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Sociologists have shown that moral understandings of market exchanges can differ between historical periods and institutional settings, but they have paid less attention to how producers' moral frameworks vary depending on their unequal positions within both markets and institutions. We use interviews and ethnographic observations to examine the vibrant market of research shops selling academic work to students around two of Uganda's top universities. We identify three groups of researchers—Knowledge Producers, Entrepreneurs, and Educators—who construct different professional identities and moral justifications of their trade, and who orient their market action accordingly. We demonstrate that these identities and moral frameworks reflect an interplay between the institutional contexts and the social class positions that researchers occupy within this illicit market. Knowledge Producers and Entrepreneurs both experienced a sense of "fit" with their respective institutional cultures, but the former now see their work as compromising ideals of research, whereas the latter capitalize on what they view as a broken system. Educators, disadvantaged at both institutions, articulate a framework countering the dominant institutional cultures and sympathetic to underperforming students. This approach illuminates how institutional contexts and individual class positions within them influence producers' moral frameworks, leading to differentiation of the market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Military sociologists have relied on a theory which is grounded in the universalistic standard argument to explain black inequality in the Army. This argument, which is a component part of the institutional racism perspective, argues that blacks do not do as well as whites in the Army because of their failure to do well on universalistic criteria such as civilian education or the Armed Forces Qualification Test. Taking promotion time as a measure of inequality, this paper presents data which suggest that universalistic criteria are not sufficient to explain black inequality vis-à-vis promotion time. When black and white enlisted men are matched on key universalistic criteria (civilian education, Armed Forces Qualification lest and occupation type), blacks consistently take more time to make grade than whites. The findings suggest the salience of the notion of ascription: when ascription is based on race, it becomes a component part of racism. Thus, one unavoidably is led by the data in this paper to conclude that the black enlisted man is subject to inequality, which is not the result of failure to meet universalistic criteria but, rather, a result of the racist actions of real-life people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The hypothesis of cumulative advantage is widely accepted in the sociology of science, but empirical tests have been few and equivocal. One approach, originated by Allison and Stewart (1974), is to see whether inequality of productivity and recognition increases as a cohort of scientists ages. This paper extends their work by examining true cohorts of biochemists and chemists rather than synthetic cohorts. Increasing inequality is observed for counts of publications but not for counts of citations to all previous publications. It is also shown that a mathematical model of cumulative advantage does not imply increasing inequality. When the model is modified to allow for heterogeneity in the rate of cumulative advantage, however, increasing inequality is implied. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although measures of inequality are increasingly used to compare nations, cities, and other social units, the properties of alternative measures have received little attention in the sociological literature. This paper considers both theoretical and methodological implications of several common measures of inequality. The Gini index is found to satisfy the basic criteria of scale invariance and the principle of transfers, but two other measures --the coefficient of variation and Theil's measure--are usually preferable. While none of these measures is strictly appropriate for interval-level data, valid comparisons can be made in special circumstances. The social welfare function is considered as an alternative approach for developing measures of inequality, and methods of estimation, testing, and decomposition are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the role that orientalism has played in shaping ethnic inequality among Jews in Israel. Earlier works usually explain ethnic exclusion as a function of Jewish life on Israeli territory. Here, however, exclusion is located within an earlier history of a Jewish encounter with orientalism and Western European colonialism. It is argued that prior to their immigration to Israel, Jews the world-over had been stigmatized as Oriental. Through a complex process, they accepted this stigma, and they arrived in Israel deeply invested in developing the new country as "western" and uncomfortable with anything identified as "eastern." It is the imperatives of this westernization "identity project" that account for the initial impetus to exclude Middle Eastern Jews, as well as non-Jewish Arabs, from emerging Israeli society. Viewing history from this perspective, ethnic cleavages in the Jewish world appear to have a historical stability and consistency that is at odds with the current focus on contingency and historical indeterminacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports development of an integrated framework for studying status. The framework provides models and methods for addressing long-standing, unresolved issues, such as (1) the emergence of status, (2) distinguishing between the status of individuals and the status of characteristics, and (3) measuring and understanding the status gap between subgroups (between men and women, or between races). The framework, which covers both small groups and large societies, and both task and nontask groups, utilizes ideas and insights from several literatures to identify three types of status, linked in precise ways to two kinds of personal characteristics (quantitative and qualitative). The three types of status are mathematically specified, and initial theoretical development is presented for all three, including, for each, formulation of measures, derivation of testable implications, and analysis of how to change status and the status structure. Testable implications cover such phenomena as status differences between group members, status gaps between subgroups, overall status inequality, and status gains and losses from discrimination -- all under varying conditions, including the number and intercorrelation of status-conferring personal characteristics and the proportions in the subgroups. The new status theory also identifies two mechanisms involved in the phenomenon of "internalized oppression." The framework thus opens many avenues for future work, both theoretical work, deriving more and sharper implications, and empirical work, testing the implications and using the new measures for the status of persons and the status of characteristics to assess key status phenomena in surveys and experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In socialist economies, work organizations differ widely in the compensation they provide employees, despite the absence of key product and labor market processes thought to explain such inequalities in market economies. Existing theories of stratification in socialist economies focus on the power and privilege of elites, but inequalities among organizations are not created by political particularism or elite power. In this paper I sketch elements of an institutional theory of stratification anchored in a conception of property rights -- the right to derive income from productive assets. Two aspects of property rights guide the analysis: (1) the dispersion of property rights across a hierarchy of government jurisdictions, and (2) the exercise of these rights by government jurisdictions as they extract revenues, primarily through taxation. Extraction of revenues from a work organization varies with the budgetary resources of a government jurisdiction and the dependence of that jurisdiction on the outputs of the organization. Variation in revenue extraction, in turn, creates inequalities among work organizations in their abilities to provide benefits to employees. An analysis of survey data on the provision of housing and benefits by work organizations in the large industrial city of Tianjin, China provides provisional support for these ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops and tests a model of cross-national and temporal variation in homicide rates using sex- and age-specific victimization data from 18 developed nations for the years 1950-1980. The results indicate that the structural and cultural factors that explain homicide rates in the United States are also associated with sex- and age-specific homicide rates in other countries. Some factors, such as absolute deprivation and extent of official violence, are associated with higher risks across victim types. Others have effects that vary by the sex or age of the victim. For example, a measure of criminal opportunities has a significant effect on homicide rates of women and children, while economic inequality and cultural heterogeneity are associated with higher rates only for adults. Family dissolution is associated with higher risks for adults and older children, but not younger children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the role of cultural capital in the relationship between social background inequalities and educational attainment. Using data from a national sample of Greek high school seniors, we assess a model that cultural capital mediates the relationships of school success with family class position and socioeconomic status. While the analysis finds that both father's class position and family socioeconomic status determine a student's cultural capital, we find no evidence that cultural capital has direct or indirect effects on educational achievement. While reproduction of the social hierarchy in Greece occurs through schooling, student ability and effort are the major mechanisms maintaining and legitimating the process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some researchers view unions primarily as functioning to increase earnings inequality among the working class while others see them as threatening employers so that they raise wages for unorganized workers and minimize working-class inequality. Threat effects are defined as the tendency for nonunionized employers to respond to the threat of unionization by increasing the earnings and benefits of their workers. This paper probes a contextual method for estimating the effects of unionization on the earnings of unorganized workers. This method controls for structural characteristics that affect workers' earnings and incorporates information about the organizational strength and vitality of specific unions. Using data from seven manufacturing industries in Indianapolis, the results suggest that (1) unionized workers' earnings positively affect the earnings of unorganized workers in unionized plants, (2) unionized workers' earnings negatively affect nonunionized workers' earnings in nonunionized plants, and (3) when plant size is controlled, unionized workers' earnings have no significant effect on the earnings of nonunionized workers in nonunionized plants. These results highlight the complexity and difficulty of estimating the effects of union threat and their importance for understanding earnings inequality in the workplace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines a model that relates individuals' explanations and evaluations of their socioeconomic standing to their sentiments of just rewards. Individuals tend to believe that inequalities are legitimate to the extent that they attribute the cause of their position of advantage or disadvantage to themselves. In this way, feelings of self-worth (i. e., self-evaluations) and explanations of responsibility are tied to the distribution of rewards. Employing survey data (N = 328), we examine these assumptions within the social psychological context of equity and attribution theories. We find that sense of worth is affected both by level of rewards and by explanations of socioeconomic standing, and that explanations and evaluations play a small role in conditioning judgments of socioeconomic fairness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article comments on a paper, which examined a formal theory explaining crime victimization, published in one of the previous issues of the journal. It is opined that the conclusions and interpretations as stated in the paper are largely incorrect, and the theory suggested is not confirmed. The authors point out the errors of interpretation made in the paper and proceed to reassess its findings. Of the nine propositions derived and tested in the study, the first six simply report cross-tabulations of victimization frequencies by race, age, and income for the offenses of burglary, personal larceny, and assault. These propositions are by definition confirmed, but have little relevance to the purpose of the theory and the article--to explain how factors such as exposure, guardianship, proximity, and target attractiveness mediate the relationship of social inequality to the probability of victimization. The main argument advanced by the authors is that these propositions were not adequately tested due to a mistaken belief that the partialling out of an effect can be accomplished by examining the main effect for a variable even when it is involved in an interaction.

This paper presents evidence that members' perceived motivation towards the group is an important determinant of the influence and status they attain in task-oriented groups. Following Meeker and Weitzel-O' Neil! (1977) and Ridgeway (1978), it was suggested that people who enter a group with low external status characteristics (e.g., women in mixed sex groups, blacks in interracial groups) can use the communication of group-oriented motivation in combination with reasonably competent task contributions to overcome the fundamental inequality (`interaction disability") they would normally face, and achieve reasonably high levels of influence in the group. Results of an experiment using mixed and same sex groups showed that while group-oriented members are generally more influential than self-oriented ones, as predicted, the size of motivation's effect is dependent upon the member's external status characteristics. Females in male groups (low external status members) achieved fairly high influence and status when they appeared group-oriented, but very low status when self-oriented. As expected males in a female group (high external status members) achieved high influence regardless of their motivation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the relationships between work organization and stratification processes, specifically, the dimensions and determinants of workers' technical roles. Four dimensions of worker-technology relations emphasized in previous research are analyzed: skill and variety, diversity, technical interdependence, and control over work pacing. We find pervasive gender differences in the forces affecting worker-machine relations: ascriptive characteristics and schooling are more decisive for women; and, because there is a more rigid differentiation among women's technical roles, occupational and job characteristics exert a greater influence on relations to machines and technology than is the case for male workers. Results indicate that individual attributes minimally affect workers' positions within the technical division of labor;factors governing the organization of jobs and firms are more decisive. The implications of these results for theoretical debates and future research concerning work and inequality are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The class theories of Karl Marx and Ralf Dahrendorf, although subject to much theoretical analysis, largely have been ignored in the dominant lines of quantitative research on status attainment and the political consequences of social stratification. This paper attempts to bridge this gap by drawing out some of the implications of Marx's ownership of the means of production and Dahrendorf's authority for both income inequality and politics, by evaluating these implications empirically and by showing how these conceptions of class can be incorporated into the dominant Blau-Duncan model of status attainment. Using survey data from large national samples in the United States and Great Britain, we show that both Marx's and Dahrendorf's class models have important implications for men's income, increasing by almost half the variance explained by the conventional Blau-Duncan model. The income of American women, in contrast, is little influenced by class and this explains a substantial part of the male-female income gap. As Marx, Dahrendorf, and others predicted, class position has a stronger impact on class identification and politics in Great Britain than in the United States. An analysis of the transfer of class position from one generation to the next in Britain suggests the existence of two overlapping but distinct stratification systems, one a class system rooted in ownership of the means of production and authority, and the other a status system based on education and occupational status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inter-country differences in income inequality have usually been explained by developmental models which posit that income inequality decreases as a consequence of economic growth. Recent research, however, points to the inadequacy of such models. This paper develops an alternative model which explains inter-country differences in inequality as a consequence of the relation of states to the world-economy. This model posits that inter-country differences in the quality are partially a result of the degree of economic dominance and influence that states, and the economic actors within them, exercise in the world-economy. Three mechanisms of this economic dominance and influence are identified: state strength, direct foreign financial control and dependence on external markets. A cross-sectional regression analysis shows that indicators of these three mechanisms do have the hypothesized effects on the degree of inequality within countries. The results suggest the importance of considering the position of states within the world-economy as a cause of inter-country differences in inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Employers often recruit workers by invoking corporate social responsibility, organizational purpose, or other claims to a prosocial mission. In an era of substantial labor market inequality, commentators typically dismiss these claims as hypocritical: prosocial employers often turn out to be no more generous with low-wage workers than are other employers. In this article, we argue that prosocial commitments in fact inadvertently reduce earnings inequality, but through a different channel than generosity. Building on research on job values, we hypothesize that college graduates are more willing than nongraduates to sacrifice pay for prosocial impact. When employers appeal to prosocial values, they can thus disproportionately reduce pay for higher-educated workers. We test this theory with data on online U.S. job postings. We find that prosocial jobs requiring a college degree post lower pay than do standard postings with exactly the same job requirements; prosocial jobs that do not require a college degree, however, pay no differently from other low-education jobs. This gap reduces the aggregate college wage premium by around 5 percent. We present a variety of supplementary evidence using labor market data, worker survey responses, and a vignette experiment with hiring managers. The findings reveal an unintended consequence of employers' embrace of prosocial values: it offsets macro-level inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Families and governments are the primary sources of investment in children, providing access to basic resources and other developmental opportunities. Recent research identifies significant class gaps in parental investments that contribute to high levels of inequality by family income and education. State-level public investments in children and families have the potential to reduce class inequality in children's developmental environments by affecting parents' behavior. Using newly assembled administrative data from 1998 to 2014, linked to household-level data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey, we examine how public-sector investment in income support, health, and education is associated with the private expenditures of low- and high-SES parents on developmental items for children. Are class gaps in parental investments in children narrower in contexts of higher public investment for children and families? We find that more generous public spending for children and families is associated with significantly narrower class gaps in private parental investments. Furthermore, we find that equalization is driven by bottom-up increases in low-SES households' developmental spending in response to progressive state investments of income support and health, and by top-down decreases in high-SES households' developmental spending in response to universal state investment in public education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To understand the relative advantage of a bachelor's degree, we must consider the question: relative to whom? Using the Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement, Horowitz (2018) argues that educational expansion between 1971 and 2010 decreased college graduates' skill usage and eroded their advantages relative to individuals without a postsecondary degree. However, the comparison group—individuals without a postsecondary degree—is inconsistently defined over time due to a change to the CPS in 1992; this group also includes individuals without a high school degree, high school graduates, and people with some college but no degree—three groups that have heterogeneous labor market experiences. I replicate Horowitz's analysis and repeat it using two alternative education categorization schemes that address these limitations. I show that college graduates' absolute and relative advantages in skill usage depend substantially on how we measure education. Notably, I find that college graduates maintain persistent relative advantages in skill usage when compared to high school graduates and individuals with some college, even as education expands. Although no classification system perfectly accounts for the full variation of the population, my findings demonstrate that researchers must carefully define key variables and comparison groups, especially when considering relative effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comparative research on income inequality has produced several frameworks to study the institutional determinants of income stratification. In contrast, no such framework and much less empirical evidence exist to explain cross-national differences in wealth inequality. This situation is particularly lamentable as cross-national patterns of inequality in wealth diverge sharply from those in income. We seek to pave the way for new explanations of cross-national differences in wealth inequality by tracing them to the influence of different wealth components. Drawing on the literatures on financialization and housing, we argue that housing equity should be the central building block of the comparative analysis of wealth inequality. Using harmonized data on 15 countries included in the Luxembourg Wealth Study (LWS), we demonstrate a lack of association between national levels of income and wealth inequality and concentration. Using decomposition approaches, we then estimate the degree to which national levels of wealth inequality and concentration relate to cross-national differences in wealth portfolios and the distribution of specific asset components. Considering the role of housing equity, financial assets, non-housing real assets, and non-housing debt, we show that cross-national variation in wealth inequality and concentration is centrally determined by the distribution of housing equity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the universalistic standards argument, which has been utilized to explain black inequality in the military. Taking promotion time as a measure of inequality, the mean months in service for black and white army enlisted men to make grades were compared. In short, most of sociologist H. Hauser's comments are mere speculation, which often seem not to consider the mass of literature on race and the military. The best point made by him is that the data does not allow looking at promotion between ranks, it only allows examining promotion from the time a person entered the service. The latter was the objective of the author and the former should be examined in the future. There is nothing wrong with speculation either. Hauser, however, makes it sound as if his alternative interpretations of the data are rooted in fact, when they are not. But to the extent that this exchange may serve to stimulate all to seek new data and facts to test their ideas, all work in this area will benefit tremendously.

The article presents author's reply on the criticism made by Gerhard Lenski on his paper entitled "Political Democracy and Social Equality." Lenski has argued that within industrializing and industrialized societies, political democracy has had important redistributive effects on the size distribution of material goods. He has also argued that in non-communist societies, parties of the left and labor unions have had similar effects on the shape of the distribution of material goods. Lenski disputes the quality of the author's data on four variables: the Schutz Coefficient of intersectoral income equality, the Social Welfare Index, the index of Democratic Performance and the measure of Socialist Party Strength. Lenski asserts that the data use on Schutz Coefficient of intersectoral income equality variable are invalid because Spain, Syria and South Korea are scored as more egalitarian than Denmark, Norway and Finland. He implies that the differences are substantial. The mean score for the first three countries is 90.49, and that for the second three countries is 87.23, which gives a difference of about one-quarter of a standard deviation.

Status distinctions have important consequences for most aspects of life, including inequalities in wealth, segregation, and interaction patterns in small groups. Much work documents such inequalities, but the mechanisms producing them are less understood. In our 2019 ASR article, "Status Characteristics, Implicit Bias, and the Production of Racial Inequality," we showed that a novel measure of implicit status beliefs explained some of the effect of race on social influence. The measure is based on an implicit association test (IAT) assessing the association between status and racial categories. In their comment, Bursell and Olsson (2020) assert that the IAT may be capturing evaluative bias, not status beliefs. Furthermore, Bursell and Olsson suggest our measure may work better for white compared to black participants. In this response, we review work in the sociology of culture and social psychology establishing the multidimensionality of cultural beliefs, and we present results from a new experiment, showing status and evaluations load on distinct underlying constructs. Results also show no racial differences in these measurement properties. We conclude with a discussion of ways to further refine the racial status IAT and the broader implications of this exchange. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Precarious work in the United States is defined by economic and temporal dimensions. A large literature documents the extent of low wages and limited fringe benefits, but research has only recently examined the prevalence and consequences of unstable and unpredictable work schedules. Yet practices such as on-call shifts, last minute cancellations, and insufficient work hours are common in the retail and food-service sectors. Little research has examined racial/ethnic inequality in this temporal dimension of job quality, yet precarious scheduling practices may be a significant, if mostly hidden, site for racial/ethnic inequality, because scheduling practices differ significantly between firms and because front-line managers have substantial discretion in scheduling. We draw on innovative matched employer-employee data from The Shift Project to estimate racial/ethnic gaps in these temporal dimensions of job quality and to examine the contribution of firm-level sorting and intra-organizational dynamics to these gaps. We find significant racial/ethnic gaps in exposure to precarious scheduling that disadvantage non-white workers. We provide novel evidence that both firm segregation and racial discordance between workers and managers play significant roles in explaining racial/ethnic gaps in job quality. Notably, we find that racial/ethnic gaps are larger for women than for men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on equality measures for nominal data. Sociologist P. Krishnan made some useful suggestions regarding the measurement of inequality for nominal data. Unfortunately his discussion is marred by erroneous and misleading statements. An equal distribution across categories, he claims, corresponds to no inequality at all in regard to the distribution of that characteristic under consideration. This principle is not limited to entropy metsines of inequality. These measures are not suitable substitutes for true measures of inequality applied to ratio-level data. In fact, they are more closely analogous to measures of dispersion than to measures of inequality.

Recent sociological work shows that culture is an important causal variable in labor market outcomes. Does the same hold for product markets? To answer this question, we study a product market in which selection decisions occur absent face-to-face interaction between intermediaries and short-term contract workers. We find evidence of "product-based" cultural matching operating as a pathway to inequality. Relying on quantitative and qualitative observational data and semi-structured interviews with intermediaries in trade fiction publishing, we show intermediaries culturally match themselves to manuscripts as a normal feature of doing "good work." We propose three organizational conditions under which "encultured biases" come to the fore in product selection, and a fourth resulting in inequalities along demographic lines and other markers of perceived cultural proximity and distance. We close with a discussion of other settings in which product-based cultural matching is likely to occur, call for the investigation of cultural matching beyond previously theorized conditions, and argue for the inclusion of cultural products in the broader movement toward reconsidering culture as a causal factor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historic increases in income inequality have coincided with widening class divides in parental investments of money and time in children. These widening class gaps are significant because parental investment is one pathway by which advantage is transmitted across generations. Using over three decades of micro-data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey and the American Heritage Time Use Survey linked to state-year measures of income inequality, we test the relationship between income inequality and class gaps in parental investment. We find robust evidence of wider class gaps in parental financial investments in children--but not parental time investments in children--when state-level income inequality is higher. We explore mechanisms that may drive the relationship between rising income inequality and widening class gaps in parental financial investments in children. This relationship is partially explained by the increasing concentration of income at the top of the income distribution in state-years with higher inequality, which gives higher-earning households more money to spend on financial investments in children. In addition, we find evidence for contextual effects of higher income inequality that reshape parental preferences toward financial investment in children differentially by class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Presidential Address offers elements for a systematic and cumulative study of destigmatization, or the process by which low-status groups gain recognition and worth. Contemporary sociologists tend to focus on inequality in the distribution of resources, such as occupations, education, and wealth. Complementing this research, this address draws attention to "recognition gaps," defined as disparities in worth and cultural membership between groups in a society. I first describe how neoliberalism promotes growing recognition gaps. Then, drawing on research on stigmatized groups across several societies, I analyze how experiences of stigma and destigmatization are enabled and constrained by various contextual factors and actors, including institutions, cultural repertoires, knowledge workers, and social movement activists. I conclude by proposing a research agenda for the sociology of recognition and destigmatization, and by sketching how social scientists, policymakers, organizations, and citizens can contribute to the reduction of recognition gaps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the intersection of two structural developments: the growth of surveillance and the rise of "big data." Drawing on observations and interviews conducted within the Los Angeles Police Department, I offer an empirical account of how the adoption of big data analytics does--and does not--transform police surveillance practices. I argue that the adoption of big data analytics facilitates amplifications of prior surveillance practices and fundamental transformations in surveillance activities. First, discretionary assessments of risk are supplemented and quantified using risk scores. Second, data are used for predictive, rather than reactive or explanatory, purposes. Third, the proliferation of automatic alert systems makes it possible to systematically surveil an unprecedentedly large number of people. Fourth, the threshold for inclusion in law enforcement databases is lower, now including individuals who have not had direct police contact. Fifth, previously separate data systems are merged, facilitating the spread of surveillance into a wide range of institutions. Based on these findings, I develop a theoretical model of big data surveillance that can be applied to institutional domains beyond the criminal justice system. Finally, I highlight the social consequences of big data surveillance for law and social inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the role of family wealth for children's educational achievement using novel Swedish register data. In particular, we focus on the relationship between grandparents' wealth and their grandchildren's educational achievement. Doing so allows us to reliably establish the independent role of wealth in contributing to long-term inequalities in opportunity. We use regression models with extensive controls to account for observed socioeconomic characteristics of families, cousin fixed effects to net out potentially unobserved grandparent effects, and marginal structural models to account for endogenous selection. We find substantial associations between grandparents' wealth and their grandchildren's grade point averages (GPA) in the 9th grade that are only partly mediated by parents' socioeconomic characteristics and wealth. Our findings indicate that family wealth inequality--even in a comparatively egalitarian context like Sweden--has profound consequences for the distribution of opportunity across multiple generations. We posit that our estimates of the long-term consequences of wealth inequality may be conservative for nations other than Sweden, like the United States, where family wealth--in addition to its insurance and normative functions--allows the direct purchase of educational quality and access. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an era of public-private partnerships, what role do nonprofit community-based organizations (CBOs) play in urban governance? Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Boston, this article presents a new way to understand CBOs' political role in poor neighborhoods: CBOs as nonelected neighborhood representatives. Over the course of four years, I followed nine CBOs in six Boston neighborhoods as they planned community development projects. The CBOs in my study superseded elected politicians as the legitimate representatives of poor urban neighborhoods. Private funders and government agencies legitimated CBO leaders' claims and treated them as the preferred representatives of neighborhoods' interests. Elected district representatives, by contrast, exhibited limited influence over resources and were rarely involved in community development decision-making. By reconsidering CBOs' political role in urban neighborhoods, this study uncovers a consequential realignment of urban political representation. It also identifies an important tradeoff between the urban poor's access to resources and the ability to hold their leaders democratically accountable--a tradeoff that will remain so long as governments continue to rely on private actors in public governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using IPUMS data for five decennial years between 1970 and 2010, we delineate and compare the trends and sources of the racial pay gap among men and women in the U.S. labor force. Decomposition of the pay gap into components underscores the significance of the intersection between gender and race; we find meaningful gender differences in the composition of the gap and in the gross and the net earnings gaps—both are much larger among men than among women. Despite these differences, the over-time trend is strikingly similar for both genders. Racial gaps sharply declined between 1970 and 1980 and continued to decline, but at a slower rate, until 2000. However, at the turn of the millennium, the trend reversed for both gender groups. The growth of the racial pay gap at the turn of the millennium is attributable to the increase in overall income inequality, stagnation in occupational segregation, and an increase in the unexplained portion of the gap, a portion we attribute to economic discrimination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many aggregate-level studies suggest a relationship between economic inequality and sociodemographic outcomes such as family formation, health, and mortality; individual-level evidence, however, is lacking. Nor is there satisfactory evidence on the mechanisms by which inequality may have an effect. We study the determinants of transitions to a nonmarital first birth as a single parent or as a cohabiting parent compared to transitions to marriage prior to a first birth among unmarried, childless young adults in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1997 cohort, from 1997 to 2011. We include measures of county-group-level household income inequality and the availability of jobs typically held by high school graduates that pay above-poverty wages (i.e., middle-skilled jobs). We find that greater income inequality is associated with a reduced likelihood of transitioning to marriage prior to a first birth for both women and men. The association between levels of inequality and transitions to marriage can be partially accounted for by the availability of middle-skilled jobs. Some models also suggest that greater income inequality is associated with a reduced likelihood of transitioning to a first birth while cohabiting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Organization scholars since Max Weber have argued that formal personnel systems can prevent discrimination. We draw on sociological and psychological literatures to develop a theory of the varied effects of bureaucratic reforms on managerial motivation. Drawing on self-perception and cognitive-dissonance theories, we contend that initiatives that engage managers in promoting diversity—special recruitment and training programs—will increase diversity. Drawing on job-autonomy and self-determination theories, we contend that initiatives that limit managerial discretion in hiring and promotion—job tests, performance evaluations, and grievance procedures—will elicit resistance and produce adverse effects. Drawing on transparency and accountability theories, we contend that bureaucratic reforms that increase transparency for job-seekers and hiring managers—job postings and job ladders—will have positive effects. Finally, drawing on accountability theory, we contend that monitoring by diversity managers and federal regulators will improve the effects of bureaucratic reforms. We examine the effects of personnel innovations on managerial diversity in 816 U.S. workplaces over 30 years. Our findings help explain the nation’s slow progress in reducing job segregation and inequality. Some popular bureaucratic reforms thought to quell discrimination instead activate it. Some of the most effective reforms remain rare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Income gains in the top 1 percent are the primary cause for the rapid growth in U.S. inequality since the late 1970s. Managers and executives of firms account for a large proportion of these top earners. Chief executive officers (CEOs), in particular, have seen their compensation increase faster than the growth in firm size. We propose that changes in the macro patterns of the distribution of CEO compensation resulted from a process of diffusion within localized networks, propagating higher pay among corporate executives. We compare three possible explanations for diffusion: director board interlocks, peer groups, and educational networks. The statistical results indicate that corporate director networks facilitate social comparisons that generate the observed pay patterns. Peer and education network effects do not survive a novel endogeneity test that we execute. A key implication is that local diffusion through executive network structures partially explains the changes in macro patterns of income distribution found in the inequality data. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The degree and scope of criminal justice surveillance increased dramatically in the United States over the past four decades. Recent qualitative research suggests the rise in surveillance may be met with a concomitant increase in efforts to evade it. To date, however, there has been no quantitative empirical test of this theory. In this article, I introduce the concept of “system avoidance,” whereby individuals who have had contact with the criminal justice system avoid surveilling institutions that keep formal records. Using data from Add Health (n = 15,170) and the NLSY97 (n = 8,894), I find that individuals who have been stopped by police, arrested, convicted, or incarcerated are less likely to interact with surveilling institutions, including medical, financial, labor market, and educational institutions, than their counterparts who have not had criminal justice contact. By contrast, individuals with criminal justice contact are no less likely to participate in civic or religious institutions. Because criminal justice contact is disproportionately distributed, this study suggests system avoidance is a potential mechanism through which the criminal justice system contributes to social stratification: it severs an already marginalized subpopulation from institutions that are pivotal to desistance from crime and their own integration into broader society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Despite rapid changes in women’s educational attainment and continuous labor force experience, convergence in the gender gap in wages slowed in the 1990s and stalled in the 2000s. Using CPS data from 1979 to 2009, we show that convergence in the gender gap in hourly pay over these three decades was attenuated by the increasing prevalence of “overwork” (defined as working 50 or more hours per week) and the rising hourly wage returns to overwork. Because a greater proportion of men engage in overwork, these changes raised men’s wages relative to women’s and exacerbated the gender wage gap by an estimated 10 percent of the total wage gap. This overwork effect was sufficiently large to offset the wage-equalizing effects of the narrowing gender gap in educational attainment and other forms of human capital. The overwork effect on trends in the gender gap in wages was most pronounced in professional and managerial occupations, where long work hours are especially common and the norm of overwork is deeply embedded in organizational practices and occupational cultures. These results illustrate how new ways of organizing work can perpetuate old forms of gender inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Contemporary scholarship has conceptualized modern fame as an open system in which people continually move in and out of celebrity status. This model stands in stark contrast to the traditional notion in the sociology of stratification that depicts stable hierarchies sustained through classic forces such as social structure and cumulative advantage. We investigate the mobility of fame using a unique data source containing daily records of references to person names in a large corpus of English-language media sources. These data reveal that only at the bottom of the public attention hierarchy do names exhibit fast turnover; at upper tiers, stable coverage persists around a fixed level and rank for decades. Fame exhibits strong continuity even in entertainment, on television, and on blogs, where it has been thought to be most ephemeral. We conclude that once a person’s name is decoupled from the initial event that lent it momentary attention, self-reinforcing processes, career structures, and commemorative practices perpetuate fame. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Changes in the nature of marriage have spurred a debate about the consequences of shifts to more egalitarian relationships, and media interest in the debate has crystallized around claims that men who participate in housework get more sex. However, little systematic or representative research supports the claim that women, in essence, exchange sex for men’s participation in housework. Although research and theory support the expectation that egalitarian marriages are higher quality, other studies underscore the ongoing importance of traditional gender behavior and gender display in marriage. Using data from Wave II of the National Survey of Families and Households, this study investigates the links between men’s participation in core (traditionally female) and non-core (traditionally male) household tasks and sexual frequency. Results show that both husbands and wives in couples with more traditional housework arrangements report higher sexual frequency, suggesting the importance of gender display rather than marital exchange for sex between heterosexual married partners. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Two long-standing research problems of interest to sociologists are sources of variations in social inequalities and differential contributions of the temporal dimensions of age, time period, and cohort to variations in social phenomena. Recently, scholars have introduced a model called Variance Function Regression for the study of the former problem, and a model called Hierarchical Age-Period-Cohort regression has been developed for the study of the latter. This article presents an integration of these two models as a means to study the evolution of social inequalities along distinct temporal dimensions. We apply the integrated model to survey data on subjective health status. We find substantial age, period, and cohort effects, as well as gender differences, not only for the conditional mean of self-rated health (i.e., between-group disparities), but also for the variance in this mean (i.e., within-group disparities)—and it is detection of age, period, and cohort variations in the latter disparities that application of the integrated model permits. Net of effects of age and individual-level covariates, in recent decades, cohort differences in conditional means of self-rated health have been less important than period differences that cut across all cohorts. By contrast, cohort differences of variances in these conditional means have dominated period differences. In particular, post-baby boom birth cohorts show significant and increasing levels of within-group disparities. These findings illustrate how the integrated model provides a powerful framework through which to identify and study the evolution of variations in social inequalities across age, period, and cohort temporal dimensions. Accordingly, this model should be broadly applicable to the study of social inequality in many different substantive contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

From 1973 to 2007, private sector union membership in the United States declined from 34 to 8 percent for men and from 16 to 6 percent for women. During this period, inequality in hourly wages increased by over 40 percent. We report a decomposition, relating rising inequality to the union wage distribution’s shrinking weight. We argue that unions helped institutionalize norms of equity, reducing the dispersion of nonunion wages in highly unionized regions and industries. Accounting for unions’ effect on union and nonunion wages suggests that the decline of organized labor explains a fifth to a third of the growth in inequality—an effect comparable to the growing stratification of wages by education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study develops a comprehensive theoretical framework regarding the evolution of the class divide in postsecondary education. I conceptualize three prototypes of class inequality—effectively maintained, declining, and expanding—and associate their emergence with the level of competition in college admissions. I also unearth the twin mechanisms, exclusion and adaptation, that link class hierarchy to a highly stratified postsecondary system in an allegedly meritocratic environment. Intra- and inter-cohort comparisons reveal that while the class divide regarding enrollment and access to selective postsecondary schooling is ubiquitous, it declines when competition for slots in higher education is low and expands during periods of high competition. In such a regime of effectively expanding inequality (EEI), a greater emphasis on a certain selection criterion (like test scores) in admission decisions—required to sort the influx of applicants—is bolstered by class-based polarization vis-à-vis this particular criterion. This vicious cycle of exclusion and adaptation intensifies and expedites the escalation of class inequality. The results show that adaptation is more effective than exclusion in expanding class inequality in U.S. higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past 50 years, women's roles have changed dramatically—a reality captured by substantial increases in employment and reductions in fertility. Yet, the social organization of work and family life has not changed much, leading to pervasive work–family conflict. Observing these strains, some scholars wonder whether U.S. women's high employment levels are sustainable. Women's employment in professional and managerial occupations—the core of the analyses offered in this article—merits particular interest because of the material and symbolic implications for gender equality. In a cohort analysis of working-age women born between 1906 and 1975, I show that employment levels among college-educated women in professional and managerial occupations have increased across cohorts. Full-time, year-round employment rates continue to rise across cohorts, even among women in historically male professions and mothers of young children. Although labor force participation rates have stopped rising, they have stalled at a very high rate, with less than 8 percent of professional women born since 1956 out of the labor force for a year or more during their prime childbearing years. Moreover, the difference in employment rates between mothers and childless women—the "child penalty"—is shrinking across cohorts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the first pooled time series analysis of the impact that politics and policy have on inequality in Latin America and the Caribbean. The authors build on models consisting of sociological and economic variables, adding the strength of the democratic tradition, long-term legislative partisan political power distribution, and social spending to explain variation in inequality. They analyze an unbalanced pooled time series data set for income distribution in 18 Latin American and Caribbean countries from 1970 to 2000. They show that the political variables add explanatory power. A strong record of democracy and a left-leaning legislative partisan balance are associated with lower levels of inequality, as are social security and welfare spending under democratic regimes. Thus, they replicate some and modify other well-established findings from studies of Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries in the very different context of Latin America and the Caribbean. They confirm that the partisan composition of government matters, and show that, in contrast to OECD countries, where social security and welfare spending consistently reduce inequality, such spending reduces inequality only in a democratic context in Latin America and the Caribbean. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Globalization has attained a prominent place on the sociological agenda, and stratification scholars have implicated globalization in the increased income inequality observed in many advanced capitalist countries. But sociologists have given much less attention to a different yet increasingly prevalent form of internationalization: regional integration. Regional integration, or the construction of international economy and polity within negotiated regions, should matter for income inequality. Regional economic integration should raise income inequality, as workers are exposed to international competition and labor unions are weakened. Regional political integration should also raise income inequality, but through a different mechanism: political integration should drive welfare state retrenchment in market-oriented regional polities as states adopt liberal policies in a context of fiscal austerity. Evidence from random-effects and fixed-effects models of income inequality in Western Europe supports these arguments. The results show that regional integration explains nearly half of the increase in income inequality in the Western European countries analyzed in this article. The effects of regional integration on income inequality are net of several controls, including two established measures of globalization, suggesting that a sociological approach to regional integration adds to our understanding of rising income inequality in Western Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Employers have experimented with three broad approaches to promoting diversity. Some programs are designed to establish organizational responsibility for diversity, others to moderate managerial bias through training and feedback, and still others to reduce the social isolation of women and minority workers. These approaches find support in academic theories of how organizations achieve goals, how stereotyping shapes hiring and promotion, and how networks influence careers. This is the first systematic analysis of their efficacy. The analyses rely on federal data describing the workforces of 708 private sector establishments from 1971 to 2002, coupled with survey data on their employment practices. Efforts to moderate managerial bias through diversity training and diversity evaluations are least effective at increasing the share of white women, black women, and black men in management. Efforts to attack social isolation through mentoring and networking show modest effects. Efforts to establish responsibility for diversity lead to the broadest increases in managerial diversity. Moreover, organizations that establish responsibility see better effects from diversity training and evaluations, networking, and mentoring. Employers subject to federal affirmative action edicts, who typically assign responsibility for compliance to a manager, also see stronger effects from some programs. This work lays the foundation for an institutional theory of the remediation of workplace inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Are American attitudes toward economic inequality different from those in other countries? One tradition in sociology suggests American "exceptionalism," while another argues for convergence across nations in social norms, such as attitudes toward inequality. This article uses International Social Survey Program (ISSP) microdata to compare attitudes in different countries toward what individuals in specific occupations "do earn" and what they "should earn," and to distinguish value preferences for more egalitarian outcomes from other confounding attitudes and perceptions. The authors suggest a method for summarizing individual preferences for the leveling of earnings and use kernel density estimates to describe and compare the distribution of individual preferences over time and cross-nationally. They find that subjective estimates of inequality in pay diverge substantially from actual data, and that although Americans do not, on the average, have different preferences for aggregate (in)equality, there is evidence for: 1. Less awareness concerning the extent of inequality at the top of the income distribution in America 2. More polarization in attitudes among Americans 3. Similar preferences for "leveling down" at the top of the earnings distribution in the United States, but also 4. Less concern for reducing differentials at the bottom of the distribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors test two theories linking religion and economic beliefs in predominantly Muslim nations using data from national surveys of Algeria, Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia. Moral Cosmology theory posits that because the religiously orthodox are theologically communitarian in viewing individuals as subsumed by a larger community of believers subject to timeless laws and God's greater plan, they are disposed toward economic communitarianism, whereby the state should provide for the poor, reduce inequality, and meet community needs via economic intervention. Modernists are theologically individualistic in seeing individuals as having to make moral decisions in a temporal context and as responsible for their own destinies. As such, modernists are inclined to economic individualism, whereby the poor are responsible for their fates, wider income differences promote individual initiative, and government should not interfere in the economy. An alternate hypothesis, based on Islamic scripture's discussion of economic matters, limits the effect of orthodoxy versus modernism to the one clear economic directive of Islam: the state's responsibility to care for the poor. The authors find that Islamic orthodoxy—measured as the desire to implement Islamic law (the shari'a)—is associated with the broad economic communitarianism expected by Moral Cosmology theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study uncovers an unexpected effect of family-friendly policies on women's economic attainments. Using hierarchical linear models, the analysis combines individual-level data (obtained from the Luxembourg Income Study) with country-level data (obtained from secondary sources) to evaluate the effects of family policies on gender earnings inequality across 20 advanced societies. The analysis shows that gender earnings disparities are less pronounced in countries with developed family policies. However, the findings also show that if cross-country differences in the wage structure are controlled, the underlying effect of family policy on the gender gap is exposed. Although "mother-friendly" policies enable more women to become economically active, they exacerbate gender occupational inequality. The authors therefore conclude that the lower earnings differentials between men and women in developed welfare states should be attributed to their more egalitarian wage structures rather than to their family policies. The paradoxical implications of policies intended to reconcile paid and unpaid work as well as the mechanisms that cause these policies to widen the gender earnings gap are discussed and evaluated in light of sociological theories on the role of family policy and wage determination institutions in contemporary societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research reveals strong effects of involvement in international organizations on state policies, but much of this research downplays inequality in world political participation, and there is only a limited understanding of what explains world-polity ties. Using data on memberships in intergovernmental and international non-governmental organizations (IGOs and INGOs) for 1960 through 2000, this study analyzes inequality in the world polity. IGO ties are fairly evenly distributed, but the level of inequality in INGO ties is as high as the level of world income inequality. Since 1960, inequality in ties to IGOs decreased sharply, but inequality in ties to INGOs remained more stable. A conflict-centered model of the world polity is developed here that explains world political participation as a function of material and symbolic conflict. Rich, core, Western states and societies have significantly more ties to the world polity than do others. Powerful states dominate IGOs less now than they did in 1960, but rich, core, Western societies have grown more dominant in the INGO field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]