American Journal of Sociology 118(4)

American Journal of Sociology, January 2013: Volume 118, Issue 4

For a Sociology of Expertise: The Social Origins of the Autism Epidemic
Gil Eyal

This article endeavors to replace the sociology of professions with the more comprehensive and timely sociology of expertise. It suggests that we need to distinguish between experts and expertise as requiring two distinct modes of analysis that are not reducible to one another. It analyzes expertise as a network linking together agents, devices, concepts, and institutional and spatial arrangements. It also suggests rethinking how abstraction and power were analyzed in the sociology of professions. The utility of this approach is demonstrated by using it to explain the recent precipitous rise in autism diagnoses. This article shows that autism remained a rare disorder until the deinstitutionalization of mental retardation created a new institutional matrix within which a new set of actors—the parents of children with autism in alliance with psychologists and therapists—were able to forge an alternative network of expertise.

Coordinating Futures: Toward a Theory of Anticipation
Iddo Tavory and Nina Eliasoph

This article presents a theoretical approach for studying the coordination of futures. Building off theories of temporality and action, the authors map three different modes of future making—protentions, trajectories, and temporal landscapes—that actors need to coordinate in order to make sense of action together. Using a wide range of empirical evidence, they then show that these modes of future-coordination are autonomous from each other, so that although they are connected, they can clash or move in disjointed directions in interaction. By focusing on the coordination and disjunctures of those three modes, the authors argue that sociologists can provide a methodological axis of comparison between cases; depict mechanisms through which other theoretical or empirical constructs—such as racism or late modernity—operate; and open a window into the ways in which people organize and coordinate their futures, a topic of inquiry in its own right.

Exposure to Classroom Poverty and Test Score Achievement: Contextual Effects or Selection?
Douglas Lee Lauen and S. Michael Gaddis

It is widely believed that impoverished contexts harm children. Disentangling the effects of family background from the effects of other social contexts, however, is complex, making causal claims difficult to verify. This study examines the effect of exposure to classroom poverty on student test achievement using data on a cohort of children followed from third through eighth grade. Cross-sectional methods reveal a substantial negative association between exposure to high-poverty classrooms and test scores; this association grows with grade level, becoming especially large for middle school students. Growth models, however, produce much smaller effects of classroom poverty exposure on academic achievement. Even smaller effects emerge from student fixed-effects models that control for time-invariant unobservables and from marginal structural models that adjust for observable time-dependent confounding. These findings suggest that causal claims about the effects of classroom poverty exposure on achievement may be unwarranted.

Overdoing Gender: A Test of the Masculine Overcompensation Thesis
Robb Willer, Christabel L. Rogalin, Bridget Conlon, and Michael T. Wojnowicz

The masculine overcompensation thesis asserts that men react to masculinity threats with extreme demonstrations of masculinity, a proposition tested here across four studies. In study 1, men and women were randomly given feedback suggesting they were either masculine or feminine. Women showed no effects when told they were masculine; however, men given feedback suggesting they were feminine expressed more support for war, homophobic attitudes, and interest in purchasing an SUV. Study 2 found that threatened men expressed greater support for, and desire to advance in, dominance hierarchies. Study 3 showed in a large-scale survey on a diverse sample that men who reported that social changes threatened the status of men also reported more homophopic and prodominance attitudes, support for war, and belief in male superiority. Finally, study 4 found that higher testosterone men showed stronger reactions to masculinity threats than those lower in testosterone. Together, these results support the masculine overcompensation thesis, show how it can shape political and cultural attitudes, and identify a hormonal factor influencing the effect.

Betrayal as Market Barrier: Identity-Based Limits to Diversification among High-Status Corporate Law Firms
Damon J. Phillips, Catherine J. Turco, and Ezra W. Zuckerman

Why are some diversified market identities problematic but others are not? We examine this question in the context of high-status corporate law firms, which often diversify into one low-status area of work—family law (FL)—but face a barrier (strong disapproval from existing clients) that prevents diversification into another such area—plaintiffs’ personal injury law (PIL). Drawing on a qualitative study of the Boston legal market, we argue that this barrier reflects a situation where loyalty norms have been violated, and it surfaces because service to individual plaintiffs is tantamount to betraying the interests of corporate clients. Our analysis clarifies identity-based limits to diversification, indicating that they are rooted in concerns about the firm’s commitments as well as its capabilities, and suggests a more general refinement of theory on status and conformity.

Spanning the Institutional Abyss: The Intergovernmental Network and the Governance of Foreign Direct Investment
Juan Alcacer and Paul Ingram

Global economic transactions such as foreign direct investment (FDI) must extend over an institutional abyss between the jurisdiction, and therefore protection, of the states involved. Intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) represent an important attempt to span this abyss. The authors use a network approach to demonstrate that the connections between two countries, through joint membership in the same IGOs, are associated with a large positive influence on the FDI that flows between them. Moreover, they show that this effect occurs not only in the case of connections through economic IGOs but also through those with social and cultural mandates. This demonstrates that relational governance is important and feasible in the global context, even for the most risky transactions. The authors also examine the interdependence between the IGO network and the domestic institutions of states. Social and cultural IGO connections do more and economic IGO connections less to increase FDI when the target country is more democratic.

Quantitative Cross-National Sociology and the Methodological Abyss: Comment on Alcacer and Ingram
Andrew Schrank