The Symbolic Child: A Cultural Sociological Analysis of the Changing Role of the Child in the Family

Annette Lareau is the Stanley I. Sheerr Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life (University of California Press). Unequal Childhoods won the best book award from three sections of the American Sociological Association: Sociology of the Family, Sociology of Children and Youth, and Sociology of Culture (co-winner).

This special issue of Comparative Population Studies on Geographical Mobilities and Family Lives is drawn from a selection of papers presented at the Interim Meeting of the Research Network on Family and Intimate Lives of the European Sociological Association, which took place in Wiesbaden in the Fall of 2011. Although the fi ve papers included in the special issue focus on distinct national contexts, concern dissimilar issues and use different methodologies, they all contribute to the advancement of the understanding of spatial dimensions of family life. This understanding has been made easier by recent changes in family sociology, which has rejected the assumption that family units are always and above all constituted by domestic households. This challenge to the Parsonian view of families, which sees them as nuclear, has enabled researchers to emphasise the importance of spatial localisations of family members for understanding family processes. To some extent, all families are multi-local: Individuals have always had signifi cant family members living elsewhere. The forms of family multi-localism, however, change according to the historical and social contexts. The multi-localism of contemporary families is exemplifi ed by the study of Isengard (in this special issue), which deals with the distance between the residence of individuals and their adult children. Typically, this distance becomes of central concern when one considers family ties beyond the household unit as functionally important. The study of Isengard, based on data collected for 14 countries by the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) shows that a variety of factors stemming from the macro-contexts as well as from the social status of respondents infl uences the localisation of parents and their adult children. The position of individuals in the family life cycle as well as their socio-economic situation have an impact on the living distance between parents and children. The analysis also revealed that in the south of Europe, parents and their adult children live far closer than in the northern parts, a likely consequence of distinct social policies and other structural constraints. The fi ndings of the study are important, as residential distance has a whole series of consequences for exchanges between family generations. Family multilocalism has one of its roots in migration practices, which are obviously linked with work and job demands. Therefore, an interest for the link between job-mobility and family life has developed during the last decade, which eventually lead to the funding by the EU of the Job mobility and family life research project, Comparative Population Studies – Zeitschrift fur Bevolkerungswissenschaft Vol. 38, 2 (2013): 229-232 (Date of release: 25.06.2013)

This article presents the profile of the East Asian theatre artist Danny Yung, director of the acclaimed Zuni Icosachedron theatre in Hong Kong. In the first part, Maciej Szatkowski offers a synthesis of his artistic biography, from his early years as a theatre maker in Hong Kong in the 1980s to the creation of a transnational Chinese theatre, which provides a space for artistic encounters of established and emerging artists from the Sinosphere and beyond. The article focuses on highlighting the main areas of Yung’s work and contextualizing them in terms of the realities of Chinese cultural life. The author describes the central distinguishing features of Yung’s activity and its consecutive stages over the years, as well as the impact of his work on theatres in China and Taiwan. The appendix provides a transcript of Yung’s talk at the conference Contemporary Acting Techniques in Eurasian Theatre, Performance and Audiovisual Art: Intercultural and Intermedia Perspective (2021). The guiding idea of the lecture is the role of institutions in shaping theatre policy and connecting artists and ideas. Yung draws on examples from his own experience, describing the process of creating his most recent productions. He emphasizes the importance of collaboration and dialogue between artists, as well as the role of theatre institutions as major actors influencing the development of theatre art in contemporary Eurasia.

Book synopsis: What is the relationship between creativity, cultural heritage institutions and copyright? Who owns culture and cultural heritage? The digital age has expanded the horizon of creative possibilities for artists and cultural institutions - what is the impact on legal regimes that were constructed for an analogue world? What are the tensions between the safeguarding of cultural heritage and the dissemination of knowledge about culture? Inspired by a three year research project involving leading European universities, this book explores the relationship between copyright and intellectual property, creativity and innovation, and cultural heritage institutions. Its contributors are scholars from both the humanities and the social sciences - from cultural studies to law - as well as cultural practitioners and representatives from cultural heritage institutions. They all share an interest in the contribution of intellectual property to the role of cultural institutions in making culture accessible and encouraging new creativity.

The aim of the study was to evaluate the associations between aspects of family stability and sleep behavior and quality as indicators of health and well-being. Participants were 312 (166 female and 146 male) undergraduate students, ranging in age from 17 to 29 (M = 19.10). Participants’ global and molecular family stability in their families of origin was assessed using the Family Life Changes Survey (FLCS) and the Stability of Activities in the Family Environment (SAFE-R), respectively. Current sleep habits and quality were measured using a modified version of the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Inventory (PSQI). Analyses suggest family stability is related to aspects of sleep. Furthermore, it appears molecular family stability moderates the relationship between family life changes, an aspect of global family stability, and subjective sleep quality in college students. Results are important in that they suggest high levels of molecular family stability may buffer against the impact of family life changes on subjective sleep quality.

Purpose: Adopting CBME is challenging in medicine. It mandates a change in processes and approach, ultimately a change in institutional culture with stakeholders ideally embracing and valuing the new processes. Adopting the transformational change model, this study describes the shift in assessment culture by Academic Advisors (AAs) and preceptors over three years of CBME implementation in one Department of Family Medicine.Methods: A qualitative grounded theory method was used for this two-part study. Interviews were conducted with 12 AAs in 2013 and nine AAs in 2016 using similar interview questions. Data were analyzed through a constant comparative method.Results: Three overarching themes emerged from the data: (1) specific identified shifts in assessment culture, (2) factors supporting the shifts in culture, and (3) outcomes related to the culture shift.Conclusions: In both parts of the study, participants noted that assessment took more time and effort. In Part 2, however, the effort was mitigated by a sense of value for all stakeholders. With support from the mandate of regulatory bodies, local leadership, department, faculty development and an electronic platform, a cultural transformation occurred in assessment that enhanced learning and teaching, use of embedded standards for performance decisions, and tracking and documentation performance.

In the past, technological tools were considered a “solution” to advising challenges. However, successful advising transformation efforts have also incorporated shifts in institutional culture and workforce in addition to the adoption of new technologies. Approaching advising redesign as a digital transformation (Dx) initiative can transform an institution's operations, strategic directions, and value propositions surrounding advising. This chapter articulates an approach to the implementation of advising technologies and the necessity to view “holistic advising redesign” as a Dx initiative for advising to reach its full potential at scale. For institutions, this means embracing not just the promise of new technology but also the investment in and attention to the critical shifts in culture and workforce.

Television soap operas are an extremely useful source of illustration for teachers of the sociology of the family. Of course, soaps are not sociological analyses, and whenever one uses them to illustrate a particular point or to introduce a general sociological theme it is important to make clear to students that we are dealing with atypical groups whose daily encounters are highly stylized and are not to be taken as examples of everyday realities. Nevertheless, their central theme is almost invariably family life and they provide us, as teachers, with the opportunity of giving (fictitious) examples with which many of our students are likely to be familiar. Soaps enable us to put some recognizable flesh on sociological concepts in a way which can make teaching more attractive. Additionally, because soaps are frequently long running, they enable us to illustrate life cycle events occurring in the family process and, therefore, to show the changes in family relationships and household composition that occur through time. In this paper I provide some specific examples of how the series Dallas may be used in three areas of the sociology of the family. I am confident that readers will have little difficulty in thinking of their own examples and incorporating them into their own teaching programes-programes that may not be limited to the sociology of the family.

Culture and Institutional Logics

Background: There has been much debate whether work and family lives became more complex in past decades, that is, exhibiting more frequent transitions and more uncertainty. Van Winkle and Fasang (2017) and Van Winkle (2018) first benchmarked change in employment and family complexity over time against cross-national differences in 14 European countries. Compared to sizeable and stable cross-national differences, the increase in employment and family complexity was small across cohorts. However, these studies could not include cohorts born past the late 1950s assumed to be most affected by the structural changes driving life course complexity and were limited to a relatively small set of West European countries. Objective: We replicate and extend these studies by adding over 15 additional countries in Eastern Europe and a decade of younger birth cohorts. Methods: The 3rd and 7th waves of the Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe, sequence complexity metrics, and cross-classified modelling are used to simultaneously quantify the proportions of variance attributable to cohort and country differences in work and family lives between ages 18 to 50. Results: The updated findings still support a negligible increase in family complexity and a moderate increase in employment complexity that pale in comparison to large and stable cross-national differences for individuals born between 1916 and 1966 for work and family lives experienced from 1934 to 2016 in 30 European countries. Specifically, 15 and 10% of employment and family complexity is nested across countries, compared to 5.5 and 2% across birth cohorts. However, the analyses also indicate a polarization in Europe between most Eastern and Southern European countries with stable and low family complexity compared to Nordic and some Western European countries with high and increasing family complexity. In contrast, moderately increasing employment complexity is a Europe-wide trend. Conclusions: This study both replicates the original studies’ findings that cross-cohort change is minor compared to large cross-national differences, and is a substantive extension by addressing a large deficit of description on family and employment life course change in the Balkan and Baltic regions. Contribution: Cross-national comparisons are particularly promising for understanding the institutional drivers of employment and family instability.

This paper looks at the role of cultural institutions in civil society from the broad perspective of cultural diversity values and human rights. Perhaps even more than the previous century, the 21st century will be an era of rapid transformation: transformation in the physical environment, in technology, in human ecology. In a globalised world, not only will ever-more humans come into increasing contact with each other, but ever-more human creativity will produce further cultural content, at the same time there will be increasing drains on natural resources, cultural homogenisation and commodification. In these circumstances much cultural heritage, particularly intangible heritage, is at risk of disappearing. How human societies negotiate this environment - both globally and locally - will be critical challenges: challenges in social relations, legislation, public policy and security. In this increasingly chaotic and transformative world where ideas, events and systems are constantly re-forming, re-intersecting and re-creating, it is often easy to forget the role that culture, the arts and heritage institutions can play in mediating relations, negotiating community tensions, building sustainable futures, and standing as testimony to the human experience. Cultural institutions, such as museums, can respond to this situation in many ways. Will the ways of the past succeed, where human experience was treated as something to collect, catalogue, exhibit, archive? Or, will this taxonomic approach be replaced by one where cultural institutions are civic spaces that hold up a mirror to society, serve the diversity of the community that funds them, and even can be alive places that preserve living heritage? Cultural institutions can, in this sense, be like canaries in a mine: if they are highly sensitive to their environment (the wider social, political and cultural context in which they function) they may survive. Indeed, they may flourish if they are able to adapt to the needs of their communities in a dynamic, plural and increasingly integrated world.

Dr. Kazuta Kurauchi established his theory of the sociology of culture under the influence of German sociology of 1920s, especially Max Scheler's sociology of knowledge and forms of sympathy. Dr. Kurauchi insisted upon the importance of the idea that sociology of culture forms a part of general sociology and social culture (institutional culture) should be excluded from the objects of the study of culture. He distinguished “sociology of culture” from “sociology of society” by the difference of the character of culture treated in the respective fields. Since social culture means patterns of social action and ways of life among people, we should treat it in sociology of society. This view is different from that of American sociology of culture, which, closely cooperating with anthropology, chooses the ways of human life as its main subject.Dr. Kurauchi was the first Japanese scholar who studied Japanese art from the sociological viewpoint. According to Dr. Kurauchi, the characteristic way of expression in Japanese art is a symbolic mode, which is realized by the similarity between artists' and appreciators' experience in human community and in their attitude towards nature. Dr. Kurauchi reached the conclusion that Japanese art is gemeinschaftlich in its essence.

This study aims to analyze how community solidarity is in the Sibaliparriq cultural identity in Tubo Tengah Village, and find out how Sibaliparriq culture forms both in family life and in community life. This study used a qualitative descriptive method, which seeks to provide a qualitative description of the cultural phenomena that occur in Tubo Tengah Village, with data collection techniques namely observation of research objects and interviews with informants in a structured manner, and documentation both in writing and using visual video. The data analysis technique used consists of data clarification stage, data reduction stage, data presentation stage and data verification or data conclusion. The results of research on Sibaliparriq Culture in the perspective of cultural sociology in Tubo Tengah Village show that the Sibaliparriq culture in Tubo Tengah Village has very close ties of social solidarity both in family and community life, for example, such as the establishment of intimacy in family life and among people, having concern for mutual assistance among society, people in their activities cooperate with each other regardless of differences in individual identity, live together in all activities in the environment. Meanwhile, the forms of solidarity in the Sibaliparriq Culture in Tubo Tengah Village show that the community forms the economic welfare of their respective families because they help each other in their family work, help each other and work together both within the family and within the community so as to produce an authentic cultural identity of Sibaliparriq

Marriage and the family are important institutions of human society. As we know, they include different private institutions: the institute of kinship, the institute of motherhood and fatherhood, the institute of property, the institute of social protection of childhood and guardianship, and others. The process of family formation is the process of assimilation of social norms, roles and standards that regulate courtship, the choice of a marriage partner, family stabilization, sexual behavior, relations with the parents of spouses.The sociology of the family in a narrow sense, as part of general sociology, as a theory of the “middle level”; considers a special sphere of life and culture of families. The sociology of the family deals with a group, and not with an individual subject of life activity. A group of people connected by family and kinship relations forms that part of the social reality that is studied by the sociology of the family, where the family lifestyle is at the forefront. The sociology of the family considers the individual as a member of the family, integral part of the society. The sociology of the family correlates with the sociology of the individual; it studies personality, first of all, through the prism of socio-cultural intra-family ties, family identity of the individual. In any societythe family has a dual character. On the one hand, it is a social institution, on the other-a small group that has its own laws of functioning and development.

The emergence of big data and computational tools has introduced new possibilities for using large-scale textual sources in sociological research. Recent work in sociology of culture, science, and economic sociology has shown how computational text analysis can be used in theory building and testing. This review starts with an introduction of the history of computer-assisted text analysis in sociology and then proceeds to discuss five families of computational methods used in contemporary research. Using exemplary studies, it shows how dictionary methods, semantic and network analysis tools, language models, unsupervised, and supervised machine learning can assist sociologists with different analytical tasks. After presenting recent methodological developments, this review summarizes several important implications of using large datasets and computational methods to infer complex meaning in texts. Finally, it calls researchers from different methodological traditions to adopt text mining tools while remaining mindful of lessons learned from working with conventional data and methods.