Essays
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The New Political Economy of Colonialism - Pepinsky, Thomas B.
The new political economy of colonialism is an interdisciplinary field that unites economists, political scientists, and sociologists interested in the nature and contemporary legacies of colonialism. It is distinctive in its reliance of quantitative data, its close attention to causal identification, and its focus on deriving novel theoretical insights using standard tools in positive political economy. This essay traces the development of the new political economy of colonialism over the past 20 years and identifies exciting new contributions in this rapidly developing and interdisciplinary field. -
The Organization of Schools and Classrooms - Diehl, David
Schools are complex organizations and their functioning involves far more than just the delivery of academic content. Existing research establishes the importance of taking such organizational features into account in examining how important school outcomes such as academic achievement are shaped by the relationships, interactions, and experiences of students and teachers. Standard approaches, however; tend to treat the organizational structures of schools as static and unchanging environments within which teachers teach and students learn. In contrast, we present the beginnings of a different conceptualization, one of schools as complex and dynamic social institutions constituted by multiple types of relations and defined at numerous levels. In this essay, we summarize existing research in order to elaborate such a view. To that end the essay is divided into four sections: major role relationships in the school; organizational levels of the school; current socio‐cultural changes shaping schools as organizations; and finally, suggestions for future work. -
The Reorganization of Work - Heckscher, Charles
In recent decades, the bureaucratic organization of work in stable hierarchies of “jobs” and “offices” has come under increasing fire, seen as unresponsive and resistant to innovation. Practice has turned to two major alternatives: freeing individual “stars” to take independent initiative and building cooperative teamwork. Academic research has lagged far behind practice, often stuck in narrow positivist frames that miss the systemic and evolving nature of these organizational shifts. The emerging paradigm is not yet clear, but it certainly involves major modifications of the Weberian principles of bureaucratic efficiency. -
The Sociology of Religious Experience - Porpora, Douglas
This essay examines the sociology of religious experience within the broader context of how other disciplines also study the same phenomenon. It explains the principle of methodological atheism sociologists have typically employed in the study of religion, which goes back to Peter Berger's The Sacred Canopy. The principle expressly excludes the possibility that subjects of religious experience may actually be experiencing something real that contributes to their experience. As a consequence, other disciplines and even some sociologists have recently departed from methodological atheism in favor of an approach that might be called methodological agnosticism. This essay examines that shift and the research agenda thereby opened up. -
The State and Development - Cohn, Samuel
The state and development is a critical issue in speaking to contemporary debates about whether prosperity is best served by small or large government. The definition of foundational versus cutting‐edge research differs depending on whether the discipline is economics or sociology. There was an early agreement that government should be big for “big pushes” or “modernization.” Economics turned antistatist as a reaction to Soviet planned economies and to corruption in general. This led to a neoliberal attempt to create growth by shrinking state programs—an initiative that failed very badly. New work in economics emphasizes flexible approaches as to what states should do, promotes states building education, infrastructure and encouraging technology transfer, and puts great weight on institutional quality. Sociology emphasized the state as a protector of poor nations from the predations of international trade and multinational corporations. Emphasis was placed on hard bargaining by states in the Global South and in developmentalist states such as those in East Asia, which administratively allocate public investment monies to overcome inefficiencies. New work suggests that more modest programs emphasizing simple public goods can be effective. Emerging work also questions traditional specifications of the adverse effects of international trade leading to a different set of suggested remedies. Future directions need to focus on palliative development—strategies of state development that build the multiplier effect rather than base industries. Methodologically, within nation studies that residualize employment from market factors offer ways to identify new government programs that are effective. -
The Underrepresentation of Women in Elective Office - Anzia, Sarah F.
Despite the inroads women have made in American politics in recent decades, women still hold far fewer elective offices than men. This raises the question of why women fall short in this important mode of political engagement. Early research on this question emphasized the obstacles created by gender socialization, women's underrepresentation in the professions most likely to produce candidates, and women's family and household responsibilities. Scholars have also found that some voters use gender stereotypes in evaluating candidates. Importantly, however, the average female candidate wins the same percentage of the vote as the average male candidate, and that fact has become the basis for the widespread belief that voters are not systematically biased against female candidates—that the cause of women's underrepresentation must lie elsewhere. Cutting‐edge political science research has found that women are less likely than men to even consider running for office, that recruiters prefer to recruit male candidates over female candidates, and that primary races that feature female candidates attract larger numbers of challengers than all‐male primary races. But other cutting‐edge work suggests that the widely accepted conclusion that voters harbor no bias against female candidates is likely incorrect. Future research will likely reevaluate this conclusion using new approaches and methods and will also delve deeper into the question of why women are less politically ambitious than men. These lines of inquiry will likely borrow insights from psychology, sociology, and economics, as well as the political science literature on race. -
The Welfare State in Comparative Perspective - Quadagno, Jill
The modern welfare state, which was created in the long economic expansion of the post‐World War II era, funded benefits that provided income security across the life course. In the 1970s, the era of welfare state expansion slowed due to rising deficits and fiscal strains associated with population aging. In recent decades benefit reductions have become commonplace. Theories designed to explain the formation of welfare state include the logic of industrialism, power resource theory, and the theory of welfare state regimes. Feminist critics challenged theorists to consider how welfare benefits influence gender inequality within regime types. In recent years, research has focused on three key issues. The first is to identify variations in welfare state attitudes across nations and among individuals within nations. The second is to consider the causes and consequences of activation policies that focus less on direct cash transfers and more on a combination of incentives and punishments to encourage work effort. Finally, the third is to expand the definition of the welfare state to include the private provision of goods and services as well as education. -
Transformation of the Employment Relationship - Kalleberg, Arne L.
Employment relations are implicit or explicit contractual arrangements that specify the reciprocal expectations and obligations linking employers and employees. They encompass a wide range of phenomena, including work organization, governance, evaluation, and rewards. During the past quarter century, the standard employment relationship that was normative in much of the world during the twentieth century declined in favor of various nonstandard employment relations involving more tenuous employer–employee linkages. The transformation of employment relations has been associated with a wide range of phenomena including growth in economic and social inequality, shifting career patterns, and changes in the organization of work. -
Transnational Work Careers - Verwiebe, Roland
This essay deals with transnational work careers, an issue that is relatively new in social‐scientific research and is discussed here in particular against the background of recent migration and management research. Both disciplines consider the emergence of transnational work careers in connection with economic globalization. In terms of methodology, most of the studies that are relevant to this issue are based on qualitatively oriented analyses and deal empirically with a variety of regions and nations (e.g., China, India, the United States, Canada, Germany, and Scandinavia). -
Trends in Religiosity and Religious Affiliation - Christiano, Kevin J.
This essay examines studies of trends in religion and religiosity, concentrating on the case of the United States but periodically comparing that country to other societies as well. -
Understanding American Political Conservatism - Aberbach, Joel D.
This essay examines contemporary American political conservatism from a variety of angles. It asks first what scholars and activists mean by conservative. It then turns to controversies about the meaning of the term to the general public and to the question of whether the United States is a conservative nation and, if so, how this came about. A central theme here is that the increasing link of conservative self‐identification and party identification grew out of reactions to events in the 1960s and early 1970s and that increased partisan polarization along ideological grounds, particularly in the South, has had a large impact on American politics at all levels (elite and general public) of the polity. After a brief look at the Tea Party phenomenon and its implications, the essay closes with a discussion of the future of American conservatism, with emphasis on the ability of conservative factions to coalesce, the evolving relationship between conservative self‐identification and issues attitudes, and the likelihood that political polarization will endure. -
US Union and Workers' Movements, Past and Future - Schneider, Daniel
The last half century of US labor movement history is characterized by dramatic decline in both density and (since 1979) real numbers. While unions and union federations in the mainstream union movement have attempted to adjust, developments outside their sphere have been especially prominent: the rise of independent unions and the initiation of alternative forms of workers movements. With union decline, community labor organizations [typified by Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN)], worker centers, and living wage campaigns have risen to fill the void. These alternate paths for worker representation, like other forms developed in the past, bring new tactics, new activists, and new links to labor struggles and may yet contribute to the future of labor movements in the United States. -
Varieties of Capitalism - Hall, Peter A.
Scholarship on varieties of capitalism (VofC) explores the ways in which the institutions structuring the political economy affect patterns of economic performance or policy making and the distribution of well‐being. Contesting the claim that there is one best route to superior economic performance, a number of schemas have been proposed to explain why countries have often been able to secure substantial rates of growth in different ways, often with relatively egalitarian distributions of income. Prominent among them is a VofC analysis focused on the developed democracies that distinguishes liberal and coordinated market economies according to the ways in which firms coordinate their endeavors. On the basis of institutional complementarities among subspheres of the political economy, it suggests that the institutional structure of the political economy confers comparative institutional advantages, notably for radical and incremental innovation, which explains why economies have not converged in the context of globalization. Although this framework is contested, it has inspired new research on many subjects, including the basis for innovation, the determinants of social policy, the grounds for international negotiation, and the character of institutional change. In this issue area, there is promising terrain for further research into the origins of varieties of capitalism, the factors that drive institutional change in the political economy, how institutional arrangements in the subspheres of the political economy interact with one another, the normative underlay for capitalism, and the effects of varieties of capitalism on multiple dimensions of well‐being. -
What is Special about Specialization? - Underhill, Anne P.
This essay argues that several key issues regarding craft specialization deserve to be further investigated. These include how specialization develops, variation in strategies to achieve intensification of production, causal factors for technological innovation versus technological conservatism, and how specialization changes in relation to the development of urbanism. Recent studies moving us forward in productive directions with respect to methodology examine the value of goods in specific social contexts, consider the impact of ritual life on craft production, and more thoroughly assess the sources of variation in finished products. -
Why Do Governments Abuse Human Rights? - Moore, Will H.
Because the abuse of human beings is abhorrent, we normatively expect governments to respect those rights. However, throughout human history, abuse of human begins has been the norm. Governments abuse rights because doing so helps leaders exercise, expand, or retain their power. Normatively, this is troubling. Yet, as a positive matter, it should not be surprising. We begin the essay explaining why this is so, and then turn to the question that broadly captures the research agendas of those studying the topic of human rights: how can people constrain Leviathan? Over the course of the 1980s and 1990s, several foundational studies helped establish a generally agreed on account that governments respond to dissent with coercion. Domestically, democracy and economic output both reduce rights abuses, while large populations increase repression. The impact of international characteristics is less well developed. In fact, what is known is that the international human right regime is complex and that norms, treaties, and international courts do not have a consistent effect on a countrys' respect for rights. Researchers are now studying complex relationships between domestic and international factors. For instance, the domestic judiciary of a country influences the extent to which human rights treaties constrain government abuse of rights. Over the coming decade, we expect scholars to produce considerable new knowledge about the impact of norms, treaties, and international courts on the states' (lack of) respect for human rights. -
Women Running for Office - Lawless, Jennifer L.
When women run for office, they tend to fare at least as well as their male counterparts. From vote totals, to fund‐raising receipts, to media coverage, to voters' evaluations, male and female candidates have become increasingly indistinguishable from one another. This is not to suggest, however, that gender is irrelevant in US politics. It might not prevent women from winning their elections, but it substantially stunts their emergence as candidates in the first place. Women are less likely than similarly situated men to consider running for office and actually to emerge as candidates. This gender gap in political ambition can be traced to differences in the manner in which women and men perceive themselves as potential candidates, as well as how electoral gatekeepers view them. The extant scholarship, therefore, suggests that if we want to understand gender dynamics in contemporary US politics, then we must focus our efforts on the precandidacy stage of the process. More specifically, pinpointing the origins of the gender gap in political ambition and developing an understanding of how political ambition evolves are crucial next steps for the women and politics subfield.