Volume 40, Issue 3

Contemporary sociological theoretizing about social memory affords two alternatives: either theories follow the suggestions of Halbwachs and ground social memory in collective interactions, or they start from processes of functional differentiation and connect the formation of social memory to key media and dominant forms. In discussing both variants of the sociological understanding of social memory, we identify factors of variation and selection in its formation. As factors of variation we identify functional, cultural, and generational differentiation, mediality, authenticity, and the communicative genres of narrativity and discursivity. These factors are combined with relevance as a mechanism of selection within a theory of the formation of social memory based on the sociology of knowledge.

The article discusses Niklas Luhmann’s concept of communication as an emergent phenomenon. The first goal of this paper is to show that despite recent objections it is possible to reconstruct Luhmann as a social emergentist theorist. Secondly, the intention is to shed some light on general problems and presuppositions of an emergentist social theory. For this purpose I first sketch the opposing camps of reductionism and emergentism within sociology, and I demonstrate to what extent Luhmann’s theory is actually emergentist. This is followed by a characterization of the way in which emergent communication is seen as an autonomous social phenomenon and how it allegedly is related to an individual basis. Subsequently, I introduce some conditions of adequacy from the philosophy of science thus criticizing Luhmann’s concept of emergence and clarifying the preconditions for a plausible emergentist theory within sociology. Finally, I consider a (more) promising concept of social emergence.

To date, it has been difficult to gauge and compare the effects of different operationalizations of immigrant origins in the German context. The 2005 microcensus provides an unprecedented opportunity to address this issue. In this paper, we first take a look at the typical operationalization of immigrant origins and generation status. Subsequently, we show that differing proportions of the total population can be identified as immigrants and their descendants depending on the operationalization used, whereby the greatest discrepancies are found in the younger age groups. Divergent findings also emerge when information on group membership is combined with information on generation status. Similar effects of different types of operationalization can be identified in multivariate analyses of educational attainment. Once ethnic German repatriates from Central and Eastern Europe (the so-called Spätaussiedler) are identified separately in the records, we observe changes in the findings for the remaining respondents from Russia and Poland. Generation status turns out to be important as well, since it reveals the contrasting educational patterns of the first and second generation. At the same time, one of the key messages of previous research is not affected by different types of operationalization: when considering characteristics of social background immigrants’ educational disadvantages disappear and sometimes initial disadvantages even turn into benefits.

This article investigates the effect in terms of vocational advantages of the use of social capital in searching for a job among recent graduates of higher education in Germany. In contrast to previous studies, we extend the analysis and distinguish between different types of networks that are used in job searches. In accordance with the literature that concentrates on the impact of social capital as a resource per se, our findings do not indicate any effects on monetary returns. However, in contrast to Franzen & Hangartner (2005, 2006) we also do not find any positive effects on job adequacy. Finding jobs via social networks even increases the risk of overqualification. The differentiation of social capital into various types of network contacts, such as those established while working during one's studies or via parents and friends, leads to a fundamentally different picture: the impact of social networks on job characteristics depends to a large extent on the type of network contacts and on the type of outcome under consideration. Hence, we conclude that there is no homogeneous effect of social capital on labor market outcomes, in particular in the case of graduates of higher education. Studies which explore the heterogeneous effects of networks that offer access to different kinds of resources promise to be more conclusive.