Research field

My research fields and interests are comparative-historical sociology, sociology of education and education politics, and more generally, comparative political economy. I have also done comparative-historical research on prostitution politics and on labor unions, with a focus on Scandinavia.

I am currently involved in the NFR-research project "Admission Impossible? School Choice in European Cities" (start date 1st of October 2021). Within this project, I am responsible for project 2, which investigates different models of school choice in Norway, making use of a combination of survey data, qualitative interviews and focus groups with parents and students of different socio-economic backgrounds to gain an insight into their experiences and preferences regarding school choice.

Other topics I am interested in are the prolongation of compulsory schooling, girls' educational expansion or state-church relations in education politics.

My PhD-project consisted of a comparison of lower secondary education reforms in Norway and Germany during the 1960s and 1970s, with a focus on comprehensive school reforms. In my thesis ("Cleavages and Coalitions", 2018), I analyze debates and power struggles around the reforms, focusing on collective actors such as political parties and teachers' organizations, their power resources, ideology, coalitions and conflicts.

 

I currently teach the BA module SOS100 (Invitation to Sociology). I have previously taught the MA module SOS322 (Work, Class and Education) and the BA module SOS108 (Education and Society).

Popular scientific article

• Sass, Katharina (2024). Comprehensive School Struggles: Mapping Social Divisions and Political Alliances in Norway and Germany. (external link)

Report

• Sass, Katharina; Aga, Sarah Christin; Lorentzen, Thomas (2024). Nøkkeltallrapport Bergen: Elevers erfaringer med og meninger om valg av videregående skole. (external link)
• Aga, Sarah Christin; Sass, Katharina; Rong, Anders Tonning (2024). Dokumentasjonsrapport om spørreundersøkelsen «Valg av videregående skole», gjennomført i 2023 . (external link)

Academic monograph

• Sass, Katharina (2024). Die Politik der Gesamtschulreform Spaltungslinien, Akteure und Koalitionen in Deutschland und Norwegen. (external link)
• Sass, Katharina (2022). The Politics of Comprehensive School Reforms: Cleavages and Coalitions. (external link)

Academic article

• Sass, Katharina (2023). Bündnis der Gesamtschulgegner*innen? Die Rolle der CDU in der Bildungspolitik von NRW in den 1950er bis 1970er Jahren. (external link)
• Sass, Katharina (2022). Struggling for girls’ education: coalition strategies of Norwegian and German women’s rights activists in comparative-historical perspective. (external link)
• Sass, Katharina; Kuhnle, Stein (2022). The Gender Cleavage: Updating Rokkanian Theory for the Twenty-First Century. (external link)

Academic chapter/article/Conference paper

• Sass, Katharina (2023). Om volden i prostitusjonen - eller: Hvordan skrive en klassiker som virkelig gjør en forskjell?. (external link)

Book review

• Sass, Katharina (2020). Prostitution als NS-Kriegsmittel. (external link)

See a complete overview of publications in Cristin.

Katharina Sass (2022): The Politics of Comprehensive School Reforms: Cleavages and Coalitions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Available with Open Access.

Katharina Sass, Stein Kuhnle (2022): The Gender Cleavage: Updating Rokkanian Theory for the Twenty-First Century, Social Politics: International Studies in Gender, State & Society, https://doi.org/10.1093/sp/jxac003  

Katharina Sass (2020): Cleavage structures and school politics: a Rokkanian comparative-historical analysis, in: History of Education, 49 (5), pp. 636-660, https://doi.org/10.1080/0046760X.2020.1747645

Katharina Sass (2018). Sass, Katharina. Cleavages and Coalitions. Comprehensive School Reforms in Norway and North Rhine-Westphalia/Germany (1954-1979). University of Bergen 2018 (ISBN 978-82-308-3747-4) 414 s.

Katharina Sass (2016): Bestraft die Freier! Der Erfolg der skandinavischen Sexkaufverbote, in: Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik, 2/16, pp. 113-120.

Katharina Sass (2015): Understanding comprehensive school reforms: Insights from comparative-historical sociology and power resources theory, in: European Educational Research Journal (online), 14(3-4), pp. 240-256.

Katharina Sass (2014): How to sit on Two Sides of the Table? Swedish and Norwegian Unions’ Approaches to Representative Worker Participation during the 20th Century, in: Nordic Journal of Working Life Studies, 4(3), pp. 79-98.

Book Review by Katharina Sass in WSI-Mitteilungen (4/2014):Cornelia Heintze, 2013: Die Straße des Erfolgs. Rahmenbedingungen, Umfang und Finanzierung kommunaler Dienste im deutsch-skandinavischen Vergleich. Marburg: Metropolis-Verlag.  

Katharina Sass (2014): History, agency, structure and objectivity in the work of Max Weber and Antonio Gramsci. Philosophy of Science Essay, June 2014, University of Bergen, Department of Sociology.

Katharina Sass (2012): Die gewerkschaftliche Organisation in Norwegen und Schweden. Berufspartikularismus und Betriebsdemokratie als Organisationsprobleme. Diplomarbeit im Fach Soziologie. Universität zu Köln.