On a dynamic response model of W. F. Kempf

Kempf's model was used by W. F. Kempf and P. Hampapa (1977, “Conditional inference for the dynamic test model,” in Mathematical Models for Social Psychology (W. F. Kempf and B. H. Repp, Eds.), Chap. 3, pp. 81–100, Wiley, New York) to analyze the cross-classification of responses to four items on sex typing of children's household chores from the 1971 Detroit Area Study. The model alters the simple Rasch measurement model for dichotomous items to include transfer effects, so that responses are allowed to be serially dependent (G. Rasch, 1966, “An individualistic approach to item analysis,” in Readings in Mathematical Social Science (P. F. Lazarsfeld and N. W. Henry, Eds.), pp. 89–107, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1980; Probabilistic Models for Some Intelligence and Attainment Tests, expanded ed., Univ. of Chicago Press, Chicago). Although Kempf and Hampapa did not find strong reason to reject the dynamic model, the present analysis indicates that it should be rejected in favor of a two-dimensional Rasch model.     

Why the trade/GNP ratio decreases with country size

Several rational models are constructed to show why the ratio of a country's foreign trade to its GNP should decrease with increasing country size. A physics-inspired model of absorption of a quasi-continuous particle flow by a quasi-homogeneous space results in detailed agreement with the observed contemporary world-wide pattern of import/GNP vs. population size. On the average, world imports behave as if 63% of a product flow were absorbed by the nearest 730,000 people or by people within 37 miles of the production center, whichever number of people is higher. “Characteristic transport distances” (over which 63% of flow is absorbed) are given for 110 countries and range from 10 to 300 miles. The corresponding “characteristic absorption numbers” range from 160 to 1700 people; they indicate the number of people, linearly arranged, which absorbs 63% of a flow.     

Latent structures of vertical control in intergovernmental relations

Much of the work on interorganizational (IO) relations focuses on intracommunity bases of resource exchange, or what a number of writers have referred to as the “horizontal axes” of community organization and resource control. Building on earlier work in the field, the present paper extends this conceptual framework to include “vertical” dimensions of resource control as they pertain to the work relations of governmental units at the local and extralocal level. In this context, vertical control is viewed as a power-dependence relation between county-based public service agencies and their “parent” units at the state and federal level. Variations in these control relations are used to identify alaternate structures of vertical control within a set of public service programs spanning several units of government. The analysis reveals three basic types of vertical control structure each of which is shown to foster a distinct pattern of exchange relations among these units.     

Trends in the relative occupational status of African Americans and European immigrants in Northern cities, 1880–1970

In his classic book, A Piece of the Pie, Stanley Lieberson described divergent trends in occupational standing for African Americans and European immigrants after 1920, as the Great Migration from the South swelled the size of the black population in northern cities. In this paper I build upon Lieberson’s work using longitudinal data drawn from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series for the census years 1880–1970. This more versatile data source allows me to examine separate occupational trends for northern-born blacks and southern-born migrants and to control for relevant socio-demographic characteristics. The findings confirm Lieberson’s general conclusion that blacks lost ground, occupationally, to immigrants after 1920. However, they show further that: (1) northern- and southern-born blacks experienced different trends in relative occupational standing after 1920, (2) that these different trends were due largely to compositional differences between the two groups of northern blacks, especially educational differences, and (3) that blacks were generally less successful than immigrants at translating additional educational attainment into improved occupational status, with southern migrants experiencing the weakest occupational returns to education. It is concluded that compositional differences and a racially-defined occupational queue were the most important factors shaping group differences and trends in occupational standing between 1920 and 1970. Timing of arrival in the northern industrial economy and a response by whites to the “racial threat” from a growing black population were less important.     

Internal labor markets, promotions, and worker skill: An indirect test of skill ILMs

The determinants of intrafirm mobility within the internal labor markets (ILMs) of one large, regional bank and one small town bank are examined. The literature on the banking industry suggests that internal labor markets exist there, and that job changes within these markets are based on the development of skill rather than on seniority. It is suggested that in skill ILMs, promotions will be a positive function of the employees' duration in the present job; while in a seniority-based ILM, promotions will be a positive function of tenure with the firm prior to the present job. These findings, for men but not women, support the hypothesis that skill rather than seniority-based ILMs are present in each bank. The findings for women suggest that they work in “firm” or secondary labor markets. While the two banks are similar in the way other factors determine mobility, differences are also found which may be explained by the size and sectoral location of each bank.     

Psychological ‘self–other overlap’ and support for slavery reparations

Neurobiological and social psychological studies suggest the existence of non-conscious ‘self–other overlap’ that can lead individuals to identify with other individuals or groups. This paper investigates whether this effect may help to explain support by some Whites for an otherwise unpopular policy on behalf of African Americans-slavery reparations. A representative telephone survey (n = 1200) serves as baseline of comparison for an online reaction time study with a non-representative sample (n = 1341) that measures ‘self–other overlap’ (interchangeably referred to as “implicit closeness” to Blacks). Partial proportional odds ordered logit analyses reveal implicit closeness to Blacks as the single most powerful predictor of support for reparations among White respondents. The magnitude of the absolute effect of implicit closeness exceeds that of traditional predictors such as racial resentment, ideology, and party identification. Methodological and political implications are discussed.     

Intergenerational transmission of sex-specific differential treatments: The allocation of education resources among siblings

Using a unique data set of 3-generation education information, in this article we extend the analysis of Greenhalgh [Greenhalgh, Susan, 1985. Sexual Stratification: The other side of ‘growth with equity’ in East Asia. Population and Development Review 11, 265–314] and study the question of intergenerational transmission of sex-specific differential treatments. The rich data are obtained from Taiwan’s Panel Study of Family Dynamics project. As far as the macro pattern is concerned, we found that although there is a clear tendency of differential treatment against females in the old generation, this tendency is significantly weakened and nearly vanishes in the young generation. Furthermore, the supporting effect of senior siblings in the old generation becomes a crowding (resource-dilution) effect in the young generation. However, within each micro lineage, there is a mild “habitus” effect in the sense that parents who experienced gender-specific differential treatment tend to treat their children in a similar fashion. We find that parents’ education contributes to the elimination of sex-based differential treatment, consistent with the finding in Thronton et al. [Thornton, Arland, Alwin, Duane F. and Camburn, Donald, 1983. Causes and consequences of sex-role attitudes and attitude change. American Sociological Review 48, 211–227].     

政府间与非政府间国际组织在全球环境治理中的有效性评估

全球环境治理是当今国际社会的重要议题,其治理主体呈现多元化趋势,治理模式也由原有的国家中心治理模式向有限治理模式、网络治理模式发展,呈现多方向的新变化。除国家政府之外,就国际组织而言可分成政府间国际组织(IGO)与非政府间国际组织(INGO)两种。文章将探究在全球环境治理问题上是否政府间国际组织可以替代非政府组织的作用,并以绿色和平与联合国环境规划署两大组织为例,从国际社会对全球环境治理体制的功能需求方面进行案例对比分析与治理有效性的评估。     

Cognitive Abilities and the Growth of High-IQ Occupations

Is there increasing cognitive partitioning by occupation over time? Herrnstein and Murray's The Bell Curve strongly suggests such a trend. Herrnstein and Murray specify 12 occupations as “high-IQ professions.” They argue that as jobs in these occupations increase over time, more people with high IQs are drawn to these occupations. Thus, there is a growing concentration of the cognitive elite in high-IQ occupations and increasing cognitive partitioning by occupation. However, I find Herrnstein and Murray's analysis problematic due to lack of evidence and misinterpretation of data. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and the Wisconsin Longitudinal Survey, I rank occupations by incumbents' mean IQ and demonstrate that Herrnstein and Murray overestimate the rankings of some high-IQ occupations, the mean IQ level of persons in high-IQ occupations, and the percentage of high-IQ persons engaged in high-IQ occupations. In addition, using data from the General Social Survey, 1974–1998, I find no evidence that cognitive partitioning by occupation has increased over time.     

The role of self-evaluations in legitimizing social inequality

This research addresses a long standing puzzle in the social sciences: why are stratified social systems accepted as legitimate (the way things “ought” to be) by those who are advantaged and those who are disadvantaged by them? We build on previous studies of self-evaluations to explain the legitimation of inequality. The research consists of two experiments designed to test the self-evaluation theory of legitimacy. The theory proposes that structural inequality becomes legitimated when individuals’ self-evaluations and the level of resources they receive are congruent. Study 1 examines the impact of structural power on self-evaluations. Results show that participants randomly assigned to advantaged positions in power structures earn more rewards and, as a result, develop higher self-evaluations than those randomly assigned to disadvantaged positions. Study 2 addresses the relationship between self-evaluations and legitimated structural inequality by testing competing hypotheses of legitimacy. The results partially support the self-evaluation theory and partially support competing arguments about legitimacy. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of our work and suggestions for future research.     

Corporate society: A time series analysis of network structure

The conceptual problem addressed here is the transition of the United States from a person-oriented society in the 19th century to a corporate society during the 20th century. Using the content analysis of mass media records from 1877 to 1972, annual networks of associations among categories of actors are analyzed for trends in their structure where z_ii is a percentage of attention given to actors in the ith category of actors and z_ij is a percentage of attention given jointly to actors in the ith and jth categories. Stable estimates are found for the increasing attention given to corporate entities, the decreasing attention given to persons, and the increasing use of unorganized collectivities of actors as a means of interaction between persons and corporate entities. “Ideal type” networks are identified and described which are reflected in the observed networks as a function of existing conditions in the nation. Distinct ideal types are associated with conditions of economic decline, conditions of unusual collective action by the populace, and conditions of joint economic growth and lack of collective action. Implications of the findings for the study of persons and corporate entities in a corporate society are discussed.     

Contradictions of commitment in the new economy: Insecurity, time, and technology

The new flexible, 24/7 economy is characterized by employment insecurity, time pressure, and technologies that increase employees’ accessibility to their workplace. Accompanying these changes is a changing social contract between employees and their employers. Labor process and organizational theories suggest that these employment characteristics will undermine the attachment component of organizational commitment that remains an important feature of contemporary workplaces. We use an unpublished dataset of a nationally representative sample of employed individuals from the Families and Work Life Institute to test hypotheses linking the attachment component of organizational commitment to organizational insecurity, time pressure, and technologically created accessibility. Our expectation is that these changes will be particularly important for decreasing older cohorts of workers’ attachment to the organization since they have experienced a change in the social contract. The data are largely consistent with these expectations.     

Welfare myths: The transmission of values and work among TANF families

Both “welfare culture” arguments and structural explanations of poverty suggest that attitudes may have an effect on work and welfare outcomes. However, most scholars only examine objective behaviors and characteristics despite the fact that values are an underlying mechanism in explanations of the transmission of welfare and work behavior. Using data from a survey of recent welfare recipients in Louisiana and structural equation methods, we analyze causal relationships among family background, socioeconomic characteristics, attitudes, and two outcomes—TANF participation and employment. We find some support for the intergenerational transmission of welfare but not through values; we find no evidence that under the TANF system, values inhibit work.     

Resources,homophily, and dependence: Organizational attributes and asymmetric ties in human service networks

This paper examines the effects of organizational attributes on power/dependence relations in interorganizational dyads. Exchange and homophily theories are discussed as two alternative perspectives on the processes that give rise to such effects. The data pertain to interagency ties in three community-based networks of youth service agencies and are analyzed via a new strategy of linear modeling dyadic relations. The results of the analysis suggest that size, administrative position, and justice system connections condition the extent to which an agency initiates and receives ties of influence, assistance, and support. Moreover, these relations are more frequent between agencies with similar treatment ideologies and client racial makeup. Finally, size and justice system access are found to reduce agency dependence on a network's administrative core. In the course of the discussion, a number of related issues and findings are discussed.     

Did send-down experience benefit youth? A reevaluation of the social consequences of forced urban–rural migration during China’s Cultural Revolution

During China’s Cultural Revolution, a large proportion of urban youth were forced to go to the countryside as a result of the state’s “send-down” policy. Past research has been ambivalent about the long-term social consequences for the Chinese youth who experienced send-down. Some scholars have suggested that the send-down experience may have yielded beneficial effects. To test this claim, we analyze data from the Survey of Family Life in Urban China, which we conducted in three large cities in 1999. Questions available in this data set allow us to ascertain the send-down experience of both the respondent and a sibling and educational attainment at the times of send-down and return. Our analyses of the new data show that the send-down experience does not seem to have benefited the affected Chinese youth. Differences in social outcomes between those who experienced send-down and those who did not are either non-existent or spurious due to other social processes.     

Can Weighting Compensate for Nonresponse Bias in a Dependent Variable? An Evaluation of Weighting Methods to Correct for Substantive Bias in a Mail Survey among Dutch Municipalities

Due to a lack of pertinent data, little is known about nonresponse in substantive, generally “dependent” variables and its consequences. However, in a study on policy performance of Dutch municipalities, we were fortunately able to gather performance data for respondents and nonrespondents from independent sources. Our study shows that very successful and very unsuccessful municipalities respond least, while intermediately successful municipalities respond most. In our opinion, this “curvilinear” relationship between performance and nonresponse can be interpreted as an interaction effect between interest in the topic of research and evaluation apprehension. As a consequence, the relationships between variables are also biased. To correct for this bias we made several weighting attempts. Weighting adjustment is based on the assumption of equal response probabilities. Our study, however, shows that this assumption is not met. Furthermore, our results indicate that weighting by one or two independent variables does not lead to better results, no more than weighting by policy performance alone. Interestingly, only weighting by a dependent and independent variable in combination leads to acceptable results, but only if weighting factors are not trimmed down too strongly and combination of weighting classes is limited.     

Do displaced workers lose occupational prestige?

Worker displacement has become a common feature of employment in the “flexible economy.” While studies of income losses and the duration of unemployment after displacement abound, and popular accounts argue that workers often lose status, less empirical attention has been paid to the quality or prestige of employment displaced workers are able to secure after a downsizing event. This paper helps to fill this gap in the literature by focusing on changes in occupational prestige among a nationally representative sample of displaced workers who became reemployed from the January 2004 Displaced Workers and Employee Tenure Supplement of the Current Population Survey. Our findings show that displaced workers with higher levels of education, net of other factors, fared significantly better than others in job quality upon reemployment, highlighting the importance of education in retaining status and privilege in the new economy.     

Racial similarity in the relationship between poverty and homicide rates: Comparing retransformed coefficients

Criminologists have shown great interest in comparing the strength of the relationship between poverty and violent crime for whites and blacks. The present paper argues that the standard approach of comparing race-specific coefficients from logarithmic metric OLS and/or Poisson-based regressions has led to erroneous conclusions in this literature. Unlike researchers in other disciplines (especially economics), criminologists have largely ignored the need to “retransform” coefficients to their linear-effect representations before making comparisons between groups. The current study illustrates the importance of this methodological issue for the substantive question of whether poverty’s relationship to homicide is racially invariant (N = 134 cities). Similar to previous studies, initial results indicated that poverty’s effect on the natural logarithm of the homicide rate was dramatically stronger for whites than blacks (nearly 300% stronger for whites). However, after applying a broadly useful retransformation formula, poverty’s effect on the homicide rate actually appeared somewhat stronger for blacks. Further application of bootstrap simulations necessary to calculate the standard error of the difference in coefficients suggested that this racial discrepancy was not statistically significant.     

Background characteristics in the U.S. adult population 1952–1973: A survey-metric model

Data from 30 surveys (46,356 cases from 10 Michigan Election Surveys and 20 Gallup polls) are analyzed to study the interrelations of cohort, sex, race, region, and education from 1952 to 1973.A d-system model is developed that pools results from the various surveys into a set of parameters forming a flowgraph model. This technique allows one to see whether the surveys used are consistent and whether the results are consistent with outside sources such as census reports. (Generally speaking, the surveys were found to be consistent and the model showed generally good fit with census and NORC General Social Survey estimates, but significant differences in two or three parameters.) A computer model of the system is used to generate implications and extrapolations.Substantively, the main results were: (1) a definite trend away from sex equality in education, especially for college attendance; (2) very little narrowing in race, region, and religious differences in education, until the most recent cohorts where Northern White Catholics and Southern White Protestants show virtual parity with “Yankees” (Northern White Protestant); and (3) a projection that shows discouragingly little narrowing of intergroup education differences in the general population for the next 5 years.     

Red unions and bourgeois democracy: A quantitative-historical analysis of worker militancy and socialist electoral power

This paper investigates how workers’ “economic struggle” determines the “democratic class struggle,” and extends socialist electoral constituency. This paper argues that political outcomes, namely, electoral behavior, may not be understood independently of the labor process, especially its most militant manifestation, strikes. Rather than follow the customary conceptual dichotomy between the sphere of production and the political sphere, it is suggested that both strike activity and electoral participation are compatible political strategies that, under specific historical circumstances, may jointly determine the fate of the Socialist party. The leading question is how did the wave of strikes in post World War I Italy affect the electoral power of the Italian Socialist party, in comparison with another mass party, the Popular Catholic Party. Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) is employed to analyze census, strike, and electoral data. It is found that strike activity and electoral democracy increased the electoral power of the Socialist party, whereas they had little effect on the power of the Catholic party. It is suggested that this was due to the Catholic non-revolutionary program which was ambivalent about the political role of strikes. It is concluded that the socialists’ political success was determined by their dual political strategy in both spheres, electoral participation, and organizing strikes.