Annual Review of Sociology - Volume 33, 2007

This essay describes in simple terms some of the major concepts of categorical data analysis (CDA) that have been and will continue to be useful in the analysis of sociological data, examples of which include data in the area of social stratification and mobility, and in many other areas that make use of survey data and/or panel studies data, and in empirical studies of latent types, latent variables, and latent structures. The exposition does not make use of any mathematical formulas, and the only arithmetic used is very simple multiplication, division, and addition. Simple numerical examples, constructed for expository purposes, are used as an aid in describing the concepts of categorical data analysis that are considered in the essay. These concepts include quasi-independence, quasi-symmetry, symmetric association, uniform association, and other related concepts useful in the analysis of mobility tables, and also other concepts that are useful in other areas of study.

This article traces the transatlantic diffusion of Pierre Bourdieu's ideas into American sociology. We find that rather than being received as abstract theory, Bourdieu has been actively put to use to generate new empirical research. In addition, American sociologists have used their findings to problematize and extend his theory. Bourdieu's sociology, in other words, has inspired a progressive research program in the United States. We trace this process in the two main forums for presenting research: journal articles and books. Content analysis of articles published in four major sociology journals reveals that, far from a recent fad, Bourdieu's ideas steadily diffused into American sociology between 1980 and 2004. Case studies of four influential books in turn illustrate how researchers have used Bourdieu's key concepts (capital, field, habitus, and symbolic power) to inform debates in four core subfields (political, economic, cultural, and urban sociology).

Since Durkheim, sociological explanations of social cooperation have emphasized the internalization of values that induce norm compliance. Since Adam Smith, economic explanations of social cooperation have emphasized incentives that induce selfish individuals to cooperate. Here, we develop a general approach—the Beliefs, Preferences, and Constraints approach—showing that each of the above models is a special case. Our approach is based on evidence indicating that pure Homo Sociologicus and pure Homo Economicus views are wrong. We show that self-regarding and norm-regarding actors coexist and that the available action opportunities determine which of these actor types dominates the aggregate level of social cooperation. Our approach contributes to the solution of long-standing problems, including the problems of social order and collective action, the determinants and consequences of social exchanges, the microfoundations of emergent aggregate patterns of social interactions, and the measurement of the impact of cultural and economic practices on individuals’ social goals.

For several decades, the concept of the niche has enriched sociological theory. The niche represents the position or function of an entity, such as an organization or population of organizations, within a larger community environment. Using the concept of the niche allows researchers to go beyond classifying entities to understanding (a) their life chances under different and changing environmental conditions and (b) how they interact under the competitive conditions induced by a finite environment. We briefly review the intellectual history of the niche concept as it came from bioecology to sociology. The bulk of the article reviews the two major streams of sociological research that use the niche concept: the population ecology of organizations and McPherson's ecology of affiliation. Finally, we survey commonalities between these approaches and highlight new directions, including applications that take the niche concept well beyond its origins in organizational studies.

Production regime theory has been one of the most innovative and influential recent contributions to neo-institutional debates about the varieties of capitalism. This review takes issue with its claim that there are major differences in the quality of work between the two principal regime types that are held to characterize European societies—coordinated market economies and liberal market economies—by examining the evidence for Denmark, Finland, Germany, Sweden, and the UK. Although the broad pattern of skill differences corresponds reasonably well to the arguments of the theory, the evidence does not confirm the other claims about work and employment conditions, in particular with respect to employee job control, autonomous work teams, organizational participation, and job security. Rather, it points to the distinctiveness of the Scandinavian countries and hence to the importance of factors that lie outside the explanatory framework of the thesis.

The sociology of markets has been one of the most vibrant fields in sociology in the past 25 years. There is a great deal of agreement that markets are social structures characterized by extensive social relationships between firms, workers, suppliers, customers, and governments. But, like in many sociological literatures, the theory camps that have formed often seem to speak by each other. We show that some of the disagreement between theory camps is due to differences in conceptual language, and other disagreements stem from the fact that theory camps ignore the concepts in other theory camps, thereby making their theories less complete. We end by considering deeper controversies in the literature that seem open both to new conceptualization and further empirical research.

The past two decades have witnessed a sea change in migration scholarship. Most scholars now recognize that many contemporary migrants and their predecessors maintain various kinds of ties to their homelands at the same time that they are incorporated into the countries that receive them. Increasingly, social life takes place across borders, even as the political and cultural salience of nation-state boundaries remains strong. Transnational migration studies has emerged as an inherently interdisciplinary field, made up of scholars around the world, seeking to describe and analyze these dynamics and invent new methodological tools with which to do so. In this review, we offer a short history of theoretical developments, outlining the different ways in which scholars have defined and approached transnational migration. We then summarize what is known about migrant transnationalism in different arenas—economics, politics, the social, the cultural, and the religious. Finally, we discuss methodological implications for the study of international migration, present promising new scholarship, and highlight future research directions.

Sociologists use negative feedback loop systems to explain identity processes, interpersonal behavior, crowd behavior, organizational behavior, social relationships, and the behavior of political systems. Control system models help us to understand how actors enact social roles with enough stability to preserve institutional arrangements, while still demonstrating remarkable creativity in unusual circumstances. These theories take us away from an oversocialized view of the actor, without relegating us to exclusive reliance on grounded theory. They provide a foundation for several generative theories of adaptive, goal-seeking behavior on the part of social actors and institutions. This chapter begins by tracing the history of control theorizing in sociology, then describes several contemporary theories that rely on control imagery, reviews the empirical support for these theories, describes some of their significant points of overlap and departure, and examines some of the key tested and untested implications of a control system approach in sociology.

We review research published in the past 15 years that explores the relationship between military service and the life course, focusing on criminal careers, marital status, lifelong health, and socioeconomic attainment. Throughout the review, we note the extent to which studies find that veterans experienced different outcomes in different historical periods, ranging from World War II to the more recent voluntary armed forces. The effects of military service depend on whether health, criminal, socioeconomic, or marital outcomes are considered. They also depend on the timing and era of service, and veterans’ family background and individual characteristics such as race and delinquency. Nevertheless, the evidence to date suggests one general conclusion: Veterans exposed to combat have suffered worse outcomes than noncombat veterans and than nonveterans. We conclude with suggestions for future research including a tighter integration of the research questions and strategies that have been employed to examine the different outcomes.

The article begins with a brief review of prior school reform movements and how and why they are different from today. Unlike past reform movements, school reform efforts are now focused on two key ideas: performance and scientific evidence. Motivated in part by economic considerations, the underlying rationale for many school reform programs is to raise the performance of U.S. students by strengthening their knowledge base and skills. Similarly, the emphasis on scientific evidence can be viewed as an economic global response to rising costs of research and development in fields such as medicine, criminology, and social welfare. This focus on performance and scientific evidence is embodied in the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB), which expanded the federal role in education and substantially altered what the purpose of education should be, when and how it should be measured, and what type of evidence should be used for its improvement. The review concludes by examining how these performance-driven reforms and the push for evidential science to assess their effectiveness can be viewed as part of a changing scientific intellectual movement.

In this review, we explore how the concept of embeddedness has shaped—and been shaped by—the evolution of the subfield of economic sociology. Although embeddedness is often taken as a conceptual umbrella for a single, if eclectic, approach to the sociological study of the economy, we argue that in fact the concept references two distinct intellectual projects. One project, following from Granovetter's (1985) well-known programmatic statement, attempts to discern the relational bases of social action in economic contexts. Another project, drawing from Polanyi's [1944 (2001), 1957, 1977] social theory, concerns the integration of the economy into broader social systems. Critically, these two formulations of embeddedness involve different views of the relationship between the economic and the social. The implication is that the obstacles to theoretical integration in economic sociology, while not insurmountable, are greater than is typically acknowledged.

During the past two decades, the radical right has reemerged as an electoral force in Western Europe, as well as in other stable democracies such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Aside from discussing the ideology of this party family and how it relates to older forms of right-wing radicalism and extremism, such as fascism, this review deals with the question of how the emergence of radical right-wing parties can be explained and why such parties have been considerably more successful among voters in some countries than in others. Possible explanations are grouped into two parts: The first consists of so-called demand-centered explanations, that is, explanations that focus on changing preferences, beliefs, and attitudes among voters. The second consists of so-called supply-side explanations, that is, explanations that focus on political opportunity structures and party organizational factors.

Women's political participation and representation vary dramatically within and between countries. We selectively review the literature on gender in politics, focusing on women's formal political participation. We discuss both traditional explanations for women's political participation and representation, such as the supply of women and the demand for women, and newer explanations such as the role of international actors and gender quotas. We also ask whether women are distinctive—does having more women in office make a difference to public policy? Throughout the review we demonstrate that a full understanding of women's political representation requires both deep knowledge of individual cases such as the United States and broad knowledge comparing women's participation across countries. We end with four recommended directions for future research: (a) globalizing theory and research, (b) expanding data collection, (c) remembering alternative forms of women's agency, and (d) addressing intersectionality.

Upon what kind of moral order does capitalism rest? Conversely, does the market give rise to a distinctive set of beliefs, habits, and social bonds? These questions are certainly as old as social science itself. In this review, we evaluate how today's scholarship approaches the relationship between markets and the moral order. We begin with Hirschman's characterization of the three rival views of the market as civilizing, destructive, or feeble in its effects on society. We review recent work at the intersection of sociology, economics, and political economy and show that these views persist both as theories of market society and moral arguments about it. We then argue that a fourth view, which we call moralized markets, has become increasingly prominent in economic sociology. This line of research sees markets as cultural phenomena and moral projects in their own right, and seeks to study the mechanisms and techniques by which such projects are realized in practice.

In recent decades, economic globalization has grown significantly in affluent democracies. Taking this as a point of departure, we review social science research on the consequences of economic globalization for the state, the economy, and civil society. We advocate for a concrete position of empirical scrutiny, between the grand theorists and earlier empirical skeptics, and measure economic globalization as the heightening of international trade and investment. Social scientists have engaged in lively debates surrounding such topics as how globalization affects the welfare state, politics, deindustrialization, inequality, and organized labor. Among the themes that emerge from these debates are the distinct values of within- and between-country comparisons and the need for a stronger connection between theoretical accounts of globalization and empirical analyses. At the same time, many aspects of social life have been neglected by recent research on globalization. Throughout, we gauge current consensus and dissensus, identify understudied topics, and suggest directions for future research.

The increase in economic disparities over the past 30 years has prompted extensive research on the causes and consequences of inequality both in the United States and, more recently, globally. This review provides an update of research on the patterns and causes of economic inequality in the United States, including inequality of earnings, wealth, and opportunity. We also explore the social and political consequences of inequality, particularly in the areas of health, education, crime, social capital, and political power. Finally, we spotlight an emerging literature on world inequality, which examines inequality trends within as well as across nations. Sociologists can advance research on inequality by bringing discipline-based expertise to bear on the organization and political economy of firms and labor markets, the pathways through which inequality has an effect, and the social, political, and cultural contingencies that might modify this effect.

This review synthesizes research about religion in the lives of post-1965 immigrants to the United States. Such research consists primarily of case studies, published since 1990, focused on individual religious organizations started and attended by immigrants. We analyze these case studies to demonstrate the different ways religion influences immigrants’ adaptation in the United States. We then consider how religion informs immigrants’ ethnic and gender-based identities, their experiences of civic and political life, and the lives of the second generation. We argue that current research is more descriptive than analytic overall, and we highlight a series of research questions and comparisons to enrich theoretical thinking. In particular, we advocate a comparative approach to examining immigrants’ religious organizations and increased attention to a “lived religion” perspective, which takes seriously the ways religion is important for immigrants outside of religious organizations in social institutions, including civic organizations, families, workplaces, schools, and health-care organizations.

Spurred in part by the rapid growth of the Hispanic population, considerable progress has been made over the past several decades in documenting the family behavior of Hispanics. Scholars increasingly recognize the importance of disaggregating the Hispanic population by national origin and generation, but the literature remains inconsistent in this regard. With an emphasis on demographic indicators of family behavior, this review summarizes trends in marriage, fertility, and family/household structure among the major Hispanic subgroups and identifies key issues in the literature that attempts to explain existing patterns. The role of generation is systematically addressed, as are the shortcomings of the standard practice of using cross-sectional data on generation to draw inferences about assimilation. We conclude that new research designs are needed to address the complexities of the migration process and their links to family patterns. In addition, future research should push toward greater integration of cultural and structural perspectives on how Hispanic families are shaped.

Recent social scientific research on childhood is oddly ambivalent. Despite much theoretically creative and empirically innovative work, the sociology of childhood, as a subfield, is often uncomfortable with its own object of inquiry. I identify three possible sources of this sociological ambivalence. First, much work does not fully differentiate children from childhood. Second, much of the literature conflates the notion of childhood as a social construct with childhood as a social good. And third, the construction of childhood in some of the literature is incommensurate with the social policies designed to protect or empower children. This review further illuminates this threefold equivocation with a schematic review of the sociological literature on childhood written since the 1980s. I conclude by briefly suggesting how recent insights from historical and poststructural approaches have begun to alleviate this ambivalence.

This article reviews the history of qualitative research on the black family during the twentieth century. Most qualitative studies on black family life focused on social class differences among blacks and between blacks and whites until the mid-1960s. In the final third of the last century, attention largely turned to the study of low-income black families, a fact I attribute in part to the publication of the Moynihan report.