Children of Austerity

Examines the impact of the financial crisis on households with children and analyses the impact of government austerity policies on living standards.

The 2008 financial crisis triggered the worst global recession since the Great Depression. Many OECD countries responded to the crisis by reducing social spending. Through 11 diverse country case studies this volume describes the evolution of child poverty and material well-being during the crisis, and links these outcomes with the responses by governments.

Research Handbook on Digital Sociology

Exploring the social implications of digital transformation, as well as demonstrating how we might use digital transformation to further sociological knowledge, this incisive Handbook provides an extensive overview of cutting-edge research on the digital turn of modern society.

This dynamic Research Handbook will be essential reading for a diverse audience of academics, researchers, students, and practitioners, particularly in the fields of sociology, demography, computer and information sciences, economics, business, and psychology

Health Politics in Europe

A major new reference work, which provides historical background and up-to-date information and analysis on health politics and health systems throughout Europe.

In particular, it captures developments that have taken place since the end of the Cold War, a turning point for many European health systems, with most post-communist transition countries privatizing their state-run health systems, and many Western European health systems experimenting with new public management and other market-oriented health reforms.

A Sociology of Family Life

This popular book presents a comprehensive assessment of recent research on 'family', parenting, childhood and interpersonal ties.

A Sociology of Family Life queries assumptions about a disintegration of 'the family' by revealing a remarkable persistence of commitment and reciprocity across cultures, within new as well as traditional family forms. Yet, while new kinds of intimate relationships such as 'friends as family' and LGBTQ+ intimacies become commonplace, such personal relationships can still be difficult to negotiate in the face of wider structural norms.

Negotiating Political Identities - Multiethnic Schools and Youth in Europe

Globalization, European integration, and migration are challenging national identities and changing education across Europe. The nation-state no longer serves as the sole locus of civic participation and identity formation, ceasing to have the influence it once had over the implementation of policies.

This groundbreaking book is the first study of its kind to examine how schools mediate government policies and create distinct educational contexts to shape youth identity negotiation and integration processes. Negotiating Political Identities will appeal to educationists, sociologists and political scientists whose work concerns issues of migration, identity, citizenship and ethnicity. 

Childcare, Early Education and Social Inequality

Recognising that social change over recent decades has strengthened the need for early childhood education and care, this book seeks to answer what role this plays in creating and compensating for social inequalities in educational attainment.

Compiling 13 cross-national and multidisciplinary empirical studies on three interrelated topics, this book explores how families from different social backgrounds decide between types of childcare, how important parental care and resources at home are for children’s educational success, and the consequences of early education and care for children’s diverging educational destinies.

Models of Secondary Education and Social Inequality

From an international comparative perspective, this book provides a thorough investigation into how social inequalities arise during individuals’ secondary schooling careers. 

Models of Secondary Education and Social Inequality brings together a number of cross-national and country studies conducted by well-known experts in the field. This book reconstructs individuals’ educational careers step-by-step, providing a longitudinal perspective essential for an appropriate understanding of the dynamics of inequalities in secondary education.

Methodological Issues of Longitudinal Surveys

This book addresses a broad array of pressing challenges of longitudinal surveys and provides innovative solutions to methodological problems based on the example of the NEPS. It covers longitudinal issues such as sampling, weighting, recruiting and fieldwork management, the design of longitudinal surveys and the implementation of constructs, conducting competence tests over the life course, effective methods to improve and to maintain the highest level of data quality, data management tools for large-scale longitudinal surveys, the dissemination of research data to heterogeneous scientific communities, as well as establishing a long-term public relations and communications unit integrating a study’s stakeholder community over time.

Gender, Education and Employment

This book asks whether or not women have been able to convert their educational success into gains on the labor market. 

For much of the twentieth century, women lagged considerably behind men in their educational attainment. However, in recent decades, young women have become an important source of human capital for labor markets in modern societies, as well as potential competitors to the male workforce.

Governing Ethnic Conflict

This book offers an intellectual history of an emerging technology of peace and explains how the liberal state has come to endorse illiberal subjects and practices.

The idea that conflicts are problems that have causes and therefore solutions rather than winners and losers has gained momentum since the end of the Cold War, and it has become more common for third party mediators acting in the name of liberal internationalism to promote the resolution of intra-state conflicts. 

Nationalism and Multiculturalism

This book explores the theories of cultural identity and pluralism that support the peace process and questions their adequacy, both with respect to the ethno-national conflict they were originally developed to comprehend, and to the difficulties Ireland now faces in coming to terms with immigration and increasing cultural diversity. 

Some of the contributors are more optimistic than others, but all share the belief that Ireland's long theoretical and practical engagement with issues related with belonging, citizenship, cultural difference, and conflict are of global significance in a post-Cold War world.