Annual Review of Sociology - Volume 26, 2000

This paper reviews current information on wealth trends, with particular attention to the role of household wealth in the stratification system. The first section considers the relevance of wealth for stratification processes and examines why an appreciation of household wealth has been slow to materialize in stratification research. Subsequent sections discuss aspects of the distribution of household wealth in the United States, the transmission of inequality across generations, and implications of a consideration of wealth for stratification theory and social policy. The concluding section conveys some observations about the need for developing models of consumption potential and living standards, akin to the socioeconomic attainment formulation, which incorporate measures of household wealth and the transmission of wealth.

The variant of new institutionalism that is our focus is a pan-disciplinary theory that asserts that actors pursue their interests by making choices within institutional constraints. We organize our review of the theory around its behavioral assumptions, the operation of institutional forms, and processes of institutional change. At each stage, we give particular attention to the potential contributions of sociology to the theory. The behavioral assumptions of the theory amount to bounded rationality and imply transaction costs, which, in the absence of institutions, may frustrate collective ends. The principle weakness of these behavioral assumptions is a failure to treat preferences as endogenous. We categorize the institutions that arise in response to transaction costs as to whether they are public or private in their source and centralized or decentralized in their making. In detailing the resulting categories of institutional forms, we identify key interdependencies across the public/private and centralized/decentralized dimensions. The new institutionalism is in particular need of better theory about private decentralized institutions, and theorists could turn to embeddedness theory and cognitive new-institutional theory as a source of help on this topic. The dominant view of institutional change is that it is evolutionary, driven by organizational competition, and framed by individual beliefs and shared understandings. Sociology can refine the change theory by adding better explanations of the behavior of organizations, and of the processes by which institutional alternatives come to be viewed as acceptable or unacceptable.

The “end of welfare as we know it” constitutes an important challenge for poverty research, shifting the focus away from once-dominant themes of dependency and toward the reality of widespread “working poverty.” The literature reviewed in this chapter points in the direction of a reformulated research agenda, built around issues of inequality, political economy, and stratification by gender, race, class, and place. It also calls into question the traditional distinction between welfare and working poor, as well as the notion of an isolated underclass existing apart from the social and economic mainstream. Finally, it points to the need to broaden a policy discourse that has been narrowly fixated on welfare and on changing the behavior of the poor. A real anti-poverty agenda would focus instead on the elements of mainstream political economy and culture that continue to produce widespread economic inequality.

Twenty years ago, two environmental sociologists made a bold call for a paradigmatic shift in the discipline of sociology—namely, one that would bring nature into the center of sociological inquiry and recognize the inseparability of nature and society. In this essay, we review recent scholarship that seeks to meet this challenge. The respective strands of this literature come from the margins of environmental sociology and border on other arenas of social theory production, including neo-Marxism, political ecology, materialist feminism, and social studies of science. Bringing together scholars from sociology, anthropology, geography, and history, each of these strands offers what we consider the most innovative new work trying to move sociology beyond the nature/society divide.

The homogeneity (mass-elite) paradigm exerts inordinate influence over social research on East and Central European socialism and its transition. I explore the epistemological and methodological underpinnings of this paradigm and argue that it has masked the importance of class relations for grasping the dynamics of these societies. I help retrieve class in general, and the working class in particular, from the analytic obscurity to which the homogeneity paradigm has relegated them by juxtaposing workers' and intellectuals' perceptions of economic inefficiency. Finally, I suggest ways that inattention to class under socialism has retarded understanding of the political struggles that have accompanied its demise.

The recent proliferation of scholarship on collective action frames and framing processes in relation to social movements indicates that framing processes have come to be regarded, alongside resource mobilization and political opportunity processes, as a central dynamic in understanding the character and course of social movements. This review examines the analytic utility of the framing literature for understanding social movement dynamics. We first review how collective action frames have been conceptualized, including their characteristic and variable features. We then examine the literature related to framing dynamics and processes. Next we review the literature regarding various contextual factors that constrain and facilitate framing processes. We conclude with an elaboration of the consequences of framing processes for other movement processes and outcomes. We seek throughout to provide clarification of the linkages between framing concepts/processes and other conceptual and theoretical formulations relevant to social movements, such as schemas and ideology.

This chapter discusses developments in feminist state theory through a comparison of feminist interventions into jurisprudence, criminology, and welfare state theory. Early feminist work on the state analyzed how women were subordinated by a centralized state. More recently, feminist scholars unearthed how states are differentiated entities, comprised of multiple gender arrangements. This discovery of state variation surfaced differently in these three branches of scholarship. Feminist legal theorists concentrated on multiple legal discourses, feminist criminologists on the diverse sites of case processing, and feminist welfare theorists on the varied dimensions of welfare stratification. Because of their different approaches to state gender regimes, these scholars have much to offer, and to gain from, one another. Thus, this chapter argues for the importance of an interdisciplinary feminist dialogue on the state. It also suggests ways to promote such a dialogue and to insert a sociological perspective into this new mode of theorizing.

The transition to adulthood has become a thriving area of research in life course studies. This review is organized around two of the field's emerging themes. The first theme is the increasing variability in pathways to adult roles through historical time. The second theme is a heightened sensitivity to transition behaviors as developmental processes. Accounts of such processes typically examine the active efforts of young people to shape their biographies or the socially structured opportunities and limitations that define pathways into adulthood. By joining these concepts, I suggest new lines of inquiry that focus on the interplay between agency and social structures in the shaping of lives.

Sociologists have long recognized the importance of the family in social mobility and in the reproduction of poverty (Featherman & Hauser 1978, McLanahan & Sandefur 1994). More recently, they have begun to study the role of the state in these processes (Skocpol 1992, O’Connor et al 1999). Children depend on their parents to provide them with the resources they need to develop into healthy and successful adults. Parents, in turn, depend on their communities and on government to share the costs of raising children. Changes that undermine children’s claims on parental resources or parents’ claims on public resources are likely to have long-term negative consequences for society. As we enter the twenty-first century, two such changes are underway—an increase in nonmarital childbearing and a restructuring of the welfare state. Nonmarital childbearing, a trend that now affects one of three children born in the United States, undermines children’s claims on fathers’ resources (time and money). Welfare reform, which curtails welfare benefits and strengthens child support enforcement, undermines the claims of poor parents on public resources. These changes disproportionately affect families at the lower end of the income distribution, who have the highest rates of nonmarital childbearing and welfare receipt.

In order to assess the full impact of these changes in the family and the state, sociologists need answers to several questions. First, they need to know more about the capabilities of the men and women who bear children outside marriage, especially the fathers. Second, they need a better understanding of the relationship between unwed parents and between parents and children. And third, they need to understand how welfare and child support policies affect parents’ relationships