Showing papers in "Review of Sociology in 2000"

Framing Processes and Social Movements: An Overview and Assessment

Abstract: ■ Abstract The recent proliferation of scholarship on collective action frames and framing processes in relation to social movements indicates that framing processes have come to be regarded, alongside resource mobilization and political opportunity processes, as a central dynamic in understanding the character and course of social movements. This review examines the analytic utility of the framing literature for un- derstanding social movement dynamics. We first review how collective action frames have been conceptualized, including their characteristic and variable features. We then examine the literature related to framing dynamics and processes. Next we review the literature regarding various contextual factors that constrain and facilitate framing processes. We conclude with an elaboration of the consequences of framing processes for other movement processes and outcomes. We seek throughout to provide clarifi- cation of the linkages between framing concepts/processes and other conceptual and theoretical formulations relevant to social movements, such as schemas and ideology.

A Space for Place in Sociology

Abstract: Sociological studies sensitive to the issue of place are rarely labeled thus, and at the same time there are far too many of them to fit in this review. It may be a good thing that this research is seldom gathered up as a “sociology of place,” for that could ghettoize the subject as something of interest only to geographers, architects, or environmental historians. The point of this review is to indicate that sociologists have a stake in place no matter what they analyze, or how: The works cited below emplace inequality, difference, power, politics, interaction, community, social movements, deviance, crime, life course, science, identity, memory, history. After a prologue of definitions and methodological ruminations, I ask: How do places come to be the way they are, and how do places matter for social practices and historical change?

Pathways to Adulthood in Changing Societies: Variability and Mechanisms in Life Course Perspective

Abstract: The transition to adulthood has become a thriving area of research in life course studies. This review is organized around two of the field's emerging themes. The first theme is the increasing variability in pathways to adult roles through historical time. The second theme is a heightened sensitivity to transition behaviors as developmental processes. Accounts of such processes typically examine the active efforts of young people to shape their biographies or the socially structured opportunities and limitations that define pathways into adulthood. By joining these concepts, I suggest new lines of inquiry that focus on the interplay between agency and social structures in the shaping of lives.

Nonstandard Employment Relations: Part-time, Temporary and Contract Work

Abstract: Nonstandard employment relations—such as part-time work, temporary help agency and contract company employment, short-term and contingent work, and independent contracting—have become increasingly prominent ways of organizing work in recent years. Our understanding of these nonstandard work arrangements has been hampered by inconsistent definitions, often inadequate measures, and the paucity of comparative research. This chapter reviews the emerging research on these nonstandard work arrangements. The review emphasizes the multidisciplinary nature of contributions to this field, including research by a variety of sociologists, economists, and psychologists. It also focuses on cross-national research, which is needed to investigate how macroeconomic, political, and institutional factors affect the nature of employment relations. Areas for future research are suggested.

Fertility and women's employment in industrialized nations

Abstract: The association between fertility and womens labor force activity reflects the incompatibility between caring for the children and participating in economically productive work that typifies industrialized societies. Women who wish to participate in the labor force must either limit their fertility or make alternative arrangements for the care of their children. As a result fertility rates in most countries are below the level needed for population replacement and rising proportion of children are in non-maternal care while their mothers work. In the assumption that women either limit their fertility to accommodate their force activity or they adjust their labor force behavior to their fertility evidence suggests that women do both. A substantial body of individual-level research describes the various strategies by which women in industrialized settings accommodate their employment patterns to their fertility and their fertility to their labor force participation. The evidence also suggests that strategies vary across national settings and that the ability to combine labor force participation and motherhood varies across countries.

Multilevel Modeling for Binary Data

Abstract: We review some of the work of the past ten years that applied the multilevel logit model. We attempt to provide a brief description of the hypothesis tested, the hierarchical data structure analyzed, and the multilevel data source for each piece of work we have reviewed. We have also reviewed the technical literature and worked out two examples on multilevel models for binary outcomes. The review and examples serve two purposes: First, they are designed to assist in all aspects of working with multilevel models for binary outcomes, including model conceptualization, model description for a research report, understanding of the structure of required multilevel data, estimation of the model via a generally available statistical package, and interpretation of the results. Second, our examples contribute to the evaluation of the approximation procedures for binary multilevel models that have been implemented for general public use.

Social Psychology of Identities

Abstract: In this chapter I review the social psychological underpinnings of identity, emphasizing social cognitive and symbolic interactionist perspectives and research, and I turn then to key themes of current work on identity—social psychological, sociological, and interdisciplinary. I emphasize the social bases of identity, particularly identities based on ethnicity, race, sexuality, gender, class, age, and (dis)ability, both separately and as they intersect. I also take up identities based on space, both geographic and virtual. I discuss struggles over identities, organized by social inequalities, nationalisms, and social movements. I conclude by discussing postmodernist conceptions of identities as fluid, multidimensional, personalized social constructions that reflect sociohistorical contexts, approaches remarkably consistent with recent empirical social psychological research, and I argue explicitly for a politicized social psychology of identities that brings together the structures of everyday lives and t...

Cohabitation in the United States: An Appraisal of Research Themes, Findings, and Implications

Abstract: Cohabitation has risen dramatically in the United States in a very short time. So, too, has the amount of sociological research devoted to the topic. In the span of a bit more than a decade, family sociologists and demographers have produced a large and rich body of research, ranging from documentation of cohabitation to assessment of its various consequences and implications. I first review basic descriptive findings about cohabitation as well as common explanations for its striking increase over recent decades. I next identify the central questions motivating most of the extant research and provide an assessment of past research as a whole. Finally, I speculate about themes that will be central to future research on cohabitation and consider the implications of cohabitation for gender equality in the United States and social science research on families.

Double Standards for Competence: Theory and Research

Abstract: This article reviews theory and research on double standards, namely, the use of different requirements for the inference of possession of an attribute, depending on the individuals being assessed. The article focuses on double standards for competence in task groups and begins by examining how status characteristics (e.g. gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic class) become a basis for stricter standards for the lower status person. I also discuss other bases for this practice (e.g. personality characteristics, allocated rewards, sentiments of either like or dislike). Next, I describe double standards in the inference of other types of valued attributes (e.g. beauty, morality, mental health) and examine the relationship between these practices and competence double standards. The article concludes with a discussion of “reverse” double standards for competence, namely, the practice of applying more lenient ability standards to lower status individuals.

Wealth inequality in the united states

Abstract: Wealth ownership in the United States has long been concentrated in the hands of a small minority of the population, yet researchers have paid relatively little attention to the causes and consequences of this inequality. In this essay, we review the literature that does exist on wealth accumulation and distribution. We begin with an examination of the reasons that wealth inequality has received little empirical attention. We then discuss methods of creating empirical estimates of wealth accumulation and distribution, and we present some estimates of recent trends in wealth inequality. We explore a diverse collection of research that explains these trends, covering treatments of aggregate influences and individual and household factors. We conclude the chapter with a review of research on intergenerational processes and wealth mobility.

Race and Race Theory

Abstract: Race has always been a significant sociological theme, from the founding of the field and the formulation of classical theoretical statements to the present. Since the nineteenth century, sociological perspectives on race have developed and changed, always reflecting shifts in large-scale political processes. In the classical period, colonialism and biologistic racism held sway. As the twentieth century dawned, sociology came to be dominated by US-based figures. DuBois and the Chicago School presented the first notable challenges to the field's racist assumptions. In the aftermath of World War II, with the destruction of European colonialism, the rise of the civil rights movement, and the surge in migration on a world scale, the sociology of race became a central topic. The field moved toward a more critical, more egalitarian awareness of race, focused particularly on the overcoming of prejudice and discrimination. Although the recognition of these problems increased and political reforms made some headwa...

The choice-within-constraints new institutionalism and implications for sociology

Abstract: The variant of new institutionalism that is our focus is a pan-disciplinary theory that asserts that actors pursue their interests by making choices within institutional constraints. We organize our review of the theory around its behavioral assumptions, the operation of institutional forms, and processes of institutional change. At each stage, we give particular attention to the potential contributions of sociology to the theory. The behavioral assumptions of the theory amount to bounded rationality and imply transaction costs, which, in the absence of institutions, may frustrate collective ends. The principle weakness of these behavioral assumptions is a failure to treat preferences as endogenous. We categorize the institutions that arise in response to transaction costs as to whether they are public or private in their source and centralized or decentralized in their making. In detailing the resulting categories of institutional forms, we identify key interdependencies across the public/private and cen...

Wealth and Stratification Processes

Abstract: This paper reviews current information on wealth trends, with particular attention to the role of household wealth in the stratification system. The first section considers the relevance of wealth for stratification processes and examines why an appreciation of household wealth has been slow to materialize in stratification research. Subsequent sections discuss aspects of the distribution of household wealth in the United States, the transmission of inequality across generations, and implications of a consideration of wealth for stratification theory and social policy. The concluding section conveys some observations about the need for developing models of consumption potential and living standards, akin to the socioeconomic attainment formulation, which incorporate measures of household wealth and the transmission of wealth.

Prejudice, politics, and public opinion : Understanding the sources of racial policy attitudes

Abstract: This review examines the intersection of prejudice, politics, and public opinion. It focuses specifically on research that seeks to understand the sources of attitudes toward policies intended to benefit African Americans and other racial/ethnic minorities by ensuring equal treatment, providing opportunity enhancement, or striving for equal outcomes. After a review of the main patterns of white and African-American public opinion on this topic, three central theoretical interpretations of racial policy attitudes—new racism, politics and nonracial principles and values, and group conflict theories—are described and compared. The empirical evidence for each approach is assessed. Finally, directions of research that pursue a more complex view of racial policy attitudes are introduced. These include efforts to incorporate insights across theoretical domains as well as correcting an overemphasis on cognitive issues to the exclusion of affect. In addition, gaps in our understanding of “non-white” attitudes, non...

Racial and Ethnic Variations in Gender-Related Attitudes

Abstract: Research on how gender-related attitudes vary across racial/ethnic groups has produced contradictory results, depending upon the type of attitudes addressed. In this chapter, I review the literature on racial and ethnic variations in three broadly defined types of gender attitudes: attitudes toward gender roles; beliefs about the origins and extent of gender inequality; and preferences for social action to reduce gender inequalities. I address three racial/ethnic groups in the United States: African Americans, whites, and Hispanic Americans. While research on attitudes toward gender roles has yielded mixed results, research addressing attitudes within the other two domains clearly indicates greater criticism of genderinequality among African Americans relative to whites; research on the various groups often combined under the label Hispanic is too limited to draw any clear conclusions. Along with addressing variations across these three types of gender-related attitudes, I also summarize several other pat...

Schools and Communities: Ecological and Institutional Dimensions

Abstract: Research on the relationship between schools and communities has reemerged as a principal focus of the sociology of education. Current research, however, rejects earlier conceptualizations of school communities as being organized locally and identifiable by reference to demographic and neighborhood characteristics. Neoinstitutional research on schools has focused examination instead on school communities defined as organizational fields. From this perspective, state regulation, professional associations, and market competition are institutional forces that combine with local neighborhood characteristics to shape school-level practices. The historical development of this theoretical approach is first discussed; current research on neighborhood effects is then critiqued for ignoring how schools vary in response to institutional environments; finally, examples of the utility of a broader institutional conceptualization of community are suggested in five current areas of educational research: racial segregati...

How Welfare Reform is Affecting Women's Work

Abstract: The new welfare system mandates participation in work activity. We review the evolution of the 1996 legislation and how states implement welfare reform. We examine evidence on recipients' employment, well-being, and future earnings potential to assess the role of welfare in women's work. Policies rewarding work and penalizing nonwork, such as sanctions, time limits, diversion, and earnings “disregards,” vary across states. While caseloads fell and employment rose, most women who left welfare work in low-wage jobs without benefits. Large minorities report material hardships and face barriers to work including depression, low skills, or no transportation. And disposable income decreased among the poorest female-headed families. Among the important challenges for future research is to differentiate between the effects of welfare reform, the economy, and other policies on women's work, and to assess how variations in state welfare programs affect caseloads and employment outcomes of recipients.

Closing the “Great Divide”: New Social Theory on Society and Nature

Abstract: Twenty years ago, two environmental sociologists made a bold call for a paradigmatic shift in the discipline of sociology—namely, one that would bring nature into the center of sociological inquiry and recognize the inseparability of nature and society. In this essay, we review recent scholarship that seeks to meet this challenge. The respective strands of this literature come from the margins of environmental sociology and border on other arenas of social theory production, including neo-Marxism, political ecology, materialist feminism, and social studies of science. Bringing together scholars from sociology, anthropology, geography, and history, each of these strands offers what we consider the most innovative new work trying to move sociology beyond the nature/society divide.

Ethnicity and Sexuality

Abstract: This paper explores the connections between ethnicity and sexuality. Racial, ethnic, and national boundaries are also sexual boundaries. The borderlands dividing racial, ethnic, and national identities and communities constitute ethnosexual frontiers, erotic intersections that are heavily patrolled, policed, and protected, yet regularly are penetrated by individuals forging sexual links with ethnic “others.” Normative heterosexuality is a central component of racial, ethnic, and nationalist ideologies; both adherence to and deviation from approved sexual identities and behaviors define and reinforce racial, ethnic, and nationalist regimes. To illustrate the ethnicity/sexuality nexus and to show the utility of revealing this intimate bond for understanding ethnic relations, I review constructionist models of ethnicity and sexuality in the social sciences and humanities, and I discuss ethnosexual boundary processes in several historical and contemporary settings: the sexual policing of nationalism, sexual a...

States and Markets in an Era of Globalization

Abstract: The paper considers how states and markets shape one another at the national and world-system levels and how globalization is transforming that relationship. This process is illustrated through a review of research on liberal, social rights, developmental, and socialist states in the postwar capitalist economy. These state models were reconciled with expanding international markets through a series of controls on trade and capital flows. Globalization has undermined many of these controls so that states must increasingly integrate themselves into local and global networks. States are experimenting with organizational and strategic changes nationally and internationally in order to respond to a networked economy and polity. Neoliberal institutions are the dominant force shaping the relation between states and markets in the contemporary era, but alternative state-society alliances are emerging to contest the hegemony of neoliberalism in shaping globalization.

Crime and Demography: Multiple Linkages, Reciprocal Relations

Abstract: Individual demographic characteristics and aggregate population processes are central to many theoretical perspectives and empirical models of criminal behavior. Recent research underscores the importance of criminal and deviant behavior for understanding the demography of the life course and macrolevel population processes. We review research that explores the multiple linkages and reciprocal relations between criminal and demographic behavior at both microsocial and macrosocial levels. In reviewing research on how demography affects crime, we describe current debates over the impact of age, sex, and race on criminal behavior, and we distinguish between compositional and contextual effects of demographic structure on aggregate crime rates. Our review of how crime affects demography focuses on the intersection of criminal and demographic events in the life course, and the influence of criminal victimization and aggregate crime rates on residential mobility, migration, and population redistribution. Direct...

Getting it Right: Sex and Race Inequality in Work Organizations

Abstract: One of sociology's major accomplishments in the last quarter of the twentieth century was establishing that race and gender matter at work. We have been far less successful in explaining why workers' sex and race affect their employment outcomes, however, especially why jobs are segregated by sex and race, and why whites outearn people of color and men outearn women. When sex segregation first attracted attention, its high level of incidence led scholars to hypothesize universal explanatory processes: gender-role socialization, the domestic division of labor, patriarchal impulses by employers, male workers' responses to competitive threat. Because most readily available data were for workers, researchers concentrated on individual-level explanations. Despite a growing body of research on why the sexes aspired to, pursued, and abandoned more or less sex-typical occupations, and why race and sex were related to earnings, neither line of research has illuminated why race and sex inequality exists to varying degrees across work organizations. A few researchers recognized that understanding on-the-job inequality required studying work organizations. From them we learned why some California establishments were more or less segregated in the 1960s and 1970s (although there wasn't a lot of variability to explain; Bielby & Baron 1984), and the factors that led California state agencies to become more or less integrated during the 1980s (Baron et al 1991). These and a handful of other studies have shown that levels of inequality in work organizations are affected by organizational demography, organizational leadership, the degree to which personnel practices are formalized, recruitment methods, external pressure, and the availability of slack resources. But we failed to grasp their most important message: Inequality at work does not just happen; it occurs through the acts and the failures to act by the people who run and work for organizations. The first challenge for the twenty-first century in this area of sociology is to formulate empirically realistic accounts of how a range of jobs are filled in a cross-section of organizations. These accounts must be based on interviews with informants at multiple levels in the organization. Researchers must learn what if any organizational constraints determine how the opening came about, who specifies the necessary qualifications, and who can authorize exceptions? Who

The changing nature of death penalty debates

Abstract: Focusing on the last 25 years of debate, this paper examines the changing nature of death penalty arguments in six specific areas: deterrence, incapacitation, caprice and bias, cost, innocence, and retribution. After reviewing recent changes in public opinion regarding the death penalty, we review the findings of social science research pertinent to each of these issues. Our analysis suggests that social science scholarship is changing the way Americans debate the death penalty. Particularly when viewed within a historical and world-wide context, these changes suggest a gradual movement toward the eventual abolition of capital punishment in America.

Poverty Research and Policy for the Post-Welfare Era

Abstract: The “end of welfare as we know it” constitutes an important challenge for poverty research, shifting the focus away from once-dominant themes of dependency and toward the reality of widespread “working poverty.” The literature reviewed in this chapter points in the direction of a reformulated research agenda, built around issues of inequality, political economy, and stratification by gender, race, class, and place. It also calls into question the traditional distinction between welfare and working poor, as well as the notion of an isolated underclass existing apart from the social and economic mainstream. Finally, it points to the need to broaden a policy discourse that has been narrowly fixated on welfare and on changing the behavior of the poor. A real anti-poverty agenda would focus instead on the elements of mainstream political economy and culture that continue to produce widespread economic inequality.

Feminist State Theory: Applications to Jurisprudence, Criminology, and the Welfare State

Abstract: This chapter discusses developments in feminist state theory through a comparison of feminist interventions into jurisprudence, criminology, and welfare state theory. Early feminist work on the state analyzed how women were subordinated by a centralized state. More recently, feminist scholars unearthed how states are differentiated entities, comprised of multiple gender arrangements. This discovery of state variation surfaced differently in these three branches of scholarship. Feminist legal theorists concentrated on multiple legal discourses, feminist criminologists on the diverse sites of case processing, and feminist welfare theorists on the varied dimensions of welfare stratification. Because of their different approaches to state gender regimes, these scholars have much to offer, and to gain from, one another. Thus, this chapter argues for the importance of an interdisciplinary feminist dialogue on the state. It also suggests ways to promote such a dialogue and to insert a sociological perspective in...

The Trend in Between-Nation Income Inequality

Abstract: About seventy percent of the world's total income inequality is between-nation inequality as opposed to within-nation inequality. Between-nation inequality is the bigger component because average incomes in the richest nations are roughly 30 times greater than average incomes in the poorest nations. This highly uneven distribution of income across nations likely reflects the long-run divergence of national incomes over the course of the Industrial Revolution. Empirical investigations suggest, however, that between-nation income inequality has stabilized in recent decades. Because between-nation inequality has stabilized, the direction of the current trend in total world income inequality depends on the direction of the change in income inequality in the average nation.

Political Sociological Models of the U.S. New Deal

Abstract: The U.S. New Deal raises issues of class, race, gender, region, social movements, and institutional constraint in the context of a societal-wide economic and political crisis, and has not surprisingly generated a considerable body of work by political sociologists over the past twenty years. In particular, the New Deal has served as a major empirical context for developing, testing, or applying broader theoretical models of political change in the United States. In this sense, it is a paradigmatic example of the “historical turn” in the social sciences. This paper examines the theoretical and empirical controversies that have persisted between four competing theoretical models of New Deal political change: (a) those emphasizing the importance of social movements from below in generating momentum for political reform, (b) those highlighting the centrality of business influence on successful New Deal reform initiatives, (c) feminist models, and (d) historical institutional models. I then turn to a survey of...

Whither the Sociological Study of Crime

Abstract: The study of crime and deviance has always been one of the most theoretically fertile areas in sociology. Fundamental questions on why individuals violate norms, the origins of social order, official reactions to deviance, and macro-level sources of violence-to name but a few-have attracted some of the best minds in the discipline. The result is a rich lineage of sociologically oriented criminological theory (e.g., control, subcultural, strain, differential association, labeling). It is perhaps axiomatic, however, that fundamental questions yield equally fundamental challenges. Criminology is no exception, and indeed the facts on crime continue to trouble extant theories. This is especially the case for theories that have hitched their wagon to the dominant strains of accepted sociological wisdom. Stratification is sociology to many, and in criminology it comes as no surprise that deprivation theories privileging materialism and economic motives are perennially popular. Everybody believes that "poverty causes crime" it seems; in fact, I have heard many a senior sociologist express frustration as to why criminologists would waste time with theories outside the poverty paradigm. The reason we do, as Jack Katz brilliantly demonstrated in Seductions of Crime (1988), is that the facts demand it. Whether increases in crime during periods of economic growth, epidemics of violence in wealthy countries such as the United States, the weak correlation of social class with delinquency, or crime in the suites, materialist theory is clearly insufficient. But it is not just deprivation-based theory that has failed. Most criminological theory is static in logic and handicapped by a focus on (allegedly) fixed explanatory categories, thereby failing to address the processes and dynamics leading to criminal events. The most important thing about crime that we do not know, in other words, concerns its causal social processes.

Family, State, and Child Well-Being

Abstract: Sociologists have long recognized the importance of the family in social mobility and in the reproduction of poverty (Featherman & Hauser 1978, McLanahan & Sandefur 1994). More recently, they have begun to study the role of the state in these processes (Skocpol 1992, O’Connor et al 1999). Children depend on their parents to provide them with the resources they need to develop into healthy and successful adults. Parents, in turn, depend on their communities and on government to share the costs of raising children. Changes that undermine children’s claims on parental resources or parents’ claims on public resources are likely to have long-term negative consequences for society. As we enter the twenty-first century, two such changes are underway—an increase in nonmarital childbearing and a restructuring of the welfare state. Nonmarital childbearing, a trend that now affects one of three children born in the United States, undermines children’s claims on fathers’ resources (time and money). Welfare reform, wh...

A Sociology for the Second Great Transformation

Abstract: Union and its satellites during the last decade of the century. The salient realities with which we have to grapple are twofold: first, the general failure to realize utopian hopes for rebuilding postsocialist societies, and second, the diversity between and within postsocialisms. The disintegration of the Soviet order has taken many routes, from reprimitivization in Russia to the firm embrace of moder capitalism in Central Europe. What has the sociological canon to say about these epochal changes? And how might the canon be reconstituted to accommodate them?