Annual Review of Sociology - Volume 15, 1989

Litigation, in ordinary speech, refers to actions contested in court; this involves a claim, a dispute or conflict, and the use of a specific institution, the court, to resolve the conflict or dispute. In the past most legal research has consisted of analysis of doctrine and theory about doctrine. But litigation is an important phenomenon in its own right and research lately has shown this. This chapter aims to sketch out a few major areas of research and theory and to add a few brief remarks about the significance of the work thus far. The topics covered include: dispute-centered and court-centered research; quantity of litigation and the so-called litigation explosion; and the impact of litigation on society.

After World War II a rapid development of sociology occurred in the Scandinavian countries, Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. By combining national intellectual traditions with different specialities in American sociology some clearly distinctive features developed within the sociology in the four countries. The student revolt at the end of the 1960s and its aftermath had substantial effects on the development of Scandinavian sociology. The dependence on American sociology weakened considerably although it did not totally disappear. Another effect was that the differences among the sociologies of the Scandinavian countries began to disappear. Rather than national sociologies there are now various orientations and code systems more or less shared by different groups in all Scandinavian countries. Sociology has become much more pluralistic, but in the process there is also an increased fragmentation and a loss of unity among the sociologists.

In the Scandinavian countries there are studies of good quality in many fields of sociology. By using international reputation, and the impact on other domains of sociology as the two main criteria, four fields are singled out as particularly interesting. These fields are studies of welfare and the welfare state, comparative studies of social stratification and political sociology, women's studies, and cultural sociology.

Recent scholars have drawn upon the insights of Marx and Weber in a renewed effort to explain the origins of capitalism in Western Europe. Few Weberians or Marxists have addressed the specific role of Protestantism in fostering rational economic action; instead they speak of modernization or of the rise of the West. Marxists are divided over whether capitalism developed out of conflicts among classes in feudal society or whether an external market sector served to undermine feudalism and to stimulate new forms of production. Analyses of the world system, proto-industry, and the seventeenth century crisis attempt to explain the concentration of capital and of production in a few Western European countries. Studies of agrarian class conflict and of absolutism address the formation of the bourgeoisie. The most valuable recent syntheses have come from scholars who combine class analysis with an examination of the particular interests of those actors who inhabited the complex of institutions that cohered into nation-states.

The purpose of this review is to assess the adequacy of various economic and sociological explanations in accounting for certain key features of change in large-scale corporations, including vertical integration, product related and unrelated diversification, and the implementation of the multidivisional form. We first review the various economic theories that purport to explain these phenomena, including the structure-conduct-performance perspective, the literature on managerial discretion, transaction cost analysis, contingency theory, and the evolutionary theory of economic change. All of these literatures have efficiency mechanisms that drive their explanations although they work in different ways. We then consider sociological approaches including the literatures in organizational theory on institutionalization and power. Our review of the empirical work provides little support for the economic view of vertical integration and unrelated product diversification, and only modest support for the economic view of product-related diversification and the multidivisional form. The sociological views aid in understanding all of these phenomena to some extent. We conclude by suggesting that the concept of organizational fields may be useful in understanding these structural changes

This review article focuses on the three control mechanisms that govern economic transactions between actors: price, authority, and trust. In contrast to conventional approaches that view market and hierarchy as mutually exclusive control mechanisms (or as poles of a continuum), we argue that price, authority, and trust are independent and can be combined in a variety of ways. For instance, price and authority are often played off each other within firms, while trust and price are sometimes intertwined to control transactions between firms. We also identify a type of organization largely ignored in the literature: the plural form. In the plural form, organizations simultaneously operate distinct control mechanisms for the same function. For example, organizations operate franchises and company-owned units under the same trademark, and companies sometimes make and buy the same part. To understand this form, the analytic focus must move from individual transactions to the broader architecture of control mechanisms

Recent research on collective action has focused on the occurrence, timing, and sequencing of such events as regime changes, riots, revolutions, protests, and the founding of social movement organizations. Event analysis allows information on the duration, number of participants, presence of violence, or outcome of some particular type of collective action to be compared across social systems or across time periods. This review considers issues of definition, measurement, and methods of estimation in event analysis. It also compares two general varieties of event analysis: approaches that model the dynamics of collective action as a process, and those that do not. A process-oriented approach evaluates how time and covariates (including past events) affect the timing and sequence of repeatable events, and it attempts to explain how events unfold over time. The nonprocess approaches summarize static relationships between levels or characteristics of units and some type of event count.

This paper undertakes a selective review of theoretical and empirical studies of internal labor markets (ILMs). Three different conceptualizations of ILMs are identified in existing literature: (a) ILMs as all jobs within a firm; (b) variable describing firms or present in discrete clusters of jobs within firms; (c) and a phenomenon present in some occupational labor markets within and across firms. Some empirical research using each conceptualization is described. Evidence apropo sseveral arguments about the theoretical origins of ILMs is assessed and some topics of future research are indicated. This review documents the absence of consensus about the characteristics defining the 1LM concept; a resulting diversity of approaches to the measurement or location of ILMs further hinders both accumulation of findings and the comparative study of ILMs. The most promising of the theoretical origins of ILMs relates scarcities of highly skilled workers to job structures generating increasing skill and knowledge among workers.

This review of sociologically relevant alcohol research addresses definitions of alcohol problems, describes patterns and trends in adult drinking practices and problems and correlates of alcoholism, and describes social policy responses to alcohol. With implications for many measures of social wellbeing, alcohol research is relevant to almost all areas of traditional sociological interest, intersecting with religious and ethnic studies, with studies of social change and social movements, with theories of social control, with criminology and social deviance, with media research and analysis of social organizations, with study of age and gender roles, with medical sociology, and with sociology of the work place. Sociologically relevant alcohol research of the last few years, while rich in the above areas, is by no means exhausted and holds great potential to illuminate issues of general interest to sociologists as well as to specialists in medical sociology or deviance.

Traditionally, the study of the life course has been divided into research on different age groups, different life phases, and different life domains such as the family cycle, fertility history, occupational careers and employment, the dynamics of income and consumption, migration, and normative patterns of aging. The emerging field of theory and research on the impact of the state on the structuring of the life course highlights overarching and integrative mechanisms for institutionalizing the life course. Therefore, the field constitutes a new analytical perspective rather than a specialized area of research. This review attempts to make the theoretical perspective explicit and to collect the various contributions from very scattered research reports. The major emphasis is macrosociological and theoretical. Examples are drawn from research on childhood, education, military service and wars, public employment, retirement, and old age. Particular attention is paid to the historical aspects of increasing state regulation. The review is based on US and Western European literature.

The immigrants to the United States since 1965 are overwhelmingly an urban population; they have converged on a small number of large metropolitan areas. This article describes the characteristics of the new immigration and its geography. It then focusses on the key immigrant-receiving metropolitan areas and discusses the relationship between the restructuring of their economies and land markets and the employment and settlement patterns of the new immigrants.

The topic of self-efficacy is part of a broad literature which has developed around the issues of human agency, mastery, and control. Its more delimited focus is on perceptions and assessments of self with regard to competence, effectiveness, and causal agency. Self-efficacy has become an important variable within social psychological research because of its association with various favorable consequences, especially in the areas of physical and mental health. It is also quite congruent with the Western emphasis on such values as mastery, self-reliance, and achievement. This review examines the nature of self-efficacy and related terms, reviews the research literature on the development of self-efficacy and how social structure and group processes affect this development, considers changes of self-efficacy over the life course, and reviews the consequences of self-efficacy for individual functioning and for social change. The focus of the review is on the social psychological literature within sociology, psychology, and to some extent political science.

Recent work in the sociology of emotions has gone beyond the development of concepts and broad perspectives to elaboration of theory and some empirical research. More work has been done at the micro-level than the macro-level of analysis. At both analytical levels, emotion most commonly is treated as a dependent variable, although increasingly, its role as an intervening and independent variable in social processes is being recognized, especially with regard to problems in substantive fields as diverse as gender roles, stress, small groups, social movements, and stratification. Considerable gaps exist in sociological knowledge about emotions; in particular, little is known about distribution of different emotional experiences in the population, the content of emotion culture, emotional socialization processes, emotional interactions, and relationships between social structure and emotion norms. More empirical research is necessary, to build on the theoretical groundwork that has been laid. Problems in measuring emotional experience and aspects of emotion culture have not been addressed and are likely to become critical issues as empirical work accumulates in the future.

This paper reviews the current state of knowledge on sex differences in earnings in the United States. The paper has three sections. The first describes the phenomenon under consideration, reviewing what is known about the size of the wage gap, historical and life course variations in the wage gap, and race differences in the wage gap. The second section, which constitutes most of the paper, reviews explanatory theories advanced to account for the wage gap and the empirical evidence relevant to their evaluation. This section is divided into two principle parts. The first considers “supply-side” explanations that focus on the characteristics and decisions of individual workers. These include the human capital theory of economics and alternative views offered by sociologists and social psychologists that focus on processes of socialization and allocation and the operation of social networks. All of these explanations attribute the sex gap in earnings to differences in the qualifications, intentions, and attitudes that women and men bring to the labor market, including the social ties that influence worker-job matches. The second part of the section considers “demand side” explanations that focus on characteristics of the workplace and actors within it. These explanations include theories of discrimination in the labor market developed primarily by economists and social psychologists and ideas about the evolution and persistence of a discriminatory wage structure put forward by institutional economists and sociologists. The final section suggests directions for future work.

This paper defines the concepts of gender and social reproduction as developed in feminist theory and discusses their utility for synthesizing recent historical research on women. We review literature on the emergence, institutionalization, and reorganization of “separate spheres” in nineteenth and early twentieth century Europe and North America. Focusing on social class differences in family strategies, procreation, sexuality, consumerism, professionalization, and state policy, we argue that the organization of gender relations and social reproduction crucially shaped macrohistorical processes, as well as being shaped by them.

As sociological research on China has accumulated over the past decade, perceptions of social change after the revolution have altered markedly. This essay reviews findings in the areas of economic development, community organization, bureaucracy, and social stratification that reflect these changed perceptions and that should be of wide interest in the discipline.