Social Forces 90(3)

Social Forces, March 2012: Volume 90, Issue 3

Economic Inequality

Retirement Patterns and Income Inequality
Anette Eva Fasang

How do social policies shape life courses, and which consequences do different life course patterns hold for individuals? This article engages the example of retirement in Germany and Britain to analyze life course patterns and their consequences for income inequality. Sequence analysis is used to measure retirement trajectories. The liberal welfare state in Britain generates more unstable retirement trajectories (differentiated) that are more dissimilar across the population (de-standardized) than the conservative-corporatist welfare state in Germany. Contrary to common conjectures, this is not associated with higher income inequality among retirees in Britain. This study concludes that there is no simple straightforward link between life course patterns and income inequality.

The Impact of Slavery on Racial Inequality in Poverty in the Contemporary U.S. South
Heather A. O'Connell

Despite Civil Rights legislation, racial inequality persists, especially in the context of poverty. This study advances the literature on racial inequality and the Southern legacy of slavery by examining slavery's relationship with inequality in poverty. I analyze county-level U.S. Census data using regression and spatial data analysis techniques. I find the 1860 slave concentration is related to contemporary black-white inequality in poverty, independent of contemporary demographic and economic conditions, racialized wealth disparities and racial threat. My research suggests the importance of slavery for shaping existing U.S. racial inequality patterns. Insights derived from this research, including the formulation of legacy as a place-based, continuous phenomenon that is distinct from racial threat, provide the basis for future research on legacy's mechanisms.

Careers

Better Off Jobless?: Scarring Effects of Contingent Employment in Japan
Wei-hsin Yu

Previous research fails to address whether contingent employment benefits individuals' careers more than the alternative they often face: being without a job. Using work history data from Japan, this study shows that accepting a contingent job delays individuals' transition to standard employment more than remaining jobless. Moreover, having a contingent job, rather than having no job, leads Japanese men to have lower occupational status after they transition back to standard employment. I argue that in a highly segmented labor market like Japan's, the strict separation of labor pools for standard and contingent jobs makes being labeled as a contingent worker particularly detrimental. Meanwhile, the legacy of Japan's welfare corporatism alleviates the stigma of unemployment, making individuals better off jobless than having a contingent job. This research thus demonstrates the importance of labor-market contexts in shaping the scarring effects of contingent work arrangements.

A Late Start: Delayed Entry, Life Course Transitions and Bachelor's Degree Completion
Josipa Roksa, Melissa Velez

While a substantial proportion of students delay entry into higher education, sociologists are only beginning to understand the consequences of this phenomenon for educational attainment. Previous studies have reported a negative relationship between delayed entry and degree completion, but they have not been able to explain it with a range of students' background characteristics. Results from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth of 1997 indicate that life course transitions, including work, marriage/cohabitation and parenthood, make a unique contribution to explaining this relationship. Adding life course transitions to the models that already control for a range of background characteristics helps to explain the negative relationship between delayed entry and degree completion. These findings have implications for studying educational success in higher education and understanding the process of educational attainment more broadly.

Family

Family Formation and Men's and Women's Attainment of Workplace Authority
Magnus Bygren, Michael Gähler

Using Swedish panel data, we assess whether the gender gap in supervisory authority has changed during the period 1968-2000, and investigate to what extent the gap can be attributed to gender-specific consequences of family formation. The results indicate that the gap has narrowed modestly during the period, and that the life-event of parenthood is a major cause. As long as women and men are childless and single, the gender gap in supervisory authority is marginal, even reversed. When men become fathers, however, they strongly increase their chances for supervisory authority whereas women's chances remain unaffected when they become mothers. We also find a male "marriage premium" on workplace authority, but this premium is generated by selection.

Mothers' Repartnering after a Nonmarital Birth
Sharon H. Bzostek, Sara S. McLanahan, Marcia J. Carlson

This article examines the prevalence, predictors and outcomes of unmarried mothers' repartnering patterns following a nonmarital birth. Results indicate that, within five years after a birth, approximately two-thirds of unmarried mothers end their relationship with the focal child's biological father, and more than half of these mothers enter new partnerships. Among those who repartnered, 60 percent of mothers formed unions with men who had higher economic capabilities than their former partners, 20 percent formed unions with men of similar capabilities, and 20 percent formed unions with men who had lower capabilities. This pattern holds for both nonresidential and coresidential unions. Our findings are consistent with marriage market, learning and evolutionary biology theories about union formation, and they provide support for qualitative evidence that unmarried mothers have high standards for new partners. While many mothers find new partners who seem to offer a higher level of economic security, many other mothers remain unpartnered, likely due (at least in part) to the limited pool of potential partners with relatively high levels of economic promise.

Crime

Enduring Consequences of Right-Wing Extremism: Klan Mobilization and Homicides in Southern Counties
Rory McVeigh, David Cunningham

Research on the consequences of social movements typically aims to identify determinants of success or to draw attention to ways that social movements are able to secure new benefits for constituents by gaining concessions from political authorities. Yet social movements, even those that are ultimately defeated, may have an enduring impact on the communities in which they were once active. This impact may be far removed from the movement's stated goals and may be detrimental to constituents and to society at large. We identify an empirical relationship between Ku Klux Klan activism in the 1960s and increased numbers of homicides in southern U.S. counties in subsequent decades. We explain this finding by drawing attention to ways in which right-wing extremism can disrupt community cohesion, generate mistrust in legal authorities, and promote interpretations of conflict and conflict resolution that weaken constraints on violent behavior.

Social Learning, Reinforcement and Crime: Evidence from Three European Cities
Charles R. Tittle, Olena Antonaccio, Ekaterina Botchkovar

This study reports a cross-cultural test of Social Learning Theory using direct measures of social learning constructs and focusing on the causal structure implied by the theory. Overall, the results strongly confirm the main thrust of the theory. Prior criminal reinforcement and current crime-favorable definitions are highly related in all three contexts and both strongly predict self-projections of criminal behavior. In addition, effects of prior reinforcement on projected misconduct appear to be both direct and indirect (through crime-favorable definitions). Yet, the findings also indicate that the processes underlying direct effects of reinforcement on criminal probabilities may need to be explicated further. Moreover, some types of definitions may be more influential than other types. Finally, parts of the reinforcement process may be affected by socio-cultural contexts.

Experimental Research

Panel Conditioning in a Longitudinal Study of Adolescents' Substance Use: Evidence from an Experiment
Florencia Torche, John Robert Warren, Andrew Halpern-Manners, Eduardo Valenzuela

Panel surveys are widely used in sociology to examine life-course trajectories and to assess causal effects. However, when using panel data researchers usually assume that the act of measuring respondents' attitudes and behaviors has no effect on the attributes being measured or on the accuracy of reports about those attributes. Evidence from cognitive psychology, marketing research, political science and other fields suggests that this assumption may not be warranted. Using a rigorous experimental design, we examine the magnitude of panel conditioning bias - the bias emerging from having answered questions in prior waves of a survey - in a panel study of substance use among adolescents in Chile. We find that adolescents who answered survey questions about alcohol, cigarette, marijuana and cocaine use were considerably less likely than members of a control group to report substance use when re-interviewed one year later. This finding has important implications, and also points to the need for sociologists to be concerned about panel conditioning as an important methodological issue.

How Norms Can Generate Conflict: An Experiment on the Failure of Cooperative Micro-motives on the Macro-level
Fabian Winter, Heiko Rauhut, Dirk Helbing

Why does the adherence to norms not prevent conflict? While the current literature focuses on the emergence, maintenance and impact of norms with regard to cooperation, the issue of norm-related conflict deserves more attention. We develop a general game theoretical model of "normative conflict" and explain how transaction failures on the macrolevel can result from cooperative motives on the microlevel. We differentiate between two kinds of conflict. The first results from distinct expectations regarding the way in which general normative obligations should be fulfilled, the second from distinct expectations as to how the norm should restrain actions based on self-interest. We demonstrate the empirical relevance of normative conflict in a version of the ultimatum game. Our data reveal widespread normative conflict among different types of actors - egoistic, equity, equality and cherry picker. Our findings demonstrate how cooperative intentions about how to divide a collectively produced good may fail to produce cooperative outcomes.

Organizations

Corporate Characteristics, Political Embeddedness and Environmental Pollution by Large U.S. Corporations
Harland Prechel, Lu Zheng

Organizational and environmental sociology contain surprisingly few studies of the corporation as one of the sources of environmental pollution. To fill this gap, we focus on the parent company as the unit of analysis and elaborate environmental theories that focus on the organizational and political-legal causes of pollution. Using a compiled longitudinal dataset of corporations in Standard & Poor's 500 from 1994 through 2001, we test hypotheses derived from an organizational political economy framework. We find that corporations with more complex structures, greater capital dependence and those headquartered in a state with lower environmental standards have higher pollution rates. In addition, the dollar amount of penalties did not curb pollution rates during this period of weakened federal environmental protection.

Networks

Segregation in Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Youth's Personal Networks: Testing Structural Constraint, Choice Homophily and Compartmentalization Hypotheses
Koji Ueno, Eric R. Wright, Mathew D. Gayman, Janice M. McCabe

Homophily promotes the development of social relationships within social groups and increases segregation across groups. Although prior research has demonstrated that network segregation operates in many dimensions such as race and gender, sexual orientation has received little attention. This study investigates what accounts for the segregation between gay, lesbian and bisexual friends and straight friends in GLB youth's personal networks by testing three possible underlying mechanisms - structural constraints, choice homophily and compartmentalization attempts. The analysis uses data collected from GLB youth who were becoming members of a community organization in Indiana from 1994 through 1998. Although the small, convenience sample does not allow generalization of the results, the rich network data provide important insights into personal network segregation in this unique social context. The results suggest that the segregation between GLB and straight friends result from structural constraints and friends' preference to interact within their groups, and that the focal GLB youth's effort to compartmentalize his or her sexual identity accounts little for the segregation.

Politics

The Impact of Race and Ethnicity, Immigration and Political Context on Participation in American Electoral Politics
John R. Logan, Jennifer Darrah, Sookhee Oh

This study uses national survey data in federal election years from 1996 through 2004 to examine voter registration and voting. It shows that racial/ethnic disparities in socio-economic resources and rootedness in the community do not explain overall group differences in electoral participation. It contradicts the expectation from an assimilation perspective that low levels of Latino participation are partly attributable to the large share of immigrants among Latinos. In fact net differences show higher average Latino participation than previously reported. The study focuses especially on contextual factors that could affect collective responses of group members. Moving beyond past research, significant effects are found for the group's representation among office holders, voting regulations and state policies related to treatment of immigrants.

Health

Bringing You More Than the Weekend: Union Membership and Self-rated Health in the United States
Megan M. Reynolds, David Brady

Previous research suggests that higher incomes, safe workplaces, job security and healthcare access all contribute to favorable health. Reflecting the interest of economic and political sociologists in power relations and institutions, union membership has been linked with many such influences on health. Nevertheless, the potential relationship between union membership and health has received little attention. Using logistic regression and propensity score matching, this study examines the association between union membership and self-rated health generally and among select subgroups of the workforce with the General Social Survey from 1973 to 2006. Initial bivariate analyses suggest that union membership is actually associated with worse health. This association disappears when controlling for demographics, then reverses and becomes significant when controlling for labor market characteristics. In well-specified models, union membership has a significant positive effect on favorable self-rated health. The effect roughly offsets the effects of five years of aging or being divorced (as opposed to married). In addition, propensity score matching analyses demonstrate that union membership has a beneficial, significant average treatment effect for the treated. We show that much of union membership's effect in the overall sample is due to the mechanism of higher incomes, but that among men, the less educated, and those with lower incomes, the union-health advantage is not explained fully by income. The effect of union membership also appears to be stable over time. We conclude by encouraging further research on how power relations and institutions shape health.