Annual Review of Sociology - Volume 37, 2011

This autobiographical essay reflects on my sociological career, highlighting the integration of sociology with social policy. I discuss the personal, social, and intellectual experiences, ranging from childhood to adult life, that influenced my pursuit of studies in race and ethnic relations and urban poverty. I then focus on how the academic and public reaction to these studies increased my concerns about the relationship between social science and public policy, as well as my attempts to make my work more accessible to a general audience. In the process, I discuss how the academic awards and honors I received based on these studies enhanced my involvement in the national policy arena. I conclude this essay with some thoughts about public agenda research and productive controversy based on my own unique experiences. In short, this autobiographical essay shows how a scholar can engage academics, policy makers, and the media concerned with how sociological knowledge can inform a policy agenda on some of the nation's most important social problems.

As American society has become ever more dominated by the market, sociological interest in commodification has paradoxically declined. Marx, among others, noted how a worker can become estranged from his work—the doing of it, the tools of it, and the product resulting from it. Consumers can become estranged from all these, too. As workers and consumers today, we often detach ourselves from what we make and buy, and extreme forms of detachment we can call estrangement or alienation. Marx's iconic worker was (a) the nineteenth-century male factory worker for whom (b) estrangement was a static state (c) about which the victim had no narrative. In today's economy, we can look to the female service worker who does emotional labor to alter her state of estrangement and whose narrative may be that of “free choice.” Is the commercial surrogate I met in a for-profit clinic in India an autonomous agent in a free market, I wondered, or is she the latest version of Marx's “alienated man”? This essay grapples with that question.

Michel Foucault was a gifted but elusive thinker with a wide and continuing impact across many academic fields. This article positions his work as a historical sociology of knowledge and evaluates its contribution. After reviewing Foucault's central preoccupations as they emerge in his major works, the argument briefly considers their influence on accounting scholarship as an informative exemplar of a wider Foucault effect. Four key areas for the sociological reception of Foucault are then considered: the nature of discourse and archaeology, his historical method, the problem of agency and action, and his conception of power. Articulating Foucault's relationship to sociology is inherently problematic, not least because he takes the emergence of the sciences of man as something to be explained rather than augmented. Yet his work remains a rich resource for inquiries of the sociological type, is broadly aligned with a practice turn in social theory, and intersects with several themes in both mainstream and critical sociology.

The present article selectively reviews the large number of recent studies that have been described as based on mixed methods. I begin by discussing a body of work that has emerged to promote mixed methods research across the social sciences. I then review and critique empirical studies in each of two general approaches to mixed methods: mixed data–collection studies, which combine two or more kinds of data; and mixed data–analysis studies, which combine two or more analytical strategies, examine qualitative data with quantitative methods, or explore quantitative data with qualitative techniques. I argue that, although mixed methods research is by no means new, empirical studies today combine methods in more diverse and, at times, innovative ways. Nevertheless, important methodological tensions will likely surface as the research becomes more self-reflexive.

Any study of public opinion must consider the ontological status of the public being represented. In this review, we outline several empirical problems in current public opinion research and illustrate them with a contemporary case: public opinion about same-sex marriage. We then briefly trace historical attempts to grapple with the public in public opinion and then present the most thoroughgoing critiques and defenses of polling. We detail four approaches to the ontology and epistemology of public opinion. We argue for a conceptualization of public opinion that relies upon polling techniques alongside other investigative modes but that understands public opinion as dynamic, reactive, and collective. Publics are shaped by techniques that represent them, including public opinion research.

In contrast to the antistructuralist and antipositivist agenda that has animated the “narrative turn” in the social sciences since the 1980s, a more uniquely sociological approach has studied stories in the interactional, institutional, and political contexts of their telling. Scholars working in this vein have seen narrative as powerful, but as variably so, and they have focused on the ways in which narrative competence is socially organized and unevenly distributed. We show how this approach, or cluster of approaches, rooted variously in conversational analysis, symbolic interactionism, network analysis, and structuralist cultural sociologies, has both responded to problems associated with the narrative turn and shed light on enduring sociological questions such as the bases of institutional authority, how inequalities are maintained and reproduced, why political challengers are sometimes able to win support, and the cultural foundations of self-interest and instrumental rationality.

Statistical models for social networks as dependent variables must represent the typical network dependencies between tie variables such as reciprocity, homophily, transitivity, etc. This review first treats models for single (cross-sectionally observed) networks and then for network dynamics. For single networks, the older literature concentrated on conditionally uniform models. Various types of latent space models have been developed: for discrete, general metric, ultrametric, Euclidean, and partially ordered spaces. Exponential random graph models were proposed long ago but now are applied more and more thanks to the non-Markovian social circuit specifications that were recently proposed. Modeling network dynamics is less complicated than modeling single network observations because dependencies are spread out in time. For modeling network dynamics, continuous-time models are more fruitful. Actor-oriented models here provide a model that can represent many dependencies in a flexible way. Strong model development is now going on to combine the features of these models and to extend them to more complicated outcome spaces.

A significant group of sociologists entering graduate school in the late 1960s and 1970s embraced Marxism as the foundation for a critical challenge to reigning orthodoxies in the discipline. In this review, we ask what impact this cohort of scholars and their students had on the mainstream of American sociology. More generally, how and in what ways did the resurgence of neo-Marxist thought within the discipline lead to new theoretical and empirical research and findings? Using two models of Marxism as science as our guide, we examine the impact of sociological Marxism on research on the state, inequality, the labor process, and global political economy. We conclude with some thoughts about the future of sociological Marxism.

A common complaint about the sociology of deviance, particularly the perspective known as labeling theory or the societal reaction perspective, is that the field is dead. However, considerable evidence suggests that the core themes of societal reaction work live on in several areas of contemporary scholarship. After identifying and describing three key strands of the early societal reaction perspective, I consider how those strands are reflected in more recent work, much of which does not explicitly reference the earlier tradition. I identify the ways that recent scholarship builds upon and yet extends the earlier societal reaction tradition. I close by describing three trajectories emerging in recent work that should focus future inquiry: the contingent effects of labeling, the causes of gaps between social control discourse and practice, and the diffusion of social control practices from deviants to nondeviants.

The focus of this review is macro-level organizational change in U.S. health-care organizations, with a special emphasis on turbulent changes in the environments of health-care organizations. We examine several contemporary theories used to study health-care organizations (institutional theory, complexity theory, and multilevel approaches). These and other theories may be helpful in framing investigations that emphasize key environmental changes of the 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century, which in turn have led to changes in health-care systems and macro-level structures. Those key changes include advances in health-care technologies, changes in the systems of care, and of course, changes in health-care policy.

Sociological theories about the political economy of the environment have appeared in two waves. The first wave has a productivist orientation, showing how the normal workings of industrial production damage the environment. It includes impact theories (IPAT and STIRPAT), the treadmill of production, growth machine theories, and resource extraction/ecologically unequal exchange theories. A second wave of theories focuses on environmental destruction and the social movements that challenge the agents of destruction. To accommodate popular unrest over environmental declines, states have typically created corporatist policymaking circles that include long-established, moderate environmental nongovernmental organizations and exclude disadvantaged and unorganized peoples. Advocates for environmental justice and sustainable consumption have attempted to mobilize the excluded, articulating a just sustainability theory that addresses both concerns. Current controversies in the field focus on the predictive power of first- and second-wave theories. This theoretical focus may shift toward the political economy of disasters as climate change intensifies.

The economic crisis of 2008–2010 stimulated an already growing sociological interest in finance. Before the crisis, disintermediation and securitization changed how the U.S. financial system operated, as bank operations shifted from the traditional originate-and-hold model to originate-and-distribute. During the 1980s and 1990s, the overall size and profitability of the financial system grew as deregulation unleashed financial innovation and reorganization. Global shifts toward capital market integration and liberalization created greater global interdependence. Households in the years before the crisis also altered their relationship to the financial system, increasing debt loads and overall exposure to the stock market. Research reveals the importance of politics for many financial market developments, various implications for corporate governance, the continuing significance of social factors within finance, and the role of theoretical and material devices in shaping financial practices. Key directions for future research focus on finance in relation to social inequality, informal sectors, valuation, and social networks.

This article reviews research on political repression by social movement scholars. Four topics are discussed: (a) debates over the conceptualization of repression, the breadth of the concept, whether distinctions within the concept are productive and/or forms of repression are directly comparable, and the relationship between repression and political opportunities; (b) recent research on different types of repression, particularly protest policing; (c) an evaluation of research on different explanations of repression; and (d) an evaluation of research on the consequences of repression. Attention is also paid to areas where future research effort might be most productively spent, including identifying substantial gaps where more research is needed, where important debates exist that need research to push toward their resolution, where robust results exist but could be furthered by refinements, and where a more inclusive conceptualization of repression may link the study of repression to other significant literatures.

The past 20 years have seen an explosion of research and theory into the emotions of protest and social movements. At one extreme, general theoretical statements about emotions have established their importance in every aspect of political action. At the other, the origins and influence of many specific emotions have been isolated as causal mechanisms. This article offers something in between, a typology of emotional processes aimed not only at showing that not all emotions work the same way, but also at encouraging research into how different emotions interact with one another. This should also help us overcome a residual suspicion that emotions are irrational, as well as avoid the overreaction, namely demonstrations that emotions help (and never hurt) protest mobilization and goals.

Most Americans believe that employment stability has declined in recent decades. Initial efforts to document this trend empirically, however, produced mixed results, and so research lost momentum. This review shows that evidence of declines in employment stability is stronger than originally portrayed and that therefore the field deserves renewed attention, particularly in light of the current recession. Research shows consistent declines in employment stability among private-sector male workers but more complex trends for female and public-sector workers. Future research should not only seek to better document these trends but go further by investigating their possible causes and broader consequences. Additionally, although changes have occurred, they do not match the strength of public perceptions. Further work is necessary, therefore, to understand this contradiction and the changing role of employment in American society.

The American conservative movement that began to gain steam in the post–World War II era had, by the 1980s, emerged as a transformative political force in the United States and the world. Yet sociology has been slower than other disciplines to come to grips with conservatism. In the hope of spurring more research, we review the substantial literature on the conservative movement produced by historians, political scientists, and serious journalists since the mid-1990s, along with the more limited number of sociological contributions. After identifying what we see as a promising approach for conceptualizing conservatism, we illustrate the benefits of sociological engagement by showing how three areas of sociology that might at first glance seem disconnected from the movement—the sociology of intellectuals, theories of social change, and scholarship on stratification—could profit from consideration of the conservative case.

Around the globe and starting in the affluent West, women have made major, even revolutionary, strides toward equality with men. However, while access to major social institutions has equalized dramatically, expanded participation in labor markets and educational systems often comes in the form of gender-differentiated roles within these institutions. This article reviews international trends on different indicators of women's economic status and considers explanations for observed patterns. The forms of equality that tend to persist in advanced industrial societies are those that are readily interpreted as outcomes of free choices by formally equal but innately different men and women.

Although past research on the African American community has focused primarily on issues of discrimination, segregation, and other forms of deprivation, there has always been some recognition of class diversity within the black community. This research, on the fringe of most scholarship in the first half of the twentieth century, grew significantly with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In this review we highlight the growth of the black middle class itself and explore the debate on the relative influence of class and race in the lives of middle-class blacks in the post–Civil Rights Era. The consensus that has emerged thus far acknowledges the increasing influence of class in the mobility chances of college-educated blacks while documenting the continued role of race in limiting black middle-class achievement. This research also finds that middle-class blacks experience discrimination both in institutional settings and in the accommodations of everyday life.

Because demographic shifts will affect their labor forces in the immediate future, rich societies will have to face up to the challenge of integrating the children of low-status immigrants, such as Mexicans in the United States and Turks in western Europe. The performance of educational systems is critical to meeting this challenge. We consider how three features of such systems—the division of labor among schools, families, and communities; tracking; and inequalities among schools—impact immigrant-origin children. In general, children from low-status immigrant families lag behind the children from native families but for reasons that differ from one system to another. Each system can profit from the experiences of the others in attempting to ameliorate this disparity.

The scholarship on gender in the Middle East takes two objectives as its mandate: first, to dismantle the stereotype of passive and powerless Muslim women and, second, to challenge the notion that Islam shapes women's condition in the same way in all places. The urgency of this endeavor is heightened by the fact that gender has come to demarcate battle lines in geopolitical struggles since September 11, 2001, and to occupy a central place in the discourse of international relations in regard to Muslim countries. To reflect the major developments in the field, I offer a critical analysis of the scholarship on issues that constitute the core of the intellectual discourse on gender in the Middle East. These include the critique of Orientalism past and present; the exploration of the diversity within Islam; the study of states and gender with respect to symbolic representations, institutions, and kin-based solidarities; the analysis of women's agency; and the debates surrounding feminism and the veil.

Recent methodological advances have allowed empirical research on adolescence to do better justice to theoretical models. Organized by a life course framework, this review covers the state of contemporary research on adolescents' physical, psychological, interpersonal, and institutional pathways; how these pathways connect within primary ecological contexts; and how they relate to broader patterns of societal stratification and historical change. Looking forward, it also emphasizes three future challenges/opportunities, including efforts to illuminate biosocial processes, link adolescence to other life stages, and account for the influence of major social changes (e.g., the new media).

We review the bourgeoning literature on ethno-racial diversity and its alleged effects on public trust and cohesion in the context of the evolution of the concept of social capital and earlier claims about its manifold positive effects. We present evidence that questions such claims and points to the roots of civicness and trust in deep historical processes associated with race and immigration. We examine the claims that immigration reduces social cohesion by drawing on the sociological classics to show the forms of cohesion that actually keep modern societies together. This leads to a typology that shows “communitarianism” to be just one such form and one not required, and not necessarily ideal, for the smooth operation of complex organizations and institutions. Implications of our conclusions for future research and immigration policy are discussed.

This article reviews the similarities and differences in the transition to adulthood in Europe. Recent change and the still striking diversity in pathways to adulthood in Europe have attracted growing comparative research interests. The considerable heterogeneity in institutional arrangements, cultural heritage, and economic life observed across contemporary European societies provides fertile ground for testing hypotheses of various macro-level theories and approaches addressing interactions between micro- and macro-level factors. Pursuing a comparative perspective, this review frames the transition to adulthood within a life course perspective. After having mapped the terrain of recent change and contemporary diversity in the transition to adulthood in Europe, the review presents the theoretical perspectives predominantly used to explain diversity and discusses whether the empirical evidence squares with the theoretical propositions. The review concludes by suggesting how future research could advance understanding of the complex nature of the transition to adulthood in Europe.

Since Durkheim's classic work on suicide, sociological attention to understanding the roots of self-destruction has been inconsistent. In this review, we use three historical periods of interest (pre-Durkheim, Durkheim, post-Durkheim) to organize basic findings in the body of sociological knowledge regarding suicide. Much of the twentieth-century research focused on issues of integration and regulation, imitation, and the social construction of suicide rates. Innovations in the twenty-first-century resurgence of sociological research on suicide are described in detail. These newer studies begin to redirect theory and analysis toward a focus on ethnoracial subgroups, individual-level phenomena (e.g., ideation), and age-period-cohort effects. Our analysis of sociology's contributions, limits, and possibilities leads to a recognition of the need to break through bifurcations in individual- and aggregate-level studies, to pursue the translation of Durkheim's original theory into a network perspective as one avenue of guiding micro-macro research, and to attend to the complexity in both multidisciplinary explanations and pragmatic interventions.

Unauthorized migration has been an important issue for decades. Because much has changed about this type of migration in the past two decades, this review takes stock of recent scholarship. These studies reveal a new complexity in the unauthorized migration in the early twenty-first century. First, compared with the past, unauthorized migration is more diverse. Whether based on gender, age, or how people enter, there is considerable heterogeneity in the unauthorized migrant population. Second, nation-states approach the issue of unauthorized migration differently than in the past, a fact that has increased the size and prominence of the unauthorized population and is related to the emergence of scholarship emphasizing the social construction of immigrant legal status.

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the nature of intergenerational relationships in immigrant families, especially between immigrant parents and their children, many of whom were born and largely raised in the United States. This review begins with an analysis of the causes of tension and conflict as well as accommodation and cooperation between parents and children in immigrant families in the contemporary United States. We then examine what happens when parents and children are separated in transnational families—why this pattern occurs today and how it affects family relationships. We provide a historical-comparative perspective, discussing what is new about parent-child relations in immigrant families today in contrast to a century ago in the last great wave of immigration to the United States. Finally, a cross-national view reveals the different emphases in the social science literature on intergenerational relations in immigrant families in the United States and western Europe.

This review outlines several key aspects of the new rural-urban interface and the growing interpenetration of American rural and urban life. The historical coincidence of spatial and social boundaries in America is changing rapidly. This review highlights (a) the enormous scale of rural-urban interdependence and boundary crossing, shifting, and blurring—along many dimensions of community life—over the past several decades, and (b) the symmetrical rather than asymmetrical influences between urban and rural areas, i.e., on bidirectional relational aspects of spatial categories. These general points are illustrated by identifying 10 common conceptions of rural America that reflect both its social and economic diversity and its changing spatial and social boundaries. Here we emphasize symbolic and social boundaries—the distinctions between urban and rural communities and people and the processes by which boundaries are engaged. Placing behaviors or organizational forms along a rural-urban continuum (or within a metropolitan hierarchy of places) or drawing sharp rural-urban distinctions seems increasingly obsolete or even problematic. We conclude with a call for new research on rural America and greater conceptual and empirical integration of urban and rural scholarship, which remains disconnected and segregated institutionally.

The transformation of the Latin American family has attracted increasing attention in sociodemographic studies, particularly those oriented from a gender perspective. This article reviews progress in the field and evaluates the links between families and public policies. It begins by focusing on the nature and meaning of modifications in family structure and dynamics (size, composition, headship, type and stability of unions, division of labor, and ways of living together). It then evaluates the extent to which there is agreement or disagreement between family changes and government initiatives. It focuses on programs oriented toward reconciling work and family and actions designed to highlight and sanction domestic violence. It concludes that, despite much that has been achieved, the actions taken so far are insufficient. It is essential to develop more complex analyses and explanations and to design reliable indicators that make it possible to monitor progress and omissions and gauge the scope of what remains to be done.

Las transformaciones de las familias latinoamericanas reciben atención creciente en los estudios sociodemográficos, especialmente en aquellos orientados desde una perspectiva de género. En este artículo revisamos los avances en este campo y sopesamos los vínculos entre familias y políticas públicas. Inicialmente nos detenemos en la naturaleza y el significado de las modificaciones en la estructura y dinámica familiares (tamaño, composición, jefatura, tipo y estabilidad de las uniones, división del trabajo y formas de convivencia). Posteriormente, valoramos los encuentros y desencuentros entre cambios familiares e iniciativas gubernamentales; nos centramos en los programas orientados a la conciliación trabajo-familia, y aquellas acciones encaminadas a visibilizar y sancionar la violencia intrafamiliar. Concluimos que a pesar de lo logrado, las acciones son insuficientes. Es preciso complejizar los análisis y las explicaciones, así como impulsar los diseños de indicadores confiables que nos permitan monitorear adelantos, omisiones y el alcance del camino que aún se necesita recorrer.