Social Forces 88(3)

Varieties of Sociological Experience

“If I had lots of money… I’d have a body makeover:”: Managing the Aging Body
Kathleen F. Slevin

This article uses a feminist framework to explore embodied aging by analyzing indepth formal interviews with 57 men and women in their 60s, 70s and 80s. Emphasizing intersectionality, I focus on the interpretations and strategies these men and women use to make sense of their aging bodies. Their aging corporeal experiences allow me to examine ageist notions about aging and being old and to explore how this thinking, which valorizes youthfulness, shapes their aging experiences.

Behavior, Expectations and Status
Murray Webster Jr., Lisa Slattery Rashotte

We predict effects of behavior patterns and status on performance expectations and group inequality using an integrated theory developed by Fisek, Berger and Norman (1991). We next test those predictions using new experimental techniques we developed to control behavior patterns as independent variables. In a 10-condition experiment, predictions accounted for about 72 percent of variance in the data, with closer fit for women than for men. The gender difference may be related to features of the experiment, especially to the experimental design that counters cultural gender prescriptions in some conditions. We suggest ways to improve the experiment by more precisely separating behavior from inferred performance competence in later research. Applications include using behavior to reduce undesirable effects of status generalization.

Innovation and Selection: Symphony Orchestras and the Construction of the Musical Canon in the United States (1879–1959)
Pierre-Antoine Kremp

This article analyzes the determinants of innovation and success of innovation in the field of U.S. symphony orchestras from 1879 through 1959: why did major orchestras (N = 27) innovate by introducing works of new composers to the repertoire instead of sticking to canonical pieces? Can organizational processes account for the selection and the popularization of new composers in the repertoire? By integrating field theory and organizational theory, this analysis shows that orchestra and musical director consecration and local elite cohesiveness favored innovative programming. Composers introduced by consecrated actors and entering the repertoire at a time of low competition with established composers and high field-level innovation were more likely to survive in the repertoire and have their works performed frequently. These effects became magnified throughout composers’ careers.

Declining Dixie: Regional Identification in the Modern American South
Christopher A. Cooper, H. Gibbs Knotts

We replicate and extend John Shelton Reed’s classic work on regional identification by examining and modeling the prevalence of the words “Dixie” and “Southern” in business names across 100 cities and four decades. We find that the instances of “Dixie” have dropped precipitously, although identification with the word “Southern” has remained more constant, providing evidence of a trend we term re-southernization. We also find that the relative number of blacks in the population provides the most consistent explanation of regional identity. Population density has also emerged as a significant predictor of regional identification in more recent time periods. These findings contribute to the literature on regional identification, the politics of naming and the sociology of the South.

Unpacking the Unspoken: Silence in Collective Memory and Forgetting
Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, Chana Teeger

Collective memory quite naturally brings to mind notions of mnemonic speech and representation. In this article, however, we propose that collective silences be thought of as a rich and promising arena through which to understand how groups deal with their collective pasts. In so doing, we explore two types of silence: overt silence and covert silence, and suggest that each may be used to enhance either memory or forgetting. We illustrate our conceptual scheme using data on the commemoration of slain Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

Global Development & Cultural Change

World-System Mobility and Economic Growth, 1980–2000
Rob Clark

World-system scholars have traditionally emphasized the stability of the core/periphery hierarchy. However, prior network studies employing both categorical and continuous measures of world-system position reveal substantial mobility across time, whereby a number of developing states have become more integrated in the world economy over the past several decades. The developmental impact generated by such mobility remains unexplored. Using data on all commodities in the world trade network, I examine the presence and economic impact of world-system mobility across 110 states during the 1980–2000 period. First, I show that the continued upward mobility of “middle-tier” states from East Asia and the semiperiphery no longer contributes to the long-term trend of trade convergence, but began producing divergence during the final decades of the 20th century. Second, using difference models that control for lagged values, I find that world-system mobility positively affects economic growth, net of initial world-system position, capital and labor inputs, and other regional and economic characteristics. In fact, the magnitude of mobility’s effect is substantially larger than that of initial world-system position and second only to initial human capital. These findings support a range of perspectives that are collectively useful for understanding the rapid economic growth of emerging states.

Globalization and Industrialization in 64 Developing Countries, 1980–2003
Yunus Kaya

This study investigates the effect of the latest wave of economic globalization on manufacturing employment in developing countries. It revisits the classic debate on the effect of internal and external influences on industrialization, and extends this debate to contemporary developing countries. In the process, it assesses the evidence for development/productivity, world systems/dependency and globalization explanations, and uses a comprehensive dataset on 64 developing countries from 1980 through 2003. The results generally show that manufacturing employment increased in most developing countries. First, this study finds that the level of economic development measured by gross domestic product per capita is the most important factor influencing the size of manufacturing employment. Second, economic globalization also influences manufacturing employment in developing countries, but mainly through trade. The size of exports and low-technology exports have a significant positive effect on manufacturing employment in developing countries. Finally, the analysis provides limited support for world systems/dependency theories. Raw materials exports do not significantly influence manufacturing employment while foreign direct investment has a negative impact in some models. This study concludes that the latest wave of economic globalization contributed to the expansion of manufacturing employment in developing countries, although it is not the most significant factor shaping the size of manufacturing employment in these countries.

For Export Only: Diffusion Professionals and Population Policy
Deborah Barrett, Charles Kurzman, Suzanne Shanahan

Export-only diffusion occurs when innovators do not adopt an innovation themselves, but rather promote it to others for adoption. Potential adopters do not take their cues from early adopters, but rather from diffusion professionals who make it their job to spread a practice or institution. The global spread of national-level, population-control policies during the Cold War is one such instance: developed and promoted by wealthy countries that did not themselves adopt such policies, they came to be widespread among poorer countries, thanks in large part to the mobilization of diffusion professionals. This article offers an analytical account of this diffusion, as well as an event-history analysis of 163 countries over the period 1950–1990 demonstrating the importance of linkages between policy adopters and the non-adopting institutions of diffusion professionals.

Anomie & Corruption

Social Change and Anomie: A Cross-National Study
Ruohui Zhao, Liqun Cao

We apply Durkheim’s social transitional theory to explain the variation of anomie in 30 nations in the world. Combining data from two sources – the 1995 World Values Survey and the United Nations University’s World Income Inequality Database or WIID – we test the hypothesis that rapid sociopolitical change at the structural level disrupts social integration and regulation, and increases the level of anomie among individuals in a society. Using the multilevel approach that permits the decomposition of variance within and between nations, the results of the analyses confirm that rapid sociopolitical change at the macro level, such as the political transition from totalitarianism to democracy, produces a higher level of anomie among individuals in a society. In addition, we find a cross-level effect of confidence in authority on anomie. Findings at the individual level are largely consistent with Merton’s theory of anomie and with the extant literature that anomie is inversely related to an individual’s social and economic position in a society.

Incubating Innovation or Cultivating Corruption?: The Developmental State and the Life Sciences in Asia
Cheol-Sung Lee, Andrew Schrank

A substantial body of literature purports to document the growth of scientific misconduct in Northeast Asia. This article traces the apparent growth of research fraud and falsification to two distinct features of the national innovation systems common to the region: liberal research regimes adopted by developmental states and marked by freedom from government oversight, and illiberal laboratory cultures imported from Germany and marked by all-powerful lab directors and their vulnerable underlings. Based on comparative, qualitative case studies of pioneering countries in bio-medical research, as well as cross-national quantitative analyses of the permissiveness of national stem-cell research policies, we argue that Asia’s scientific pathologies are the products of two institutional factors: funding and freedom offered to scientists by developmental states, and the lack of informal control prevalent in the German model of higher education. We conclude that, while Northeast Asian officials offer their biomedical researchers funding and freedom to take advantage of opportunities that rarely exist in the West, their scientists stifle open debate and criticism, and thereby hinder the growth of informal as well as formal control mechanisms that are critical for deterring and detecting scientific fraud.

Why Do People Engage in Corruption?: The Case of Estonia
Margit Tavits

This study uses survey data for 2004 on the general public (N = 788) and public officials (N = 791) in the young post-communist democracy of Estonia to examine individual-level determinants of corruption. The results indicate that both public officials and citizens are more likely to engage in corruption when they do not define corruption as wrong, and when they perceive that corrupt behavior is widespread among their peers. This social learning effect becomes statistically insignificant for those citizens who are extorted. The results provide no support for the most common argument on corruption and compliance–that people are more likely to engage in corruption when they are distrustful of their fellow citizens or of government.

Three From Sweden

Social Insurance as a Collective Resource: Unemployment Benefits, Job Insecurity and Subjective Well-being in a Comparative Perspective
Ola Sjöberg

This article argues that unemployment benefits are providing a crucial but often overlooked function by reducing the insecurity associated with modern labor markets. Because job insecurity is associated with concerns about future financial security, economic support during unemployment may lessen the negative effects of job insecurity on employed individuals’ well-being. Using data from the European Social Survey, this article shows that the generosity of unemployment benefits makes a difference to the subjective well-being of employed individuals, especially those with limited economic resources and an insecure position in the labor market. These results indicate that unemployment benefits may be viewed as a collective resource with important external benefits, i.e., benefits to society over and above those to the unemployed who directly utilize such benefits.

Ethnic Environment During Childhood and the Educational Attainment of Immigrant Children in Sweden
Magnus Bygren, Ryszard Szulkin

We ask whether ethnic residential segregation influences the future educational careers of children of immigrants in Sweden. We use a dataset comprising a cohort of children who finished compulsory school in 1995 (n = 6,560). We follow these children retrospectively to 1990 to measure neighborhood characteristics during late childhood, and prospectively through 2003 to measure the number of years of education attained thus far. The largest immigrant groups came from Finland, Turkey, former Yugoslavia, Iran and Chile. Our empirical analysis reveals that immigrant children who grow up in neighborhoods with many young coethnics who have limited educational resources, obtain relatively low average grades from compulsory school, and on average, do not attain the same levels of education as do immigrant children who grow up elsewhere. For a minority of immigrant children who lived in neighborhoods with educationally successful young coethnics, we find a positive effect of growing up in an ethnic enclave. Also in this case, the effect of the ethnic environment on future educational attainment is mediated by school results in compulsory school.

Neighborhood Social Influence and Welfare Receipt in Sweden: A Panel Data Analysis
Carina Mood

This article places the choice to claim welfare benefits in a social context by studying how neighborhood welfare receipt affects welfare receipt among couples in Stockholm, Sweden. It is expected that the propensity to claim welfare should increase with welfare use in the neighborhood, primarily through stigma reduction and increasing availability of information. I use individual-level panel data (N = 1,595,843) for the Stockholm County population during the 1990s, data that contain a wide range of information and allow extensive controls for observed and unobserved confounding factors. The results from pooled and fixed-effects logistic regressions suggest that welfare receipt among people in the same neighborhood substantially increases the number of households entering the welfare system (inflow), but the effects on outflow are negligible.

Social Processes in Spatial Contexts

Gun Cultures or Honor Cultures?: Explaining Regional and Race Differences in Weapon Carrying
Richard B. Felson, Paul-Philippe Pare

We use the National Violence against Women (and Men) Survey to examine the effects of region and race on the tendency to carry weapons for protection. We find that Southern and Western whites are much more likely than Northern whites to carry guns for self-protection, controlling for their risk of victimization. The difference between Southern and Northern whites is particularly strong for women. We do not find much evidence for regional/race differences in carrying knives or mace. These findings provide support for the idea that regional differences in weapon carrying reflect a gun culture rather than an honor culture. We see more evidence of an honor culture among blacks: they are more likely than whites to carry knives as well as guns, controlling for their risk of victimization.

The Effect of Minimum Wage Rates on High School Completion
John Robert Warren, Caitlin Hamrock

Does increasing the minimum wage reduce the high school completion rate? Previous research has suffered from (1. narrow time horizons, (2. potentially inadequate measures of states’ high school completion rates, and (3. potentially inadequate measures of minimum wage rates. Overcoming each of these limitations, we analyze the impact of changes in state and federal minimum wage rates on state high school completion rates for the graduating classes of 1982 through 2005. Our state-level analyses, which consist of a series of state and year fixed-effects models with controls for state-year time-varying covariates, provide no support for the argument that increasing the minimum wage reduces rates of high school completion.

Latino Employment and Black Violence: The Unintended Consequence of U.S. Immigration Policy
Edward S. Shihadeh, Raymond E. Barranco

U.S. immigration policies after 1965 fueled a rise in the Latino population and, thus, increased the competition for low-skill jobs. We examine whether Latino immigration and Latino dominance of low-skill industries increases black urban violence. Using city-level data for the year 2000, we find that (1. Latino immigration is positively linked to urban black violence, (2. the link is most prevalent where blacks lost ground to Latinos in low-skill markets, (3. not all low-skill sectors operate in unison; black violence rises only when jobs in agriculture, manufacturing and construction are in short supply and, (4. Latino immigration raises black violence by first increasing black unemployment. We discuss the implications of these findings.

Hispanic Population Growth and Rural Income Inequality
Emilio A. Parrado, William A. Kandel

We analyze the relationship between Hispanic population growth and changes in U.S. rural income inequality from 1990 through 2000. Applying comparative approaches used for urban areas we disentangle Hispanic population growth’s contribution to inequality by comparing and statistically modeling changes in the family income Gini coefficient across four rural county types: established Hispanic, rapidly growing Hispanic, rapidly growing non-Hispanic, and slow-growth or declining counties. Results support perspectives that stress growing social heterogeneity for understanding the contribution of minority population growth to inequality, including changes in human capital and industrial restructuring. We find remarkably similar inequality growth across rapidly growing Hispanic and non-Hispanic counties. This suggests that growing rural inequality stems largely from economic expansion and population growth rather than changing Hispanic composition.

Health & Risk

Risk Groups in Exposure to Terror: The Case of Israel’s Citizens
Yariv Feniger, Ephraim Yuchtman-Yaar

This research addresses a largely ignored question in the study of terror: who are its likely victims? An answer was sought through analysis of comprehensive data on civilian victims of terror in Israel from 1993 through 2003. The chances of being killed in seemingly random terror attacks were found unequally distributed in Israeli society, but the weaker sectors were not the most vulnerable. This pattern may be attributed to the perpetration of most terror attacks in public places, where members of underprivileged groups are less likely to be. Paradoxically, ethnic segregation, gender and other forms of social exclusion and inequality may have helped to protect marginalized social groups from the risk of terror victimization.

Clocking In: The Organization of Work Time and Health in the United States
Sibyl Kleiner, Eliza K. Pavalko

This article assesses the health implications of emerging patterns in the organization of work time. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, we examine general mental and physical health (SF-12 scores), psychological distress (CESD score), clinical levels of obesity, and the presence of medical conditions, at age 40. Overall, we find that health varies more across work hours than across types of shifts, and part-time workers report worse physical and emotional health than full-time workers. However, controlling for individual, family and job characteristics explains the poorer health observed among part-time workers. Those who are satisfied with their jobs, have more education, or have an employed spouse, report better health, while women and those with a prior health limitation report worse health. After taking these factors into account, we find a curvilinear relationship between work hours and health, with those working between 40 and 59 hours per week reporting worse mental and physical health than those working 40 hours per week. We also find that obesity differs from current health problems in its relationship to work time. Those who work part-time or fixed-hour schedules are less likely to be obese, suggesting that long-term health risks operating through obesity, such as cardiovascular disease and diabetes, are affected by time availability.

Social Forces, March 2010: Volume 88, Issue 3