American Journal of Sociology 117(3)

American Journal of Sociology, November 2011: Volume 117, Issue 3

“737-Cabriolet”: The Limits of Knowledge and the Sociology of Inevitable Failure
John Downer

This article looks at the fateful 1988 fuselage failure of Aloha Airlines Flight 243 to suggest and illustrate a new perspective on the sociology of technological accidents. Drawing on core insights from the sociology of scientific knowledge, it highlights, and then challenges, a fundamental principle underlying our understanding of technological risk: a realist epistemology that tacitly assumes that technological knowledge is objectively knowable and that “failures” always connote “errors” that are, in principle, foreseeable. From here, it suggests a new conceptual tool by proposing a novel category of man-made calamity: the “epistemic accident,” grounded in a constructivist understanding of knowledge. It concludes by exploring the implications of epistemic accidents and a constructivist approach to failure, sketching their relationship to broader issues concerning technology and society, and reexamining conventional ideas about technology, accountability, and governance

Is a College Degree Still the Great Equalizer? Intergenerational Mobility across Levels of Schooling in the United States
Florencia Torche

A quarter century ago, an important finding in stratification research showed that the intergenerational occupational association was much weaker among college graduates than among those with lower levels of education. This article provides a comprehensive assessment of the “meritocratic power” of a college degree. Drawing on five longitudinal data sets, the author analyzes intergenerational mobility in terms of class, occupational status, earnings, and household income for men and women. Findings indicate that the intergenerational association is strong among those with low educational attainment; it weakens or disappears among bachelor’s degree holders but reemerges among those with advanced degrees, leading to a U-shaped pattern of parental influence. Educational and labor market factors explain these differences in mobility: parental resources influence college selectivity, field of study, and earnings more strongly for advanced-degree holders than for those with a bachelor’s degree alone.

Educational Assortative Mating and Earnings Inequality in the United States
Richard Breen, Leire Salazar

This article investigates how changes in educational assortative mating affected the growth in earnings inequality among households in the United States between the late 1970s and early 2000s. The authors find that these changes had a small, negative effect on inequality: there would have been more inequality in earnings in the early 2000s if educational assortative mating patterns had remained as they were in the 1970s. Given the educational distribution of men and women in the United States, educational assortative mating can have only a weak impact on inequality, and educational sorting among partners is a poor proxy for sorting on earnings.

Practicing What They Preach? Lynching and Religion in the American South, 1890–1929
Amy Kate Bailey, Karen A. Snedker

This project employs a moral solidarity framework to explore the relationship between organized religion and lynching in the American South. The authors ask whether a county’s religious composition affected its rate of lynching, net of demographic and economic controls. The authors find evidence for the solidarity thesis, using three religious metrics. First, their findings show that counties with greater religious diversity experienced more lynching, supporting the notion that a pluralistic religious marketplace with competing religious denominations weakened the bonds of a cohesive moral community and might have enhanced white racial solidarity. Second, counties in which a larger share of the black population worshipped in churches controlled by blacks experienced higher levels of racial violence, indicating a threat to intergroup racially based solidarity. Finally, the authors find a lower incidence of lynching in counties where a larger share of church members belonged to racially mixed denominations, suggesting that cross-racial solidarity served to reduce racial violence.

When Organizations Rule: Judicial Deference to Institutionalized Employment Structures
Lauren B. Edelman, Linda H. Krieger, Scott R. Eliason, Catherine R. Albiston, Virginia Mellema

This article offers a theoretical and empirical analysis of legal endogeneity—a powerful process through which institutionalized organizational structures influence judicial conceptions of compliance with antidiscrimination law. It finds that organizational structures (e.g., grievance and evaluation procedures, antiharassment policies) become symbolic indicators of rational governance and compliance with antidiscrimination laws, first within organizations, but eventually in the judicial realm as well. Lawyers and judges tend to infer nondiscrimination from the mere presence of those structures. Judges increasingly defer to organizational structures in their opinions, ultimately inferring nondiscrimination from their presence. Legal endogeneity theory is tested by analyzing a random sample of 1,024 federal employment discrimination opinions (1965–99) and is found to have increased over time. Judicial deference is most likely when plaintiffs lack clout and when the legal theories require judges to rule on unobservable organizational attributes. The authors argue that legal endogeneity weakens the impact of law when organizational structures are viewed as indicators of legal compliance even in the face of discriminatory actions.

Causality and Statistical Learning
Andrew Gelman

Reviewed work(s):
Counterfactuals and Causal Inference: Methods and Principles for Social Research. By Stephen L. Morgan and Christopher Winship. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. xiii+319.
Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference, 2d ed. By Judea Pearl. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pp. xix+464.
Causal Models: How People Think About the World and Its Alternatives. By Steven A. Sloman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp. xi+212.