Social Problems 61(4)

Social Problems, November 2014: Volume 61, Issue 4

Flirting with Capital: Negotiating Perceptions of Pan-Asian Ascendency and Western Decline in Global Sex Work
Kimberly Kay Hoang

This study highlights how two developments in global finance—the 2008 financial crisis centered in the United States and Central Europe and the expansion of East Asian economies—created new openings for us to rethink the multiply inflected hierarchies woven through racialized, national, and class-based relations, which produce competing hierarchies of global masculinities. Drawing on 23 months of participant observation and ethnographic research from 2006-2007 and 2009-2010 in four niche markets of Vietnam’s global sex industry catering to Western budget tourists, Western transnational businessmen, Viet Kieu (overseas Vietnamese) men, and wealthy local Vietnamese entrepreneurs, I strategically bring together multiple performances of masculinities that simultaneously affirm and contest Western superiority. In lower-paying niche markets that cater to Western businessmen and Western budget travelers, sex bars provide men with the space to project their status anxieties onto women’s bodies, affirming Western superiority. In contrast, more expensive bars catering to Viet Kieu and local elite Vietnamese businessmen provide men with the stage to contest Western superiority by capitalizing on this particular moment of economic flux and engaging in acts of conspicuous consumption to display their financial dominance. Together, these four niche markets of Vietnam’s global sex industry provide a unique window to examine how multiple performances of masculinity unfold in relation to each other in the context of rapid economic change.

The “State” of Equal Employment Opportunity Law and Managerial Gender Diversity
Julie A. Kmec and Sheryl L. Skaggs

Women’s underrepresentation in management is a persistent social problem. We take a new approach to understanding the lack of managerial gender diversity by investigating how U.S. state equal employment opportunity laws are related to women’s presence in upper and lower management. We draw on data from 2010 EEO-1 reports documenting managerial sex composition in U.S. work establishments and a state employment law database to answer our research questions. State mandates are found to be differentially associated with upper- versus lower-level managerial gender diversity. Establishments in states with an equal pay law, or that once ratified the ERA, employ more women in upper management than those in states without such a law or in nonratifying states, but this holds only in establishments in industries that typically employ women. In contrast, establishments in states that require anti-discrimination workplace postings employ fewer women in upper-management than those in states without such a requirement. State equal pay laws, especially those adopted before federal equal pay legislation, family responsibility discrimination protections, and past ERA ratification are positively associated with women’s lower-level managerial presence. Conversely, state expanded family and medical leave coverage, prohibited sex discrimination, and specific posting rules are negatively associated with women’s presence in lower management. Results hold net of establishment, state, firm, and industry factors. We discuss the meaning behind differences across managerial level and the role of state regulation in moving toward greater managerial gender equity.

A Battleground of Identity: Racial Formation and the African American Discourse on Interracial Marriage
Jan Doering

This article utilizes a sample of letters to the editor from African American newspapers to investigate racial identity formation. Drawing on an analysis of 234 letters, published predominantly between 1925 and 1965, I examine how African American writers discussed black-white intermarriage. Writers used the issue of intermarriage to negotiate conceptions of racial identity and the politics of racial emancipation. Because of its strong symbolic implications, the intermarriage discourse became a “battleground of identity” for the conflict between two competing racial ideologies: integrationism and separatism. The battleground concept elucidates why some debates become polarized, and why it is so difficult to arbitrate them. I argue that identity battlegrounds may emerge around emotionally charged and concrete but heavily symbolic issues that densely link to key ideas in the ideological systems of two or more conflicting movements. They must be issues that none of the movements can cease to compete over without surrendering their political essence.

Old Times Are Not Forgotten: The Institutionalization of Segregationist
Academies in the American South
Jeremy R. Porter, Frank M. Howell and Lynn M. Hempel

Brown v. Board of Education is considered a crowning achievement of racial equality yet, to date, there remains marked racial segregation in U.S. public schools. One explanation for continuing segregation lies in the reproduction of racialized institutions initially designed to preserve the color line. In this article, we examine the persistence of one such institution, drawing on historical institutionalism and rational choice theory to identify forces potentially linked to the reproduction of segregationist academies in the South. Using spatial analyses of National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) data on public and private schools, we observe a process of the elite preservation of hierarchical advantage with linkages to former plantation economies, a legacy of lynching, and organization of white countermovement groups in response to civil rights mobilization. The findings highlight the reproduction of racialized institutions through organizational creation and adaptation and underscore the continuing relevance of spatial and temporal context in shaping specific manifestations of the color line.

Family Socioeconomic Status, Peers, and the Path to College
Robert Crosnoe and Chandra Muller

Drawing on the primary/secondary effects perspective of educational inequality, this mixed methods study investigated connections between high school students’ trajectories through college preparatory course work and their relationships with parents and peers as a channel in the intergenerational transmission of socioeconomic inequality. Growth curve and multilevel analyses of national survey and transcript data revealed that having college-educated parents differentiated students’ enrollment in advanced course work at the start of high school and that this initial disparity was stably maintained over subsequent years. During this starting period of high school, exposure to school-based peer groups characterized by higher levels of parent education appeared to amplify these course work disparities between students with and without college-educated parents. Ethnographic data from a single high school pointed to possible mechanisms for these patterns, including the tendency for students with college-educated parents to have more information about the relative weight of grades, core courses, and electives in college going and for academically relevant information from school peers with college-educated parents to matter most to students’ course work when it matched what was coming from their own parents.

Marrying Ain't Hard When You Got A Union Card? Labor Union Membership and First Marriage
Daniel Schneider and Adam Reich

Over the past five decades, marriage has changed dramatically, as young people began marrying later or never getting married at all. Scholars have shown how this decline is less a result of changing cultural definitions of marriage, and more a result of men’s changing access to social and economic prerequisites for marriage. Specifically, men’s current economic standing and men’s future economic security have been shown to affect their marriageability. Traditionally, labor unions provided economic standing and security to male workers. Yet during the same period that marriage has declined among young people, membership in labor unions has declined precipitously, particularly for men. In this article, we examine the relationship between union membership and first marriage and discuss the possible mechanisms by which union membership might lead to first marriage. We draw on longitudinal data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth-79 to estimate discrete time event-history models of first marriage entry and find that, controlling for many factors, union membership is positively and significantly associated with marriage. We show then that this relationship is largely explained by the increased income, regularity and stability of employment, and fringe benefits that come with union membership.

Privatization, Business Attraction, and Social Services across the United States: Local Governments' Use of Market-Oriented, Neoliberal Policies in the Post-2000 Period
Linda Lobao, Lazarus Adua and Gregory Hooks

Privatization, business attraction incentives, and limited social service provision are market-oriented policies that broadly concern social scientists. These policies are conventionally assumed to be widely implemented across the United States, a world model of neoliberal development. This study takes a new look at these policies, providing a first view of how they unfold across the nation at a geographic scale that drills down to the local state. We document the extent to which localities privatized their public services, used business attraction, and limited social service delivery in the last decade. Extending national-level theories of the welfare state, we focus on two sets of factors to explain where these policies are most likely to be utilized. The first, derived from the class-politics approach, emphasizes class interests such as business and unions and political-ideological context, and anticipates that these policies are utilized most in Republican leaning, pro-business, and distressed contexts. The second, derived from the political-institutional approach, emphasizes state capacity and path dependency as determinants. The analyses are based on over 1,700 localities, the majority of county governments, using unique policy data. Class-politics variables have modest relationship to neoliberal policies and show that business sector influence and public sector unions matter. The findings strongly support the importance of state capacity and path dependency. Overall our study challenges assumptions that acquiescence to neoliberal policies is widespread. Rather, we find evidence of resilience to these policies among communities across the United States.

Undocumented Immigrant Threat and Support for Social Controls
Ted Chiricos, Elizabeth K. Stupi, Brian J. Stults and Marc Gertz

Popular support for enhanced border and internal controls to deal with undocumented immigration is examined in relation to contextual measures of group threat as well as perceived levels of cultural and economic threat posed by undocumented immigrants. Results from a national survey of non-Latino respondents (N = 1,364) indicate that presumed threatening context measured in static terms is inconsequential. But when context is measured in dynamic terms that also reflect dispersion and potential contact, it significantly predicts support for border controls. Perceived threats are stronger predictors of support for enhanced controls than either contextual indicators of presumed threat or individual characteristics of respondents. Results also show that perceived economic and cultural threats mediate the effects of individual respondent characteristics and dynamic contextual conditions as well. Implications for future research on immigrant threat emphasize the importance of context measured in both change and dispersion-related terms and responses to threat that distinguish alternative dimensions of control. Future work should also consider that perceptions of threat may not only have direct influence on immigration policy preferences but can mediate the effects of context and individual characteristics on those preferences.