Strat

Wimmer, Andreas. 2008. "The Making and Unmaking of Ethnic Boundaries: A Multi-Level Process Theory." American Journal of Sociology 113:970-1022. 53 pages.

"Defines ethnicity (drawing from Weber) as a subjectively felt sense of belonging based on the belief in shared culture and common ancestry. For Wimmer, ethnicity subsumes race, nationality, religion, etc.-- each of these are a form of ethnicity. Four dimensions that determine variation in ethnic constellations: 1) Political salience of boundaries (think institutional context) 2) Social closure and exclusion (high degree of social closure implies that a boundary cannot be easily crossed and that it is consequential for everyday life because it denies access to the resources that have been monopolized by the dominant group). Highlights two-way process here: Cultural differentiation makes a boundary appear quasi natural and self evident, while social closure among ethnic lines may reinforce such differences through invention of new boundaries 3) Cultural differentiation between groups 4) Stability over time--derives from three above features Socially-imposed categories can become self-identities. Wimmer proposes use of continuous variable for ethnicity, rather than dichotomous, given the factors that determine ethnic constellations"

Lamont, Michele. 1992. Money, Morals and Manners: The Culture of the French and American Upper-Middle Class. University of Chicago Press. Chapters 1, 3, 4, and 7.

Lamont (1992) challenges Bourdieu, arguing that culture and material conditions do not necessarily perpetuate class domination. Rather, socioeconomic, cultural, and moral symbolic boundaries serve as the basis by which individual differentiate between insiders and outsiders, thus reproducing inequality. Symbolic boundaries are conceptual distinctions that we make to categorize objects, people, practices, and even time and space. In Chapter One, "The Questions and the Stage," Lamont explores cultural categories through which the upper-middle class defines valued cultural styles. Furthermore, she explores common categorization systems to differentiate between insiders and outsiders, and common vocabularies and symbols through which they create a shared identity. Interviewees who share such categories can be considered to be members of a same symbolic community. Symbolic boundaries are conceptual distinctions that we make to categorize objects, people, practices, and even time and space. Lamont focuses on three types of symbolic boundaries: moral; socioeconomic; and cultural. Socioeconomic boundaries are drawn on the basis of judgments concerning people's social position as indicated by their wealth, power, or professional success. Cultural boundaries are drawn on the basis of education, intelligence, manners, tastes, and command of high culture. Moral boundaries are drawn on the basis of moral character; they are centered on such qualities as honesty, work ethic, personal integrity, and consideration for others. Lamont argues that Bourdieu greatly underestimates the importance of moral boundaries while he exaggerates the importance of cultural and socioeconomic boundaries. Furthermore, Lamont shows the importance of considering macro-structural determinants of tastes and preferences. Lamont view symbolic boundaries as necessary but insufficient condition for the creation of inequality (Lamont and Lareau 1988). Boundaries constitute a system of rules that guide interaction by affecting who comes together to engage in what social acts (Goffman; Simmel). They consist of the criteria people use to define and discriminate between worthy and less worthy persons. Boundaries create groups, but also produce inequality because they are an essential medium through which individuals acquire status, monopolize resources, ward of threats, or legitimate social advantages. According to the framework presented in this book, prejudices and stereotypes are the supra-individual by-products of basic social processes that are shaped by the cultural resources that people have at their disposal and by the structural situations they live in. Method: Data is drawn from semi-directed interviews with four groups of forty with upper-middle-class men who lived in and around Indianapolis, New York, Paris, and Clermont-Ferrand. The upper-middle class is defined by occupation and educational attainment as college-educated professionals, managers, and businessmen. Respondents were randomly chosen from the phone directories of middle- and upper-middle-class suburbs and neighborhoods in order to avoid tapping into a specific upper-middle-class subculture. Lamont critiques previous survey studies of cultural capital, which define a priori what status signals are most valued by adopting the analytical categories built into the questionnaire. By using open-ended questions, it is possible to allow people themselves to define what high status signals are most important to them. They find that the range of high cultural status signals that most individuals mobilize is much broader than had been originally suggested by in the literature. CULTURAL CAPITAL AND CULTURE

Sampson, Robert J. 2012. Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Chapters 5-6 (97-148), 11 (261-286). 78 pages.

Sampson discusses how the general force of ecological concentration and neighborhood racial stratification, which scholars highlighted seventy years ago, remains pervasive in Chicago today. Building upon the work of Moynihan, the Chicago School and others, Sampson argues that social problems and dislocations have a deep neighborhood structure and relation to concentrated inequality. Not only that, the strength of the interrelatedness of poverty, crime, infant mortality, low birth weight, incarceration, and unemployment is especially stronger in communities of color. Furthermore, neighborhood social disadvantage has durable properties and tends to repeat itself and, because of racial segregation, is most salient in the black community. For these reasons, black children are particularly exposed to the cumulative effects of structural disadvantage, such that the cycle is continually reinforced. Finally, this "poverty trap" cycle can only be broken with structural interventions. What is even more striking, though, is that patterns of racial stratification and concentrated poverty are deeply stable nationwide, as shown in the enduring nature of most neighborhoods' relative economic standing over time, which contests the view that cities like Chicago are unique. These patterns point towards a process of reproduction of inequality that has been taking place for decades across American cities. Sampson goes on to investigate the perceptual and cultural bases of social inequality. His argument is that perceptions of disorder constitute a critical element of social inequality at the neighborhood level and maybe even larger areas. Indeed, the claim that some areas are disreputable and disordered triggers long-term processes that eventually reinforce stigmatized areas and contribute to the durability of concentrated inequality. Though objective visual cues of disorder do not form the causal link to crime as proponents of the broken windows theory often assume, the meanings and contexts of disorder are a central component of neighborhood change. Individual-level social position, observed disorder, racial stigma by place, and implicit bias in interpreting the effect of concentrated minority and foreign-born groups all work together to produce perceptions and feelings of disorder. Furthermore, collective (or intersubjectively shared) perceptions shape a context that constrains individual perceptions and further social outcomes. Sampson provides empirical evidence for this statement by showing that socially perceived disorder is a highly significant predictor of future poverty and outmigration. In short, "shared perceptions of disorder rather than systematically observed disorder appear to be a mechanism of durable inequality. Finally, Sampson dissects the underlying assumptions and validity of experiments that induce subjects to "trade places," such as Moving to Opportunity. In short, these experiments pose individual-level questions while neglecting "the causes or consequences of selection, neighborhood-level interventions, or the study of neighborhood social mechanisms." If we intend to learn about the effects of neighborhood interventions in an experimental design, Sampson argues, the best approach is to randomly assign interventions at the level of neighborhoods or other ecological units instead of that of the individual.

Lamont, Michele and Mario Luis Small. 2008. "How Culture Matters for the Understanding of Poverty." Chapter in The Colors of Poverty: Why Racial and Ethnic Disparities Persist, edited by Ann Lin and David Harris. New York: Russell Sage.

The use of culture has been imprecise or rejected in studies of urban poverty. Culture has been: interchanged with race as a set of group attributes; used as unaccounted variance in statistical models; and considered an intermediary, self-perpetuating mechanism that merely explains the effect of structural conditions. Intragroup differences are often larger than intergroup differences, and so culture must be understood as how individuals make sense of their lives rather than imputing a shared set of values and norms on the basis of racial or ethnic group. Citing Ellwood and Jencks (2003), Lamont and Small argue that cultural sociologists must move beyond the limits of quantitative data. They argue against Parsonian concept of culture as a unitary and internally coherent set of attributes. Instead, they advocate for a definition of culture that is more like Geertz and Ortner whereby culture refers to meaning that human beings produce and mobilize to act on their environment. The idea that races or ethnic groups have a unitary, static culture is unhelpful to the study of racial differences in poverty. Lamont and Small (2008) review analytical tools for examining culture in the study of poverty to capture dimensions of the causal process in producing inequality and poverty: o Frames: An interpretive schema that simplifies and condenses the surrounding social world by selectively punctuating and encoding objects, situations, events, experiences, and sequences of actions within one's present or past environment. Frames can be conceptualized as tinted glasses. Frames are a necessary but insufficient concept for explaining urban poverty. o Repertoires: A tool kit of habits, skills, and styles from which people construct strategies of action. Culture influences action not by providing the ultimate values toward which action is oriented but by shaping repertoires. Thus, people may share aspirations while remaining profoundly different in the way their culture organizes their overall pattern of behavior. According to this perspective, culture is a heterogeneous set of attributes rather than a single coherent system. Repertoires leave room for diversity within groups and for a multiplicity of perspectives within a single actor. However, this perspective does not explain why some repertoire choices are followed in a course of action (see Lamont 1992, Chapter 7). o Narratives: Individuals likely to pursue the course of action most consistent with their personal narrative. Stories people tell themselves influence how they make sense of their lives and of their difficulties. Useful in demonstrating how self-conception, including one's sense of self-limitations and responsibility toward others, influences action. o Symbolic boundaries: Conceptual distinctions between objects, people, and practices that operate as a system of rules that guide interaction by affecting who comes together to engage in what social act. Symbolic boundaries are a necessary but insufficient condition for the creation of social boundaries like spatial and labor market segregation and patterns of intermarriage. However, boundary work is critical to the construction of collective identity. o Cultural capital: An analytical device to understand how differences in lifestyles and taste contribute to the reproduction of inequality. Institutional, widely-shared, high status cultural signals are used to exclude others in various contexts. Lamont and Small cite Carter's non-dominant forms of cultural capital and Lareau's cultural logics of childrearing. o Institutions: Institutions can be defined as formal and informal rules, procedures, routines, and norms, as socially constructed shared cognitive and interpretive schemas, or more narrowly as formal organizations. Institutions enable and constrain shared definitions and experiences of race, class and gender. Institutional arrangements reproduce themselves and result in systematic exclusion. CULTURAL CAPITAL AND CULTURE

Solon, Gary. 1992. "Intergenerational Income Mobility in the United States." American Economic Review 82:393-408. 16 pages.

By analyzing data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, Solon concludes that intergenerational income correlations are not as small as previous statistical studies have implied. The author argues that the estimates that these studies present, which are used to emphasize the predominance of social mobility in the U.S., have been biased downward by measurement error, unrepresentative samples, or both. Solon's findings lead him to the assertion that the American society is much less mobile than earlier research seems to depict.

Pager, Devah. 2003. "The Mark of a Criminal Record." American Journal of Sociology 108:937-975. 39 pages.

A criminal record has staggering effects for hiring opportunities, especially for blacks. Black non-offenders even fell behind white offenders in receiving callbacks. Blacks were less likely to receive callbacks with or without criminal records. Because more blacks than whites are incarcerated and employment is found to be the main contributor to crime desistance, these findings shows that blacks have limited alternatives for improving life chances.

Breen, Richard. "Social Mobility in Europe." Pp. 465-481.

Absolute mobility: movement between class origins and class destinations Social fluidity: relationship between class origins and current position; it is based on a comparison between people of different class origins and their chances of being found in one destination class rather than another (if these chances were the same regardless of origins, a mobility table would display perfect mobility.) Breen finds that a trend toward convergence in class structures has occurred together with decreasing variation between countries in rates of overall mobility. As societies move from being agricultural to industrial, more people fill jobs in higher strata positions. And so changes over time and differences between countries in absolute mobility are driven by variations in origin and destination class distributions rather than social fluidity. Meanwhile, there is a widespread tendency toward great social fluidity (an index of equality in chances, openness), but there is also wide variation between countries. Breen suggests that structural factors within countries (e.g. policy) are more important than general economic trends in shaping social fluidity. And although he finds convergence among countries in their absolute mobility, he doesn't find evidence for convergence in social fluidity. These findings are contrary to Erikson and Goldthorpe's finding of a basic similarity in social fluidity (relative mobility) in all industrial societies. Breen argues that this is because of a cohort effect - Breen's data covered a longer time span, and younger cohorts are more fluid. Breen argues that overall levels of inequality of opportunity will change mainly through cohort replacement. METHOD: Empirical analysis of social mobility in 11 European countries over a period of 30 years (1970-2000) SOCIAL MOBILITY AND STATUS ATTAINMENT

Berk, Richard A., and Sarah Fenstermaker Berk. "Supply-side sociology of the family: The challenge of the new home economics." Annual Review of Sociology (1983): 375-395. 21 pages.

Berk and Berk argue that the sociology of family has essentially become the study of interpersonal relations, thereby overlooking routine household work and neglecting the material base in which family life is grounded. In response to this trend, microeconomic approaches to the family - namely, the New Home Economics - have proved to be utterly relevant. The household production function - through which family members produce "household commodities" like health and prestige by combining their time with market goods and services, and around which human capital is invested, time is allocated, and fertility and childrearing practices are determined - is the basis upon which the New Home Economics is built. These microeconomic approaches to the family are pertinent because they investigate productive activities that are vital to family life, and which sociologists have largely neglected by assuming that instrumental activities take place only outside the home. Yet, because the New Home Economics is virtually entirely dependent on assumptions from neoclassical microeconomics, such as maximization of utility, it risks oversimplifying the social reality surrounding the family.

Brady, David and Rebekah Burroway. 2012. "Targeting, Universalism, and Single-Mother Poverty: A Multilevel Analysis Across 18 Affluent Democracies." Demography 49:719-46. 28 pages.

Brady and Burroway offer multilevel cross-national analysis of single-mother poverty across 18 affluent democracies. Their findings show that single mothers are disproportionately more likely to be poor in all countries, and that individual characteristics as well as social policy shape single-mother poverty. "Single-mother households with multiple earners, well-educated and older heads of household, and multiple adults are less likely to be poor. Those with no one employed, low-educated and younger heads of household, and multiple children are more likely to be poor." Moreover, generous and universal welfare states are substantially able to reduce the poverty of single mothers, which shows that welfare universalism is a more effective anti-poverty strategy than altering the behavior of single mothers. Not only that, the authors find evidence that welfare universalism is more effective than social policy that is targeted at reducing single-mother poverty.

Burt, Ronald S. "Structural Holes and Good Ideas." American Journal of Sociology 110.2 (2004): 349-399. 51 pages.

Burt investigates the network of managers in a large electronics company to explain how brokerage across structural holes between groups is a source of social capital. To the extent that opinion and behavior are more homogeneous within than between groups, people whose networks span structural holes have more access to alternative ways of thinking and behaving, "which gives them more options to select from and synthesize." As a result, these individuals are in a situation of competitive advantage in perceiving good ideas. To assess brokerage, Burt uses a measure of network constraint, which varies with three features of the discussion network around a manager: size, density, and hierarchy. The constraint is high if an actor's discussion partners talked a lot to one another directly (that is, dense network) or if they shared information directly via some central contact (i.e., hierarchical network). More constrained networks, therefore, span fewer structural holes. It turns out that managers who often discussed work-related issues with managers in other groups were better paid, received more positive job evaluations, and were more likely to be promoted. What is more, Burt finds evidence that brokerage is associated with good ideas. Managers whose networks spanned structural holes were not only more likely to express an idea and discuss it with co-workers, they were also more likely to have the idea engaged by senior management and have it judged valuable. SOCIAL CAPITAL

Western, Bruce, Deirdre Bloome, and Christine Percheski. 2008. "Inequality among American Families with Children, 1975 to 2005." American Sociological Review 73: 903-20. 18 pages.

By analyzing annual data from the March Current Population Survey, Western et al. attempt to explain the increase in income inequality among American families with children from 1975 to 2005. The authors see income inequality as the joint product of the distribution of earnings in the labor market and the pooling of incomes in families. Whereas the market power of workers in the labor market is assessed mainly by their level of education, income pooling relates to the number of adults in a family and women's involvement in paid work. Such an analytical framework, then, has the advantage of separating the correlated effects of education, single parenthood, and maternal employment. Three key findings emerge from this decomposition technique. First, educational inequality as well as differences in family structure are associated with increased income inequality, such that there has been a large increase in the income advantage of families headed by college graduates, and rising rates of single parenthood account for a substantial portion of the growth in overall income inequality. But two trends have helped offset the effects of education and single parenthood: the educational upgrading from 1975 to 2005, represented by a decrease in the number of high school dropouts and a significant increase in college graduates; and growth in women's employment. Finally, Western et al. conclude that most of the increase in income inequality is associated with the growth of within-group inequality across family types and levels of schooling, thus showing that "the rising heterogeneity of incomes has not spared any skill level or family type."

Correll, Shelley, Stephen Benard, and In Paik. 2007. "Getting a Job: Is There a Motherhood Penalty?" American Journal of Sociology 112:1297-1338.

Correll et. al. attempt to ascertain if there a motherhood penalty for women with children in the workplace. The study examines discrimination only at the point of hire. In other words, it can be seen as a measure of social fit for women in these professions based on this ascriptive characteristic. They employ both an experiment and an audit study. The main theory is that parenthood, specifically motherhood, is a status characteristic (that is) in tension with cultural definitions of "ideal worker." Correll et. al. argues that the saliency of motherhood affects women's employability (employability taken as hiring, wages, and evaluations).

Domhoff, G. William. "Who Rules America? Power and Politics." Pp. 290-295. [Grusky]

Domhoff is interested in explaining the extreme corporate domination and high poverty levels that exist in the US even though it is a democratic country. He argues that there exists a coherent upper class in which social, political, and corporate powers are intertwined. "Not everyone in the nationwide upper class knows everyone else, but everybody knows somebody who knows someone..." The upper class is maintained and reproduced through elite education (boarding schools, after which people go to Ivy League college), career choices (disproportionately choose careers in business, finance, and law), and social clubs (exclusive, nationwide clubs). Club membership often overlaps with positions on corporate boards of directors. So the upper class manipulates politics directly and by financing foundations and think tanks that shape public policy. The upper class persists through institutions - families may rise and fall within the class structure, but the institutions of the upper class persist.

Structuralism

New structuralism examines how processes of occupational attainment and other forms of personal achievement are influenced by structural constraints such as those imposed by the class structure, organizational size, segmented labor markets, occupational segregation, and the operation of the dual economy. It emphasizes the ways in which certain features of economic systems and formal organizations enhance or constrain the distribution of opportunities for particular categories of people. The neo-Marxist theory of contradictory class locations formulated by Wright is often included in this designation as well.

Wilson, William Julius. 2012. "Reflections on Responses to The Truly Disadvantaged" in William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012, 2nd ed., pp. 251-304. 54 pages.

Wilson reflects on the contributions and legacy of The Truly Disadvantaged twenty-five years after he wrote it. The theoretical framework that Wilson laid out in his book states that a structure of inequality has taken shape, which is tied to contemporary behavior in the ghetto by a combination of opportunities, constrains, and social psychology. Exogenous factors like "racial discrimination, changes in the economy that have restructured occupations and relocated industries away from inner-city neighborhoods, and political processes (affirmative action programs and antibias legislation) that have had the unanticipated consequence of increasing the class division among urban African Americans" represent the sources of the concentration of black ghetto poverty. The endogenous factors that these exogenous determinants bring about include urban migration, age structures, economic factors like employment and income distributions, and social isolation, which deprives inner-city residents of economic and social resources as well as cultural learning from mainstream social networks, which smooths the way for social mobility. Social isolation, in turn, hinders advancement by producing outcomes that can be either structural, such as weak labor-force attachment and deficient access to informal job networks, or social-psychological, as shown in limited aspirations and problematic social dispositions. From this theoretical framework, Wilson derives the concept of underclass. What distinguishes members of the underclass from those of other groups that are economically disadvantaged is that their neighborhoods reinforce their weak attachment to the labor force (i.e., the marginal position of people in the labor force because of the restricted job opportunities that they face as well as their limited access to informal job network systems). The concept, therefore, aims at capturing the problems of both weak attachment to the labor force and social isolation in environments of highly concentrated poverty. Wilson contends that most quantitative studies that have tried to examine neighborhood effects have used inadequate measures to capture the concept. In this regard, Sampson's Great American City is groundbreaking for emphasizing a holistic contextual causality that probes into neighborhood social processes. Under Sampson's approach, macro-structural factors interact with "lower order" mechanisms - which encompass the relationship between sociopsychological factors and broad cultural processes, such as shared perceptions of disorder - in shaping neighborhoods. By considering the structural as well as the cultural dimensions of neighborhood effects, Sampson provides a multifaceted view of the impact that ecologically concentrated disadvantage has on both the levels of the individual and the neighborhood. Wilson goes on to review a number of studies that corroborate the ideas stated in his theory of neighborhood effects. But he does acknowledge that The Truly Disadvantaged should have been clearer at some points, including the author's position on the interaction effects between social structure and cultural constraints. Today, Wilson contends that culture mediates the impact of structural forces like poverty and racial segregation, such that residents of inner cities develop meaning-making and decision-making processes - e.g., the creation of informal cultural codes to regulate behavior - to adjust to chronic racial and economic subjection. Finally, Wilson argues that nowhere in the book he advocated deconcentration of public housing as a policy option. Instead, the policy options that he put forth involved macroeconomic, labor market, and family policies that would eliminate historic discriminatory hindrances to social and geographic mobility and would enable poor inner-city family to gather the resources they need to make their own mobility decisions.

Sorensen, Aage B. "Foundations of a Rent-Based Class Analysis." Pp. 219-235.

● Rent: the value one derives from control of an asset above the value that the asset could command in a competitive market (e.g. unions help employees extract rent on their labor by demanding higher wages) ● Class as life conditions: "The total wealth controlled by actors defines their class situation with respect to class as life conditions. The assets controlled will determine their incomes and the variability of their incomes." Sorensen proposes a theory of class that combines Marx's theory of class as exploitation and Weber's emphasis on life chances. Sorensen maintains that a theory of class should have an antagonistic component ("The present proposal overcomes the evident problem associated with Weberian and neo-Weberian class analysis where there is no proposal for why anyone should be upset about their position in society and engage in class formation."), but restricts exploitation to inequality generated by ownership or possession of rent-producing assets. The concept of rents is consistent with modern economic theory and implies exploitation, because rents are advantages that prevent other actors from realizing their full return on their assets. "Rents are crucial for the emergence of exploitation classes because those who benefit from rents have an interest in protecting their rights to the rent-producing assets, while those who are prevented from realizing the full return on their assets have an interest in eliminating the rents. Rents thus create antagonistic interests and conflict." There are 3 types of rents in modern industrial society: monopoly (artificial or social constraints in production, e.g. when certain jobs are closed to outsiders), composite rents (when the value of two assets combined is greater than the sum of the individual values - asset specificity, e.g. when a company has invested in training workers), and rents based on natural abilities and talents (cultural capital, schooling, genetic endowments). GRADATIONALISM

Reardon, Sean and Kendra Bischoff. 2011. "Income Inequality and Income Segregation." American Journal of Sociology 116:1934-81. 48 pages.

Analyzing U.S. census data from 1970 to 2000, Reardon and Bischoff attempt to explain how income inequality affects income segregation - i.e., the uneven geographic distribution of income groups within some area. Income segregation, the authors argue, may lead to inequality in social outcomes, to the extent that sociological theories predict that the average income of one's neighbors indirectly affects one's own social, economic, and physical outcomes. Their findings shot that there is a substantial relationship between within-race metropolitan area income inequality and within-race metropolitan area income segregation. What is more, income inequality affects income segregation chiefly by shaping the segregation of affluence rather than the segregation of poverty. Furthermore, the authors find different relationship patterns between income inequality and income segregation for black and white families. As a result of the growing black middle class and reductions in housing discrimination since the 1970s, income segregation among black families dramatically increased from 1970 to 1990, as the black middle class could move into suburban areas that had been previously inaccessible. Lastly, the results show that the effects of income inequality on income segregation are driven predominantly by the effects of inequality on macro-scale patterns of segregation. In other words, income inequality shapes income segregation mainly by prompting the highest-earning families to move far away from lower-income households. To sum up, the findings indicate that income inequality shapes a pervasive pattern of large-scale separation of the affluent from lower-income households and families. Income inequality, however, does not seem to account for patterns of segregation of poverty, which the authors contend to be due to housing policy. Nor is it responsible for small-scale income segregation, such as the gentrification of urban neighborhoods that are geographically proximate to poor neighborhoods.

Lareau, Annette. 2002. "Invisible Inequality: Social Class and Childrearing in Black Families and White Families." American Sociological Review 67(5): 747-776. 30 pages.

Child rearing practices vary according to social class rather than according to race or ethnicity. Middle class and working or lower class parents have a different dominant set of cultural repertoires and subsequent child rearing practices, which result in the transmission of differential advantages to their children. The focus of middle class parents on concerted cultivation and the focus of working class and poor parents on the accomplishment of natural growth have differing costs and benefits both within and outside of institutional frameworks such as the school. That is, parenting strategies among different class positions shape how children learn how to interact with institutions in society. Institutions adopt the dominant culture logic and impose it (e.g., American individualism and support of concerted cultivation by schools). In schools, some students find the dominant cultural logic natural and are rewarded, while others find it unnatural and are punished. Method: In-home participant observation and in-depth interviews with twelve families, selected by social class, race, school district and wealth, and neighborhood. The middle-class and working or lower-class families identified in her study are classified according to the employment status, occupation, and industry of the parents rather than income. HUMAN CAPITAL, EDUCATION, AND THE FAMILY

Gradationalism

Gradationalism is the belief that the underlying structure of modern stratification can be more closely approximated with gradational measures of income, status, or prestige than with mapping individuals/families into mutually exclusive categories or "classes."

Fischer, Claude et al. 1996. Inequality by Design: Cracking the Bell-Curve Myth. Princeton University Press. Chapters 1 (3-21) and 6 (129-157). 47 pages.

Inequality is shaped by social environment and policy decisions. Inequality is constructed and perpetuated by institutions; it is neither necessary, nor necessarily functional. This work critiques the Bell Curve myth (Herrnstein & Murray), which claims inequality is natural and inevitable due to intelligence stratification (i.e. free market acting on genetic talent). As inequality is a social construction, Fischer et al. conclude that individual traits matter to the extent that society makes them matter. ***US policies directly and indirectly alter inequality through redistribution, middle- and upper-class subsidies, market regulation, and public investments (think subsidies, low unionization rates, etc.). Berkeley sociologists mobilized to contradict Murray's Bell Curve because it didn't acknowledge the very important institutional context in the United States. They argue that institutions are the "rules of the game" that determine the position of individuals in society. These rules can be formal, such as laws, or informal institutionalized forms of action and cognition, such as a repertoire of action or shared set of cognitive perceptions. *** Fischer's reaction to The Bell Curve describes role of past institutions (particularly government programs) that have maintained certain system of stratification. While The Bell Curve takes functionalist position that inequality is result of differences in IQ (given its surviving author is now fellow at American Enterprise Institute), Fischer covers number of past programs that have maintained inequality. While there is large discussion over role of welfare in helping poor, compared to subsidies that have gone to wealthier Americans, support for the poor has been relatively small. Government institutions have been formed in order to support middle class lifestyle.

Moller, Stephanie, Arthur S. Alderson, and Francois Nielsen. "Changing Patterns of Income Inequality in US Counties, 1970-2001." American Journal of Sociology 114.4 (2009): 1037-1101. 65 pages.

Moller et al. employ multilevel analysis to investigate the upswing in economic inequality that has affected the U.S. and other advanced industrial societies in the late 20th century by examining data on the distribution of family income within American counties over 1970-2000. By looking into counties, the authors plan to understand the extent to which institutional and political factors that scholars have found to be determinant of cross-national differences in economic inequality can also explain the variation in inequality across local units (in this case, counties) within a single society. Furthermore, their analytical approach intends to distinguish variables that operate at the level of the county, such as demographic factors, from others that operate at the state level like institutional and political factors. The methods used also allow for comparing between factors that affect inequality cross-sectionally and those that produce a more longitudinal effect. Moller et al. find that the impact of the institutional context and state policy is more manifested longitudinally. For example, union density - i.e., the percentage of nonagricultural workers who are unionized - has a negative effect on inequality over time. So does the size of the government sector, as measured by the percentage of the labor force employed in public administration. Nonetheless, sociodemographic factors still have larger effect on inequality within counties than those related to the level of the state. The factors that has the strongest effects both longitudinally and cross-sectionally are those corresponding to median income and income squared. The authors interpret median income as a generalized measured of economic development. What they find is U-shaped trajectory of inequality with development, such that inequality at first declines, but at high levels of development, further development is associated with increasing inequality. Other variables with substantial effects include education (counties with higher levels of education tend to be less unequal than those with lower levels), shifts in the force between sectors (manufacturing sector size, for example, has negative effects both longitudinally and cross-sectionally), and race and ethnicity (counties where the black population has increased have also become more unequal, which shows that the nature of race relations in the U.S. has a substantial contribution to patterns of income inequality). All in all, their findings indicate that "patterns in income inequality within and across U.S. counties are the result of labor market and demographic trends operating within changing institutional contexts." (This is a parallel to the unified theory that DiPrete (2007) explains).

Petersen, Trond and Laurie Morgan. 1995. "Separate and Unequal: Occupation-Establishment Sex Segregation and the Gender Wage Gap." American Journal of Sociology 101:329-365.

Petersen and Morgan argue that the gender wage gap is mostly a function of women occupying different occupations and being in different firms than men (allocative and valuative discrimination), rather than women receiving lower wages than men. They highlight three models for gender wage gap, arguing that the first two most explain the gender wage gap: (1) Allocative discrimination—women allocated to jobs and firms that pay lower; (2) Valuative discrimination—female-dominated occupations are paid lower than male-dominated occupations; (3) Within-job wage discrimination—paying women less than men in the same job. Attention should be paid more to allocative and valuative discrimination and less to within-job wage discrimination (which is covered under the Equal Pay Act of 1963)

Durkheim, Emile. The Division of Labor in Society. Pp. 159-164.

Summary: Durkheim (1893) posits that professional groups and corporations are critical to society because the create norms and values, which help to counter legal and moral anomie brought about by industrialization. Notes: In industrial society, the increasing complexity of economic life creates a state of legal and moral anomie. In this context, anomie refers to the absence of the usual social or ethical standard in an individual or group. Durkheim writes, "So vague a morality, one so inconsistent, cannot constitute any kind of discipline," and thus cannot form the basis of a collective contract. Professional groups and corporations are the most effect counter to this anomie and become an elementary unit of social organization. As life becomes more segmented and consumed by work, the state, territorial constituencies, and kinship ties are no longer effective moral forces. Even economic life cannot be regulated by the state; activity within a profession can only be effectively regulated by a group constituted by members working in the same industry, who are close enough to that profession to be cognizant of its functions and needs. Corporations or professional groups form based on shared interests, sentiments, and common occupation and, like all collectivities, establish norms and values. These groups do not just apply vocational rules but are a moral force. "A group is not a only a moral authority regulating the life of its members, but is also a source of life sui generis...which makes the individual disposed to empathize." Corporations of the future will be assigned even greater and more complex functions, regulating economic, political, and social life.

Esping-Andersen, Gosta. 1999. Social Foundations of Postindustrial Economies. Oxford University Press. Chapters 1 (1-12). 12 pages.

"In a postindustrial society, the revolutionary changes in families and labor markets have created a trade off between equality and full employment. Egalitarianism and full employment in tension with one another with emergence of poorly paid service sector jobs. Welfare state is seen as restricting labor supply as it attempts to reduce inequality. Directly addresses the unit of measurement when studying institutions, need to anchor analysis of post industrial society in the household economy. Household is a core component of any welfare regime. Has the ability to encapsulate gender differences, as well."

Marshall, T.H. 1950. "Citizenship and Social Class." In Citizenship and Social Class and Other Essays. Cambridge University Press. Pp. 1-85. 85 pages.

"Introduces the concept of social rights (welfare rights). Social rights warranted based on status of citizenship. Social welfare state concerned with equality of citizenship over equality of economic class. Citizenship is entrenched within a market system due to its process of development in three stages: civil, political, and social rights. These rights shaped the patterns of social inequality in modern society. Citizenship has become the architect of social inequality through the development of equality of opportunity. Education is becoming the main determinant of social class but still yields unequal outcomes. Relatedly, social status/prestige of a job is more important than income."

Piketty, Thomas and Emmanuel Saez. 2003. "Income Inequality in the United States, 1913-1998." Quarterly Journal of Economics 118:1-39. 39 pages.

"Piketty and Saez (2003) show how taxation policy preventing wealth accumulation, not technological change alone, explains the U-shaped pattern of inequality in the US over time among the share of the top income and wages. While Kuznets hypothesized that income inequality should follow an inverse-u-shape along the development process, Piketty and Saez (2003) find that over the period they studied (1913-1998), top income and wages have displayed a u-shaped pattern, concluding that a pure Kuznets mechanism cannot fully account for trends. The increase in the top income shares during the last three decades as a direct consequence of a surge in top wages (which would have been even higher if tax policy had not prevented even greater wealth accumulation at the top), changing the composition of income in the top income groups whereby the working rich have now replaced rentiers (non-working rich). The sharp downturn and upturn in top wage shares was too sudden to be the result of technological change along and other factors, such as labor market institutions, fiscal policy, and social norms may have played important roles in the determination of wage structure."

Orloff, Ann. 1993. "Gender and the Social Rights of Citizenship: The Comparative Analysis of Gender Relations and Welfare States." American Sociological Review 58:303-28. 26 pages.

"State social provision affects women's material situations, shapes gender relationships, structures political conflict and participation, and contributes to the formation and mobilization of identities and interests. This leads to gender stratification. Orloff (1993) develops a conceptual framework for analyzing the gender content of social provision that draws on feminist and mainstream comparative work which is called "gendering". This new conceptual framework amends that of the mainstream literature, especially the "power resources" school of analysis (Korpi and Esping-Andersen) in order to incorporate gender: The state-market relations dimension is extended to consider ways countries organize the provision of welfare through families as well as through states and markets, creating the state-market-family relations dimension. The stratification dimension is expanded to consider the effects of social provision by the state on gender relations, especially the treatment of paid and unpaid labor. The social citizenship rights/de-commodification dimension is criticized for implicit assumptions about the sexual division of caring and domestic labor and for ignoring the differential effects on men and women of benefits that decommodify labor. Then Orloff proposes two more dimensions to capture the effects of state social provision on gender relations: access to paid work and capacity to form and maintain an autonomous household. Ability to work has more benefits for women than men; women's labor is not valued as much, and women's role in the family hinders that in the labor market."

Armstrong, Elizabeth and Laura T. Hamilton. 2013. Paying for the Party: How College Maintains Inequality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ch. 1 (26-49) and 2 (50-73). 47 pages.

Armstrong and Hamilton conduct a five-year ethnographic and interview study of a cohort of women who lived on the same residence hall floor on the campus of a flagship public research university in the Midwest during the 2004-2005 academic year. The authors argue that student experiences during college as well as class trajectories at graduation are shaped by the structure of academic and social life on campus. That is, college experiences and class trajectories out of college are determined by the fit between individual characteristics - i.e., resources associated with class background and orientations to college - and organizational characteristics - that is, the college pathways that the university provides. In particular, the ways that the university that they study organizes the college experience systematically disadvantages all except the most affluent students. "When the university structures the interests of a constituency into its organizational edifice," Armstrong and Hamilton claim, "we say that it has created a 'pathway.'" The authors find three pathways: the party pathways, which is envisioned to support the affluent and socially oriented; the mobility pathway, which is planned with the pragmatic and vocationally oriented in mind; and the professional pathways, which welcomes ambitious students from privileged families. Through the party pathway, for example, the university offers affluent, white, socially oriented students ways to isolate themselves from those who are less privileged. This pathway was predominant at their research site. Indeed, university-controlled resources were unevenly distributed to the Greek system, which was the organizational core of the institution's party scene.

Chan, Tak Wing and John Goldthorpe. 2007. "Class and Status: The Conceptual Distinction and Its Empirical Relevance." American Sociological Review 72:512-32.

Class and status are different, and are each important. Status has more to do with lifestyle and is based on occupation. Class has more to do with employment conditions and is based on the types of people one interacts with at work, e.g. managers, coworkers. Class and status should each be investigated in relation to outcomes. Class predicts economic life-chances whereas status predicts patterns of cultural consumption. Method: Empirical analysis of British data; use 7 or 9 class categories from "professionals and managers" to "non-skilled manual workers"; 31 status groupings; run models that use class and status to predict party voting, political attitudes, unemployment, earnings, cultural consumption NEO-WEBERIAN

Collins, Randall. 2000. Situational Stratification: A Micro-Macro Theory of Inequality" Sociological Theory 18 (1): 17-43. 21 pages.

Collins argues that society is no longer stratified along fixed structures along which micro-situations mirror the macro-situation. For example, a waiter in a high class restaurant would be considered to be of lower SES than the patrons, but in the restaurant, the waiter commands the attention and respect of the patrons. So stratification depends on micro-situations - people's lived experiences and how people are able to exchange their resources for benefit or command deference in their everyday lives. For example, a top sociologist wouldn't command the same respect in a crowd of non-sociologists. So survey questions about, for example, occupational prestige don't necessarily translate into people's lived experiences that result from their occupations (e.g. a plumber would be rated low but makes a lot of money that can be translated into material comfort). Therefore, micro-situational encounters are the basis of social action, and social phenomena can be understood as a distribution of micro-situations. Micro-situations should, therefore, be the foundation of our sociological evidence. Collins is challenging the standard social science hierarchical approach to stratification - the idea that conclusions can be made at the macro level based on aggregated micro-level survey data (e.g. income, prestige, education). STRUCTURALISM

Korpi, Walter and Joakim Palme. 1998. "The Paradox of Redistribution and Strategies of Equality: Welfare State Institutions, Inequality, and Poverty in the Western Countries." American Sociological Review 63:661-87. 27 pages.

Debates on how to reduce poverty and inequality have focused on two controversial questions: Should social policies be targeted to low-income groups or be universal? Should benefits be equal for all or earnings-related? Traditional arguments in favor of targeting and flat-rate benefits, focusing on the distribution of the money actually transferred, neglect three policy-relevant considerations: (1) The size of redistributive budgets is not fixed but reflects the structure of welfare state institutions. (2) A trade-off exists between the degree of low-income targeting and the size of redistributive budgets. (3) Outcomes of market-based distribution are often more unequal than those of earnings-related social insurance programs. We argue that social insurance institutions are of central importance for redistributive outcomes. Using new data, our comparative analyses of the effects of different institutional types of welfare states on poverty and inequality indicate that institutional differences lead to unexpected outcomes and generate the paradox of redistribution: The more we target benefits at the poor and the more concerned we are with creating equality via equal public transfers to all, the less likely we are to reduce poverty and inequality.

Erikson, Robert and John H. Goldthorpe. 2002. "Intergenerational Inequality: A Sociological Perspective." Journal of Economic Perspectives 16(3):31-44. 14 pages.

Erikson and Goldthorpe compare the approaches of economics and sociology to studying the inheritance of inequality. Whereas the former focuses on the intergenerational transmission of income or wealth, the latter is more concerned with the intergenerational mobility between different class positions. To operationalize class, the authors recommend that class positions be determined by employment relations, as indicated by employment status and occupation. They go on to summarize the main findings from sociological research on the topic: all modern societies have similar patterns of mobility regimes (a contradiction to Breen's study above); evidence does not suggest a worldwide movement toward great social mobility; educational attainment is a major mediating factor in class mobility; since dependency of current class on class of origin still remains after controlling for education and other "merit" variables, modern societies are not meritocracies. The authors finish their piece by mentioning that intergenerational inequality has self-maintaining properties in that it creates conditions under which individuals in less advantaged positions act in ways that can be seen as adaptively rational, but which also serve to perpetuate the status quo. In addition to educational expansion and reform, therefore, efforts to reduce inequalities of condition and class inequalities in economic stability and prospects should be made.

Granovetter, Mark. 1973. "The Strength of Weak Ties." American Journal of Sociology 78:1360-80. 21 pages.

Granovetter (1973) demonstrates how getting a job is a social process through which people with more advantage in the labor market use weak ties, often with shorter chains and new information, resulting in the procurement of better jobs. Weak ties are better than strong ties because they can bridge across sectors and offer shorter chains, but there are more potential recipients of job information. The strength of weak ties: having a low degree of overlap in networks, weak ties are powerful bridges for gaining information, mobility, and social cohesion. ● Method: Granovetter (1973, 1974) presents an analysis of job search process for professional, technical and managerial jobs in Newton, MA. He examines how networks influence job acquisition by focusing on the job search and matching process. He notes that imperfect information prevents labor markets from being perfect. People dependent on actively searching and vacancy chains are less well-placed in the labor market and typically less likely to get good jobs. The job search is more than a rational economic process. Social factors including social ties and socioeconomic status matter for job search success. SOCIAL CAPITAL

McLanahan, Sara. 2004. "Diverging Destinies: How Children are Faring under the Second Demographic Transition." Demography 41: 607-27. 21 pages.

McLanahan argues that the forces underlying the second demographic transition that began around 1960 - namely, the reemergence of the feminist movement, the development of new birth control technologies, change in labor market conditions, and changes in welfare-state policies - are leading to two different trajectories for women and to greater disparities in children's resources. Whereas women who have access to the most opportunities and resources are seeing delays in childbearing and increases in maternal employment - changes that reflect gains in resources - those with the fewest opportunities and resources are going through increases in divorce and nonmarital childbearing, which reflect losses. As a result, the second demographic transition has widened class inequalities in children's resources. Children who were born to mothers from the most-advantaged backgrounds are making substantial gains in resources, for their mothers are more mature and more likely to have well-paying jobs than they were decades ago. On the other hand, children who were born to mothers from the most disadvantaged backgrounds are not making as many gains and, sometimes, are even losing parental resources. Their mothers typically work at low-paying jobs, and their parents' relationships are unstable. Finally, the author claims that the government should create institutions for guaranteeing the provision of child care and child support as a way of coping with the changes that the second demographic transition has brought about.

Mouw, Ted. 2003. "Social Capital and Finding a Job: Do Contacts Matter?" American Sociological Review 68:868-898.

Overall, the results of social capital models (e.g., Granovetter) suggest that individuals with well-connected social networks do better in the labor market. However, does this result reflect causality or merely the fact that similar people tend to associate with each other? Network theories of social capital argue that well-connected workers benefit because of the job information and influence they receive through their social ties. Results suggest that much of the effect of social capital in the existing literature reflects the tendency for similar people to become friends rather than a causal effect of friends' characteristics on labor market outcomes. There is little consistent evidence that using contacts affects wages or occupational prestige. Method: Four data sets are used to reassess findings on the role of social capital in the labor market. For example, Moux uses data from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth (NLSY) to test the direct effect of contacts on labor market outcomes. A test of causality is proposed based on the argument that if social capital variables do have a causal effect on job outcomes, then workers with high levels of social capital should be more likely to use contacts to find work, all else being equal. SOCIAL CAPITAL

Torche, Florencia. 2011. "Is a College Degree Still the Great Equalizer? Intergenerational Mobility across Levels of Schooling in the United States." American Journal of Sociology 117: 763-807. 44 pages.

Torche analyzes five longitudinal datasets to assess patterns of intergenerational mobility across levels of schooling separately for men and women. Her results show that chances of achieving economic success - as measured by social class, occupational status, individual earnings, and total family income - are independent of social background once one attains a bachelor's degree. This finding supports the idea that labor markets for college graduates are meritocratic. However, Torche goes beyond previous studies to differentiate across levels of schooling. She finds that the direct influence of social origins on economic well-being is stronger among advanced-degree holders than among those with a bachelor's degree only. What is more, while mobility among BA holder has remained stabled over the last decades, the considerable intergenerational association among the educational elite has become more pervasive only recently, as the advanced degree level has expanded. Among those holding an advanced degree, horizontal stratification - the extent to which people of different socioeconomic backgrounds are allocated into different types of postsecondary education - is pervasive across measures of institutional selectivity, field of study, and type of program. Furthermore, occupational allocation is substantially shaped by social origins, to the extent that graduates who come from an upper-class background are more likely to hold more lucrative managerial jobs than those who are less advantaged. By contrast, Torche finds little evidence of horizontal stratification and weak differences in occupational allocation by social background among BA holders, which further attests to significant patterns of intergenerational fluidity among them. All in all, the study calls into question the view that meritocracy will inevitably grow among higher levels of education. Instead, "mobility opportunity is embedded in educational and labor market processes," such as horizontal stratification and patterns of occupational allocation by social origins.

Wodtke, Geoffrey T., David J. Harding, and Felix Elwert. 2011. "Neighborhood Effects in Temporal Perspective: The Impact of Long-Term Exposure to Concentrated Disadvantage on High School Graduation." American Sociological Review 76:713-36. 24 pages.

Analyzing data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, Wodtke et al. investigate neighborhood effects on high school graduation. With their data and methods, the authors are able to measure duration of exposure to disadvantaged neighborhoods throughout childhood and adolescence and consider the effect of neighborhood context operating indirectly through time-varying features of the family. Hence, the analysis grasps the full impact of a lifetime of neighborhood disadvantage, which is consistent with the theoretical prediction that Sampson and Wilson lay out. Their findings show that exposure to disadvantaged neighborhoods - characterized by factors like high poverty and unemployment - throughout the early life course severely hinders the chances of high school graduation for both black and nonblack children. What is more, these effects seem to be mediated by time-varying characteristics of the family, which shows that neighborhood effects on children operate partially through neighborhood effects on parents. That is, family characteristics that are typically associated with children's educational attainment, such as parental marital and family income, are not only important predictor of the family's current residence but are also affected by neighborhood conditions in the past.

Condron, Dennis J. 2009. "Social Class, School and Non-School Environments, and Black/White Inequalities in Children's Learning." American Sociological Review 74:685-708. 24 pages.

Analyzing national data on first graders, Condron finds that whereas non-school factors largely explain social class inequalities in learning, school factors play a major role in producing the black/white achievement gap. As a result, because children's exposure to school environments reduces the impact of non-school factors, going to school mitigates class disparities in learning. On the other hand, given the impact of school factors on the racial gap, increased exposure to school intensifies the pace at which black children fall behind their white peers. The author claims that racial segregation is the main mechanism whereby school widens the black/white gap. Black students are strikingly more likely than white students to attend predominantly minority schools, and they are far less likely to attend predominantly white schools. This trend persists across classes, which indicates that racial segregation is probably accounts for a substantial portion of the gap that persists after controlling for class. Indeed, attending a minority segregated school is associated with reduced reading and math gains when compared with attending a predominantly white or an integrated school.

Blau, Peter M. and Otis Dudley Duncan. 1967. The American Occupational Structure. Pp. 486-97.

Blau and Duncan were the first to attempt to measure mobility in this way. They model the process of stratification by estimating the strength of ascriptive forces and the scope of opportunities in contemporary society. Their variables are father's educational attainment and occupational status, respondent's education attainment, status of first job, and status of occupation in 1962. Their model includes both direct and indirect effects of fathers' characteristics on those of their sons. When looking at the ways in which social origins determine outcomes, they found that education is a key mediator. Education has a dual role as a mechanism involved in the reproduction of immobility as well as a primary way in which mobility is achieved. Education is a tool of immobility, but it's also true that when people are mobile, most of that operates through education (since a lot of variation in education is not explained by social origins). Blau and Duncan believe that the process of stratification in the US is becoming more dependent on education (achievement) than on parents' status attainment (ascription). They find that the influence of education on ultimate occupational achievement, though not on career beginnings, has increased in recent decades. METHOD: Blau and Duncan use survey data that sampled men of prime age - 25-64. SOCIAL MOBILITY AND STATUS ATTAINMENT

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1986. Distinction. Pp. 982-1003. 22 pages.

Bourdieu defines the social space as the distribution of different classes, which runs from those who are best provided with both economic and cultural capital and those who are most deprived. But each class is also divided into class fractions, defined by different distributions of their total capital across economic and cultural capital. The relationship between the characteristics of economic and social condition and the features associated with the corresponding position in the universe of life-styles is determined by the habitus. As Bourdieu puts it, "the habitus is necessity internalized and converted into a disposition that generates meaningful practices and meaning-giving perceptions." Taste, in turn, is the propensity to appropriate a given class of classified, classifying objects or practices. This system of classificatory schemes, which is the product of the internalization of the structure of social space, generates practices adjusted to the regularities inherent in a condition. As such, taste "transforms necessities into strategies" and "constraints into preferences." Distinction is constructed along the lines of consumption of food, culture, and presentation. For example, the working classes' patterns of food consumption follow the side of being and substance, whereas those of the bourgeoisie is more concerned with categories of form and appearance. To construct the space of life-styles within which cultural practices are defined, one would need to establish for each class and class fraction the generative formula of the habitus that retranslated the necessities characteristic of that class of homogeneous conditions of existence into a particular life-style.

Weeden, Kim A. 2002. "Why Do Some Occupations Pay More than Others? Social Closure and Earnings Inequality in the United States." American Journal of Sociology 108:55-101.

Building off of Weber, Weeden (2002) demonstrates how collective action, as posited by Durkheim in 1893, has resulted in positional inequality. She finds that certain occupations pay more than others due to a combination of mechanisms underlying institutionalized social closure strategies via collective action. That is, occupations use social closure to artificially restrict their supply, resulting in increases in the prices of their labor. These strategies for occupational social closure include: credentialing by formal education system, certification through voluntary programs, licensing, unionization, and representation by associations. Social closure refers to the ways in which groups define their boundaries and their niches in the social structure. She argues that that human capital and functionalist theories are insufficient for understanding earnings inequality in the U.S. Method: Empirical analysis of data from the CPS and GSS from the 1990s NEO-DURKHEIMIAN

Sen, Amartya K. "From Income Inequality to Economic Inequality." Pp. 235-249.

Income is one of several means (e.g., rights, liberties) toward allowing a person to do the things she values. But income is differentially useful to different people depending on their circumstances (e.g., personal characteristics such as disability, age; social climate such as health care, education). "We can have complete equality of the chosen index of primary goods, and yet some people may be immensely more deprived than others because of age, disabilities, proneness to illness, epidemiological conditions, and so on." Therefore, a measure of inequality should be broader to capture the capability set, a person's freedom to choose from alternate functioning (the various things a person may value doing or being, e.g. nourishment, the avoidance of disease) combinations. This would capture "causal influences on individual well-being and freedom that are economic in nature but that are not captured by the simple statistics of incomes and commodity holdings." Furthermore, we don't need a perfect ordering but rather just an approximation of gross inequalities so that we can work to remedy them. GRADATIONALISM

Hout, Michael. 1988. "More Universalism, Less Structural Mobility: The American Occupational Structure in the 1980s." American Journal of Sociology 93:1358-1400.

The association between men's and women's socioeconomic origins and destinations decreased by one-third between 1972 and 1985. This trend is related to the rising proportion of workers who have college degrees. Origin status affects destination status among workers who do not have bachelor's degrees, but college graduation cancels the effect of background status. Therefore, the more college graduates in the work force, the weaker the association between origin status and destination status for the population as a whole. [But] overall mobility remains unchanged because a decline in structural mobility offsets the increased openness of the class structure. ["This is because the rate of change in occupational composition decreased enough to narrow the gap between origins and destinations. The existence of fewer workers with farm origins and more fathers who were managers and professionals adds up to less structural mobility."] Upward mobility still exceeds downward mobility in the 1980s but by a smaller margin than it did in the 1960s and 1970s. METHOD: Empirical analysis of GSS data SOCIAL MOBILITY AND STATUS ATTAINMENT

DiPrete, Thomas A. 2007. "What Has Sociology to Contribute to the Study of Inequality Trends? A Historical and Comparative Perspective." American Behavioral Scientist 50:603-18. 16 pages.

DiPrete argues that there are five main reason why sociologists did not devote much attention to the rising inequality trend in the United States as well as to the difference between the American trend and that of other industrialized countries until the late 1990s: lack of concern in the discipline with wages, earnings, and income; relative focus on social mobility rather than distributional change; relative attention to intergenerational mobility rather than career mobility; relative emphasis on gender and racial inequality rather than inequality in the population as a whole; and finally, the relative lack of interest by quantitative scholars in institutional features of the labor market, such as unions or the minimum wage and their impact on inequality. Furthermore, DiPrete reviews various arguments in favor and against the skill-biased technological change (SBTC) theory that states that the demand curve has shifted upward for high-skill labor relative to low-skill labor. With the hypothesis that SBTC exists both in Europe and the United States, a unified theory has emerged as an attempt to explain differences in inequality trends between the two sides of the Atlantic. All in all, the theory claims that "institutions can control inequality trends but only through trade-offs with other desirable economic outcomes." According to the unified theory, then, the flexibility of the U.S. wage-setting mechanisms causes wages to get adjusted to macroeconomic shocks on the American labor force, such that their impact on employment levels was somewhat small. By contrast, the rigidity of European labor markets, with their institutional control of wage setting and aspects surrounding the allocation of labor, minimized the impact of those shocks on the wage structure while at the same time producing a reduction in employer demand for low-skill labor, which is reflected both in low employment levels and high unemployment rates for low-skills workers. In spite of the cogency of the theory, DiPrete alerts that much remains to be investigated about the "nature, strength, and direction of the forces of SBTC and of globalization."

England, Paula, George Farkas, Barbara Stanek Kilbourne, and Thomas Dou. 1988. "Explaining Occupational Sex Segregation and Wages: Findings from a Model with Fixed Effects." American Sociological Review 53:544-558. 15 pages.

Does segregation arise because 'female" occupations have financial advantages for women planning to spend some time as homemakers, as human-capital theorists claim? Do "male" occupations have more onerous working conditions that explain their higher earnings, as the neoclassical notion of "compensating differentials" suggests? Or do female occupations have low wages that are depressed by the sort of discrimination at issue in "comparable worth," as sociologists have argued? To answer these questions, we use a model with fixed effects to predict the earnings of young men and women from a pooled cross-section time-series of the National Longitudinal Survey. Analyses are undertaken for both blacks and whites. A fixed-effects model is useful for answering these questions because it corrects for the selection bias that result from the tendency of persons who differ on stable characteristics that are unmeasured but affect earnings to select themselves into different occupations. We find little evidence that female occupations provide either low penalties for intermittent employment or high starting wages, the advantages human capital theorists have argued them to have. Rather, there is evidence of pay discrimination against men and women in predominantly female occupations. Implications for economic and sociological theories of labor markets are discussed.

Correll, Shelley. 2004. "Constraints into Preferences: Gender, Status, and Emerging Career Aspirations." American Sociological Review 69:93-113.

From the abstract: The model implies that, if men and women make different assessments of their own competence at career-relevant tasks, they will also form different aspirations for career paths and activities believed to require competence at these tasks. Data from the experiment support this model. In one condition, male and female undergraduate participants completed an experimental task after being exposed to a belief that men are better at this task. In this condition, male participants assessed their task ability higher than female participants did even though all were given the same scores. Males in this condition also had higher aspirations for career relevant activities described as requiring competence at the task. No gender differences were found in either assessments or aspirations in a second condition where participants were instead exposed to a belief that men and women have equal task ability. To illustrate the utility of the model in a "real world" (i.e., non-laboratory) setting results are compared to a previous survey study that showed men make higher assessments of their own mathematical ability than women, which contributes to their higher rates of persistence on paths to careers in science, math, and engineering. This paper shows that larger cultural narratives are important in understanding how men and women come to understand themselves, their roles and preferences.

Giddens, Anthony. 1973. "The Class Structure of the Advanced Societies." Pp. 132-143.

Giddens develops the concept of class structuration to explain how people in similar class positions become a social group. He argues that it happens simultaneously through both mediate and proximate structuration. Mediate structuration is governed by the degree of closure of mobility chances. The effect of closure in terms of intergenerational movement is to provide for the reproduction of common life experiences over generations. Meanwhile, proximate structuration refers to the localized factors that shape class formation: division of labor in the workplace (e.g. separation of manual and administrative employees reinforces class grouping between middle and working class), authority systems in the workplace, and distributive groupings (consumption patterns, e.g. in housing based on mortgage availability creates spatial class divisions). The extent to which the various bases of mediate and proximate class structuration overlap will help determine the extent to which classes will exist as distinguishable formations as well as the manifestation of common lifestyle. Furthermore, stratification is stronger when class and status group membership overlap (e.g. when economic class and ethnic differences overlap). Links: What's the theoretical framework? Giddens first outlines Weber's extension of Marx's theory of class. For Marx, class referred to one's relationship to the means of production. Weber extended this by developing the ideas of status groups (groups derived from consumption and life style, as opposed to production) and social classes (a cluster of class situations which are linked together by virtue of the fact that they involve common mobility chances). But Weber didn't pursue the implications of his pluralistic conceptions of class, and so "the most important blank spots in the theory of class concern the processes whereby 'economic classes' become 'social classes,' and whereby in turn the latter are related to other social forms." This is the hole that Giddens is filling. NEO-WEBERIAN

Heckman, James. 2006. "Skill Formation and the Economics of Investing in Disadvantaged Children," Science, 312 (5782): 1900-1902. 3 pages.

Heckman (2000) emphasizes the importance of both cognitive and non-cognitive skills in producing economic and social success, and the importance of both formal academic institutions and families and firms as sources of learning. Skill formation is a dynamic process with strong synergistic components. Non-cognitive skills and personal motivation are important determinants of success and these can be improved more successfully and at later ages than basic cognitive skills. However, current research evaluating educational interventions ignores non-cognitive skills and therefore substantially underestimates the benefits of early intervention programs and teenage mentoring programs. The returns to human capital investments are greatest for the young for two reasons: (1) younger persons have a longer horizon over which to recoup the fruits of their investments; and (2) skill begets skill. The foundation for current policy for fostering skill formation in the modern economy focuses on cognitive skills and educational institutions, neglecting the importance of non-cognitive skills and the role of firms and families in fostering skills for economic and social success. In evaluating a human capital investment strategy, it is crucial to consider the entire policy portfolio of interventions together—training programs, school-based policies, school reform, and early interventions—rather than focusing on one type of policy in isolation from the others. Skill remediation programs for adults are much less efficient than early interventions. An efficient human capital investment strategy focuses investments on formal education and training for children, young adults, and younger workers more generally, and subsidizes the older and unskilled with programs integrated with the labor market. HUMAN CAPITAL, EDUCATION, AND THE FAMILY

Kalleberg, Arne L. 2000. "The Rise of Precarious Work." Pp. 640-44. 5 pages.

Kalleberg discusses the rise of precarious work in the United States, where precarious is defined as "more uncertain, insecure, and risky." The author contends argues that "globalization, technological change, re-regulation of labor markets and the removal of institutional protections have shifted the balance of power away from workers and toward employers and made precarious work increasingly common across the globe." These changes, he contends, are not merely a reflection of temporary fluctuations in supply and demand; rather, they represent deeply ingrained structural transformations in labor markets. To handle the consequences of this trend, Kalleberg claims that a new social contract must emerge. This contrast should encompass three core features, which are grounded both in flexibility for employers and labor markets and security for workers: economic security, such that people should be entitled to a range of insurances that would give them the confidence to assume risks; representation security, meaning that a new generation of worker organizations must surface, which would be adapted to changes in the structure of the economy and the organization of work; and skill reproduction security, in the sense that individuals should be guaranteed access to basic education and vocational training, which would help them be prepared for moving among jobs more frequently.

Small, Mario Luis. 2004. Villa Victoria: The Transformation of Social Capital in a Boston Barrio. University of Chicago Press. Chapters 1 and 4.

In his case study of a neighborhood in Boston, Small (2002) finds that older cohorts have higher social capital in the form of friendship and familial ties. Small also finds that older residents are less likely to participate in neighborhood social organizations, which he attributes to cohort differences in how residents perceive the social environment. He introduces the concept of "neighborhood narrative frames," which refer to the continuously shifting sets of categories through which the neighborhood's built environment, population, history, and institutions are made sense of and understood. Small demonstrates how differences in neighborhood narrative frames across cohorts due to length of residence and common life experiences rather than age affects adult bonds to neighborhood institutions and political participation. He begins his case study with the research question: How does neighborhood poverty affect social capital? In particular, by what mechanisms does living in a poor neighborhood decrease local community participation, reduce ties to the middle class, and weaken social ties among neighborhood? There is a general consensus that living in a disadvantaged neighborhood is bad for individual well-being a dearth of role models, reduced social control, increased social disorganization, and greater social isolation. The latter of which has been challenged by the community liberated perspective that social networks are not tied to physical neighborhoods. Small does not address social disorganization or isolation, but instead focuses on the presence or absence of voluntary participation in neighborhood activities and the prevalence or scarcity of local institutional resources. Small outline three conceptions of culture: normative; cognitive; and narrative. He emphasizes that culture is not normative but is rather cognitive. Small allows for flexibility in the relationship between structure and culture - not just structural poverty causing culture. He emphasizes that culture may have different paths and forms and furthermore may affect different outcomes so there no reason to assume that it should always be caused by structural poverty. Culture isn't just a mediator. Method: Case study of Villa Victoria, a Puerto Rican neighborhood in South Boston. SOCIAL CAPITAL

Willis, Paul. 1982. Learning to Labor. How Working Class Kids get Working Class Jobs. NY, NY: Columbia University Press. Pp. 1-50. 50 pages.

In his ethnography of working-class boys in a small English town, Willis argues that the milieu in which a subjective sense of manual labor power and an objective decision to apply it to manual work are produced is the working-class counter-school culture. This culture comprises some quite remarkable elements: widespread opposition to authority - which is manifested anywhere from insubordination in classrooms to wearing particular clothes and hairstyles - and rejection of those who conform to it; the importance of the informal group, where any aspect of the formality of the school environment is resisted; creative ways of limiting school demands to a minimum; the pervasiveness of sexism and racism in working-class boys' enactment of superiority over girls and ethnic minority groups. It is through this culture that working-class themes are mediated to individuals and working-class youth develop, transform and reproduce aspects of the larger culture in how they behave, "in such a way as to finally direct them to certain kinds of work." To the extent that it is working-class youth' own culture that prepares them for performing manual work, Willis claims there is an element of self-damnation in the process. This self-damnation, however, is often experienced as learning, affirmation, appropriation, and resistance. What is more, it is only through a real articulation with their conditions - and not through the "official versions" of their reality, which the school and state agencies voice out - that working-class boys participate in their own damnation. Finally, the author claims that the processes of self-induction into manual labor also play a key role in reproducing the social totality.

Mills, C. Wright. "The Power Elite." Pp. 275-285.

In modern American society, power has become increasingly concentrated and efficient. Power is the ability to realize one's will even if others resist. Power resides in the leaders economic, political, and military institutions. A person is powerful as a result of his position within those institutions; power is not intrinsic to individuals. Rather, institutions give the elite money, power, and prestige. Mills (1956) views power as residing in the upper-stratum of society through leads of its major institutions, by which institutions give them money, power, and prestige. He coins the term "power elite," which refers to people in positions that enable them to transcend ordinary environments and can make decisions having major consequences.

Jencks, Christopher et al. 1973. Inequality: A Reassessment of the Effect of Family and Schooling in America. Pp. 498-504.

Jencks et al. (1973) argue that poverty should be seen as a relative—not an absolute—conditions. Raising incomes of the poor will not eliminate poverty if everyone's income increases. "The cost of living is not the cost of buying some fixed set of good and services. It is the cost of participating in a social system." After all, prior to the 1960s, many poor families "got by" with a privy in lieu of a functioning toilet. Jencks et al. argue that there are two strategies for eliminating poverty: (1) reducing or eliminating income inequality and (2) equalizing opportunity by making sure that everyone enters the competition with the same advantages and disadvantages. However, the latter emphasis on 'equal opportunity' is individualistic and does not address structural components of poverty. For example, education reform has been seen as a way to equalize opportunity. This strategy assumes that: poverty is hereditary and children can escape; the primary reason children do not escape is lack of basic cognitive skills; and the best mechanism for equality is education reform. Jencks et al. refute each of these assumptions and demonstrate that test score differences do not account for much of the variation in income. Thus, focusing on education reform is foolish. In fact, genetics, nor parents, nor schools cause economic inequality. It is luck and on-the-job competence, personality, and dumb luck. They claim that the equality of rewards is more important than equality of opportunity for reducing inequality—writing, "Society should get on with the task of equalizing income rather than waiting for the day when everyone's earning power is equal." Some differences in cognitive skills and vocational competence are inevitable. HUMAN CAPITAL, EDUCATION, AND THE FAMILY

Massey, Douglas S. and Robert J. Sampson. 2009. "Moynihan Redux: Legacies and Lessons." ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 621: 6-27. 22 pages.

Massey and Sampson discuss the legacy of the Moynihan report, which was completed in 1965 and sought to offer solutions to "the Negro problem." In it, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who was then assistant secretary of labor, claimed that the end of legal segregation in the South was not enough and that black poverty was more intractable than white poverty due to the legacy of slavery and the persistence of discrimination throughout the country. Moynihan referred to female-headed households as "pathological" and argued that federal effort to provide jobs for black men was necessary to put an end to the alarming rise in family instability. When the report got leaked in the context of rising black power and feminist movements, however, Moynihan was deemed a racist and sexist for calling the black family pathological and for stating that its hurdles originated from its matriarchal nature. In the decades following the report, the social sciences shied away from the idea that "behavioral repertoires, interpersonal scripts, and cultural understandings developed to cope with the extreme circumstances of poverty, segregation, and concentrated disadvantage might themselves have deleterious consequences." Instead, liberal scholars stressed the virtues of single motherhood and extolled the resilience of children while overlooking the causes of single parenthood and its consequences for children and the community. Because research fell short of linking negative behaviors to structural conditions, conservatives saw this as an opportunity for explaining black poverty solely in terms of family instability and individual values. The disregard for the report has proved to be detrimental. In spite of the significant changes that have happened in American society since the time when Moynihan wrote his report - with increases in the numbers of immigrants and convicts, rise in inequality, and decrease in the number of welfare mothers - segregation and discrimination are still very much pervasive. Black men are still disproportionately affected by unemployment, unwed childbearing is widespread, child poverty is substantial, and the black family remains fragmented.

Reskin, Barbara and Patricia Roos. 1990. Job Queues / Gender Queues. Temple University Press. Chapters 1 and 2.

Occupational segregation by sex persists despite the feminist revolution of the 1960s and notable progress in the 1980s. While occupational sex segregation remained high at the end of the 1980s, the authors argue that women were able to integrate (and find greater success in) some traditionally male occupations (a process known as "occupational feminization"). This happened in certain sectors when the supply of men was inadequate—because of rapid job growth in the sector, because men spurned jobs as inferior to accessible alternatives, or because of the cost of regulatory agencies that made hiring women cheaper. The authors argue that the "job queue model" best explains occupational sex segregation and the alternate feminization of occupations. In this model, employers rank workers on individual characteristics but their rankings are affected by threats of current employees, gender labels for jobs and expectations and costs. Shortages will force employers to hire from lower in the labor queue (lower-ranked job seekers). Employers hire workers from as high in the labor queue as possible, and workers accept the best jobs available to them. This jointly generates the uneven distribution of groups across occupations (segregation). Of note is that some labor queues are disproportionately male or disproportionately female—and this disproportionality changes over time through changes in workers' preferences, changes in the queue's shape (e.g. job growth), or changes in employers' preferences.

Alba, Richard and Victor Nee. 2003. Remaking the American Mainstream: Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration. Harvard University Press. Chapters 1, 2, and 6.

Old assimilation theory has become passé since the 1960s; old assimilation theory devalues minority group culture, assumes assimilation is a one-way process, largely ignores non-white immigrants, and undervalues immigrant advantages in the form of networks and economic niches. Historical events and intellectual trends since the 1960s have introduced alternative models leading to Alba and Nee's new assimilation theory, which draws from the Chicago School of Sociology and the theoretical approach of new institutionalism. They argue that key to understanding the trajectories of incorporation and ethnic change is the interplay between (1) purposive action on the part of immigrants and their descendants and (2) context, including the institutional structures, cultural beliefs, and social networks that shape that purposive action. Assimilation is a contingent outcome stemming from cumulative effect of individual choices and collective action occurring at different rates within and across ethnic groups. This model recognizes that: (1) ethnicity is a social boundary; (2) this boundary is embedded in and validated by a variety of social and cultural differences between groups; and (3) assimilation is a form of ethnic change that occurs through changes taking place on both sides of the boundary. According to this model, the mainstream is defined by its plasticity and changes as elements of the cultures of new groups are incorporated into it.

Fernandez, Roberto M. 2001. "Skill-Biased Technological Change and Wage Inequality: Evidence from a Plant Retooling." American Journal of Sociology 107:273-320. 48 pages.

One of the most popular explanations for the increased wage inequality that has occurred since the late 1970s is that technological change has resulted in a downward shift in the demand for low-skill workers. This pattern is also alleged to account for the growth in racial inequality in wages over the same period. This article reports on a case study of the retooling of a food processing plant. A unique, longitudinal, multi-method design reveals the nature of the technological change, the changes in job requirements, and the mechanisms by which the changes affect the wage distribution for hourly production workers. This research finds that, indeed, the retooling resulted in greater wage dispersion and that the changes have also been associated with greater racial inequality in wages. However, contrary to the claims of advocates of the skill-bias hypothesis, organizational and human resources factors strongly mediated the impact of the changing technology. Absent these "high road" organizational choices, this impact on wage distribution would have been even more extreme.

Kirschenman, Joleen and Kathryn M. Neckerman. 1991. "We'd Love to Hire Them, But...: The Meaning of Race for Employers." In The Urban Underclass, edited by Christopher Jencks and Paul E. Peterson. Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, pp. 203-234.

Racism and discrimination are significant factors in explaining inner-city joblessness. Inner-city joblessness cannot be explained purely by discrimination or social isolation and lack of job skills. Instead, inner-city joblessness can be explained by both. With regard to discrimination, however, the authors argue that employer discrimination is "statistical discrimination" rather than "pure discrimination." "Pure discrimination" is where people have a taste for discrimination and will pay a premium to avoid certain groups. "Statistical discrimination" is where employers use race as a "signal" or proxy for aspects of productivity that are relatively expensive of impossible to measure. For employers interviewed in this study, race interacts with perceptions of class and space (the inner city)—i.e. they practice statistical discrimination where race is a signal for certain behaviors. They conflate the black people with the inner-city and they view inner-city workers as unstable, uncooperative, dishonest and uneducated. Blacks, however, are not viewed as a homogenous group, as employers took into account space and class in their evaluations of workers.

Ridgeway, Cecilia. 2014. "Why Status Matters for Inequality." American Sociological Review. 79(1): 1-16. 16 pages.

Ridgeway calls for the incorporation of the effects of social status - that is, inequality based on differences in honor, esteem, and respect - alongside those based on resources and power. By doing so, she intends to consider cultural and material processes as well as look into group-based inequality, such as race and gender inequality, and to link micro and macro processes. That is, Ridgeway sees status as an independent mechanism whereby inequality between individuals and groups is produced. It is essential that scholars consider the cultural beliefs that shape status because they affect inequality at a social relational level "by shaping people's expectations for themselves and others and their consequent actions in social contexts." If inequality were solely based on organizational control of resources and power, it would be unstable. For it to become durable, then, there must also be some categorical difference between people, such as race, gender, or class-based life style. Hence, control over resources and power turns into a matter of status difference between "types" of people who are ranked in terms of their perceived superiority. Status beliefs, then, shape the construction of culturally defined social differences on which high-status individuals rely to stabilize their control over resources and power, to the extent that those differences provide these actors with an uncomplicated justification about their superiority. Finally, when a difference becomes a status difference, it becomes an independent factor that "generates material inequalities between people above and beyond their personal control of resources." For example, gender status beliefs confer men with an advantage over women who are structurally similar (i.e., similar access to resources and power). Three micro-level status processes influence inequality: status biases that shape implicit assumptions about who is better; associational preference biases that determine to whom people form ties; and resistance reactions to status challenges that constrain lower status people from going too far. By bringing together status - which is based on cultural beliefs and works primarily at the level of everyday social relations - and inequality based on resources and power - which is grounded in material arrangements at a macro-structural level - Ridgeway sheds light on how micro and macro-level processes work together to create mutually sustaining patters of inequality among social groups. INTERACTIONIST PERSPECTIVE

Sewell, William H., Archibald O. Haller, and Alejandro Portes. 1969. "The Educational and Early Occupational Attainment Process." American Sociological Review 34:82-92. 11 pages.

Sewell et al. build upon the work of Blau and Duncan to offer a model that considers psychological and social psychological variables as well as social structural antecedents of educational and occupational attainment, which are already present in Blau and Duncan's study. The model proposes a causal sequence that starts with parents' stratification position and the respondent's mental ability. Following these factors are performance in school, influence of significant others, levels of educational and occupational aspiration, and, finally, educational and occupational attainments. The authors find that the model is useful for explaining educational and early occupational attainment of a large sample of Wisconsin farm-reared males. Because they do not consider psychological and social psychological variables, Blau and Duncan fall short of shedding light on the mechanisms underlying the connection between father's education and occupation, and the subsequent factors determining the respondent's life outcomes - that is, education, first job, and current occupation. What is more, a social psychological model like the one that Sewell et al. propose can indicate new variables that can offer further possibilities for manipulating outcomes.

Smith, Sandra. 2005. "Don't Put My Name on It: Social Capital Activation and Job-Finding Assistance among the Black Urban Poor." American Journal of Sociology 111:1-57. 58 pages.

Smith conducts in-depth interviews to investigate why the black urban poor suffer from social capital deficiency, in spite of the fact that their networks "are larger, more diverse and wide ranging, and much less detached from the mainstream than conventional wisdom indicates." The author finds that the black urban poor are deprived of social capital less because they encounter deficiencies in access to mainstream ties than because their potential job contacts are unwilling to assist when given the opportunity to do so. It is not that these contacts lack the ability to influence hires; instead, they choose not to help because they perceive pervading untrustworthiness among their job-seeking ties. The issue, then, is one of failure to activate social capital. The crucial factor determining whether or not job contacts would provide assistance revolves around their job-seeking ties' reputations, both at work and home. In doing so, they are considering the potential damage that job seekers might do to their own reputations. It is the interaction, therefore, between job contacts' and job seekers' reputations that seems to matter most in conditioning social capital activation. This entrenched distrust that Smith finds in her study show that, much like employers, the black urban poor are skeptical of the work ethic of individuals with whom they share this social background. To make sense of her results, the author proposes a multilevel conceptual framework to explain social capital activation, which takes into account both individual- and dyadic-level properties as well as features of job contacts' community of residence. This latter dimension comes from the fact that contacts who live in residences marked by concentrated disadvantage are more concerned about their job-seeking ties' reputations than are residents of low-poverty neighborhoods, since they have had negative experiences with job seekers more often.

Smock, Pamela J., Wendy D. Manning, and Sanjiv Gupta. 1999. "The Effect of Marriage and Divorce on Women's Economic Well-Being." American Sociological Review 64:794-812. 19 pages.

Smock et al. analyze data from the National Survey of Families and Households to simulate two scenarios: divorced women's expected economic well-being were they to remain married, and married women's expected economic well-being were they to divorce. Their findings suggest that previous studies have somewhat overstated the potential economic benefits of marriage - that is, divorced women would not do as well economically as those who are married were they to remain married. These results, then, show that the occurrence and stability of marriage are consequences, and not just causes, of favorable economic conditions. Nonetheless, marriage does seem to provide women with significant benefits, as divorced women would enjoy greater economic well-being were they to remain married. It is just that these potential benefits are smaller for the subgroup that divorces. Furthermore, since the study finds that the typical married woman would experience the same financial distress as a divorced one if she were to divorce, it corroborates the idea that women are economically vulnerable outside marriage. The authors argue that this vulnerability arises from the division of labor in marriage, through which women accrue lower levels and less continuity of employment than do their husbands. Given the gender gap in wages, women's excessive responsibility for childcare, and increasing marital disruption, that division leads to seriously deleterious harmful for women once they divorce.

Reskin, Barbara F. 2003. "Modeling Ascriptive Inequality - From Motives to Mechanisms." American Sociological Review 68:1-21.

Sociologists' principal contribution to our understanding of ascriptive inequality has been to document race and sex disparities. We have made little headway, however, in explaining these disparities because most research has sought to explain variation across ascriptive groups in more or less desirable outcomes in terms of allocators' motives. This approach has been inconclusive because motive-based theories cannot be empirically tested. Our reliance on individual-level data and the balkanization of research on ascriptive inequality into separate specialties for groups defined by different ascriptive characteristics have contributed to our explanatory stalemate. Explanation requires including mechanisms in our models-the specific processes that link groups' ascribed characteristics to variable outcomes such as earnings. Reskin discusses mechanisms that contribute to variation in ascriptive inequality at four levels of analysis—intrapsychic, interpersonal, societal, and organizational. She argues that redirecting our attention from motives to mechanisms is essential for understanding inequality and—equally important—for contributing meaningfully to social policies that will promote social equality. A summary of the three four potential mechanisms at different levels of analysis: (1) Intrapsychic: hardest to measure, in/out group biases (2) Interpersonal: converts allocators' mental states into differential behavior (3) Societal: depends on external social and economic factors including normative considerations within establishments' institutional communities, expectation of clientele, collective bargaining agreements, can check or permit other levels (4) Organizational: practices, usually affecting access to information about ascribed characteristics, by which employers and their agents link worker's ascriptive characteristics to work outcomes; can check or permit other levels

Marx, Karl. "Alienation and Social Classes," "Classes in Capitalism and Pre-Capitalism," "Ideology and Class," Pp. 74-90.[1]

Stratification is an outcome of the economic base. Ownership as a means of production dictates class; class structure subsequently predicts rewards and generates conflict. Capitalism creates two classes through processes of alienation - the bourgeoisie and the proletariat - where classification is based on one's relation to the means of production. The proletariat works to create a product, but in doing so, he is alienated from the product, labor, himself, and other men. The capitalist also experiences alienation, but he experiences it as a sign of power and it can appear as humanness for him. Antagonism between the classes is thus based on one's relation to private property. As an extension of this idea, Marx believes that history is the story of class struggles and that the ruling class dominates political society and creates the dominant ideology.

Schwalbe, Michael, et al. 2000 "Generic Processes in the Reproduction of Inequality: An Interactionist Analysis." Social Forces 79: 419-452. 34 pages.

The authors aim to grasp the interactive processes that create and reproduce inequality, which the literature has largely overlooked in favor of the dimensions of inequality that can be measured, such as what kinds of inequalities exist and how large they are. The key generic processes - i.e., processes that occur in multiple contexts where individuals face similar problems - that they point out are othering, subordinate adaptation, boundary maintenance, and emotion management. Othering refers to the process of producing categories and ideas about what marks someone as belonging to these categories. Othering, then, is a form of collective identity work whereby conceptions of what it means to be part of a dominant or an inferior group get constructed. Subordinate adaptation encompasses the strategies that people use to cope with the deprivations that their subordinate statuses entail. Though these strategies can challenge inequality, they often inadvertently reproduce it. Boundary maintenance is the preservation of the boundaries (e.g., symbolic, interactional, spatial, or all of these) between dominant and subordinate groups. Finally, emotion management consists of processes that constrain the myriad of emotions elicited by a system of inequality, such as anger, resentment, sympathy, and despair. It is only through patterns of feeling, then, that patterns of action are held together. INTERACTIONIST PERSPECTIVE

Hochschild, Arlie Russell and Anne Machung. 1989. The Second Shift. Viking Penguin. Chapters 1-4 (1-60). 61 pages.

The cultural and economic landscape of the 1970s and 1980s changed to incorporate women into the workplace and accept women as equal participants in the labor force. However, this cultural and economic change can be considered a "stalled revolution" because men's gender ideologies and workplace politics have not been able to catch up. Moreover, women's participation in the workplace has forced families to "speed up," causing them to figure out how to manage and divide up housework and childcare. More often than not, women absorb most of the speed up, taking responsibility for housework, childcare, and their jobs. This causes stress, lack of sleep and a negative perception by others. This also causes a "leisure gap" between men and women in the home. How women juggle the "speed up" depends upon their gender ideology. There are three ideal types: (1) Traditional: identity with home, wife, mother and wants husband to have more power; (2) Transitional: identifies with home, wife, mother and job, and wants husband to focus on work (not more power, though); (3) Egalitarian: identify with same spheres as husband and equal power.

Thompson, E.P. 1963. The Making of the English Working Class. Excerpted as "Rituals of Mutuality," Chapter 16, pp. 173-182 in Culture and Society, edited by Jeffrey C. Alexander and Steven Seidman, Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Thompson was a Marxist historian with interests in culture and institutions. His book, The Making of the English Working Class, redefined class creation as a relational, cultural process: "Class-consciousness is the way in which these experiences [the experience of one's productive relationships] are handled in cultural terms: embodied in traditions, value-systems, ideas, and institutional forms." He provides an institutional explanation of the creation of culture through working men's "friendly societies," which reinforced a code of discipline, dignity, self-respect, collectivism and community values. Similar to a Durkheimian corporation, these friendly societies were moral forces. Friendly societies eventually gave rise to trade unions. The model: As the Industrial Revolution advanced, the code of self-respecting artisan extended to ever-wider sections of working people. Friendly societies evidenced the growth of independent working class culture and institutions. These friendly societies led to trade unions, which elaborated codes of conduct and provided a more financially and legally stable foundation. Friendly societies were found in diverse communities but were a unifying cultural influence. Collectivist values were consciously held and propagated in political theory, trade union ceremonial, moral rhetoric. Collective self-consciousness with corresponding theory, institutions, discipline, and community values which distinguishes the 19th century working class from the 18th century mob. CULTURAL CAPITAL AND CULTURE

Tilly, Charles. 1998. Durable Inequality. University of California Press. Chapters 1, 5 and 6.

Tilly (1998) believes the most important inequality-producing mechanisms are organizational, not individualistic. They operate in the domains of cumulative collective experience and social interaction (not one-time decisions of power-holders). Differences between categories are more important than differences in individual abilities in producing durable inequalities. Categorical inequality: inequality between groups/organizations (bounded clusters of individuals, e.g. black/white, male/female, citizen/foreigner) Durable inequality: lasting from one social interaction to the next, with special attention to those that persist over whole careers, lifetimes, and organizational histories Tilly bridges Marx's exploitation with Weber's social closure in explaining durable inequality. He argues that multiple categorical systems resolve into comparisons of bounded pairs of categories, each with a distinct set of social relations. (Boundary work is important.) People who control access to value-producing resources resolve problems of distribution with distinctions between categories. These distinctions matter when institutionalized. The mechanisms that cause and reinforce inequality, both singularly and in interaction, are exploitation (powerful, connected people command resources from which they draw significantly increased returns by coordinating the effort of outsiders, whom they exclude) and opportunity hoarding (members of a categorically bounded distinctive network acquire access to a resource that is valuable, renewable, subject to monopoly, supportive of the network's activities, and enhanced by the network's modus operandi, creation of beliefs, and practices that sustain the network's control of the resource). Where group boundaries align with gender, ethnic, and/or class distinctions, categorical inequality results. Opportunity hoarding is often done by ethnic categories (relates to chain migration and niche formation in the immigration lit) and can be exploitative or exist without drawing on exploitation. (The value of resources depends on their potential uses outside of the circle of hoarders.) This all implies that the creation of categorical inequalities is often accidental - people are trying to solve the problems of, e.g. how to sort students, who to hire how to secure rewards from sequestered resources. And various inequalities (e.g. by race, gender, citizenship) are all produced by similar processes. Each of the mechanisms (exploitation, opportunity hoarding, emulation, and adaptation) encourage the reproduction of inequality. GRADATIONALISM

Tomaskovic-Devey, Donald. 2014. "The Relational Generation of Workplace Inequalities." Social Currents. 1 (1): 51-73. 23 pages.

Tomaskovic-Devey expands Tilly's (1998) relational inequality model, which emphasizes the role of social relationships in producing inequalities in access to respect, resources, and rewards. In particular, Tilly's theory argues that categorical distinctions like gender and education, when coupled with organizational divisions of labor, "become the interactional bases for moral evaluation, exclusion from opportunities, and exploitation of effort and value." In addition to exploitation and opportunity hoarding, which Tilly tackles, Tomaskovic-Devey claims that two other organizational processes shape inequality: resource pooling (i.e., the idea that the flow of resources into organizations determines their existence as well as their internal reward structure), and claims-making (i.e., claims for respect, resources, and rewards that condition the distribution of resources within an organization). Also, by stressing "the cognitive bases of distinction, the creation of status expectations in interaction, and the dramaturgical production of inequality," the author also introduces a social-psychological framework that is absent from Tilly's theory. Finally, Tomaskovic-Devey highlights the role of intersectionality. That is, individuals occupy multiple categorical distinctions simultaneously as they relate to others in historically specific interactional contexts. In other words, "the meanings and power resources associated with particular categorical intersections reflect local interactional and institutional influences, producing complex inequalities." In contrast to Tilly's model, then, which emphasizes the durability of categorical inequalities, Tomaskovic-Devey's signs the possibility for disruption of those inequalities, since intersectionality makes it clear they are far from set in stone and instead are historically contingent.

Katznelson, Ira. 2005. When Affirmative Action Was White. WW Norton. Chapters 1 and 2.

Traces development of the increasing inequality gap, which has set the foundation for affirmative action for blacks, as having roots in the discriminatory policies of the New Deal era that favored welfare for whites. The New Deal excluded primarily black occupations, thus restricting opportunities for blacks while helping whites. Government programs in 20th century (e.g., New Deal, housing programs) exacerbated racial inequalities. Such institutions set stage for extenuate poverty levels among blacks, and ensured high degrees of stratification between blacks and whites for decades after policies officially ended. New Deal has increased living standards of whites only, thereby contributing to race-inequality of today.

Mouw, Ted, and Arne L. Kalleberg. 2010. "Occupations and the Structure of Wage Inequality in the United States, 1980s to 2000s." American Sociological Review 75: 402-31. 30 pages.

Using data from the Current Population Survey for 1983 through 2008, Mouw and Kalleberg test the idea, originated from the emphasis on the role of occupations in sociologists' theoretical conceptions of the stratification system, that changes in the occupational structure - i.e., in the relative size and wages of different occupations - can help explain the increase in wage inequality in the U.S. over the past decades. Their model assesses the mean and variance of wages for each occupation while controlling for education and demographic factors at the individual level. The results show that occupational differences in wages became more salient for explaining differences during the past 15 years. These findings corroborate the view of an increased polarization of occupations, especially in the 1990s, as shown in the growth of high- and low-wage occupations and the decline of middle-level occupations. Because of technological innovations, deregulation of markets, and changes promoted by globalization, high-paying managerial and professional occupations, such as bankers and computer scientist, have increased. On the other hand, the expansion of the service sector has brought about the rise in low-paying sales and service occupations in industries like retail trade and temporary services. Finally, technological changes have also caused the decline in middle-level occupations like secretaries and file clerks. What is more, Mouw and Kalleberg find that a substantial fraction of the change in wage inequality in recent decades can be attributed to a handful of occupations - managers "not elsewhere classified," secretaries, and computer system analysts - which leads them to assert that the effects of the polarization of occupations might be due to changes in a small number of occupations rather than being a general feature of the occupational structure.

Budig, Michelle J., and Paula England. 2001. "The Wage Penalty for Motherhood." American Sociological Review 66: 204-225. 22 pages.

Using fixed-effects models to analyze data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, Budig and England find evidence that motherhood causes a wage penalty of 7 percent per child. Furthermore, only one-third of the penalty comes from interruptions in women's employment, which lead to breaks and more part-time work as well as fewer years of experience and seniority. Finally, the authors conclude that mothers' placement in jobs that are associated with low pay, such as those that are less demanding or that offer mother-friendly features, explain little of the motherhood penalty. Budig and England argue that the remaining, unexplained penalty may arise from the impact that motherhood has on productivity and/or from employer discrimination. As a last point, they argue that the costs of child rearing should be collectivized broadly to the extent that its benefits diffuse broadly.

Rivera, Lauren. 2012. "Hiring as Cultural Matching: The Case of Elite Professional Service Firms." American Sociological Review 77: 999-1022. 24 pages.

Using interviews and participant observation, Rivera investigates the process of hiring in elite professional service firms to assess the widely discussed though untested hypothesis that cultural similarities between employers and job candidates matter for hiring decisions. She argues that hiring is more than merely a process of skills sorting; rather, it also involves cultural matching - as evidenced in "shared tastes, experiences, leisure pursuits, and self-presentation styles" - between candidates, evaluators, and firms. Indeed, concerns about cultural similarities often outweighed concerns about productivity alone. The author finds three processes whereby cultural matching shapes candidate evaluation: cultural fit as a formal evaluative criterion incorporated in organizational processes and embraced by evaluators; cognitive processes through which cultural similarities accrue to greater understanding and valuation of candidates' qualifications, such that evaluators believe that culturally similar applicants are better candidates; and finally, affective processes, which encourage evaluators to fight for those candidates with whom they feel an emotional spark of commonality.

Waters, Mary C. 1999. Black Identities: West Indian Immigrant Dreams and American Realities. Chapters 1 (1-15), 5 (140-191) and 9 (326-346). 88 pages.

Using interviews and participant observation, Waters studies how the experiences of West Indian immigrants and their children are determined by the interaction between their culture and identities and how that culture and those identities are shaped and transformed by conditions in American society - especially the American racial structure. Some aspects of the West Indian culture help immigrants to be successful in American. In comparing West Indians and African Americans concerning their interpretations of and reactions to racial discrimination, Waters claims that the former have a low expectation of bitter interpersonal race relations, which enables them to have better interactions with white Americans than many native African Americans. Additionally, West Indians have high ambitions, since they come from a society with a majority of blacks and where many blacks are in high positions. Yet, because they expect race relations to be an obstacle for them to rise socioeconomically in America, they have a strong sense of militance for their rights. Ultimately, however, the structural realities of the race relations in America overwhelm these aspects of the West Indian culture. Although structural racism - that is, "blocked mobility for blacks in the society and a hierarchy in which whites have political and economic power" - fits in with immigrants' worldview, such that they feel ready to handle it, they are often unprepared for the pervasiveness of interpersonal racism in American society. Interpersonal racism can be manifested in either old-fashioned racism - i.e., blatant acts of discrimination and prejudice, such as insults and physical threats - and subtle experiences that are stained with racial suspicions and connotations. With time, interpersonal racism undermines immigrants' openness to respond to whites as "individuals," and the expectation of mistreatment because of one's skin color begins to shape every encounter between blacks and whites. These experiences are particularly true for working-class and poor immigrants, who are unable to keep their identities and pass them on to their children, thereby becoming more like black Americans. Whereas working-class second-generation West Indians are perceived more as African Americans, their middle-class counterparts "use their cultural identities to claim an American identity as a member of a 'model minority,' such that they distance themselves from the underclass image of black Americans while simultaneously not denying their racial identity as black. It is clear, then, that class shapes how race and culture interact in the development of people's identities. To sum up her argument, Waters states that the solution to the problems of racial disadvantages in America lies in drastic changes in the racist structures that deny equal opportunities to anyone who is identified as black.

Lucas, Samuel R. 2001. "Effectively Maintained Inequality: Education Transitions, Track Mobility, and Social Background Effects." American Journal of Sociology 106:1642-90. 49 pages.

Using longitudinal data from High School and Beyond, Lucas intends to bring two literatures together: the one that investigates students' placement in the stratified curriculum - i.e., students' track location - and a second that understands educational attainment as a process of completing a sequence of transitions. In doing so, the author is able to provide a comprehensive explanation for the role of social background in shaping educational attainment. This explanation relies on a theory of effectively maintained inequality. The theory states that "socioeconomically advantaged actors secure for themselves and their children some degree of advantage wherever advantages are commonly possible." That is, if quantitative differences are common, then these actors will obtain some quantitative advantage; on the other hand, if qualitative differences are common, they will secure some qualitative advantage. Social background, therefore, affects educational attainment in two key ways: it determines who completes some level of education if completion of that level is not nearly universal, and it influences the kind of education received within levels of education that are nearly universal. In other words, instead of coming to an end with universality of access, class conflict merely changes its shape as social background factors continue to exert a pervasive role in molding class differences in education.

Reardon, Sean F. 2011. "The Widening Academic Achievement Gap between the Rich and the Poor: New Evidence and Possible Explanations." Pp. 91-115 in Whither Opportunity? Rising Inequality, Schools, and Children's Life Chances, edited by Greg J. Duncan and Richard J. Murnane. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. 25 pages.

Using various datasets, Reardon investigates the relationship between family socioeconomic characteristics and children's academic achievement and concludes that the achievement gap between children from high- and low-income families has been widening over the past decades. The author finds that the achievement gap by income is now substantially larger than the black/white gap. He justifies this pattern with the changes that have taken place since the 1970s, such as efforts to desegregate schools and affirmative-action programs. At the same time, income inequality began to grow considerably in the 1970s and has been following this trend since then. His view about racial disparities in education, then, is more optimistic than that of Condron. But Reardon is not as hopeful about the ability of school environments to mitigate class disparities in learning. Nonetheless, he remains cautious about asserting that family income has become more determinative than race in American society. The fact that achievement gaps by income do not grow in ways that would be predicted by changes in income inequality challenges the idea that rising income inequality is the dominant factor shaping the gap. While the achievement gap has grown among children from above-median-income families, Reardon contends that this is because of an increase in the association between income and achievement, not because of increases in income inequality. Higher-income families have continually invested more in their children's cognitive development, which might at least partially explain trends in the achievement gap.

Wacquant, Loic. 2013. "Symbolic Power and Group-Making: On Pierre Bourdieu's reframing of Class." Journal of Classical Sociology 13 (2): 274-291. 18 pages.

Wacquant discusses Bourdieu's work on class. He argues that Bourdieu's contribution was to unveil the ontological status of groups by shedding light on the mechanisms whereby they are created. These mechanisms involve the inculcation of schemata of perception that turns a mental construct into a historical reality and the deployment of these schemas to draw, enforce, or challenge social boundaries. Hence, Bourdieu is particularly interested in the concrete activities and mechanism whereby mental constructs are realized into enduring historical realities. Institutions as a "system of positions" and embodied subjectivities as "clumps of dispositions" work together to make symbolic divisions a reality by carving them into materiality.

Warren, John Robert, and Robert M. Hauser. 1997. "Social Stratification across Three Generations: New Evidence from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study." American Sociological Review 62: 561-572. 12 pages.

Warren and Hauser attempt to contribute to the stratification literature by expanding the notion of "family of origin" to encompass a third generation of family members - that is, grandparents. Their decision emerges in response to the fact that scholars of intergenerational mobility have typically limited their analysis to mobility across two generations. The authors' main question is whether grandparents' educational attainments, occupational statuses, and incomes affect their grandchildren's outcomes (i.e., educational attainments and occupational statuses) directly when the characteristics of parents are held constant. For this, they use data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study. Their findings show that there are no significant, independent effects of grandparents' socioeconomic statuses on their grandchildren's outcomes, net of parents' characteristics. In other words, there seem to be no lagged effects of grandparents' status on grandchildren's outcomes. Warren and Hauser, therefore, conclude that previous studies are not in any way biased by taking only two generations of family members into account.

Oliver, Melvin and Thomas Shapiro. 1997. Black Wealth / White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality. Routledge. Chapters 1 (11-34). 24 pages.

Wealth is a measure not just of income but also of one's investments, savings, inheritance, income and prudent consumption over a lifetime. Oliver and Shapiro argue that blacks and whites of similar income levels have very different amounts of wealth. This disparity represents a cumulative disadvantage that allows historical discrimination to continue to have an impact today. (Note: Cumulative disadvantage is the theory by Price and Merton in the 1960s that basically argues that advantages and disadvantages in early life stages have a profound effect throughout the life span. Advantage and disadvantage in early life is transmitted intergenerationally.) Historical discrimination and the racialization of state policies, in various forms, is the root cause of this wealth gap. Specifically, the authors highlight (1) the federal housing authority—stimulated segregation by encouraging white suburbanization, public housing projects in black neighborhoods; (2) AFDC(Aid to Families with Dependent Children)—at first, did not include blacks because states did home inspections to determine 'suitability'; (3) Tax code—tax breaks for investments and mortgages, are less common among blacks; (4) Social security—when implemented, old age insurance used to marginalize agricultural workers, who were mostly black. Now non-married partners/ mothers of children do not receive SS benefits; (5) Sedimentation of racial inequality—harder to accumulate wealth: Each generation has to start from scratch; (6) Stymied black self-employment—Post-bellum prohibition of business ownership by blacks and segregation closing off certain markets to black businesses.

Western, Bruce, and Katherine Beckett. 1999. "How Unregulated Is the US Labor Market? The Penal System as a Labor Market Institution." American Journal of Sociology 104: 1030-60. 31 pages.

Western and Beckett challenge the view that the reason behind the high rates of unemployment in Europe is the pervasiveness of large welfare states, whereas unregulated labor market in the United States yields a robust employment performance. To do so, they argue that labor markets are embedded in a vast range of social arrangements that go beyond the welfare state or industrial relations. In particular, the criminal justice system in America equates a substantial state intervention that has profound effects on employment. The authors analyze both short-run and long-run effects of the rapid growth in U.S. incarceration over the past decades. Their conclusion is that while incarceration in America lowers conventional measures of unemployment in the short run by keeping joblessness among able-bodied, working-age men from sight, it raises unemployment in the long run by hindering the job prospects of ex-convicts. On the one hand, then, state intervention in the labor market through the penal system contributes to a falsely optimistic depiction of labor market performance in the U.S. compared to Europe. On the other, incarceration significantly undercuts the productivity and employment chances of the male workforce in the long run. In short, labor markets are embedded in a multitude of social arrangements, and this broader institutional context dramatically influence labor market outcomes even if not directly through such mechanisms as labor unions or social policy.

Weber, Max. "Class, Status, Party," "Status Groups and Classes," "Open and Closed Relationships." Pp. 114-132.

Whereas Durkheimians and Marxists view the formation of social systems based on collective action and class struggles, respectively, Weber adds the notion of power to the discussion. He argues that social systems are not merely determined on economic grounds; rather, he views dimensions of social stratification as resting on class, status, and power. ● Weber defines power as the chance that a man or group can realize their own will in a communal action against the resistance of others. Action is aimed at acquiring social power and influencing communal action. ● Weber defines class position as one's class situation or "market position," which refers to one's chance in the market and the power to dispose of goods or services. Class resides in the economic order. Whereas Marx views class as confined to ownership and is related only to the process of production (and, in tum, exploitation), Weber views class as being related to ownership (the process and means of production) and exchange (on the market). Weber's conception of class is more gradational. ● Weber views status as based on consumption and the social estimation of honor. Status resides in social order. Status is usually determined by a mode of living, formal education, prestige of birth, or occupation. It is a status grouping of individuals who share a style of life and interact as social equals. While status is not necessarily linked to class situation, property classes often form the nucleus of a status group. This can be contrasted with Marx, who provides an explicit discussion of class and explains how communal identity does not necessarily respond to class.

Wilson, William Julius. 1978. The Declining Significance of Race (and "Revisited" Essay). Pp. 765-79. 15 pages.

Wilson discusses the fundamental changes that have happened to traditional patterns of interaction between blacks and whites - especially in the labor market - in recent years. Whereas the previous barriers were aimed at curtailing the opportunities of the entire black population, the new barriers of the latter half of the twentieth century create obstacles essentially for the black underclass. That is, while the old barriers relied on the features of racial oppression, the new barriers point toward an emerging form of class subordination. In the economic sphere, then, class has become more salient than race in determining the access of blacks to privilege and power. The author's thesis states that American society has experienced three major stages of race relations - namely, "plantation economy and racial-caste oppression," "industrial expansion, class conflict, and racial oppression," and a modern, industrial, post-World War II period of "progressive transition from racial inequalities to class inequalities" - and that in each of these stages, different systems of production and different polity arrangements have imposed different constraints on how racial groups interact in the United States. These constraints have structured race relations and have produced unique contexts for the manifestation of racial antagonisms as well as for patterns of racial group access to rewards and privileges. Wilson argues that in the current modern industrial era, governmental attempts to eliminate traditional racial barriers through such programs as affirmative action have inadvertently widened class divisions within the black community, as those programs have paved the way for the success of more privileged blacks while falling short of mitigating the economic barriers that members of the black underclass face. In short, the economic and political systems in the United States have somewhat allowed privileged blacks to fill positions of prestige and influence at the same time that they have continued to deny lower-class blacks access to opportunities. In his "Revisited" essay written years after the book's publication, Wilson admits that he no longer supports the view that policy should shifts its focus to more class-based, race-neutral programs. Instead, he now believes that both race-specific and race-neutral programs should be strongly emphasized to combat racial inequality. This view stems from the fact that racial stratification in the country has remained pervasive in the decades following his writing, and the variety of problems that plague blacks demand both race-based solutions like affirmative action and class-based solutions, such as programs to increase employment in areas where joblessness is rife.

Wright, Erik Olin. "A General Framework for the Analysis of Class Structure." Pp. 98-111.

Wright (1984) attempts to refine Marxist theory by grappling with the issue of the middle class, which doesn't fit neatly into Marx's classification of the two-class struggle. He argues that it's more useful to think of class in terms of exploitation than in terms of dominance. He argues that property relations are based on the exploitation of assets that classes control, which means that the middle class should be conceptualized as both exploiting one asset (e.g. skills) and being exploited for another (e.g. capital). For example, highly skilled wage-earners are capitalistically exploited because they lack assets in capital, but they are also exploiters. They, therefore, constitute contradictory locations within exploitation relations. The middle class thus represents a contradictory location within exploitation relations. This provides the basis for a more systematic empirical analysis of the relationship between the objective properties of class structures and the problems of class formation, class alliances, and class struggle. Method: Analysis of Swedish and U.S. data on income and class attitudes to back up his theory; looks at differences across different cells of the table, but no strong attempt to tease out the order of the cells. NEO-MARXIST