Annual Review of Sociology - Volume 23, 1997

The savings and loan crisis of the 1980s was one of the worst financial disasters of the twentieth century. We argue here that much financial fraud of the sort that contributed to this debacle constitutes “collective embezzlement,” and that this collective embezzlement may be the prototypical corporate crime of the late twentieth century. We further argue that the state may have a different relationship to this kind of financial fraud than to manufacturing crime perpetrated on behalf of corporate profits. In the conclusion, we suggest that an understanding of the relationship between financial fraud and state interests may open up new regulatory space for the control of these costly crimes. Our data come from a wide variety of sources, including government documents, primary statistical data on prosecutions, and interviews with regulators.

The last decade has witnessed a plethora of macro studies of various forms of social control ranging from lynching to hospitalization. Unfortunately, these specific areas of research tend to be isolated from each other and do not constitute a recognizable literature. This paper shifts the focus of study from substantive forms of social control to theoretical issues that cut across them. One such issue is the relationship between forms of social control. First, the paper explicates this issue. Second, the paper reviews and critiques three specific research literatures on the relationships between various forms of social control that are isolated from each other although they bear on the same theoretical questions. Third, the paper argues that bivariate relationships between forms of social control are not meaningful theoretically in that they are not clearly derived from general theories of social control. Fourth, the paper argues that we should focus on the causal processes and structures that underlie the relationships between forms of social control and explicate their implications for these relationships.

Since the 1980s, immigrant children and children of immigrant parentage have become the fastest growing and the most extraordinarily diverse segment of America's child population. Until the recent past, however, scholarly attention has focused on adult immigrants to the neglect of their offspring, creating a profound gap between the strategic importance of the new second generation and the knowledge about its socioeconomic circumstances. The purpose of this article is to pull together existing studies that bear directly or indirectly on children's immigrant experiences and adaptational outcomes and to place these studies into a general framework that can facilitate a better understanding of the new second generation. The article first describes the changing trends in the contexts of the reception the new second generation has encountered. The article then discusses the ways in which conventional theoretical perspectives about immigrant adaptation are being challenged and alternative frameworks are being developed. Thirdly, it examines empirical findings from recent research and evaluates their contribution to the sociology of immigration. Finally, it highlights the main conclusions from prior research and their theoretical and practical implications for future studies.

Feminist theories in sociology reflect the rich diversity of general theoretical orientations in our discipline; there is no one form of feminist theory. The development of these theories over the last 25 years has only recently begun to influence the mainstream theory canon, which has much to learn from their insights. This chapter demonstrates why feminist versions of the following theory types should be more fully integrated into mainstream sociological theory: neo-Marxist, macro-structural, exchange, rational choice, network, status expectations, symbolic interactionist, ethnomethodological, neo-Freudian, and social role. Feminist standpoint theory, an epistemological critique of mainstream sociology, is discussed at the beginning, and the chapter concludes with a brief account of the newly developing effort to theorize the intersection of race, class, and gender.

The deteriorating economic well-being of children portends less well-adjusted adults and a diminished economic future for America. A disproportionate share of today's poor children will become tomorrow's poor adults. This chapter discusses the concept, definition, and measurement of children's economic well-being and poverty. Children's current economic well-being is evaluated in comparative perspective—international, historical, and demographic. The chapter also evaluates the etiology of changes in children's absolute and relative economic well-being, focusing especially on the role of the changing family, parental employment, and levels of social provision for poor families. These “causes” are then evaluated in the context of recent public policy debates, including the devolution of federal welfare programs to the states.

Infant mortality has long been viewed as a synoptic indicator of the health and social condition of a population. In this article we examine critically the structure of this reflective capacity with a particular emphasis on how new health care technologies may have altered traditional pathways of social influence. The infant mortality rate is a composite of a series of component rates, each with its own relationship to social factors. Advances in health care have reduced dramatically the risk of mortality for the critically ill newborn, thereby elevating the importance of access to this care in shaping absolute and disparate infant mortality rates. These advances in health services technology have also had the effect of concentrating infant mortality among extremely premature and low birth-weight infants, a group tied directly to social factors operating through maternal influences and the general well-being of women.

In this manner, current patterns of infant mortality in the United States provide a useful illustration of the dynamic interaction of underlying social forces and technological innovation in determining trends in health outcomes. We review the implications of this perspective for sociological research into disparate infant mortality, including the social and economic structure of societies, access to health services, the potential for prenatal intervention, women's health status, and racial and ethnic disparities.

Sociologists have not addressed directly the normative issues that constitute the core of medical ethics as an intellectual discipline. They have, however, contributed to a “realist” critique of medical ethics in practice. In regard to the institutionalization of “autonomy” around the principle of informed consent, they have noted widespread indifference on the part of patients, considerable variation among settings, and a persistent ability of physicians to deflect challenges to their authority. In regard to failed efforts to institutionalize “justice,” sociologists have noted both the difficulty physicians experience moving from individual clinical decisions to a recognition of the collective consequences of those decisions and the social structures that shape allocation decisions along dimensions orthogonal to ethical concerns. Most importantly, however, medical ethics is an arena in which sociologists can revisit, in new form, old issues about the doctor-patient relationship, the relationship between medicine and gender, the meaning of death and dying, and the character of medical professionalism.

Although rational choice theory has made considerable advances in other social sciences, its progress in sociology has been limited. Some sociologists' reservations about rational choice arise from a misunderstanding of the theory. The first part of this essay therefore introduces rational choice as a general theoretical perspective, or family of theories, which explains social outcomes by constructing models of individual action and social context. “Thin” models of individual action are mute about actors' motivations, while “thick” models specify them ex ante. Other sociologists' reservations, however, stem from doubts about the empirical adequacy of rational choice explanations. To this end, the bulk of the essay reviews a sample of recent studies that provide empirical support for particular rational choice explanations in a broad spectrum of substantive areas in sociology. Particular attention is paid to studies on the family, gender, and religion, for these subareas often are considered least amenable to understanding in terms of rational choice logic.

Our paper represents an attempt to stimulate continued sociological interest in professional work. Our review suggests that understanding professional work is central to understanding larger workplace changes in the late twentieth century. Some researchers have documented the increasingly diverse arrangements for the delivery of professional services, even as others point to a convergence of professional control around accountability and cost containment issues. Claims of diverging interests across work settings are often confounded by greater racial, gender, and ethnic diversity among professionals. We suggest that the study of professional careers provides an avenue for studying the diversification of professionals and work settings. Future research should also follow changes in the prestige rankings of different organizational arrangements from the viewpoint of professionals, professional associations, and clients. Finally we warn researchers that managerial groups seeking control of professional work have professional agendas of their own which constrain the possibilities for sweeping change.

The measurement of age, age structuring, and the life course has become more problematic as the study of human lives has moved toward more detailed analyses and explanations. As we seek to better understand the course of human lives in contemporary and changing societies, the effective empirical measurement of its key concepts simultaneously becomes more pressing and more complicated. We first review the critical concepts of, and measurement strategies associated with, age and age structuring—including a discussion of different types of age, subjective age identification, age norms and age expectations, critical life events, life phases, and life review. We then discuss state-of-the-art methods for measuring the life course, especially through life history and event matrices, and we close the chapter with some comments on the organization, analysis, and modeling of data.

Recent work in cognitive psychology and social cognition bears heavily on concerns of sociologists of culture. Cognitive research confirms views of culture as fragmented; clarifies the roles of institutions and agency; and illuminates supra-individual aspects of culture. Individuals experience culture as disparate bits of information and as schematic structures that organize that information. Culture carried by institutions, networks, and social movements diffuses, activates, and selects among available schemata. Implications for the study of identity, collective memory, social classification, and logics of action are developed.

Women's entrance into the labor market in large numbers has exacerbated incompatibilities between employer and family interests. Research reveals that conflict between paid work and family responsibilities has been linked to decreased employee productivity as well as decreased family functioning. In this review, we explore the nature of job/family incompatibility, organizational interests in family responsive policies, and the current prevalence of various policies within work organizations. We then review what is known about the effectiveness of particular family-responsive policies on organizational and family functioning. Finally, we consider barriers to further institutionalization of family responsive policy and suggest future research and policy directions.

A growing body of social science literature has examined the organizational innovations and staffing practices comprising new flexible forms of work. Researchers have investigated the depth and scope of these changes and questioned how they affect diverse groups of workers in the United States. Reviewing the research on this transformation reveals a model of combined and uneven flexibility, characterized by the opening of opportunities that are differentially distributed across different groups of American workers, emerging under conditions in which effort is intensified, control is decentered, and employment is destabilized. The essay concludes by suggesting additional areas of inquiry for sociologists concerned with new forms of work organization.

This paper surveys sociological approaches to the study of markets. Afte considering the economic approach, I delineate the wide range of theoretical schools, including alternative schools in economics, economic anthropology, cultural sociology, the embeddedness approach, and the new political economy. I also briefly discuss recent debates on the transition from planned economy to market and on globalization. I conclude by noting the difficulties of theorizing about the historical and institutional complexity of markets.

In the past few years, the area of politics and culture has moved from the margins of cultural inquiry to its center as evidenced by the number of persons who identify themselves as working within the area and by its growing institutionalization within sociology. “Politics and culture” suggests that each term constitutes an autonomous social realm; whereas “political culture” suggests the boundaries of cultural action within which ordinary politics occurs. Bourdieu's emphasis on boundary making, Foucault's disciplinary mechanisms, and Habermas's conception of the public are setting the research agenda of scholars who focus on macro-level social change. Interdisciplinary dialogues are emerging, conducted on a landscape of historical and contemporary empirical research. Four sub-areas have crystallized: first, political culture, which focuses on problems of democratization and civil society; second, institutions, which includes law, religion, the state, and citizenship; third, political communication and meaning; and fourth, cultural approaches to collective action. Promising directions for future work are historical ethnographies, participant observation and interview studies of political communication, and studies of political mobilization that examine how emotion operates in politics. Paradigms are not yet firm within this area, suggesting that politics and culture is a disciplinary site of theoretical, methodological, and empirical innovation.

The study of identity forms a critical cornerstone within modern sociological thought. Introduced by the works of Cooley and Mead, identity studies have evolved and grown central to current sociological discourse. Microsociological perspectives dominated work published through the 1970s. Sociologists focused primarily on the formation of the “me,” exploring the ways in which interpersonal interactions mold an individual's sense of self. Recent literature constitutes an antithesis to such concerns. Many works refocus attention from the individual to the collective; others prioritize discourse over the systematic scrutiny of behavior; some researchers approach identity as a source of mobilization rather than a product of it; and the analysis of virtual identities now competes with research on identities established in the copresent world. This essay explores all such agenda as raised in key works published since 1980. I close with a look toward the future, suggesting trajectories aimed at synthesizing traditional and current concerns.

Discussions of New Social Movements have sought to explain the apparent shift in the forms of contemporary social movements in Western nations by linking it to the rise of a postmodern world. However, the central propositions of the NSM paradigm have not been critically analyzed in terms of its concepts or the evidence. This review provides a critical analysis of the NSM thesis, finding that the central propositions are not defensible as a theory or a paradigm.

This chapter critically examines the hypothesis that women's rising employment levels have increased their economic independence and hence have greatly reduced the desirability of marriage. Little firm empirical support for this hypothesis is found. The apparent congruence in time-series data of women's rising employment with declining marriage rates and increasing marital instability is partly a result of using the historically atypical early postwar behavior of the baby boom era as the benchmark for comparisons and partly due to confounding trends in delayed marriage with those of nonmarriage. Support for the hypothesis in multivariate analyses is found only in cross-sectional aggregate-level studies, which are poor tests of an individual-level behavioral hypothesis and which also present difficulty in establishing the appropriate causal direction. Individual-level analyses of marriage formation using longitudinal data and hazard modeling uniformly fail to support the hypothesis, while analyses of marital dissolution yield mixed results. Theoretically, the hypothesis also has severe limitations. The frequent tendency to equate income equality between spouses with women's economic independence and a lowered gain to marriage fails to distinguish between situations where high gains to marriage may be the result of income equality from situations where the result is a very low gain to marriage. Focusing on income ratios alone also tends to distract attention from the underlying causes of these ratios and their structural determinants. Finally, the independence hypothesis is based on a model of marriage that views the gain to marriage as a result of gender-role specialization and exchange. Historical evidence on the family indicates that this is a high risk and inflexible family strategy for independent nuclear families and one that is in strong contrast to contemporary family patterns.

Humans are inexorably driven to search for order and meaning in their own and others' lives; accounts are a major avenue for sociologists to depict and understand the ways in which individuals experience and identify with that meaning and their social world. The accounts concept has a solid foundation and history in early sociological analysis and research. The current work on accounts focuses on “story-like” interpretations or explanations and their functions and consequences to a social actor's life. The concept is useful for gaining insight into the human experience and arriving at meanings or culturally embedded normative explanations. This concept deserves greater explicit attention in sociology and is in need of further theoretical development and stimulation. I argue that sociologists should embrace the concept of accounts; the foundation is set for a resurgence of work on accounts in sociology.

Sociology has recently witnessed a rapprochement between research on organizations and research on law. This essay reviews a number of central developments and tendencies in this emerging literature, with a particular emphasis on the characteristics of law as an element of the organizational environment. We begin by distinguishing two metatheoretical perspectives on law and organizations: the materialist perspective, which portrays organizations as rational wealth-maximizers and sees the law as a system of substantive incentives and penalties; and the cultural perspective, which portrays organizations as cultural rule-followers and sees the law as a system of moral principles, scripted roles, and sacred symbols. Within each of these traditions, we examine three distinct facets of organizations' legal environments: the facilitative environment, in which law passively provides an arena for organizational action; the regulatory environment, in which law actively seeks to control organizational behavior; and the constitutive environment, in which law defines the basic building blocks of organizational forms and interorganizational relations. Finally, we distinguish between literature that sees law as an independent variable, determining organizational behavior; literature that sees law as a dependent variable, determined by organizational behavior; and a growing literature that discusses the endogeneity between law and organizations. Although any taxonomy tends to depict clear lines where they are in fact murky, we think that this approach not only provides a means of categorizing the literature on law and organizations, it also calls attention to the many different ways in which law and organizations are dynamically intertwined.