"Unlinked lives": Elaboration of a concept and its significance for the life course

This article introduces the concept of "unlinked lives" and illustrates its significance for scholarship on the life course. There are many lessons to be learned about human interdependence by focusing not on relationships that are formed and then maintained, but instead on relationships that are lost or ended by choice or circumstance, such as through changes in institutional affiliations, social status and positions or places. Unlinked lives carry important social meanings, are embedded in complex social processes, and bring consequences for the wellbeing of individuals, families, and societies. To develop this concept, we put forward nine key propositions related to when and how unlinkings happen as processes, as well as some of the consequences of being unlinked as a status or outcome. The coupling of "unlinked lives" with "linked lives" offers a crucial avenue for advancing life course theories and research, integrating scholarship across multiple life periods and transitions, and bridging the two now-distinct traditions of intellectual inquiry on the life course and on social networks.

The Impact of Education on Fertility During the Chinese Reform Era (1980-2018): Changes Across Birth Cohorts and Interaction with Fertility Policies

We examined the influence of education on fertility decisions in contemporary China, drawing upon theoretical insights that emphasise the role of social institutions, gender relations, and life course dynamics in shaping family behaviour. This led us to propose a set of hypotheses that explain the differential effect of education on each parity. We used information on female cohorts born between 1960 and 1989, coming from the China Family Panel Studies for 2010-2018. We applied event history models with both independent and simultaneous equations models to account for selection and endogeneity effects. The results point to a substantial contribution of the increased educational attainment in the population in the fertility decline and current low levels of fertility, beyond the role of fertility policies. Consistent with our hypotheses, the results show that woman's educational attainment has a strong negative effect on the hazard of bearing a second or third child. Male partner's educational attainment also has a negative effect on the hazard of transition to a second or third birth, yet with a weaker intensity. We also found that the negative effect of education on second birth rates significantly declines across birth cohorts. The results show little educational differentials in the probability of bearing a first child, while the better educated postpone first births. Moreover, the effect of fertility policies, measured at the individual level, gradually increases with the level of education.

Understanding the devaluation of vulnerable groups: A novel application of Institutional Anomie Theory

Prejudices legitimize the discrimination against groups by declaring them to be of unequal, especially of less, worth. This legitimizing power is highly relevant in social conflicts of modern societies that are governed by market-oriented value systems. However, prejudice research has yet to be linked to sociological discourses on the marketization of society. We argue that Institutional Anomie Theory (IAT), a theory originally developed to explain crime rates, offers a fruitful macro-sociological framework for a better understanding of micro-social prejudices that emerge along with processes of marketization. Extending IAT to explain prejudices in a German study based on survey data offers a first attempt to underpin our theoretical hypotheses with empirical data. Although the results need to be interpreted with due caution, they suggest that the extended IAT model can be usefully applied to explain how a marketized mentality is related to different forms of institutional integration, and how it is conducive to specific prejudices that emerge in market-dominated societies against purported economically burdening social groups.