Tom 45 (2019): Zeszyt 1 (March 2019)

This study estimates the prevalence of non-take-up of social assistance using administrative data from the Canton of Bern. Regional variation in non-take-up rates is then used to study the contextual effects of social norms with respect to welfare receipt legitimacy. Social norms are proxied with the degree of urbanity, language regions and communal voter shares of left- and right-wing parties. Multiple regression analysis, extended by several robustness checks, suggests that social norms do indeed have an impact on take-up behavior.

The article presents the empirical findings of a multi-site ethnography in two organizations in Swiss street-level bureaucracy. We examined both a municipal child welfare office and the police force of a medium-sized city. The focus was on the question as to whether and how ethnic differentiation takes place in such public agencies and what role it plays at work. The findings suggest that un/doing ethnicity follows an instrumental logic and that it is executed in manifold and ambivalent ways.

In previous research, both positive and negative relationships between social status and prosociality have been reported. We argue that the nature of the observed status can explain these divergent findings. In an experimental study with technical and commercial apprentices, we show that objective status can have a positive effect on prosocial behaviour and that subjective status can have a negative effect when controlling for objective status.

Two explanations for discrimination against Muslims in Switzerland are threat to secularization and xenophobia. We conducted lost letter experiments and find that distinctively religious Muslim groups are indeed discriminated against, although not to a larger degree than Christian sects. Moreover, discrimination against Muslims decreases when there is no reference to religiousness. In sum, the discrimination against Muslims seems mainly to be a result of distinctive religious characteristics attributed to this group.

This article offers a social science analysis of the resilience concept’s success and common sense uses. Based on a sample of letters from the readers of the French author Boris Cyrulnik’s self-help best-sellers, the article first depicts the characteristics of the attitude of the letters’ authors towards Cyrulnik and what they expect from him. Second, it proposes to understand resilience as a language game used to communicate about suffering and then analyses why certain readers feel resilient while others don’t. It concludes that this way of reacting to adversity (i. e., tapping one’s inner resources, never giving up) is particularly desirable in a context where autonomy has become more prestigious.