American Behavioral Scientist

Social science research has denoted the role that exclusionary and divisive ideologies play in fortifying group boundaries and shaping inequality, including what is arguably its most extreme form—genocide. We know little, however, about where and why such ideologies emerge. This article analyzes 159 countries between 1955 and 2009 to assess the factors that influence the emergence and presence of exclusionary ideologies. Doing so informs broader social science conceptions of the role of culture and politics in the production of inequality and violence. I find that certain critical junctures, including independence and irregular regime change, are associated with the onset of exclusionary ideologies. Colonial histories and threats to political elites are also consequential. I conclude by discussing exclusionary ideologies relative to genocide as well as the general importance of cultural and political dynamics for future analyses of inequality.

Symbolic boundaries, understood as the conceptual distinctions used to demarcate in-groups and out-groups, are fundamental to social inequality. While we know a great deal about how groups and individuals construct and contest symbolic boundaries along lines of class, race, ethnicity, religion, and nationality, less attention is given to (a) national belonging as a component of symbolic boundaries distinct from citizenship and (b) comparing how distinct symbolic boundaries shape individuals perceptions of, and reactions to, instances of stigmatization and discrimination. To examine these issues we compared two marginalized groups in Israel, Arab Palestinian citizens and Ethiopian Jewish immigrants. Analyzing 90 in-depth interviews, we find that exclusion based on boundaries of nationality engenders different ways of interpretating and responding to stigmatizing and discriminatory behavior, compared with exclusion based on racial and ethnic boundaries. While Ethiopians see everyday stigmatizing encounters as part of their temporary position as a recently immigrated group from a developing country, and react accordingly with attempts to prove their worth as individuals and ultimately assimilate, Palestinians view the line between them and the Jewish majority as relatively impermeable and attempts to fully integrate as mostly useless, viewing solidarity and education as a means to improve their group’s standing.

Over the past decade, social science researchers in the area of feminism, labor, immigration, and family have written extensively on the care work crisis and globalized care work. Depending on how broadly care work is conceived, these writings emphasize unique aspects of gender, race, class, and/or citizenship inequalities. Second wave of feminist perspectives, for instance, identify housework and most work culturally defined as “women’s work”—including all paid health occupations dominated by women, such as nurses, direct care workers, and hospital workers but also possibly even health, education, and social service occupations—as central to gender subordination. Another important research stream, focusing on domestic labor as women’s work, but recognizing its traditional outsourcing to slaves, servants, and later employees, highlights the complexities of the inequality generated, not only in terms of gender but race, class, and citizenship as well. Bringing these two bodies of literature together in conversation initially pointed to the inaccurate assumption that care work was valued when it became wage labor. The paid labor of domestics, nannies, and elderly care workers, however, remains deeply devalued, most often with those with limited options entering the profession. This article both assesses contradictions within dominant approaches to care work and highlights the cultural and political foundations of the very inequalities that domestic care workers experience.

Building on substantive yet neglected foundations provided by classical sociological theorists—theorists who emphasized the experiential conditions of work in structuring ideology—we examine in this article the impact of job authority tasks on levels of support for policy to redistribute income. Such a focus contributes to a broader sociological understanding of the links between status, ideology, and political action. With data drawn from the 2010 and 2012 National Election Studies, we find that workplace experiences and tasks involving sanctioning/organizational responsibility as well as the hierarchical patterning of interactions on one’s job help structure generalized views regarding inequality and policy orientations ultimately enacted outside of the workplace. In this regard, the number of authority tasks is inversely related to support for redistributive policy. Subsequent analyses, however, reveal this general pattern does not hold on the basis of race: less variation in policy support as well as greater levels of policy support is expressed by African Americans than Whites across all authority task levels. We conclude by discussing how our findings inform broader conceptions regarding the link between work, ideology, and politics, as well a deeper sociological sense of the attitudinal consequences of work and the underpinnings of tenets of American stratification ideology.

In the Pacific Northwest, control over lucrative and dwindling salmon fisheries have served as the primary source of contention between Native Americans and non-Indians for nearly 200 years. Despite the lopsided power dynamics favoring the states, and the commercial and recreational stakeholders whose interests are championed by State authority, fishing tribes have successfully infiltrated prevailing decision-making bodies and have taken a leading role in efforts to save the salmon from the perils of overfishing and habitat destruction utilizing a combination of scientific methods and traditional knowledge. This study examines the efforts of fishing tribes in Washington State to protect their customary and commercial fishing rights as a key project in a broader process of decolonizing state institutions that have historically controlled Indigenous resources as well as the entrenched ideological foundations that have historically devalued Native American culture. Examined through the lenses of racial formation, state-building and environmental justice theories, this case provides broader lessons for how scholars of social inequality can investigate the mechanisms through which racial inequality is both produced and resisted. Our findings contribute to undertheorized areas in the social inequality literature by taking history seriously, while paying particular attention to the ways that legal, political, and cultural mechanisms interact to reinforce systems of stratification or to reveal opportunities for meaningful resistance. Our analyses also foreground the role of human agency in successfully challenging long-standing legal and cultural foundations of racial inequality.

In multiethnic nation-states experiencing new flows of immigrants, political officials and citizens alike have expressed hostility in the form of demonstrations, campaigns, vandalism, and even policies. Yet local communities have also displayed public support for immigrants in the form of protests and advocacy efforts. Past literature has almost exclusively focused on anti-immigrant activity, using theories of group threat and competition, which suggest that new influxes or large concentrations of immigrants should prompt dominant groups to protect their interests, leading to anti-immigrant attitudes and behaviors. We extend the literature by focusing on pro-immigrant behavior, which we define as efforts initiated by established local residents and organizations to include immigrants in the larger community and/or to improve the lives of immigrants. In contrast to theories of group threat, we put forth the group inclusion model, and contend that demographic and political “threats” operate to break down rather than bolster group boundaries. We also find that when the increasing demographic and political presence of immigrants is coupled with the visibility of immigration, immigrant inclusion thrives. Using a data set of pro-immigrant collective action across 52 U.S. metropolitan areas, we generally find support for our model, and discuss the broader implications for immigrant–native relations.