Essays
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Education in an Open Informational World - Scardamalia, Marlene
Education now functions in an open informational world in which there are essentially no boundaries constraining the information that may be brought to bear on any topic, question, or activity. Changes in the form and connectedness of information are giving rise to new issues concerning coherence, sustained work with ideas, and complexity. In place of the extended text of a well‐crafted book, with its carefully developed line of thought, information on the web is frequently presented as hypertext—relatively small packets of information complexly interlinked. It is now up to the reader to construct a connecting line of thought. The ability to produce coherent knowledge out of such fragmentary information now has a name: transliteracy. Transliteracy requires not only skill in using new information media but ability to carry on sustained integrative work with ideas—an ability traditionally the mark of a skilled teacher but now increasingly the shared capacity of a knowledge‐building community. Whereas traditionally the skilled teacher has smoothed the way to learning by simplifying complex content and problems, functioning in the open informational world requires that learners be able and willing to work with complexity and with problems that have not been structured for them. A current trend is to bring these requirements together in a focus on the “big ideas” of the disciplines. A number of “constructivist” educational approaches engage students in creative knowledge work and problem solving but neglect the sine qua non of contemporary knowledge building: students taking collective responsibility for idea development and improvement. -
Educational Testing: Measuring and Remedying Achievement Gaps - Lee, Jaekyung
Achievement gaps, as measured by standardized tests, are inextricably related to educational goals, standards, norms, and benchmarks for student learning outcomes. I revisit conventional approaches to educational testing to measure achievement gaps—norm‐referenced, criterion‐referenced, and potential‐referenced tests. I explore and discuss a paradigm shift from “passive” tests to “responsive” tests that promotes the diagnosis and remediation of achievement gaps. Particularly, I propose an environment‐referenced approach to testing with the specification of desired learning opportunities and environment conditions that enable students to meet upgraded achievement norms, standards, and benchmarks. -
Electoral Authoritarianism - Schedler, Andreas
Electoral authoritarian regimes practice authoritarianism behind the institutional facades of representative democracy. They hold regular multiparty elections at the national level, yet violate liberal‐democratic minimum standards in systematic and profound ways. Since the end of the Cold War, they have turned into the most common form of nondemocratic rule in the world. Responding to the empirical expansion of nondemocratic multiparty elections, the study of “electoral authoritarian” regimes has taken center stage in comparative political science. This essay reviews the conceptual and empirical foundations of this flourishing new field of comparative politics, summarizes cutting‐edge research on regime trajectories and internal regime dynamics, and lays out substantive issues and methodological desiderata for future research. -
Emerging Trends in the Political Economy of Taxation - Kiser, Edgar
This essay briefly summarizes recent work and suggests future directions in the study of taxation. We analyze the determinants of total tax revenue, tax structure, tax administration, and the relationship between taxation and spending. In the section on total tax revenue, we look at the effects of democracy, debates a possible ceiling on total revenue, and whether less developed and Asian countries will catch up with revenue extraction in the developed west. The section on tax structure suggests that the era of progressive taxation may be ending and that taxes intended to serve social purposes, such as sin taxes and carbon taxes, are on the rise. Our discussion of tax administration focuses on the determinants of taxpayer compliance and whether less developed countries are developing centralized bureaucratic administrations. We conclude by looking at the relationship between taxation and spending, first exploring the increase in deficit spending and second looking at attempts by both sub‐state and supra‐state political units to get more control of taxation relative to national states. -
Emerging Trends: Asset Pricing - Campbell, John Y.
The modern field of asset pricing is organized around the concept of the stochastic discount factor. This essay uses this framework to discuss the literature on predictability of asset returns in the short and long run, the influence of irrational investor expectations on asset prices, and the cross‐section of stock returns. Future progress will require microeconomic data on investor actions and ideally survey evidence on their risk preferences and beliefs. -
Emerging Trends: Family Formation and Gender - Matysiak, Anna
Family formation is a well‐studied topic in demography and the social sciences. Yet, open questions to be addressed by future research remain. Focusing on the childbearing side of family formation, we discuss how a gendered lens, which led researchers to concentrate on women's experiences, has shaped previous studies. We argue that future research can be advanced by (i) going beyond this perspective and addressing men and their experiences pertaining to work and family and by (ii) broadening research on couples in order to understand how his and her resources, values, and experiences interact in relating to family formation. Furthermore, we discuss (iii) the relevance of incorporating a larger array of macrolevel factors into studies on family formation, such as regulations affecting the practical and daily lives of families, or the cultural context of emotions and (iv) which methodological advances are needed to address the complexity of the studied processes. -
Empirical Models of Bilateral Contracting - Lee, Robin S.
This essay briefly surveys the empirical literature on bilateral contracting. The focus is on contracting between firms in vertical markets, and I discuss recent approaches to modeling their determination and the impact of contractual restrictions on competition, industry structure, and welfare. I also highlight challenges facing future research in this area. -
Evaluating and Rewarding Teachers - Hart, Cassandra
Policymakers and researchers alike debate the optimal structure of teacher evaluation and compensation systems. This article reviews research in both fields, with a concentration on one increasingly policy‐relevant topic in each domain. Within the evaluation domain, particular attention is given to value‐added measures, which are increasingly being used to incorporate information about student test performance into teacher evaluations. While these measures allow evaluators to make quantitative estimates of teachers' contributions to student learning, critics argue that the measures suffer from a number of problems, including lack of stability, bias, and misattribution of teacher contributions. Within the realm of compensation, I devote particular attention to recent efforts to implement merit pay schemes, which aim to reward teachers, or teams of teachers, that are especially successful at boosting student achievement. Given that states and districts are increasingly requiring the use of value‐added measures in evaluations and experimenting with merit pay plans, both areas are ripe for future research into the benefits and costs of these policies. Suggestions for future directions for research in both fields are offered. -
Family Complexity and Kinship - Thomson, Elizabeth
Increases in parental cohabitation, separation or divorce, and re‐partnering or remarriage have generated an increase in the complexity of family and kinship ties. As a result, many scholars claim that family and kinship have become voluntary, with rights and obligations to be negotiated in the same way as those between friends and neighbors. This essay briefly reviews the demographic trends that have produced complex families and kin, and their projections into the future. It argues that kinship structures arising from stable nuclear family and kin networks provide a template for the organization of more complex family ties. Although a considerable degree of voluntariness can be found in ties among complex families and kin, rights and obligations remain structured in terms of blood and marriage, and are also strongly influenced by periods of coresidence. Guidelines do exist for relationships in complex families and kinship networks, and they can be used to further institutional arrangements that fit the circumstances of increasingly diverse types of families and kin. -
Family Formation in Times of Labor Market Insecurities - Huinink, Johannes
Family formation is still a major life goal for an overwhelming section of the population in contemporary societies. It is a major transition in the individual life course because bringing up children in modern societies is a challenging and costly task. Men and women are increasingly aware of this fact. That is why family formation is no longer taken for granted as an obligatory marker of the transition to adulthood. It is increasingly a matter of conscious decision making—at least in modern societies. One would expect economic uncertainty to be a major issue in this decision. Labor market insecurity in particular should prevent couples from realizing family formation and impact the timing of childbirth or the likelihood of remaining childless. -
Family Income Composition - Smith, Kristin E.
Family income has increased overall in the United States since the 1950s, but increased prosperity has not been distributed evenly, with family economic well‐being increasing more for some families than others. The end result has been increased family income inequality. Married couple families with a wife in the labor force have seen the largest gains over the decades. In general, families experienced increased prosperity over the 1950s and 1960s, a time when earnings increased for men and women. Starting in the early 1970s, however, the gap between families with a wife in the labor force and other families expanded markedly, as men's wage inequality grew and women's earnings continued to rise. This resulted in a flat trend line for families dependent only on men's earnings. Meanwhile, female‐led families have seen only modest increases in family income. This uneven growth in family income has its roots in demographic changes in the family, the focus of this essay. Markedly, the rise in women's employment and earnings, the rise in men's wage inequality, and shifts in family structure and increased marital homogamy on earnings all contributed to the shifts in family income composition. -
Financialization of the US Economy - Davis, Gerald (Jerry) F.
“Financialization” describes the increasing centrality of finance and financial considerations to the workings of the economy. This essay reviews the evidence that (i) creating shareholder value became a predominant concern for corporations since 1980, particularly in the United States, and (ii) the financial sector gained increasing prominence and power in the economy, with a number of consequences for the operations of corporations and the organization of society. Opportunities for future research are discussed including documenting the rise of securitization and its effect on the finance industry; understanding the emergence of new noncorporate forms of organization not tied to financial markets; finance and social movements; and finance and culture. -
Framing Work in Metacompetition - Barnett, William P.
Existing research studies competition among organizations, but normally takes as a given the formal and informal “rules of the game” governing competitions. Yet, these “rules” are often determined through a prior, higher‐level competition over the game to be played. Such “metacompetitions” determine who can compete, what kinds of competitive moves can be made, what criteria will be used to evaluate competitors, and what will be the payoffs to competitions. By prevailing in metacompetitions, organizations gain the advantage of competing in a game for which they are well suited, and the disadvantage of rivals who find themselves playing the wrong game. This essay notes that organizations engage in framing work to influence the outcome of metacompetitions, and argues that this behavior shapes the distribution of strategies that we observe among organizations in competition. -
Government Formation and Cabinets - Golder, Sona N.
The government in a parliamentary (or semi‐presidential) democracy refers to the prime minister and the other cabinet ministers, whereas the government in a presidential democracy refers to the president's cabinet. The members of the government cabinet determine national policy and arguably hold the most important political positions in their country. Most governments comprise two or more parties, which means that the government formation process requires coalition‐building. During this process, party elites bargain over who gets which ministerial position and over policy; they can reach an agreement quickly and take office, or the bargaining can break down and take months to resolve. This essay discusses the different types of governments that can form as well as how they form in parliamentary, semi‐presidential, and presidential regimes. Recent research on government formation and cabinets has introduced new theoretical arguments, and the implications of these arguments are being tested with new data and new statistical methods. For example, analyses of European democracies now include the post‐communist Eastern countries (not only the Western ones), and more scholars are studying coalition governments in Latin America. Future research might include more work on cabinets in developing democracies in regions such as Africa and Asia, as well as analyses of the political and economic consequences of bargaining delays and the partisan composition of the government. -
Higher Education and the Exponential Rise of Science: Competition and Collaboration - Powell, Justin J.W.
How we collaborate and compete to find solutions to the problems and challenges of our age vastly impacts our individual and group success and well‐being. Interdependent, the institutions of education and science have dramatically expanded. Today, scientists in nearly all countries contribute to our shared stores of knowledge, with research universities the driving force behind unexpected pure exponential growth in scientific production. Competition—regional, national, organizational, and individual—has become more potent—with performance measures, comparative indicators, and formal evaluations continuously generated and used in decision‐making. Simultaneously, collaboration across institutional, disciplinary, organizational, and cultural boundaries expands the possibilities of discovery and produces the most influential science. Competition and collaboration at the nexus of higher education and science demand enhanced attention as they shape the future of scientific innovation and production, with its understudied yet increasingly incontrovertible effects on individuals and societies. -
Higher Education: A Field in Ferment - Scott, W. Richard
Higher education in the United States is in the throes of change as existing institutions are being challenged and new forms and modes of educational delivery are appearing. To understand and examine these changes, three versions of the “organization field” perspectives are employed. The first emphasizes the forces that have created and perpetuated the existing configuration of colleges and universities. The second stresses the ways in which colleges compete for scarce resources and engage in strategic behavior to survive and gain advantage in a highly competitive and contested arena. And the third focuses attention on consumers (students) rather than providers (colleges), noting alternatives that are emerging to offer training and education outside of the conventional providers. In combination, these perspectives identify varying players and processes that collectively are shaping the future of higher education. -
Household Economy - Lein, Laura
Debates about poverty—the nature of poverty, the measurement of poverty, and appropriate responses to poverty—are at the core of a great deal of research, policy debate, and political discussion. Since the 1950s the prevalence of poverty in the United States has been measured against a national poverty income line that is recalculated every year. A great deal of poverty research concentrates on income levels: how these are assessed, and their implications for family and individual well‐being. Furthermore, access to a number of poverty programs is based on the poverty line or a related measure of income. -
Household Wealth Effects and the US Macroeconomy - Dynan, Karen
The effect of wealth on consumption is an issue of long‐standing interest to economists. Analysts believe that fluctuations in household wealth have driven major swings in economic activity. This essay considers the so‐called “wealth effects”—the impact of changes in wealth on household consumption and the overall macroeconomy. There is an extensive existing literature on wealth effects, but there are also many unanswered issues and questions. This essay reviews the important issues regarding the role wealth plays in the macroeconomy and argues that there is a need for much more wealth effect research as well as better data sources for conducting such analysis. -
How Do Labor Market Networks Work? - Rubineau, Brian
The informal seeking and sharing of job opportunity information via contacts are the dominant mechanisms for both the supply and demand sides of the labor market. Despite many decades of scholarly scrutiny, we have established little certainty about the mechanisms through which labor market networks operate. Much of this uncertainty results from single‐perspective investigations of a fundamentally triadic process. Network‐mediated job search is not merely a version of the classic two‐way matching problem with some additional network factors but is rather a three‐way matching problem with three distinct agentic decision makers: the job seeker, the job screener, and the social contact acting as a connector. This essay summarizes what is currently known about the operation and consequences of labor market networks, their mechanisms, and their contextual dependencies. We show how the perspective of a triad of actors presents new opportunities for resolving current contradictory empirical findings and areas of ongoing debate. Progress on this topic requires both careful causal research isolating mechanisms affecting a particular actor and integrative research on how these mechanisms interact among the triad of actors. -
Incarceration and Health - Wildeman, Christopher
In this essay, I start by briefly discussing the foundational research in this area, which, similar to the study of the consequences of mass imprisonment more broadly, is mostly new. Indeed, all of the foundational research in this field (with the exception of The Prison Community and The Society of Captives), which considered the mental and physical health of current and former inmates, as well as their mortality risks, was conducted only in the past 25 years. In general, this research finds that (i) the imprisonment period appears to have negative effects on mental health but some paradoxical benefits for physical health and mortality and (ii) former inmates have more health problems and higher mortality risk than a comparison group in the free population. After reviewing this literature, I then review some new research in this area, which shows how incarceration shapes (i) the mental health of current and former inmates, (ii) the health of women connected to current and former inmates, and (iii) the health of the children of current and former inmates. This new research is unique not just because of the breadth of outcomes it considers but also because it uses much more rigorous methods to tease out causal relationships (especially for mental health). I close by discussing directions for research, focusing especially on overcoming obstacles to causal inference, considering effects on inequality, and further returning to the roots of this field, which focused on the acute effects of incarceration on the mental health of inmates. -
Inefficiencies in Health Care Provision - Burgess, James F.
This essay seeks to elucidate salient issues on the topic of inefficiency in the provision of health care. We begin with a discussion on the definition of efficiency, and the particular forms it can take in health care. From there, we define a useful framework for thinking about ways in which efficiency in the health care system can be improved. We describe cutting edge research being conducted in the field, and the major challenges to furthering the research agenda in this area, not the least of which is the unique nature of health care itself. We conclude with a discussion about key issues for future research, including the importance of incorporating multidisciplinary perspectives into this research. -
Innovation - Jaffe, Adam B.
Innovation is the creation and commercial implementation of a new product or process, often (but not necessarily) based on new technology. Innovation is a major source of private business success and competitive advantage, and is the major long‐term source in growth in per capita income in an economy. The innovation process is characterized by a high level of uncertainty, long lead times, and “spillovers” of economic benefits whereby innovators capture only a portion of the benefits created by an innovation. Intellectual property rights such as patents mitigate, but do not completely solve the problem of firms' inability to appropriate all of the benefits of their innovations. As a result, the private incentive to invest in innovation is lower than the social benefit, and so the private economy will invest too little in innovation in the absence of government intervention. Governments in developed economies support innovation both directly and indirectly. -
Institutional Change in American Religion - Clevenger, Casey
This essay provides an overview of demographic and organizational changes in American religion since 1965. We focus on religious beliefs and practices, congregational life, special purpose groups, religion outside of religious organizations, and transnational and global aspects of religion. American religious institutions are increasingly diverse, reflecting the growing ethnic, linguistic, and religious pluralism of the United States. Recent immigrants to the United States are more Catholic, more Orthodox, and less Christian than adult Americans overall, and they have joined existing congregations in addition to forming their own religious organizations. A substantial number of Americans now consider themselves spiritual, but not religious, and many do not identify with organized religion at all. American Christianity itself is more politically polarized than in the past, and individuals who are religiously active across traditions tend to be more politically and socially conservative than others with tensions evident around contemporary social issues such as abortion and homosexuality. Existing religious organizations and secular organizations such as hospitals, universities, and prisons have responded to demographic and religious changes by offering new or changed services and physical spaces to meet religious and spiritual needs. We encourage future scholars to address institutional changes in American religion by considering diverse people and traditions, asking questions about religion in religious and nonreligious organizations, and situating studies of the United States in their broader global contexts. -
Institutional Contexts for Socioeconomic Effects on Schooling Outcomes - van de Werfhorst, Herman G.
In the field of stratification sociology, one of the most important developments of the past two decades has been an improved understanding of cross‐national variations with regard to the role of education in society. The structure of educational systems differs in important respects between countries, affecting patterns of inequality. The central issue that will be addressed in this essay is to what extent educational institutional characteristics are related to the level of inequality of educational opportunity (IEO) in a country. IEO refers to the association between background variables, most notably social class origin and race/ethnicity, and schooling outcomes of children. These outcomes include the highest attained educational level, school continuation decisions during the educational career, and student test scores. Institutional characteristics that are discussed include early tracking, forms of standardization, the vocational orientation, and private schooling. -
Institutions and the Economy - Gershenson, Carl
Sociology, political science, and economics have undergone parallel revolutions since the late 1970s, following on the heels of the behavioral revolution of the 1950s and 1960s. Four distinct institutional paradigms have emerged: sociological institutionalism, rational choice institutionalism in political science, historical institutionalism in the same discipline, and new institutional economics. Sociologists argue that economic institutions—which encompass paradigms, conventions, rules, and regulations—shape modern behavior. National institutional differences produce stable patterns of economic behavior within countries, but institutions themselves change over time. Four recent trends in sociology are reviewed: studies of the global spread of regulatory institutions; studies of the use of economic theories to support policy design and economic conventions; studies of market actors as social movements promoting economic change; and studies of the moral and cultural underpinnings of the economy.