American Journal of Sociology 117(2)

American Journal of Sociology, September 2011: Volume 117, Issue 2

Avoiding Catastrophe: The Interactional Production of Possibility during the Cuban Missile Crisis
David R. Gibson

In October 1962, the fate of the world hung on the U.S. response to the discovery of Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba. President Kennedy’s decision to impose a blockade was based on hours of discussions with top advisers (the so-called ExComm), yet decades of scholarship on the crisis have missed the central puzzle: How did the group select one response, the blockade, when all options seemed bad? Recently released audio recordings are used to argue that the key conversational activity was storytelling about an uncertain future. Kennedy’s choice of a blockade hinged on the narrative “suppression” of its most dangerous possible consequence, namely the perils of a later attack against operational missiles, something accomplished through omission, self-censorship, ambiguation, uptake failure, and narrative interdiction. The article makes the very first connection between the localized dynamics of conversation and decision making in times of crisis, and offers a novel processual account of one of the most fateful decisions in human history.

Jazz and the Disconnected: City Structural Disconnectedness and the Emergence of a Jazz Canon, 1897–1933
Damon J. Phillips

The study of organizations and markets suffers from the underdevelopment of disconnected producers. This article emphasizes the imputed identities of sources to argue that difficult-to-categorize outputs were appealing when associated with a source high in disconnectedness. Worldwide data on recordings and mobility with detailed data on Midwest recordings provide evidence that jazz from cities high in disconnectedness was rerecorded more often by musicians over time. Moreover, recordings with difficult-to-categorize elements were more likely to be rerecorded when coming from cities high in disconnectedness, despite evidence that original music was paradoxically less likely to come from these cities.

Fragmented Networks and Entrepreneurship in Late Imperial Russia
Henning Hillmann, Brandy L. Aven

Emergent economies suffer from underdeveloped market infrastructures and insufficient public institutions to enforce contract commitments and property rights. Informal reputation-based arrangements may substitute for government enforcement, but they require close-knit networks that enable monitoring. Economic development also requires access to capital, information, and other resources, which is enabled by wide-reaching and diverse networks and not by closure. How is entrepreneurship possible given these conflicting demands? In this article, the authors examine how partnership networks and reputation channel the mobilization of capital for new enterprises, using quantitative information on 4,172 corporate partnerships during the industrialization of late imperial Russia (1869–1913). They find that reputation is locally effective in small and homogeneous network components. By contrast, founders in the largest components that form the network core raise more capital from investors but benefit less from reputation and more from brokerage opportunities and ties that reach diverse communities.

The Structural Sources of Association
Evan Schofer, Wesley Longhofer

Where do associations come from? The authors argue that the expansion and openness of state institutions encourage the formation of associations. Moreover, the institutional structures of world society provide important resources and legitimation for association. Longitudinal cross-national data on voluntary associations are analyzed using panel models with fixed-effects and instrumental variables models to address possible endogeneity. Institutional features of the state and the structures of world society are linked to higher levels of association, as are wealth and education. These factors differentially affect specific types of association, helping make sense of the distinctive configurations of civil society observed around the globe.

Pride and Prejudice: Employment Discrimination against Openly Gay Men in the United States
András Tilcsik

This article presents the first large-scale audit study of discrimination against openly gay men in the United States. Pairs of fictitious résumés were sent in response to 1,769 job postings in seven states. One résumé in each pair was randomly assigned experience in a gay campus organization, and the other résumé was assigned a control organization. Two main findings have emerged. First, in some but not all states, there was significant discrimination against the fictitious applicants who appeared to be gay. This geographic variation in the level of discrimination appears to reflect regional differences in attitudes and antidiscrimination laws. Second, employers who emphasized the importance of stereotypically male heterosexual traits were particularly likely to discriminate against openly gay men. Beyond these particular findings, this study advances the audit literature more generally by covering multiple regions and by highlighting how audit techniques may be used to identify stereotypes that affect employment decisions in real labor markets.

Wealth and the Marital Divide
Daniel Schneider

Marriage patterns differ dramatically in the United States by race and education. The author identifies a novel explanation for these marital divides, namely, the important role of personal wealth in marriage entry. Using event-history models and data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 cohort, the author shows that wealth is an important predictor of first marriage and that differences in asset ownership by race and education help to explain a significant portion of the race and education gaps in first marriage. The article also tests possible explanations for why wealth plays an important role in first marriage entry.