Social Problems 60(3)

Social Problems, August 2013: Volume 60, Issue 3

New Jobs, New Workers, and New Inequalities: Explaining Employers' Roles in Occupational Segregation by Nativity and Race
Jill Lindsey Harrison and Sarah E. Lloyd

While sociologists have shown how employers contribute to occupational segregation along lines of race, gender, and nativity, little attention has been paid to unpacking why employers engage in those practices. We take on this gap through a case study of hired labor relations on Wisconsin dairy farms, which have become segregated along lines of nativity and race in recent years. We ask how these workplaces have become segregated, what employers' roles in this process have been, and why, in particular, employers have engaged in practices that contribute to workplace inequalities. We find that employers engage in practices that leave immigrant workers clustered in the low-end jobs for a complex array of reasons: to maintain profits within a changing industry context, meet their own middle-class aspirations, comply with their peers' middle-class lifestyle expectations, manage their own concerns about immigration policing, assert their own class identity, justify the privileges that they and their U.S.-born employees enjoy on the farm, and maintain the advantages they have gained. We argue that sociologists seeking to explain employers' roles in occupational segregation must examine not only the stories employers tell about different worker groups but also the stories they tell about themselves and the contexts that shape their aspirations and identities. Doing so provides more complete explanations for why occupational segregation occurs and does the important work of bringing whiteness into the spotlight and showing how privilege is quietly constructed and defended.

Constructing the Model Immigrant: Movement Strategy and Immigrant Deservingness in the New Sanctuary Movement
Grace Yukich

The model minority stereotype has been widely criticized for creating distinctions between racial groups by depicting some as more deserving than others. Immigration scholars have begun exploring similar distinctions among immigrant groups, with most research highlighting the role of anti-immigrant forces, the media, and policymakers in constructing divisions. Ethnographic research on the New Sanctuary Movement, a network of interfaith immigrant rights organizations, reveals that pro-immigrant activists also construct distinctions between “deserving” and “undeserving” immigrants. Building on frame alignment theory, which often focuses on movement discourse, I use a dramaturgical approach to highlight the nonrhetorical framing practices involved in creating these distinctions: in particular, the casting of select members of stigmatized groups and their public and visual association with more powerful actors. Through a type of frame transformation I call the model movement strategy—the use of model cases to challenge negative stereotypes of members of disadvantaged groups—New Sanctuary activists drew distinctions between model immigrants and those who did not share their dominant-friendly characteristics, implicitly portraying certain undocumented immigrants as less deserving of legal residency and citizenship. These findings suggest that the model movement strategy, an approach used by a variety of contemporary social movements, may have insidious consequences for the most vulnerable movement constituents.

Economy and Disability: Labor Market Conditions and the Disability of Working-Age Individuals
Rourke L. O'Brien

Previous work on the link between macroeconomic conditions and disability has focused almost exclusively on changes in applications for disability benefit programs, not changes in individuals' self-perceived disability status. This article demonstrates that macroeconomic conditions may influence disability through a direct disabling pathway that is distinct from the reservation wage pathway highlighted in previous analyses of disability assistance. State-level analyses using data from the Current Population Survey (CPS) from 1982–2006 reveal a robust inverse relationship between state GDP per capita and disability among the working-age population. Analyses using individual-level data from the 2008 American Community Survey (ACS) find that currently employed persons are more likely to report a disability if they reside in a local area with higher unemployment rates and that this association exists across levels of education; and finally, a lagged regression model analyzing change in local unemployment from 2008 to 2009, the first year of the “Great Recession,” finds that an increase in local area unemployment in one year is associated with an increased self-reported disability rate among currently employed workers in the next year. Findings have implications for understanding how macroeconomic downturns influence perceptions of disability and how structural conditions shape individual identity more broadly.

Delinquency as a Consequence of Misperception: Overestimation of Friends' Delinquent Behavior and Mechanisms of Social Influence
Jacob T. N. Young and Frank M. Weerman

This article examines how actors' perceptions of other people's behavior may be exaggerated and how this inaccuracy may influence behavior. More specifically, we apply these issues to improve our understanding of the correlation between delinquency of friends and individual delinquency. This relationship is one of the most replicated findings in the social sciences. However, research has not distinguished misperceptions of friends' behavior from actual behavior of friends, leaving two empirical questions unanswered. First, why do youth overestimate their friends' level of delinquency? Second, does overestimation of friends' delinquency influence one's own delinquency? We examine these questions using data from two waves of the Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement (NSCR) School Project. These data include self-reports by school friends of their own delinquent behavior, as well as respondents' estimates of their friends' behavior, making them uniquely equipped to calculate how much respondents exaggerate the behavior of their school friends and to investigate the determinants and consequences of this overestimation. Findings indicate that youth who engage in delinquency, have attitudes supporting delinquency, and experience peer pressure are more likely to exaggerate the prevalence of delinquency in their friendship network. Also, overestimating friends' delinquency leads to more delinquency in a subsequent wave, net of actual delinquency of friends and individual and situational characteristics. Overestimating friends' delinquency has the strongest effect on individuals who value social approval, are unpopular in their school, and experience peer pressure from their friends. We conclude by discussing avenues for future research.

Does Violence toward Others Affect Violence toward Oneself? Examining the Direct and Moderating Effects of Violence on Suicidal Behavior
Gregory M. Zimmerman

Although interpersonal violence and suicide are two of the leading causes of death among young Americans, analyses focusing simultaneously on violence and suicide in sociological inquiry are sparse. Analyses also tend to be limited by their focus on either the individual-level predictors of suicidal behaviors or the aggregate-level predictors of suicide rates, despite the recognition that psychological and sociological forces contribute independently as well as interactively to facilitate suicide. To address these issues, I use data from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN) to examine the direct and moderating effects of individual- and neighborhood-level violence on attempted suicide. Estimates from hierarchical logistic regression models indicate that individual acts of violent aggression, but not neighborhood levels of violence, increase the likelihood of attempting suicide. Furthermore, the well-established relationship between depression and attempted suicide is conditioned by individual- and neighborhood-level violence, such that the effect of depression is (1) amplified for individuals living in neighborhoods characterized by violence and (2) attenuated for individuals engaging in violent behavior. Finally, the combined effect of neighborhood violence and individual violent aggression on the depression/suicide relationship is greater than the partial moderating effects of these variables.

The Role of Perceptions of the Police in Informal Social Control:
Implications for the Racial Stratification of Crime and Control
Kevin M. Drakulich and Robert D. Crutchfield

Recent research has established the importance of informal social control to a variety of aspects of neighborhood life, including the prevalence of crime. This work has described informal social control as rooted in a neighborhood's structural and social context, but has less frequently explored the interconnections between informal and formal social control efforts. Drawing on data from Seattle, this article suggests that perceptions of formal social control—specifically perceptions of police procedural injustice and police efficacy—directly influence both individual evaluations of informal social control efforts as well as neighborhood capacities for informal social control. We suggest a pragmatic mechanism to explain this relationship—that low evaluations of the police will influence perceptions of the effectiveness of and costs associated with informal social control efforts—and we control for alternative cultural explanations related to the desirability of social control. Most strikingly, we find that strong racial disparities in faith in the police help explain why neighborhoods with larger race-ethnic minority populations have lower capacities for informal social control. We conclude with a discussion of emerging accounts of the role of culture in local organizational processes and of the larger social implications of the race-ethnic stratification of perceptions of the police.