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.