Social Attainment - Stratification Sociology - Lecture Slides, Slides of Sociology

Download Social Attainment - Stratification Sociology - Lecture Slides and more Slides Sociology in PDF only on Docsity! Social Attainment II Moving beyond the Classical Attainment Model docsity.com Blau and Duncan (’67) Status Attainment Model • DV=person’s occupational prestige position in 1962 • Two basic variables to describe early stratification position of each person; 1) father’s educational attainment status 2) father’s occupational attainment status • Two behavioral variables; 1) educational level of the individual 2) prestige level of first job docsity.com Critiques of the B&D model • Class-Gender Critiques (and Featherman) • Social Psychological Critiques (and Bourdieu) • Social Capital Modifications • Genetic Critiques docsity.com Featherman and Hauser Building on Blau and Duncan • There treatment of manpower flows parallels Blau and Duncan’s, but makes use of log-linear modeling of the mobility table to describe a mobility regime that is free of the distributions of occupational origins and destinations. • They are following a similar inductive path to Blau and Duncan. • They are also building on the quasi-independence models of Goodman in the sense that they are focusing on more than just the traditional aspect of occupational inheritance. They want to uncover the patterns of immobility and exchange between occupational strata. docsity.com Featherman and Hauser The Model docsity.com Szelenyi and Sorensen • Szelenyi critiques models which attempt to deal with the unit of stratification systems as either familial or individual and concludes that the debate is more about contextual effects than gender itself. docsity.com Szelenyi Model FIGURE 1 A typology of approaches to locating women in the class structure FAMILY UNIT OF ANALYSIS | [ INDIVIDUAL UNIT OF ANALYSIS | : ; - \ | ger See | a \ { a Conventional Dominance Joint \ f Production-based ystems View Models Classification \ i Models. Models f d ‘i / geek | Models Vi wey / Marxist Models ae \ ’ we 4 Functionalist Liberal Models of Domestic Mode of Patriarchy Production Models Explanations — Explanations docsity.com The Conventional View • The position that: “(1) the family rather than the individual forms the basic unit of sociological analysis, a (2) the social position of the family is properly indexed by the status of its (usually) male head” (681). • - “it fails to appreciate the simple fact that women are entering the labor force in ever-increasing numbers” (683) docsity.com Marxist Models • Classifies women with their relation to the means of production or as “explicitly involved in sustaining capitalist relations of production” as housewives (684-5) • - “women thus facilitate the exploitation of men, but are not themselves exploited in a classical Marxian sense” contrary to “the domestic labor theorists [who] argue that housewives are indirectly exploited by capital because their husbands are paid a ‘family wage’ that reimburses them not only for their direct contribution to profit on the shopfloor, but also for the daily reproduction of their labor power at home” (685). docsity.com Production-Based Models • Like the Marxist models insofar as it “assign[s] employed women to a class position that reflects their own job but treat housewives as outside the labor force and therefore ignore[s] them” • - considered as a step that stratification researchers use to distance themselves from the conventional view. docsity.com Dual System Models • “The dual systems approach considers economic and sex-based inequalities simultaneously and posits that ‘a healthy and strong partnership exists between patriarchy and capital’ (685). It incorporates women who are housewives into the model by formulating a “domestic mode of production” (686). • the approach is difficult to work with because it is highly abstract but it does bring housewives into the model and is thus an improvement on pervious classifications (686). docsity.com Question? • Szelenyi says, “I doubt that much headway can be made in the gender- class debate without operationalizing the model” (686). How could we operationalize Szelenyi’s contextual model of class identification? (below) Friends Spouse Actor Lifestyles Consumption Practices Politics Identities Class Action docsity.com Sorensen “ . . . a replacement of the conventional approach to determining the family’s class position will make it possible to address many questions that are central to our understanding of the class position of families” (45) Sorensen reviews studies on voting behavior and social mobility to evaluate the conventional, or classical, view of stratification in which the male head of the household is used to determine the family’s social class. docsity.com Findings • - With regard to voting behavior most studies support the conventional view, however, Sorensen finds that such a conclusion can “easily lead to different conclusions regarding the performance for the conventional approach, and, [that] . . . it is not clear what a rejection of the conventional view means” (36) • - “Research on intergenerational mobility has also shown that the conventional analysis of male-only tables to represent the whole population underestimates the degree of openness in the mobility regime” (45) docsity.com Sewell, Haller, and Portes Hypotheses 1. Initial stratification position and mental ability affect both the type of SOI bearing on the youth and the youth’s personal observations of his ability 2. SOI and self-assessed ability affect levels of educational and occupational aspiration 3. Levels of aspiration affect levels of educational attainment 4. Education affects levels of occupational attainment docsity.com Sewell, Haller, and Portes Social Psychological Model X,-Occupational Attainment X5-Significant Others’ Influence X>-Educational Attainment X¢-Academic Performance X3-Level of Occupational Aspiration X;-Socioeconumic Status X Level of Educational Aspiration X_-Mental Ability docsity.com Sewell, Haller, and Portes Important Methodological Points • Their sampling frame was Wisconsin high school seniors who; a) had completed both the ’57 and ’64 survey, b) were males, c) whose fathers were farmers in ’57. - What are the implications of this sampling frame on their results? - Can their results be compared to Blau and Duncan? docsity.com MacLeod Findings • Hallway Hangers 1. “..Own job experiences as well as those of family members have contributed to a deeply entrenched cynicism about their futures” (422). 2. Work is important to them only as a means to an end; namely money. 3. Evaluation of the opportunity structure plays the dominant role. 4. Tend to blame others for their failures, not themselves. • The Brothers 1. Do not hesitate to name their occupational goals, but may mask them to prevent ridicule. 2. Tend to blame their failures on personal inadequacy 3. View their opportunity structure as open docsity.com MacLeod The Theory of Social Reproduction • MacLeod interprets and applies Bourdieu’s concept of habitus as consitutive of factors such as ethnicity, educational history, peer associations, and demographic characteristics. - While finding it theoretically useful, MacLeod sees limitations to the use of the habitus. What are some of these limitations? How does he apply it? (430-432) docsity.com MacLeod Additional Questions • Neither group has been very successful in achieving occupational mobility. - What does this imply about the importance of (or lack thereof) social psychological influences on occupational mobility? Would MacLeod argue that structure takes primacy over social psychology. docsity.com Bourdieu • “Taste, the propensity and capacity to appropriate (materially or symbolically) a given class of classified, classifying objects or practices, is the generative formula of life- style, a unitary set of distinctive preferences which express the same expressive intention in the specific logic of each of the symbolic subspaces, furniture, clothing, language or body hexis” (504). docsity.com Bourdieu • “This classificatory system, which is the product of the internalization of the structure of social space, the form in which it impinges through the experience of a particular position in that space, is, within the limits of economic possibilities and impossibilities (which it tends to reproduce in its own logic), the generator of practices adjusted to the regularities inherent in a condition” (505). docsity.com Granovetter, Lin and Burt • Granovetter • - “whatever is to be diffused can reach a larger number of people, and traverse greater social distance . . .when passed through weak ties rather than strong” (450). • “To derive implications for large networks of relations, it is necessary to frame the basic hypothesis more precisely . . . by investigating the possible triads consisting of strong, weak, or absent ties among A, B, and any arbitrarily chosen friend of either or both” (448). docsity.com Lin’s Theory • The macro-social structure consist[s] of positions ranked according to certain normatively valued resources such as wealth, status, and power. • The structure has a pyramidal shape in terms of accessibility and control of such resources. The higher the position, the fewer the occupants; and the higher the position, the better the view it has of the structure. • For instrumental actions (attaining status in the social structure being one prime example), the better strategy would be for ego to reach toward contacts higher up in the hierarchy. These contacts would be better able to exert influence on positions whose actions may benefit ego’s interest. • This reaching-up process may be facilitated if ego uses weaker ties, because weaker ties are more likely to reach out vertically rather than horizontally relative to ego’s position in the hierarchy (452-3) docsity.com Burt • - “Managers with more social capital get higher returns to their human capital because they are positioned to identify and develop more rewarding opportunities” (454). • - Uses structural hole theory to connect social capital and social network location to explain how “managers with more social capital get higher returns on their human capital because they are positioned to identify and develop more rewarding opportunities” (454). docsity.com Findings • - “Managers with contact networks rich in structural holes know about, have a hand in, and exercise control over the more rewarding opportunities . . . Mangers with networks rich in structural holes operate somewhere between the force of corporate authority and the dexterity of markets, building bridges between disconnected parts of the firm where it is valuable to do so” ( 457). docsity.com Scarr and Weinberg Preliminary Observations • Family distributions of IQ, SES, and mean age of children comparable for both adoptive and biological groups. • There were significant sex differences in tests, but this is not a concern because of the approximately equal amount of males and females. • No significant demographic differences in adoptive and biological families for this study (679) • Parental IQ scores were correlated with family demographic characteristics. • Adoptive families have slightly fewer children than biological families. • Family size is unrelated to IQ in adoptive families, but slightly negatively correlated for biological families. - What is their reasoning for this? • Later born or adopted children have a negatively correlated IQ scores. docsity.com Scarr and Weinberg Findings (1) • The author’s choose to focus on the R-squares of the models as opposed to the coefficients of individual variables. - What is the advantage to doing this? • They find that when IQ scores for parents are added in, the R-square of the biological families increases to .309 while the R-square of the adoptive families only increased to .075. They claim the difference in increase can be attributed to the “genetic contribution of the biological parent IQ” (682) • The R-squares for the adoptive models do improve when educational information is added on the biological mother of the adopted child, confirming the above result. • This late-adolescent study confirms the results of earlier childhood studies, thus adding more evidence to the biological argument. docsity.com Scarr and Weinberg Findings (2) • While the authors provide some evidence for inheritable traits, they continue on to claim that “…it seems evident to us that the study of adoptive and biological families provides extensive support for the idea that half or more of the long- term effects of “family background” on children’s intellectual attainment depend upon genetic, not environmental, transmission.” (686) - Do they perhaps overstate themselves here, or does their argument support this stronger assertion? docsity.com Figure 2 - Behavior genetic model of adolescent schooling. ] WI = verbal 10, GPA = grade point average, (CPL = college plans. Each side (lett or right) of the model corresponds to one of the siblings in a pair. Latent variable sets AL, AZ, and AS; C1, C2, CS; and Fl, E2, ES correspond to Cholesky (triangular) factorizations for genetic factors, common environment factors, and specitic environment factors, respectively (see text for discussion). Each genetic tactor A is correlated across siblings by a quantity & that depends on the degree ot relatedness of jNings and assumptions concerning assortative mating; each common environmental Ll) across siblings. Variances of all latent docsity.com or C is assumed perfectly correlated (1 lables are set to 1.0. Nielsen Results • Nielsen finds that the association between GPA and VIQ is largely explained by genetic factors. • The findings suggest that the three measures of schooling are highly heritable, strongly affected by specific environmental factors, and unaffected by common environmental factors. docsity.com Nielsen Generalizability • Behavior genetics requires that heritability, environmentality, and specificity are not fixed properties but vary depending upon the empirical context. • THUS, to use the behavior genetic approach as a tool for comparative stratification research means finding comparable heritability and enivronmentality estimates for school or occupational outcomes in different social systems. docsity.com