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In the 2023 ASA presidential address, Prudence Carter delves into the landscape of U.S. society, tracing some of its historical progress and confronting contemporary social, economic, educational, and political challenges. Central to her argument is an exploration of the concept of "unrealized integration" and how it has hindered the nation's march toward an inclusive, multiracial democracy. Carter describes and characterizes the current state of integration within education and society. Despite the widespread rhetoric of diversity in our organizations and institutions, she critiques its shallow application, exposing diversity's inability to rectify imbalances of power- and resource-sharing. Incorporating the idea of "tipping points," she discusses how civil rights movements, despite expanding representation and opportunity, have faced recurrent waves of political backlash and reversals. She contends that an erosion of social progress occurs when there is an imbalance in the pursuit of distributional equality (concerning material resources) and relational equality (involving social and cultural dynamics and processes that shape well-being). Additionally, she identifies three other crucial areas that warrant focus to pave the path toward realized integration within education and society. In a forward-looking call to arms, Carter underscores the imperative for sociologists to transcend epistemological and methodological boundaries; and she advocates for robust collaborations across the social sciences and humanities to harness the collective power of knowledge-generation and solution-building for pressing societal issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rising inequalities in rich countries have led to concerns that the economic ladder is getting harder to climb. Yet, research on trends in intergenerational income mobility finds conflicting results. To better understand this variation, we adopt a multiverse approach that estimates trends over 82,944 different definitions of income mobility, varying how and for whom income is measured. Our analysis draws on comprehensive register data for Swedish cohorts born 1958 to 1977 and their parents. We find that income mobility has declined, but for reasons neglected by previous research: improved gender equality in the labor market raises intergenerational persistence in women's earnings and the household incomes of both men and women. Dominant theories that focus on childhood investments have blinded researchers to this development. Methodologically, we show how multiverse analysis can be used with abduction—inference to the best explanation—to improve theory-building in social science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conspiracies are consequential and social, yet online conspiracy groups that consist of individuals (and bots) seeking to explain events or a system have been neglected in sociology. We extract conspiracy talk about the COVID-19 pandemic on Twitter and use the biterm topic model (BTM) to provide a descriptive baseline for the discursive and social structure of online conspiracy groups. We find that individuals enter these communities through a gateway conspiracy theory before proceeding to extreme theories, and humans adopt more diverse conspiracy theories than do bots. Event-history analyses show that individuals tweet new conspiracy theories, and tweet inconsistent theories simultaneously, when they face a threat posed by a rising COVID-19 case rate and receive attention from others via retweets. By contrast, bots are less responsive to rising case rates, but they are more consistent, as they mainly tweet about how COVID-19 was deliberately created by sinister agents. These findings suggest human beings are bricoleurs who use conspiracy theories to make sense of COVID-19, whereas bots are designed to create moral panic. Our findings suggest that conspiracy talk by individuals is defensive in nature, whereas bots engage in offense. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Legitimacy is widely invoked as a condition, cause, and outcome of other social phenomena, yet measuring legitimacy is a persistent challenge. In this article, I synthesize existing approaches to conceptualizing legitimacy across the social sciences to identify widely agreed upon definitional properties. I then build on these points of consensus to develop a generalizable approach to operationalization. Legitimacy implies specific relationships among three empirical elements: an object of legitimacy, an audience that confers legitimacy, and a relationship between the two. Together, these empirical elements constitute a dyad (i.e., a single unit consisting of two nodes and a tie). I identify three necessary conditions for legitimacy— expectations, assent, and conformity —that specify how elements of the dyad interact. I detail how these conditions can be used to empirically establish legitimacy (and illegitimacy), distinguishing it from dissimilar phenomena that often appear similar empirically. Followed to its logical conclusion, this operationalization has novel implications for understanding the effects of legitimacy. I discuss these implications, and how they inform debates over the relevance of legitimacy as an explanation for socially significant outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We make only one point in this article. Every quantitative study must be able to answer the question: what is your estimand? The estimand is the target quantity—the purpose of the statistical analysis. Much attention is already placed on how to do estimation; a similar degree of care should be given to defining the thing we are estimating. We advocate that authors state the central quantity of each analysis—the theoretical estimand—in precise terms that exist outside of any statistical model. In our framework, researchers do three things: (1) set a theoretical estimand, clearly connecting this quantity to theory; (2) link to an empirical estimand, which is informative about the theoretical estimand under some identification assumptions; and (3) learn from data. Adding precise estimands to research practice expands the space of theoretical questions, clarifies how evidence can speak to those questions, and unlocks new tools for estimation. By grounding all three steps in a precise statement of the target quantity, our framework connects statistical evidence to theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In light of ongoing concerns about the relevance of scholarly activities, we ask, what are public ideas and how do they come to be? More specifically, how do journalists and other mediators between the academy and the public use social science ideas? How do the various uses of these ideas develop over time and shape the public careers of these ideas? How do these processes help us understand public ideas and identify their various types? In addressing these questions, we make the case for a sociology of public social science. Using data from newspaper articles that engage with seven of the most publicly prominent social science ideas over the past 30 years, we make three contributions. First, we advance a pragmatic, cultural approach to understanding public ideas, one that emphasizes fit-making processes and applicative flexibility. Second, we define public ideas: social science ideas become public ideas when they are used as objects of interest (being the news), are used as interpretants (making sense of the news), and ebb and flow between these uses as part of an unfolding career. Third, we construct a typology of public ideas that provides an architecture for future research on public social science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on Bayesian probability theory, we propose a generalization of affect control theory (BayesACT) that better accounts for the dynamic fluctuation of identity meanings for self and other during interactions, elucidates how people infer and adjust meanings through social experience, and shows how stable patterns of interaction can emerge from individuals’ uncertain perceptions of identities. Using simulations, we illustrate how this generalization offers a resolution to several issues of theoretical significance within sociology and social psychology by balancing cultural consensus with individual deviations from shared meanings, balancing meaning verification with the learning processes reflective of change, and accounting for noise in communicating identity. We also show how the model speaks to debates about core features of the self, which can be understood as stable and yet malleable, coherent and yet composed of multiple identities that may carry competing meanings. We discuss applications of the model in different areas of sociology, implications for understanding identity and social interaction, as well as the theoretical grounding of computational models of social behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Driven by the popularity of social capital theories, the concept of community is enjoying a renaissance in sociology. Yet much research in this area relies on exclusively “structural” thinking, attributing group identification to mechanisms such as the arrangement of physical space, power relations, or high investment requirements. Often neglected is a strand of theory that attributes gemeinschaft to shared moral order and culture. Using data from the Urban Communes Project, this article directly tests the influence of both structural and cultural mechanisms in producing the experience of community. Although the results show that both structural and cultural mechanisms are positively correlated with gemeinschaft, they also confirm the existence of shared moral order as the most likely proximate mechanism for creating community in these groups. Analyses using fuzzy-set techniques illustrate how culture and structure combine to sustain—or inhibit—the experience of community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the high visibility of religiously charged international social conflicts, the unique role of religion often is overlooked in social science research and theory. Some studies ignore religion, others conflate religion with other identities. Virtually all lack adequate data. We respond to these deficiencies by testing a theory-driven model of a particular form of social conflict, religious persecution. We investigate the proposition that religious regulation leads to religious persecution. Using measures coded from the 2003 International Religious Freedom Reports, we consider how both social regulation and government regulation of religion in 143 countries affect the level of religious persecution. We also consider and test competing hypotheses, particularly Huntington's clash-of-civilizations thesis. We find strong support for the religious economies arguments and only limited support for the clash-of-civilizations thesis and other competing arguments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In theories of the journalism-state relationship, the watchdog model of journalism competes with other models emphasizing either subservient or oppositional relations. Since actual journalistic practice is circumstantially variable, this study isolates the social conditions associated with aggressive journalism. Data are drawn from presidential news conferences from 1953 to 2000, and the focus is on the aggressiveness of the questions asked therein. Through multivariate models, four sets of explanatory conditions are explored: (1) the administration life cycle, (2) presidential popularity, (3) the state of the economy, and (4) foreign affairs. Results show (1) no evidence of a first-term honeymoon period, but significantly more aggressive questions during second terms, (2) the president's Gallup job approval rating is not a significant independent predictor of aggressiveness, (3) both the unemployment rate and the prime interest rate are positively associated with aggressiveness, and (4) questions about foreign affairs are significantly less aggressive than questions about domestic affairs, and this differential has been stable for at least a half-century. We conclude by discussing the theoretical implications of these findings, which show that journalists modulate their conduct in complex ways that do not readily map onto any single model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using data on state voting patterns, we examine the positions taken by state delegations on questions that arose over the course of the United States Constitutional Convention of 1787. Whereas existing accounts tend to assume that this type of collective decision making can be understood by linking fixed interests—either material or ideological—to specific, decontextualized propositions, we argue that the meaning of any one issue was dependent upon its position relative to other issues in the overall sequence of questions. Consequently, each decision changed the meaning of future issues, and hence how actors understood where their commonalities of interest lay. Devoted to the task of rebuilding the institutions that constituted the national state, delegates explicitly reshaped the board on which the political game would be played such that patterns of action within the Convention had implications for patterns of action outside of the Convention. As each subsequent decision within the Convention fixed a previous point of contention, it also indirectly determined which issues would become viable points of conflict in the future. By the end of the Convention, even before the first presidential election, state delegations began to arrange themselves in a manner consonant with the outlines of the first party system. This previously unrecognized finding only makes sense, however, in terms of a temporally contextualized model of political action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women's political representation, once considered unacceptable by politicians and their publics, is now actively encouraged by powerful international actors. In this article, the authors ask how the growth and discourse of the international women's movement affected women's acquisition of political power over time. To answer this question, they use event history techniques to address women's political representation in more than 150 countries over 110 years (1893–2003). They consider multiple political outcomes: female suffrage, first female parliamentarian, and achievement of 10, 20, and 30 percent women in a country's national legislature. The findings show that increasing global pressure for the inclusion of women in international politics and the changing discourse of the international women's movement help to explain women's acquisition of these multiple political outcomes. Furthermore, by adding these concepts to traditional domestic models of women in politics, the authors demonstrate that country-level political, social structural, and cultural characteristics cause countries to act in conjunction with, or in opposition to, these global pressures. This is the first time that research on women in politics has considered such a comprehensive list of countries, time points, and outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article develops a sociological perspective on the rhetorical conditions for good public deliberation, a topic of longstanding interest to scholars of the public sphere. The authors argue that the capacity of reason-giving, storytelling, and other rhetorical genres to foster deliberation depends on social conventions of the genre's use and popular beliefs about its credibility relative to other genres. Such beliefs are structured but contingently so: concerns about the generalizability of personal stories or the abstraction of logical arguments come into play on some occasions and not others. The authors appraise this argument by way of a systematic comparison of personal storytelling and reason-giving in public deliberation, the first such empirical study. Drawing upon an analysis of 1,415 claims made by 263 people in 12 discussion groups, the authors show that ordinary conventions of storytelling helped deliberators to identify their own preferences, demonstrate their appreciation of competing preferences, advance unfamiliar views, and reach areas of unanticipated agreement. The ambivalence, however, with which participants generally viewed storytelling as a rhetorical form restricted personal stories to discussions that were seen as without impact on the policy-making process. More broadly, by drawing attention to the evaluative structures through which people's use of cultural forms is differentially assessed, the authors provide an alternative to both instrumentalist and structuralist approaches to culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To understand the rise of market fundamentalism from the margins of influence to mainstream hegemony, we compare the US. 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunities Reconciliation Act and the English 1834 New Poor Law-two episodes in which existing welfare regimes were overturned by market-driven ones. Despite dramatic differences across the cases, both outcomes were mobilized by "the perversity thesis "-a public discourse that reassigned blame for the poor's condition from "poverty to perversity." We use the term "ideational embeddedness" to characterize the power of such ideas to shape, structure, and change market regimes. The success of the perversity thesis is based on the foundations of social naturalism, theoretical realism, and the conversion narrative. In the poverty to perversity conversion narrative, structural blame for poverty is discredited as empiricist appearance while the real problem is attributed to the corrosive effects of welfare's perverse incentives on poor people themselves-they become sexually promiscuous, thrust aside personal responsibility, and develop long-term dependency. This claim enables market fundamentalism to delegitimate existing ideational regimes, to survive disconfirming data, and to change the terms of debate from social problems to the timeless forces of nature and biology. Coupling economic sociology with a sociology of ideas, we argue that ideas count but not all ideas are created equal. Only some have the capacity to fuel radical transformations in the ideational embeddedness of markets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Responding to the growing gap between the sociological ethos and the world we study, the challenge of public sociology is to engage multiple publics in multiple ways. These public sociologies should not be left out in the cold, but brought into the framework of our discipline. In this way we make public sociology a visible and legitimate enterprise, and, thereby, invigorate the discipline as a whole. Accordingly, if we map out the division of sociological labor we discover antagonistic interdependence among four types of knowledge: professional, critical, policy, and public. In the best of all worlds the flourishing of each type of sociology is a condition for the flourishing of all, but they can just as easily assume pathological forms or become victims of exclusion and subordination. This field of power beckons us to explore the relations among the four types of sociology as they vary historically and nationally, and as they provide the template for divergent individual careers. Finally, comparing disciplines points to the umbilical chord that connects sociology to the world of publics, underlining sociology's particular investment in the defense of civil society, itself beleaguered by the encroachment of markets and states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the sociological theories. The basic claim of the economists is that certain sociological arguments cannot be used to explain the world of financial markets. Economists refers to the taking of a specific sociological theory to a market context.

The article focuses on social reconstruction. Perhaps more than in any other subfield of sociology, researchers in economic sociology tend to justify their work through opposition to a rival discipline. Another potentially dysfunctional outcome of economic sociologists' oppositional posture towards economics is that, if they are too eager to find a neighboring discipline's faults, they are more likely to overlook valuable research by that discipline.

The prestige of academic departments is commonly understood as rooted in the scholarly productivity of their faculty and graduates. I use the theories of Weber and Bourdieu to advance an alternative view of departmental prestige, which I show is an effect a department's position within networks of association and social exchange-that is, it is a form of social capital The social network created by the exchange of PhDs among departments is the most important network of this kind. Using data on the exchange of PhDs among sociology departments, I apply network analysis to investigate this alternative conception of departmental prestige and to demons trate its superiority over the conventional view. Within sociology, centrality within interdepartmental hiring networks explains 84 percent of the variance in departmental prestige. Similar findings are reported for history and political science. This alternative understanding of academic prestige helps clarify anomalies-e.g., the variance in prestige unconnected to scholarly productivity, the strong association between department size and prestige, and the long-term stability of prestige rankings-encountered in research that is based on the more conventional view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on interviews with peer-review panelists from five multidisciplinary fellowship competitions, this paper analyzes one of the main criteria used to evaluate scholarship in the humanities and the social sciences: originality. Whereas the literature in the sociology of science focuses on the natural sciences and defines originality as the production of new findings and new theories, we show that in the context of fellowship competitions, peer reviewers in the social sciences and humanities define originality much more broadly: as using a new approach, theory, method, or data; studying a new topic; doing research in an understudied area; or producing new findings. Whereas the literature has not considered disciplinary variation in the definition of originality, we identified significant differences. Humanists and historians clearly privilege originality in approach, and humanists also emphasize originality in the data used. Social scientists most often mention originality in method, but they also appreciate a more diverse range of types of originality. Whereas the literature tends to equate originality with substantive innovation and to consider the personal attributes of the researcher as irrelevant to the evaluation process, we show that panelists often view the originality of a proposal as an indication of the researcher's moral character especially of his/her authenticity and integrity. These contributions constitute a new approach to the study of peer review and originality that focuses on the meaning of criteria of evaluation and their distribution across clusters of disciplines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historical and quantitative examination of one scientific field -- geology -- provides the basis for exploring how Western science became institutionalized worldwide during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Prior research emphasizes the importance of industrialization, Protestantism, and the legacy of colonial rule. An alternative perspective is offered here -- one rooted in sociological neoinstitutionalism. Mechanisms are examined that linked non-Western colonies and nations to "world society," serving as conduits for the diffusion of Western science. The relevant mechanisms have changed over time as world society has become more organized and structured. Direct ties among nations were important early on, but links to international organizations became important in the postwar era. Historical examples and a quantitative analysis of the spread of professional geological associations from 1800 to 1990 provide evidence in support of several theories. Results suggest that the institutionalization of geology was very much an international process. Societies strongly linked to world society institutionalized geological science rapidly, supporting unconstitutional predictions. Finally, Protestantism had a positive effect on the institutionalization of geological science, while the effects of colonization and industrialism were mixed and fluctuated over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the ethnographic technique of the focused revisit -- rare in sociology but common in anthropology -- when an ethnographer returns to the site of a previous study. Discrepancies between earlier and later accounts can be attributed to differences in: (1) the relation of observer to participant, (2) theory brought to the field by the ethnographer, (3) internal processes within the field site itself, or (4) forces external to the field site. Focused revisits tend to settle on one or another of these four explanations, giving rise to four types of focused revisits. Using examples, the limits of each type of focused revisit are explored with a view to developing a reflexive ethnography that combines all four approaches. The principles of the focused revisit are then extended to rolling, punctuated, heuristic, archeological, and valedictory revisits. In centering attention on ethnography-as-revisit sociologists directly confront the dilemmas of participating in the world they study -- a world that undergoes (real) historical change that can only be grasped using a (constructed) theoretical lens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although questions about social cohesion lie at the core of our discipline, definitions are often vague and difficult to operationalize. Here, research on social cohesion and social embeddedness is linked by developing a concept of structural cohesion based on network node connectivity. Structural cohesion is defined as the minimum number of actors who, if removed from a group, would disconnect the group. A structural dimension of embeddedness can then be defined through the hierarchical nesting of these cohesive structures. The empirical applicability of nestedness is demonstrated in two dramatically different substantive settings, and additional theoretical implications with reference to a wide array of substantive fields are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the sociology of religion has been consumed by a debate over secularization that pits advocates of a new, rational-choice paradigm (the so-called religious economies model) against defenders of classical secularization theory. According to the old paradigm, the Western world has become increasingly secular since the Middle Ages; according to the new paradigm, it has become increasingly religious. I put these two images of religious development to the test through a detailed examination of religious life in Western Europe before and after the Reformation. I conclude that the changes in social structure and religious experience that occurred during this period were considerably more complex than either the old or new paradigms suggest and, indeed, that the two paradigms are neither so opposed nor so irreconcilable as many of their defenders contend. It is possible, indeed probable, that Western society has become more secular without becoming less religious. I discuss the limitations of the two competing paradigms and sketch the outlines of a more adequate theory of religious change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purposive social action has provided the bedrock for theoretical developments and model building in several social sciences. Since its beginnings, however, sociology has harbored, a "contrarian" vocation based on examining the unrecognized, unintended, and emergent consequences of goal-oriented activity. I present several examples of the sociological practice of bashing myths based on the logic of purposive action and offer a typology of alternative goals, means, and outcomes illustrated by both classic sociological writings and contemporary research. The multiple contingencies documented by sociologists in the past cautions against attempts to build institutions or implement programs grounded on grand blueprints. The cautionary tale supported by sociological analysis of concealed goals, shifts in midcourse, and unexpected effects does not lead, however, to the conclusion that scientific prediction and practical intervention are futile endeavors. It leads instead to an emphasis on the dialectics of social life, and on the need to take into account the definitions of the situation of relevant actors. I offer some illustrations of successful mid-range theories that are based on the analysis of dilemmas in social processes and the importance of sensitivity to the unexpected in the implementation of programmatic interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The role of bureaucratic authority structures in facilitating economic growth has been a sociological concern since Max Weber's classic contributions almost 100 years ago. Using a recent and original data set, we examine the characteristics of core state economic agencies and the growth records of a sample of 35 developing countries for the 1970-1990 period. Our "Weberianness Scale" offers a simple measure of the degree to which these agencies employ meritocratic recruitment and offer predictable, rewarding long-term careers. We find that these "Weberian" characteristics significantly enhance prospects for economic growth, even when we control for initial levels of GDP per capita and human capital. Our results imply that "Weberianness" should be included as a factor in general models of economic growth. They also suggest the need for more attention by policymakers to building better bureaucracies and more research by social scientists on variations in how state bureaucracies are organized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) has challenged many of the "core" conceptions of theory and method that remain entrenched in sociology textbooks. In conjunction with recent developments in history and philosophy of science, sociologists of science speak of the disunity of science and describe the local-historical origins of particular scientific facts and laws. "Core" sociology textbooks devote no attention to the methodological implications of recent sociology of science. Elementary textbooks present upbeat versions of the discipline that emphasize sociology's scientific methodology; they describe sociological methods as implementations of a general research process designed along hypothetico-deductive lines. Viewed from the vantage point of SSK, such widely disseminated elementary versions of sociology promote an asociological conception of science. In this paper we suggest that the "epistemic flattening" accomplished by SSK's research on the natural sciences provides a valuable antidote to current anxieties about the coherence and scientific status of sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article comments on a 1993 study by Peter Kollock, which examined the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma (IPD) under monitoring uncertainty. Much of what is true in Kollock's paper is not new, and much of what is new is either not true or not significant. First, Kollock does not address a new problem. What he identifies as the key issue, namely the compromise that must be made between vulnerability to exploitation and vulnerability to needless cycles of recrimination, was clearly identified as a problem a decade ago. Kollock's main result is not new either. His main finding is that when playing the noisy IPD, strategies that use a more relaxed accounting system often have important advantages. In contrast, strategies that were generous--for instance, cooperated more than their partners did--were quite effective. To see why Kollock's observations regarding the effects of noise cannot be taken at face value, they ought to be reconsidered in the context of what is known. Kollock portrays uncertainty as have only negative consequences. However, uncertainty's benign effects may be significant. The benign effects of noise concern the two most fundamental aspects of the evolution of cooperation: its emergence and its stability.

One of the basic questions of social science theory is whether social order can evolve in a Hobbesian world. This question is approached using a micro-based simulation that explains macro-outcomes and can handle the macrolevel's ensuing effects on micro-decisions. In this way, the analysis is also an argument for a viable reductionism in the micro/macro debate. The Hobbesian problem is simulated by an artificial world of boundedly rational, innovative individuals playing a multitude of Iterated Prisoner's Dilemmas. Over time, individuals change their strategies to optimize against everyone else's choices. This simple dynamic approach reveals a surprising efficiency: Even with substantial amounts of misunderstanding, cooperation can emerge and be sustained. Moreover, the level of cooperation is high--generally much better than would be obtained using TIT FOR TAT. The uncoerced cooperation that evolves is stable because it is composed of many different strategies-some nice (in the nucleus) and some more cautious (in a protective shield)making it difficult for any contender to beat everyone. Such a dynamic model provides a powerful metaphor for a pluralistic society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a response to several comments on the study, which developed the concept of an accounting system and argued that generous or forgiving strategies often have significant advantages over strategies of strict reciprocation. The comments touch on very different issues, and interestingly, come to different general conclusions. The first comment argues in part for the strengths of a policy of strict reciprocation, while the second comment points out additional weaknesses of TIT FOR TAT (TFT). In the study, a number of ways that noise can work against the emergence of cooperation were discussed. Noise allows SUSPICIOUS-TFT to escape its basement of unrelenting defection, but the best it does is only equivalent to the outcome of two random actors. In one section of the study, there is a mention of a solution concept known as collective stability. Collective stability is equivalent to the Nash equilibrium. There are a variety of solution concepts, both stronger and weaker than the Nash equilibrium, and there is a continuing and vigorous debate about the advantages of various solution concepts and how well they fit empirical data. Generally, the study demonstrated that relaxed accounting systems have significant advantages in some environments.

This article comments on a 1993 study by Peter Kollock, which employed computer simulations allowing a diversity of cooperative strategies in repeated games. In this study, he made a significant claim, that is, in noisy environments, a generous strategy is more successful than one that follows the injunction of an eye for an eye. The implications of Kollock's analysis are striking. When substantial noise is present, there is the evolution of stable strategies of generous cooperation that cannot be displaced by less generous strategies. Kollock offered several examples of social environments that favor a generous and forgiving strategy. For instance, he offered the case of food exchange in hunting and gathering societies. A reading of the anthropological literature in this area found that in small-scale societies, people are sometimes generous with their food resources, especially when kinship ties are close. It is hypothesized that Kollock's results showed TAT+1 to be the most successful strategy because of the large range of noise magnitude in his simulations. His analysis seems to be predicated on the idea that social exchange is so noisy that actors frequently cannot distinguish between the strategies before them.

In this paper, I introduce a new measure of power in exchange networks under substitutable/complementary exchange relations. Although it is derived from a model based on a modification and extension of Coleman's model of collective action, the new measure reflects major characteristics of Emerson and Cook's power-dependence theory, in which power emerges as a result of exchange based on actors' benefit-maximizing actions under network constraints on exchange. In the new measure, an actor's power depends on the number of exchange partners interested in the actor's resource, the extent to which the actor's partners are not interested or are less interested in others' resources than in the actor's, the power of the actor's partners as interdependent correlates, and the consequences of shifts in demand made by the actor's partners under the substitutability/complementarity of exchange relations among their multiple partners. I also show high consistency between power distributions predicted by the new measure and corresponding experimental results by Cook et al. (1983), Yamagishi, Gilmore, and Cook (1988), and Skvoretz and Wilier (1993). Finally, using simulated exchange network data, I derive an enriched set of hypotheses about the structural and relational determinants of power centralization under closely substitutable exchange relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on recent work in the sociology of science, we propose a sociological approach for understanding the process by which statistical methods were originally incorporated into the social sciences in America. In a departure from past accounts, which have viewed early statistical developments in the United States as part of the history of separate academic disciplines, we analyze interdisciplinary relations and local institutional conditions in turn-of-the-century America to elucidate the adoption and use of statistical methods by James McKeen Cattell in psychology, Franz Boas in anthropology, Franklin H. Giddings in sociology, and Henry L. Moore in economics. We argue that these four thinkers were doing boundary work to legitimize their disciplines in a competitive interdisciplinary field, where they confronted the "newcomer's dilemma" of conformity versus differentiation in relation to other disciplines. All four innovators turned to statistical methods to demonstrate compliance with acceptable scientific models and at the same time carve out a distinctive mode of statistical analysis to differentiate their own discipline from the others. Our analysis also shows that these developments occurred only under certain local institutional conditions. Cattell, Boas, Giddings, and Moore were faculty members at Columbia University at a time when the University had gained a competitive lead in the area of statistics over rival universities. Determined to preserve this institutional advantage, Columbia provided a conducive setting for the interdisciplinary process of the incorporation of statistical methods into the social sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the nineteenth century, social scientists have been unable to explain age and gender differentials in the risk of suicide. Almost universally, men have a greater risk of suicide than women. Furthermore, in economically developed countries, the risk tends to be highest for men in old age and for women in middle age. Age patterns of suicide in some Third World countries are fundamentally different than this. I test an interdisciplinary theory that focuses on role identities, economic development, and kinship institutions to account for these patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although evidence supports Easterlin's hypothesis that changes in relative cohort size account for swings in fertility in the post-war United States (at least until the 1980s), studies of fertility in Europe show only weak effects of relative cohort size on fertility. I argue that institutional structures of collective social protection and changes in rates of female labor force participation influence cohort relative economic status and thereby specify the effect of relative cohort size. These factors should help explain differences among nations in the effect of relative cohort size and the recent failure of fertility to increase. I test this interaction hypothesis using time-series data from 1949 to 1986 for 18 high income nations. Estimates from pooled cross-sectional time-series models show a clear positive effect of relative cohort size on fertility, but the relationship is weak in countries with collectivist social protection policies and in countries and periods with high rates of female labor force participation. Easterlin's socioeconomic-choice model can be extended to include socio-political factors that shape the meaning of relative cohort size to families and its impact on fertility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite their otherwise divergent arguments, pluralist, state-centered, and neo-Marxist "relative autonomy" conceptions of political power in capitalist societies share the view that the "capitalist class" is generally incapable of unified political action. Yet, a striking feature of policy struggles in the United States between 1974 and 1981 was the dominant influence of a well-organized and unified business lobby. I examine business unity and political influence in the context of recent U.S. policy history. Tracing the legislative histories of the unsuccessful Labor Law Reform and Consumer Protection Agency bills of the 1970s, and the successful Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, a class-based, corporate power structure perspective is supported. The historical conditions fostering the political mobilization and intraclass cohesion of business in the 1970s, and the theoretical implications of the breakdown of business unity after 1981, are also examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research contends that when Talcott Parsons developed the substantive argument of The Structure of Social Action, he turned away from the theoretical emptiness of American social science and drew on the ideas of four European social thinkers -- Weber, Durkheim, Pareto, and Marshall. Such research exemplifies the "content-fit model" of predecessor selection, which assumes that intellectual predecessors are chosen on the basis of a fit between their ideas and the project of the thinker who engages them. This model fails to explain Parsons's exclusion of the American institutionalists, most notably his Amherst teachers Walton Hamilton and Clarence Ayres, whose work fit directly with the argument of The Structure of Social Action. Institutionalist work was also characterized, however, by its negative reputation, particularly at Harvard University in the 1920s and 1930s, where Marshall, Pareto, Durkheim, and Weber were thinkers of growing reputational standing. Examination of Parsons's involvement in the local Harvard network indicates that contemporary reputational judgments decisively affected his choice of intellectual predecessors. This analysis also brings to light the organizational and institutional conditions under which a "reputational model" is required to understand the process of predecessor selection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Class theorists often argue against the use of unidimensional or hierarchical analyses in class mobility research. They assert that nonvertical effects are of paramount importance in understanding the structure and process of stratification. By explicitly incorporating both vertical and nonvertical effects into the structural model of class mobility, I demonstrate the importance of both effects for understanding the structure of mobility chances within and between countries. Although vertical and nonvertical effects are equally important in explaining association patterns in individual countries, nonvertical effects are the major source of cross-national variation. Two nonvertical effects are particularly important: economic sector of employment -- whether nonmanual, manual, or farm; and employment status-whether self-employed or not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I propose the log-multiplicative layer effect model for comparing mobility tables. The model constrains cross-table variation in the origin-destination association to be the log-multiplicative product of a common association pattern and a table-specific parameter. Like Yamaguchi's (1987) uniform layer effect model, the log-multiplicative layer effect model provides one-parameter tests and thus facilitates analysis of the difference in "vertical mobility" between two mobility tables. Compared to the uniform layer effect model, the log-multiplicative layer effect model is far more flexible in specifying the origin-destination association. Virtually all two-way mobility models can be incorporated into the log-multiplicative layer effect model while retaining their usual interpretability. All that is required is that the tables being compared have a common pattern for the origin-destination association. Properties of the new model are demonstrated using three data sets previously analyzed in comparative mobility research. The same methodology can be generalized to the analysis of multiple two-way contingency tables if the two-way association of primary interest is specified to follow a common pattern, albeit with different levels, across the tables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Easterlin's cohort-size hypothesis suggests that crime rates fluctuate according to the relative size of the birth cohort. We examine the hypothesis using arrest statistics from the Uniform Crime Reports for the years 1953 through 1989. This paper extends an earlier ASR article (Steffensmeier et al. 1987) and tests three hypotheses derived from the Easterlin framework: (1) whether cohort size is positively related to age-period-specific crime rates, net of age and period effects; (2) whether the effect of cohort size is stronger for property crimes than for violent crimes; and (3) whether the effect of cohort size is stronger for young adults than for older adults or is consistently additive across the life course. Results using two different procedures to assess the cohort-size effect generally contradict the hypotheses, leading us to question the usefulness of cohort size as an explanation of periodicity in crime rates and possibly in other social phenomena as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Oliver-Marwell theory of "critical mass" is a prominent solution to the "free-rider" problem that plagues collective action in large groups. I reformulate the theory as a stochastic learning model in which cooperative responses are shaped by the social sanctions and cues generated by the responses of others. This relaxes four assumptions in the original formulation: that the actors are rational, decisions are isolated events, outcomes are deterministic, and public goods have pure jointness of supply and "collective profit." Computer simulations then show how adaptive actors become trapped in a suboptimal equilibrium and how they escape through attainment of critical mass. "Start-up" problems arise from accommodation to social costs and not from low returns to early contributors as previously believed. Simulations also identify a new dilemma of group size and show why solidarity tends to emerge in response to crisis. Finally, normative solidarity appears to be a consequence rather than cause of critical mass but may promote recovery from random deviance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the micro-macro debate, ethnomethodology is generally cast as microsociology. This is misleading given that ethnomethodology is indifferent to structure at any level Instead, ethnomethodology transcends the terms of the debate with a focus on empirical social practices whereby both microstructure and macrostructure are produced by and for the membership. This is also true of conversation analysis. Modifying Collins's "interaction ritual chains" to include this indifference to structure expands ethnomethodological understanding as well as Collins's theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Metatheory makes sociopolitical analyses of "stability" and "crisis" more empirically and theoretically comprehensive. Multidimensional yet parsimonious presuppositions and models reside at the core of metatheory. Power and viability are political sociology's pivotal presuppositional topics . A multidimensional view of power permits a more valid study of such issues as the interaction of capitalism and the state and the autonomy and transformative potential of the latter. Multidimensional analyses of viability encourage a tiered image of politics in which activity and passivity can coexist and the rejection of the binary interpretation of "stability" and "crisis. " A model of the polity with a minimum of four tiers is presented. The state tier is modeled as a complex organization. An organizational, but "nonmanagerialist" perspective opposes a monogoaled view of state effectiveness. Moreover, viability is understood as entailing lot merely state effectiveness but the efficiency of participation and the legitimacy of institution as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The results of quantitative, cross-national studies of the effect of dependency/world- system position on fertility trends in noncore nations are contradictory. Some provide support for the view that dependency distorts development and, in turn, impedes fertility decline. Others either qualify or refute this finding. This study criticizes the methods, measures, and approaches used in previous research. It then conducts a new analysis based on those criticisms. Results suggest that dependency does distort development and impede fertility decline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars continue to debate the nature of the bitter political polarization in the French Revolution of 1789. One view is that prosperous urban notables (property-holders, office incumbents, elite professionals, entrepreneurs) held a coherent world-view at odds with that held by nobles. Others argue that the prosperous, nobles and non-nobles alike, shared a vision of social change. I use statements of grievances drawn up at the beginning of the French Revolution-the cahiers de doléances-to measure local variation in the extent to which nobles and prosperous commoners agreed on their programs for the future of France. This variation is used as the dependent variable in a multiple regression analysis to identify the social processes that helped either forge elite unity or drive the two groups apart. Unity was more characteristic of the prosperous areas of the kingdom and the regions more directly administered by the central government, while increasing town size promoted divisions. Mobility opportunities played no role. if the organized activities of intellectuals played a role, it was a unifying force (although a weak one). Finally, the more severe the immediate economic crisis, the more the elites found common ground, perhaps through common concern over revolt from below. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study uses data on the contributions of corporate political action committees to evaluate six popular theories of business political partisanship. Two theories are supported by the data: the "Yankee-Cowboy" theory of regional political differences among U.S. corporations and the regulatory environment theory, which views the differential relationship to government regulation as a primary determinant of corporate political behavior. No support is found for four other theories of business political partisanship: the core-periphery theory, the inner-circle theory, the managerialist theory, and the domestic-multinational theory. The four disconfirmed theories are all variants of a perspective known as the theory of "corporate liberalism," which hypothesizes a tendency toward greater liberalism on the part of the more dominant or central corporations in American society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea that certain types of corporate crime are caused by a squeeze on firm profits is a common theme in the current criminological literature. This.. paper, drawn from a study of 52 "survivor" firms over 55 years of economic and criminal activity, extends this literature in several ways. First, the sources of firm profit-squeeze are expanded beyond the traditional categories of firm and industry to include macro economic influences. Second, a longitudinal design allows the estimation of changes in the extent and nature of corporate crime as a function of economic and structural changes over time. Third, the typically broad corporate crime typologies which are used to categorize illegal activities are eschewed in favor of greater conceptual and empirical refinement. Antitrust crime is decomposed into specific crime types and predicted by a multilevel economic model of profit-squeeze. The findings suggest that only certain forms of antitrust criminality are related to profit-squeeze; others occur within a munificent environment while some are unrelated to economic conditions. The implications of these findings are discussed as well as directions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of social indicators is valuable for understanding the role that the social sciences play in the political arena. One common pattern is for a particular social indicator to become frozen in place once it takes on political significance, and this can result in ironic consequences. This study traces out the case of indicators of aggregate productivity trends in the United States. These measures were initially developed as part of an underconsumptionist argument that was linked to the political left, but there was considerable debate over different measurement schemes. Over time, one particular measure of trends in aggregate productivity became central for wage negotiations and for government policy. This created a context in which the slower rates of growth of this measure of productivity in the 1970s helped to validate the views of those on the political right who saw the need for greater restrictions on wage gains and government civilian spending. The paper raises questions about the value of this particular measure and ends by emphasizing the problems of locking in place an "objective" social indicator when the reality being measured is in continua! flux. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The effects of the organization of schools on individual student performance have been the focus of investigations for many years. One area of inquiry that has led to mixed results and varied interpretations is research on the effects of ability grouping within schools. The present study has several advantages over previous, research on this question. (a) It is based on a large, national sample. (b) it examines the effects of both school types (some of which serve students selected according to ability) and ability grouping within school types. (c) The analysis involves comparing students who have been separated into ability groups with those who have not been so separated. (d) The analysis and interpretation take into account the effects of ceiling and floor effects of the measures used. The results support the general hypothesis that students in high ability groups gain more and students in low ability groups gain less over a five-year period than they would be expected to gain if they had not been separated into ability groups. It is suggested that one of the reasons similarly strong effects have not been consistently observed in the United States is that we have not collected the kinds of information needed to conduct the type of analysis presented here. However, ability grouping in British and American schools may serve different functions. The several types of schools and the ability groups within them may have more clearly defined "charters" in Great Britain, the higher levels serving to "sponsor" their students' movement toward elite adult statuses more effectively than their American counterparts do. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the interfaces between pragmatism and interactionist sociology. Four tenets central to social interactionism have been selected for this study: the philosophical perspective on reality as being in the state of flux, the sociological view of social structure as emergent process, the methodological preference for participatory modes of research, and the ideological commitment to ongoing social reconstruction as a goal of sociological practice. It is argued that from the start interactionist sociologists were concerned with the problem of social order and sought new ways of conceptualizing social structure. Special emphasis is placed on the interactionists' predilection for a logic of inquiry sensitive to the objective indeterminacy of the situation. An argument is made that the failure of interactionist sociologists to address head-on the issues of power and inequality reflects not so much their uncritical reliance on pragmatism as their failure to follow consistently pragmatist tenets and to fulfill the political commitments of pragmatist philosophers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociology faces a peculiar paradox: Every general sociological proposition is both true and false. On the one hand, one can easily find exceptions to most of the propositions which are advanced as genera! sociological principles. Yet, there are many instances in which genera! sociological principles are supported by empirical findings. As a consequence, it is not clear when some sociological principle is to be counted as false. This paper argues that a proper assessment of the state of sociological knowledge and the possibility of cumulative growth in sociology depends on resolving the true-false paradox. We argue that the paradox can be resolved if sociologists make the scope of their theories explicit. We offer a formulation of scope restrictions, demonstrate how the formulation resolves the true-false paradox, and illustrate the differences between the method proposed here and other strategies for making sociological theories conditional. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]