Do regime change and market reform disrupt patterns of intergenerational mobility? China's political trajectory is distinctive from that of other communist regimes in two ways. During its first three decades, the regime...Do regime change and market reform disrupt patterns of intergenerational mobility? China's political trajectory is distinctive from that of other communist regimes in two ways. During its first three decades, the regime enforced unusually restrictive barriers to elite status inheritance. And during the subsequent market transition, unlike most of its counterparts, the Communist Party survived intact. Data from a multigeneration survey suggest that despite their obvious exclusion from the party and related administrative careers in the Mao era, certain prerevolution elites transmitted one type of elite status to their offspring to a surprising degree. Party elites, in contrast, were hit hard by radical Maoism but recovered quickly afterward, and their offspring inherited elite status at much higher rates.
This article examines four movements of the religiously orthodox that should have failed according to most social movement theory and research. The movements combine (1) an extraordinarily broad agenda, (2) a strict, mor...This article examines four movements of the religiously orthodox that should have failed according to most social movement theory and research. The movements combine (1) an extraordinarily broad agenda, (2) a strict, morally absolutist ideology, and (3) a strong proscription against compromise with other groups, each of which has been identified as a liability that can lead to movement failure. Through inductive, qualitative analyses, the authors identify four shared strategies that helped these movements overcome these obstacles: bypassing the state, building grassroots structures, providing graduated membership, and reprioritizing agendas. Analyses of these movements also suggest that particular combinations of movement "liabilities" may actually be advantageous.
The authors argue that both the large variability in survey estimates of volunteering and the fact that survey estimates do not show the secular decline common to other social capital measures are caused by the greater p...The authors argue that both the large variability in survey estimates of volunteering and the fact that survey estimates do not show the secular decline common to other social capital measures are caused by the greater propensity of those who do volunteer work to respond to surveys. Analyses of the American Time Use Survey (ATUS)--the sample for which is drawn from the Current Population Survey (CPS)--together with the CPS volunteering supplement show that CPS respondents who become ATUS respondents report much more volunteering in the CPS than those who become ATUS nonrespondents. This difference is replicated within subgroups. Consequently, conventional adjustments for nonresponse cannot correct the bias. Although nonresponse leads to estimates of volunteer activity that are too high, it generally does not affect inferences about the characteristics of volunteers.
Names often indicate belonging to a certain ethnic group. When immigrant parents choose a first name for their child that is common in their host society, they show a high degree of acculturation. In contrast, selecting...Names often indicate belonging to a certain ethnic group. When immigrant parents choose a first name for their child that is common in their host society, they show a high degree of acculturation. In contrast, selecting a name common only in the parents' country of origin indicates ethnic maintenance. Using data from the German Socio-economic Panel for Turkish, Southwest European, and former Yugoslav immigrants, the authors show that acculturation in terms of name giving depends on several factors: the cultural boundary between the country of origin and the host society, the parents' sociostructural integration in terms of education and citizenship, interethnic networks, and religious affiliation.
The upswing in economic inequality that has affected a number of advanced industrial societies in the late 20th century has been particularly conspicuous in the United States. The authors explore its causes using data on...The upswing in economic inequality that has affected a number of advanced industrial societies in the late 20th century has been particularly conspicuous in the United States. The authors explore its causes using data on the distribution of family income in 3,098 U.S. counties in 1970, 1980, 1990, and 2000. The authors build a model of within-county income inequality that assumes that distribution processes involving labor market and sociodemographic variables operate primarily at the county level and those involving the political and institutional context operate primarily at the state level. Multilevel methods are used to distinguish county cross-sectional, state cross-sectional, and longitudinal effects on inequality. The authors find that, when features of the state-level institutional and political context are associated with inequality, these effects are larger longitudinally than cross-sectionally. A range of other factors, including economic development, labor force changes, shifts in the racial/ethnic and gender composition of the labor force, educational expansion, and urbanization are found to have comparatively large effects, both longitudinally and cross-sectionally.
In the sociological literature on social mobility, the long-standing convention has been to assume that intergenerational reproduction takes one of two forms: a categorical form that has parents passing on a big-class po...In the sociological literature on social mobility, the long-standing convention has been to assume that intergenerational reproduction takes one of two forms: a categorical form that has parents passing on a big-class position to their children or a gradational form that has parents passing on their socioeconomic standing. These approaches ignore in their own ways the important role that occupations play in transferring opportunities from one generation to the next. In new analyses of nationally representative data from the United States, Sweden, Germany, and Japan, the authors show that (a) occupations are an important conduit for social reproduction, (b) the most extreme rigidities in the mobility regime are only revealed when analyses are carried out at the occupational level, and (c) much of what shows up as big-class reproduction in conventional mobility analyses is in fact occupational reproduction in disguise.
Data from 44 societies are used to explore sex segregation by field of study. Contrary to accounts linking socioeconomic modernization to a "degendering" of public-sphere institutions, sex typing of curricular fields is...Data from 44 societies are used to explore sex segregation by field of study. Contrary to accounts linking socioeconomic modernization to a "degendering" of public-sphere institutions, sex typing of curricular fields is stronger in more economically developed contexts. The authors argue that two cultural forces combine in advanced industrial societies to create a new sort of sex segregation regime. The first is gender-essentialist ideology, which has proven to be extremely resilient even in the most liberal-egalitarian of contexts; the second is self-expressive value systems, which create opportunities and incentives for the expression of "gendered selves." Multivariate analyses suggest that structural features of postindustrial labor markets and modern educational systems support the cultivation, realization, and display of gender-specific curricular affinities.
Women's wages do not grow with experience or tenure as much as men's do. Many accounts of this cumulative gender disadvantage attribute it to women's underinvestment in firm-specific skills. Yet if that were true, this d...Women's wages do not grow with experience or tenure as much as men's do. Many accounts of this cumulative gender disadvantage attribute it to women's underinvestment in firm-specific skills. Yet if that were true, this disadvantage would not exist where firm-specific skills are not rewarded by the labor market. This article investigates this argument in the context of contract employment, where demand for firm specificity is minimal. Contrary to expectations, men still receive higher rewards than women over time. Drawing on quantitative evidence and qualitative fieldwork using job histories of high-skill contractors affiliated with a staffing firm, the author finds support for two sources of women's disadvantage: lower rates of movement across clients on the supply side and unmeasured demand-side factors by which similar levels of tenure and client transitions accrue lower rewards to women. Implications for research on gender stratification and career advancement in non-formalized labor markets are discussed.
This article examines letters to the editor as one of the ways citizens seek to enact a public sphere using technological mediation. Using a sample of all letters received by a metropolitan newspaper during a three-month...This article examines letters to the editor as one of the ways citizens seek to enact a public sphere using technological mediation. Using a sample of all letters received by a metropolitan newspaper during a three-month period (N = 1,113), the authors demonstrate that the tone and argumentative styles of letters differ with the scope of the issues the letters address. Local issues evoke more reasoned, conciliatory tones, while issues beyond the local context evoke more emotional, confrontational tones, even after controlling for individual writers' characteristics and anger as a motivation to write.
This article adopts an institutional approach to describe the changing secondary market for life insurance in the United States. Since the 1990s, this market, in which investors buy strangers' life insurance policies, ha...This article adopts an institutional approach to describe the changing secondary market for life insurance in the United States. Since the 1990s, this market, in which investors buy strangers' life insurance policies, has grown in the face of considerable moral ambivalence. The author uses news reports and interviews to identify and describe three conceptions of this market: sacred revulsion, consumerist consolation, and rationalized reconciliation. Differences among the conceptions are considered in view of the institutional legacy of life insurance and its success in organizing practices, perceptions, and understandings about markets and death. From this case, the author draws implications for analyses of morals in markets, an important and emergent topic within economic sociology.
This article reports findings from a recent survey of international migration from China's Fujian Province to the United States. Using the ethnosurvey approach developed in the Mexican Migration Project, the authors cond...This article reports findings from a recent survey of international migration from China's Fujian Province to the United States. Using the ethnosurvey approach developed in the Mexican Migration Project, the authors conducted surveys in migrant-sending communities in China as well as in destination communities in New York City. Hypotheses are derived from the international migration literature and the market transition debate. The results are generally consistent with hypotheses derived from cumulative causation of migration; however, geographical location creates some differences in migration patterns to the United States. In China as in Mexico, the existence of migration networks increases the propensity of migration for others in the community. In contrast to the Mexican case, among Chinese immigrants, having a previously migrated household member increases the propensity of other household members to migrate only after the debt for previous migration is paid off. In step with market transition theory, the authors also find that political power influences the migration experience from the coastal Fujian Province.
This article retrieves the ethnic roots that underlie a universalist class ideology. Focusing empirically on the emergence of Bolshevism, it provides biographical analysis of the Russian Revolution's elite, finding that...This article retrieves the ethnic roots that underlie a universalist class ideology. Focusing empirically on the emergence of Bolshevism, it provides biographical analysis of the Russian Revolution's elite, finding that two-thirds were ethnic minorities from across the Russian Empire. After exploring class and ethnicity as intersectional experiences of varying significance to the Bolsheviks' revolutionary politics, this article suggests that socialism's class universalism found affinity with those seeking secularism in response to religious tensions, a universalist politics where ethnic violence and sectarianism were exclusionary, and an ethnically neutral and tolerant "imperial" imaginary where Russification and geopolitics were particularly threatening or imperial cultural frameworks predominated. The claim is made that socialism's class universalism was as much a product of ethnic particularism as it was constituted by it.
A long-standing objective of friendship research is to identify the effects of personal preference and structural opportunity on intergroup friendship choice. Although past studies have used various methods to separate p...A long-standing objective of friendship research is to identify the effects of personal preference and structural opportunity on intergroup friendship choice. Although past studies have used various methods to separate preference from opportunity, researchers have not yet systematically compared the properties and implications of these methods. This study puts forward a general framework for discrete choice, where choice probability is specified as proportional to the product of preference and opportunity. To implement this framework, the authors propose a modification to the conditional logit model for estimating preference parameters free from the influence of opportunity structure and then compare this approach to several alternative methods for separating preference and opportunity used in the friendship choice literature. As an empirical example, the authors test hypotheses of homophily and status asymmetry in friendship choice using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. The example also demonstrates the approach of conducting a sensitivity analysis to examine how parameter estimates vary by specification of the opportunity structure.
This article analyzes race-targeted policy in Brazil as both a political stake and a powerful instrument in an unfolding classificatory struggle over the definition of racial boundaries. The Brazilian state traditionally...This article analyzes race-targeted policy in Brazil as both a political stake and a powerful instrument in an unfolding classificatory struggle over the definition of racial boundaries. The Brazilian state traditionally embraced mixed-race classification, but is adopting racial quotas employing a black/white scheme. To explore potential consequences of that turn for beneficiary identification and boundary formation, the author analyzes attitudinal survey data on race-targeted policy and racial classification in multiple formats, including classification in comparison to photographs. The results show that almost half of the mixed-race sample, when constrained to dichotomous classification, opts for whiteness, a majority rejects mixed-race individuals for quotas, and the mention of quotas for blacks in a split-ballot experiment nearly doubles the percentage choosing that racial category. Theories of how states make race emphasize the use of official categories to legislate exclusion. In contrast, analysis of the Brazilian case illuminates how states may also make race through policies of official inclusion.
Social scientists generally seek to explain welfare-related behaviors in terms of economic choice, social structural, or culture of poverty theories. Because such explanations incompletely account for nativity difference...Social scientists generally seek to explain welfare-related behaviors in terms of economic choice, social structural, or culture of poverty theories. Because such explanations incompletely account for nativity differences in public assistance receipt among those of Mexican origin, this paper draws upon the sociology of migration and culture literatures to develop alternative materialist-based cultural repertoire hypotheses to explain the welfare behaviors of Mexican immigrants. We argue that immigrants from Mexico arrive and work in the United States under circumstances fostering employment-based cultural repertoires that, compared with natives and other immigrant groups, encourage less welfare participation (in part because such repertoires lead to faster welfare exits) and more post-welfare employment, especially in states with relatively more generous welfare-policies. Using individual-level data predating Welfare Reform from multiple panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), merged with state-level information on welfare-benefit levels, we assess these ideas by examining immigrant-group differences in welfare receipt, retention, and transition to employment across locales with varying levels of welfare benefits. Overall, the results are consistent with the notion that cultural repertoires incline Mexican immigrants to utilize welfare not primarily to avoid work, cope with disadvantage, or perpetuate a culture of dependency, but rather mostly to minimize employment discontinuities. This result carries important theoretical and policy implications.
Recasting Durkheim's "community of saints" thesis, the authors argue that the severity of punishment is predicted in part by the prevalence of the deviant behavior of which the deviant stands accused. Although there is s...Recasting Durkheim's "community of saints" thesis, the authors argue that the severity of punishment is predicted in part by the prevalence of the deviant behavior of which the deviant stands accused. Although there is some curvilinearity at low levels of prevalence, the relationship is generally negative. Thus, all else equal, where a particular crime is frequent, any punishment applied to it is likely to be mild; conversely, where a crime is infrequent, its punishment ought to be severe. Using hierarchical regression models, the authors support this hypothesis with 1988 homicide conviction and imprisonment decisions in 32 U.S. counties.
The literature on assimilation and ethnic identity formation largely assumes that the durability of ethnic boundaries is a function of the assimilation measures that sociologists commonly employ. But this literature fail...The literature on assimilation and ethnic identity formation largely assumes that the durability of ethnic boundaries is a function of the assimilation measures that sociologists commonly employ. But this literature fails to account adequately for the role of immigration patterns in explaining the durability and nature of ethnic boundaries. Using 123 in-depth interviews with later-generation Mexican Americans, this article shows that Mexican immigrant replenishment shapes ethnic boundaries and ethnic identity formation. The sizable immigrant population sharpens intergroup boundaries through the indirect effects of nativism and by contributing to the continuing significance of race in the lives of later-generation Mexican Americans. The presence of a large immigrant population also creates intragroup boundaries that run through the Mexican-origin population and that are animated by expectations about ethnic authenticity. The article illustrates the importance of immigrant replenishment to processes of assimilation and ethnic identity formation.
This study helps to fill a significant gap in the literature on organizations and inequality by investigating the central role of merit-based reward systems in shaping gender and racial disparities in wages and promotion...This study helps to fill a significant gap in the literature on organizations and inequality by investigating the central role of merit-based reward systems in shaping gender and racial disparities in wages and promotions. The author develops and tests a set of propositions isolating processes of performance-reward bias, whereby women and minorities receive less compensation than white men with equal scores on performance evaluations. Using personnel data from a large service organization, the author empirically establishes the existence of this bias and shows that gender, race, and nationality differences continue to affect salary growth after performance ratings are taken into account, ceteris paribus. This finding demonstrates a critical challenge faced by the many contemporary employers who adopt merit-based practices and policies. Although these policies are often adopted in the hope of motivating employees and ensuring meritocracy, policies with limited transparency and accountability can actually increase ascriptive bias and reduce equity in the workplace.
This article explores the organizational conditions under which discrimination charges occur. Drawing on structural and organizational theories of the workplace, the authors demonstrate how organizational conditions affe...This article explores the organizational conditions under which discrimination charges occur. Drawing on structural and organizational theories of the workplace, the authors demonstrate how organizational conditions affect workers' and regulatory agents' understandings of unlawful discrimination. Using a national sample of work establishments, matched to discrimination-charge data obtained from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the authors examine how characteristics of the workplace and institutional environment affect variation in the incidence of workers' charges of sex and race discrimination and in the subset of discrimination claims that are verified by EEOC investigators. The findings indicate that workplace conditions, including size, composition, and minority management, affect workers' charges as well as verified claims; the latter are also affected by institutional factors, such as affirmative action requirements, subsidiary status, and industrial sector. These results suggest that internal workplace conditions affect both workers' and regulatory agents' interpretations of potentially discriminatory experiences, while institutional conditions matter only for regulatory agents' interpretations of those events.