American Sociological Review

In the past few decades forces such as globalization and international competition, rising public budgets, and aging populations have caused many nations to reexamine the social programs they established at least a half century ago. Some nations have cut spending; others have reorganized priorities to provide support for dual-earner families, single mothers, or elderly people who need long-term care. The United States appears instead to be in transition from a social insurance welfare state to a “capital investment welfare state” in which the objective is to increase savings and investment. This shift in U.S. public policy is most explicit in the ascendance of a neoconservative ideology, which depicts the welfare state as an impediment to a free market. This ideology has lent credence to proposals for privatizing Social Security and is implicit in seemingly minor technocratic changes in Medicare, which nonetheless have inserted market principles into a social insurance program. Whether current trends represent the most recent manifestation of American exceptionalism or a concurrent restructuring across nations can be determined only by comparative research examining (]) how different nations are responding to contemporary fiscal pressures, and (2) if nations are redistributing the social welfare burden from the public to the private sector.

From 1967 to 1978, the state “send-down” policy in the People's Republic of China forced 17 million urban youth to live and work in rural areas. We examine the life experiences of the children of the Cultural Revolution—those youths who entered the labor force during this period. The send-down episode provides a “natural experiment”—an opportunity to study the effects of state policies on the life course in a state socialist society. We focus on two theoretical issues: (1) how the effects of adverse state policies on the life course were mediated by the structure of social stratification, and (2) how the send-down experience affected individuals’ later life course and economic well-being. We compare and contrast patterns of entry into the labor force, subsequent major life events, and the economic well-being of sentdown youth with those who stayed in urban areas. Our findings show that all social groups were negatively affected by adverse state policies, but the bureaucratic class had some capacity to reduce such negative effects on their children. The send-down experience has had lasting effects on individuals’ life courses, as reflected in the patterns of the later life course events and in the determinants of personal income.

We analyze the dynamic interaction of state institutions and organizational policies through an analysis of leave benefits in U.S. organizations. Following the Pregnancy Leave Act of 1978 and the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, organizations have been required by law to allow workers to take time off from work for childbearing and childrearing. Yet organizations vary on whether they offer full-time employees benefits that actually facilitate leave for family responsibilities. We analyze the determinants of the organizational decision to offer paid maternity leave to full-time employees. We compare these findings to the determinants of the organizational decision to offer paid sick leave to full-time employees. Our analysis suggests that organizations have taken an activist approach to their institutional environments: In the face of federal definitions of the law that mandated gender-neutral policies in the workplace and linked pregnancy to disability, those organizations that most often deal with maternity issues (e.g., those located in female-dominated industries) have institutionalized sick leave policies (often instead of maternity leave) to accommodate pregnant employees. The analysis examines specific aspects of the institutional environment at the state and federal levels to illuminate these trends.

We examine how organizations that mediate “life-of-project” employment segment the labor market in a culture industry. Using longitudinal data on writers for television and feature films, we examine trends in the extent to which type of agency representation affects writers’ employment and earnings. Elite or “core “ agencies are those that transcend their role as market brokers between the suppliers and purchasers of writing services by participating actively in the production process. Writers who are represented by such agencies are substantially more likely to find employment, and they earn considerably more than equally accomplished writers with noncore agency representation. We discuss the implications of these findings for contingent employment of professionalized employees in other highly institutionalized industrial sectors.

Scholars have argued that although occupational sex segregation is high in aggregate terms, women frequently move between sex-typical and sex-atypical occupations over the life course—hence the “revolving doors.” I reexamine the revolving doors thesis using career history data from Great Britain. I argue that the conventional boundaries for occupational sex types need revision, at least for Britain. Specifically, female-dominated occupations should be distinguished from heavily female-dominated occupations. I show that although the strong version of the revolving doors thesis (which rules out path dependence) does not apply to both “female” and “heavily female” occupations, a weak version describes the former better than it does the latter. This result points to a ghetto effect.

Contradicting earlier studies, some research suggests that families of black southern migrants to northern cities experienced more stability (e.g., children living with two parents) than did the families of their northern-born neighbors. Adequate explanations for this “migrant advantage “ in family stability have remained elusive. We examine the effects of metropolitan-level distress on urban black family patterns and explore whether group differences in exposure to these contextual conditions can explain the greater stability of migrant families. A multilevel analysis of the living arrangements of 0– to 14–year-old children is conducted using 1970 data from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) and the 1970 Summary Statistic File Fourth Count. Several metropolitan-level characteristics, including poverty, male underemployment, female headship, and welfare prevalence, have significant effects on whether a child lives with two parents. Interestingly, the migrant advantage is not attenuated when these variables are controlled. Supplemental analyses show that migrants are not positively selected for family stability from the southern population, and that their family structures grow more similar to those of the northern-born as their length of residence outside of the South increases. We conclude that context does play a role in the migrant advantage in family stability, but that the advantage is likely to be the result of a northern “disadvantage” resulting from prolonged exposure to a social environment that destabilizes families.

We use longitudinal data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, in conjunction with decennial census data, to examine the impact of neighborhood socioeconomic disadvantage on young women's risk of premarital childbearing and the timing of their transition to first marriage. Discrete-time event-history models reveal that, among black women, neighborhood disadvantage has little impact on the risk of premarital childbearing, but has a significant nonlinear effect on the probability of marriage prior to first birth. Among white women, as neighborhood disadvantage increases, premarital childbearing rates rise nonlinearly, and marriage rates rise linearly. The nonlinear effects of neighborhood disadvantage on white women's premarital childbearing and black women's first prebirth marriage are generally consistent with arguments regarding the detrimental consequences of concentrated poverty, as opposed to merely high poverty. We find no evidence that the effects of individual socioeconomic status on these dimensions of family formation vary by neighborhood quality. And although white women's estimated rates of premarital childbearing may approach those of blacks in the most disadvantaged neighborhoods, socioeconomic differences between the neighborhoods inhabited by black women and white women explain only a modest proportion of the pronounced racial differences in premarital child-bearing and the timing of first marriage.

This paper explores the possibility of constructing justice indexes—measures that would quantify the amount of perceived injustice in a society and thus enable comparison of the amount of injustice across societies and over time. I develop a framework, addressing six issues that arise in formulating a justice index, and present two (families of) justice indexes. The first, called JI1, distinguishes between two qualitatively different kinds of injustice—unjust underreward and unjust overreward; the second, called JI2, combines both underreward and overreward into a single type of injustice. The paper describes properties and relations of the two indexes and begins the task of assessing them by providing theoretical and empirical illustration. In the theoretical illustration, I use probability distributions to investigate, a priori, operation of the justice indexes in diverse societies and groups, which may differ in the kinds of goods and bads their members value and in the distributional patterns of those goods and bads. In the empirical illustration, I present estimates of the two justice indexes in a large 13–country microdata set, which provides information on respondents’ assessments about the justice of their own earnings in 1991–1992. An important property of one of the indexes is that it enables decomposition of the total amount of perceived injustice into injustice due to scarcity and injustice due to inequality.