Showing papers in "American Journal of Sociology in 1978"

Threshold models of collective behavior.

Abstract: Models of collective behavior are developed for situations where actors have two alternatives and the costs and/or benefits of each depend on how many other actors choose which alternative. The key...

Homophily, Selection, and Socialization in Adolescent Friendships

Abstract: Longitudinal sociometric data on adolescent friendship pairs, friends-to-be, and former friends are examined to assess levels of homophily on four attributes (frequency of current marijuana, use, level of educational aspirations, political orientation, and participation in minor delinquency) at various stages of friendship formation and dissolution. In addition, estimates are developed of the extent to which observed homophily in friendship dyads results from a process of selection (assortative pairing), in which similarity precedes association and the extent to which it results from a process of socialization in which association leads to similarity. The implications of the results for interpreting estimates of peer influence derived from cross-sectional data are discussed.

Remarriage as an Incomplete Institution

Abstract: The higher divorce rate for remarriages after divorce than for first marriages, it is argued, is due to the incomplete institutionalization of remarriage after divorce in the United States. Persons who are remarried after a divorce and have children from previous marriages face problems unlike those encountered in first marriages. The institution of the family provides no standard solutions to many of these problems, with the result that the unity of families of remarriages after divorce often becomes precarious. The incomplete institutionalization of ramarriage shows us, by way of contrast, that family unity in first marriages is still supported by effective institutional controls, despite claims that the institutional nature of family life has eroded in the 20th century. Some suggestions for future research on remarriage and on the institutionalization of married life are presented.

The Role and the Person

Abstract: As a complement to the familiar idea of self-conception, the concept of role-person merger is proposed as a more behavioral approach to understanding the social construction of personality than has been taken previously. Person and role are said to be merged when there is a systematic pattern involving failure of role compartmentalization, resistance to abandoning a role in the face of advantageous alternative roles, and the acquisition of role-appropriate attitudes. Three principles concerning appearance, effect, and consistency provide the basis for a series of propositions concerning interactive determinants of merger. Three other principles-consensual frames of reference, autonomy and favorable evaluation, and investment-provide the basis for propositions concerning individual determinants of roleperson merger. By each individual, some roles are put on and taken off like clothing without lasting personal effect. Other roles are difficult to put aside when a situation is changed and continue to color the way in which many of the individual's roles are performed. The question is not whether the role is played well or poorly or whether it is played with zest or quite casually. Role embracement (Goffman 1961b, p. 106) can coexist with strict role compartmentalization. An accomplished thespian can give himself unreservedly to a role and take great pride in producing a convincing portrayal of the part but return to being a very different kind of person when the play is over. The question is whether the attitudes and behavior developed as an expression of one role carry over into other situations. To the extent that they do, we shall speak of a merger of role with person. Many of the discrepahcies between role prescription and role behavior in organizations can be explained by the individual's inability to shed roles that are grounded in other settings and other stages of the life cycle. Merger of role with person is often the source of role conflict, as Killian (1952) demonstrated for emergency workers whose more deeply merged family roles infringed on the performance of their rescue roles in a disaster situation. When a role is deeply merged with the person, socialization in that role has pervasive effects in personality formation. When there is little 11 am grateful for support from the National Institute of Mental Health (grants USPHS MH 16505 and MH 26243) and comments from Steve Gordon, Sheldon Messinger, Jerald Schutte, Stephen Spitzer, Thomas Tyler, and Lewis Zurcher.

The Reciprocal Effects of the Substantive Complexity of Work and Intellectual Flexibility: A Longitudinal Assessment

Abstract: Our previous research, based on cross-sectional data, provided prima facie evidence of a reciprocal relationship between the substantive complexity of men's work and their intellectual flexibility. The present study employs longitudinal data to make a more definitive assessment. Using maximum-likelihood confirmatory factor analysis to separate measurement error from real change, it develops measurement models for both substantive complexity and intellectual flexibility. These models show that, over a 10-year time span, the "stability" of both variables, shorn of measurement error, is high, that of intellectual flexibility especially so. Nevertheless, a structural equation causal analysis demonstrates that the effect of the substantive complexity of work on intellectual flexibility is real and remarkably strong-on the order of one-fourth as great as the effect of men's earlier levels of intellectual flexibility on their present intellectual flexibility. The reciprocal effect of intellectual flexibility on substantive complexity is even more pronounced. This effect, however, is not contemporaneous but, rather, a lagged effect occurring more gradually over time.

Cross-National Evidence of the Effects of Foreign Investment and Aid on Economic Growth and Inequality: A Survey of Findings and a Reanalysis

Abstract: As an outgrowth of dependency theories of national development, there have been a large number of cross-national empirical studies of the effects of foreign investment and aid on economic growth and inequality. This paper reviews these studies in order to discover what can be concluded about these relationships. Our strategy is as follows: First, we discuss the conceptualization of the four main variables at issue. Second, we discuss the differences in the research designs and measuments in the studies. Third, we compare their results and explain contradictory and inconsistent findings. Fourth, we present some new analyses based on this review. We conclude: (1) The effect of direct foreign investment and aid has been to increase economic inequality within countries. (2) Flows of direct foreing investment and aid have had a short-term effect of increasing the relative rate of economic growth of countries. (3) Stocks of direct foreign investment and aid have had the cumulative, long-term effect of decreasin...

Social Class and Self-Esteem Among Children and Adults

Abstract: The literature on the relationship of social class to self-esteem is riddled with contradictions, showing positive, null, and inverse relationships. Two studies examinig this relationship are compared-one, a sample of children aged 8-18; the other, a sample of adults aged 18-65. The results indicate virtually no association for younger children, a modest association for adolescents, and a moderate association for adults. Four principles of self-esteem development are advanced to account for these conditional relations-social comparison processes, reflected appraisals, self-perception theory, and psychological centrality. It is suggested that these principles apply equally to adults and children and that the identical principles help to explain why social class should have different effects on the self-esteem of children and adults.

Social Movements in Organizations: Coup d'Etat, Insurgency, and Mass Movements

Abstract: Organizational change and conflict are conceptualized in social movement terms Using an analogy to social movements in the nation-state, a resource-mobilization approach is employed to examine the range of social movement phenomena in organizations Three major forms are distinguished-the coup d'etat, bureaucratic insurgency, and mass movements-which differ in their breadth, location in the organizational social structure, goals, and tactics Major attention is given to the occurrence of social movements in corporate hierarchical forms, although the approach is applicable also to social movement phenomena in federated and in voluntary associatins A number of illustrative hypotheses are given

Who Should Get What? Fairness Judgments of the Distribution of Earnings

Abstract: Previous traditions of distributive-justice research assume the existence of a normative structure for making judgments about fairness of allocations of social goods, such as earnings. Does a consensual normative framework for judging the fairness of distributions of earnings exist in the U.S. population? What principles underlie popular judgments concerning earnings distributions? Data indicate both that judgments of earnings fairness are not idiosyncratic and that they involve individual and group differences related to considerations of merit and need. Some tolerance for variation in earnings among house-holds is noted, and the same factors accounting for earnings-fairness judgments justify earnings considered fair. Considerable agreement exists concerning what principles are relevant to earnings-fairness judgments, while disagreement concerning how to apply these standards in practice is admitted. Apparently the standards for earnings judgments derive both from conceptions of the empirical distributio...

Substantive Theory and Statistical Interaction: Five Models

Abstract: For a series of theoretical models involving two independent interval-scale variables acting together to produce a joint causal effect, different modes of analysis are described. In each case statistical interaction is involved, but the form of this interation differs with each model. Methods for deriving appropriate interaction terms are given. These models provide a flexibility for statistical analyses appropriate to a broader range of theories than can be treated well by conventional regression procedures. If, as seems likely, theoretical propositions are often stated in empirical research in a form appropriate to additive multiple regression, these methods suggest that such propositions might be reexamined and reformulated. It is possible that the methods have particular relevance for some aspects of functional, equilibrium, balance, and conflict theories.

Group Formation and the Cultural Division of Labor

Abstract: A structural theory of the relationship between class and status group formation is presented. The approach postulates, first, that differences in the solidarity of any objectively defined groups are independently determined by the extent of stratification among these groups and interaction within them. These expectations are confirmed by an analysis of variation in the solidarity of 17 American ethnic groups in 1970. Second, the relative importance of class as against status group division in societies as a whole is held to depend upon the degree of hierarchy and segmentation of their respective cultural divisions of labor. Supportive evidence is found in the examination of differences in the strength of class voting among five Australian states in 1964.

Human values and the market: the case of life insurance and death in 19th-century America.

Abstract: Qualitative analysis of historical data concerning the diffusion of life insurance in the United States during the 19th century helps to explore the problem of establishing monetary equivalents for those aspects of the social order, such as death, that are culturally defined as above financial relationships. The financial evaluation of a man's life introduced by the life insurance industry was initially rejected by many as a profanation which transformed the sacred event of death into a vulgar commodity. By the latter part of the 19th century, the economic definition of the value of death became finally more acceptable, legitimating the life insurance enterprise. However, the monetary evaluation of death did not desacralize it; life insurance emerged as a new form of ritual with which to face death.

Growth, Politics, and the Stratification of Places'

Abstract: Systematic inequalities among interdependent places are described here as a dimension of stratification of persons and organizations. The "stratification of places" is compared with the classic dimensions of class and status as a basis of collective action, and it is argued that the competition of places is a significant cause of the territorial differentiation of human communities. This is an essay on the process of spatial differentiation of human communities. I argue that the differentiation of places implies sets of advantages and disadvantages for persons who are tied to each place and thus affects the chances for individual upward or downward mobility. A common response to this fact is a continuing collective effort to influence the pattern of development among places through political action. Places with early advantages, by making full political use of their superior resources, can potentially reinforce their relative position within the system of places. I hypothesize therefore that spatial differentiation tends to be transformed over time into an increasingly rigid stratification of places. The study of the development of systems of places found its classical formulation in human ecology. By emphasizing the stratification aspect of spatial differentiation I am proposing a reorientation toward a more political human ecology, with spatial differentiation seen not only as the population's natural selective response to its habitat but also as a means of organizing inequality.

On the Justice of Earnings: A New Specification of the Justice Evaluation Function

Abstract: This paper describes a new specification of the justice evaluation function. It predicts precisely and unambiguously the kind of injustice (i.e., underreward or overreward) and the degree of injustice associated with given departures from perfect justice. The new justice evaluation function was inducted from extensive analyses of survey data on the perceived justice or injustice of earnings. It is directly generalizable to cover all socially distributed goods, and hence I propose it as a candidate for a universal Law of Justice Evaluation in distributional matters. Finally, I suggest that such a Law of Justice Evaluation performs one of the three tasks essential to a scientific theory of distributive justice.

Token women: An empirical test of Kanter's hypothesis.

Abstract: In this article we test empirically Rosabeth Kanter's hypothesis that minority achievements are diminished by the underrepresntation of minority persons in majority-dominated work groups. using data on male and female achievements at two law schools with significantly different sex ratios, we find evidence that performance pressure, social isolation, and role entrapment all operate to diminish the achievements of women law students where they are only a small minority of the student body.

Arts and Crafts

Abstract: "Art" and "craft" are two contrasting kinds of aesthetic, work organization, and work ideology, differing in their emphases on the standards of utility, virtuoso skill, and beauty. Activities organized as craft can become art when members of established art worlds take over their media, techniques, and organizations. Conversely, through increased academicism or subordination of traditional art concerns to exigencies that arise outside an art world, activities organized as art can become craft.

Scientific Productivity, Sex, and Location in the Institution of Science

Abstract: Although sex differences in scientists' careers are often explained in terms of hypothesized productivity differences, little is known about the extent or bases of such differences. Comparisons for a sample of chemists indicate that men outpublished women, but to a smaller extent than is commonly supposed. Regression analyses document sex differences in the determinants of productivity, with women's productivity more responsive than men's to prestigious postdoctoral fellowships, employment in ternure-track university position, and collegial recognition.

Race, Class, and Income Inequality

Abstract: The basic thesis of this paper is that class, defined within the Marxist tradition as common position within the social relations of production, mediates racial differences in income returns to education. That is, class position is viewed as a determinant of the extent to which education can be transformed into income, and thus it is hypothesized that much of the commonly observed racial difference in returns to education is a consequence of the distribution of racial groups into class categories. The results of the study strongly confirm this perspective: the differences in returns to education between black and white males largely disappear when the regression equations are run within class positions.

Max Weber's Elective Affinities: Sociology Within the Bounds of Pure Reason

Abstract: Several scholars have called attention to the importance of Weber's use of the term "elective affinity," yet nowhere has the term received a treatment both systematic and historically founded. The present paper attempts to fill that gap. Each instance of Weber's usage is cited and discussed. Next, the place of elective affinity in his order of discourse is determined. Then, the lineage of the term in the histories of literature, chemistry, and philosophy is examined with special reference to Weber's knowledge of those histories. Two related terms, "affinity" and "inner affinity," are examined and brought into relationship with Weber's use of elective affinity. These materials suggest that elective affinity, conceived as an "idea" in the Kantian sense, would have served to answer the question, How is social science possible? which was implicit in the neo-Kantian framework of Weber's order of discourse.

Transitions over the Life Course: Lessons from Age-Set Societies1

Abstract: This study examines processes of life-course transitions in 21 African age-set societies, a group of preliterate societies where age is a major organizing principle, and compares processes of transition there with those in the United States today. The analysis challenges some longheld views about the putative smooth course of passage throught the life course in "simple" societies and troubled transitions in the United States. Despite the contrasting societal contexts, in both types of society transitions constitute immanent sources of tension: for the individual, conflicts between old and new roles and for the society, competition for rewarding roles. But in both contexts mechanisms emerge that serve to mitigate some transition difficulties. Even the processes of transition themselves are subject to change as a result of individual and societal adaptations to transitional problems and to social and environmental change. Some theoretical implications of these findings are explored.

Changing Public Policy: The Impact of Public Opinion, Antiwar Demonstrations, and War Costs on Senate Voting on Vietnam War Motions'

Abstract: A new approach to the study of legislative change enables us to deal directly and quantitatively with questions about how long-term changes in public policy come about. The approach is applied to the aggregate change of mind by the U.S. Senate as it moved from support of the Vietnam war to opposition from 1964 to 1973. Substantively, cumulative war costs, public opinion, and antiwar demonstrations all had significant effects on Senate roll call outcomes, but they were so highly intercorrelated that their separate effects could not be disentangled. In addition, demonstrations taking place in the months before a vote had a slight positive impact on the number of dovish votes received by motions. The 1970 invasion of Cambodia seems to have led to a significant turning point in the way the Senate dealt with the war. The general strengths and weaknesses of the new approach are assessed. It opens a new area to statistical inquiry and generates a number of novel questions that should lead to additional research.

Schooling and Socioeconomic Attainments: High School and College Influences

Abstract: The socioeconomic consequences of qualitative variations in educational experiences are evaluated for a sample of young adult males who were first surveyed in 1955 as high school sophomores and followed up in 1970. Models of institutional influence and of within-school processes are developed for both secondary and postsecondary education to integrate and refine the literatures on school effects and returns to schooling. Rather impressive occupational status and earnings differentials are associated with gross school-to-school differences and with qualitative differences in educational experiences within institutions. Secondary school characteristics and experiences weigh particularly upon the market outcomes of youth who terminated formal schooling at high school graduation. We suggest that the traditional use for quantitative indices of schooling (years of school completed or certification levels) in assessing the market consequences of investments in education needs to be supplemented by information on...

Approaches to Social Change and the Family

Abstract: The decade of the 1960s has emerged as a turning point of sorts in family studies, as a time when at least some analysts began to penetrate the cloud of social myths, ideologies, and rhetoric that had obscured historical realities in family life and lulled us into the false presumption of knowledge about the family in past time and its course to the present. Despite a rich legacy of sociological uses of history from the pre-1940 era, exemplified by Weber's The Protestant Ethic and Thomas and Znaniecki's The Polish Peasant,2 social research in the postwar years largely ignored the historical facts that are so vital in understanding family patterns?those of events, setting, circumstance, and especially time. A large share of analysis, which C. Wright Mills once chided for its misguided devotion to "grand theory" and "abstracted empiricism,"3 managed to sever families from their historical settings and from the specific social contexts in which they are embedded. The times were indeed conducive to fallacious interpretations of the family in the course of history, to ideologically inspired diagnoses and speculation, to the reification of abstractions and error-prone applications of high-level theory to concrete situations. Major historical studies in this era dealt less with families or domestic groups than with family systems in a highly abstract domain of generalizations. With social change widely acknowledged as the major intellectual problem of the discipline, it is noteworthy that few contemporary sociologists would quarrel with the judgment that useful theories are sadly lacking on the fam? ily in transition across several generations, and that unknowns far exceed solid knowledge on those primary causal forces in observed trends over the 1 Research for this essay was supported by grant MH-25834 from the National Institute of Mental Health to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Glen H. Elder, Jr., principal investigator). I am indebted to a number of colleagues, but especially to John Modell and Frank Furstenberg, for suggestions and criticism on initial drafts of the essay. 2 These two classics represent different models of social change: the strong, independent force of values in human action and change in Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Rise of Capitalistn (1958); and the interaction of values, resources, and situational demands in Thomas's theory of crisis and adaptation, as developed in The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1918-20), vols. 1 and 2. 3 Mills (1959) is referring in particular to the work and influence of two sociologists: grand theory as represented by Parsons (1951) and Lazarsfeld's contributions to empirical socio? logical analysis (1972).

Net Worth as an Aspect of Status

Abstract: While sociologists have recognized the importance of wealth for analysis of political power, they have given little attention to wealth as a measure of economic status. Yet from both a sociological and an economic point of view, wealth is an important determinant of status and life chances, especially at the end of the life cycle. In this paper we discuss the role of net worth as a component of status, and, using data from the National Longitudinal Studies of Labor Force Participation, we estimate a status-attainment model for net worth. Net worth includes savings, home equity, business assets, and real estate holdings. We find that (a) the effects of family background are transmitted via education; (b) the effect of education is asymptotic rather than linear; (c) single and divorced persons possess substantially fewer assets, net of other characteristics, than married persons; and (d) net of all other variables, earnings have a substantial effect on net worth. The effects of family background and socioec...

University Social Structure and Social Networks Among Scientists

Abstract: Findings are presented that describe the pattern of research communication among faculty in the six physical science departments of an elite American university. The findings provide a basis for modifying and extending Peter Blau's analysis of the relationship between university social structure and the pattern of communication among university faculty. Blau regards the formation of integrative multidisciplinary social networks within university communities as highly problematic; he suggests that academic departments are the primary site of integrative social networks within universities. My findings suggest that academic departments are not appropriate units for describing the pattern of research communication among university faculty, at least in the physical sciences, and that university social structure can foster an integrative social network which is multidisciplinary in composition. Proposals are introduced that relate facets of university social structure to the formation of integrative multidisci...

Urban-to-Rural Diffusion of Opinions in Contemporary America

Abstract: Recent studies indicate continuing cultural differences between residents of larger and smaller communities. This paper argues that these differences persist because they are constantly generated anew. Innovations emerge in metropolitan centers and diffuse from them to smaller places, so that there is always a gap between the two. Predictions from this model are evaluated with poll data, covering 20 years, on changing social attitudes. The results are consistent with the predictions. Patterns in the rates of opinion change indicate d hierarchical diffusion model in which early adoption and/or rate of diffusion are positively associated with community size.

The Timing of Marriage in the Transition to Adulthood: Continuity and Change, 1860-1975

Abstract: All societies are age graded to a degree and must, therefore, make some provision for marking and sanctioning the orderly passage from one stage of life to the next. The patterning of social transitions provides an unusually good site from which to observe regularities of a social system over time. Clearly, the ways in which such transitions are accomplished are not fixed features of any given society but are subject to renegotiation as social and economic conditions change. In turn, the alteration of social schedules may itself be a source of change, bringing about shifts in other social institutions. Such alterations, though sometimes subtle, are a prime subject for inquiry. Remarkably little attention in the literature on family history has been given to the subject of transitions. Most family scholars, attempting to depict change over time, have fixed their interest on shifts in household size, composition, and headship (Hareven 1976). In this excessive preoccupation with the organization of the household, more dynamic processes have been slighted; it is almost as though it were necessary to make the family stand still in order to appreciate that it has changed. Both on an aggregate and an individual level, it is easy to treat events

Income and Independence Effects on Marital Dissolution: Results from the Seattle and Denver Income-Maintenance Experiments

Abstract: Using data from the Seattle and Denver Income-Maintenance Experiments, this paper discusses the effects of income and changes in income on marital dissolution. In an earlier article, we presented evidence of an experimental impact on marital dissolution and discussed how the pattern of effects found could be accounted for by nonlinear income and independence effects. The income effect decrease the marital dissolution rate by increasing the family's economic well being. The independence effect increase the dissolution rate by reducing the economic dependence of the more dependent partner (usually the wife) on the marriage. In this article, we present a model of nonlinear income and independence effects that accounts for much of the experimental-control difference reported in the earlier paper. According to the model, the effect of an income-maintenance program on marital dissolution depends not only upon the magnitude of the payment a couple receives but also on their level of income before the program, th...

Ascription Versus Achievement in the Attribution of Family Social Status

Abstract: The social standing of families in our society is the result of collective evaluations of certain characteristics of family members. The most important characteristics are known to be the occupational and educational attainments of both husband and wife. Beyond such achieved characteristics, there are many ascribed characteristics which have been presumed to have importance in the determination of a family's social standing. This paper presents the results of research on the relative importance of a number of achieved and ascribed characteristics in the evaluation of family units. Social origins as indicated by parental social status and individual achievements as indicated by educational and occupational attainments are studied for their relative importance to the process of status attribution. We shwo that achievement is more important than ascription. However, the latter is quite important in the status evaluation of families in our society. Further, it is apparent that families are evaluated on the ba...