Pub Date : 2023-02-01Epub Date: 2023-01-24DOI: 10.1177/00031224221145727
Cecilia Menjívar
In this presidential address, I argue for the importance of state-created categories and classification systems that determine eligibility for tangible and intangible resources. Through classification systems based on rules and regulations that reflect powerful interests and ideologies, bureaucracies maintain entrenched inequality systems that include, exclude, and neglect. I propose adopting a critical perspective when using formalized categories in our work, which would acknowledge the constructed nature of those categories, their naturalization through everyday practices, and their misalignments with lived experiences. This lens can reveal the systemic structures that engender both enduring patterns of inequality and state classification systems, and reframe questions about the people the state sorts into the categories we use. I end with a brief discussion of the benefits that can accrue from expanding our theoretical repertoires by including knowledge produced in the Global South.
{"title":"State Categories, Bureaucracies of Displacement, and Possibilities from the Margins.","authors":"Cecilia Menjívar","doi":"10.1177/00031224221145727","DOIUrl":"10.1177/00031224221145727","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In this presidential address, I argue for the importance of state-created categories and classification systems that determine eligibility for tangible and intangible resources. Through classification systems based on rules and regulations that reflect powerful interests and ideologies, bureaucracies maintain entrenched inequality systems that include, exclude, and neglect. I propose adopting a critical perspective when using formalized categories in our work, which would acknowledge the constructed nature of those categories, their naturalization through everyday practices, and their misalignments with lived experiences. This lens can reveal the systemic structures that engender <i>both</i> enduring patterns of inequality and state classification systems, and reframe questions about the people the state sorts into the categories we use. I end with a brief discussion of the benefits that can accrue from expanding our theoretical repertoires by including knowledge produced in the Global South.</p>","PeriodicalId":48461,"journal":{"name":"American Sociological Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":9.1,"publicationDate":"2023-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10651057/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44142112","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-01-27DOI: 10.1177/00031224221141887
Xiaoping Zhou, Guanghui Pan
How does higher education shape the Black-White earnings gap? It may help close the gap if Black youth benefit more from attending and completing college than do White youth. On the other hand, Black college-goers are less likely to complete college relative to White students, and this disparity in degree completion helps reproduce racial inequality. In this study, we use a novel causal decomposition and a debiased machine learning method to isolate, quantify, and explain the equalizing and stratifying roles of college. Analyzing data from the NLSY97, we find that a bachelor’s degree has a strong equalizing effect on earnings among men (albeit not among women); yet, at the population level, this equalizing effect is partly offset by unequal likelihoods of bachelor’s completion between Black and White students. Moreover, a bachelor’s degree narrows the male Black-White earnings gap not by reducing the influence of class background and pre-college academic ability, but by lessening the “unexplained” penalty of being Black in the labor market. To illuminate the policy implications of our findings, we estimate counterfactual earnings gaps under a series of stylized educational interventions. We find that interventions that both boost rates of college attendance and bachelor’s completion and close racial disparities in these transitions can substantially reduce the Black-White earnings gap.
{"title":"Higher Education and the Black-White Earnings Gap","authors":"Xiaoping Zhou, Guanghui Pan","doi":"10.1177/00031224221141887","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00031224221141887","url":null,"abstract":"How does higher education shape the Black-White earnings gap? It may help close the gap if Black youth benefit more from attending and completing college than do White youth. On the other hand, Black college-goers are less likely to complete college relative to White students, and this disparity in degree completion helps reproduce racial inequality. In this study, we use a novel causal decomposition and a debiased machine learning method to isolate, quantify, and explain the equalizing and stratifying roles of college. Analyzing data from the NLSY97, we find that a bachelor’s degree has a strong equalizing effect on earnings among men (albeit not among women); yet, at the population level, this equalizing effect is partly offset by unequal likelihoods of bachelor’s completion between Black and White students. Moreover, a bachelor’s degree narrows the male Black-White earnings gap not by reducing the influence of class background and pre-college academic ability, but by lessening the “unexplained” penalty of being Black in the labor market. To illuminate the policy implications of our findings, we estimate counterfactual earnings gaps under a series of stylized educational interventions. We find that interventions that both boost rates of college attendance and bachelor’s completion and close racial disparities in these transitions can substantially reduce the Black-White earnings gap.","PeriodicalId":48461,"journal":{"name":"American Sociological Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":9.1,"publicationDate":"2023-01-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42804902","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}
Pub Date : 2023-01-24DOI: 10.1177/00031224221147899
Simone Zhang, Rebecca A. Johnson
Social provision in the United States is highly decentralized. Significant federal and state funding flows to local organizational actors, who are granted discretion over how to allocate resources to people in need. In welfare states where many programs are underfunded and decoupled from local need, how does decentralization shape who gets what? This article identifies forces that shape how local actors classify help-seekers when they ration scarce resources, focusing on the case of prioritization in the Housing Choice Voucher Program. We use network methods to represent and analyze 1,398 local prioritization policies. Our results reveal two patterns that challenge expectations from past literature. First, we observe classificatory restraint, or many organizations choosing not to draw fine distinctions between applicants to prioritize. Second, when organizations do institute priority categories, policies often advantage applicants who are formally institutionally connected to the local community. Interviews with officials, in turn, reveal how prioritization schemes reflect housing agencies’ position within a matrix of intra-organizational, inter-organizational, and vertical forces that structure the meaning and cost of classifying help-seekers. These findings illustrate how local organizations’ use of classification to solve on-the-ground organizational problems and manage scarce resources can generate additional forms of exclusion.
{"title":"Hierarchies in the Decentralized Welfare State: Prioritization in the Housing Choice Voucher Program","authors":"Simone Zhang, Rebecca A. Johnson","doi":"10.1177/00031224221147899","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00031224221147899","url":null,"abstract":"Social provision in the United States is highly decentralized. Significant federal and state funding flows to local organizational actors, who are granted discretion over how to allocate resources to people in need. In welfare states where many programs are underfunded and decoupled from local need, how does decentralization shape who gets what? This article identifies forces that shape how local actors classify help-seekers when they ration scarce resources, focusing on the case of prioritization in the Housing Choice Voucher Program. We use network methods to represent and analyze 1,398 local prioritization policies. Our results reveal two patterns that challenge expectations from past literature. First, we observe classificatory restraint, or many organizations choosing not to draw fine distinctions between applicants to prioritize. Second, when organizations do institute priority categories, policies often advantage applicants who are formally institutionally connected to the local community. Interviews with officials, in turn, reveal how prioritization schemes reflect housing agencies’ position within a matrix of intra-organizational, inter-organizational, and vertical forces that structure the meaning and cost of classifying help-seekers. These findings illustrate how local organizations’ use of classification to solve on-the-ground organizational problems and manage scarce resources can generate additional forms of exclusion.","PeriodicalId":48461,"journal":{"name":"American Sociological Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":9.1,"publicationDate":"2023-01-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45732042","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}
Pub Date : 2022-12-28DOI: 10.1177/00031224221138079
Marc Schneiberg, Adam Goldstein, Matthew S. Kraatz
Integrating research on communities with economic and organizational sociology, we analyze how organizations’ responses to marketization are shaped by their embeddedness in communities and the socio-associational structure of those communities. We address these relations via event-history analyses of mutual conversions to stock corporations among savings and loan associations (SLAs) in the United States, a population of depositor-owned and traditionally community-based banks that demutualized amid deregulation during the 1970s and 1980s. Consistent with accounts of social disorganization and declining social capital, SLA managers abandoned mutual for corporate enterprise as SLAs became less locally embedded, and where communities experienced disorganization and declining working- or cross-class associationalism. Yet conversions also depended on elite detachment, civic reorganization, bifurcation within communities, and “upwardly oriented” associations that helped SLA managers reorient SLAs from Main Street to Wall Street. Through this study, we look beyond networks, institutions, and categories to add communities and local associations to economic sociology’s toolkit for understanding the social foundations of firms and markets. We show how financialization coupled macro-level political-institutional dynamics of marketization with community-level dynamics of elite disconnection, class and ethno-racial fracture, and civic reorganization, while also shedding light on the contemporary fates of mutual and cooperative forms.
{"title":"Embracing Market Liberalism? Community Structure, Embeddedness, and Mutual Savings and Loan Conversions to Stock Corporations","authors":"Marc Schneiberg, Adam Goldstein, Matthew S. Kraatz","doi":"10.1177/00031224221138079","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00031224221138079","url":null,"abstract":"Integrating research on communities with economic and organizational sociology, we analyze how organizations’ responses to marketization are shaped by their embeddedness in communities and the socio-associational structure of those communities. We address these relations via event-history analyses of mutual conversions to stock corporations among savings and loan associations (SLAs) in the United States, a population of depositor-owned and traditionally community-based banks that demutualized amid deregulation during the 1970s and 1980s. Consistent with accounts of social disorganization and declining social capital, SLA managers abandoned mutual for corporate enterprise as SLAs became less locally embedded, and where communities experienced disorganization and declining working- or cross-class associationalism. Yet conversions also depended on elite detachment, civic reorganization, bifurcation within communities, and “upwardly oriented” associations that helped SLA managers reorient SLAs from Main Street to Wall Street. Through this study, we look beyond networks, institutions, and categories to add communities and local associations to economic sociology’s toolkit for understanding the social foundations of firms and markets. We show how financialization coupled macro-level political-institutional dynamics of marketization with community-level dynamics of elite disconnection, class and ethno-racial fracture, and civic reorganization, while also shedding light on the contemporary fates of mutual and cooperative forms.","PeriodicalId":48461,"journal":{"name":"American Sociological Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":9.1,"publicationDate":"2022-12-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42758630","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}
Pub Date : 2022-11-26DOI: 10.1177/00031224221135797
Jordan Brensinger, Ramina Sotoudeh
Recent public and scholarly discourse suggests that partisanship informs how people feel about social groups in the United States by organizing those groups into camps of political friends and enemies. More generally, this implies that Americans’ attitudes toward social groups exhibit interdependence, a heretofore underexplored proposition. We develop a conceptual and methodological approach to investigating such interdependence and apply it to attitudes toward 17 social groups, the broadest set of measures available to date. We identify three subpopulations with distinct attitude logics: partisans, who feel warm toward groups commonly associated with their political party and cool toward those linked to the out-party; racials, distinguished by their consistently warmer or cooler feelings toward all racial groups relative to other forms of social group membership; and neutrals, who generally evaluate social groups neither warmly nor coolly. Individuals’ social positions and experiences, particularly the strength of their partisanship, their race, and their experience of racial discrimination, inform how they construe the social space. These findings shed light on contemporary political and social divisions while expanding the toolkit available for the study of attitudes toward social groups.
{"title":"Party, Race, and Neutrality: Investigating the Interdependence of Attitudes toward Social Groups","authors":"Jordan Brensinger, Ramina Sotoudeh","doi":"10.1177/00031224221135797","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00031224221135797","url":null,"abstract":"Recent public and scholarly discourse suggests that partisanship informs how people feel about social groups in the United States by organizing those groups into camps of political friends and enemies. More generally, this implies that Americans’ attitudes toward social groups exhibit interdependence, a heretofore underexplored proposition. We develop a conceptual and methodological approach to investigating such interdependence and apply it to attitudes toward 17 social groups, the broadest set of measures available to date. We identify three subpopulations with distinct attitude logics: partisans, who feel warm toward groups commonly associated with their political party and cool toward those linked to the out-party; racials, distinguished by their consistently warmer or cooler feelings toward all racial groups relative to other forms of social group membership; and neutrals, who generally evaluate social groups neither warmly nor coolly. Individuals’ social positions and experiences, particularly the strength of their partisanship, their race, and their experience of racial discrimination, inform how they construe the social space. These findings shed light on contemporary political and social divisions while expanding the toolkit available for the study of attitudes toward social groups.","PeriodicalId":48461,"journal":{"name":"American Sociological Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":9.1,"publicationDate":"2022-11-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46533256","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}
Pub Date : 2022-11-18DOI: 10.1177/00031224221135810
Jayanti Owens
Bridging research in social psychology with scholarship on racialized organizations, this article shows how individual bias and organizational demographic composition can operate together to shape the degree of discrimination in schools. To understand Black and Latino boys’ higher rates of discipline that persist net of differences in behavior, I combine an original video experiment involving 1,339 teachers in 295 U.S. schools with organizational data on school racial/ethnic and socioeconomic composition. In the experiment, teachers view and respond to a randomly assigned video of a White, Black, or Latino boy committing identical, routine classroom misbehavior. I find that, compared to White boys, Black and Latino boys face a double jeopardy. They experience both (1) individual-level teacher bias, where they are perceived as being more “blameworthy” and referred more readily for identical misbehavior, and (2) racialized organizational climates of heightened blaming, where students of all races/ethnicities are perceived as being more “blameworthy” for identical misbehavior in schools with large minority populations versus in predominantly White schools. This study develops a more comprehensive understanding of the production of racial/ethnic inequality in school discipline by empirically identifying a dual process that involves both individual teacher bias and heightened blaming that is related to minority organizational composition.
{"title":"Double Jeopardy: Teacher Biases, Racialized Organizations, and the Production of Racial/Ethnic Disparities in School Discipline","authors":"Jayanti Owens","doi":"10.1177/00031224221135810","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00031224221135810","url":null,"abstract":"Bridging research in social psychology with scholarship on racialized organizations, this article shows how individual bias and organizational demographic composition can operate together to shape the degree of discrimination in schools. To understand Black and Latino boys’ higher rates of discipline that persist net of differences in behavior, I combine an original video experiment involving 1,339 teachers in 295 U.S. schools with organizational data on school racial/ethnic and socioeconomic composition. In the experiment, teachers view and respond to a randomly assigned video of a White, Black, or Latino boy committing identical, routine classroom misbehavior. I find that, compared to White boys, Black and Latino boys face a double jeopardy. They experience both (1) individual-level teacher bias, where they are perceived as being more “blameworthy” and referred more readily for identical misbehavior, and (2) racialized organizational climates of heightened blaming, where students of all races/ethnicities are perceived as being more “blameworthy” for identical misbehavior in schools with large minority populations versus in predominantly White schools. This study develops a more comprehensive understanding of the production of racial/ethnic inequality in school discipline by empirically identifying a dual process that involves both individual teacher bias and heightened blaming that is related to minority organizational composition.","PeriodicalId":48461,"journal":{"name":"American Sociological Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":9.1,"publicationDate":"2022-11-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47824541","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}
Pub Date : 2022-11-09DOI: 10.1177/00031224221131758
J. Gerring, C. Knutsen
We argue that cross-national variability in homicide rates is strongly influenced by state history. Populations living within a state are habituated, over time, to settling conflicts through regularized, institutional channels rather than personal violence. Because these are gradual and long-term processes, present-day countries composed of citizens whose ancestors experienced a degree of “state-ness” in previous centuries should experience fewer homicides today. To test this proposition, we adopt an ancestry-adjusted measure of state history that extends back to 0 CE. Cross-country analyses show a sizeable and robust relationship between this index and lower homicide rates. The result holds when using various measures of state history and homicide rates, sets of controls, samples, and estimators. We also find indicative evidence that state history relates to present levels of other forms of personal violence. Tests of plausible mechanisms suggest state history is linked to homicide rates via the law-abidingness of citizens. We find less support for alternative channels such as economic development or current state capacity.
{"title":"Homicide and State History","authors":"J. Gerring, C. Knutsen","doi":"10.1177/00031224221131758","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00031224221131758","url":null,"abstract":"We argue that cross-national variability in homicide rates is strongly influenced by state history. Populations living within a state are habituated, over time, to settling conflicts through regularized, institutional channels rather than personal violence. Because these are gradual and long-term processes, present-day countries composed of citizens whose ancestors experienced a degree of “state-ness” in previous centuries should experience fewer homicides today. To test this proposition, we adopt an ancestry-adjusted measure of state history that extends back to 0 CE. Cross-country analyses show a sizeable and robust relationship between this index and lower homicide rates. The result holds when using various measures of state history and homicide rates, sets of controls, samples, and estimators. We also find indicative evidence that state history relates to present levels of other forms of personal violence. Tests of plausible mechanisms suggest state history is linked to homicide rates via the law-abidingness of citizens. We find less support for alternative channels such as economic development or current state capacity.","PeriodicalId":48461,"journal":{"name":"American Sociological Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":9.1,"publicationDate":"2022-11-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41734949","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}
Pub Date : 2022-11-07DOI: 10.1177/00031224221131798
B. McCabe
Sociological studies of poverty governance investigate how state actors manage marginalized populations, regulate their participation in social institutions, and reform their behavior through systems of punishment and rewards. Research in this area considers a range of institutions involved in managing poverty, but it has largely ignored an institution omnipresent in the lives of the poor—public housing agencies (PHAs). Focusing on the Housing Choice Voucher program, the largest rental assistance program in the country, I examine discretionary choices made by PHAs that affect who gets access to rental assistance, how long clients have to wait, and what they must do to maintain their benefits. I ask how these administrative decisions create successive opportunities for state agencies to govern the poor. Drawing on interviews with agency officials, I describe a tripartite process of selecting market-ready households, engaging them in rituals of market formation, and utilizing market nudges to remind them of their responsibilities as market actors. This framework deepens sociological understandings of how local state agencies utilize discretionary choices in a resource-scarce, highly decentralized policy environment to evaluate, reform, and discipline the poor.
{"title":"Ready to Rent: Administrative Decisions and Poverty Governance in the Housing Choice Voucher Program","authors":"B. McCabe","doi":"10.1177/00031224221131798","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00031224221131798","url":null,"abstract":"Sociological studies of poverty governance investigate how state actors manage marginalized populations, regulate their participation in social institutions, and reform their behavior through systems of punishment and rewards. Research in this area considers a range of institutions involved in managing poverty, but it has largely ignored an institution omnipresent in the lives of the poor—public housing agencies (PHAs). Focusing on the Housing Choice Voucher program, the largest rental assistance program in the country, I examine discretionary choices made by PHAs that affect who gets access to rental assistance, how long clients have to wait, and what they must do to maintain their benefits. I ask how these administrative decisions create successive opportunities for state agencies to govern the poor. Drawing on interviews with agency officials, I describe a tripartite process of selecting market-ready households, engaging them in rituals of market formation, and utilizing market nudges to remind them of their responsibilities as market actors. This framework deepens sociological understandings of how local state agencies utilize discretionary choices in a resource-scarce, highly decentralized policy environment to evaluate, reform, and discipline the poor.","PeriodicalId":48461,"journal":{"name":"American Sociological Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":9.1,"publicationDate":"2022-11-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47132917","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}
Pub Date : 2022-11-03DOI: 10.1177/00031224221132295
Aliya Hamid Rao
How do parents decide what goods, experiences, and activities they can afford for their children during times of economic insecurity? This article draws on 72 in-depth interviews with U.S. professional middle-class families in which one parent is unemployed. Extending the concept of relational work, this study illuminates how the microfoundation of economic decisions is gendered. Families where fathers are unemployed take the approach of relational preservation: they seek to maintain a high threshold of expenditures on children and view curtailing child-related spending as a threat to their class status. These families see reducing expenditures on children as a parental, and especially paternal, failure. Families where mothers are unemployed take an approach of relational downscaling, lowering the threshold for essential expenditures on children. These families are reluctant to spend less on children’s education, but they do not view decreasing spending on other items, such as consumer goods, as threatening their class status. Gendering relational work reveals how inequalities within families are reproduced through meaning-making around expenditures on children, and it clarifies a key source of variation in parental economic decision-making.
{"title":"Relational Work in the Family: The Gendered Microfoundation of Parents’ Economic Decisions","authors":"Aliya Hamid Rao","doi":"10.1177/00031224221132295","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00031224221132295","url":null,"abstract":"How do parents decide what goods, experiences, and activities they can afford for their children during times of economic insecurity? This article draws on 72 in-depth interviews with U.S. professional middle-class families in which one parent is unemployed. Extending the concept of relational work, this study illuminates how the microfoundation of economic decisions is gendered. Families where fathers are unemployed take the approach of relational preservation: they seek to maintain a high threshold of expenditures on children and view curtailing child-related spending as a threat to their class status. These families see reducing expenditures on children as a parental, and especially paternal, failure. Families where mothers are unemployed take an approach of relational downscaling, lowering the threshold for essential expenditures on children. These families are reluctant to spend less on children’s education, but they do not view decreasing spending on other items, such as consumer goods, as threatening their class status. Gendering relational work reveals how inequalities within families are reproduced through meaning-making around expenditures on children, and it clarifies a key source of variation in parental economic decision-making.","PeriodicalId":48461,"journal":{"name":"American Sociological Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":9.1,"publicationDate":"2022-11-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43012473","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}
Pub Date : 2022-10-29DOI: 10.1177/00031224221130506
Anthony M. Johnson
Scholars have extensively documented social class differences in students’ relationships with educational institutions through their interactions with authority figures and the unequal institutional advantages these interactions yield. However, little is known about whether or how social class also shapes students’ peer interactions in ways that produce these inequalities. Using a qualitative case study of an elite engineering school in which I draw on participant observation and interviews with 88 undergraduates and six administrators, I argue that social class context—a proxy for social class—shapes the peer help-seeking and help-giving (collaborative) strategies students use, which can create inequalities in the institutional advantages they secure in the form of academic help, support, and learning opportunities. Focusing specifically on the social class context of students’ high schools, I find that compared to their less-privileged counterparts, privileged students—who came from class-advantaged high school contexts where they became familiar with collaboration and upper-middle-class cultural signals—more easily collaborated with their college classmates and displayed signals that communicated they were “good” collaborators. The findings highlight new mechanisms through which inequalities are reproduced in educational institutions and make theoretical contributions to research on cultural capital, inequality, and education.
{"title":"Collaborating in Class: Social Class Context and Peer Help-Seeking and Help-Giving in an Elite Engineering School","authors":"Anthony M. Johnson","doi":"10.1177/00031224221130506","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/00031224221130506","url":null,"abstract":"Scholars have extensively documented social class differences in students’ relationships with educational institutions through their interactions with authority figures and the unequal institutional advantages these interactions yield. However, little is known about whether or how social class also shapes students’ peer interactions in ways that produce these inequalities. Using a qualitative case study of an elite engineering school in which I draw on participant observation and interviews with 88 undergraduates and six administrators, I argue that social class context—a proxy for social class—shapes the peer help-seeking and help-giving (collaborative) strategies students use, which can create inequalities in the institutional advantages they secure in the form of academic help, support, and learning opportunities. Focusing specifically on the social class context of students’ high schools, I find that compared to their less-privileged counterparts, privileged students—who came from class-advantaged high school contexts where they became familiar with collaboration and upper-middle-class cultural signals—more easily collaborated with their college classmates and displayed signals that communicated they were “good” collaborators. The findings highlight new mechanisms through which inequalities are reproduced in educational institutions and make theoretical contributions to research on cultural capital, inequality, and education.","PeriodicalId":48461,"journal":{"name":"American Sociological Review","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":9.1,"publicationDate":"2022-10-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44348925","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}
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：
京公网安备 11010802042870号