Trust and Estate Planning: The Emergence of a Profession and Its Contribution to Socioeconomic Inequality1

This article offers a new perspective on the connection between socioeconomic inequality and occupations by examining the impact of trust and estate planners on global wealth stratification. While many studies treat the professions as mirrors of inequalities in their environments, this article looks at the ways professionals participate in the creation of stratification regimes. Trust and estate planners do this by sheltering their clients' assets from taxation, thereby preserving private wealth for future generations. Using tools such as trusts, offshore banks, and shell corporations, these professionals keep a significant portion of the world’s private wealth beyond the reach of the state. Trust and estate planning thus contributes to creating and maintaining socioeconomic inequality on a global scale. The significance of the profession has grown as wealth itself has become more fungible, spurring innovation in legal, organizational, and financial strategies, and thwarting a myriad of laws and policies designed to limit enduring inequality in modern, democratic societies.     

Marriage and Socioeconomic Change in Contemporary Indonesia

This study investigates the relationship between economic trends and entry into marriage in a rapidly developing setting. We examine Indonesian marriage in the 1990s, a decade of substantial economic growth followed by a sudden financial collapse in 1998. We use discrete‐time hazard models to analyze information on 4,078 women and 4,496 men from the Indonesia Family Life Survey. Although previous research has shown that marriages may be postponed after economic downturn, we find no evidence of such delays at the national level following the 1998 financial crisis. In contrast, we use regional wage rate data to show that entry into marriage is inversely related to economic growth throughout the decade for all women and for men from lower socioeconomic strata.     

Elite Colleges and Socioeconomic Status

Elite colleges have long been associated with socioeconomic reproduction, passing along elite social standing to children of middle and upper‐middle socioeconomic status (SES) parents. How has that role changed during the expansion of American higher education over the past 50 years? Have elite colleges and universities also become providers of socioeconomic mobility? In this essay, I outline recent demographic, admissions, and financial aid changes at these institutions and compare both in‐college experiences and college outcomes between low‐SES and more‐affluent students at elite colleges. I argue that although elite colleges and universities do include greater numbers of low‐SES students than in earlier generations and have great potential for even further inclusion, they remain far from serving as broad engines of socioeconomic mobility.     

Multiple Jobs and Inequality in Earnings

This paper shows that individual and structural factors which determine professors' salaries also influence, in various degrees, the accumulation of earnings from additional sources. As a result, those who receive greater rewards from their main work role are likely to have proportionately higher supplementary incomes. Thus, expanding occupational role-sets increase the inequality in economic rewards in the academic system. It is proposed that the relative effect of each of the salary determinants on extra earnings depends on their ability to generate, directly or indirectly, extra earning opportunities.
The examined factors are professorial rank, research productivity, departmental prestige and the length of academic experience. Professorial rank has been shown as the main determinant of institutional salary level, whereas research productivity is the most crucial factor in generating extra earning opportunities. It is likely that the importance of the latter, in our case, is mainly indirect in that it generates critical intervening resources such as professional reputation, visibility in the academic system and communication network.     

A New Kuznetsian Dynamic: The Knowledge Economy and Income Inequality in the United States, 1917–2008

The rise of the knowledge economy resulted in higher levels of income inequality in the United States and forced many to question the Kuznets Inverted‐U hypothesis. However, this study argues that the establishment of a knowledge economy does not negate the importance of employment shifts for income inequality. Instead, the expansion of knowledge employment alters the major sectors that are responsible for the overall distribution of income. To this end, this article presents the key argument that the current service–knowledge transition impacts income inequality trends, of today, in a way that is similar to the agricultural–industrial transition, of the past. According to the autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity regressions, the agricultural–industrial transition returns stronger associations with income inequality in the United States before 1950. The agricultural–industrial transition's impact diminishes thereafter as the service–knowledge transition shares a more robust association with income inequality after 1980.     

Inequality in voting power

This paper deals with the assessment of inequality in the distribution of voting power. Voting power is evaluated through a general concept of power measurement based on both the voting rule and the probability distribution over vote configurations. This general concept includes as particular cases the most usual power indices and other extensions of this traditional concept. Thus no particular power index is privileged in our approach. An inequality index over the class of all power profiles with a given number of voters generated by this general measure is then singled out by requiring reasonable properties. In order to compare profiles with different numbers of voters, two alternative principles are considered, which extend the said index consistently in two ways.Previous versions of this work were circulated under different titles. We gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología under the Ramón y Cajal programme and under projects PB96-0247 and BEC2000-0875; from the European Commission under the Training and Mobility of Researchers programme (contract FMRX - CT966-0055); and from the Instituto Valenciano de Investigaciones Económicas. We also thank two anonymous referees for their comments.2 October 2001     

Reproducing Inequality in Sociology

This essay discusses some mechanisms reproducing inequality in the discipline of sociology. I argue that credit for communally produced ideas accrues to individual and that the discipline is governed by a kind of “racial contract” partially governing which ideas and individuals are included. As a discipline centrally concerned with inequality and stratification, I argue sociologists should employ greater reflexivity when thinking about how disciplinary practices reproduce structures we typically critique in other contexts.     

Learning Disabilities and Inequality

Functionally speaking, students are labeled with learning disabilities (LDs) and placed into special education to enable them to achieve up to their potential. Nonetheless, potential links between LDs and inequality have been a dominant research theme. Inequality may determine who experiences LDs, or who receives the LD label, just as inequality may result from LDs, or from the LD label. This article reviews broad theoretical perspectives of LDs, as well as research focused specifically on LDs and inequality. With significant data and methodological limitations hindering this body of research, this article also demonstrates how theoretical perspectives and methodologies from sociology of education and sociology of health could make significant contributions to the literatures and policy focused on this group of students.     

Inequality and Multiracial Gatekeeping

ABSTRACT

Theoretical propositions linking power and status relations are deeply rooted in classical sociological thought. Building on that tradition, this paper investigates the impact of racial status on a specific power relation, the relation between gatekeepers and their clients. Gatekeepers control access to “benefits” they do not own, benefits that are valued by “clients.” Seeking access to those benefits, clients assume obligations which may be discharged by a fee paid to the gatekeeper. The size of the fee paid is the amount of power exercised by the gatekeeper. Employment agents, car salesmen, real estate agents are gatekeepers because they control access to jobs, cars, and housing, respectively, as well as information about each. When clients are lower status, for example, African American, employment agents may steer them to lower-paid, less desirable jobs, car salesmen may ask for and receive higher prices, and real estate agents may show only segregated housing. Research reported here extends previous work on gatekeeping to multiracial (black-white) gatekeeping relations by jointly applying two theories. Network Exchange Theory (NET) models the gatekeeper–client relation, and Status Characteristics Theory (SCT) models the impact of racial status on that relation. The result is three theoretical predictions that are experimentally tested in the well-understood context of exchange networks. As a first replication of previous work on gatekeeping, a key finding is that gatekeeping does produce power differences, as theoretically predicted. Two new additional findings are that 1) whereas race does indeed undermine the effects of blacks’ gatekeeping of whites, 2) it does not amplify (significantly) the effect of whites’ gatekeeping of blacks. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.     

Social Inequality and Interaction

This paper looks at the effects of social inequality on where we live, who we associate with and who we choose (and hang on to) as our friends and partners. We may feel that we freely choose our friends or lovers, but our most personal and intimate choices are constrained by patterns of social similarity and 'differential association'. The pattern of 'homophily' (the principle that we are more likely to associate with people who are socially similar to ourselves) has a major impact on social networks creating 'social interaction distance' between unequals. There is a social sorting process in the way we form social ties, so that the people we interact with tend to be similar to ourselves in education, social class, race/ethnicity, religion and attitudes. This has major consequences for our routes through life and worldviews, and for how inequality is reproduced.     

Inequality and Democratic Responsiveness

By allowing voters to choose among candidates with competingpolicy orientations and by providing incentives for incumbentsto shape policy in the direction the public desires, electionsare thought to provide the foundation that links governmentpolicy to the preferences of the governed. In this article Iexamine the extent to which the preference/policy link is biasedtoward the preferences of high-income Americans. Using an originaldata set of almost two thousand survey questions on proposedpolicy changes between 1981 and 2002, I find a moderately strongrelationship between what the public wants and what the governmentdoes, albeit with a strong bias toward the status quo. But Ialso find that when Americans with different income levels differin their policy preferences, actual policy outcomes stronglyreflect the preferences of the most affluent but bear virtuallyno relationship to the preferences of poor or middle-incomeAmericans. The vast discrepancy I find in government responsivenessto citizens with different incomes stands in stark contrastto the ideal of political equality that Americans hold dear.Although perfect political equality is an unrealistic goal,representational biases of this magnitude call into questionthe very democratic character of our society.     

Socioeconomic Status and Mental Illness in Japan*

Abstract Since the pioneering work of Faris and Dunham (1938), a number of studies in the United States have documented an inverse association between socioeconomic status (SES) and mental illness both at the aggregate and the individual levels, and both for the treated and the general population. However, there are few studies of whether this relationship holds in other countries. This study examines socioeconomic characteristics and mental illness in Japan, which has a very different social stratification system from that of the United States. It was found that, at the aggregate level, the “inverse” association between socioeconomic characteristics and the rate of treated mental illness does not hold in Japan. Instead, the relationship is curvilinear: mental illness is higher in districts with large numbers of blue collar and upper white collar workers than in districts with large numbers of lower white collar workers. The effect of SES on mental illness operates through economic stress embedded in the macro social context. Because different social structures lead to different patterns of economic stress, the inverse relationship between socioeconomic status and mental health cannot be assumed to hold in all countries.     

Decoding and encoding facial expressions in preschool-age children

Preschool-age children drew, decoded, and encoded facial expressions depicting five different emotions. Each child was rated by two teachers on measures of school adjustment. Facial expressions encoded by the children were decoded by college undergraduates and the children's parents. Results were as follows: (1) accuracy of drawing, decoding and encoding each of the five emotions was consistent across the three tasks; (2) decoding ability was correlated with drawing ability among female subjects, but neither of these abilities was correlated with encoding ability; (3) decoding ability increased with age, while encoding ability increased with age among females and slightly decreased among males; (4) parents decoded facial expressions of their own children better than facial expressions of other children, and female parents were better decoders than male parents; (5) children's adjustment to school was related to their encoding and decoding skills and to their mothers' decoding skills; (6) children with better decoding skills were rated as being better adjusted by their parents.The authors gratefully acknowledge the assistance of the Greater Rochester Jewish Community Center, Early Childhood Department, and the parents of the participating children in the completion of this study. Special thanks to Sandra Walter, Director of the Early Childhood Department, for her cooperation and support during all stages of the project.     

Nonverbal Decoding Skills and Relationship Well-Being in Adults

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the relation between nonverbal decoding skills and relationship well-being. Sixty college students were administered tests of their abilities to identify the affective meanings in facial expressions and tones of voice. The students also completed self-report measures of relationship well-being and depression. Correlational analyses indicated that errors in decoding facial expressions and tones of voice were associated with less relationship well-being and greater depression. Hierarchical regression revealed that nonverbal decoding accuracy was significantly related to relationship well-being even after controlling for depression.     

Demonstrating Effectiveness in Public Relations: Goals,Objectives, and Evaluation

Public relations planning and evaluation were explored among 32 practitioners and 10 top executives. Practitioners said their goals reflect the priorities of their institution. The CEOs believed public relations' ultimate aim is communicating the image of the organization. Responses showed many practitioners conduct informal evaluation, whereas only a few conduct formal evaluation. This research suggests public relations planning and evaluation are becoming more systematic but are still constrained by lack of resources and difficulty.