bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Abortion, Race, and Gender in Nineteenth-Century America
Authors: Beisel Nicola , Kay Tamara
Published: January 2010

Many sociologists have considered the intersection of race and gender in the production of social life, but while works on “intersectionality” have offered a useful paradigm for analyzing the experience of individual persons, a model for understanding how structures interact remains unclear. Appropriating Sewell's (1992) argument that structures consist of cultural schemas applied to resources, this article develops a more nuanced approach to intersectionality. It presents the argument that because the basis of race and gender as social structures is the inscription of cultural schemas on bodies, and because racial reproduction is predicated on the continued creation of these culturally inscribed bodies, race and gender as social structures necessarily intersect at the level of biological reproduction. The study uses this theoretical insight to analyze how physicians and suffragists contested the meaning of, and policy regarding, abortion in nineteenthcentury America. While most histories of abortion argue that nineteenth-century abortion politics concerned gender relations, this article argues that what was at stake was Anglo- Saxon control of the state and dominance of society. Abortion politics contested the proper use of a valuable social resource, the reproductive capacity of Anglo-Saxon women.
All the Rioting That's Fit to Print: Selection Effects in National Newspaper Coverage of Civil Disorders, 1968-1969
Authors: Myers Daniel J. , Caniglia Beth Schaefer
Published: January 2010

This study examined selection effects in newspaper reports about civil disorders in the late 1960s. A comprehensive set of events recorded in newspapers across the United States was compared with the subsets of these events recorded in two national newspapers often used to construct collective event data bases-the New York Times and the Washington Post. The results demonstrate that fewer than half of all disorders are covered in these two newspapers combined, and that those reported are selected on the basis of event intensity, distance, event density, city population size, type of actor, and day of the week. To demonstrate the effects of these selection patterns on substantive analysis of civil disorder, the authors replicated earlier studies using all reported events, and then repeated the analyses using only the events reported in the Times and the Post. This procedure showed some substantial differences in results. The implications of these findings for event analyses and for substantive understandings of media selection are discussed.
“Generations and Collective Memory” Revisited: Race, Region, and Memory of Civil Rights
Authors: Griffin Larry J.
Published: January 2010

Using the spontaneous memories of a national sample of Americans in 1985, Schuman and Scott (1989) largely confirmed Mannheim's theory of generational identity by demonstrating that respondents' age structured their recall of important national and world events over the past 50 years. But they did not find the predicted age patterns for whites' recollections of civil rights. I argue that their failure was the consequence of ignoring regional differences in the impact of the Civil Rights movement on whites. Because the South was the target of and the battlefield for civil rights, “civil rights memory” should be greater for southern whites who experienced the movement as mature teenagers or young adults than for their equal-aged peers elsewhere or for southern whites in different age groups. I also hypothesize that this cohort of southern whites should attribute more historical importance to civil rights than do others. Both hypotheses are supported by analysis of the 1993 General Social Survey and Schuman's and Scott's original 1985 data. The theoretical import of the study is that where highly charged events happen shapes consciousness and memory, suggesting that Mannheim's idea of the “social location” of generational identity formation is place-specific, as well as age-dependent.
How Culture Mattered at Vatican II: Collegiality Trumps Authority in the Council's Social Movement Organizations
Authors: Wilde Melissa J.
Published: January 2010

The overwhelmingly progressive outcome of the Second Vatican Council in the Roman Catholic Church (1962 to 1965) changed Church doctrine on everything from the Latin mass to nuns' habits to openness to other faith traditions. This article examines a cause of this outcome by analyzing the informal organizations activist bishops built during the Council. Progressives' and conservatives' cultural understandings of authority determined what type of organization they built as well as how effectively that organization helped them to address their concerns. Progressives believed in the doctrine of “collegiality,” that bishops convening together are as infallible as the Pope—a doctrine conservatives saw as threatening the primacy and authority of the Pope. Consequently, while progressives built a highly effective, consensus-based organization as soon as the Council began, conservatives were much slower to mobilize and, when they did so, formed a hierarchical organization that proved to be much less effective. Most studies of social movements do not have faith in the effectiveness of the progressives' consensus-based organization, which have typically found such organizations to be inefficient and subject to breakdowns. This study suggests that organizational effectiveness depends in part on how well activists' cultural understandings mesh with the environment in which they are enacted.
Tightening Up: Declining Class Mobility during Russia's Market Transition
Authors: Gerber Theodore P. , Hout Michael
Published: January 2010

This study analyzes intergenerational occupational mobility in late Soviet and post-Soviet Russia using data from six surveys. Belying claims that class differences did not matter in the Soviet Union, the authors find that social origin did affect occupational opportunity during Russia's Soviet period. But the transition from state socialism to a market economy tightened the link between origins and destinations. Men and women were equally constrained by their social origin, even though they faced significantly different opportunity structures in both periods. As the economic transformation took hold, fewer Russians experienced upward mobility and more were downwardly mobile. Political and economic transition, not the demographic replacement of retiring cohorts by younger ones, strengthened the association between origins and destinations. Career mobility during the 1990s took the form of a regression toward origins, as workers who had the most upward mobility during the Soviet era lost the most in the transition to markets, abetting the reproduction of the class structure across generations as they fell.
The Economic Incorporation of Immigrants in 18 Western Societies: Origin, Destination, and Community Effects
Authors: van Tubergen Frank , Maas Ineke , Flap Henk
Published: January 2010

This article examines differences in labor market participation and unemployment between immigrant groups in different countries. The authors argue that two macro designs must be combined to provide a more comprehensive perspective on the economic integration of immigrant groups. Instead of reliance on observations of multiple-origin groups in a single destination or a single-origin group in multiple destinations, multiple origins in multiple destinations are compared, suggesting that the economic status of immigrants may be affected by the country from which they come (“origin effect”), the country to which they migrate (“destination effect”), and the specific relations between origins and destinations (“community effect”). From the human capital theory, compositional hypotheses are derived, which predict that these macro effects can be attributed to the selection of human capital. From discrimination theories, contextual hypotheses are deduced, which maintain that macro effects can be ascribed to in-group preferences and out-group prejudices. Data on immigrants' labor force activity and employment in 18 Western countries during the period 1980 to 2001 are reported. Using multilevel techniques, the analysis shows that compositional differences associated with political suppression in the countries of origin, relative income inequality, and geographic distance affect the labor force status of immigrants. Contextual effects play a role as well in terms of religious origin, the presence of left wing parties in the government, and the size of the immigrant community.
The Influence of Physical and Sexual Abuse on Marriage and Cohabitation
Authors: Cherlin Andrew J. , Hurt Tera R. , Burton Linda M. , Purvin Diane M.
Published: January 2010

Using ethnographic and survey data on low-income families residing in Boston, Chicago, and San Antonio, we examine the relationship between women's patterns of union formation and their experience of physical and sexual abuse. Both sets of data suggest that women who have been physically or sexually abused are substantially less likely to be married or to be in stable, long-term cohabiting relationships. The data also suggest that the timing and different forms of abuse may have distinctive associations with union formation. Women who have experienced abuse beginning in childhood, particularly sexual abuse, are less likely to be in sustained marriages or stable cohabiting relationships and instead are more likely to experience transitory unions: multiple short-term, mostly cohabiting unions with brief intervals between them. Women who have not been abused in childhood but experience adult physical abuse, however, are less likely to be in either a marriage or a cohabiting union, long-term or transitory; and some have withdrawn from having relationships with men. The relevance of these findings for the decline of marriage among low-income women and men is discussed.
Kin Support among Blacks and Whites: Race and Family Organization
Authors: Sarkisian Natalia , Gerstel Naomi
Published: January 2010

This article addresses two central debates in the scholarship on black families: the disorganization versus superorganization debate and the culture versus structure debate. Focusing on kin support as a measure of family integration and using the National Survey of Families and Households (1992-1994), this article challenges the assumptions about black and white families in both debates. It shows that blacks and whites have different patterns of kin support involvement. Whereas blacks are more involved in practical support (help with transportation, household work, and child care), whites report greater involvement in financial and emotional kin support. This article also shows that gender is crucial for understanding racial differences. Black men and white men are very much alike, whereas there are many significant differences between black women and white women. Furthermore, in understanding kin support, diversity within racial groups appears to matter more than race itself. Social structure explains most of the racial differences in kin support, though cultural differences between whites and blacks do exist and help to explain kin support.
For Public Sociology
Authors: Burawoy Michael
Published: January 2010

Responding to the growing gap between the sociological ethos and the world we study, the challenge of public sociology is to engage multiple publics in multiple ways. These public sociologies should not be left out in the cold, but brought into the framework of our discipline. In this way we make public sociology a visible and legitimate enterprise, and, thereby, invigorate the discipline as a whole. Accordingly, if we map out the division of sociological labor, we discover antagonistic interdependence among four types of knowledge: professional, critical, policy, and public. In the best of all worlds the flourishing of each type of sociology is a condition for the flourishing of all, but they can just as easily assume pathological forms or become victims of exclusion and subordination. This field of power beckons us to explore the relations among the four types of sociology as they vary historically and nationally, and as they provide the template for divergent individual careers. Finally, comparing disciplines points to the umbilical chord that connects sociology to the world of publics, underlining sociology's particular investment in the defense of civil society, itself beleaguered by the encroachment of markets and states.
The Discourse of Globalization: Framing and Sensemaking of an Emerging Concept
Authors: Fiss Peer C. , Hirsch Paul M.
Published: January 2010

While the literature on framing has importantly expanded our understanding of frame creation and contests from an interpretive point of view, previous studies have largely neglected the structural contexts in which framing activities occur. In this study, we propose extending the framing approach by incorporating insights from the literature on sensemaking to examine how and when opportunities for meaning creation open up and how this affects subsequent discursive processes. Connecting framing and sensemaking better enables us to examine how structural factors prompt and bound discursive processes, affecting when and where frame contests emerge. We demonstrate the utility of this approach by examining changes in the discourse of globalization. Using qualitative and quantitative analyses of newspaper articles and corporate press releases, we trace the emergence of globalization discourse, its diffusion, and the increasing contention that surrounds it. Our findings show how and where globalization discourse emerged in response to greater U.S. involvement with the international economy, and how later frame contests over the meaning of globalization have depended on the interests of the actors involved.
History, Commemoration, and Belief: Abraham Lincoln in American Memory, 1945-2001
Authors: Schwartz Barry , Schuman Howard
Published: January 2010

Ever since Maurice Halbwachs's pioneering work, most scholars have been content to explore collective memory through texts and commemorative symbolism. Assuming that a study of collective memory has fuller meaning when it takes into account what ordinary people think about the past, we compare historians' and commemorative agents' representations of Abraham Lincoln to what four national samples of Americans believe about him. Five primary images-Savior of the Union, Great Emancipator, Man of the People, First (Frontier) American, and Self-Made Man-are prominent in the cumulative body of Lincoln representations, but recent surveys show that only one of these images, the Great Emancipator, is dominant within the public. Lincoln's one-dimensional Emancipator image, which differs from the multi—dimensional one evident in a 1945 sample, reflects new perceptions of the Civil War shaped by late twentieth-century minority rights movements. Thus, “bringing men [and women] back in” involves survey evidence being added to historiographic and commemoration analysis to clarify one of sociology's most ambiguous concepts, collective memory, and to explore its social and generational roots.
A General Theory of Scientific/Intellectual Movements
Authors: Frickel Scott , Gross Neil
Published: January 2010

The histories of all modern scientific and intellectual fields are marked by dynamism. Yet, despite a welter of case study data, sociologists of ideas have been slow to develop general theories for explaining why and how disciplines, subfields, theory groups, bandwagons, actor networks, and other kindred formations arise to alter the intellectual landscape. To fill this lacuna, this article presents a general theory of scientific/intellectual movements (SIMs). The theory synthesizes work in the sociology of ideas, social studies of science, and the literature on social movements to explain the dynamics of SIMs, which the authors take to be central mechanisms for change in the world of knowledge and ideas. Illustrating their arguments with a diverse sampling of positive and negative cases, they define SIMs, identify a set of theoretical presuppositions, and offer four general propositions for explaining the social conditions under which SIMs are most likely to emerge, gain prestige, and achieve some level of institutional stability.
From Poverty to Perversity: Ideas, Markets, and Institutions over 200 Years of Welfare Debate
Authors: Somers Margaret R. , Block Fred
Published: January 2010

To understand the rise of market fundamentalism from the margins of influence to mainstream hegemony, we compare the U.S. 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunities Reconciliation Act and the English 1834 New Poor Law—two episodes in which existing welfare regimes were overturned by market-driven ones. Despite dramatic differences across the cases, both outcomes were mobilized by “the perversity thesis”—a public discourse that reassigned blame for the poor's condition from “poverty to perversity.” We use the term “ideational embeddedness” to characterize the power of such ideas to shape, structure, and change market regimes. The success of the perversity thesis is based on the foundations of social naturalism, theoretical realism, and the conversion narrative. In the poverty to perversity conversion narrative, structural blame for poverty is discredited as empiricist appearance while the real problem is attributed to the corrosive effects of welfare's perverse incentives on poor people themselves—they become sexually promiscuous, thrust aside personal responsibility, and develop longterm dependency. This claim enables market fundamentalism to delegitimate existing ideational regimes, to survive disconfirming data, and to change the terms of debate from social problems to the timeless forces of nature and biology. Coupling economic sociology with a sociology of ideas, we argue that ideas count; but not all ideas are created equal. Only some have the capacity to fuel radical transformations in the ideational embeddedness of markets.
Suicide Determination and the Professional Authority of Medical Examiners
Authors: Timmermans Stefan
Published: January 2010

Since Durkheim's pioneering study, official suicide statistics have been suspected of underreporting the true suicide rate. A majority of researchers asserts that mistakes are minimal and not systematic while a minority claims that suicide statistics are systematically biased. Lingering uncertainties about suicide rate accuracy call into question the claims of scholarship and the efficacy of prevention programs. From the perspective of the sociology of professions, the critique of suicide accuracy challenges the professional authority of death investigators. Ethnographic observations show that medical examiners tend to underclassify suicides because the suicide classification requires positive proof of suicidal intent and because false negatives do not challenge the authority of medical examiners as much as false positives. Sufficient proof for suicide results from medical examiners' privileging of pathological evidence, the legal threshold to interpret evidence, and close relationships with law enforcement and clinicians. The same professional characteristics that safeguard forensic authority result in suicide underreporting: medical examiners protect their authority by determining suicide conservatively. Relatives acting to avoid the stigma of suicide and public health officials concerned with underreporting have a marginal influence on suicide determinations. This article contributes to the sociology of professions literature by analyzing how a professional group maintains authority in spite of profound criticism from outside parties.
Unequal But Fluid: Social Mobility in Chile in Comparative Perspective
Authors: Torche Florencia
Published: January 2010

A major finding in comparative mobility research is the high similarity across countries and the lack of association between mobility and other national attributes, with one exception: higher inequality seems to be associated with lower mobility. Evidence for the mobility-inequality link is, however, inconclusive, largely because most mobility studies have been conducted in advanced countries with relatively similar levels of inequality. This article introduces Chile to the comparative project. As the 10th most unequal country in the world, Chile is an adjudicative case. If high inequality results in lower mobility, Chile should be significantly more rigid than its industrialized peers. This hypothesis is disproved by the analysis. Despite vast economic inequality, Chile is as fluid, if not more so, than the much more equal industrialized nations. Furthermore, there is no evidence of a decline in mobility as the result of the increase in inequality during the market-oriented transformation of the country in the 1970s and 1980s. Study of the specific mobility flows in Chile indicates a significant barrier to long-range downward mobility from the elite (signaling high “elite closure”), but very low barriers across nonelite classes. This particular mobility regime is explained by the pattern, not the level, of Chilean inequality-high concentration in the top income decile, but significantly less inequality across the rest of the class structure. The high Chilean mobility is, however, largely inconsequential, because it takes place among classes that share similar positions in the social hierarchy of resources and rewards. The article concludes by redefining the link between inequality and mobility.
Cooperation in Microcredit Borrowing Groups: Identity, Sanctions, and Reciprocity in the Production of Collective Goods
Authors: Anthony Denise
Published: January 2010

Cooperation to produce collective goods is widespread in society, and yet so is its failure. Theorists have identified competing mechanisms for facilitating group cooperation, including group identity, sanctions and reciprocity. Here I use empirical data to explore how these mechanisms influence cooperation in the natural laboratory of microcredit borrowing groups. Microcredit makes loans to high-risk borrowers through borrowing groups in which individuals' access to credit is dependent on the behavior of other members of the group, thereby creating a social dilemma for members and an opportunity to observe cooperation in real world groups. By analyzing both collective goods production (loans) and compliance (repayment), I find that the competing mechanisms have differential effects. Group identity, sanctions and reciprocity are all associated with more borrowing in the group. Only reciprocity, however, limits loan delinquency and is associated with group longevity, suggesting both that collective goods production is a distinct process from group compliance over time, and that reciprocity may be an important mechanism in both processes. I discuss how these findings contribute to our understanding of group cooperation, as well as the implications for the related theoretical concept of embeddedness.
It's Not “a Black Thing”: Understanding the Burden of Acting White and Other Dilemmas of High Achievement
Authors: Tyson Karolyn , Darity William , Castellino Domini R.
Published: January 2010

For two decades the acting white hypothesis—the premise that black students are driven toward low school performance because of racialized peer pressure—has served as an explanation for the black-white achievement gap. Fordham and Ogbu proposed that black youths sabotage their own school careers by taking an oppositional stance toward academic achievement. Using interviews and existing data from eight North Carolina secondary public schools, this article shows that black adolescents are generally achievement oriented and that racialized peer pressure against high academic achievement is not prevalent in all schools. The analysis also shows important similarities in the experiences of black and white high-achieving students, indicating that dilemmas of high achievement are generalizable beyond a specific group. Typically, highachieving students, regardless of race, are to some degree stigmatized as “nerds” or “geeks.” The data suggest that school structures, rather than culture, may help explain when this stigma becomes racialized, producing a burden of acting white for black adolescents, and when it becomes class-based, producing a burden of “acting high and mighty” for low-income whites. Recognizing the similarities in these processes can help us refocus and refine understandings of the black-white achievement gap.
Gender Stereotypes, Same-Gender Preferences, and Organizational Variation in the Hiring of Women: Evidence from Law Firms
Authors: Gorman Elizabeth H.
Published: January 2010

Laboratory studies have shown that stereotypes and in-group favoritism influence people's perceptions and evaluations of others, but empirical research has not yet linked these processes to gender disparities in real workplace outcomes. This study proposes that the gender stereotypicality of selection criteria and decision makers' same-gender preferences operate to intensify gender inequality in hiring. These arguments are tested with data on large U.S. law firms in the mid-1990s. The findings show that when selection criteria include a greater number of stereotypically masculine characteristics, women constitute a smaller proportion of new hires, and that, conversely, when criteria include more stereotypically feminine traits, women are better represented among new hires. Female decision makers also fill more vacancies with women than do male decision makers, but among entry-level hires, this effect diminishes as women's share of high-ranking positions increases toward gender balance.
Social Status in an Open-Source Community
Authors: Stewart Daniel
Published: January 2010

Despite a fair amount of conjecture regarding the circumstances that lead to the generation of status orders, most of the previous literature in this area typically has studied the effects of social cues within a laboratory setting. This article analyzes the evolution of the status hierarchy within a large-scale, natural setting. The results of empirical analyses assessing a large online community of software developers show that in the process of status attainment, community members tend to evaluate a focal actor's reputation according to publicly available social references. Ironically, these same social references also work to constrain an actor's status mobility.
“Just Call Me Adonai”: A Case Study of Ethnic Humor and Immigrant Assimilation
Authors: Shifman Limor , Katz Elihu
Published: January 2010

This article describes a case study of humor created in the course of immigrant assimilation, specifically regarding the jokes (n = 150) told by Eastern European oldtimers at the expense of well-bred German Jews (Yekkes) who migrated to Palestine/Israel beginning in the mid-1930s. A taxonomy divides the corpus into jokes lampooning rigidity, exaggerated deference to authority, difficulty in language acquisition, and alienation from the new society. The jokes carry a dual message of welcome to our egalitarian nation, but please note that we, and our norms, were here first. The ethnic superiority implicit in the latter part of the message turns the tables on two earlier encounters-in Germany and the United States-in which Jewish immigrants from Russia and Poland were denigrated for “embarrassing” their relatively wellestablished German brethren. The Yekke jokes analyzed in this article arose from a third encounter in Palestine/Israel, where, this time, the Eastern Europeans arrived earlier, as Zionist pioneers. The jokes, it is argued, constitute a kind of “revenge.”
The Worldwide Expansion of Higher Education in the Twentieth Century
Authors: Schofer Evan , Meyer John W.
Published: January 2010

The authors analyze the rapid worldwide expansion of higher educational enrollments over the twentieth century using pooled panel regressions. Expansion is higher in economically developed countries (in some but not all analyses) as classic theories would have it. Growth is greater where secondary enrollments are high and where state control over education is low, consistent with conflict and competition theories. Institutional theories get strong support: growth patterns are similar in all types of countries, are especially high in countries more linked to world society, and sharply accelerate in virtually all countries after 1960. The authors theorize and operationalize the institutional processes involved, which include scientization, democratization and the expansion of human rights, the rise of development planning, and the structuration of the world polity. With these changes, a new model of society became institutionalized globally-one in which schooled knowledge and personnel were seen as appropriate for a wide variety of social positions, and in which many more young people were seen as appropriate candidates for higher education. An older vision of education as contributing to a more closed society and occupational system—with associated fears of “over-education”—was replaced by an open-system picture of education as useful “human capital” for unlimited progress. The global trends are so strong that developing countries now have higher enrollment rates than European countries did only a few decades ago, and currently about one-fifth of the world cohort is now enrolled in higher education.
Comparative Perspectives and Competing Explanations: Taking on the Newly Configured Reductionist Challenge to Sociology
Authors: Duster Troy
Published: January 2010

Sociology faces three important interrelated challenges in the coming decades. The first will be the increasing authority of reductionist science for which partial evidence is found in the strikingly imbalanced allocation of research funding for “causes” of wide-ranging problems—from disparities in health and educational achievement to explanations of alcoholism and violence. The second is the attendant expansion of databases on markers and processes “inside the body.” Directly but inversely related is the third challenge: new evidence that the release of already collected data sets is blocked and data collection on social and economic forces is reduced. These challenges can be confronted and addressed directly if sociologists emulate an earlier generation of sociological researchers and turn greater attention to an analysis of data collection at the site of reductionist knowledge production. This includes, for example, close scrutiny of new computer technologies assisting several DNA identification claims. It is insufficient to simply assert the arbitrariness of the “social construction” of these claims. Instead, the architecture of that construction must be demonstrated. Unless that is done, competing explanations (from various disciplines) will have far greater significance on public policy and on the particular discipline's status with public and private funding sources.
Wealth, Race, and Inter-Neighborhood Migration
Authors: Crowder Kyle , South Scott J. , Chavez Erick
Published: January 2010

Racial differences in wealth have often been thought to underlie racial differences in residential segregation and neighborhood attainment, but research supporting this claim is limited. The authors of this article use data from the 1989–2001 waves of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), in conjunction with tract-level decennial census data, to examine the effects of household and parental wealth on the migration of black and non-Hispanic white families between neighborhoods comprised of varying percentages of Anglos (i.e., non-Hispanic whites). They find generally modest effects of wealth on these patterns of inter-neighborhood migration. Consistent with one version of the place-stratification model of locational attainment, the effects of both household and parental wealth are stronger among blacks than among non-Hispanic whites, with the sharpest racial difference emerging among renters. Racial differences in household and parental wealth, however, can account for only a trivial portion of the pronounced racial difference in migration into neighborhoods containing larger percentages of Anglo residents. The authors conclude that explanations for the racially stratified inter-neighborhood migration streams that underlie and reinforce black-Anglo residential segregation will need to look beyond the influence of wealth and other socioeconomic resources.
Black and White Control of Numbers Gambling: A Cultural Assets–Social Capital View
Authors: Steffensmeier Darrell , Ulmer Jeffery T.
Published: January 2010

The relationship between race, ethnicity, and illegal business enterprise is addressed through an analysis of black and white involvement in illegal numbers gambling in a large eastern state. The authors outline a cultural assets and social capital theoretical framework for analyzing ethnicity and criminal enterprise that draws from recent work on “ethnic economies” in legal enterprise. The analysis covers the period 1970–2000 and is based on information drawn from a variety of sources, including key individuals who were or had been participants in the illegal numbers industry. The findings show that black bankers historically were key players in the Eaststate numbers industry, but that they have steadily lost ground. Currently, white, particularly Italian American, organized crime-connected enterprises are dominant. The major arguments are that numbers gambling is not simply economic activity and not simply produced by socioeconomic disadvantage; cultural assets and social capital are necessary for profitability and longevity in numbers gambling, aside from any role that disadvantage may play in producing illegal enterprise, motives, and opportunities; ethnic groups differ in conventional and criminal social capital for success in numbers gambling; and ethnic succession theories cannot explain trends in the dominance of numbers gambling.
Gender and the Meanings of Adolescent Romantic Relationships: A Focus on Boys
Authors: Giordano Peggy C. , Longmore Monica A. , Manning Wendy D.
Published: January 2010

Many studies of the adolescent period have focused on peer interactions and relationships, but less is known about the character of adolescents' early dating experiences. Researchers have recently explored girls' views of romance and sexuality, but studies of boys' perspectives are noticeably lacking. Theorizing in this area leads to the expectation that as adolescents cross over into heterosexual territory, boys will do so, on average, with greater confidence, while being relatively less engaged emotionally (i.e., the notion that boys want sex, girls want romance), and ultimately emerging as the more powerful actors within the relationship. This article develops a symbolic interactionist perspective to examine the experiences of adolescent boys and girls in the context of the romantic dyad. It focuses on the nature of communication, emotion, and influence within adolescent dating relationships. Findings based on structured interviews with over 1,300 adolescents provide a strong contrast to existing portraits: among those adolescents who had begun dating (n = 957), boys report significantly lower levels of confidence navigating various aspects of their romantic relationships, similar levels of emotional engagement as girls, and greater power and influence on the part of their romantic partners. In-depth relationship-history narratives, elicited from a subset (n = 100) of these respondents, provide additional support for the quantitative findings and are useful in the process of reconciling our perspective and results with the emphases of prior research.
The Conditional Nature of Embeddedness: A Study of Borrowing by Large U.S. Firms, 1973–1994
Authors: Mizruchi Mark S. , Stearns Linda Brewster
Published: January 2010

Economic and organizational sociologists have increasingly demonstrated that the actions of individuals and firms are affected by the social networks within which they are embedded. In recent years scholars have begun to recognize that the effects of these social networks may vary across populations or types of relations. This article examines the extent to which the effects of interfirm networks on the behavior of firms are historically contingent. Focusing on the level of debt financing among approximately 140 large U.S. corporations over a 22-year period, the authors show that the extent to which the firms' use of debt was influenced by those with which they were tied through director interlocks declined over time. The authors argue that this decline in the network effect reflected a shift in the institutional environment within which the firms operated, and that it was driven by three processes: the professionalization of the finance function within the firm, the internalization of financial decision-making, and the increased volatility of the environment. They conclude that corporate financing is socially embedded, but this embeddedness is historically contingent.
Social Policy Responsiveness in Developed Democracies
Authors: Brooks Clem , Manza Jeff
Published: January 2010

Do mass policy preferences influence the policy output of welfare states in developed democracies? This is an important issue for welfare state theory and research, and this article presents an analysis that builds from analytical innovations developed in the emerging literature on linkages between mass opinion and public policy. The authors analyze a new dataset combining a measure of social policy preferences with data on welfare state spending, alongside controls for established causal factors behind social policy-making. The analysis provides evidence that policy preferences exert a significant influence over welfare state output. Guided also by statistical tests for endogeneity, the authors find that cross-national differences in the level of policy preferences help to account for a portion of the differences among social, Christian, and liberal welfare state regimes. The results have implications for developing fruitful connections between welfare state scholarship, comparative opinion research, and recent opinion/policy studies.
The Growing Female Advantage in College Completion: The Role of Family Background and Academic Achievement
Authors: Buchmann Claudia , DiPrete Thomas A.
Published: January 2010

In a few short decades, the gender gap in college completion has reversed from favoring men to favoring women. This study, which is the first to assess broadly the causes of the growing female advantage in college completion, considers the impact of family resources as well as gender differences in academic performance and in the pathways to college completion on the rising gender gap. Analyses of General Social Survey data indicate that the female-favorable trend in college completion emerged unevenly by family status of origin to the disadvantage of sons in families with a low-educated or absent father. Additional analyses of National Educational Longitudinal Survey (NELS) data indicate that women's superior academic performance plays a large role in producing the gender gap in college completion, but that this effect remains latent until after the transition to college. For NELS cohorts, who were born in the mid-1970s, the female advantage in college completion remains largest in families with a low-educated or absent father, but currently extends to all family types. In conjunction with women's growing incentives to attain higher education, gender differences in resources related to family background and academic performance largely explain the growing female advantage in college completion.
Best Practices or Best Guesses? Assessing the Efficacy of Corporate Affirmative Action and Diversity Policies
Authors: Kalev Alexandra , Dobbin Frank , Kelly Erin
Published: January 2010

Employers have experimented with three broad approaches to promoting diversity. Some programs are designed to establish organizational responsibility for diversity, others to moderate managerial bias through training and feedback, and still others to reduce the social isolation of women and minority workers. These approaches find support in academic theories of how organizations achieve goals, how stereotyping shapes hiring and promotion, and how networks influence careers. This is the first systematic analysis of their efficacy. The analyses rely on federal data describing the workforces of 708 private sector establishments from 1971 to 2002, coupled with survey data on their employment practices. Efforts to moderate managerial bias through diversity training and diversity evaluations are least effective at increasing the share of white women, black women, and black men in management. Efforts to attack social isolation through mentoring and networking show modest effects. Efforts to establish responsibility for diversity lead to the broadest increases in managerial diversity. Moreover, organizations that establish responsibility see better effects from diversity training and evaluations, networking, and mentoring. Employers subject to federal affirmative action edicts, who typically assign responsibility for compliance to a manager, also see stronger effects from some programs. This work lays the foundation for an institutional theory of the remediation of workplace inequality.
Neighborhood Social Processes, Physical Conditions, and Disaster-Related Mortality: The Case of the 1995 Chicago Heat Wave
Authors: Browning Christopher R. , Wallace Danielle , Feinberg Seth L. , Cagney Kathleen A.
Published: January 2010

The authors draw on Klinenberg's (2002) ethnography and recent neighborhood theory to explain community-level variation in mortality during the July 1995 Chicago heat wave. They examine the impact of neighborhood structural disadvantage on heat wave mortality and consider three possible intervening mechanisms: social network interaction, collective efficacy, and commercial conditions. Combining Census and mortality data with the 1995 Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods Community Survey and Systematic Social Observation, the authors estimate hierarchical Poisson models of death rates both during the 1995 heat wave and comparable, temporally proximate July weeks (1990-94, 1996). They find that neighborhood affluence was negatively associated with heat wave mortality. Consistent with Klinenberg's ethnographic study of the Chicago heat wave, commercial decline was positively associated with heat wave mortality and explains the affluence effect. Where commercial decline was low, neighborhoods were largely protected from heat-related mortality. Although social network interaction and collective efficacy did not influence heat wave mortality, collective efficacy was negatively associated with mortality during comparable July weeks (when no heat wave occurred). Unequal distribution of community-based resources had important implications for geographic differences in survival rates during the Chicago heat wave, and may be relevant for other disasters.
Movements and Memory: The Making of the Stonewall Myth
Authors: Armstrong Elizabeth A. , Crage Suzanna M.
Published: January 2010

This article examines why the Stonewall riots became central to gay collective memory while other events did not. It does so through a comparative-historical analysis of Stonewall and four events similar to it that occurred in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York in the 1960s. The Stonewall riots were remembered because they were the first to meet two conditions: activists considered the event commemorable and had the mnemonic capacity to create a commemorative vehicle. That this conjuncture occurred in New York in 1969, and not earlier or elsewhere, was a result of complex political developments that converged in this time and place. The success of the national commemorative ritual planned by New York activists depended on its resonance, not only in New York but also in other U.S. cities. Gay community members found Stonewall commemorable and the proposed parade an appealing form for commemoration. The parade was amenable to institutionalization, leading it to survive over time and spread around the world. The Stonewall story is thus an achievement of gay liberation rather than an account of its origins.
Navigating Dangerous Streets: The Sources and Consequences of Street Efficacy
Authors: Sharkey Patrick T.
Published: January 2010

The concept of street efficacy, defined as the perceived ability to avoid violent confrontations and to be safe in one's neighborhood, is proposed as a mechanism connecting aspects of adolescents'“imposed” environments to the choices they make in creating their own “selected” environments that minimize the potential for violent confrontations. Empirical models using data from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods suggest that street efficacy is substantially influenced by various aspects of the social context surrounding adolescents. Adolescents who live in neighborhoods with concentrated disadvantage and low collective efficacy, respectively, are found to have less confidence in their ability to avoid violence after controlling for an extensive set of individual- and family-level factors. Exposure to violence also reduces street efficacy, although it does not explain the association between collective efficacy and individual street efficacy. Adolescents' confidence in their ability to avoid violence is shown to be an important predictor of the types of environments they select for themselves. In particular, adolescents with high levels of street efficacy are less likely to resort to violence themselves or to associate with delinquent peers.
The International Women's Movement and Women's Political Representation, 1893–2003
Authors: Paxton Pamela , Hughes Melanie M. , Green Jennifer L.
Published: January 2010

Women's political representation, once considered unacceptable by politicians and their publics, is now actively encouraged by powerful international actors. In this article, the authors ask how the growth and discourse of the international women's movement affected women's acquisition of political power over time. To answer this question, they use event history techniques to address women's political representation in more than 150 countries over 110 years (1893–2003). They consider multiple political outcomes: female suffrage, first female parliamentarian, and achievement of 10, 20, and 30 percent women in a country's national legislature. The findings show that increasing global pressure for the inclusion of women in international politics and the changing discourse of the international women's movement help to explain women's acquisition of these multiple political outcomes. Furthermore, by adding these concepts to traditional domestic models of women in politics, the authors demonstrate that country-level political, social structural, and cultural characteristics cause countries to act in conjunction with, or in opposition to, these global pressures. This is the first time that research on women in politics has considered such a comprehensive list of countries, time points, and outcomes.