Current Sociology

Georg Simmel is the seminal author on trust within sociology, but though inspired by Simmel, subsequent studies of intersubjective trust have failed to address Simmel’s suggestion that trust is as differentiated as the social relations of which it is part. Rather, trust has been studied within limited sets of exchange or work relations. This article revisits Simmel’s concept of trust as social form in order to investigate this differentiation. From an interview study, the differentiation and limits of trust are analysed within different types of social relations. Trust is found to vary greatly in scope and mode influenced by the intersecting dimensions of relations, objects and situations. Furthermore, trust exists between an outer threshold of expected deceit and an inner threshold of confident reliance. The findings from the qualitative study contribute new knowledge on the diversity of trust, opening new avenues of sociological investigation of trust outside exchange and work relations.

In the developed world, Israel is the only country without a civil option for regulating personal status. Determinants of changes in attitudes toward the introduction of the civil marriage in 1969–2009 among the Jewish population are the focus of this article. According to the Human Empowerment framework, the support for civil marriage should increase over time, and the younger generation should be more permissive than the older. However, despite growing support among all population groups, there is stagnation in the overall attitude due to changes in population composition. Being religious, the younger cohorts oppose the trend of permitting couples to marry any way they choose. Besides religiosity and traditionalism, this attitude can be predicted by national identity, education and being a 1990s immigrant from the former Soviet Union. The relative impact of the two demographic forces – the natural increase of the religious versus immigration – is analyzed. The article shows the relevance of internal and external national identity for the institution of civil marriage in Israel. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

This article focuses on the association between language and gender from a sociological perspective. The article provides research-based evidence to analyse whether and to what extent gender characteristics represented through the educational system are associated with the languages used in the educational resources. The analysis uses socialization theory which recognizes the educational system, particularly the school and its educational materials, as the first official agent and the most powerful engine of gender socialization. Using the method of content analysis, this study is based on Iranian school textbooks, including 35 teaching and grammar textbooks for Persian (Farsi), Arabic and English languages. Generally speaking, the results show that while the dominance of male gender persists throughout the textbooks, the intensity of the dominance varies according to the learning stages of the languages. The results also suggest that the association between ‘gender and language’ is more strongly influenced by social and ideological structure.

Reciprocity has been traditionally treated in sociological and anthropological theory as a force of integration that keeps network members tied together through a complex web of obligations and interdependencies. This article suggests that in the context of poverty it can be a burden and source of relational stress that leads to the demise of social relationships. It is argued that poverty can make it difficult for individuals to maintain relations with others and participate in social support networks because they do not have many resources to share and reciprocate. Recently published ethnographic studies on the social networks of low-income families in the United States form the basis for a micro-level model linking poverty to social fragmentation. By focusing on the suppressive effect of reciprocity, this model identifies two major emergent mechanisms – exclusion and withdrawal – operating in two realms – material and normative – that are conducive to social fragmentation. This article thus promotes our understanding of the ways in which relational dynamics affect low-income families’ social well-being and contributes methodologically by laying the groundwork for future empirical research.

This article considers the approach to human nature implicit in four textbooks often used to introduce sociology. Human nature is seen as a set of drives and capacities, which play a key role in people’s actions in any social context. In the textbooks, a variety of arguments suggest the irrelevance of a concept of human nature to the discipline. Partly, this message is conveyed by opposing social to biological explanations. In addition, the discipline is framed to exclude the concept of human nature. Society, on the one hand, and the culturally unique individual, on the other, exhaust the sociological arena. Accounts of socialization imply the transcendence of biology and with that, human nature. Refutations of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology are supported with broad ranging rejections of biological explanation, with a similar implication that human nature is not a necessary concept in sociological accounts. Nevertheless, human nature is the elephant in the room. The concept is required and assumed in the detail of these textbooks as they explain current sociological research and analysis. One impact of the denial of human nature is to misunderstand current disputes between sociology and evolutionary psychology.