American Journal of Sociology 120(6)

American Journal of Sociology, May 2015: Volume 120, Issue 6

Explaining the Persistence of Health Disparities: Social Stratification and the Efficiency-Equity Trade-off in the Kidney Transplantation System
Jonathan Daw

Why do health disparities persist when their previous mechanisms are eliminated? Fundamental-cause theorists argue that social position primarily improves health through two metamechanisms: better access to health information and technology. I argue that the general, cumulative, and embodied consequences of social stratification can produce another metamechanism: an efficiency-equity trade-off. A case in point is kidney transplantation, where the mechanisms previously thought to link race to outcomes—ability to pay and certain factors in the kidney allocation system—have been greatly reduced, yet large disparities persist. I show that these current disparities are rooted in factors that directly influence posttransplant success, placing efficiency and racial/ethnic equity at cross-purposes.

From Masterly Brokers to Compliant Protégées: The Frontier Governance System and the Rise of Ethnic Confrontation in China–Inner Mongolia, 1900–1930
Liping Wang

Center-periphery explanations focus on political centralization, state collapse, and nationalization to explain the genesis of separatist movements that form new national states. This study shows that three periods of Chinese-Mongolian relations—land reform (1900–1911), revolution and interregnum (1912–16) and warlordism (1917–30)—contained events that center-periphery perspectives associate with the rise of autonomous movements, yet Mongolian separatism did not occur until the last period. To explain this puzzle, the author characterizes the formation, integration, and dismemberment of the frontier governance system as an intermediate body between the center and the periphery. She demonstrates that the effects pointed to by center-periphery explanations were mediated, at least in the case of Inner Mongolia, by the structural transformations of the frontier governance system. Not assuming a natural opposition between the center and the periphery, this study elucidates the polarization of the center-periphery relationship and its impact on minority separatism.

Community Constraints on the Efficacy of Elite Mobilization: The Issuance of Currency Substitutes during the Panic of 1907
Lori Qingyuan Yue

Organizing collective action to secure support from local communities provides a source of power for elites to protect their interests, but community structures constrain the ability of elites to use this power. Elites’ power is not static or self-perpetuating but changing and dynamic. There are situations in which elites are forced into movement-like struggles to mobilize support from their community. The success of elites’ mobilization is affected by cultural and structural factors that shape the collective meaning of supporting elites’ actions and the identities that are formed in doing so. I find broad support for these propositions in a study of the issuances of small-denomination currency substitutes in 145 U.S. cities during the Panic of 1907. I discuss the contributions of this article to elite studies, the social movement literature, and the sociology of money.

Urbanization as Socioenvironmental Succession: The Case of Hazardous Industrial Site Accumulation
James R. Elliott and Scott Frickel

This study rehabilitates concepts from classical human ecology and synthesizes them with contemporary urban and environmental sociology to advance a theory of urbanization as socioenvironmental succession. The theory illuminates how social and biophysical phenomena interact endogenously at the local level to situate urban land use patterns recursively and reciprocally in place. To demonstrate this theory we conduct a historical-comparative analysis of hazardous industrial site accumulation in four U.S. cities, using a relational database that was assembled for more than 11,000 facilities that operated during the past half century—most of which remain unacknowledged in government reports. Results show how three iterative processes—hazardous industrial churning, residential churning, and risk containment—intersect to produce successive socioenvironmental changes that are highly relevant to but often missed by research on urban growth machines, environmental inequality, and systemic risk.

Agents of Change or Cogs in the Machine? Reexamining the Influence of Female Managers on the Gender Wage Gap
Sameer B. Srivastava and Eliot L. Sherman

Do female managers act in ways that narrow or instead act in ways that preserve or even widen the gender wage gap? Although conceptual arguments exist on both sides of this debate, the empirical evidence to date has favored the former view. Yet this evidence comes primarily from cross-establishment surveys, which do not provide visibility into individual managers’ choices. Using longitudinal personnel records from an information services firm in which managers had considerable discretion over employee salaries, we estimate multilevel models that indicate no support for the proposition that female managers reduce the gender wage gap among their subordinates. Consistent with the theory of value threat, we instead find conditional support for the cogs-in-the-machine perspective: in the subsample of high-performing supervisors and low-performing employees, women who switched from a male to a female supervisor had a lower salary in the following year than men who made the same switch.

Do Different Methods for Modeling Age-Graded Trajectories Yield Consistent and Valid Results?
John Robert Warren, Liying Luo, Andrew Halpern-Manners, James M. Raymo, and Alberto Palloni

Data on age-sequenced trajectories of individuals’ attributes are used for a growing number of research purposes. However, there is no consensus about which method to use to identify the number of discrete trajectories in a population or to assign individuals to a specific trajectory group. The authors modeled real and simulated trajectory data using “naïve” methods, optimal matching, grade of membership models, and three types of finite-mixture models. They found that these methods produced inferences about the number of trajectories that frequently differ (1) from one another and (2) from the truth as represented by simulation parameters. They also found that they differed in the assignment of individuals to trajectory groups. In light of these findings, the authors argue that researchers should interpret results based on these methods cautiously, neither reifying point estimates about the number of trajectories nor treating individuals’ trajectory group assignments as certain.