Sunday, September 9, 2012

Social Forces 91(1)

Social Forces, September 2012: Volume 91, Issue 1

90th Anniversary Reflections

Now We Are Almost Fifty! Reflections on a Theory of the Transformation of Social Movement Organizations
Roberta Garner, Mayer N. Zald

Reflections upon “The Effects of Industrial, Occupational and Sex Segregation on Blue-Collar Markets” – 35 Years Later
William Form

Reflections on Conceptualizing and Measuring Tie Strength
Peter V. Marsden, Karen E. Campbell

The Social Dynamics of Trust: Theoretical and Empirical Research, 1985–2012
J. David Lewis, Andrew J. Weigert

Reflection on “A Revised Strain Theory of Delinquency"
Robert Agnew

Reflections on the Dimensions of Segregation
Douglas S. Massey

Reflections on “Family Structure and Child Well-Being: Economic Resources vs. Parental Socialization”
Elizabeth Thomson, Sara S. McLanahan

Housework: Who Did, Does or Will Do It, and How Much Does It Matter?
Suzanne M. Bianchi, Liana C. Sayer, Melissa A. Milkie, John P. Robinson

The Measure of American Religious Traditions: Theoretical and Measurement Considerations
Robert D. Woodberry, Jerry Z. Park, Lyman A. Kellstedt, Mark D. Regnerus, Brian Steensland

Labor Markets

Dual Embeddedness: Informal Job Matching and Labor Market Institutions in the United States and Germany
Steve McDonald, Richard A. Benton, David F. Warner
Drawing on the embeddedness, varieties of capitalism and macrosociological life course perspectives, we examine how institutional arrangements affect network-based job finding behaviors in the United States and Germany. Analysis of cross-national survey data reveals that informal job matching is highly clustered among specific types of individuals and firms in the United States, whereas it is more ubiquitous in Germany. These differences are linked to (1. loosely regulated and hierarchical employment relations in the United States that facilitate network dominance in specific economic sectors and (2. coordinated market relations, tight employment regulations and extensive social insurance system in Germany that generate opportunities for informal matching but limit the influence of network behavior on employment characteristics. These findings illustrate how social institutions shape access to economic resources through network relations.

The Scarring Effects of Bankruptcy: Cumulative Disadvantage Across Credit and Labor Markets
Michelle Maroto
As the recent economic crisis has demonstrated, inequality often spans credit and labor markets, supporting a system of cumulative disadvantage. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, this research draws on stigma, cumulative disadvantage and status characteristics theories to examine whether credit and labor markets intersect through the event of bankruptcy to disadvantage certain individuals over time. The transmission of bankruptcy’s stigma across markets occurs in a specific legal setting where, even though the current U.S. Bankruptcy Code grants bankrupters a fresh start through debt forgiveness, the Fair Credit Reporting Act limits bankrupters’ ability to begin anew because it permits employers to access credit reports. My findings highlight these ambiguities and show that, net of their previous labor market statuses, bankrupters spend less time working and have lower earnings than nonbankrupters. Thus, having become bankrupt exposes people to subsequent disadvantage in the labor market.

Don’t Blame the Babies: Work Hour Mismatches and the Role of Children
Jeremy Reynolds, David R. Johnson
Many authors suggest that having children leads to gaps between the number of hours people prefer to work and the hours they actually work. Existing research, however, offers mixed support for that claim. We discuss the roots of this popular but poorly supported hypothesis and offer the first review of research on the topic, paying special attention to the theoretical implications of previous findings. We also offer the first evaluation of the hypothesis using U.S. panel data. We find that one particular change, the transition from no children to one child, heightens the desire for fewer hours among men and women. Most arrivals and departures of children, however, are not closely connected to hour mismatches. In part, this is because some workers (particularly women) manage to change their actual hours to match their preferences, but it is also because children have modest effects on preferred hours (especially among men). In sum, having children brings many challenges, but our analysis indicates that children bear little responsibility for the work hour mismatches so many Americans report.

Economic Inequality

Relational Inequality: Gender Earnings Inequality in U.S. and Japanese Manufacturing Plants in the Early 1980s
Dustin Avent-Holt, Donald Tomaskovic-Devey
We examine the relational model of inequality using samples of employer-employee matched data from manufacturing plants in the United States and Japan. We argue that gender is a salient status characteristic in both the United States and Japan, but because of differences in gender politics, wage inequality will vary more across U.S. workplaces than Japanese workplaces. We find this claim to be supported, and then we model this variation as a function of exploitation and opportunity hoarding processes. Women’s exclusion from high-wage plants and gender-linked claims-making resources help to explain between and within plant wage variation in U.S. workplaces. In Japan, where gender distinctions were less locally contested, access to lifetime employment and gender differences in labor supply generate local gender wage gaps. This paper provides evidence on the utility of relational inequality theory and an empirical strategy to observe the exploitation and opportunity hoarding mechanisms.

Minority Population Concentration and Earnings: Evidence From Fixed-Effects Models
Kecia Johnson, Jeremy Pais, Scott J. South
Consistent with the hypothesis that heightened visibility and competition lead to greater economic discrimination against minorities, countless studies have observed a negative association between minority population concentration and minority socioeconomic attainment. But minorities who reside in areas with high minority concentration are likely to differ from minorities who reside in areas with few minorities on unobserved characteristics related to economic attainment. Thus, this association may be a product of differential skills, behaviors and networks acquired during childhood or of selective migration. Applying fixed-effects models to a quarter century of panel data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, we find that for Blacks and Latinos the inverse association between minority population concentration and earnings is eliminated when unobserved person-specific characteristics are controlled. The findings suggest that the negative association between Black population size and Blacks’ earnings is driven largely by the selection of high-earning Blacks into labor markets with relatively small Black populations. Most of the association between Latino population concentration and earnings is attributable to the level of Latino population concentration experienced during childhood.

Social Capital
Mexican American Protest, Ethnic Resiliency and Social Capital: The Mobilization Benefits of Cross-Cutting Ties
Wayne A. Santoro, María B. Vélez, Stacy M. Keogh
Using terms like free spaces and havens, conventional wisdom views social ties by subordinate groups to dominant group members as hindering protest participation. In contrast, we draw on ethnic resiliency and social capital perspectives and argue that there are mobilization benefits to having dominant group members as friends. We offer a unique statistical test by examining the effect of white social ties on Mexican American participation in cultural and political protest. Using survey data, bivariate and multivariate results demonstrate that social connections to whites promote Mexican American activism. We conclude with a discussion of how our findings can be reconciled with previous scholarship.

Age, Period and Cohort Effects On Social Capital
Philip Schwadel, Michael Stout
Researchers hypothesize that social capital in the United States is not just declining, but that it is declining across generations or birth cohorts. Testing this proposition, we examine changes in social capital using age-period-cohort intrinsic estimator models. Results from analyses of 1972–2010 General Social Survey data show (1. that informal association with neighbors declined across periods while informal association with friends outside of the neighborhood increased across birth cohorts; (2. that formal association was comparatively stable with the exception of relatively high levels of formal association among the early 1920s and early 1930s birth cohorts; and (3. that trust declined considerably across both periods and cohorts, though the oldest cohorts are less trusting than those born in the 1920s through the 1940s. While the results suggest that changes in social capital are more complex than the simple decline depicted by many researchers, the aspects of social capital that have declined may be essential for promoting social and political participation.

Temporal Dynamics of Social Exchange and the Development of Solidarity: “Testing the Waters” Versus “Taking a Leap of Faith”
Ko Kuwabara, Oliver Sheldon
In their concerted efforts to unpack the microprocesses that transform repeated exchanges into an exchange relation, exchange theorists have paid little attention to how actors perceive changes and dynamics in exchanges over time. We help fill this gap by studying how temporal patterns of exchange affect the development of cohesion. Some exchange relations develop gradually as actors hedge their bets, making incremental commitments to “test the water” and manage the risks of exchange (incremental exchange). Other relations settle quickly into full commitment as actors take “leaps of faith” in each other (constant exchange). Do these patterns result in different levels of bonding? We examined this question across a series of two laboratory studies and a vignette survey that manipulated two dimensions of repeated exchange: resource level (how much actors exchange in each interaction) and frequency (how often actors exchange). In each study, participants played or imagined a series of social exchange tasks with a fixed partner. Results show that exchanging incrementally in resource level promotes cohesion, but exchanging incrementally in frequency undermines it. These findings affirm the importance of exchange frequency for cohesion, but demonstrate an opposite effect of resource level: compared to exchanging constant and full levels, exchanging incremental levels of resources creates more cohesion, even while resulting in lower instrumental benefits.

Religion

Religion and End-of-Life Treatment Preferences: Assessing the Effects of Religious Denomination and Beliefs
Shane Sharp, Deborah Carr, Cameron Macdonald
We use Wisconsin Longitudinal Study data (n = 2,678) to assess the effects of religious denomination and ideology on end-of-life treatment preferences in two hypothetical terminal illness scenarios: physical pain and severe cognitive impairment. We found no statistically significant differences when comparing traditionally defined religious denominational groups (i.e., conservative, moderate and liberal Protestants; Catholics; other religions; no religion). However, when we considered the intersection of broad denominational group and adherence to Christian fundamentalist beliefs, we found that fundamentalist Catholics and fundamentalist Protestants were significantly more likely than their nonfundamentalist counterparts to desire life-extending treatments in both scenarios. These effects were fully explained by beliefs about quality of life and religious control over medical decisions. We end with a discussion of the study’s theoretical and policy implications.

Environment

Outcomes of Global Environmentalism: Longitudinal and Cross-National Trends in Chemical Fertilizer and Pesticide Use
Kristen Shorette
Previous research identifies changing world cultural norms as the impetus for a worldwide trend promoting environmentalism. However, the extent to which countries comply with the norms promoted and codified by environmental organizations and treaties has been less rigorously tested. Suspected noncompliance is generally explained as “decoupling” between policy and outcome. Here, I address the relationship between stated environmental objectives and practices and integrate world society and world-systems perspectives on the natural environment. Using random effects regression analyses of cross-national chemical fertilizer and pesticide use, I find that integration into world culture significantly predicts overall decreased use of these environmentally harmful products. However, the effect varies by zone of the world system, which supports an integrated theory of global environmentalism.

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