Social Attainment II - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

1 / 52
About This Presentation
Title:

Social Attainment II

Description:

... involved in sustaining capitalist relations of production' as housewives (684-5) ... It incorporates women who are housewives into the model by formulating a ' ... – PowerPoint PPT presentation

Number of Views:144
Avg rating:3.0/5.0
Slides: 53
Provided by: unc
Category:

less

Transcript and Presenter's Notes

Title: Social Attainment II


1
Social Attainment II
  • Moving beyond the Classical Attainment Model

2
Blau and Duncan (67)Status Attainment Model
  • DVpersons occupational prestige position in
    1962
  • Two basic variables to describe early
    stratification position of each person 1)
    fathers educational attainment status 2)
    fathers occupational attainment status
  • Two behavioral variables 1) educational level of
    the individual 2) prestige level of first job

3
Blau and Duncan (67)Status Attainment Model
(Information taken directly from Nielsens
presentation)
  • Direct occupational inheritance pRsOccFsOcc is
    only .115
  • Most of rFsOccROcc .405 is indirect, thru RsEd
  • The major part of the total effect of RsEd on
    RsOc (.596) is independent of social origins
    (.535 vs. only .061 thru FsOc and FsEd) driven
    by RsEd residual

4
Blau and Duncan (67)Status Attainment Model
5
Critiques of the BD model
  • Class-Gender Critiques (and Featherman)
  • Social Psychological Critiques (and Bourdieu)
  • Social Capital Modifications
  • Genetic Critiques

6
Featherman and HauserBuilding on Blau and Duncan
  • There treatment of manpower flows parallels Blau
    and Duncans, 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.

7
Featherman and HauserThe Model
8
Featherman and HauserBroad results of the Model
  • Large immobility at the extremes of the hierarchy
    (farm occupations and upper nonmanual jobs)
  • The transitional zones surrounding the extremes
    experience homogenous chances of immobility
  • Data suggest barriers to movement across class
    boundaries (hard to move between the extremes and
    the transitional zones)
  • No social distance variant seems to effect
    long-distance mobility chances within the
    transitional zones
  • Immobility is almost non-existent in the middle
    of the hierarchy (no evidence of class boundaries
    to chances of movement to or from skilled manual
    occupations)
  • Roughly equal propensity to be moving up or down
    between occupational strata.

9
Featherman and HauserImplications
  • How do the results of this model differ from Blau
    and Duncans model? (329)
  • What are the implications of this observed
    difference on attainment models?

10
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.

11
Szelenyi Model
12
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)

13
The Dominance Model
  • A family centered model that . . . identifies
    the class position of the family with that of the
    individual who is most highly ranked within a
    dominance hierarchy, where this hierarchy is
    established by ordering family members in terms
    of their labor force participation and work
    situation (683).
  • - like the Conventional View it fails because .
    . . no single individual can possibly capture the
    total income of the family when both spouses are
    working . . . no single individual can adequately
    represent the work situations of all family
    members (684).

14
The Joint Classification Model
  • Classifies families in terms of the employment
    situation of both spouses, with the result thus
    being a joint classification that represents
    all possible combinations of their individual
    work statuses (684).
  • - introduces a new family-based approach which
    attends to the influence of the positions of both
    spouses and is thus superior to other singular
    family member based models.

15
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).

16
Production-Based Models
  • Like the Marxist models insofar as it assigns
    employed women to a class position that reflects
    their own job but treat housewives as outside the
    labor force and therefore ignores them
  • - considered as a step that stratification
    researchers use to distance themselves from the
    conventional view.

17
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).

18
Dual System Models
  • In what ways is this approach abstract? Are
    there ways to empiricize dual system models?

19
Findings
  • 1. Family-based models of class are especially
    difficult to evaluate, because their proponents
    sometimes fail to specify the dimensions of
    inequality that they ultimately seek to capture
    (686).
  • 2. The Joint classifications model appears to
    take us in a fruitful direction, if only because
    it begins forecast the class-gender debate in the
    language of contextual effects (686). This is
    the direction Szelenyi feels is necessary to
    accurately assess the gender-class issue, it is
    illustrated in figure 2 (687).
  • 3. We need to rethink the debate as pertaining
    not so much to the woman problem as to the
    strength of contextual effects, especially those
    embedded in the family (686).

20
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 Szelenyis contextual model of
    class identification? (below)

21
Sorensen
  • . . . a replacement of the conventional
    approach to determining the familys 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 familys social class.

22
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)

23
Findings and Questions
  • - While there is general support for the
    conventional approach, there remains uncertainty
    with regard to womens employment and class.
    Empirical evidence of womens employment and its
    relation to class is required to explain
    inadequacies of the conventional view.
  • - Do you think that studies in Sorensens article
    should be interpreted as supporting the continued
    use of the conventional view or as highlights of
    the small, but significant, inadequacies of it?

24
Sewell, Haller, and PortesMain Critiques of BD
  • Needed to include explanation of mental ability
    that was present in the literature
  • Omitted all social psychological factors which
    may have mediated the influence of the input
    variables on attainment
  • Fail to explicitly state why there should be any
    observed connection between the input factors and
    the dependent variable
  • Did not address opportunities to change the
    attainment behaviors of persons
  • Inclusion of social psychological variables will
    better explain the variance in the dependent
    variables

  • Sewells Goal To link stratification and
    mental ability inputs through a set of social
    psychological and behavioral mechanisms to
    educational and occupational attainments. (411)

25
Sewell, Haller, and PortesHypotheses
  • Initial stratification position and mental
    ability affect both the type of SOI bearing on
    the youth and the youths personal observations
    of his ability
  • SOI and self-assessed ability affect levels of
    educational and occupational aspiration
  • Levels of aspiration affect levels of educational
    attainment
  • Education affects levels of occupational
    attainment

26
Sewell, Haller, and PortesSocial Psychological
Model
27
Sewell, Haller, and PortesImportant
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?

28
Sewell, Haller, and PortesResults and Questions
  • They find that, There is a pair of perhaps
    consequential direct paths from academic
    performance to educational aspiration and to
    educational attainment. (416)
  • - What does this finding suggest?
  • They offer no speculation for the finding that
    there is an unexpected path between mental
    ability and level of occupational aspiration.
  • - Does this suggest anything? What might be a
  • possible explanation using what we know from
    other studies we have read?

29
MacLeodMain Arguments
  • Makes an analytical distinction between
    aspirations and expectations. (422)
  • - What is this difference?
  • - Which does the author believe takes primacy?
  • MacLeod speculates that the immediate social
    world influences actors in different ways
    (differences between Hallway Hangers and The
    Brothers)

30
MacLeodFindings
  • Hallway Hangers
  • ..Own job experiences as well as those of family
    members have contributed to a deeply entrenched
    cynicism about their futures (422).
  • Work is important to them only as a means to an
    end namely money.
  • Evaluation of the opportunity structure plays the
    dominant role.
  • Tend to blame others for their failures, not
    themselves.
  • The Brothers
  • Do not hesitate to name their occupational goals,
    but may mask them to prevent ridicule.
  • Tend to blame their failures on personal
    inadequacy
  • View their opportunity structure as open

31
MacLeodThe Theory of Social Reproduction
  • MacLeod interprets and applies Bourdieus 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)

32
MacLeodAdditional 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.

33
Bourdieu
  • . . . the spaces defined by preferences in food,
    clothing or cosmetics are organized according to
    the same fundamental structure, that of the
    social space determined by volume and composition
    of capital
  • Fully to construct the space of life-styles
    within which cultural practices are defines, one
    would first have to establish, for each class and
    class fraction, that is, for each other
    configurations of capital, the generative formula
    of the habitus which retranslates the necessities
    and facilities characteristic of that class of
    (relatively) homogeneous conditions of existence
    into a particular life-style. One would then
    have to determine how the dispositions of the
    habitus are specified, for each of the major
    areas of practice, by implementing one of the
    stylistic possibles offered by each field (the
    field of sport, or music, or food, decoration,
    politics, language, ect.) (522)

34
Bourdieu
  • There is a direct relationship between possession
    of quantities of types of capital and the
    cultural expression of social class.
  • The dialectic of conditions and habitus is the
    basis of an alchemy which transforms the
    distribution of capital, the balance-sheet of a
    power relation, into a system of perceived
    differences, distinctive properties, that is, a
    distribution of symbolic capital, legitimate
    capital, whose objective truth is misrecognized
    (504).

35
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).

36
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).

37
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).

38
Granovetter
  • except under unlikely conditions, no strong tie
    is a bridge . . . A strong tie can be a bridge,
    therefore, only if neither party to it has any
    other strong ties . . . Weak ties suffer no such
    restriction, though they are certainly not
    automatically bridges . . . all bridges are weak
    ties (448)
  • The significance of weak ties, therefore, would
    be that those which are local bridges create
    more, and shorter, paths assuming Davis (449).
  • Do you think that such network effects account
    for some of the error in Blau and Duncans work?
    If so, how?

39
Lin
  • The emergence of a theory of social resources
    where individuals are best served in actions
    involving status attainment to seek contacts with
    those high up on the social network hierarchy.
    Nan deducts this theory from Granovettter, Blau
    Duncan and Lin, Dayton, Greenwald. (452).

40
Lins Theory
  • The macro-social structure consists 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 egos
    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 egos position in the
    hierarchy (452-3)

41
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).

42
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).

43
Questions
  • How might this finding relate to those of Blau
    and Duncan?
  • What does this suggest about strategies which
    determine how people might attempt to gain social
    capital?

44
Scarr and WeinbergGenetic Influences on
Attainment
  • To prevent conflation of genetic and
    environmental influences, the authors use
    adoptive and biological families controlling for
    selection bias in adoptive parents.
  • To the left is the breakdown of the families
    recruited. Thinking back to the article, are
    there any concerns with external validity?

45
Scarr and WeinbergPreliminary 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.

46
Scarr and WeinbergFindings (1)
  • The authors 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.

47
Scarr and WeinbergFindings (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 childrens intellectual attainment depend upon
    genetic, not environmental, transmission. (686)
  • - Do they perhaps overstate themselves here, or
    does their argument support this stronger
    assertion?

48
NielsenBehavior Genetic Model
  • Behavior genetic models improve upon earlier
    attainment models by separating a measurable
    trait into 3 components 1) genetic inheritance
    (affects both siblings in accordance to their
    proportion of shared genes), 2) common
    environment (SES, ethnic culture, neighborhood,
    etc.), 3) specific environment (birth order, a
    disease that only affects one child, etc.).
  • This division allows a clearer distinction to be
    made between achievement and ascription.
  • Nielsens model is looking at school achievement
    among adolescents

49
NielsenMethodology
  • Uses AddHealth data and examines siblings living
    in the same household who are related/not related
    as MZ, DZ, FS, HS, CO, and NR.
  • Sampling Frame only included blacks and
    non-Hispanic whites to control for
    second-language influences.
  • Controlled for race and sex differences in verbal
    scores

50
NielsenThe Model
51
NielsenResults
  • 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.

52
NielsenGeneralizability
  • 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.
Write a Comment
User Comments (0)
About PowerShow.com