Knowledge that Transforms

Status distinctions have important consequences for most aspects of life, including inequalities in wealth, segregation, and interaction patterns in small groups. Much work documents such inequalities, but the mechanisms producing them are less understood. In our 2019 ASR article, “Status Characteristics, Implicit Bias, and the Production of Racial Inequality,” we showed that a novel measure of implicit status beliefs explained some of the effect of race on social influence. The measure is based on an implicit association test (IAT) assessing the association between status and racial categories. In their comment, Bursell and Olsson (2020) assert that the IAT may be capturing evaluative bias, not status beliefs. Furthermore, Bursell and Olsson suggest our measure may work better for white compared to black participants. In this response, we review work in the sociology of culture and social psychology establishing the multidimensionality of cultural beliefs, and we present results from a new experiment, showing status and evaluations load on distinct underlying constructs. Results also show no racial differences in these measurement properties. We conclude with a discussion of ways to further refine the racial status IAT and the broader implications of this exchange.

Access to formal financial products like savings accounts constitutes a hallmark feature of economic development, but individuals do not uniformly embrace these products. In explaining such financial preferences, scholars have focused on institutional, cultural, and material factors, but they have paid less attention to organizations and small groups. In this article, we argue that these factors are crucial to understanding financial preferences. We investigate a government-sponsored microsavings program in Colombia and find that participants became less interested in banking services over the course of the program, even as they gained access to appropriate accounts and their savings increased. Turning to qualitative data to understand this curious finding, we show that organizational efforts to disseminate abstract information about banking triggered a process of “elaboration” among group members, leading many to develop financial preferences at odds with those promoted by the government. This study integrates insights from economic sociology, organizational theory, and microsociology to advance theories of financial preference. In doing so, we reveal how organizational efforts to compress information, followed by group efforts to personalize and expand upon the information, can shape preferences and potentially undermine organizational goals.

Criminal organizations, like legitimate organizations, adapt to shifts in markets, competition, regulations, and enforcement. Exogenous shocks can be consequential moments of power consolidation, resource hoarding, and inequality amplification in legitimate organizations, but especially in criminal organizations. This research examines how the exogenous shock of the U.S. prohibition of the production, transportation, and sale of alcohol in 1920 restructured power and inequality in Chicago organized crime. I analyze a unique relational database on organized crime from the early 1900s via a criminal network that tripled in size and centralized during Prohibition. Before Prohibition, Chicago organized crime was small, decentralized, and somewhat inclusive of women at the margins. However, during Prohibition, the organized crime network grew, consolidated the organizational elites, and left out the most vulnerable participants from the most profitable opportunities. This historical case illuminates how profits and organizational restructuring outside of (or in response to) regulatory environments can displace people at the margins.

Using archival materials from the Domestic Relations Court of New York City, this article traces the conflict between private institutions and the state over responsibility for neglected African American children in the early twentieth century. After a long history of exclusion by private child welfare, the court assumed public responsibility for the protection of children of all races. Yet, in an arrangement of delegated governance, judges found themselves unable to place non-white children because of the enduring exclusionary policies of private agencies. When the situation became critical, the City sought to wrest control from private agencies by developing a supplemental public foster care system. This compromise over responsibility racialized the developing public foster care system of New York City, and it transformed frameworks of child protection as a social problem. The findings highlight the political salience surrounding issues of racial access in the delegated welfare state. Tracing how the conflict over access unfolded in New York City child protection provides an empirical case for understanding how the delegation of social welfare to private agencies can actually weaken racial integration efforts, generate distinct modes of social welfare inclusion, and racialize perceptions of social problems.

Are individuals’ attitudes constrained such that it is difficult to change one attitude without also changing other attitudes? Given a lack of longitudinal studies in real-world settings, it remains unclear if individuals have coherent attitude systems at all—and, if they do, what produces attitude constraint. I argue and show that groups can endogenously produce attitude constraint via cognitive authorities. Within groups, cognitive authorities explicitly link attitudes and generate feelings of connectedness among members, thereby facilitating the interpersonal processing of attitudes. Using data on interpersonal sentiment relations and attitude changes among members of intentional communities, I find cognitive authorities constrain attitudes via two mechanisms: (1) interpersonal tensions when attitudes and sentiment relations are misaligned (i.e., balance dynamics), and (2) social influence processes leading to attitude changes that are concordant with the group’s attitude system (i.e., constraint satisfaction). These findings imply that attitude change models based exclusively on interpersonal contagion or individual drives for cognitive consistency overlook important ways group structures affect how individuals feel and think.

Adult children’s labor market status and their type of marriage are major channels through which family advantages are passed from one generation to the next. However, these two routes are seldom studied together. We develop a theoretical approach to incorporate marriage entry and marital sorting into the intergenerational transmission of family income, accounting for differences between sons and daughters and considering education as a central explanatory factor. Using a novel decomposition method applied to data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we find that marriage plays a major role in intergenerational transmission only among daughters and not until they reach their late-30s. This is more salient in the recent cohort in our data (people born 1963 to 1975). Marital status and marital sorting are comparably important in accounting for the role of marriage, but sorting becomes more important over cohorts. The increasing earnings returns to education over a husband’s career and the weakening association between parental income and daughter’s own earnings explain why marital sorting, and marriage overall, have been growing more important for intergenerational transmission from parents to their daughters.

Despite growing interest in state race-making, we know little about how race-making plays out in the everyday practice of policy governance. To address this gap, I examine the implementation of the Indian Child Welfare Act (1978), which sought to end generations of state policies that denied tribal sovereignty and forcibly removed Native children from their tribes. ICWA’s protections extend to children based on tribal citizenship, not racial status. Marshalling 40 years of archival data from the government agencies charged with ICWA enforcement, I analyze how ICWA implementers determine a child’s Indian status. I find that authorities routinely eschew the requirement to treat Indian as a citizenship category, re-defining it as a race. Yet whether and how state actors racialize Indianness varies by the institutional contexts in which they work. Comparing state child welfare agencies, state courts, and federal courts, I identify three institutional characteristics that organize race-making practices: evidentiary standards, record-keeping requirements, and incentive structures. These characteristics influence whether state decision-makers operationalize “Indian” as a racial category and the cognitive and ideological processes that undergird their classifications. I also demonstrate that changes in these institutional characteristics yield concomitant shifts in whether and how state agents engage in racialization.

Cases of measles and other highly contagious diseases are rising in the United States. Public health experts blame the rise partly on the spatial concentration of parents declining to vaccinate their children, but researchers have given little attention to theorizing why this clustering occurs in particular communities. We argue that residential and school selection processes create “pockets of homogeneity” attracting parents inclined to opt out of vaccines. Structural features of these enclaves reduce the likelihood of harsh criticism for vaccine refusal and foster a false sense of protection from disease, making the choice to opt out seem both safe and socially acceptable. Examination of quantitative data on personal belief exemptions (PBEs) from school-based vaccination requirements in California schools and districts, as well as findings from parent interviews, provide empirical support for the theory. We discuss substantive implications for lawmakers and public health officials, as well as broader sociological contributions concerning neighborhood effects and residential sorting.

Autism is one of the twenty-first century’s most contested illnesses. Early controversies around vaccine harm have irrevocably structured the field of autism science. Despite incredible investment in genetic research on autism over the past 30 years, scientists have failed to identify a set of “genes for” autism, and genomic causality has become more complex. Yet, orthodox genetic explanations for autism have retained dominance over a vociferous field of heterodox experts pointing to a series of environmental insults (vaccines, heavy metal exposure, overuse of antibiotics, toxic pollution) as the main causes of autism. To make sense of this puzzling trend, we develop a novel theoretical synthesis combining a Bourdieusian field analysis with a Gramscian conception of hegemony, centered around the concept of “subsumptive orthodoxy.” Analyzing multiple years of archival data from the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee, we argue that when faced with heterodox challenges, dominant members of the field shore up hegemony by incorporating environmental causal factors into the genome, thus engaging in subsumptive orthodoxy. This move gives rhetorical space to environmental explanations without providing them substantive causal weight, which renders particular environmental causes (like vaccines) impossible. This article traces the strategies dominant members of the field use to retain control over the definition and etiology of autism. We develop the broader implications of the study within autism science and beyond.

By carefully examining our original data and models, Zoorob identified a potential outlier that should be scrutinized when evaluating our findings. We thank him for raising this important point and for engaging in collaborative, problem-solving research. Examining Zoorob’s analysis provided us the opportunity to return to our original study. We began by thinking about his first point: the raw data show that crime-related 911 calls did not appear to fall after the local press reported on Jude’s vicious beating by police officers. The Jude story was published in February, when both crime and crime reporting were at their lowest points of the year. (The enduring seasonal nature of crime has been empirically established at least since the eighteenth century [Anderson 2001; Field 1992; Hipp et al. 2004].) As temperatures warmed in subsequent weeks, crime increased but crime reporting did not rise at the same rate. That crime-related calls remained somewhat flat from January to March, despite a rise in recorded lawbreaking, suggests that the rate of 911 calls per crime decreased. This basic insight encouraged us to more directly control for the seasonal nature of crime.1 Accordingly, we estimated models that excluded the outlier Zoorob identified but controlled for average weekly temperature, as well as month and block-group fixed effects, as in our original specification.2 Doing so better enabled us to juxtapose rates of 911 calls during weeks with similar weather conditions and avoid comparing cooler days to hotter ones that see more crime. In Table 1, we report the results of these new models. Using AIC and BIC to guide model selection, we found that our revised models provide a better balance between fit and parsimony than our original model and those developed by Zoorob. Model 3 includes a quadratic post-Jude trend, as in the first two models. Model 4 includes a linear post-Jude trend.3 The third model of Table 1—which excludes the outlier week and controls for weekly temperatures—reports a negative linear term for the post-Jude period (p < .001) and a small, positive quadratic term (p < .01). Figure 1 plots the estimates from Model 3, showing that 911 calls declined initially following the Jude story before returning to expected levels a few months later. Likewise, Model 4 reports a significant linear decline in crime-related 911 calls following Jude’s story. These models (neither of which include the outlier week) indicate that crime-related 911 calls were much lower than expected in Milwaukee neighborhoods following news reports of Jude’s beating. The results are highly consistent with our original findings, reflected in the first column of the table. 895979 ASRXXX10.1177/0003122419895979American Sociological ReviewDesmond et al. research-article2020