American Journal of Sociology 119(2)

American Journal of Sociology, September 2013: Volume 119, Issue 2

Budgetary Units: A Weberian Approach to Consumption
Erin Metz McDonnell

Established consumption theory relies heavily on application of individualistic frames and market models of behavior. A framework built around consumption-oriented groups would facilitate progress toward a more general theory of consumption. This article reintroduces and extends Weber’s “budgetary unit” concept to address this gap, correcting key problems dogging the consumption literature. The budgetary unit concept (1) offers a new framework for theorizing and better accounting for observed consumption patterns, (2) reveals how consumption units have organizational logics, preferences, strengths, and vulnerabilities that are consequentially distinct from market logic of production and profit, and (3) focuses attention on social processes and features enabling theorization of general social patterns of consumption across diverse contexts. This article highlights the explanatory power and broad applicability of Weber’s budgetary unit approach using the conventionally dissimilar cases of Russian organized crime, Catholic nuns, immigrant remittances, and low-income families’ child support.

Misdemeanor Justice: Control without Conviction
Issa Kohler-Hausmann

Current scholarship has explored how the carceral state governs and regulates populations. This literature has focused on prison and on the wide-reaching collateral consequences of a felony conviction. Despite the obvious importance of these findings, they capture only a portion of the criminal justice system’s operations. In most jurisdictions, misdemeanors, not felonies, constitute the bulk of criminal cases, and the number of such arrests is rising. This article explores a puzzling fact about New York City’s pioneering experiment in mass misdemeanor arrests: the preponderance result in no finding of guilt and no assignment of formal punishment. Drawing on two years of fieldwork, this article explores how the criminal justice system functions to regulate significant populations without conviction or sentencing. The author details the operation of penal power through the techniques of marking through criminal justice record keeping, the procedural hassle of case processing, and mandated performance evaluated by court actors to show the social control capacity of the criminal justice system.

Racialized Conflict and Policy Spillover Effects: The Role of Race in the Contemporary U.S. Welfare State
Hana E. Brown

This article introduces a racialized conflict theory to explain how racial divisions structure welfare state development in the absence of de jure discrimination. The author explains the effect of racial divisions on policy outcomes as the result of the attitudinal, cultural, and political spillover effects of prevailing conflicts in a social field. Using a paired-case comparison and analysis of multiple data sources, the author applies this theory to analyze Georgia’s and Alabama’s surprisingly divergent welfare reforms in the 1990s. Results support the racialized conflict theory and suggest important revisions to prevailing theories about the sociopolitical effects of contemporary racial divides.

Counterbalances to Economic Homophily: Microlevel Mechanisms in a Historical Setting
Denis Trapido

The tendency to transact within, rather than across, identity-based groups is a well-established effect of identity divisions. While previous work emphasized macrolevel, impersonal factors that counteract this tendency, this article looks at how individuals may counteract it in everyday interaction. Two microlevel counterbalances to economic homophily are examined with unique data on partnerships among Tory and Whig merchants in 18th-century Bristol, England. No conclusive support is found for the first examined counterbalance, which presumes that cross-group social relations, such as joint civic activities, induce parallel economic relations. Instead, the analysis shows that Tory-Whig partnerships were facilitated by the practice of choosing cross-party partners of unequal professional prominence. Such professionally unequal relations involve tacit status subordination, which reduces the relation-specific uncertainty associated with transacting across a salient identity division. The results highlight the potential of uncertainty avoidance to sustain inequality between social groups and suggest unexplored contingencies to theories of status homophily.

Diversity, Integration, and Social Ties: Attraction versus Repulsion as Drivers of Intra- and Intergroup Relations
John Skvoretz

Interethnic and intergroup social ties are critical to knitting together increasingly diverse societies into cohesive wholes. Yet their formation faces the homophily hurdle: important and intimate social ties tend to be established disproportionately between those sharing significant social attributes. In the spirit of analytical sociology, the author explores two mechanisms that could drive intra- and intergroup relations: attraction to similar versus repulsion from dissimilar others. The models differ in predictions as illustrated by data on interethnic marriages in Great Britain and the United States, on U.S. dating and cohabitation relations by religion and education, on educational diversity in marriages in 22 European countries, and on marriages of the native and foreign-born in Austria. A unified model for the two mechanisms, in which tie formation is a conceptualized as a two-stage process of encounter and consummation, is proposed, and its empirical and theoretical analysis provides deeper understanding of the homophily hurdle.

Disavowing Politics: Civic Engagement in an Era of Political Skepticism
Elizabeth A. Bennett, Alissa Cordner, Peter Taylor Klein, Stephanie Savell, and Gianpaolo Baiocchi

Today, Americans are simultaneously skeptical of and engaged with political life. How does widespread cynicism affect the culture of civic participation? What are the implications for democracy? This study synthesizes data from a one-year collective ethnography of seven civic groups and theoretical work on boundary making, ambiguity, and role distancing. The authors find skepticism generates “disavowal of the political,” a cultural idiom that allows people to creatively constitute what they imagine to be appropriate forms of engagement. Disavowal generates taboos, and the authors show how disdain for conflict and special interests challenges activism around inequality. Political disavowal both facilitates and constrains civic engagement in an era of political skepticism.