American Journal of Sociology (AM J SOCIOL)

Publications in this journal

• Article: Misunderstandings in human relations: a study in false social perception.

  Gustav Ichheiser
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  ABSTRACT: In this monograph supplement certain implicit assumptions which may distort the analysis of human relationships are discussed. Sources of misinterpretations include: (1) a tendency to over-estimate the unity of personality. (2) emphasis in our culture on success and failure, (3) stereotyped classifications, (4) lack of awareness of the limits of insight, and (5) a tendency to overestimate the role of personal and to underestimate the role of situational factors. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
  American Journal of Sociology 10/2012;
• Article: Bright Futures in Malawi's New Dawn: Educational Aspirations as Assertions of Identity.

  Margaret Frye
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  ABSTRACT: Imagined futures, once a vital topic of theoretical inquiry within the sociology of culture, have been sidelined in recent decades. Rational choice models cannot explain the seemingly irrational optimism of youth aspirations, pointing to the need to explore other alternatives. This article incorporates insights from pragmatist theory and cognitive sociology to examine the relationship between imagined futures and present actions and experiences in rural Malawi, where future optimism appears particularly unfounded. Drawing from in-depth interviews and archival sources documenting ideological campaigns promoting schooling, the author shows that four elements are understood to jointly produce educational success: ambitious career goals, sustained effort, unflagging optimism, and resistance to temptation. Aspirations should be interpreted not as rational calculations, but instead as assertions of a virtuous identity, claims to be "one who aspires."
  American Journal of Sociology 05/2012; 117(6):1565-1624.
• Article: Citizenship rights for immigrants: national political processes and cross-national convergence in western Europe, 1980-2008.

  Ruud Koopmans, Ines Michalowski, Stine Waibel
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  ABSTRACT: Immigrant citizenship rights in the nation-state reference both theories of cross-national convergence and the resilience of national political processes. This article investigates European countries' attribution of rights to immigrants: Have these rights become more inclusive and more similar across countries? Are they affected by EU membership, the role of the judiciary, the party in power, the size of the immigrant electorate, or pressure exerted by anti-immigrant parties? Original data on 10 European countries, 1980-2008, reveal no evidence for cross-national convergence. Rights tended to become more inclusive until 2002, but stagnated afterward. Electoral changes drive these trends: growth of the immigrant electorate led to expansion, but countermobilization by right-wing parties slowed or reversed liberalizations. These electoral mechanisms are in turn shaped by long-standing policy traditions, leading to strong path dependence and the reproduction of preexisting cross-national differences.
  American Journal of Sociology 01/2012; 117(4):1202-45.
• Article: Gender deviance and household work: the role of occupation.

  Daniel Schneider
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  ABSTRACT: This article takes a new approach to gender and housework by identifying a new measure of gender deviance--work in gender-atypical occupations--and by arguing that men who do "women's work" and women who do "men's work" in the labor market may seek to neutralize their gender deviance by doing male- and female-typed work at home. Analysis of data from the National Survey of Families and Households and the 2003-7 waves of the American Time Use Survey shows that men who do "women's work" in the market spend more time on male-typed housework relative to men in gender-balanced occupations and their wives spend more time on female-typed housework. Women in gender-atypical occupations also do more female-typed housework than women in gender-balanced occupations. The article provides clearer evidence about the important ways in which cultural conceptions of gender shape and are shaped by economic processes.
  American Journal of Sociology 01/2012; 117(4):1029-72.
• Article: Human rights as myth and ceremony? Reevaluating the effectiveness of human rights treaties, 1981-2007.

  Wade M Cole
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  ABSTRACT: Much research has shown human rights treaties to be ineffective or even counterproductive, often contributing to greater levels of abuse among countries that ratify them. This article reevaluates the effect of four core human rights treaties on a variety of human rights outcomes. Unlike previous studies, it disaggregates treaty membership to examine the effect of relatively "stronger" and "weaker" commitments. Two-stage regression analyses that control for the endogeneity of treaty membership show that stronger commitments in the form of optional provisions that allow states and individuals to complain about human rights abuses are often associated with improved practices. The article discusses the scholarly and practical implications of these findings.
  American Journal of Sociology 01/2012; 117(4):1131-71.
• Article: Settler colonial power and the American Indian sovereignty movement: forms of domination, strategies of transformation.

  Erich Steinman
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  ABSTRACT: The article extends the multi-institutional model of power and change through an analysis of the American Indian Sovereignty Movement. Drawing upon cultural models of the state, and articulating institutionalist conceptions of political opportunities and resources, the analysis demonstrates that this framework can be applied to challenges addressing the state as well as nonstate fields. The rational-legal diminishment of tribal rights, bureaucratic paternalism, commonsense views of tribes as racial/ethnic minorities, and the binary construction of American and Indian as oppositional identities diminished the appeal of "contentious" political action. Instead, to establish tribes' status as sovereign nations, tribal leaders aggressively enacted infrastructural power, transposed favorable legal rulings across social fields to legitimize sovereignty discourses, and promoted a pragmatic coexistence with state and local governments. Identifying the United States as a settler colonial society, the study suggests that a decolonizing framework is more apt than racial/ethnicity approaches in conceptualizing the struggle of American Indians.
  American Journal of Sociology 01/2012; 117(4):1073-130.
• Article: Pride and prejudice: employment discrimination against openly gay men in the United States.

  András Tilcsik
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  ABSTRACT: This article presents the first large-scale audit study of discrimination against openly gay men in the United States. Pairs of fictitious résumés were sent in response to 1,769 job postings in seven states. One résumé in each pair was randomly assigned experience in a gay campus organization, and the other résumé was assigned a control organization. Two main findings have emerged. First, in some but not all states, there was significant discrimination against the fictitious applicants who appeared to be gay. This geographic variation in the level of discrimination appears to reflect regional differences in attitudes and antidiscrimination laws. Second, employers who emphasized the importance of stereotypically male heterosexual traits were particularly likely to discriminate against openly gay men. Beyond these particular findings, this study advances the audit literature more generally by covering multiple regions and by highlighting how audit techniques may be used to identify stereotypes that affect employment decisions in real labor markets.
  American Journal of Sociology 09/2011; 117(2):586-626.
• Source

  Available from: princeton.edu

  Article: Wealth and the marital divide.

  Daniel Schneider
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  ABSTRACT: Marriage patterns differ dramatically in the United States by race and education. The author identifies a novel explanation for these marital divides, namely, the important role of personal wealth in marriage entry. Using event-history models and data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 cohort, the author shows that wealth is an important predictor of first marriage and that differences in asset ownership by race and education help to explain a significant portion of the race and education gaps in first marriage. The article also tests possible explanations for why wealth plays an important role in first marriage entry.
  American Journal of Sociology 09/2011; 117(2):627-67.
• Source

  Available from: umich.edu

  Article: Social organization, population, and land use.

  William G Axinn, Dirgha J Ghimire
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  ABSTRACT: A new approach to investigation of human influences on the environment identifies social organization as an influence independent of population size, affluence, and technology. The framework also identifies population events, such as births, that influence the environment. The authors use longitudinal, multilevel, mixed-method measures of local land use changes, population dynamics, and social organization to test this framework. These tests reveal that changes in social organization are strongly associated with changes in land use independent of measures of population size, affluence, and technology. Also, local birth events shape local land use changes and key proximate determinants of land use change.
  American Journal of Sociology 07/2011; 117(1):209-58.
• Article: Network position and sexual dysfunction: implications of partner betweenness for men.

  Benjamin Cornwell, Edward O Laumann
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  ABSTRACT: This article combines relational perspectives on gender identity with social network structural perspectives on health to understand men's sexual functioning. The authors argue that network positions that afford independence and control over social resources are consistent with traditional masculine roles and may therefore affect men's sexual performance. For example, when a heterosexual man's female partner has more frequent contact with his confidants than he does--which the authors refer to as partner betweenness--his relational autonomy, privacy, and control are constrained. Analyses of data from the National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project (NSHAP) show that about a quarter of men experience partner betweennessa and that these men are 92% more likely to report erectile dysfunction. Partner betweenness is strongest among the youngest men in the sample, which may reflect changing conceptions of masculinity in later life. The authors consider several explanations for these findings and urge additional research on the links between health, gender, and network structure.
  American Journal of Sociology 07/2011; 117(1):172-208.
• Article: The end of the gender revolution? Gender role attitudes from 1977 to 2008.

  David Cotter, Joan M Hermsen, Reeve Vanneman
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  ABSTRACT: After becoming consistently more egalitarian for more than two decades, gender role attitudes in the General Social Survey have changed little since the mid-1990s. This plateau mirrors other gender trends, suggesting a fundamental alteration in the momentum toward gender equality. While cohort replacement can explain about half of the increasing egalitarianism between 1974 and 1994, the changes since the mid-1990s are not well accounted for by cohort differences. Nor is the post-1994 stagnation explained by structural or broad ideological changes in American society. The recent lack of change in gender attitudes is more likely the consequence of the rise of a new cultural frame, an "egalitarian essentialism" that blends aspects of feminist equality and traditional motherhood roles.
  American Journal of Sociology 07/2011; 117(1):259-89.
• Source

  Available from: wisc.edu

  Article: The population dynamics of black-white-mulatto racial systems.

  James D Montgomery
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  ABSTRACT: Building on Preston and Campbell's two-sex model of intergenerational transmission, this article provides a theoretical analysis of the dynamics of the racial distribution in black-white-mulatto systems. The author shows that "bounded" patterns of racial classification and switching imply long-run racial homogeneity in the absence of differential reproduction. Beyond the theoretical analysis, the author attempts to account for the dramatic growth of the white population share in Puerto Rico in the early 20th century. Because the effects of racial classification and differential reproduction were roughly offsetting, the observed growth of the white share can be attributed almost entirely to racial switching.
  American Journal of Sociology 07/2011; 117(1):46-89.
• Source

  Available from: wisc.edu

  Article: The legacy of disadvantage: multigenerational neighborhood effects on cognitive ability.

  Patrick Sharkey, Felix Elwert
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  ABSTRACT: This study examines how the neighborhood environments experienced over multiple generations of a family influence children's cognitive ability. Building on recent research showing strong continuity in neighborhood environments across generations of family members, the authors argue for a revised perspective on "neighborhood effects" that considers the ways in which the neighborhood environment in one generation may have a lingering impact on the next generation. To analyze multigenerational effects, the authors use newly developed methods designed to estimate unbiased treatment effects when treatments and confounders vary over time. The results confirm a powerful link between neighborhoods and cognitive ability that extends across generations. A family's exposure to neighborhood poverty across two consecutive generations reduces child cognitive ability by more than half a standard deviation. A formal sensitivity analysis suggests that results are robust to unobserved selection bias.
  American Journal of Sociology 05/2011; 116(6):1934-81.
• Article: She left, he left: how employment and satisfaction affect women's and men's decisions to leave marriages.

  Liana C Sayer, Paula England, Paul D Allison, Nicole Kangas
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  ABSTRACT: Studies examining determinants of divorce have largely ignored differences between factors that elevate wives' and husbands' initiation of divorce. The authors use longitudinal data and a latent class model embedded in a competing-risks event history model to assess distinct predictors of wives and husbands leaving marriages. They find that when men are not employed, either spouse is more likely to leave. When wives report better-than-average marital satisfaction, their employment affects neither spouse's exit. However, when wives report below-average marital satisfaction, their employment makes it more likely they will leave. The authors' findings suggest that theories of divorce require "gendering" to reflect asymmetric gender change.
  American Journal of Sociology 05/2011; 116(6):1982-2018.
• Source

  Available from: brynmawr.edu

  Article: Race and the local politics of punishment in the new world of welfare.

  Richard C Fording, Joe Soss, Sanford F Schram
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  ABSTRACT: To illuminate how race affects the usage of punitive tools in policy implementation settings, we analyze sanctions imposed for noncompliant client behavior under welfare reform. Drawing on a model of racial classification and policy choice, we test four hypotheses regarding client race, local context, and sanctioning. Based on longitudinal and cross-sectional multilevel analyses of individual-level administrative data, we find that race plays a significant role in shaping sanction implementation. Its effects, however, are highly contingent on client characteristics, local political contexts, and the degree to which state governments devolve policy control to local officials.
  American Journal of Sociology 03/2011; 116(5):1610-57.
• Source

  Available from: columbia.edu

  Article: Segregation in social networks based on acquaintanceship and trust.

  Thomas A DiPrete, Andrew Gelman, Tyler McCormick, Julien Teitler, Tian Zheng
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  ABSTRACT: Using 2006 General Social Survey data, the authors compare levels of segregation by race and along other dimensions of potential social cleavage in the contemporary United States. Americans are not as isolated as the most extreme recent estimates suggest. However, hopes that "bridging" social capital is more common in broader acquaintanceship networks than in core networks are not supported. Instead, the entire acquaintanceship network is perceived by Americans to be about as segregated as the much smaller network of close ties. People do not always know the religiosity, political ideology, family behaviors, or socioeconomic status of their acquaintances, but perceived social divisions on these dimensions are high, sometimes rivaling racial segregation in acquaintanceship networks. The major challenge to social integration today comes from the tendency of many Americans to isolate themselves from others who differ on race, political ideology, level of religiosity, and other salient aspects of social identity.
  American Journal of Sociology 01/2011; 116(4):1234-83.
• Article: Children of misfortune: early adversity and cumulative inequality in perceived life trajectories.

  Markus H Schafer, Kenneth F Ferraro, Sarah A Mustillo
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  ABSTRACT: Adversity early in life may alter pathways of aging, but what interpretive processes can soften the blow of early insults? Drawing from cumulative inequality theory, the authors analyze trajectories of life evaluations and then consider whether early adversity offsets favorable expectations for the future. Results reveal that early adversity contributes to more negative views of the past but rising expectations for the future. Early adversity also has enduring effects on life evaluations, offsetting the influence of buoyant expectations. The findings draw attention to the limits of human agency under the constraints of early adversity-a process described as biographical structuration.
  American Journal of Sociology 01/2011; 116(4):1053-91.
• Source

  Available from: SSRN

  Article: Cultural mechanisms and the persistence of neighborhood violence.

  David S Kirk, Andrew V Papachristos
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  ABSTRACT: Sociologists have given considerable attention to identifying the neighborhood-level social-interactional mechanisms that influence outcomes such as crime, educational attainment, and health. Yet, cultural mechanisms are often overlooked in quantitative studies of neighborhood effects. This paper adds a cultural dimension to neighborhood effects research by exploring the consequences of legal cynicism. Legal cynicism refers to a cultural frame in which people perceive the law as illegitimate, unresponsive, and ill equipped to ensure public safety. The authors find that legal cynicism explains why homicide persisted in certain Chicago neighborhoods during the 1990s despite declines in poverty and declines in violence city-wide.
  American Journal of Sociology 01/2011; 116(4):1190-233.
• Source

  Available from: psu.edu

  Article: Income inequality and income segregation.

  Sean F Reardon, Kendra Bischoff
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  ABSTRACT: This article investigates how the growth in income inequality from 1970 to 2000 affected patterns of income segregation along three dimensions: the spatial segregation of poverty and affluence, race-specific patterns of income segregation, and the geographic scale of income segregation. The evidence reveals a robust relationship between income inequality and income segregation, an effect that is larger for black families than for white families. In addition, income inequality affects income segregation primarily through its effect on the large-scale spatial segregation of affluence rather than by affecting the spatial segregation of poverty or by altering small-scale patterns of income segregation.
  American Journal of Sociology 01/2011; 116(4):1092-153.
• Source

  Available from: nber.org

  Article: Moving teenagers out of high-risk neighborhoods: how girls fare better than boys.

  Susan Clampet-Lundquist, Jeffrey R Kling, Kathryn Edin, Greg J Duncan
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  ABSTRACT: Moving to Opportunity (MTO) offered public housing residents the opportunity to move to low-poverty neighborhoods. Several years later, boys in the experimental group fared no better on measures of risk behavior than their control group counterparts, whereas girls in the experimental group engaged in lower-risk behavior than control group girls. The authors explore these differences by analyzing data from in-depth interviews conducted with 86 teens in Baltimore and Chicago. They find that daily routines, fitting in with neighborhood norms, neighborhood navigation strategies, interactions with peers, friendship making, and distance from father figures may contribute to how girls who moved via MTO benefited more than boys.
  American Journal of Sociology 01/2011; 116(4):1154-89.