The 10 most-cited articles in American Journal of Sociology, 2017

This article challenges the implicit assumption of many cross-national studies that gender-role attitudes fall along a single continuum between traditional and egalitarian. The authors argue that this approach obscures theoretically important distinctions in attitudes and renders analyses of change over time incomplete. Using latent class analysis, they investigate the multidimensional nature of gender-role attitudes in 17 postindustrial European countries. They identify three distinct varieties of egalitarianism that they designate as liberal egalitarianism, egalitarian familism, and flexible egalitarianism. They show that while traditional gender-role attitudes have precipitously and uniformly declined in accordance with the “rising tide” narrative toward greater egalitarianism, the relative prevalence of different egalitarianisms varies markedly across countries. Furthermore, they find that European nations are not converging toward one dominant egalitarian model but rather, remain differentiated by varieties of egalitarianism.

Many accounts of political belief systems conceive of them as networks of interrelated opinions, in which some beliefs are central and others peripheral. This article formally shows how such structural features can be used to construct direct measures of belief centrality in a network of correlations. This method is applied to the 2000 ANES data, which have been used to argue that political beliefs are organized around parenting schemas. This structural approach instead yields results consistent with the central role of political identity, which individuals may use as the organizing heuristic to filter information from the political field. In light of recent accounts of belief system heterogeneity, a search for population heterogeneity in this organizing logic was undertaken first by comparing 44 demographic subpopulations and then using inductive techniques. Contra these recent accounts, the study finds that belief systems of different groups vary in the amount of organization but not in the logic that organizes them.

This article uses sequence analysis to examine how gender inequality in work-family trajectories unfolds from early adulthood until middle age in two different welfare state contexts. Results based on the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and the German National Education Panel Study demonstrate that in Germany, all work-family trajectories are highly gender-specific irrespective of social class. In contrast, patterns of work-family interplay across the life course in the United States are, overall, less gendered, but they differ widely by social class. In fact, work-family patterns characterized by high occupational prestige are fairly equally accessible for men and women. However, women are far more likely than men to experience the joint occurrence of single parenthood and unstable low-prestige work careers in the United States. The authors contribute to the literature by bringing in a longitudinal, process-oriented life course perspective and conceptualizing work-family trajectories as interlocked, multidimensional processes.

This article develops a framework for analyzing the risks of poverty in terms of prevalences (share of the population with a risk) and penalties (increased probability of poverty associated with a risk). A comparison of the four major risks (low education, single motherhood, young headship, and unemployment) across 29 rich democracies reveals there is greater variation in penalties than prevalences. The United States has high poverty partly because it has the highest penalties despite below average prevalences. Also, U.S. poverty in 2013 would be worse with prevalences from 1970 or 1980. There is little evidence that penalties discourage prevalences, while welfare generosity significantly moderates the penalties for unemployment and low education. The authors conclude that a focus on risks does not provide a convincing explanation of poverty, single motherhood may be the least important of the risks, and studies based solely on the United States are constrained by potentially large sample selection biases.

Scholars have debated whether laws can influence public opinion, but evidence of these “feedback” effects is scant. This article examines the effect of Arizona’s 2010 high-profile anti-immigrant law, SB 1070, on both public attitudes and behaviors toward immigrants. Using sentiment analysis and a difference-in-difference approach to analyze more than 250,000 tweets, the author finds that SB 1070 had a negative impact on the average sentiment of tweets regarding immigrants, Mexicans, and Hispanics, but not on those about Asians or blacks. However, these changes in public discourse were not caused by shifting attitudes toward immigrants but by the mobilization of anti-immigrant users and by motivating new users to begin tweeting. While some scholars propose that punitive laws can shape people’s attitudes toward targeted groups, this study shows that policies are more likely to influence behaviors. Rather than placating the electorate, anti-immigrant laws may stir the pot further, mobilizing individuals already critical of immigrants.

A new research agenda is proposed for assessing the strength of linkages between educational credentials, including fields of study, and occupational positions. The authors argue that a theoretically fruitful conception of linkage strength requires a focus on granular structure as well as the macroinstitutional characteristics of pathways between education and the labor market. Building on recent advances in the study of multigroup segregation, the authors find that Germany has stronger overall linkage strength than France or the United States. However, the extent to which the three countries differ varies substantially across educational levels and fields of study. The authors illustrate the substantive importance of the new approach by showing, first, that the standard organization space/qualification space distinction poorly describes the contemporary difference between Germany and France and, second, that relative mean occupational wages in Germany and the United States vary directly with the relative linkage strength for occupations in the two countries.

In recent years, sociologists have noted the increasing centrality of credit for determining life chances in our society, but they have not given adequate attention to the credit market as a key site where individuals assert claims over economic resources. This article explores distinctive features of the credit transaction that differentiate claims making in the credit market from more familiar forms of claims making in the labor market. Rather than the quid pro quo exchange between formal equals that characterizes the wage relation, the extension of credit creates an obligation that marks the debtor as inferior to the creditor. The hierarchical and asymmetrical nature of the loan contract appears to erode the possibility for effective political demands in this arena. However, this article demonstrates that to the extent the status of “ownership” is institutionalized in the credit transaction, borrowers may be able to overcome some of the disadvantages associated with occupying the weaker position in an unequal relationship of exchange.

Actors and associates often match on a few dimensions that matter most for the relationship at hand. In so doing, they are exposed to unanticipated social influences because counterparts have broader attitudes and preferences than would-be contacts considered when they first chose to pair. The authors label as “partially deliberate” social matching that occurs on a small set of attributes, and they present empirical methods for identifying causal social influence effects when relationships follow this generative logic. A data set tracking the training and professional activities of academic biomedical scientists is used to show that young scientists adopt their advisers’ orientations toward commercial science as evidenced by adviser-to-advisee transmission of patenting behavior. The authors demonstrate this in two-stage models that account for the endogeneity of matching, using both inverse probability of treatment weights and an instrumental variables approach. They also draw on qualitative methods to support a causal interpretation. Overall, they present a theory and a…

Drawing on the social disorganization tradition and the social ecological perspective of Jane Jacobs, the authors hypothesize that neighborhoods composed of residents who intersect in space more frequently as a result of routine activities will exhibit higher levels of collective efficacy, intergenerational closure, and social network interaction and exchange. They develop this approach employing the concept of ecological networks—two-mode networks that indirectly link residents through spatial overlap in routine activities. Using data from the Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey, they find evidence that econetwork extensity (the average proportion of households in the neighborhood to which a given household is tied through any location) and intensity (the degree to which household dyads are characterized by ties through multiple locations) are positively related to changes in social organization between 2000–2001 and 2006–2008. These findings demonstrate the relevance of econetwork characteristics—heretofore neglected in research on urban neighborhoods—for consequential…

Since Durkheim, sociologists have believed that actors in dense network structures experience fewer norm violations. Coleman proposed one explanatory mechanism, arguing that dense networks provide an opportunity structure to reward those who punish norm violators, leading to more frequent punishment and in turn fewer norm violations. Despite ubiquitous scholarly references to Coleman’s theory, little empirical work has directly tested it in large-scale natural settings with longitudinal data. The authors undertake such a test using records of norm violations during the editing process on Wikipedia, the largest user-generated online encyclopedia. These data allow them to track all three elements required to test Coleman’s mechanism: norm violations, punishments for such violations, and rewards for those who punish violations. The results support Coleman’s mechanism.