Gitte Sommer Harrits

VIA University College Aarhus N Denmark · Research Center for management organization and society

In classic theories on professions and professionalism, the relationship between professionals and citizens are typically seen as based on formal, scientific knowledge and expertise and thus as functionally specific. This conception may, however, be too simplistic for professionals working in close and frequent interactions with citizens. The artic...

Even though contemporary discussions of class have moved forward towards recognizing a multidimensional concept of class, empirical analyses tend to focus on cultural practices in a rather narrow sense, that is, as practices of cultural consumption or practices of education. As a result, discussions within political sociology have not yet utilized...

For decades, the Weberian approach to the study of professions has been strong, emphasizing state authorization and market monopolies as constituting what is considered a profession. Originally, however, the Weberian conception of closure, or the ways in which a profession is constituted and made separate, was broader. This article suggests a revis...

Within recent years, Denmark has implemented a number of preventive policies based on the line of reasoning that it is better to prevent than to solve problems. Preventive policies express political intentions aimed at solving core welfare state problems, but policy goals are ambiguous and vague, and policy tools are often poorly specified. Thus, f...

Throughout the 20th century, objective class position was a strong predictor of both class identity, political preferences and party choice, but since the 1980s, the relationship between objective and subjective dimensions of class has supposedly vanished–according to some as the result of a fundamental blurring of class relations. However, others...

The symbolic categorisation of social groups has become prominent in studies of social class. This article addresses a tension in this research regarding the relationship between different symbolic categories. We argue that the potential of moral categorisations to change or oppose the order of socioeconomic or cultural categorisations depends on w...

Contrary to much conventional wisdom, this article shows that class is still used by people to sort others into groups, that this sorting is largely on the basis of income and occupation and that it occurs in conditions of both high and low income inequality. Uniquely, we use both open-ended survey questions and a factorial survey experiment to sho...

Stereotype use in street‐level work and discretionary judgments is important because of the possible introduction of bias. This article contributes to the study of stereotypes in street‐level work by suggesting that stereotypes are related to both cognitive and social uncertainties. A distinction between uncontrolled stereotype activation in the in...

Class relations have been proven to affect various aspects of social life, even in modern individualized societies. However, following claims on individualization and the so-called 'death of class' thesis, studying the subjective dimension of class - that is, the way individuals perceive of class relations and their own position within them - has g...

Betydningen af sociale klasser i det moderne samfund er fortsat omstridt. Vælgeradfærdsforskningen har vist, at sociale klasser har svindende betydning for partivalg, men sociologiske studier viser, at sociale klasser fortsat har afgørende betydning for menneskers livsstil. En mulig årsag til den uafklarede betydning af klasser er, at folks forståe...

The impact of social class in modern societies is still contested. Research in voter behavior has demonstrated a declining importance of class on voting, but sociological studies demonstrate that class is still important for lifestyle. One potential reason for this ambiguous role of social class is that people’s understanding of classes and class r...

Pierre Bourdieu (1930 – 2002) står som en af de mest indflydelsesrige europæiske sociologer i det 20. århundrede, og hans arbejde har haft stor betydning for så forskellige forskningsområder som klasse, kunst, uddannelse, videnskab, journalistik, og politik. Denne bog introducerer læseren til Bourdieus sociologi og politiske tænkning. Først præsen...

Introduction to Special Issue: Professional-Citizen Relations

It is often argued or taken for granted that professionals have lost their position of authority in relation to citizens, either because of individualization or because they are controlled by state interventions. The sociology of knowledge conversely points to a new reflexive modernization where our dependence upon expertise increases rather than d...

see http://hansreitzel.dk/Samfundsvidenskab/Klasse/9788741255736

This article explores the political legitimatization of intervention toward at-risk target groups in Danish preventive policy. Here, the overall intention is to detect social problems before they occur. Part of these preventive policies is the emergence of at-risk target groups identified as potential deviants among ‘the normal population’ of child...

Artiklen diskuterer marxistisk klasseteori og peger på, at denne er udfordret på spørgsmålet om det senmoderne samfunds konfl iktlinjer, men samtidig fremhæves den unikke forståelse af udbytningsrelationer og teoriens kritisk-normative potentiale.

http://politica.dk/tidsskriftet/udgivelser/aargang-44-nr-3-velfaerdsstaten/

This article presents a comprehensive framework for the study of categories and categorization. Sociological studies of the classic theme ‘categorization’ seem to have faded in favor of psychological research and – most recently – policy studies, and we argue that present theories lack an adequate conception of the distinction between political and...

This article discusses the possibility of the simultaneous existence of inclusion/empowerment and exclusion/dominance within the practices of everyday political participation. Taking a point of departure in the Bourdieusian approach to practice and symbolic power, the article first constructs a theoretical framework for studying political practices...

This article challenges the idea that mixed methods research (MMR) constitutes a coherent research paradigm and explores how different research paradigms exist within MMR. Tracing paradigmatic differences at the level of methods, ontology, and epistemology, two MMR strategies are discussed: nested analysis, recently presented by the American politi...

The trend within studies of voting and political attitudes has been to give less attention to class as a structuring dimension and more to postmaterial values. The basic argument of this article is that this is a false opposition: The adherence to different sets of values is related to social background, although in complex ways, which can only be...