Although it has long been claimed that the welfare state is crisis, demographic and economic pressures on state welfare provision are particularly intense today, and invite a systemic analysis of what welfare is for. Doing so widens the welfare debate from its habitually narrow and technocratic focus to include unfamiliar dialogue partners, such as Christian theology. This introductory chapter draws on the work of Gøsta Esping-Andersen to explain the nature of different welfare "regimes" and steer the conversation away from narrowly economic measures of welfare. It then touches on why Christian thought is a particularly fruitful dialogue partner in this, arguing that Christianity was present at the birth of the welfare state in Britain, and has continued to play an active role in both the support of state-based welfare, and in the delivery of welfare services. More pertinently, a systemic re-evaluation of welfare requires a careful understanding of the kind of creature whose welfare we are pursuing, and that is a subject on which Christian theology has much to contribute.

Compares those to whom the US government denies nonimmigrant visas to those it grants such visas in order to show how officers are more likely to deny visas to those who tell surveyors would not immigrate if they had the opportunity to do so whereas they are more likely to grant visas to those who told surveyors they would immigrate if they had an opportunity – contrary to what US immigration law ostensibly mandates visa officers to do. Officers are more likely to grant visas to those who possess indicators of what I define as (im)mobility capital. Such (im)mobility capital consists of only a subset of many measures of socioeconomic status and social ties, such as high levels of formal education, extensive travel experience, attendance at a selective school, and the number of years at their current job. The components I identified to comprise (im)mobility capital are also associated with whether a (non)immigrant visa applicant would be willing to spend more than half of the rest of their life in the country of destination if they had the opportunity. Adjudication about who to deny visas to by US visa officers is similar to how consulates of other countries operate.

My results about denial, deterrence, and disenchantment provide empirical support to how a push-retain-pull-repel model can help us understand why many remain ambivalent (im)mobile and never immigrate. I also review how my findings about each mechanism demonstrate how socioeconomic resources and social ties both facilitate and increase the costs of migration due to an interaction of immigration policy and social forces in society that incentivize individuals to establish stable ties to their society rather than migrate. This (im)mobility paradox makes international migration a far more difficult decision and unlikely event than many in migrant-destination countries perceive it to be. Finally, I reflect on how my data from the PIS the interaction of immigration policy and social forces stratifies potential immigrants who never immigrated due to deterrence, denial, and disenchantment into respectively an under-class, a lower class, and an upper class in the origin society, mirroring the stratification of immigrants through different pathways of assimilation in the migrant-destination society.

The way B-visa applicants’ presentation of self to surveyors and officers in their visa interviews differs from those that are applying for other types of visas-like degree-seeking student visas, cultural exchange visas, and skilled worker visas, which are more frequently converted to immigrant visas. This is due to a provision in the immigration law statute–the dual-intent doctrine–that encourages US visa officers to evaluate immigrant intent more strictly with the former than the latter by not denying nonimmigrant visas to such latter applicants based on the likelihood that they will change their mind about immigrating after they arrive in the United States. Therefore, I show how B nonimmigrant visa (NIVs) applicants answer questions differently than all other nonimmigrant visa applicants about how they first came to go abroad, why they want to visit the United States rather than another country, what questions the visa officer asked them, and why or why not they would immigrate or not into the United States. (Im)mobility capital is not as important to demonstrate for those applying for such high-conversion visas as those with low-conversion visas due to the dual-intent doctrine.

Our understanding of international migration as a general phenomenon and in its various aspects is still limited to a relative deficiency in knowledge about a possibly even larger population of individuals that might have counterfactually immigrated but did not. This book examines the processes that prevent migration via the interaction between (a) specific government policies; and (b) societal forces emanating from the social networks in which potential immigrants are embedded. Additional data, empirical results, and theories about potential immigrants help us contribute three new theoretical frameworks to international migration: (1) the push-retain-pull-repel model, (2) the (im)mobility paradox, and (3) how might-have-been-immigrants who do not immigrate due to denial, deterrence, and disenchantment are stratified as unequally as immigrants are. Previous scholars have already discovered much about denial, deterrence, and disenchantment but no study has systematically and comparatively analyzed these three processes alongside each other. The outline of chapters for this book examines different aspects of denial, deterrence, and disenchantment.

The public discourse on class and stratification in Japan experienced a dramatic paradigm shift towards the end of the twentieth century. Although widely portrayed as an egalitarian and predominantly middle-class society during the period of high economic growth until the early 1990s, Japan was suddenly deemed a society divided along class lines under the prolonged stagnation that characterized the Japanese economy for three decades, from the 1990s to the 2020s.

Based on macro-sociological data, this chapter delineates the focal points of debate on the analysis of class and stratification in Japan as a general prelude to specific spheres covered later in the book – cultural diversity and class competition in relation to generation, region, labor, education, gender, ethnicity, and so on.

There have been only a few surveys of radical economics and of those most have focused on a specific topic in economic literature. In the first years of the Union for Radical Political Economics (URPE) there were several proposals of definition of radical economics, including a foundational reliance on Marxian economics, the elaboration of an anti-marginalist paradigm, or the idealization of a radical scholar-activist. After an early enthusiasm, attempts at this kind of normative work fell away. Instead what drove radical work forward was critique and adaptation from pre-existing work in economics, particularly with respect to labor markets and its stratification. With labor issues often at its core, radical extended work into the analysis of education, gender, and the firm. Efforts to bring these strands of work together took a distinctively institutional flavour, not with the label of paradigm or radical, but as social structures of accumulation. The chapter concludes by examining radical textbooks and how they recorded the evolution and contributions of radical research.

This chapter advances the premise that one way in which racism impacts health and developmental outcomes is through the experiences of the finite resource of time. Although all humans experience the same twenty-four hours in a given day, how those hours are allocated, how much agency over how those hours are spent, and the lived experiences of that time are stratified by structural systems such as racism. Taking a lifecourse perspective, we describe how human development is shaped as much by social factors as biological influences, using time as an example. Ultimately, stratified experiences of time set the stage for racism to shape even the most fundamental of human experiences. We call upon the field to deepen our study of the connections between time, racism, and health inequities, and offer a few recommendations for future research.

Descriptive psychiatry has served our field well for more than half a century. The need to rely on phenomenology cannot be blamed for the structural errors built into the DSM system, such as choosing categories over dimensions, pseudo-precision to serve interrater reliability, and the arbitrary division of psychopathology into nearly three hundred distinct categories. Like all of medicine, psychiatric treatments exhibit unacceptable levels of variability in patient outcomes, consistent with cryptic mechanistic heterogeneity underlying indistinguishable clinical presentations. The result is an aspiration for precision medicine using biomarkers to select the right treatment for the right patient at the right time. Unlike most of medicine, however, psychiatric disorders lack clear natural anchors, like amyloid and tau in Alzheimer’s disease, that nominate mechanisms, biomarkers, and treatment targets. Hyman argues that it is now scientifically possible, albeit still very difficult, to begin identifying mechanisms and biomarkers, and that a concerted effort is warranted.

This chapter explores the potential of realist evaluation methodology to uncover the complexity of implementing an English for Specific Purposes programme at a Saudi university. Realist evaluation draws on the principle of retroduction, which necessitates the redescription of causal components of an event into theoretically significant terms for a closer approximation to reality. The chapter investigates the interaction between underlying causal mechanisms and teachers’ reasonings that operate in a particular context, an interaction which leads to particular outcomes. To this end, we outline how the English for Specific Purposes programme was conceptualised, designed, and implemented, before we explain how relevant theories were defined by analysing the responses of the teachers who implemented the programme. The findings highlight the importance of viewing the role of ESP teachers and acknowledging the need for collaboration across disciplinary boundaries. The study provides further insight into the process of theorising from participants’ responses in the study of both embedded practices and underlying causal mechanisms operating within a specific professional community.

There are a number of microphysics and transport processes that can be extremely important to suppress or enhance the growth of these instabilities. I will provide a detailed description of how the hydrodynamic instability evolutions can be modified by incorporating the viscosity, surface tension, diffuse interface, and compressibility of the flows into the governing equations and growth rates.

Chapter 26 analyzes the political economy of higher education finance from an international perspective. This analysis documents and explains the increasingly stratified nature of higher education institutions by social class and, often, by level of public financing per student. It discusses the possible economic rationale for such stratification and unequal public investment in different strata. It also analyzes why some countries’ governments assume a high fraction of the cost of higher education expansion and others make families and students bear most of the cost. This comparative international analysis suggests that politics play a very important role in defining how higher education is financed and how that financing is used to shape the higher education system. The chapter makes the case that the “public” function of higher education is highly contested politically because of its direct role in providing access to higher productivity jobs and higher earnings figured in discussions about the worldwide trend toward expanding higher education through private institutions (many, for profit), and, in some societies, through increasing the share of private tuition payments in the financing of public institutions.