Social Problems 60(2)

Social Problems, May 2013: Volume 60, Issue 2

Counting Care Work: The Empirical and Policy Applications of Care Theory
Mignon Duffy, Randy Albelda and Clare Hammonds

The adequate provision of quality care to the elderly, children, and those who are ill or disabled is one of the pressing social problems of our time. Despite the far-reaching formulations of care in the theoretical realm, advocacy and policy-making efforts around care work remain largely atomized. Translating the wide-ranging insights of care scholarship into tools for public policy solutions requires a practical application of the concept as well as empirical measurement. In this article, we integrate the insights of care theory with feminist economic analysis to conceptualize care as a single sector at the foundation of the state's human infrastructure. We then measure the scope of care work across paid work, unpaid labor, and government investment in one U.S. state. We estimate that the care sector in Massachusetts comprises 22 percent of the paid labor force, 20 percent of the average resident's daily time, and 57 percent of state and local government spending. Such data gives policy makers and advocates an empirical foundation to make a case for the human and economic impact of the care sector and to build on framing a broader vision of care policy. Strengthening the human infrastructure in Massachusetts and elsewhere is an economic and ethical imperative, and our goal is to provide both empirical data and a practically useful conceptual frame that can be used as tools by those working towards the social transformation of care.

Glass Cliffs and Organizational Saviors: Barriers to Minority Leadership in Work Organizations?
Alison Cook and Christy Glass

Racial/ethnic minorities remain underrepresented in positions of authority. While ample scholarship has identified barriers to mobility, much less scholarship has explored the conditions under which minorities are promoted to leadership positions. Relying on a unique data set that includes all transitions among NCAA men's basketball head coaches over a 30-year period, we analyze the promotion probability and post-promotion trajectory of minority coaches. First, we find that minority coaches are more likely to be appointed in historically black colleges and universities (HBCU) due to bottom-up ascription. Second, minorities are more likely than whites to be promoted to losing teams, a phenomenon termed the glass cliff. And third, when minority coaches are unable to generate winning records they are replaced by white coaches, a phenomenon we term the savior effect. By testing mechanisms related to the mobility chances of minorities, this analysis advances our understanding of the processes that shape racial/ethnic hierarchies in organizations.

A Test of the Temperance Hypothesis: Class, Religiosity, and Tolerance of Prostitution
Liqun Cao and Edward R. Maguire

Public attitudes toward prostitution are a neglected area of study. Temperance theory posits that end-of-the century political culture is characterized by the persistence of moral politics in which personal behavior is moralized and sanctioned. Driving this politics is the economic insecurity of the middle class to reassert status boundaries as markers of respectability in order to clearly separate classes physically and socially. This hypothesis has not been tested empirically and it contradicts hypotheses derived from post materialist theory or revised modernization theory, which proposes that there is a trend toward more tolerance of deviance in contemporary society, and that the traditional class-based cleavages have shifted and now focus more on value cleavages. This article tests these competing hypotheses, examining whether there is a trend toward greater intolerance of prostitution and whether the middle class became more intolerant in the 1990s. In addition, we test the effects of social class and religiosity on tolerance of prostitution. Results show that the U.S. pubic became more tolerant toward prostitution across social classes in the 1990s and that religiosity continues to serve as a powerful counterbalance to social acceptance of prostitution.

Limited Engagements? Women's and Men's Work/Volunteer Time in the Encore Life Course Stage
Phyllis Moen and Sarah Flood

Americans are living healthier and longer lives, but the shifting age distribution is straining existing and projected social welfare protections for older adults (e.g., Social Security, Medicare). One solution is to delay retirement. Another is an alternative to “total leisure” retirement—an “encore” stage of paid or unpaid engagement coming after career jobs but before infirmities associated with old age. We draw on gendered life course themes together with data from the American Time Use Survey (2003–2009) to examine the real time American men and women ages 50 to 75 apportion to paid work and unpaid volunteer work on an average day, as well as factors predicting their time allocations. We find that while full-time employment declines after the 50s, many Americans allot time to more limited engagements—working part time, being self-employed, volunteering, helping out—through and even beyond their 60s. Caring for a child or infirm adult reduces the odds of paid work but not volunteering. While time working for pay declines with age (though more slowly for men than women), time volunteering does not. Older men and women in poor health, without a college degree, with a disability or SSI income are the least likely to be publicly engaged. This social patterning illustrates that while the ideal of an encore of paid or unpaid voluntary, flexible, and meaningful engagement is an emerging reality for some, it appears less attainable for others. This suggests the importance of organizational and public policy innovations offering all Americans a range of encore opportunities.

A Mark of Disgrace or a Badge of Honor?: Subjective Status among Former Inmates
Jason Schnittker and Valerio Bacak

Using the National Comorbidity Survey Replication, this study explores the effects of incarceration on the subjective status of men, based on the MacArthur Scale of Subjective Social Status (or the “ladder”). The study makes several crucial distinctions. First, it distinguishes subjective status in one's community and subjective status in the United States generally, thereby exploring differences between the local and global meanings of incarceration. Second, it distinguishes crime, arrest, and incarceration, thereby exploring the added effects of contact with the criminal justice system, apart from offending. The results reveal that contact with the criminal justice system results in progressively lower status: those who committed a crime report lower subjective status than those who did not, those who were arrested report lower status than those who only committed a crime, and those who were incarcerated report lower status than those who were only arrested. Although these differences along the crime-to-sentencing continuum are strong, the effects of crime, arrest, and incarceration are, if anything, even stronger among African Americans than whites. The results also suggest that the effects of incarceration are similar to—if not greater than—those of other stigmatizing statuses, including having spent time in a psychiatric hospital. The effects of arrest and incarceration are not driven entirely by the social or economic consequences of incarceration, although these consequences further deflate subjective status among former inmates.

Broad Reciprocity, Elderly Poverty, and the Retiree/Nonretiree Cleavage in the Demand for Public Retirement Income Support
Juan J. Fernández

This article examines whether a structural or a neo-institutionalist approach best explains cross-national variations in the retiree/nonretiree cleavage regarding pension policy preferences. Prior research on welfare policy attitudes shows that in European countries retirees are more likely to support intensive public pension provision than are nonretirees, while in the United States both groups are as likely to support it. As an alternative to the increasingly predominant, neo-institutionalist approach, I propose a structural explanation that focuses on the role of elderly poverty. I argue that higher levels of elderly poverty induce nonretirees to establish their pension policy preferences based on a principle of broad reciprocity. First, in a context of high elderly poverty, nonretirees react to the demand for reciprocity by their impoverished elderly parents by supporting improvements in public pension protection. Second, in the same context, due to perceptions of retirees as highly deserving of public support, nonretirees feel more compelled to demand more public pension protection that improves the economic wellbeing of retirees. The results are consistent with this expectation. Using a sample of 30 OECD country years and multilevel models, countries with higher levels of elderly poverty present smaller retiree/nonretiree divides in support of public pension provision and pension spending increases.