American Sociological Review  （ASR ）

August 2009; 74 (4)

Bringing Intergenerational Social Mobility Research into the Twenty-first Century: Why Mothers Matter

Emily Beller

Abstract: Conventional social mobility research, which measures family social class background relative to only fathers' characteristics, presents an outmoded picture of families—a picture wherein mothers' economic participation is neither common nor important. This article demonstrates that such measurement is theoretically and empirically untenable. Models that incorporate both mothers' and fathers' characteristics into class origin measures fit observed mobility patterns better than do conventional models, and for both men and women. Furthermore, in contrast to the current consensus that conventional measurement strategies do not alter substantive research conclusions, analyses of cohort change in social mobility illustrate the distortions that conventional practice can produce in stratification research findings. By failing to measure the impact of mothers' class, the current practice misses a recent upturn in the importance of family background for class outcomes among men in the United States. The conventional approach suggests no change between cohorts, but updated analyses reveal that inequality of opportunity increased significantly for men born since the mid-1960s compared with those born earlier in the century.

From Credit to Collective Action: The Role of Microfinance in Promoting Women's Social Capital and Normative Influence

Paromita Sanyal

Abstract: Can economic ties positively influence social relations and actions? If so, how does this influence operate? Microfinance programs, which provide credit through a group-based lending strategy, provide the ideal setting for exploring these questions. This article examines whether structuring socially isolated women into peer-groups for an explicitly economic purpose, such as access to credit, has any effect on the women's collective social behavior. Based on interviews with 400 women from 59 microfinance groups in West Bengal, India, I find that one third of these groups undertook various collective actions. Improvements in women's social capital and normative influence fostered this capacity for collective action. Several factors contributed to these transformations, including economic ties among members, the structure of the group network, and women's participation in group meetings. Based on these findings, I argue that microfinance groups have the potential to promote women's social capital and normative influence, thereby facilitating women's collective empowerment. I conclude by discussing the need for refining our understanding of social capital and social ties that promote normative influence.

Resource Variation and the Development of Cohesion in Exchange Networks

David R. Schaefer

Abstract: Social exchange theories have identified social structural factors and interaction processes that build cohesion through the everyday exchange of valued resources. However, the types of resources considered in previous research do not reflect the properties of many commonly exchanged resources, namely information, social support, and material goods. In this article, I identify two resource dimensions that underlie and affect exchange: (1) duplicability, that is, whether a resource's provider retains control of the resource after exchange and (2) transferability, that is, whether a resource's recipient can exchange the resource in another relation. I present a causal model to explain how these dimensions affect cohesion through the mediating effects of structural power, exchange frequency, and uncertainty. Notably, resource variation alters the source of structural power, making it necessary to specify when different power mechanisms will operate and their disparate effects on the other mediating factors. A laboratory experiment provides support for the causal model. Resource characteristics fundamentally shape both the exchange process and the outcomes actors experience.

The Sources and Consequences of National Identification

Robert M. Kunovich

Abstract: This article examines national identification from a comparative and multilevel perspective. Building on the identity, nationalism, and prejudice literatures, I analyze relationships between societies' economic, political, and cultural characteristics (e.g., development, globalization, democratic governance, militarism, and religious and linguistic diversity), individual characteristics (e.g., socioeconomic status and minority status), and preferences for the content of national identities. I also examine relationships between national identity content and public policy preferences toward immigration, citizenship, assimilation, and foreign policy, generally. I use confirmatory factor analysis and multilevel modeling to analyze country-level data and survey data from 31 countries (from the International Social Survey Program's 2003 National Identity II Module). Results suggest that individual and country characteristics help account for the variable and contested nature of national identification. Moreover, the content of national identity categories has implications for public policy and intergroup relations.

What Do These Memories Do? Civil Rights Remembrance and Racial Attitudes

Larry J. Griffin

Kenneth A. Bollen

Abstract: Scholarly inquiry into collective memory has fostered a host of innovative questions, perspectives, and interpretations about how individuals and communities are both constituted by the past and mobilize it for present-day projects. Race is one of the more important current issues demonstrating how the presence of the past is both potent and sorrowful in the United States. It is therefore critical to examine how memories of racial oppression, conflict, and reconstruction shape race relations. Studies of race relations, however, generally ignore collective memory's role in shaping racial norms and attitudes. This article uses the 1993 General Social Survey to address the silences in the collective memory and race relations literatures by examining how Americans' recollections of the civil rights movement influence their racial attitudes and racial policy preferences. Although we find that Americans' opinions about government programs targeting African Americans are unrelated to civil rights memory, respondents who spontaneously recalled the civil rights struggle and its victories as an especially important historical event generally expressed more racially liberal opinions than did those with different memories. Our findings both support the basic presupposition of collective memory studies—memory matters—and point to a fruitful innovation in the study of racial attitudes.

Radicalism or Reformism? Socialist Parties before World War I

Gary Marks

Heather A. D. Mbaye

Hyung Min Kim

Abstract: This article builds on social movement theory to explain ideological variation among socialist, social democratic, and labor parties across 18 countries in the early twentieth century. We propose a causal argument connecting (1) the political emergence of the bourgeoisie and its middle-class allies to (2) the political space for labor unions and working-class parties, which (3) provided a setting for internal pressures and external opportunities that shaped socialist party ideology. Combining quantitative analysis and case studies, we find that the timing of civil liberties and the strength of socialist links with labor unions were decisive for reformism or radicalism. Refining Lipset's prior analysis, we qualify his claim that male suffrage provides a key to socialist orientation.

All the Movements Fit to Print: Who, What, When, Where, and Why SMO Families Appeared in the New York Times in the Twentieth Century

Edwin Amenta

Neal Caren

Sheera Joy Olasky

James E. Stobaugh

Abstract: Why did some social movement organization (SMO) families receive extensive media coverage? In this article, we elaborate and appraise four core arguments in the literature on movements and their consequences: disruption, resource mobilization, political partisanship, and whether a movement benefits from an enforced policy. Our fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analyses (fsQCA) draw on new, unique data from the New York Times across the twentieth century on more than 1,200 SMOs and 34 SMO families. At the SMO family level, coverage correlates highly with common measures of the size and disruptive activity of movements, with the labor and African American civil rights movements receiving the most coverage. Addressing why some movement families experienced daily coverage, fsQCA indicates that disruption, resource mobilization, and an enforced policy are jointly sufficient; partisanship, the standard form of “political opportunity,” is not part of the solution. Our results support the main perspectives, while also suggesting that movement scholars may need to reexamine their ideas of favorable political contexts.

The 2004 GSS Finding of Shrunken Social Networks: An Artifact?

Claude S. Fischer

Abstract: McPherson, Smith-Lovin, and Brashears (2006, 2008b) reported that Americans' social networks shrank precipitously from 1985 to 2004. When asked to list the people with whom they discussed “important matters,” respondents to the 2004 General Social Survey (GSS) provided about one-third fewer names than did respondents in the 1985 survey. Critically, the percentage of respondents who provided no names at all increased from about 10 percent in 1985 to about 25 percent in 2004. The 2004 results contradict other relevant data, however, and they contain serious anomalies; this suggests that the apparently dramatic increase in social isolation is an artifact. One possible source of the artifact is the section of the 2004 interview preceding the network question; it may have been unusually taxing. Another possible source is a random technical error. With as yet no clear account for these inconsistencies and anomalies, scholars should be cautious in using the 2004 network data. Scholars and general readers alike should draw no inference from the 2004 GSS as to whether Americans' social networks changed substantially between 1985 and 2004; they probably did not.

Models and Marginals: Using Survey Evidence to Study Social Networks

Miller McPherson

Lynn Smith-Lovin

Matthew E. Brashears

Abstract: Fischer (2009) argues that our estimates of confidant network size in the 2004 General Social Survey (GSS), and therefore the trend in confidant network size from 1985 to 2004, are implausible because they are (1) inconsistent with other data and (2) contain internal anomalies that call the data into question. In this note, we assess the evidence for a decrease in confidant network size from 1985 to 2004 in the GSS data. We conclude that any plausible modeling of the data shows a decided trend downward in confidant network size from 1985 to 2004. The features that Fischer calls anomalies are exactly the characteristics described by our models (Table 5) in the original article.