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Historians regularly conceive of “gentlemen” (shi 士) in 7th–14th century China as men belonging to an elite social stratum, defined by their study of the classical and literary canons, participation in the civil service examinations, officeholding in the imperial bureaucracy, engagement in various literary or intellectual undertakings, hereditary status from a patriline, or connection to certain marriage, kinship, or friendship networks. This dissertation seeks to expand as well as complicate this perception of “gentlemen” as a social category, by understanding the label as referring not to an elite social stratum but to an identity, internalized and enacted in a variety of ways by men in low and high social positions alike. Using this framework to analyze the construction of “gentlemanly” identities in various arts and activities that served as leisure for some and livelihoods for others, this dissertation reveals a significant expansion in the repertory of signals and strategies used to create and perform “gentlemanly” identities in these fields, reshaping what it meant to be a “gentleman” in middle period China. Each chapter draws upon extensive source material from libraries, digital databases, and museums, to examine processes of identity construction and presentation in a series of different arts or activities in which both the “gentlemanly” and “non-gentlemanly” participated: painting, music making, practicing medicine, divining, farming and gardening, fishing and woodcutting, and playing the board game weiqi 圍棋 (also known as go). In each of these fields, between the 7th and 14th centuries, new “gentlemanly” identity signals were constructed to distinguish the “gentlemanly” sort from social categories like “artisan” (gong 工) that they viewed as inferior. New kinds of “gentlemen” like the “qin-zither gentleman” (qinshi 琴士), “painting gentleman” (huashi 畫士), and “classicist physician” (ruyi 儒醫) emerged; older labels like “recluse” (yinshi 隱士) expanded to encompass a wider variety of ways of living. New offices and titles at court were created that could signal membership in “gentlemanly” communities despite a close connection with arts like medicine or painting. And beyond these labels, men developed new “gentlemanly” identities through distinct modes of engagement in the respective field: the way one divined others’ fates, the strategies one used to win a board game, the metaphysical elements and ideals expressed in one’s art and discursive artistic judgments, the tools one didn’t use when fishing, and so on. These identity signals were situational, and each chapter draws upon examples of disagreement or doubt over the inclusion or exclusion of certain men as “gentlemen” to explore instances in which such signals were performed with varying degrees of efficacy. In my conclusion, I discuss the connection between many of these “gentlemanly” identity signals and an emerging form of social snobbery that I call the “discourse of ‘gentlemanly’ expertise.” In the 7th century and earlier, if the “gentlemanly” sort compared themselves to “artisans,” it would almost certainly be based on what they did. However, around the 9th–13th centuries, the “gentlemanly” sort became more actively involved (or vocal about their involvement) in the arts, and started to contrast their own practice and appreciation of these arts more actively with the (ostensibly inferior) practice and appreciation of “non-gentlemanly” sorts. In doing so, they began to define and distinguish themselves not by what they did, but by how they did it. They did not stop with simply articulating “gentlemanly” practices as different but equally good; they asserted that their practices and products were superior, claiming expertise in these fields on the basis of their ethical values, cultural norms, aesthetic preferences, and abstract knowledge of the cosmos and the ineffable “Way” (Dao 道). I argue that, ironically, this snobbish discourse of social distinction actually made it increasingly possible for people earning a livelihood in various arts to enact “gentlemanly” identities, by associating symbolic capital with the demonstration or depiction of “gentlemanly” modes of engagement. By focusing on the increasing number of ways in which “gentlemanly” identities were constructed and performed in 7th–14th century China, this dissertation offers insight into how individuals and groups made decisions of inclusion or exclusion, offered or obtained access to resources, and developed a sense of self and place in society. In doing so, it enriches our understandings of both the social forces shaping the middle period Chinese social world, and the individuals and groups who inhabited it.

This essay will analyze a selection of characters from Charles Dickens’ novel Hard Times. Characterizations will be analyzed by using a Marxist theoretical framework, e.g., characters’ relations to Marxist concepts such as class struggle, alienation, and stratification will be studied. The purpose of this essay is to use Marxist concepts in order to understand Dickens’ satire and critique of capitalism. This is done by applying a theory criticizing capitalism, namely Marxist theory, to some of the novel’s characters and analyzing these characters according to their relations to the main features of Marxist theory. A few characters are selected for analysis, to distinguish characteristics or traits that satirize society. Moreover, the essay will investigate whether the author alludes to Marxist concepts when satirizing contemporary society. The characters portrayed in the novel are all exposed to a society characterized by hardship, inequality, and class struggle. These concepts are all features of a society that Marxism critiques. Accordingly, the thesis is that Marxist concepts are implicit in the text and do play a role in Dickens’ satirizing of his contemporary, capitalist, industrialized society, despitenot being mentioned explicitly.

The study of household wealth as a distinct dimension of social stratification is crucial to understand the main factors and mechanisms driving the intergenerational reproduction of inequalities in contemporary societies. This dissertation aims to contribute to the expanding literature on wealth inequalities by investigating the role played by parental wealth in shaping children’s educational opportunities. More specifically, the dissertation concentrates on three main research axes. First, it investigates the relevance of wealth gaps in education in Italy, a country that received little attention in the literature so far. In doing so, it evaluates wealth gaps in the attainment of upper secondary degrees, in the enrolment at university, and in the attainment of tertiary degrees. Second, it aims to clarify the various roles played by different levels and components of parental wealth in providing children with advantages in educational outcomes. In this regard, it provides a theoretical reflection linking potential wealth mechanisms to the combination of levels and components of wealth and it empirically evaluates their relevance in the transition to post-secondary education. Third, it explores whether and how wealth gaps in education vary across different national contexts. Broad international comparisons are still missing in the literature and single-country studies are hardly comparable. To this purpose, this dissertation aims at evaluating wealth gaps in the access to post-secondary education across 14 European countries while also accounting for the relative importance of different wealth components.

Educational credentials have a central role in contemporary societies. However, social origins continue to affect educational performances and transitions well before children enter compulsory school, thus threatening future outcomes and development. By interacting research streams from economics, psychology, and pedagogy, this dissertation locates within the literature on child development, early education, and social stratification, and it aims at further contributing to the sociological evidence on the mechanisms that lead to inequalities in skills. The core of this dissertation lies in the analysis of the characteristics of the early childhood educational system (ECE) and of the home learning environment (HLE), as growth-promoting or unfavourable contexts for the development of both cognitive and noncognitive skills. Adopting recent cross-national and longitudinal data, this dissertation asks (1) whether and how much ECE matters in the lives of children around Europe, leaving long-lasting traces on their achievements once adolescents; (2) whether and how much parental social position, beliefs, and other family and child characteristics play a role in the care selection process in Germany; and (3) whether and how much quality in HLE and ECE contributes at explaining differences in skills before entering primary school in Ireland.

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Despite being one of the few human-specific types of play that humans of various ages engage in, games are understudied in cross-cultural research. Games are not distributed randomly across cultures and vary with some socio-ecological aspects of human cultures. Previous observational studies suggest that the cooperativeness and egalitarianism of cultural groups is reflected in the games that are played across cultures, but this has yet to be studied using a breadth of method- ological approaches. In this dissertation, I investigate the relationship the cooperativeness of games may have with the cooperativeness of cultural groups and offer one potential avenue as to how and why games are distributed across cultures. This dissertation consists of two main parts. The first part (chapters 2 - 3) focuses on gathering and analyzing descriptions of historical games and cultural levels of cooperation from ethnolinguistic groups on the Austronesian language phylogeny. The second part (chapters 4 - 6) focuses on gathering games, cultural levels of cooperation, and investigating the relationship between games and cultural levels of cooperation by three modern-day cultural groups. In chapter two, I describe the making of the Austronesian Game Taxonomy, an open-access database of game descriptions as gathered from historical, ethnographic, and other sources. I also describe my goal structure coding scheme and apply it to the 907 games in the Austronesian Game Taxonomy. In chapter three, I test the relationship between the goal structure of games from the Austronesian Game Taxonomy and several proxies for cultural levels of cooperation in 25 ethnolin- guistic groups. I find that the cooperativeness of games is negatively related to cultural levels of intra-group conflict and positively related with inter-cultural conflict. The goal structure of games is not associated with the social structure of cultures, nor reliably correlate with measures of interdependence in subsistence. Chapter four provides a detailed description of the three cultures that are the focus of Part two of this dissertation: Hai||om and Ovambo in Namibia, and Germans in Leipzig, Germany. I use three semi-structured interviews to obtain information about the levels of social stratification, intra-group conflict, and inter-cultural conflict experienced by these three groups. Chapter five documents the games played by Hai||om and Ovambo children and adults during my research visit to Namibia. I describe a handful of games with variety of goal structures. I provide the interview used to gather this information for future cross-cultural game collection. In chapter six, I examine the relationship between the preference for games that are cooperative or competitive, and cultural levels of cooperation in three modern-day cultures. I also interview caretakers on their attitudes toward children’s play and games. I find cross-cultural variation in children’s game preferences, but adult game preferences do not vary across cultures. Game preferences do not systematically vary with predicted cultural levels of cooperation. In the general discussion, I discuss my research findings in terms of the relationship between games and cultural levels of cooperation and suggest further improvements for the field of cross-cultural game research. This dissertation provides some evidence that games relate with types of conflict, but not with levels of social stratification nor interdependence in subsistence.

The dissertation is looking into the diagnostics of student's understanding of the principals of society organisation in relation to thecontentof sociologicalcivic curriculumeducation and socialbasisin secondary schools. The teoretical part delimits basic sociological terms, especially social stratification, social mobility and social status. Concept of didactical content knowledge and didactical theory of curricullum reconstruction is described to connect sociological approach to school education. Current research at this area are also presented. In the practical part was implementeda research inquiry, which used semistructured depth interview for data collection. The Gathered data wereprocessedqualitatively. The measure of hierarchy in society, the cause of social stratification and social mobility options, were primarily watched in the research inquiry. Where possible, student's answers were compared to previous research inquiry results.