Acta Sociologica

Developments in biotechnology have sparked off a number of social controversies during the past decades and it has been common to understand public debate as a necessary prerequisite for the ability to deal with these controversies. This is particularly true in the case of Denmark, where public debate has been taking place for more than 25 years; the article uses the Danish example to argue that controversies about biotechnology intersect with fundamental political discussions about order and control in today’s knowledge society. Inspired by cultural theory and the work of Mary Douglas, it is proposed that arguments about biotechnology are justified by reference to particular articulations of social order. Her four notions of social order are identified in the analysis of a sample of arguments from four major Danish newspapers. On the basis of this typology, the article examines the broad discursive consensus in favour of public debate and participatory exercises regarding the social responses to biotechnology. Simultaneously, however, it points to inherent tensions in expectations towards public debate and its role in the creation of solutions to controversies over science and technology.

Autonomy, or the extent to which employees can control their own work, is a central theme in debates on organizational flexibility and labour market stratification. Predictions of upskilling and autonomy, for manual workers too, have been a striking component in visions of post-Fordism and post-industrialism. The two main comparative labour market theories — the varieties of capitalism school and the power resources approach — suggest that both the level and the distribution of autonomy vary across production contexts, either because of national differences in skill requirements or because of the varying strength of organized labour. The objective of the article, based on the 2004 European Social Survey, is to test these two hypotheses by examining national variation regarding mean levels and class differences in autonomy among 21 countries. The main conclusion is that both mean levels and class differences in autonomy have much more to do with the strength of organized labour than with the skill requirements of production. The analysis also questions a central element of the varieties of capitalism theory, namely the notion of national production strategies based on differences in skill specificity.

In this study, we examine factors assumed to have disposed students to radicalism in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The data are from a recent retrospective survey of 1,246 former University of Oslo students born between 1940 and 1950. The unprecedented number of radical respondents allows for analyses that could not be done in earlier studies, especially of the extreme left. The results reflect the preponderant influence of parents’ political preferences. Variations in political orientation between different fields of study and between cohorts, with students born towards the end of the 1940s being more radical than students born earlier in the decade, suggest influence by peers, although this is hard to gauge. Urban upbringing is found to be significant, pointing to the possible importance of exposure to radical world-view carriers. Neither gender nor class has significant controlled predictive power. Since most students were men, and students were far more likely to protest than extramural youth, males dominated the protest movement. Students from the working class were more radical than middle-class students, but apparently this was due not to any independent effect of class but to differences in the world-view to which they were exposed at home, manifested in parents’ political preferences.

In this article, we pose the question: To what extent does a lack of individual resources and of access to high quality resources in one’s core social network explain why low-educated people are likely to experience economic vulnerability? Additionally, we explain cross-national differences in the risk that the low-educated run in terms of economic vulnerability. Multi-level models estimated for 22 countries of the European Social Survey show that a lack of labour market success and partner’s resources explain why the low-educated are likely to suffer from economic vulnerability. Next, we find a number of determinants to explain why the low-educated are better off in some countries than in others, i.e. cross-national variation in access of the low-educated group to high quality social resources, beliefs about the productivity of the group as a whole, structural labour market conditions and welfare state arrangements. In so far as welfare states can influence the contexts in which their (low-educated) citizens live, to a great extent they can also reduce economic vulnerability among the low-educated.

Using data from Sweden and Norway on cohabitors aged 25 to 35, we examine the association between socio-economic resources, relationship quality and commitment and cohabitors’ marriage intentions. The individualization process, i.e. the arguably growing importance of individual choice, leads us to assume that relationship assessments are more important predictors of marriage intentions than socio-economic variables. Nonetheless, multivariate results show that university education and having a partner whose education is higher than one’s own increase the likelihood that cohabitors intend to marry. Likewise, being satisfied with and committed to the union is positively related to having marriage plans. Separate analyses for men and women reveal that whereas commitment is positively related to women’s marriage intentions, men’s marriage intentions are significantly more influenced by their own education, income, as well as the income of their partners. In this sense, one conclusion to be drawn is that both love and money are associated with cohabitors’ intention to marry.