Institutions, Inequalities, and Life courses
Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research / AISSR
Institutions affect the degree of inequality in a society and they modify the individual determinants of status, income and well-being. For example, educational systems affect the influence of parents on children’s success in school, labor market rules affect gender inequality in wages and work careers, and pension systems affect income inequality at older ages.
With life courses, the programme especially refers to changes in the household- and family relationships that people experience as they grow older, such as leaving school, making a career, and retirement. Institutions affect life courses in many ways. For example, gender roles affect the formation of marriage and the way couples divide paid and household labor, welfare state arrangements affect divorce and fertility, and governmental care systems for the elderly may affect intergenerational relationships.
The IIL programme aims to provide strong evidence on the effects of institutions by comparing individuals across many countries and tracking changes over their life courses. By using multi-level and longitudinal data, the programme can better understand causal relationships between life events and individual changes.
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FIRMS: How the Workplace Structures Career Inequality
Over recent decades, economic inequality has increased in most societies. Research shows that workplaces—or firms—play an important role in shaping these inequalities, yet we still know little about why they matter so much. This project examines how firms affect people’s career trajectories and how workplaces can have lasting effects on careers. It studies how firms create new or reinforce existing inequalities along two key axes of labor market inequality: gender and ethnicity. A central aim is to uncover the mechanisms behind these patterns—when does a workplace offer career opportunities, and when does it limit them? This project will not just advance our knowledge of inequality, but also provide insights into how firms can mitigate it.
Project period: June 2026 - May 2031
Funded by: ERC Consolidator Grant
Team
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GUTS: Growing Up Together in Society
GUTS is a collaboration of researchers from seven universities and a wide variety of disciplines that share one mission: to understand how young people grow up in a complex society.
The key-question that the GUTS program aims to answer is: how do young people with varying opportunities grow up in an increasingly complex society? And what are the main causes for differences in contributing to society?
GUTS investigate how young people’s brain and (social) behavior develop over a period of ten years. The project connects these patterns of neurobiological and behavioral development to the circumstances someone grows up in: what access to educational opportunities, social networks and societal norms does someone have?
And what makes some adolescents deviate from expected societal norms and engage in antisocial behavior? In other words, how do nature and nurture interact during growing up to adulthood? And what impact does your starting point in life have on where you will end up in society?
Project period: Jan 2023 - Sept 2027
Funded by: Gravitation programme by the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science (OCW)
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RECOGNITION: The role of religious cognition for immigrant integration
Immigrants in general, and Muslims in particular, have been found to be more religious than non-migrants in European societies. In public and scholarly discourses, this high level of religiosity is often conceived of as a barrier to immigrant integration.
However, 20 years of large-scale survey research have yielded contradictory findings regarding the question of how religion is related to immigrant integration and how immigrant religion changes as a consequence of migration and integration. Fenella Fleischmann argues that these nonconclusive results are due to a limited conceptualisation of immigrant religion in survey-based research, which has too narrowly focused on religiousness, i.e., the frequency of religious practices and the subjective importance of religion, but largely ignored religious cognition, i.e., the more literal or symbolic ways in which individuals reason about religion.
The RECOGNITION project takes an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural comparative approach and proposes to transform this line of research with a systematic investigation of religious cognition as explanation for different domains of immigrant integration that is independent of religiousness.
Project period: Jan 2023 - Dec 2027
Funded by: NWO Vidi