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.

Ascription and labor markets: Race and sex differences in earnings

Race, Regional Labor Markets and Earnings

Assumptions about the processes that link a mother's employment to the development of her child must underlie expectations about how children may fare when their mothers move from welfare dependence into employment. This article explores the idea, mentioned in the research overview by Zaslow and Emig in this journal issue, that the working conditions such as wages, work hours, and task complexity that mothers experience on the job can influence their behavior as parents and shape the home environments they provide for their children. This article discusses the significance of home environments for children's intellectual and emotional development and considers how home surroundings change when mothers begin jobs that are more rewarding or less rewarding. The authors conclude that, while maternal employment is not necessarily harmful, if welfare recipients find only low-wage, stressful jobs, working may prove costly for both family and child well-being. The authors recommend that welfare-to-work programs devote attention to (1) assisting mothers to obtain more complex work at good wages, (2) helping mothers understand the role home environments play in shaping children's development, and (3) encouraging parents to make their children's home surroundings as positive as possible.

Effects of Low-Wage Employment on Family Well-Being

This paper looks at racial differences in how male workers accumulate housing equity. Findings from a national sample suggest major differences favoring whites in the payoff to such characteristics as earnings, age, marital status, and area of current residence. Blacks and whites also differ in the form of the relationship between years of schooling and housing equity. When the analysis is confined to homeowners only, many of these racial differences remain. The findings provide evidence concerning racial inequity in the United States housing markets and thus allow inferences concerning discrimination in housing. The findings also dramatize racial differences in a key form of wealth accumulation as a complement to other reports of racial differences in socio-economic outcomes.

Wealth accumulation of black and white men: the case of housing equity*

This study compares how being raised in an original, two-parent family and being raised in other family structures affects educational achievement, occupational status, and earnings attainment for a national sample of 30- to 59-year-old women and men. Data are derived from the 1989 Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Findings suggest that family structure has different effects by gender. Although both men and women from original, two-parent families earn more, on average, than those from other family structures, for women, this effect occurs through educational attainment. For men, the association between family structure and attainment is explained by other family background variables, including smaller family size, being Catholic, higher levels of parental education, and being White. Men who are raised by both natural parents are not advantaged educationally, compared with those who grow up in other types of family structures. A cohort analysis for men that compares baby boomers with prebaby boomers, however, suggests contradictory effects of family structure that deserve more exploration. Key Words: divorce, earnings attainment, family structure, gender, two-parent families. How does family structure in childhood affect an individual's subsequent socioeconomic wellbeing? We know that the absence of the father lowers cognitive test scores for young children (Mott, 1993) and that being raised by a single parent may interfere with high school graduation (Coleman, 1988; McLanahan, 1985; Shaw, 1982) and with the availability of funding for higher education (Steelman & Powell, 1991). McLanahan and Sandefur (1994) argue that children raised by only one biological parent are deprived of economic and social resources, which negatively affects their future success. Boys who grow up in original, two-parent families have a greater chance of achieving a higher occupational status than those raised in families headed by women (Duncan & Duncan, 1969), and boys who are raised by their mothers have a greater chance of ending up in occupations with lower status than those their fathers held (Biblarz & Raftery, 1993). Amato and Keith (1991) indicate that children who experienced parental divorce are more likely than those raised in original, two-parent families to exhibit psychological, behavioral, social, and academic problems. A great deal of evidence suggests that being raised without both natural parents involves costs for both children and the larger society. (See McLanahan & Booth, 1991, and Seltzer, 1994, for comprehensive reviews and Demo, 1992, for some counter arguments.) These studies do not tell us, however, whether divorce affects children when they mature to adulthood. In addition, prior research on the effects of family structure on socioeconomic outcomes frequently has failed to consider effects by gender by considering men only (Biblarz & Raftery, 1993; Duncan & Duncan, 1969; Greenberg & Wolf, 1982; Krein, 1986) or has been limited by confining attention to outcomes in young adulthood (Hill, Augustoniak, & Ponza, 1987). This article extends previous work by providing a clear causal picture of the effects of childhood family structure on adult socioeconomic outcomes for both men and women. We differentiate two broad categories of family structure: those respondents who were raised by both natural parents most of the time until they were 16 years old (original, two-parent family status) and those who report that they were not. We provide a rationale for using these broad categories and expand on this definition. We study (a) how growing up with both natural parents affects educational attainment, occupational status, and earnings, compared with growing up in other family structures, and (b) whether these effects differ by gender. THEORETICAL GUIDANCE Human capital and status attainment perspectives provide useful bases for studying the effects of family structure on adult socioeconomic outcomes. …

Toby L. Parcel

Papers

Ascription and labor markets: Race and sex differences in earnings

Race, Regional Labor Markets and Earnings

Effects of Low-Wage Employment on Family Well-Being

Wealth accumulation of black and white men: the case of housing equity*

Effects of family structure on the earnings attainment process: differences by gender.