American Journal of Sociology 118(2)

American Journal of Sociology, September 2012: Volume 118, Issue 2

Northward Migration and the Rise of Racial Disparity in American Incarceration, 1880–1950
Christopher Muller

Of all facets of American racial inequality studied by social scientists, racial disparity in incarceration has proved one of the most difficult to explain. This article traces a portion of the rise of racial inequality in incarceration in northern and southern states to increasing rates of African-American migration to the North between 1880 and 1950. It employs three analytical strategies. First, it introduces a decomposition to assess the relative contributions of geographic shifts in the population and regional changes in the incarceration rate to the increase in racial disparity. Second, it estimates the effect of the rate of white and nonwhite migration on the change in the white and nonwhite incarceration rates of the North. Finally, it uses macro- and microdata to evaluate the mechanisms proposed to explain this effect.

Defining America’s Racial Boundaries: Blacks, Mexicans, and European Immigrants, 1890–1945
Cybelle Fox and Thomas A. Guglielmo

Contemporary race and immigration scholars often rely on historical analogies to help them analyze America’s current and future color lines. If European immigrants became white, they claim, perhaps today’s immigrants can as well. But too often these scholars ignore ongoing debates in the historical literature about America’s past racial boundaries. Meanwhile, the historical literature is itself needlessly muddled. In order to address these problems, the authors borrow concepts from the social science literature on boundaries to systematically compare the experiences of blacks, Mexicans, and southern and eastern Europeans (SEEs) in the first half of the 20th century. Their findings challenge whiteness historiography; caution against making broad claims about the reinvention, blurring, or shifting of America’s color lines; and suggest that the Mexican story might have more to teach us about these current and future lines than the SEE one.

Difficult Decoupling: Employee Resistance to the Commercialization of Personal Settings
Catherine Turco

The market’s tendency to organize personal spheres of life is not always unfettered, and while past studies have identified public discomfort as a bar to market expansion, this study considers a commercialization project that gained public acceptance yet nevertheless failed. The study’s key theoretical insight is that the organizational decoupling required for successful commercialization may complicate companies’ ability to gain employee acceptance. Rich ethnographic data from Motherhood, Inc., an organization offering support and services for new mothers, is leveraged to identify two conditions under which employee resistance may arise and undermine successful commercialization. This article contributes to sociological understandings by theorizing the important role of employees in commercialization and to organizational theory more generally by specifying conditions under which decoupling may be difficult to achieve.

Cohort Change, Diffusion, and Support for Environmental Spending in the United States
Fred C. Pampel and Lori M. Hunter

Long-standing debates over the effect of socioeconomic status (SES) on environmental concern contrast postmaterialist and affluence arguments, suggesting a positive relationship in high-income nations, with counterarguments for a negative or near zero relationship. A diffusion-of-innovations approach adapts parts of both arguments and predicts initial adoption of proenvironmental views by high-SES groups; however, environmentalism diffuses over time to other SES groups, weakening the association. This argument is tested with General Social Survey data (1973–2008) across 83 cohorts, whose attitudes before, during, and after the emergence of environmentalism identify long-term changes in environmental concern. Multilevel age, period, and cohort models support diffusion arguments by demonstrating that the effects across cohorts of education, income, and occupational prestige first strengthen, then weaken. This finding suggests that diffusion of environmental concern first produces positive relationships consistent with postmaterialism arguments and later produces null or negative relationships consistent with global environmentalism arguments.

Building Europe on a Weak Field: Law, Economics, and Scholarly Avatars in Transnational Politics
Stephanie Lee Mudge and Antoine Vauchez

The present article mobilizes the concepts of “weak field” and “avatar” to explain Europe’s historically variable meanings, analyzing two successful reinventions (as a “community of law” and a “single market”) and one failure (“social Europe”). Focusing on law and economics, the authors first show that the weak field of EU studies serves as a crossroads between nationally anchored scholarly professions and Europe’s political field; second, they show that under certain conditions legal and economic constructions have exerted performative effects via scholarly avatars. Depending on their strategic positioning, scholarly avatars facilitate symbolic exchange across political, technocratic, and scholarly boundaries and endow theoretical constructions with performative potential.