Social Forces 88(2)

Four on the Family

Taking on the Second Shift: Time Allocations and Time Pressures of U.S. Parents with Preschoolers
Melissa A. Milkie, Sara B. Raley, Suzanne M. Bianchi

The term "second shift" from Hochschild's (1989) classic volume is commonly used by scholars to mean that employed mothers face an unequal load of household labor and thus a "double day" of work. We use two representative samples of contemporary U.S. parents with preschoolers to test how mothers employed fulltime and married to a full-time worker (focal mothers) differ in time allocations and pressures from fathers and from mothers employed parttime or not at all. Results indicate focal mothers' total workloads are greater than fathers' by a week-and-a-half, not an "extra month" per year. Focal mothers have less leisure, but do not experience more onerous types of unpaid work, nor get less sleep than fathers. Focal mothers feel greater time pressures compared with fathers; however, some of these tensions extend to other mothers of young children. Finally, these families may be engaged in fewer quality activities with children compared with families where mothers are not employed fulltime.

Has the Marital Time Cost of Parenting Changed Over Time?
Jeffrey Dew

Qualitative and quantitative research has suggested that married couples handle the increasing demands of intensive parenting norms and work expectations by reducing spousal time (e.g., the time that spouses spend alone with each other). Using nationally representative time-diary data, this study examined whether married individuals with children at home lost more spousal time in the years 1975-2003 than individuals without children at home. The analyses showed that on average married individuals have reduced their spousal time by 50 minutes a day. Contrary to expectations, however, individuals with minor children at home had lower time declines than individuals without children. The strategies that assisted married individuals with children to protect their spousal time differed between weekdays and weekend days.

Education Differences in Intended and Unintended Fertility
Kelly Musick, Paula England, Sarah Edgington, Nicole Kangas

Using a hazards framework and panel data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (1979-2004), we analyze the fertility patterns of a recent cohort of white and black women in the United States. We examine how completed fertility varies by women's education, differentiating between intended and unintended births. We find that the education gradient on fertility comes largely from unintended childbearing, and it is not explained by child-bearing desires or opportunity costs, the two most common explanations in previous research. Less-educated women want no more children than the more educated, so this factor explains none of their higher completed fertility. Less-educated women have lower wages, but wages have little of the negative effect on fertility predicted by economic theories of opportunity cost. We propose three other potential mechanisms linking low education and unintended childbearing, focusing on access to contraception and abortion, relational and economic uncertainty, and consistency in the behaviors necessary to avoid unintended pregnancies. Our work highlights the need to incorporate these mechanisms into future research.

Is There a Career Penalty for Mothers' Time Out?: A Comparison of Germany, Sweden and the United States
Silke Aisenbrey, Marie Evertsson, Daniela Grunow

This article focuses on three countries with distinct policies toward motherhood and work: Germany, Sweden and the United States. We analyze the length of mothers' time out of paid work after childbirth and the short-term career consequences for mothers. In the United States, we identify a career punishment even for short timeout periods; long time-out periods increase the risk of a downward move and reduce the chances of an upward move. In Germany, long time-out periods destabilize the career and, the longer the leave, the greater the risk of either an upward or downward move. In Sweden, we find a negative effect of time out on upward moves. Hence, even in "woman-friendly" Sweden, women's career prospects are better if they return to paid work sooner rather than later.

Perspectives on Culture

Knowledge Specialization, Knowledge Brokerage and the Uneven Growth of Technology Domains
Gianluca Carnabuci, Jeroen Bruggeman

Why do certain domains of knowledge grow fast while others grow slowly or stagnate? Two distinct theoretical arguments hold that knowledge growth is enhanced by knowledge specialization and knowledge brokerage. Based on the notion of recombinant knowledge growth, we show that specialization and brokerage are opposing modes of knowledge generation, the difference between them lying in the extent to which homogeneous vs. heterogeneous input ideas get creatively recombined. Accordingly, we investigate how both modes of knowledge generation can enhance the growth of technology domains. To address this question, we develop an argument that reconciles both specialization and brokerage into a dynamic explanation. Our contention is that specializing in an increasingly homogeneous set of input ideas is both more efficient and less risky than brokering knowledge. Nevertheless, specializing implies progressively exhausting available recombinant possibilities, while brokerage creates new ones. Hence, technology domains tend to grow faster when they specialize, but the more specialized they become, the more they need knowledge brokerage to grow. We cast out our argument into five hypotheses that predict how growth rates vary across technology domains.

Culture and Embodied Cognition: Moral Discourses in Internet Support Groups for Overeaters
Gabriel Ignatow

This article argues that a modified version of Bourdieu's habitus concept can generate insights into moral culture and the ways people use culture to make changes in their lives. If revised in light of recent findings from cognitive neuroscience, the habitus allows for the analysis of culture as embodied cognitive structures linking individuals to primary-group discourses. To demonstrate the utility of this conception, I examine the unique abstract language and embodied metaphors used by members of religious and secular overeaters' internet support groups. The religious group used far more cleanliness metaphors, and members who made frequent use of such metaphors remained with the group longer and posted more messages. This effect was not found for either group's abstract language or for the secular group's embodied metaphors. The findings suggest that a cultural influence on social bonding can be shown when culture is operationalized in terms of embodied cognitive schemas that operate within both the habitus and group discourses. Also, traditionally religious moral culture may be more strongly associated with cultural coherence and social bonding than is modernist culture.

How Do Cultural Producers Make Creative Decisions?: Lessons from the Catwalk
Frédéric C. Godart

Faced with high uncertainty, how do producers in the cultural economy make creative decisions? We present a case study of the fashion modeling industry. Using participant observation, interviews and network analysis of the Spring/Summer 2007 Fashion Week collections, we explain how producers select models for fashion shows. While fashion producers conceive of their selection of models as a matter of "taste," or personal preference, we find that their decisions are shaped by information sharing mechanisms in social networks, principally through a mechanism known as "optioning," which enables producers to know each others' preferences and to align themselves with similar status actors. For cultural producers, choices are a matter of strategic status considerations, even as they are expressed as a matter of personal taste.

Listening to Rap: Cultures of Crime, Cultures of Resistance
Julian Tanner, Mark Asbridge, Scot Wortley

This research compares representations of rap music with the self-reported criminal behavior and resistant attitudes of the music's core audience. Our database is a large sample of Toronto high school students (n = 3,393) from which we identify a group of listeners, whose combination of musical likes and dislikes distinguish them as rap univores. We then examine the relationship between their cultural preference for rap music and involvement in a culture of crime and their perceptions of social injustice and inequity. We find that the rap univores, also known as urban music enthusiasts, report significantly more delinquent behavior and stronger feelings of inequity and injustice than listeners with other musical tastes. However, we also find that the nature and strengths of those relationships vary according to the racial identity of different groups within urban music enthusiasts. Black and white subgroups align themselves with resistance representations while Asians do not; whites and Asians report significant involvement in crime and delinquency, while blacks do not. Finally, we discuss our findings in light of research on media effects and audience reception, youth subcultures and post-subcultural analysis, and the sociology of cultural consumption.

Contexts of Violence

Fathers' Rights Groups, Domestic Violence and Political Countermobilization
Jocelyn Elise Crowley

Domestic violence continues to be a serious problem for women in the United States. As a result, the battered women's movement has been tireless in campaigning for greater awareness of the issue, tougher penalties against offenders, and public vigilance against potential batterers, including fathers from dissolving families. In reaction to this stance, a small but vocal countermovement composed of activists in the fathers' rights movement has argued that the BWM is guilty of what I term enemy boundary creep, a perception whereby these men maintain that they have been inappropriately targeted. Using 40 in-depth interviews with fathers' rights activists located across the country, this article details the narrative that these men have composed as to why the BWM is expanding the scope of its enemies, the tactics that the BWM is using in this campaign, and the insidious effects that these efforts are having on fathers across the country. This narrative formulates a boundary-push back response. This analysis thus articulates how an unlikely countermovement can use the accusation of enemy boundary creep by its social movement opponents in an effort to shift the political discourse on a significant public problem.

Collateral Consequences of Violence in Disadvantaged Neighborhoods
David J. Harding

Using data from Add Health, this study investigates the role of neighborhood violence in mediating the effects of neighborhood disadvantage on high school graduation and teenage pregnancy. Results show that neighborhood violence is a strong predictor of both outcomes, net of individual, family, community and school controls. Neighborhood violence accounts for almost half the conditional association between neighborhood disadvantage and high school graduation among males and almost all of the association among females. Violence also accounts for about a fifth of the conditional association between disadvantage and teenage pregnancy among adolescents of both genders. Violence is a critical social characteristic of disadvantaged neighborhoods, one that explains a sizable portion of the effects of growing up in such neighborhoods.

Dividing and Ruling the World?: A Statistical Test of the Effects of Colonialism on Postcolonial Civil Violence
Matthew Lange, Andrew Dawson

To test claims that postcolonial civil violence is a common legacy of colonialism, we create a dataset on the colonial heritage of 160 countries and explore whether a history of colonialism is related to indicators of inter-communal conflict, political rebellion and civil war in the years 1960-1999. The analysis provides evidence against sweeping claims that colonialism is a universal cause of civil violence but finds that some forms of colonialism increase the risk of some forms of civil violence. Specifically, the findings support claims that inter-communal violence is a common legacy of colonialism – especially of British colonialism and colonialism by minor colonial powers – but suggest that a history of colonialism has only a limited impact on political rebellion and civil war.

Comparative Social Mobility

The Differential Valuation of Women's Work: A New Look at the Gender Gap in Lawyers' Incomes
Ronit Dinovitzer, Nancy Reichman, Joyce Sterling

This article seeks to identify the mechanisms underlying the gender wage gap among new lawyers. Relying on nationally representative data to examine the salaries of lawyers working fulltime in private practice, we find a gender gap of about 5 percent. Identifying four mechanisms – work profiles, opportunity paths and structures, credentials, and legal markets – we first estimate how much of the gap stems from the differential valuation of women's endowments; second, we estimate the effects of different endowments for men and women; and third we assess both these possibilities. The analyses indicate that none of these mechanisms can fully account for the gender gap. Experimental studies that indicate women's work is less valued and rewarded than men's suggest new directions for research on gendered compensation.

Occupational Feminization and Pay: Assessing Causal Dynamics Using 1950-2000 U.S. Census Data
Asaf Levanon, Paula England, Paul Allison

Occupations with a greater share of females pay less than those with a lower share, controlling for education and skill. This association is explained by two dominant views: devaluation and queuing. The former views the pay offered in an occupation to affect its female proportion, due to employers' preference for men–a gendered labor queue. The latter argues that the proportion of females in an occupation affects pay, owing to devaluation of work done by women. Only a few past studies used longitudinal data, which is needed to test the theories. We use fixed-effects models, thus controlling for stable characteristics of occupations, and U.S. Census data from 1950 through 2000. We find substantial evidence for the devaluation view, but only scant evidence for the queuing view.

The Impact of Origin and Host Country Schooling on the Economic Performance of Immigrants
Agnieszka Kanas, Frank van Tubergen

This study examines the economic returns to schooling acquired in the country of origin and the country of destination. It uses large-scale survey data on Turkish, Moroccan, Surinamese and Antillean immigrants in the Netherlands, which contain direct measures of pre- and post-migration schooling. It is studied whether the returns to origin-country schooling depend on contextual factors: i.e., immigrant group and the region of living. Furthermore, we examine the importance of host-country schooling for labor market outcomes and if these can be partly explained by increasing contacts with natives. Results show that the returns to origin-country schooling are higher for Surinamese and Antillean immigrants (i.e., those originating from former Dutch colonies) than for immigrants from Turkey and Morocco. The returns to origin-country schooling are not affected by ethnic concentration in the region of living. Finally, it appears that the returns to host-country schooling are much larger than to origin-country schooling, and the higher returns to host-country schooling cannot be explained by increased social contacts with natives.

Modernization Theory and Changes Over Time in the Reproduction of Socioeconomic Inequalities in Australia
Gary N. Marks

Modernization theory argues that, as societies industrialize and further develop, the influence of social background and other ascribed characteristics on educational and socioeconomic outcomes declines, while achievement in the education system becomes more important. The purpose of this research is to investigate propositions derived from modernization theory as they apply to Australian society during the second half of the 20th century. Specifically, these are (1. declines in the influence of socioeconomic background on education, occupation and earnings; (2. increases in the occupational and economic returns to education; and (3. decreases in gender inequalities in all three outcomes. These propositions are examined using data from nationally representative surveys conducted from 1965 through 2005. In accordance with modernization theory, it was found that the effects of socioeconomic background on education, occupational attainment and earnings have declined. Gender inequalities in education have been reversed, and the gender gap in earnings has declined. The effect of education on occupational attainment has increased more strongly among men than women. Contrary to expectations from one interpretation of modernization theory, the returns in earnings from education have not increased.

Youth Civic Engagement: A Paper and Commentary

Assessing the Effects of Voluntary Youth Service: The Case of Teach for America
Doug McAdam, Cynthia Brandt

We use survey data from all accepted applicants to Teach for America 1993-98 to assess the longer-term effect of youth service on participants' current civic attitudes and behaviors. While TFA "graduates" score higher than the two comparison groups–"dropouts" and "non-matriculants"–on a broad range of attitudinal items measuring civic commitment, these differences appear to be less a byproduct of the TFA experience than a reflection of current involvement with the TFA organization. Moreover, the attitudinal differences are not reflected in actual civic behavior. Specifically, graduates lag behind non-matriculants in current service activity and generally trail both non-matriculants and drop-outs in self-reported participation in five other forms of civic/ political activity measured in the study. Graduates also vote at lower rates than the other two groups. Finally, fewer graduates report employment in "pro-social" jobs than either non-matriculants or drop-outs. We close by speculating on what mechanisms may help explain variation in the long-term effects of youth service or activist experiences.

Why We Need To Learn More About Youth Civic Engagement
James Youniss

Social Forces, December 2009: Volume 88, Issue 2