Knowledge that Transforms

Nearly a century of empirical research examines how neighborhood properties influence a host of phenomena such as crime, poverty, health, civic engagement, immigration, and economic inequality. Theoretically bundled within these neighborhood effects are institutions’ and actors’ social networks that are the foundation of other neighborhood-level processes such as social control, mobilization, and cultural assimilation. Yet, despite such long-standing theoretical links between neighborhoods and social networks, empirical research rarely considers or measures dimensions of geography and social network mechanisms simultaneously. The present study seeks to fill this gap by analyzing how both geography and social networks influence an important social problem in urban America: gang violence. Using detailed data on fatal and non-fatal shootings, we examine effects of geographic proximity, organizational memory, and additional group processes (e.g., reciprocity, transitivity, and status seeking) on gang violence in Chicago and Boston. Results show adjacency of gang turf and prior conflict between gangs are strong predictors of subsequent gang violence. Furthermore, important network processes, including reciprocity and status seeking, also contribute to observed patterns of gang violence. In fact, we find that these spatial and network processes mediate racial effects, suggesting the primacy of place and the group in generating gang violence.

Although the working poor are a much larger population than the unemployed poor, U.S. poverty research devotes much more attention to joblessness than to working poverty. Research that does exist on working poverty concentrates on demographics and economic performance and neglects institutions. Building on literatures on comparative institutions, unionization, and states as polities, we examine the influence of a potentially important labor market institution for working poverty: the level of unionization in a state. Using the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) for the United States, we estimate (1) multi-level logit models of poverty among employed households in 2010; and (2) two-way fixed-effects models of working poverty across seven waves of data from 1991 to 2010. Further, we replicate the analyses with the Current Population Survey while controlling for household unionization, and assess unionization’s potential influence on selection into employment. Across all models, state-level unionization is robustly significantly negative for working poverty. The effects of unionization are larger than the effects of states’ economic performance and social policies. Unionization reduces working poverty for both unionized and non-union households and does not appear to discourage employment. We conclude that U.S. poverty research can advance by devoting greater attention to working poverty, and by incorporating insights from the comparative literature on institutions.

Married men’s wage premium is often attributed to within-household specialization: men can devote more effort to wage-earning when their wives assume responsibility for household labor. We provide a comprehensive evaluation of the specialization hypothesis, arguing that, if specialization causes the male marriage premium, married women should experience wage losses. Furthermore, specialization by married parents should augment the motherhood penalty and the fatherhood premium for married as compared to unmarried parents. Using fixed-effects models and data from the NLSY79, we estimate within-gender differences in wages according to marital status and between-gender differences in the associations between marital status and wages. We then test whether specialization on time use, job traits, and tenure accounts for the observed associations. Results for women do not support the specialization hypothesis. Childless men and women both receive a marriage premium. Marriage augments the fatherhood premium but not the motherhood penalty. Changes in own and spousal employment hours, job traits, and tenure appear to benefit both married men and women, although men benefit more. Marriage changes men’s labor market behavior in ways that augment wages, but these changes do not appear to occur at the expense of women’s wages.

Social epidemiologists Marmot and Wilkinson argue that relative deprivation is the dominant mechanism through which socioeconomic status (SES) affects mortality. If such an argument is valid, we would expect to consistently see the influence of relative deprivation in situations where two or more highly qualified and very similar individuals are nominated in a status competition, but only one receives the status boost conferred by winning. We studied mortality experiences of Emmy Award winners, Baseball Hall of Fame inductees, and presidents and vice presidents—comparing each to nominated losers in the same competition. Our findings and results of similar studies fail to show consistent advantages for winners. The association between winning and longevity is sometimes positive, sometimes negative, and sometimes nonexistent. We conclude that the critical processes determining the strength and direction of any status effect on longevity are changes in life circumstances that result from winning or losing, rather than the processes that inexorably flow from one’s relative position in a status hierarchy.

This address explores a broad framework for thinking sociologically about emancipatory alternatives to dominant institutions and social structures, especially capitalism. The framework is grounded in two foundational propositions: (1) Many forms of human suffering and many deficits in human flourishing are the result of existing institutions and social structures. (2) Transforming existing institutions and social structures in the right way has the potential to substantially reduce human suffering and expand the possibilities for human flourishing. An emancipatory social science responding to these propositions faces four broad tasks: specifying the moral principles for judging social institutions; using these moral principles as the standards for diagnosis and critique of existing institutions; developing an account of viable alternatives in response to the critique; and proposing a theory of transformation for realizing those alternatives. The idea of “real utopias” is one way of thinking about alternatives and transformation.