Journal of Marriage and Family 75(1)

Journal of Marriage and Family, February 2013: Volume 75, Issue 1

Brief Reports

Relationship Churning, Physical Violence, and Verbal Abuse in Young Adult Relationships
Sarah Halpern-Meekin, Wendy D. Manning, Peggy C. Giordano and Monica A. Longmore

Gendered Divisions of Fertility Work: Socioeconomic Predictors of Female Versus Male Sterilization
Andrea M. Bertotti

Family Environments of Children and Adolescents

Family Time Activities and Adolescents' Emotional Well-being
Shira Offer

Marital Satisfaction, Family Emotional Expressiveness, Home Learning Environments, and Children's Emergent Literacy
Laura C. Froyen, Lori E. Skibbe, Ryan P. Bowles, Adrian J. Blow and Hope K. Gerde

Mothers' and Fathers' Work Hours, Child Gender, and Behavior in Middle Childhood
Sarah Johnson, Jianghong Li, Garth Kendall, Lyndall Strazdins and Peter Jacoby

Family of Origin, Race/Ethnicity, and Socioeconomic Attainment: Genotype and Intraindividual Processes
K. A. S. Wickrama and Catherine Walker O'Neal

Relationship Quality and Instability

Marital and Cohabitation Dissolution and Parental Depressive Symptoms in Fragile Families
Claire M. Kamp Dush

Divorce in Korea: Trends and Educational Differentials
Hyunjoon Park and James M. Raymo

Marital Quality, Gender, and Markers of Inflammation in the MIDUS Cohort
Carrie J. Donoho, Eileen M. Crimmins and Teresa E. Seeman

Past-Year Sexual Inactivity Among Older Married Persons and Their Partners
Amelia Karraker and John DeLamater

Marital Well-being and Religiousness as Mediated by Relational Virtue and Equality
Randal D. Day and Alan Acock

Of General Interest

Pathways of Adult Children Providing Care to Older Parents
Amanda E. Barnett

The Power and Limits of Marriage: Married Gay Men's Family Relationships
Abigail Ocobock

How Older People Position Their Late-Life Childlessness: A Qualitative Study
Ruth E. S. Allen and Janine L. Wiles

Methods for Handling Missing Secondary Respondent Data
Rebekah Young and David Johnson

Intergenerational Transfers to Adult Children in Europe: Do Social Policies Matter?
Martina Brandt and Christian Deindl

Exchange on Parental Incarceration

Misidentifying the Effects of Parental Incarceration? A Comment on
Christopher Wildeman, Sara Wakefield and Kristin Turney

Misidentified or Misunderstood? A Reply to Wildeman, Wakefield, and Turney (2013)
Elizabeth I. Johnson and Beth Easterling

American Journal of Sociology 118(3)

American Journal of Sociology, November 2012; Volume 118, Issue 3

Network-Related Personality and the Agency Question: Multirole Evidence from a Virtual World
Ronald S. Burt

The more consistent a person’s network across roles and the more relevant that consistency is for achievement, the more important agency is for understanding network effects on achievement. With network, experience, and achievement data on persons playing multiple characters in a virtual world, evidence is presented to support two conclusions: (1) About a third of network structure is consistent within persons across roles: that is, those who in one role build networks rich in access to structural holes will build similar networks in other roles; builders of closed networks also tend to build that network across roles. (2) Network consistency across roles contributes almost nothing to predicting achievement, which is instead determined by experience and the network specific to the role. The two conclusions are robust across substantively significant differences in the mix of roles combined in a multirole network (too many roles, difficult combination of roles, or roles played to overlapping audiences).

Socially Embedded Investments: Explaining Gender Differences in Job-Specific Skills
Javier G. Polavieja

This article offers an innovative explanation for gender differences in job specialization that connects individual choices to the social structure. Decisions about jobs are modeled as a choice over different tenure-reward slopes, which are steeper for more specialized skills. The choice of job depends on expected duration. Individuals have imperfect information about their probability of success in different jobs and form expectations partly by observing the social context. Because women face greater constraints and uncertainties than men, their choices depend more on this context. Contextual influences on job specialization are tested for European respondents nested in 234 different regions. Consonant with the theory’s predictions, women are found to have more specialized jobs in regions where (1) the preceding generation’s job specialization diverged less by gender, (2) peers arrange a more equal division of housework, and (3) peers have fewer children. None of these contextual variables have significant effects on men.

Echoes of the Past: Organizational Foundings as Sources of an Institutional Legacy of Mutualism
Henrich R. Greve and Hayagreeva Rao

Conventional wisdom in organization theory holds that the environment imprints organizations at the time of their birth. We reverse the imagery and propose that early founding of a nonprofit organization in one domain imprints a community with a general institutional legacy of collective civic action. Consequently, the community is more likely to later establish new nonprofit organizations in a different domain. Empirically, we show that Norwegian communities that were the earliest to establish mutual fire insurance organizations and mutual savings banks in the 19th century were more likely to experience foundings of cooperative stores in the 20th century. We discuss how the founding of formal nonprofit organizations creates an institutional legacy that amplifies variations in the civic capacity of communities and outline how it complements accounts of organizational imprinting.

Racial Fluidity and Inequality in the United States
Aliya Saperstein and Andrew M. Penner

The authors link the literature on racial fluidity and inequality in the United States and offer new evidence of the reciprocal relationship between the two processes. Using two decades of longitudinal data from a national survey, they demonstrate that not only does an individual’s race change over time, it changes in response to myriad changes in social position, and the patterns are similar for both self-identification and classification by others. These findings suggest that, in the contemporary United States, microlevel racial fluidity serves to reinforce existing disparities by redefining successful or high-status people as white (or not black) and unsuccessful or low-status people as black (or not white). Thus, racial differences are both an input and an output in stratification processes; this relationship has implications for theorizing and measuring race in research, as well as for crafting policies that attempt to address racialized inequality.

To Act or Not to Act: Context, Capability, and Community Response to Environmental Risk
Rachel A. Wright and Hilary Schaffer Boudet

Social movement theory has rarely been tested with counterfactual cases, that is, instances in which movements do not emerge. Moreover, contemporary theories about political opportunity and resources often inadequately address the issue of motivation. To address these shortcomings, this article examines 20 communities that are “at risk” for mobilization because they face controversial proposals for large energy infrastructure projects. Movements emerge in only 10 cases, allowing for the identification of factors that drive mobilization or nonmobilization. Utilizing insights from social psychology, the authors contend that community context shapes motivations to oppose or accept a proposal, not objective measures of threat. They conclude that the combination of community context—to understand motivation—and measures of capability is the best way to model movement emergence.

Inheriting the Homeland? Intergenerational Transmission of Cross-Border Ties in Migrant Families
Thomas Soehl and Roger Waldinger

Theories of migrant transnationalism emphasize the enduring imprint of the premigration connections that the newcomers bring with them. But how do the children of migrants raised in the parents’ adopted country develop ties to the parental home country? Using a structural equation model and data from a recent survey of adult immigrant offspring in Los Angeles, this article shows that second-generation cross-border activities are strongly affected by earlier experiences of and exposure to home country influences. Socialization in the parental household is powerful, transmitting distinct home country competencies, loyalties, and ties, but not a coherent package of transnationalism. Our analysis of five measures of cross-border activities and loyalties among the grown children of migrants shows that transmission is specific to the social logic underlying the connection: activities rooted in family relationships such as remitting are transmitted differently than emotional attachments to the parents’ home country.

Sociological Theory 30(4)

Sociological Theory, December 2012: Volume 30, Issue 4

Self-relations in Social Relations
Daniel Silver and Monica Lee

This article contributes to an ongoing theoretical effort to extend the insights of relational and network sociology into adjacent domains. We integrate Simmel’s late theory of the relational self into the formal analysis of social relations, generating a framework for theorizing forms of association among self-relating individuals. On this model, every “node” in an interaction has relations not only to others but also to itself, specifically between its ideality and its actuality. We go on to integrate this self-relation into a formal model of social relations. This model provides a way to describe configurations of social interactions defined by the forms according to which social relations realize participants’ ideal selves. We examine four formal dimensions along which these self-relational relationships can vary: distance, symmetry, scope, and actualization.

A Theory of the Public Sphere
Ari Adut

The dominant approach to the public sphere is characterized by idealism and normativism. It overemphasizes civic-minded or civil discourse, envisions unrealistically egalitarian and widespread participation, has difficulty dealing with consequential public events, and neglects the spatial core of the public sphere and the effects of visibility. I propose a semiotic theory that approaches the public sphere through general sensory access. This approach enables a superior understanding of all public events, discursive or otherwise. It also captures the dialectical relationship between the public sphere and politics by (1) specifying the mechanisms through which visibility and publicity become resources or constraints for political actors, (2) explaining the political regulation of visibility, (3) showing the central role that struggles over the contents of public spaces play in political conflict, and (4) analyzing the links among social structure, social norms, and political action in the transformation of the public sphere.

Reconceptualizing and Theorizing "Omnivorousness": Genetic and Relational Mechanisms
Omar Lizardo and Sara Skiles

Scores of sociological studies have provided evidence for the association between broad cultural taste, or omnivorousness, and various status characteristics, such as education, occupation, and age. Nevertheless, the literature lacks a consistent theoretical foundation with which to understand and organize these empirical findings. In this article, we offer such a framework, suggesting that a mechanism-based approach is helpful for examination of the origins of the omnivore-univore taste pattern as well as its class-based distribution. We reground the discussion of this phenomenon in Distinction (Bourdieu 1984), conceptualizing omnivorous taste as a transposable form of the aesthetic disposition available most readily to individuals who convert early aesthetic training into high cultural capital occupational trajectories. After outlining the genetic mechanisms that link the aesthetic disposition to early socialization trajectories, we identify two relational mechanisms that modulate its manifestation (either enhancing or inhibiting it) after early socialization.

The Political Dynamics of Market Organization: Cultural Framing, Neoliberalism, and the Case of Airline Deregulation
Dustin Avent-Holt

Sociologists have argued that markets are politically constituted, yet we lack an understanding of the causal mechanisms through which political mobilization organizes and reorganizes markets over time. In this article I show how the concept of cultural framing—already widely used by economic sociologists—can be further developed to explain how mobilization reproduces markets in some moments while reorganizing them in others. Specifically, I link the concept of cultural framing to rent-seeking mobilization within markets to better explain when political contestation will lead to new market institutions and when it will fail to do so. I illustrate the value of this approach through an analysis of deregulation in the U.S. airline industry and conclude by discussing the consequences of the model and empirical case for the politics of markets, the rise of neoliberalism, and economic policymaking.