Nan Dirk de Graaf (born 1958) is a Dutch sociologist working in Nuffield College, University of Oxford. [1] He is known for his work on social stratification, religion (with a focus on secularisation), political sociology, the impact of social mobility on a variety of social issues (e.g., health, cultural consumption, and political preferences), pro-social behaviour, as well as his books.
Nan Dirk de Graaf joined Nuffield College in 2007 and is an Official Fellow and a Professor in Sociology. He obtained his PhD at Utrecht University (1988) and was a post-doc researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Education and Human Development in Berlin (1988-1989). De Graaf was a research fellow of the Royal Netherlands Academy (1990-1995) and a full Professor in Sociology at Nijmegen University (2001-2007). Between 2003 and 2007 he was the chair of the Inter-university Centre for Social Science Theory and Methodology (ICS). [2]
De Graaf’s work challenged some of the notions of the transmission of social capital as formulated by Pierre Bourdieu. [3] For Bourdieu, the effect of families’ social origin on educational attainment is dependent on economic capital and increasingly on cultural resources of privileged parents. De Graaf and colleagues, contrary to Bourdieu’s claims, demonstrate that it is not the elites that were successfully transmitting their cultural capital on their children’s educational attainment, but rather the cultivating behaviour (particularly in reading) of lower-educated parents that improved their children’s educational attainment. [4] [5] Furthermore, social stratification is determined by the degree of heterogamy displayed by the marriages within a society, [6] and it is also the result of social capital. [7] People with more weak ties have access to more information, which leads to better life chances. [8]
Social mobility, either intergenerational or intragenerational, is often assumed to have various important consequences, e.g. for health, cultural consumption, political preferences, and happiness. A problem with investigating mobility effects is that social mobility is the linear transformation () of any two status variables and . Therefore, any regression equation predicting social mobility cannot be identified as all three terms are included. [9] Michael Sobel had a theoretically elegant solution to this problem, the Diagonal Mobility Models (commonly known as Diagonal Reference Models, DRM). [10] [11] De Graaf and colleagues compared the DRM model with the conventional ones, and found it superior, [9] [12] and had applied DRMs to estimate the impact of:
(1) intergenerational class mobility on political preferences; [13] [14] [15]
(2) intra- and inter-generational social mobility on happiness; [16]
(3) the education of husband and wife on cultural consumption; [12] [17] [18]
(4) class of wife and husband on their political preference [19] and their class identity; [20]
(5) the impact of the education of husband and wife; [21]
(6) intergenerational educational mobility on health; [22]
De Graaf maintains that despite secularisation, religion is still a central element of modern life. It shapes world-views, family lives, moral standards, as well as political preferences. [23] With Kelley, De Graaf discovered that in secular societies children are more likely to become secular, but in secular societies parental religiosity is stronger positively associated with one’s own religiosity than in devout nations. [24] [25] De Graaf and colleagues have also shown that the state can accelerate the secular transition [26] and, using Dutch event history data, that people are more likely to leave faith when they are in their late teens. [27]
Lim and De Graaf tested Peter Berger’s theory of secularisation, which claims that in a religious pluralist society, religions must compete with one another and with non-religious institutions, which undermines a religion’s plausibility structure and leads to secularisation. [28] [29] For the first time, they tested its theoretical mechanisms by perceiving religious diversity from each religious group’s perspective. They did so because any specific local religious environment has different implications depending on one’s religion. Lim and De Graaf confirmed that religious diversity, especially the share of people of other religions, tends to reduce people’s religious involvement. [30]
One of De Graaf’s earliest field of research has been the changing impact of social class on political preferences. [31] [32] [33] Consequently, he investigated the rise of new social classes, the social and cultural specialists within the old service class, and their political preferences. [34] [35] De Graaf and colleagues had also found that with decline in class voting there is also a decline in religious based voting. [33] [36] [37] With Van Spanje, he investigated how established parties can reduce other (upcoming) parties’ electoral support (often Right-Wing Populist Parties). An analysis of 296 elections results in 28 countries show that parroting a party decreases its support only if that party is ostracised at the same time. A party can be seen as ostracised if its largest established competitor systematically rules out all political cooperation with it. [38]
Volunteering is not only helpful for society, but is also pays off at the individual level. Ruiter and De Graaf show that members of volunteering organisations are more likely to start new jobs which are better in terms of status and earnings than those of non-members. Furthermore, volunteering is beneficial when entering the labour market for the first time. Members of associations with more high-status co-members are more likely to get a new job and these jobs are of higher status too. Hence, voluntary association involvement provides an important additional network and that pays off. [8] In another study, Ruiter and De Graaf confirmed that frequent churchgoers are more active in volunteer work and discovered that a devout national context has an additional positive effect. However, the difference between secular and religious people is substantially smaller in devout countries than in secular countries. Church attendance is not relevant for volunteering in devout countries. Furthermore, religious volunteering has a strong spillover effect, implying that religious citizens also volunteer more for secular organisations. This spillover effect is stronger for Catholics than for Protestants, non-Christians and non-religious individuals. [39]
Edited together with Klarita Gërxhani and Werner Raub, the book aims at an integrative perspective on ongoing developments in sociological science. [40] These developments share key methodological features and can therefore be labelled ‘rigorous sociology’. There are, however, numerous research approaches within the discipline, but this pluralism may ultimately lead to the fragmentation of the discipline. The book makes the case for progress and cumulative growth in sociological knowledge by emphasising a common core of basic methodological standards for theoretical and empirical work. The handbook sketches basic features of rigorous sociology related to theory construction, empirical research, methods, and contributions to policy-making.
Written together with Dingeman Wiertz, this textbook discusses many pressing problems facing societies today: corruption, crime, economic inequality, religious extremism, financial crises, global warming, population ageing, gender inequalities, and the challenges of large scale migration. [41] The book demonstrates that many similar social processes lie behind these seemingly disparate problems. The problems can often be traced back to actions that are perfectly rational or well-intended from an individual perspective, but that, taken together, give rise to undesirable societal outcomes. The book also explains why some problems rank higher on the public agenda than others. Moreover, it shows how government intervention may sometimes provide a cure, yet in other times exacerbate existing problems or create new problems of its own.
In 2013, together with Geoffrey Evans, De Graaf edited "Political Choice Matters: Explaining the strength of class and religious cleavages in cross-national perspective". [42] The volume investigates the role of ideological positions adopted by political parties in shaping the extent of class and religious voting in contemporary democracies. The key question therefore is how are political cleavages formed and how do they change? Combining over-time, cross-national data and multi-level research designs, it demonstrates that parties' programmatic positions can provide voters with choice sets that accentuate or diminish political cleavages. It also simultaneously tests alternative, ‘bottom up’, approaches that attribute changes in class and religious voting to individualisation processes associated with socio-economic development and secularisation. There are detailed case studies of eleven European and Anglo-democracies examining, mostly, election studies ranging from the post-war period until the early 21st century. These studies are augmented by a pooled cross-national and overtime analysis of 15 Western democracies using an unprecedented dataset of 188 national pooled surveys.
Maximilian Karl Emil Weber was a German sociologist, historian, jurist, and political economist who was one of the central figures in the development of sociology and the social sciences more generally. His ideas continue to influence social theory and research.
Secularism is the principle of seeking to conduct human affairs based on naturalistic considerations, uninvolved with religion.
Sociology of religion is the study of the beliefs, practices and organizational forms of religion using the tools and methods of the discipline of sociology. This objective investigation may include the use both of quantitative methods and of qualitative approaches.
Morality is the categorization of intentions, decisions and actions into those that are proper (right) and those that are improper (wrong). Morality can be a body of standards or principles derived from a code of conduct from a particular philosophy, religion or culture, or it can derive from a standard that is understood to be universal. Morality may also be specifically synonymous with "goodness", "appropriateness" or "rightness".
Nonconformists were Protestant Christians who did not "conform" to the governance and usages of the state church in England, and in Wales until 1914, the Church of England.
Civil religion, also referred to as a civic religion, is the implicit religious values of a nation, as expressed through public rituals, symbols, and ceremonies on sacred days and at sacred places. It is distinct from churches, although church officials and ceremonies are sometimes incorporated into the practice of civil religion. Countries described as having a civil religion include France and the United States. As a concept, it originated in French political thought and became a major topic for U.S. sociologists since its use by Robert Bellah in 1960.
Irreligion is the absence or rejection of religious beliefs or practices. It encompasses a wide range of viewpoints drawn from various philosophical and intellectual perspectives, including atheism, agnosticism, skepticism, rationalism, and secularism. These perspectives can vary, with individuals who identify as irreligious holding a diverse array of specific beliefs about religion or its role in their lives.
In sociology, secularization is a multilayered concept that generally denotes "a transition from a religious to a more worldly level." There are many types of secularization and most do not lead to atheism, irreligion, nor are they automatically antithetical to religion. Secularization has different connotations such as implying differentiation of secular from religious domains, the marginalization of religion in those domains, or it may also entail the transformation of religion as a result of its recharacterization.
Secularity, also the secular or secularness, is the state of being unrelated or neutral in regards to religion. Origins of secularity can be traced to the Bible itself and fleshed out through Christian history into the modern era. In the medieval period there were even secular clergy. Furthermore, secular and religious entities were not separated in the medieval period, but coexisted and interacted naturally. The word "secular" has a meaning very similar to profane as used in a religious context.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines religiosity as: "Religiousness; religious feeling or belief. [...] Affected or excessive religiousness". Different scholars have seen this concept as broadly about religious orientations and degrees of involvement or commitment. The contrast between "religious" and "religiose" and the concept of "strengthening" faith suggest differences in the intensity of religiosity.
In the field of sociology, cultural capital comprises the social assets of a person that promote social mobility in a stratified society. Cultural capital functions as a social relation within an economy of practices, and includes the accumulated cultural knowledge that confers social status and power; thus cultural capital comprises the material and symbolic goods, without distinction, that society considers rare and worth seeking. There are three types of cultural capital: (i) embodied capital, (ii) objectified capital, and (iii) institutionalised capital.
Sexual capital or erotic capital is the social power an individual or group accrues as a result of their sexual attractiveness and social charm. It enables social mobility independent of class origin because sexual capital is convertible, and may be useful in acquiring other forms of capital, including social capital and economic capital.
S. N. Balagangadhara is a professor emeritus of the Ghent University in Belgium, and was director of the India Platform and the Research Centre Vergelijkende Cutuurwetenschap.
European Islam is a hypothesized new branch of Islam that historically originated and developed among the European peoples of the Balkans and parts of countries in Eastern Europe with sizable Muslim minorities which constitute of large populations of European Muslims. Historically significant Muslim populations in Europe include the Ashkali and Balkan Egyptians, Gorani, Torbeshi, Pomaks, Bosniaks, Chechens, Muslim Albanians, Ingushs, Greek Muslims, Vallahades, Muslim Romani people, Balkan Turks, Turkish Cypriots, Cretan Turks, Yörüks, Volga Tatars, Crimean Tatars, Lipka Tatars, Kazakhs, Gajals, and Megleno-Romanians from Notia today living in Turkey, although the majority are secular.
The correlates of crime explore the associations of specific non-criminal factors with specific crimes.
Scholarly studies have investigated the effects of religion on health. The World Health Organization (WHO) discerns four dimensions of health, namely physical, social, mental, and spiritual health. Having a religious belief may have both positive and negative impacts on health and morbidity.
Most scientists agree that religiosity is not an independent personality trait, despite there being some commonality between their characteristics. Religiosity and personality traits both relate to one's feelings, thoughts, and behaviors. However, unlike for personality, one's level of religiosity is often measured by the presence or lack of belief in and relationship with a higher power, certain lifestyles or behaviors adopted for a higher power, and a sense of belonging with other followers of one's religion. Additionally, personality traits tend to follow a normal distribution, such that the majority of individuals' scores for a personality trait will be concentrated towards the middle, rather than being extremely high or low. Distributions for religiosity, however, follow a non-normal distribution, such that there are more individuals who score particularly high or low on religiosity scales.
Homogamy is marriage between individuals who are, in some culturally important way, similar to each other. It is a form of assortative mating. The union may be based on socioeconomic status, class, gender, caste, ethnicity, or religion, or age in the case of the so-called age homogamy.
Michael Hout is a Professor of Sociology at New York University. His contributions to sociology include using demographic methods to study social change in inequality, religion, and politics. His current work used the General Social Survey (GSS) to estimate the social standing of occupations introduced into the census classification since 1990. He digitized all occupational information in the GSS (1972–2014) and coded it all to the 2010 standard. Other recent projects used the GSS panel to study Americans' changing perceptions of class, religion, and happiness. In 2006, Mike and Claude Fischer published Century of Difference, a book on twentieth-century social and cultural trends in the United States. Other books include Truth about Conservative Christians with Andrew Greeley, Following in Father's Footsteps: Social Mobility in Ireland, and Inequality by Design
In sociology, desecularization is a resurgence or growth of religion after a period of secularization. The theory of desecularization is a reaction to the theory known as the secularization thesis, which posits a gradual decline in the importance of religion and of religious belief itself, as a universal feature of modern society. The term desecularization was coined by Peter L. Berger, a former proponent of the secularization thesis, in his 1999 book The Desecularization of the World.
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