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Wage inequality has increased dramatically in the United States since the 1980s. This article investigates the relationship between this trend and occupational structure measured at the three-digit level. Using the Current Population Survey from 1983 to 2002, we find that the direct association between occupations and wage inequality declined over this period as within-occupational inequality grew faster than between-occupational inequality. We estimate multilevel growth models using detailed occupational categories as the unit of analysis to assess how the characteristics of occupations affect changes in mean wages and levels of wage inequality across this time period. The results indicate that changes in mean wages across occupations vary depending on the characteristics of individuals in those occupations and that intra-occupational inequality is difficult to predict using conventional labor force data. These findings seem largely inconsistent with the common sociological view of occupation as the most fundamental feature of the labor market. Correspondingly, a more comprehensive approach—one that incorporates the effects of organizational variables and market processes on rising wage inequality in the New Economy—is warranted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines to what extent religious context influences giving to, and volunteering for, religious causes—both directly and through increased attendance at religious services—and whether it has unintended spillover effects on giving and volunteering for secular purposes. Results from individuals living in a sample of counties in the United States indicate that a high level of religious pluralism is not associated with an increase in the probability that individuals will attend religious services regularly. Religious pluralism is, however, directly and positively associated with religious volunteering, while the association is not statistically significant for giving. Increases in religious volunteering associated with a high level of religious pluralism do not displace secular volunteering. There is no minority effect: individuals are equally likely to give to, and volunteer for, religious and secular causes whether they live in counties where their religious group represents the majority or the minority of the total population of religious adherents. As the proportion of the population in a county who is religious increases, so does the probability that any one individual will give to, and volunteer for, religious causes. I do not, however, find a relationship between the devoutness of a religious community and an individual's propensity to give to, and volunteer for, secular causes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This analysis has two basic objectives: First, to understand as precisely as possible the inner structure of Weber's concept of class, its similarities and differences from Marx's concept, and its relationship to the problem of exploitation; second, to use this interrogation of Weber's work to defend the importance of the concept of exploitation for sociological theory. To understand the foundations of Weber's class analysis one must look beyond his most synoptic treatments of class in Economy and Society and see how his concept of class is intimately linked to his investigations of the broad problem of rationalization in modern society. Class, in these terms, is the way economic power is distributed when economic action is organized to the greatest degree in an instrumentally-rational manner. The problem of exploitation--the extraction of labor effort from workers--is treated, in this framework, primarily as a problem of technical efficiency and economic rationality in creating work incentives and effective discipline. This conceptualization leads to a relatively impoverished understanding of the nature of antagonistic interests generated by class relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present evidence of a historic realignment in the relationship between class and voting behavior in U.S. presidential elections in the postwar period. We take advantage of recent advances in class analysis and statistical methodology to introduce a distinction between "traditional" class voting and "total" class voting. Neither shows a decline in the postwar era. The realignment occurred since 1968, as professionals and nonmanagerial white-collar workers moved from voting for Republicans to supporting Democratic presidential candidates. Stronger support for Republicans among the self-employed and among managers has more than offset the shift of professionals and nonmanagerial white-collar workers to the Democrats. Skilled blue-collar workers have become volatile, moving away from their historic support for the Democratic Party without firmly attaching themselves to the Republican Party. Significant class differences in voter turnout also contribute to the total association between class and voting outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Class analysis traditionally has focused on the position of men in the occupational system: Women have been ignored completely or classified according to the status of the male head of household. This approach implies that women derive their class identities from the class locations of their husbands. However, recent research suggests that this "conventional" view of class analysis is challenged by women's increasing independence from men. I address this issue using comparative data for the United States, Sweden, Norway, and Australia. I use a series of logistic regression models to examine the relationship between husband's and wife's class locations and subjective class identifications. Results indicate that husband's class location is a significant predictor of husband's and wife's class identifications. Education is also a key determinant of subjective class identity. There is no evidence of significant differences among countries in these patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although a negative relationship between socioeconomic position and psychological distress has consistently been documented in community surveys, we know very little about the determinants of this relationship. The dominant interpretation argues that distress is caused by exposure to stressful life experiences, that lower status people are highly exposed to this sort of experience, and that statistical adjustment for differential exposure can account for the higher rates of distress among lower status people. In this paper, a different interpretation is emphasized. It is shown that differential exposure to stress, while clearly of some importance, accounts for only a minor part of the status/distress relationship, and that a far more central role is played by class differences in responsiveness to stress-that is, by the fact that lower status people are more likely than middle and upper status people to develop symptoms of distress when exposed to problematic life experience. Several plausible interpretations of this differential responsiveness are presented and an analysis strategy developed to evaluate their relative contributions. Results of an empirical evaluation document the importance of social origins and mobility experiences as determinants of differential responsiveness to stress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Marxian class categories have been almost totally ignored in systematic quantitative studies of social stratification and income inequality. Occupational status or a similar variable is almost always used as the core criterion defining the individual's position in the system of stratification. This study provides a preliminary operationalization of the Marxian class categories for use in quantitative research. The three most important of these classes--workers, managers and employers--then are analyzed to see what interactions occur between class position and tire usual variables used in predicting income (education, occupational status, age and job tenure) and between class and race-sex categories. It was found that there is a substanial interaction between class position and the income returns to education; within class categories, however, there are no differences between race and sex groups in the returns to education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Durkheim popularized the term anomie and stimulated a great deal of theoretical discussion and research. Subsequently, Srole constructed interview schedule items to measure Personal anomia, and his items have been used by a large number of investigators. Many of these researchers implicitly assumed unidimensionality while others explicitly tested for it by Gutttman scaling and factor analysis techniques. However, none of these researchers repeated Srole's latent class analysis. In this paper, representative samples of households in the Los Angeles SMSA and in a "suburban type" city responded to the anomia items as part of larger investigations. The responses were subjected to factor analysis and Guttman scaling for a test of unidimensionality, and latent class analysis as a test of scalability and typological construction. For both samples, the responses did not meet the generally accepted criterion of a "pure" Guttman scale. As a result of a principal axis factor analysis only one common factor was extracted in both samples. The Green solution was used for latent class analysis and the result was the minimum one would expect from a unidimensional set of items, or two classes--the anomic and eunomic. Major conclusions are that it cannot be assumed an item, or universe of items, will foster the same results in different universes or at different times, even under somewhat similar modes of analysis. If no tests for unidimensionality and scalability are made, gradations of the Guttman scale type appear to be contra-indicated and polarization appears to be more appropriate for the Srole items. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the impact of marital adjustment on social class and social mobility. It focuses on the position of marriage as a system for equality of status in a stratified social order. It discusses the existence of social strata and family as an unit in the class structure. It analyzes whether the marriage of a man and woman of different social levels result in the shift of status for one or both of them. It is stated that the actual class levels of the spouses at marriage determines the success of the marriage.

The development of a new kind of scale for socio-economic status has been described. This scale consists entirely of items drawn from a personality inventory, and contains no overt references to status whatsoever. Inspection of the items suggests that they fall into five general groups, namely literary-esthetic attitudes; social poise, security, confidence in self and others; denial of fears and anxieties; "broad-minded," "emancipated," and "frank" attitudes towards moral, religious, and sexual matters; and positive, dogmatic, and self-righteous opinions. The tested reliability of the scale as a whole appeared to be satisfactory, and its validity in the original and in a test sample was demonstrated. There are certain personality factors characteristically related to sociological categories; once these personality factors have been empirically isolated they may be presumed to be present in some degree among persons assignable to the class according to some other defining property.