American Sociological Review 78(5)

American Sociological Review, October 2013: Volume 78, Issue 5

A Broken Public? Americans’ Responses to the Great Recession
Clem Brooks and Jeff Manza

Did Americans respond to the recent Great Recession by demanding that government provide policy solutions to rising income insecurity, an expectation of state-of-the-art theorizing on the dynamics of mass opinion? Or did the recession erode support for government activism, in line with alternative scholarship pointing to economic factors having the reverse effect? We find that public support for government social programs declined sharply between 2008 and 2010, yet both fixed-effects and repeated survey analyses suggest economic change had little impact on policy-attitude formation. What accounts for these surprising developments? We consider alternative microfoundations emphasizing the importance of prior beliefs and biases to the formation of policy attitudes. Analyzing the General Social Surveys panel, our results suggest political partisanship has been central. Gallup and Evaluations of Government and Society surveys provide further evidence against the potentially confounding scenario of government overreach, in which federal programs adopted during the recession and the Obama presidency propelled voters away from government. We note implications for theoretical models of opinion formation, as well as directions for partisanship scholarship and interdisciplinary research on the Great Recession.

Remembering May 4, 1970: Integrating the Commemorative Field at Kent State
Christina R. Steidl

Recent research on collective memory suggests that commemorations of difficult pasts take either a multivocal or a fragmented form. I suggest these forms exist as ideal types for the initial commemoration, but the commemorative field, as a whole, remains dynamic over time, effectively shifting between forms. This study traces the creation, maintenance, and transformation of collective memory of the May 4, 1970 shootings at Kent State from 1970 to 2013 using archival sources, media accounts, and participant observation. In examining the commemorative field at Kent, I theorize the existence of a third commemorative form—the integrated commemorative field, which allows for the expression of divergent narratives and the maintenance of separate commemorative spaces while simultaneously enhancing social solidarity through shared meta-narratives that stress overarching values, like human rights or scientific inquiry.

Belonging Before Believing: Group Ethos and Bloc Recruitment in the Making of Chinese Communism
Xiaohong Xu

Why did Communism take root in China during the May Fourth Movement era (1917 to 1921)? I argue that a key factor was the revolutionary vanguard’s emergence through taking over existing activist organizations. Using reports and meeting minutes of 28 organizations and individual activists’ correspondence, diaries, and memoirs as sources for comparative cross-sectional analysis and processual case studies of the organizational debates over whether to adopt Bolshevism as a unifying ism, I find that a crucial factor explaining an organization’s positive response to Communist bloc recruitment was whether it practiced ethical activism, which engendered a sectarian group ethos that meshed with Bolshevik organizational culture. By contrast, the absence of ethical activism, and the correlative mismatch in organizational ethos, was associated with a negative response to Communist recruitment efforts. Two key mechanisms—frame resonance and group discipline—mediate this selective attraction. I conclude by discussing how organization-level analysis of selective spillover between social movements enhances our understanding of both individual participants’ motivations and the distinct style in which a movement responds to its political environment.

Pulpit and Press: Denominational Dynamics and the Growth of Religious Magazines in Antebellum America
Adam Goldstein and Heather A. Haveman

Religious economies theory, which views religious organizations as akin to single-unit firms competing for adherents in local markets, has three shortcomings that we solve by reconceptualizing religious organizations and developing a new theory of religious mobilization. First, we treat religious organizations as multi-unit entities operating in interdependent markets in a national field. Second, we incorporate insights from social movement theory to challenge the exclusive focus on the impetus to mobilize (competition) by also considering the capacity to do so (resources). Third, we consider competition within organizations as well as between them. To analyze mobilization directly, we study a key religious resource, magazines. We analyze original data covering virtually all faiths and affiliated magazines in antebellum America, a time of great religious ferment. Consistent with our conception of religious organizations, we find that competition played out mostly within a national field. Consistent with resource mobilization theory, we find that the geography of religious mobilization reflected variations in the availability of resources more than variations in the intensity of competitive pressures. Conceiving of religious organizations as translocal movement organizations rather than local firms better accounts for their behavior. Our analysis sheds light on group dynamics in general by revealing how translocal groups in modern societies mobilize and build identity through group media.

Decomposing School Resegregation: Social Closure, Racial Imbalance, and Racial Isolation
Jeremy E. Fiel

Today’s typical minority student attends school with fewer whites than his counterpart in 1970. This apparent resegregation of U.S. schools has sparked outrage and debate. Some blame a rollback of desegregation policies designed to distribute students more evenly among schools; others blame the changing racial composition of the student population. This study clarifies the link between distributive processes of segregation, population change, and school racial composition by framing school segregation as a mode of social closure. I use a novel decomposition approach to determine the relative contributions of distributive processes and compositional change in the apparent resegregation of schools from 1993 to 2010. For the most part, compositional changes are to blame for the declining presence of whites in minorities’ schools. During this period, whites and minorities actually became more evenly distributed across schools, helping increase minority students’ exposure to whites. Further decompositions reveal the continued success of district-level desegregation efforts, but the greatest barrier to progress appears to be the uneven distribution of students between school districts in the same area. These findings call for new research and new policies to address contemporary school segregation.

When White Is Just Alright: How Immigrants Redefine Achievement and Reconfigure the Ethnoracial Hierarchy
Tomás R. Jiménez and Adam L. Horowitz

Research on immigration, educational achievement, and ethnoraciality has followed the lead of racialization and assimilation theories by focusing empirical attention on the immigrant-origin population (immigrants and their children), while overlooking the effect of an immigrant presence on the third-plus generation (U.S.-born individuals of U.S.-born parents), especially its white members. We depart from this approach by placing third-plus-generation individuals at center stage to examine how they adjust to norms defined by the immigrant-origin population. We draw on fieldwork in Cupertino, California, a high-skilled immigrant gateway, where an Asian immigrant-origin population has established and enforces an amplified version of high-achievement norms. The resulting ethnoracial encoding of academic achievement constructs whiteness as having lesser-than status. Asianness stands for high-achievement, hard work, and success; whiteness, in contrast, represents low-achievement, laziness, and academic mediocrity. We argue that immigrants can serve as a foil against which the meaning and status of an ethnoracial category is recast, upending how the category is deployed in daily life. Our findings call into question the position that treats the third-plus generation, especially whites, as the benchmark population that sets achievement norms and to which all other populations adjust.

When Unionization Disappears: State-Level Unionization and Working Poverty in the United States
David Brady, Regina S. Baker, and Ryan Finnigan

Although the working poor are a much larger population than the unemployed poor, U.S. poverty research devotes much more attention to joblessness than to working poverty. Research that does exist on working poverty concentrates on demographics and economic performance and neglects institutions. Building on literatures on comparative institutions, unionization, and states as polities, we examine the influence of a potentially important labor market institution for working poverty: the level of unionization in a state. Using the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) for the United States, we estimate (1) multi-level logit models of poverty among employed households in 2010; and (2) two-way fixed-effects models of working poverty across seven waves of data from 1991 to 2010. Further, we replicate the analyses with the Current Population Survey while controlling for household unionization, and assess unionization’s potential influence on selection into employment. Across all models, state-level unionization is robustly significantly negative for working poverty. The effects of unionization are larger than the effects of states’ economic performance and social policies. Unionization reduces working poverty for both unionized and non-union households and does not appear to discourage employment. We conclude that U.S. poverty research can advance by devoting greater attention to working poverty, and by incorporating insights from the comparative literature on institutions.

Segmented Assimilation, Split Labor Markets, and Racial/Ethnic Inequality: The Case of Early-Twentieth-Century New York
Salvatore J. Restifo, Vincent J. Roscigno, and Zhenchao Qian

Assimilation and split labor market dynamics are core foci in research on immigration, race/ethnicity, and inequality. Little work, however, systematically analyzes how assimilation and group-level power dynamics within labor markets intersect relative to employment trajectories and rewards. In this article, we do so by offering integrated analyses of racial/ethnic inequalities for an important case, New York City from 1910 to 1930. Our multi-method analyses draw from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) and content-coded coverage from the New York Times for the period. Quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate a clear racial/ethnic hierarchy as well as group-level variations in opportunity relative to industrial concentration, segregation, and discrimination. Assimilative attributes and generational status mattered, yet certain inequalities were more firmly entrenched. Most pronounced, as seen in our qualitative analyses, were processes of social closure, discrimination, and related exclusionary constraints—constraints encountered and eventually alleviated, to some degree, for new white ethnics but not for African Americans. We conclude by discussing the theoretical and empirical utility of considering the embedded nature of assimilation within broader contexts of racial/ethnic closure in labor market opportunities and also relative to historical and contemporary eras.