Social Forces 91(4)

Social Forces, June 2013: Volume 91, Issue 4

Gender Inequality

Stay or Leave?: Externalization of Job Mobility and the Effect on the U.S. Gender Earnings Gap, 1979–2009
Anne-Kathrin Kronberg

As jobs in the United States become less secure and traditional job ladders deteriorate, employees increasingly change employers to build their career. This article explores how this shift affects gender earnings disparities. I find that the effect of changing employers depends on whether changes occur in “good” or “bad” jobs and whether individuals leave voluntarily or involuntarily. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics 1979–2009, gender disparities narrowed among voluntary leavers in good jobs and involuntary leavers in bad jobs. Disparities stagnated among voluntary leavers in bad jobs. The gender gap actually increased among involuntary leavers in good jobs. Although the causal mechanisms driving these trends are still unknown, the results indicate that the externalization opens opportunities primarily to those who are already in good positions.

Ideological Wage Inequalities?: The Technical/Social Dualism and the Gender Wage Gap in Engineering
Erin A. Cech

Can professional cultures contribute to wage inequality? Recent literature has demonstrated how widely held cultural biases reproduce ascriptive inequalities in the workforce, but cultural belief systems within professions have largely been ignored as mechanisms of intra-profession inequality. I argue that cultural ideologies about professional work, which may seem benign and have little salience outside of a profession’s boundaries, play an important role in reproducing wage inequalities therein. Using nationally representative data on engineers, I demonstrate that patterns of sex segregation and gendered wage allocation in engineering break consistently along the lines predicted by its “technical/social dualism”—an ideological distinction between “technical” and “social” engineering subfields and work activities. After explaining how these findings deepen our understanding of gender inequality in engineering, the article discusses how the consideration of professional cultures may open up fresh areas of inquiry into intra-profession inequality more generally.

Up the Down Staircase: Women’s Upward Mobility and the Wage Penalty for Occupational Feminization, 1970–2007
Hadas Mandel

This study examines the long-term trends of two parallel and related gender effects, in light of the hypothesis that highly rewarded occupations will be the most penalized by the process of feminization. Using multilevel models of the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series data from 1970 to 2007, the study analyzes trends in women’s occupational mobility and juxtaposes these trends with trends in the effects of feminization on occupational pay across diverse occupational wage groups. The findings reveal two opposing processes of gender (in)equality: during this period, many women had impressive success in entering highly rewarded occupations. Simultaneously, however, the negative effect of feminization on the pay levels of these occupations intensified, particularly in high-paid and male-typed occupations. Consequently, women found themselves moving “up the down staircase.” The findings confirm the dynamic nature of gender discrimination and have broad implications for our understanding of the devaluation and exclusion mechanisms discussed in earlier literature.

Gender, the Labor Process and Dignity at Work
Martha Crowley

This study brings together gender inequality and labor process research to investigate how divergent control structures generate inequality in work experiences for women and men. Content-coded data on 155 work groups are analyzed using Qualitative Comparative Analysis to identify combinations of control techniques encountered by female and male work groups and their relationship to outcomes measuring workplace dignity. Results suggest that male work groups more often encounter persuasive “bundles” of control that enhance autonomy, creativity, meaningfulness and satisfaction, while female work groups confront more coercive arrangements, especially direct supervision, that erode these and other foundations of dignity at work. I conclude with implications of these findings relative to understandings of the labor process, workplace sex segregation and forms of inequality not so easily quantified in dominant approaches to stratification.

Immigration

The Bounded Polity: The Limits to Mexican Emigrant Political Participation
Roger Waldinger, Thomas Soehl

International migration yields pervasive cross-border social engagements, yet homeland political involvements are modest to minimal. This contrast reflects the ways in which the distinctive characteristics of expatriate political life impede participation in the polity that emigrants have left behind. As polities are bounded, moving to the territory of a different state yields political detachment: diminishing awareness of home country political matters and weakened ties to the home state’s electoral institutions. To assess this argument, we use a representative survey of the Mexican-born population in the United States to analyze two critical conditions for participation in expatriate elections: emigrants’ ability to demonstrate eligibility to vote and their knowledge about voting procedures. We find clear signs of detachment. Most Mexican emigrants are not in a position to participate in homeland politics. Social ties, while pervasive, are associated with more knowledge only for the very small segment of the most engaged.

Social Citizenship, Integration and Collective Action: Immigrant Civic Engagement in the United States
Kim Ebert, Dina G. Okamoto

Collective action has been examined in studies of worker insurgency, homeless protest, the Civil Rights movement and white backlash against racial minorities. Relatively few studies, however, focus on noncontentious forms of immigrant collective action. Utilizing a new data set comprising over 1,000 immigrant civic events, we examine whether the civic and political environment within metropolitan areas affect civic engagement. Our results indicate that political opportunities and resources did not have uniform effects, but that institutional threats to immigrants deterred civic activity. Furthermore, we find that local restrictive efforts instigated solidarity events, while outreach efforts directed at immigrants facilitated community improvement projects. These findings suggest that conditions intensifying group boundaries between immigrants and natives and encouraging collective efficacy are important predictors of immigrant civic engagement.

Cumulative Causation, Coethnic Settlement Maturity and Mexican Immigration to U.S. Metropolitan Areas, 1995–2000
James D. Bachmeier

This article applies the tenets of Massey’s (1999) cumulative causation theory of migration to explain variation in aggregate patterns of Mexican migration to U.S. metropolitan destinations during the late 1990s. Analogous to sending contexts, results suggest that the dynamics of migration vary substantially with the maturity of the Mexican settlement community within destinations (approximated here using characteristics of the resident Mexican-origin population and distance from the Mexican border). The rate of immigration between 1995 and 2000 was determined overwhelmingly by the rate a decade earlier, but the extent to which this was the case depended significantly on the level of destination settlement maturity. The immigration rate into newly emerging destinations was governed to a greater extent by pull factors in the local labor and housing market (e.g., unemployment and cost of living) than in more established destinations where the rate of immigration varied largely independently of such factors. Settlement maturity played a more direct role in explaining variation in the demographic composition of new immigration flows, and was inversely related to the percentage of adult inflows comprising unaccompanied males. The results are consistent with the hypothesis recently advanced by Light (2006), asserting that migratory shifts away from traditional destinations beginning in the late 1990s were driven, at least in part, by saturation of labor and housing markets resulting from network-driven migration. Implications of the findings for related avenues of research are discussed.

Political Sociology

Apology and Redress: Escaping the Dustbin of History in the Postsegregationist South
Gary Alan Fine

How at moments of dramatic change and a shifting social context do political actors alter their public identities? Put differently, how do political figures respond when positions with which they have been closely identified are no longer morally and electorally defensible and must be altered? Responses to identity challenge within institutional spheres require an expansion of the theory of accounts to an approach that examines shifts in cultural fields. Those challenged must signal adherence to newly claimed values. The standard view of accounts examines interpersonal justifications outside of institutional pressures, downplaying social location. Extending a theory of accounts to political actors requires recognizing appeals to audiences and distribution of resources. In the political arena the presentation of accounts carries reputational dangers. Presenting excuses, politicians deny agency, placing themselves at jeopardy as incompetent. Justifications require a credulous audience that overlooks possible insincerity. As a result, other strategies are necessary. Political actors rely on apologies or redress to demonstrate a revised self to stakeholders, strategies based on position, resources and audience. To analyze the realignment of reputation in unsettled times, I examine the postsegregation careers of Governor George Wallace of Alabama and Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina. Both moved from being icons of segregation to (claimed) devotees of racial equality, but because of their political location they moved in different ways. Given their context, Wallace apologized, while Thurmond provided redress to offended communities.

Segregation

The Sense of Place behind Segregating Practices: An Ethnographic A
Marco Garrido

The literature on cities in the developing world equates segregation with the proliferation of enclaves and slums and tends to overlook how the people associated with those places are further segregated in public spaces and enclaves. To account for the symbolic partitioning of Metro Manila, I document the segregating practices of the residents of enclaves (villagers) and slums (squatters). These practices reveal a well-developed sense of place on both sides, a commitment to the relative status positioning of the two groups as expressed through their separation in space. A sense of place explains why squatters and villagers engage in segregating practices. It also enables us to identify other spatial practices that conform to or challenge its logic. Integrating practices are largely consistent with a sense of place, while desegregating practices challenge it and may set up or advance contentious situations. By using this approach we are better able to understand how class patterns of residential segregation are extended to encompass virtually all urban spaces where class interaction occurs.

Race and Ethnicity

The Marginalized “Model” Minority: An Empirical Examination of the Racial Triangulation of Asian Americans
Jun Xu, Jennifer C. Lee

In this article, we propose a shift in race research from a one-dimensional hierarchical approach to a multidimensional system of racial stratification. Building upon Claire Kim’s (1999) racial triangulation theory, we examine how the American public rates Asians relative to blacks and whites along two dimensions of racial stratification: racial valorization and civic acceptance/ostracism. Using selected years from the General Social Survey, our analyses provide support for the multidimensional racial triangulation perspective as opposed to a singular hierarchical approach, although findings do not match all predictions by the racial triangulation thesis. Our results also suggest that on average whites are more likely than blacks to have more favorable views of the relative positions of Asians, particularly for family commitment, nonviolence and wealth, but blacks are more likely to assume racially egalitarian views than do whites.

Racial and Ethnic Differences in Neighborhood Attainments in the Transition to Adulthood
Raymond R. Swisher, Danielle C. Kuhl, Jorge M. Chavez

This paper examines racial and ethnic differences in locational attainments in the transition to adulthood, using longitudinal data about neighborhoods of youth in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. It examines place stratification and life course models of locational attainment during the 1990s, a period during which neighborhood poverty rates were declining for many groups. The analysis reveals durable inequalities in neighborhood poverty from adolescence to young adulthood, particularly for blacks and Hispanic origin subgroups. Family socioeconomic status and emerging educational attainments are associated with decreases in neighborhood poverty, with blacks receiving a stronger return from educational attainments than whites. Despite the benefits of education, racial and ethnic minorities remain more likely to live in considerably more disadvantaged neighborhoods in young adulthood than whites.

Unemployment

Why Do Unemployed Americans Blame Themselves While Israelis Blame the System?
Ofer Sharone

This article provides a new account of American job seekers’ individualized understandings of their labor-market difficulties, and more broadly, of how structural conditions shape subjective responses. Unemployed white-collar workers in the U.S. tend to interpret their labor market difficulties as reflecting flaws in themselves, while Israelis tend to perceive flaws in the hiring system. These different responses have profound individual and societal implications. Drawing on in-depth interviews with unemployed job seekers and participant observations at support groups in the U.S. and Israel, this article shows how different labor market institutions give rise to distinct job search games, which I call the chemistry game in the U.S. and the specs game in Israel. Challenging the broad cultural explanations of the unemployment experience in the existing literature, this article shows how subjective responses to unemployment are generated by the search experiences associated with institutionally rooted job search games.

Education

Stutter-Step Models of Performance in School
Stephen L. Morgan, Theodore S. Leenman, Jennifer J. Todd, Kim A. Weeden

To evaluate a stutter-step model of academic performance in high school, this article adopts a unique measure of the beliefs of 12,591 high school sophomores from the Education Longitudinal Study, 2002–2006. Verbatim responses to questions on occupational plans are coded to capture specific job titles, the listing of multiple jobs, and the listing of multiple jobs with divergent characteristics. The educational requirements of detailed jobs, as specified in the Department of Labor’s Occupational Information Network database, are then matched to all jobs that students list within their plans. Students with uncertain beliefs about their occupational futures are then shown to have lower levels of commitment to and performance in school. These results support the conjecture that uncertainty about the future has consequences for the short-run behavior that determines important educational outcomes, beyond the effects that are commonly attributed to existing models of performance.

Legal Status and Educational Transitions for Mexican and Central American Immigrant Youth
Emily Greenman, Matthew Hall

This study uses the Survey of Income and Program Participation to infer the legal status of Mexican and Central American immigrant youth and to investigate its relationship with educational attainment. We assess differences by legal status in high school graduation and college enrollment, decompose differences in college enrollment into the probability of high school graduation and the probability of high school graduates’ enrollment in college and estimate the contributions of personal and family background characteristics to such differences. Results show that undocumented students are less likely than documented students to both graduate from high school and enroll in college, and differences in college enrollment cannot be explained by family background characteristics. We conclude that legal status is a critical axis of stratification for Latinos.

Social Psychology

Position and Disposition Position and Disposition: The Contextual Development of Human Values
Kyle C. Longest, Steven Hitlin, Stephen Vaisey

Research on the importance of values often focuses primarily on one domain of social predictors (e.g., economic) or limits its scope to a single dimension of values. We conduct a simultaneous analysis of a wide range of theoretically important social influences and a more complete range of individuals’ value orientations, focusing both on value ratings and rankings. Results indicate that traditional institutions such as religion and parenthood are associated with more concern for the welfare of others and maintaining the status quo, whereas more individually oriented occupational factors like higher income and self-employment are linked to achievement and change-related values. Yet several factors, such as education and gender, have complex associations when individual values are examined as part of a coherent system rather than in isolation.

Hidden Paths from Morality to Cooperation: Moral Judgments Promote Trust and Trustworthiness
Brent Simpson, Ashley Harrell, Robb Willer

Classic sociological solutions to cooperation problems were rooted in the moral judgments group members make about one another’s behaviors, but more recent research on prosocial behaviors has largely ignored this foundational work. Here, we extend theoretical accounts of the social effect of moral judgments. Where scholars have emphasized the roles of moral judgments in clarifying moral boundaries and punishing deviants, we present two less intuitive paths from moral judgments to social behavior. We argue that those who engage in moral judgments subsequently act more morally. Further, we argue that group members anticipate the more moral behavior of judges, trusting them more under situations of risk and uncertainty. We thus establish paths from moral judgments to the primary foundations of voluntary cooperation: trust and trustworthiness. The results of three experiments support the predicted effects: Participants randomly assigned to make moral judgments were more trustworthy in subsequent interactions (Study 1). A follow-up experiment sought to clarify the underlying mechanism, showing that making moral judgments led individuals to view themselves as more moral (Study 2). Finally, audience members anticipated the greater trustworthiness of moral judges (Study 3).