Sociological Perspectives

Fictive kin, defined as family-type relationships, based not on blood or marriage but rather on religious rituals or close friendship ties, constitutes a type of social capital that many immigrant groups bring with them and that facilitates their incorporation into the host society. We describe three types of fictive kin systems in different immigrant populations and argue that their functions are similar across various ethnic groups and types of fictive kin relationships. Fictive kin systems expand the network of individuals who provide social and economic capital for one another and thereby constitute a resource to immigrants as they confront problems of settlement and incorporation. While anthropologists have long noted systems of fictive kin in premodern and modernizing societies, sociologists have paid little attention to fictive kin networks. We argue, however, that systems of fictive kin constitute an important part of the social networks that draw immigrants to a particular locale and provide them with the material and social support that enables them to become incorporated into a new and often hostile society. Data are derived from interviews with informants from various immigrant groups in Houston, Texas, and from a Yoruba community in Brooklyn, New York.

Prevalence of extended family households and factors associated with them are examined for non-Hispanic whites, African Americans, Asians, and Hispanics using data from the 1990 U.S. Census. Nuclear family households and three distinct types of extended family households (upward, downward, and horizontal) are identified, and racial/ethnic differences in the distribution of these types are noted. I contend that household extensions occur as a result of a combination of economic, demographic, and cultural factors. To examine economic aspects of household extension, I first examine income distributions across various household types. Then, using multinomial logistic regression, I identify economic, demographic, and cultural factors related to the three different types of extended family households. Even after racial/ethnic differences in demographic and economic variables are accounted for, preferences for downward extension among African Americans, upward extension among Asians, and horizontal extension among Hispanics still remain, suggesting an independent effect of racial/ethnic culture regarding household extension.

This article presents a theoretical perspective and a research agenda for the study of the relationship between love and effective conflict management in marriage. Love is conceptualized as virtue. Five virtues, regarded as components of benevolent love, are considered: prudence, temperance, fortitude, justice, and charity. The contribution of each virtue to conflict management is considered in relation to static and process models of marital interaction and in relation to Sorokin's five dimensions of the variation of love. Ideas from symbolic interactionist, exchange, and conflict theories are employed as perspectives in the analysis. Propositions are formulated relating each of the virtues to effective conflict management.

This article explores the increasing involvement of the state in science, in particular the establishment of a new cabinet-level ministry for science and technology by 146 countries from 1950 to 1990. As confirmatory analyses to test hypotheses, I employ event history techniques—piecewise exponential models with period-specific effects. The results show that although internal, functional conditions exerted a positive influence on the adoption rate of science ministries during the earlier period (1950–70), institutional effects have become more influential over time (1971–90). The increasing institutional effects were supported by three findings. First, the baseline founding rate of science ministries during the later period is significantly higher than that of the earlier period, which indicates that the ministry of science and technology became an expected and legitimated governmental structure since the late 1960s. Second, the amount of global organizational discourse on science and national development has a positive and significant effect on the founding of science ministries throughout the world in the later period. Third, direct linkage to international science organizations and discourse, as measured by the number of memberships of each country in the International Council of Science Unions (ICSU), strongly affects the founding of science ministries during both periods and even more strongly during the latter one.

This article develops and tests a general hypothesis derived from a theoretical perspective that links the individual-level outcome of voluntary association membership to the aggregate-level feature of town heterogeneity. The hypothesis predicts that heterogeneity will be negatively related to membership because, ceteris paribus, the potential for homophilous social network ties decreases with heterogeneity. The research examines heterogeneity with respect to four sociodemographic variables: education, income, industry, and race. To correctly separate individual effects from structural effects, nonlinear hierarchical models are employed. The results from models separately including each type of heterogeneity provide support for the hypothesis. Estimates from a model including all four types of heterogeneity suggest that race heterogeneity has the strongest impact on affiliation, although the effect of education heterogeneity also remains. The article concludes with a discussion of how future research on voluntary associations might further consider heterogeneity, with special emphasis on race heterogeneity.

Research examining the impact of corporate interests, state structures, and class contradictions on the state policy formation process has been dominated by three major theoretical perspectives: business dominance theory, state-centered theory, and Marxian structuralism. I argue that these existing perspectives pay insufficient attention to race and racial discrimination as a central component in the formulation and implementation of state policy. This article uses the concept of racialization to reframe existing theories of the state to explain the origin of the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) through the Housing Act of 1934. As an integral component of New Deal legislation, the FHA was created for the purpose of salvaging the home building and finance industries that had collapsed during the Great Depression. I draw on government housing reports and analyses, real estate industry documents, and congressional testimony to examine the racial dynamic of the FHA's housing policies and subsidies. The analysis demonstrates the value of employing a racialization framework to account for the racial motivations surrounding the origin of state policies, the racial basis of corporate interests, and the impact of race and racial discrimination on the creation and development of state structures.

The minority (nonwhite) can tell stories about institutional practices in academia that result in unintended benefits for the majority (white). One institutional practice in academia is affirmative action. This article presents a story about a minority applicant for a sociology position and his referral to an affirmative action program for recruiting minority faculty. One reason for telling the story is to illustrate how an affirmative action program can be implemented in a manner that marginalizes minority persons in the faculty recruitment process and results in benefits for majority persons. Another reason for telling the story is to sound an alarm for majority and minority faculty who support affirmative action programs that the programs can fall short of their goals if their implementation is simply treated as a bureaucratic activity in academia.

I explore the incorporation of the narrative approach in sociology, the role of sociologist as narrator, and why this approach is unsettling to traditional sociology, where tension exists between the postmodern implications of a narrative approach and our empiricist assumptions. A narrative approach represents an epistemological shift and should force us to interrogate the crucial role played by narrative in the construction of reality. Affirmative action provides a perfect example, as sociologists actively define and construct what constitutes affirmative action through narrative. I argue that taking narratives seriously is key to confronting anti—affirmative action narratives and denaturalizing white privilege.