Knowledge that Transforms

Connections between grammar and social organization are examined via one of the most pervasive practices of speaking used in talk-in-interaction: yes/no type interrogatives and the turns speakers build in response to them. This investigation is composed of two parts. The first analyzes a basic organization set in motion by yes/no type interrogatives, describing a preference for “type-conforming” responses and its consequences. The second considers how this basic organization is shaped and simplified to accomplish institutionally specific goals in survey research, medical encounters, and courtroom cross-examinations, and what such manipulations reveal about these institutions. Together these findings deepen our understanding of how language is adapted to—and for—interaction, while providing analytic resources for a broad range of sociologists, whether they are engaged in the direct observation of human behavior, developing sociological theories of language, analyzing institutions and social organizations, or interested in the practical consequences of questioning in the myriad institutions that make use of this form.

Using the 1996 General Social Survey, the antecedents of feminist self-identification and their link to gender-related social attitudes are explored. Although most sociodemographic variables show either no relationship or a weak relationship with feminist self-identification, there are strong differences across cohorts. Males and females who were young adults during the “second wave “ of feminism (birth years 1936 to 1955) are more likely to identify as feminists than are those younger or older. In addition, the link between feminist self-identification and some social attitudes is cohort specific: Seemingly profeminist positions distinguish self-identified feminists from nonfeminists only among members of the “second-wave” generation. These results reinforce the importance of political generation and suggest increasing heterogeneity in public conceptions of feminism.

Drawing from cumulative disadvantage theory, the health consequences of obesity are considered in light of the accumulation of risk factors over the life course. Two forms of compensation are also examined to determine if the risk due to obesity is persistent or modifiable. Analyses make use of data from a national survey to examine the consequences of obesity on disability among respondents 45 years of age or older, tracked across 20 years (N = 4,106). Results from tobit models indicate that obesity, especially when experienced early in life, is consistently related to lower-body disability. The results also show that obesity has long-term health consequences during adulthood, altering the life course in an enduring way. Compensation was not manifest from risk-factor elimination (weight loss), but rather through regular exercise. Although there is evidence for long-term consequences of risk factors on health, the findings suggest that more attention should be given to compensatory mechanisms in the development of cumulative disadvantage theory.

Empirical research on the determinants of economic growth typically neglects the influence of religion. To fill this gap, this study uses international survey data on religiosity for a broad panel of countries to investigate the effects of church attendance and religious beliefs on economic growth. To isolate the direction of causation from religiosity to economic performance, the estimation relies on instrumental variables suggested by an analysis in which church attendance and religious beliefs are the dependent variables. The instruments are variables for the presence of state religion and for regulation of the religion market, the composition of religious adherence, and an indicator of religious pluralism. Results show that economic growth responds positively to religious beliefs, notably beliefs in hell and heaven, but negatively to church attendance. That is, growth depends on the extent of believing relative to belonging. These results accord with a model in which religious beliefs influence individual traits that enhance economic performance. The beliefs are an output of the religion sector, and church attendance is an input to this sector. Hence, for given beliefs, higher church attendance signifies more resources used up by the religion sector.

The first social transformation of American medicine institutionally established medicine by the end of World War II. In the next decades, medicalization—the expansion of medical jurisdiction, authority, and practices into new realms—became widespread. Since about 1985, dramatic changes in both the organization and practices of contemporary biomedicine, implemented largely through the integration of technoscientific innovations, have been coalescing into what the authors call biomedicalization, a second “transformation “ of American medicine. Biomedicalization describes the increasingly complex, multisited, multidirectional processes of medicalization, both extended and reconstituted through the new social forms of highly technoscientific biomedicine. The historical shift from medicalization to biomedicalization is one from control over biomedical phenomena to transformations of them. Five key interactive processes both engender biomedicalization and are produced through it: (1) the political economic reconstitution of the vast sector of biomedicine; (2) the focus on health itself and the elaboration of risk and surveillance biomedicines; (3) the increasingly technological and scientific nature of biomedicine; (4) transformations in how biomedical knowledges are produced, distributed, and consumed, and in medical information management; and (5) transformations of bodies to include new properties and the production of new individual and collective technoscientific identities.

This paper explores the ethnographic technique of the focused revisit—rare in sociology but common in anthropology—when an ethnographer returns to the site of a previous study. Discrepancies between earlier and later accounts can be attributed to differences in: (1) the relation of observer to participant, (2) theory brought to the field by the ethnographer, (3) internal processes within the field site itself, or (4) forces external to the field site. Focused revisits tend to settle on one or another of these four explanations, giving rise to four types of focused revisits. Using examples, the limits of each type of focused revisit are explored with a view to developing a reflexive ethnography that combines all four approaches. The principles of the focused revisit are then extended to rolling, punctuated, heuristic, archeological, and valedictory revisits. In centering attention on ethnography-as-revisit sociologists directly confront the dilemmas of participating in the world they study—a world that undergoes (real) historical change that can only be grasped using a (constructed) theoretical lens.

Variation in compliance with public policies across local settings is examined through an analysis of the number of reported hate crime incidents in United States counties. Particular attention is given to the role that activist organizations play in promoting, or impeding, compliance with public policies. Each hate crime reported to the federal government is conceptualized as a successful outcome of social movement mobilization. Drawing upon political mediation theory and Fine's model of discursive rivalry, the analysis shows how social movement resources, framing processes, political incentives, and features of local contexts combine to promote successful social movement outcomes. The presence of resourceful civil rights organizations in a county can lead to higher numbers of reported hate crimes, but the influence of civil rights organizations is contingent upon the political context and upon objective conditions that lend credibility to civil rights framing.

The mechanisms governing the composition of formal social groups (e.g., task groups, organizational founding teams) remain poorly understood, owing to (1) a lack of representative sampling from groups found in the general population, (2) a “success” bias among researchers that leads them to consider only those groups that actually emerge and survive, and (3) a restrictive focus on some theorized mechanisms of group composition (e.g., homophily) to the exclusion of others. These shortcomings are addressed by analyzing a unique, representative data set of organizational founding teams sampled from the U.S. population. Rather than simply considering the properties of those founding teams that are empirically observed, a novel quantitative methodology generates the distribution of all possible teams, based on combinations of individual and relational characteristics. This methodology permits the exploration of five mechanisms of group composition—those based on homophily, functionality, status expectations, network constraint, and ecological constraint. Findings suggest that homophily and network constraints based on strong ties have the most pronounced effect on group composition. Social isolation (i.e., exclusion from a group) is more likely to occur as a result of ecological constraints on the availability of similar alters in a locality than as a result of status-varying membership choices.