AJS; American Journal Of Sociology[JOURNAL]
Sun
200 papers
Beyond strong and weak: rethinking postdictatorship civil societies.
Riley D, Fernández JJ
AJS · 2014 Sep · PMID 25811069 · Publisher ↗
What is the impact of dictatorships on postdictatorial civil societies? Bottom-up theories suggest that totalitarian dictatorships destroy civil society while authoritarian ones allow for its development. Top-down theori...
What is the impact of dictatorships on postdictatorial civil societies? Bottom-up theories suggest that totalitarian dictatorships destroy civil society while authoritarian ones allow for its development. Top-down theories of civil society suggest that totalitarianism can create civil societies while authoritarianism is unlikely to. This article argues that both these perspectives suffer from a one-dimensional understanding of civil society that conflates strength and autonomy. Accordingly we distinguish these two dimensions and argue that totalitarian dictatorships tend to create organizationally strong but heteronomous civil societies, while authoritarian ones tend to create relatively autonomous but organizationally weak civil societies. We then test this conceptualization by closely examining the historical connection between dictatorship and civil society development in Italy (a posttotalitarian case) and Spain (a postauthoritarian one). Our article concludes by reflecting on the implications of our argument for democratic theory, civil society theory, and theories of regime variation.
Class advantage and the gender divide: flexibility on the job and at home.
Gerstel N, Clawson D
AJS · 2014 Sep · PMID 25811068 · Publisher ↗
Using a survey, interviews, and observations, the authors examine inequality in temporal flexibility at home and at work. They focus on four occupations to show that class advantage is deployed in the service of gendered...
Using a survey, interviews, and observations, the authors examine inequality in temporal flexibility at home and at work. They focus on four occupations to show that class advantage is deployed in the service of gendered notions of temporal flexibility while class disadvantage makes it difficult to obtain such flexibility. The class advantage of female nurses and male doctors enables them to obtain flexibility in their work hours; they use that flexibility in gendered ways: nurses to prioritize family and physicians to prioritize careers. Female nursing assistants and male emergency medical technicians can obtain little employee-based flexibility and, as a result, have more difficulty meeting conventional gendered expectations. Advantaged occupations "do gender" in conventional ways while disadvantaged occupations "undo gender." These processes operate through organizational rules and cultural schemas that sustain one another but may undermine the gender and class neutrality of family-friendly policies.
Race in California's prison fire camps for men: prison politics, space, and the racialization of everyday life.
Goodman P
AJS · 2014 Sep · PMID 25811067 · Publisher ↗
The vast majority of social scientists agree that race is "socially constructed." Yet many scholars of punishment and prisons still treat race as static, self-evident categories. One result is that not enough is known ab...
The vast majority of social scientists agree that race is "socially constructed." Yet many scholars of punishment and prisons still treat race as static, self-evident categories. One result is that not enough is known about the production, meanings, and consequences of race as experienced by prisoners and those who guard and manage them. The author's research on California's prison fire camps uncovers the micro-level ways in which race is performed and imbued with meaning; he reveals how racial understandings color people and settings. One puzzle is that prisoners in California's fire camps will fight natural disasters side by side, sharing water and provisions, but separate into racial groups when in the camp itself. In part to answer this (and in part to develop better understandings of race and prisons more generally), the author unpacks the variegated nature of punishment and the spatialization of race and advocates for research that is faithful to the constructivist framework.
Common sense and sociological explanations.
Watts DJ
AJS · 2014 Sep · PMID 25811066 · Publisher ↗
Sociologists have long advocated a sociological approach to explanation by contrasting it with common sense. The argument of this article, however, is that sociologists rely on common sense more than they realize. Moreov...
Sociologists have long advocated a sociological approach to explanation by contrasting it with common sense. The argument of this article, however, is that sociologists rely on common sense more than they realize. Moreover, this unacknowledged reliance causes serious problems for their explanations of social action, that is, for why people do what they do. Many such explanations, it is argued, conflate understandability with causality in ways that are not valid by the standards of scientific explanation. It follows that if sociologists want their explanations to be scientifically valid, they must evaluate them specifically on those grounds--in particular, by forcing them to make predictions. In becoming more scientific, however, it is predicted that sociologists' explanations will also become less satisfying from an intuitive, sense-making perspective. Even as novel sources of data and improved methods open exciting new directions for sociological research, therefore, sociologists will increasingly have to choose between unsatisfying scientific explanations and satisfying but unscientific stories.
Coevolution in management fashion: an agent-based model of consultant-driven innovation.
Strang D, David RJ, Akhlaghpour S
AJS · 2014 Jul · PMID 25705784 · Publisher ↗
The rise of management consultancy has been accompanied by increasingly marked faddish cycles in management techniques, but the mechanisms that underlie this relationship are not well understood. The authors develop a si...
The rise of management consultancy has been accompanied by increasingly marked faddish cycles in management techniques, but the mechanisms that underlie this relationship are not well understood. The authors develop a simple agent-based framework that models innovation adoption and abandonment on both the supply and demand sides. In opposition to conceptions of consultants as rhetorical wizards who engineer waves of management fashion, firms and consultants are treated as boundedly rational actors who chase the secrets of success by mimicking their highest-performing peers. Computational experiments demonstrate that consultant-driven versions of this dynamic in which the outcomes of firms are strongly conditioned by their choice of consultant are robustly faddish. The invasion of boom markets by low-quality consultants undercuts popular innovations while simultaneously restarting the fashion cycle by prompting the flight of high-quality consultants into less densely occupied niches. Computational experiments also indicate conditions involving consultant mobility, aspiration levels, mimic probabilities, and client-provider matching that attenuate faddishness.
Issue bricolage: explaining the configuration of the social movement sector, 1960-1995.
Jung W, King BG, Soule SA
AJS · 2014 Jul · PMID 25705783 · Publisher ↗
Social movements occupy a shared ideational and resource space, which is often referred to as the social movement sector. This article contributes to the understanding of the relational dynamics of the social movement se...
Social movements occupy a shared ideational and resource space, which is often referred to as the social movement sector. This article contributes to the understanding of the relational dynamics of the social movement sector by demonstrating how ideational linkages are formed through protest events. Using a data set of protest events occurring in the United States from 1960 to 1995, the authors model the mechanisms shaping why certain movement issues (e.g., women's and peace or environmental and gay rights) appear together at protest events. They argue that both cultural similarity and status differences between two social movement issues are the underlying mechanisms that shape joint protest and the resultant ideational linkages between issues. Finally, they show that the linking of issues at protest events results in changes in the prominence of a given issue in the social movement sector.
Blocked acculturation: cultural heterodoxy among Europe's immigrants.
Wimmer A, Soehl T
AJS · 2014 Jul · PMID 25705782 · Publisher ↗
Which immigrant groups differ most from the cultural values held by mainstream society and why? The authors explore this question using data from the European Social Survey on the values held by almost 100,000 individual...
Which immigrant groups differ most from the cultural values held by mainstream society and why? The authors explore this question using data from the European Social Survey on the values held by almost 100,000 individuals associated with 305 immigrant groups and the native majorities of 23 countries. They test whether distant linguistic or religious origins (including in Islam), value differences that immigrants "import" from their home countries, the maintenance of transnational ties and thus diasporic cultures, or legal and social disadvantage in the country of settlement shape acculturation processes. They find that only legally or socially disadvantaged groups differ from mainstream values in significant ways. For first generation immigrants, this is because the values of their countries of origin diverge more from those of natives. Among children of disadvantaged immigrants, however, value heterodoxy emerges because acculturation processes are blocked and the values of the parent generation partially maintained. From the second generation onward, therefore, cultural values are endogenous to the formation and dissolution of social boundaries, rather than shaping these as an exogenous force.
Governing inside the organization: interpreting regulation and compliance.
Gray GC, Silbey SS
AJS · 2014 Jul · PMID 25705781 · Publisher ↗
Looking inside organizations at the different positions, expertise, and autonomy of the actors, the authors use multisite ethnographic data on safety practices to develop a typology of how the regulator, as the focal act...
Looking inside organizations at the different positions, expertise, and autonomy of the actors, the authors use multisite ethnographic data on safety practices to develop a typology of how the regulator, as the focal actor in the regulatory process, is interpreted within organizations. The findings show that organizational actors express constructions of the regulator as an ally, threat, and obstacle that vary with organizational expertise, authority, and continuity of relationship between the organizational member and the regulator. The article makes three contributions to the current understandings of organizational governance and regulatory compliance, thereby extending both institutional and ecological accounts of organizations' behavior with respect to their environments. First, the authors document not only variation across organizations but variable compliance within an organization. Second, the variations described do not derive from alternative institutional logics, but from variations in positions, autonomy, and expertise within each organization. From their grounded theory, the authors hypothesize that these constructions carry differential normative interpretations of regulation and probabilities for compliance, and thus the third contribution, the typology, when correlated with organizational hierarchy provides the link between microlevel action and discourse and organizational performance.
Neither ideologues nor agnostics: alternative voters' belief system in an age of partisan politics.
Baldassarri D, Goldberg A
AJS · 2014 Jul · PMID 25705780 · Publisher ↗
How do Americans organize their political beliefs? This article argues that party polarization and the growing prominence of moral issues in recent decades have catalyzed different responses by different groups of Americ...
How do Americans organize their political beliefs? This article argues that party polarization and the growing prominence of moral issues in recent decades have catalyzed different responses by different groups of Americans. The article investigates systematic heterogeneity in the organization of political attitudes using relational class analysis, a graph-based method for detecting multiple patterns of opinion in survey data. Three subpopulations, each characterized by a distinctive way of organizing its political beliefs, are identified: ideologues, whose political attitudes strongly align with either liberal or conservative categories; alternatives, who are instead morally conservative but economically liberal, or vice versa; and agnostics, who exhibit weak associations between political beliefs. Individuals' sociodemographic profiles, particularly their income, education, and religiosity, lie at the core of the different ways in which they understand politics. Results show that while ideologues have gone through a process of issue alignment, alternatives have grown increasingly apart from the political agendas of both parties. The conflictual presence of conservative and liberal preferences has often been resolved by alternative voters in favor of the Republican Party.
"I don't like passing as a straight woman": queer negotiations of identity and social group membership.
Pfeffer CA
AJS · 2014 Jul · PMID 25705779 · Publisher ↗
For decades, sociological theory has documented how our lives are simultaneously produced through and against normative structures of sex, gender, and sexuality. These normative structures are often believed to operate a...
For decades, sociological theory has documented how our lives are simultaneously produced through and against normative structures of sex, gender, and sexuality. These normative structures are often believed to operate along presumably "natural," biological, and essentialized binaries of male/female, man/woman, and heterosexual/ homosexual. However, as the lives and experiences of transgender people and their families become increasingly socially visible, these normative structuring binaries are called into stark question as they fail to adequately articulate and encompass these social actors' identities and social group memberships. Utilizing in-depth interviews with 50 women from the United States, Canada, and Australia, who detail 61 unique relationships with transgender men, this study considers how the experiences of these queer social actors hold the potential to rattle the very foundations upon which normative binaries rest, highlighting the increasingly blurry intersections, tensions, and overlaps between sex, gender, and sexual orientation in the 21st century. This work also considers the potential for these normative disruptions to engender opportunities for social collaboration, solidarity, and transformation.
Moving beyond Stylized Economic Network Models: The Hybrid World of the Indian Firm Ownership Network.
Mani D, Moody J
AJS · 2014 Jun · PMID 25418990 · Full text
A central theme of economic sociology has been to highlight the complexity and diversity of real world markets, but many network models of economic social structure ignore this feature and rely instead on stylized one-di...
A central theme of economic sociology has been to highlight the complexity and diversity of real world markets, but many network models of economic social structure ignore this feature and rely instead on stylized one-dimensional characterizations. Here, the authors return to the basic insight of structural diversity in economic sociology. Using the Indian interorganizational ownership network as their case, they discover a composite-or "hybrid"-model of economic networks that combines elements of prior stylized models. The network contains a disconnected periphery conforming closely to a "transactional" model; a semiperiphery characterized by small, dense clusters with sporadic links, as predicted in "small-world" models; and finally a nested core composed of clusters connected via multiple independent paths. The authors then show how a firm's position within the mesolevel structure is associated with demographic features such as age and industry and differences in the extent to which firms engage in multiplex and high-value exchanges.
Fewer and better children: race, class, religion, and birth control reform in America.
Wilde MJ, Danielsen S
AJS · 2014 May · PMID 25243273 · Publisher ↗
In the early 20th century, contraceptives were illegal and, for many, especially religious groups, taboo. But, in the span of just two years, between 1929 and 1931, many of the United States' most prominent religious gro...
In the early 20th century, contraceptives were illegal and, for many, especially religious groups, taboo. But, in the span of just two years, between 1929 and 1931, many of the United States' most prominent religious groups pronounced contraceptives to be moral and began advocating for the laws restricting them to be repealed. Met with everything from support, to silence, to outright condemnation by other religious groups, these pronouncements and the debates they caused divided the American religious field by an issue of sex and gender for the first time. This article explains why America's religious groups took the positions they did at this crucial moment in history. In doing so, it demonstrates that the politics of sex and gender that divide American religion today is deeply rooted in century-old inequalities of race and class.
The missing link in the diffusion of protest: asking others.
Walgrave S, Wouters R
AJS · 2014 May · PMID 25243272 · Publisher ↗
Mobilization for protest is a process of diffusion in interpersonal networks. Extant work has found that being asked by people one knows is a key determinant of participation, but the flip side--asking others--has been n...
Mobilization for protest is a process of diffusion in interpersonal networks. Extant work has found that being asked by people one knows is a key determinant of participation, but the flip side--asking others--has been neglected. The authors examine which prospective participants are most likely to ask others to participate and whom they ask. Drawing on a new and unusual data set including evidence on more than 7,000 participants in 48 demonstrations across Europe, the authors find that activists who are committed to the demonstration's cause (willing to recruit others) and who are part of participation-friendly networks (able to recruit others) are the most active recruiters. Asking others is dependent on being asked: participants tend to recruit people similar to those who have recruited them and, most importantly, participants who are recruited via strong ties are less active recruiters themselves.
Contradictions in the commodification of hospital care.
Reich AD
AJS · 2014 May · PMID 25243271 · Publisher ↗
The "moralized markets" school within economic sociology has convincingly demonstrated variation in the relationship between economic activity and moral values. Yet this scholarship has not sufficiently explored either t...
The "moralized markets" school within economic sociology has convincingly demonstrated variation in the relationship between economic activity and moral values. Yet this scholarship has not sufficiently explored either the causes of this variation or the consequences of this variation for organizational practice. By examining different moral-market understandings and practices in the context of a single market-based organizational field, this article highlights the contradictory character of processes of commodification, as different historically institutionalized ideas conflict, in different ways, with the market logic that increasingly organizes the field as a whole. The article examines the contradictory commodification of hospital care in three hospitals within one Northern California community.
From motherhood penalties to husband premia: the new challenge for gender equality and family policy, lessons from Norway.
Petersen T, Penner AM, Høgsnes G
AJS · 2014 Mar · PMID 25097932 · Publisher ↗
Given the key role that processes occurring in the family play in creating gender inequality, the family is a central focus of policies aimed at creating greater gender equality. We examine how family status affects the...
Given the key role that processes occurring in the family play in creating gender inequality, the family is a central focus of policies aimed at creating greater gender equality. We examine how family status affects the gender wage gap using longitudinal matched employer-employee data from Norway, 1979-96, a period with extensive expansion of family policies. The motherhood penalty dropped dramatically from 1979 to 1996. Among men the premia for marriage and fatherhood remained constant. In 1979, the gender wage gap was primarily due to the motherhood penalty, but by 1996 husband premia were more important than motherhood penalties.
Categories and organizational status: the role of industry status in the response to organizational deviance.
Sharkey AJ
AJS · 2014 Mar · PMID 25097931 · Publisher ↗
Extant research in organizational and economic sociology posits that organizations derive status from their prior demonstrations of quality, as well as their affiliations with high-status alters. Yet there are also indic...
Extant research in organizational and economic sociology posits that organizations derive status from their prior demonstrations of quality, as well as their affiliations with high-status alters. Yet there are also indications that organizations may acquire status by virtue of their membership in salient social categories that are themselves status valued. In this article, the author explicitly theorizes and measure the concept of categorical status among organizations and test whether it influences the evaluation of organizational actions. More concretely, she develops a measure of industry status and test whether it affects the market reaction to U.S. firms announcing earnings restatements between 2000 and 2009. Results of the empirical analyses indicate that investors react less negatively to earnings restatements announced by firms from higher-status industries, supporting the argument that category status acts as a lens that shapes the extent to which an organization's actions are viewed favorably.
Economists, capitalists, and the making of globalization: North American free trade in comparative-historical perspective.
Fairbrother M
AJS · 2014 Mar · PMID 25097930 · Publisher ↗
Why did globalization happen? Current explanations point to a variety of conditions under which states have made the free market policy changes driving international economic integration since the 1980s. Such accounts di...
Why did globalization happen? Current explanations point to a variety of conditions under which states have made the free market policy changes driving international economic integration since the 1980s. Such accounts disagree, however, about the key actors involved. This article provides a reconciliation, showing how two different combinations of actors, and two different political economic pathways, have led to globalization in recent decades. In developed countries, mobilization by business has been central; elsewhere, technocrats both constrained and empowered by international finance have pursued globalization more independently of business. In both contexts, economists' technical authority has helped legitimate liberalization, despite the limited diffusion of their ideas. The article validates and elaborates this model using a comparative-historical study of how the United States, Canada, and Mexico proposed, negotiated, and ratified agreements for free trade in North America.
Saying yes to taxes: the politics of tax reform campaigns in three northwestern states, 1965-1973.
Pearson E
AJS · 2014 Mar · PMID 25097929 · Publisher ↗
This article analyzes factors shaping popular support for new taxes by examining variation in the outcomes of votes in nine American states during the 1960s and early 1970s. New taxes were endorsed in five states but rej...
This article analyzes factors shaping popular support for new taxes by examining variation in the outcomes of votes in nine American states during the 1960s and early 1970s. New taxes were endorsed in five states but rejected in four. Using comparative and historical methods focused on the cases of Oregon, Washington, and Idaho, the author argues that the sequence of policy making shapes popular vetoes through three mechanisms: the mobilization of interest groups, the information available to voters about a policy, and how the costs and benefits of a policy appear to voters. The findings demonstrate that voter perceptions of the potential gains and losses of a new policy are sociologically mobilized through the policy process. Controlling when popular veto points appear in a policy process is an understudied strategy that is employed by American state builders to overcome ambivalence toward the fiscal imperatives of the activist state.
The new immigration contestation: social movements and local immigration policy making in the United States, 2000-2011.
Steil JP, Vasi IB
AJS · 2014 Jan · PMID 25032270 · Publisher ↗
Analyzing oppositional social movements in the context of municipal immigration ordinances, the authors examine whether the explanatory power of resource mobilization, political process, and strain theories of social mov...
Analyzing oppositional social movements in the context of municipal immigration ordinances, the authors examine whether the explanatory power of resource mobilization, political process, and strain theories of social movements' impact on policy outcomes differs when considering proactive as opposed to reactive movements. The adoption of pro-immigrant (proactive) ordinances was facilitated by the presence of immigrant community organizations and of sympathetic local political allies. The adoption of anti-immigrant (reactive) ordinances was influenced by structural social changes, such as rapid increases in the local Latino population, that were framed as threats. The study also finds that pro-immigrant protest events can influence policy in two ways, contributing both to the passage of pro-immigrant ordinances in the locality where protests occur and also inhibiting the passage of anti-immigrant ordinances in neighboring cities.
Hybrid activism: social movement mobilization in a multimovement environment.
Heaney MT, Rojas F
AJS · 2014 Jan · PMID 25032269 · Publisher ↗
Social movement organizations often struggle to mobilize supporters from allied movements in their efforts to achieve critical mass. The authors argue that organizations with hybrid identities--those whose organizational...
Social movement organizations often struggle to mobilize supporters from allied movements in their efforts to achieve critical mass. The authors argue that organizations with hybrid identities--those whose organizational identities span the boundaries of two or more social movements, issues, or identities--are vital to mobilizing these constituencies. They use original data from their study of the post-9/11 U.S. antiwar movement to show that individuals with past involvement in nonantiwar movements are more likely to join hybrid organizations than are individuals without involvement in nonantiwar movements. In addition, they show that organizations with hybrid identities occupy relatively more central positions in interorganizational cocontact networks within the antiwar movement and thus recruit significantly more participants in demonstrations than do nonhybrid organizations. Contrary to earlier research, they do not find that hybrid organizations are subject to an illegitimacy discount; instead, they find that hybridization can augment the ability of social movement organizations to mobilize their supporters in multimovement environments.
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