AJS; American Journal Of Sociology[JOURNAL]
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200 papers
Social Class and Income Inequality in the United States: Ownership, Authority, and Personal Income Distribution from 1980 to 2010.
Wodtke GT
AJS · 2016 Mar · PMID 27087695 · Full text
This study outlines a theory of social class based on workplace ownership and authority relations, and it investigates the link between social class and growth in personal income inequality since the 1980s. Inequality tr...
This study outlines a theory of social class based on workplace ownership and authority relations, and it investigates the link between social class and growth in personal income inequality since the 1980s. Inequality trends are governed by changes in between-class income differences, changes in the relative size of different classes, and changes in within-class income dispersion. Data from the General Social Survey are used to investigate each of these changes in turn and to evaluate their impact on growth in inequality at the population level. Results indicate that between-class income differences grew by about 60% since the 1980s and that the relative size of different classes remained fairly stable. A formal decomposition analysis indicates that changes in the relative size of different social classes had a small dampening effect and that growth in between-class income differences had a large inflationary effect on trends in personal income inequality.
Ethnic Composition and Friendship Segregation: Differential Effects for Adolescent Natives and Immigrants.
Smith S, Van Tubergen F, Maas I … +1 more , McFarland DA
AJS · 2016 Jan · PMID 27017710 · Publisher ↗
Ethnically diverse settings provide opportunities for interethnic friendship but can also increase the preference for same-ethnic friendship. Therefore, same-ethnic friendship preferences, or ethnic homophily, can work a...
Ethnically diverse settings provide opportunities for interethnic friendship but can also increase the preference for same-ethnic friendship. Therefore, same-ethnic friendship preferences, or ethnic homophily, can work at cross-purposes with policy recommendations to diversify ethnic representation in social settings. In order to effectively overcome ethnic segregation, we need to identify those factors within diverse settings that exacerbate the tendency toward ethnic homophily. Using unique data and multiple network analyses, the authors examine 529 adolescent friendship networks in English, German, Dutch, and Swedish schools and find that the ethnic composition of school classes relates differently to immigrant and native homophily. Immigrant homophily disproportionately increases as immigrants see more same-ethnic peers, and friendship density among natives has no effect on this. By contrast, native homophily remains relatively low until natives see dense groups of immigrants. The authors' results suggest that theories of interethnic competition and contact opportunities apply differently to ethnic majority and minority groups.
Neighborhood Effect Heterogeneity by Family Income and Developmental Period.
Wodtke GT, Harding DJ, Elwert F
AJS · 2016 Jan · PMID 27017709 · Full text
Effects of disadvantaged neighborhoods on child educational outcomes likely depend on a family's economic resources and the timing of neighborhood exposures during the course of child development. This study investigates...
Effects of disadvantaged neighborhoods on child educational outcomes likely depend on a family's economic resources and the timing of neighborhood exposures during the course of child development. This study investigates how timing of exposure to disadvantaged neighborhoods during childhood versus adolescence affects high school graduation and whether these effects vary across families with different income levels. It follows 6,137 children in the PSID from childhood through adolescence and overcomes methodological problems associated with the joint endogeneity of neighborhood context and family income by adapting novel counterfactual methods--a structural nested mean model estimated via two-stage regression with residuals--for time-varying treatments and time-varying effect moderators. Results indicate that exposure to disadvantaged neighborhoods, particularly during adolescence, has a strong negative effect on high school graduation and that this negative effect is more severe for children from poor families.
Does Racial Isolation in School Lead to Long-Term Disadvantages? Labor Market Consequences of High School Racial Composition.
Gamoran A, Collares AC, Barfels S
AJS · 2016 Jan · PMID 27017708 · Publisher ↗
School racial composition has modest effects on test score gaps, but evidence of a longer-term impact is scarce. Perpetuation theory suggests that blacks who attend schools with higher proportions of white classmates may...
School racial composition has modest effects on test score gaps, but evidence of a longer-term impact is scarce. Perpetuation theory suggests that blacks who attend schools with higher proportions of white classmates may have better job outcomes. Multilevel analyses of two national longitudinal surveys reveal no effects of high school racial composition on occupational status, employment, or annual earnings for blacks or whites. For other minority groups, attending schools with more whites impedes occupational advancement. For all groups, however, school racial composition predicts workplace racial composition: Whites who attend high schools with higher proportions of white students have higher proportions of white coworkers, while nonwhites who attend schools with higher proportions of whites have fewer same-race coworkers. The findings are modest in size but robust to alternative specifications, and sensitivity analyses support a causal interpretation for same-race coworkers. These results support perpetuation theory for workplace composition but not for stratification outcomes.
A Dynamic Model of Cultural Reproduction.
Jaeger MM, Breen R
AJS · 2016 Jan · PMID 27017707 · Publisher ↗
The authors draw on Pierre Bourdieu's theory of cultural reproduction to develop a formal model of the pathways through which cultural capital acts to enhance children's educational and socioeconomic success. The authors...
The authors draw on Pierre Bourdieu's theory of cultural reproduction to develop a formal model of the pathways through which cultural capital acts to enhance children's educational and socioeconomic success. The authors' approach brings conceptual and empirical clarity to an important area of study. Their model describes how parents transmit cultural capital to their children and how children convert cultural capital into educational success. It also provides a behavioral framework for interpreting parental investments in cultural capital. The authors review results from existing empirical research on the role of cultural capital in education to demonstrate the usefulness of their model for interpretative purposes, and they use National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979--Children and Young Adults survey data to test some of its implications.
Race Making in a Penal Institution.
Walker ML
AJS · 2016 Jan · PMID 27017706 · Publisher ↗
This article provides a ground-level investigation into the lives of penal inmates, linking the literature on race making and penal management to provide an understanding of racial formation processes in a modern penal i...
This article provides a ground-level investigation into the lives of penal inmates, linking the literature on race making and penal management to provide an understanding of racial formation processes in a modern penal institution. Drawing on 135 days of ethnographic data collected as an inmate in a Southern California county jail system, the author argues that inmates are subjected to two mutually constitutive racial projects--one institutional and the other microinteractional. Operating in symbiosis within a narrative of risk management, these racial projects increase (rather than decrease) incidents of intraracial violence and the potential for interracial violence. These findings have implications for understanding the process of racialization and evaluating the effectiveness of penal management strategies.
Making the City "Second Nature": Freegan "Dumpster Divers" and the Materiality of Morality.
Barnard AV
AJS · 2016 Jan · PMID 27017705 · Publisher ↗
How do people maintain deeply held moral identities in a seemingly immoral social environment? Cultural sociologists and social psychologists have focused on how individuals cope with contexts that make acting on moral m...
How do people maintain deeply held moral identities in a seemingly immoral social environment? Cultural sociologists and social psychologists have focused on how individuals cope with contexts that make acting on moral motivations difficult by building supportive networks and embedding themselves in communities of like-minded people. In this article, however, the author argues that actors can achieve a moral "sense of one's place" through a habitus that leverages the material dimensions of place itself. In particular, he shows how one community of radical environmental activists make affirming moral identities centered on living "naturally" seem like "second nature," even in a seemingly unnatural and immoral urban environment, by reconfiguring their physical world. The author shows how nonhuman objects serve as proofs of moral labor, markers of moral boundaries, and reminders of moral values, playing both a facilitating and constraining role in moral life.
Peer Influence, Genetic Propensity, and Binge Drinking: A Natural Experiment and a Replication.
Guo G, Li Y, Wang H … +2 more , Cai T, Duncan GJ
AJS · 2015 Nov · PMID 26900620 · Full text
The authors draw data from the College Roommate Study (ROOM) and the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health to investigate gene-environment interaction effects on youth binge drinking. In ROOM, the environmenta...
The authors draw data from the College Roommate Study (ROOM) and the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health to investigate gene-environment interaction effects on youth binge drinking. In ROOM, the environmental influence was measured by the precollege drinking behavior of randomly assigned roommates. Random assignment safeguards against friend selection and removes the threat of gene-environment correlation that makes gene-environment interaction effects difficult to interpret. On average, being randomly assigned a drinking peer as opposed to a nondrinking peer increased college binge drinking by 0.5-1.0 episodes per month, or 20%-40% the average amount of binge drinking. However, this peer influence was found only among youths with a medium level of genetic propensity for alcohol use; those with either a low or high genetic propensity were not influenced by peer drinking. A replication of the findings is provided in data drawn from Add Health. The study shows that gene-environment interaction analysis can uncover social-contextual effects likely to be missed by traditional sociological approaches.
Abortion Liberalization in World Society, 1960-2009.
Boyle EH, Kim M, Longhofer W
AJS · 2015 Nov · PMID 26900619 · Full text
Controversy sets abortion apart from other issues studied by world society theorists, who consider the tendency for policies institutionalized at the global level to diffuse across very different countries. The authors c...
Controversy sets abortion apart from other issues studied by world society theorists, who consider the tendency for policies institutionalized at the global level to diffuse across very different countries. The authors conduct an event history analysis of the spread (however limited) of abortion liberalization policies from 1960 to 2009. After identifying three dominant frames (a women's rights frame, a medical frame, and a religious, natural family frame), the authors find that indicators of a scientific, medical frame show consistent association with liberalization of policies specifying acceptable grounds for abortion. Women's leadership roles have a stronger and more consistent liberalizing effect than do countries' links to a global women's rights discourse. Somewhat different patterns emerge around the likelihood of adopting an additional policy, controlling for first policy adoption. Even as support for women's autonomy has grown globally, with respect to abortion liberalization, persistent, powerful frames compete at the global level, preventing robust policy diffusion.
Love Thy Neighbor? Ethnoracial Diversity and Trust Reexamined.
Abascal M, Baldassarri D
AJS · 2015 Nov · PMID 26900618 · Publisher ↗
According to recent research, ethnoracial diversity negatively affects trust and social capital. This article challenges the current conception and measurement of "diversity" and invites scholars to rethink "so-cial capi...
According to recent research, ethnoracial diversity negatively affects trust and social capital. This article challenges the current conception and measurement of "diversity" and invites scholars to rethink "so-cial capital" in complex societies. It reproduces the analysis of Putnam and shows that the association between diversity and self-reported trust is a compositional artifact attributable to residential sorting: non-whites report lower trust and are overrepresented in heterogeneous communities. The association between diversity and trust is better explained by differences between communities and their residents in terms of race/ethnicity, residential stability, and economic conditions; these classic indicators of inequality, not diversity, strongly and consistently predict self-reported trust. Diversity indexes also obscure the distinction between in-group and out-group contact. For whites, heterogeneity means more out-group neighbors; for nonwhites, heterogeneity means more in-group neighbors. Therefore, separate analyses were conducted by ethnoracial groups. Only for whites does living among out-group members--not in diverse communities per se--negatively predict trust.
The Theory of Industrial Society and Cultural Schemata: Does the "Cultural Myth of Stigma" Underlie the WHO Schizophrenia Paradox?
Pescosolido BA, Martin JK, Olafsdottir S … +3 more , Long JS, Kafadar K, Medina TR
AJS · 2015 Nov · PMID 26640277 · Full text
The WHO's International Studies of Schizophrenia conclude that schizophrenia may have a more benign course in "developing" societies than in the West. The authors focus on this finding's most common corollary: cultural s...
The WHO's International Studies of Schizophrenia conclude that schizophrenia may have a more benign course in "developing" societies than in the West. The authors focus on this finding's most common corollary: cultural schemata are shaped by the transition from agrarian to industrial society. Developing societies are viewed as traditional, gemeinschaft cultures lacking the stigmatizing beliefs about persons with mental illness held in modern, gesellschaft cultures of developed societies. The Stigma in Global Context-Mental Health Study formalized the cultural myth of public stigma (CMPS) with propositions linking level of development to intolerant, exclusionary, and individualistic attitudes. In 17 countries, the authors find no support for the corollary; where support is found, the findings are opposite expectations, with developed societies reporting lower stigma levels. Reconceptualizing of the cultural landscape on more specific dimensions also produces null or contrary findings. This correction to nostalgic myths of cultural context in developing societies thwarts misguided treatment, policy, and stigma-reduction efforts.
Representing Human Rights Violations in Darfur: Global Justice, National Distinctions.
Savelsberg JJ, Brehm HN
AJS · 2015 Sep · PMID 26594717 · Publisher ↗
This article examines how international judicial interventions in mass atrocity influence representations of violence. It relies on content analysis of 3,387 articles and opinion pieces in leading newspapers from eight W...
This article examines how international judicial interventions in mass atrocity influence representations of violence. It relies on content analysis of 3,387 articles and opinion pieces in leading newspapers from eight Western countries, compiled into the Darfur Media Dataset, as well as in-depth interviews to assess how media frame violence in the Darfur region of Sudan. Overall, it finds that UN Security Council and International Criminal Court interventions increase representations of mass violence as crime in all countries under investigation, although each country applies the crime frame at a different level. Reporting suffering and categorizing the violence as genocide also varies across countries. Comparative case studies identify country specific structural and cultural forces that appear to account for these differences. Multilevel multivariate analyses confirm the explanatory power of cultural sensitivities and policy practices, while individual-and organization-level factors, such as reporters' gender and the newspapers' ideological orientation, also have explanatory power.
The Making of a Good Woman: Extended Parental Leave Entitlements and Mothers' Work Commitment in Germany.
Gangl M, Ziefle A
AJS · 2015 Sep · PMID 26594716 · Publisher ↗
The authors investigate the relationship between family policy and women's attachment to the labor market, focusing specifically on policy feedback on women's subjective work commitment. They utilize a quasi-experimental...
The authors investigate the relationship between family policy and women's attachment to the labor market, focusing specifically on policy feedback on women's subjective work commitment. They utilize a quasi-experimental design to identify normative policy effects from changes in mothers' work commitment in conjunction with two policy changes that significantly extended the length of statutory parental leave entitlements in Germany. Using unique survey data from the German Socio-Economic Panel and difference-in-differences, triple-differenced, and instrumental variables estimators for panel data, they obtain consistent empirical evidence that increasing generosity of leave entitlements led to a decline in mothers' work commitment in both East and West Germany. They also probe potential mediating mechanisms and find strong evidence for role exposure and norm setting effects. Finally, they demonstrate that policy-induced shifts in mothers' preferences have contributed to. retarding women's labor force participation after childbirth in Germany, especially as far as mothers' return to full-time employment is concerned.
Group Threat and Policy Change: The Spatial Dynamics of Prohibition Politics, 1890-1919.
Andrews KT, Seguin C
AJS · 2015 Sep · PMID 26594715 · Publisher ↗
The authors argue that group threat is a key driver of the adoption of new and controversial policies. Conceptualizing threat in spatial terms, they argue that group threat is activated through the joint occurrence of (1...
The authors argue that group threat is a key driver of the adoption of new and controversial policies. Conceptualizing threat in spatial terms, they argue that group threat is activated through the joint occurrence of (1) proximity to threatening groups and (2) the population density of threatened groups. By analyzing the adoption of county and state "dry laws" banning alcohol from 1890 to 1919, they first show that prohibition victories were driven by the relative strength of supportive constituencies such as native whites and rural residents, vis-à-vis opponents such as Irish, Italian, or German immigrants or Catholics. Second, they show that threat contributed to prohibition victories: counties bordering large immigrant or urban populations, which did not themselves contain similar populations, were more likely to adopt dry laws. Threat arises primarily from interactions between spatially proximate units at the local level, and therefore higher-level policy change is not reducible to the variables driving local policy.
From Narcissism to Face Work: Two Views on the Self in Social Interaction.
Peräkylä A
AJS · 2015 Sep · PMID 26594714 · Publisher ↗
Through the analysis of conversational interaction and clinical notes, this article develops conceptual linkages between the Goffmanian concept of face and the psychoanalytic and psychiatric understandings of narcissism....
Through the analysis of conversational interaction and clinical notes, this article develops conceptual linkages between the Goffmanian concept of face and the psychoanalytic and psychiatric understandings of narcissism. Self-cathexis--the investment of libidinal emotion to the image of self--is a key issue both for Goffman and in psychoanalytic studies of narcissism. For Goffman, the self and its cathexis are inherently fragile interactional achievements, whereas for psychoanalysts such as Kernberg and Kohut, they are relatively stable intrapsychic structures. An application of Goffman's theory to narcissistic personality disorders suggests that pathological narcissism involves the isolation of the person's self-image from interactional. practices and a consequent inability to benefit from face work in ordinary social encounters. Clinical experience suggests revisions to the theory of face work: there is a biographical continuity in a person's experience of face, and successful participation in face work is made possible by the psychic capacity of playful orientation to one's own and others' narcissistic illusions. Such playful orientation is manifested through the interactional practices of role distancing.
The Cost of Color: Skin Color, Discrimination, and Health among African-Americans.
Monk EP
AJS · 2015 Sep · PMID 26594713 · Publisher ↗
In this study, the author uses a nationally representative survey to examine the relationship(s) between skin tone, discrimination, and health among African-Americans. He finds that skin tone is a significant predictor o...
In this study, the author uses a nationally representative survey to examine the relationship(s) between skin tone, discrimination, and health among African-Americans. He finds that skin tone is a significant predictor of multiple forms of perceived discrimination (including perceived skin color discrimination from whites and blacks) and, in turn, these forms of perceived discrimination are significant predictors of key health outcomes, such as depression and self-rated mental and physical health. Intraracial health differences related to skin tone (and discrimination) often rival or even exceed disparities between blacks and whites as a whole. The author also finds that self-reported skin tone, conceptualized as a form of embodied social status, is a stronger predictor of perceived discrimination than interviewer-rated skin tone. He discusses the implications of these findings for the study of ethnoracial health disparities and highlights the utility of cognitive and multidimensional approaches to ethnoracial and social inequality.
Cooperative Networks: Altruism, Group Solidarity, Reciprocity, and Sanctioning in Ugandan Producer Organizations.
Baldassarri D
AJS · 2015 Sep · PMID 26594712 · Publisher ↗
Repeated interaction and social networks are commonly considered viable solutions to collective action problems. This article identifies and systematically measures four general mechanisms--that is, generalized altruism,...
Repeated interaction and social networks are commonly considered viable solutions to collective action problems. This article identifies and systematically measures four general mechanisms--that is, generalized altruism, group solidarity, reciprocity, and the threat of sanctioning--and tests which of them brings about cooperation in the context of Ugandan producer organizations. Using an innovative methodological framework that combines "lab-in-the-field" experiments with survey interviews and complete social networks data, the article goes beyond the assessment of a relationship between social networks and collective outcomes to study the mechanisms that favor cooperative behavior. The article first establishes a positive relationship between position in the network structure and propensity to cooperate in the producer organization and then uses farmers' behavior in dictator and public goods games to test different mechanisms that may account for such a relationship. Results show that cooperation is induced by patterns of reciprocity that emerge through repeated interaction rather than other-regarding preferences like altruism or group solidarity.
Urbanization as Socioenvironmental Succession: The Case of Hazardous Industrial Site Accumulation.
Elliott JR, Frickel S
AJS · 2015 May · PMID 26478941 · Publisher ↗
This study rehabilitates concepts from classical human ecology and synthesizes them with contemporary urban and environmental sociology to advance a theory of urbanization as socioenvironmental succession. The theory ill...
This study rehabilitates concepts from classical human ecology and synthesizes them with contemporary urban and environmental sociology to advance a theory of urbanization as socioenvironmental succession. The theory illuminates how social and biophysical phenomena interact endogenously at the local level to situate urban land use patterns recursively and reciprocally in place. To demonstrate this theory we conduct a historical-comparative analysis of hazardous industrial site accumulation in four U.S. cities, using a relational database that was assembled for more than 11,000 facilities that operated during the past half century--most of which remain unacknowledged in government reports. Results show how three iterative processes--hazardous industrial churning, residential churning, and risk containment--intersect to produce successive socioenvironmental changes that are highly relevant to but often missed by research on urban growth machines, environmental inequality, and systemic risk.
Explaining the Persistence of Health Disparities: Social Stratification and the Efficiency-Equity Trade-off in the Kidney Transplantation System.
Daw J
AJS · 2015 May · PMID 26478940 · Publisher ↗
Why do health disparities persist when their previous mechanisms are eliminated? Fundamental-cause theorists argue that social position primarily improves health through two metamechanisms: better access to health inform...
Why do health disparities persist when their previous mechanisms are eliminated? Fundamental-cause theorists argue that social position primarily improves health through two metamechanisms: better access to health information and technology. I argue that the general, cumulative, and embodied consequences of social stratification can produce another metamechanism: an efficiency-equity trade-off. A case in point is kidney transplantation, where the mechanisms previously thought to link race to outcomes--ability to pay and certain factors in the kidney allocation system--have been greatly reduced, yet large disparities persist. I show that these current disparities are rooted in factors that directly influence posttransplant success, placing efficiency and racial/ethnic equity at cross-purposes.
Caste and Choice: The Influence of Developmental Idealism on Marriage Behavior.
Allendorf K, Thornton A
AJS · 2015 Jul · PMID 26430712 · Full text
Is the marriage behavior of young people determined by their socioeconomic characteristics or their endorsement of developmental idealism? This article addresses this question using a unique longitudinal data set from Ne...
Is the marriage behavior of young people determined by their socioeconomic characteristics or their endorsement of developmental idealism? This article addresses this question using a unique longitudinal data set from Nepal and provides the first individual-level test of developmental idealism theory. The authors find that unmarried individuals with greater endorsement of developmental idealism in 2008 were more likely by 2012 to choose their own spouse, including a spouse of a different caste, rather than have an arranged marriage. Those with salaried work experience were also less likely to have arranged marriages, but urban proximity and education were not significant. The authors conclude that both developmental idealism and socioeconomic characteristics influence marriage and that their influences are largely independent.
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