American Sociological Review 80(3)

American Sociological Review, June 2015: Volume 80, Issue 3

Her Support, His Support: Money, Masculinity, and Marital Infidelity
Christin L. Munsch

Recent years have seen great interest in the relationship between relative earnings and marital outcomes. Using data from the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, I examine the effect of relative earnings on infidelity, a marital outcome that has received little attention. Theories of social exchange predict that the greater one’s relative income, the more likely one will be to engage in infidelity. Yet, emerging literature raises questions about the utility of gender-neutral exchange approaches, particularly when men are economically dependent and women are breadwinners. I find that, for men, breadwinning increases infidelity. For women, breadwinning decreases infidelity. I argue that by remaining faithful, breadwinning women neutralize their gender deviance and keep potentially strained relationships intact. I also find that, for both men and women, economic dependency is associated with a higher likelihood of engaging in infidelity; but, the influence of dependency on men’s infidelity is greater than the influence of dependency on women’s infidelity. For economically dependent persons, infidelity may be an attempt to restore relationship equity; however, for men, dependence may be particularly threatening. Infidelity may allow economically dependent men to engage in compensatory behavior while simultaneously distancing themselves from breadwinning spouses.

Ideals as Anchors for Relationship Experiences
Margaret Frye and Jenny Trinitapoli

Research on young-adult sexuality in sub-Saharan Africa typically conceptualizes sex as an individual-level risk behavior. We introduce a new approach that connects the conditions surrounding the initiation of sex with subsequent relationship well-being, examines relationships as sequences of interdependent events, and indexes relationship experiences to individually held ideals. New card-sort data from southern Malawi capture young women’s relationship experiences and their ideals in a sequential framework. Using optimal matching, we measure the distance between ideal and experienced relationship sequences to (1) assess the associations between ideological congruence and perceived relationship well-being, (2) compare this ideal-based approach to other experience-based alternatives, and (3) identify individual- and couple-level correlates of congruence between ideals and experiences in the romantic realm. We show that congruence between ideals and experiences conveys relationship well-being along four dimensions: expressions of love and support, robust communication habits, perceived biological safety, and perceived relationship stability. We further show that congruence is patterned by socioeconomic status and supported by shared ideals within romantic dyads. We argue that conceiving of ideals as anchors for how sexual experiences are manifest advances current understandings of romantic relationships, and we suggest that this approach has applications for other domains of life.

Neighborhood Foreclosures, Racial/Ethnic Transitions, and Residential Segregation
Matthew Hall, Kyle Crowder, and Amy Spring

In this article, we use data on virtually all foreclosure events between 2005 and 2009 to calculate neighborhood foreclosure rates for nearly all block groups in the United States to assess the impact of housing foreclosures on neighborhood racial/ethnic change and on broader patterns of racial residential segregation. We find that the foreclosure crisis was patterned strongly along racial lines: black, Latino, and racially integrated neighborhoods had exceptionally high foreclosure rates. Multilevel models of racial/ethnic change reveal that foreclosure concentrations were linked to declining shares of whites and expanding shares of black and Latino residents. Results further suggest that these compositional shifts were driven by both white population loss and minority growth, especially from racially mixed settings with high foreclosure rates. To explore the impact of these racially selective migration streams on patterns of residential segregation, we simulate racial segregation assuming that foreclosure rates remained at their 2005 levels throughout the crisis period. Our simulations suggest that the foreclosure crisis increased racial segregation between blacks and whites by 1.1 dissimilarity points, and between Latinos and whites by 2.2 dissimilarity points.

Ethnic Diversity and Social Trust: Evidence from the Micro-Context
Peter Thisted Dinesen and Kim Mannemar Sønderskov

We argue that residential exposure to ethnic diversity reduces social trust. Previous within-country analyses of the relationship between contextual ethnic diversity and trust have been conducted at higher levels of aggregation, thus ignoring substantial variation in actual exposure to ethnic diversity. In contrast, we analyze how ethnic diversity of the immediate micro-context—where interethnic exposure is inevitable—affects trust. We do this using Danish survey data linked with register-based data, which enables us to obtain precise measures of the ethnic diversity of each individual’s residential surroundings. We focus on contextual diversity within a radius of 80 meters of a given individual, but we also compare the effect in the micro-context to the impact of diversity in more aggregate contexts. Our results show that ethnic diversity in the micro-context affects trust negatively, whereas the effect vanishes in larger contextual units. This supports the conjecture that interethnic exposure underlies the negative relationship between ethnic diversity in residential contexts and social trust.

Ancestry Matters: Patrilineage Growth and Extinction
Xi Song, Cameron D. Campbell, and James Z. Lee

Patrilineality, the organization of kinship, inheritance, and other key social processes based on patrilineal male descent, has been a salient feature of social organization in China and many other societies for centuries. Because patrilineage continuity or growth was the central focus of reproductive strategies in such societies, we introduce the number of patrilineal male descendants generations later as a stratification outcome. By reconstructing and analyzing 20,000 patrilineages in two prospective, multi-generational population databases from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century China, we show that patrilineages founded by high-status males had higher growth rates for the next 150 years. The elevated growth rate of these patrilineages was due more to their having a lower probability of extinction at each point in time than to surviving patrilineal male descendants having larger numbers of sons on average. As a result, male descendants of high-status males account for a disproportionately large share of the male population in later generations. In China and elsewhere, patrilineal kin network characteristics influence individuals’ life chances; effects of a male founder’s characteristics on patrilineage size many generations later thus represent an indirect channel of status transmission that has not been considered previously.

Historical Sociology’s Puzzle of the Missing Transitions: A Case Study of Early Modern Japan
Mark Cohen

Prominent accounts of the transition to capitalism have a far too limited understanding of pre-capitalist agrarian economies’ potential for dynamism. Recent research shows that conditions earlier accounts identify as triggers for a transition to capitalism could be present without a transition occurring. I expand on implications of these cases of “missing transitions” for theorizing the dynamics of pre-capitalist agrarian economies. I present a theoretical framework that shows how phenomena previously associated with the transition to capitalism—such as flexible property rights in land and labor, extensive markets, and accumulation of industrial and mercantile wealth—emerged in pre-capitalist societies without leading to capitalist development. I illustrate the analytic upshot of this framework by considering the case study of Japan in the Tokugawa era (1603 to 1868). For historical sociologists, early modern Japan has long been seen as an anomalous case, puzzlingly mixing developments thought to represent early signs of capitalism with evidence of the durable survival of the feudal social order. In light of a more accurate account of the forces for and limits of dynamism in pre-capitalist agrarian economies, Tokugawa-era Japan is no longer a puzzling anomaly.

Collective Labor Rights and Income Inequality
Jasmine Kerrissey

This article examines the relationship between income inequality and collective labor rights, conceptualized as workers’ legal and practical ability to engage in collective activity. Although worker organization is central to explaining income inequality in industrialized democracies, worldwide comparative studies have neglected the role of class-based actors. I argue that the repression of labor rights reduces the capacity of worker organizations to effectively challenge income inequality through market and political processes in capitalist societies. Labor rights, however, are unlikely to have uniform effects across regions. This study uses unbalanced panel data for 100 developed and less developed countries from 1985 through 2002. Random- and fixed-effects models find that strong labor rights are tightly linked to lower inequality across a large range of countries, including in the Global South. Interactions between regions and labor rights suggest that the broader context in which class-based actors are embedded shapes worker organizations’ ability to reduce inequality. During the period of this study, labor rights were particularly important for mitigating inequality in the West but less so in Eastern Europe.

A Dynamic Process Model of Private Politics: Activist Targeting and Corporate Receptivity to Social Challenges
Mary-Hunter McDonnell, Brayden G King, and Sarah A. Soule

This project explores whether and how corporations become more receptive to social activist challenges over time. Drawing from social movement theory, we suggest a dynamic process through which contentious interactions lead to increased receptivity. We argue that when firms are chronically targeted by social activists, they respond defensively by adopting strategic management devices that help them better manage social issues and demonstrate their normative appropriateness. These defensive devices have the incidental effect of empowering independent monitors and increasing corporate accountability, which in turn increase a firm’s receptivity to future activist challenges. We test our theory using a unique longitudinal dataset that tracks contentious attacks and the adoption of social management devices among a population of 300 large firms from 1993 to 2009.