Claude Fischer

University of California, Berkeley | UCB · Department of Sociology

The proportion of Americans who reported no religious preference doubled from 7 percent to 14 percent in the 1990s. This dramatic change may have resulted from demographic shifts, increasing religious skepticism, or the mix of politics and religion that characterized the 1990s. One demographic factor is the succession of generations; the percentage...

We apply Random Forests to detailed survey data of social relations in order to derive an inductive typology of egocentric networks. Beginning with over 40 descriptors of 1050 northern California respondents’ networks, we combine 21 of these into seven dimensions, the extent to which those networks display: (1) interaction with nonkin, (2) proximit...

Twenty percent of American adults claimed no religious preference in 2012, compared to 7 percent twenty-five years earlier. Previous research identified a political backlash against the religious right and generational change as major factors in explaining the trend. That research found that religious beliefs had not changed, ruling out secularizat...

Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews http://csx.sagepub.com/ The Great Indian Phone Book: How the Cheap Cell Phone Changes Business, Politics, and Daily Life Claude S. Fischer Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews 2014 43: 680 DOI: 10.1177/0094306114545742q The online version of this article can be found at: http://csx.sagepub.com/co...

Objectives. This paper tests whether differences by gender and by educational attainment in contact with friends and family and in support expected from friends and family narrow or widen in late middle age. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Gerontological Society of America. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail:...

Our nation began with the simple phrase, “We the People.” But who were and are “We”? Who were we in 1776, in 1865, or 1968, and is there any continuity in character between the we of those years and the nearly 300 million people living in the radically different America of today? With Made in America, Claude S. Fischer draws on decades of h...

The view that America is fragmenting is popular among both pundits and academics and may well be endemic to American culture. We review claims that between 1970 and 2005 American society fragmented along lines of cultural politics, social class, immigration, race, or lifestyle. Taking the twentieth century as historical context, we weigh evidence f...

McPherson, Smith-Lovin, and Brashears (2006, 2008b) reported that Americans' social networks shrank precipitously from 1985 to 2004. When asked to list the people with whom they discussed "important matters," respondents to the 2004 General Social Survey (GSS) provided about one-third fewer names than did respondents in the 1985 survey. Critically,...

I point to contradictions in American individualism not unlike those suggested by Robin M. Williams Jr. I go on to suggest how twenty-first-century sociologists might better understand this aspect of American exceptionalism: not as an egoistic, asocial individualism, but as a covenantal, social voluntarism.

Happiness scholars have tried to resolve the seeming paradox that as Americans’ wealth increased substantially over the last few decades, their happiness did not. This article questions whether the paradox is real. Demonstrations of the paradox almost always rely on GDP per capita as the measure of wealth, but that is a poor measure of a people’s w...

In every generation, Americans have worried about the solidarity of the nation. Since the days of the Mayflower, those already settled here have wondered how newcomers with different cultures, values, and (frequently) skin color would influence America. Would the new groups create polarization and disharmony? Thus far, the United States has a remar...

In this article, we assess trends in residential segregation in the United States from 1960 to 2000 along several dimensions of race and ethnicity, class, and life cycle and present a method for attributing segregation to nested geographic levels. We measured segregation for metropolitan America using the Theil index, which is additively decomposed...

This paper considers social psychological models of consumption that underlie most claims that Americans turned into over-buying "consumerists" sometime in the last two centuries. It identifies emulation, indulgence, and self-expression as the key models. Economists critique the very notion of consumerism, but over-buying is a social reality. Nonet...

Drawing on decennial census data, we assess trends in residential segregation in the United States from 1960 to 2000 along several dimensions of ancestry, class, and life cycle. To do so, we develop a methodology for attributing segregation to several nested geographical levels. Segregation for metropolitan America is measured using the Theil index...

of the United States 2000.

The proportion of Americans who reported no religious preference doubled from 7 percent to 14 percent in the 1990s. This dramatic change may have resulted from demographic shifts, increasing religious skepticism, or the mix of politics and reli- gion that characterized the 1990s. One demographic factor is the succession of generations; the percenta...

The most recent census data show that on average, black and Hispanic households live in neighborhoods with more than one and a half times the poverty rate of neighborhoods where the average non-Hispanic white lives. Even Asians, who have higher incomes than blacks and Hispanics and are less residentially segregated, live in somewhat poorer neighbor...

The proportion of Americans who reported no religious preference doubled from 7 to 14 percent in the second half of the 1990s, according to data from the General Social Survey. This dramatic change may be the result of demographic shifts, increasing skepticism, or the politicization of religion. Part of the increase reflects a succession of generat...

this paper. Comments by John Logan and Felice Levine on earlier draf t improved the essay. 1 I draw largely from Miller (1989). 1 Social Science and the Public After Mumford I feel honored to give the Lewis Mumford lecture. Few, if any, in the twentieth century bestrode the borderland between social science and the public as Lewis Mumford did. The...

Many scholars attribute contemporary ills to greater "rootlessness" among Americans. Residential mobility may be of some concern because local communities are disordered and vulnerable individuals are at risk when turnover is especially rapid. However, rates of residential mobility actually declined between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries an...

Did family time constraints lead Americans in the 1990s to cut back on their religious activities? Using the 1988-1998 GSS, we compared respondents by class, by whether or not they had children at home, and by how many hours spouses worked each week (and we controlled for several other factors, including religion of origin). Generally, Americans su...

We explore four components of American religious diversity in the twentieth century: (1) denominational diversity, (2) compositional diversity, (3) diversity of practice, and (4) tolerance. Denominational diversity declined as Protestant domination of the religious landscape gave way to, first, Judeo-Christian America, then, more recently, to a ful...

Sociologists commonly assert that Americans are exceptionally individualistic. Two sets of extensive cross-national survey data raise doubts about that assumption. Although American respondents endorsed economic self-reliance more than did respondents from other western nations, they did not generally favor individual interest over group interest m...

As debate rages over the widening and destructive gap between the rich and the rest of Americans, Claude Fischer and his colleagues present a comprehensive new treatment of inequality in America. They challenge arguments that expanding inequality is the natural, perhaps necessary, accompaniment of economic growth. They refute the claims of the ince...

Over the last 20 years, some urban sociologists have placed Fischer's 1975 article, ''Subcultural Theory of Urbanism,'' on equal footing with Wirth's 1938 classic, ''Urbanism as a Way of Life,'' as an explanation of urban-rural differences. But ambiguities in Fischer's subcultural theory require clarification before its validity can be thoroughly j...

Most sociological perspectives suggest that personal relations are shaped by broad societal structures, but there is relatively little systematic cross-national research on social networks. We replicated Fischer's (1982) study of northern Californians' networks in the Haifa, Israel, region. Results suggest that, in many respects, the networks did n...

This study presents a rare glimpse of haw people use their social networks during a mortal threat. In surveys done around the time of the 1991 Gulf War, we asked residents of metropolitan Haifa, Israel, to tell us from whom they received support during the missile attacks. The results show that Israelis relied more on kin than they did in their eve...

One million fewer American farms had telephones in 1940 than in 1920; the instrument was disconnected in at least a third of the farm homes that once had it. Knowing how and why this “devolution” (Mattingly and Aspbury, 1985) occurred can expand our understanding of the social role of technology, diffusion of innovation, and more generally, twentie...

Recent work on gender and technology debunks the claim that household technologies have liberated women from domestic work. The history of telephone use in North America suggests, however, that global conclusions about gender and consumer technologies may be misleading. Although marketed primarily as a business instrument and secondarily as an inst...

The familiar refrain, "Reach out, reach out and touch someone," has been part of American Telephone and Telegraph's (ATT for decades it was more likely to discourage it. The industry's "discovery" of sociability illustrates how structural and cultural constraints interact with public demand to shape the diffusion of a technology. While historians h...

The application of network analysis to certain issues in sociology requires measurement of individuals' personal networks. These issues generally involve the impact of structural locations on persons' social lives. One such case is the Northern California Community Study of the personal consequences of residential environments. This article describ...

Recent studies indicate continuing cultural differences between residents of larger and smaller communities. This paper argues that these differences persist because they are constantly generated anew. Innovations emerge in metropolitan centers and diffuse from them to smaller places, so that there is always a gap between the two. Predictions from...

The experimental study of human crowding is one of the behavioral sciences’ fastest-growing areas of research. We come to this forum with two major interests. As social psychologists who have engaged in experimental work on crowding, we are concerned with the conduct and evaluation of these laboratory studies. As urban sociologists, we have noted w...

This article reviews and critically evaluates current research on the effects of crowding. Particular concern is to examine this literature from the perspective of urban studies and to assess its value for urban planners. The article is divided into three sections. The first section reviews in considerable detail the various types of studies conduc...

Wirth's (1938) theory of urban life has been eclipsed in recent years by a perspective that denies the importance of ecological factors. This view, though more accurate than Wirth's, fails to account for the pervasive "unconventionality" (deviance, invention, etc.) of urban life. A model is presented here to remedy that problem; it reintroduces the...

Three models predict an association between urbanism and nontraditional behavior: (1) that it is a function of the characteristics of individuals found in cities; (2) that it is due to the anomie of cities; (3) that it is due to the generation of and consequent influence of innovative urban subcultures. Secondary analysis of American survey data on...

This study concerns decisionmaking by men who serve as third parties in disputes between two other individuals. A study was made of hearings at which a government official (O) attempted to judge the merits of a wage claim brought by a worker (C) against his former employer (D). O's attitudes before and after the hearing were assessed, and a content...

We tested the hypothesis derived from Louis Wirth (1938) that urban life, all else equal, leads to alienation by secondary analysis of three large surveys. We examined two dimensions: powerlessness, operationalized with a sense of personal competence scale, and social isolation, operationalized by scales and items reflecting a distrust of others (a...

Louis Wirth's classic description of the social and psychological effects of urbanism is organized into a model for the purpose of reviewing relevant theory and empirical research. Evidence on predicted structural effects (differentiation, formal integration and anomie) and individual effects (sensory overload, role mobility, isolation and deviance...

Persistent school segregation does not mean just that children of diierent racial and ethnic backgrounds attend diierent schools, but that their schools are also unequal in their students' performance. This study documents nation-ally the extent of disparities in student performance between schools attended by whites and Asians compared to blacks,...

A mixed-motive bargaining game involving division of a joint reward by two negotiators was used in three experiments. For each bargaining problem each negotiator was privately assigned a minimum necessary share (MNS) which he had to exceed if agreement was to be profitable to him. Since each person had no direct knowledge of the other's MNS, condit...