainment, class differences in educational attainment persisted. Educational policies in Scotland supported educational expansion which allowed larger numbers of working-class children to climb the social class ladder than in the past. However, these did not translate into any break with the patterns of social inequalities in the chances of entering the top-level occupations. The conclusions highlight that educational policies on their own are not powerful enough to change patterns of social mobility which are mainly driven by labour market and social class structures.


1992 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 435-442 ◽  
Author(s):  
James R. Jacob ◽  
Margaret C. Jacob

Slightly more than two decades ago in an article entitled “Scientists and society: the saints preserved” we began an historiographical intervention into the debate about the social origins of modern science. In that 1971 review essay we argued that recent work on the Restoration latitudinarians, particularly the important contribution of Barbara Shapiro, did not adequately account for the role played in latitudinarian thought by political and ecclesiastical interests. The time has come to return to the discussion. This occasion has been presented by the publication of a book of essays written for a conference held in 1987 at the Clark Library, entitled Philosophy, Science, and Religion in England 1640–1700, and edited by Richard Kroll, Richard Ashcraft, and Perez Zagorin. The volume constitutes one of the few recent contributions to an important debate about science and religion that was noisy in the 1970s and largely ignored during the Tory backlash of the 1980s. But the times are finally changing, and revitalization may now be occurring in British cultural and intellectual history. The newly edited volume stands at the cusp of the revitalization. It struggles to move forward to fresher approaches toward culture, i.e. toward the view that texts require historical and linguistic location. Yet the volume is trapped by those few contributors who are still wedded to conventions and attitudes now largely confined to the high churchmen of the 1980s.The volume revolves around two themes: the nature of liberal English Protestantism after 1660 and the contested role of science in that mental and social construct. These are themes basic to English historiography in this century, if not before, and they are very much associated with the writings of Robert Merton and Christopher Hill. Their work largely focused on the mid-century Puritans; in the 1970s attention turned to the latitudinarians and their scientific associates, from Boyle to Newton.


1988 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-85 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. G. Walsh

One of the more endearing of the seventy-eight treatises which make up the Moralia of Plutarch is one entitled ‘On not minding your own business'. The Greek title, Περ Πολυπραγμοσνης, reminds us momentarily of Plato's famous definition of justice in Republic 4, which is to do your own thing (μ πολυπραγμονεῖν). Plutarch was indeed an ardent Platonist, but here he is concerned not with political philosophy but with social habits. The treatise reminds me of nothing so much as of a famous Lancastrian comedian of my youth called Norman Evans, who in a sketch called Over the Garden Wall assumed the transvestite role of a nosy female neighbour, simultaneously pegging out clothes and retailing juicy items of gossip. For Plutarch, after defining this nosiness or πολυπραγμοσνη as ‘an unhealthy and harmful state of mind, a fondness for learning the misfortunes of others, a disease apparently free of neither envy nor malice’, condemns the common tendency to pry into the social origins of neighbours, their debts, and their private conversations. He likewise condemns people who read their friends' letters, and who watch sacred ceremonies which it is μ θμισ ρν (perhaps he had in mind Clodius' gate-crashing of the rite of Bona Dea). Such inquisitiveness, says Plutarch, is invariably accompanied by a wagging tongue, for what these people gladly hear, they gladly blab about: a ἃ γἔρ δως κοουσιν, δως λαλοσιν Pascal in his Pensees says much the same thing: ‘Curiosity is only vanity. Most often we only wish to know in order to talk about it.’


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