American Journal of Sociology 115(3)

Operating Room: Relational Spaces and Microinstitutional Change in Surgery
Katherine C. Kellogg

One of the great paradoxes of institutional change is that even when top managers in organizations provide support for change in response to new regulation, the employees whom new programs are designed to benefit often do not use them. This 15-month ethnographic study of two hospitals responding to new regulation demonstrates that using these programs may require subordinate employees to challenge middle managers with opposing interests. The article argues that relational spaces—areas of isolation, interaction, and inclusion that allow middle-manager reformers and subordinate employees to develop a cross-position collective for change—are critical to the change process. These findings have implications for research on institutional change and social movements.

Invigorating the Content in Social Embeddedness: An Ethnography of Life Insurance Transactions in China
Cheris Shun-ching Chan

Based on more than 14 months’ ethnographic research in China, this article brings in culture and symbolic interactionism to understand the social embeddedness of economic transactions. First, an analytic frame linking tie strengths to defining principles, relational properties, and interactions is constructed and applied to changes in life insurance transactions in China. The data suggest that strong tie transactions were common until the economic gains of the sellers were made public. The author argues that the ethical-affective principle that defines strong ties and the high intensity of trust, affection, and asymmetric obligation that constitute these ties make them a double-edged sword for economic transactions. Instead, ties with midrange or weak strength are more effective because of their relational complementarity (although direct economic exchanges may take place among strong ties under extreme institutional or contingency conditions). The author also reveals that dramaturgical interactions, through which economic actors exercise their agency, are an integral part of embedded transactions.

A Sociological (De)Construction of the Relationship between Status and Quality
Freda B. Lynn, Joel M. Podolny, and Lin Tao

Although many sociologists are strongly wedded to the idea of “social construction,” the contextual factors that influence the magnitude of construction are rarely considered. This article explores the decoupling of an actor’s status from the actor’s underlying quality and examines the factors that influence the magnitude of decoupling. The authors specifically consider the role of quality uncertainty, diffuse status characteristics, and the self-fulfilling prophecy. To analyze the impact of each mechanism on decoupling, they simulate the evolution of thousands of small groups using a dyadic model of status allocation. The authors discuss the results of these simulations and conclude with the implications for future research and the practical management of groups.

Does Your Neighbor’s Income Affect Your Happiness?
Glenn Firebaugh and Matthew B. Schroeder

The relative income or income status hypothesis implies that people should be happier when they live among the poor. Findings on neighborhood effects suggest, however, that living in a poorer neighborhood reduces, not enhances, a person's happiness. Using data from the American National Election Study linked to income data from the U.S. census, the authors find that Americans tend to be happier when they reside in richer neighborhoods (consistent with neighborhood studies) in poorer counties (as predicted by the relative income hypothesis). Thus it appears that individuals in fact are happier when they live among the poor, as long as the poor do not live too close.

Why Do Nominal Characteristics Acquire Status Value? A Minimal Explanation for Status Construction
Noah P. Mark, Lynn Smith-Lovin, and Cecilia L. Ridgeway

Why do beliefs that attach different amounts of status to different categories of people become consensually held by the members of a society? We show that two microlevel mechanisms, in combination, imply a system-level tendency toward consensual status beliefs about a nominal characteristic. (1) Status belief diffusion: a person who has no status belief about a characteristic can acquire a status belief about that characteristic from interacting with one or more people who have that status belief. (2) Status belief loss: a person who has a status belief about a characteristic can lose that belief from interacting with one or more people who have the opposite status belief. These mechanisms imply that opposite status beliefs will tend to be lost at equal rates and will tend to be acquired at rates proportional to their prevalence. Therefore, if a status belief ever becomes more prevalent than its opposite, it will increase in prevalence until every person holds it.

Religious Attendance in Cross-National Perspective: A Multilevel Analysis of 60 Countries
Stijn Ruiter and Frank van Tubergen

Why are some nations more religious than others? This article proposes a multilevel framework in which country differences in religious attendance are explained by contextual, individual, and cross-level interaction effects. Hypotheses from different theories are simultaneously tested with data from 60 nations obtained from the European/World Values Surveys. Multilevel logistic regression analyses show that religious regulation in a country diminishes religious attendance and that there are only small negative effects of people's own education and average educational level of the country. Religious attendance is strongly affected by personal and societal insecurities and by parental and national religious socialization and level of urbanization. These theories explain 75% of the cross-national variation in religious attendance.

American Journal of Sociology, December 2009: Volume 115, Issue 3