Showing papers in "American Journal of Sociology in 2001"

Networks as the Pipes and Prisms of the Market1

Abstract: This article draws an analytical distinction between two types of market uncertainty: egocentric, which refers to a focal actor’s uncertainty regarding the best way to convert a set of inputs to an output desired by a potential exchange partner, and altercentric, which denotes the uncertainty confronted by a focal actor’s exchange partners regarding the quality of the output that the focal actor brings to the market. Given this distinction, the article considers how the value of “structural holes” and market status vary with these two types of uncertainty. The article proposes that the value of structural holes increases with egocentric uncertainty, but not with altercentric uncertainty. In contrast, the value of status increases with altercentric uncertainty, but declines with egocentric uncertainty. Thus actors with networks rich in structural holes should sort into markets or market segments that are high in egocentric uncertainty; high‐status actors should sort into markets that are low in egocentric ...

Syndication Networks and the Spatial Distribution of Venture Capital Investments

Abstract: Sociological investigations of economic exchange reveal how institutions and social structures shape transaction patterns among economic actors. This article explores how interfirm networks in the U.S. venture capital (VC) market affect spatial patterns of exchange. Evidence suggests that information about potential investment opportunities generally circulates within geographic and industry spaces. In turn, the circumscribed flow of information within these spaces contributes to the geographic‐ and industry‐localization of VC investments. Empirical analyses demonstrate that the social networks in the VC community—built up through the industry’s extensive use of syndicated investing—diffuse information across boundaries and therefore expand the spatial radius of exchange. Venture capitalists that build axial positions in the industry’s coinvestment network invest more frequently in spatially distant companies. Thus, variation in actors’ positioning within the structure of the market appears to differentia...

Effectively Maintained Inequality: Education Transitions, Track Mobility, and Social Background Effects1

Abstract: This article proposes a general explanation for social background‐related inequality. Educational attainment research indicates that the later an education transition, the lower the social background effect. While some suggest life course changes in the parent‐child relationship or between‐family competition explain this pattern, others contend the result is a statistical artifact, and that the analytic strategy presupposes agents are irrationally myopic. This article addresses these criticisms by framing educational transitions in terms of students' movement through the stratified curriculum. Students select their stratum, one of which is dropping out. To make these choices, they consider their most recent salient performance. Using time‐varying performance measures to predict students' track placement/school continuation sustains the validity of the educational transitions approach and suggests substantively important social background effects even for nearly universal transitions. Results are consisten...

Race, School Integration, and Friendship Segregation in America1

Abstract: Integrated schools may still be substantively segregated if friendships fall within race. Drawing on contact theory, this study tests whether school organization affects friendship segregation in a national sample of adolescent friendship networks. The results show that friendship segregation peaks in moderately heterogeneous schools but declines at the highest heterogeneity levels. As suggested by contact theory, in schools where extracurricular activities are integrated, grades tightly bound friendship, and races mix within tracks, friendship segregation is less pronounced. The generally positive relation between heterogeneity and friendship segregation suggests that integration strategies built on concentrating minorities in large schools may accentuate friendship segregation.

Gender and the Career Choice Process: The Role of Biased Self-Assessments

Abstract: This article develops a supply‐side mechanism about how cultural beliefs about gender differentially influence the early career‐relevant decisions of men and women Cultural beliefs about gender are argued to bias individuals' perceptions of their competence at various career‐relevant tasks, controlling for actual ability To the extent that individuals then act on gender‐differentiated perceptions when making career decisions, cultural beliefs about gender channel men and women in substantially different career directions The hypotheses are evaluated by considering how gendered beliefs about mathematics impact individuals' assessments of their own mathematical competence, which, in turn, leads to gender differences in decisions to persist on a path toward a career in science, math, or engineering

An Affect Theory of Social Exchange

Abstract: This article develops a theory that explains how and when emotions, produced by social exchange, generate stronger or weaker ties to relations, groups, or networks. It is argued that social exchange produces positive or negative global feelings, which are internally rewarding or punishing. The theory indicates that social units (relations, groups, networks) are perceived as a source of these feelings, contingent on the degree of jointness in the exchange task. The jointness of the task is greatest if (1) actors find it difficult to distinguish their individual effects on or contributions to solving the exchange task (nonseparability) and (2) actors perceive a shared responsibility for success or failure at the exchange task. The theory explicates the effects of different exchange structures on these conditions and, in turn, on cohesion and solidarity. Implications are developed for network‐to‐group transformations.

Delinquent Peers Revisited: Does Network Structure Matter?1

Abstract: This study examines whether structural properties of friendship networks condition the association between friends' delinquency and an individual's own delinquent behavior. Data from the Add Health allows a more accurate conceptualization of the peer network and a more rigorous measurement of peer delinquency than previous research. Findings from this study indicate that friends' delinquency is associated with an adolescent's own delinquency involvement. However, characteristics of adolescents' friendship networks, such as its density and adolescents' centrality and popularity, condition the delinquency‐peer association. Network density, in particular, emerges as an important component of the delinquency‐peer association, with very cohesive networks containing stronger delinquency‐peer associations than those that are less cohesive. These findings suggest that it is necessary to consider the underlying structural properties of friendship networks in order to understand the impact of peer influence on adol...

Middle‐Status Conformity: Theoretical Restatement and Empirical Demonstration in Two Markets1

Abstract: This article aims to reestablish the long‐standing conjecture that conformity is high at the middle and low at either end of a status order. On a theoretical level, the article clarifies the basis for expecting such an inverted \documentclass{aastex} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{bm} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{pifont} \usepackage{stmaryrd} \usepackage{textcomp} \usepackage{portland,xspace} \usepackage{amsmath,amsxtra} \usepackage[OT2,OT1]{fontenc} ewcommand\cyr{ \renewcommand\rmdefault{wncyr} \renewcommand\sfdefault{wncyss} \renewcommand\encodingdefault{OT2} ormalfont \selectfont} \DeclareTextFontCommand{\textcyr}{\cyr} \pagestyle{empty} \DeclareMathSizes{10}{9}{7}{6} \begin{document} \landscape $\textsf{U}$\end{document} ‐shaped curve, taking care to specify key scope conditions on the social‐psychological orientations of the actors, the characteristics of the status structure, and the nature of the relevant actions. It also validates the conjecture...

Medical Innovation revisited: Social contagion versus marketing effort

Abstract: This article shows that Medical Innovation—the landmark study by Coleman, Katz, and Menzel—and several subsequent studies analyzing the diffusion of the drug tetracycline have confounded social contagion with marketing effects. The article describes the medical community’s understanding of tetracycline and how the drug was marketed. This situational analysis finds no reasons to expect social contagion; instead, aggressive marketing efforts may have played an important role. The Medical Innovation data set is reanalyzed and supplemented with newly collected advertising data. When marketing efforts are controlled for, contagion effects disappear. The article underscores the importance of controlling for potential confounds when studying the role of social contagion in innovation diffusion.

Black Neighbors, Higher Crime? The Role of Racial Stereotypes in Evaluations of Neighborhood Crime

Abstract: This article investigates the relationship between neighborhood racial composition and perceptions residents have of their neighborhood’s level of crime. The study uses questions about perceptions of neighborhood crime from surveys in Chicago, Seattle, and Baltimore, matched with census data and police department crime statistics. The percentage young black men in a neighborhood is positively associated with perceptions of the neighborhood crime level, even after controlling for two measures of crime rates and other neighborhood characteristics. This supports the view that stereotypes are influencing perceptions of neighborhood crime levels. Variation in effects by race of the perceiver and implications for racial segregation are discussed.

In Search of Excellence: Fads, Success Stories, and Adaptive Emulation1

Abstract: The faddishness of the business community is often noted and lamented but not well understood by standard models of innovation and diffusion. We combine arguments about organizational cognition and institutional mimicry to develop a model of adaptive emulation, where firms respond to perceived failure by imitating their most successful peers. Computational experiments show that this process generates empirically plausible cascades of adoption, even if innovations are entirely worthless. Faddish cycles are most robust across alternative treatments of managerial decision making where innovations have modest positive effects on outcomes. These results have broad implications for the faddishness of a business community increasingly marked by media‐driven accounts of success, and for the properties of organizational practices that are hot one day and cold the next.

Social capital and international migration: a test using information on family networks.

Abstract: This article uses a multistate hazard model to test the network hypothesis of social capital theory. The effects of family network ties on individual migration are estimated while controlling for measured and unmeasured conditions that influence migration risks for all family members. Results suggest that social network effects are robust to the introduction of controls for human capital, common household characteristics, and unobserved conditions. Estimates also confirm the ancillary hypothesis, which states that diffuse social capital distributed among community and household members strongly influences the likelihood of out‐migration, thus validating social capital theory in general and the network hypothesis in particular.

Promising the future: Virginity pledges and first intercourse

Abstract: Since 1993, in response to a movement sponsored by the Southern Baptist Church, over 2.5 million adolescents have taken public “virginity” pledges, in which they promise to abstain from sex until marriage. This paper explores the effect of those pledges on the transition to first intercourse. Adolescents who pledge are much less likely to have intercourse than adolescents who do not pledge. The delay effect is substantial. On the other hand, the pledge does not work for adolescents at all ages. Second, pledging delays intercourse only in contexts where there are some, but not too many, pledgers. The pledge works because it is embedded in an identity movement. Consequently, the pledge identity is meaningful only in contexts where it is at least partially nonnormative. Consequences of pledging are explored for those who break their promise. Promise breakers are less likely than others to use contraception at first intercourse.

Diversity Rhetoric and the Managerialization of Law

Abstract: This article examines the rise of diversity rhetoric in U.S. management and how that rhetoric reframes ideas inherent in civil rights law. Quantitative and qualitative content analyses of the professional management literature (mid‐1980s–mid‐1990s) illustrate a managerialization of law, a process by which legal ideas are refigured by managerial ways of thinking as they flow across the boundaries of legal fields and into managerial and organizational fields. The managerial conception of diversity adds a variety of nonlegal dimensions of diversity (e.g., personality traits) to the legally protected categories like race and sex, and it disassociates diversity from civil rights law.

Labor Pains: Change in Organizational Models and Employee Turnover in Young, High-Tech Firms

Abstract: Organizational theories, especially ecological perspectives, emphasize the disruptive effects of change. However, the mechanisms producing these effects are seldom examined explicitly. This article examines one such mechanism—employee turnover. Analyzing a sample of high‐technology start‐ups, we show that changes in the employment models or blueprints embraced by organizational leaders increase turnover, which in turn adversely affects subsequent organizational performance. Turnover associated with organizational change appears to be concentrated among the most senior employees, suggesting “old guard disenchantment” as the primary cause. The results are consistent with the claim of neoinstitutionalist scholars that founders impose cultural blueprints on nascent organizations and with the claim of organizational ecologists that altering such blueprints is disruptive and destabilizing.

Welfare regimes, family-supportive policies, and women's employment along the life-course

Abstract: This article examines women's employment patterns during thechild‐rearing period and the consequences of those patterns for earnings later in life, in 12 industralized countries. This study proposes an analytic framework that combines “welfare regime” and gender‐specific policies to explain country differences. The findings presented here suggest that institutional arrangements mediate the costs to women's part‐time and intermittent employment. Within welfare regimes, employment continuity is highest among countries in which the state provides support for working mothers. Furthermore, this study finds that lower support for mothers' employment is associated with higher wage penalties to employment discontinuity.

The Evolution of Norms1

Abstract: Social norms that induce us to reward or punish people not for what they did to us but for what they did to other members of one’s group have long been thought as sine qua non sociological and thus impossible to explain in terms of rational choice. This article shows how social norms can be deductively derived from principles of (boundedly) rational choice as mechanisms that are necessary to stabilize behaviors in a large class of evolutionary games.

Emergence in Sociology: Contemporary Philosophy of Mind and Some Implications for Sociological Theory1

Abstract: Many accounts of the micro‐macro link use the philosophical notion of emergence to argue that collective phenomena are collaboratively created by individuals yet are not reducible to explanation in terms of individuals. However, emergence has also been invoked by methodological individualists; they accept the existence of emergent social properties yet claim that such properties can be reduced to explanations in terms of individuals and their relationships. Thus, contemporary sociological uses of emergence are contradictory and unstable. This article clarifies this situation by developing an account of emergence based in contemporary philosophy of mind. The philosophical account is used to evaluate contradictory sociological theories. Several unresolved issues facing theories of emergence in sociology are identified.

Dynamics of niche width and resource partitioning.

Abstract: This article examines the effects of crowding in a market center on rates of change in organizational niche width and on organizational mortality. It proposes that, although firms with wide niches benefit from risk spreading and economies of scale, they are simultaneously exposed to intense competition. An analysis of organizational dynamics in automobile manufacturing firms in France, Germany, and Great Britain shows that competitive pressure not only increases the hazard of disbanding but also prompts organizational transformations that give rise to processes of resource partitioning. Emphasizing the content/process distinction in conceptualizing organizational change, the article finds that the process effect of changes in niche width and position increases mortality hazards. We discuss our findings in light of the processes investigated by the ecological theories of density dependence, resource partitioning, and structural inertia, and point to the theoretical links that help to integrate these theories.

Student Resistance: How the Formal and Informal Organization of Classrooms Facilitate Everyday Forms of Student Defiance1

Abstract: Critical and resistance theorists propose that race and class backgrounds influence everyday forms of student resistance in schools. This article argues that the microsocial process of student defiance is less characterized by individual traits of race and class than by the formal and informal organizational characteristics of social settings. Using unique data on resistance in multiple schools and classrooms, this article finds that defiant behaviors arise when instructional formats give students access to public discourse and when students have advantaged social network relations. Social opportunities of tasks, coupled with political opportunities of networks, enable students to consistently undermine and redirect classroom affairs. The results suggest that resistant behavior is more the result of organizational features of social networks and instruction than “alienation” factors, and is therefore rectifiable through classroom management.

The Demographic Imperative in Religious Change in the United States

Abstract: US Protestants are less likely to belong to “mainline” denominations and more likely to belong to “conservative” ones than used to be the case Evidence from the General Social Survey indicates that higher fertility and earlier childbearing among women from conservative denominations explains 76% of the observed trend for cohorts born between 1903 and 1973: conservative denominations have grown their own Mainline decline would have slowed in recent cohorts, but a drop‐off in conversions from conservative to mainline denominations prolonged the decline A recent rise in apostasy added a few percentage points to mainline decline Conversions from mainline to conservative denominations have not changed, so they played no role in the restructuring

Social change, the social organization of families, and fertility limitation

Abstract: The social organization of the family is a key link between macrolevel social change and individual‐level childbearing behavior. The family mode of organization framework and life course perspective are used to develop hypotheses about these links. To test those hypotheses, the analysis uses a combination of life history and neighborhood history measures designed explicitly for this purpose. Results from fully dynamic multilevel hazard models demonstrate both childhood and adult community contexts shape childbearing in independent ways. The results implicate a variety of specific mechanisms linking social change to fertility behavior: cost‐benefit analysis, ideational diffusion, and long‐term personality development. The results also show contextual characteristics at multiple points in the life course may each exert independent effects on individual outcomes.

Regulating American Industries: Markets, Politics, and the Institutional Determinants of Fire Insurance Regulation1

Abstract: This article assesses three approaches to state regulation: capture theory, interest group analyses, and neoinstitutional research. State‐level event history analyses of fire insurance rate regulation from 1906 to 1930 are used. Contrary to capture theory, regulation was not driven simply by firms’ interests in market control. Instead, consistent with interest group analyses, regulation was more likely when anticompany forces—farmers and small businesses—could challenge big business politically. Further, as neoinstitutional research suggests, regulation was more likely when industry governance evoked legitimacy crises, when courts and professions endorsed regulation and its underlying models, and when states developed system‐wide administrative capacities. Institutional conditions also mediated the effects of markets and politics on regulation. Using these findings, we develop a theory of how political and institutional conditions shape industries’ governance options.

Culture wars and opinion polarization: The case of abortion

Abstract: Recent observers have pointed to a growing polarization within the U.S. public over politicized moral issues—the so‐called culture wars. DiMaggio, Evans, and Bryson studied trends over the past 25 years in American opinion on a number of critical social issues, finding little evidence of increased polarization; abortion is the primary exception. However, their conclusions are suspect because they treat ordinal or nominal scales as interval data. This article proposes new methods for studying polarization using ordinal data and uses these to model the National Election Study (NES) abortion item. Whereas the analysis of this item by DiMaggio et al. points to increasing polarization of abortion attitudes between 1972 and 1994, this article's analyses of these data offers little support for this conclusion and lends weight to their view that recent concerns over polarization are overstated.

Career Advancement as Party Patronage: Sponsored Mobility into the Chinese Administrative Elite, 1949-1996

Abstract: Core features of mobility regimes are obscured by models common in comparative research. Party patronage in China is apparent only in the timing of career events. Elites are chosen from among party members, but only some are eventually chosen. Those who join the party while young enter a career path that includes sponsorship for adult education and more likely promotion. While the party's preference for youth from “red” classes has yielded to one for prior education, party sponsorship endures. Because patronage blurs distinctions between politics and merit, it confounds interpretations of returns to individual attributes.

Skill‐Biased Technological Change and Wage Inequality: Evidence from a Plant Retooling1

Abstract: One of the most popular explanations for the increased wage inequality that has occurred since the late 1970s is that technological change has resulted in a downward shift in the demand for low‐skill workers This pattern is also alleged to account for the growth in racial inequality in wages over the same period This article reports on a case study of the retooling of a food processing plant A unique, longitudinal, multimethod design reveals the nature of the technological change, the changes in job requirements, and the mechanisms by which the changes affect the wage distribution for hourly production workers This research finds that, indeed, the retooling resulted in greater wage dispersion and that the changes have also been associated with greater racial inequality in wages However, contrary to the claims of advocates of the skill‐bias hypothesis, organizational and human resources factors strongly mediated the impact of the changing technology Absent these “high road” organizational choices, th

Welfare state and infant mortality.

Abstract: This article seeks to understand the effects of welfare‐state spending on infant mortality rates. Infant mortality was chosen for its importance as a social indicator and its putative sensitivity to state action over a short time span. Country fixed‐effects models are used to determine that public health spending does have a significant impact in lowering infant mortality rates, net of other factors, such as economic development, and that this effect is cumulative over a five‐year time span. A net effect of health spending is also found, even when controlling for the level of spending in the year after which the outcome is measured (to account for spurious effects or reverse causation). State spending affects infant mortality both through social mechanisms and through medical ones. This article also shows that the impact of state spending may vary by the institutional structure of the welfare state. Finally, this study tests for structural breaks in the relationship between health spending and infant mort...

One Way or Multiple Paths: For a Comparative Sociology of East European Capitalism1

Abstract: While we were writing our book, Postsocialist Pathways, during the mid1990s, a friend in Budapest told us about a board game he had played as a child during the socialist period. Prior to the Second World War, Hungarians had played Monopoly, which they knew as Kapitaly. But the competitive game of capitalism was banned by communist authorities, who substituted another board game, Gazdalkodj Okosan! or “Economize Wisely.” In this goulash communist version of political correctness the goal was to get a job, open a savings account, and acquire and furnish an apartment. Our friend was too young to have had a Kapitaly board, but his older cousins from another part of the country knew the banned game and taught him the basic rules. You did not need to be a nine-yearold dissident to see that Monopoly was the more exciting game. And so they turned over the socialist board game, drew out the Kapitaly playing field from Start to Boardwalk on the reverse side, and began to play Monopoly—using the cards and pieces from Economize Wisely. But with the rules only intermittently regulated by the older cousins, the bricolaged game developed its own dynamics, stimulated by the cards and pieces from the “other side.” Why, for example, be satisfied with simple houses and hotels when you could have furniture as well? And under what configurations of play would a Prize of Socialist Labor be grounds for releasing you from or sending you to jail? The notion of playing capitalism with noncapitalist pieces strikes us as an apt metaphor for the postsocialist condition. The political upheavals of 1989 in Eastern Europe and 1991 in Russia turned the world upside

How Did the Increase in Economic Inequality between 1970 and 1990 Affect Children’s Educational Attainment?1

Abstract: This study estimates the effect of changes in economic inequality between 1970 and 1990 on children’s educational attainment. Data on individual children from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics is combined with other data on state characteristics. Growing up in a state with widespread economic inequality increases educational attainment for high-income children and lowers it for low-income children. Most of the effect is due to factors unassociated with family income or economic segregation in the state. These other factors include state spending for schooling and the increase in the returns to schooling over this period.

The Promotion Paradox: Organizational Mortality and Employee Promotion Chances in Silicon Valley Law Firms, 1946–19961

Abstract: This article argues that there is a “promotion paradox”—a negative relation between firm life chances and employee promotion chances. I argue that this is due to a firm’s bargaining power, which increases with the firm’s competitive strength. I find strong support using data on 50 years of Silicon Valley law firms and attorneys. Young, small, specialist, and low‐status firms are more likely to fail but are also contexts with the highest promotion likelihood. Moreover, except for those firms that are “near death,” an associate’s promotion likelihood increases with the law firm’s probability of failure.