Sociological Perspectives

Research has evaluated the impact of military service on socioeconomic outcomes, but little research has assessed the association between such outcomes and military occupations. The following article examines this relationship by analyzing the National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1979. It evaluates whether military occupations produce associations that are consistent with hypotheses based on theories of skills mismatch, selection, or turning points. Contrary to expectations, veterans of combat occupations did not have different earnings from those of other occupations, which suggests that any apparent effects of combat exposure reflect neither skills mismatch nor selection into these roles. Yet veterans earned less than nonveterans at the same years of combined military and civilian experience, regardless of occupation. These findings indicate that employers did not value time in the military as much as time in the civilian labor market.

There are no studies that compare the work ethic of Jews and Muslims in and out of Israel. This study examines and compares the work ethic among Jews and Muslims in Israel according to their degree of religiosity. The sample included 898 Jews and 215 Muslims representing the labor force that filled out the Meaning of Work questionnaire. The work ethic dimensions were obligation norms, entitlement norms, and work centrality. Among Jews, the agreement with obligation and entitlement norms was the highest among religious respondents and the lowest among their secular counterparts, while secular Jews have higher work centrality than traditionalists, especially than religious Jews. Muslim society was found to be more homogeneous than Jewish society, as the work ethic dimensions among Muslims are not affected by religiosity degree and, even when it is controlled, the other demographic variables do not generally influence work ethic dimensions. The meaning of the findings and their implications are discussed.

Whereas some researchers suggest that workers face a tradeoff between job security and earnings, others imply that low earnings and high unemployment risks tend to accompany each other. Despite the contradictory views, direct evidence on whether, holding skill levels constant, insecure jobs pay more—or less—is lacking. Equally lacking is an understanding of how the national context may condition the way in which job security is associated with earnings. Using cross-national data from the International Social Survey Programme, this study examines the association between self-reported job security and earnings. Results indicate that jobs perceived to be more secure unequivocally pay more. The positive association between job security and earnings remains even after controlling an extensive set of job and individual characteristics, including detailed occupational categories, possession of irreplaceable skills, and risk-related personality traits. Furthermore, this positive association is universal; it is found within different employment sectors and occupations, as well as for both men and women. Although workers who perceive themselves as having lower risks of job loss generally earn more, they earn especially more in countries with higher unemployment rates and greater income inequality. Within Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, however, the earnings gap between those with secure and insecure jobs is smaller when the unemployment benefits replace a greater amount of the earnings prior to the job loss.

In the United States, the dominant view of children is that they are passive receivers of parental resources—sites of investment that consume parental assets. However, this research largely ignores immigrant families, a fast-growing segment of the American population. This study uses data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study–Kindergarten Class of 1998–1999 (ECLS-K) to examine immigrant-native differences in who provides homework help to children in their households, a resource that most, if not all, children need and which parents are asked to provide. I find that, relative to white children in native-born households, both Asian and Latino children in immigrant households are more likely to rely on siblings for homework help (as opposed to parents). Unequal parental resources do not explain these immigrant-native differences. I show that far from being passive receivers of parental resources, children in immigrant families contribute much-needed resources—homework assistance, in this case—to their household members. This contribution, I suggest, is an expression of a larger immigrant adaptation strategy in the United States.

Asian American children exhibit stronger math and reading skills than white children at school entry, a pattern that has motivated scholars to examine early childhood to determine when and why these gaps form. Yet, to date, it has been unclear what parenting practices might explain this “Asian Advantage.” Analyzing more than 4,100 children from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study–Birth Cohort, we find that the role of parenting is complex. Asian American parents have high educational expectations compared with whites but are less engaged in traditional measures of parenting (e.g., reading to the child, maternal warmth, parent-child relationship), and these differences matter for understanding the Asian American/white math advantage in early childhood. Thus, even by age four, Asian American parents (across ethnic subgroups) play an important but complex role in the development of a child’s cognitive skills in the first few years of life.

Part of listening to popular music is complaining about it: Why is mainstream music so dreadful? . . . so repetitive? . . . and so the argument goes. Popular culture producers argue that they do not force-feed the public or “dupe” listeners into liking awful music. They are simply giving consumers what they want, or they are trying to figure out what consumers want. This paper explores the issue while focusing on gender and popular culture, by asking whether popular music producers and listeners agree or disagree regarding the types of artistic representations that are valuable. I find they do not, especially when it comes to female music listeners and female artist types. According to the production of culture perspective, demands of production and pursuit of market share usurp accommodating listeners, which includes overemphasis on gender stereotypes that are less popular with female consumers. Discussion includes suggestions as to why certain gendered patterns emerge in popular culture production and consumption.

This study explores the relationship structure of cultural rejection. The proposition is advanced that people reject cultural practices as the proxies of out-groups who are perceived to be associated with them, so that they would maintain social identities that are separate from those of out-groups. Using data on musical preferences from 1993 General Social Survey, it applies blockmodeling—a methodology originally developed in social network analysis—in a new way to analyze the structure of cultural rejection within U.S. society. The results indicate that blockmodeling based on cultural rejection is effective in uncovering sociologically meaningful positions among the respondents. The results are mostly consistent with the omnivore thesis, while highlighting the multifaceted nature of cultural divisions in the United States. Finally, the identified positions correspond with respondents’ perception of the degree of unity (or lack thereof) among Americans, consistent with the theoretical assumption of this study.

This paper investigates how neighborhood cultural context shapes academic achievement. Drawing on contemporary conceptualization of culture and recent evidence of the importance of neighborhood cultural context, I hypothesize that students from disadvantaged neighborhoods will display more cultural heterogeneity, or variability in cultural orientations, operationalized here as self-efficacy. In addition, I hypothesize that neighborhood cultural heterogeneity will have negative effects on academic achievement, particularly for those students with high individual self-efficacy. Results from multilevel models using data from the National Educational Longitudinal Study (NELS) support my hypotheses. Results indicate that students exposed to greater cultural heterogeneity are less able to translate high self-efficacy into better achievement, and suggest that exposure to increased cultural heterogeneity is one reason why students residing in disadvantaged neighborhoods underperform in education.

We argue that social order emerges from interactions among human individuals who develop and internalize emotional beliefs on their place within wider social surroundings in the form of social contract. Although parts of this thesis can be justified by referencing recent works in international relations, the sociology of emotions allows elaborating the thesis more consistently across various analytical levels: the individual, the intrastate/societal, and the international. We rely on sociological theories of emotions and draw implications for the establishment and maintenance of social contract, as well as the restoration and bolstering of social order in failing states. Knowledge of local culture, rituals, perceptions of self and others, modes of exchange, power and status hierarchies, and stratification patterns can all provide clues, here summarized in the form of guidelines as to how more effective, yet noninvasive, means of engagement in failing states may be thought out and put to action.

Scholarly work has discussed the ways in which stigmatized groups may resist their stigma, along with various resources at their disposal that facilitate such resistance. However, it has not explicitly considered how organization can serve as one such resource. Bringing into dialogue scholarly work on stigma, organizations, and social movements, this article examines the role of organization as a key resource for managing and resisting stigma. In doing so, it draws from a comparative analysis of two groups of dumpster divers in New York City. It finds that whereas informal social organization allowed one group to develop shared views regarding the practice, formal collective organization enabled another group to confront the stigma itself. The findings therefore highlight the role of organization in both mitigating shared stigma and challenging its basis—thereby providing insights into the social conditions of stigma management and the collective resources at the disposal of stigmatized groups.