AJS; American Journal Of Sociology[JOURNAL]
Sun
200 papers
The Sound of Stigmatization: Sonic Habitus, Sonic Styles, and Boundary Work in an Urban Slum.
Schwarz O
AJS · 2015 Jul · PMID 26430711 · Publisher ↗
Based on focus groups and interviews with student renters in an Israeli slum, the article explores the contributions of differences in sonic styles and sensibilities to boundary work, social categorization, and evaluatio...
Based on focus groups and interviews with student renters in an Israeli slum, the article explores the contributions of differences in sonic styles and sensibilities to boundary work, social categorization, and evaluation. Alongside visual cues such as broken windows, bad neighborhoods are characterized by sonic cues, such as shouts from windows. Students understand "being ghetto" as being loud in a particular way and use loudness as a central resource in their boundary work. Loudness is read as a performative index of class and ethnicity, and the performance of middle-class studentship entails being appalled by stigmatized sonic practices and participating in their exoticization. However, the sonic is not merely yet another resource of boundary work. Paying sociological attention to senses other than vision reveals complex interactions between structures anchored in the body, structures anchored in language, and actors' identification strategies, which may refine theorizations of the body and the senses in social theory.
How Places Shape Identity: The Origins of Distinctive LBQ Identities in Four Small U.S. Cities.
Brown-Saracino J
AJS · 2015 Jul · PMID 26430710 · Publisher ↗
Tools from the study of neighborhood effects, place distinction, and regional identity are employed in an ethnography of four small cities with growing populations of lesbian, bisexual, and queer-identified (LBQ) women t...
Tools from the study of neighborhood effects, place distinction, and regional identity are employed in an ethnography of four small cities with growing populations of lesbian, bisexual, and queer-identified (LBQ) women to explain why orientations to sexual identity are relatively constant within each site, despite informants' within-city demographic heterogeneity, but vary substantially across the sites, despite common place-based attributes. The author introduces the concept of "sexual identity cultures"--and reveals the defining role of cities in shaping their contours. She finds that LBQ numbers and acceptance, place narratives, and newcomers' encounters with local social attributes serve as touchstones. The article looks beyond major categorical differences (e.g., urban/rural) to understand how and why identities evolve and vary and to reveal the fundamental interplay of demographic, cultural, and other city features previously thought isolatable. The findings challenge notions of identity as fixed and emphasize the degree to which self-understanding and group understanding remain collective accomplishments.
Stress and Hardship after Prison.
Western B, Braga AA, Davis J … +1 more , Sirois C
AJS · 2015 Mar · PMID 26421345 · Publisher ↗
The historic increase in U.S. incarceration rates made the transition from prison to community common for poor, prime-age men and women. Leaving prison presents the challenge of social integration--of connecting with fam...
The historic increase in U.S. incarceration rates made the transition from prison to community common for poor, prime-age men and women. Leaving prison presents the challenge of social integration--of connecting with family and finding housing and a means of subsistence. The authors study variation in social integration in the first months after prison release with data from the Boston Reentry Study, a unique panel survey of 122 newly released prisoners. The data indicate severe material hardship immediately after incarceration. Over half of sample respondents were unemployed, two-thirds received public assistance, and many relied on female relatives for financial support and housing. Older respondents and those with histories of addiction and mental illness were the least socially integrated, with weak family ties, unstable housing, and low levels of employment. Qualitative interviews show that anxiety and feelings of isolation accompanied extreme material insecurity. Material insecurity combined with the adjustment to social life outside prison creates a stress of transition that burdens social relationships in high-incarceration communities.
Why Do Liberals Drink Lattes?
DellaPosta D, Shi Y, Macy M
AJS · 2015 Mar · PMID 26421344 · Publisher ↗
Popular accounts of "lifestyle politics" and "culture wars" suggest that political and ideological divisions extend also to leisure activities, consumption, aesthetic taste, and personal morality. Drawing on a total of 2...
Popular accounts of "lifestyle politics" and "culture wars" suggest that political and ideological divisions extend also to leisure activities, consumption, aesthetic taste, and personal morality. Drawing on a total of 22,572 pairwise correlations from the General Social Survey (1972-2010), the authors provide comprehensive empirical support for the anecdotal accounts. Moreover, most ideological differences in lifestyle cannot be explained by demographic covariates alone. The authors propose a surprisingly simplesolution to the puzzle of lifestyle politics. Computational experiments show how the self-reinforcing dynamics of homophily and influence dramatically amplify even very small elective affinities between lifestyle and ideology, producing a stereotypical world of "latte liberals" and "bird-hunting conservatives" much like the one in which we live.
Do Reputation Systems Undermine Trust? Divergent Effects of Enforcement Type on Generalized Trust and Trustworthiness.
Kuwabara K
AJS · 2015 Mar · PMID 26421343 · Publisher ↗
Research shows that enforcing cooperation using contracts or tangible sanctions can backfire, undermining people's intrinsic motivation to cooperate: when the enforcement is removed, people are less trusting or trustwort...
Research shows that enforcing cooperation using contracts or tangible sanctions can backfire, undermining people's intrinsic motivation to cooperate: when the enforcement is removed, people are less trusting or trustworthy than when there is no enforcement to begin with. The author examines whether reputation systems have similar consequences for generalized trust and trustworthiness. Using a web-based experiment simulating online market transactions (studies 1 and 2), he shows that reputation systems can reinforce generalized trust and trustworthiness, unlike contractual enforcement or relational enforcement based on repeated interactions. In a survey experiment (study 3), he finds that recalling their eBay feedback scores made participants more trusting and trustworthy. These results are predicated on the diffuse nature of reputational enforcement to reinforce perceptions of trust and trustworthiness. These results have implications for understanding how different forms of governance affect generalized trust and trustworthiness.
Go with Your Gut: Emotion and Evaluation in Job Interviews.
Rivera LA
AJS · 2015 Mar · PMID 26421342 · Publisher ↗
This article presents hiring as an emotional process rooted in interpersonal evaluation. Drawing from Randall Collins's theory of interaction ritual, the author offers a qualitative case study of elite professional servi...
This article presents hiring as an emotional process rooted in interpersonal evaluation. Drawing from Randall Collins's theory of interaction ritual, the author offers a qualitative case study of elite professional service firms to unpack how employers' emotional reactions to applicants in job interviews affect hiring evaluations. She finds that employers use subjective feelings of excitement and enthusiasm toward candidates-akin to Collins's concept of emotional energy--to-evaluate applicants and make hiring decisions. With these data, she constructs an original theoretical framework of emotional energy development, which highlights the qualities that tend to produce or inhibit the subjective experience of emotional energy in job interviews. Additionally, she outlines the particular phases of an encounter where energy gains and losses are most consequential for influencing hiring outcomes and inequalities. She discusses the implications of these findings for research on hiring, labor market stratification, and interaction rituals.
The Social Origins of Networks and Diffusion.
Centola D
AJS · 2015 Mar · PMID 26421341 · Publisher ↗
Recent research on social contagion has demonstrated significant effects of network topology on the dynamics of diffusion. However, network topologies are not given a priori. Rather, they are patterns of relations that e...
Recent research on social contagion has demonstrated significant effects of network topology on the dynamics of diffusion. However, network topologies are not given a priori. Rather, they are patterns of relations that emerge from individual and structural features of society, such as population composition, group heterogeneity, homophily, and social consolidation. Following Blau and Schwartz, the author develops a model of social network formation that explores how social and structural constraints on tie formation generate emergent social topologies and then explores the effectiveness of these social networks for the dynamics of social diffusion. Results show that, at one extreme, high levels of consolidation can create highly balkanized communities with poor integration of shared norms and practices. As suggested by Blau and Schwartz, reducing consolidation creates more crosscutting circles and significantly improves the dynamics of social diffusion across the population. However, the author finds that further reducing consolidation creates highly intersecting social networks that fail to support the widespread diffusion of norms and practices, indicating that successful social diffusion can depend on moderate to high levels of structural consolidation.
Reconceptualizing Agency within the Life Course: The Power of Looking Ahead.
Hitlin S, Johnson MK
AJS · 2015 Mar · PMID 26166833 · Full text
Empirical treatments of agency have not caught up with theoretical explication; empirical projects almost always focus on concurrent beliefs about one's ability to act successfully without sufficiently attending to tempo...
Empirical treatments of agency have not caught up with theoretical explication; empirical projects almost always focus on concurrent beliefs about one's ability to act successfully without sufficiently attending to temporality. The authors suggest that understanding the modern life course necessitates a multidimensional understanding of subjective agency involving (a) perceived capacities and (b) perceived life chances, or expectations about what life holds in store. The authors also suggest that a proper understanding of agency's potential power within a life course necessitates moving beyond the domain-specific expectations more typical of past sociological work. Using the Youth Development Study, the authors employ a scale of general life expectations in adolescence to explore the potential influence of a general sense of optimistic life expectations in addition to the traditional approach on a range of important outcomes.
Family structure instability, genetic sensitivity, and child well-being.
Mitchell C, Brooks-Gunn J, Garfinkel I … +3 more , McLanahar S, Notterman D, Hobcraft J
AJS · 2015 Jan · PMID 26046228 · Full text
The association between family structure instability and children's life chances is well documented, with children reared in stable, two-parent families experiencing more favorable outcomes than children in other family...
The association between family structure instability and children's life chances is well documented, with children reared in stable, two-parent families experiencing more favorable outcomes than children in other family arrangements. This study examines father household entrances and exits, distinguishing between the entrance of a biological father and a social father and testing for interactions between family structure instability and children's age, gender, and genetic characteristics. Using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study and focusing on changes in family structure by age (years 0-9), the authors show that father exits are associated with increases in children's antisocial behavior, a strong predictor of health and well-being in adulthood. The pattern for father entrances is more complicated, with entrances for the biological father being associated with lower antisocial behavior among boys and social father entrances being associated with higher antisocial behavior. Child's age does not moderate the association; however, genetic information in the models sharpens the findings substantially.
Game changer: the topology of creativity.
de Vaan M, Stark D, Vedres B
AJS · 2015 Jan · PMID 26046227 · Publisher ↗
This article examines the sociological factors that explain why some creative teams are able to produce game changers--cultural products that stand out as distinctive while also being critically recognized as outstanding...
This article examines the sociological factors that explain why some creative teams are able to produce game changers--cultural products that stand out as distinctive while also being critically recognized as outstanding. The authors build on work pointing to structural folding--the network property of a cohesive group whose membership overlaps with that of another cohesive group. They hypothesize that the effects of structural folding on game changing success are especially strong when overlapping groups are cognitively distant. Measuring social distance separately from cognitive distance and distinctiveness independently from critical acclaim, the authors test their hypothesis about structural folding and cognitive diversity by analyzing team reassembly for 12,422 video games and the career histories of 139,727 video game developers. When combined with cognitive distance, structural folding channels and mobilizes a productive tension of rules, roles, and codes that promotes successful innovation. In addition to serving as pipes and prisms, network ties are also the source of tools and tensions.
Where do inmmigrants fare worse? Modeling workplace wage gap variation with longitudinal employer-employee data.
Tomaskovic-Devey D, Hällsten M, Avent-Holt D
AJS · 2015 Jan · PMID 26046226 · Publisher ↗
The authors propose a strategy for observing and explaining workplace variance in categorically linked inequalities. Using Swedish economy-wide linked employer-employee panel data, the authors examine variation in workpl...
The authors propose a strategy for observing and explaining workplace variance in categorically linked inequalities. Using Swedish economy-wide linked employer-employee panel data, the authors examine variation in workplace wage inequalities between native Swedes and non-Western immigrants. Consistent with relational inequality theory, the authors' findings are that immigrant-native wage gaps vary dramatically across workplaces, even net of strong human capital controls. The authors also find that, net of observed and fixed-effect controls for individual traits, workplace immigrant-native wage gaps decline with increased workplace immigrant employment and managerial representation and increase when job segregation rises. These results are stronger in high-inequality workplaces and for white-collar employees: contexts in which one expects status-based claims on organizational resources, the central causal mechanism identified by relational inequality theory, to be stronger. The authors conclude that workplace variation in the non-Western immigrant-native wage gaps is contingent on organizational variationin the relative power of groups and the institutional context in which that power is exercised.
Emergent ghettos: black neighborhoods in New York and Chicago, 1880-1940.
Logan JR, Zhang W, Chunyu MD
AJS · 2015 Jan · PMID 26046225 · Full text
This article studies in detail the settlement patterns of blacks in the urban North from before the Great Migration and through 1940, focusing on the cases of New York and Chicago. It relies on new and rarely used data s...
This article studies in detail the settlement patterns of blacks in the urban North from before the Great Migration and through 1940, focusing on the cases of New York and Chicago. It relies on new and rarely used data sources, including census geocoded microdata from the 1880 census (allowing segregation patterns and processes to be studied at any geographic scale) and census data for 1900-1940 aggregated to enumeration districts. It is shown that blacks were unusually highly isolated in 1880 given their small share of the total population and that segregation reached high levels in both cities earlier than previously reported. Regarding sources of racial separation, neither higher class standing nor northern birth had much effect on whether blacks lived within or outside black neighborhoods in 1880 or 1940, and it is concluded that the processes that created large black ghettos were already in place several decades before 1940.
Race, self-selection, and the job search process.
Pager D, Pedulla DS
AJS · 2015 Jan · PMID 26046224 · Full text
While existing research has documented persistent barriers facing African-American job seekers, far less research has questioned how job seekers respond to this reality. Do minorities self-select into particular segments...
While existing research has documented persistent barriers facing African-American job seekers, far less research has questioned how job seekers respond to this reality. Do minorities self-select into particular segments of the labor market to avoid discrimination? Such questions have remained unanswered due to the lack of data available on the positions to which job seekers apply. Drawing on two original data sets with application-specific information, we find little evidence that blacks target or avoid particular job types. Rather, blacks cast a wider net in their search than similarly situated whites, including a greater range of occupational categories and characteristics in their pool of job applications. Additionally, we show that perceptions of discrimination are associated with increased search breadth, suggesting that broad search among African-Americans represents an adaptation to labor market discrimination. Together these findings provide novel evidence on the role of race and self-selection in the job search process.
Do Different Methods for Modeling Age-Graded Trajectories Yield Consistent and Valid Results?
Warren JR, Luo L, Halpern-Manners A … +2 more , Raymo JM, Palloni A
AJS · 2015 May · PMID 28515496 · Full text
Data on age-sequenced trajectories of individuals' attributes are used for a growing number of research purposes. However, there is no consensus about which method to use to identify the number of discrete trajectories i...
Data on age-sequenced trajectories of individuals' attributes are used for a growing number of research purposes. However, there is no consensus about which method to use to identify the number of discrete trajectories in a population or to assign individuals to a specific trajectory group. We modeled real and simulated trajectory data using "naïve" methods, optimal matching, grade of membership models, and three types of finite mixture models. We found that these methods produced inferences about the number of trajectories that frequently differ (1) from and (2) from as represented by simulation parameters. We also found that they differed in the assignment of individuals to trajectory groups. In light of these findings, we argue that researchers should interpret results based on these methods cautiously, neither reifying point estimates about the number of trajectories nor treating individuals' trajectory group assignments as certain.
Sources of sibling (dis)similarity: total family impact on status variation in The Netherlands in the nineteenth century.
Knigge A, van Leeuwen MH, Maas I
AJS · 2014 Nov · PMID 25848672 · Publisher ↗
The authors describe and explain variation in the occupational status resemblance of brothers in The Netherlands during modernization. They test opposing hypotheses about how modernization processes influenced fraternal...
The authors describe and explain variation in the occupational status resemblance of brothers in The Netherlands during modernization. They test opposing hypotheses about how modernization processes influenced fraternal resemblance through the value and inequality of family resources based on a job competition model in combination with modernization theory, status maintenance theory, and dualism theory. The authors use the high-quality, large-scale database GENLIAS, yielding digitized information for approximately 450,000 linked Dutch marriage certificates from 250,000 families, complemented with historical indicators of six modernization processes for over 2,500 communities. Using multilevel meta-regression models, they find that brother correlations in status decreased slowly from about 1860 onward. Although this exactly parallels the period of modernization, the authors find that modernization processes were not responsible (except possibly urbanization and mass transportation). In fact, in line with dualism theory, fraternal resemblance increased with most processes (i.e., industrialization, educational expansion, in-migration, and mass communication) because they amplified in-equality.
Who is black, white, or mixed race? How skin color, status, and nation shape racial classification in Latin America.
Edward Telles, Paschel T
AJS · 2014 Nov · PMID 25848671 · Publisher ↗
Comparative research on racial classification has often turned to Latin America, where race is thought to be particularly fluid. Using nationally representative data from the 2010 and 2012 America's Barometer survey, the...
Comparative research on racial classification has often turned to Latin America, where race is thought to be particularly fluid. Using nationally representative data from the 2010 and 2012 America's Barometer survey, the authors examine patterns of self-identification in four countries. National differences in the relation between skin color, socioeconomic status, and race were found. Skin color predicts race closely in Panama but loosely in the Dominican Republic. Moreover, despite the dominant belief that money whitens, the authors discover that status polarizes (Brazil), mestizoizes (Colombia), darkens (Dominican Republic), or has no effect (Panama). The results show that race is both physical and cultural, with country variations in racial schema that reflect specific historical and political trajectories.
Racially and ethnically diverse schools and adolescent romantic relationships.
Strully K
AJS · 2014 Nov · PMID 25848670 · Full text
Focusing on romantic relationships, which are often seen as a barometer of social distance, this analysis investigates how adolescents from different racial-ethnic and gender groups respond when they attend diverse schoo...
Focusing on romantic relationships, which are often seen as a barometer of social distance, this analysis investigates how adolescents from different racial-ethnic and gender groups respond when they attend diverse schools with many opportunities for inter-racial-ethnic dating. Which groups respond by forming inter-racial-ethnic relationships, and which groups appear to "work around" opportunities for inter-racial-ethnic dating by forming more same-race-ethnicity relationships outside of school boundaries? Most prior studies have analyzed only relationships within schools and, therefore, cannot capture a potentially important way that adolescents express preferences for same-race-ethnicity relationships or work around constraints from other groups' preferences. Using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, I find that, when adolescents are in schools with many opportunities for inter-racial-ethnic dating, black females and white males are most likely to form same-race-ethnicity relationships outside of the school; whereas Hispanic males and females are most likely to date across racial-ethnic boundaries within the school.
Decisions about knowledge in medical practice: the effect of temporal features of a task.
Menchik DA
AJS · 2014 Nov · PMID 25848669 · Publisher ↗
A classic question of social science is how knowledge informs practice. Research on physicians' decisions about medical knowledge has focused on doctors' personal capabilities and features of the knowledge corpus, produc...
A classic question of social science is how knowledge informs practice. Research on physicians' decisions about medical knowledge has focused on doctors' personal capabilities and features of the knowledge corpus, producing divergent findings. This study asks, instead, How is decision making about the use of knowledge influenced by features of work? From observations of one team's decisions in multiple clinical and administrative contexts, the author argues that making decisions is contingent upon temporal features of physicians' tasks. Physicians receive feedback at different speeds, and they must account for these speeds when judging what they can prioritize. This finding explains doctors' perceived uncertainty in other studies as a product of the long feedback loop in tasks, and their certainty or pragmatism as a product of shorter feedback loops. In these latter scenario's, physicians consider and deploy scientific knowledge after--and not before, as is usually assumed--determining a fruitful plan of action.
When politics froze fashion: the effect of the Cultural Revolution on naming in Beijing.
Obukhova E, Zuckerman EW, Zhang J
AJS · 2014 Sep · PMID 25811071 · Publisher ↗
The authors examine the popularity of boys' given names in Beijing before and after the onset of the Cultural Revolution to clarify how exogenous and endogenous factors interact to shape fashion. Whereas recent work in t...
The authors examine the popularity of boys' given names in Beijing before and after the onset of the Cultural Revolution to clarify how exogenous and endogenous factors interact to shape fashion. Whereas recent work in the sociology of culture emphasizes the importance of endogenous processes in explaining fashion, their analysis demonstrates two ways in which politics shaped cultural expression during the Cultural Revolution: by promoting forms of expression reflecting prevailing political ideology and by limiting individuals' willingness to act differently. As argued by Lieberson and developed further in this article, the second condition is important because endogenous fashion cycles require a critical mass of individuals who seek to differentiate themselves from common practice. Exogenous factors can influence the operation of the endogenous factors. The authors discuss the implications of their study for understanding the nature of conformity under authoritarian regimes and social conditions supporting individual expression.
The denigration of heroes? How the status attainment process shapes attributions of considerateness and authenticity.
Hahl O, Zuckerman EW
AJS · 2014 Sep · PMID 25811070 · Publisher ↗
This article develops and tests a theory to explain the common tendency to "denigrate heroes," whereby high-status actors are suspected of being inconsiderate and inauthentic relative to low-status counterparts. This ten...
This article develops and tests a theory to explain the common tendency to "denigrate heroes," whereby high-status actors are suspected of being inconsiderate and inauthentic relative to low-status counterparts. This tendency is argued to reflect two conditions typical of status attainment processes: (a) assertions of superiority over others and (b) the presence of incentives to pursue status. The latter is key since awareness of such incentives breeds suspicions of inauthenticity, which in turn undermine perceptions of prosocial intentions. This theory is validated in a series of online experiments, in which categorical status hierarchies emerge either via deference on a coordinated task or via competitive interactions. Results show that high-status actors may also be "celebrated" as authentic and considerate when the observable incentive structure is such that assertions of superiority appear as unintended by-products of prosocial action. Implications are drawn regarding the sources of instability and insecurity in status hierarchies.
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