Some contributions of sociology to the understanding of career
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This chapter examines career from a sociological perspective, with emphasis on the changes that have affected employment and work organisation during recent decades. First, we argue that the context of the 1950s and 1960s, which was characterised by economic prosperity, made two quite different sociological theories plausible. While status attainment theory asserts that motivation allows people to seize the opportunities offered by the labour market, reproduction theory maintains that far from being chosen, a career is assigned on the basis of an individual's social and economic origin. The first theory implies that individuals have to adapt through adequate socialisation and the second suggests that societal structures be transformed. Secondly, the employment crisis of the 1980s and 1990s is described and new theories such as human capital theory, segmentation theory, and regulation theory, which attempt to provide an explanation of career interruptions, are presented. Thirdly, courses of action for interventions in career based on these recent theories are formulated. In sociology, career is usually examined in terms of social mobility, which describes the movement of individuals or family units within the system of occupational categories or the social class system (Boudon & Bourricaud, 1994). The concept of mobility has been used as an indicator of the relative rigidity of both structures and the social order, and has been linked with career prospects. According to Emile Durkheim (1858 – 1917), who represents an early theoretical perspective emphasising social structure, people had little scope for action when it came to occupational choice. He maintained that social facts represent ‘ways of acting or thinking with the peculiar characteristic of exercising a coercive influence on individual consciousness’ (Durkheim, 1964, p. liii).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".