Essays
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Aging and the Life Course - O'Rand, Angela M.
This essay reviews major elements of aging and life course research, its foundations, frontiers, and research challenges. This research examines how human lives are organized and manifested across the life span in different environments. The first foundation of life course research is the historical observation of the institutionalization of the life course; that is, how it became standardized in industrialized contexts through the operation of work, family and state institutions and how it is increasingly destandardized in the new global economy. The second foundation is the examination of the life course as a process that is manifold and cumulative: manifold because it consists of intertwining roles and events over time and cumulative because it consists of sequentially contingent transitions and path‐dependent processes. The third foundation is the recognition of the formative and enduring impact of exposures to severe life conditions or major sustained macro events such as wars or disasters. The stress process is the fourth foundation that addresses how stresses over the life course shape its trajectory. Finally, cognition and emotion over the life span serve as a foundation for the major psychological experience of aging. Three frontiers of life course research are highlighted: the individualization of the life course and the devolution of risk; cumulative advantage and cumulative disadvantage as major processes of life course inequalities; and biological processes and the life course. The essay ends with consideration of life course data and methods and the challenges of interdisciplinary research. -
Assimilation and Its Discontents - Zhou, Min
This essay offers a review of the scholarly literature on immigrant assimilation, looking at how classical assimilation theories explain the processes and outcomes of assimilation among contemporary immigrants and their offspring and how alternative theories are developed to address assimilation's discontents. The essay first revisits the commonly held assumptions underlying classical theories of assimilation and investigates why even normative pathways can lead to divergent assimilation outcomes. It then discusses new theoretical development in this area, highlighting the central ideas and conceptualization of the segmented assimilation theory and the neoclassical assimilation theory. The author emphasizes how multilevel determinants interact to produce unconventional pathways that have profound implication for success or failure of assimilation. She also suggests that researchers problematize the notions of “success” or “failure,” paying special attention to how immigrants and their offspring, rather than social scientists themselves, imagine and frame these notions because subjective conceptualization can influence strategies that result in vastly different pathways and outcomes. The essay concludes with a discussion on issues for future research. -
Becoming Adult: Meanings of Markers to Adulthood - Settersten JR., Richard A.
This essay examines a range of meanings and markers of adulthood, from biological to social, psychological, and legal. It describes a shift from more universal and traditional definitions of adulthood, which were also heavily gendered, to an increasingly diverse and personalized set of definitions. This shift reflects the prolonged, complex, and highly unequal spectrum of pathways that young people take into adulthood today. And yet, public perceptions of what adulthood is supposed to look like, and even the views of young people themselves, are often anchored in an earlier historical era. The clash between outdated ideas and the new realities of adulthood create a major set of contradictions for young people. Two contexts are shown to be crucial in determining individuals' actual and perceived progress toward adulthood: families and institutions of higher education. But in these contexts, too, young people receive contradictory signals about their status. The essay concludes with thoughts about the changing meanings of what it means to be “young” and “adult” today. -
Below‐Replacement Fertility - Philip Morgan, S.
When a human population has underlying birth rates too low to sustain its current population size, it has below‐replacement fertility. If mortality rates are low, then replacement‐level fertility is slightly above two births per woman. Currently, over 50% of the global population lives in a country with below‐replacement fertility; below‐replacement fertility is especially widespread in developed countries and is emerging in many developing ones. But there is substantial variation in degree—some countries having very low fertility (below 1.5 births) and other countries (such as the United States) have levels at or near the replacement level. Because the level of fertility intended (or desired) approximates two births per woman in most countries, explanations for fertility levels below replacement levels focus on why people fail to have the number of children they intend. An important factor is fertility timing. Postponement of fertility to older ages reduces birth rates in current periods (lowering period fertility rates), but it also exposes persons to events and experiences that may lead them to forego childbearing or additional births. Below‐replacement fertility produces important macro‐level effects (e.g., a population with older persons and a declining population size). Average fertility below two births also impacts families and individuals' life courses and activities. -
Built Environments and the Anthropology of Space - McDonogh, Gary W.
Analysis of human interaction with and interpretations of the surrounding physical world has been of fundamental interest for anthropology since its emergence as a discipline in the nineteenth century. The comparative description of homes, monumental spaces, and worked landscapes has provided foundations for social and cultural analysis and facilitated early exchanges with archaeology, architecture history, and linguistics. Over time, changes in the lives of those with whom anthropologists work and the concomitant expansion of urban anthropologies have promoted new questions as well as expanding interactions with geography, social theory, urban studies and gender, class, ethnic, and cultural studies while engaging anthropologists in wider public participation. Future anthropologies of space and place should continue to build on these methodological, data and theoretical heritages, including fieldwork and global comparisons, while expanding interdisciplinarity and engaging civic perspectives. Building on these foundations, anthropologists will need to address environmental concerns in their broadest scope. They will also grapple with the methodological and theoretical challenges of changing mobilities and similarly analyze rapidly evolving (electronic) mediations and virtual spaces and communities while sharing this knowledge in wider academic and public discussions. -
Can Public Policy Influence Private Innovation? - Bessen, James
Private innovation appears to have played a major if not dominant role in the growth of output per capita since the Industrial Revolution. Yet economic theory indicates that the level of investment in private innovation will generally be less than is socially optimal unless public policies such as patents encourage additional investment. Therefore, public innovation policy would seem to be critical to economic growth. Surprisingly, a large body of research fails to find unambiguously positive effects of patents on innovation and economic growth, even though patents have been used for hundreds of years. While some industries in some nations clearly benefit from patents, many other industries do not and patents might actually discourage innovation in some industries. Economic theory has provided valuable insights, yet real‐world policy apparently needs to reflect a richer set of behavior and a more complex legal environment. New research is developing a more nuanced understanding including research on alternative means of providing rewards to innovators, research on the costs of litigation and disputes arising from the failure of patents to provide clear boundaries, research on cumulative innovation and strategic uses of large blocks of patents, and research on the extension of patent coverage to new technologies and to developing nations. In addition, major new sources of data permit much more extensive empirical research. -
Cities and Sustainable Development - Cusack, Christopher
When considering the future of the world, one must first and foremost consider the future of its cities. Cities are currently home to more than half the world's population and are projected to encompass the preponderance of all future population growth. Cities also require vast inputs of energy and resources while producing vast outputs of waste. Recognition that these trends are not sustainable has generated a wealth of relevant research. How cities can be sustainably developed in such a way that meets present needs without limiting the ability of future generations to meet their own needs is the critical problem to solve. Research in a myriad of fields, including sociology, political science, economics, and geography, is active in its pursuit of the sustainable city. This essay explains the components of sustainable development and underscores the connection between sustainability and cities. Foundational research, which primarily takes a regional approach to urban analysis, is then explored. This, then, is followed by cutting‐edge research that highlights new ways to measure sustainability and new efforts to build sustainable cities. The essay concludes with an examination of some of the key issues for future research, including the need to consider the cultural diversity within and between cities, as well ways to generate sustainability through pioneering efforts of planning and governance. -
Computer Technology and Children's Mental Health - Kendall, Philip C.
Computer technology has sparked rapid change for children's mental health, altering how treatments can be delivered (e.g., stand‐alone, computer‐assisted). Research has found that computerized approaches produce comparable outcomes as treatments provided face‐to‐face. We define terms related to computer‐assisted treatment and, with a focus on anxiety in youth, we consider the outcomes of computer‐based and computer‐assisted interventions (programs for youth, programs for training therapists, and programs for parents). We conclude with consideration of advances in technology and benefits for service providers, consumers, and researchers, and a discussion of key issues. -
Demography and Cultural Evolution - Shennan, Stephen
Trying to explain the increase in cultural complexity over the long term of human history has long been an interest of anthropology and of historical social sciences more generally. In recent years, interest has grown rapidly in the idea that a key factor in accounting for it might be the size of the human population itself and the extent of interaction between people, because of the effect these have on the innovation rates in populations and on the success with which innovations are transmitted. An important driver of this growth of interest has been the emergence of the new interdisciplinary field of cultural evolution, which makes extensive use of mathematical techniques, especially methods derived from population genetics. The result has been the development of a range of analytical and computer simulation models that make various predictions about the way in which population size influences cultural change, and in particular the growth of cumulative culture, including the processes that have led from the very simple forms of culture possessed by other great apes to those characteristic of Homo sapiens. The aim of this review is to distinguish them, so that future work can focus on evaluating their strengths and weaknesses and the circumstances in which they are useful. -
Domestic Institutions and International Conflict - Chiozza, Giacomo
From the democratic peace to the current wave of research on political leaders, the study of the connection between domestic politics and international conflict has been one of the most dynamic areas of study in International Relations in the past 25 years. This essay takes stock of the past 25 years of research on how domestic politics underpins the dynamics of war and peace in the international arena. It reviews the foundational arguments envisioned by Kant in 1795 and later grounded in the scientific canon by Russett and Oneal. The essay then argues that research that evaluates how political leaders make decisions under different institutional arrangements is likely to be one of the most fruitful lines of research in International Relations in the years to come. It illustrates this claim with a review of two alternative perspectives on leaders and international conflict. -
Economics of Renewable Energy Production - Nemet, Gregory F.
Renewable energy (RE) includes a diverse set of technologies that produce useful energy from nondepleting resources, emit little pollution, and involve no fuel costs. While RE comprises only about an eighth of world energy supply, it is growing quickly and could become a much larger share without approaching resource supply constraints. Valuation of the costs and benefits of RE has improved as studies have become more comprehensive in scope and more precise. Still valuation remains complicated and subject to wide bands of uncertainty for several reasons: heterogeneity among RE technologies; accounting for externalities, such as pollution, that are not always traded in markets; and benefits that depend on counterfactuals that vary substantially by time and location. Costs have to account for intermittency, which depends on many factors such as how thin a reserve margin to maintain, as well as technology dynamics, which over the long term may reduce costs. Experience with substantial shares of RE generation in real commercial settings has provided data and opportunities to analyze the integration of RE with the surrounding energy market. A key research challenge is to use this fuller accounting of costs and benefits to produce general insights about energy markets, without being limited by the technological, location, and temporal idiosyncrasies, which so far appear dominant. Future research questions revolve around whether costs are increasing or decreasing in deployment and include considerations of resource availability, temporal correlation in production across space and technologies, technological change in RE and complementary technologies, and emergent properties at large scale. -
Emerging Trends: Shaping Age By Technology and Social Bonds - Spellerberg, Annette
Global ageing is a challenge, particularly with the high speed of the ageing process. As the orientation toward nuclear families without extended family members is growing and the number of children is decreasing, fewer senior citizens in developed countries live under the same roof with their children as in past decades. Families are less and less able to provide support and comfort for older people. Social communities are expected to secure the quality of life of senior citizens as well as their ability to lead a self‐reliant, autonomous life. Social policies emphasize ageing in place and therefore the enhancement of neighborhoods and community resources. Digital technologies can contribute to the welfare of the elderly, as they offer communication opportunities, safety functions or health support. More and more the question of enabling contacts and service provision is increasingly based on access to broadband and ICT. -
Environmental Accounting - Muller, Nicholas Z.
While metrics such as gross domestic product (GDP) constitute important means to gauge the value of production, it is widely recognized that indices that focus exclusively on market production are incomplete. Omitted environmental assets include (i) those that have the capacity to act as a source of valuable inputs to production such as timber, subsurface minerals, or fisheries; and (ii) media that serve as a sink for anthropogenic residuals such as air, water, or soil. The human health impacts depend crucially on two parameters in the integrated asset models (IAMs): the effect that exposures to fine particles have on adult mortality rates and the value attributed to small changes in mortality risk. This essay focuses on recent research that augments standard measures of output to include damages from air and greenhouse gas pollution into national output. -
Ethnic Enclaves - Gold, Steven J.
Ethnic enclaves are geographically delimited regions wherein a community of immigrants characterized by common national or ethnic origins as well as class diversity owns a significant fraction of local businesses. By pooling business skill and investment capital within an environment of shared solidarity and coethnic employment, group members are able to successfully compete in the host society's economy such that both owners and workers are protected from the economic disadvantages (in the form of low returns on their investments in human capital) that recent immigrants generally encounter when seeking jobs in a host society's labor market. Through reliance on the ethnic enclave, immigrant populations are able to acquire wealth and provide their children with education sufficient to enter the middle class of the host society. -
Evidence of Causation—The Contribution of Life Course Research, Part I: Dominant Models of Causal Inference and Their Limitations in Life Course Research - Blossfeld, Hans‐Peter
Life course research has been increasingly criticized for relying only on observational data where processes by which subjects select themselves (or are selected) into the states of a causal variable are not under the control of the researcher. The primary objectives of this essay, the first in a two‐part set, are to discuss two dominant models of causal inference and to identify the uses and limitations of randomized control trials (RCTs) and quasi‐experimental designs for answering life course questions. -
Evidence of Causation—The Contribution of Life Course Research, Part II: Causation as Generative Process - Blossfeld, Hans‐Peter
This is the second part in a pair of essays on causal inference in life course research. The first part presented the dominant models of causal inference and their limitations in life course research. This essay develops the idea of “causation as generative process,” offering a quite promising model for inferences in life course research. -
Global Income Inequality - Firebaugh, Glenn
This essay describes the evolution of global income inequality over the past two‐and‐a‐half centuries, and its likely evolution during the twenty‐first century. Global income inequality—the sum of inequality within and between nations—is massive today, the legacy of uneven growth in the world's regions since the advent of the Industrial Revolution. Because incomes shot up in the West while lagging behind in Asia and Africa over most of this period, between‐nation income inequality grew dramatically, and most global income inequality now lies between nations. Economic growth remains uneven across the world's regions, but the fastest growth is occurring in populous poor regions of the world, compressing between‐nation inequality. As a result, global income inequality is currently receding, according to most (but not all) investigations of the matter. The compression of global inequality is attributable to rapid economic growth in China and India: If the rate of economic growth in China and India were the same as in the rest of the world, global income inequality would not be declining. The slow rate of economic growth in sub‐Saharan Africa, on the other hand, is retarding the decline. A high level of global income inequality is problematic in large part because it results in abject poverty for masses of people. If average income in the world continues to rise, alleviating abject poverty in the twenty‐first century, for future generations the level of global income inequality might matter much less than the level of income inequality within local communities. -
Globalization Backlash - Berezin, Mabel
Backlash against globalization has become a defining feature of the first decade of the twenty‐first century, from the Seattle riots in fall 1999 to the recent riots and strikes within Europe to protest government austerity measures. The global financial crisis has exacerbated nascent backlash and contributed to its spread. Backlash against globalization within global power centers takes two forms: a left leaning collective public protest against global capitalism and a right leaning defense of national sovereignty. The left variation occurs outside of standard political institutions, which is often, but not exclusively, NGO (nongovernmental organization) driven and usually involves expressive public demonstrations and disruption; the right variant occurs within institutions, particularly nationalist political parties and electoral systems. The right and the left share a mutual animus toward globalization and progress narratives. The left variant receives more media attention; the right is more durable as it is embedded within national political systems. Scholars acknowledge “globalization backlash.” Yet, the phenomenon has been under‐theorized as well as under‐empiricized and covers a range of disparate issues. A first step in a research agenda vis‐a‐vis the concept would be to establish the parameters of the phenomenon. What forms of social action might we attribute to the cultural, social, economic, and political forces of globalization, and which actions have other causes? The second issue is to identify the differences between institutional and extra‐institutional backlashes. The former is potentially more enduring, whereas the latter opens the door to iterations of public violence. -
Globalization of Capital and National Policymaking - Hall, Steven R.
Through a combination of economic, political, and technological changes, capital has become increasingly mobile across borders. This globalization of capital markets has created constraints on national policymaking. Fearing the loss capital inflows and the destabilizing effects of capital outflows, governments have incentives to avoid enacting policies that investors dislike. Applied across countries, this creates pressure for governments to compete for capital inflows by progressively reducing regulatory and tax burdens. Ultimately, this could lead to a race to the bottom that ends in complete deregulation. Yet, scholarship shows that while this pressure on governments exists, there has not been complete convergence of policy across countries. Instead, there remains persistent divergence as states do maintain some autonomy across a number of policy choices. This essay explores how recent research explains this interaction between the globalization of capital and national policymaking autonomies. Financial crises in the United States and Europe have challenged our understanding of how systemic risk can and should be managed in a world of mobile capital. Moving forward, scholars must build on the lessons from these crises. -
Globalization: Consequences for Work and Employment in Advanced Capitalist Societies - Elger, Tony
This essay considers the consequences of globalization for work and employment in advanced capitalist societies. It outlines the classic arguments of hyperglobalists, sceptics, and transformationalists. It first discusses the roles of multinational companies (MNCs) in both disseminating and differentiating distinctive models of work organization and employment relations across their international operations, emphasizing the micropolitical mediation of such processes and the interplay of “system,” “societal,” and “dominance” effects in the selection and hybridization of such models. It next considers the roles of corporate and state actors in recasting national institutional configurations, highlighting the contradictory and contested features of such configurations, and the scope for substantive remaking despite apparent institutional continuity. It then considers agendas for future research which build on these arguments but give fuller consideration to service MNCs and MNC operations beyond advanced capitalist societies. Finally, it notes the possible impact of other vectors of globalization on overall trends and variations in work and employment across societies. -
Human Residence Patterns - Walker, Robert S.
This essay addresses the significance and evidence surrounding the debate about how hunter‐gatherers and other humans organize their residential groups. In most species of mammals, either males or female remain in their natal group (the philopatric sex) while the other sex disperses at maturity (the dispersing sex). Sex‐biased philopatry and dispersal has many downstream effects on all aspects of social bonds and organization. Recent genetic data and detailed cross‐cultural ethnographic information suggest that human societies are quite variable and flexible in nature with males and females likely to either stay or disperse from natal families. Brothers and sisters commonly coreside in the same community and form life‐long bonds in a system quite unlike that of our primate relatives. This multilocal human residence pattern of flexible residence combined with marriage exchange systems create complex meta‐group social structures with kin‐based coalitions that extend across multiple residential groups. Human kinship and social networks that encompass multiple communities led to the emergence of large alliances at scales unparalleled by other species. -
Immigrant Adolescents: Opportunities and Challenges - Titzmann, Peter F.
Immigration is a critical issue for adolescent development as migration around the world continues at an increased pace. This essay provides insights into the opportunities and challenges in this area of research, but also spotlights important work that can serve as the foundation for future investigations. Our focus is on adolescent immigrants, as a substantial share of international migrants is under the age of 20. We first address specific issues across the crucial life domains of family, peers, and school, highlighting the need for developing outcome‐ and domain‐specific models in immigration research instead of focusing on “The Integration” of adolescent immigrants in general. We will then discuss more general challenges and future avenues in research with immigrant adolescents: the interplay of development and acculturation, discrimination, and the increasing heterogeneity of modern societies. -
Immigrant Children and the Transition to Adulthood - Gonzales, Roberto G.
The children of immigrants represent a large and growing segment of the US population. The children of immigrants are not progressing steadily as a group at the same rate or following a standard pathway to adulthood. Rather, there is wide variation across ethnic groups and immigrant generations, and immigrant children are not necessarily following the patterned sequence of the nonimmigrant majority. -
Immigrant Sociocultural Adaptation, Identification, and Belonging - Mahler, Sarah J.
For over 150 years and motivated by mass rural‐to‐urban migrations precipitated by industrialization, social scientists have been studying the experiences of newcomers into established sociocultural contexts. They rightly hypothesized that people's identifications with their social groups, their feelings of belonging in particular, might be altered in societies where the scope and scale of social life rapidly expanded well beyond the face‐to‐face relations characteristic of smaller‐scale societies. In addition, new forms of social solidarities and polarizations were swiftly emerging and taking hold. Early theorists faced the daunting task of not only chronicling these changes but also of theorizing in an age of newly forged and not yet sharpened social science analytical tools. Today the opposite is true; multiple models and almost innumerable publications compete to shed just a little more light on this complex social reality. Yet there is still room for innovation. Toward that goal I identify an approach meriting twenty‐first century focus: bridging heretofore separate approaches to understanding the experiences of immigrant versus native newcomers, that is, acculturation versus enculturation. Scholars of immigration have studied acculturation intensively—the processes of adapting to new cultural contexts by people who come to these contexts firmly established culturally from their homelands. Meanwhile, the same scholars almost completely ignore enculturation—the processes involved in learning culture and belonging that occupy infants and young children. Drawing upon advances in understanding the brain‐culture nexus, this essay argues that knowing more about enculturation can inform and improve understanding of acculturation. These concepts should form an analytical continuum examining how people come to identify and belong socially and how and why these shift in the course of life—particularly with migration. -
Immigration and the Changing Status of Asian Americans - Lee, Jennifer
Mass immigration over the past four decades has changed the racial and ethnic composition of United States by ushering in millions of Asians and Latinos whose arrival has not only challenged the traditional black‐white color line, but has also changed perceptions about race. Focusing on Asian Americans, I show how contemporary immigration has changed the racial status of this group; once considered “unassimilable” and “undesirable immigrants,” Asian Americans now exhibit the highest rates of intermarriage, the lowest rates of residential segregation, and the highest median household incomes of all US racial groups. By highlighting the changing selectivity of Asian immigration after the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, I illustrate how their hyper‐selectivity has not only affected their patterns of incorporation, but also produced positive stereotypes of contemporary Asian Americans. This, in turn, has resulted in a social psychological process that I refer to as stereotype promise—the promise of being viewed through the lens of a positive stereotype that leads one to perform in such a way that confirms the positive stereotype, thereby enhancing performance and outcomes. By introducing research in social psychology to the fields of immigration and race, I provide a better understanding of the ways in which immigration is changing the meaning of race for Asian Americans in twenty‐first century America.