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Advanced modernity is regarded as an era of time obsession and people in modernized societies seem to live harried lives. Leading time sociologists like Hartmut Rosa adopt a modernization-critical stance and ascribe an accelerated pace of life and frequent time scarcity to socioeconomic and technological advancement. According to these protagonists of the ''acceleration debate,'' time becomes increasingly precious due to severely changed conditions of work and private life. Against this background it can be assumed that many people may suffer from an unsatisfactory work-life balance. This study uses individual-level data from the fifth round of the European Social Survey (fielded in 2010/11) as well as suitable country-level data capturing key features of advanced modernity to empirically test assumptions arising from the ''acceleration debate.'' Results from multilevel analyses of 23 European countries provide some confirmation of these assumptions. While most macro indicators for 2010 reflecting a certain stage of development are uninfluential, a country's degree of globalization matters, and moreover growth rates of crucial macro indicators signaling paces of development exert an impact on people's work-life balance in the assumed direction: In countries with accelerations in terms of economic development, coverage of households with internet access and numbers of new cars working people show a significantly greater inclination toward an unsatisfactory work-life balance. Aside from results at the country-level individual-level determinants and group-specific differences of work-life balance under different conditions of advanced modernity are presented. This study's two main

Socioeconomic inequality and conflicts regarding distributional issues have resurfaced in many OECD countries over the past three decades. Whereas most research has focused on the objective determinants of perceived social conflicts, we contribute a new facet to this discussion by assessing the relevance of collective stratification beliefs as an independent driver of vertical conflict perceptions. After formulating theoretical positions that give precedence to two factors in explaining the perceptions of social conflicts -objective inequality and the collective stratification belief -we use individual-level data from the 2009 International Social Survey Programme, along with suitable country-level indicators to evaluate both hypotheses. Amid the diverse collective stratification beliefs, we focus on the role of an egalitarian (middle-) class imagery. We are particularly interested in the extent to which such a class imagery can mediate the relationship between socioeconomic inequality and individual conflict perceptions. The results of our multilevel analyses of 27 OECD countries indicate that an egalitarian (middle-) class imagery held by a certain share of a country's population constitutes a distinct dimension of reality and clearly dominates country-level objective inequality in the explanation of individually perceived social conflicts.

Globalization refers to a growth in international trade, the integration of financial markets and investment flows as well as greater labour mobility. It is also associated with greater market volatility and intensified competition. The general question we address is, does globalization strengthen or weaken public support for governmental redistribution? However, rather than assuming that globalization undermines or buffers welfare state support generally, we suppose that this effect might be class-specific. It might lead to a reduction in welfare state support for better-off classes while those at the lower end of the social strata may call for more governmental intervention. We test this hypothesis on the basis of cross-sectional data from the fourth round of the European Social Survey (ESS) (fielded 2008/2009). The results of multilevel analyses of 31 countries indicate that while welfare state support is generally lower in globalized countries, class cleavages in welfare attitudes are neither intensified nor diluted under conditions of globalization.

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