Wout Ultee

Bio: Wout Ultee is an academic researcher from Radboud University Nijmegen. The author has contributed to research in topics: Occupational prestige & Unemployment. The author has an hindex of 23, co-authored 134 publications receiving 2424 citations. Previous affiliations of Wout Ultee include University of Amsterdam & Utrecht University.

Examining Trends in Muslim Self-Identification and Mosque Attendance Among People of Turkish and Moroccan Descent in the Netherlands, 1997–2009

Abstract: This study examines the extent to which Muslim self-identification and mosque attendance have changed in the period 1997-2009 among people of Turkish and Moroccan descent in the Netherlands. Mainly trendless fluctuations are found. Overall, Muslim self-identification seems to very slightly increase and mosque attendance seems to very slightly decrease. We examined the extent to which factors that are important according to theories and previous research explain or enlarge these differences over time. The factors about which we hypothesize are largely unable to explain differences over time in Muslim self-identification and mosque attendance.

Analogical Reasoning and the Content of Creation Stories : Quantitative Comparisons of Preindustrial Societies

Abstract: A long-standing question in sociology concerns preindustrial societies and the relationship between their subsistence technology and ideas about god. This article proposes a shift from questions regarding gods who now and then create to questions about creations that sometimes involve a god. For preindustrial societies, it addresses the relation between their subsistence technology and the content of their creation stories. This article’s answer combines Hume’s general hypothesis that people reason by analogy with Topitsch’s specification that invokes vital, technical, and social analogies. This conjunction yields concrete hypotheses about the substance of creation stories in societies with varying levels of subsistence technology according to Lenski’s typology. To test these hypotheses, the authors used Murdock’s Standard Cross-Cultural Sample and the Human Relations Area Files. Field reports were coded for 116 preindustrial societies. The findings show that people use different thought models to explain the unknown, depending on the society’s level of subsistence technology.

Ontwikkelingen in de opbrengsten van diploma's op de arbeidsmarkt: Structurele veranderingen én veranderde samenhang?

Abstract: In this article we examine whether decreasing returns to educational credentials can simply be explained by changes in the distributions of the labour force according to educational attainment and level of occupation (structural changes), or that these should also be attributed to shifted preferences of employers and employees which modify the net association between schooling and level of occupation. In order to answer this question we use data from the 1960 Census and four Labour Force Surveys as held in 1973, 1977, 1985, and 1991. A loglinear analysis showed that the net association between education and occupation has increased since 1960. We conclude that the process of credential inflation is not only the result of structural changes, but also the outcome of shifted preferences of both employers and employees. These shifted preferences are largely connected with the business cycle: in times of high unemployment levels employers increasingly select employees on education. We also found some support for the modernisation theory, but as soon as we account for the business cycle the impact of modernisation becomes non-significant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]; Copyright of Mens en Maatschappij is the property of Amsterdam University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Similarities and differences between sociology 90 years ago and sociology 90 years from now

Abstract: Before setting off, I wish to pay tribute to the person who held the first chair for sociology in Finland. Inevitably that person did not study sociology, Uno Harva came from theology, collected myths of steppe and forest societies in Northern Eurasia, found that their stories about the origin of the world refer to, among others, trees of life and water spirits, and admitted that their tales about the end of times are understudied. These societies and such ideas no longer charm sociologists. Still, Harva’s findings are pertinent to a venerable question: what is the content of the origin and destination stories told in various human societies, and how did these ideas come about? They were not derived from observations, since neither the story tellers themselves were present at the events they recount, nor the persons who told them the hearsay. Now, one hypothesis says that people do not always derive ideas from observations, but reason by analogy, with the far away and unknown being modeled on the familiar and vitally important. In addition, the world originated long ago, and lakes, rivers and trees feature in the survival strategy of fishers and hunters in forests of Northern Eurasia, but not in that of peoples there who herd cattle on dry and treeless grasslands. So, trees of life and water spirits will be less dominant in folk lore of steppe societies. I quite like my own theoretical exercise regarding Harva’s societies and their myths. However, I will not follow it up here by identifying analogies behind ideas on coming catastrophes in contemporary high-tech societies. There are quite a few possible disasters: the bursting of bubbles blown from a tower in Frankfurt, floods resulting from fossil fuel overdoses, mass killings in the name of God, and military clashes after diplomatic brinkmanship by Putin and Trump. I deal with the prospects, if any, of sociology in general. Contemporary sociology is in a sorry state. This is valid for Finland, where people in Turku decided to celebrate the launch of sociology in Finland in 1926, by a talk in 2016 on the state of sociology in 2106. That sociology is in a sorry state, holds for the Netherlands too: Turku seduced with success a Dutch sociologist to take up the 90+90 topic. All joking apart, I do think that several phenomena indicate that present day sociology is in a sorry state, and I will argue that, as a consequence of the digitalization of everything, sociology’s state in 2106 will be much healthier. I thank the organizers of this event for asking me to elaborate on +90

Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks

Abstract: Similarity breeds connection. This principle—the homophily principle—structures network ties of every type, including marriage, friendship, work, advice, support, information transfer, exchange, comembership, and other types of relationship. The result is that people's personal networks are homogeneous with regard to many sociodemographic, behavioral, and intrapersonal characteristics. Homophily limits people's social worlds in a way that has powerful implications for the information they receive, the attitudes they form, and the interactions they experience. Homophily in race and ethnicity creates the strongest divides in our personal environments, with age, religion, education, occupation, and gender following in roughly that order. Geographic propinquity, families, organizations, and isomorphic positions in social systems all create contexts in which homophilous relations form. Ties between nonsimilar individuals also dissolve at a higher rate, which sets the stage for the formation of niches (localize...

A Treatise on the Family

Abstract: A Treatise on the Family. G. S. Becker. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1981. Gary Becker is one of the most famous and influential economists of the second half of the 20th century, a fervent contributor to and expounder of the University of Chicago free-market philosophy, and winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in economics. Although any book with the word "treatise" in its title is clearly intended to have an impact, one coming from someone as brilliant and controversial as Becker certainly had such a lofty goal. It has received many article-length reviews in several disciplines (Ben-Porath, 1982; Bergmann, 1995; Foster, 1993; Hannan, 1982), which is one measure of its scholarly importance, and yet its impact is, I think, less than it may have initially appeared, especially for scholars with substantive interests in the family. This book is, its title notwithstanding, more about economics and the economic approach to behavior than about the family. In the first sentence of the preface, Becker writes "In this book, I develop an economic or rational choice approach to the family." Lest anyone accuse him of focusing on traditional (i.e., material) economics topics, such as family income, poverty, and labor supply, he immediately emphasizes that those topics are not his focus. "My intent is more ambitious: to analyze marriage, births, divorce, division of labor in households, prestige, and other non-material behavior with the tools and framework developed for material behavior." Indeed, the book includes chapters on many of these issues. One chapter examines the principles of the efficient division of labor in households, three analyze marriage and divorce, three analyze various child-related issues (fertility and intergenerational mobility), and others focus on broader family issues, such as intrafamily resource allocation. His analysis is not, he believes, constrained by time or place. His intention is "to present a comprehensive analysis that is applicable, at least in part, to families in the past as well as the present, in primitive as well as modern societies, and in Eastern as well as Western cultures." His tone is profoundly conservative and utterly skeptical of any constructive role for government programs. There is a clear sense of how much better things were in the old days of a genderbased division of labor and low market-work rates for married women. Indeed, Becker is ready and able to show in Chapter 2 that such a state of affairs was efficient and induced not by market or societal discrimination (although he allows that it might exist) but by small underlying household productivity differences that arise primarily from what he refers to as "complementarities" between caring for young children while carrying another to term. Most family scholars would probably find that an unconvincingly simple explanation for a profound and complex phenomenon. What, then, is the salient contribution of Treatise on the Family? It is not literally the idea that economics could be applied to the nonmarket sector and to family life because Becker had already established that with considerable success and influence. At its core, microeconomics is simple, characterized by a belief in the importance of prices and markets, the role of self-interested or rational behavior, and, somewhat less centrally, the stability of preferences. It was Becker's singular and invaluable contribution to appreciate that the behaviors potentially amenable to the economic approach were not limited to phenomenon with explicit monetary prices and formal markets. Indeed, during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, he did undeniably important and pioneering work extending the domain of economics to such topics as labor market discrimination, fertility, crime, human capital, household production, and the allocation of time. Nor is Becker's contribution the detailed analyses themselves. Many of them are, frankly, odd, idiosyncratic, and off-putting. …