Annual Review of Sociology - Volume 35, 2009

The view that America is fragmenting is popular among both pundits and academics and may well be endemic to American culture. We review claims that between 1970 and 2005 American society fragmented along lines of cultural politics, social class, immigration, race, or lifestyle. Taking the twentieth century as historical context, we weigh evidence for both main variants of the fragmentation thesis—that there is an increasing divide between two Americas, or that America is fragmenting into a variety of “little worlds that touch but do not interpenetrate.” We find a well-documented, widening gap in social class, whether measured by education or income. We also find that political elites and activists are demonstrably more polarized in 2005 than they were in 1970; this gap's effect on the electorate is debatable, however. Caveats aside, there is little evidence for increasing fragmentation of America along lines of race, ethnicity, or immigration status. American cultural tastes increasingly cluster into distinct lifeways, but there is little evidence about what effects, if any, this development has. The loudest claims of fragmentation, those concerning value issues, are based on the most contested evidence, but the widening gap between Americans by income and education—which receives less popular attention—is substantial and serious.

Despite years of research, methodological and practical obstacles make it difficult to conclude whether policies aimed at improving schools and communities are effective for improving youth outcomes. To complement existing work, we assess research on the educational and social outcomes for comparable youth who change school and neighborhood settings through unique housing policy and school voucher programs. Research shows that housing programs have helped poor families move to much safer, less disadvantaged, and less segregated neighborhoods. Some housing programs have also provided early educational benefits for young people who relocated to less poor and less segregated neighborhoods, but these gains were not maintained in the long run. School voucher programs have helped disadvantaged youth attend higher-performing private schools in less segregated environments with more middle-class peers. Although some voucher programs have shown small positive effects, the results of others are less certain owing to methodological weaknesses. Future research should directly examine families’ selection processes and be cautious with quantitative research that uses naturally occurring variation to model the effects of potential social programs. Researchers should also recognize the family processes that interact with social policy to determine how youth development can be improved, alongside the structural and political processes that condition how programs work at a larger scale.

Population health tends to be better in societies where income is more equally distributed. Recent evidence suggests that many other social problems, including mental illness, violence, imprisonment, lack of trust, teenage births, obesity, drug abuse, and poor educational performance of schoolchildren, are also more common in more unequal societies. Differences in the prevalence of ill health and social problems between more and less equal societies seem to be large and to extend to the vast majority of the population. Rather than referencing all the literature, this paper attempts to show which interpretations of these relationships are consistent with the research evidence. After discussing their more important and illuminating characteristics, we conclude that these relationships are likely to reflect a sensitivity of health and social problems to the scale of social stratification and status competition, underpinned by societal differences in material inequality.

Most studies of assortative marriage still rely on cross-sectional data and apply log-linear modeling of the contingency table of wives’ and husbands’ educational levels. However, these macro studies have provided quite ambiguous findings and interpretations. In comparison, the life course approach analyzes single individuals over the life course and explicitly recognizes the dynamic nature of partner decisions and the importance of educational roles and institutional circumstances. Based on life course studies, educational homogamy seems to be driven by three factors: (a) Individuals often prefer to associate with equally educated partners; (b) educational expansion increases contact opportunities for equally educated men and women at an age when young people start to look for partners and form couples; and (c) women's changing economic role in dual-earner societies increases the importance of women's education and labor force attachment.

Sociological analyses of social interaction have been primarily directed toward human-to-human exchange. Recently, some have begun to actively question that stance. Challenges are found in new theoretical ideas and in empirical study—experimental, field, and survey data on people's attitudes and behaviors toward nonhumans. Such developments are leading many scholars to carve out a more central role for animals, objects, images, and both memories and projections of the self and others in the study of social interaction. In this article, I review these innovative ideas, pursuing four specific tasks. First, I briefly review the theoretical grounds that eliminated nonhumans from studies of social interaction. Next, I present new theories and empirical studies that construct a role for nonhumans in social interaction. Third, I review surveys that document popular perceptions of human/nonhuman interaction. I conclude by proposing some conceptual guidelines that might bring nonhumans into our contemporary analytic frames.

Social class inequalities in health and mortality have become an increasingly prominent topic of study among sociologists, demographers, economists, and social epidemiologists. Considerable progress has been made in documenting such inequalities in a wide variety of settings using multiple measures of health and all-cause and cause-specific mortality. That social class inequalities are pervasive is now well established, but factors that underlie them are less clearly understood. This review discusses various measures used to define social class in studies of health inequalities. It then reviews the literature on patterns of these inequalities in developed countries as well as their potential explanations. Promising new research approaches include those that employ a life course perspective in the study of health inequalities and those that integrate multiple levels of analysis, including biological pathways that are likely to be involved in translating cumulative adversity to poor health.

Wal-Mart has been both praised and pilloried as a template for twenty-first century capitalism. Therein lies the challenge in analyzing the world's largest retailer. We examine the sociological impact of Wal-Mart in terms of four themes: its business model and organizational structure, the dual impact of Wal-Mart's labor relations in terms of its own stores and working conditions in its global supply chain, the genesis and effectiveness of community mobilizations against Wal-Mart, and how Wal-Mart's growth is linked to the emergence of buyer-driven commodity chains in the global economy. Wal-Mart underscores the value of a public sociology agenda that embraces three research criteria: the incorporation of new media and audiences, the need to go global with our research, and the ability to work for change from within.