Volume 43, Issue 1

Behavioral decisions may be associated with inner conflicts which reflect the interaction of different personal orientations (e. g., norms vs. resources). The goals of this paper are the reconstruction and analysis of such conflicts in the context of a formal model, whose applications are illustrated. To formulate the model, we use (non-cooperative) game theory as the part of Rational Choice Theory (RCT) which explicitly deals with conflict situations. In contrast to related German work in the sociological theory of action, however, the paper does not emphasize the alleged limitations of RCT. Instead, the formal model shows that RCT is flexible enough to deal with scenarios which, according to sociological critics, would require an alternative theoretical approach (e. g., low-cost situations, crowding-out-hypothesis, electoral participation). Additionally, we offer extensions of the model and develop empirically testable hypotheses with respect to the behavioral effects of inner conflicts.

We discuss the sociological model of educational choice and Coleman’s social capital approach in order to develop hypotheses on social selectivity in the use of private tutoring. Our empirical work is based on panel data on almost 1,800 students and their parents collected from elementary schools in two German states. Our logistic regression results provide little support for our hypotheses on educational aspirations and status maintenance, on parental help with homework, and on financial and time resources. The results show that the use of tutoring is driven mainly by low school performance. An additional investigation of the effectiveness of tutoring in a control group shows that private tutoring does not lead to improved achievement in German or mathematics between the third and fourth grades.

Current sociological debate on the effects of demographic change on education systems still swings between the extremes of “demography as destiny,” which conceives of demographic change as a phenomenon with immediate impact, and “demography as ideology,” which questions any relevance of demographic factors at all. This article adopts a Durkheimian perspective and checks whether changes in the division of labor moderate the effects of demographic change. This hypothesis is tested by analyzing panel data at the regional level of counties on the differentiation of the German secondary school system for the years 1995-2010. In addition to demography, the effects of path dependency, party politics, and German re-unification are modeled as well. The analysis shows a moderate effect of demographic change on the (de-)differentiation of the German secondary school system. Zusammenfassung Der soziologische Diskurs über die Folgen des demographischen Wandels für Bildungssysteme schwankt immer noch zwischen den Extremen „Demographie als Schicksal“, was Bevçlkerungsveränderungen unmittelbare Folgen zuschreibt, und „Demographie als Ideologie“, was die Relevanz demographischer Faktoren grundsätzlich in Frage stellt. Der vorliegende Aufsatz nimmt eine Durkheim’sche Perspektive ein und prüft, ob Veränderungen der Arbeitsteilung die Folgen des demographischen Wandels moderieren. Diese Hypothese wird mit Hilfe von Paneldaten über die Differenzierung des deutschen Sekundarschulsystems auf der regionalen Ebene der Kreise für die Jahre 1995-2010 analysiert. Zusätzlich zu demographischen Veränderungen werden auch Effekte von Pfadabhängigkeit, Parteiideologie und der Wiedervereinigung modelliert. Die Analyse zeigt einen moderaten Effekt des demographischen Wandels auf die (Ent-)Differenzierung des deutschen Sekundarschulsystems.

This paper examines anomic world interpretations from a double perspective. Firstly, the sociological discussion on anomic experiences is recapitulated showing that the concept of “anomie” has varying meanings in different theoretical contexts. Secondly, worldviews of welfare benefit recipients are explored empirically. Based on biographical narrative interviews, the paper analyzes experiences of contingency and heteronomy, focusing in particular on the perception of order or disorder in one’s own life and the world. The empirical analyses are, in addition, condensed in a typology of worldviews differentiating the dimension of order and complementing the Durkheimian opposition of anomie and fatalism with the perception of a well ordered world. The typology is elaborated further with reference to the concept of process structures of the life course formulated by Fritz Schütze: biographical action schemes, on the one hand, and biographical trajectory of suffering (“Verlaufskurve”), on the other.