The book Inequality by Christopher Jencks is in one sense an arid waste of somewhat confusing and misleading statistics between chapter one and chapter nine, and, in another sense, a destructive, unscientific critique of American education and families. Jencks' interpretation comes down hard on his basic feeling that "The crucial problem today is that relatively few people view income inequality as a serious problem; indeed the Nixon administration apparently convinced itself that income was too equally distributed in 1968 and that the rich needed additional incentives to get even richer . The Kennedy and Johnson administrations were only marginally better. Neither made any explicit effort to equalize incomes; the subject was hardly discussed. Instead reformers focused on equalizing opportunity." This view is probably correct but it is no excuse for an unscholarly, unscientific polemic against far from "peripheral institutions," which is Jencks' evaluation of the American schools. This book states

Inequality, A Reassessment of the Effect of Family and Schooling in America.

Social Mobility in Industrial Society

Throughout the post-Soviet bloc, people regularly describe as 'normal' high-quality commodities and living environment so therwise considered extraordinary in their local context. In Hungary, this discourse of the normal indicates that middle-class aspirants, claiming 'European' status, now evaluate their own standards of living by comparison to imagined western ones. Looking to the socialist period, I argue that the construction of a socialist modern consumer led to the equation of western standards of living with self-value and dignity. Western material worlds were perceived to be conducive to a form of family life and personhood impossible under the 'abnormal' conditions of state-socialism. As this new standard comes to dictate middle-class fashioning, it becomes instrumental in the ongoing social, economic and material transformation of the country.

American Kitchens, Luxury Bathrooms, and the Search for a 'Normal' Life in Postsocialist Hungary

Based on reference group and cognitive bias considerations, we advance a theory, explicated via a computer simulation, to explain (1) people's perceptions of how equalitarian the class system is, (2) where people place themselves in the class system, (3) where people place others' occupations, and (4) people's estimates of the pay of different occupations. Using a new set of diagrammatic and verbal questions on class, we test our hypotheses on large, representative national samples in Australia (N = 6,177) and Hungary (N = 2,606). A full-information maximum-likelihood analysis strongly supports the hypotheses.

Images of Class: Public Perceptions in Hungary and Australia

By expanding J. S. Coleman's theory of the intergenerational conversion process, social network theory, and Bourdieu's cultural capital theory, the author identified four components of family capital that are important for the educational attainment of children : human capital, financial capital, social capital, and cultural capital. Furthermore, unlike the conventional approach that focuses on parent-child relationships in families, the author defined social capital to include social relationships and networks outside the family that parents can use. The relative importance of each component of family capital for a child's education is illustrated by a case study of socialist Czechoslovakia in which social capital was operationalized by membership in the Communist Party. The study found that in addition to each component's independent influences on children's educational attainment, there may also be an interaction effect between the parents' social and human capital in the conversion process

Multidimensional Influences of Family Environment in Education: The Case of Socialist Czechoslovakia.

The study of social structure represents an important field of sociological research in the European socialist countries. At first, the objective of these studies was to revise the ideological model of society developed during the period of Stalinism, a model that distinguished “two allied classes”—the working class and the peasantry—and “one stratum” the intelligentsia. Later, as knowledge developed, scientific interest shifted from ideological criticism to exploring and understanding actual social conditions. The present paper briefly touches upon these ideological and scientific developments and makes an attempt to build a model that represents both the system of reproduction and the system of inequality of Hungarian society.

Stratification and social structure in hungary

Almost eighty years have passed since the book Social and Cultural Mobility by Pitirim Sorokin was published in 1927. It gave in many respects a new direction to scientific thinking about social structure. The central thesis of the work was that a society is primarily characterised not by the extent of social inequality or by the distribution of social positions, but by a measure of how open it is, what the chances for different people are of filling any position regardless of their origin. Although people around the world continued to initiate political movements, fight revolutions and even kill under the banner of equality for a further fifty years, a new paradigm was then born: the idea of equality that curtailed performance and effectively made progress impossible was replaced by the notion of equality of opportunity.

/pdf/go-ahead-a-complex-approach-to-status-attainment-and-2u7zf4g4gk.pdf

Tamas Kolosi

Papers

Stratification and social structure in hungary

GO AHEAD - A Complex Approach to Status Attainment and Inequality of Opportunity -