Social Attainment II Moving beyond the Classical Attainment Model

Social Attainment II Moving beyond the Classical Attainment Model

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

Blau and Duncan (’67) Status Attainment Model (Information taken directly from Nielsen’s 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

Blau and Duncan (’67) Status Attainment Model

Critiques of the B&D model Class-Gender Critiques (and Featherman) Social Psychological Critiques (and Bourdieu) Social Capital Modifications Genetic Critiques

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.

Featherman and Hauser The Model

Featherman and Hauser Broad results of the Model 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 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.

Featherman and Hauser Implications How do the results of this model differ from Blau and Duncan’s model? (329) What are the implications of this observed difference on attainment models?

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.

Szelenyi Model

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)

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).

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.

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).

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.

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).

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

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).

Question? Szelenyi says, “I doubt that much headway can be made in the genderclass debate without operationalizing the model” (686). How could we operationalize Szelenyi’s contextual model of class identification? (below) Friends Actor Spouse Lifestyles Consumption Practices Politics Identities Class Action

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.

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)

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

Sewell, Haller, and Portes Main Critiques of B&D 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 *********************************************************** Sewell’s Goal: “ To link stratification and mental ability inputs through a set of social psychological and behavioral mechanisms to educational and occupational attainments.” (411)

Sewell, Haller, and Portes Hypotheses 1. 2. 3. 4. 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 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

Sewell, Haller, and Portes Social Psychological Model

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?

Sewell, Haller, and Portes Results 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?

MacLeod Main 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)

MacLeod Findings Hallway Hangers 1. 2. 3. 4. “.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 1. 2. 3. 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

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)

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.

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)

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).

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).

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).

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).

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 Duncan’s work? If so, how?

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).

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)

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).

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).

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?

Scarr and Weinberg Genetic 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?

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.

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.

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?

Nielsen Behavior 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. Nielsen’s model is looking at school achievement among adolescents

Nielsen Methodology 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

Nielsen The Model

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.

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.