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.

While working on a follow-up project, I discovered errors involving data merges in my August 2018 ASR article “Relative Education and the Advantage of a College Degree.” I am the first to discover these errors, and I would like to take the opportunity to correct the record. The original study investigated the value of a bachelor’s degree in obtaining a skilled job, and how the value of a bachelor’s degree changes as higher education expands. The main argument was that the value of a college degree is relative to the level of education of peers. People in birth cohorts where college education is relatively rare are viewed by employers as elite, in terms of their skill level or cultural aptitude. In contrast, in cohorts that have more bachelor-degree holders, the bachelor’s degree is more of a minimum qualification than a mark of distinction. Thus, the relative education hypothesis states that workers with bachelor’s degrees should be more likely to obtain skilled jobs when college degrees are relatively rare, compared to when college education is relatively plentiful. The original study used CPS data from 1971 to 2010 and age-period-cohort models to determine whether individuals with bachelor’s degrees obtain less-skilled jobs as higher education expands. These analyses demonstrated that workers in cohorts with a higher proportion of bachelor’s degrees enter jobs requiring less verbal, quantitative, and analytic skills. Workers with bachelor’s degrees are increasingly being displaced into less-skilled jobs as bachelor’s degrees become more common. Moreover, because workers without bachelor’s degrees are increasingly entering higher skill occupations, the advantage of a bachelor’s degree over no college experience is declining even more than the absolute declines in skill utilization. The decline was consistently stronger for men than for women in the original study. Based on an analysis of the corrected data, the main conclusions from the original publication are robust: workers with bachelor’s degrees enter less-skilled jobs as cohort-level education rises, and the gap between workers with four-year degrees and those without any college experience has shrunk at an even faster rate as workers without any college increase their cognitive skill utilization. The findings still support the relative education hypothesis. Effect sizes for men are weaker in the corrected results, however, and are no longer consistently larger than women’s.

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.

Personal network change is largely driven by transitions between the groups and organizations where people spend their day-to-day lives. But, how do entrants choose which relationships to pursue among the numerous possibilities a new environment offers? We expect newcomers will use the same mechanisms as longer-tenured members, although this will take time as they acclimate and form initial relationships that support future ties. Thus, our goal is to understand how the network selection processes used by new organizational members shift in importance as time in the organization grows. We focus on network selection via homophily, propinquity, formal relations, and endogenous network processes. For each mechanism, we distinguish between change in the strength of the mechanism and opportunities to enact the mechanism. We evaluate expected changes using network data from a prison-based therapeutic community (TC). This setting is ideal because the structured nature of TC entry and exit generates regular membership turnover and removes confounds present in studies of more familiar contexts (e.g., schools). Results show that the relative importance of network selection mechanisms varies over tenure, with homophily dominating early on and endogenous network processes catching up later. We discuss implications of these findings for new member socialization and broader patterns of inequality.

In “Status Characteristics, Implicit Bias, and the Production of Racial Inequality,” Melamed, Munn, Barry, Montgomery, and Okuwobi present an innovative and intriguing study on social influence, status beliefs, and implicit racial bias. To capture status-based expectancies, the authors measure implicit racial status beliefs using an Implicit Association Test (IAT) with words related to high and low status. We identify an important flaw in the study’s analytic approach that severely limits the conclusions that can be drawn based on the study. We argue that the authors neglected to separate the valence of the words included in the racial status IAT with the stereotype content of these words. It is therefore possible that the study’s racial IAT only captures implicit racial evaluations, and not status-based implicit racial beliefs.

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.