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This paper employs responsible fathering as a theoretical framework and explores the transnational fathering practices of wild geese fathers--middleclass Korean fathers who remained alone in their home country while sending their wives and children abroad for their children's education. Based on in-depth interviews with 64 wild geese parents in the United States, Canada, and South Korea, it analyses how wild geese fathers strived to fulfil components of responsible fathering--providing economic support and emotional/physical care for children--in the transnational context by utilizing three tools of transnational fathering: remittances, transnational communication, and face-to-face encounters. It revisits the one-dimensional and economically-oriented portrait of transnational fatherhood by documenting wild geese fathers who actively renegotiated the gendered boundary of parenting and practiced more affectionate, expressive, and involved fatherhood from a distance. It highlights the significance of social class, legal status and technology as critical resources of transnational father-child intimacy. In sum, its analysis of the middle-class Asian transnational fathering contributes to better understanding the growing diversity of transnational fatherhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comparative research on the second generation in Europe and the US has demonstrated the significance of educational systems in determining socio-economic outcomes for children of immigrants. However, an institutional approach to the study of the second-generation incorporation needs to employ a broader perspective, both in terms of the countries included in comparative studies and in what institutional features that are examined. This article investigates the Norwegian second generation's pathways through the educational system and into elite positions in the labour market. Two data sources are combined: First, populationwide administrative data on elite educational attainments and occupational statuses of majority natives and children of labour immigrants originating from Pakistan, Turkey, India and Morocco. Second, in-depth interviews with 62 second-generation individuals from the same origins currently employed as doctors, lawyers and business professionals. Exploring their pathways to their current positions, we investigate the role of Norway's egalitarian educational system - characterized by high levels of standardization and low levels of stratification; a range of possibilities to change tracks; and a high-quality public university system free of charge - in enabling them to translate their aspirations into educational achievements and their current labour market positions. The paper contributes to the further development of integration context theory by adding an egalitarian welfare state context into the mix and by specifying the institutional determinants of second generation success in this context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Death and dying remain taboo in modern societies. Care at the end-of-life is limited, even in advanced countries with an efficient public health system like Spain. In this paper I demonstrate that the knowledge acquired by the medical students in the textbooks they use during their studies in the medical school about end-of-life care and better dying is minimal. The majority of those textbooks is in English, and/or published by international publishing houses. I analyze both, national and international textbooks, as far as they are actually included in the reading lists of the 44 courses of the six years of the Medical School at the University of Barcelona (Spain). I work with 2,868 textbooks used by the students and recommended by teachers. I analyze all those books classified as textbooks at the library of the Medical School and Hospital Clínico (teaching hospital funded in 1906) in the heart of Barcelona. It is the best medical school and the best medical library in the region. I review the textbooks by courses and medical specialties. Some of those courses --like public health, and medical psychology-- do not deal adequately with the care at the end-of-life. The transitions to death of terminal patients are absent. I only found relevant information in some textbooks (like oncology, family and community Medicine). But even in those cases the information is biased and not original. The terminal patient care --i.e. the transition to a better dying-- is neglected in the medical schools. A modern model of death (MMD) is still absent in the medical textbooks researched. The case of Spain is probably similar to other countries, as it uses practically the same textbooks, but that needs to be demonstrated using further data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using data from Chinese Family Panel Studies (CFPS), this paper investigated the impact of sent-down experience on personal income and explored the selective and mediating effect of education on the above relationship. The findings indicated that the sent-down experience had a significant positive effect on the youth income. Education therein had a selective and intermediary effect on this influencing mechanism. In addition, the timing of sent-down experience had a significant impact on personal income. The conclusion also addressed the intergenerational implications of high levels of cumulative disadvantage on the education years among the cohort of educated youth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces a new "micro-educational" classification to the study of educational assortative mating capturing both hierarchical and horizontal forms of educational differentiation. Previous research tend to use highly aggregated hierarchical or gradational measures of education neglecting distinctive socialization and preference patterns found within specific types of educations. We advance the research on assortative mating by separating men and women and by using a much more detailed educational classification than normally applied (micro-educations). Taking advantage of rich Danish administrative data the paper investigates a) whether homogamy is not only linked to levels of education but also to particular types of education; b) how well different educational closure mechanisms explain assortative mating (i.e., aggregated vs. disaggregated measures of education); and c) whether mating patterns differ for men and women. We use a topological model that takes into account several measures of educational homogamy patterns: Gradational (by returns to education), categorical (5-level), horizontal (field of study), and our disaggregated (60 micro-educational groupings). Results show that, even when we control for the other measures, the disaggregated measure (micro-educations) still explain a substantial part of the changes in educational homogamy patterns for 45-year-olds from 1981-2010. Among the microeducations, older professions such as law, engineering and medicine display decreasing mating patterns while newer professions, such as the creative arts programs, social science and architects increase their propensity to be educationally homogamous. In addition, women have higher odds than men of being educational homogamous at the university and university college level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public opinion studies note the importance of economic and cultural contexts in shaping individuals' ideas. The effect of political systems is also important but remains under studied. The potential conditioning effects of various societal level factors need more investigation as well. The paper combines these issues in an analysis of data from 99 societies in five waves of the World Value Survey (WVS). It finds economic development and political freedom both condition the educational effect on values: education's liberalizing effect on people's liberal attitudes is greater in a rich society than a poor society and is greater in a free society than a non-free society. This paper contributes to the literature by examining the importance of societal level conditioning effects. Its findings have important implications for democratization studies: a non-democratic political context slows down citizens' value liberalization process through education and corrupts the value basis required for democratization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As an indicator of social distance and social inequality, interracial cohabitation nonetheless has been attracting little attention in the past few decades. The current study is the first attempt in sociological academic field to examine the influence of demographic characteristics on the likelihoods of interracial cohabitation between whites and minorities in the United States. Using multinomial logistic regression with the national representative data of CPS (2003-2005), the current study investigates the influences of educational attainment on the likelihoods of interracial cohabitation between whites and minorities (Non-Hispanic Black, Non-Hispanic Asian, Hispanic) in the United States. With an emphasis on the examination of cohabitations between whites and Asian Americans, this paper finds that whites who are better educated are more likely to cohabit with Asian Americans, compared to whites who cohabit with other minorities. And it is true for both males and females. Additionally, contrary to the common idea that Asians are less likely to cohabit because of their deep-rooted and traditional family values, this paper finds that Asians in the United States have the highest percentage of interracial cohabitation with whites. Both findings indicate that, when taking interracial cohabitation into account, the social distance between Asian Americans and whites in the United States are even smaller than we previously thought. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is part of a larger book project, tentatively titled, When Race Meets Class: Being African American in a Small-City High School. Since the summer of 2001, I have been following the lives of about 40 African American teenagers in a diverse small-city high school in the Northeast. The population of the city is approximately 60,000 with the racial breakdown of the student high school being approximately 20% black, 5% Hispanic, 4% Asian, and 70% white. Forty percent of the over 1600 high school students are eligible for free or reduced lunch. This paper focuses on three male high school students and traces their hopes, fears, and educational experiences. Through the voices of the teenagers themselves, various factors are put forward to shed light on understanding the longstanding and puzzling academic achievement gap between blacks and whites in high schools. In addition, this paper examines how the broader experience during the high school years influences not only educational outcomes but socioeconomic attainment as well. Theoretically this papers seeks to develop a deeper understanding of race in contemporary American society and persistent racial inequality that neither reduces race to class inequality nor conceptualizes race separate from what I call a racialized class structure. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses three puzzles in inequality to illustrate a new type of account of changes in inequality. The puzzles are first, the combination of falling racial wage inequality with rising racial employment inequality; second, the failure of large numbers of degree holders to drive down the relative returns to degrees; and third, the rise in inequality within and between groups. The paper discusses the overall logical structure of the explanations offered, what those explanations do and do not show, and how they compare to other accounts. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The impact of familial characteristics on youth achievement has been of great interest since the Coleman Report. In recent years, racial differences in educational performance has been the subject of legislation. In this paper, I use a family-centered model to explore the impact of multiple social contexts on the achievement of black and white youth. I consider both the direct and indirect effect of family sociodemographic and interpersonal process characteristics on youth math test score and grade point average. The paper also explores if the effect of family sociodemographic characteristics are partially or wholly mediated through neighborhood, school and peer characteristics. I also consider if the impact of these characteristics differ for white and black youth. Using longitudinal data from Prince George's County, Maryland, a middle class area outside of Washington, DC, I find support for the family-centered model. The results also suggests that although the family-centered model explains the educational performance of white and black youth, the mechanism through which family characteristics are mediated and susceptibility to different social contexts vary for black and white youth. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feminist research has established how religious, national, and ethnic communities police, mark, and enlist women's bodies to assert and protect collective identities and cultural boundaries, suggesting that the female body is a crucial symbol in the construction of "imagined communities". Often, these analyses identify and celebrate subversion and resistance. While capturing gendered and sexualized symbolic meanings of the body, this approach does not address the body as a site of moral training. This shortcoming is particularly acute when one approaches non-western, "traditional" practices, thereby revealing secularist intellectual biases.This paper approaches this "problem of feminism" by drawing on data collected for a research project that examines the negotiations that shape and transform Israel's modern-orthodox community. Examining several pedagogies that orthodox traditionalists employ to enlist women's bodies and sexuality in their cultural battles with secular Israeli culture, this paper argues that these negotiations hinge on the differentiation from and vilification of secular femininity, sexuality, and way of life. At the same time, I caution against a simplistic approach that posits women as pedagogical targets of communal attempts to guard national boundaries. Coming from secular scholars, this view fails to recognize the multiple layers of meanings of traditional practices; propagated by progressive orthodox women, this view reflects a learned, rather than embodied, understanding of religiosity. I argue that despite such internal and external critiques, modesty and purity also potentially define an alternative modality of sexuality-an "authentic Jewish femininity"-that is embodied through the practices associated with Jewish menstrual laws and modesty. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many urban school districts have recently implemented sweeping reforms that alter the ways in which educational services are administered. The environment in which these reforms are embedded is increasingly and more directly tied to core political institutions and business elites. Hence, as this dependence has grown, districts have become more likely to reflect the rational myths regarding both behavior and structure promoted by these proximate political institutions and business elites. This paper explores the process through which conformity to these pressures results in organizations changing their structural arrangements to become isomorphic with institutionally prescribed expectations. Using a subset of the educational field in New York City, this paper focuses on the role of coercive pressures in this isomorphic process. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses risk and resilience among a group of sixty homeless youth by examining in-depth interview narratives about their educational experiences. The authors profile those who have dropped out and those who have graduated high school, and illustrate the factors that predict these outcomes. The paper further outlines some of the obstacles that can derail youth in terms of education, and conversely the supports that can help homeless youth succeed. The authors conclude by offering a number of policy suggestions that can help homeless youth re-attach to education. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the meaning of grades and grading practices from a Marxian, Foucauldian, and Deweyan perspective. Grades are analyzed as a commodifying and disciplinary practice, with anti-growth and anti-experiential, in a word, anti-educational, consequences. This paper is part of a larger project on the commodification of student labor. This is a truncated version of the larger project, offering a primarily theoretical framing and analysis of grades. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how indigenousness is represented and imagined in the context of the current educational reform in Bolivia. Half of the Bolivian population self-identifies as belonging to an indigenous group, the largest in the Americas, but this group has continued to be marginalized economically, politically, and educationally. The educational reform was promulgated as constitutional law in 1994 and set forth a radical new agenda for education and society as a whole by mandating Bolivian education be based on fomenting democratic principles, social equality and valorization of cultural diversity. The reform has made impressive strides in bringing indigenous cultures into the classroom through the introduction of multilingual textbooks, which are also designed to be gender sensitive. Educators report that within the reform indigenous cultures are to be valued and this is supported by textbooks that represent the typical lived realities of indigenous as well as non-indigenous (i.e., Mestizo, European) Bolivians. Special school events that pay tribute to Bolivian cultural diversity are also now commonplace. In the last decade, Bolivian education has become much more a multicultural institution. This paper argues, however, that new educational rhetoric and school rituals for valorizing the indigenous also threaten to simplify indigenous cultures into their folkloric artifacts and romanticize indigenousness as socially static, tradition-bound, and geographically limited rather than dynamic and composed of diverse individuals. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studying interaction to understand how social actions are accomplished has been a central focus of conversation analysis. These rich findings born from CA have been used to help develop theories about the way the social world works. The paper I am presenting here performs such an exercise. In particular, this paper focuses on interactional sequences that involve the doing of discipline and how the doing of discipline speaks to the institutional culture of one highly successful middle school. In order examine the link between interaction and institutional culture, I set out to accomplish three things. First, I will lay out the cultural beliefs that help guide life at the KIPP Academy, where this study takes place. Second, I will closely examine to interactional sequences involving disciplining. Third, I will show that KIPP's culture not only can be identified by determining the actions the provoke disciplining, but that it is also inherent in how disciplining sequences are interactionally accomplished. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When culture is invoked to understand the consequences of growing up in disadvantaged communities, the isolation of ghetto residents from mainstream individuals and mainstream culture is often emphasized. This paper is an attempt to reorient current thinking about what is important about culture in disadvantaged neighborhoods when it comes to adolescent decision-making and well-being. It argues that rather than being characterized by the dominance of "oppositional" or "ghetto-specific" cultures, disadvantaged neighborhoods are characterized by cultural heterogeneity: a wide array of competing and conflicting cultural models. Using survey data from Addhealth, it shows that disadvantaged neighborhoods exhibit greater heterogeneity in cultural goals and frames regarding teenage pregnancy and education, but that conventional views dominate numerically. This paper also investigates the consequences of cultural heterogeneity for adolescent outcomes, showing that in more heterogeneous neighborhoods adolescents are less likely to act in accordance with the goals and frames that they articulate. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the findings from my Determinants of School Success study-a qualitative comparative analysis of six elementary schools in low-income, immigrant neighborhoods in Vancouver, Canada. Despite having similar neighborhood profiles in terms of socio-economic factors, three of these elementary schools have high standardized test score achievement in literacy and numeracy, and the other three low scores. Utilizing in-depth interviews and participant observation in these schools and their surrounding neighborhoods, I explain the factors that promote or hinder academic achievement. These include the successful implementation of curriculum, basic-needs, training, literacy, and other programs as well as programs that address the basic needs of students. The research also uncovers some of the deleterious consequences of education funding cutbacks in the province of British Columbia. Finally, I consider some of the theoretical implications of these findings in terms of the debates in sociology of education, segmented assimilation theory, urban poverty, and stratification. The paper concludes that high academic achievement in literacy and numeracy is possible to achieve in public schools serving low-income, immigrant urban populations, if the government provides the resources for teachers and students to succeed. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a state-focused approach for tracing and explaining transformations of nationalism. As such, it provides a corrective to the relative absence of theories that explain historical transformations of nationalism-as opposed to its emergence. I analyze changes in official national ideologies as driven by conflicts between states and movements of subordinate actors and alternative elites. The main argument of the paper is that comprehensive transformations of nationalism are driven by the conjuncture of (1) the formation of political movements that successfully advanced alternative ideas about the nation, (2) the emergence of alliances between the central state and subordinate sectors, which provided an incentive for the incorporation of these alternative national narratives into state ideologies, and (3) the simultaneous expansion of the cultural machinery of the state, facilitating the institutionalization of these state ideologies. A case study of Peru under the military government of Velasco (1968-1975) illustrates the explanatory power of this framework. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of this paper is to consider the phenomenon of immigrant adaptation in the United Kingdom through an intergenerational analysis of the nature and determinants of the educational attainments of the children of immigrants, that is, of second-generation immigrants (SGIs). Specifically, the paper examines the role of immigrant status, parental status, and ethnicity. Numerous theoretical accounts of immigrant adaptation and of educational attainment, as well as empirical descriptions of second-generation life outcomes, have highlighted the importance of such determinants. Upon examination of inferential statistics, the results show that immigrant status, and ethnicity appear to play an important yet limited role in the successful attainments of SGIs with regards to holding a university degree, whereas parental status does not. This sheds an interesting light on the phenomenon of adaptation, a phenomenon that ought to be more clearly established, given appropriate data. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through participant observation and in-depth interviews, this paper examines how militarism and masculinity are played out and bound together in the social space of a military-style charter school in California. The middle school was opened in 2003, maintains strict entrance requirements, and enrolls over 200 male and female cadets. Drawing on Connell's concept of hegemonic masculinity and Higate and Hopton's discussion of the reciprocal relationship between militarism and masculinity, this paper argues that the construction of a militaristic masculinity at the school is used as a vehicle to promote military identification and military recruitment among the students who are overwhelmingly working-class, youth of color. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through a careful consideration and emphasis on culture, this paper demonstrates the lack of utility of theories of oppositional culture and downward assimilation in describing the trajectories of disadvantaged second generation youth. The paper compares working class and poor second generation teenagers in London and New York City by using school ethnographic, interview (n=130), and survey (n=191) data. Finding that youth in both cities express positive attitudes toward school and education; strong preferences for African American-inspired hip-hop music and styles; and the need to act tough and maintain self-pride, the paper concludes that Nondominant Cultural Capital (NDCC) is a better concept to explain minority urban youth. Urban youth create their own socio-cultural world with its own set of rules, taste preferences, and interactional styles. NDCC buys status for youth within their peer worlds. The most successful teenagers are able to succeed academically as well as within their peer world of NDCC. Indeed, this, rather than rejecting mainstream society and norms, is what most youth say they strive for. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Excerpted from a larger project on the moral culture of American teens during the first year after high school graduation, this paper summarizes results from 125 in-depth interviews with American teens and one-year of field research. It reports on the ubiquity of teen employment, the character and context of teen work, the American teen lifestyle and its impact on teen money use and general economic life of teens, the distinct leisure preferences of teens, the impact teen leisure preference have on teen work patterns and money behaviors, and the ways teens adjust their work, money, and leisure practices during the first year after high school. Particular attention is given to similarities and differences across gender, race, and class, and to the role of socializing agents such as the family, religion, and local community. This paper argues: 1) that most American teens view work as a necessary nuisance, money as a lifestyle essential, and leisure as a purchased commodity, 2) that most American teens are blinded to their conformity to these American patterns of consumption, and 3) that American teens have learned these patterns from their families, their religious communities, and their local communities -- not because these communities send these messages explicitly, but do so implicitly as they pattern their own behaviors along these lines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper assesses the utility of “segmented assimilation” theory in predicting the academic outcomes of second generation immigrant students. It uses the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study to regress students’ GPA on measures of “selective acculturation,” particularly fluent bilingualism. An initial OLS regression offers slight support for the idea that fluent bilingual students have more positive academic outcomes than English monolingual students. A multinomial logistic regression then assesses predictors of fluent bilingualism, finding that being Latino and attending a private bilingual school are the main positive predictors of this language category. Finally, the paper considers the argument of segmented assimilation theory that selective acculturation should matter for those students from families with lower socioeconomic status, who are theoretically most “at risk” of “dissonant acculturation”. Interactions intended to demonstrate differences in the influence of selected acculturation variables for Latinos and for those students who are “at risk” were found not to be significant. The analysis therefore offers limited support for hypotheses motivated by segmented assimilation theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the role of local racial and ethnic groups and external organizations in creating specific types of charter schools in New York State. Prior work has shown that a combination of minority interests and conservative politics has helped the adoption of school choice policies at the state level. Other research has demonstrated that charter schools are often oriented to promoting local community identities and even specific racial and ethnic identities. This contradicts an historic public school mission—to create a cohesive national cultural identity—and also undermines the historic tendency toward larger, more bureaucratic, and more centrally controlled schools and school districts. This paper argues that the "tribal" character of charter schooling and racial group's reliance on external conservative sponsors are valid descriptions of New York charter schools, but that the specific character of charters is dependent on a complex play between local conditions and the global institutional models that provide organizational scripts for action. This interplay provides the potential foundation for a new institutional framework for public education and suggests how institutionalist theory might be revised to account for this possibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is part of a debate about current and possible future trajectories of Affirmative Action. The author examines de facto participation of foreign nationals in Affirmative Action. The focus is on postsecondary faculty who are foreign nationals and who do not fit into traditional minority categories. The general hypothesis is that some of these neither protected, nor unprotected groups occupy a middle status in ethnic hierarchy of American education, and as such, fulfill the function of middleman minorities. This paper examines: the employment trajectories of teaching faculty who are foreign nationals; their position within traditionally black-white Affirmative Action debate; discriminatory exclusionary practices they may experience. The research employs different methods: secondary analysis of the 1999 National Study of Postsecondary Faculty; regression analysis; qualitative case studies. The study suggests to explore "situational racism" - exclusion based on a situational white versus black power distribution. The study urges the attention to some ambiguously positioned groups, especially in the light of growing societal ethnic heterogeneity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both New York and San Francisco maintain high schools that admit students through a selection process that excludes many applicants who must attend other, less elite, high schools. In both cities, this policy has come under attack at times as manifesting discrimination by race, ethnicity, and/or parental economic status. Students admitted to these high schools over-represent white, Asian and middle- and upper-middle-class students while under-representing minority and poor students. This paper examines the attacks on these elite schools and the policies that produce them as well as the defenses of the policies that have been mounted by defenders of their existence. The trajectories of each city's conflict have differed widely, the former largely being played out in the state legislature, while the latter has been in and remains in court. Utilizing path dependency model, the paper seeks to illuminate the forces that turned the conflict in each City as it developed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most research attention in the field of immigration has been devoted understanding particular transnational practices, including shuttle migration, collective remittances and political involvement in multiple contexts. Yet these behaviors cannot be understood as inevitable consequences of social circumstances. People must learn transnational practices. With a sociological focus on the information that flows through different network channels, this paper studies how individuals are socialized to specific transnational practices, or to a general orientation towards transnationalism at all. This paper investigates how international students locate themselves socially and what the consequences are for the ways in which they are or are not socialized towards transnational practices. It also suggests a modification to existing theory—the Migration Prevalence Ratio—to enable it to serve as a mechanism connecting macro- and micro-level immigration processes, particularly with respect to how individuals gather social capital and learn transnational practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses an important gap in the current literature on equity-based educational reform. At present, educational inequality literature focuses primarily on the racial achievement gap. Indeed this focus is mirrored in national reform efforts, particularly the No Child Left Behind Act. Much of these efforts aim to address high standards and accountability for schools, educators and students. In this paper I document the importance of incorporating reform aimed at addressing not only expectations and accountability, but the disparate needs of students in U.S. public schools. To accomplish this distinction I introduce a measure of school context that encompasses educational segregation, neighborhood disorder, school violence and the quality of school facilities. I focus on both neighborhood disorder and school violence in this paper. Using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS-K), I establish that not only are black and impoverished first grader students living in more violent neighborhoods, but they attend more violent schools. Policy implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rather than formulate a causal theory, this paper proposes a sociology of simulation. Most theoretical treatments of simulation come out of a post-structuralist tradition that understands it in relation to a symbolic system, defined by and defining of "the real" and "the natural". On the other hand, social scientists have generally restricted their use of the concept of simulation to pragmatic scientific and educational goals such as developing more robust pedagogy, scientific methods, theory, or models. In all of this work, three relatively distinct theoretical conceptions of simulation are blurred: 1) simulation as a symbolic or material process; 2) simulation as an organizational or group-level technique, and 3) simulation as a discrete artifact. By disaggregating these three conceptions, this paper introduces a framework for a sociology of simulation that is more portable and coherent than is currently the case. I draw on a wide array of empirical examples, including two very different sites - both of which I have conducted extensive ethnographic study - boxing gyms and artificial intelligence laboratories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, the findings of a 3-year longitudinal study on the effect of medium of instruction policy in Hong Kong will be presented. In September 1997, the newly established government of Hong Kong Special Administrative Region published a policy document entitled Medium of Instruction Guidance for Secondary Schools (Guidance) The Guidance stipulated that all secondary schools were required to use Chinese as MOI starting with their 1998/99 Secondary-1 intakes. However, the Guidance allowed individual schools to apply for using English as MOI if they could prove their instructional efficacy. After two rounds of applications and assessments, about a quarter of secondary schools, i.e. 114 schools, were granted the status of using English as MOI (EMI), while the other three quarters of secondary schools were required to adopted Chinese as MOI (CMI). The Guidance has spawned a series of discussions and criticisms, yet all of them are theoretical and perceptional in nature. None of them have ever provided any empirical evidences relating to the effects and consequences of the policy measures of the Guidance. In this paper, findings of a policy evaluation research on the effects of the Guidance will be reported. The samples of the study are student (approximately 17,000) in 100 randomly sampled secondary schools. These students? growth curves in five academic areas are constructed with Hierarchical Linear Modeling to assess the effects of EMI-CMI streaming on their academic growth. The five academic areas are English, Chinese, mathematics, science and social studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper employs a gender and sexuality "lens" to critically re-examine Fordham and Ogbu?s (1986) ?acting-white? thesis. My analysis is born from a rereading and re-interpretation of the data and a critique of their conclusions in their seminal and highly influential essay ?Black Students? School Success: Coping with the ?Burden of ?Acting White??, of Fordham and Ogbu (1986). This paper reveals Fordham and Ogbu?s unfortunate lack of attention to the constitutive and discursive role that gender AND sexuality play in assigning ones? behavior as ?acting white?. My paper will show that Imbedded in black students labeling of their peers as "acting white" is a policing and informing of what are the appropriate "acts" of boys and girls; this is done in support of the heteronormative structure of the school and broader society. Black students, indeed all students, are involved in a highly contentious, and necessarily contradictory, process of fashioning and transforming a sense of self within the highly discursive site of the school where issues of race, gender, sexuality and class intersect and collide. Therefore, an exploration of the roles that race, gender and sexuality play in informing and regulating behaviors and identifications with the academic mission of the school will complicate and challenge the ?acting-white? hypothesis, and ultimately lead to a better understanding of the responses and reactions of students and help us explain academic underachievement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper concerns how credentials mark boundaries between different kinds of higher educational actors. In particular, this research inquires into how organizations respond to rapid shifts in their institutional environments in terms of the maintenance of symbolic boundaries that granting specific kinds of credentials provides. As a field of higher education expands rapidly to encompass new kinds of persons, and new areas of credentialing, what happens to the ways in which organizations manage their identities as distinct from others in the field? Are boundaries blurred or sharpened in such a process? This paper addresses these concerns within the field of higher education in business, and the rapid changes that occurred after 1972 (and the passage of Title IX legislation) as the field expanded from a relatively exclusive white male domain to include a wide swath of institutional space with women a majority of the degree recipients. Using government surveys of higher education, and formal analytic techniques (WMDS, Cluster Analysis), I model the shifting logics of distinction that structured the field over this period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores three mechanisms that may account for the disadvantage adolescents from non-intact families experience in terms of postsecondary education. Using the Postsecondary Education Transcript Study (PETS) data of the High School and Beyond (HS&B) sophomore cohort and the National Education Longitudinal Study (NELS) of 1988, this paper examines how family economics, parental involvement, and family turbulence influences students? college enrollment and degree completion during the 1980s and the 1990s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper searches for political explanations of institutional change during the Reagan presidency. Using historical qualitative methods, this paper argues that education policy was substantively altered by the Reagan administration. With a focus on business interests and the Christian Right, the paper finds that presidents manage the demands of exogenous interests. The paper concludes that presidential scholars should recognize institutional disruption from movements, voting blocs, and other outside political interests, and should also have greater understanding of the true extent of the Reagan accomplishments. The new policy to curtail school desegregation helped Reagan build a new ?voluntary? state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

?Diversity? has become a fashionable and plastic buzzword over the past thirty years. With the recent U.S. Supreme Court cases concerning affirmative action at the University of Michigan, the concept of diversity has received even greater public scrutiny. The existing scholarly literature that examines discourses about diversity usually relies on macro-level, legal, or text analyses, overlooking people?s interpretations of diversity in their everyday practices. The proposed paper helps to fill in this gap. It draws on over a year of ethnographic evidence about how interests groups involved in the lawsuits against UM?including university administrators, pro- and anti-affirmative action activists, legal professionals, and political leaders?politically and legally mobilized around the lawsuits and then responded to the Court?s decisions. The paper builds on cultural analyses of the law and collective action by examining how various interest groups negotiate different socio-legal paradoxes around diversity. Preliminary findings show how nearly every group is in favor of ?diversity,? but they all confront challenges when defining this concept and putting it into practice. For example, outsider activists?both in favor of and opposed to affirmative action?talk about diversity by simultaneously endorsing it and questioning its relevance, meaning, or existence. The proposed paper concludes with a discussion of how ideas related to law acquire constituencies, constitute the categories through which people construct the world, and ultimately shape their efforts to address different social problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why are female-dominated paths (which I will call ‘feminine paths’) in education and occupations still chosen by a number of women, especially in a society like Japan? I argue that it is partly because a choice for ‘feminine paths’ is believed to produce advantageous quality (which I call ‘feminine capital’) in the marriage market for women. In this paper, with qualitative analysis on interview comments, I will investigate people’s perception of ‘feminine paths’ in contrast with ‘egalitarian (or male-dominated) paths’, regarding their advantage in the marriage market. The analyses in this paper suggest that ‘feminine paths’ in education and occupations are oftentimes perceived as more advantageous for women’s marital status attainment than ‘egalitarian paths’ because of cultural capital and social capital they entail. However, such ‘advantageous qualities for a marriage’ consists of various and often contradictory elements. Especially, the qualities useful ‘before’ marriage (for a ‘search’ of husband) is different from qualities useful ‘after’ marriage (for a ‘compatibility’ with household responsibilities), and such contradiction suggests why the pursuit of the two courses of status attainment (one through marriage, and the other through occupational attainment) becomes difficult, resulting in a discontinuity in an occupational career. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I set out to complicate the notion of success. In order to do so, I draw from the data collected during a yearlong ethnographic study of the KIPP Academy (Knowledge is Power Program: KIPP) in Houston, TX. I argue that success is not simply a static entity that schools and students do or do not have, but rather, a dynamic social construct that becomes visible in different social locations. Through my research I have located to categories of success. One category consists of definitions of success that are external to the school (i.e., held by agencies external to the school such as the state government) that I term, "frontstage success." The second consists of definitions that are internal to the school that I term "backstage success." Whereas frontstage definitions of success are indicated through "objective" measures such as testing that hold schools accountable to the public, backstage definitions are represented by situated, local understandings used by students (and their teachers) to render conduct accountable, achieve a sense of agency, and create a culture of success. In the past, analytic priority has been given to frontstage definitions of success, while backstage definitions have been overlooked. However, I demonstrate in this paper that it is crucial to understand backstage definitions of success to help students become active participants in their education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of this paper is to give exploratory and descriptive empirical evidence on the degree of conflict and characteristics of teacher conflicts in Latin America. The paper focuses on: how the conflicts are expressed, the main and secondary reasons behind them, their evolution, the actors involved, and their resolution mechanisms. Using content analysis of a sample of newspaper articles that appeared from January to July 21st 2003, several trends are observed. The education systems of the region show a high degree of conflict with their teaching labor force. Conflicts usually started with specific teacher labor unions demands or with the rejection of education policies that affect teachers. There is a common regional trend to use teacher strikes or mobilizations, and countries vary more with respect to the intensity of these strikes and manifestations than with respect to the actual use of strikes and manifestations as protest strategies. The common reasons behind teacher conflicts are salary demands, but teachers also present claims around the appointment and promotion systems, rejection of education policies implemented by the governments, working conditions, pensions and social security, and even incentives to teachers. The majority of teacher conflicts in the region have apparently found a solution. Teachers and their employers reached agreements that set the basis for political and economic decisions of paying teachers their overdue salaries, granting salary increases, or for the use of legal tools like approving laws, decrees, and ruling other aspects of teachers? work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents cross-national analyses from 1985 through 1999 of the impact of war on children?s life chances across six domains?economic well-being, social stability, food production and distribution, health services, mortality, and education. In five of the six domains, war adversely affects children?s life chances. War substantially reduces gross national product per capita, dramatically increases the proportion of the population that is displaced, decreases access to immunizations, increases mortality, and increases illiteracy. Information for the paper comes from the Children and Life Chances Dataset. Analyses are conducted using country-years as the units of analysis, controlling for time trends and country-specific factors while estimating the impact of war on children?s life chances. Given the broad impact of war, future research should consider the impact of war in theories and analyses concerned with economic and social development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the purpose of exploring internal gender segregation, this paper presents historical data on New England teaching from state and local school records and manuscript district school meeting accounts. The paper first identifies pre-nineteenth century forms of job segregation within teaching. Second, it examines the predominant form of segregation in the first decades of the nineteenth century -- segregation by seasons. The third section documents the process of change from gender segregation by season to gender segregation by hierarchical ranking. The fourth investigates gender segregation within the bureaucratic organization of late nineteenth-century urban schools. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of its findings and the specific consequences of changes in gender segregation to nineteenth-century schoolteachers [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using IPUMS data for 1940 through 2000, this paper examines three economic-characteristics explanations for the declines in marriage rates over time: 1) Becker?s (1981) independence hypothesis; 2) Bernard?s (1982) marriage gradient hypothesis; and 3) Oppenheimer?s (1988) male economic status hypothesis. In addition, this paper considers a different approach which combines the notion of the gender revolution (Hochschild 1989; McDonald 2000) with bargaining theory and theories of marriage that stress noneconomic resources (e.g., Cherlin 2000). This paper also explores differences in marriage patterns by race/ethnicity over the period. If the independence/marriage gradient/male economic status hypotheses are correct then we would expect the most educated women (or the highest earning women) and least educated men (or lowest earning men) to be the least likely to marry in all years. The growing number of women with greater education and income, and the growing number of men of lower socioeconomic status, should dramatically lower marriage rates overall. As such controlling for income and education should explain away changes in marriage rates over time, and any race/ethnic differences in marriage rates. If the gender revolution hypothesis is correct then controlling for education/income in a statistical model will not explain away the effect of time on marital status. Furthermore, it allows for an explanation which incorporates greater race/ethnic differences in marriage patterns because the separate spheres ideology was more prevalent for some groups than others and the move away from it occurred at different times and for different reasons. The role of cohabitation is also considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent rise in school violence and prevalence of weapons in the hands of students in the past twenty years has led to implementing new disciplinary policies in schools? most notably, ?zero tolerance policies.? While these seemingly ?get tough on crime? policies remain popular, criticism and skepticism as to their effectiveness and appropriateness increase daily. The implementation of these policies nationwide has resulted in dramatic increases in school exclusions (suspensions and expulsions). Not only are exclusions more prevalent, but research suggests that a disproportionate number of African American and other minority students are being excluded from schools across the country. An additional concern regarding the consequences of zero tolerance policies is what happens to the students who are expelled and suspended from school ? where do they go? This paper will discuss the development of zero tolerance policies, as well as the most common criticisms and effects of these rigid disciplinary codes and their implementation. In addition, this paper will focus on the effects of alternative schooling. A recent concern in the literature is that many of the students who are excluded are never referred to an alternative program at all. In this paper we will examine this student-school gap and the role that race plays in the equation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Amidst the dilemmas, controversies, and challenges associated with incorporating computer technology in developing countries, many studies suggest that information and communication technology (ICT) offers a creative solution to persistent social problems such as illiteracy, poverty, and unemployment (Wagner, 2001). ICTs are also tools used to further individual or collective entrepreneurial endeavors. With the expansion of ICTs, women, in particular, are capitalizing on these technologies to strengthen their individual position in the public and private spheres. The widespread incorporation of ICTs may have positive or benign affects on its participants, or may not be useful at all if applied without an eye towards the needs of the target population. Concomitantly, ICTs may pose a threat to women by perpetuating or deepening gender biases and the sexual division of labor. My study is a case-study example of a non-governmental organization in Costa Rica that participated in a pilot program in 2002 by expanding information and communication technology to one hundred women nationwide through a free computer class. This program, like others, was initiated with an effort to expand women?s access to and control over technology. It is important to analyze the success of this and other programs from the perspective of the participants and to understand how such programs change behaviors in the public and private sphere, on the micro and macro levels. My paper specifically assesses how and in what ways this program, entrenched within development and modernization ideology, altered job opportunities for the female participants, modified their role within the family, reformulated the individual?s perspective of self, and empowered students. The data was collected over several months of fieldwork and includes over twenty in-depth, semi-structured interviews and two focus groups representing a total of 33 respondents. In this paper, I will use qualitative methods to analyze the individual experiences of the students in the programs to better understand the successes and failures of such development schemes for women in the developing world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A pivotal idea in this paper is that prevailing notions of childhood have changed over time in the U.S. Specifically, I show that changes have occurred in parent behaviors regarding cognitive development of their young children and argue the growing trend in the parenting of cognitive development in young children in the latter half of the 20th century is largely attributable to the institutionalization of mass schooling. This paper examines parenting cognitive development from 1951 to 2001 in four ways. First I briefly review three related literatures: 1) the sociological literature on changes in parenting in the U.S. during the 20th century; 2) the research literature on changes in the U.S. during the 20th century in expert literature to parents on cognitive development of children; and, 3) the research literature on parental involvement in schooling. Next, I present analysis of data on parents from Patterns of Childrearing 1951-52, the Detroit Area Study 1963, and the National Household Education Surveys 1991 and 2001 to show the changes in parent behaviors around the cognitive development of their children in the U.S. in the 50 year span from 1951 to 2000. Third, I demonstrate the changing impact of household income and mother?s education as evidence of the overall influence of mass education on norms and behaviors of parents. Finally, I describe the normative nature of parenting cognitive development by the beginning of the 21st century using the National Household Education Survey 1991, 1993, 1996, 1999, and 2001 and speculate on its implications for the sociologies of parenting and education, as well as a neo-institutional analysis of schooling. The results show parents increasingly spend time more time engaging in activities related to cognitive development over the second half of the 20th century so that by 1991 it is normative behavior. In addition, mother?s education becomes an increasingly better predictor of parenting cognitive development over the latter half of the 20th century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we follow a cohort of students through medical school in order to examine the determinants of intentions to pursue careers in academic medicine or medical research.. Data collected by the American Association of Medical Colleges on 14219 freshman and senior medical students graduating in 2002 from 125 medical schools are analyzed. The key determinants of interest in research careers are perceived motivations to study medicine, having research experience during medical school (especially writing a thesis or submitting a paper for publication), and intended specialty. Women are as likely as men to intend to pursue an academic career but are less likely than men to express interest in conducting research. The implications of these findings for medical education are discussed in the conclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Goode (1962) argues that at the start of modern society the upper classes will have higher divorce rates, but as divorce procedures are gradually made available to all classes this differences will dwindle away. Since family strain towards the lower strata is greater, the proportion of lower strata divorces will increase, and eventually Goode expects an inverse relation between class and divorce rate. The partly contradicting results on this relation between class and divorce risk ask for a more systematic, cross-national and cross-cohort analysis of the relation between education and divorce and separation. This will be the first aim of this paper. We use multi-level analysis to analyze this relation in various countries in Europe and the USA. We analyze this relation for both all unions (whatever their juridical form) and for the married couples only (with or without cohabitation). The second aim of this paper is to explain these cross-national and cross-cohort differences in the relation between education and divorce/separation by (changes in) state regulations of marriage and divorce, social policies, the level of female full time labor market participation and the general acceptance of divorce. We use the files of the Fertility and Family Survey project. These data were collected during the 1990s. They are national representative samples of male and female respondents in Finland, Poland, Estonia, France, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Spain, Switzerland, Austria, Belgium, West Germany, Sweden, USA and Greece. Final results will be presented at the conference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As one of the popular and promising instructional technologies, Internet is playing a more and more important role in educational field all over the world. Bringing Internet into classrooms is encouraged in many countries; however, their policy initiatives to achieve this vary. The present paper is an empirical and multi-nation exploratory study, trying to explore different policy initiatives taken by different countries to enable school classrooms to have access to Internet. The study is based on a broad survey on the policy initiatives concerning classroom Internet in four countries and regions: the United States, China, Taiwan and Japan. The choice of these four countries is based on our personal interest, socioeconomic and political factors. For each country and region, three research questions are explored and analyzed: (1) Evaluation of the policy----Merits and criticism of such a policy; (2) Administration features of the policy----How to implement such a policy; (3) Rational for the policy----Why should we have such a policy and how is it made? Through a comparative analysis, we find that difference do exit in the policy approaches across the four countries; however, we believe that there is no universal ?perfect? policy and we look at our paper as a preliminary and explorative one for further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reviews prior work on the media and discusses two approaches. The first focuses primarily on the content of media and assumes that children passively consume such content. In this view the media directly affects children (positively or negatively). In the second approach children are seen as active agents who appropriate and use media content in their lives. This paper extends prior research in line with the second approach as children as active consumers, by focusing on children spontaneous references and uses of media in their peer cultures in preschool and elementary school settings in the United States and Italy. The study find that children have complex knowledge of the media, use it in their collective peer routines, and that the use of media can contribute to children?s development of literacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The upsurge of coeducation in the late 1960s and 1970s led to the virtual disappearance of men’s colleges and difficulties for women’s colleges. This paper discusses the reasons women’s colleges have had serious financial and enrollment problems and ways in which they have adapted to this challenging environment. Each year fewer women’s colleges remain. Most of those that do not admit men and thereby become coeducational use alternative survival strategies, which often involve men students in some programs. The paper concludes with a comparison of formerly women’s colleges and formerly men’s colleges, in terms of their enrollments and experiences of women students, faculty, and staff. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]