Explore the vast range of titles available.

This article explores the relationship between individuals’ satisfaction with their social life and global life satisfaction during periods of economic prosperity and crisis, using data from the Panel of Social Inequalities in Catalonia, Spain (PaD 2001–2012). The study also investigates how this relationship varies across different social origins. Catalonia is a pertinent context due to its significant increase in inequality and unemployment during the 2008 Economic Crisis, positioning it among the most affected regions in Europe. The findings reveal that satisfaction with one’s social life matters for global life satisfaction, even after accounting for individual and macro characteristics. However, contrary to the initial expectations, the study demonstrates that satisfaction with one’s social life becomes less influential for global life satisfaction during the macroeconomic crisis, particularly among individuals from middle and low social origins. Furthermore, while a strong positive relationship exists between satisfaction with one’s social life and global life satisfaction during times of economic prosperity for all social groups, a robust negative relationship emerges in periods of macroeconomic crisis for individuals from high social origins. The article offers several potential explanations for these findings.

This article compares the emerging concept, practice, and context of social enterprise across seven regions and countries of the world. Broadly defined as the use of market-based approaches to address social issues, social enterprise provides a \"business\" source of revenue for civil society organizations. However, within these broad parameters, world regions have come to identify different concepts and contexts with the social enterprise movement in their areas. Largely lacking in the social enterprise literature are explanations of what these regional differences are, and whether and how socioeconomic context may play a role in these variations. Drawing on social origins theory, recent social enterprise comparative research, and socioeconomic data, this article examines the different factors shaping social enterprise in seven regions and countries. It finds that variations in socioeconomic contexts appear to account for international differences in social enterprise. These findings have practical implications for the development and transfer of social enterprise internationally. Cet article compare la notion émergente, la pratique et le contexte de l'enterprise sociale à travers sept régions et pays du monde. Généralement définie comme l'utilisation de méthodes basées sur le marché pour régler les problèmes sociaux, l'entreprise sociale procure une source de revenus «commerciaux» aux organisations de la société civile. Cependant, à l'intérieur de ces paramètres, les régions du monde en viennent à identifier des conditions et des contextes différents en ce qui concerne le mouvement de l'entreprise sociale dans leurs pays. Les explications sur ces différences régionales, et dans quelle mesure le contexte socio-économique peut jouer un rôle dans ces disparités, manquent cruellement dans les publications sur l'enterprise sociale. S'appuyant sur la théorie des origines sociales, les recherches comparatives récentes en matière d'entreprise sociale, ainsi que les données socio-économiques, cet article examine les différents facteurs qui façonnent l'entreprise sociale dans sept régions et pays. D'après ses conclusions, il apparaît que les différences dans les contextes socio-économiques semblent expliquer les différences au niveau international en matière d'entreprise sociale. Ces conclusions ont des répercussions pratiques pour le développement et la cession des entreprises sociales au niveau international. Dieser Artikel vergleicht das sich entwickelnde Konzept, Praxis und Kontext von sozialen Unternehmen in sieben Regionen und Ländern der Welt. Grob definiert als auf dem Markt basierende Ansätzen nutzent, um sich sozialen Problemen zu widmen, soziale Unternehmen bieten zivilgesellschaftliche Organisationen eine \"geschäftliche\" Einkommensquelle. Innerhalb dieser breit angelegten Parameter haben verschiedene Regionen der Welt jedoch verschiedene Konzepte und Kontexte für soziale Unternehmen in ihren Gebieten identifiziert. In der Literatur über soziale Unternehmen fehlen weitgehend Erklärungen, was diese regionalen Unterschiede sind, und ob und welche Rolle sozialökonomischer Kontext in diesen Variationen spielen könnte. Basierend auf der Theorie der sozialen Herkunft, jüngster vergleichender Forschung zu sozialen Unternehmen und sozialökonomischen Daten untersucht dieser Artikel die verschiedenen Faktoren, die soziale Unternehmen in sieben Regionen und Ländern prägen. Er findet, dass Variationen in sozialökonomischen Kontexten für Unterschiede in sozialen Unternehmen weltweit verantwortlich zu sein scheinen. Diese Ergebnisse haben praktische Folgen für die Entwicklung und Transfer von sozialen Unternehmen weltweit. En este artículo se compara el concepto, la práctica emergente y el contexto de la empresa social en siete regiones y países del mundo. Generalmente definida como el uso de enfoques de mercado para abordar las cuestiones sociales, la empresa social ofrece a las organizaciones de la sociedad civil una fuente «empresarial» de ganancias. No obstante, dentro de estos amplios parámetros, las regiones del mundo han llegado a identificar en sus zonas distintos conceptos y contextos con el movimiento de la empresa social. En la literatura sobre empresas sociales brillan por su ausencia las explicaciones sobre qué son estas diferencias regionales, si el contexto socioeconómico desempeña un papel en estas variaciones y cómo es este papel. Basado en la teoría de los orígenes sociales, el reciente estudio comparativo de empresas sociales y los datos socioeconómicos, este artículo analiza los distintos factores que conforman la empresa social en siete regiones y países. Descubre que los cambios en los contextos socioeconómicos parecen ser la causa de las diferencias sociales en la empresa social. Estos descubrimientos tienen implicaciones prácticas para el desarrollo y la distribución de la empresa social internacionalmente.

Academic research on social mobility from the 1960s until now has made several facts clear. First, and most important, it is better to ask how the conditions and circumstances of early life constrain adult success than to ask who is moving up and who is not. The focus on origins keeps the substantive issues of opportunity and fairness in focus, while the mobility question leads to confusing side issues. Second, mobility is intrinsically symmetrical; each upward move is offset by a downward move in the absence of growth, expansion, or immigration. Third, social origins are not a single dimension of inequality that can be paired with the outcome of interest (without significant excluded variable bias); they are a comprehensive set of conditions describing the circumstances of youth. Fourth, the constraints of social origins vary by time, place, and subpopulation. These four \"knowns\" should inform any attempt to collect new data on mobility.

This paper studies dynamically the direct effect of social origin on occupational destinations among men in Italy over the career. It aims at investigating the existence, the pattern over time and the heterogeneity of differences in occupational achievement related to social origins, net of education (DESO) and occupational allocation at first job. It also analyses if the change of the DESO over the career is related to the effect of specific job change episodes (voluntary job change, involuntary job change, internal career move). Results based on growth curve models show the relevance of first job in shaping the DESO, which also slightly increases over the career. The DESO is stronger among highly educated individuals, confirming a boosting pattern primarily driven by a better allocation at first job. The (smaller) DESO among the loweducated, increasing over the career, depends from the higher probabilities to benefit from voluntary and internal career job changes for the children of the service class. The (stronger) DESO among the highly educated is driven by the higher probabilities of experiencing internal career mobility for the children of the service class as well as by their ability to benefit also from an involuntary job change (e.g. dismissal).

Previous studies of nonprofit growth have lamented the lack of cross-national longitudinal data measuring the size of the nonprofit sector across countries, which has made it difficult to assess the current state of knowledge about the nonprofit sector beyond national boundaries. Recent progress in measuring nonprofit growth using panel studies or cross-national data has compensated for the limitations of the existing research, but even the recent data are either country specific or cross sectional in nature. This study takes on the challenge of supplementing the current research by measuring nonprofit growth using internationally comparable longitudinal data. Specifically, this study focuses on whether certain key indicators of the overall state of the economy can be used to predict and explain the size of nonprofit sectors cross-nationally. The overall state of the economy has considerable relevance for nonprofit growth, as it influences the levels of government funding and private philanthropy that benefit the nonprofit sector. The results indicate that the existing theories about the nonprofit sector account for variations in nonprofit growth but are limited in their explanations of the underlying dynamics of such variations beyond national boundaries. Social origins theory is a useful addition that helps to explain cross-national variations in nonprofit growth. Importantly, the interplay among the government, private philanthropy, and the nonprofit sector is dynamic, and its effect on economic indicators varies across nonprofit regime types when sociodemographic variables are controlled.

Social origins theory explains variation between civil societies by power relations between socioeconomic classes and by path dependencies. There have been few systematic reflections on which dimensions of civil society depend on these factors and can thus be explained by the theory. With the help of a historical narrative of the eventful history of Vienna’s civil society, in which traditional, liberal, social democratic, statist, and corporatist patterns feature, we tentatively identify ten such dimensions: CSOs’ original founding dates; fields of activity; societal roles; reliance on volunteers and paid staff; political and religious affiliation; the relationship with government when engaging in advocacy; organizational governance structures; socioeconomic characteristics of CSOs’ workforce, board members, and service recipients; CSOs’ funding sources; and CSOs’ sizes. We suggest that civil society research would benefit from the anthropological approach of deriving etic categories for comparing civil societies and explaining the similarities and differences between them by consolidating single case studies that analyze the development of specific civil societies from an emic perspective.

What set our ancestors off on a separate evolutionary trajectory was the ability to flex their reproductive and social strategies in response to changing environmental conditions. Exploring new cross-disciplinary research that links this capacity to critical changes in the organization of the primate brain, Social DNA presents a new synthesis of ideas on human social origins – challenging models that trace our beginnings to traits shaped by ancient hunting economies, or to genetic platforms shared with contemporary apes.

The paper examines the explanatory potential of the social origins theory advanced by L. Salamon and H. Anheier. This examination follows two tracks. The first track is a comparative investigation of the conceptual affinity between the social origins, on one hand, and the theories of welfare regimes and varieties of capitalism, on the other. We argue that the conceptual affinity between these three theories lies in the fact that they explore what could be referred to as vertical and horizontal interactions between state and market. Vertical interactions are based on the legitimate coercion by government authorities, while horizontal relations develop at the initiative of their autonomous members. The social origins approach introduces yet another essential dimension, that of civic self-organization, into the analysis of vertical and horizontal interactions embodied in state/market relationships. Similarity of underlying conceptual foundations might suggest that all three theories would generate similarly strong academic interest in reexamining their analytical tools and applying their approaches to the diversity of new social and economic realities. The literature indicates that both the welfare regimes and varieties of capitalism have generated robust academic discussions, whereas the conceptual and analytical potential of the social origins remains relatively less explored. It has become particularly evident in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic which gave rise to a number of studies that apply the frameworks of the welfare regimes and varieties of capitalism to examine cross-country differences in government social welfare policies. However, the social origins theory seems not to have generated comparably rich research testing its explanatory power in the new conditions triggered by the pandemic challenges. To address this gap, the paper follows a second track which investigates pandemic-induced transformations in nonprofit sectors of Germany, Austria, UK and USA – countries representing three “basic” nonprofit regimes immediately corresponding to Esping-Andersen’s welfare state typology: welfare partnership, social democratic and liberal. Applying the analytical lens of the social origins approach, we look at how the impact of the pandemic moved the measurable parameters of nonprofit sectors: the scope of the third sector, the volunteer share of the workforce, the extent of nonprofits’ engagement in the provision of social services, and the share of government financial support for the sector. We further look at the pandemic-induced changes in the composition of the “tool kit” employed in government-nonprofit cooperation. Thus, testing the explanatory potential of the social origins approach, we observe that responses to pandemic challenges have contributed to a degree of convergence of both liberal and social democratic nonprofit regimes with the welfare partnership pattern. However, path dependency, which is suggested by the regimes’ “moorings” embedded in the social origins approach, remains strong enough to explain the observed viability of the core features typical of “basic” nonprofit regimes in times of the pandemic crisis.

Although there is an extensive literature on intergenerational mobility in education, including the completion of PhD degrees, far less is known about the transition into academic faculty positions. Here, the authors use administrative microdata following entire birth cohorts born from 1955 to 1985 in Norway, an egalitarian welfare state, to investigate the social origins of academic faculty. Despite publicly funded higher education and competitive wages for PhD positions, arguably removing many barriers to entry, the present findings reveal persistent disparities in the likelihood of becoming a faculty member. Differences in earlier stages of the educational career largely account for these disparities, indicating that disadvantaged family background does not appear to constitute an additional barrier to becoming a faculty member when comparing individuals with PhD degrees. However, more advantageous social origins influence the likelihood of employment at more prestigious institutions and higher earnings among faculty members, indicating that socioeconomic origins impact academic careers beyond their effects on entering academia. Overall, these findings show that within an egalitarian context designed to promote equality of opportunity, social origins continue to shape access and progression within academia.

This article uses the study of two environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data vendors—KLD and Innovest—to exemplify the “social origins of ESG issues” argument made by Eccles and Stroehle in their 2018 working paper “Exploring Social Origins in the Construction of ESG Measures.” Based on in-depth interviews with the organizations’ founders and historical document analysis, we recap the history of the cases and show how different origins, philosophies, and “purposes” of ESG issues shaped the methods and data characteristics of two of the most important data vendors of their time. We discuss why MSCI chose to continue with the financial value–oriented methodology of Innovest while discontinuing the values-driven KLD methodology. Through an in-depth literature analysis, we further show that not only the creation but also the use of “nonfinancial performance” concepts rely on processes of social construction. We also show that investors use different ESG data from those used by academics, potentially leading to misaligned narratives. Finally, with this article we join the call for more explicit contextualization of ESG data, highlighting that both practitioners and academics need to better understand the social construction that underlies analyses that use different concepts of ESG.