American Journal of Sociology 121(1)

American Journal of Sociology, July 2015: Volume 121, Issue 1

How Places Shape Identity: The Origins of Distinctive LBQ Identities in Four Small U.S. Cities
Japonica Brown-Saracino

Tools from the study of neighborhood effects, place distinction, and regional identity are employed in an ethnography of four small cities with growing populations of lesbian, bisexual, and queer-identified (LBQ) women to explain why orientations to sexual identity are relatively constant within each site, despite informants’ within-city demographic heterogeneity, but vary substantially across the sites, despite common place-based attributes. The author introduces the concept of “sexual identity cultures”—and reveals the defining role of cities in shaping their contours. She finds that LBQ numbers and acceptance, place narratives, and newcomers’ encounters with local social attributes serve as touchstones. The article looks beyond major categorical differences (e.g., urban/rural) to understand how and why identities evolve and vary and to reveal the fundamental interplay of demographic, cultural, and other city features previously thought isolatable. The findings challenge notions of identity as fixed and emphasize the degree to which self-understanding and group understanding remain collective accomplishments.

The Structure of Contingency
Ivan Ermakoff

Can we identify and theorize contingency as a property of processes and situations? Applied to social and historical events, contingency denotes a mode of causality characterized by its indeterminate character. Conjunctural causation and period effects lack the specificity required to identify a distinctive class of processes. References to chance happenings offer no clue to analyze endogenous disruptions. Focusing on breaks in patterns of social relations and the role played by individual agency, the author distinguishes four types of impact—pyramidal, pivotal, sequential, and epistemic—and investigates how these relate to the possibility of indeterminacy through an Event Structure Analysis of the night of August 4, 1789, in Versailles. This empirical foray underscores the significance of junctures that are indeterminate with respect to their collective outcomes. The article grounds analytically this class of conjunctures with the concept of mutual uncertainty, gauges the phenomenal scope of this contingency in terms of action domains and group types, contrasts it with the notion of chance events, and draws its implications for the study of social and historical change.

Closing Ranks: Closure, Status Competition, and School Segregation
Jeremy Fiel

The shift away from school desegregation policies toward market-based reforms necessitates a deeper understanding of the social and institutional forces driving contemporary school segregation. The author conceptualizes school segregation as a mode of monopolistic closure amid status competition, where racial/ethnic groups compete for school-based status and resources. He tests the theory by analyzing primary and secondary school segregation throughout the United States from 1993 to 2010. Findings support the hypotheses that segregation increases with the salience of race/ethnicity and the decentralization of school systems, which fuels differentiation and provides incentives and opportunities to monopolize schools. Parallel findings for black-white, Hispanic-white, and black-Hispanic segregation suggest that a core set of processes drives school segregation as a general phenomenon.

Selective Service, the Gender-Ordered Family, and the Rational Informality of the American State
Dorit Geva

How do gender relations regulate the American state? To answer this question the author examines archival material on the formation and operation of the Selective Service System during World War I, the understudied federal American draft system. She shows how the federal government vested local draft board members with the authority to determine on a subjective, case-by-case basis whether potential draftees were genuine breadwinners in determining whom to draft and who would receive dependency-based deferments. Informal rules of thumb about the gender-ordered family structured the First World War draft. By analyzing the Selective Service System and by placing feminist political sociology, scholarship in the American political development tradition, and Weberian scholarship on the modern state in critical dialogue with one another, the author identifies how the American state’s locally applied substantive rationality relied on the family’s gender hierarchy in ordering its rational informality. Gender relations thereby rationalized the state’s local informality.

The Sound of Stigmatization: Sonic Habitus, Sonic Styles, and Boundary Work in an Urban Slum
Ori Schwarz

Based on focus groups and interviews with student renters in an Israeli slum, the article explores the contributions of differences in sonic styles and sensibilities to boundary work, social categorization, and evaluation. Alongside visual cues such as broken windows, bad neighborhoods are characterized by sonic cues, such as shouts from windows. Students understand “being ghetto” as being loud in a particular way and use loudness as a central resource in their boundary work. Loudness is read as a performative index of class and ethnicity, and the performance of middle-class studentship entails being appalled by stigmatized sonic practices and participating in their exoticization. However, the sonic is not merely yet another resource of boundary work. Paying sociological attention to senses other than vision reveals complex interactions between structures anchored in the body, structures anchored in language, and actors’ identification strategies, which may refine theorizations of the body and the senses in social theory.

Caste and Choice: The Influence of Developmental Idealism on Marriage Behavior
Keera Allendorf and Arland Thornton

Is the marriage behavior of young people determined by their socioeconomic characteristics or their endorsement of developmental idealism? This article addresses this question using a unique longitudinal data set from Nepal and provides the first individual-level test of developmental idealism theory. The authors find that unmarried individuals with greater endorsement of developmental idealism in 2008 were more likely by 2012 to choose their own spouse, including a spouse of a different caste, rather than have an arranged marriage. Those with salaried work experience were also less likely to have arranged marriages, but urban proximity and education were not significant. The authors conclude that both developmental idealism and socioeconomic characteristics influence marriage and that their influences are largely independent.

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.

American Journal of Sociology 120(5)

American Journal of Sociology, March 2015: Volume 120, Issue 5

The Social Origins of Networks and Diffusion
Damon Centola

Recent research on social contagion has demonstrated significant effects of network topology on the dynamics of diffusion. However, network topologies are not given a priori. Rather, they are patterns of relations that emerge from individual and structural features of society, such as population composition, group heterogeneity, homophily, and social consolidation. Following Blau and Schwartz, the author develops a model of social network formation that explores how social and structural constraints on tie formation generate emergent social topologies and then explores the effectiveness of these social networks for the dynamics of social diffusion. Results show that, at one extreme, high levels of consolidation can create highly balkanized communities with poor integration of shared norms and practices. As suggested by Blau and Schwartz, reducing consolidation creates more crosscutting circles and significantly improves the dynamics of social diffusion across the population. However, the author finds that further reducing consolidation creates highly intersecting social networks that fail to support the widespread diffusion of norms and practices, indicating that successful social diffusion can depend on moderate to high levels of structural consolidation.

Go with Your Gut: Emotion and Evaluation in Job Interviews
Lauren A. Rivera

This article presents hiring as an emotional process rooted in interpersonal evaluation. Drawing from Randall Collins’s theory of interaction ritual, the author offers a qualitative case study of elite professional service firms to unpack how employers’ emotional reactions to applicants in job interviews affect hiring evaluations. She finds that employers use subjective feelings of excitement and enthusiasm toward candidates—akin to Collins’s concept of emotional energy—to evaluate applicants and make hiring decisions. With these data, she constructs an original theoretical framework of emotional energy development, which highlights the qualities that tend to produce or inhibit the subjective experience of emotional energy in job interviews. Additionally, she outlines the particular phases of an encounter where energy gains and losses are most consequential for influencing hiring outcomes and inequalities. She discusses the implications of these findings for research on hiring, labor market stratification, and interaction rituals.

Do Reputation Systems Undermine Trust? Divergent Effects of Enforcement Type on Generalized Trust and Trustworthiness
Ko Kuwabara

Research shows that enforcing cooperation using contracts or tangible sanctions can backfire, undermining people’s intrinsic motivation to cooperate: when the enforcement is removed, people are less trusting or trustworthy than when there is no enforcement to begin with. The author examines whether reputation systems have similar consequences for generalized trust and trustworthiness. Using a web-based experiment simulating online market transactions (studies 1 and 2), he shows that reputation systems can reinforce generalized trust and trustworthiness, unlike contractual enforcement or relational enforcement based on repeated interactions. In a survey experiment (study 3), he finds that recalling their eBay feedback scores made participants more trusting and trustworthy. These results are predicated on the diffuse nature of reputational enforcement to reinforce perceptions of trust and trustworthiness. These results have implications for understanding how different forms of governance affect generalized trust and trustworthiness.

Reconceptualizing Agency within the Life Course: The Power of Looking Ahead
Steven Hitlin and Monica Kirkpatrick Johnson

Empirical treatments of agency have not caught up with theoretical explication; empirical projects almost always focus on concurrent beliefs about one’s ability to act successfully without sufficiently attending to temporality. The authors suggest that understanding the modern life course necessitates a multidimensional understanding of subjective agency involving (a) perceived capacities and (b) perceived life chances, or expectations about what life holds in store. The authors also suggest that a proper understanding of agency’s potential power within a life course necessitates moving beyond the domain-specific expectations more typical of past sociological work. Using the Youth Development Study, the authors employ a scale of general life expectations in adolescence to explore the potential influence of a general sense of optimistic life expectations in addition to the traditional approach on a range of important outcomes.

Why Do Liberals Drink Lattes?
Michael Macy, Daniel DellaPosta, and Yongren Shi

Popular accounts of “lifestyle politics” and “culture wars” suggest that political and ideological divisions extend also to leisure activities, consumption, aesthetic taste, and personal morality. Drawing on a total of 22,572 pairwise correlations from the General Social Survey (1972–2010), the authors provide comprehensive empirical support for the anecdotal accounts. Moreover, most ideological differences in lifestyle cannot be explained by demographic covariates alone. The authors propose a surprisingly simple solution to the puzzle of lifestyle politics. Computational experiments show how the self-reinforcing dynamics of homophily and influence dramatically amplify even very small elective affinities between lifestyle and ideology, producing a stereotypical world of “latte liberals” and “bird-hunting conservatives” much like the one in which we live.

Stress and Hardship after Prison
Bruce Western, Anthony A. Braga, Jaclyn Davis, and Catherine Sirois

The historic increase in U.S. incarceration rates made the transition from prison to community common for poor, prime-age men and women. Leaving prison presents the challenge of social integration—of connecting with family and finding housing and a means of subsistence. The authors study variation in social integration in the first months after prison release with data from the Boston Reentry Study, a unique panel survey of 122 newly released prisoners. The data indicate severe material hardship immediately after incarceration. Over half of sample respondents were unemployed, two-thirds received public assistance, and many relied on female relatives for financial support and housing. Older respondents and those with histories of addiction and mental illness were the least socially integrated, with weak family ties, unstable housing, and low levels of employment. Qualitative interviews show that anxiety and feelings of isolation accompanied extreme material insecurity. Material insecurity combined with the adjustment to social life outside prison creates a stress of transition that burdens social relationships in high-incarceration communities.

American Journal of Sociology 120(4)

American Journal of Sociology, January 2015: Volume 120, Issue 4

Race, Self-Selection, and the Job Search Process
Devah Pager and David S. Pedulla

While existing research has documented persistent barriers facing African-American job seekers, far less research has questioned how job seekers respond to this reality. Do minorities self-select into particular segments of the labor market to avoid discrimination? Such questions have remained unanswered due to the lack of data available on the positions to which job seekers apply. Drawing on two original data sets with application-specific information, we find little evidence that blacks target or avoid particular job types. Rather, blacks cast a wider net in their search than similarly situated whites, including a greater range of occupational categories and characteristics in their pool of job applications. Additionally, we show that perceptions of discrimination are associated with increased search breadth, suggesting that broad search among African-Americans represents an adaptation to labor market discrimination. Together these findings provide novel evidence on the role of race and self-selection in the job search process.

Emergent Ghettos: Black Neighborhoods in New York and Chicago, 1880–1940
John R. Logan, Weiwei Zhang, and Miao David Chunyu

This article studies in detail the settlement patterns of blacks in the urban North from before the Great Migration and through 1940, focusing on the cases of New York and Chicago. It relies on new and rarely used data sources, including census geocoded microdata from the 1880 census (allowing segregation patterns and processes to be studied at any geographic scale) and census data for 1900–1940 aggregated to enumeration districts. It is shown that blacks were unusually highly isolated in 1880 given their small share of the total population and that segregation reached high levels in both cities earlier than previously reported. Regarding sources of racial separation, neither higher class standing nor northern birth had much effect on whether blacks lived within or outside black neighborhoods in 1880 or 1940, and it is concluded that the processes that created large black ghettos were already in place several decades before 1940.

Where Do Immigrants Fare Worse? Modeling Workplace Wage Gap Variation with Longitudinal Employer-Employee Data
Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, Dustin Avent-Holt, and Martin Hällsten

The authors propose a strategy for observing and explaining workplace variance in categorically linked inequalities. Using Swedish economy-wide linked employer-employee panel data, the authors examine variation in workplace wage inequalities between native Swedes and non-Western immigrants. Consistent with relational inequality theory, the authors’ findings are that immigrant-native wage gaps vary dramatically across workplaces, even net of strong human capital controls. The authors also find that, net of observed and fixed-effect controls for individual traits, workplace immigrant-native wage gaps decline with increased workplace immigrant employment and managerial representation and increase when job segregation rises. These results are stronger in high-inequality workplaces and for white-collar employees: contexts in which one expects status-based claims on organizational resources, the central causal mechanism identified by relational inequality theory, to be stronger. The authors conclude that workplace variation in the non-Western immigrant-native wage gaps is contingent on organizational variation in the relative power of groups and the institutional context in which that power is exercised.

Game Changer: The Topology of Creativity
Mathijs de Vaan, Balazs Vedres, and David Stark

This article examines the sociological factors that explain why some creative teams are able to produce game changers—cultural products that stand out as distinctive while also being critically recognized as outstanding. The authors build on work pointing to structural folding—the network property of a cohesive group whose membership overlaps with that of another cohesive group. They hypothesize that the effects of structural folding on game changing success are especially strong when overlapping groups are cognitively distant. Measuring social distance separately from cognitive distance and distinctiveness independently from critical acclaim, the authors test their hypothesis about structural folding and cognitive diversity by analyzing team reassembly for 12,422 video games and the career histories of 139,727 video game developers. When combined with cognitive distance, structural folding channels and mobilizes a productive tension of rules, roles, and codes that promotes successful innovation. In addition to serving as pipes and prisms, network ties are also the source of tools and tensions.

Family Structure Instability, Genetic Sensitivity, and Child Well-Being
Colter Mitchell, Sara McLanahan, John Hobcraft, Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, Irwin Garfinkel, and Daniel Notterman

The association between family structure instability and children’s life chances is well documented, with children reared in stable, two-parent families experiencing more favorable outcomes than children in other family arrangements. This study examines father household entrances and exits, distinguishing between the entrance of a biological father and a social father and testing for interactions between family structure instability and children’s age, gender, and genetic characteristics. Using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study and focusing on changes in family structure by age (years 0–9), the authors show that father exits are associated with increases in children’s antisocial behavior, a strong predictor of health and well-being in adulthood. The pattern for father entrances is more complicated, with entrances for the biological father being associated with lower antisocial behavior among boys and social father entrances being associated with higher antisocial behavior. Child’s age does not moderate the association; however, genetic information in the models sharpens the findings substantially.

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.

American Journal of Sociology 120(2)

American Journal of Sociology, September 2014: Volume 120, Issue 2

Common Sense and Sociological Explanations
Duncan J. Watts

Sociologists have long advocated a sociological approach to explanation by contrasting it with common sense. The argument of this article, however, is that sociologists rely on common sense more than they realize. Moreover, this unacknowledged reliance causes serious problems for their explanations of social action, that is, for why people do what they do. Many such explanations, it is argued, conflate understandability with causality in ways that are not valid by the standards of scientific explanation. It follows that if sociologists want their explanations to be scientifically valid, they must evaluate them specifically on those grounds—in particular, by forcing them to make predictions. In becoming more scientific, however, it is predicted that sociologists’ explanations will also become less satisfying from an intuitive, sense-making perspective. Even as novel sources of data and improved methods open exciting new directions for sociological research, therefore, sociologists will increasingly have to choose between unsatisfying scientific explanations and satisfying but unscientific stories.

Race in California’s Prison Fire Camps for Men: Prison Politics, Space, and the Racialization of Everyday Life
Philip Goodman

The vast majority of social scientists agree that race is “socially constructed.” Yet many scholars of punishment and prisons still treat race as static, self-evident categories. One result is that not enough is known about the production, meanings, and consequences of race as experienced by prisoners and those who guard and manage them. The author’s research on California’s prison fire camps uncovers the microlevel ways in which race is performed and imbued with meaning; he reveals how racial understandings color people and settings. One puzzle is that prisoners in California’s fire camps will fight natural disasters side by side, sharing water and provisions, but separate into racial groups when in the camp itself. In part to answer this (and in part to develop better understandings of race and prisons more generally), the author unpacks the variegated nature of punishment and the spatialization of race and advocates for research that is faithful to the constructivist framework.

Class Advantage and the Gender Divide: Flexibility on the Job and at Home
Naomi Gerstel and Dan Clawson

Using a survey, interviews, and observations, the authors examine inequality in temporal flexibility at home and at work. They focus on four occupations to show that class advantage is deployed in the service of gendered notions of temporal flexibility while class disadvantage makes it difficult to obtain such flexibility. The class advantage of female nurses and male doctors enables them to obtain flexibility in their work hours; they use that flexibility in gendered ways: nurses to prioritize family and physicians to prioritize careers. Female nursing assistants and male emergency medical technicians can obtain little employee-based flexibility and, as a result, have more difficulty meeting conventional gendered expectations. Advantaged occupations “do gender” in conventional ways while disadvantaged occupations “undo gender.” These processes operate through organizational rules and cultural schemas that sustain one another but may undermine the gender and class neutrality of family-friendly policies.

Beyond Strong and Weak: Rethinking Postdictatorship Civil Societies
Dylan Riley and Juan J. Fernández

What is the impact of dictatorships on postdictatorial civil societies? Bottom-up theories suggest that totalitarian dictatorships destroy civil society while authoritarian ones allow for its development. Top-down theories of civil society suggest that totalitarianism can create civil societies while authoritarianism is unlikely to. This article argues that both these perspectives suffer from a one-dimensional understanding of civil society that conflates strength and autonomy. Accordingly we distinguish these two dimensions and argue that totalitarian dictatorships tend to create organizationally strong but heteronomous civil societies, while authoritarian ones tend to create relatively autonomous but organizationally weak civil societies. We then test this conceptualization by closely examining the historical connection between dictatorship and civil society development in Italy (a posttotalitarian case) and Spain (a postauthoritarian one). Our article concludes by reflecting on the implications of our argument for democratic theory, civil society theory, and theories of regime variation.

The Denigration of Heroes? How the Status Attainment Process Shapes Attributions of Considerateness and Authenticity
Oliver Hahl and Ezra W. Zuckerman

This article develops and tests a theory to explain the common tendency to “denigrate heroes,” whereby high-status actors are suspected of being inconsiderate and inauthentic relative to low-status counterparts. This tendency is argued to reflect two conditions typical of status attainment processes: (a) assertions of superiority over others and (b) the presence of incentives to pursue status. The latter is key since awareness of such incentives breeds suspicions of inauthenticity, which in turn undermine perceptions of prosocial intentions. This theory is validated in a series of online experiments, in which categorical status hierarchies emerge either via deference on a coordinated task or via competitive interactions. Results show that high-status actors may also be “celebrated” as authentic and considerate when the observable incentive structure is such that assertions of superiority appear as unintended by-products of prosocial action. Implications are drawn regarding the sources of instability and insecurity in status hierarchies.

When Politics Froze Fashion: The Effect of the Cultural Revolution on Naming in Beijing
Elena Obukhova, Ezra W. Zuckerman, and Jiayin Zhang

The authors examine the popularity of boys’ given names in Beijing before and after the onset of the Cultural Revolution to clarify how exogenous and endogenous factors interact to shape fashion. Whereas recent work in the sociology of culture emphasizes the importance of endogenous processes in explaining fashion, their analysis demonstrates two ways in which politics shaped cultural expression during the Cultural Revolution: by promoting forms of expression reflecting prevailing political ideology and by limiting individuals’ willingness to act differently. As argued by Lieberson and developed further in this article, the second condition is important because endogenous fashion cycles require a critical mass of individuals who seek to differentiate themselves from common practice. Exogenous factors can influence the operation of the endogenous factors. The authors discuss the implications of their study for understanding the nature of conformity under authoritarian regimes and social conditions supporting individual expression.

American Journal of Sociology 120(1)

American Journal of Sociology, July 2014: Volume 120, Issue 1

“I Don’t Like Passing as a Straight Woman”: Queer Negotiations of Identity and Social Group Membership
Carla A. Pfeffer

For decades, sociological theory has documented how our lives are simultaneously produced through and against normative structures of sex, gender, and sexuality. These normative structures are often believed to operate along presumably “natural,” biological, and essentialized binaries of male/female, man/woman, and heterosexual/homosexual. However, as the lives and experiences of transgender people and their families become increasingly socially visible, these normative structuring binaries are called into stark question as they fail to adequately articulate and encompass these social actors’ identities and social group memberships. Utilizing in-depth interviews with 50 women from the United States, Canada, and Australia, who detail 61 unique relationships with transgender men, this study considers how the experiences of these queer social actors hold the potential to rattle the very foundations upon which normative binaries rest, highlighting the increasingly blurry intersections, tensions, and overlaps between sex, gender, and sexual orientation in the 21st century. This work also considers the potential for these normative disruptions to engender opportunities for social collaboration, solidarity, and transformation.

Neither Ideologues nor Agnostics: Alternative Voters’ Belief System in an Age of Partisan Politics
Delia Baldassarri and Amir Goldberg

How do Americans organize their political beliefs? This article argues that party polarization and the growing prominence of moral issues in recent decades have catalyzed different responses by different groups of Americans. The article investigates systematic heterogeneity in the organization of political attitudes using relational class analysis, a graph-based method for detecting multiple patterns of opinion in survey data. Three subpopulations, each characterized by a distinctive way of organizing its political beliefs, are identified: ideologues, whose political attitudes strongly align with either liberal or conservative categories; alternatives, who are instead morally conservative but economically liberal, or vice versa; and agnostics, who exhibit weak associations between political beliefs. Individuals’ sociodemographic profiles, particularly their income, education, and religiosity, lie at the core of the different ways in which they understand politics. Results show that while ideologues have gone through a process of issue alignment, alternatives have grown increasingly apart from the political agendas of both parties. The conflictual presence of conservative and liberal preferences has often been resolved by alternative voters in favor of the Republican Party.

Governing Inside the Organization: Interpreting Regulation and Compliance
Garry C. Gray and Susan S. Silbey

Looking inside organizations at the different positions, expertise, and autonomy of the actors, the authors use multisite ethnographic data on safety practices to develop a typology of how the regulator, as the focal actor in the regulatory process, is interpreted within organizations. The findings show that organizational actors express constructions of the regulator as an ally, threat, and obstacle that vary with organizational expertise, authority, and continuity of relationship between the organizational member and the regulator. The article makes three contributions to the current understandings of organizational governance and regulatory compliance, thereby extending both institutional and ecological accounts of organizations’ behavior with respect to their environments. First, the authors document not only variation across organizations but variable compliance within an organization. Second, the variations described do not derive from alternative institutional logics, but from variations in positions, autonomy, and expertise within each organization. From their grounded theory, the authors hypothesize that these constructions carry differential normative interpretations of regulation and probabilities for compliance, and thus the third contribution, the typology, when correlated with organizational hierarchy provides the link between microlevel action and discourse and organizational performance.

Blocked Acculturation: Cultural Heterodoxy among Europe’s Immigrants
Andreas Wimmer and Thomas Soehl

Which immigrant groups differ most from the cultural values held by mainstream society and why? The authors explore this question using data from the European Social Survey on the values held by almost 100,000 individuals associated with 305 immigrant groups and the native majorities of 23 countries. They test whether distant linguistic or religious origins (including in Islam), value differences that immigrants “import” from their home countries, the maintenance of transnational ties and thus diasporic cultures, or legal and social disadvantage in the country of settlement shape acculturation processes. They find that only legally or socially disadvantaged groups differ from mainstream values in significant ways. For first generation immigrants, this is because the values of their countries of origin diverge more from those of natives. Among children of disadvantaged immigrants, however, value heterodoxy emerges because acculturation processes are blocked and the values of the parent generation partially maintained. From the second generation onward, therefore, cultural values are endogenous to the formation and dissolution of social boundaries, rather than shaping these as an exogenous force.

Issue Bricolage: Explaining the Configuration of the Social Movement Sector, 1960–1995
Wooseok Jung, Brayden G. King, and Sarah A. Soule

Social movements occupy a shared ideational and resource space, which is often referred to as the social movement sector. This article contributes to the understanding of the relational dynamics of the social movement sector by demonstrating how ideational linkages are formed through protest events. Using a data set of protest events occurring in the United States from 1960 to 1995, the authors model the mechanisms shaping why certain movement issues (e.g., women’s and peace or environmental and gay rights) appear together at protest events. They argue that both cultural similarity and status differences between two social movement issues are the underlying mechanisms that shape joint protest and the resultant ideational linkages between issues. Finally, they show that the linking of issues at protest events results in changes in the prominence of a given issue in the social movement sector.

Coevolution in Management Fashion: An Agent-Based Model of Consultant-Driven Innovation
David Strang, Robert J. David, and Saeed Akhlaghpour

The rise of management consultancy has been accompanied by increasingly marked faddish cycles in management techniques, but the mechanisms that underlie this relationship are not well understood. The authors develop a simple agent-based framework that models innovation adoption and abandonment on both the supply and demand sides. In opposition to conceptions of consultants as rhetorical wizards who engineer waves of management fashion, firms and consultants are treated as boundedly rational actors who chase the secrets of success by mimicking their highest-performing peers. Computational experiments demonstrate that consultant-driven versions of this dynamic in which the outcomes of firms are strongly conditioned by their choice of consultant are robustly faddish. The invasion of boom markets by low-quality consultants undercuts popular innovations while simultaneously restarting the fashion cycle by prompting the flight of high-quality consultants into less densely occupied niches. Computational experiments also indicate conditions involving consultant mobility, aspiration levels, mimic probabilities, and client-provider matching that attenuate faddishness.

American Journal of Sociology 119(6)

American Journal of Sociology, May 2014: Volume 119, Issue 6

Classification and Coercion: The Destruction of Piracy in the English Maritime System
Matthew Norton

The article argues that coordinated state action depends not just on organizational forms and institutions but also on “cultural infrastructures,” systems of state meaning making. Cultural infrastructures are potentially consequential sites for explaining processes of state formation. The article develops this argument through an analysis of the production of coercive power against piracy in the early modern English empire. It analyzes the cultural dynamics involved in the transformation of piracy from an ambiguous legal category to a violently enforced social boundary, focusing on the interplay of codes, interpretive institutions, and social performances. Violence directed against the pirates in the 1710s and 1720s turned on an earlier, contentious period of state formation focused on the cultural infrastructures that made the authoritative classification of piracy possible.

Contradictions in the Commodification of Hospital Care
Adam D. Reich

The “moralized markets” school within economic sociology has convincingly demonstrated variation in the relationship between economic activity and moral values. Yet this scholarship has not sufficiently explored either the causes of this variation or the consequences of this variation for organizational practice. By examining different moral-market understandings and practices in the context of a single market-based organizational field, this article highlights the contradictory character of processes of commodification, as different historically institutionalized ideas conflict, in different ways, with the market logic that increasingly organizes the field as a whole. The article examines the contradictory commodification of hospital care in three hospitals within one Northern California community.

Moving beyond Stylized Economic Network Models: The Hybrid World of the Indian Firm Ownership Network
Dalhia Mani and James Moody

A central theme of economic sociology has been to highlight the complexity and diversity of real world markets, but many network models of economic social structure ignore this feature and rely instead on stylized one-dimensional characterizations. Here, the authors return to the basic insight of structural diversity in economic sociology. Using the Indian interorganizational ownership network as their case, they discover a composite—or “hybrid”—model of economic networks that combines elements of prior stylized models. The network contains a disconnected periphery conforming closely to a “transactional” model; a semiperiphery characterized by small, dense clusters with sporadic links, as predicted in “small world” models; and finally a nested core composed of clusters connected via multiple independent paths. The authors then show how a firm’s position within the mesolevel structure is associated with demographic features such as age and industry and differences in the extent to which firms engage in multiplex and high-value exchanges.

The Missing Link in the Diffusion of Protest: Asking Others
Stefaan Walgrave and Ruud Wouters

Mobilization for protest is a process of diffusion in interpersonal networks. Extant work has found that being asked by people one knows is a key determinant of participation, but the flip side—asking others—has been neglected. The authors examine which prospective participants are most likely to ask others to participate and whom they ask. Drawing on a new and unusual data set including evidence on more than 7,000 participants in 48 demonstrations across Europe, the authors find that activists who are committed to the demonstration’s cause (willing to recruit others) and who are part of participation-friendly networks (able to recruit others) are the most active recruiters. Asking others is dependent on being asked: participants tend to recruit people similar to those who have recruited them and, most importantly, participants who are recruited via strong ties are less active recruiters themselves.

Fewer and Better Children: Race, Class, Religion, and Birth Control Reform in America
Melissa J. Wilde and Sabrina Danielsen

In the early 20th century, contraceptives were illegal and, for many, especially religious groups, taboo. But, in the span of just two years, between 1929 and 1931, many of the United States’ most prominent religious groups pronounced contraceptives to be moral and began advocating for the laws restricting them to be repealed. Met with everything from support, to silence, to outright condemnation by other religious groups, these pronouncements and the debates they caused divided the American religious field by an issue of sex and gender for the first time. This article explains why America’s religious groups took the positions they did at this crucial moment in history. In doing so, it demonstrates that the politics of sex and gender that divide American religion today is deeply rooted in century-old inequalities of race and class.

American Journal of Sociology 119(5)

American Journal of Sociology, March 2014: Volume 119, Issue 5

How Population Structure Shapes Neighborhood Segregation
Elizabeth E. Bruch

This study provides a framework for understanding how population composition conditions the relationship between individuals’ choices about group affiliation and aggregate patterns of social separation or integration. The substantive focus is the role of income inequality in racial residential segregation. The author identifies three population parameters—between-group inequality, within-group inequality, and relative group size—that determine how income inequality between race groups affects racial segregation. She uses data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to estimate models of individual-level residential mobility and incorporates these estimates into agent-based models. She then simulates segregation dynamics under alternative assumptions about (1) the relative size of minority groups and (2) the degree of correlation between race and income among individuals. The author finds that income inequality can have offsetting effects at the high and low ends of the income distribution. She demonstrates the empirical relevance of the simulation results using fixed-effects, metro-level regressions applied to 1980–2000 U.S. census data.

Saying Yes to Taxes: The Politics of Tax Reform Campaigns in Three Northwestern States, 1965–1973
Elizabeth Pearson

This article analyzes factors shaping popular support for new taxes by examining variation in the outcomes of votes in nine American states during the 1960s and early 1970s. New taxes were endorsed in five states but rejected in four. Using comparative and historical methods focused on the cases of Oregon, Washington, and Idaho, the author argues that the sequence of policy making shapes popular vetoes through three mechanisms: the mobilization of interest groups, the information available to voters about a policy, and how the costs and benefits of a policy appear to voters. The findings demonstrate that voter perceptions of the potential gains and losses of a new policy are sociologically mobilized through the policy process. Controlling when popular veto points appear in a policy process is an understudied strategy that is employed by American state builders to overcome ambivalence toward the fiscal imperatives of the activist state.

Economists, Capitalists, and the Making of Globalization: North American Free Trade in Comparative-Historical Perspective
Malcolm Fairbrother

Why did globalization happen? Current explanations point to a variety of conditions under which states have made the free market policy changes driving international economic integration since the 1980s. Such accounts disagree, however, about the key actors involved. This article provides a reconciliation, showing how two different combinations of actors, and two different political economic pathways, have led to globalization in recent decades. In developed countries, mobilization by business has been central; elsewhere, technocrats both constrained and empowered by international finance have pursued globalization more independently of business. In both contexts, economists’ technical authority has helped legitimate liberalization, despite the limited diffusion of their ideas. The article validates and elaborates this model using a comparative-historical study of how the United States, Canada, and Mexico proposed, negotiated, and ratified agreements for free trade in North America.

Categories and Organizational Status: The Role of Industry Status in the Response to Organizational Deviance
Amanda J. Sharkey

Extant research in organizational and economic sociology posits that organizations derive status from their prior demonstrations of quality, as well as their affiliations with high-status alters. Yet there are also indications that organizations may acquire status by virtue of their membership in salient social categories that are themselves status valued. In this article, the author explicitly theorizes and measure the concept of categorical status among organizations and test whether it influences the evaluation of organizational actions. More concretely, she develops a measure of industry status and test whether it affects the market reaction to U.S. firms announcing earnings restatements between 2000 and 2009. Results of the empirical analyses indicate that investors react less negatively to earnings restatements announced by firms from higher-status industries, supporting the argument that category status acts as a lens that shapes the extent to which an organization’s actions are viewed favorably.

From Motherhood Penalties to Husband Premia: The New Challenge for Gender Equality and Family Policy, Lessons from Norway
Trond Petersen, Andrew M. Penner, and Geir Høgsnes

Given the key role that processes occurring in the family play in creating gender inequality, the family is a central focus of policies aimed at creating greater gender equality. We examine how family status affects the gender wage gap using longitudinal matched employer-employee data from Norway, 1979–96, a period with extensive expansion of family policies. The motherhood penalty dropped dramatically from 1979 to 1996. Among men the premia for marriage and fatherhood remained constant. In 1979, the gender wage gap was primarily due to the motherhood penalty, but by 1996 husband premia were more important than motherhood penalties.

American Journal of Sociology 119(4)

American Journal of Sociology, January 2014: Volume 119, Issue 4

Job Displacement among Single Mothers: Effects on Children’s Outcomes in Young Adulthood
Jennie E. Brand and Juli Simon Thomas

Given the recent era of economic upheaval, studying the effects of job displacement has seldom been so timely and consequential. Despite a large literature associating displacement with worker well-being, relatively few studies focus on the effects of parental displacement on child well-being, and fewer still focus on implications for children of single-parent households. Moreover, notwithstanding a large literature on the relationship between single motherhood and children’s outcomes, research on intergenerational effects of involuntary employment separations among single mothers is limited. Using 30 years of nationally representative panel data and propensity score matching methods, the authors find significant negative effects of job displacement among single mothers on children’s educational attainment and social-psychological well-being in young adulthood. Effects are concentrated among older children and children whose mothers had a low likelihood of displacement, suggesting an important role for social stigma and relative deprivation in the effects of socioeconomic shocks on child well-being.

Red States, Blue States, and Divorce: Understanding the Impact of Conservative Protestantism on Regional Variation in Divorce Rates
Jennifer Glass and Philip Levchak

Why do states with larger proportions of religious conservatives have higher divorce rates than states with lower proportions of religious conservatives? This project examines whether earlier transitions to marriage and parenthood among conservative Protestants (known risk factors for divorce) contribute to this paradox while attending to other plausible explanations. County-level demographic information from all 50 states is combined from a variety of public data sources and merged with individual records from the National Surveys of Family Growth to estimate both aggregated county and multilevel individual models of divorce. Results show that individual religious conservatism is positively related to individual divorce risk, solely through the earlier transitions to adulthood and lower incomes of conservative Protestants. However, the proportion of conservative Protestants in a county is also independently and positively associated with both the divorce rate in that county and an individual’s likelihood of divorcing. The earlier family formation and lower levels of educational attainment and income in counties with a higher proportion of conservative Protestants can explain a substantial portion of this association. Little support is found for alternative explanations of the association between religious conservatism and divorce rates, including the relative popularity of marriage versus cohabitation across counties.

Hybrid Activism: Social Movement Mobilization in a Multimovement Environment
Michael T. Heaney and Fabio Rojas

Social movement organizations often struggle to mobilize supporters from allied movements in their efforts to achieve critical mass. The authors argue that organizations with hybrid identities—those whose organizational identities span the boundaries of two or more social movements, issues, or identities—are vital to mobilizing these constituencies. They use original data from their study of the post-9/11 U.S. antiwar movement to show that individuals with past involvement in nonantiwar movements are more likely to join hybrid organizations than are individuals without involvement in nonantiwar movements. In addition, they show that organizations with hybrid identities occupy relatively more central positions in interorganizational cocontact networks within the antiwar movement and thus recruit significantly more participants in demonstrations than do nonhybrid organizations. Contrary to earlier research, they do not find that hybrid organizations are subject to an illegitimacy discount; instead, they find that hybridization can augment the ability of social movement organizations to mobilize their supporters in multimovement environments.

The New Immigration Contestation: Social Movements and Local Immigration Policy Making in the United States, 2000–2011
Justin Peter Steil and Ion Bogdan Vasi

Analyzing oppositional social movements in the context of municipal immigration ordinances, the authors examine whether the explanatory power of resource mobilization, political process, and strain theories of social movements’ impact on policy outcomes differs when considering proactive as opposed to reactive movements. The adoption of pro-immigrant (proactive) ordinances was facilitated by the presence of immigrant community organizations and of sympathetic local political allies. The adoption of anti-immigrant (reactive) ordinances was influenced by structural social changes, such as rapid increases in the local Latino population, that were framed as threats. The study also finds that pro-immigrant protest events can influence policy in two ways, contributing both to the passage of pro-immigrant ordinances in the locality where protests occur and also inhibiting the passage of anti-immigrant ordinances in neighboring cities.

American Journal of Sociology 119(3)

American Journal of Sociology, November 2013: Volume 119, Issue 3

Special Contributions

Causal Thinking and Ethnographic Research
Mario Luis Small

Styles of Causal Thought: An Empirical Investigation
Gabriel Abend, Caitlin Petre, and Michael Sauder

While most work on causation in ethnography addresses the normative question of what ethnographers should do, this article addresses the empirical question of what ethnographers actually do. Specifically, it investigates whether ethnographic articles make causal arguments and how these arguments are made. The authors draw on a content analysis of 48 ethnographic articles sampled from four groups of sociological journals: contemporary generalist journals, contemporary specialist journals, mid-20th-century generalist journals—all in the United States—and contemporary generalist journals in Mexico. They find that ethnographies in U.S. contemporary generalist journals are most likely to advance strong and central causal claims and to use logical and rhetorical devices comparable to those used in quantitative articles. They also find that most Mexican ethnographic articles undertake a different kind of project, which they call “shedding light” on social phenomena. In addition to offering one methodological and one substantive suggestion to account for these findings, the authors highlight their implications for the sociology of social science.

How Options Disappear: Causality and Emergence in Grassroots Activist Groups
Kathleen Blee

This study advances recent theorizing on causality and emergence by analyzing how new activist groups create a collective sense of plausible tactics. A comparative ethnographic approach is used to observe shifts in the discussions of four fledgling activist groups. In each group, implicit discursive rules, often set off by minor comments and events, authorize some options and silence others. Although such rules emerge without deliberation or explicit decision making, they shape the group’s sense of possibility into the future. This study contributes both a new understanding of the role of contingency in collective activism and a method for using ethnographic observation to locate subtle causal mechanisms in social life.

A Pragmatist Approach to Causality in Ethnography
Iddo Tavory and Stefan Timmermans

Drawing on early pragmatist theorizing, the authors propose three interrelated methodological activities for the construction of robust causal claims in ethnographic research. First, Charles S. Peirce’s semiotic approach offers ethnographers a useful foundation for a mechanism-based approach to causality by tracing iterations of meaning-making-in-action. Second, taking advantage of the structure of Peirce’s semiotics ethnographers can examine three forms of observed variation to distinguish regularly occurring causal sequences and temporally and spatially remote causal processes. Third, the authors emphasize that the standards to evaluate causal arguments—their plausibility and assessments of explanatory fit—are always made in relation to challenges provided within a disciplinary community of inquiry. The use-value of the pragmatic approach to causality is demonstrated with an explanation of the different reactions of parents and clinicians to positive newborn screening results.

Other Articles

The Transformation of Prison Regimes in Late Capitalist Societies
John R. Sutton

Recent studies argue that cultural and political-economic shifts have led to a sea change in penal regimes among modern Western societies, resulting in more punitive social policies in general and a trend toward higher incarceration rates in particular. This is a special case of a wider argument that globalization has led to a decline in state autonomy and convergence on a market-based model of economic and social policy. This thesis has been challenged by the empirical literature on welfare states, which finds persistent cross-national diversity in institutional structures, policies, and patterns of inequality. Focusing on incarceration rates as the outcome of interest, this study evaluates these arguments by applying a Bayesian change-point model to four decades of data from 15 countries. Results show that a regime shift did occur but that incarceration rates increased mainly among countries with unregulated labor markets, decentralized polities, or weak labor unions. Profound institutional differences persist and are fateful for incarceration trajectories.

The Self-Expressive Edge of Occupational Sex Segregation
Erin A. Cech

Recent gender scholarship speculates that occupational sex segregation is reproduced in large part through the gendered, self-expressive career decisions of men and women. This article examines the effects of college students’ expression of their self-conceptions on their likelihood of entering occupations with a high or low proportion of women and theorizes the consequences of this mechanism for gender inequality. The author uses unique longitudinal data on students from four U.S. colleges to examine how the gender composition of students’ field at career launch is influenced by their earlier self-conceptions. Students with emotional, unsystematic, or people-oriented self-conceptions enter fields that are more “female,” even net of their cultural gender beliefs. Results suggest that cultural ideals of self-expression reinforce occupational sex segregation by converting gender-stereotypical self-conceptions into self-expressive career choices. The discussion section broadens this theoretical framework for understanding the role of self-expression in occupational sex segregation and notes the difficulty of addressing this mechanism through social or policy actions.

Challenger Groups, Commercial Organizations, and Policy Enactment: Local Lesbian/Gay Rights Ordinances in the United States from 1972 to 2008
Giacomo Negro, Fabrizio Perretti, and Glenn R. Carroll

Drawing on theories of social movements and organizations, the authors examine how the expanding presence of commercial organizations and the growing diversity of their forms foster policy change securing rights for a group of challengers. In particular, they suggest that these organizations can operate as bridges and can signal the legitimacy of the group in a community. Empirically, they analyze organizations linked to lesbians/gays and the promulgation of local ordinances banning discrimination, using a data set covering American counties from 1972 to 2008. Using hazard models, they find that the rate of policy enactment increases (1) with greater presence of lesbian/gay commercial organizations, particularly of those linking toward the larger community, and (2) with greater diversity of their organizational forms. Finally, they find evidence that commercial and political organizations are linked in a complex way.

American Journal of Sociology 119(2)

American Journal of Sociology, September 2013: Volume 119, Issue 2

Budgetary Units: A Weberian Approach to Consumption
Erin Metz McDonnell

Established consumption theory relies heavily on application of individualistic frames and market models of behavior. A framework built around consumption-oriented groups would facilitate progress toward a more general theory of consumption. This article reintroduces and extends Weber’s “budgetary unit” concept to address this gap, correcting key problems dogging the consumption literature. The budgetary unit concept (1) offers a new framework for theorizing and better accounting for observed consumption patterns, (2) reveals how consumption units have organizational logics, preferences, strengths, and vulnerabilities that are consequentially distinct from market logic of production and profit, and (3) focuses attention on social processes and features enabling theorization of general social patterns of consumption across diverse contexts. This article highlights the explanatory power and broad applicability of Weber’s budgetary unit approach using the conventionally dissimilar cases of Russian organized crime, Catholic nuns, immigrant remittances, and low-income families’ child support.

Misdemeanor Justice: Control without Conviction
Issa Kohler-Hausmann

Current scholarship has explored how the carceral state governs and regulates populations. This literature has focused on prison and on the wide-reaching collateral consequences of a felony conviction. Despite the obvious importance of these findings, they capture only a portion of the criminal justice system’s operations. In most jurisdictions, misdemeanors, not felonies, constitute the bulk of criminal cases, and the number of such arrests is rising. This article explores a puzzling fact about New York City’s pioneering experiment in mass misdemeanor arrests: the preponderance result in no finding of guilt and no assignment of formal punishment. Drawing on two years of fieldwork, this article explores how the criminal justice system functions to regulate significant populations without conviction or sentencing. The author details the operation of penal power through the techniques of marking through criminal justice record keeping, the procedural hassle of case processing, and mandated performance evaluated by court actors to show the social control capacity of the criminal justice system.

Racialized Conflict and Policy Spillover Effects: The Role of Race in the Contemporary U.S. Welfare State
Hana E. Brown

This article introduces a racialized conflict theory to explain how racial divisions structure welfare state development in the absence of de jure discrimination. The author explains the effect of racial divisions on policy outcomes as the result of the attitudinal, cultural, and political spillover effects of prevailing conflicts in a social field. Using a paired-case comparison and analysis of multiple data sources, the author applies this theory to analyze Georgia’s and Alabama’s surprisingly divergent welfare reforms in the 1990s. Results support the racialized conflict theory and suggest important revisions to prevailing theories about the sociopolitical effects of contemporary racial divides.

Counterbalances to Economic Homophily: Microlevel Mechanisms in a Historical Setting
Denis Trapido

The tendency to transact within, rather than across, identity-based groups is a well-established effect of identity divisions. While previous work emphasized macrolevel, impersonal factors that counteract this tendency, this article looks at how individuals may counteract it in everyday interaction. Two microlevel counterbalances to economic homophily are examined with unique data on partnerships among Tory and Whig merchants in 18th-century Bristol, England. No conclusive support is found for the first examined counterbalance, which presumes that cross-group social relations, such as joint civic activities, induce parallel economic relations. Instead, the analysis shows that Tory-Whig partnerships were facilitated by the practice of choosing cross-party partners of unequal professional prominence. Such professionally unequal relations involve tacit status subordination, which reduces the relation-specific uncertainty associated with transacting across a salient identity division. The results highlight the potential of uncertainty avoidance to sustain inequality between social groups and suggest unexplored contingencies to theories of status homophily.

Diversity, Integration, and Social Ties: Attraction versus Repulsion as Drivers of Intra- and Intergroup Relations
John Skvoretz

Interethnic and intergroup social ties are critical to knitting together increasingly diverse societies into cohesive wholes. Yet their formation faces the homophily hurdle: important and intimate social ties tend to be established disproportionately between those sharing significant social attributes. In the spirit of analytical sociology, the author explores two mechanisms that could drive intra- and intergroup relations: attraction to similar versus repulsion from dissimilar others. The models differ in predictions as illustrated by data on interethnic marriages in Great Britain and the United States, on U.S. dating and cohabitation relations by religion and education, on educational diversity in marriages in 22 European countries, and on marriages of the native and foreign-born in Austria. A unified model for the two mechanisms, in which tie formation is a conceptualized as a two-stage process of encounter and consummation, is proposed, and its empirical and theoretical analysis provides deeper understanding of the homophily hurdle.

Disavowing Politics: Civic Engagement in an Era of Political Skepticism
Elizabeth A. Bennett, Alissa Cordner, Peter Taylor Klein, Stephanie Savell, and Gianpaolo Baiocchi

Today, Americans are simultaneously skeptical of and engaged with political life. How does widespread cynicism affect the culture of civic participation? What are the implications for democracy? This study synthesizes data from a one-year collective ethnography of seven civic groups and theoretical work on boundary making, ambiguity, and role distancing. The authors find skepticism generates “disavowal of the political,” a cultural idiom that allows people to creatively constitute what they imagine to be appropriate forms of engagement. Disavowal generates taboos, and the authors show how disdain for conflict and special interests challenges activism around inequality. Political disavowal both facilitates and constrains civic engagement in an era of political skepticism.

American Journal of Sociology 119(1)

American Journal of Sociology, July 2013: Volume 119, Issue 1

Defense against Recession: U.S. Business Mobilization, 1950–1970
Todd Schifeling

The unexpected investment decisions of companies during recessions often frustrate commentators and policy makers who view the economy from the top down. Companies may act against immediate market signals during recessions because of uncertainties about strategy and the future direction of the economy. A mesolevel sociological model of how firms interpret and respond to economic conditions in uncertain times improves understanding of firms’ variable responses to recessions, which cumulatively shape macroeconomic trajectories. Examining firm-level employment during four recessions from 1950 to 1970, the author generates results from dynamic panel models to show that firms set their employment levels against profits and market share and in alignment with peers and political affiliations. Firms manage uncertainty by imitating peers but also by endeavoring to construct their environment collectively through business associations. This article’s counterintuitive economic findings and the evidence of social and political influences reinforce the importance of careful investigation into how firms respond to recessions.

The Effects of U.S. Immigration on the Career Trajectories of Native Workers, 1979–2004
Jeremy Pais

While earlier work primarily examines the point-in-time effects of immigration on the earnings of native workers, this article focuses more broadly on the effects of immigration on native workers’ career trajectories. Cross-classified multilevel growth-curve models are applied to 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and U.S. Census Bureau data to demonstrate how people adjust to changing local labor market conditions throughout their careers. The key findings indicate that substitution and complementary effects depend on the stage of the worker’s career. At entry into the labor market, high levels of immigration have a positive effect on the career paths of young native-born adults. However, negative contemporaneous effects to natives’ earnings tend to offset positive point-of-entry effects, a finding that suggests job competition among natives is greater in areas of high immigrant population concentration. These results raise questions about whether foreign-born workers need to be in direct competition with natives for there to be substitution effects.

Funding Immigrant Organizations: Suburban Free Riding and Local Civic Presence
Els de Graauw, Shannon Gleeson, and Irene Bloemraad

The authors argue that taken-for-granted notions of deservingness and legitimacy among local government officials affect funding allocations for organizations serving disadvantaged immigrants, even in politically progressive places. Analysis of Community Development Block Grant data in the San Francisco Bay Area reveals significant inequality in grants making to immigrant organizations across central cities and suburbs. With data from 142 interviews and documentary evidence, the authors elaborate how a history of continuous migration builds norms of inclusion and civic capacity for public-private partnerships. They also identify the phenomenon of “suburban free riding” to explain how and why suburban officials rely on central city resources to serve immigrants, but do not build and fund partnerships with immigrant organizations in their own jurisdictions. The analysis affirms the importance of distinguishing between types of immigrant destinations, but argues that scholars need to do so using a regional lens.

Social Organization, Collective Sentiment, and Legal Sanctions in Murder Cases
Eric P. Baumer and Kimberly H. Martin

The traditional “jurisprudential model” of law views the application of legal sanctions primarily as a function of the facts of the case and the rules that govern the proceedings. Sociology of law scholars have challenged this model on theoretical grounds, arguing persuasively that law is variable and often yields patterns that parallel broader considerations of community social organization and collective sentiment. The authors' analysis yields evidence that the certainty and severity of sanctions for murder cases are heightened where social capital is more plentiful, religious fundamentalist values more prevalent, and support for punitive sanctions is greater. They also find that sentences given to murder defendants are longer in areas in which the public expresses higher levels of fear. Overall, the findings provide provocative evidence that legal outcomes in murder cases are influenced by several features of the social environments in which they are processed.

Mate Selection in Cyberspace: The Intersection of Race, Gender, and Education
Ken-Hou Lin and Jennifer Lundquist

In this article, the authors examine how race, gender, and education jointly shape interaction among heterosexual Internet daters. They find that racial homophily dominates mate-searching behavior for both men and women. A racial hierarchy emerges in the reciprocating process. Women respond only to men of similar or more dominant racial status, while nonblack men respond to all but black women. Significantly, the authors find that education does not mediate the observed racial preferences among white men and white women. White men and white women with a college degree are more likely to contact and to respond to white daters without a college degree than they are to black daters with a college degree.

The Embeddedness of Adolescent Friendship Nominations: The Formation of Social Capital in Emergent Network Structures
Kenneth A. Frank, Chandra Muller, and Anna S. Mueller

Although research on social embeddedness and social capital confirms the value of friendship networks, little has been written about how social relations form and are structured by social institutions. Using data from the Adolescent Health and Academic Achievement study and the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, the authors show that the odds of a new friendship nomination were 1.77 times greater within clusters of high school students taking courses together than between them. The estimated effect cannot be attributed to exposure to peers in similar grade levels, indirect friendship links, or pair-level course overlap, and the finding is robust to alternative model specifications. The authors also show how tendencies associated with status hierarchy inhering in triadic friendship nominations are neutralized within the clusters. These results have implications for the production and distribution of social capital within social systems such as schools, giving the clusters social salience as “local positions.”

American Journal of Sociology 118(6)

American Journal of Sociology, May 2013: Volume 118, Issue 6

The Power of Instability: Unraveling the Microfoundations of Bargained Authoritarianism in China
Ching Kwan Lee and Yonghong Zhang

This article develops an interactive and relational conception of infrastructural state power for studying the capacity of authoritarian regimes to absorb popular protests. Based on an ethnography of the grassroots state in moments of unrest in China, the authors identify three microfoundations of Chinese authoritarianism: protest bargaining, legal-bureaucratic absorption, and patron-clientelism. Adopting, respectively, the logics of market exchange, rule-bound games, and interpersonal bonds, these mechanisms have the effect of depoliticizing social unrest and constitute a lived experience of authoritarian domination as a non-zero-sum situation, totalizing and transparent yet permissive of room for maneuvering and bargaining. This heuristic framework calls for bringing the subjective experience of subordination back into the theorizing of state domination.

The Demography of Social Mobility: Black-White Differences in the Process of Educational Reproduction
Vida Maralani

Increases in women’s education represent one of the most wide-reaching socioeconomic changes of recent decades. But how much will future generations benefit from these gains, and will black and white Americans benefit equally? Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, this study examines differences in the process of educational reproduction for black and white Americans. The approach considers the implication of race and education differences in marriage, assortative mating, and fertility in the parent generation on the distribution of schooling in the next generation. The analyses use a dynamic, multidimensional model that allows for intergenerational pathways at the individual, family, and population levels. The results show that these demographic mechanisms play an important role in explaining race differences in educational reproduction. Ignoring these pathways underestimates intergenerational effects for whites and overestimates them for blacks.

Understanding Latin American Beliefs about Racial Inequality
Edward Telles and Stanley Bailey

Scholars argue that Latin American ideologies of mestizaje, or racial mixing, mask ethnoracial discrimination. We examine popular explanations for indigenous or Afrodescendant disadvantage in Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, and Peru using the 2010 AmericasBarometer survey. Findings show that numerical majorities across all countries endorse structural-disadvantage explanations and reject victim-blaming stances; in seven of eight countries, they specifically recognize discrimination against ethnoracial minorities. Brazilians most point to structural causes, while Bolivians are least likely to recognize discrimination. While educational status differences tend to be sizable, dominant and minority explanations are similar. Both are comparable to African-American views and contrast with those of U.S. whites.

Making the Connection: Social Bonding in Courtship Situations
Daniel A. McFarland, Dan Jurafsky, and Craig Rawlings

Sociologists have long argued that the force of a social bond resides in a sense of interpersonal connection. This is especially true for initial courtship encounters when pairs report a sense of interpersonal chemistry. The authors explore the process of romantic bonding by applying interaction ritual theory, extended and integrated with methods from computational linguistics, to the study of courtship encounters and, specifically, heterosexual speed dating. The authors find that the assortment of interpersonal moves associated with a sense of connection characterizes a conventionalized form of initial courtship activity. The game is successfully played when females are the point of focus and engaged in the conversation and males demonstrate alignment with and understanding of the female. In short, initial heterosexual courtship encounters are associated with a sense of bonding when they reflect a reciprocal asymmetrical performance in which differentiated roles are mutually coordinated.

Interethnic Friendship, Trust, and Tolerance: Findings from Two North Iraqi Cities
Jens Rydgren, Dana Sofi, and Martin Hällsten

This article examines correlates of social trust and tolerance within a high-violence context. The authors study first the extent to which friendship ties that cross ethnic boundaries are associated with specific interaction spaces (neighborhoods, workplaces, civil society organizations, and political parties) and, second, the extent to which interethnic friendships are associated with trust and tolerance. Using individual-level data (N = 2,264) on interethnic contacts collected in 2006 in the two northern Iraqi cities of Erbil and Kirkuk, the authors show that people who spend time within ethnically heterogeneous interaction spaces are considerably more likely to have friendship ties that cross ethnic group boundaries and, in turn, also to express general social trust, interethnic trust, and tolerance toward outgroups.