Social Stratification
Power, Revisited
Vincent J. Roscigno
Power is a core theoretical construct in the field with amazing utility across substantive areas, levels of analysis and methodologies. Yet, its use along with associated assumptions – assumptions surrounding constraint vs. action and specifically organizational structure and rationality – remain problematic. In this article, and following an overview of important divides on the topic, I develop a dynamic relational theory of power. My framework, which builds on several strands of literature and my own in-depth investigations of workplace discrimination, challenges prevailing top-down conceptions of bureaucratic organizational constraint and rationality (derived from Weber). It also makes explicit the constitutive interplay of structure, culture and action, and provides significant insight into the relational nature of power. Relational, in these regards, entails often-assumed interpersonal interactions but also the capacities of actors to invoke structure (and thus leverage) and legitimate inequality through a two-pronged process of symbolic vilification and amplification. Contemporary bureaucracy and its structural and cultural foundations can provide the leverage for doing so and in a manner whereby hierarchical projects surrounding race, sex, age and social class are systematically reified.
Cohort Change and Racial Differences in Educational and Income Mobility
Deirdre Bloome, Bruce Western
Policy reforms and rising income inequality transformed educational and economic opportunities for Americans approaching midlife in the 1990s. Rising income inequality may have reduced mobility, as income gaps increased between rich and poor children. Against the effects of rising inequality, Civil Rights reforms may have increased mobility, as opportunities expanded across cohorts of black students and workers. We compare educational and income mobility for two cohorts of black and white men, the older born in the late 1940s and the younger born in the early 1960s. We find that educational mobility increased for black men, but income mobility declined for both races. Economic mobility declined despite unchanged or improved educational mobility because of increased returns to schooling and increased intergenerational income correlations, independent of schooling.
The Unequal Burden of Weight Gain: An Intersectional A
Jennifer A. Ailshire, James S. House
The implications of recent weight gain trends for widening social disparities in body weight in the United States are unclear. Using an intersectional approach to studying inequality, and the longitudinal and nationally representative American’s Changing Lives study (1986–2001/2002), we examine social disparities in body mass index trajectories during a time of rapid weight gain in the United States. Results reveal complex interactive effects of gender, race, socioeconomic position and age, and provide evidence for increasing social disparities, particularly among younger adults. Most notably, among individuals who aged from 25–39 to 45–54 during the study interval, low-educated and low-income black women experienced the greatest increase in BMI, while high-educated and high-income white men experienced the least BMI growth. These new findings highlight the importance of investigating changing disparities in weight intersectionally, using multiple dimensions of inequality as well as age, and also presage increasing BMI disparities in the U.S. adult population.
Social Movements
Movements, Markets and Fields: The Effects of Anti-Sweatshop Campaigns on U.S. Firms, 1993–2000
Tim Bartley, Curtis Child
How do social movements influence corporations? Recent work suggests that movements can inflict material damage on their targets and shape categories of evaluation in organizational fields. Extending these ideas, we examine the effects of anti-sweatshop campaigns on sales, stock performance, reputation and specialized ratings of U.S. firms, using fixed-effects regression models and event study methods. The analysis demonstrates that social movements can in some circumstances shape both the markets and fields that firms inhabit. Specifically, anti-sweatshop campaigns (1. had negative effects on sales (though only among certain types of firms), (2. influenced stock prices, and (3. shaped specialized ratings of corporate responsibility. They also diminished previously positive corporate reputations (to a modest degree) but did not radically alter reputational hierarchies in the business community.
Understanding Activist Leadership Effort in the Movement O
Cassandra R. Dorius, John D. McCarthy
Why do some social movement leaders work harder than others? And, how does gender affect the patterns we uncover? Utilizing historical case study evidence of local chapters in the emerging movement opposing drinking and driving we are able to develop and test theoretical expectations about predictors of weekly effort among MADD and RID leaders. Taken together, our model explains 45 percent of the variation in leadership effort. We find bureaucratic complexity and victim support activities are more powerful predictors of effort than are individual leader characteristics, although all are important. Further analysis reveals that gender almost wholly conditions the strong effect of bureaucratic complexity on leadership effort so that increasingly complex chapter structures are associated with substantial increases in work hours for women but not men.
Subsidizing the Cost of Collective Action: International Organizations and Protest among Polish Farmers during Democratic Transition
Sarah Valdez
Polish farmers became politically contentious after democratization in 1989, despite their minimal involvement in the Solidarity movement. I test the effectiveness of social movement theories in explaining this phenomenon by examining frequency and intensity of protest from 1980–1995. I find that grievance models have little explanatory power, political opportunity accounts for the frequency of protest, and resource mobilization offers insight into both frequency and intensity of protests. Supplementing existing theories, I offer qualitative evidence that development programs designed to restructure agricultural cooperatives created mobilizing structures. The reforms were intended to help family farmers adapt to the new market economy, but because most protests targeted liberalization policies, I conclude that in their short-term success, development agencies inadvertently subsidized the cost of collection action against their long-term goals.
Education
Adoption? Adaptation?: Evaluating the Formation of Educational Expectations
Megan Andrew, Robert M. Hauser
Sociologists have long used educational expectations to understand the complex mental processes underlying individuals’ educational decision making. Yet, little research evaluates how students actually formulate their educational expectations. Status attainment theory asserts that students adopt their educational expectations early based on family background and social influences, and that their educational expectations are driven by a static mental construct as a result. In contrast, recent research based on Bayesian learning theory hypothesizes that students mostly adapt their educational expectations in light of new information about their academic potential. Comparing models of expectations formation in adolescence, we find that students’ expectations do not derive from a static mental construct. However, students adapt their educational expectations only modestly and only in response to very large changes in grade point averages. Thus, adolescent educational expectations stabilize early and are rather persistent over time.
The Complexity of Non-Completion: Being Pushed or Pulled to Drop Out of High School
Christen L. Bradley, Linda A. Renzulli
Using a model of student dropout with only two possible outcomes – “still in school” or “dropout” – hides the complex reasons that students leave high school. We offer a model with three outcomes: in school, pushed out or pulled out. Using data from the Educational Longitudinal Survey, we find that for black students, differences in SES explain higher likelihoods of being either pushed or pulled out as compared to white students, but Latino students remain more likely to be pulled out even after we control for SES. We also find that SES moderates the relationship between race/gender and being pushed out, and that higher levels of SES may be detrimental to students of color in the context of high poverty schools.
Student-Centeredness in Social Science Textbooks, 1970–2008: A Cross-National Study
Patricia Bromley, John W. Meyer, Francisco O. Ramirez
A striking feature of modern societies is the extent to which individual persons are culturally validated as equal and empowered actors. The expansion of a wide range of rights in recent decades, given prominence in current discussions of world society, supports an expanded conception of the individual. We examine the extent to which broad global changes promoting human empowerment are associated with expanded ideas of the status and capacities of students. We hypothesize that there are substantial increases in student-centered educational foci in countries around the world. First, the rights of students as children are directly asserted. Second, an emphasis on empowered human agency supports forms of socialization that promote active participation as well as the capacities and interests of the student. Examining a unique dataset of 533 secondary school social science textbooks from 74 countries published over the past 40 years, we find that textbooks have indeed become more student-centered, and that this shift is associated with the rising status of individuals and children in global human rights treaties and organizations. Student-centered texts are more common in countries with greater individualism embodied in political and socio-economic institutions and ideologies, and with more links to world society. The study contributes to both political and educational sociology, examining how global changes lead to increased emphasis on empowered individual agency in intended curricula.
Intergenerational Family Relationships
Intergenerational Ties in Context: Grandparents Caring for Grandchildren in China
Feinian Chen, Guangya Liu, Christine A. Mair
Guided by theories and empirical research on intergenerational relationships, we examine the phenomenon of grandparents caring for grandchildren in contemporary China. Using a longitudinal dataset (China Health and Nutrition Survey), we document a high level of structural and functional solidarity in grandparent-grandchildren relationships. Intergenerational solidarity is indicated by a high rate of coresidence between grandchildren and grandparents, a sizable number of skipped-generation households (no parent present), extensive childcare involvement by non-coresidential grandparents, and a large amount of care provided by coresidential grandparents. Multivariate analysis further suggests that grandparents’ childcare load is adaptive to familial needs, as reflected by the characteristics of the household, household members and work activities of the mothers.
Family Events and the Timing of Intergenerational Transfers
Thomas Leopold, Thorsten Schneider
This research investigates how family events in adult children’s lives influence the timing of their parents’ financial transfers. We draw on retrospective data collected by the German Socio-Economic Panel Study and use event history models to study the effects of marriage, divorce and childbirth on the receipt of large gifts from parents. We find increased chances of receiving real estate at marriage and in subsequent years, at childbirth, but not in the event of divorce. Large gifts of money are received in the years of marriage and divorce, but not at childbirth. Our findings indicate that parental gifts are triggered by adult children’s economic need, but also point to a plurality of transfer motives and meanings for parents, adult children and their relationships.
Social Relations
(Re)Integrating Simmel in Contemporary Social Exchange: The Effect of Nonpartisans on Relational Outcomes
Jessica L. Collett
Despite the increased prevalence of neutral third parties in both formal and informal exchange processes, social exchange theory has yet to consider the effect of nonpartisans on important cognitive and affective outcomes of exchange. This research integrates Simmel’s conceptualization of small groups and nonpartisans with contemporary theory and research in social exchange to explore how different levels of neutral third party intervention in an exchange process affect the “relational outcomes” of exchange (perceptions of fairness of, general positive regard toward, the exchange partner and optimism about the tone of future interactions). Experimental results indicate that increased third party intervention is positively related to favorable relational outcomes. The increased likelihood of external attributions and decreased salience of conflict associated with high levels of third-party intervention partially explain this result.
A Theoretical Model and New Test of Managerial Legitimacy in Work Teams
Jeongkoo Yoon, Shane Thye
This study examines endorsement and authorization as two social mechanisms that can induce perceptions of legitimacy for individuals who manage work teams. Endorsement is the support of a manager by one’s own team members, whereas authorization is the support of a team manager stemming from a higher bureaucratic level. Applying these mechanisms to specific work teams we hypothesize that (1. a team member who observes that other team members endorse a manager and the upper management authorizes the manager will perceive that manager’s acts to be more legitimate; (2. in the context of the team environment the effect of endorsement will be greater than that of authorization; and (3. perceived legitimacy will mediate the effects of endorsement and authorization on positive outcomes such as team members’ efficacy and commitment. These hypotheses were tested using 320 respondents from 56 Korean work teams. The results provide overall support of these hypotheses. As predicted, endorsement and authorization are key mechanisms significantly enhancing legitimacy. Further, the effect of endorsement on legitimacy is greater than that of authorization, and legitimacy partially mediates the effects of both endorsement and authorization on team efficacy and commitment. The implications of these findings are discussed in the context of prevailing theories of legitimacy.
Migration
Development and the Urban and Rural Geography of Mexican Emigration to the United States
Erin R. Hamilton, Andrés Villarreal
Past research on international migration from Mexico to the United States uses geographically-limited data and analyzes emigrant-sending communities in isolation. Theories supported by this research may not explain urban emigration, and this research does not consider connections between rural and urban Mexico. In this study we use national data from Mexico to investigate rural and urban emigration. We find that a central motivation for emigration – self-insurance through labor market diversification – is most relevant to less rural, non-metropolitan places. Paradoxically, while Mexican cities have the lowest rates of emigration, the rural places that are spatially proximate to cities have the highest rates. These findings suggest that while urban development retains emigrants within city borders, it may generate emigration out of neighboring rural places.
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