Essays
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Intellectual Property - Boldrin, Michele
Intellectual property is a propaganda term used by proponents of copyrights and patents to promote the idea that government‐enforced monopolies over ideas and parts of ideas share the beneficial effects of property. In fact, economic research shows that both copyrights and patents do more economic harm than good. In many areas, including copyright and software patents, the only reasonable policy conclusion is abolition. In other areas such as pharmaceutical products, a complex web of regulation and laws have grown around patent protection, and the best method of unraveling this web is still to be found. -
Language Proficiency and the Integration of Immigrant Students in the Education System - Stanat, Petra
The integration of immigrant students in the education system is an important concern in most countries around the world. Several lines of research on this issue focus on the role of language, often distinguishing between students' family language, typically referred to as first language (L1), and the school language, typically referred to as second language (L2). Past research has clearly shown that immigrant students' level of proficiency in L2 affects their school success, yet the role of L1 proficiency is less clear. In addition, the question whether bilingual or monolingual instruction is more effective in supporting immigrant students is largely unresolved. Current investigations aim at overcoming limitations of prior research by employing longitudinal designs, by controlling relevant third variables, and by conducting randomized field trials. Promising avenues for future research include developing more clear‐cut conceptual and operational definitions of core constructs, analyzing potentially important moderators of effects, determining the role quality of language input and instruction play for proficiency development and school success, and analyzing the associations between proficiency development in L1 and L2 with various aspects of integration. -
Latinos and the Color Line - Rodríguez, Clara E.
This essay reviews the issues and current literature on how “race,” skin color, and/or phenotype operate as stratifying agents among Latinos in the United States. We review the trends and emerging issues in this area with regard to health, housing and segregation, and socioeconomic status (SES), including education and criminal justice. We do so in the context of the Census Bureau's release of its 2010 Alternative Questionnaire Experiment (AQE) study. This 5‐year study focuses on how to best ask the race question. One of the key findings of the study was that including “Hispanic/Latinos” as a race in the combined questionnaire format did not reduce the number of people identifying as Hispanic/Latino; however, it did reduce the number of Hispanics/Latinos reporting detailed information on specific national origin. The AQE also recommended further testing of the combined question format. The only time that a Hispanic origin group was included in the Census as a racial category was in 1930 when “Mexican” was included as a race. If the Census recommends the inclusion of Hispanic as a race, it would mark a significant departure from the 1997 Office of Management and Budget (OMB) guidelines and the Census' current policy of thinking of Latinos as an ethnic group, composed of many races, to a racial group similar to Whites, Blacks, or Asians in the United States. We also examine works that assess the importance of collecting data on race and ethnicity as analytically distinct concepts. -
Learning Across the Life Course - Allmendinger, Jutta
Owing to intense changes in educational demands in a globalized world and demographic shifts in almost all developed countries, structures and content of educational and vocational training have to adapt. Specificity refers to the need for a broad‐based education, allowing people to train for more than one occupation. In terms of content, social skills must be taught to embrace diversity. Educational institutions need to be open for all stages in the life course. Moreover, possibilities of disconnecting time and space owing to progress in educational media need to be explored. -
Lifecourse and Aging - Hazan, Haim
This essay addresses the need of peoples everywhere to think about the human life span as a series of discretely identifiable stages here characterized and analyzed as a series of fundamental dimensions around which dominant cultural beliefs are commonly organized. They include: Universality versus diversity; determinacy versus indeterminacy; social time versus experienced time; and course versus cycle. Each dimension is described and exemplified, resulting in a framework to guide future studies of aging and the life course. -
Limits to Human Longevity - Preston, Samuel H.
Longevity has increased sharply in the past century and it is likely to continue increasing. Historical trends in maximum life expectancy at birth show major improvements since 1760. Life expectancy at age 80 has also improved with an accelerating pace in recent years suggesting we are not approaching a biological limit to the length of life. Anticipating the near future of longevity typically relies on extrapolating either longevity itself or age‐specific death rates. The principal alternative to extrapolative methods attempts to model factors affecting mortality and to project those factors into the future. In the more distant future, rather than targeting specific diseases, much research would attempt to arrest the aging process itself either through gene therapy or through medicines that replicate the genes' activities. Stem cell technologies may make it possible to create new body organs to replace defective ones. Although discoveries in laboratories will play an important role in determining the future of longevity, many puzzles remain to be worked out in translating individual behaviors into population‐level indexes. Quasi‐experimental designs may provide a useful approach to investigate systemic determinants of mortality, with implications for the future of longevity. In addition to projections of longevity for national populations, there would also be projections for major groups within populations. Future projections of longevity are likely also to involve much more consideration of the epidemiology of diseases and their interactions. Finally, an attractive approach to longevity is to base projections on birth cohorts instead of, or in addition to, period‐specific data. -
Migrant Networks - Garip, Filiz
Migrant networks—webs of social ties between individuals in origin and migrants in destination—are a key determinant of the magnitude and direction of migration flows, as well as migrants' adaptation outcomes. The increasing emphasis on migrant networks represents a new approach to migration research, which, until the late 1980s, had been dominated by economic or political explanations of migration. This entry summarizes findings on migrant networks from relevant areas of research in anthropology, sociology, demography, and economics; identifies the promising lines of inquiry recently undertaken; and points to key issues for future research, such as understanding how migrant networks impact migration behavior and migrants' experiences. Such research into the specific mechanisms of social transmission will need to engage with the ongoing discussions on network effects and their identification in the social science literature at large, which will require the interdisciplinary collaboration of researchers. -
Migration and Globalization - Peters, Margaret E.
Scholarship on globalization since the 1970s has focused on the increasing integration of world markets for goods, services, and capital. International migration, by comparison, has received relatively little attention. As recent scholarship has shown, the absence of migration from studies on globalization has made our understanding of other aspects of globalization incomplete. Immigration policy interacts with trade and capital policy. All three policies affect firms' production strategies and their support for openness in the other policy areas. Migration, trade, and capital flows also interact. For instance, increased migration can increase trade and investment as well as help states maintain fixed exchange rates. This entry discusses these effects in greater detail and discusses paths for future research. -
Modeling Life Course Structure: The Triple Helix - Schuller, Tom
Researching the life course—the way our lives are structured into particular stages and sequences—opens up a huge range of issues and perspectives. I begin with selected synoptic approaches that give a sense of this multidimensionality, such as the levels at which it applies and the linkages between individual life courses and their social contexts. I discuss particular concepts that figure prominently in the analytical toolbox of life course research, notably stages, transitions, and trajectories. -
Natural Resources and Development - Morrison, Kevin M.
The idea that there is a “resource curse”—that countries with more natural resources tend to do poorly economically and politically—has gained widespread currency in the popular press and elsewhere. Despite the paradoxical nature of the hypothesis, in some ways it seems intuitive because one can look around the world and see many resource‐rich countries that are authoritarian or seem to have squandered their wealth. Nevertheless, recent research has cast doubts on whether there is actually a relationship between natural resources and economic growth or democracy, once one has controlled for other factors. And an alternative line of research argues that natural resources do affect these economic and political outcomes, but whether they do so in a positive or negative way depends on the institutions a country has in place. That is, countries with poor economic and political institutions will suffer a “curse,” but countries with better institutions will not. In this entry, I review the foundational works on natural resources and development as well as these more recent responses, analyzing the trajectory of the literature and key issues for future research. Despite two decades of intensive research, we still have much to learn about whether developing countries will suffer or benefit in an era of increasing commodity prices and resource exploration. -
Neighborhoods and Cognitive Development - Chen, Jondou
Research on neighborhoods and individual well‐being has produced a substantive body of knowledge over the past quarter century. Neighborhood conditions—especially socioeconomic status (SES), which is based on income and education and to a lesser extent on residential stability—are predictive of cognitive development. The strongest evidence controls for individual and family‐level characteristics or examines individuals clustered within neighborhoods in order to obtain estimates of within‐ and between‐neighborhood variance. Another line of research has focused on housing mobility projects, which allow for the experimental assignment of residents to more advantaged neighborhoods. Future research on neighborhoods will continue to blend methods and data from an increasing number of disciplines to better understand human development in context. -
Objects of Urban Security Part II: Emerging Trends - Molotch, Harvey
Security things––intrinsic aspects of the built environment––offer a way to understand an important subset of life encounters while offering up clues of surrounding social relations and political structures. Security projects inveigle citizens in pursuit of everyday goals. For authorities, they set up special challenges both for gaining public acquiescence and for dealing with those who oppose them. As with all public objects, including those as mundane as trash bins, outcomes––for better or worse––involve specific manipulations and negotiations, material as well as ideological. Especially when justified as “security,” they have––we argue––negative consequences on other individual and collective goals. We have detailed this argument in the companion piece to this essay (see Part I: Background & Research Starts by same authors in this volume; see also Molotch, 2012) and carry it forward here toward some larger implications. -
Objects of Urban Security, Part I: Background and Research Starts - Molotch, Harvey
Cities are populated by mechanisms of security. Notice the many intrusive devices and repertoires of control at airport departure gates, office reception, subways, and other sites of modern life. But the presence of security, at least more broadly construed to include infrastructures that channel, inhibit, and intrude, did not originate with 9/11 in America. -
Politics of Immigration Policy - Money, Jeannette
In this essay, I first describe the foundational research that focuses on host or receiving states and the policies that determine states' openness to immigration and to immigrant integration. This research privileges domestic actors and institutions in the choice of immigration policy. In the following section, I outline the research that disaggregates both dimensions of immigration policy into component parts. For immigration control, these include skilled migration, unskilled migration, undocumented migration, and border control. For immigrant integration, this includes labor market integration, family reunification, and access to citizenship, among other policies. The focus on receiving states remains strong but is now complemented by research on sending states' policies toward emigrants. I also outline significant efforts by scholars to construct datasets that would allow researchers to evaluate the hypotheses generated by case studies. In the final section, I argue that, despite advances in the research agenda, there is a continuing paucity of quantitative data that would allow researchers to adjudicate among plausible hypotheses. Moreover, even where data are available, the data are generated by wealthy Western democracies about Western democracies. We have little systematic, cross‐national time series data on the rest of the world. I offer a generic concept, “politicians' incentives,” that provides one way of bridging the gap between our understanding of the politics of immigration policy in wealthy Western democracies and other states in the international system that are implicated in global migration patterns and policies. -
Property Rights and Development - Frye, Timothy
There is a strong consensus that secure property rights are critical for economic development, but tricky issues about the direction of causation and measurement have made it difficult to demonstrate this relationship empirically. In recent years, scholars have made progress on these issues. In the future, scholars can profitably turn their attention to four issues: (i) why privatization is so unpopular, (ii) how politics shapes property rights, (iii) the distributional consequences of property rights, and (iv) the impact of violence on property rights and economic development. -
Regime Type and Terrorist Attacks - Kingma, Kara
We review the current literature on why democracies experience terrorist attacks. Noting that most of these studies were based on data that ended in 2004, we update the data and analyze regime type and terrorist attacks through 2012. We identify a key trend: 2009 appears to have been a watershed year, where terrorist attacks began to occur more often in failed states and countries under military occupation than in democratic ones. Most strikingly, we find that autocratic regimes have experienced a modest increase in terrorist attacks, whereas democracies have experienced a generalized decrease. We then review the literature on terrorism in autocratic regimes, which is mainly focused on explaining variation in terrorist attack patterns across autocratic regimes with different capacities for coercion and co‐optation and different sensitivities to audience costs. We conclude by highlighting some of the research and policy implications on regime type and terrorism. -
Remote Sensing with Satellite Technology - Parcak, Sarah
This essay discusses the current capabilities in the field of remote sensing in multiple social and behavioral science fields (Anthropology, History, Government, Psychology, Sociology, and Social work), and shows how remote sensing is playing an increasingly important role in social and behavioral science research. Why social and behavioral scientists apply satellite data, or should apply remote sensing data, is reviewed and evaluated, especially in connection to nonsatellite datasets (including US census data). This study clarifies how high resolution satellite data will impact research in the social and behavioral sciences, especially considering the release of additional sensors in 2014 and later, including new potential application of data collected from drones. Social and behavioral scientists will also need to develop research methodologies appropriate to their subfields. Last, coverage is given to present capabilities and emerging trends for remote sensing research, with an emphasis on, future possibilities for applying satellite data in the social and behavioral sciences. -
Robot‐Mediated Communication - Herring, Susan C.
Since telepresence robots began entering the US commercial market over a decade ago, telepresence robot‐mediated communication (RMC) has become increasingly prevalent and relevant. In this essay, I describe key technological properties of telepresence robots, summarize findings regarding communication and social interaction through such robots, and propose a framework to guide future study of telepresence robot‐mediated discourse and language use. In concluding, I reimagine how telepresence robots could be reconceptualized and redesigned, for example, by moving beyond human metaphors to incorporate “superhuman” attributes, and raise questions about the intended and unintended consequences of RMC. -
Skill Production Regimes and Immigrant Labor Market Integration - Kogan, Irena
In recent years, Western countries have been experiencing a significant increase in both humanitarian and economic immigration. With the number of migrants, the challenges of integration have also surged. In consequence, host countries have invested a considerable amount of resources in comprehensive and effective immigrant integration policies. Various integration measures, such as foreign credential recognition or education and (re‐)training, have been implemented to help immigrants with their transition into the host country's labor market. The success of such policies, we argue, depends not only on their extent and coverage but also on whether they are compatible with other institutional characteristics of the host countries. This contribution hence asks to what extent host countries' immigrant integration policies aligned with these countries' skill production regimes channel immigrants into the labor market and consequently are responsible for the cross‐national differences in immigrants' economic integration. We expect that immigrants, particularly those with a less marketable status (e.g., refugees or asylum seekers), should have higher incentives to acquire host‐country‐specific education or to have their source country education recognized in countries that lay a stronger emphasis on highly specific vocational skills. They also should have higher labor market returns on their investments in countries with more vocationally oriented education systems (such as in Germany and Austria) as opposed to countries with more generally oriented education systems (such as Ireland and the United Kingdom). -
Social Change and Entry to Adulthood - Mortimer, Jeylan T.
The effects of social change on the transition to adulthood are manifest in large‐scale societal and institutional changes, alterations in relationships and networks, and shifts in individual psychological orientations and behaviors. This essay reviews key foundational work that has established the framework for our understanding of social change and the transition to adulthood, highlighting Mannheim and Elder's theoretical contributions and early empirical studies of age norms, status attainment, and the timing and sequencing of adult role markers. It then describes major ongoing programs of research on the movement from school to work, pathways of transition, familial financial and residential support of transitioning children, and both adult roles and character traits as sources of adult identity. Finally, in view of ongoing societal trends, it calls for future studies of inequality and its implications for the diverging destinies of youth that depend on their social class origin, race, and gender; shifts in the bases of youth age‐related and other identities; the consequences of social media for transitional dynamics; and the implications of transitional patterns for young adult health, cross‐national comparative studies, and youth responses to climate change. -
Social Inequality Across the Life Course: Societal Unfolding and Individual Agency - Heckhausen, Jutta
Social inequality is rising around the globe with devastating consequences for individuals and societies. Modern societies allow social mobility but vary greatly in the extent and means by which it is hampered or facilitated at different points in the life course. Motivational and lifespan developmental psychology view individuals as agents of their development, and specify sequential models and strategies for adaptive developmental agency. Individual differences in planful goal selection, optimism, action‐orientation, and goal disengagement capacities are critical for adaptive developmental agency, especially under conditions of major age‐graded changes in opportunities, unexpected losses, or increasing uncertainty and destabilization of life courses. -
Sociological Theory After the End of Nature - Brulle, Robert J.
Anthropogenic climate change poses a fundamental challenge to the cultural beliefs and social structure of global social order. However, the social sciences treat the natural world as a passive backdrop in which the human project unfolds, and focus primarily on the relation between social facts. In a world where human activities are being manifestly impacted by a continuously shifting climate, it is no longer adequate to only look to human social interactions to gain an understanding of how social order is constituted and changed. This realization has led a number of scholars across the range of social sciences to identify a need to move beyond anthropocentric social sciences. This essay provides an overview of the major efforts to create a social science that integrates social and natural facts within the field of sociology. Three areas of foundational research in this area are discussed, including the reinterpretation of sociological classics, the development of constructed society/nature hybrids, and the creation of linked society–natural systems models. Examples of empirical research demonstrating these approaches are then provided. The essay concludes with a survey of ongoing sociological theory projects on this topic. -
Sustainability - Tainter, Joseph A.
Research needs in sustainability encompass a range of topics spanning much of social and behavioral science. Sustainability requires understanding human cognition, capacity to reason and make decisions, capacity for long‐term planning, understanding trade‐offs, risk perceptions, communication techniques, innovation, the consequences of improvements in efficiency, energy and other resources, complexity in problem solving, and other matters. We discuss research accomplishments and needs in the four most important areas of sustainability: (i) risk perceptions; (ii) influencing behavior; (iii) resources and economics; and (iv) problem solving and complexity. -
Technology Diffusion - Jaffe, Adam B.
Technology diffusion is the process by which new technologies are adopted for use across individual firms or households in a given market, and across different markets. The most salient facts about this process are that it always plays out over time, and the time before adoption is widespread varies greatly across technologies. The dominant explanations for gradual adoption are the time needed for information about the technology to diffuse, and heterogeneity among adopters, such that those for whom the benefits of the new technologies adopt first, while those for whom the benefits are less wait until the technology has improved and/or its cost has fallen. Research has focused on the nature of the information diffusion process, and the attributes of firms and households that affect their adoption decisions. Promising areas for new research include the application of insights ad methods from behavioral economics, the linking of formal models to empirical research, the diffusion of technology to less developed countries and its role in economic development, and public policy issues related to technology diffusion in important sectors such as health care and global climate change. -
The Good, the Bad, and the Long‐Term Implications of Social Diversity - Ramos, Miguel R.
Demographic trends reveal that modern societies have become more heterogeneous in terms of their ethnic composition. Concerns about social diversity and its implications have received critical scholarly attention, and it has become a prominent topic in several social sciences. The recent but already impressive amount of published research has examined the impact of social diversity (e.g., ethnic, religious diversity) on societal variables such as economic performance and neighborhood trust. However, results from this body of work have been contradictory and a lack of consensus in diversity research has undermined the impact of science on policy. To address this concern, we propose a time‐focused perspective in which seemingly contradictory theoretical perspectives can be integrated to provide a coherent account as to why social diversity can potentially yield both negative and positive outcomes. This perspective is discussed in light of its implications for diversity politics. A successful management and planning of these unprecedented demographic changes will dictate the quality of people's lives.