Annual Review of Sociology - Volume 25, 1999

Recent research on entrepreneurship by sociologists has focused on subsectors of the discipline rather than on entrepreneurship as a class. This review draws insights from diverse literatures to develop a sociological perspective on entrepreneurship as a whole. Until recently, the supply-side perspective, which focuses on the individual traits of entrepreneurs, has been the dominant school of research. Newer work from the demand-side perspective has focused on rates, or the context in which entrepreneurship occurs. This review emphasizes this less developed demand-side perspective—in particular, the influence of firms and markets on how, where, and why new enterprises are founded. I take stock of the differences and separation in the two perspectives and argue that sociological frameworks, an embeddedness perspective, institutional and ecological theory, and multilevel models can be used to integrate the two schools and extend their research implications.

Sociology has paid insufficient attention to third world women's movements. In this review, for which we draw upon a variety of interdisciplinary sources, we focus on three questions: the issue of women's interests; the conditions under which women mobilize—particularly the effects of democratization, nationalist, religious, and socialist movements; and the issue of state and organizational autonomy. We argue that the concept of a political opportunity structure inadequately captures the role that states in the third world play in determining the possibilities of third world women's movements. We call for more comparative work with a focus on the local rather than on the macro level. This will help us to better understand both the ways in which women's collective identities and interests are constructed and the ideological and material conditions under which mobilizations actually take place.

Flirting, bantering, and other sexual interactions are commonplace in work organizations. Not all of these interactions constitute harassment or assault; consensual sexual relationships, defined as those reflecting positive and autonomous expressions of workers' sexual desire, are also prevalent in the workplace and are the focus of this paper. We begin by reviewing research on the distinction between sexual harassment and sexual consent. Next we examine popular and business literatures on office romance. Finally we discuss sociological research on consensual sexual relationships, including research on mate selection, organizational policy, and workplace culture. We argue that sexual behaviors must be understood in context, as an interplay between organizational control and individual agency.

For many years, US trade unions declined in union density, organizing capacity, level of strike activity, and political effectiveness. Labor's decline is variously attributed to demographic factors, inaction by unions themselves, the state and legal system, globalization, neoliberalism, and the employer offensive that ended a labor-capital accord. The AFL-CIO New Voice leadership elected in 1995, headed by John Sweeney, seeks to reverse these trends and transform the labor movement. Innovative organizing, emphasizing the use of rank-and-file intensive tactics, substantially increases union success; variants include union building, immigrant organizing, feminist approaches, and industry-wide non–National Labor Relations Board (or nonboard) organizing. The labor movement must also deal with participatory management or employee involvement programs, while experimenting with new forms, including occupational unionism, community organizing, and strengthened alliances with other social movements.

This essay reviews research on the type and degree of fragmentation of firm ownership with an emphasis on the consequences of ownership organization for firm performance. We use a property rights approach to synthesize sociological, organizational, legal, and economic research that has examined the effect of ownership organization on firm performance. Agency theorists generally assume that shareholders are homogenous and that their influence on firm performance is directly proportional to the percentage of equity they hold. However, empirical research following this approach has failed to produce definitive evidence. Class analysis perspectives interpret these inconclusive results as demonstrating that, regardless of ownership organization, firms are run to serve the capitalist class. An alternative interpretation is that shareholders are not homogeneous but that certain types of shareholders use their formal authority, social influence, and expertise to “capture” property rights and strongly influence firm performance. The influence of different types of owners may depend on industry characteristics, and we review literature pointing to a contingency theory of ownership organization.

The United States in the 1990s has experienced the greatest sustained decline in violent crime rates since World War II—even though rates thus far have not fallen as rapidly as they increased during the crime boom of the 1960s and early 1970s. I review a set of exogenous and policy-related explanations for the earlier crime boom and for the crime bust of the 1990s. I argue that our understanding of crime trends is hampered by a lack of longitudinal analysis and by ahistorical approaches. I identify a set of questions, concepts, and research opportunities raised by taking a more comprehensive look at crime waves.

Research on sexual harassment is still in its infancy. Over the past 20 years, research has moved from prevalence studies to more sophisticated empirical and theoretical analyses of the causes and consequences of sexual harassment. This review provides an overview of the prevalence and measurement of harassment along with some suggestions for developing standard measures of sexual harassment. Researchers are encouraged to include organizational forms of harassment in their measures, along with commonly understood individual forms. The most prominent and promising explanations of harassment are discussed including societal, organizational, and individual level approaches. Of particular promise are approaches incorporating the gendered nature of organizational structures and processes. Research on the responses to and consequences of sexual harassment are also presented. The review ends with a discussion of overlooked areas and directions for future research, including the need for more advanced survey data collection techniques and qualitative research.

The gender system includes processes that both define males and females as different in socially significant ways and justify inequality on the basis of that difference. Gender is different from other forms of social inequality in that men and women interact extensively within families and households and in other role relations. This high rate of contact between men and women raises important questions about how interaction creates experiences that confirm, or potentially could undermine, the beliefs about gender difference and inequality that underlie the gender system. Any theory of gender difference and inequality must accommodate three basic findings from research on interaction. (a). People perceive gender differences to be pervasive in interaction. (b). Studies of interaction among peers with equal power and status show few gender differences in behavior. (c). Most interactions between men and women occur in the structural context of roles or status relationships that are unequal. These status and power differences create very real interaction effects, which are often confounded with gender. Beliefs about gender difference combine with structurally unequal relationships to perpetuate status beliefs, leading men and women to recreate the gender system in everyday interaction. Only peer interactions that are not driven by cultural beliefs about the general competence of men and women or interactions in which women are status- or power-advantaged over men are likely to undermine the gender system.

We analyze and review how research on emotion and emotional phenomena can elaborate and improve contemporary social exchange theory. After identifying six approaches from the psychology and sociology of emotion, we illustrate how these ideas bear on the context, process, and outcome of exchange in networks and groups. The paper reviews the current state of the field, develops testable hypotheses for empirical study, and provides specific suggestions for developing links between theories of emotion and theories of exchange.

The motivating engines of intellectual life are not true ideas but interesting ones. This article investigates the aphorism, the purest form of an interesting idea that draws the mind onward. It begins by examining the linguistic style of aphorisms, their reconceptions of experience from deceptive surfaces to more fundamental truths, their psychological and social effects on the vanity and status of their creators and conveyers, and the decline of their conceptual charisma into cliché until a surprising modification restarts the aphorism-cliché cycle. The investigation of aphorisms broadens to their intellectual and cultural contexts by examining their expansion into articles and collection into books, the different aspects of a topic revealed by aphoristic perspectives and scientific sequences, and the similarities (and differences) between aphoristic and postmodern ways of knowing. This article ends with a series of aphorisms on the cognitive substance of alluring knowledge, which distinguish some of the components of interesting ideas.

In keeping with traditional sociological concerns about order and disorder, this essay addresses the dark side of organizations. To build a theoretical basis for the dark side as an integrated field of study, I review four literatures in order to make core ideas of each available to specialists in the others. Using a Simmelian-based case comparison method of analogical theorizing, I first consider sociological constructs that identify both the generic social form and the generic origin of routine nonconformity: how things go wrong in socially organized settings. Then I examine three types of routine nonconformity with adverse outcomes that harm the public: mistake, misconduct, and disaster produced in and by organizations. Searching for analogies and differences, I find that in common, routine nonconformity, mistake, misconduct, and disaster are systematically produced by the interconnection between environment, organizations, cognition, and choice. These patterns amplify what is known about social structure and have implications for theory, research, and policy.

This paper reviews trends in “feminization” and “juvenilization” of poverty showing that the relative risks of poverty increased for women in the 1970s but decreased for working-age women in the early 1980s. Relative risks of poverty increased for children between the 1970s and 1990s particularly in comparison with the elderly. Four factors affect these trends: First, the increase in women's employment and decline in the gender wage gap enhanced the likelihood that women remained above the poverty level. Second, the decline in manufacturing employment and “family wage” jobs for men increased the likelihood that less-educated men (and their families) fell into poverty in the early 1980s. These two factors combined to halt the feminization of poverty among the working-age population. At the same time, a third trend, the increase in “nonmarriage,” elevated the proportion of single parents who were young, never-married mothers and complicated the collection of child support from nonresident fathers. This tended to concentrate poverty in mother-child families. Finally, public transfers of income, especially Social Security, were far more effective in alleviating poverty among the elderly than among children, a factor dramatically increasing the “juvenilization” of poverty after 1970.

This chapter reviews research on the determinants and consequences of race and sex composition of organizations. Determinants include the composition of the qualified labor supply; employers' preferences, including the qualifications they require; the response of majority groups; and an establishment's attractiveness, size, and recruiting methods. The race and sex composition of an establishment affects workers' cross-group contact; stress, satisfaction, and turnover; cohesion; stereotyping; and evaluation. Composition also affects organizations themselves, including their performance, hiring and promotion practices, levels of job segregation, and wages and benefits. Theory-driven research is needed (a) on the causal mechanisms that underlie the relationships between organizational composition and its determinants and consequences and (b) on the form of the relationships between organizational composition and workers outcomes (e.g., cross-group contact, cohesion, turnover, etc). Research is needed on race and ethnic composition, with a special focus on the joint effects of race and sex.

The sociology of religion is experiencing a period of substantial organizational and intellectual growth. Recent theoretical and empirical papers on the sociology of religion appearing in top journals in sociology have generated both interest and controversy. We begin with a selective overview of research on religious beliefs and commitments. Second, we investigate the influence of religion on politics, the family, health and well-being, and on free space and social capital. Finally, we review rational choice theories in the sociology of religion and the controversies surrounding applications of these perspectives.

As an emergent orientation in sociology, criminology, and criminal justice, cultural criminology explores the convergence of cultural and criminal processes in contemporary social life. Drawing on perspectives from cultural studies, postmodern theory, critical theory, and interactionist sociology, and on ethnographic methodologies and media/textual analysis, this orientation highlights issues of image, meaning, and representation in the interplay of crime and crime control. Specifically, cultural criminology investigates the stylized frameworks and experiential dynamics of illicit subcultures; the symbolic criminalization of popular culture forms; and the mediated construction of crime and crime control issues. In addition, emerging areas of inquiry within cultural criminology include the development of situated media and situated audiences for crime; the media and culture of policing; the links between crime, crime control, and cultural space; and the collectively embodied emotions that shape the meaning of crime.

For most of the past 50 years, South Africa served as the outlier in sociological discussions of racial inequality: From the late 1940s, when most of the world was moving away from strict racial classification and segregation, apartheid provided social scientists with their most extreme example of the dynamics of racial segregation and exclusion.Yet while apartheid South Africa was unique, social scientists have also used it in comparative studies to explore the underlying dynamics of racial capitalism: Insights from South Africa have offered sociologists new ways to think about migrant labor; the construction of ethnicity; racial exclusion and colonial relationships; relationships between business, white workers and capitalist states; and oppositional social movements. With the end of legal apartheid, South Africa is poised to move into a new position in the annals of social science. From being an outlier, it is increasingly used an an exemplar, in discussions of democratic transitions, development strategies and globalization, and post-colonial transformations. Still to come, perhaps, are comparative studies that draw on insights from other parts of the world to re-examine aspects of South African society that have been left relatively unexplored—ironically including issues around racial identities and changing patterns of race relations as South Africa constructs a new non-racial democracy.

From the complex literatures on “institutionalisms” in political science and sociology, various components of institutional change are identified: mutability, contradiction, multiplicity, containment and diffusion, learning and innovation, and mediation. This exercise results in a number of clear prescriptions for the analysis of politics and institutional change: disaggregate institutions into schemas and resources; decompose institutional durability into processes of reproduction, disruption, and response to disruption; and, above all, appreciate the multiplicity and heterogeneity of the institutions that make up the social world. Recent empirical work on identities, interests, alternatives, and political innovation illustrates how political scientists and sociologists have begun to document the consequences of institutional contradiction and multiplicity and to trace the workings of institutional containment, diffusion, and mediation.

This essay traces the development of the research enterprise, known as the social resources theory, which formulated and tested a number of propositions concerning the relationships between embedded resources in social networks and socioeconomic attainment. This enterprise, seen in the light of social capital, has accumulated a substantial body of research literature and supported the proposition that social capital, in terms of both access and mobilization of embedded resources, enhances the chances of attaining better statuses. Further, social capital is contingent on initial positions in the social hierarchies as well as on extensity of social ties. The essay concludes with a discussion of remaining critical issues and future research directions for this research enterprise.

Is living in a relatively poor community bad for your health; is living in a relatively affluent community good for your health; or is it only your own socioeconomic position that matters to your health no matter where you live? This article (a) presents a conceptual model suggesting the basic pathways that may link community socioeconomic context to individual health, (b) reviews recent research that has examined whether the socioeconomic context of communities impacts the health of individual residents, over and above their own socioeconomic position, (c) discusses conceptual and methodological challenges of current research, and (d) suggests new directions for future research such as the importance of more closely examining how age, race, gender, and individual socioeconomic position may moderate the impact of community socioeconomic context on individual health and mortality.