Sunday, April 20, 2014

American Journal of Sociology 119(3)

American Journal of Sociology, November 2013: Volume 119, Issue 3

Special Contributions

Causal Thinking and Ethnographic Research
Mario Luis Small

Styles of Causal Thought: An Empirical Investigation
Gabriel Abend, Caitlin Petre, and Michael Sauder
While most work on causation in ethnography addresses the normative question of what ethnographers should do, this article addresses the empirical question of what ethnographers actually do. Specifically, it investigates whether ethnographic articles make causal arguments and how these arguments are made. The authors draw on a content analysis of 48 ethnographic articles sampled from four groups of sociological journals: contemporary generalist journals, contemporary specialist journals, mid-20th-century generalist journals—all in the United States—and contemporary generalist journals in Mexico. They find that ethnographies in U.S. contemporary generalist journals are most likely to advance strong and central causal claims and to use logical and rhetorical devices comparable to those used in quantitative articles. They also find that most Mexican ethnographic articles undertake a different kind of project, which they call “shedding light” on social phenomena. In addition to offering one methodological and one substantive suggestion to account for these findings, the authors highlight their implications for the sociology of social science.

How Options Disappear: Causality and Emergence in Grassroots Activist Groups
Kathleen Blee
This study advances recent theorizing on causality and emergence by analyzing how new activist groups create a collective sense of plausible tactics. A comparative ethnographic approach is used to observe shifts in the discussions of four fledgling activist groups. In each group, implicit discursive rules, often set off by minor comments and events, authorize some options and silence others. Although such rules emerge without deliberation or explicit decision making, they shape the group’s sense of possibility into the future. This study contributes both a new understanding of the role of contingency in collective activism and a method for using ethnographic observation to locate subtle causal mechanisms in social life.

A Pragmatist Approach to Causality in Ethnography
Iddo Tavory and Stefan Timmermans
Drawing on early pragmatist theorizing, the authors propose three interrelated methodological activities for the construction of robust causal claims in ethnographic research. First, Charles S. Peirce’s semiotic approach offers ethnographers a useful foundation for a mechanism-based approach to causality by tracing iterations of meaning-making-in-action. Second, taking advantage of the structure of Peirce’s semiotics ethnographers can examine three forms of observed variation to distinguish regularly occurring causal sequences and temporally and spatially remote causal processes. Third, the authors emphasize that the standards to evaluate causal arguments—their plausibility and assessments of explanatory fit—are always made in relation to challenges provided within a disciplinary community of inquiry. The use-value of the pragmatic approach to causality is demonstrated with an explanation of the different reactions of parents and clinicians to positive newborn screening results.

Other Articles

The Transformation of Prison Regimes in Late Capitalist Societies
John R. Sutton
Recent studies argue that cultural and political-economic shifts have led to a sea change in penal regimes among modern Western societies, resulting in more punitive social policies in general and a trend toward higher incarceration rates in particular. This is a special case of a wider argument that globalization has led to a decline in state autonomy and convergence on a market-based model of economic and social policy. This thesis has been challenged by the empirical literature on welfare states, which finds persistent cross-national diversity in institutional structures, policies, and patterns of inequality. Focusing on incarceration rates as the outcome of interest, this study evaluates these arguments by applying a Bayesian change-point model to four decades of data from 15 countries. Results show that a regime shift did occur but that incarceration rates increased mainly among countries with unregulated labor markets, decentralized polities, or weak labor unions. Profound institutional differences persist and are fateful for incarceration trajectories.

The Self-Expressive Edge of Occupational Sex Segregation
Erin A. Cech
Recent gender scholarship speculates that occupational sex segregation is reproduced in large part through the gendered, self-expressive career decisions of men and women. This article examines the effects of college students’ expression of their self-conceptions on their likelihood of entering occupations with a high or low proportion of women and theorizes the consequences of this mechanism for gender inequality. The author uses unique longitudinal data on students from four U.S. colleges to examine how the gender composition of students’ field at career launch is influenced by their earlier self-conceptions. Students with emotional, unsystematic, or people-oriented self-conceptions enter fields that are more “female,” even net of their cultural gender beliefs. Results suggest that cultural ideals of self-expression reinforce occupational sex segregation by converting gender-stereotypical self-conceptions into self-expressive career choices. The discussion section broadens this theoretical framework for understanding the role of self-expression in occupational sex segregation and notes the difficulty of addressing this mechanism through social or policy actions.

Challenger Groups, Commercial Organizations, and Policy Enactment: Local Lesbian/Gay Rights Ordinances in the United States from 1972 to 2008
Giacomo Negro, Fabrizio Perretti, and Glenn R. Carroll
Drawing on theories of social movements and organizations, the authors examine how the expanding presence of commercial organizations and the growing diversity of their forms foster policy change securing rights for a group of challengers. In particular, they suggest that these organizations can operate as bridges and can signal the legitimacy of the group in a community. Empirically, they analyze organizations linked to lesbians/gays and the promulgation of local ordinances banning discrimination, using a data set covering American counties from 1972 to 2008. Using hazard models, they find that the rate of policy enactment increases (1) with greater presence of lesbian/gay commercial organizations, particularly of those linking toward the larger community, and (2) with greater diversity of their organizational forms. Finally, they find evidence that commercial and political organizations are linked in a complex way.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.