Work and Stratification
Cultural and Institutional Factors Shaping Mothers’ Employment and Working Hours in Postindustrial Countries
Irene Boeckmann, Joya Misra, Michelle J. Budig
Existing research shows that women’s employment patterns are not driven so much by gender as by motherhood, with childless people and fathers employed at substantially higher levels than mothers in most countries. We focus on the cross-national variation in the gap in employment participation and working hours between mothers and childless women. Controlling for individual- and household-level factors, we provide evidence that institutional and cultural contexts shape maternal employment. Well-paid leaves, publicly supported childcare services for very young children, and cultural support for maternal employment predict smaller differences in employment participation and working hours between mothers and childless women. Yet, extended leave, notably when unpaid, is associated with larger motherhood employment gaps.
Shareholder Value and Workforce Downsizing, 1981–2006
Jiwook Jung
This paper develops a theoretical account of the reconstruction of workforce downsizing as a shareholder-value strategy since the 1980s. This account has two components. First, building on resource-dependence theory, I suggest that growing corporate dependence on institutional investors makes firms susceptible to their demand for greater returns, especially when these institutional investors are blockholders and resistant to counter-pressure from managers. Second, building on Fligstein’s theory of conceptions of control, I suggest that the rise of shareholder value reorients managerial behavior, by changing the decision context in a way that induces managers to maximize shareholder value. Crucial to constructing this new decision context are a set of agency-theory prescriptions for reforming corporate governance. My analysis of downsizing announcements, drawing on a sample of 714 US firms between 1981 and 2006, shows that both the pressure from institutional investors and the new decision context encourage firms to downsize more frequently. By demonstrating how both pressure from investors and changed managerial decision contexts have contributed to the prevalence of workforce downsizing, this paper makes a strong case for the financialization of the American corporation, and contributes to the sociological research on growing job insecurity and income inequality over the past three decades.
The Impact of Work and Family Life Histories on Economic Well-Being at Older Ages
Andrew Halpern-Manners, John Robert Warren, James M. Raymo, D. Adam Nicholson
Motivated by theoretical and empirical research in life course sociology, we examine relationships between trajectories of work and family roles across the life course and four measures of economic well-being in later adulthood. Using data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS) and multiple trajectory-generating methods, we first identify latent trajectories of work and family roles between late adolescence and age 65. We then model economic well-being at age 65 as a function of these trajectories and contemporaneously measured indicators of older adults’ work, family, and health statuses. Our central finding is that trajectories of work and family experiences across the life course have direct effects on later-life economic well-being, as well as indirect effects that operate through more proximate measures of work, family, and other characteristics. We argue that these findings have important implications for how social scientists conceptualize and model the relationship between later-life economic outcomes and people’s work and family experiences across the life course.
Educational Expansion and Occupational Change: US Compulsory Schooling Laws and the Occupational Structure 1850–1930
Emily Rauscher
During the US Industrial Revolution, educational expansion may have created skilled jobs through innovation and skill upgrading or reduced skilled jobs by mechanizing production. Such arguments contradict classic sociological work that treats education as a sorting mechanism, allocating individuals to fixed occupations. I capitalize on state differences in the timing of compulsory school attendance laws to ask whether raising the minimum level of schooling: (1) increased school attendance rate; or (2) shifted state occupational distributions away from agricultural toward skilled and non-manual occupation categories. Using state-level panel data constructed from 1850–1930 censuses and state-year fixed effects models, I find that compulsory laws significantly increased school attendance rates, particularly among lower-class children, and shifted the categorical distribution toward skilled and non-manual occupations. Thus, rather than deskilling through mechanization, raising the minimum level of education seems to have created skilled jobs and raised the occupational distribution through skill-biased technological change. Results suggest that education was not merely a sorting mechanism, supporting the importance of education as an institution even around the turn of the century.
Race
Is Love (Color) Blind?: The Economy of Race among Gay and Straight Daters
Jennifer H. Lundquist, Ken-Hou Lin
A drawback to research on interracial couplings is that it almost exclusively studies heterosexual relationships. However, compelling new evidence from analyses using the Census shows that interracial relationships are significantly more common among the gay population. It is unclear how much of this reflects weaker racial preference or more limited dating markets. This paper examines the interactions of white gay and straight online daters who have access to a large market of potential partners by modeling dyadic messaging behaviors. Results show that racial preferences are highly gendered, and do not line up neatly by gay or straight identity. White lesbians and straight men show the weakest same-race preference, followed by gay men, while straight women show the strongest same-race preference. Put differently, minority men are discriminated to a greater degree than minority women in both same-sex and different-sex dating markets. These results suggest that white gay men’s higher rates of interracial cohabitation are driven more by constrained dating markets, while lesbians’ appear to be driven by more open racial preferences.
Discrimination in the Credential Society: An Audit Study of Race and College Selectivity in the Labor Market
S. Michael Gaddis
Racial inequality in economic outcomes, particularly among the college educated, persists throughout US society. Scholars debate whether this inequality stems from racial differences in human capital (e.g., college selectivity, GPA, college major) or employer discrimination against black job candidates. However, limited measures of human capital and the inherent difficulties in measuring discrimination using observational data make determining the cause of racial differences in labor-market outcomes a difficult endeavor. In this research, I examine employment opportunities for white and black graduates of elite top-ranked universities versus high-ranked but less selective institutions. Using an audit design, I create matched candidate pairs and apply for 1,008 jobs on a national job-search website. I also exploit existing birth-record data in selecting names to control for differences across social class within racialized names. The results show that although a credential from an elite university results in more employer responses for all candidates, black candidates from elite universities only do as well as white candidates from less selective universities. Moreover, race results in a double penalty: When employers respond to black candidates, it is for jobs with lower starting salaries and lower prestige than those of white peers. These racial differences suggest that a bachelor’s degree, even one from an elite institution, cannot fully counteract the importance of race in the labor market. Thus, both discrimination and differences in human capital contribute to racial economic inequality.
Homebuyer Neighborhood Attainment in Black and White: Housing Outcomes during the Housing Boom and Bust
Mary J. Fischer, Travis Scott Lowe
This paper examines the types of neighborhoods that black and white homebuyers have secured loans in during the recent housing boom and subsequent bust. We expand upon and refine previous research on locational attainment using loan-level data from the 1992–2010 Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) combined with tract- and metropolitan-level data from the 1990, 2000, and 2010 Census and the American Community Survey. Multilevel models show that black homebuyers are moving into considerably more racially segregated neighborhoods than their white counterparts and that their access to “whiter” neighborhoods did not expand during the housing boom, even after controlling for the racial composition of the metropolitan area and other key ecological factors. Conversely, new white homebuyers have been moving into neighborhoods with greater percent black residents, which may be a contributing factor in observed declines in segregation during the past few decades. Additionally, black homebuyers in metropolitan areas with greater suburban growth were on average accessing homes in more integrated neighborhoods. Finally, the models explained considerably more of the variation in the neighborhood racial composition of whites compared to blacks. These findings are suggestive of a dual housing market, one in which the experiences of blacks are still systematically different than those of whites, despite expanded access to homeownership.
Political Sociology
Civil War and Trajectories of Change in Women’s Political Representation in Africa, 1985–2010
Melanie M. Hughes, Aili Mari Tripp
In recent decades, the expansion of women’s political representation in sub-Saharan Africa has been nothing short of remarkable. The number of women legislators in African parliaments tripled between 1990 and 2010, resulting in African countries having among the highest rates of women’s legislative representation in the world. The dominant explanations for this change have been institutional factors (namely, the adoption of gender quotas and presence of proportional representation systems) and democratization. We suggest that existing research has not gone far enough to evaluate the effects of one powerful structural change: the end of civil war. Using Latent Growth Curve modeling, we show that the end of long-standing armed conflict had large positive impacts on women’s political representation, above what can be explained by electoral institutions and democratization alone. However, post-conflict increases in women’s legislative representation materialize only after 2000, amid emerging international and regional norms of women’s political inclusion. In countries exiting armed conflict in these recent years, women’s movement into national legislatures follows a trajectory of social change that is much faster and more extensive than what we observe in other African countries.
When Do States Respond to Low Fertility?: Contexts of State Concern in Wealthier Countries, 1976–2011
Emily A. Marshall
Since the 1970s, expressions of state concern over low fertility have greatly increased among wealthier countries. This study asks to what extent this increase is explained by demographic factors, national-level economic and political factors, and processes of international diffusion and changing international norms. Analyses integrate the world polity literature on global policy diffusion with a social problems approach to examine international diffusion of state concern among more powerful members of the world polity, a process that can produce changes in international policy consensus. Comparisons of the characteristics of states that do and do not express concern over low fertility find that among wealthier “first-world” countries, state concern has become more responsive to fertility rates: fertility rates are not significantly associated with concern early in the study period, but are strongly associated with concern later in the study period. There is no evidence that integration into the world polity is associated with concern in these countries, and some evidence that less integrated countries are more likely to express concern, suggesting that processes shaping the diffusion of state concern may differ from those identified as shaping policy diffusion in the existing literature. Among “second-world” former Eastern bloc countries, different patterns of associations reflect different political histories: concern is associated only with demographic factors, with no significant change in this association over time.
Health
Work-Family Context and the Longevity Disadvantage of US Women
Jennifer Karas Montez, Pekka Martikainen, Hanna Remes, Mauricio Avendano
Female life expectancy is currently shorter in the United States than in most high-income countries. This study examines work-family context as a potential explanation. While work-family context changed similarly across high-income countries during the past half century, the United States has not implemented institutional supports, such as universally available childcare and family leave, to help Americans contend with these changes. We compare the United States to Finland—a country with similar trends in work-family life but generous institutional supports—and test two hypotheses to explain US women’s longevity disadvantage: (1) US women may be less likely than Finnish women to combine employment with childrearing; and (2) US women’s longevity may benefit less than Finnish women’s longevity from combining employment with childrearing. We used data from women aged 30–60 years during 1988–2006 in the US National Health Interview Survey Linked Mortality File and harmonized it with data from Finnish national registers. We found stronger support for hypothesis 1, especially among low-educated women. Contrary to hypothesis 2, combining employment and childrearing was not less beneficial for US women’s longevity. In a simulation exercise, more than 75 percent of US women’s longevity disadvantage was eliminated by raising their employment levels to Finnish levels and reducing mortality rates of non-married/non-employed US women to Finnish rates.
Disease and Dowry: Community Context, Gender, and Adult Health in India
Samuel Stroope
Despite growing research on health and residential contexts, relatively little is understood about gendered contexts that are differentially important for women’s and men’s physical health in low- and middle-income countries. This study advances the prior knowledge by examining whether the local frequency of a salient and gendered practice in India—dowry—is associated with gender differences in physical health (acute illness, illness length, and chronic illness). Analyses are conducted using multilevel logistic and negative binomial regression models and national data on men and women across India (N = 102,763). Results show that as dowry frequency increases in communities, not only do women have a greater likelihood of poor health across all three health outcomes, but men also have a greater likelihood of acute illness and illness length. Men, however, have a lower likelihood of chronic illness as the frequency of dowry increases in communities. In the case of all three health outcomes, results showed consistently wider health gaps between men and women in communities with a higher frequency of dowry.
Social Policy
Individual Troubles, Shared Troubles: The Multiplicative Effect of Individual and Country-Level Unemployment on Life Satisfaction in 95 Nations (1981–2009)
Esteban Calvo, Christine A. Mair, Natalia Sarkisian
Although the negative association between unemployment and life satisfaction is well documented, much theoretical and empirical controversy surrounds the question of how unemployment actually shapes life satisfaction. Previous studies suggest that unemployment may endanger subjective well-being through individual experiences, contextual influences, or a combination of both. Drawing on data from the World and European Values Surveys, National Accounts Official Country Data, Social Security Programs Throughout the World Reports, World Development Indicators, and World Income Inequality databases for 398,533 individuals in 95 nations (1981–2009), we use three-level hierarchical linear models to test four competing theory-based hypotheses—that unemployment shapes life satisfaction through individual, contextual, additive, or multiplicative effects. Our results support a multiplicative interaction between individual- and country-level unemployment. Unemployed individuals are less satisfied than other individuals, and when unemployment rates rise, their satisfaction drops even further below students, homemakers, and employed individuals; retirees, however, become more similar to the unemployed. We discuss these findings in light of previous theoretical models to argue for a model where individual unemployment is understood in the context of diverse labor force statuses and national unemployment rates. We conclude with policy suggestions aiming to address the negative consequences of unemployment through individualized and contextualized plans.
Social Policy and Perceived Immigrant Labor Market Competition in Europe: Is Prevention Better Than Cure?
Boris Heizmann
Previous research on attitudes toward immigrants has so far focused on composite outcome measures instead of dealing with more specific forms of perceived threat and prejudice. The present article approaches this gap by investigating the antecedents of the perception that immigrants take jobs away from the host-country population. This form of perceived economic competition is a fundamental feature of immigrant-native relations in many countries, and it is embedded in the institution of the labor market. Accordingly, the main interest of this study lies in the influence of two central aspects of labor market policy, employment protection legislation and unemployment benefit level. European Social Survey data are used in multilevel models that include individual-, regional-, and country-level factors. The results indicate that unemployment benefits abate perceived competition, and the impact is strong. This finding is robust against the inclusion of several other policy indicators, including integration policies, welfare regime types, and other structural factors such as unemployment rates and unionization figures. Employment protection affects perceived economic threat only indirectly by mitigating the impact of regional unemployment. Furthermore, it actually increases perceived competition for unemployed persons. These findings challenge the notion that prevention is always better than cure.
Social Networks
Streams of Thought: Knowledge Flows and Intellectual Cohesion in a Multidisciplinary Era
Craig M. Rawlings, Daniel A. McFarland, Linus Dahlander, Dan Wang
How has the recent shift toward multidisciplinary research affected intellectual cohesion in academia? We answer this question through an examination of collaborations and knowledge flows among researchers. We examine the relevant case of Stanford University during a period of intense investment in multidisciplinary research, using a novel measure of knowledge flows in the short-cycled movement of published references from one researcher to another. We describe intellectual cohesion and its trajectory among 1,007 faculty members between 1997 and 2006, and then examine the social-structural antecedents of dyadic knowledge flows that help explain macro-level patterns. Results show that university collaborations have grown denser and more integrated across faculty members and their institutional divisions. However, this integration is led by “star” researchers and is accompanied by a greater centralization of knowledge flows around these individuals. Results illustrate important shifts in the nature of academic research, and contribute to a dynamic view of intellectual cohesion.
Environment
Natural Hazards and Residential Mobility: General Patterns and Racially Unequal Outcomes in the United States
James R. Elliott
This study conducts a nationwide, locally comparative analysis of the extent to which natural hazards contribute to residential mobility in the United States and how this influence varies for racial and ethnic minorities. Analyses combine census data on households with data from thousands of recorded natural hazards during the late 1990s. Findings affirm that natural hazards are common throughout the country; that associated property damage correlates positively with increases in residential mobility for all groups; that these increases are particularly noticeable among racial and ethnic minorities because of preexisting inequalities in mobility; and that areas with more costly damage tend to pull as well as push migrants, especially Latinos and Asians. Implications for existing theory, methods, and policy are discussed.
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