[Who Feels Excluded? On the Use of the Concept of Social Exclusion to Analyze Current Societal Trends]. / Wer fühlt sich exkludiert? Zur zeitdiagnostischen Verwendung des Konzepts der sozialen Exklusion.

The concept of social exclusion has had an astonishing career in the social sciences. The focus of this paper is an empirical investigation of the use of this concept to analyze current societal trends. From this theoretical perspective we derive four theses, which are empirically tested in this paper with a focus on the perception of exclusion: First, that because of the processes of economic structural change, larger population groups are affected by social exclusion in several dimensions (unemployment, poverty, social isolation), culminating in a subjective sense of exclusion among them. Thus, it is assumed that social exclusion has become the main social cleavage in contemporary society. Second, it is assumed that social exclusion cannot be clearly located in classical sociostructural categories but has diffused into broad segments of society. Third, socioeconomic precariousness and social isolation are thought to play a central role in the emergence of a subjective sense of exclusion. Here, and fourth, it is assumed, however, that this impacts on the sense of exclusion via the subjective perception of the objective life conditions. We test these theses derived from this theoretical perspective on the basis of survey data, using the sense of exclusion as a dependent variable. It becomes clear that, first, social exclusion has not diffused into large parts of society and thus can by no means be regarded as the main social cleavage in society; and second, an increased sense of exclusion can be found in different but clearly identifiable social groups. Moreover, our analyses show that the subjective sense of exclusion is rooted in both social isolation and socioeconomic precariousness, albeit clearly mediated by their subjective perception.

The Unequal Distribution of Linguistic Capital in a Transnational Economic Order.

Foreign language proficiency is an unequally distributed form of linguistic capital that is becoming increasingly important in contemporary societies: first, it enables persons to participate transnationally in educational activities and in labor markets beyond the national institutions of their home country. It is also crucial for integrating an increasing share of the population with a migration background into the labor market. Thus, this article focuses on the explanation of language proficiency. Its main aim is to enrich the discussion in this field by deriving hypotheses from the sociological theory of reproduction and the discourse on migrant integration. Variables are included which have not been tested in a broad fashion in previous empirical research. We use data on different groups of migrants and non-migrants in multilingual Switzerland, where we could study the determinants of the unequal distribution of language proficiency in three official languages and foreign language repertoire in general. Our main results show that the hypotheses derived from the two theoretical discussions are empirically supported overall and contribute substantially to the explanation of language proficiency. However, most of these variables indicate the importance of unequally distributed opportunities for learning languages, thus highlighting that language learning may be part of the general process of reproducing social inequality structures.

Is participation in high-status culture a signal of trustworthiness?

Trust is essential for social interactions, cooperation and social order. Research has shown that social status and common group memberships are important determinants of receiving and reciprocating trust. However, social status and group membership can coincide or diverge-with potentially different effects. Our study contributes to the existing literature on the role of status and group membership by testing two separate trust-generating mechanisms against each other. We examine if individuals tend to place trust in high-status groups (irrespective of their own group membership) or, rather, if they tend to trust others with whom they share a common group membership. We assume that status group membership is signalled by cultural (musical) taste. This operationalization follows the theoretical reasoning of Bourdieu who argues that it is, above all, musical taste that classifies persons of different status. By demonstrating their "legitimate" cultural taste, upper-class members distinguish themselves from the middle and lower classes and signal their social status, thereby creating awe, respect and an air of trustworthiness. We report evidence from online experiments with incentivized trust games, which enable us to separate the two trust-generating mechanisms. We find no evidence that persons with "legitimate" tastes are generally trusted more. Instead, our results clearly demonstrate ingroup favouritism towards persons with a similar taste. Participants place more trust in members of their own group and expect them to be more trustworthy. In other words: members of taste-based groups trust each other more than members of different-taste-based groups. Interestingly, this group-based trust is not always justified inasmuch as received trust is not necessarily reciprocated more strongly by own group members. This suggests that ingroup favouritism is, at least in part, driven by false beliefs.