Annual Review of Sociology - Volume 30, 2004

For the past half-century, the study of organizations has been an active area within sociology. I provide an overview of the emergence of this specialty during the second half of the twentieth century, its relation to the larger field of organization studies, and the important theoretical advances associated with the adoption of an open system framework during the 1960s. Among the recent trends I describe are changes in our conceptions of organization boundaries, strategies, and controls, and the beginning of a shift from an entity-based to a process-based view of organization. Evidence of success—the number of sociologists now employed in professional schools—simultaneously raises concerns about the source of future organizational sociologists.

Property rights matter for their effects on economic inequality and economic performance, and they unfold at the intersection of law, the state, politics, and the economy. Five dimensions of property are discussed: the objects of property (what can be owned), the subjects of property (who can own), the uses of property (what can be done with it), the enforcement of rights (how property rules are maintained), and the transfer of property (how property moves between different owners). We offer examples of how property rights systems vary along these dimensions and how they change over time. We illustrate the arguments with two contemporary empirical cases: the transition economies of Eastern and Central Europe, Russia, and China, and the transformation of intellectual property rights.

We identify three trends in the recent sociology of sexuality. First, we examine how queer theory has influenced many sociologists whose empirical work observes sexuality in areas generally thought to be asexual. These sociologists also elaborate queer theory's challenge to sexual dichotomizing and trace the workings of power through sexual categories. Second, we look at how sociologists bring sexuality into conversation with the black feminist notion of “intersectionality” by examining the nature and effects of sexuality among multiple and intersecting systems of identity and oppression. A third trend in the sociology of sexuality has been to explore the relationships between sexuality and political economy in light of recent market transformations. In examining these trends, we observe the influence of globalization studies and the contributions of sociologists to understanding the role of sexuality in global processes. We conclude with the contributions sociologists of sexuality make toward understanding other social processes and with the ongoing need to study sexuality itself.

Studying collective action with newspaper accounts of protest events, rare only 20 years ago, has become commonplace in the past decade. A critical literature has accompanied the growth of protest event analysis. The literature has focused on selection bias—particularly which subset of events are covered—and description bias—notably, the veracity of the coverage. The “hard news” of the event, if it is reported, tends to be relatively accurate. However, a newspaper's decision to cover an event at all is influenced by the type of event, the news agency, and the issue involved. In this review, we discuss approaches to detecting bias, as well as ways to factor knowledge about bias into interpretations of protest event data.

The last decade featured the emergence of a significant and growing literature concerning comparative-historical methods. This literature offers methodological tools for causal and descriptive inference that go beyond the techniques currently available in mainstream statistical analysis. In terms of causal inference, new procedures exist for testing hypotheses about necessary and sufficient causes, and these procedures address the skepticism that mainstream methodologists may hold about necessary and sufficient causation. Likewise, new techniques are available for analyzing hypotheses that refer to complex temporal processes, including path-dependent sequences. In the area of descriptive inference, the comparative-historical literature offers important tools for concept analysis and for achieving measurement validity. Given these contributions, comparative-historical methods merit a central place within the general field of social science methodology.

New state and market arrangements were twice imposed on the residents of the eastern part of Germany, once when Germany was divided in 1949 and again when it was reunified in 1990; these changes produced a unique natural experiment concerning the effect of policies and institutions on the gendered nature of work. This review synthesizes research on gender equality in paid and unpaid work in East versus West Germany during the decades immediately preceding and following reunification. We consider empirical evidence on gender equality in five major dimensions of work: the prevalence of labor market attachment, time spent in paid work, wages, employment sector and occupation, and time spent in unpaid work in the home. Taken together, developments across these dimensions suggest that, following reunification, the two parts of the country converged toward the gendered arrangement in which men are employed full-time and their female partners hold part-time jobs—with some evidence of continuing differences between East and West.

I review the development of the political opportunity or political process perspective, which has animated a great deal of research on social movements. The essential insight—that the context in which a movement emerges influences its development and potential impact—provides a fruitful analytic orientation for addressing numerous questions about social movements. Reviewing the development of the literature, however, I note that conceptualizations of political opportunity vary greatly, and scholars disagree on basic theories of how political opportunities affect movements. The relatively small number of studies testing political opportunity hypotheses against other explanations have generated mixed results, owing in part to the articulation of the theory and the specifications of variables employed. I examine conflicting specifications of the theory by considering the range of outcomes scholars address. By disaggregating outcomes and actors, I argue, we can reconcile some of the apparent contradictions and build a more comprehensive and robust theory of opportunities and social movements.

Organizing scholarship both chronologically and thematically, this article provides a review and critical evaluation of the literature that examines factors influencing criminalization. The first part of the paper examines three streams of inquiry and theorizing: (a) classic work that has shaped decades of scholarship on criminalization by focusing on the relationship between demographic changes, material and symbolic politics, and the emergence of criminal law; (b) contemporary work that unpacks the nature of the relationship between organizational, social movement, and state-related factors that structure and mediate the outcome of definitional and political processes involved in efforts to criminalize elements of social life; and (c) more recent work that envisions criminalization as a social process intimately connected to, and indeed arguably derivative of, larger processes of institutionalization, globalization, and modernization. The discussion and conclusion section summarizes the consequences of these three streams of inquiry and theorizing for our collective understanding of the structures and processes that underlie criminalization. Thereafter, the article concludes with a proposed agenda for subsequent research on criminalization and related topics.

Consumption is a social, cultural, and economic process of choosing goods, and this process reflects the opportunities and constraints of modernity. Viewing consumption as an “institutional field,” the review suggests how consumption bridges economic and cultural institutions, large-scale changes in social structure, and discourses of the self. New technologies, ideologies, and delivery systems create consumption spaces in an institutional framework shaped by key social groups, while individual men and women experience consumption as a project of forming, and expressing, identity. Studying the institutional field requires research on consumer products, industries, and sites; on the role of consumption in constructing both the consuming subject and collective identity; and on historical transitions to a consumer society. Ethnography, interviews, and historical analysis show a global consumer culture fostered by media and marketing professionals yet subject to different local interpretations.

We define the knowledge economy as production and services based on knowledge-intensive activities that contribute to an accelerated pace of technical and scientific advance, as well as rapid obsolescence. The key component of a knowledge economy is a greater reliance on intellectual capabilities than on physical inputs or natural resources. We provide evidence drawn from patent data to document an upsurge in knowledge production and show that this expansion is driven by the emergence of new industries. We then review the contentious literature that assesses whether recent technological advances have raised productivity. We examine the debate over whether new forms of work that embody technological change have generated more worker autonomy or greater managerial control. Finally, we assess the distributional consequences of a knowledge-based economy with respect to growing inequality in wages and high-quality jobs.

Over the past four decades, immigration has increased the racial and ethnic diversity in the United States. Once a mainly biracial society with a large white majority and relatively small black minority—and an impenetrable color line dividing these groups—the United States is now a society composed of multiple racial and ethnic groups. Along with increased immigration are rises in the rates of racial/ethnic intermarriage, which in turn have led to a sizeable and growing multiracial population. Currently, 1 in 40 persons identifies himself or herself as multiracial, and this figure could soar to 1 in 5 by the year 2050. Increased racial and ethnic diversity brought about by the new immigration, rising intermarriage, and patterns of multiracial identification may be moving the nation far beyond the traditional and relatively persistent black/white color line. In this chapter, we review the extant theories and recent findings concerning immigration, intermarriage, and multiracial identification, and consider the implications for America's changing color lines. In particular, we assess whether racial boundaries are fading for all groups or whether America's newcomers are simply crossing over the color line rather than helping to eradicate it.

In recent years, the analysis and modeling of networks, and also networked dynamical systems, have been the subject of considerable interdisciplinary interest, yielding several hundred papers in physics, mathematics, computer science, biology, economics, and sociology journals (Newman 2003c), as well as a number of books (Barabasi 2002, Buchanan 2002, Watts 2003). Here I review the major findings of this emerging field and discuss briefly their relationship with previous work in the social and mathematical sciences.

The sociology of terrorism has been understudied, even though considerable literatures on various forms of social conflict and violence have been produced over the years. The aim here is to note what has been learned about the social origins and dynamics of terrorism in order to suggest agendas for future research. Arguably the main foci of sociological studies of terrorism should be (a) the social construction of terrorism, (b) terrorism as political violence, (c) terrorism as communication, (d) organizing terrorism, (e) socializing terrorists, (f) social control of terrorism, and (g) theorizing terrorism. For each issue, I provide a brief summary of current knowledge, with bibliographic leads to more detailed information, as well as identify research issues.

The nature of narrative explanations is explored as an alternative to the better established variable-centered explanations. Narratives are conceived as di-graphs where the nodes are states of the world and the arcs are actions (causes). Comparative narratives are understood as mappings between di-graphs. Ethnographic and historical explanations, where the number of cases is small and causality complex, may depend upon a narrative depiction.

The production of culture perspective focuses on how the symbolic elements of culture are shaped by the systems within which they are created, distributed, evaluated, taught, and preserved. After tracing the consolidation of the perspective in the late 1970s, we introduce six facets of production (technology, law and regulation, industry structure, organization structure, occupational careers, and market) and use them to theorize within the production perspective a wide range of research. Third, we show the utility of the facet model in coherently theorizing a research study based in a quite different perspective. Fourth, we explore the recent application of the production perspective in organizational research. Fifth, we outline the recent extension of the production perspective to autoproduction, the study of identity formation, and meaning in informal relations. Finally, we discuss criticisms of the perspective and suggest opportunities for research.

This paper examines recent work in the sociology of culture devoted to providing endogenous explanations of cultural phenomena. The focus is on works that provide cultural explanations of cultural processes, as opposed to the social structural and “production of culture” explanations otherwise predominant in the literature. I examine three distinct approaches: a “post-hermeneutic” approach devoted not to the question of cultural interpretation but to the issue of subjects' manipulation of culture in the quest for meaning; a semiotic approach focused on the mechanics of symbol systems; and an ecological approach that emphasizes the role of competition and niche density in explaining both cultural stasis and change. The three approaches have in common a general lack of interest in traditional conceptions of meaning (verstehen), choosing instead to focus on issues related to the internal structure and dynamics of cultural expression. This marks a new opportunity for synthesis and exploration in a field traditionally devoted to extra-cultural explanation of cultural phenomena. Both endogenous and exogenous explanations are offered for the rise of this new trend in the sociology of culture.

Over the past decades, the concept of values has gone in and out of fashion within sociology. Relatively recent advances in both the conceptualization and measurement of values offer the potential for a reincorporation of values into sociological work. Sociologists often employ cursory understandings of values, imbuing values with too much determinism or viewing them as too individually subjective. The concept is employed sporadically in sociological subdisciplines. This review maps out the contours of the various approaches to linking values with culture, social structure, and individual behavior. We discuss theoretical and empirical approaches to values, organizing the broad literature to address three questions: (a) What are values? (b) Where do values come from? and (c) What do values do? We identify important research findings and suggest areas for future inquiry.

Durkheim hypothesized that basic categories of thought are based on society as their model, and that these mental representations arise from participation in society's totemic rites. This proposition is evaluated in light of recent research on the cognitive architecture of newborns and infants. The evidence suggests that presocialized infants possess mental representations of not only the physical world but also the minds of others and even the sui generis quality of collectivities. This review concludes that the Durkheimian theory of the social origin of mind has little empirical support and suggests that the sociology of mental life needs to be radically retheorized.

Investigators interested in developing a general theory of social cohesion are confronted with a complex body of work that involves various definitions of social cohesion, specialized literatures on particular dimensions of social cohesion (e.g., membership turnover, organizational commitment, categorical identifications, interpersonal attachments, network structures), and lines of inquiry focused on the social cohesion of specific types of groups (e.g., families, schools, military units, and sports teams). This review addresses the problem of integrating the individual and group levels at which social cohesion has been defined. It also develops a perspective on social cohesion as a domain of causally interrelated phenomena concerned with individuals' membership attitudes and behaviors, in which the major dimensions of social cohesion occupy different theoretical positions with respect to one another as antecedent, intervening, or outcome variables.

This article reviews recent literature on low-income fathers, including the transition to fatherhood for young unmarried fathers and levels of father involvement among married, cohabiting, and nonresident low-income fathers. I discuss predictors of father involvement as well as available evidence concerning their effects on children's well-being. Although mounting qualitative evidence argues that unmarried low-income men may be more favorably disposed to fatherhood than previously recognized and that such intentions may greatly influence subsequent fathering behavior, studies of fertility intention remain largely separate from those of father involvement. I propose that subsequent research should also pay greater attention to the effects of fatherhood on low-income men.