Essays
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Postsocialism - Cullen Dunn, Elizabeth
Postsocialism is not just the study of the period after the end of Communism. Like postcolonialism, it is an analytic, a way of looking at societies in both East and West that were shaped by state socialism and the Cold War. Focusing on capitalism's alter ego, postsocialism looks at how production, consumption, identity and sovereignty were shaped by the experience of one party rule and central planning, and it reflects critically on the enduring effects of socialist ideas about the role of state and market in social life. While the countries that were once grouped by their affiliation with Communism are now diverging, future research focuses on the reorganization of the “Second World” into donors and receivers within a new international order based on humanitarianism and development, on the role of bureaucratic governance in integrating former socialist countries into the EU, and on the crucial standpoint that socialist ideologies continue to provide outside neoliberal capitalism. -
Rationalization of Higher Education - Cottom, Tressie McMillan
Since roughly 1980, the rationalization of higher education has been escalating. That is, means‐end schema and bureaucratic organization have become ever more dominant as the authority over academic matters has been shifting from the professoriate to managers who in the mid‐twentieth century had been mainly responsible for economic affairs and “making things run.” At many research universities today, the administrative sector has grown so large that the budget devoted to administrative salaries and benefits exceeds the monies reserved for faculty. -
Rationing of Health Care - Mechanic, David
Rationing refers to the allocation of a scarce supply relative to need and demand. In market‐based economies, price typically establishes access to valued commodities except when ethical values, norms, and technical limitations make it impossible to allocate simply on the basis of price. Commonly recognized prototypes include allocation of scarce resources such as gasoline during war or currently in transplantation where the number of available organs is insufficient to respond to need and there are long waiting lists. -
Recent Demographic Trends and the Family - Wu, Lawrence L.
For demographers, perhaps the most stunning set of changes in the family to have emerged over the last century are changes that drove what appeared to have been exploding populations, both in the world at large as well as in individual countries, to changes that now raise the distinct possibility of future population decline in a non‐negligible number of nations. These changes are in turn intimately connected to profound changes in family life and most particularly in fertility—trends in how many women, on average, remain childless over their lifetimes, and for those women who become mothers, how many births they will have. What is especially intriguing is “American exceptionalism”—that the United States appears to have been largely immune, at least to date, from demographic trends that are so pronounced and potentially worrisome in so many other advanced industrialized nations. I review what lies behind the shift from exploding populations to the possibility of population decline in at least some parts of the world, and then speculate on what may be the likely sources of why the United States has been an exception to these trends. This then leads me to highly speculative remarks about why two specific groups very often seen in a negative light—immigrants and women who give birth outside of formal marriage—have played an important role in American demographic exceptionalism, and why these groups may likewise continue to be a major factor in why the future of the United States may be far rosier than that of other advanced industrialized nations. However, I caution that this optimistic scenario depends crucially on realizing the social, economic, and demographic potential of these subpopulations. -
Religion - Purzycki, Benjamin Grant
Religions are complex systems that can adapt to diverse environments because of the dynamic relationship of their internal parts. The most fundamental of these parts includes supernatural beliefs, rituals, and myths. The social scientific study of religion focuses on these parts and builds on previous generations of research to provide distal explanations for religion as a dynamic phenomenon. In recent years, interest in the social science of religion has turned to the cognitive and behavioral studies of religion. The cognitive science of religion documents the mental organization and structure of religious thought, while the behavioral science of religion focuses on ritual behavior as the building block of sociality. Key issues for future research include the ontogeny of religion, the cognitive and cross‐cultural representation of religious concepts, the relationship between religion and reproduction, and the evolution of religion. With these new frontiers have come a variety of novel methodologies but also an emphasis on the need for comparative ethnography. -
Religion and Nationalism - Omer, Atalia
This essay examines the relations between religion and nationalism by highlighting the existing scholarly approaches as well as the ways in which they might be further expanded into deeper engagements with the legacies of colonialism and race. The argument is that cross‐fertilizing the religion and nationalist literature with critical race theories and the study of coloniality will provide explanatory frames and analytic tools to interpret the waves of right‐wing populist nationalisms in Euro‐America in the twenty‐first century. In particular, the ways in which appeals to Christianity, Judeo‐Christianity, or “civilizational” values participate in patterns of exclusion and inclusion through the mechanisms of sexual politics and human rights' instruments are studied as an opportunity to interrogate the interrelation between anti‐Semitism and anti‐Muslim rhetoric to the histories of colonialism and how they have undergirded the patterns of interactions between religion and the production, reproduction, and subversion of political national identities. -
Rent, Rent‐Seeking, and Social Inequality - Bird, Beth Red
The compensation paid out to workers reflects (i) the value of their contribution to their firm or organization and (ii) a possible premium because of restrictions on competition. The latter restrictions, which may take the form of corruption or monopolies that preclude labor from freely flowing throughout the economy, allow for various types of rent to be extracted. This essay addresses the way in which rents may arise, the sectors of the labor market that are gaining new opportunities to extract rent, and the sectors of the labor market that are losing the capacity to extract rent. Although it is typically argued that all forms of rent are gradually withering away, the available evidence suggests, to the contrary, that rent destruction is mainly occurring at the bottom of the class structure. At the top of the class structure, new opportunities to collect rent appear to be emerging, opportunities that raise earnings among the already privileged and thus increase income inequality. The foregoing characterization of the evidence, although not without support, is necessarily controversial because of intrinsic difficulties in distinguishing the true marginal contribution of workers from returns that are attributable to market failure. -
Restoring Racial Justice - Davis, Fania E.
Despite important overlapping interests, until recently, few racial justice advocates have embraced restorative justice (RJ), and the RJ community has largely failed to explicitly address race. Suggesting a convergence of the two movements, this essay presents an overview of RJ principles, history, and methods. We review the evidence for racial bias in criminal justice and school discipline and then note emerging restorative initiatives to ameliorate historical and contemporary racial inequities. We conclude by touching on gaps and challenges characterizing research and applied work in the field while suggesting strategies to move toward a racially‐conscious restorative movement as both an effective alternative to state‐imposed punishment and a powerful force for racial justice. -
Returns to Education in Different Labor Market Contexts - SchöEmann, Klaus
Labor market contexts shape the returns to education to a great deal. Beyond the known positive effects of higher education to yield higher returns to education, there is ample evidence that supports the view that labor market institutions shape the returns as well as cohort and period effects. Additional returns to education consist in faster career progression and less frequent early retirement for higher educated employees. Part of the positive returns is the close link of higher education and continuous participation in further education and training, which tends to widen the differences between high investors in education and persons with few qualifications. Occupational and industry sector contexts largely shape such differential learning and work trajectories. Temporary high demand for specific professions such as engineers, medical doctors, or care personnel create cycles of exceptionally high returns to special fields of education, but as soon as the wider economic, demographic, or institutional factors vanish, returns shrink again. Context specific skill mismatches allow above average returns for some professions, whereas they can make fields of education also obsolete. Nonmonetary returns to education such as increases in happiness, subjective well‐being, job security, or health have gained more attention in recent work. Differential returns due to labor market contexts encourage labor market agents to switch between contexts to increase returns. Job mobility, further training, and migration appear to be common strategies to ensure above average monetary and nonmonetary returns to education. -
Rulemaking Pursuing a Policy Agenda - Waterman, Richard W.
Rulemaking is a difficult process that involves interpreting legislation, often vaguely written, by legislators into formal rules of action for bureaucratic implementation. The process is highly political and often confrontational, with varied interests attempting to influence the behavior of the bureaucratic experts involved in writing rules, regulations, and setting standards. The end result is often delay, during which time the bureaucracy gets the blame. Even under the best of circumstances, however, rulemaking is a difficult process. -
Schooling, Learning, and the Life Course - Pallas, Aaron M.
The modern life course is characterized by three major trends: (i) schooling has increased worldwide and penetrates virtually all phases of life; (ii) the globalization of the economy has rendered work, and the features of modern life that stem from it, less predictable; and (iii) new technologies and the ongoing institutionalization of the self allow for participation in an ever‐increasing number of communities. These shifts open up new ways of thinking about the life course, moving from the traditional framing of the life course as a sequence of role transitions to a view that highlights competent membership in a configuration of communities of practice, particularly in the domains of work, family, and leisure. This shift also entails moving from schooling as credentials and human capital to understanding what is learned in school that is relevant to being a competent adult. Theories of how what is learned in school might transfer to adult life continue to outstrip the prevailing technologies for assessment of that learning. -
Search and Learning in Markets - Kircher, Philipp
Search is a process of learning and discovery. Consumers search for goods that fit their requirements and budgets, and workers search for jobs commensurate to their skills. Learning can vary by domain—whether a person learns about herself, about the other market participants, about the fit between both, or about the conditions in the larger economic environment; and it can span several domains at the same time. While the search process has traditionally been modeled as a black box where it simply takes time to locate the desired opportunity, recent work and future research will break up this process to be more explicit about the source of the problem. This has been missing partly because it is easier to model environments where everyone and everything is identical. Once it is acknowledged that people, firms and goods are different, that they learn over time about their type, and that the differences interact in important ways, new avenues for research open up. While much of existing work has focused on quantity (i.e., number of jobs found), future work is likely to focus more on the quality (i.e., how valuable is this job to society). This essay discusses which elements might shape the research in this area, and highlights the new lessons that are likely to emerge from this work. -
Sensational Jurisprudence: Visual Culture and Human Rights - Renteln, Alison Dundes
Sensational jurisprudence is a new branch of sociolegal studies that deals with the five senses and public policy. Because the law privileges the visual, this essay examines social science research about images of suffering and the implications of these findings. The interdisciplinary scholarship about visual culture emphasizes the negative aspects of humanitarian appeals for funding to aid the distant sufferer, and it suggests that bombarding the public with graphic depictions of pitiable individuals is counterproductive. Instead, researchers ought to develop methodologies to ascertain which emotions motivate individuals to engage in global civic action. -
Shadow Education - Byun, Soo‐Yong
Over the past few decades shadow education has expanded worldwide and become a multi‐billion dollar global service‐industry offering many different and costly tutoring services from after‐school classes to a host of on‐line options. While much remains to be explored as to why this transformation is occurring, the worldwide expansion of shadow education is now a substantial topic in the sociology of education. This essay briefly describes the foundational research on shadow education; outlines the cutting‐edge research on shadow education effects; and discusses key issues for future research. This essay concludes that shadow education becomes more normative to the point of being a partner institution to formal education itself and as an educational phenomenon it will continue to be a topic of study and policy analysis. -
Sociology of Entrepreneurship - Ruef, Martin
Since the 1970s, we have witnessed a growing body of scholarship that investigates the social context, processes, and consequences of entrepreneurship. Despite—or, perhaps, because of—the conceptual vagueness around the definition of the entrepreneur, this topic has attracted attention from a wide range of interdisciplinary scholars and has been applied to a variety of entrepreneurial activities among businesses, nonprofits, social movements, and public sector initiatives. This review begins with three views of entrepreneurs that are rooted in classical scholarship, conceptualizing them as innovators, autonomy seekers, and organizers. It then analyzes the mechanisms that link these views to entrepreneurial outcomes at different levels of analysis. Scholarship on social networks examines how the structure of relations may transmit new ideas, encourage freedom from interpersonal constraint, and produce social support for organizing. Research on career structures considers how past organizational contexts tend to augment or decrease entrepreneurial propensities. Studies of organizational populations and regions address when the ecology of those contexts allows entrepreneurs to carve out a new niche, despite competition from incumbents. The review concludes with suggestions for improving research methodology and the representativeness of social contexts in the study of entrepreneurship. -
Stability and Change in Corporate Governance - Davis, Gerald F.
Corporate governance describes the process that allocates power and resources within organizations and the societal institutions that shape how they look, how they make decisions, and how the proceeds from their activities are divided. Research and theory traditionally focused on the institutions that overcome the separation of ownership and control created by dispersed shareholdings. Critics noted that this problem was distinctively American, and that corporate governance is shaped by history, culture, and power. We describe several domains for productive future research that is comparative, historical, and attentive to power dynamics. -
States and Nationalism - Herzfeld, Michael
Nationalism, especially in the form that links national identity and statehood, is in its present form a relatively recent but highly successful and pervasive invention. Grounded in metaphors of shared blood and collective inheritance (including the idea of national culture as patrimony or heritage), it still displays unexpected staying power despite concern over its negative history as “ethnonationalism” and as the translation of superficially benign ideologies into doctrines of violent exclusion and genocide. Modern nation‐states, also unexpectedly, often encapsulate segmentary models of collective identity; nationalism may appear in everyday (“banal”) activities, the less respectable of which—as intimate zones of sociability—it may seek to hide behind official images of cultural and genetic homogeneity. Current research focuses on the practices that link idealized national identity to their realization and subversion in social and bodily experience and performance. -
Teacher Judgments and their Role in the Educational Process - Artelt, Cordula
Teacher judgments matter for students: They have an impact not only on students' academic self‐concepts and for their theories about themselves as learners but also on educational pathways through grades and school leaving certificates. However, do teachers have the expertise for such judgments? Is there such a thing as a professional ability to judge (diagnostic competence)? The essay provides an overview on research related to teacher judgment accuracy and bias and specifies conditions under which accurate teacher judgments can (and cannot) be expected. It is argued that in research as well as in teacher training, causes of judgment and judgment demands need to be taken into account and that the role of knowledge components in controlled and automatic decision‐making after intensive experience on the job needs to be better understood. -
The Economics of Conflict and Peace - Rohner, Dominic
This essay takes stock of the existing literature in economics on the costs, consequences and causes of armed conflicts. The existing literature has put a particular focus, among others, on the impact of ethnic diversity, natural resource abundance and high poverty levels on the likelihood of conflict. Drawing on this, the current essay highlights several broad emerging trends in this literature. First of all, more and more papers use newly created, very fine‐grained data. Second, there is a trend towards linking more closely the empirical analysis to underlying theoretical frameworks. Third, there is a growing awareness of the importance of being policy relevant. Studying the impact of particular policies and institutions is likely to take a more central importance in this literature in the coming years. -
The Evolving View of the Law and Judicial Decision‐Making - D'Elia‐Kueper, Justine
Attitudinalists and legal realists initially saw the law, not as something that constrained judges, but rather as a nuisance that judges could easily avoid in order to make decisions consistent with their personal policy preferences. As the study of law and judicial decision‐making has evolved, however, scholars are beginning to realize that judges may actually use the law to help them secure their most favored outcomes (Bueno de Mesquita & Stephenson, 2002; Hansford & Spriggs, 2006). As scholarship on the law and judicial decision‐making continues to evolve a key issue going forward will be how to measure the law. Text‐based analysis and citation analysis are promising new approaches in this regard. -
The Future of Employment, Wages, and Technological Change - Handel, Michael J.
The United States and other advanced economies enjoyed a remarkable period of sustained growth and broadly‐shared prosperity from the late 1940s to the early 1970s. After a series of crises from the mid‐1970s to mid‐1980s the character of jobs and the structure of earnings changed markedly but the causes continue to be debated. Most workers' inflation‐adjusted wages have stagnated since the early 1980s, employment security has fallen, and inequality has grown. One set of explanations emphasizes structural and institutional forces, such as employment shifts from manufacturing to services, deunionization, import competition, declining value of the minimum wage, macroeconomic shocks, and changing wage norms. Others stress the interplay of the supply of and demand for human capital, citing rising returns to education and skills, which they attribute to the spread of computer technology. The debate has significant implications for understanding the likely course of future labor market trends. -
The Future of Marriage - McClintock, Elizabeth Aura
After briefly examining the history or marriage and the development of modern marriage, this essay describes major themes in the study of marriage, including research on the rise of alternatives to marriage, the “deinstitutionalization” of marriage, and the consequences of these changes. It next considers current demographic trends, recent advances in research, and likely future directions of research. In particular, the imminence of same‐sex marriage and the increasing importance of the internet in partner selection are likely to be important areas of research and social change. The conclusion considers the implications of these trends for marriage's future and for future research on marriage. -
The Great Recession and Young Adults' Labor Market Outcomes around the World - Mont'Alvao, Arnaldo
In this essay, we consider the impacts of the Great Recession on youth labor market prospects around the world. Young adults were especially affected by the crisis, experiencing heightened levels of unemployment, underemployment, and idleness. We highlight how variations in social context as well as youth status characteristics and skill levels matter in how youth fare in the labor market. We also draw connections to other important outcomes, such as college enrollments and migration. Our discussion points to important lines of inquiry needing development, especially regarding the plight of youth in developing countries and much needed evaluation of institutional and policy changes that have been designed to promote successful transitions to adulthood despite the economic challenges youth face. -
The Institutional Logics Perspective - Thornton, Patricia H.
This essay discusses a new approach to institutional analysis—the institutional logics perspective (ILP). This perspective is a meta‐theory useful for integrating and augmenting a variety of social science theories to better understand the effects of cultural institutions on individuals, organizations, and societies. We describe the history of the development of the ILP, define its core concepts and mechanisms, and review and discuss foundational and cutting‐edge research. Prior overviews emphasize the mechanisms, variety of substantive contexts, and the cross‐level effects. We take a different approach by organizing the literature review by institutional orders. This meta‐analysis reveals a pattern of institutional change—the weakening of the professions and the spread of the market logic in many domains. We discuss implications of this finding and suggest future research. -
The Intergenerational Transmission of Fertility - Bernardi, Laura
The intergenerational transmission of fertility has direct consequences on population dynamics and is indirectly related to the reproduction of social inequality. Early studies focused on the positive correlation of parents and children fertility outcomes such as family size or childbearing timing. Explanations for the observed correlations have spanned from genetic and social status inheritance mechanisms to role modeling and socialization processes based on social learning and social influence. More recently, the focus has shifted from fertility outcomes to similarities and dissimilarities of family formation patterns across generations, framing fertility in the context of interrelated life course trajectories. Recent cutting‐edge research has also expanded upon the existing literature by focusing on the role played by multigenerational relationships and by bidirectional influence processes in parents‐children fertility behaviors. Challenges for future research are provided by the need to disentangle the interplay between genes and culture in defining tastes and preferences for given values and norms related to fertility and the increasing family complexity and migration that interfere with socialization processes.