Volume 39, Issue 4

Gifts as intergenerational transfers inter vivos allow us to study the importance of life course events for the chances of receiving transfers. In Germany, gifts are highly private and leave more scope for decision-making than regulated bequests. Thus, gifts are better suited to test theories of family solidarity and transfer behavior. Our analysis focuses on larger transfers from parents and grandparents to their children and grandchildren. Bequests provide a comparative reference which highlights similarities and differences between transfers inter vivos and mortis causa. In our account, gift-giving is purposive action driven primarily by economic needs of the receivers, but also by immaterial aspects of family ties. We use event history models to study the effects of family events on the likelihood of initiating transfers. Chances of receiving large gifts increase in the first years after a marriage and also immediately after a divorce. These findings indicate, on the one hand, that transfers are triggered by economic need and thus support concepts of transfer behavior motivated by altruism or by norms of parental responsibility. On the other hand, these gifts express parental affection toward offspring families and the wish to strengthen kinship ties.

This paper investigates whether xenophobic attitudes in Germany are determined by personal characteristics and by individual social situations. To this end, the influence on xenophobia of attachment style as a personal characteristic and of social disintegration as a variable of the social structure is tested. The analysis of a sample of 1779 persons indicates that attachment styles can be considered as predispositions for the occurrence or not of social disintegration, which simultaneously determines the extent of xenophobia (complete mediation): a secure attachment style decreases the degree of social disintegration which then reduces the extent of xenophobic attitudes. An insecure attachment style induces an increasing degree of social disintegration and xenophobia. A consideration of the subscales “anxiety” and “avoidance” and of categorical values of attachment style (secure, anxious-preoccupied, fearful-avoidant, dismissive-avoidant) specifies this finding. The extent of avoidance and the fearful-avoidant attachment style are particularly important for the effects which we were able to identify.

This article develops and applies a sociological differentiation between conflict and competition in three distinct steps: (1) Conflicts can be understood as dynamic processes of communication which are initiated by a concatenation of contradictions of contradictions; they are a direct form of struggle that depends on mutual communication between the parties. (2) In contrast, following Georg Simmel, in situations of competition parties become rivals only once they try to win the favor of a third party; competition is therefore an indirect form of struggle that depends on observation by third parties but does not require contact between the opponents. (3) This differentiation opens up new possibilities of comparison, and it is used here to analyze exemplary cases of coexistence and collision between the two forms. The heuristic advantage of the differentiation is particularly salient in cases in which the public becomes involved as a third party, which brings about the special dynamics of modern competition as a “fight of all for all” (Simmel). It is in these cases that the differentiation of the two forms of struggle gains particular theoretical significance and practical importance.

Theorists of the “practice turn” argue that the concept of action should be replaced by the concept of embodied social practices because they assume that the tacit knowledge and skills of social practices are much more fundamental for understanding human social conduct than the action theorists’ supposedly individual and rational actions. The aim of the paper is to show that the role of tacit knowledge and skills can be analyzed more clearly and in a more refined way within a theory-of-action framework, especially by drawing on recent approaches which add to the concept of action further considerations concerning the definition of the situation.