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SAGE Publications Inc: American Sociological Review: Table of Contents

“Stepping-Stone” versus “Dead-End” Jobs: Occupational Structure, Work Experience, and Mobility Out of Low-Wage Jobs

American Sociological Review, Ahead of Print.
Does working in a low-wage job lead to increased opportunities for upward mobility, or is it a dead-end that traps workers? In this article, we examine whether low-wage jobs are “stepping-stones” that enable workers to move to higher-paid jobs that are linked by institutional mobility ladders and skill transferability. To identify occupational linkages, we create two measures of occupational similarity using data on occupational mobility from matched samples of the Current Population Survey (CPS) and data on multiple dimensions of job skills from the O*NET. We test whether work experience in low-wage occupations increases mobility between linked occupations that results in upward wage mobility. Our analysis uses longitudinal data on low-wage workers from the 1979 National Longitudinal Study of Youth (NLSY) and the 1996 to 2008 panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP). We test the stepping-stone perspective using multinomial conditional logit (MCL) models, which allow us to analyze the joint effects of work experience and occupational linkages on achieving upward wage mobility. We find evidence for stepping-stone mobility in certain areas of the low-wage occupational structure. In these occupations, low-wage workers can acquire skills through work experience that facilitate upward mobility through occupational changes to skill and institutionally linked occupations.

23 March 2024, 12:29 pm
Honor among Crooks: The Role of Trust in Obfuscated Disreputable Exchange

American Sociological Review, Ahead of Print.
When people want to conduct a transaction, but doing so would be morally disreputable, they can obfuscate the fact that they are engaging in an exchange while still arranging for a set of transfers that are effectively equivalent to an exchange. Obfuscation through structures such as gift-giving and brokerage is pervasive across a wide range of disreputable exchanges, such as bribery and sex work. In this article, we develop a theoretical account that sheds light on when actors are more versus less likely to obfuscate. Specifically, we report a series of experiments addressing the effect of trust on the decision to engage in obfuscated disreputable exchange. We find that actors obfuscate more often with exchange partners high in loyalty-based trustworthiness, with expected reciprocity and moral discomfort mediating this effect. However, the effect is highly contingent on the type of trust; trust facilitates obfuscation when it is loyalty-based, but this effect flips when trust is ethics-based. Our findings not only offer insights into the important role of relational context in shaping moral understandings and choices about disreputable exchange, but they also contribute to scholarship on trust by demonstrating that distinct forms of trust can have diametrically opposed effects.

16 March 2024, 5:44 pm
A Hidden Barrier to Diversification? Performance Recognition Penalties for Incumbent Workers in Male-Dominated Occupations

American Sociological Review, Ahead of Print.
Responding to persistent gender inequity, organizations have adopted diversity initiatives to promote women’s representation in traditionally male-dominated occupations. Although studies have identified challenges to these initiatives for women entering occupations, we uncover a performance recognition penalty for incumbent workers originating from the process of occupational diversification. As women incrementally enter a male-dominated occupation, a conflict arises between the changing gender composition at the work-unit level and the masculine “ideal worker” prototype embedded in the occupation. We propose that this conflict will lower the performance expectations of the work unit, decreasing the individual likelihood of performance recognition for each worker in the unit. Using detailed panel data on police officers, we found that an officer’s individual likelihood of being nominated for a performance award consistently declined when their police unit proportionately increased in women officers. Both men and women managers enacted this penalty, with men managers penalizing men subordinates more than women subordinates. This pattern remained for awards recognizing exceptional performance, regardless of gender-typing of the unit or its work tasks, and considering officer tenure and attrition from the unit. Our findings offer novel insights into the challenge of diversifying male-dominated occupations.

8 March 2024, 5:41 pm
Learning to Think Like an Economist without Becoming One: Ambivalent Reproduction and Policy Couplings in a Masters of Public Affairs Program

American Sociological Review, Ahead of Print.
In recent years, sociologists have labored to understand how economists have gained influence over policymaking. We extend this research by shifting focus from the matter of influence to the matter of policy training. Granted that economists already have influence, how do future policy professionals learn economic rationales? How is this mindset transmitted to hesitant students? By asking these questions, we bring socialization back into institutional research on “new” professionals. Utilizing data from an ethnography of a Masters of Public Affairs program, we find that students learn economics through a process of “ambivalent reproduction”: they learn to “think like an economist without becoming one.” They remain skeptical and reject the notion that they are economists, and when they use economics in their future policy work they do so in limited ways. Nonetheless, ambivalent reproduction sustains the policy status-quo and allows economics to remain influential without true belief. Ambivalent reproduction provides a new means for understanding the loosely coupled influence of economics on policy, and it contributes to the sociology of economics, inhabited institutionalism, and professional socialization.

5 March 2024, 2:33 pm
Safe as Houses: Financialization, Foreclosure, and Precarious Homeownership in the United States

American Sociological Review, Ahead of Print.
The financialization of the U.S. economy has had important implications for household well-being, but the mechanisms connecting financialization and precarity have not been fully identified. This research identifies mortgage foreclosure as a nexus connecting macro-level financialization to an array of downstream consequences for homeowners and asks (1) how mortgage securitization, a key technology of financialization, enabled new foreclosure practices; and (2) how these practices affect housing precarity among homeowners at risk of foreclosure. To answer these questions, I analyze court records, interviews with key participants, and primary source documents to examine the evolution of mortgage foreclosure in Cook County, Illinois, from 1992 to 2006. I find that as mortgage securitization transformed the social and economic relations between borrowers and lenders, foreclosure became actively managed as both a driver of costs and a source of profits, and loan administrators and their attorneys worked to reduce costly borrower protections. These changes increased housing precarity by making foreclosure more frequent and more rapid.

1 March 2024, 3:35 pm
Cultural Tariffing: Appropriation and the Right to Cross Cultural Boundaries

American Sociological Review, Ahead of Print.
Why are some acts of cultural boundary-crossing considered permissible whereas others are repudiated as cultural appropriation? We argue that perceptions of cultural appropriation formed in response to the emergence of cultural omnivorousness as a dominant form of high-status consumption, making boundary-crossing a source of cultural capital. Consequently, the right to adopt a practice from a culture that is not one’s own is determined on the basis of the costs and benefits one is presumed to accrue. People express disapproval at boundary-crossing if they believe it devalues or extracts value at the expense of the target culture. We call this process cultural tariffing. We test our theory in a between-subject experimental design, demonstrating that individuals who enjoy a privileged social position, as inferred from their social identity or socioeconomic status, have less normative latitude to cross cultural boundaries. This is explained by perceptions that these actors are either devaluing or exploiting the target culture. While symbolic boundaries and cultural distinction theories are inconsistent with our results, we find that Americans who are disenchanted about group-based social mobility are the most likely to be outraged by cultural boundary-crossing. Cultural tariffing, we therefore posit, is a form of symbolic redistribution.

21 February 2024, 8:41 pm
Understanding Competition in Social Space: Religious Congregations in Manhattan, 1949 to 1999

American Sociological Review, Volume 89, Issue 1, Page 60-87, February 2024.
Competition between social units has long been central to sociological theories of change. Understanding it has become particularly important in the sociology of religion with the theory of religious economies, a market model of religious change. Existing empirical tests of the theory are limited by (1) ambiguity regarding which religious groups are expected to compete with which other groups, and/or (2) a neglect of the local level (competition among congregations). Using an original compilation of the life histories of religious congregations in Manhattan from 1949 to 1999, I conduct event-history analyses that avoid those limitations. The chief results are the following: (1) the more congregations there were near a given congregation that were theologically dissimilar to that congregation, the less likely that congregation was to advertise; (2) when there was an increase over time in the number of nearby congregations that were theologically similar to the focal congregation, that congregation became more likely to advertise; and (3) when there was an increase over time in the number of nearby congregations that were theologically dissimilar to the focal congregation, that congregation became less likely to advertise. Implications for the study of religion include modifications of religious-economies theory; broader implications speak to understanding the social units that compete and what drives competition.

22 January 2024, 1:20 pm
Editors’ Note, 2024 to 2026: Looking to W.E.B. Du Bois

American Sociological Review, Volume 89, Issue 1, Page 1-5, February 2024.

 

18 January 2024, 7:43 pm
From Hard Labor to Market Discipline: The Political Economy of Prison Work, 1974 to 2022

American Sociological Review, Volume 89, Issue 1, Page 126-158, February 2024.
A long sociological tradition has examined how state coercion undergirds the “free market” for labor. In the contemporary prison, however, there are signs this relationship has been turned on its head. Whereas in the past, state coercion helped prisons generate profit for private markets, today market ideas are increasingly used within prisons to facilitate state control. I draw on an analysis of seven waves of the Survey of Inmates in State Correctional Facilities, as well as 61 interviews with state prison administrators, prison industry advocates, and formerly incarcerated people. Although the market for the products of prison labor has declined, and incarcerated people, on average, are working less than ever before, inequality in the distribution of work and rewards for this work has sharpened. This changing structure of prison labor is associated with a changing understanding of it. Prison administrators, and to some extent incarcerated people themselves, use market ideas to explain the new organization of prison labor and justify people’s places within it. This organization and these ideas solve managerial problems within the prison and are suggestive of parallels between prison and social welfare policy in the contemporary era.

18 January 2024, 7:41 pm
Threats to Blue Networks: The Effect of Partner Injuries on Police Misconduct

American Sociological Review, Volume 89, Issue 1, Page 159-195, February 2024.
Police culture creates an “us versus them” dynamic, which, at its worst, treats threats to the “thin blue line” as worthy of group response. Prior research documents such a group threat process as a possible mechanism for police misconduct, but few studies have analyzed the precise network relationships that serve as the conduit for a misconduct response. Using data on misconduct, officer injuries, and officer networks within the Chicago Police Department (CPD) between 2004 and 2015, this study examines the extent to which injuries officers receive from civilians might elicit a misconduct response from officers’ peers, and especially their direct network associates. Findings demonstrate that network ties to injured officers predict higher levels of subsequent misconduct, especially for officers with stronger ties to the injured officer. Furthermore, the effects of peer injury on subsequent misconduct are contingent on the race of the suspect involved: officers whose peers are injured are linked to more use of excessive force, as well as other types of misconduct, when the suspects involved are Black. These findings support our central hypothesis of a networked group threat response that links peer injuries to police misconduct.

3 January 2024, 8:37 pm
The Social Foundations of Academic Freedom: Heterogeneous Institutions in World Society, 1960 to 2022

American Sociological Review, Volume 89, Issue 1, Page 88-125, February 2024.
This article analyzes academic freedom worldwide with newly available cross-national data. The literature principally addresses impingements on academic freedom arising from religion or repressive states. Academic freedom has broadly increased since 1945, but we see episodic reversals, including in recent years. Conventional work emphasizes the uniformity of international institutional structures and their influence on countries. We attend to the heterogeneity of international structures in world society and theorize how they contribute to ebbs and flows of academic freedom. Post-1945 liberal international institutions enshrined key rights and norms that bolstered academic freedom worldwide. Alongside them, however, illiberal alternatives coexisted. Cold War communism, for instance, anchored cultural frames that justified greater constraints on academia. We evaluate domestic and global arguments using regression models with country fixed effects for 155 countries from 1960 to 2022. Findings support conventional views: academic freedom is associated positively with democracy and negatively with state religiosity and militarism. We also find support for our argument regarding heterogeneous institutional structures in world society. Country linkages to liberal international institutions are positively associated with academic freedom. Illiberal international structures and organizations have the opposite effect. Heterogeneous institutions in world society, we contend, shape large-scale trajectories of academic freedom.

30 December 2023, 9:24 am
Tokenism and Its Long-Term Consequences: Evidence from the Literary Field

American Sociological Review, Volume 89, Issue 1, Page 31-59, February 2024.
Research on tokenism has mostly focused on negative experiences and career outcomes for individuals who are tokenized. Yet tokenism as a structural system that excludes larger populations, and the meso-level cultural foundations under which tokenism occurs, are comparatively understudied. We focus on these additional dimensions of tokenism using original data on the creation and long-term retention of postcolonial literature. In an institutional environment in which the British publishing industry was consolidating the production of non-U.S. global literatures written in English, and readers were beginning to convey status through openness in cultural tastes, the conditions for tokenism emerged. Using data on the emergence of postcolonial literature as a category organized through the Booker Prize for Fiction, we test and find for non-white authors (1) evidence of tokenism, (2) unequal treatment of those under consideration for tokenization, and (3) long-term retention consequences for those who were not chosen. We close with a call for more holistic work across multiple dimensions of tokenism, analyses that address inequality across and within groups, and a reconsideration of tokenism within a broader suite of practices that have grown ascendent across arenas of social life.

15 December 2023, 1:08 pm
Unrealized Integration in Education, Sociology, and Society

American Sociological Review, Volume 89, Issue 1, Page 6-30, February 2024.
In the 2023 ASA presidential address, Prudence Carter delves into the landscape of U.S. society, tracing some of its historical progress and confronting contemporary social, economic, educational, and political challenges. Central to her argument is an exploration of the concept of “unrealized integration” and how it has hindered the nation’s march toward an inclusive, multiracial democracy. Carter describes and characterizes the current state of integration within education and society. Despite the widespread rhetoric of diversity in our organizations and institutions, she critiques its shallow application, exposing diversity’s inability to rectify imbalances of power- and resource-sharing. Incorporating the idea of “tipping points,” she discusses how civil rights movements, despite expanding representation and opportunity, have faced recurrent waves of political backlash and reversals. She contends that an erosion of social progress occurs when there is an imbalance in the pursuit of distributional equality (concerning material resources) and relational equality (involving social and cultural dynamics and processes that shape well-being). Additionally, she identifies three other crucial areas that warrant focus to pave the path toward realized integration within education and society. In a forward-looking call to arms, Carter underscores the imperative for sociologists to transcend epistemological and methodological boundaries; and she advocates for robust collaborations across the social sciences and humanities to harness the collective power of knowledge-generation and solution-building for pressing societal issues.

15 December 2023, 1:07 pm

American Sociological Review

The American Sociological Review is the flagship journal of the American Sociological Association (ASA). The ASA founded this journal in 1936 with the mission to publish original works of interest to the sociology discipline in general, new theoretical developments, results of research that advance our understanding of fundamental social processes, and important methodological innovations. All areas of sociology are welcome in the American Sociological Review. Emphasis is on exceptional quality and general interest. The American Sociological Review does not publish book reviews.

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