Week Six: Where Are We? Where Are We Going?

SOC 611

Fall 2007

Week Six: Where are We? Where Are We Going?

I. Week Four: Moral and Political Bases of Inequality

A. Durkheim and solidarity

1. moral and social contrrol (see also Parsons, if interested)

2. occupations versus classes

B. politics and elites

1. ruling class (Mosca)

2. power elite (Mills)

3. synthesis? (Giddens)

4. No elites here (Shils)

5. corporate/business elites (Useem)

C. Ways of conceptualizing inequality

1. reputation or self-identification (Warner)

a. social closure

b. community based

c. status (see Weber)

2. deference: relations of superiority/inferiority and mutual respectt (Shils)

D. Measurement Issues

1. SEI

2. occupational prestige

3. social class (based on occupational/industrial categories)

3. education and other forms of human capital

II. Week five: Social Mobility

A. American Mythology

1. U.S. as Land of Opportunity

2. U.S. as Land of Contest (rather than) Sponsored Mobility

3. critiques (Sorokin, Lipset, et al., Turner)

B. How do we measure mobility?

1. status attainment models (OLS)

a. Blau and Duncan

b. Wisconsin School specification

2. Hauser, et al. and Mobility Tables

At the end of last week we entered into a couple of interesting discussions, based on the following observations: First, the research of the Fifties and Sixties was limited to white men. Second, the role of education is poorly specified or understood.

Today I hope to re-invigorate the discussion on the second point (if not the first) by looking at some more micro level explanations of mobility that critique more macro-level (Marxist and Weberian) theories.

III. Week Six: Rationality, Status and Party

A. As predictors or enablers of mobility

1. subcultural theories (McLeod and Piore)

2. rational choice or human capital theories (Sorenson, Breen and Goldethorpe, Logan, and Mare)

3. network theory (Granovetter and Burt)

B. As consequences of mobility or standing

1. Class and Status: Veblen and Bourdieu

2. Class and Party: Hout et al.

3. work and personality: Kohn and DiMaggio

As a ploy toward inspiring discussion, let me offer a few quotes from other sources that might speak to some of the issues that are being debated here

Questions for consideration:

1. What keeps lower or working class people from "pulling themselves up by their bootstraps"?

Herbert Gans, The Urban Villagers: Group and Class in the Life of Italian American NY:

Free Press, 1962), "peer group society is a working-class phenomenon [which] separate[s] the West Enders from the middle class." (p. 229). The assertion here is that being "people-oriented" rather than "object-oriented" and being local rather than cosmopolitan creates barries to social, political, and economic success.

Much like the Hangers (and unlike the Brothers) poor people have "behavorial" problems that make it difficult for them to show up for work on time (is this "poor people's time"), as Piore explains (p. 435).

2. What are the consequences of inequality? How is inequality reproduced occupationally and generationally?

Mary R. Jackman and Robert W. Jackman, Class Awareness in the United States (Berkeley: University California Press, 1983) report, "[P}eople seem to derive their class identification primarily from their present family's, rather than their personla social standing. ... within the family, the husband is the principle source of status, and this state of affairs is unaffected by the wife's labor force participation. The pervasive dominance of the male head in this matter underscores the resilience of traditional domestic relations: married women's labor force participation does not in itself imply the adoption of egalitarian domestic arrangements." (p. 164). [for an update, see recommended readings for week 8].

Samuel Bowles and Hergert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reforms and the Contradictions of Economic Life (Basic Books, 1976) arue, "The most critical aspect of U.S. capitalism is that a few people own and controlthe bulk of productive resources, while most—aside from personal possessions—own only their labor power. ... The many must daily acquiesce to domination by the few, giving risee to systemic perpetuation of of extensive inequalities—not only between capital and wage labor, but among working people as well. ... The educational system neither adds nor subtracts from the degree of inequality and repression originating in the economic sphere. Rather, it reproduces and legitimates a preexisting pattern in the process of training and stratifying the work force." (p. 265).

These is the classic (Weberian and Marxist) statements of how education reproduces class (as well as race and gender differences). There is a brief review of this literature, with more recent citations that offered here, can be found in Richard Hogan and Carolyn C. Perrucci, "Black Women:Truly Disadvantaged in the Transition from Employment to Retirement Income." Social Science Research 36 (2007):1184-1199. More detail and more literature, focusing on critiques of Erik Wright but also mentioning critiques of Bowles and Gintis, can be found in Richard Hogan, "Was Wright Wrong? (2005—see additional reading in the syllabus).

So what do you think? What are the consequences of inequality? How is it reproduced at home and at work and at school?