Social Forces 88(5)

Three on Gender

Trends in Global Gender Inequality
Shawn F. Dorius, Glenn Firebaugh

This study investigates trends in gender inequality throughout the world. Using data encompassing a large majority of the world's population, we examine trends in recent decades for key indicators of gender inequality in education, mortality, political representation and economic activity. We find that gender inequality is declining in virtually all major domains, that the decline is occurring across diverse religious and cultural traditions, and that population growth is slowing the decline because populations are growing faster in countries where there is the greatest gender inequality.

The Shifting Supply of Men and Women to Occupations: Feminization in Veterinary Education
Anne E. Lincoln

A confining limitation for the occupational sex segregation literature has been the inability to determine how many persons of one sex would have entered an occupation had the other sex not successfully entered instead. Using panel data from all American colleges of veterinary medicine (1976-1995), a fixed-effects model with lagged independent variables finds support for the concurrent effects of many hypothesized feminization mechanisms. Declining relative earnings and policies aimed at increasing production of graduates affect applications from men and women similarly, but feminization is driven by the decline in men's college graduation and their avoidance of fields dominated by women. The findings demonstrate the relative contributions and interdependence of supply and demand to occupational sex composition and the job search process more broadly.

Sex Typing of Jobs in Hiring: Evidence from Japan
Eunmi Mun

Using unique data on employers' pre-hire preferences, this article examines the effect of sex typing on the gender gap in offered wages and training. Previous studies using post-hire data have not been able to focus directly on the effects of employer behavior, distinct from employee preferences. By analyzing gender-designated job requisitions for the entry-level labor market in a Japanese city, this study investigates employers' pre-hire decisions about the wage level and on-the-job training that accompany the sex typing of jobs. Results show that employers' sex typing excludes women in advance from jobs that provide higher wages and longer training.

Stratification Processes

Framing the Future: Revisiting the Place of Educational Expectations in Status Attainment
Robert Bozick, Karl Alexander, Doris Entwisle, Susan Dauber, Kerri Kerr

This study revisits the Wisconsin model of status attainment from a life course developmental perspective. Fixed-effects regression analyses lend strong support to the Wisconsin framework's core proposition that academic performance and significant others' influence shape educational expectations. However, investigating the process of expectation formation back to the elementary grades yields insights not evident when analyses are limited to the high school years: (1. many youth consistently expect to attend college from as early as fourth grade; (2. the expectations of middle- and low-SES youth are less stable, and across years the preponderance of their exposure to socialization influences mitigates against sustained college ambitions; (3. long-term stable expectations are more efficacious in forecasting college enrollment than are changing, volatile expectations. As anticipated in the Wisconsin framework, family-and school-based socialization processes indeed contribute to social reproduction through children's educational expectations, but the process starts much earlier and includes dynamics outside the scope of the original status attainment studies.

Do Changes in Job Mobility Explain the Growth of Wage Inequality among Men in the United States, 1977-2005?
Ted Mouw, Arne L. Kalleberg

To what extent did the increase in wage inequality among men in the United States over the past three decades result from job loss and/or employment instability? We propose a simple method for decomposing the change in wage inequality into components due to upward and downward between-employer mobility and within-employer wage changes using data on men's wages and job mobility from the 1977-2005 waves of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. We find that downward employer mobility—a proxy for job displacement based on movement to a lower paid job with a new employer—has the largest effect on inequality over a two-year period. However, the effect of job displacement declines with time. We find that the effect of job loss accounts for 39 percent of the increase in wage inequality during the average eight-year period from 1977 through 2005, compared to 52 percent that is attributable to wage changes for workers who stay with the same employer.

Occupational Status and the Experience of Anger
Jessica L. Collett, Omar Lizardo

Current theories in the sociology of emotions posit contradictory expectations regarding the relationship between status and the relative experience of anger, with some predicting a negative relationship and others proposing a positive one. We test the compatibility of these opposing hypotheses by examining the relationship between anger and a key dimension of socioeconomic status—the occupational status score of an individual's occupation—for a representative sample of Americans. We connect different strands of theory and research in the social psychology of emotions to posit a non-linear relationship between occupational status and the experience of anger. Analyses of data from the 1996 General Social Survey's emotions module (N = 1460) are consistent with this integrative account. Individuals located at the two opposite ends of the status and prestige hierarchy are more likely to experience anger than those of middle status. We use insight from Blau's macro-structural theory to help elucidate this complex relationship.

Political Capital in a Market Economy
Victor Nee, Sonja Opper

This research applies a transaction-focused institutional analysis to compare the value of political capital in different institutional domains of China's market economy. Our results show that the value of political capital is associated with institutional domains of the economy in which agents can use political connections to secure advantages. Political capital is most fungible in institutional domains where government restricts economic activity. In this sense, the value of political connections in China does not differ fundamentally from patterns observable in established market economies. We interpret this as evidence suggesting China may have experienced a tipping point in its transition to a market economy around the turn of the new century.

How Socio-Economic Change Shapes Income Inequality in Post-Socialist Europe
Nina Bandelj, Matthew C. Mahutga

Although income inequality in Central and Eastern Europe was considerably lower during socialism than in other countries at comparable levels of development, it increased significantly in all Central and East European states after the fall of communist regimes. However, some of these countries managed to maintain comparatively low inequality levels 10 years into the transition period while inequalities have skyrocketed in others. What explains this variation? This article presents one of the first longitudinal cross-national analyses of the factors that determine changes in income inequality in 10 Central and East European countries during the first decade after 1989. Results suggest that rising income inequality is principally related to (1. the expansion of the private sector, (2. retrenchment of the redistributive state, (3. the social exclusion of ethno-national minorities, and (4. penetration of foreign capital. Moreover, the analyses suggest that privatization strategies promoting foreign investment created more inequality than those promoting domestic investment. These findings reveal the social, political and cultural foundations of the income inequality dynamic during post-socialist transition in Central and Eastern Europe.

Culture and Organization

The Ecology of Technological Progress: How Symbiosis and Competition Affect the Growth of Technology Domains
Gianluca Carnabuci

We show that the progress of technological knowledge is an inherently ecological process, wherein the growth rate of each technology domain depends on dynamics occurring in other technology domains. We identify two sources of ecological interdependence among technology domains. First, there are symbiotic interdependencies, implying that the rate of growth of one technology domain is driven by the advances made in other technology domains. Second, some technology domains compete with each other, implying that the rate at which a given technology domain advances varies inversely with the competitive pressure it receives from other technology domains. Based on all the technological knowledge patented in the United States between 1975 and 1999, we find statistical support for our argument and hypotheses.

The Deviant Organization and the Bad Apple CEO: Ideology and Accountability in Media Coverage of Corporate Scandals
Mike Owen Benediktsson

What role do the media play in the identification and construction of white-collar crimes? Few studies have examined media coverage of corporate deviance. This study investigates news coverage of six large-scale accounting scandals that broke in 2001 and 2002. Using a variety of empirical methods to analyze the 51 largest U.S. newspapers, the study tests several explanations for tendencies to run more or less coverage of the scandals in question. The study then examines the substantive focus of coverage. First, the results suggest that scandal coverage was influenced by the political ideology of newspapers, as opposed to economic interests or social structural ties between firms. Second, the analysis shows that attention to the adjudication of individual crimes and the punishment of individual offenders received the bulk of media attention.

Socio-demographic Determinants of Economic Growth: Age-Structure, Preindustrial Heritage and Sociolinguistic Integration
Edward Crenshaw, Kristopher Robison

This study establishes a socio-demographic theory of international development derived from selected classical and contemporary sociological theories. Four hypotheses are tested: (1. population growth's effect on development depends on age-structure; (2. historic population density (used here as an indicator of preindustrial social complexity) boosts contemporary economic performance; (3. ethnic polarization impairs economic growth; and (4. a nation's degree of sociolinguistic integration positively influences economic performance. Investigating annual changes in real gross domestic product per capita from 1970 to 2000, our pooled time-series analyses of 101 developed and developing countries generally support these hypotheses net of common alternative explanations, suggesting that the etiology of economic growth could benefit from the reintroduction of classic and contemporary sociological theories.

Perspectives on the Environment

No Safe Place: Environmental Hazards & Injustice along Mexico's Northern Border
Sara E. Grineski, Timothy W. Collins, María de Lourdes Romo Aguilar, Raed Aldouri

This article examines spatial relationships between environmental hazards (i.e., pork feed lots, brick kilns, final assembly plants and a rail line) and markers of social marginality in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. Juárez represents an opportunity for researchers to test for patterns of injustice in a recently urbanizing metropolis of the Global South. We use spatial-econometric modeling to predict the four unique hazard variables and a composite hazard variable using socio-demographic variables at the neighborhood level. Lower class and higher percentages of children and migrants were statistically significant predictors of composite hazard density. These results align with previous studies in the North. However, disaggregating these results by hazard type reveals important and counterintuitive differences in groups at risk based on the market-orientation of the hazard (i.e., domestic vs. transnational) and its location within the urban structure.

Movement Organizations, Synergistic Tactics and Environmental Public Policy
Erik W. Johnson, Jon Agnone, John D. McCarthy

This study builds on political mediation and movement infrastructure models to highlight contingent and synergistic ways in which social movements may impinge upon the U.S. national policy-making process. Analyses employ a variety of datasets to examine the role of environmental movement organizational capacity, protest and institutional activity in garnering Congressional attention to, and action on, salient issues from 1961 through 1990. We find all types of movement activity, but especially the development of national organizational infrastructures, to be positively associated with the convening of Congressional hearings on the environment. Only when there are high levels of both protest and institutional activity is there any evidence that the environmental movement directly influences the passage of environmental laws.

Other Papers

Scenes: Social Context in an Age of Contingency
Daniel Silver, Terry Nichols Clark, Clemente Jesus Navarro Yanez

This article builds on an important but underdeveloped social science concept—the "scene" as a cluster of urban amenities—to contribute to social science theory and subspecialties such as urban and rural, class, race and gender studies. Scenes grow more important in less industrial, more expressively-oriented and contingent societies where traditional constraints fall and self-motivated action around consumption, leisure and amenities is a more important feature of social cohesiveness and interaction. Scenes contextualize the individual through amenities and consumption-based expressions of shared sensibilities as to what is right, beautiful and genuine. This framework adds to concepts such as neighborhood and workplace by specifying 15 dimensions of the urban scenescape. Like neighborhood and workplace, scenes reduce anomie, but because of their focus on consumption and the use of specific amenities, they are more consistent with today's ethos of contingency, moving beyond traditional ideas of the fundamental power of social, family and occupational background. We introduce a new amenities-focused database to measure and analyze scenes and their dimensions for each of 40,000 U.S. zip codes. We illustrate the framework by applying it to one distinct type of scene, bohemia, and analyze its position in the broader social system.

Measuring Government Effectiveness and Its Consequences for Social Welfare in Sub-Saharan African Countries
Audrey Sacks, Margaret Levi

We introduce a method for measuring effective government and modeling its consequences for social welfare at the individual level. Our focus is on the experiences of citizens living in African countries where famine remains a serious threat. If a government is effective, it will be able to deliver goods that individuals need to improve their social welfare. At a minimum, effective governments facilitate reliable access to food for its citizens. We assess this conception of effective government via a multi-level model from 17 sub-Saharan countries sampled in 2005 by Afrobarometer. We find that citizens who live in regions and in countries with a civil bureaucracy, reliable law enforcement and good infrastructure enjoy higher levels of food security than those who live in regions with weaker institutional penetration.

The Lasting Effect of Civic Talk on Civic Participation: Evidence from a Panel Study
Casey A. Klofstad

Extant research shows that individuals who discuss politics and current events with their peers also participate more actively in civil society. However, this correlation is not sufficient evidence of causation due to a number of analytical biases. To address this problem, data were collected through a panel study conducted on students who were randomly assigned to dormitories during their first year of college. In addition, the data were preprocessed before analysis with a matching procedure. These data show that discussing politics and current events caused these students to participate in civic activities during their first year of college. A follow-up study conducted on the same population during their fourth year of college shows that the positive effect of civic talk on civic participation still exists despite the passage of three years. Further analysis shows that the boost in civic participation initially after engaging in civic talk is the mechanism by which the effect of civic talk lasts into the future.

Social Forces, July 2010: Volume 88, Issue 5