American Sociological Review 78(4)

American Sociological Review, August 2013: Volume 78, Issue 4

The Historical Nature of Cities: A Study of Urbanization and Hazardous Waste Accumulation
James R. Elliott and Scott Frickel

Endemic uncertainties surrounding urban industrial waste raise important theoretical and methodological challenges for understanding the historical nature of cities. Our study advances a synthetic framework for engaging these challenges by extending theories of modern risk society and classic urban ecology to investigate the accumulation of industrial hazards over time and space. Data for our study come from a unique longitudinal dataset containing geospatial and organizational information on more than 2,800 hazardous manufacturing sites operating between 1956 and 2006 in Portland, Oregon. We pair these site data with historical data from the U.S. population census and the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) to examine the historical accumulation of hazardous parcels in relation to changing patterns of industrial land use, neighborhood composition, new residential development, and environmental regulation. Results indicate that historical accumulation of hazardous sites is scaling up in ways that exhibit little regard for shifting neighborhood demographics or existing regulatory policies as sites merge into larger, more contiguous industrialized areas of historically generated hazards, creating the environmental conditions of urban risk society.

Leading Associations: How Individual Characteristics and Team Dynamics Generate Committed Leaders
Matthew Baggetta, Hahrie Han, and Kenneth T. Andrews

Leaders make vital contributions to the survival and success of civic associations, but they vary widely in levels of commitment to those groups. Why are some leaders more committed than others? We draw from scholarship on civic participation, volunteering, social movements, and team management to develop an original explanation. Although theory suggests individual and organizational factors may explain differences, most prior empirical studies examine only individual-level hypotheses. We use data collected from 1,616 Sierra Club volunteer leaders and the 368 chapters and groups they led to conduct multilevel analyses of the determinants of behavioral commitment among leaders. At the individual level, we find that leaders with more applicable skills, available time, and aligned motivations are more committed to the organization. At the organizational level, we find that leaders whose organizations are more complex, and who are on teams that operate more interdependently, share work more equally, and devote smaller shares of time to meetings, are more committed. These findings have implications for scholars of leadership and commitment and for organizations seeking more committed leaders.

Deciding to Cross: Norms and Economics of Unauthorized Migration
Emily Ryo

Why are there so many unauthorized migrants in the United States? Using unique survey data collected in Mexico through the Mexican Migration Project, I develop and test a new decision-making model of unauthorized labor migration. The new model considers the economic motivations of prospective migrants, as well as their beliefs, attitudes, and social norms regarding U.S. immigration law and legal authorities. My findings show that perceptions of certainty of apprehension and severity of punishment are not significant determinants of the intent to migrate illegally; however, perceptions of availability of Mexican jobs and the dangers of border crossing are significant determinants of these intentions. In addition, individuals’ general legal attitudes, morality about violating U.S. immigration law, views about the legitimacy of U.S. authority, and norms about border crossing are significant determinants of the intent to migrate illegally. Perceptions of procedural justice are significantly related to beliefs in the legitimacy of U.S. authority, suggesting that, all else being equal, procedural fairness may produce greater deference to U.S. immigration law. Together, the results show that the decision to migrate illegally cannot be fully understood without considering an individual’s underlying values and norms.

Neighborhood Immigration, Violence, and City-Level Immigrant Political Opportunities
Christopher J. Lyons, María B. Vélez, and Wayne A. Santoro

Using a multilevel comparative framework, we propose that politically receptive city contexts facilitate the viability of marginalized neighborhoods. To illustrate this proposition, we examine the relationship between immigrant concentration and neighborhood violence. Drawing on political process and minority incorporation theories, we argue that favorable immigrant political opportunities will strengthen the often-found inverse relationship between immigration and crime at the neighborhood level. Unique data from the National Neighborhood Crime Study (Peterson and Krivo 2010a) provide demographic and violence information for Census tracts in a representative sample of 87 large cities. We append this dataset with city-level measures of immigrant political opportunities, such as the extent of minority political incorporation into elected offices and pro-immigrant legislation. Multilevel instrumental variable analyses reveal that the inverse relationship between immigrant concentration and neighborhood violent crime is generally enhanced in cities with favorable immigrant political opportunities. We speculate that this occurs because favorable political contexts bolster social organization by enhancing trust and public social control within immigrant neighborhoods. Our findings demonstrate that the fate of neighborhoods marginalized across ethnicity and nativity are shaped by the responsiveness of political actors and structures to their concerns.

The Association of Social Class and Lifestyles: Persistence in American Sociability, 1974 to 2010
Ivaylo D. Petev

Despite the burgeoning research on lifestyles, we have surprisingly little evidence to answer one of the literature’s founding questions: Is the association between social class and lifestyles disappearing? I explore this inquiry with data from the past four decades. In analyzing the class-lifestyle association, I examine changes in the variability of lifestyles within and between social classes. Using data from the General Social Survey on informal social ties and formal membership ties to voluntary associations, I derive proxies for lifestyles and examine their relation to social class with latent class models. Results show that social classes’ contemporary sociability patterns are substantively similar to traditional descriptions from empirical studies on analogous data from as early as the mid-twentieth century. The association between social classes and sociability patterns shows no sign of having weakened over the past four decades. In fact, recent trends of civic disengagement and social isolation in contemporary U.S. society, which these data corroborate, reinforce class differences in sociability.

The Grandparents Effect in Social Mobility: Evidence from British Birth Cohort Studies
Tak Wing Chan and Vikki Boliver

Using data from three British birth cohort studies, we examine patterns of social mobility over three generations of family members. For both men and women, absolute mobility rates (i.e., total, upward, downward, and outflow mobility rates) in the partial parents-children mobility tables vary substantially by grandparents’ social class. In terms of relative mobility patterns, we find a statistically significant association between grandparents’ and grandchildren’s class positions, after parents’ social class is taken into account. The net grandparents-grandchildren association can be summarized by a single uniform association parameter. Net of parents’ social class, the odds of grandchildren entering the professional-managerial class rather than the unskilled manual class are at least two and a half times better if the grandparents were themselves in professional-managerial rather than unskilled manual-class positions. This grandparents effect in social mobility persists even when parents’ education, income, and wealth are taken into account.

Pathways to Empowerment: Repertoires of Women’s Activism and Gender Earnings Equality
Maria Akchurin and Cheol-Sung Lee

This article examines how different repertoires of women’s activism influence gender earnings equality across countries. We develop a typology of three forms of mobilization—professionalized women’s activism, labor women’s activism, and women’s activism in popular movements—emphasizing distinct actors, patterns of claims-making, and inter-organizational ties among women’s organizations and other civil society groups in multi-organizational fields. Based on data on membership and co-membership ties built using World Values Surveys, we test the effects of different repertoires of women’s activism on earnings equality between women and men in 51 countries. We also consider a gendered development model and the role of welfare states as main explanatory variables in accounting for the gap in earnings. Our findings suggest that even in the presence of these alternative explanations, women’s activism matters. Furthermore, women’s organizations with access to institutional politics, through either direct advocacy or ties to unions or professional associations, have had the most success in promoting gender earnings equality. Our research contributes to prior work on social movement outcomes by conceptualizing women’s mobilization in the context of fields and further testing its effects on distributional outcomes in a comparative perspective.

Conditional Decoupling: Assessing the Impact of National Human Rights Institutions, 1981 to 2004
Wade M. Cole and Francisco O. Ramirez

National human rights institutions, defined as domestic but globally legitimated agencies charged with promoting and protecting human rights, have emerged worldwide. This article examines the effect of these organizations on two kinds of human rights outcomes: physical integrity rights and civil and political rights. We analyze cross-national longitudinal data using regression models that account for the endogeneity of organizational formation. Our first main finding is that all types of human rights institutions improve long-term physical integrity outcomes but not civil and political rights practices. This finding may reflect a greater worldwide focus on physical integrity violations such as torture, and also many countries’ propensity to resist Western civil and political rights standards. A second main finding is that time matters: in the cases we observe, initial increases in rated abuse levels were followed by improvements. These initial increases may be due to closer scrutiny or the expanded scope of what constitutes human rights abuses. Our results call for rethinking the concept of decoupling in the sociology of human rights and other focal areas.