Volume 50, Issue 5

Accounts of why rankings are pervasive features of the modern world focus mostly on their properties as valuation devices that, upon entering the public sphere, exert pressure on the ranked. In doing so, however, research tends to overlook the important role played by the different types of organizations that produce rankings. To remedy this, the article draws from a qualitative study consisting of semi-structured interviews with members of these organizations to show that they put a great deal of effort into addressing and responding to different kinds of criticism. Working towards building and maintaining the credibility of rankings is thus revealed to require constant attention by their producers, who devise multiple procedures and rhetorical strategies to this end.

In times of educational expansion, privileged families are looking for new strategies of distinction. Referring to Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of distinction, we argue that choosing Latin at school – a language that is no longer spoken and therefore has no direct value – is one of the strategies of privileged families to set themselves apart from less privileged families. Based on two surveys we conducted at German schools, the paper analyzes the relationship between parents’ educational background and the probability that their child will learn Latin. Results indicate that historically academic families have the strongest tendency towards learning Latin, followed by new academic families, and leaving behind the non-academic families. We distinguish between four causal mechanisms that might help to explain these associations: cultural distinction, selecting a socially exclusive learning environment, beliefs in a secondary instrumental function of learning Latin, and spatial proximity between the location of humanist Gymnasiums and the residential areas of privileged families. The hypotheses are formalized by means of Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAG). Findings show that the decision to learn Latin is predominately an unintended consequence of the selection of a socially exclusive learning environment. In addition, there is evidence that especially children from historically academic families learn Latin as a strategy of cultural distinction.

Referring to a survey question in the German socio-economic panel, which measures worries about protecting the environment, the article looks at the development of environmental worries in Germany for the timespan 1984–2019. The analyses mainly have descriptive character. We explore several expectations and assumptions discussed in historical accounts of the environmental movement in Germany and in empirical studies on environmental attitudes and their determinants. Results show that the overall development can be divided into a period of rising environmental worries in the 1980s, a considerable decline in the 1990s, and a relative stability since 2000. From 2018 to 2019, however, a sizable upswing can be observed. Environmental worries are associated negatively with the unemployment rate and economic worries over time. In the 1980s and early 1990s, younger people were more worried than older people, but, in the meanwhile, this no longer holds. Education and (less so) income yielded significant differences in the 1980s and 1990s, but also these differences have faded away since 2000. Data confirm that environmental worries are shared more broadly in the population and that previously important group differences are increasingly leveling out.

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, scientific work is highly affected by the governments’ measures taken to reduce the spread of the virus. With closing colleges, universities, and kindergartens, scientists had to adapt to new forms of working procedures. Immediately after the peak of the first COVID-19 wave in Germany, we surveyed in professors and postdoctoral researchers in the field of German sociology in May 2020 to investigate how their work is constrained by these measures. In this research note, we present the results of this survey. They show that the position in the sociological field as well as demographic factors affect the degree to which sociologists feel constrained in their work. Postdoctoral sociologists feel more restricted in their work than professors, and qualitatively working sociologists more restricted than quantitatively working sociologists. Moreover, being a woman and having children under the age of 14 years increases the probability that sociologists expect to research less. Our empirical results shed some light on the effect of COVID-19 measures on working routines and inequality in Higher Education during the pandemic.