American Sociological Review 76(5)

American Sociological Review, October 2011: Volume 76, Issue 5

Professional Role Confidence and Gendered Persistence in Engineering
Erin Cech, Brian Rubineau, Susan Silbey, and Caroll Seron

Social psychological research on gendered persistence in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) professions is dominated by two explanations: women leave because they perceive their family plans to be at odds with demands of STEM careers, and women leave due to low self-assessment of their skills in STEM’s intellectual tasks, net of their performance. This study uses original panel data to examine behavioral and intentional persistence among students who enter an engineering major in college. Surprisingly, family plans do not contribute to women’s attrition during college but are negatively associated with men’s intentions to pursue an engineering career. Additionally, math self-assessment does not predict behavioral or intentional persistence once students enroll in a STEM major. This study introduces professional role confidence—individuals’ confidence in their ability to successfully fulfill the roles, competencies, and identity features of a profession—and argues that women’s lack of this confidence, compared to men, reduces their likelihood of remaining in engineering majors and careers. We find that professional role confidence predicts behavioral and intentional persistence, and that women’s relative lack of this confidence contributes to their attrition.

Bringing Managers Back In: Managerial Influences on Workplace Inequality
Emilio J. Castilla

While great progress has been made in documenting that organizational practices affect workplace inequality, little is known about how managers in particular may shape the careers of the employees below them. Using unique longitudinal personnel data on managers and their subordinates, this study identifies and tests for evidence of three distinct mechanisms by which managers potentially influence the assessment of employee performance in the workplace: (1) social network influence between employees’ current and former managers; (2) manager–manager (horizontal) homophily; and (3) manager–employee (vertical) homophily. I find evidence of the independent effects of all three mechanisms of managerial influence on the outcome of disagreement in the performance evaluation ratings of the same worker between former and current managers. In particular, my results stress that both managerial network influence and horizontal homophily affect the process of employee performance assessments, over and above the well-studied vertical homophily mechanism. I conclude by discussing the theoretical implications of these findings for future research regarding the interactional aspects of workplace inequality within contemporary organizations.

The Firm Strikes Back: Non-compete Agreements and the Mobility of Technical Professionals
Matt Marx

This study explores how firms shape labor markets and career paths using employee non-compete agreements. The sociology of work has overlooked non-competes, but data indicate that nearly half of technical professionals in the United States are asked to sign such employment contracts. Fearing loss of investments in talent and trade secrets, firms use non-competes to “strike back” against technical professionals’ increased mobility following the decline of internal labor markets. In-depth interviews with 52 randomly sampled patent holders in a single industry, coupled with a survey of 1,029 engineers across a variety of industries, reveal that ex-employees subject to non-competes are more likely to take career detours—that is, they involuntarily leave their technical field to avoid a potential lawsuit. Moreover, firms strategically manage the process of getting workers to sign such contracts, waiting for workers’ bargaining position to weaken. These findings inform our understanding of the social organization of work in the knowledge economy.

Neighborhood Effects in Temporal Perspective: The Impact of Long-Term Exposure to Concentrated Disadvantage on High School Graduation
Geoffrey T. Wodtke, David J. Harding, and Felix Elwert

Theory suggests that neighborhood effects depend not only on where individuals live today, but also on where they lived in the past. Previous research, however, usually measures neighborhood context only once and does not account for length of residence, thereby understating the detrimental effects of long-term neighborhood disadvantage. This study investigates effects of duration of exposure to disadvantaged neighborhoods on high school graduation. It follows 4,154 children in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, measuring neighborhood context once per year from age 1 to 17. The analysis overcomes the problem of dynamic neighborhood selection by adapting novel methods of causal inference for time-varying treatments. In contrast to previous analyses, these methods do not “control away” the effect of neighborhood context operating indirectly through time-varying characteristics of the family; thus, they capture the full impact of a lifetime of neighborhood disadvantage. We find that sustained exposure to disadvantaged neighborhoods has a severe impact on high school graduation that is considerably larger than effects reported in prior research. We estimate that growing up in the most (compared to the least) disadvantaged quintile of neighborhoods reduces the probability of graduation from 96 to 76 percent for black children, and from 95 to 87 percent for nonblack children.

Dangerous Liaisons? Dating and Drinking Diffusion in Adolescent Peer Networks
Derek A. Kreager and Dana L. Haynie

The onset and escalation of alcohol consumption and romantic relationships are hallmarks of adolescence. Yet only recently have these domains jointly been the focus of sociological inquiry. We extend this literature by connecting alcohol use, dating, and peers to understand the diffusion of drinking behavior in school-based friendship networks. Drawing on Granovetter’s classic concept of weak ties, we argue that adolescent romantic partners are likely to be network bridges, or liaisons, connecting daters to new peer contexts that, in turn, promote changes in individual drinking behaviors and allow these behaviors to spread across peer networks. Using longitudinal data of 449 couples from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, we estimate Actor–Partner Interdependence Models and identify unique contributions of partners’ drinking, friends’ drinking, and friends-of-partners’ drinking to daters’ own future binge drinking and drinking frequency. Findings support the liaison hypothesis and suggest that friends-of-partners’ drinking have net associations with adolescent drinking patterns. Moreover, the coefficient for friends-of-partners’ drinking is larger than the coefficient for one’s own peers and generally immune to prior selection. Our findings suggest that romantic relationships are important mechanisms for understanding the diffusion of emergent problem behaviors in adolescent peer networks.

Misery Does Not Love Company: Network Selection Mechanisms and Depression Homophily
David R. Schaefer, Olga Kornienko, and Andrew M. Fox

Conventional wisdom holds that friends protect against depression through the social support they provide; however, depression likely has a role in structuring friendship networks. In particular, we investigate friend selection mechanisms responsible for similarity in depression among friends (i.e., homophily). Preference is one explanation, yet several correlates of depression make homophilous selection among depressed individuals unlikely. We propose two alternative mechanisms—avoidance and withdrawal—that can produce depression homophily in the absence of preference. These alternative mechanisms create homophily indirectly by limiting friendship partners available to depressed individuals. We test the preference, avoidance, and withdrawal mechanisms using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health and a dynamic network model. Results provide support for the withdrawal mechanism. These findings help explain how depression affects friend selection and have broader implications for understanding selection mechanisms responsible for network patterns such as homophily.

How General Is Trust in "Most People"? Solving the Radius of Trust Problem
Jan Delhey, Kenneth Newton, and Christian Welzel

Generalized trust has become a paramount topic throughout the social sciences, in its own right and as the key civic component of social capital. To date, cross-national research relies on the standard question: “Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you need to be very careful in dealing with people?” Yet the radius problem—that is, how wide a circle of others respondents imagine as “most people”—makes comparisons between individuals and countries problematic. Until now, much about the radius problem has been speculation, but data for 51 countries from the latest World Values Survey make it possible to estimate how wide the trust radius actually is. We do this by relating responses to the standard trust question to a new battery of items that measures in-group and out-group trust. In 41 out of 51 countries, “most people” in the standard question predominantly connotes out-groups. To this extent, it is a valid measure of general trust in others. Nevertheless, the radius of “most people” varies considerably across countries; it is substantially narrower in Confucian countries and wider in wealthy countries. Some country rankings on trust thus change dramatically when the standard question is replaced by a radius-adjusted trust score. In cross-country regressions, the radius of trust matters for civic attitudes and behaviors because the assumed civic nature of trust depends on a wide radius.