Annual Review of Sociology - Volume 27, 2001

In what follows we critically assess a selection of the works on urban poverty that followed the publication of WJ Wilson's The Truly Disadvantaged (1987), with a particular focus on the family, the neighborhood, and culture. We frame our discussion by assessing the broad explanations of the increased concentration of poverty in urban neighborhoods characteristic of the 1970s and 1980s. Then, in the section on the family, we address the rising out-of-wedlock and disproportionately high teenage birthrates of poor urban women. Next, we critique the literature on neighborhood effects. Finally, in the discussion of culture, we examine critically the new efforts at complementing structural explanations with cultural accounts. We conclude by calling for more comparative, cross-regional, and historical studies, broader conceptions of urban poverty, and a greater focus on Latinos and other ethnic groups.

Routines, protocols, and organization charts focus attention, structure cognition, and shape decision making. Participants in organizations, legal systems, and markets compare cases, deciding which protocol governs the treatment of each case in a stream. But situations vary in the extent to which thought and action are effectively governed by routines and standard operating procedures. In less structured or more chaotic situations, biography is an alternative form of analysis that shapes cognition and helps people make sense of otherwise uninterpretable events. Biography and narrative do their work by constructing the causal unity of objects over time rather than by constructing causation from a comparison across similar cases. Using examples such as critically ill infants, animals, heirlooms, the penalty phase of capital trials, juvenile justice, the lower criminal courts, religious relics, and cloth, the paper compares case and biographical analysis in organizations, legal settings, and markets, asking how these different ways of thinking come about and what follows from them.

This review examines research on education and inequality in developing regions. In tracing the progress of this field of inquiry, it focuses on empirical studies of educational inequality in four broad areas: macro-structural forces shaping education and stratification; the relationship between family background and educational outcomes; school effects; and education's impact on economic and social mobility. It assesses the contributions of research in Africa, Asia, and Latin America to the general study of education and social stratification and the theoretical leverage gained from examining stratification processes in developing regions of the world. Finally, the review discusses recent developments that hold promise for addressing the knowledge gaps that remain; these include utilizing relatively new data sources and methods in comparative, cross-national studies and greater collaboration between researchers who study strikingly similar questions but remain segregated due to their focus on either industrialized or developing societies.

One of the most profound changes in the United States in the past century is the national abandonment of farming as a livelihood strategy. This change is evident both in the exodus of Americans from farming and in the conditions faced by the farmers remaining, most of whom are marginal producers in an increasingly concentrated industry. In this article, we provide a retrospective account of the empirical and sociological fate of family farmers. While sociologists have had longstanding interest in agrarian change, research on contemporary farmers is largely confined to speciality publications, with a loss to the discipline at large. We examine three distinct research traditions that continue to document farm transformation: research on macro-level transformation, community impacts, and household response. While these traditions evolved separately, we describe how they overlap and inform each other. Most notably, research on household and community responses delineates meso- and micro-level institutional factors that extend macro-level theory. Research on the contemporary farm population offers an alternative context in which to interrogate conventional accounts of economic development; such research yields insights about aspects of social life being rediscovered as part of the new economy and continues to pull sociologists into politically charged public policy debates.

I first argue that religion partakes of the symbolic order of the nation-state and that contemporary nationalisms are suffused with the religious. I then suggest that religious nationalism calls into question the theoretical duality of the social and the cultural, a divide variously identified with the material and the symbolic, class and status, economy and civil society. Religious nationalism, I suggest, requires an institutional approach to the project of collective representation. Religious nationalism offers a particular ontology of power, an ontology revealed and affirmed through its politicized practices and the central object of its political concern, practices that locate collective solidarity in religious faith shared by embodied families, not in contract and consent enacted by abstract individual citizens. Understanding the institutional basis of religious nationalist discourse allows us to understand its affinities with socialist politics. If religious nationalism derives from religion's institutional heterology with the capitalist market and the democratic state, then it suggests the limits of a social theory that occludes that heterology. In the remainder of the paper, I argue that religious nationalism cannot be adequately understood either through Pierre Bourdieu's theory of habitus and field, nor through Jeffrey Alexander's theory of civil society. Bourdieu's theory of fields imports the logic of dominant institutions and thereby culturally homogenizes the institutional diversity of contemporary society, making the stake of politics a culturally empty space of domination. Alexander's theory of civil society, while rich in cultural substance, identifies civil society with democratic political culture and thereby makes unnecessarily restrictive assumptions about the institutional sources of collective representation in modern society.

The concepts of socioeconomic status (SES) and class are pervasive in sociological studies, yet an examination of the sociological and social science literature suggests a lack of consensus on their conceptual meaning and measurement. Our review focuses on the use of SES and class in a specific substantive field, studies of child health and fertility in developing countries. We discuss the mechanisms that underlie the relationship between SES and fertility and child health and the divergent results found in this field. We then provide a brief review of the theoretical literature on SES and class, contrasting unitary and component views. Following this is a section on the use of SES and class in empirical studies of child health and fertility in developing countries. We investigate the relationship between the conceptual and empirical literature, highlighting the inconsistencies we find. In addition, we discuss the variety of meanings and measures of SES that researchers use in these studies. Next, we address a series of methodological issues that arise from the review. Finally, we make recommendations for the treatment of SES and class in these and related areas.

Despite its economic and cultural centrality, sport is a relatively neglected and undertheorized area of sociological research. In this review, we examine sports' articulation with stratification issues, especially race, class, and gender. In addition, we look at how the media and processes of globalization have affected sports. We suggest that sports and cultural sociologists need to attend more closely to how leisure products and practices are produced and distributed and how they intersect with educational, political, and cultural institutions. We propose the work of Bourdieu and the new institutionalism to undergird future research.

In this article we review theory and comparative and historical research on US social policy. We discuss first the conceptual frameworks used to think about social policy, the changing images of American social policy implied by these different frameworks, and the questions they raise. From there we examine the arguments offered to answer questions about US social policy as well as the research strategies and evidence used to appraise the arguments. We address work that situates US social policy in comparative perspective as well as work that examines the development of American social policy historically or across states. Although many lines of argumentation have some empirical support, we find that some lines of political and institutional analyses provide the best supported answers to the questions and the greatest potential for wide usage in comparative and historical studies. We conclude that scholars would do well not to treat American social policy as so exceptional as to require separate images, explanations, and approaches. We suggest promising new lines of empirical inquiry prompted by new conceptualizations of social policy and other developments in this literature.

The sociological, economic, political, and anthropological literatures are devoting increasing attention to globalization. This chapter discusses the various connotations of the term and puts it in historical perspective. Existing theoretical and empirical research on globalization is organized around five key issues or questions: Is it really happening? Does it produce convergence? Does it undermine the authority of nation-states? Is globality different from modernity? Is a global culture in the making? A plea is made for a comparative sociology of globalization that is sensitive to local variations and to how agency, interest, and resistance mediate in the relationship between globalization causes and outcomes.

The bulk of the earth must not only be spherical, but not large in comparison with the size of other stars.

     —Aristotle (384–322 BC), as quoted by Dreyer (1953, p. 118)

For more than a decade, sociologists of religion have been debating the answer to a basic question: What is the relationship between religious pluralism and religious vitality? The old wisdom was that the relationship was negative, that pluralism undermines vitality. This view has been challenged by advocates of a supply-side model of religious vitality. They argue that the relationship is positive—that pluralism increases vitality—and this empirical claim has become foundational to the larger project of applying economic theory to religion. We review the relevant evidence and reach a straightforward conclusion: The empirical evidence does not support the claim that religious pluralism is positively associated with religious participation in any general sense. We discuss this conclusion's theoretical implications, and we identify potentially productive directions for future research on religious pluralism, church-state relations, and religious competition.

It appears that North Americans are religious in spite of, not because of, religious pluralism. (Olson 1998a:761).

[R]eligious practice is strongly and positively associated with pluralism. (Finke & Stark 1998:762)

Sociologists have turned to collective identity to fill gaps in resource mobilization and political process accounts of the emergence, trajectories, and impacts of social movements. Collective identity has been treated as an alternative to structurally given interests in accounting for the claims on behalf of which people mobilize, an alternative to selective incentives in understanding why people participate, an alternative to instrumental rationality in explaining what tactical choices activists make, and an alternative to institutional reforms in assessing movements' impacts. Collective identity has been treated both too broadly and too narrowly, sometimes applied to too many dynamics, at other times made into a residual category within structuralist, state-centered, and rationalist accounts.

The Internet is a critically important research site for sociologists testing theories of technology diffusion and media effects, particularly because it is a medium uniquely capable of integrating modes of communication and forms of content. Current research tends to focus on the Internet's implications in five domains: 1) inequality (the “digital divide”); 2) community and social capital; 3) political participation; 4) organizations and other economic institutions; and 5) cultural participation and cultural diversity. A recurrent theme across domains is that the Internet tends to complement rather than displace existing media and patterns of behavior. Thus in each domain, utopian claims and dystopic warnings based on extrapolations from technical possibilities have given way to more nuanced and circumscribed understandings of how Internet use adapts to existing patterns, permits certain innovations, and reinforces particular kinds of change. Moreover, in each domain the ultimate social implications of this new technology depend on economic, legal, and policy decisions that are shaping the Internet as it becomes institutionalized. Sociologists need to study the Internet more actively and, particularly, to synthesize research findings on individual user behavior with macroscopic analyses of institutional and political-economic factors that constrain that behavior.

In the last quarter of the twentieth century, urban law practice changed markedly. Using data from two surveys of Chicago lawyers, the first in 1975 and the second in 1995, the article argues that the most consequential development was the sheer increase in the size of firms. The organization of the delivery of legal services was restructured, and the relationships between lawyers and clients changed. Growth in the power and prestige of corporate inside counsel, greater competition among law firms, and the move by those firms into broader geographic markets precipitated changes in firm management. The recent movement into the international market for legal services of large accounting firms, financial services firms, and consulting firms (creating “multidisciplinary” partnerships) suggests the possibility of more far reaching changes in the next decade or two.

Social science research on stigma has grown dramatically over the past two decades, particularly in social psychology, where researchers have elucidated the ways in which people construct cognitive categories and link those categories to stereotyped beliefs. In the midst of this growth, the stigma concept has been criticized as being too vaguely defined and individually focused. In response to these criticisms, we define stigma as the co-occurrence of its components–labeling, stereotyping, separation, status loss, and discrimination–and further indicate that for stigmatization to occur, power must be exercised. The stigma concept we construct has implications for understanding several core issues in stigma research, ranging from the definition of the concept to the reasons stigma sometimes represents a very persistent predicament in the lives of persons affected by it. Finally, because there are so many stigmatized circumstances and because stigmatizing processes can affect multiple domains of people's lives, stigmatization probably has a dramatic bearing on the distribution of life chances in such areas as earnings, housing, criminal involvement, health, and life itself. It follows that social scientists who are interested in understanding the distribution of such life chances should also be interested in stigma.

The distinctive contribution of sociological social psychology can be referred to as sociological miniaturism, a way of interpreting social processes and institutions that is microsociological more than it is psychological. We argue that social psychology of this variety permits the examination of large-scale social issues by means of investigation of small-scale social situations. The power of this approach to social life is that it permits recognition of the dense texture of everyday life, permits sociologists to understand more fully a substantive domain, and permits interpretive control. In the chapter we provide examples of this approach from two quite distinct theoretical orientations: symbolic interactionism and social exchange theory. We discuss the ways in which the study of two substantive topics, social power and collective identity, using these perspectives can be informed by closer collaboration between theorists within sociological social psychology. In the end it is our hope that pursuing such integrative theoretical and methodological efforts will produce a more complete understanding of important social phenomena. We offer sociological miniaturism as a promising vehicle for advancing the earlier call for greater mutual appreciation of and rapprochement between diverse lines of social psychological work in sociology.

Similarity breeds connection. This principle—the homophily principle—structures network ties of every type, including marriage, friendship, work, advice, support, information transfer, exchange, comembership, and other types of relationship. The result is that people's personal networks are homogeneous with regard to many sociodemographic, behavioral, and intrapersonal characteristics. Homophily limits people's social worlds in a way that has powerful implications for the information they receive, the attitudes they form, and the interactions they experience. Homophily in race and ethnicity creates the strongest divides in our personal environments, with age, religion, education, occupation, and gender following in roughly that order. Geographic propinquity, families, organizations, and isomorphic positions in social systems all create contexts in which homophilous relations form. Ties between nonsimilar individuals also dissolve at a higher rate, which sets the stage for the formation of niches (localized positions) within social space. We argue for more research on: (a) the basic ecological processes that link organizations, associations, cultural communities, social movements, and many other social forms; (b) the impact of multiplex ties on the patterns of homophily; and (c) the dynamics of network change over time through which networks and other social entities co-evolve.

This article documents the empirical, methodological, and theoretical contributions of African-American sociologists from the late 1800s until 1945, an era that constitutes the early tradition of African-American sociological thought. African-American sociologists came to the discipline with the desire to assess the stake of African Americans in modernity, which centered on their transition to the urban sphere and the industrial socio-economic order in American society. Despite the connections between the sociological project writ-large and the quest of African-American sociologists in particular, the latter remained little regarded in the profession for years to come. While providing an overview of the contributions of African-American sociologists and the assessments made by other scholars about those contributions, this essay focuses upon the ways by which African-American sociologists have depicted the social character of black Americans. This essay also accounts for the ways that such scholars have introduced or enriched the standard paradigms and methodologies employed in American sociology, and documents the legacy that these efforts had on later sociological depictions of African Americans.

Hate crime is difficult to define, measure, and explain. After summarizing some of the leading conceptual issues and theoretical perspectives, we discuss the practical difficulties associated with data collection. Although the research literature remains small and largely descriptive, recent studies have begun to relate hate crime patterns to economic cycles, population flows, and changes in the political environment. The task ahead is to extend these analyses to other settings and levels of aggregation.