American Journal of Sociology 120(3)

American Journal of Sociology, November 2014: Volume 120, Issue 3

A Life Course Trajectory Framework for Understanding the Intracohort Pattern of Wage Inequality
Siwei Cheng

Much research has been devoted to cross-sectional and intercohort patterns of wage inequality, but relatively little is known about the mechanisms for the intracohort pattern of wage inequality. To fill this intellectual gap, this article establishes a life course trajectory (LCT) framework for understanding the intracohort pattern of wage inequality. First, the author proposes and conceptualizes three essential properties of the LCT framework (random variability, trajectory heterogeneity, and cumulative advantage) that are used to establish a mathematical formalization of the LCT framework. Both the conceptualization and the formalization imply that intracohort wage inequality will increase over the life course due to random variability, trajectory heterogeneity, and cumulative advantage. Finally, the author combines the LCT framework with the multilevel growth curve model, then applies the model to data from the NLSY79, and finds support for the significance of random variability, trajectory heterogeneity, and between-group cumulative advantage properties but not the within-group cumulative advantage property.

Decisions about Knowledge in Medical Practice: The Effect of Temporal Features of a Task
Daniel A. Menchik

A classic question of social science is how knowledge informs practice. Research on physicians’ decisions about medical knowledge has focused on doctors’ personal capabilities and features of the knowledge corpus, producing divergent findings. This study asks, instead, How is decision making about the use of knowledge influenced by features of work? From observations of one team’s decisions in multiple clinical and administrative contexts, the author argues that making decisions is contingent upon temporal features of physicians’ tasks. Physicians receive feedback at different speeds, and they must account for these speeds when judging what they can prioritize. This finding explains doctors’ perceived uncertainty in other studies as a product of the long feedback loop in tasks, and their certainty or pragmatism as a product of shorter feedback loops. In these latter scenarios, physicians consider and deploy scientific knowledge after—and not before, as is usually assumed—determining a fruitful plan of action.

Racially and Ethnically Diverse Schools and Adolescent Romantic Relationships
Kate Strully

Focusing on romantic relationships, which are often seen as a barometer of social distance, this analysis investigates how adolescents from different racial-ethnic and gender groups respond when they attend diverse schools with many opportunities for inter-racial-ethnic dating. Which groups respond by forming inter-racial-ethnic relationships, and which groups appear to “work around” opportunities for inter-racial-ethnic dating by forming more same-race-ethnicity relationships outside of school boundaries? Most prior studies have analyzed only relationships within schools and, therefore, cannot capture a potentially important way that adolescents express preferences for same-race-ethnicity relationships or work around constraints from other groups’ preferences. Using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, I find that, when adolescents are in schools with many opportunities for inter-racial-ethnic dating, black females and white males are most likely to form same-race-ethnicity relationships outside of the school; whereas Hispanic males and females are most likely to date across racial-ethnic boundaries within the school.

Civic Action
Paul Lichterman and Nina Eliasoph

Commonly, researchers have looked for civic life in a distinct sector in which they assume that voluntary associations will cultivate special skills and virtues. Gathering together many challenges to this approach, and using ethnographic cases of housing advocacy and youth civic engagement projects, the authors reconceptualize “the civic” as civic action and show how patterned scene styles shape it. Doing so reveals patterns of action in complex organizations that may span institutional sectors. The authors show how researchers can locate scene styles, and with an extensive literature review, they portray several common styles and suggest that different civic styles often lead to different outcomes.

Who Is Black, White, or Mixed Race? How Skin Color, Status, and Nation Shape Racial Classification in Latin America
Edward Telles and Tianna Paschel

Comparative research on racial classification has often turned to Latin America, where race is thought to be particularly fluid. Using nationally representative data from the 2010 and 2012 America’s Barometer survey, the authors examine patterns of self-identification in four countries. National differences in the relation between skin color, socioeconomic status, and race were found. Skin color predicts race closely in Panama but loosely in the Dominican Republic. Moreover, despite the dominant belief that money whitens, the authors discover that status polarizes (Brazil), mestizoizes (Colombia), darkens (Dominican Republic), or has no effect (Panama). The results show that race is both physical and cultural, with country variations in racial schema that reflect specific historical and political trajectories.

Sources of Sibling (Dis)similarity: Total Family Impact on Status Variation in the Netherlands in the Nineteenth Century
Antonie Knigge, Ineke Maas, and Marco H. D. van Leeuwen

The authors describe and explain variation in the occupational status resemblance of brothers in the Netherlands during modernization. They test opposing hypotheses about how modernization processes influenced fraternal resemblance through the value and inequality of family resources based on a job competition model in combination with modernization theory, status maintenance theory, and dualism theory. The authors use the high-quality, large-scale database GENLIAS, yielding digitized information for approximately 450,000 linked Dutch marriage certificates from 250,000 families, complemented with historical indicators of six modernization processes for over 2,500 communities. Using multilevel meta-regression models, they find that brother correlations in status decreased slowly from about 1860 onward. Although this exactly parallels the period of modernization, the authors find that modernization processes were not responsible (except possibly urbanization and mass transportation). In fact, in line with dualism theory, fraternal resemblance increased with most processes (i.e., industrialization, educational expansion, in-migration, and mass communication) because they amplified inequality.