Gianluca MANZO, La spirale des inégalités. Choix scolaires en France et en Italie au XXe siècle, Paris, Presses de l'Université Paris-Sorbonne (PUPS), coll. L'intelligence du social, 2009, 336 p. (ISBN 978-2-84050-6444-7), , 2009

La Spirale des inégalités analyzes both the absolute and the relative dimension of educational inequalities in France and Italy in the 1990s as well as during the twentieth century. The book at the same time describes the structure of these inequalities and suggests a theoretical model to explain them. According to this model, sociocultural constraints, the social return of education, cost-benefit comparison and social interactions make the emergence of educational inequalities possible. In order to study this generative model, the author builds an agent-based simulation. The analysis of this artificial society shows the extent to which a segregated social network tends to amplify the orginal differences between groups in terms of resources, preferences and intermediary educational outcomes. La Spirale des inégalités thus buils on an original and ambitious integration of the so-called analytical sociology, quantitative sociology, mathematical and computational sociology.

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