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- Volume 35, 2009
Annual Review of Sociology - Volume 35, 2009
Volume 35, 2009
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Working in Six Research Areas: A Multi-Field Sociological Career
Vol. 35 (2009), pp. 1–19More LessI have written a strictly autobiographical essay about the half dozen areas or fields in which I have done sociological research during my career. One reason for writing the essay is to encourage students to become what I call a “multi,” there being too few in sociology, as in other disciplines in which most researchers do their work in one field. I hope the essay demonstrates that working in many fields can make for a satisfying and productive career. Research across areas also encourages comparative work, and if enough young people become multi-field researchers, sociologists might then develop more interdisciplinary skills, which is even now desirable and may one day be necessary for all the social sciences. My essay also describes how and why I became interested in my six fields and how I moved between them during my career. The rest of the paper describes my major studies and other activities in my fields as well as the institutional and other contexts that I believe have affected my work.
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Ethnicity, Race, and Nationalism
Vol. 35 (2009), pp. 21–42More LessThis article traces the contours of a comparative, global, cross-disciplinary, and multiparadigmatic field that construes ethnicity, race, and nationhood as a single integrated family of forms of cultural understanding, social organization, and political contestation. It then reviews a set of diverse yet related efforts to study the way ethnicity, race, and nation work in social, cultural, and political life without treating ethnic groups, races, or nations as substantial entities, or even taking such groups as units of analysis at all.
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Interdisciplinarity: A Critical Assessment
Vol. 35 (2009), pp. 43–65More LessThis article draws together disparate research and theorizing on interdisciplinarity. We first describe widespread efforts to promote interdisciplinarity in U.S. universities and critically examine the assumptions underlying these initiatives. Next, we present a cross-sectional view of interdisciplinary communication, knowledge diffusion, research assessment, and interdisciplinary research centers. We then describe research and theories that provide historical perspectives on the disciplinary system, interdiscipline formation, applied and professional fields, and institutional fragmentation. We present original findings on the prevalence of research centers, faculty hiring patterns in hybrid fields, and the diffusion of research across disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. The review concludes with a critical summary and suggestions for future research.
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Nonparametric Methods for Modeling Nonlinearity in Regression Analysis
Vol. 35 (2009), pp. 67–85More LessThe linear model and related generalized linear model (GLM) are important tools for sociologists. If the relationships between y (or in the case of the GLM, the linear predictor η) and the xs are linear, these methods provide elegant summaries of the data. However, these methods fail to adequately model underlying relationships if they are characterized by complex nonlinear patterns. In such cases, nonparametric regression, which allows the functional form between y and x to be determined by the data themselves, is more suitable. There are many types of nonparametric simple regression. I focus on locally weighted scatterplot smoothing (lowess or loess) and smoothing splines because they are the most widely used. I also describe additive and generalized additive models (GAM), which allow modeling of categorical dependent variables, and I explain how these methods can handle both parametric and nonparametric (i.e., lowess and smoothing splines) effects for many predictors. Finally, I briefly introduce the more recent development of the vector generalized additive model (VGAM), which further extends the GAM to handle multivariate dependent variables, and the generalized additive mixed model (GAMM), which allows specification of smooth functions within the mixed model framework.
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Gender Ideology: Components, Predictors, and Consequences
Vol. 35 (2009), pp. 87–105More LessThe purpose of this article is to review research on the construction of gender ideology and its consequences. The article begins with a summary of research focused on measuring gender ideology—individuals' levels of support for a division of paid work and family responsibilities that is based on the belief in gendered separate spheres. We describe the ways this concept has been operationalized in widely available data sources and provide a categorization schema for the items used to measure gender ideology. We also review the research predicting gender ideology, focusing on social and demographic characteristics while concurrently examining studies using cross-sectional, trend, and panel data. Finally, this article summarizes research focused on the consequences of gender ideology, both in families and family-related behaviors and in other areas of social life where beliefs about gender are relevant, such as the workplace. We conclude with implications for future research for measurement tools, predictors of gender ideology, and consequences of ideology in individuals' lives.
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Genetics and Social Inquiry
Vol. 35 (2009), pp. 107–128More LessSocial science and genetic science still have fairly little engagement with one another, but the continued swift development of genetic science has certainly gained social scientists’ attention. First, some social scientists are incorporating techniques from quantitative and molecular genetics into their work. Genetic data are increasingly recognized as providing valuable leverage even for research animated by strict interest in social environmental causes. Second, social scientists have been interested in understanding aspects of genetic science as a social phenomenon. This literature identifies possible noxious effects of uncritical public acceptance of genetic science, although how consistent these speculations are with public opinion and other available data is less clear. Because public understanding of genetics can influence behavior and social policies in ways that affect the ultimate causal potency of genes themselves, adequately theorizing genes as causes requires integration of these two lines of inquiry.
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Race Mixture: Boundary Crossing in Comparative Perspective
Vol. 35 (2009), pp. 129–146More LessIn this article, we examine a large, interdisciplinary, and somewhat scattered literature, all of which falls under the umbrella term race mixture. We highlight important analytical distinctions that need to be taken into account when addressing the related, but separate, social phenomena of intermarriage, miscegenation, multiracial identity, multiracial social movements, and race-mixture ideologies. In doing so, we stress a social constructivist approach to race mixture with a focus on boundary crossing. Finally, we also demonstrate how ideologies and practices of race mixture play out quite differently in contexts outside of the United States, particularly in Latin America. Race-mixture ideologies and practices in Latin America have been used to maintain racial inequality in the region, thus challenging recent arguments by U.S. scholars that greater racial mixture leads to a decline in racism, discrimination, and inequality.
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The Sociology of Emotional Labor
Vol. 35 (2009), pp. 147–165More LessEmotional labor refers to the process by which workers are expected to manage their feelings in accordance with organizationally defined rules and guidelines. Hochschild's (1983)The Managed Heart introduced this concept and inspired an outpouring of research on this topic. This article reviews theory and research on emotional labor with a particular focus on its contributions to sociological understandings of workers and jobs. The sociological literature on emotional labor can be roughly divided into two major streams of research. These include studies of interactive work and research directly focused on emotions and their management by workers. The first uses emotional labor as a vehicle to understand the organization, structure, and social relations of service jobs, while the second focuses on individuals’ efforts to express and regulate emotion and the consequences of those efforts. The concept of emotional labor has motivated a tremendous amount of research, but it has been much less helpful in providing theoretical guidance for or integration of the results generated by these bodies of work.
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Societal Responses to Terrorist Attacks
Vol. 35 (2009), pp. 167–189More LessTerrorist attacks in the United States and in Western Europe have been rare, and public awareness of the terrorist menace has largely been molded by a few horrific events. In contrast, other countries have experienced chronic terrorism, with attacks on buses, restaurants, coffee shops, and retail establishments. In this review, we assess the impact of terrorism on civilian society in the United States, Northern Ireland, and Israel. We examine the psychological effects, the adaptations made by individuals to enhance their safety, and the consequent adjustments made by institutional actors and by commercial establishments to ensure continued economic viability. We review the various theories of societal adjustments to exogenous shocks and point out that a very different formulation is required for the case of chronic terrorism than for the societal experience of a one-time attack.
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Intergenerational Family Relations in Adulthood: Patterns, Variations, and Implications in the Contemporary United States
Vol. 35 (2009), pp. 191–212More LessRecent research suggests that intergenerational relations—the relationships between adult children and their parents in particular—are becoming increasingly important to Americans. Two main social forces appear to be driving these changes: marital instability and broader demographic shifts. Intergenerational relationships involve both affective ties and more instrumental forms of support such as financial resources or child care. Although actual material assistance tends to be episodic and primarily responsive to specific needs, these relationships appear to be durable and flexible and often fill in when marriage or other emotional attachments deteriorate. As such, intergenerational family relations may reflect adaptations to contemporary, postmodern economic and cultural conditions. Variations in these general patterns and dynamics are also exhibited, the most striking of which are those involving race and class. These variations are driven largely by social structure and position and suggest that intergenerational relations constitute an important and largely hidden aspect of how families contribute to the reproduction of social inequality in society. These findings reinforce the value of extending both scholarly and cultural notions of family beyond the traditional nuclear family model.
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Sociology of Sex Work
Vol. 35 (2009), pp. 213–234More LessThis review examines key dimensions of contemporary sex work, particularly prostitution. Most research focuses exclusively on street prostitution and female workers, with much less attention devoted to indoor prostitution, male and transgender workers, customers, and managers. Furthermore, most of the literature examines prostitution where it is illegal, neglecting contexts where it is legal and regulated by the government. The review demonstrates how research on these topics can enrich our understanding of contemporary sex work.
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The Sociology of War and the Military
Vol. 35 (2009), pp. 235–254More LessRecent work on war and the military has addressed two broad questions: Why do states and societies wage war as they do? And what difference does it make that war is, or has been, waged in that manner? Building on the Clausewitzian focus on relations among the state, the armed forces, and society, responses to these questions emphasize the need for the analyst to recognize that the state may not possess a monopoly of force, interstate and civil wars may intertwine, and meaning and valence may figure prominently in war and its consequences. Scholarship in this area tends to focus on three broad domains: mobilization into war, treatment of the enemy, and signification. Each has its own distinctive analytics and historical pattern of transformation and development. How these three domains intersect holds real promise for future work.
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Socioeconomic Attainments of Asian Americans
Vol. 35 (2009), pp. 255–276More LessAccording to the majority-minority paradigm, racial and ethnic minorities have lower socioeconomic characteristics than whites owing to discrimination. Asian Americans defy this conventional view, however, at least on average. Asian Americans tend to have higher mean levels of educational achievements, and several recent studies indicate approximate parity with whites in most arenas of the labor market for those Asian Americans who were schooled in the United States. Their favorable socioeconomic outcomes stand in contrast to the widespread discrimination and labor market disadvantages that Asian Americans encountered during the earlier part of the twentieth century. The improved opportunities for Asian Americans suggest increasingly successful interrelations with whites in the post–Civil Rights era, with its more multicultural ethos. Less encouragingly, the favorable average socioeconomic profile of Asian Americans in the post–Civil Rights era in part reflects the rising significance of class resources and associated inequalities. The latter trend is evident in the notable socioeconomic variability within the racial category of Asian Americans.
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Men, Masculinity, and Manhood Acts
Vol. 35 (2009), pp. 277–295More LessIn the 1980s research on men shifted from studying the “male sex role” and masculinity as a singular trait to studying how men enact diverse masculinities. This research has examined men's behavior as gendered beings in many contexts, from intimate relationships to the workplace to global politics. We consider the strengths and weaknesses of the multiple masculinities approach, proposing that further insights into the social construction of gender and the dynamics of male domination can be gained by focusing analytic attention on manhood acts and how they elicit deference from others. We interpret the literature in terms of what it tells us about how males learn to perform manhood acts, about how and why such acts vary, and about how manhood acts reproduce gender inequality. We end with suggestions for further research on the practices and processes through which males construct the category “men” and themselves as its members.
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American Trade Unions and Data Limitations: A New Agenda for Labor Studies
Vol. 35 (2009), pp. 297–320More LessResearch on the historical level of union density in the United States is based on data or estimates that represent the sum of union members from different organizations. This results in aggregation bias, where the time-trend in union density is consistent with multiple, divergent trends among organizations. Some unions have experienced membership gains in specific industries or regions with distinct strategies that the analysis of aggregate data misses. No longitudinal data set, based on a random sample of unions, exists. We identify sources for the development of such a data set. Case studies suggest that organizational strategy, financial resources, internal politics, worker attitudes, and competition affect membership; further research on geographic and industry conditions is needed. Purposive sampling, poor understanding of aggregation, and models that do not account for the clustering of unions within larger federations or industries have retarded progress in labor studies.
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Outsourcing and the Changing Nature of Work
Vol. 35 (2009), pp. 321–340More LessWhile much has been written about the effects of outsourcing on the location of jobs and on the wages of workers, the effects of outsourcing on the experience of work and on the design of work and organizations have received limited research attention. A full understanding of the consequences of outsourcing requires examining the effects of outsourcing on the nature of both work and the organizations that define and delimit work. In this review, we define outsourcing and describe the key dimensions of outsourcing arrangements that are likely to affect the nature of work. We then review existing research on the effects of outsourcing on individuals’ attitudes and behaviors, work group dynamics, job design, and organizational structure and culture. We conclude with a discussion of the critical research issues that must be addressed to fully understand the effects of outsourcing on the nature of work.
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Taming Prometheus: Talk About Safety and Culture
Vol. 35 (2009), pp. 341–369More LessTalk of safety culture has emerged as a common trope in contemporary scholarship and popular media as an explanation for accidents and as a recipe for improvement in complex sociotechnical systems. Three conceptions of culture appear in talk about safety: culture as causal attitude, culture as engineered organization, and culture as emergent and indeterminate. If we understand culture as sociologists and anthropologists theorize as an indissoluble dialectic of system and practice, as both the product and context of social action, the first two perspectives deploying standard causal logics fail to provide persuasive accounts. Displaying affinities with individualist and reductionist epistemologies, safety culture is frequently operationalized in terms of the attitudes and behaviors of individual actors, often the lowest-level actors, with the least authority, in the organizational hierarchy. Sociological critiques claim that culture is emergent and indeterminate and cannot be instrumentalized to prevent technological accidents. Research should explore the features of complex systems that have been elided in the talk of safety culture: normative heterogeneity and conflict, inequalities in power and authority, and competing sets of legitimate interests within organizations.
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Paradoxes of China's Economic Boom
Vol. 35 (2009), pp. 371–392More LessChina's stunning economic performance for the past three decades was not only unexpected but contradicts much received wisdom in the study of development. Four paradoxes posed by China's record are critically examined: (a) China's traditional culture and institutions as obstacles to development; (b) the necessity of big bang comprehensive reforms to transform a centrally planned economy into a market economy; (c) the perils of state-directed economic development (especially when the state is composed of lifelong communist bureaucrats); and (d) the necessity of getting the institutions right in order to foster development, particularly by establishing secure private property rights. Reasons why China was able to defy expectations and the received wisdom and develop so successfully are discussed. The Chinese case indicates that countries cannot succeed at development by a standard cookbook approach but must tailor their development policies and institutions to their distinctive history, potentials, and limitations.
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Political Sociology and Social Movements
Vol. 35 (2009), pp. 393–412More LessUntil the 1970s, the study of social movements was firmly within a diverse sociological tradition that explored the relationship between social structure and political behavior, and was preoccupied with explaining variation in the political orientation of movements: their ideologies, aims, motivations, or propensities for violence. Subsequently, a breakaway tradition redefined the central problem, radically narrowing the scope of interest to the process of mobilization—how social groups, whoever they are and whatever their aims, marshal resources, recruit adherents, and navigate political environments in order to grow and succeed. Critics would later insist that the construction of meaning, the formation of collective identities, and the stimulation and amplification of emotions play vital and neglected roles in mobilization, but these alternatives did not challenge the narrowed construction of the problem itself. The resulting subfield has largely abandoned the quest to explain variation in the political orientation of movements. Researchers in related fields—on revolution, unions, and ethnic mobilization—have retained an interest in explaining political orientation, although they often view it primarily as a by-product of mobilization. Reviving theories about the impact of social structure on movement political orientation will require integrating insights from research on related but widely scattered subjects.
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New Directions in Life Course Research
Vol. 35 (2009), pp. 413–433More LessLife courses are studied in sociology and neighboring fields as developmental processes, as culturally and normatively constructed life stages and age roles, as biographical meanings, as aging processes, as outcomes of institutional regulation and policies, as demographic accounts, or as mere empirical connectivity across the life course. This review has two aims. One is to report on trends in life course research by focusing on empirical studies published since the year 2000. The other is to assess the overall development of the field. Major advances can be observed in four areas: national individual-level longitudinal databases, the impact of institutional contexts on life courses, life courses under conditions of societal ruptures, and health across the life course. In four other areas, advancements have been less pronounced: internal dynamics and causal linkages across life, the interaction of development and socially constructed life courses, theory development, and new methods. Overall, life course sociology still has far to go to reach its full potential.
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Previous Volumes
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Volume 49 (2023)
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Volume 48 (2022)
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Volume 47 (2021)
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Volume 46 (2020)
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Volume 45 (2019)
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Volume 44 (2018)
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Volume 43 (2017)
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Volume 42 (2016)
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Volume 41 (2015)
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Volume 40 (2014)
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Volume 39 (2013)
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Volume 38 (2012)
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Volume 37 (2011)
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Volume 36 (2010)
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Volume 35 (2009)
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Volume 34 (2008)
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Volume 33 (2007)
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Volume 32 (2006)
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Volume 31 (2005)
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Volume 30 (2004)
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Volume 29 (2003)
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Volume 28 (2002)
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Volume 27 (2001)
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Volume 26 (2000)
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Volume 25 (1999)
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Volume 24 (1998)
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Volume 23 (1997)
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Volume 22 (1996)
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Volume 21 (1995)
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Volume 20 (1994)
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Volume 19 (1993)
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Volume 18 (1992)
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Volume 17 (1991)
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Volume 16 (1990)
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Volume 15 (1989)
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Volume 14 (1988)
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Volume 13 (1987)
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Volume 12 (1986)
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Volume 11 (1985)
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Volume 10 (1984)
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Volume 9 (1983)
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Volume 8 (1982)
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Volume 7 (1981)
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Volume 6 (1980)
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Volume 5 (1979)
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Volume 4 (1978)
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Volume 3 (1977)
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Volume 2 (1976)
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Volume 1 (1975)
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Volume 0 (1932)