American Journal of Sociology 116(2)

The Oncomouse That Roared: Hybrid Exchange Strategies as a Source of Distinction at the Boundary of Overlapping Institutions
Fiona Murray

Conventional wisdom suggests that when institutional logics overlap, the production of hybrids signifies collapse, blending, or easy coexistence. The author provides an alternative interpretation: hybrids can maintain a distinctive boundary and can emerge from contestation, not coexistence. This alternative interpretation is grounded in an analysis of a critical moment at the academic-commercial boundary: the enforcement of patents to a key technology on academic geneticists. In their reaction to commercial encroachment, skilled actors (scientists) took the resources of the commercial logic and transformed their meaning to establish hybrid strategies that preserved the distinctive institutions. Thus, hybrids must be reconsidered as emerging from conflict and produced through boundary work to maintain the distinction and resilience of logics.

Industry Induces Academic Science to Know Less about More
James A. Evans

How does collaboration between academic research and industry shape science? This article argues that companies' relative indifference to theory nudges their academic partners toward novel, theoretically unanticipated experiments. The article then evaluates this proposition using fieldwork, archival materials, and panel models of all academic research using the popular plant model Arabidopsis thaliana and the companies that support that research. Findings suggest that industry partnerships draw high-status academics away from confirming theories and toward speculation. For the network of scientific ideas surrounding Arabidopsis, industry sponsorship weaves discoveries around the periphery into looser, more expansive knowledge. Government funding plays a complementary role, sponsoring focused scientific activity in dense hubs that facilitate scientific community and understanding.

Three Worlds of Relief: Race, Immigration, and Public and Private Social Welfare Spending in American Cities, 1929
Cybelle Fox

Using a data set of public and private relief spending for 295 cities, this article examines the racial and ethnic patterning of social welfare provision in the United States in 1929. On the eve of the Depression, cities with more blacks or Mexicans spent the least on social assistance and relied more heavily on private money to fund their programs. Cities with more European immigrants spent the most on relief and relied more heavily on public funding. Distinct political systems, labor market relations, and racial ideologies about each group’s proclivity to use relief best explain relief spending differences across cities.

A Multilevel Systemic Model of Community Attachment: Assessing the Relative Importance of the Community and Individual Levels
Jeremy Flaherty and Ralph B. Brown

To what extent does community context affect individuals’ social ties and levels of community attachment? The authors replicate Sampson’s multilevel version of Kasarda and Janowitz’s systemic model of community using data from a survey of nearly 10,000 people residing in 99 small Iowa communities. They improve on Sampson’s work by using multilevel statistical tools, better measurement of community attachment, and data from 99 actual communities. While the authors find general support for the systemic model, their results suggest that the community one lives in actually has little effect on one’s level of community attachment, calling into question many of the basic assumptions and findings of past community research.

Settling Down and Aging Out: Toward an Interactionist Theory of Desistance and the Transition to Adulthood
Michael Massoglia and Christopher Uggen

Conceptions of adulthood have changed dramatically in recent decades. Despite such changes, however, the notion that young people will eventually “settle down” and desist from delinquent behaviors is remarkably persistent. This article unites criminology with classic work on age norms and role behavior to contend that people who persist in delinquency will be less likely to make timely adult transitions. The empirical analysis supports this proposition, with both arrest and self-reported crime blocking the passage to adult status. The authors conclude that desisting from delinquency is an important part of the package of role behaviors that define adulthood.

Beyond and Below Racial Homophily: ERG Models of a Friendship Network Documented on Facebook
Andreas Wimmer and Kevin Lewis

A notable feature of U.S. social networks is their high degree of racial homogeneity, which is often attributed to racial homophily—the preference for associating with individuals of the same racial background. The authors unpack racial homogeneity using a theoretical framework that distinguishes between various tie formation mechanisms and their effects on the racial composition of networks, exponential random graph modeling that can disentangle these mechanisms empirically, and a rich new data set based on the Facebook pages of a cohort of college students. They first show that racial homogeneity results not only from racial homophily proper but also from homophily among coethnics of the same racial background and from balancing mechanisms such as the tendency to reciprocate friendships or to befriend the friends of friends, which both amplify the homogeneity effects of homophily. Then, they put the importance of racial homophily further into perspective by comparing its effects to those of other mechanisms of tie formation. Balancing, propinquity based on coresidence, and homophily regarding nonracial categories (e.g., students from “elite” backgrounds or those from particular states) all influence the tie formation process more than does racial homophily.

Commentary and Debate


Vox Regni? Underestimating the Role of the State in Radio Licensing Decisions: A Comment on Greve, Pozner, and Rao
Peter Hart-Brinson

Vox Veritatis: Reply to Hart-Brinson
Henrich Greve, Jo-Ellen Pozner, and Hayagreeva Rao


American Journal of Sociology, September 2010: Volume 116, Issue 2