Annual Review of Sociology - Volume 14, 1988

This paper identifies and elaborates the unique conditions that differentiate stepfamilies from first families and evaluates and critiques the theory and methods used to study stepfamilies. The paper begins with a summary of past and current demographic trends, followed by a discussion of children and their custodial arrangements, the factor that most profoundly distinguishes a stepfamily from a first family. Next, the difficulties associated with stepmother, stepfather, and stepchild positions are reviewed. Certain processes (e.g. commitment, cohesion, communication) are important for the formation and stable maintenance of all family groups. One of these processes, boundary maintenance, is used to illustrate the unique experiences of stepfamilies. The stepfamily as a high risk setting is next discussed. Suggestions that are offered in the literature to explain stepmember vulnerability to abuse are summarized. The paper concludes with a discussion of theory and methods and the progress, problems, and promising directions of this research topic.

Cultural analysis has recently emerged as a prominent subfield within sociology. The subfield comprises a variety of approaches and substantive concerns, which may for heuristic purposes be divided along several lines. One major division separates studies viewing culture as implicit in social life from studies in which culture is seen as an explicit social product. Alternatively, recent cultural studies can be divided on the basis of the theoretical methods they employ. Four such approaches predominate: subjective, structural, dramaturgic, and institutional. Finally, cultural studies may be classified with respect to their area of substantive interest. Reviews are given of recent work in four substantive fields: public moral discourse, science, organizational culture, and ideology.

The last decade saw considerable advances in the state of research on social stratification, work, and personality. The program carried out by Kohn, Schooler, and colleagues was central to refocusing research on social structure and personality, and generating new knowledge about social stratification, work, and personality. The review is organized around the Kohn-Schooler program and considers other research and issues in relation to this centerpiece. It includes central features and findings of the Kohn-Schooler models, replication support and extensions, scope conditions and limitations, alternate hypotheses and relationships to other explanatory models, and other forms of unattended heterogeneity. The review concludes with a summary of the ways in which the field can and should move beyond this central program; the summary is organized in terms of a research agenda at multiple levels of time and space in social structure.

The core of the paper is an analysis of the meaning of sociology in the USSR, as defined by the participants and outsiders alike. The review is based on the study of programmatic statements, the character of references in sociological writings, and available biographical information on their authors. All of these help to locate Soviet sociology within the intellectual enterprise in general and to establish whether it is actually a counterpart of what is called “sociology” in the West, or a different branch of intellectual activity which for some reason uses its name. Most of the findings are derived from an analysis of Sotsiogicheskie lssledovania (Sociological Research), the only specifically sociological journal in the USSR, published since 1974. These findings are compared with parallel observations on representative samples of the American Journal of Sociology and the American Sociological Review. The conclusion is that Soviet sociology, although it uses some of the methods of Western sociology, is an activity of a different nature on the whole. It is a branch of social technology, a managerial science oriented towards the promotion of the goals and the increase of the ideological and administrative efficiency of the Soviet government.

We review four topics which have dominated the research on homosexuality in the last decade. First, we address the question of etiology which is now best described as the essentialist/constructionist debate. Second, we review the research on the relationship between sexuality and gender role nonconformity. Third, we critique the studies of intimate relationships. Finally, we present a summary of the research on the gay community, including the impact of AIDS on gay male culture. We critique much of the previous literature for presuming sexual desire can be used to categorize human beings into homosexual versus heterosexual types. We suggest instead that the term “homosexual” is more appropriately used as an adjective rather than a noun. Future research needs to begin the arduous task of developing a more general sociology of desire.

Energy is a crucial social variable and has sporadically been of interest to sociologists. Recent world events and trends have revived interest and concern. This review traces key themes and arguments in the sociology of energy and critically evaluates the literature. The discussion is organized into four sections: energetic theories of society, macrosociology of energy, microsociology of energy, and energy policy and other special topics. A concluding section assesses the state of the field and speculates on its future directions.

Organizational demography may be conveniently broken into four areas of theoretical development: intraorganizational demography, interorganizational demography, individual careers, and organizational and external populations. The bulk of the work has been conducted in the first three areas and deals with turnover of both personnel and jobs; growth, decline and stability; opportunity structures; and performance and policy. As for the latter, there are new insights into innovation and adaptation; cohort conflict and competition; labor costs and labor cuts; and EEO and Affirmative Action, particularly sex segregation. Here, only one of the four areas, intraorganizational demography, is extensively covered, with the other three areas briefly reviewed. Overall, the potential for organizational demography appears great, especially for yielding new insights into organizational behavior. There are also current linkages with internal labor market theory, and linkages with ecological and network theories are beginning to emerge. New implications for stratification theory and national opportunity structures, the dynamics of labor markets, and for research in aging are also indicated. From this review, we conclude that there is much to be gained from theoretical development at the interface of organizations and demography.

This essay synthesizes comparative research on work structures and inequality. It emphasizes explicitly comparable cross-national studies, though it also discusses historical research as well as some illustrative nation-specific studies that provide interesting contrasts with research in the United States. The focus is mainly on studies of work structures and earnings inequality, though selected studies of careers and commitment are also considered. The kinds of cross-national studies reviewed will become increasingly common in the future, due to the growing availability of explicitly comparable microdata sets.

Policy debates over comparable worth have directed the attention of sociologists to questions of how employers evaluate the worth of jobs and determine interjob wage differences. We discuss techniques of job evaluation, developed primarily by industrial psychologists. Job evaluation can embody some kinds of gender bias; nonetheless, it is useful in detecting gender discrimination of other types. The methods and findings of job evaluation are then situated within theoretical positions in sociology: the global theories of functionalism and conflict theory, and the middle range theory of the new structuralism in stratification research. The neoclassical economic view on comparable worth is contrasted with the sociological view.

This chapter discusses recent empirical work in the sociology of education which emerged from a widespread concern about equality of educational opportunity. Four bodies of empirical work can be linked to this concern: status attainment studies, school effects studies, research on the organization of schools and instruction, and research on school and classroom processes. The chapter discusses how these bodies of research are linked to an interest in social equality and how they have developed beyond that initial concern. While some comparative, cross-national and cross-cultural research exists in these traditions, this review is limited to work conducted in the United States.

Sociologist tend now to shift their attention away from the meanings and expressive qualities of art and instead focus attention on the material and social conditions of art. This has resulted in a considerable advance in our understanding of the “peopled” arrangements that help to define the matrix of art production and consumption. However, the topic of art—and culture more generally—provides a unique opportunity for sociologists to investigate the connections between meanings and the social order and the way in which meanings penetrate all levels of that social order, including the level of individuals and that of the entire society. Recent scholarship that employs historical, and often quantitative, methods suggests that there are new developments along these lines.

This chapter reviews the recent literature on social support and health and its relation to preexisting research and theory in the areas of social networks and social integration. We identify crucial directions for future theoretical and empirical work, focusing on the need to better understand the structures and processes through which social relationships affect human health and well-being. Two elements of social relationship structure are distinguished: (a) social integration, which refers to the existence or quantity of social relationships, and (b) social network structure, referring to the structural properties that characterize a set of relationships. We further identify three social processes through which these structures may have their effects: (i) social support, which pertains to the emotionally or instrumentally sustaining quality of social relationships; (ii) relational demands and conflict, referring to the negative or conflictive aspects of social relationships; and (iii) social regulation or control, referring to the controlling or regulating quality of social relationships. We also consider the social (as well as psychological and biological) determinants of levels and consequences of relationship structures and processes. In conclusion, we discuss the relevance of research and theory on social relationships and health to current demographic trends and public policy concerns.

This paper reviews the literature on organizational learning. Organizational learning is viewed as routine-based, history-dependent, and target-oriented. Organizations are seen as learning by encoding inferences from history into routines that guide behavior. Within this perspective on organizational learning, topics covered include how organizations learn from direct experience, how organizations learn from the experience of others, and how organizations develop conceptual frameworks or paradigms for interpreting that experience. The section on organizational memory discusses how organizations encode, store, and retrieve the lessons of history despite the turnover of personnel and the passage of time. Organizational learning is further complicated by the ecological structure of the simultaneously adapting behavior of other organizations, and by an endogenously changing environment. The final section discusses the limitations as well as the possibilities of organizational learning as a form of intelligence.

The article provides a nontechnical description of multistate population models, useful analytical tools that can reflect changes over time in the characteristics of a closed group of persons. The multistate life table literature is reviewed, emphasizing applications of the models to studies of marital status, family and household status, interregional migration, and labor force participation and concluding with a discussion of the relationship between multistate and event history models.

This paper reviews the recent literature on the determinants of socioeconomic success among immigrants from Europe and East Asia. The survey focuses on the larger, better studied groups and gives particular attention to historically based investigations of their progress. The concluding section emphasizes the need for additional descriptive and explanatory research on the labor market outcomes of ethnic Americans since the Second World War.

A large body of research in social psychology has investigated the links between attitudes and social structure. Efforts have focused on (a) relating attitudes to aspects of the social context and to indicators of location in the social structure; (b) investigating how social structure affects attitudes via such intervening mechanisms of influence as social networks and roles; and (c) identifying the psychological processes through which persons interpret their experiences, and which in turn affect their attitudes (House 1981). This article reviews recent work in these three areas, as well as on the relationship between social structure and attitude change over time. While attitudes often are found to be weakly correlated with socioeconomic status, research on work and personality has continued to make progress in identifying the particular aspects of occupations that influence attitudes. Theories of the intervening mechanisms through which social structure affects attitudes need to be more systematically articulated, and such theories must specify the psychological processes that mediate the effects of social structure. A promising line of research develops and tests models that show the links between aspects of social structure, psychological processes, and attitudes. Future work also would benefit by incorporating recent findings concerning the motivations and cognitive limitations that affect attitudes. The review concludes by discussing challenges that remain. These are to improve attitude measurement, to determine the relative strength of structural and cultural influences in various types of attitudes, to reconsider the degree to which attitudes are situational rather than dispositional, and to integrate research on self-attitudes with research on other attitudes.

The study of social structure represents an important field of sociological research in the European socialist countries. At first, the objective of these studies was to revise the ideological model of society developed during the period of Stalinism, a model that distinguished “two allied classes”—the working class and the peasantry—and “one stratum” the intelligentsia. Later, as knowledge developed, scientific interest shifted from ideological criticism to exploring and understanding actual social conditions. The present paper briefly touches upon these ideological and scientific developments and makes an attempt to build a model that represents both the system of reproduction and the system of inequality of Hungarian society.

Research on social movements in both political science and sociology was radically renewed by the movements of the 1960s. The 1970s saw the growth in the United States of the resource mobilization approach and in Western Europe of the study of “new movements.” Although political factors were present in both approaches, the connections between politics and movements remained obscure in each. Research in the 1980s has restored politics to its central role in the origins, the dynamics, and the outcomes of social movements. Three important political concepts and the problems they raise for research on movements are explored in this review: the social movements sector, the political opportunity structure, and cycles of protest.

The paper reviews recent publications in ethnomethodology (EM) from sympathetic but critical perspective. It is agreed that EM has made major contributions to sociological theory and to the empirical investigation of everyday life. A number of major reservations are made, however. The author suggests that some contemporary versions of EM—conversation analysis in particular—have an unduly restricted perspective. They give rise to a sociology which is behaviorist and empiricist, and which does not reflect the interpretative origins that inspired EM. Far from being a coherent and homogenous movement, the author suggests, EM is marked by inconsistency.