Race and Trust Smith, Sandra Susan
Annual review of sociology,
01/2010, Letnik:
36, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This review considers that aspect of the voluminous trust literature that deals with race. After discussing the social conditions within which trust becomes relevant and outlining the distinctive ...contours of the three most common conceptualizations of trust—generalized, particularized, and strategic—I elaborate on the extent and nature of ethnoracial trust differences and provide an overview of the explanations for these differences. Ethnoracial differences in generalized trust are attributed to historical and contemporary discrimination, neighborhood context, and ethnoracial socialization. The consequences for the radius-of-trust problem are discussed with regard to particularized trust. And ethnoracial differences in strategic trust are located in structures of trustworthiness—such as social closure—and reputational concerns. I end the review with a brief discussion of social and economic consequences for trust gaps.
Unemployment among black Americans is twice that of whites. Myriad theories have been put forward to explain the persistent employment gap between blacks and whites in the U.S. Structural theorists ...point to factors such as employer discrimination and the decline of urban manufacturing. Other researchers argue that African-American residents living in urban neighborhoods of concentrated poverty lack social networks that can connect them to employers. Still others believe that African-American culture fosters attitudes of defeatism and resistance to work. In Lone Pursuit, sociologist Sandra Susan Smith cuts through this thicket of competing explanations to examine the actual process of job searching in depth. Lone Pursuit reveals that unemployed African Americans living in the inner city are being let down by jobholding peers and government agencies who could help them find work, but choose not to. Lone Pursuit is a pioneering ethnographic study of the experiences of low-skilled, black urban residents in Michigan as both jobseekers and jobholders. Smith surveyed 105 African-American men and women between the ages of 20 and 40, each of whom had no more than a high school diploma. She finds that mutual distrust thwarts cooperation between jobseekers and jobholders. Jobseekers do not lack social capital per se, but are often unable to make use of the network ties they have. Most jobholders express reluctance about referring their friends and relatives for jobs, fearful of jeopardizing their own reputations with employers. Rather than finding a culture of dependency, Smith discovered that her underprivileged subjects engage in a discourse of individualism. To justify denying assistance to their friends and relatives, jobholders characterize their unemployed peers as lacking in motivation and stress the importance of individual responsibility. As a result, many jobseekers, wary of being demeaned for their needy condition, hesitate to seek referrals from their peers. In a low-skill labor market where employers rely heavily on personal referrals, this go-it-alone approach is profoundly self-defeating. In her observations of a state job center, Smith finds similar distrust and non-cooperation between jobseekers and center staff members, who assume that young black men are unwilling to make an effort to find work. As private contractors hired by the state, the job center also seeks to meet performance quotas by screening out the riskiest prospects—black male and female jobseekers who face the biggest obstacles to employment and thus need the most help. The problem of chronic black joblessness has resisted both the concerted efforts of policymakers and the proliferation of theories offered by researchers. By examining the roots of the African-American unemployment crisis from the vantage point of the everyday job-searching experiences of the urban poor, Lone Pursuit provides a novel answer to this decades-old puzzle.
In the United States, almost seven million people are under correctional control. This includes 2.3 million held in the nation’s jails, prisons, detention centers, and involuntary commitment ...facilities. It also includes 4.5 million people in community corrections—3.7 million on probation and more than eight hundred thousand on parole (Sawyer and Wagner 2019). That works out to be roughly 2,160 per hundred thousand adult residents (Kaeble and Cowhig 2018). Among low-income people of color, who are far more likely to be caught in the system’s web, the rate is much higher.1 Although these figures represent modest declines over the past decade in the population under supervision, by historical standards, current rates are still extraordinarily high. They are roughly seven times higher than at any other period in the United States between 1900 and 1975 (and probably since the genesis of the prison in the nineteenth century), and higher per capita than any other nation, including China and Russia.The dramatic expansion of the criminal justice system, with its attendant collateral consequences, has left no major institution untouched. Perhaps nowhere, however, have effects of the system’s growing reach been studied more than in the labor market. As is by now well known, contact with the criminal justice system is associated with significantly poorer employment outcomes. Arrest, conviction, and incarceration reduce the odds of searching for work (Sugie 2018; Smith and Broege 2019), and, contingent on a search, of getting a job (Apel and Sweeten 2010). When employed, individuals who have had criminal justice contact struggle with job stability, annually working many fewer weeks and earning significantly lower wages (Freeman 1991a; Grogger 1992; Waldfogel 1994; Nagin and Waldfogel 1995; Western 2006; for exceptions, see Kling 2002; Pettit and Lyons 2007; Sabol 2007). This is in part because for many individuals, employment typically amounts to day labor with no real prospects of further employment, let alone benefits (Sugie 2018). Thus the criminal justice system not only affects aggregate labor market participation, employment rates, and employment stability, but also erodes wages and earnings while driving up rates of poverty among the employed (Western and Beckett 1999; Western 2002; Western and Pettit 2005).We draw from the economic and sociological bodies of research to define what we mean by labor market institutions and then explain how criminal justice policies serve as such, focusing on the role these policies have played to both exclude justice-involved individuals from labor market opportunities, but also to extract labor from the same population, often under oppressive conditions. We end our discussion by asking whether the United States is unique in its use of the criminal justice system as a key labor market institution? Is this yet another case of American exceptionalism?
From a social capital theoretical perspective, deficiencies in access to mainstream ties and institutions explain persistent joblessness among the black urban poor. Little problematized, however, is ...the extent to which access leads to mobilization and the social context within which social capital activation occurs. Employing in‐depth interviews of 105 low‐income African‐Americans, this work advances the literature in two ways. First, it suggests that what we have come to view as deficiencies in access among the black urban poor may have more to do with functional deficiencies of their job referral networks. Second, the findings from this study lay the groundwork for a single, multilevel conceptual framework within which to understand social capital activation, a framework that takes into consideration properties of the individuals, dyads, and communities of residence.
The author draws from in-depth interviews with thirtynine black and Latino custodial and food service workers at the University of California, Berkeley, to determine how workers make decisions about ...making job referrals. Interviews were revelatory. Drawing from widely available and institutionalized scripts about what makes a good worker, jobholders assessed jobseekers' orientation toward work as well as what effect this orientation might have on their own reputations on the job to determine whom to help and how much to do so. Because of ethno-racial differences in how unemployment was interpreted, Latinos were more likely than their black counterparts to help and to do so proactively. These findings suggest that theories of social capital mobilization must take into consideration individuals' access to and deployment of cultural resources to fully understand the circumstances under which actors are mobilized for instrumental action.
While neither study offers an unequivocal account of the mechanisms linking pretrial incarceration to diminished employment outcomes, Dobbie, Goldin, and Yang (2018) point to the role that criminal ...conviction plays: Because pretrial detention increases the likelihood that individuals are convicted, it also diminishes the likelihood of finding work, since employers are disinclined to hire job seekers with criminal records. ...a higher percentage of people who lost their jobs and/or vehicles perceived the criminal record, employer discrimination, and lack of transportation as major barriers to employment some three years after the detention experience. ...this exploration suggests two additional pathways through which pretrial incarceration erodes employment prospects: by initiating job and vehicle losses that then further destabilize employment, and then by shaping perceptions about the extent and nature of barriers to employment they face, increasing both the number of barriers they imagine and their sense of how important these barriers are to finding and keeping jobs. Very few who were employed at arrest reported having the same employer one year later (16 percent); pretrial detainees are people who, even without detention, would have precarious ties to the formal economy. ...the researchers reasoned, pretrial detention is not likely a major cause of job instability. The process allowed for the development of mini theories based on findings from prior research, respondents' interpretation of their circumstances, and team members' thinking about the meaning of responses that respondents shared. ...in-depth interview responses allowed for a unique opportunity to explore mechanisms linking pretrial detention to post-detention employment.
Searching for Work with a Criminal Record Smith, Sandra Susan; Broege, Nora C. R.
Social problems (Berkeley, Calif.),
05/2020, Letnik:
67, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
People with a criminal record face substantial demand-side employment barriers that have clear implications for whether or not they search for work and what strategies they use. We know relatively ...little, however, about whether and how penal contact affects patterns of job search and how search patterns affect search success. Using the 2001–2011 waves of the 1997 cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY97), we find that penal contact and penal dispositions—arrest, conviction, and incarceration—reduce odds of job search, decrease the number of search methods job seekers deploy, and direct job seekers away from search methods that are generally more efficient and effective at yielding offers. Further, altered search patterns contribute significantly to post-contact job seekers’ lower odds of search success, especially for blacks. Taken together, our findings suggest that job search engagement is another key mechanism linking penal contact and poorer job search outcomes.
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