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This paper draws on theories of socio-economic change stemming from political economy and economic sociology to examine the financialization of the US forest products industry. I argue that the widespread adoption of shareholder value norms of corporate governance constitutes one of the core ideological foundations for explaining how the financialization of non-financial firms was accomplished. At the same time, I suggest that economic sociologists' emphasis on the role of shareholder value ideology tends to obscure the concrete realities of contemporary capitalism and the socio-economic relations that underlie managerial conceptions of control. In this paper, I adopt a dialectical methodology that works at multiple levels of abstraction in order to highlight the internal relationship that exists between managerial conceptions of control and the material processes of capital accumulation. Using data mined from corporate proxy statements, I show that increases in concentrated stock ownership among institutional investors and the use of incentive-based compensation--among other important factors--underlie the adoption of shareholder value strategies in the US forest products sector. I then demonstrate how the pursuit of shareholder value reshaped the US forest products in the interests of the financial community while undermining long-term stability of the industry and the people who depend on it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a theoretical account of the reconstruction of workforce downsizing as a shareholder-value strategy since the 1980s. This account has two components. First, building on resource-dependence theory, I suggest that growing corporate dependence on institutional investors makes firms susceptible to their demand for greater returns, especially when these institutional investors are blockholders and resistant to counter-pressure from managers. Second, building on Fligstein's theory of conceptions of control, I suggest that the rise of shareholder value reorients managerial behavior, by changing the decision context in a way that induces managers to maximize shareholder value. Crucial to constructing this new decision context are a set of agency-theory prescriptions for reforming corporate governance. My analysis of downsizing announcements, drawing on a sample of 714 US firms between 1981 and 2006, shows that both the pressure from institutional investors and the new decision context encourage firms to downsize more frequently. By demonstrating how both pressure from investors and changed managerial decision contexts have contributed to the prevalence of workforce downsizing, this paper makes a strong case for the financialization of the American corporation, and contributes to the sociological research on growing job insecurity and income inequality over the past three decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines a topic of continuing interest for demographers and sociologists of the family: which factors promote relationship stability among couples. Two competing theories have been highly debated to explain how relative earnings relate to relationship quality and stability. The neoclassical economic theory posits that specialization of home and work duties leads to stability because partners fill complementary roles. Gender scholars propose an alternative explanation, suggesting that when couples violate the traditional male-breadwinner model, they experience relationship strain and are more likely to experience a breakup. Using the new How Couples Meet and Stay Together (HCMST) data set, this paper offers a unique perspective on the debate, by comparing same-sex couples to heterosexual couples. The paper presents three sets of analyses to determine how relative earnings relate to relationship stability. The first analysis employs discrete-time event history models to assess the likelihood of breakup for both heterosexual and same-sex cohabiting couples. Next, the paper presents results predicting self-reported relationship quality among married and cohabiting couples. The final analysis focuses on non-cohabiting couples from wave I of the HCMST survey and examines the likelihood of entering cohabitation in subsequent survey waves. Results demonstrate that the economic or specialization model does not hold in same-sex relationships, suggesting that the effect of earnings equality is dependent upon gender norms in heterosexual relationships. When earnings power is disentangled from gender, as in the case of same-sex couples, equality in earnings promotes stability. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the patterns of entry into self-employment in urban and rural China and across different reform stages, focusing on how communist cadres have responded to new market opportunities. Analysis of data from a national representative survey shows that both education and cadre status deter people from entry into self-employment in urban areas but not in rural areas. However, urban cadres have become increasingly more likely to be self-employed over time, and only those who became self-employed in the late reform stage have enjoyed higher income returns. The paper concludes that the labor mobility process should be taken into account in studying changes in advantages/disadvantages associated with different social groups in post-socialist transition economies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increases in women's labor-force participation and the time families spend at work have reduced the time families have available to care for one another. Recent evidence suggests that responses to these challenges vary for different types of care. While time spent on housework has declined, time devoted to care of children has increased. This paper examines cohort changes in another form of unpaid work, care for ill or disabled friends or family members, and assesses the influence of employment, attitudes, and need for care on age and cohort trends in carework. Using data from the National Longitudinal Surveys, we estimate age and cohort differences in carework among women born between 1922 and 1952. We find a decline in overall levels of carework among more recent birth cohorts of women. However, we do not find cohort changes in the probability that women will provide more intense levels of care, defined as nine or more hours of care per week. The amount of illness and disability among family members partially reduces differences between cohorts, but women's employment and attitudes about work and family do little to clarify changing patterns of care. Overall, our findings suggest that, even after the large-scale social changes of the twentieth century, women will continue to provide carework when necessary. Thus, the real concern for families is not whether ill or disabled members will have care, but rather, whether their careworkers receive the institutional support required to successfully balance paid and unpaid work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past four decades, women have made major inroads into occupations previously dominated by men. This paper examines whether occupational feminization is accompanied by a decline in wages: Do workers suffer a wage penalty if they remain in, or move into, feminizing occupations? We analyze this question over the 1990s and 2000s in Britain, Germany, and Switzerland, using longitudinal panel data to estimate individual fixed effects for men and women. Moving from an entirely male to an entirely female occupation entails a loss in individual earnings of 13 percent in Britain, 7 percent in Switzerland, and 3 percent in Germany. The impact of occupational feminization on wages is not linear, but sets apart occupations holding more than 60 percent of women. Moving into such female occupations incurs a wage penalty. Contrary to the prevailing idea in economics, differences in productivity--human capital, job-specific skills, and time investment--do not fully explain the wage gap between male and female occupations. The wage penalty associated with working in a female occupation is also much larger where employer discretion is greater--in the private sector--than where wagesetting is guided by formal rules--the public sector. These findings suggest that wage disparities across male and female occupations are due to gender devaluation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A drawback to research on interracial couplings is that it almost exclusively studies heterosexual relationships. However, compelling new evidence from analyses using the Census shows that interracial relationships are significantly more common among the gay population. It is unclear how much of this reflects weaker racial preference or more limited dating markets. This paper examines the interactions of white gay and straight online daters who have access to a large market of potential partners by modeling dyadic messaging behaviors. Results show that racial preferences are highly gendered, and do not line up neatly by gay or straight identity. White lesbians and straight men show the weakest same-race preference, followed by gay men, while straight women show the strongest same-race preference. Put differently, minority men are discriminated to a greater degree than minority women in both samesex and different-sex dating markets. These results suggest that white gay men's higher rates of interracial cohabitation are driven more by constrained dating markets, while lesbians' appear to be driven by more open racial preferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the types of neighborhoods that black and white homebuyers have secured loans in during the recent housing boom and subsequent bust. We expand upon and refine previous research on locational attainment using loan-level data from the 1992-2010 Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) combined with tract- and metropolitan-level data from the 1990, 2000, and 2010 Census and the American Community Survey. Multilevel models show that black homebuyers are moving into considerably more racially segregated neighborhoods than their white counterparts and that their access to "whiter" neighborhoods did not expand during the housing boom, even after controlling for the racial composition of the metropolitan area and other key ecological factors. Conversely, new white homebuyers have been moving into neighborhoods with greater percent black residents, which may be a contributing factor in observed declines in segregation during the past few decades. Additionally, black homebuyers in metropolitan areas with greater suburban growth were on average accessing homes in more integrated neighborhoods. Finally, the models explained considerably more of the variation in the neighborhood racial composition of whites compared to blacks. These findings are suggestive of a dual housing market, one in which the experiences of blacks are still systematically different than those of whites, despite expanded access to homeownership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Single mothers' relatively high levels of poverty are well documented, but the role that intergenerational coresidence may play in mitigating this disadvantage is not well understood. In this paper, we use multiple rounds of a large national survey between 1986 and 2007 (n = 67,252) to evaluate the extent to which income sharing via intergenerational coresidence limits poverty among single mothers in Japan. Results indicate that conventional poverty rates based on single-mother households overstate the prevalence of poverty among single mothers by 12–20 percent as a result of excluding those who are coresiding with parents. We find no evidence that the prevalence of intergenerational coresidence has changed in a way that would offset the poverty-increasing effect of growth in single parenthood. Finally, we show not only that shared income is the most important factor in limiting poverty among single mothers living with parents, but also that many single mothers are coresiding with parents who are themselves economically disadvantaged. We discuss the implications of our findings for understanding relationships between rapid family change and poverty in countries like Japan, where public income support for single mothers is limited and where family support via intergenerational coresidence is both common and normative. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Protestantism has expanded rapidly in Brazil in recent decades. The question we tackle in this paper is whether Protestantism has had a positive influence on male earnings in this setting, either through its influence on health and productivity, by way of social networks or employer favor and reduced discrimination, or through other mechanisms. We tackle the problem of the selectivity of religious conversion and affiliation using microdata from the Brazilian censuses of 1970, 1980, 1991, and 2000, and analyzing the association between Protestantism and earnings at the group rather than the individual level. Our results show a strong association between the proportion of Protestants in a region, and the earnings of men in one educational group: those with less than five years of education. Upon introducing race into our models, we found that the association between religion and the earnings of less educated men is concentrated in regions in which there is a substantial non-white population. The relationships we have uncovered contribute to the literature on racial inequality and discrimination in Brazil, which to date has given little space to the role of religion in moderating the pernicious effect of race on economic outcomes in Brazil. The substantial association we found between religion and earnings contrasts with much of the research that has been carried out on the influence of religion on earnings in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper analyzes the societal impact of economic growth. I argue that, from a certain stage of development on, economic growth leads to the proliferation of consumption as a mode of social and cultural action. As a consequence, traditional forms of social and cultural practice, such as religious service attendance, become incrementally marginalized. I empirically test this hypothesis using data from official statistics and survey data from the ISSP and the ESS. Results first show that expenditures on leisure consumption significantly increase as GDP waxes. Second, I find that engagement in religious practices as well as leisure consumption activities positively affect involvement in informal social relations. Third, the results indicate that engagement in leisure consumption activities is negatively associated with participation of individuals in religious services. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper uses a new age period cohort model to show that among cohorts born between 1935 and 1975, cohorts born around 1950 are significantly above the income trend in most countries. However, such inequalities between generations are much stronger in conservative, continental European welfare states, compared to social democratic and liberal welfare states. As we show, this is because conservative welfare states expose some cohorts to high youth unemployment and make lifetime earnings dependent on a favorable entry into the labor market. We thus demonstrate that conservative welfare states have put the burden of adjustment to the post-1975 economic slowdown on birth cohorts that could not get stable jobs before 1975, while similar cohort inequalities are much weaker in liberal and social democratic welfare states. In these latter two welfare regimes, the burden of adjustment to the post-1975 economic slowdown was not put on the shoulders of some cohorts relative to others. Our analysis is the first to show which welfare regimes are more conducive to such inequalities between cohorts and what mechanisms lead to these material cohort inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Research on inequality in the legal profession underemphasizes the macro-level factors that structure legal work. This paper introduces two measures that characterize local legal labor markets. The index of gender dissimilarity is the proportion of women required to move into the private law firm sector from the public sector to create gender balance. The index of hierarchical market structure is defined by a concentration of elite law graduates, highly leveraged law firms, lucrative billings, and corporate clients. Women's salaries increase more rapidly than men's in these markets, yet men continue to out-earn women. Furthermore, HLM models indicate that in labor markets with greater gender dissimilarity, women's wages are significantly depressed. We explain this in terms of mechanisms of opportunity hoarding and exploitation (Tilly 1998). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]