Showing papers in "American Journal of Sociology in 2013"

For a Sociology of Expertise: The Social Origins of the Autism Epidemic

Abstract: This article endeavors to replace the sociology of professions with the more comprehensive and timely sociology of expertise. It suggests that we need to distinguish between experts and expertise as requiring two distinct modes of analysis that are not reducible to one another. It analyzes expertise as a network linking together agents, devices, concepts, and institutional and spatial arrangements. It also suggests rethinking how abstraction and power were analyzed in the sociology of professions. The utility of this approach is demonstrated by using it to explain the recent precipitous rise in autism diagnoses. This article shows that autism remained a rare disorder until the deinstitutionalization of mental retardation created a new institutional matrix within which a new set of actors—the parents of children with autism in alliance with psychologists and therapists—were able to forge an alternative network of expertise.

Financialization and U.S. Income Inequality, 1970-2008

Abstract: Focusing on U.S. nonfinance industries, we examine the connection between financialization and rising income inequality. We argue that the increasing reliance on earnings realized through financial channels decoupled the generation of surplus from production, strengthening owners’ and elite workers’ negotiating power relative to other workers. The result was an incremental exclusion of the general workforce from revenue-generating and compensation-setting processes. Using time-series cross-section data at the industry level, we find that increasing dependence on financial income, in the long run, is associated with reducing labor’s share of income, increasing top executives’ share of compensation, and increasing earnings dispersion among workers. Net of conventional explanations such as deunionization, globalization, technological change, and capital investment, the effects of financialization on all three dimensions of income inequality are substantial. Our counterfactual analysis suggests that financial...

The Power of Instability: Unraveling the Microfoundations of Bargained Authoritarianism in China

Abstract: This article develops an interactive and relational conception of infrastructural state power for studying the capacity of authoritarian regimes to absorb popular protests. Based on an ethnography of the grassroots state in moments of unrest in China, the authors identify three microfoundations of Chinese authoritarianism: protest bargaining, legal-bureaucratic absorption, and patron-clientelism. Adopting, respectively, the logics of market exchange, rule-bound games, and interpersonal bonds, these mechanisms have the effect of depoliticizing social unrest and constitute a lived experience of authoritarian domination as a non-zero-sum situation, totalizing and transparent yet permissive of room for maneuvering and bargaining. This heuristic framework calls for bringing the subjective experience of subordination back into the theorizing of state domination.

Overdoing gender: a test of the masculine overcompensation thesis

Abstract: The masculine overcompensation thesis asserts that men react to masculinity threats with extreme demonstrations of masculinity, a proposition tested here across four studies. In study 1, men and women were randomly given feedback suggesting they were either masculine or feminine. Women showed no effects when told they were masculine; however, men given feedback suggesting they were feminine expressed more support for war, homophobic attitudes, and interest in purchasing an SUV. Study 2 found that threatened men expressed greater support for, and desire to advance in, dominance hierarchies. Study 3 showed in a large-scale survey on a diverse sample that men who reported that social changes threatened the status of men also reported more homophopic and prodominance attitudes, support for war, and belief in male superiority. Finally, study 4 found that higher testosterone men showed stronger reactions to masculinity threats than those lower in testosterone. Together, these results support the masculine overc...

Coordinating Futures: Toward a Theory of Anticipation1

Abstract: This article presents a theoretical approach for studying the coordination of futures. Building off theories of temporality and action, the authors map three different modes of future making—protentions, trajectories, and temporal landscapes—that actors need to coordinate in order to make sense of action together. Using a wide range of empirical evidence, they then show that these modes of future-coordination are autonomous from each other, so that although they are connected, they can clash or move in disjointed directions in interaction. By focusing on the coordination and disjunctures of those three modes, the authors argue that sociologists can provide a methodological axis of comparison between cases; depict mechanisms through which other theoretical or empirical constructs—such as racism or late modernity—operate; and open a window into the ways in which people organize and coordinate their futures, a topic of inquiry in its own right.

Terrorist Events and Attitudes toward Immigrants: A Natural Experiment ⇤

Abstract: Using a quasi-experimental research design, this study examines the effect of terrorist events on the perception of immigrants across 65 regions in nine European countries. It first elaborates a theoretical argument that explains the effect of events and points to economic conditions, the size of the immigrant population, and personal contact as mediating factors. This argument is evaluated using the fact that the terror attack in Bali on October 12, 2002, occurred during the fieldwork period of the European Social Survey. The findings from this natural experiment reveal considerable cross-national and regional variation in the effect of the event and its temporal duration. The analysis on the regional level supports the argument about contextual variations in the response to the event and a second analysis based on the 2004 Madrid bombing confirms the study’s conclusions. Implications of the findings for societal responses to terror attacks, the literature on attitudes toward immigrants, and survey resea...

The Transformation of America’s Penal Order: A Historicized Political Sociology of Punishment1

Abstract: Comparative historical methods are used to explain the transformation of the US penal order in the second half of the 20th century The analysis of multiple state-level case studies and national-level narratives suggests that this transformation has three distinct, but interconnected, historical periods and reveals that the complex interaction between national and state-level politics and policy helps explain the growth in imprisonment between 1970 and 2001 Specifically, over time, national political competition, federal crime control policy, and federal court decisions helped create new state-level political innovation and special interest groups that compelled lawmakers to increasingly define the crime problem as a lack of punishment and to respond by putting more people in prison for longer periods of time In turn, state-level developments facilitated increasingly radical crime control politics and policies at the national level that reflected historical traditions found in Sun Belt states

Mate selection in cyberspace: The intersection of race, gender, and education

Abstract: In this article, the authors examine how race, gender, and education jointly shape interaction among heterosexual Internet daters. They find that racial homophily dominates mate-searching behavior for both men and women. A racial hierarchy emerges in the reciprocating process. Women respond only to men of similar or more dominant racial status, while nonblack men respond to all but black women. Significantly, the authors find that education does not mediate the observed racial preferences among white men and white women. White men and white women with a college degree are more likely to contact and to respond to white daters without a college degree than they are to black daters with a college degree.

Misdemeanor Justice: Control without Conviction1

Abstract: Current scholarship has explored how the carceral state governs and regulates populations. This literature has focused on prison and on the wide-reaching collateral consequences of a felony conviction. Despite the obvious importance of these findings, they capture only a portion of the criminal justice system’s operations. In most jurisdictions, misdemeanors, not felonies, constitute the bulk of criminal cases, and the number of such arrests is rising. This article explores a puzzling fact about New York City’s pioneering experiment in mass misdemeanor arrests: the preponderance result in no finding of guilt and no assignment of formal punishment. Drawing on two years of fieldwork, this article explores how the criminal justice system functions to regulate significant populations without conviction or sentencing. The author details the operation of penal power through the techniques of marking through criminal justice record keeping, the procedural hassle of case processing, and mandated performance evalu...

The Embeddedness of Adolescent Friendship Nominations: The Formation of Social Capital in Emergent Network Structures.

Abstract: Although research on social embeddedness and social capital confirms the value of friendship networks, little has been written about how social relations form and are structured by social institutions. Using data from the Adolescent Health and Academic Achievement study and the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, the authors show that the odds of a new friendship nomination were 1.77 times greater within clusters of high school students taking courses together than between them. The estimated effect cannot be attributed to exposure to peers in similar grade levels, indirect friendship links, or pair-level course overlap, and the finding is robust to alternative model specifications. The authors also show how tendencies associated with status hierarchy inhering in triadic friendship nominations are neutralized within the clusters. These results have implications for the production and distribution of social capital within social systems such as schools, giving the clusters social salience as ...

The Payoff to Skill in the Third Industrial Revolution1

Abstract: Is the third industrial revolution indeed driven by rising payoffs to skill? This simple but important question has gone unanswered because conventional models of earnings inequality are based on exceedingly weak measurements of skill. By attaching occupational skill measurements to the 1979–2010 Current Population Surveys, it becomes possible to adjudicate competing accounts of the changing returns to cognitive, creative, technical, and social skill. The well-known increase in between-occupation inequality is fully explained when such skills are taken into account, while returns to schooling prove to be quite stable once correlated changes in workplace skills are parsed out. The most important trend, however, is a precipitous increase in the wage payoff to synthesis, critical thinking, and related “analytic skills.” The payoff to technical and creative skills, often touted in discussions of the third industrial revolution, is shown to be less substantial.

Understanding Latin American Beliefs about Racial Inequality1

Abstract: Scholars argue that Latin American ideologies of mestizaje, or racial mixing, mask ethnoracial discrimination. We examine popular explanations for indigenous or Afrodescendant disadvantage in Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, and Peru using the 2010 AmericasBarometer survey. Findings show that numerical majorities across all countries endorse structural-disadvantage explanations and reject victim-blaming stances; in seven of eight countries, they specifically recognize discrimination against ethnoracial minorities. Brazilians most point to structural causes, while Bolivians are least likely to recognize discrimination. While educational status differences tend to be sizable, dominant and minority explanations are similar. Both are comparable to African-American views and contrast with those of U.S. whites.

The Self-Expressive Edge of Occupational Sex Segregation1

Abstract: Recent gender scholarship speculates that occupational sex segregation is reproduced in large part through the gendered, self-expressive career decisions of men and women. This article examines the effects of college students’ expression of their self-conceptions on their likelihood of entering occupations with a high or low proportion of women and theorizes the consequences of this mechanism for gender inequality. The author uses unique longitudinal data on students from four U.S. colleges to examine how the gender composition of students’ field at career launch is influenced by their earlier self-conceptions. Students with emotional, unsystematic, or people-oriented self-conceptions enter fields that are more “female,” even net of their cultural gender beliefs. Results suggest that cultural ideals of self-expression reinforce occupational sex segregation by converting gender-stereotypical self-conceptions into self-expressive career choices. The discussion section broadens this theoretical framework for...

Betrayal as Market Barrier: Identity-Based Limits to Diversification among High-Status Corporate Law Firms1

Abstract: Why are some diversified market identities problematic but others are not? We examine this question in the context of high-status corporate law firms, which often diversify into one low-status area of work—family law (FL)—but face a barrier (strong disapproval from existing clients) that prevents diversification into another such area—plaintiffs’ personal injury law (PIL). Drawing on a qualitative study of the Boston legal market, we argue that this barrier reflects a situation where loyalty norms have been violated, and it surfaces because service to individual plaintiffs is tantamount to betraying the interests of corporate clients. Our analysis clarifies identity-based limits to diversification, indicating that they are rooted in concerns about the firm’s commitments as well as its capabilities, and suggests a more general refinement of theory on status and conformity.

Funding Immigrant Organizations: Suburban Free Riding and Local Civic Presence

Abstract: The authors argue that taken-for-granted notions of deservingness and legitimacy among local government officials affect funding allocations for organizations serving disadvantaged immigrants, even in politically progressive places. Analysis of Community Development Block Grant data in the San Francisco Bay Area reveals significant inequality in grants making to immigrant organizations across central cities and suburbs. With data from 142 interviews and documentary evidence, the authors elaborate how a history of continuous migration builds norms of inclusion and civic capacity for public-private partnerships. They also identify the phenomenon of “suburban free riding” to explain how and why suburban officials rely on central city resources to serve immigrants, but do not build and fund partnerships with immigrant organizations in their own jurisdictions. The analysis affirms the importance of distinguishing between types of immigrant destinations, but argues that scholars need to do so using a regional lens.

Exposure to classroom poverty and test score achievement: Contextual effects or selection?

Abstract: It is widely believed that impoverished contexts harm children. Disentangling the effects of family background from the effects of other social contexts, however, is complex, making causal claims difficult to verify. This study examines the effect of exposure to classroom poverty on student test achievement using data on a cohort of children followed from third through eighth grade. Cross-sectional methods reveal a substantial negative association between exposure to high-poverty classrooms and test scores; this association grows with grade level, becoming especially large for middle school students. Growth models, however, produce much smaller effects of classroom poverty exposure on academic achievement. Even smaller effects emerge from student fixed-effects models that control for time-invariant unobservables and from marginal structural models that adjust for observable time-dependent confounding. These findings suggest that causal claims about the effects of classroom poverty exposure on achievement ...

Disavowing Politics: : Civic Engagement in an Era of Political Skepticism

Abstract: Today, Americans are simultaneously skeptical of and engaged with political life. How does widespread cynicism affect the culture of civic participation? What are the implications for democracy? This study synthesizes data from a one-year collective ethnography of seven civic groups and theoretical work on boundary making, ambiguity, and role distancing. The authors find skepticism generates “disavowal of the political,” a cultural idiom that allows people to creatively constitute what they imagine to be appropriate forms of engagement. Disavowal generates taboos, and the authors show how disdain for conflict and special interests challenges activism around inequality. Political disavowal both facilitates and constrains civic engagement in an era of political skepticism.

Making the connection: Social bonding in courtship situations

Abstract: Sociologists have long argued that the force of a social bond resides in a sense of interpersonal connection. This is especially true for initial courtship encounters when pairs report a sense of interpersonal chemistry. The authors explore the process of romantic bonding by applying interaction ritual theory, extended and integrated with methods from computational linguistics, to the study of courtship encounters and, specifically, heterosexual speed dating. The authors find that the assortment of interpersonal moves associated with a sense of connection characterizes a conventionalized form of initial courtship activity. The game is successfully played when females are the point of focus and engaged in the conversation and males demonstrate alignment with and understanding of the female. In short, initial heterosexual courtship encounters are associated with a sense of bonding when they reflect a reciprocal asymmetrical performance in which differentiated roles are mutually coordinated.

A Pragmatist Approach to Causality in Ethnography

Abstract: Drawing on early pragmatist theorizing, the authors propose three interrelated methodological activities for the construction of robust causal claims in ethnographic research. First, Charles S. Peirce’s semiotic approach offers ethnographers a useful foundation for a mechanism-based approach to causality by tracing iterations of meaning-making-in-action. Second, taking advantage of the structure of Peirce’s semiotics ethnographers can examine three forms of observed variation to distinguish regularly occurring causal sequences and temporally and spatially remote causal processes. Third, the authors emphasize that the standards to evaluate causal arguments—their plausibility and assessments of explanatory fit—are always made in relation to challenges provided within a disciplinary community of inquiry. The use-value of the pragmatic approach to causality is demonstrated with an explanation of the different reactions of parents and clinicians to positive newborn screening results.

Racialized Conflict and Policy Spillover Effects: The Role of Race in the Contemporary U.S. Welfare State1

Abstract: This article introduces a racialized conflict theory to explain how racial divisions structure welfare state development in the absence of de jure discrimination. The author explains the effect of racial divisions on policy outcomes as the result of the attitudinal, cultural, and political spillover effects of prevailing conflicts in a social field. Using a paired-case comparison and analysis of multiple data sources, the author applies this theory to analyze Georgia’s and Alabama’s surprisingly divergent welfare reforms in the 1990s. Results support the racialized conflict theory and suggest important revisions to prevailing theories about the sociopolitical effects of contemporary racial divides.

Styles of causal thought: an empirical investigation

Abstract: While most work on causation in ethnography addresses the normative question of what ethnographers should do, this article addresses the empirical question of what ethnographers actually do. Specifically, it investigates whether ethnographic articles make causal arguments and how these arguments are made. The authors draw on a content analysis of 48 ethnographic articles sampled from four groups of sociological journals: contemporary generalist journals, contemporary specialist journals, mid-20th-century generalist journals—all in the United States—and contemporary generalist journals in Mexico. They find that ethnographies in U.S. contemporary generalist journals are most likely to advance strong and central causal claims and to use logical and rhetorical devices comparable to those used in quantitative articles. They also find that most Mexican ethnographic articles undertake a different kind of project, which they call “shedding light” on social phenomena. In addition to offering one methodological and...

The Demography of Social Mobility: Black-White Differences in the Process of Educational Reproduction1

Abstract: Increases in women’s education represent one of the most wide-reaching socioeconomic changes of recent decades. But how much will future generations benefit from these gains, and will black and white Americans benefit equally? Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, this study examines differences in the process of educational reproduction for black and white Americans. The approach considers the implication of race and education differences in marriage, assortative mating, and fertility in the parent generation on the distribution of schooling in the next generation. The analyses use a dynamic, multidimensional model that allows for intergenerational pathways at the individual, family, and population levels. The results show that these demographic mechanisms play an important role in explaining race differences in educational reproduction. Ignoring these pathways underestimates intergenerational effects for whites and overestimates them for blacks.

Diversity, Integration, and Social Ties: Attraction versus Repulsion as Drivers of Intra- and Intergroup Relations1

Abstract: Interethnic and intergroup social ties are critical to knitting together increasingly diverse societies into cohesive wholes. Yet their formation faces the homophily hurdle: important and intimate social ties tend to be established disproportionately between those sharing significant social attributes. In the spirit of analytical sociology, the author explores two mechanisms that could drive intra- and intergroup relations: attraction to similar versus repulsion from dissimilar others. The models differ in predictions as illustrated by data on interethnic marriages in Great Britain and the United States, on U.S. dating and cohabitation relations by religion and education, on educational diversity in marriages in 22 European countries, and on marriages of the native and foreign-born in Austria. A unified model for the two mechanisms, in which tie formation is a conceptualized as a two-stage process of encounter and consummation, is proposed, and its empirical and theoretical analysis provides deeper unders...

Interethnic Friendship, Trust, and Tolerance : Findings from Two North Iraqi Cities

Abstract: This article examines correlates of social trust and tolerance within a high-violence context. The authors study first the extent to which friendship ties that cross ethnic boundaries are associated with specific interaction spaces (neighborhoods, workplaces, civil society organizations, and political parties) and, second, the extent to which interethnic friendships are associated with trust and tolerance. Using individual-level data () on interethnic contacts collected in 2006 in the two northern Iraqi cities of Erbil and Kirkuk, the authors show that people who spend time within ethnically heterogeneous interaction spaces are considerably more likely to have friendship ties that cross ethnic group boundaries and, in turn, also to express general social trust, interethnic trust, and tolerance toward outgroups.

Social Organization, Collective Sentiment, and Legal Sanctions in Murder Cases

Abstract: The traditional “jurisprudential model” of law views the application of legal sanctions primarily as a function of the facts of the case and the rules that govern the proceedings. Sociology of law scholars have challenged this model on theoretical grounds, arguing persuasively that law is variable and often yields patterns that parallel broader considerations of community social organization and collective sentiment. The authors' analysis yields evidence that the certainty and severity of sanctions for murder cases are heightened where social capital is more plentiful, religious fundamentalist values more prevalent, and support for punitive sanctions is greater. They also find that sentences given to murder defendants are longer in areas in which the public expresses higher levels of fear. Overall, the findings provide provocative evidence that legal outcomes in murder cases are influenced by several features of the social environments in which they are processed.

Spanning the Institutional Abyss: The Intergovernmental Network and the Governance of Foreign Direct Investment

Abstract: Global economic transactions such as foreign direct investment (FDI) must extend over an institutional abyss between the jurisdiction, and therefore protection, of the states involved. Intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) represent an important attempt to span this abyss. The authors use a network approach to demonstrate that the connections between two countries, through joint membership in the same IGOs, are associated with a large positive influence on the FDI that flows between them. Moreover, they show that this effect occurs not only in the case of connections through economic IGOs but also through those with social and cultural mandates. This demonstrates that relational governance is important and feasible in the global context, even for the most risky transactions. The authors also examine the interdependence between the IGO network and the domestic institutions of states. Social and cultural IGO connections do more and economic IGO connections less to increase FDI when the target country is mo...

Relative deprivation and internal migration in the United States: A comparison of black and white men.

Abstract: While the link between geographic and social mobility has long been a cornerstone of sociological approaches to migration, recent research has cast doubt on the economic returns to internal U.S. migration. Moreover, important racial disparities in migration patterns remain poorly understood. Drawing on data from the 2000 census, the author reappraises the link between migration and social mobility by taking relative deprivation into consideration. She examines the association between migration, disaggregated by region of origin and destination, and absolute and relative earnings and occupational prestige, separately by race. Findings lend new insight into the theoretical and stratification implications of growing racial disparities in migration patterns; while both blacks and whites who move north-south generally average lower absolute incomes than their stationary northern peers, they enjoy significantly higher relative social positions. Moreover, the relative “gains” to migration are substantially large...

The Sacralization of the Individual: Human Rights and the Abolition of the Death Penalty1

Abstract: In the latter half of the 20th century, countries abolished the death penalty en masse. What factors help to explain this global trend? Conventional analyses explain abolition by focusing primarily on state level political processes. This article contributes to these studies by analyzing world cultural factors that lend to the abolition trend. The main finding in three separate models on full, ordinary, and de facto cumulative measures of abolition show that the global sacralization of the individual, measured as the institutionalization of the human rights regime, represents a significant driver of states’ abolition. Countries’ predominant religion is also found to significantly affect the probability of abolition: predominantly Catholic nation-states are most likely to abolish the death penalty, and predominantly Muslim nation-states are least likely to abolish. These findings provide evidence for world cultural factors that structure the abolition trend globally.

Challenger Groups, Commercial Organizations, and Policy Enactment: Local Lesbian/Gay Rights Ordinances in the United States from 1972 to 20081

Abstract: Drawing on theories of social movements and organizations, the authors examine how the expanding presence of commercial organizations and the growing diversity of their forms foster policy change securing rights for a group of challengers. In particular, they suggest that these organizations can operate as bridges and can signal the legitimacy of the group in a community. Empirically, they analyze organizations linked to lesbians/gays and the promulgation of local ordinances banning discrimination, using a data set covering American counties from 1972 to 2008. Using hazard models, they find that the rate of policy enactment increases (1) with greater presence of lesbian/gay commercial organizations, particularly of those linking toward the larger community, and (2) with greater diversity of their organizational forms. Finally, they find evidence that commercial and political organizations are linked in a complex way.

The transformation of prison regimes in late capitalist societies

Abstract: Recent studies argue that cultural and political-economic shifts have led to a sea change in penal regimes among modern Western societies, resulting in more punitive social policies in general and a trend toward higher incarceration rates in particular. This is a special case of a wider argument that globalization has led to a decline in state autonomy and convergence on a market-based model of economic and social policy. This thesis has been challenged by the empirical literature on welfare states, which finds persistent cross-national diversity in institutional structures, policies, and patterns of inequality. Focusing on incarceration rates as the outcome of interest, this study evaluates these arguments by applying a Bayesian change-point model to four decades of data from 15 countries. Results show that a regime shift did occur but that incarceration rates increased mainly among countries with unregulated labor markets, decentralized polities, or weak labor unions. Profound institutional differences ...