Documents Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World 5 results

"The coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic upended work, family, and social life. These massive changes may have created shifts in exposure to work-life conflict. Using a national survey that followed Canadian workers from September 2019 into April and June 2020, the authors find that work-life conflict decreased among those with no children at home. In contrast, for those with children at home, the patterns depended on age of youngest child. Among individuals with children younger than 6 or between 6 and 12, no decreases in work-life conflict were observed. In contrast, those with teenagers did not differ from the child-free. Although these patterns did not significantly differ by gender, they were amplified among individuals with high work-home integration. These findings suggest an overall pattern of reduced work-life conflict during the pandemic—but also that these shifts were circumscribed by age of youngest child at home and the degree of work-home integration."

"We assess how renewable electricity production interacts with GDP per capita to influence CO2 emissions per capita, analyzing cross-national data from 1960 to 2012. We find an interaction effect between the quantity of renewables and GDP per capita, where, counterintuitively, economic growth is more closely tied to emissions in nations with a large share of their electricity from renewable sources and growth of renewable electricity has a smaller suppressive effect on emissions in more affluent nations. Additional analyses suggest that this relationship emerges because renewable energy sources tend to suppress nuclear energy in affluent nations, thereby unintentionally perpetuating reliance on fossil fuels."

"Reducing global emissions will require a global cosmopolitan culture built from detailed attention to conflicting national climate change frames (interpretations) in media discourse. The authors analyze the global field of media climate change discourse using 17 diverse cases and 131 frames. They find four main conflicting dimensions of difference: validity of climate science, scale of ecological risk, scale of climate politics, and support for mitigation policy. These dimensions yield four clusters of cases producing a fractured global field. Positive values on the dimensions show modest association with emissions reductions. Data-mining media research is needed to determine trends in this global field."

"This paper examines the long-run effects of globalization, financialization, and European integration on union density in 18 affluent capitalist democracies between 1981 and 2010. After appropriate controls, imports from developing and imports from advanced countries and financialization negatively affect, and capital mobility positively affects, unionization. Immigration has no consistent effect on unionization. Also, European integration—measured as logged years of membership in the European Union (EU)—negatively affects unionization. Interactions of EU membership with globalization and financialization variables reveal a complicated pattern with distinctive effects for EU and non-EU countries. Overall, our findings contribute to the ongoing stream of scholarly research about the causes of union decline among affluent democratic countries in the neoliberal period."

"The extent to which successive immigrant generations experience economic progress is a fundamental yardstick of assimilation and future ethnic stratification in the increasingly diverse societies of the rich West. In this regard, measuring how immigrants and local-born adult descendants of immigrants are distributed across different labor market segments provides clues about their relative assimilation into the mainstream economy. Drawing on linked employer-employee administrative data from Norway, the author uses heat plots to visualize differences in ethnic and socioeconomic characteristics of workplace contexts by immigrant background. The visualization reveals a striking overall pattern of intergenerational assimilation, whereby immigrant descendants are employed in workplaces that are more like those of nonmigrant natives in terms of immigrant concentration and, in particular, coworkers' salaries, education, and occupational task profiles compared with the immigrant generation. However, less-successful members of the second generation found in workplaces with less prestigious job characteristics still experience disproportionate levels of ethnic workplace segregation."