Status maintenance in the social middle: intergenerational stability in occupational fields of the middle class

该项目研究中产阶级如何在特定职业领域保持其代际地位的战略和机制。许多关于社会平等的研究已经表明，中产阶级认为自己受到社会不安全和社会危机动态的威胁。该项目首先调查了成功维护状态的条件。家庭以何种方式和方式成功地维持了几代人的社会地位，从而同时复制了社会不平等的结构。其次，我们特别关注代际关系：在什么条件下，为了保持社会地位，什么样的心态、价值观、性格和社会定位是代代相传或改变的？其目的是重建家庭的主观认知和(或多或少)意识、共识或冲突的机制，当比较三代人的时间时，这些机制保持稳定或发生变化。这种机制可能远远超出了投资于教育等重要的特定职业行为模式。第三，该项目比较了中产阶级的三个典型职业领域：(准)政府机构的职业、中产阶级的手艺和技术领域的合格员工。因此，我们结合了关于社会不平等和关于工作和职业的社会学观点，并将职业文化作为家庭维持地位战略中的一个中心因素进行调查。关于社会构成的一个更广泛的问题与此有关：是否有特定于职业的地位维持机制，以及这些职业在中产阶级内部的纵向和横向分化方面发挥了什么作用？我们的研究方法包括对三代人的家庭访谈。在上述三个专业领域之一工作的中代人是招募更多家庭成员的支柱。这种创新的方法提供了机会来分析家庭中的集体生产和沟通方式，并将它们与个人的观点直接联系起来。抽样和数据收集采用扎根理论方法论。实证分析的目的是建立一种跨代身份维护策略的类型学。

The project studies strategies and mechanisms of how the middle class maintains their intergenerational status within specific occupational fields. Numerous studies on social equality have already demonstrated that the middle class perceives itself as threatened by social insecurity and dynamics of social crisis. The project firstly investigates the conditions of successful status maintenance. By which means and in what ways do families succeed to maintain their social status across several generations and thus simultaneously reproduce structures of social inequality. Secondly, we put a special focus on the intergenerational relations: Under which conditions are which kind of mentalities, values, dispositions, and social positioning passed on or modified across generations in order to maintain the social status? The aim is to reconstruct the subjective perception of families and the (more or less) conscious, consensual or conflicting mechanisms which remain stable or change when comparing three generations across time. Such mechanisms may go well beyond the important occupation-specific behavioral patterns such as investing into education. Thirdly, the project compares three typical occupational fields of the middle class: professions in (quasi-)government institutions, middle-class craftsmanship, and qualified employees in the technical field. We thus combine sociological perspectives on social inequality and on work and professions and investigate occupational cultures as a central factor in families strategy of status maintenance. A more general inquiry on the making of societies is related to this: Are there occupation-specific mechanisms of status maintenance and which role to those occupation play with regard to the internal, both vertical and horizontal differentiation of the middle class? Our research methods involve family interviews with members of three generations. Persons of the middle generations who work in one of the three professional fields named above are the anchor for recruiting further family members. This innovative approach offers the opportunity to analyze the collective production and ways of communication in families and directly relate them to the perspective of the individual. The sampling and data collection is based on the Grounded Theory Methodology. The empirical analyzes aims at developing a typology of cross-generational strategies of status maintenance.