AJS; American Journal of Sociology

Conventional analyses of social mobility and status reproduction retrospectively compare an outcome of individuals to a characteristic of their parents. By ignoring the mechanisms of family formation and excluding childless individuals, conventional approaches introduce selection bias into estimates of how characteristics in one generation affect an outcome in the next. The prospective approach introduced here integrates the effects of college on marriage and fertility into the reproduction of educational outcomes...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

With two experiments the authors test and find support for the argument that in small, collectively oriented task groups, status affects social influence the most when the distribution of opinions reduces the least uncertainty. Moreover, they demonstrate that people use the distribution of both status and opinions to reduce uncertainty about the task on which they are working and that this, in turn, promotes social influence. Experiment 1 illustrates that, regardless of the group's sex composition, basis for status differentiation, or size of the group, uncertainty reduction mediates a significant share of the effect of status and opinions on social influence...

This article asks whether standard accounts of class reproduction apply among migrants and their descendants as among the majority group, whether there is a process of assimilation across generations toward the overall (British) pattern of class reproduction, whether the trends over time in absolute and relative mobility among the majority population are mirrored among migrants and their descendants, and whether trends in class reproduction are mirrored in trends in ethnic stratification. Using national representative surveys covering four decades, the authors find a major generational shift, with the first generation experiencing a notable social decline but the second generation having a clear advancement...

Concerns about neighborhood erosion and conflict in ethnically di- verse settings occupy scholars, policy makers, and pundits alike; but the empirical evidence is inconclusive. This article proposes the contested boundaries hypothesis as a refined contextual explanation focused on poorly defined boundaries between ethnic and racial groups. The authors argue that neighborhood conflict is more likely to occur at fuzzy boundaries defined as interstitial or transitional areas sandwiched between two homogeneous communities...

Two related lines of research have gained traction in the social sciences during the past three decades. One examines the association between race and punishment, while a second investigates stratification and colorism, defined as discrimination based on skin tone. Yet rarely do scholars examine these issues together. The current study uses new data to investigate the association between offender's skin tone, Afrocentric facial features, and criminal punishment. More than 850 booking photos of black and white male offenders in two Minnesota counties were coded and then matched to detailed sentencing records...

Women in male-dominated occupations report negative workplace social climates, whereas most men in female-dominated occupations report positive workplace social climates. Using a laboratory experiment mimicking the negative workplace social climates experienced by these token women, the author examines whether women are more sensitive to negative workplace social climates than men are or if, instead, men and women react similarly. Using salivary cortisol, the author finds that token men and token women are equally likely to exhibit a physiological stress response to social exclusion on the basis of gender...

Evidence that social and biological processes are intertwined in producing health and human behavior is rapidly accumulating. Using a feminist approach, this research explores how gender moderates the interaction between biological processes and men's and women's behavioral and emotional responses to similar social environments. Using data from the Collaborative Study on the Genetics of Alcoholism, the influence of gender, social integration, and genetic risk on nicotine and alcohol dependence is examined. Three-way interaction models reveal gender-specific moderation of interactions between genetic risk score and social integration...

In this article we undertake a systematic analysis of why border enforcement backfired as a strategy of immigration control in the United States. We argue theoretically that border enforcement emerged as a policy response to a moral panic about the perceived threat of Latino immigration to the United States propounded by self-interested bureaucrats, politicians, and pundits who sought to mobilize political and material resources for their own benefit. The end result was a self-perpetuating cycle of rising enforcement and increased apprehensions that resulted in the militarization of the border in a way that was disconnected from the actual size of the undocumented flow...

This article builds on Hacking's framework of "dynamic nominalism" to show how knowledge about biological etiology can interact with the "kinds of people" delineated by diagnostic categories in ways that "loop" or modify both over time. The authors use historical materials to show how "geneticization" played a crucial role in binding together autism as a biosocial community and how evidence from genetics research later made an important contribution to the diagnostic expansion of autism. In the second part of the article, the authors draw on quantitative and qualitative analyses of autism rates over time in several rare conditions that are delineated strictly according to genomic mutations in order to demonstrate that these changes in diagnostic practice helped to both increase autism's prevalence and create its enormous genetic heterogeneity...

This article presents a theoretical framework of how intergroup violence may figure into the activation and maintenance of group categories, boundaries, and identities, as well as the mediating role played by organizations in such processes. The framework's analytical advantages are demonstrated in an application to southern lynchings. Findings from event- and community-level analyses suggest that "public" lynchings, carried out by larger mobs with ceremonial violence, but not "private" ones, perpetrated by smaller bands without public or ceremonial violence, fed off and into the racial group boundaries, categories, and identities promoted by the southern Democratic Party at the turn of the 20th century and on which the emerging Jim Crow system rested...

This study outlines a theory of social class based on workplace ownership and authority relations, and it investigates the link between social class and growth in personal income inequality since the 1980s. Inequality trends are governed by changes in between-class income differences, changes in the relative size of different classes, and changes in within-class income dispersion. Data from the General Social Survey are used to investigate each of these changes in turn and to evaluate their impact on growth in inequality at the population level...

Ethnically diverse settings provide opportunities for interethnic friendship but can also increase the preference for same-ethnic friendship. Therefore, same-ethnic friendship preferences, or ethnic homophily, can work at cross-purposes with policy recommendations to diversify ethnic representation in social settings. In order to effectively overcome ethnic segregation, we need to identify those factors within diverse settings that exacerbate the tendency toward ethnic homophily. Using unique data and multiple network analyses, the authors examine 529 adolescent friendship networks in English, German, Dutch, and Swedish schools and find that the ethnic composition of school classes relates differently to immigrant and native homophily...

Effects of disadvantaged neighborhoods on child educational outcomes likely depend on a family's economic resources and the timing of neighborhood exposures during the course of child development. This study investigates how timing of exposure to disadvantaged neighborhoods during childhood versus adolescence affects high school graduation and whether these effects vary across families with different income levels. It follows 6,137 children in the PSID from childhood through adolescence and overcomes methodological problems associated with the joint endogeneity of neighborhood context and family income by adapting novel counterfactual methods--a structural nested mean model estimated via two-stage regression with residuals--for time-varying treatments and time-varying effect moderators...

School racial composition has modest effects on test score gaps, but evidence of a longer-term impact is scarce. Perpetuation theory suggests that blacks who attend schools with higher proportions of white classmates may have better job outcomes. Multilevel analyses of two national longitudinal surveys reveal no effects of high school racial composition on occupational status, employment, or annual earnings for blacks or whites. For other minority groups, attending schools with more whites impedes occupational advancement...

The authors draw on Pierre Bourdieu's theory of cultural reproduction to develop a formal model of the pathways through which cultural capital acts to enhance children's educational and socioeconomic success. The authors' approach brings conceptual and empirical clarity to an important area of study. Their model describes how parents transmit cultural capital to their children and how children convert cultural capital into educational success. It also provides a behavioral framework for interpreting parental investments in cultural capital...

This article provides a ground-level investigation into the lives of penal inmates, linking the literature on race making and penal management to provide an understanding of racial formation processes in a modern penal institution. Drawing on 135 days of ethnographic data collected as an inmate in a Southern California county jail system, the author argues that inmates are subjected to two mutually constitutive racial projects--one institutional and the other microinteractional. Operating in symbiosis within a narrative of risk management, these racial projects increase (rather than decrease) incidents of intraracial violence and the potential for interracial violence...

How do people maintain deeply held moral identities in a seemingly immoral social environment? Cultural sociologists and social psychologists have focused on how individuals cope with contexts that make acting on moral motivations difficult by building supportive networks and embedding themselves in communities of like-minded people. In this article, however, the author argues that actors can achieve a moral "sense of one's place" through a habitus that leverages the material dimensions of place itself...