Kevin T. Leicht

• PHD Indiana University, 1987
• Professor at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Since the early 1970's state and local governments have launched an array of economic development programs designed to promote high-technology development. The question our analysis addresses is whether these programs promote long-term high-technology employment growth net of state location and agglomeration advantages. Proponents talk about an inf...

Sociologists have spent a great deal of energy studying social inequality, but in this presentation I suggest that we need to refocus our efforts a bit. I examine four popular myths among the general public, and among some in sociology, regarding the drivers of extreme inequality: (1) that most inequality is generated by race and gender, (2) that m...

Professional work is being attacked by three separate but related forces that transcend easy categorization; market fundamentalism, the rigid belief that unfettered and unregulated free markets will deliver higher quality professional services at lower prices, cultural fragmentation resulting from globalization and the spread of easily available in...

The relationship between institutions and professions has been defined by neo-institutional theory since the 1990s. However, the abandonment of Keynesian economics and the rise of neoliberal ideology have changed the relationship between the normative and technical environments in the professions. The emphasis by old institutional theory on how bes...

In this analysis, we revisit the arguments made in our 2007 book, Post-Industrial Peasants: The Illusion of Middle Class Prosperity, and foreshadow our arguments in our forthcoming book, Middle Class Meltdown in America: Causes, Consequences and Remedies (2014, Routledge). The plight of the American middle class has been growing steadily since the...

In accessible prose for North American undergraduate students, this short text provides a sociological understanding of the causes and consequences of growing middle class inequality, with an abundance of supporting, empirical data. The book also addresses what we, as individuals and as a society, can do to put middle class Americans on a sounder f...

In this paper, I suggest that one creator of state-level economic inequalities is the ability to accumulate personal debt through home mortgage financing schemes. My analysis assesses the extent to which local political environments and labour market opportunities are systematically related to housing distress in the 48 continental United States. T...

Purpose – David Gordon (1996) contended that the size of the managerial/administrative class has expanded in recent decades and that this has contributed to growing earnings inequality. This argument, however, has received insufficient attention despite its potential to explain some of the growth of earnings inequality in recent decades. We assess...

The global recession has made researchers and policy makers ask a broad set of questions about the future of work and pay in America. This article examines three recent books, Pollin et al.’s A Measure of Fairness: The Economics of Living Wages and Minimum Wages in the United States (2008), Devault’s People at Work: Life, Power, and Social Inclusio...

The study of politics and political phenomena is important for understanding a variety of questions that are at the core of social science research, theorizing, and policy analysis. This collection by top scholars of politics is designed to provide a broad overview of the substantive, theoretical and methodological state of political research while...

Kevin T. Leicht, The University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA J. Craig Jenkins, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA Political sociology is the interdisciplinary study of power and the intersection of personality, society and politics. The field also examines how the political process is affected by major social trends as well as exploring h...

The professions in the West are undergoing unprecedented calls for greater accountability and efficiency in service delivery. This article links these changes to recent developments in institutional theory that emphasize shifting salience of technical over symbolic organizational environments. The analysis of the adaptations to these changes in Fre...

American business schools are in an existential crisis. From the corporate scandals of the last 10 years, to the mercenary role of executive MBA programs, to the guru worship of corporate CEOs and others, to the variable quality of students and the doubtful connections between business school faculty and management practice, it is difficult to thin...

Group gaps research risks irrelevance because new forms of earnings inequality are increasing inequality within groups. This review attempts to stimulate more broad-ranging research on earnings inequality beyond the study of average gender and racial gaps. After reviewing some of the problems with research on average group gaps, I provide a brief r...

Objective. Growth in the share of high-technology employment is critical to discussions of the postindustrial transition. Do new state and local technology policies create growth in the share of high-technology employment? This article examines this question along with the effects of location and agglomeration advantages, identifying sources of qua...

The Texas legislature passed the Top 10% Law in 1996 guaranteeing automatic admission to any Texas public college or university for seniors who graduate in the top decile of their high school class.Using data on a representative sample of seniors (N = 12,029) enrolled in 96 Texas public high schools, we examine whether and how this law affects the...

Much social science suggests that income inequality is a product of economic and demographic factors and recent work highlights the influence of Leftist politics in affluent Western democracies. But, prior research has neglected rightist politics. We examine the impact of cumulative right party power on three measures of income inequality in an unb...

Purpose The paper aims to argue that US colleges and universities resemble a “leaning tower” with ever expanding layers of administrators and managers who control and dominate university life. This set of institutional changes has altered the way that college administrators are recruited. Design/methodology/approach The paper uses recent developme...

Beginning in 1982, the majority of college students have been women and that majority has increased since. Explanations for the predominance of women in college enrollments and completion include a variety of labor-market factors that might now advantage men less than in the past. Avariety of labor-market analyses show that, while some recent devel...

Political sociology has a wide array of theoretical and methodological tools for explaining political processes and their consequences. These tools provide potent new techniques for addressing global inequalities tied to differential access to power and resources. From the latest developments in state theory to studies of social movements, from the...

Since the 1970s, federal state and local governments have launched an array of new high technology development programs. Researchers and policy-makers disagree about the relative merits of these policies. We address the effects of seven of these policies on high tech industry employment growth in metropolitan statistical areas in the United States...

We identify three key areas of change in the context of professional services. First, is the increasing demographic diversity and growing income inequality within professions; second, is the emergence of neo-liberal ideologies that challenge traditional professional norms; third, is the emergence of management consulting as a distinct occupational...

The United States has experienced a significantdevolution of social and economic policy responsibilities to the states sincethe early 1970s. In an attempt to improve tax bases and generate jobs, stateand local governments have adopted proactive economic development policies thattarget favored industries, promoting state intervention in the privatem...

The relationship between unions and their members is an important, yet neglected, subject in recent studies of the sociology of work. This study develops and tests a theory of union satisfaction and participation that combines recent research in the sociology of work with previous explanations of union satisfaction and participation provided by ind...

The historical changes in management paradigmsthroughout the twentieth century are traced, and the emergence of a newparadigm—neoentrepreneurialism—is discussed. The study develops a professionalautonomy perspective to assess the acceptance of new management ideas in theUnited States, with an emphasis on the waning role of bureaucracy. As theauthor...

This article revisits Hunter’s (1991) culture wars thesis and applies it to an institutional arena that has received comparatively little attention in the culture wars debate—the contemporary American workplace. The authors ask to what extent cultural divisions originating in four broad cultural domains (i.e., social equality, social freedom, multi...

Our paper represents an attempt to stimulate continued sociological interest in professional work. Our review suggests that understanding professional work is central to understanding larger workplace changes in the late twentieth century. Some researchers have documented the increasingly diverse arrangements for the delivery of professional servic...

Social Forces 81.2 (2002) 669-671 Baldoz, Koeber, and Kraft attempt to give the sociology of the labor process a shot in the arm by focusing readers' attention on new and unconventional work arrangements. This edited volume is the product of a conference at SUNY-Binghamton in May 1998 titled "Work, Difference and Social Change," involving participa...

Work is a central institution in the United States. The work that Americans do has a major influence on their position within the stratification system in the United States. Work is also the basis on which important social benefits such as health insurance and many pension benefits are distributed. Changes in work in the United States reflect key s...

Social Forces 80.2 (2001) 733-734 Like many things that sociologists study, the fact that most of us know health care delivery is changing doesn't mean we know much about it. Yet Institutional Change in Healthcare Organizations is more than a study of organizational change in health care delivery. Scott, Ruef, Mendel, and Caronna focus on the deins...

This research examines the extent of poverty among working men in urban labor markets and analyzes differences in the risk of working poverty among Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, and non-Latino White men. Using data from the 1990 Public Use Microdata Sample, the research documents sizable ethnic differences in rates of working poverty and ascertains...

Incl. bibl.

This paper examines a common assumption of much of the research on class relations in capitalist economies that workers' collective action improves the economic standing of the working class. Specifically, we utilize a quarterly, time-series analysis to test hypotheses about the impact of changes in union membership and strike activity on changes i...

Our analysis addresses whether the legal profession can be classified as experiencing successful feminization. Drawing on the work of Reskin and Roos (1990) and Wright and Jacobs (1994), we suggest that relatively successful feminization occurs where (1) occupational growth is rapid, (2) graduate and specialized degrees are important, and (3) wages...

Discussions of policy formation have reached an impasse with accumulating support for rival theories. We address this impasse by advancing a “political resource” theory that synthesizes class-, state-centered, neocorporatist and institutional ideas to explain policy formation in advanced capitalist democracies. Political institutions constitute inf...

Analysis of six books on workplace change indicates (1) workplace data collection and social stratification measures must change; (2) definition of unemployment is becoming amorphous; (3) studies of gender/racial inequality should consider networking and recruitment issues; (4) disillusioned workers should be studied; and (5) political and social a...

This study examined the role that the gender of job informants plays in the job-finding process for men and women. Data on job seekers at a large bank were used to test hypotheses derived from work on social distance and gender segregation. Our results suggest that jobs found via cross-gender referrals are hierarchically lower than the jobs of the...

During the 1980s state governments in the United States embarked on an experiment in direct economic intervention by launching public venture capital programs. This paper examines class-, state-centered and neocorporatist theories, showing that relatively autonomous state governments responded to their fiscal dependence on corporate taxes, deindust...

This paper examines the effects of hospital characteristics and radical organizational change on the relative representation of health care professions in hospitals over the period of the 1980s. Health care organizations, and hospitals in particular, represent organizations where multiple professional groups make competing claims of expertise that...

This analysis takes a life-course approach to the study of gender inequality in earnings among young adults. The authors construct hypotheses that assess the effects of family role accumulation, earnings atrophy and occupational choice, occupational segregation, and statistical discrimination. The authors find considerable support for the hypothesi...

State governments have adopted a wide variety of policies to promote economic development over the past two decades. There has been little progress, however in developing a clear conceptualization of the general strategies that underlie these programs or in assessing their impact on economic growth. Using confirmatory factor analysis, the authors e...

This article attempts to expand our understanding of the effects of unions on the earnings of workers by examining several dimensions of union presence simultaneously. Specifically, the authors examine the direct effects of unions (union membership) and the indirect effects of intraindustry union threats (union density) and interindustry union thre...

This study investigates work-family connections and economic success among women and men small business owners. We use what we term gender similarity and gender difference models to frame this investigation. The first model emphasizes the similarities between women and men in the processes through which work outcomes are determined. In contrast, th...

This article seeks to advance “new structuralist” theory by considering the effects of positional power and class on individual earnings. We contend that positional power, that is the power wielded by workers employed in industries in an interdependent economy, confers upon workers the potential to disrupt system-wide production and creates leverag...

We test several hypotheses derived from Marxist crisis theories regarding the impact of macroeconomic performance on the distribution of income between labor and capital in the United States during the period 1950 to 1980. Using annual data on compensation, profits, and employment, we estimate the short-term effects of cyclical variations in unempl...

This research explores the effect of gender on organizational performance. Data used in the analysis was collected from small businesses in South Central Indiana from 1985-1987. The businesses were from the food and drink, computer sales and software, and health industries. Of the businesses surveyed, 312 were headed by men while 99 where headed by...

Some researchers view unions primarily as functioning to increase earnings inequality among the working class while others see them as threatening employers so that they raise wages for unorganized workers and minimize working-class inequality. Threat effects are defined as the tendency for nonunionized employers to respond to the threat of unioniz...

The newspaper industry provides an ideal context for studying the impact of industrial and technological change on the labor process. Sociologists have long noted the exemplary craftsmanship and occupational pride of the printing trades.1 These authors viewed printing as “an anachronism in the age of large scale industrial organization,”2 where the...

In this paper, we illustrate a multivariate structural approach to explaining inequalities in job skills. We argue that skill differences are produced by work structures operating at several levels of analysis, including organizations, occupations, technology, and unions. In addition, background characteristics of individuals are important for allo...

The development of the structural approach to the study of social stratification suggests that economic, organizational, and personal characteristics may be defined as resources that workers can grasp in order to improve their relative position in the stratification system. Recent emphasis on the role of the state in influencing the environment whe...