Nan Dirk de Graaf
Nan Dirk de Graaf (born 1958) is a Dutch sociologist working in Nuffield College, University of Oxford. He is known for his work on social stratification, religion (with a focus on secularisation), political sociology, the impact of social mobility on a variety of social issues (e.g., health, cultural consumption, and political preferences), pro-social behaviour, as well as his books. Biography Nan Dirk de Graaf joined Nuffield College in 2007 and is an Official Fellow and a Professor in Sociology. He obtained his PhD at Utrecht University (1988) and was a post-doc researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Education and Human Development in Berlin (1988-1989). De Graaf was a research fellow of the Royal Netherlands Academy (1990-1995) and a full Professor in Sociology at Nijmegen University (2001-2007). Between 2003 and 2007 he was the chair of the Inter-university Centre for Social Science Theory and Methodology (ICS). Research Social Stratification De Graaf’s work challenged some of the notions of the transmission of social capital as formulated by Pierre Bourdieu. For Bourdieu, the effect of families’ social origin on educational attainment is dependent on economic capital and increasingly on cultural resources of privileged parents. De Graaf and colleagues, contrary to Bourdieu’s claims,