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Annual Review of Sociology - Volume 38, 2012
Volume 38, 2012
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My Life in Sociology
Vol. 38 (2012), pp. 1–16More LessFollowing on an article in Bennett Berger (1990), Authors of Their Own Lives, titled “From Socialism to Sociology,” in which I and other sociologists describe how we came to sociology, I continue with my academic and public career as a sociologist at the University of California–Berkeley (1963–1969) and at Harvard subsequently, in the Graduate School of Education and the Sociology Department. I describe my involvement in the formulation of urban policy in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and beyond, and my attempt to understand the student revolt at Berkeley, which spread throughout the United States and indeed much of the world. I further discuss my long involvement in the issue of affirmative action, on which I in time changed my views, originally based on a distinctive conception of the course of ethnicity and ethnic and racial groups in the United States, from critical opposition to acceptance, and my similar involvement in the debates over social policy in the United States, in which a complex point of view has too often been summarized under the term neoconservatism.
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The Race Discrimination System
Vol. 38 (2012), pp. 17–35More LessTo understand the persistence of racial disparities across multiple domains (e.g., residential location, schooling, employment, health, housing, credit, and justice) and to develop effective remedies, we must recognize that these domains are reciprocally related and comprise an integrated system. The limited long-run success of government social policies to advance racial justice is due in part to the ad hoc nature of policy responses to various forms of racial discrimination. Drawing on a systems perspective, I show that race discrimination is a system whose emergent properties reinforce the effects of their components. The emergent property of a system of race-linked disparities is über discrimination—a meta-level phenomenon that shapes our culture, cognitions, and institutions, thereby distorting whether and how we perceive and make sense of racial disparities. Viewing within-domain disparities as part of a discrimination system requires better-specified analytic models. While the existence of an emergent system of über discrimination increases the difficulty of eliminating racial disparities, a systems perspective points to strategies to attack that system. These include identifying and intervening at leverage points, implementing interventions to operate simultaneously across subsystems, isolating subsystems from the larger discrimination system, and directly challenging the processes through which emergent discrimination strengthens within-subsystem disparities.
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Instrumental Variables in Sociology and the Social Sciences
Vol. 38 (2012), pp. 37–72More LessInstrumental variable (IV) methods provide a powerful but underutilized tool to address many common problems with observational sociological data. Key to their successful use is having IVs that are uncorrelated with an equation's disturbance and that are sufficiently strongly related to the problematic endogenous covariates. This review briefly defines IVs, summarizes their origins, and describes their use in multiple regression, simultaneous equation models, factor analysis, latent variable structural equation models, and limited dependent variable models. It defines and contrasts three methods of selecting IVs: auxiliary instrumental variable, model implied instrumental variable, and randomized instrumental variable. It provides overidentification tests and weak IV diagnostics as methods to evaluate the quality of IVs. I review the use of IVs in models that assume heterogeneous causal effects. Another section summarizes the use of IVs in contemporary sociological publications. The conclusion suggests ways to improve the use of IVs and suggests that there are many areas in which IVs could be profitably used in sociological research.
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Rational Choice Theory and Empirical Research: Methodological and Theoretical Contributions in Europe
Vol. 38 (2012), pp. 73–92More LessRational choice theory (RCT) constitutes a major approach of sociological theorizing and research in Europe. We review key methodological and theoretical contributions that have arisen from the increasing empirical application of RCT and have the potential to stimulate the development of RCT and sociology more generally. Methodologically, discussions have evolved around how to test RCT empirically and how to realize its ambition to give theory-guidance to social research. These discussions have identified the strengths and shortcomings of direct and indirect test strategies using survey or experimental data. Metatheoretically, different views have emerged about how to deal with counterevidence from applied fields of sociological research. Whereas some argue for a wide version of RCT that allows a broad set of auxiliary assumptions about preferences, expectations, and constraints, others advocate a major overhaul of RCT's core assumptions by incorporating additional concepts and mechanisms.
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Network Effects and Social Inequality
Paul DiMaggio, and Filiz GaripVol. 38 (2012), pp. 93–118More LessStudents of social inequality have noted the presence of mechanisms militating toward cumulative advantage and increasing inequality. Social scientists have established that individuals' choices are influenced by those of their network peers in many social domains. We suggest that the ubiquity of network effects and tendencies toward cumulative advantage are related. Inequality is exacerbated when effects of individual differences are multiplied by social networks: when persons must decide whether to adopt beneficial practices; when network externalities, social learning, or normative pressures influence adoption decisions; and when networks are homophilous with respect to individual characteristics that predict such decisions. We review evidence from literatures on network effects on technology, labor markets, education, demography, and health; identify several mechanisms through which networks may generate higher levels of inequality than one would expect based on differences in initial endowments alone; consider cases in which network effects may ameliorate inequality; and describe research priorities.
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Youth Political Participation: Bridging Activism and Electoral Politics
Vol. 38 (2012), pp. 119–137More LessWhat is the relationship between social movements and electoral politics? Although the empirical reality of American politics has increasingly blurred the lines between activism and electoral politics, sociology has yet to explore these changes and provide theoretical and methodological tools to understand them. Focusing on the experience of young Americans, this review explores this relationship and outlines opportunities for future research. It is broken down into three sections. First, I review the main themes in the study of youth political participation in America. Second, using examples from the 2008 election, the article examines recent increases in youth participation. Third and finally, this article discusses the case of the Obama campaign, its transition into the Democratic National Committee's Organizing for America, and aspects of the 2012 election to highlight the complex relationship between movements and electoral politics in America today. The paper concludes by highlighting opportunities for sociologists to bridge the connections between activism and electoral politics in new and meaningful ways.
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Brokerage
Vol. 38 (2012), pp. 139–158More LessAlthough sociologists have frequently touched on ideas related to brokerage in their research, brokerage is rarely considered a central concept in the discipline's theoretical or analytic arsenal. Theoretically, brokerage is one of a small number of mechanisms by which disconnected or isolated individuals (or groups) can interact economically, politically, and socially. Across substantive domains, we are particularly struck by a dual aspect of brokerage: On the one hand, brokerage has the capacity to ease social interaction, enhance economic activity, and facilitate political development. On the other hand, brokerage often breeds exploitation, the pursuit of personal profit, corruption, and the accumulation of power; through these and other processes, brokerage can exacerbate existing inequalities. In this review, we make the case for elevating the concept of brokerage to a more prominent place in the sociological canon. Brokerage's significance stems from its potential for macro-level consequences, which are revealed primarily through its impact on the permeability of group boundaries. However, because brokerage is built from informal, personal relationships, understanding it requires close attention to micro-level relations and social psychological processes.
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Group Culture and the Interaction Order: Local Sociology on the Meso-Level
Vol. 38 (2012), pp. 159–179More LessAlthough explicit attention to the role of small groups has waned in sociology, an empirical understanding of the interaction order is increasing. A focus on the group—the meso-level of analysis—enriches both structural and interactional approaches, stressing shared and ongoing meaning. Groups constitute social order, just as groups are themselves constituted by that order. The examination of local action reveals how interaction orders emerge and create meanings that spread throughout a wider network. Despite the limits of a meso-level analysis in examining both external webs of constraint and immediate negotiations, this approach addresses identity, social capital, collective action, group culture, networks, and civil society. By building on collective identity, shared history, common spaces, and ongoing social relations, groups provide mechanisms through which individuals fit into larger structures and through which social structures shape individuals.
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Resolution of Social Conflict
Vol. 38 (2012), pp. 181–199More LessFor generations, sociological theorists have debated the relative function, utility, and harm of social conflict and its resolution. This review identifies some of the most prominent among recent contested forms of conflict resolution as well as their social histories, worldviews, and ways of operating. In sorting out the myriad theoretical traditions and positions guiding this field, we note that the resolution of social conflict is a thing in itself, and hence any design of its study should be directed at this liminal moment during which change is occurring. We conclude by examining four aspects of resolution—violence, spatiality, temporality, and language—using these themes to demarcate fault lines or gaps in the literature and to suggest new directions for future research.
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Toward a Comparative Sociology of Valuation and Evaluation
Vol. 38 (2012), pp. 201–221More LessThis review discusses North American and European research from the sociology of valuation and evaluation (SVE), a research topic that has attracted considerable attention in recent years. The goal is to bring various bodies of work into conversation with one another in order to stimulate more cumulative theory building. This is accomplished by focusing on (a) subprocesses such as categorization and legitimation, (b) the conditions that sustain heterarchies, and (c) valuation and evaluative practices. The article reviews these literatures and provides directions for a future research agenda.
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Construction, Concentration, and (Dis)Continuities in Social Valuations
Vol. 38 (2012), pp. 223–245More LessI review and integrate recent sociological research that makes progress on three interrelated questions pertaining to social valuation: (a) the degree of social construction relative to objective constraints; (b) the degree of concentration in social valuations at a single point in time; and (c) the conditions that govern two broad forms of temporal discontinuity—(i) fashion cycles, especially in cultural expression and in managerial practices, and (ii) bubble/crash dynamics, as witnessed in such domains as authoritarian regimes and financial markets. In the course of the review, I argue for the importance of identifying how objective conditions constrain social construction and suggest two contrarian mechanisms by which this is accomplished—valuation opportunism and valuation entrepreneurship—and the conditions under which they are more or less effective.
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A Cultural Sociology of Religion: New Directions
Vol. 38 (2012), pp. 247–265More LessIn this article, I review three contemporary streams of scholarship that are revitalizing the cultural analysis of religion, an approach that dates to the discipline's founding. Research from an institutional field perspective focuses on the institutions that shape religious belief, practice, and mobilization. Work on lived religion, including neo-Durkheimian approaches, focuses on religious experience and contested practices of sacralization. Scholarship on religious cultural tools and symbolic boundaries analyzes religion as symbolic legitimation. These three approaches avoid serious problems associated with both market and secularization accounts, in part because of the way they conceptualize religious authority and religious identity, and in part because of their broader scope of inquiry. In the conclusion, I combine the insights from these approaches to articulate a promising agenda for future research, offering a set of focus questions that are relevant to both classical and contemporary concerns about religion's role in modern societies.
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Status: Insights from Organizational Sociology
Vol. 38 (2012), pp. 267–283More LessStatus has become an increasingly influential concept in the fields of organizational and economic sociology during the past two decades. Research in this area has not only helped explain behavior within and between organizations, but has also contributed to our understanding of status processes more generally. In this review, we point to the contributions of this field in terms of the determinants of status, the effects of status, and the mechanisms by which these effects are produced. We next appraise the way in which a network approach has contributed to our formal understanding of status positions and status hierarchies. We then highlight recent studies that demonstrate the value of studying the structures of status hierarchies themselves rather than focusing solely on the actors within them. After suggesting potential directions for future research, we conclude by calling for renewed efforts to translate concepts and theories across levels of analysis and substantive commitment in order to build more general theories of status processes.
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Outsourcing Social Transformation: Development NGOs as Organizations
Vol. 38 (2012), pp. 285–315More LessThe literature on development nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) envisions an alternative form of social organization, one that is more altruistic, more cooperative, and less hierarchical than governments and for-profit organizations. We engage with the literature on quite different terms: NGOs and their donors are organizations, and much of what is distinctive about them as organizations derives from the special uncertainties they face due to the environments in which they operate, the goals they pursue, and the social and material technologies they employ. We conclude that there are unexplored issues in the literature on development NGOs that sociologists, with their toolkit of theories and practices, are uniquely qualified to address.
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The Arc of Neoliberalism
Vol. 38 (2012), pp. 317–340More LessFor three decades, neoliberalism dominated the global political economy. Defined as an explicit preference for private over public control, neoliberalism represented a dramatic break from postwar policies. This article examines the historical development of neoliberalism through three perspectives: as an economic policy, as an expression of political power, and as an ideational hegemony. We reject the notion of neoliberal inevitability and suggest how it came to dominate all other possible alternatives. The review emphasizes the critical importance of political preferences and influences as well as the central role ideas played in defining policy paradigms.
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Economic Insecurity and Social Stratification
Vol. 38 (2012), pp. 341–359More LessEconomic insecurity describes the risk of economic loss faced by workers and households as they encounter the unpredictable events of social life. Our review suggests a four-part framework for studying the distribution and trends in these economic risks. First, a focus on households rather than workers captures the microlevel risk pooling that can smooth income flows and stabilize economic well-being. Second, insecurity is related to income volatility and the risk of downward mobility into poverty. Third, adverse events such as unemployment, family dissolution, or poor health commonly trigger income losses. Fourth, the effects of adverse events are mitigated by insurance relationships provided by government programs, employer benefits, and the informal support of families. Empirical research in these areas reveals high levels of economic insecurity among low-income households and suggests an increase in economic insecurity with the growth in economic inequality in the United States.
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The Sociology of Elites
Vol. 38 (2012), pp. 361–377More LessElites are those with vastly disproportionate control over or access to a resource. We can understand this as a position that a social actor occupies, or we can imagine such resources as a possession of an actor. The study of elites is the study of power and inequality, from above. It involves looking at the distribution of social resources, which can include economic, social, cultural, political, or knowledge capital. It also means exploring the role of institutions such as schools, families, and clubs in how such resources are organized and distributed. Over the past decade, particularly as social power and economic rewards have become increasingly concentrated in the hands of the few, elite sociology has experienced a revival. Empirical observations of these phenomena point to the changing character of American inequality.
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Social and Economic Returns to College Education in the United States
Vol. 38 (2012), pp. 379–400More LessEducation correlates strongly with most important social and economic outcomes such as economic success, health, family stability, and social connections. Theories of stratification and selection created doubts about whether education actually caused good things to happen. Because schools and colleges select who continues and who does not, it was easy to imagine that education added little of substance. Evidence now tips the balance away from bias and selection and in favor of substance. Investments in education pay off for individuals in many ways. The size of the direct effect of education varies among individuals and demographic groups. Education affects individuals and groups who are less likely to pursue a college education more than traditional college students. A smaller literature on social returns to education indicates that communities, states, and nations also benefit from increased education of their populations; some estimates imply that the social returns exceed the private returns.
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Race Relations Within the US Military
Vol. 38 (2012), pp. 401–422More LessSociologists now often say that the US military is a model of good race relations. Although there is no denying progress made in military race relations, especially since establishment of the all-volunteer force, this review challenges that comfortable claim as research done over the past two decades supports it only in part. Instead, we conclude that disparities in military allocations of goods and burdens sometimes disadvantage racial minorities. This conclusion rests on a review of institutional analyses in five arenas to which researchers have paid close attention: racial patterns in enlistment, officer promotion rates, administration of military justice, risk of death in combat, and health care for wounded soldiers. Although not a direct or intended result of military policy and practice, in three of five cases there was evidence of racial bias and institutional racism. Further work is needed to identify mechanisms through which the bias and racism arose.
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The Future of Historical Family Demography
Vol. 38 (2012), pp. 423–441More LessAn explosion of new data sources describing historical family composition is opening unprecedented opportunities for discovery and analysis. The new data will allow comparative multilevel analysis of spatial patterns and will support studies of the transformation of living arrangements over the past 200 years. Using measurement methods that assess family choices at the individual level and analytic strategies that assess variations across space and time, we can dissect the decline of patriarchal family forms in the developed world and place Northwest Europe and North America in global comparative context.
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Previous Volumes
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Volume 50 (2024)
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Volume 49 (2023)
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Volume 48 (2022)
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Volume 47 (2021)
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Volume 46 (2020)
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Volume 45 (2019)
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Volume 44 (2018)
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Volume 43 (2017)
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Volume 42 (2016)
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Volume 41 (2015)
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Volume 40 (2014)
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Volume 39 (2013)
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Volume 38 (2012)
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Volume 37 (2011)
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Volume 36 (2010)
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Volume 35 (2009)
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Volume 34 (2008)
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Volume 33 (2007)
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Volume 32 (2006)
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Volume 31 (2005)
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Volume 30 (2004)
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Volume 29 (2003)
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Volume 28 (2002)
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Volume 27 (2001)
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Volume 26 (2000)
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Volume 25 (1999)
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Volume 24 (1998)
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Volume 23 (1997)
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Volume 22 (1996)
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Volume 21 (1995)
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Volume 20 (1994)
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Volume 19 (1993)
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Volume 18 (1992)
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Volume 17 (1991)
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Volume 16 (1990)
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Volume 15 (1989)
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Volume 14 (1988)
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Volume 13 (1987)
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Volume 12 (1986)
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Volume 11 (1985)
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Volume 10 (1984)
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Volume 9 (1983)
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Volume 8 (1982)
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Volume 7 (1981)
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Volume 6 (1980)
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Volume 5 (1979)
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Volume 4 (1978)
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Volume 3 (1977)
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Volume 2 (1976)
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Volume 1 (1975)
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Volume 0 (1932)