The Brown decision represents a watershed moment in U.S. history as the remedy served as a guiding light during a pandemic. A pandemic is an epidemic taking place on a scale that spans the globe. A ...circumstance is not a pandemic merely because it exists in different regions of the world or results in the death of many people; it must also be infectious. For centuries, by way of mutually reinforcing regimes consisting of politicians, intellectuals, religious supporters, business leaders, and others, an ideology of racial biology “infected” the world, causing a disease to spread in global fashion. The disease fed on a rhetoric that assigned biological superiority to certain races. A resulting pandemic of segregation occurred. In the United States, the Brown decision offered hope as a therapeutic. This lecture examines Brown through the lens of a medical model while exploring its various pervasive effects on society and education.
This article reviews research on inequality and social stratification in China since the mid-1990s. Going beyond the theoretical framework of the market transition debate, research in the field has ...been advanced by paying more attention to the roles of the institutions of Chinese state socialism, such as the household registration (
hukou
) and urban work unit (
danwei
) systems, and workers' self-selective mobility. Empirical studies have benefited from the systematic collection of well-designed and high-quality survey data and from the application of advanced statistical methods. Substantive analysis has been extended to new themes related to social class, gender, ethnicity, education, and housing wealth. This review concludes by seeking to identify the wider implications of empirical findings from China for comparative research on inequality and social stratification and by providing some suggestions for the future direction of the field.
Endogenous selection bias is a central problem for causal inference. Recognizing the problem, however, can be difficult in practice. This article introduces a purely graphical way of characterizing ...endogenous selection bias and of understanding its consequences (Hernán et al. 2004). We use causal graphs (direct acyclic graphs, or DAGs) to highlight that endogenous selection bias stems from conditioning (e.g., controlling, stratifying, or selecting) on a so-called collider variable, i.e., a variable that is itself caused by two other variables, one that is (or is associated with) the treatment and another that is (or is associated with) the outcome. Endogenous selection bias can result from direct conditioning on the outcome variable, a post-outcome variable, a post-treatment variable, and even a pre-treatment variable. We highlight the difference between endogenous selection bias, common-cause confounding, and overcontrol bias and discuss numerous examples from social stratification, cultural sociology, social network analysis, political sociology, social demography, and the sociology of education.
Abstract
Enduring and accumulated advantages and disadvantages in work and family lives remain invisible in studies focusing on single outcomes. Further, single outcome studies tend to conflate labor ...market inequalities related to gender, race, and family situation. We combine an intersectional and quantitative life course perspective to analyze parallel work and family lives for Black and White men and women aged 22–44. Results using sequence analysis and data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79) show that White men enjoy privileged opportunities to combine work and family life and elicit specific gendered and racialized constraints for Black men and women and White women. Black women experience the strongest interdependence between work and family life: events in their work lives constrain and condition their family lives and vice versa. For Black men, stable partnerships and career success mutually support and sustain each other over the life course. In contrast, for Black women, occupational success goes along with the absence of stable partnerships. Precarious and unstable employment is associated with early single parenthood for all groups supporting instability spillovers between life domains that are most prevalent among Black women, followed by Black men. The findings highlight a sizeable group of resourceful Black single mothers who hold stable middle-class jobs and have often gone unnoticed in previous research. We conclude that economic interventions to equalize opportunities in education, employment, and earnings, particularly early in life, are more promising for reducing intersectional inequalities in work-family life courses than attempting to intervene in family lives.
Wealth Inequality and Accumulation Killewald, Alexandra; Pfeffer, Fabian T; Schachner, Jared N
Annual review of sociology,
07/2017, Letnik:
43, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Research on wealth inequality and accumulation and the data upon which it relies have expanded substantially in the twenty-first century. Although the field has experienced rapid growth, conceptual ...and methodological challenges remain. We begin by discussing two major unresolved methodological concerns facing wealth research: how to address challenges to causal inference posed by wealth's cumulative nature and how to operationalize net worth given its highly skewed distribution. Next, we provide an overview of data sources available for wealth research. To underscore the need for continued empirical attention to net worth, we review trends in wealth levels and inequality and evaluate wealth's distinctiveness as an indicator of social stratification. We then review recent empirical evidence on the effects of wealth on other social outcomes, as well as research on the determinants of wealth. We close with a list of promising avenues for future research on wealth, its causes, and its consequences.
Abstract
Prior inequality literature has mainly focused on the period trends of inequality. This paper advances this literature by adopting a cohort approach to examine the age and cohort patterns of ...wage inequality. Employing a trajectory-based analytic framework to analyze almost 50 years of longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, I found that the life course patterns of inequality among American men have shifted across cohorts on both aggregate level and microlevel. The cumulative wage advantage associated with higher educational attainment has become more important across cohorts. Wage volatility has increased from earlier to later cohorts and the trend varies by age. The increase in volatility occurred first among mid-career workers and then among early-career workers. Additional analysis suggests that these cohort shifts differ by educational and occupational groups. The findings highlight the value of a cohort and life course approach for studying the process of social stratification.
This essay brings together intersectionality and institutional approaches to health inequalities, suggesting an integrative analytical framework that accounts for the complexity of the intertwined ...influence of both individual social positioning and institutional stratification on health. This essay therefore advances the emerging scholarship on the relevance of intersectionality to health inequalities research. We argue that intersectionality provides a strong analytical tool for an integrated understanding of health inequalities beyond the purely socioeconomic by addressing the multiple layers of privilege and disadvantage, including race, migration and ethnicity, gender and sexuality. We further demonstrate how integrating intersectionality with institutional approaches allows for the study of institutions as heterogeneous entities that impact on the production of social privilege and disadvantage beyond just socioeconomic (re)distribution. This leads to an understanding of the interaction of the macro and the micro facets of the politics of health. Finally, we set out a research agenda considering the interplay/intersections between individuals and institutions and involving a series of methodological implications for research - arguing that quantitative designs can incorporate an intersectional institutional approach.
•Bridges intersectionality and institutional approaches to health inequalities.•Considers health inequalities beyond socioeconomic status.•Considers the intersections between institutions and individuals.•Emphasises the macro and the micro facets of the politics of health.•Suggests an intersectionality and institutionally informed research agenda.
Despite the emerging literature on multigenerational stratification beyond two-generation models, our understanding of how disadvantages are transmitted over multiple generations at the bottom of the ...socioeconomic hierarchy is limited, with the lack of data on the extremely disadvantaged. We fill this research gap by investigating the legacy of the nobi system, a system by which individuals were treated as property and owned by the government or private individuals, upon social mobility across four generations. The formal abolition of the nobi system in 1801 provides an opportunity to assess the extent to which nobi great-grandfathers still mattered for great-grandsons’ upward mobility, more than six decades after the dismantling of the system. Korean household registers, which were compiled every three years during 1765–1894 in two villages on Jeju Island and incorporated a variety of individual demographic and social status information, allow us to link families across generations. We identify the social status of adult males recorded in 1864–94 registers as well as that of their fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers. Logistic regression results show that the odds of attaining high status were substantially lower for adult males whose great-grandfathers were nobis than for those whose great-grandfathers held high- or middle-status positions, even after controlling for the social statuses of fathers and grandfathers. Despite the abolition of the nobi system and the rapid expansion of high-status positions throughout the nineteenth century, the upward mobility of descendants of nobi great-grandfathers was considerably restricted, revealing the continuity of disadvantages over multiple generations.
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