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Wednesday 23 April 2014 8.30 - 10.30
H-1 ECO14a Social Mobility 1
Hörsaal 27 first floor
Network: Social Inequality Chair: Zoltán Lippényi
Organizers: - Discussant: Zoltán Lippényi
Sofie De Veirman, Helena Haage, Lotta Vikström : Deaf and Unwanted? Marriage Opportunities of the Hearing Impaired. A Comparative Case-study of 19th-century Flanders and Sweden
In 1868, the Flemish textile worker Frederic S. married the one-year-younger factory worker Mathilde. After marriage they moved to a house close to their parents and set up a household of their own. So far, this couple complies to the life many youngsters in the nineteenth century lead. However, one ... (Show more)
In 1868, the Flemish textile worker Frederic S. married the one-year-younger factory worker Mathilde. After marriage they moved to a house close to their parents and set up a household of their own. So far, this couple complies to the life many youngsters in the nineteenth century lead. However, one feature made them different from the average married couple, Frederic was born deaf. Getting married and establishing a self-sufficient household were an integral part of everyday living in nineteenth-century Europe. To what extent, though, could a (hearing) disability interrupt or delay this general path of life? Due to small opportunities to find disabled individuals in historical sources, insight in the life course and specific life events, as marriage, of people with disabilities is difficult to obtain. The Demographic Data Base (DDB) of Umeå University and the database of Sofie De Veirman offer a unique opportunity to study the possibilities and/or obstacles the deaf encountered in life, as in the finding of a partner. Through the digitization of Swedish and Flemish parish and civil registers, the databases allow to follow people from birth to death, including those labelled as “deaf-mute”. Previous research suggests that disabled individuals were faced with stronger “barriers” in successfully entering the marriage market: institutional (e.g. legislation), economic (e.g. self-sufficient employment) and cultural factors (e.g. attitudes and perceptions) could subvert their marriage chances. In this paper we explore these chances and shed light on the marriage pattern of about 150 deaf individuals, born between 1830 and 1860 in either East-Flanders (Belgium) or the region of Sundsvall (Sweden). By comparing two regions, it becomes possible to test the often underlying assumption of a universal “disability-experience” and elucidate how macro-level conditions interact with micro-level experiences of disablement. By allowing for individual differences within a longitudinal life course analysis, the lack of personal experiences of disablement within disability history is tackled. The paper explores the marriage opportunities of deaf individuals, and the extent to which intersectional characteristics as gender, socioeconomic status and geographical origin were influential. The demographic features of the spouses are taken into account as well to answer the question as to whom deaf people married. Preliminary findings show that 16,6% of the Flemish compared to 25,3% of the Swedish deaf married, at an average age at first marriage of 29,5 and 26,2 years. These figures indicate the value of a comparative approach. (Show less)

Wouter Marchand : Aims and Effects of 200 Years of Student Grants in the Netherlands, 1815-2015
Aims and effects of 200 years of study grants in the Netherlands.
Contribution to educational accessibility and social mobility, 1815-2015.
Wouter Marchand – University of Groningen - w.j.marchand@rug.nl

This paper investigates the system of government grants for students in the Netherlands between 1815 and 2015, from a perspective of accessibility of education ... (Show more)
Aims and effects of 200 years of study grants in the Netherlands.
Contribution to educational accessibility and social mobility, 1815-2015.
Wouter Marchand – University of Groningen - w.j.marchand@rug.nl

This paper investigates the system of government grants for students in the Netherlands between 1815 and 2015, from a perspective of accessibility of education and social mobility. It does so, focusing on both academic and vocational types of education throughout the Netherlands and poses the question: what were the aims and effects of the system of government subsidies to students with regard to social mobility, between 1815 and today?
Study grants attributed to adolescents from lower class or low income families can have an effect on upward intergenerational social mobility. After all, they take away financial barriers towards continuing the educational career. This in turn could lead to occupational careers of higher standing. By investigating the social background and occupational careers of samples of grant students in comparison with overall student populations, this paper reveals to what extent study grants had this effect on a micro and a macro scale. The investigated period of two centuries witnessed important societal processes, influencing occupational structure, social mobility and social composition of student population. The aims and size of the grant system changed as well, carrying consequences for the effects of the grants. In the entire nineteenth century grants for university students were restricted to students already enrolled, minimizing the appeal on newcomers from low income families. The limited number of grants available prevented the system from influencing the composition of the student population fundamentally. This changed when the grant system was extended in 1920 and again after 1945, and grant attribution was connected to parental income level. The rapid increase of educational participation and connected democratization from the 1960s made the grant system influential, however costly. It has therefore been subject of political debate during the last few decades, in which the supposed effect on upward mobility has played an important role.
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Levente Pakot : Family Size and Intergenerational Social Mobility: a Micro-level Study of Two Communities in Western Hungary 1850-1948
The aim of this paper is to study intergenerational social mobility in two Western Hungarian villages from 1850 to 1948. All the studied communities are located in the Western part of Hungary close to Austria. This part of the country is regarded as open to western economic and cultural impact ... (Show more)
The aim of this paper is to study intergenerational social mobility in two Western Hungarian villages from 1850 to 1948. All the studied communities are located in the Western part of Hungary close to Austria. This part of the country is regarded as open to western economic and cultural impact where the flow of people and goods was continuous between the two neighboring countries. One village experienced a process of industrialization at the end of the 19th century, while the other remained mainly rural throughout the period analyzed. Micro-level data from parish registers, civil registers and administrative sources are used in order to reconstruct the changing patterns of intergenerational social mobility in long time perspective, and to compare the experience of the two communities. The family reconstitution database made it possible to study whether family characteristics, especially number of siblings in the family, were detrimental or not to social mobility.


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Paul Puschmann, Jan Kok, Per-Olof Grönberg & Koen Matthijs : A Life Course Approach to Social Mobility among Migrants in Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Northwestern European Port Cities - Antwerp, Rotterdam and Stockholm -
One way of studying labor market adaptation of migrants is to investigate their social mobility behavior. It can be argued that those migrants who experience the most successful careers are best integrated in the labor market.
Until very recently, it was problematic to incorporate different groups of migrants in different ... (Show more)
One way of studying labor market adaptation of migrants is to investigate their social mobility behavior. It can be argued that those migrants who experience the most successful careers are best integrated in the labor market.
Until very recently, it was problematic to incorporate different groups of migrants in different cities into one analysis of social mobility. This has to do with major shortcomings in the source materials with respect to the registration of occupations in the past. In population registers, the registration of occupational change is depending upon other major events. This leads to unbalanced research designs which are difficult to handle in normal regression analyses. Due to the fact that the exact dates of occupational changes are mostly unknown, event history analysis - the most common approach to career mobility in contemporary research - is also not suited for the analysis of social mobility in the past. In our paper we will make use of multilevel growth models. This is a new approach to social mobility in the past based on the idea that occupational status grows with experience on the job market. This technique is designed to tackle problems related to the registration of occupational titles in population registers.
In our paper different theories of social mobility will be tested for different groups of migrants in three different port cities. In this way we get an idea about the integration trajectories of migrants on the labor market. We will make a controlled comparison of these trajectories of migrants in Antwerp, Rotterdam and Stockholm and investigate what determined successful and unsuccessful careers, by examining the impact of sex, place of birth (rural/urban; national or abroad), the last type of residence (rural/urban; national or abroad), age and year at arrival, travelled distance, marital status and the presence of family members in the household on the social mobility of migrants.
We expect that Stockholm offered the best opportunities for social upward mobility as its labor market was very diversified. Next to the port, industry and government offered an increasing number of jobs. Antwerp, by contrast, was more or less completely dominated by its port. We expect that this type of ‘monoculture’ highly limited opportunities for upward mobility among newcomers, especially among women since port labor demanded physical strength. Rotterdam took an intermediate position, as next to the port, industry was flourishing. We therefore anticipate that in Rotterdam the chances of climbing up the social ladder, were somewhat better than in Antwerp. However, the absence of government related jobs, might have meant that the chances for social upward mobility were lower than in Stockholm.
The data for Antwerp comes from the Antwerp Cor* Database, for Rotterdam we will rely on the Historical Sample of the Netherlands and the data from the Swedish capital we will gather from the Stockholm Historical Database.
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Hendrik Tieke : Social Agents in a Small Town before the Third Reich - How to Combine Stratification and Network Analysis
From a social-historical perspective we only know little about the Germans as a whole before Hitler’s time. Indeed, we know which occupations they held in big cities and medium sized towns, whom they married there, whom the dwellers of the worker's and bourgeoisie's districts elected in these habitats or in ... (Show more)
From a social-historical perspective we only know little about the Germans as a whole before Hitler’s time. Indeed, we know which occupations they held in big cities and medium sized towns, whom they married there, whom the dwellers of the worker's and bourgeoisie's districts elected in these habitats or in which voluntary associations they gathered. However, much less is known about the social structures outside these areas – although more than half of the Germans lived in small towns and the country side in 1933.

Small towns in particular remain an uncharted territory for social history which is a pity for they offer unique research opportunities. In this framework it is possible to combine almost any conceivable dimension of social history with one another in a single living space and even within a single research project. This is exactly what I am aiming at in my current project: I am trying to find out how the inhabitants of the old Saxonian town of Delitzsch networked and seek to figure out which social agents emerged from these contexts.
Did they correspond to the agents commonly determined by social history regarding the research on big cities– like for instance the petty bourgeoisie, working class or Bildungsbürgertum? Or were there different structures and agents in Delitzsch? This may be be assumed, following modern urban sociology since the days of the “spatial turn”: every living space creates its own social structure.

Concerning this, historical small towns differ very much from big cities or medium sized towns. Due to the reason, that there people by default met everywhere, no districts can be sought out in which a single class dwelled, and central locations like the marketplace, cinema, pharmacy or parks were frequented by all inhabitants.
My sources derive from a unique discovery of registers of persons, which consistently disclose names and occupations: address books, registers of marriages, baptisms or pupils, lists of members in associations, of gun owners or tax payers and many more. In my presentation I will introduce a method with which it will be possible to reconstruct social agents out of these person related data. In this context I consider a group of persons which develop ties of sufficient strength as social agent.

The method I will show consists of three steps, led by three questions:
1. Can inhabitants be grouped into meaningful units of analysis with classification systems only ?
2. Which social ties may be reconstructed by registers of persons? Which of these ties were stronger, which were weaker? This exercise will be all about hierarchizing social ties.
3. How may conclusions be drawn from these ties between social agents in a small town like Delitzsch?

The aim is for the audience to arrive at a way of combining classification systems and network analysis, utilizable for all smaller living spaces.


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