Knowledge that Transforms

Although family life has an important impact on children's life chances, the mechanisms through which parents transmit advantages are imperfectly understood. An ethnographic data set of white children and black children approximately 10 years old shows the effects of social class on interactions inside the home. Middle-class parents engage in concerted cultivation by attempting to foster children's talents through organized leisure activities and extensive reasoning. Working-class and poor parents engage in the accomplishment of natural growth, providing the conditions under which children can grow but leaving leisure activities to children themselves. These parents also use directives rather than reasoning. Middle-class children, both white and black, gain an emerging sense of entitlement from their family life. Race had much less impact than social class. Also, differences in a cultural logic of childrearing gave parents and their children differential resources to draw on in their interactions with professionals and other adults outside the home. Middle-class children gained individually insignificant but cumulatively important advantages. Working-class and poor children did not display the same sense of entitlement or advantages. Some areas of family life appeared exempt from the effects of social class, however.

Many countries that have recently undergone transitions to democracy have experienced increases in violent crime. Yet sociological theories have generally failed to consider the impact of political factors on crime. The author examines the relation between greater electoral competition and homicide at the subnational level in a country undergoing an uneven transition to democracy. In societies characterized by the presence of patronage networks, social and political changes that undermine the source of unequal exchange between actors at different levels in the social hierarchy result in a temporary loss of social control and an increase in crime. The relation between electoral competition and homicide is tested using electoral results from a sample of 1,800 Mexican municipalities. Greater electoral competition is associated with higher homicide rates across municipalities and over time, even after controlling for standard correlates of violent crime. Consistent with the hypothesis that the increase is due to the disruption of patronage networks, this association is present only in rural areas where patron-client relations are more common.

Has the relationship between economic prospects and marriage formation in the United States changed in recent decades? To answer this question, a discrete-time event-history analysis was conducted using data from multiple cohorts of the National Longitudinal Surveys of Labor Market Experience. Among women, results indicate growth in the importance of earnings for marriage formation between the early baby-boom cohort (born between 1950 and 1954) and late baby-boom cohort (born between 1961 and 1965). Evidence of cohort change in the relationship between men's economic prospects and marriage, however, is limited. Despite important racial differences in the economic and attitudinal context of marriage, key results are generally similar for whites and for African Americans. Taken together, these findings imply that men and women are growing to resemble one another with respect to the relationship between economic prospects and marriage, although this convergence is driven primarily by changing patterns of marriage among women. These results are largely supportive of Oppenheimer's career-entry theory of marriage and suggest that Becker's specialization and trading model of marriage may be outdated.

The proportion of Americans who reported no religious preference doubled from 7 percent to 14 percent in the 1990s. This dramatic change may have resulted from demographic shifts, increasing religious skepticism, or the mix of politics and religion that characterized the 1990s. One demographic factor is the succession of generations; the percentage of adults who had been raised with no religion increased from 2 percent to 6 percent. Delayed marriage and parenthood also contributed to the increase. Religious skepticism proved to be an unlikely explanation: Most people with no preference hold conventional religious beliefs, despite their alienation from organized religion. In fact, these “unchurched believers” made up most of the increase in the “no religion” preferences. Politics, too, was a significant factor. The increase in “no religion “ responses was confined to political moderates and liberals; the religious preferences of political conservatives did not change. This political part of the increase in “nones” can be viewed as a symbolic statement against the Religious Right.