Sociologie

Aiming to construct empirically-grounded theoretical insights related to the suggestion that Internet forums are especially attractive to people with ‘unusual’ identities, this article studies how participation in an online forum for orthodox protestant homosexuals can be understood in relation to experiences in offline social life. Drawing on in-depth interviews with fifteen participants, two mechanisms between offline questions of identity and online participation are uncovered. Those struggling with stigmatisation conceive of the forum as a tight-knit, homogeneous community providing online refuge, whereas those facing reflexive questions of identity regard the forum to be an open, heterogeneous place for debate functioning as a springboard to offline life. These findings indicate it is important to take experiences and understandings into account when studying the interrelationship between online and offline social life, and they inform the discussion of online forums as Goffmanian backstages.

This article deals with the relation between social structure and social change on the one hand and the school curriculum on the other. The research focuses on the introduction of a new subject in primary schools as a response to public concern about moral decline. In the course of the twentieth century, teaching methods in primary schools developed towards self-development, independence, responsibility and autonomy of pupils, fitting the requirements of post-industrial society. At the end of the century worries about moral decline, resulting from ongoing social processes like individualisation, informalisation, trends to egalitarianism, and the influx of ethnic minorities stimulated various actors in the educational field to redefine moral education in schools. It were political actors who reformulated the public concern about loss of norms and values into citizenship education, and introduced this as an obligatory part of the curriculum. Primary schools, which had already responded by the introduction of stricter rules and more discipline used this new subject for intensification of the teaching of social and emotional skills needed in a multicultural society. Parents welcomed this attention to discipline, though they approved of the existing child-centred interactions in the schools. The study shows that macro-social developments are not automatically reflected in the school curriculum, but are mediated and reformulated by parties with different interests and opinions.

This article seeks to elucidate changes over time and cross-national variations in the status of art forms through a comprehensive content analysis of the coverage given to arts and culture in elite newspapers of four different countries – France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States – in the period 1955–2005. The authors explore how cultural hierarchy is affected by specific features of these societies and their respective journalistic and cultural production fields. The four countries show significant differences in journalistic attention to high and popular art forms. Throughout the period of study, the American newspapers and to a slightly lesser extent, French elite newspapers generally devote more attention to popular art forms than their Dutch and German counterparts. In accounting for cross-national differences in the coverage given to popular culture, field-level factors like market structure and the position and size of local cultural industries seem more important than more remote factors such as national cultural repertoires and the level of social mobility.

This article assesses separately the push and pull factor explanation in Sassen’s theory of migration from newly industrialising countries to cities in OECD countries. The former explanation argues that foreign direct investments initiate migration flows to the country from where these investments stem from. The pull factor explanation revolves around demand for low-skilled workers in cities owing to the clustering of advanced producer services. It is found that Dutch investment flows indeed function as a push factor for migration to Dutch cities, but that the local settlement of immigrants is not related to the clustering of advanced producer services.