Annual Review of Sociology - Volume 26, 2000

This article reviews theory and research on double standards, namely, the use of different requirements for the inference of possession of an attribute, depending on the individuals being assessed. The article focuses on double standards for competence in task groups and begins by examining how status characteristics (e.g. gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic class) become a basis for stricter standards for the lower status person. I also discuss other bases for this practice (e.g. personality characteristics, allocated rewards, sentiments of either like or dislike). Next, I describe double standards in the inference of other types of valued attributes (e.g. beauty, morality, mental health) and examine the relationship between these practices and competence double standards. The article concludes with a discussion of “reverse” double standards for competence, namely, the practice of applying more lenient ability standards to lower status individuals.

Focusing on the last 25 years of debate, this paper examines the changing nature of death penalty arguments in six specific areas: deterrence, incapacitation, caprice and bias, cost, innocence, and retribution. After reviewing recent changes in public opinion regarding the death penalty, we review the findings of social science research pertinent to each of these issues. Our analysis suggests that social science scholarship is changing the way Americans debate the death penalty. Particularly when viewed within a historical and world-wide context, these changes suggest a gradual movement toward the eventual abolition of capital punishment in America.

Wealth ownership in the United States has long been concentrated in the hands of a small minority of the population, yet researchers have paid relatively little attention to the causes and consequences of this inequality. In this essay, we review the literature that does exist on wealth accumulation and distribution. We begin with an examination of the reasons that wealth inequality has received little empirical attention. We then discuss methods of creating empirical estimates of wealth accumulation and distribution, and we present some estimates of recent trends in wealth inequality. We explore a diverse collection of research that explains these trends, covering treatments of aggregate influences and individual and household factors. We conclude the chapter with a review of research on intergenerational processes and wealth mobility.

Individual demographic characteristics and aggregate population processes are central to many theoretical perspectives and empirical models of criminal behavior. Recent research underscores the importance of criminal and deviant behavior for understanding the demography of the life course and macrolevel population processes. We review research that explores the multiple linkages and reciprocal relations between criminal and demographic behavior at both microsocial and macrosocial levels. In reviewing research on how demography affects crime, we describe current debates over the impact of age, sex, and race on criminal behavior, and we distinguish between compositional and contextual effects of demographic structure on aggregate crime rates. Our review of how crime affects demography focuses on the intersection of criminal and demographic events in the life course, and the influence of criminal victimization and aggregate crime rates on residential mobility, migration, and population redistribution. Directions for future research on the many linkages between criminal and demographic behavior are discussed.

This paper explores the connections between ethnicity and sexuality. Racial, ethnic, and national boundaries are also sexual boundaries. The borderlands dividing racial, ethnic, and national identities and communities constitute ethnosexual frontiers, erotic intersections that are heavily patrolled, policed, and protected, yet regularly are penetrated by individuals forging sexual links with ethnic “others.” Normative heterosexuality is a central component of racial, ethnic, and nationalist ideologies; both adherence to and deviation from approved sexual identities and behaviors define and reinforce racial, ethnic, and nationalist regimes. To illustrate the ethnicity/sexuality nexus and to show the utility of revealing this intimate bond for understanding ethnic relations, I review constructionist models of ethnicity and sexuality in the social sciences and humanities, and I discuss ethnosexual boundary processes in several historical and contemporary settings: the sexual policing of nationalism, sexual aspects of US–American Indian relations, and the sexualization of the black-white color line.

This review examines the intersection of prejudice, politics, and public opinion. It focuses specifically on research that seeks to understand the sources of attitudes toward policies intended to benefit African Americans and other racial/ethnic minorities by ensuring equal treatment, providing opportunity enhancement, or striving for equal outcomes. After a review of the main patterns of white and African-American public opinion on this topic, three central theoretical interpretations of racial policy attitudes—new racism, politics and nonracial principles and values, and group conflict theories—are described and compared. The empirical evidence for each approach is assessed. Finally, directions of research that pursue a more complex view of racial policy attitudes are introduced. These include efforts to incorporate insights across theoretical domains as well as correcting an overemphasis on cognitive issues to the exclusion of affect. In addition, gaps in our understanding of “non-white” attitudes, nonprejudiced respondents, nonracial policies, and non-Americans are identified as potentially fertile ground for future research aimed at understanding the complexity of racial policy attitudes and what these can reveal about contemporary US race relations.

Race has always been a significant sociological theme, from the founding of the field and the formulation of classical theoretical statements to the present. Since the nineteenth century, sociological perspectives on race have developed and changed, always reflecting shifts in large-scale political processes. In the classical period, colonialism and biologistic racism held sway. As the twentieth century dawned, sociology came to be dominated by US-based figures. DuBois and the Chicago School presented the first notable challenges to the field's racist assumptions. In the aftermath of World War II, with the destruction of European colonialism, the rise of the civil rights movement, and the surge in migration on a world scale, the sociology of race became a central topic. The field moved toward a more critical, more egalitarian awareness of race, focused particularly on the overcoming of prejudice and discrimination. Although the recognition of these problems increased and political reforms made some headway in combatting them, racial injustice and inequality were not surmounted. As the global and domestic politics of race entered a new period of crisis and uncertainty, so too has the field of sociology. To tackle the themes of race and racism once again in the new millennium, sociology must develop more effective racial theory. Racial formation approaches can offer a starting point here. The key tasks will be the formulation of a more adequate comparative historical sociology of race, the development of a deeper understanding of the micro-macro linkages that shape racial issues, and the recognition of the pervasiveness of racial politics in contemporary society. This is a challenging but also exciting agenda. The field must not shrink from addressing it.

The paper considers how states and markets shape one another at the national and world-system levels and how globalization is transforming that relationship. This process is illustrated through a review of research on liberal, social rights, developmental, and socialist states in the postwar capitalist economy. These state models were reconciled with expanding international markets through a series of controls on trade and capital flows. Globalization has undermined many of these controls so that states must increasingly integrate themselves into local and global networks. States are experimenting with organizational and strategic changes nationally and internationally in order to respond to a networked economy and polity. Neoliberal institutions are the dominant force shaping the relation between states and markets in the contemporary era, but alternative state-society alliances are emerging to contest the hegemony of neoliberalism in shaping globalization.

Volunteering is any activity in which time is given freely to benefit another person, group or cause. Volunteering is part of a cluster of helping behaviors, entailing more commitment than spontaneous assistance but narrower in scope than the care provided to family and friends. Although developed somewhat independently, the study of volunteerism and of social activism have much in common. Since data gathering on volunteering from national samples began about a quarter of a century ago, the rate for the United States has been stable or, according to some studies, rising slightly. Theories that explain volunteering by pointing to individual attributes can be grouped into those that emphasize motives or self-understandings on the one hand and those that emphasize rational action and cost-benefit analysis on the other. Other theories seek to complement this focus on individual level factors by pointing to the role of social resources, specifically social ties and organizational activity, as explanations for volunteering. Support is found for all theories, although many issues remained unresolved. Age, gender and race differences in volunteering can be accounted for, in large part, by pointing to differences in self-understandings, human capital, and social resources. Less attention has been paid to contextual effects on volunteering and, while evidence is mixed, the impact of organizational, community, and regional characteristics on individual decisions to volunteer remains a fruitful field for exploration. Studies of the experience of volunteering have only just begun to plot and explain spells of volunteering over the life course and to examine the causes of volunteer turnover. Examining the premise that volunteering is beneficial for the helper as well as the helped, a number of studies have looked at the impact of volunteering on subjective and objective well-being. Positive effects are found for life-satisfaction, self-esteem, self-rated health, and for educational and occupational achievement, functional ability, and mortality. Studies of youth also suggest that volunteering reduces the likelihood of engaging in problem behaviors such as school truancy and drug abuse.

The new welfare system mandates participation in work activity. We review the evolution of the 1996 legislation and how states implement welfare reform. We examine evidence on recipients' employment, well-being, and future earnings potential to assess the role of welfare in women's work. Policies rewarding work and penalizing nonwork, such as sanctions, time limits, diversion, and earnings “disregards,” vary across states. While caseloads fell and employment rose, most women who left welfare work in low-wage jobs without benefits. Large minorities report material hardships and face barriers to work including depression, low skills, or no transportation. And disposable income decreased among the poorest female-headed families. Among the important challenges for future research is to differentiate between the effects of welfare reform, the economy, and other policies on women's work, and to assess how variations in state welfare programs affect caseloads and employment outcomes of recipients.

The U.S. New Deal raises issues of class, race, gender, region, social movements, and institutional constraint in the context of a societal-wide economic and political crisis, and has not surprisingly generated a considerable body of work by political sociologists over the past twenty years. In particular, the New Deal has served as a major empirical context for developing, testing, or applying broader theoretical models of political change in the United States. In this sense, it is a paradigmatic example of the “historical turn” in the social sciences. This paper examines the theoretical and empirical controversies that have persisted between four competing theoretical models of New Deal political change: (a) those emphasizing the importance of social movements from below in generating momentum for political reform, (b) those highlighting the centrality of business influence on successful New Deal reform initiatives, (c) feminist models, and (d) historical institutional models. I then turn to a survey of more recent work on some of the topics that have been the most widely debated in more recent scholarship and pose some questions for future research.

About seventy percent of the world's total income inequality is between-nation inequality as opposed to within-nation inequality. Between-nation inequality is the bigger component because average incomes in the richest nations are roughly 30 times greater than average incomes in the poorest nations. This highly uneven distribution of income across nations likely reflects the long-run divergence of national incomes over the course of the Industrial Revolution. Empirical investigations suggest, however, that between-nation income inequality has stabilized in recent decades. Because between-nation inequality has stabilized, the direction of the current trend in total world income inequality depends on the direction of the change in income inequality in the average nation.

Nonstandard employment relations—such as part-time work, temporary help agency and contract company employment, short-term and contingent work, and independent contracting—have become increasingly prominent ways of organizing work in recent years. Our understanding of these nonstandard work arrangements has been hampered by inconsistent definitions, often inadequate measures, and the paucity of comparative research. This chapter reviews the emerging research on these nonstandard work arrangements. The review emphasizes the multidisciplinary nature of contributions to this field, including research by a variety of sociologists, economists, and psychologists. It also focuses on cross-national research, which is needed to investigate how macroeconomic, political, and institutional factors affect the nature of employment relations. Areas for future research are suggested.

In this chapter I review the social psychological underpinnings of identity, emphasizing social cognitive and symbolic interactionist perspectives and research, and I turn then to key themes of current work on identity—social psychological, sociological, and interdisciplinary. I emphasize the social bases of identity, particularly identities based on ethnicity, race, sexuality, gender, class, age, and (dis)ability, both separately and as they intersect. I also take up identities based on space, both geographic and virtual. I discuss struggles over identities, organized by social inequalities, nationalisms, and social movements. I conclude by discussing postmodernist conceptions of identities as fluid, multidimensional, personalized social constructions that reflect sociohistorical contexts, approaches remarkably consistent with recent empirical social psychological research, and I argue explicitly for a politicized social psychology of identities that brings together the structures of everyday lives and the sociocultural realities in which those lives are lived.

“Identity … is a concept that neither imprisons (as does much in sociology) nor detaches (as does much in philosophy and psychology) persons from their social and symbolic universes, [so] it has over the years retained a generic force that few concepts in our field have.” (Davis 1991:105)

“[I]dentity is never a priori, nor a finished product; it is only ever the problematic process of access to an image of totality.” (Bhabha 1994:51)

Research on the relationship between schools and communities has reemerged as a principal focus of the sociology of education. Current research, however, rejects earlier conceptualizations of school communities as being organized locally and identifiable by reference to demographic and neighborhood characteristics. Neoinstitutional research on schools has focused examination instead on school communities defined as organizational fields. From this perspective, state regulation, professional associations, and market competition are institutional forces that combine with local neighborhood characteristics to shape school-level practices. The historical development of this theoretical approach is first discussed; current research on neighborhood effects is then critiqued for ignoring how schools vary in response to institutional environments; finally, examples of the utility of a broader institutional conceptualization of community are suggested in five current areas of educational research: racial segregation, resource inequality, curriculum variation, school-to-work transitions, and school discipline.

Research on how gender-related attitudes vary across racial/ethnic groups has produced contradictory results, depending upon the type of attitudes addressed. In this chapter, I review the literature on racial and ethnic variations in three broadly defined types of gender attitudes: attitudes toward gender roles; beliefs about the origins and extent of gender inequality; and preferences for social action to reduce gender inequalities. I address three racial/ethnic groups in the United States: African Americans, whites, and Hispanic Americans. While research on attitudes toward gender roles has yielded mixed results, research addressing attitudes within the other two domains clearly indicates greater criticism of genderinequality among African Americans relative to whites; research on the various groups often combined under the label Hispanic is too limited to draw any clear conclusions. Along with addressing variations across these three types of gender-related attitudes, I also summarize several other patterns evident in the literature: convergence across groups over time; gender gaps in gender-related attitudes; and differential predictors of gender attitudes across racial/ethnic groups.

We review some of the work of the past ten years that applied the multilevel logit model. We attempt to provide a brief description of the hypothesis tested, the hierarchical data structure analyzed, and the multilevel data source for each piece of work we have reviewed. We have also reviewed the technical literature and worked out two examples on multilevel models for binary outcomes. The review and examples serve two purposes: First, they are designed to assist in all aspects of working with multilevel models for binary outcomes, including model conceptualization, model description for a research report, understanding of the structure of required multilevel data, estimation of the model via a generally available statistical package, and interpretation of the results. Second, our examples contribute to the evaluation of the approximation procedures for binary multilevel models that have been implemented for general public use.