Annual Review of Sociology - Volume 17, 1991

The proliferation of research on the US labor movement has created opportunities for the development of theory on labor action. Such theory would account for variations in the development, structure, ideology, goals, functions, social composition, and societal impact of labor unions and, more generally, the labor movement. This review of recent sociological research focuses on two sets of enduring questions to which this research has been addressed. The first concerns the development of the U. S. labor movement—that is, its connection to industrialization; its internal organizational and ideological development; and worker predispositions to unionize and conduct strikes. The second pertains to the socioeconomic and political impact of the U.S. labor movement—i. e. its impact on worker livelihoods and life chances and social inequality, as well as its universalizing effects on the determinants of inequality; and, its impact on working class political participation and the shaping of social policy. This review concludes with suggestions for redirecting research in order to realize the growing opportunities for developing theory on labor action.

We review the literature on the economic consequences of marital dissolution for women. Longitudinal studies of the effects of divorce and widowhood indicate that both types of dissolutions have negative and prolonged consequences for women's economic well-being. This is not the case for men, where marital dissolution often leads to an improved economic standard of living. Following an examination of empirical studies and measurement issues in the divorce and widowhood literatures, we describe preexisting and direct sources of women's postdissolution economic insecurity. Women's postdissolution economic hardship is due to multiple interrelated factors, often only superficially coupled with the marital dissolution event. In particular, the division of labor during marriage, lower wages paid to women both during and after marriage, and the lack of adequate postdissolution transfers to women imply that unless changes in women's work roles are mirrored by social policy initiatives and men's assumption of equal responsibility for children (both within and out of marriage), economic prospects for previously married women will remain poor.

Rather quietly over the last decade, a large body of literature has emerged to consider how new forms of organization arise and become established in the organizational community. The literature represents a very wide array of theoretical perspectives, and no emerging consensus or dominant theme can plausibly be identified. No long stream of research has been produced to validate the arguments of any perspective. What we find instead is a disparate group of mostly nascent theories from organizational ecology, economics, institutional sociology, strategic management, and others, all seeking to explicate the nature of contexts and processes that may generate new organizational forms. This review organizes this literature according to assumptions about how variations are generated in the organizational community. Three perspectives appear to capture most of the arguments: an organizational genetics view, which emphasizes random variation; an environmental conditioning view, which considers variation to be contextually constrained; and an emergent social systems view, which considers variations in organizational forms to be the products of embedded social-organizational interactions. Theories associated with each of the perspectives are explicated, and their practical implications for future research are examined. The review concludes with a brief consideration of the theory of the evolution of new organizational forms as itself an evolution of a new and important field of study.

This article examines the main theoretical contributions of critical theory, poststructuralism and postmodernism. It is argued that these three theories offer related perspectives on the shortcomings of positivism as well as new ways to theorize and study contemporary societies. Empirical and conceptual applications of these perspectives in sociological research are discussed. Some of these applications include work in the sociology of deviance, gender, media and culture. Finally, implications of these three theoretical perspectives for the ways sociologists think about the boundaries and territoriality of their discipline are discussed.

The concept of vacancy chains, originally developed in Harrison White’s pioneering analysis of organizational mobility processes, has been extended to phenomena as diverse as national labor and housing markets, the historical development of professions, gender and ethnic group discrimination in job and housing markets, organizational demography, and the mobility of hermit crabs to empty snail shells. In all populations in which they occur—whether human or animal—vacancy chains appear to organize a variety of social processes in nearly identical ways. This chapter provides a broad and relatively nonmathematical review of the vacancy chain literature covering basic definitions and formulations, main theoretical ideas and assumptions, comparisons of social processes in different vacancy chain systems, and several conceptual and methodological extensions to vacancy chain analysis. The review concludes by discussing a number of outstanding problems, present limitations, and promising areas for future research using the vacancy chain approach to mobility.

This review examines one of the most fundamental issues of family history, the nature of domestic groups in which people lived in the past. The focus is further limited to the evolution of family forms in Europe. Although such models as those originally proposed by Laslett and Hajnal for western family history have been shown to be wanting, they have served an invaluable role in stimulating and guiding family history research. We are now able to begin to grasp the contours of a much more complex western family heritage than earlier scholars recognized.

This paper reviews recent developments in the analysis of business power and the corporate elite, focussing on those approaches rooted in the techniques of social network analysis. A typology of research strategies is outlined, and this is illustrated through discussions of North American studies. It is argued that results from these studies cannot be generalized across all societies. This is illustrated with reference to European and Asian studies, where a number of variant patterns of corporate development can be discerned. Particular attention is given to Japan and the development of its pattern of corporate organization, which contrasts sharply with the dominant Anglo-American pattern.

The authors, by reviewing the recent work of several behavioral and social science disciplines concerned with the impact of war upon society, suggest that the study of war’s social ramifications has been characterized by the publication of empirical work that neglects, to some extent, the larger sociological implications of war as well as its ability to reorder society. The work published over the last two decades and reviewed here was written in the United States in the wake of the Vietnam conflict. This work has examined the implications of military manpower recruitment and training, as well as the psychological and economic implications of wartime service. The immediacy of this conflict, however, may have deterred sociological analysts from systematically examining the macroscopic implications of social change, a void that is remedied, in part, by historical and literary analyses that consider the long-range impacts of past wars on their belligerent societies. Finally, the authors propose that the study of the life course may offer one avenue of inquiry that can connect the micro- and macro- levels of analysis, thus connecting the soldier’s story to that of his changing society.

For reasons of cost and ease of implementation, mail surveys are more frequently used for social research than are either telephone or face-to-face interviews. In this chapter, the last two decades of research aimed at improving mail survey methods are examined. Discussion of this research is organized around progress made in overcoming four important sources of error: sampling , noncoverage, measurement, and nonresponse. Progress has been especially great in improving response rates as a means of reducing nonresponse error. Significant progress has also been made in finding means of overcoming measurement error. Because mail surveys generally present few, if any, special sampling error problems, little research in this area has been conducted. The lack of research on noncoverage issues is a major deficiency in research to date , and noncoverage error presents the most significant impediment to the increased use of mail surveys. The 1990s are likely to see increased research on mail surveys, as efforts are made to incorporate mail into cost-effective mixed mode designs.

Not only sociologists but also economists have made important contributions to economic sociology. Which particular works by economists are relevant in this context is indicated with the help of Schumpeter's History of Economic Analysis, a work unique in that it traces not only the history of economic theory but also that of economic sociology. Three main traditions appear in economic sociology, which are still fairly unexplored: the German tradition of Wirtschajissoziologie (1890-1930), the French tradition of sociologie economique (1890-1930), and the US tradition of “economy and society” (1950s). Since the 1970s a revival of interest in economic institutions has occurred especially in the United States, and a new economic sociology has come into being. Both economists and sociologists helped to create this new economic sociology. Economists have developed an approach known as New Institutional Economics. The main idea here is to explain the emergence and functioning of economic institutions with the help of microeconomics. Sociologists have developed an approach to economic sociology, sometimes referred to as the “new sociology of economic life.” This approach attempts to analyze core economic problems, as opposed to the problems traditionally left over by the economists for the sociologists to solve. Today's sociologists have done important work, particularly on the role of networks in the economy, on the structure of economic organizations, and on the role of culture in economic life. Though some weaknesses hamper both new institutional economics and the new sociology of economic life, they have breathed new life and vigor into economic sociology.

In this article we review 40 years of cross-national comparative research on the intergenerational transmission of socioeconomic advantage, with particular attention to developments over the past 15 years—that is, since the transition between (what have become known as) the second and third generations of social stratification and mobility research. We identify the generations by a set of core studies and categorize them with respect to data collection, measurement, analytical models, research problems, main hypotheses, and substantive results. We go on to discuss a number of new topics and approaches that have gained prominence in the research agenda in the last decade. We conclude that the field has progressed considerably with respect to data collection and measurement; that shifts across generations with respect to data analytic and modelling strategies do not unambiguously represent advances; and that with respect to problem development and theory formulation the field has become excessively narrow.

Sociologists interested in politics have increasingly turned in recent years to the study of policy domains—components of the political system organized around substantive issues. This review focuses on the process leading to legislative enactment of policy change and assesses issues and findings in three aspects of the political process: agenda setting. the development of policy proposals, and the struggle for adoption of particular proposals. Quite a bit is known about adoption of proposals, but relatively little work has been done on agenda setting, and the task of understanding the development of policy proposals has barely begun. Policy change is affected most directly by formal organizations whose activities are channeled and given meaning by culture; government organizations play an active role in formulating policy and deciding how it will be implemented as well.

The sociological study of the mental health of racial-ethnic minorities addresses issues of core theoretical and empirical concern to the discipline. This review summarizes current knowledge about minority mental health and identifies conceptual and methodological problems that continue to confront research in this field. First, a critique is presented of epidemiological approaches to the definition and measurement of mental health in general, and minority mental health in particular, induding an overview of the most frequently used symptom scales and diagnostic protocols. Next, the most important research studies conducted over the past two decades are summarized and discussed, and comparisons of prevalence rates and correlates of depressive symptomatology among Black, Hispanic, Asian, and American Indian ethnic groups are provided. Following the overview of descriptive epidemiological findings, some key analytic issues surrounding the study of stress, adaptation and minority mental health are considered . Finally, we propose various recommendations for future research.

Our purpose is to review the enormous range of ethnomethodological research from the past three decades. Periodically, scholars have produced review articles, monographs, and position papers that usually promote or critique the work of a particular ethnomethodological subfield. Also, textbook and other accounts of ethnomethodology sometimes impose a homogeneity on the field that neglects the various theoretical and methodological strands. We attempt to articulate the diversity each of the subfields represents, to clarify distinctions between them, and to demonstrate assumptions they share. The areas we discuss include theory, phenomenology, cognition, conversation analysis, research in institutional settings, studies of science, and applied research. While debates about proper topics and methods of research will no doubt continue, underneath such debates are a shared orientation to an extant, achieved orderliness in everyday activities and a commitment to discovering organizational features of direct interaction.

Until recently little theoretical or empirical attention has focused on the ways in which socially structured experiences in the workplace affect the interactions that occur within families. This review considers the many levels at which family interaction is currently being studied, presents arguments regarding expected relationships between aspects of workplace experiences and spousal and parent-child interaction, and summarizes the relatively small body of empirical research that links occupation and family interaction. It emphasizes the extent to which emotional consequences of work mediate the effect of workplace conditions on family interaction. The chapter reviews evidence suggesting that a variety of workplace conditions—restriction of opportunity to exercise self-direction, work overload, poor quality of interpersonal relations on the job, low opportunity for cooperative problemsolving, job insecurities, job loss, and low earnings—have emotional repercussions that have negative implications for family interaction. It argues that future research can illuminate social influences on family interaction by more fully incorporating observational methods to investigate both workplace and family processes and by more systematically and explicitly bringing the larger occupational and economic context into the emerging analyses of the microstructure of family interaction.

Writing in 1965, Lewis Coser observed, “The poor, a stratum recruited from heterogeneous origins, belong to a common category by virtue of an essentially passive trait, namely that society reacts to them in a particular manner” (Coser 1965:142). This review examines the “urban underclass,” the latest effort to analyze, categorize, and react to poverty in America. It begins with a discussion of the continuing and pervasive appeal of cultural explanations as the root cause of poverty, perspectives which boast a myriad of scholarly proponents from the right and increasingly from the left. Structural theories, which by contrast find explanation for poverty in various, sometimes conflicting changes in the economy and have an equally loyal following, are also examined. A third, ethnographic approach with antecedents in the prior work of Liebow, Howell, and Stack is explored. This emerging perspective both embraces and eschews different elements of the other two, attempting to ignore labels and understand instead “how people in real communities devise collective responses to their problems” (Sullivan 1989:50). The review suggests that nascent attempts are now in evidence from all sides to produce a common ground—part culture, part structure. But it also concludes that the real advance will come about when theorizing expands beyond the limited arena of the culture versus structure debate.

Few aspects of international social change have generated as much scholarship as patterns of urbanization in the Third World. In this review of interdisciplinary research, we first trace the trends and dimensions of urbanization in developing countries and then discuss major theories guiding global urban studies. Second, we review and critique recent cross-national investigations of the determinants of urbanization and its dimensions, concluding that severe underspecification, the dearth of comparative statistics on critical dimensions, and the ambiguity of proxy variables hinder research in this area. Finally, we discuss issues that warrant additional investigation in the near future,