Gender and racial pay penalties are well-known: women (of all races) and people of color (of all genders) earn less, on average, even when they gain access to occupations historically reserved for White men. Studies of social mobility show that people from working-class backgrounds in the US have also been excluded from top professional and managerial occupations. But do working-class-origin people who attain top US jobs face a class-origin pay penalty? Despite evidence of class-origin pay gaps in higher professional and managerial occupations elsewhere, we might expect that the central role of race and racism in US stratification processes, along with the relatively low salience of class identities, would render class origins irrelevant to earnings in exclusive occupations, at least within racial groups. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to link childhood class position to adult occupation and earnings, we describe the racial and class-origin composition of different high-status occupations and the earnings of people within them. We show that when people who are from working-class backgrounds are upwardly mobile into high-status occupations, they earn almost $20,000 per year less, on average, than individuals who are themselves from privileged backgrounds. The difference is partly explained by the upwardly mobile being less likely to have college degrees, but it remains substantial (around $11,700) even after accounting for education, race and other important predictors of earnings. The gap is largest among White people; there is a class-origin penalty in top US occupations that is distinct from the racial pay gap.
性别和种族薪酬惩罚是众所周知的:女性(所有种族)和有色人种(所有性别)的平均收入较低,即使她们获得了历史上专属于白人男性的职业。对社会流动性的研究表明,美国工人阶级出身的人也被排除在顶级专业和管理职业之外。但是,获得美国顶尖工作的工人阶级出身的人是否会面临阶级出身的薪酬惩罚呢?尽管有证据表明,在其他地方的高级专业和管理职业中存在阶级出身的薪酬差距,但我们可能会认为,种族和种族主义在美国分层过程中的核心作用,以及相对较低的阶级身份显著性,会使阶级出身与专属职业的收入无关,至少在种族群体内部是如此。我们利用《收入动态面板研究》(Panel Study of Income Dynamics)将童年时期的阶级地位与成年后的职业和收入联系起来,描述了不同高地位职业的种族和阶级出身构成以及这些职业中人们的收入情况。我们的研究表明,当工人阶级出身的人向上流动进入高地位职业时,他们的年收入平均比出身优越的人少将近 2 万美元。造成这种差距的部分原因是上进阶层拥有大学学位的可能性较低,但即使考虑到教育、种族和其他重要的收入预测因素,这种差距仍然很大(约 11,700 美元)。这种差距在白人中最大;在美国的顶级职业中,存在着不同于种族薪酬差距的阶级出身惩罚。
{"title":"The Class Ceiling in the United States: Class-Origin Pay Penalties in Higher Professional and Managerial Occupations","authors":"Daniel Laurison, Sam Friedman","doi":"10.1093/sf/soae025","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soae025","url":null,"abstract":"Gender and racial pay penalties are well-known: women (of all races) and people of color (of all genders) earn less, on average, even when they gain access to occupations historically reserved for White men. Studies of social mobility show that people from working-class backgrounds in the US have also been excluded from top professional and managerial occupations. But do working-class-origin people who attain top US jobs face a class-origin pay penalty? Despite evidence of class-origin pay gaps in higher professional and managerial occupations elsewhere, we might expect that the central role of race and racism in US stratification processes, along with the relatively low salience of class identities, would render class origins irrelevant to earnings in exclusive occupations, at least within racial groups. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to link childhood class position to adult occupation and earnings, we describe the racial and class-origin composition of different high-status occupations and the earnings of people within them. We show that when people who are from working-class backgrounds are upwardly mobile into high-status occupations, they earn almost $20,000 per year less, on average, than individuals who are themselves from privileged backgrounds. The difference is partly explained by the upwardly mobile being less likely to have college degrees, but it remains substantial (around $11,700) even after accounting for education, race and other important predictors of earnings. The gap is largest among White people; there is a class-origin penalty in top US occupations that is distinct from the racial pay gap.","PeriodicalId":48400,"journal":{"name":"Social Forces","volume":"30 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.8,"publicationDate":"2024-02-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140015604","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In response to women’s changing roles in labor markets, couples have adopted varied strategies to reconcile career and family needs. Yet, most studies on the gendered division of labor focus almost exclusively on changes either in work or family domain. Doing so neglects the process through which couples negotiate and contest traditional work and family responsibilities. Studies that do examine these tradeoffs have highlighted how work–family strategies range far beyond simple traditional-egalitarian dichotomies but are limited to specific points in time or population subgroups. Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and latent-class analysis, this article provides the first population-based estimates of the couple-level tradeoffs inherent in work–family strategies in the United States, documents trends in the share of couples who fall into each of these strategies, and considers social stratification by gender and college education in these trends. Specifically, I identify seven distinct work–family strategies (traditional, neotraditional, her-second-shift, egalitarian, his-second-shift, female-breadwinner, and neither-full-time couples). Egalitarian couples experienced the fastest increase in prevalence among college-educated couples, whereas couples that lacked two full-time earners increased among less-educated couples. Still, about a quarter of all couples adopted “her-second-shift” strategies, with no variation across time, making it the modal work–family strategy among dual-earner couples. The long-run, couple-level results support the view that the gender revolution has stalled and suggest that this stall may be caused partly by strong traditional gender preferences, whereas structural resources appear to facilitate gender equality among a selected few.
为了应对妇女在劳动力市场中不断变化的角色,夫妻双方采取了各种策略来协调事业和家庭的需要。然而,大多数关于性别分工的研究几乎只关注工作或家庭领域的变化。这样做忽视了夫妻对传统工作和家庭责任进行协商和争论的过程。考察这些权衡的研究强调了工作与家庭策略的范围如何远远超出了简单的传统-平等二分法,但却局限于特定的时间点或人口亚群。本文利用《收入动态面板研究》(Panel Study of Income Dynamics)的数据和潜在阶层分析,首次以人口为基础对美国工作-家庭策略中夫妇层面的内在权衡进行了估算,记录了属于每种工作-家庭策略的夫妇所占比例的变化趋势,并考虑了这些变化趋势中的性别和大学教育等社会分层因素。具体而言,我确定了七种不同的工作-家庭策略(传统型、新传统型、她-二班制、平等型、他-二班制、女性面包赢家和非全职夫妻)。在受过大学教育的夫妇中,平等主义夫妇的比例增长最快,而在受教育程度较低的夫妇中,缺少两个全职收入者的夫妇比例有所上升。尽管如此,大约四分之一的夫妇采取了 "她-第二班 "策略,而且在不同时期没有变化,这使得 "她-第二班 "策略成为双职工夫妇中最常见的工作-家庭策略。夫妻层面的长期结果支持了性别革命已经停滞的观点,并表明这种停滞可能部分是由强烈的传统性别偏好造成的,而结构性资源似乎促进了少数特定人群的性别平等。
{"title":"Gender Equality for Whom? The Changing College Education Gradients of the Division of Paid Work and Housework Among US Couples, 1968–2019","authors":"Léa Pessin","doi":"10.1093/sf/soae028","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soae028","url":null,"abstract":"In response to women’s changing roles in labor markets, couples have adopted varied strategies to reconcile career and family needs. Yet, most studies on the gendered division of labor focus almost exclusively on changes either in work or family domain. Doing so neglects the process through which couples negotiate and contest traditional work and family responsibilities. Studies that do examine these tradeoffs have highlighted how work–family strategies range far beyond simple traditional-egalitarian dichotomies but are limited to specific points in time or population subgroups. Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and latent-class analysis, this article provides the first population-based estimates of the couple-level tradeoffs inherent in work–family strategies in the United States, documents trends in the share of couples who fall into each of these strategies, and considers social stratification by gender and college education in these trends. Specifically, I identify seven distinct work–family strategies (traditional, neotraditional, her-second-shift, egalitarian, his-second-shift, female-breadwinner, and neither-full-time couples). Egalitarian couples experienced the fastest increase in prevalence among college-educated couples, whereas couples that lacked two full-time earners increased among less-educated couples. Still, about a quarter of all couples adopted “her-second-shift” strategies, with no variation across time, making it the modal work–family strategy among dual-earner couples. The long-run, couple-level results support the view that the gender revolution has stalled and suggest that this stall may be caused partly by strong traditional gender preferences, whereas structural resources appear to facilitate gender equality among a selected few.","PeriodicalId":48400,"journal":{"name":"Social Forces","volume":"170 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.8,"publicationDate":"2024-02-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140015700","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
When commercial real estate becomes a highly coveted investment commodity, tensions intensify between those whose interest lies in extracting maximum profits from their properties and those who utilize the very same spaces for making a livelihood. Through ethnographic research with a tenant shopkeepers’ social movement organization (SMO) in Korea, I analyze the new collective consciousness forming among tenant shopkeepers who are defending their livelihoods against their landlords’ rapacious use of rent hikes and evictions to fully realize the speculative potential of their properties. Examining how the SMO brings together geographically scattered tenant shopkeepers based primarily in the larger metropolitan area of Seoul, I ask, more broadly: How can the self-employed facing precaritization overcome their fragmentation and generate a new collective consciousness based on a politics of solidarity? Drawing from my case study of tenant shopkeepers and the literature on livelihood struggles elsewhere around the globe, I identify the practice of occupying livelihood spaces as playing a pivotal role in the development of a sense of collective among those previously atomized in their struggles. I advance existing scholarship by scrutinizing both the challenges and the transformative potential of the solidarity cultivated through the occupy sites in bridging divergent interests, cultural sensibilities, and political beliefs of the previously unorganized.
当商业地产成为令人垂涎的投资商品时,那些希望从其房产中获取最大利润的人与那些利用这些空间谋生的人之间的紧张关系就会加剧。通过对韩国一个租户店主社会运动组织(SMO)的人种学研究,我分析了租户店主之间正在形成的新的集体意识,他们正在捍卫自己的生计,抵制房东为充分发挥其房产的投机潜力而采取的涨租和驱逐等贪婪手段。通过考察 SMO 如何将主要位于首尔大都会区、地理位置分散的租户店主聚集在一起,我提出了一个更广泛的问题:面临不稳定的自营职业者如何才能克服各自为政的状况,并在团结政治的基础上形成新的集体意识?根据我对租户店主的案例研究以及有关全球其他地方生计斗争的文献,我发现占据生计空间的做法在发展那些以前在斗争中被孤立的人的集体意识方面发挥了关键作用。我仔细研究了通过占领场所培养的团结精神在弥合以往无组织者的不同利益、文化情感和政治信仰方面所面临的挑战和变革潜力,从而推进了现有的学术研究。
{"title":"Occupying Shops to Defend Spaces of Livelihoods: From Tenant Shopkeepers’ Fragmentation to Collective Consciousness in Urban Korea","authors":"Yewon Andrea Lee","doi":"10.1093/sf/soae026","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soae026","url":null,"abstract":"When commercial real estate becomes a highly coveted investment commodity, tensions intensify between those whose interest lies in extracting maximum profits from their properties and those who utilize the very same spaces for making a livelihood. Through ethnographic research with a tenant shopkeepers’ social movement organization (SMO) in Korea, I analyze the new collective consciousness forming among tenant shopkeepers who are defending their livelihoods against their landlords’ rapacious use of rent hikes and evictions to fully realize the speculative potential of their properties. Examining how the SMO brings together geographically scattered tenant shopkeepers based primarily in the larger metropolitan area of Seoul, I ask, more broadly: How can the self-employed facing precaritization overcome their fragmentation and generate a new collective consciousness based on a politics of solidarity? Drawing from my case study of tenant shopkeepers and the literature on livelihood struggles elsewhere around the globe, I identify the practice of occupying livelihood spaces as playing a pivotal role in the development of a sense of collective among those previously atomized in their struggles. I advance existing scholarship by scrutinizing both the challenges and the transformative potential of the solidarity cultivated through the occupy sites in bridging divergent interests, cultural sensibilities, and political beliefs of the previously unorganized.","PeriodicalId":48400,"journal":{"name":"Social Forces","volume":"3 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.8,"publicationDate":"2024-02-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140015681","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
All around the world, school-entry cohorts are organized on an annual calendar so that the age of students in the same cohort differs by up to one year. It is a well-established finding that this age gap entails a consequential (dis)advantage for academic performance referred to as the relative age effect (RAE). This study contributes to a recent strand of research that has turned to investigate the RAE on non-academic outcomes such as personality traits. An experimental setup is used to estimate the causal effect of monthly age on cognitive effort in a sample of 798 fifth-grade students enrolled in the Spanish educational system, characterized by strict enrolment rules. Participants performed three different real-effort tasks under three different incentive conditions: no rewards; material rewards; and material and status rewards. We observe that older students outwork their youngest peers by two-fifths of a standard deviation, but only when material rewards for performance are in place. Despite the previously reported higher taste for competition among the older students within a school-entry cohort, we do not find that the RAE on cognitive effort increases after inducing competition for peer recognition. Finally, the study also provides suggestive evidence of a larger RAE among boys and students from lower social strata. Implications for sociological research on educational inequality are discussed. To conclude, we outline policy recommendations such as implementing evaluation tools that nudge teachers toward being mindful of relative age differences.
世界各地的入学班级都是按年历组织的,因此同一班级的学生年龄最多相差一岁。众所周知,这种年龄差距会对学习成绩产生(不利)影响,即相对年龄效应(RAE)。本研究是对近期一系列研究的贡献,这些研究转而调查 RAE 对人格特质等非学术结果的影响。本研究以西班牙教育系统中 798 名五年级学生为样本,采用实验设置来估计月龄对认知努力的因果效应。参与者在三种不同的激励条件下完成了三种不同的实际努力任务:无奖励;物质奖励;物质和地位奖励。我们观察到,高年级学生的学习成绩比低年级学生高出五分之二个标准差,但只有在有物质奖励的情况下才会出现这种情况。尽管之前有报道称,在入学队列中,高年级学生更喜欢竞争,但我们并没有发现,在诱导竞争以获得同伴认可后,认知努力的 RAE 会增加。最后,本研究还提供了暗示性证据,表明男生和来自社会底层的学生的 RAE 更大。我们还讨论了教育不平等社会学研究的意义。最后,我们概述了一些政策建议,如实施评价工具,促使教师注意相对年龄差异。
{"title":"Month of Birth and Cognitive Effort: A Laboratory Study of the Relative Age Effect among Fifth Graders","authors":"Jonas Radl, Manuel T Valdés","doi":"10.1093/sf/soae023","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soae023","url":null,"abstract":"All around the world, school-entry cohorts are organized on an annual calendar so that the age of students in the same cohort differs by up to one year. It is a well-established finding that this age gap entails a consequential (dis)advantage for academic performance referred to as the relative age effect (RAE). This study contributes to a recent strand of research that has turned to investigate the RAE on non-academic outcomes such as personality traits. An experimental setup is used to estimate the causal effect of monthly age on cognitive effort in a sample of 798 fifth-grade students enrolled in the Spanish educational system, characterized by strict enrolment rules. Participants performed three different real-effort tasks under three different incentive conditions: no rewards; material rewards; and material and status rewards. We observe that older students outwork their youngest peers by two-fifths of a standard deviation, but only when material rewards for performance are in place. Despite the previously reported higher taste for competition among the older students within a school-entry cohort, we do not find that the RAE on cognitive effort increases after inducing competition for peer recognition. Finally, the study also provides suggestive evidence of a larger RAE among boys and students from lower social strata. Implications for sociological research on educational inequality are discussed. To conclude, we outline policy recommendations such as implementing evaluation tools that nudge teachers toward being mindful of relative age differences.","PeriodicalId":48400,"journal":{"name":"Social Forces","volume":"16 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.8,"publicationDate":"2024-02-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139945353","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Valerio Baćak, Sarah Esther Lageson, Kathleen Powell
Fairness in the criminal legal system is unattainable without effective legal representation of indigent defendants, yet we know little about the experience of attorneys who do this critical work. Using semi-structured interviews, our study investigated occupational stress in a sample of 78 attorneys representing indigent clients across the United States. We show how the chronic stressors experienced at work culminate in what we define as the stress of injustice: the social and psychological demands of working in a punitive system with laws and practices that target and punish those who are the most disadvantaged. Respondents positioned their professional stress around structural, not individual, aspects of the American criminal legal system, specifically punitive excess, underfunding of indigent defense, and the criminalization of mental illness and substance use. Working within these interrelated structural constraints makes public defenders highly vulnerable to stress and attrition.
{"title":"The Stress of Injustice: Public Defenders and the Frontline of American Inequality","authors":"Valerio Baćak, Sarah Esther Lageson, Kathleen Powell","doi":"10.1093/sf/soae027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soae027","url":null,"abstract":"Fairness in the criminal legal system is unattainable without effective legal representation of indigent defendants, yet we know little about the experience of attorneys who do this critical work. Using semi-structured interviews, our study investigated occupational stress in a sample of 78 attorneys representing indigent clients across the United States. We show how the chronic stressors experienced at work culminate in what we define as the stress of injustice: the social and psychological demands of working in a punitive system with laws and practices that target and punish those who are the most disadvantaged. Respondents positioned their professional stress around structural, not individual, aspects of the American criminal legal system, specifically punitive excess, underfunding of indigent defense, and the criminalization of mental illness and substance use. Working within these interrelated structural constraints makes public defenders highly vulnerable to stress and attrition.","PeriodicalId":48400,"journal":{"name":"Social Forces","volume":"169 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.8,"publicationDate":"2024-02-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139945393","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Mary Ellen Stitt, Katherine Sobering, Javier Auyero
Police collusion with drug market organizations is widespread around the world, but the nature of this collaboration remains poorly understood. This article draws on a unique data source to dissect the inner workings of police collusion: transcripts of wiretapped conversations, embedded in thousands of pages of court cases in which state agents have been prosecuted for collaborating with drug market groups. We catalogue and analyze the wide range of social interactions that constitute police collaboration with drug market groups and show that those interactions are often embedded in trust networks constituted by residential, professional, friendship, and kinship ties. Our findings signal the importance of reciprocal social ties surrounding police corruption and cast light on what we refer to as the clandestine hands of the state.
{"title":"The Clandestine Hands of the State: Dissecting Police Collusion in the Drug Trade","authors":"Mary Ellen Stitt, Katherine Sobering, Javier Auyero","doi":"10.1093/sf/soae024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soae024","url":null,"abstract":"Police collusion with drug market organizations is widespread around the world, but the nature of this collaboration remains poorly understood. This article draws on a unique data source to dissect the inner workings of police collusion: transcripts of wiretapped conversations, embedded in thousands of pages of court cases in which state agents have been prosecuted for collaborating with drug market groups. We catalogue and analyze the wide range of social interactions that constitute police collaboration with drug market groups and show that those interactions are often embedded in trust networks constituted by residential, professional, friendship, and kinship ties. Our findings signal the importance of reciprocal social ties surrounding police corruption and cast light on what we refer to as the clandestine hands of the state.","PeriodicalId":48400,"journal":{"name":"Social Forces","volume":"42 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.8,"publicationDate":"2024-02-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139945360","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Liang Cai, Christopher R Browning, Kathleen A Cagney
A longstanding urban sociological literature emphasizes the geographic isolation of city dwellers in residence and everyday routines, expecting exposures to neighborhood racial and socio-economic structure driven principally by city-wide segregation and the role of proximity and homophily in mobility. The compelled mobility approach emphasizes the uneven distribution of organizational and institutional resources across urban space, expecting residents of poor Black-segregated neighborhoods to exhibit non-trivial levels of everyday exposure to White, non-poor areas for resource seeking. We use two sets of location data in the hypersegregated Chicago metro to examine these two approaches: Global Positioning System (GPS) location tracking on a sample of older adults from the Chicago Health and Activity Space in Real-Time (CHART) study and travel diaries on a sample of younger adults by the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning (CMAP). We introduce a novel and flexible individual-level method for assessing activity space exposures that accounts for the spatially proximate environment around home. Analyses reveal that activity space contexts mimic the racial/ethnic and socio-economic landscape of respondents’ broad residential environment. However, after residential-based adjustment, Black younger (CMAP) adults from poor Black neighborhoods are disproportionately exposed to Whiter, less Black but less non-poor neighborhoods. Older (CHART) adult activity spaces align more closely with their residential areas; however, activity spaces of poor-Black-neighborhood-residing CHART Blacks are systematically poorer and, less consistently, more Black and less White after local area adjustment. Implications for understanding contextual exposures on well-being and the potential for age or cohort differences in isolation are discussed.
{"title":"Exposure of Neighborhood Racial and Socio-Economic Composition in Activity Space: A New Approach Adjusting for Residential Conditions","authors":"Liang Cai, Christopher R Browning, Kathleen A Cagney","doi":"10.1093/sf/soae021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soae021","url":null,"abstract":"A longstanding urban sociological literature emphasizes the geographic isolation of city dwellers in residence and everyday routines, expecting exposures to neighborhood racial and socio-economic structure driven principally by city-wide segregation and the role of proximity and homophily in mobility. The compelled mobility approach emphasizes the uneven distribution of organizational and institutional resources across urban space, expecting residents of poor Black-segregated neighborhoods to exhibit non-trivial levels of everyday exposure to White, non-poor areas for resource seeking. We use two sets of location data in the hypersegregated Chicago metro to examine these two approaches: Global Positioning System (GPS) location tracking on a sample of older adults from the Chicago Health and Activity Space in Real-Time (CHART) study and travel diaries on a sample of younger adults by the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning (CMAP). We introduce a novel and flexible individual-level method for assessing activity space exposures that accounts for the spatially proximate environment around home. Analyses reveal that activity space contexts mimic the racial/ethnic and socio-economic landscape of respondents’ broad residential environment. However, after residential-based adjustment, Black younger (CMAP) adults from poor Black neighborhoods are disproportionately exposed to Whiter, less Black but less non-poor neighborhoods. Older (CHART) adult activity spaces align more closely with their residential areas; however, activity spaces of poor-Black-neighborhood-residing CHART Blacks are systematically poorer and, less consistently, more Black and less White after local area adjustment. Implications for understanding contextual exposures on well-being and the potential for age or cohort differences in isolation are discussed.","PeriodicalId":48400,"journal":{"name":"Social Forces","volume":"22 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.8,"publicationDate":"2024-02-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139945379","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Birth weight is a robust predictor of valued life course outcomes, emphasizing the importance of prenatal development. But does birth weight act as a proxy for environmental conditions in utero, or do biological processes surrounding birth weight themselves play a role in healthy development? To answer this question, we leverage variation in birth weight that is, within families, orthogonal to prenatal environmental conditions: one’s genes. We construct polygenic scores in two longitudinal studies (Born in Bradford, N = 2008; Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, N = 8488) to empirically explore the molecular genetic correlates of birth weight. A 1 standard deviation increase in the polygenic score is associated with an ~100-grams increase in birth weight and a 1.4 pp (22 percent) decrease in low birth weight probability. Sibling comparisons illustrate that this association largely represents a causal effect. The polygenic score–birth weight association is increased for children who spend longer in the womb and whose mothers have higher body mass index, though we find no differences across maternal socioeconomic status. Finally, the polygenic score affects social and cognitive outcomes, suggesting that birth weight is itself related to healthy prenatal development.
{"title":"Exploring the Fetal Origins Hypothesis Using Genetic Data","authors":"Sam Trejo","doi":"10.1093/sf/soae018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soae018","url":null,"abstract":"Birth weight is a robust predictor of valued life course outcomes, emphasizing the importance of prenatal development. But does birth weight act as a proxy for environmental conditions in utero, or do biological processes surrounding birth weight themselves play a role in healthy development? To answer this question, we leverage variation in birth weight that is, within families, orthogonal to prenatal environmental conditions: one’s genes. We construct polygenic scores in two longitudinal studies (Born in Bradford, N = 2008; Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, N = 8488) to empirically explore the molecular genetic correlates of birth weight. A 1 standard deviation increase in the polygenic score is associated with an ~100-grams increase in birth weight and a 1.4 pp (22 percent) decrease in low birth weight probability. Sibling comparisons illustrate that this association largely represents a causal effect. The polygenic score–birth weight association is increased for children who spend longer in the womb and whose mothers have higher body mass index, though we find no differences across maternal socioeconomic status. Finally, the polygenic score affects social and cognitive outcomes, suggesting that birth weight is itself related to healthy prenatal development.","PeriodicalId":48400,"journal":{"name":"Social Forces","volume":"14 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.8,"publicationDate":"2024-02-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139750368","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Political economists and labour sociologists alike have studied how the skill specificity of workers can be explained, as it significantly affects workers’ performance. However, the emergence of the gig economy may substantially change skill hiring and specificity in online labour markets because gig workers do not need formal educational credentials to offer their services. Instead, skills are “unbundled” from occupations, and platforms provide alternative ways to signal competencies, for example, via their rating and review systems. To shed light on the applicability of existing theories to explain the skill profiles of gig workers, we examine what predicts the skills hired in the online gig economy. Based on multilevel ordinal logistic regression analyses of 2336 gig worker profiles, we show that—as in traditional labour markets—gig workers with a vocational degree and longer online work experience are hired for more specific skills. However, national labour market institutions and educational systems affect the gig workers’ skill specificity in the opposite direction than in traditional labour markets. Our findings thus suggest that online gig platforms allow workers to overcome restrictions imposed by national institutions as they are hired for those skills in the online gig economy that are institutionally less facilitated in their home labour markets.
{"title":"Skill Specificity on High-Skill Online Gig Platforms: Same as in Traditional Labour Markets?","authors":"Jaap van Slageren, Andrea M Herrmann","doi":"10.1093/sf/soad153","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soad153","url":null,"abstract":"Political economists and labour sociologists alike have studied how the skill specificity of workers can be explained, as it significantly affects workers’ performance. However, the emergence of the gig economy may substantially change skill hiring and specificity in online labour markets because gig workers do not need formal educational credentials to offer their services. Instead, skills are “unbundled” from occupations, and platforms provide alternative ways to signal competencies, for example, via their rating and review systems. To shed light on the applicability of existing theories to explain the skill profiles of gig workers, we examine what predicts the skills hired in the online gig economy. Based on multilevel ordinal logistic regression analyses of 2336 gig worker profiles, we show that—as in traditional labour markets—gig workers with a vocational degree and longer online work experience are hired for more specific skills. However, national labour market institutions and educational systems affect the gig workers’ skill specificity in the opposite direction than in traditional labour markets. Our findings thus suggest that online gig platforms allow workers to overcome restrictions imposed by national institutions as they are hired for those skills in the online gig economy that are institutionally less facilitated in their home labour markets.","PeriodicalId":48400,"journal":{"name":"Social Forces","volume":"65 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.8,"publicationDate":"2024-01-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139474312","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The United States manufacturing industry has long been regarded as the economic engine that built and sustained the middle class. In recent decades, this pillar of economic opportunity has eroded substantially. Though much has been written about the decline of manufacturing sectors in United States communities, the potential consequences for economic mobility, and stratification processes more generally, remain largely unexplored. In this study, I develop a conceptual framework linking the study of labor market change to economic stratification. I examine how structural changes to United States labor markets have altered opportunities for economic advancement in the United States. I focus the analysis on birth cohorts in the 1980s, whose labor market entry spans the large-scale erosion of the manufacturing industry in the 2000s. I find strong evidence that declines in manufacturing employment have contributed to growing geographic disparities in upward intergenerational income mobility. Children raised in counties that experienced large contractions in manufacturing industries throughout adolescence experienced large economic penalties in adulthood via reduced levels of upward mobility. The results demonstrate how long-term macroeconomic changes can disrupt and redistribute opportunities within societies.
{"title":"Cohort-Specific Experiences of Industrial Decline and Intergenerational Income Mobility","authors":"Nathan Seltzer","doi":"10.1093/sf/soad145","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soad145","url":null,"abstract":"The United States manufacturing industry has long been regarded as the economic engine that built and sustained the middle class. In recent decades, this pillar of economic opportunity has eroded substantially. Though much has been written about the decline of manufacturing sectors in United States communities, the potential consequences for economic mobility, and stratification processes more generally, remain largely unexplored. In this study, I develop a conceptual framework linking the study of labor market change to economic stratification. I examine how structural changes to United States labor markets have altered opportunities for economic advancement in the United States. I focus the analysis on birth cohorts in the 1980s, whose labor market entry spans the large-scale erosion of the manufacturing industry in the 2000s. I find strong evidence that declines in manufacturing employment have contributed to growing geographic disparities in upward intergenerational income mobility. Children raised in counties that experienced large contractions in manufacturing industries throughout adolescence experienced large economic penalties in adulthood via reduced levels of upward mobility. The results demonstrate how long-term macroeconomic changes can disrupt and redistribute opportunities within societies.","PeriodicalId":48400,"journal":{"name":"Social Forces","volume":"124 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.8,"publicationDate":"2024-01-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139431773","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}