This paper reviews the origins and definitions of social capital in the writings of Bourdieu, Loury, and Coleman, among other authors. It distinguishes four sources of social capital and examines their dynamics. Applications of the concept in the sociological literature emphasize its role in social control, in family support, and in benefits mediated by extrafamilial networks. I provide examples of each of these positive functions. Negative consequences of the same processes also deserve attention for a balanced picture of the forces at play. I review four such consequences and illustrate them with relevant examples. Recent writings on social capital have extended the concept from an individual asset to a feature of communities and even nations. The final sections describe this conceptual stretch and examine its limitations. I argue that, as shorthand for the positive consequences of sociability, social capital has a definite place in sociological theory. However, excessive extensions of the concept may j...

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Social Capital: Its Origins and Applications in Modern Sociology

The present historical moment may seem a particularly inopportune time to review Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam's latest exploration of civic decline in America. After all, the outpouring of volunteerism, solidarity, patriotism, and self-sacrifice displayed by Americans in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks appears to fly in the face of Putnam's central argument: that \"social capital\" -defined as \"social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them\" (p. 19)'has declined to dangerously low levels in America over the last three decades. However, Putnam is not fazed in the least by the recent effusion of solidarity. Quite the contrary, he sees in it the potential to \"reverse what has been a 30to 40-year steady decline in most measures of connectedness or community.\"' As an example of how the current \"war on terrorism\" could generate a durable civic renewal, Putnam points to the burst in civic practices that occurred during and after World War II, which he says \"permanently marked\" the generation that lived through it and had a \"terrific effect on American public life over the last half-century.\" 3 If Americans can follow this example and channel their current civic

Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community

How we raise young children is one of today's most highly personalized and sharply politicized issues, in part because each of us can claim some level of "expertise." The debate has intensified as discoveries about our development-in the womb and in the first months and years-have reached the popular media. How can we use our burgeoning knowledge to assure the well-being of all young children, for their own sake as well as for the sake of our nation? Drawing from new findings, this book presents important conclusions about nature-versus-nurture, the impact of being born into a working family, the effect of politics on programs for children, the costs and benefits of intervention, and other issues. The committee issues a series of challenges to decision makers regarding the quality of child care, issues of racial and ethnic diversity, the integration of children's cognitive and emotional development, and more. Authoritative yet accessible, From Neurons to Neighborhoods presents the evidence about "brain wiring" and how kids learn to speak, think, and regulate their behavior. It examines the effect of the climate-family, child care, community-within which the child grows.

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From Neurons to Neighborhoods: The Science of Early Childhood Development

A Treatise on the Family. G. S. Becker. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1981. Gary Becker is one of the most famous and influential economists of the second half of the 20th century, a fervent contributor to and expounder of the University of Chicago free-market philosophy, and winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in economics. Although any book with the word "treatise" in its title is clearly intended to have an impact, one coming from someone as brilliant and controversial as Becker certainly had such a lofty goal. It has received many article-length reviews in several disciplines (Ben-Porath, 1982; Bergmann, 1995; Foster, 1993; Hannan, 1982), which is one measure of its scholarly importance, and yet its impact is, I think, less than it may have initially appeared, especially for scholars with substantive interests in the family. This book is, its title notwithstanding, more about economics and the economic approach to behavior than about the family. In the first sentence of the preface, Becker writes "In this book, I develop an economic or rational choice approach to the family." Lest anyone accuse him of focusing on traditional (i.e., material) economics topics, such as family income, poverty, and labor supply, he immediately emphasizes that those topics are not his focus. "My intent is more ambitious: to analyze marriage, births, divorce, division of labor in households, prestige, and other non-material behavior with the tools and framework developed for material behavior." Indeed, the book includes chapters on many of these issues. One chapter examines the principles of the efficient division of labor in households, three analyze marriage and divorce, three analyze various child-related issues (fertility and intergenerational mobility), and others focus on broader family issues, such as intrafamily resource allocation. His analysis is not, he believes, constrained by time or place. His intention is "to present a comprehensive analysis that is applicable, at least in part, to families in the past as well as the present, in primitive as well as modern societies, and in Eastern as well as Western cultures." His tone is profoundly conservative and utterly skeptical of any constructive role for government programs. There is a clear sense of how much better things were in the old days of a genderbased division of labor and low market-work rates for married women. Indeed, Becker is ready and able to show in Chapter 2 that such a state of affairs was efficient and induced not by market or societal discrimination (although he allows that it might exist) but by small underlying household productivity differences that arise primarily from what he refers to as "complementarities" between caring for young children while carrying another to term. Most family scholars would probably find that an unconvincingly simple explanation for a profound and complex phenomenon. What, then, is the salient contribution of Treatise on the Family? It is not literally the idea that economics could be applied to the nonmarket sector and to family life because Becker had already established that with considerable success and influence. At its core, microeconomics is simple, characterized by a belief in the importance of prices and markets, the role of self-interested or rational behavior, and, somewhat less centrally, the stability of preferences. It was Becker's singular and invaluable contribution to appreciate that the behaviors potentially amenable to the economic approach were not limited to phenomenon with explicit monetary prices and formal markets. Indeed, during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, he did undeniably important and pioneering work extending the domain of economics to such topics as labor market discrimination, fertility, crime, human capital, household production, and the allocation of time. Nor is Becker's contribution the detailed analyses themselves. Many of them are, frankly, odd, idiosyncratic, and off-putting. …

A Treatise on the Family

▪ Abstract Socioeconomic status (SES) is one of the most widely studied constructs in the social sciences. Several ways of measuring SES have been proposed, but most include some quantification of family income, parental education, and occupational status. Research shows that SES is associated with a wide array of health, cognitive, and socioemotional outcomes in children, with effects beginning prior to birth and continuing into adulthood. A variety of mechanisms linking SES to child well-being have been proposed, with most involving differences in access to material and social resources or reactions to stress-inducing conditions by both the children themselves and their parents. For children, SES impacts well-being at multiple levels, including both family and neighborhood. Its effects are moderated by children's own characteristics, family characteristics, and external support systems.

Socioeconomic status and child development.

This important book assesses the level of unreliability—random measurement error—in individual survey items found in general-population surveys, on which much scholarship in sociology and kindred fields depends. Duane Alwin aspires to reduce measurement error at its source by identifying less error-prone methods of constructing and administering surveys. His study contributes to understanding survey quality by showing how reliability varies with item content and instrument design; many findings provide empirical grounding for well-established survey practices, while others suggest that some common data collection protocols may heighten error. The study rests on an original, unique data base of reliability estimates for nearly 500 individual survey items drawn from longitudinal surveys representing well-defined populations. Questions included measure both basic sociodemographic facts and subjective phenomena (beliefs, attitudes, selfperceptions). Alwin coded item properties (number of response alternatives, length), question content (factual or nonfactual), and survey context (inclusion in a topical series or ‘‘battery’’ of related questions, ordinal position within a questionnaire), and then assessed associations between these design features and reliability. As befits a study of data quality, much of Margins of Error justifies the measurement of its dependent variable, item reliability. Three chapters that outline and critique extant approaches to reliability assessment can be read profitably on their own. But the key here is that Alwin seeks reliability measures for single survey items, not composite scales. He stresses the distinction between multiple measures (verbatimreplicated items) and multiple indicators (distinct items related to a common underlying construct). He finds widely-applied ‘‘internal consistency’’ approaches based on classical test score theory (coefficient a) wanting, because they estimate the reliability of multiple-indicator composites rather than individual items, and because such composites need not be ‘‘univocal’’—that is, they combine indicators that often have imperfectly correlated true scores. A particular difficulty is that those methods understate item reliability by classifying stable, but measure-specific, variance in a survey response as erroneous rather than reliable. Alwin argues that cross-sectional designs cannot adequately estimate the reliability of single items, because respondent memory raises correlations among multiple measures or indicators. He advocates longitudinal designs that administer identically worded questions on at least three occasions, suggesting that those measurements be separated by intervals of up to two years to avoid memoryinduced inflation of reliability estimates. When these demanding data requirements are met, suitable analytic methods can distinguish reliability and stability, and incorporate stable item-specific variance within true score variance. Many results substantiate widely-used and -taught guidelines for constructing survey instruments. For example, reliability tends to be higher for factual questions than for items measuring subjective content, for selfreports than for proxy responses about others, and (usually) for shorter questions. In keeping with much recent methodological research on survey data, Alwin invokes cognitive considerations to interpret such associations; he suggests, for instance, that respondents may better comprehend short questions, and more readily access and retrieve information needed to answer factual ones. Of particular note is Alwin’s finding that the widespread survey practice of presenting items in batteries—sets of consecutive questions using the same response format—tends

The Impact of Parental Employment: Young People, Well-Being and Educational Achievement

Stability and Change in Children's Home Environments: The Effects of Parental Occupational Experiences and Family Conditions.

Research in the Sociology of Work, Vol. 7: Work and Family

We test the applicability of dual economy theory in the peripheral country of Taiwan. Based on factor and regression analyses of industry level data, we find that Taiwan's economic structure cannot be divided into two distinct sectors as the strictest form of dual economy theory suggests. Instead, the structure is multidimensional, characterized by dimensions such as capital intensity and concentration, economic scale and firm size, profits, and state control. Several of these dimensions, especially earnings, affect work outcomes, and these effects are not generally mediated by the occupational structure. When these findings are compared with those from a similar study of the United States, we find that the structure of economic segmentation and relationships between economic structure and work outcomes are simpler in Taiwan, as would be expected given Taiwan's less developed economy. Thus, the findings demonstrate the usefulness of concepts underlying segmentation perspectives for understanding ...

Economic Segmentation in Taiwan: A Comparative Study with the United States

Interest in nonstatus and nonprestige dimensions of occupational differentiation prompts questions concerning temporal change in new measures of occupational ranking. Literature that argues in favor of temporal change in the bases of occupational differentiation is juxtaposed with arguments suggesting stability. Confirmatory factor analytic models of occupational complexity, physical dexterity, physical activities, and unpleasantness of work suggest considerable stability in their measurement between 1965 and 1977. Limitations to the analysis and DOT data are noted. Implications for opposing arguments are discussed, as are the types of research situations in which these findings would be useful.

Toby L. Parcel

Papers

The Impact of Parental Employment: Young People, Well-Being and Educational Achievement

Stability and Change in Children's Home Environments: The Effects of Parental Occupational Experiences and Family Conditions.

Research in the Sociology of Work, Vol. 7: Work and Family

Economic Segmentation in Taiwan: A Comparative Study with the United States

Temporal Change in Occupational Differentiation