Does childhood family structure help create stratification in adult education and labor market attainment?: An argument for the selectivity perspective

Stratification in opportunities for and attainment of educational credentials, stable and well‐paying jobs, wealth, and socioeconomic status causes problems for both individuals and the societies they live in. It is unclear, however, the extent to which important childhood experiences, such as family structure and transitions, shapes opportunity paths and eventual attainment later in adulthood. The intergenerational transmission literature suggests little if any role of family structure in later attainment, while family scholars and demographers find more compelling evidence that childhood family structures and transitions are influential in adulthood. We argue that both perspectives may be identifying selectivity processes that help explain potential links between families of origin and differences in opportunities to attain education, careers, and status. We then provide suggestions for future work in each of these scholarly traditions to help untangle both the degree to which family structure does or does not affect adult attainment and whether selectivity is the key explanation for any such relationships.     

The Empirical Side of the Power Elite Debate: an Assessment and Critique of Recent Research*

From the earliest writings in social science there have been lively debates over the extent to which societies are dominated by elites. Recently, empirical data have been considered for elite backgrounds, elite interlock, elite unity, and elite influence on public policy, but interpretation of the data continue to be problematic. The findings are often confusing and conflicting mainly because of differing methodologies, definitions and indicators of elite status. Focusing on the four areas of quantitative research listed, we compare the findings in an attempt to explain some of the conflicts. When possible, we have prepared summaries of the consistent findings, which tend to show, with respect to these issues, greater support for elite theories as opposed to pluralist theory. Finally we discuss some of the major questions in the debate that current research is unable to answer, and outline future research needs.     

Political Activism of Palestinian Youth: Exploring Individual,Parental, and Ecological Factors

The growing literature on youth and political conflict has not included an adequate focus on youth activism. To address this deficit, this study used youth‐ and parent‐reported data (N = 6,718) from the 1994–1995 Palestinian Family Study to test an ecological model of family influence (parents' activism, expectations for their adolescents' activism, support, psychological control), youth characteristics (self‐evaluation), and elements of the broader social ecology (socioeconomic status, religiosity, and region of residence) predicting Palestinian 9th graders' political activism during the first intifada (1987–1993). Parental activism was the strongest predictor of youth activism, both directly and via parental expectations for activism. Classic parenting behaviors were not systematically useful in understanding activism; neither were socioeconomic status or religiosity. The model applied equally well for sons and daughters, with the exception that maternal activism contributed uniquely to daughters' activism beyond the significant effect of fathers' activism.     

From democratic participation to civic resistance: the loss of institutional trust as an outcome of activism in the refugee solidarity movement

Adding to the literature on non‐institutional political action and trust, this article argues that the loss of institutional trust is not only a cause but also an outcome of political activism. Studying the Danish refugee solidarity movement in a mixed‐methods research design including survey and qualitative interview data, the article shows that three kinds of activism – political activism, humanitarian activity, and civil disobedience – relate differently to the loss of trust in the institutions of the Parliament, the legal system, and the police. Political activism primarily affects a loss of trust in the Parliament due to low external efficacy and a closed political opportunity structure. Civil disobedience affects a loss of trust in the legal system and the police due to a perceived lack of procedural justice. Humanitarian activity does not affect a loss of institutional trust because it does not imply interaction with the institutions to the same extent as the other kinds of activism. The consequence of losing trust in the political institutions is not an abandonment of democratic values, nor political apathy, but rather a change in civic engagement from a mode of democratically legitimizing participation in the institutions to a mode of contending and questioning the legitimacy of the political institutions. This finding indicates that in turn loss of institutional trust may cause an increase in extra‐institutional political action which is consistent with the commonly assumed causality in the literature. This leads to a final integrating argument for conceptualizing activism and loss of institutional trust as reinforcing factors in a process where, in line with the main finding of this study, activism may cause a loss of institutional trust which, in turn, may cause additional activism, as argued in the existing literature.     

Women in elite positions: Insiders or outsiders?

Formal institutional locations and informal participation in elite networks are examined for women and men occupying principal decision-making positions in powerful institutions in three advanced societies: the United States, West Germany, and Australia. In all three countries, the few women are concentrated in a small number of elite positions, especially those set aside for women. Social backgrounds vary, with women coming from somewhat higher status and class origins than their male counterparts. Further, network analyses reveal that men are more integrated than women in informal elite networks in all three nations. The results suggest that women in formal positions of power remain outsiders on the inside.     

Higher education and challenging work: Open admissions and ethnic and gender differences in job complexity

While there has been much research on the influence of educational attainment on occupational status and earnings, relatively little is known about its impact on other qualities of work, such as job complexity. This article explores how educational credentials affect access to jobs that provide challenging work. To do so it uses longitudinal data on black, Hispanic, and white men and women who attended the City University of New York after it initiated its landmark open-admissions policy in 1970. That program was designed to boost educational attainments among disadvantaged minority students and to enhance opportunities for desirable jobs. Analyses reveal that overall the jobs held by these minorities involved less complex work than those held by whites. These inequalities are explained partly by disparities in educational attainment, but differences in employment sector also are important: the minorities were more often in the public sector, where work was generally less challenging. Gender differences in work complexity are related to the varying distribution of sex-typed jobs in the public and private sectors. Policies such as open admissions add to opportunity in the labor market, but effects are limited by wider institutional conditions.     

The power elite and elite-driven countermovements: The associated farmers of california during the 1930s

The involvement of the power elite in social movements has been a neglected area of research. The investigation of elites has generally been limited to that of local elites, political parties, and philanthropic foundations, and their involvement in social movements is believed limited to resource support (either to further or deter the progress of an insurgent social movement) or the institutional obstruction or facilitation of the movement. I contend that under specific conditions, the power elite may become active mobilizers, leaders, and supporters of countermovements (movements to deter insurgent movements). These conditions arise during periods of heightened insurgent movement activity and when the efficacy of institutional channels to safeguard or advance the interests of the power elite is reduced. This is illustrated in the case of the Associated Farmers of California, Inc., a countermovement aimed at interfering with and obstructing the attempts of farmworkers to strike and unionize during the 1930s by enlisting citizens and citizen groups as anti-unionization shock troops. It also opposed New Deal policies and legislation. The mobilization of nonelites into the Associated Farmers originated in and was carried out by agricultural and industrial elite of California to advance their own interests. Citizens allied with the Associated Farmers either because of ideological alignment with their goals or dependence on their economic activities. The theoretical ramifications of this example will be explored.     

Interview: Sukaynah Salameh,director of the Vocational Development Association (VDSA), Lebanon

In this interview, Sukaynah Salameh, director of the nongovernmental Vocational Development Association (VDA) of Lebanon, states that the VDA was created to provide Palestinian and Lebanese youth with employment skills appropriate for local market conditions. The young men and women served by the VDA have had their education curtailed by 15 years of civil war and deteriorating economic conditions in their country. The situation is particularly difficult for Palestinian refugee women who face employment opportunities limited by scarce jobs, laws regulating the employment of refugees, competition by cheaper migrant labor, and women's unequal status. Most training programs provide refugee women with skills that do little but enhance their housekeeping skills. The VDA offers 6-9 month training courses using its own curricula. In addition, the VDA keeps a roster of its graduates to evaluate the usefulness of its training. This record-keeping allowed the VDA to determine that the market was being saturated with the skills they were offering. Therefore, the VDA conducted a market analysis that focused on the socioeconomic status of refugee women. This research revealed that the number of refugee girls enrolled in primary and intermediate school has gradually declined, although most young women 15-25 years old want to learn skills in order to find jobs. In order to increase the level of female enrollment in its vocational courses, the VDA decided to provide women who already have basic education skills with additional training in subjects the market is demanding, like architecture and design and computer studies. In addition, the VDA has begun an individual outreach program to promote the idea of female education and employment and has developed a network to help women find jobs.     

Educational ties,social capital and the translocal (re)production of MBA alumni networks

Research on elite, transnational networks has identified social and cultural capital associated with particular academic credentials as being an important element in network formation. How and why such networks are reproduced after graduation, however, has received less attention. In response, in this article I combine work on social capital and personal networks to explore the reproduction of MBA alumni networks in London's financial services district that were created in leading business schools in the USA and UK. My analysis documents the ways in which business schools and individual alumni combine forms of virtual and corporeal co‐presence to reproduce translocal educational ties. I then argue that the motivation for sustaining these educational ties lies in the potential to convert the social and cultural capital of MBA alumni networks into different types of value ranging from enhanced career progression to increased alumni donations. In doing so, I develop debates on the intersections between social capital, academic credentials and the reproduction of elite networks.     

A Room With a View or a Room of One's Own? Housing and Social Stratification

This study attempts to understand the role that housing plays in the system of social stratification. First, it generates a model of how housing outcomes are stratified along dimensions of socioeconomic status and race. Second, it asks what role housing conditions play in the system of educational stratification of offspring. Using two-generational data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, this paper demonstrates that home ownership is predicted by family income and race and that this indicator has a significant effect in predicting the educational attainment of offspring. Household crowding is also related to income and race and also affects the educational attainment of offspring. Meanwhile, housing quality—as measured by the physical condition of the unit—is not related to income or race and has no effect on educational attainment. Of particular note is that when socioeconomic status and housing conditions are held constant, African-Americans demonstrate more than a half-grade advantage over their non-black counterparts in years of completed schooling. In conclusion, the paper argues that housing matters not only for the immediate well-being of families, but also for the life-chances of the subsequent generation, and should be a standard variable in the conception of class background.     

Sustaining corporate class consciousness across the new liquid managerial elite in Britain

This article asks: how is class consciousness and cohesiveness amongst the UK business elite maintained in the twenty‐first century? Elite studies traditionally sought to account for the construction and circulation of dominant ideology through exclusive education systems, institutional board interlocks and club memberships. The problem is that business elite membership of all these institutions has been steady declining in recent decades. Contemporary corporate elites now appear more mobile and fragmented in an age of globalization. However, class cohesion amongst business leaders appears as strong as ever after decades of neoliberal policy hegemony. So, how are such ideas, norms and values circulated and maintained? This study tried to answer this question drawing on a set of 30 semi‐structured interviews with top UK CEOs and a demographic audit of current FTSE 100 CEOs. The findings suggest that three additional means of achieving business elite coherence have become more significant: professional business education, semi‐formal but regular meeting sites, and specialist business media.     

Separate education and hegemonic domination: civil society challenges in the Arab-Jewish city of Jaffa

The case of education in the mixed Arab-Jewish city of Jaffa, Israel, demonstrates the dialectical role of education in conflict-affected societies. As scholars of transformative education and critical pedagogy have noted, education tends to serve as an instrument of the dominant ideology of social and political elites, yet it is also a significant arena of civil society, where diverse and often subversive identities and values can be asserted. This duality is particularly evident in conflict-affected societies, where, as Gallagher points out, education can either contribute to conflict or challenge it, through structure of schools, contents of the curriculum and the routes and opportunities available to young people. The education system in Jaffa demonstrates the ways in which schooling separation, lack of multiculturalism in the curriculum and discrimination in education enforce elite domination. At the same time, it demonstrates how community members and civil society organisations may use the education system as an arena for challenging the status quo of inter-community relations in conflict-affected societies, through initiatives that may occur due to necessity, response to negative change or ideological challenges to domination.     

Fundamental causes of health disparities: stratification, the welfare state, and health in the United States and Iceland

Research has established that those with higher social status have better health. Less is known about whether this relationship differs cross-nationally and whether it operates similarly across different institutional arrangements. To examine the relationship between stratification and health, two Western, industrialized societies at opposite ends of an equal/unequal continuum are compared: the United States and Iceland. Using data from the 1998 General Social Survey and the 1998 Health and Living Standards of Adult Icelanders survey, I draw from two theoretical perspectives. First, I explore the notion of fundamental causes of disease by examining whether stratification has similar effects on health. Second, I examine whether the organization of welfare states affects this relationship. The results show that education, employment, and relative poverty have similar effects on health in both nations, thus supporting the notion of a fundamental cause. However in Iceland relative affluence has a weaker relationship with health. Further, being a parent, regardless of marital status, has a stronger positive relationship with good health in Iceland. Welfare state intervention may be most successful in equalizing health outcomes by supporting families and by removing advantages traditionally accumulated by the wealthy in capitalist societies.     

Ethnic Penetration Into Toronto'S Elite Structure*

Le pbinomene du degre de la penetration des individus qui ne sont pas d'ascen-dance anglo-saxonne dans les cercles d'elite a Toronto fournit une base pour pre-ciser la notion d'elite. En plus de tenir compte de la position dans la structure du pouvoir et de l'importance fonctionnelle des individus on ajoute le critere de prestige social. On reussit ainsi a distinguer deux differents niveau de statut lies a l'elite. Au niveau inferieur se retrouvent des individus detenant des roles fonc-tionnels cles dans la societe: c'est le niveau des elites strategiques. Au niveau superieur, que Ton nomme l'elite centrale, on retrouve un groupe restreint de personnes qui, en plus de posseder le pouvoir et l'aisance materielle qui accompa-gnent le leadership fonctionnel, sont investies d'un prestige social eleve dans la communaute. Par le biais de cette conception dualiste du statut de l'elite, une analyse de la composition ethnique de la structure des elites a Toronto met en lumiere que les Anglo-Saxons dominent toujours la couche superieure de l'elite. The extent of non-Anglo-Saxon penetration into elite circles in Toronto provides a basis for refining the elite concept. In addition to the usual considerations of power and functional importance, the element of prestige has also been included. Two distinct levels of elite status have been delineated. The lower level consists of persons holding key functional roles in the society, designated as the level of strategic elites. The upper level, termed the core elite, consists of a small group of people who combine high social status in the community with the power and wealth that accompany functional leadership. Utilizing this dual concept of elite status, analysis of the ethnic composition of Toronto's elite structure reveals that the upper level is still dominated by Anglo-Saxons.     

Extending Lenski's Schema to Hold Up Both Halves of the Sky—A Theory‐Guided Way of Conceptualizing Agrarian Societies that Illuminates a Puzzle about Gender Stratification

This paper suggests that Lenski's classification of agrarian societies into simple versus advanced, based on the use of iron in the latter, obscures important variations in the gender division of labor and the level of gender stratification. In particular, his categories lump the gender egalitarian irrigated rice societies of Southeast Asia with the great majority of agrarian societies, which are strongly patriarchal. Based on my general theory of gender stratification and experience coding and analyzing gender stratification in the ethnographic databases and fieldwork in 39 countries worldwide, I propose a three‐category alternative. First, agrarian societies are divided according to the technological criterion of irrigation into dry (rain‐fed) and wet (irrigated rice) categories. This distinguishes two gender divisions of labor: a male farming system in dry agrarian and an "everybody works" system in labor‐intensive rice cultivation, in which women are important in production. Second, irrigated rice societies are divided into patri‐oriented‐male advantage and those neutral to positive for women, based on the nature of the kinship system. This distinguishes the gender egalitarian Southeast Asian wet rice societies from the highly gender stratified majority of irrigated rice societies. Furthermore, these distinctions in gender equality are predicted by my gender stratification theory.     

Making sense of collective identity and trauma through drawing: the case study of a Palestinian refugee student

Abstract

Identity construction can be very complex for refugee children, especially for Palestinian refugee children. For refugee children, organised violence and immigration are important parts of their life experience that can lead to trauma, which in turn influences how they construct their collective identity. Schools have to consider this specific experience as the development of a meaningful identity is an important factor in refugee students’ well-being and school adjustment. School-based activities centred on creative expression can help refugee students in expressing trauma and in making sense of their identity and migration experience. This paper presents the case study of a 9-year-old Palestinian refugee boy in Canada and explores how he expressed and made sense of his multiple identities in his drawings. Many features of the boy’s drawings evoked a wounded identity, especially spatial disorganisation and enmeshment. Data analysis revealed that the boy might have been experiencing collective identity trauma and that he used drawing and a peer as props to heal his wounded identity. Both drawing and the space offered by his teacher to safely explore and experiment with different identities contributed to the integration of his multiple identities into a meaningful whole, which contributed to his school adjustment.     

Young people,emotional suspicion and the emergence of paediatric selfhood in Palestine

This paper explores young people's relationships to emotions and mental health care in Ramallah, Palestine. Palestinian young people—via public anger, sadness, or even joy—are often marked as emotionally other in familial, institutional and other public spaces as part of NGO-driven constructions of emerging paediatric selfhood. In response, they reproduce and/or reframe notions of emotional suspicion that underwrite these marginalizing processes. Thinking along such axes as possibility and impossibility; mobility and immobility; and the local and international, they simultaneously integrate and resist representational subjection, which is an important part of understanding broader post-Oslo Palestinian identity and community formation.     

The Impermanence of Permanence: The Rise of Probationary Immigration in Canada

This article engages with arguments that contemporary immigration politics is defined by a “loss of settlement” by examining recent developments in Canadian immigration and refugee policy that have made permanent residence less permanent. We suggest that the rise of probationary immigration has been facilitated by horizontal status stratification within groups that were historically marked by relative status equality. In order to examine this claim empirically in the Canadian context, we analyze the rise of temporary foreign worker recruitment, the move from “one-step” to “two-step” immigration, and changes to refugee policy that, for the first time, linked loss of refugee status to the loss of permanent resident status.     

The field of graduate recruitment: leading financial and consultancy firms and elite class formation

The symbolic value of being recruited by a high status multinational company likely represents an important marker of distinction. For the first time, a unique Destinations of Leavers in Higher Education (DLHE) data‐set is used here to model entry to elite multinational company in finance, accountancy and consultancy sectors among graduates of different social origins, universities, degree subjects and with different degree classifications. From a sample of 11,755 graduates working across these three sectors, we examine what predicts entry to 31 leading firms and then examine pay hierarchies among the 3,260 graduates working for these companies using random‐effects models. At first glance, significantly, we find that elite recruits come from a much broader range of universities than might be imagined. However, a closer look at the highest paid graduates within these firms reveals more familiar patterns of social and institutional stratification. We argue that these patterns likely reflect the nature of work undertaken by graduates in these elite firms, with institutional and social origins of graduates differing according to the particular track taken in what are likely to be highly differentiated graduate recruitment schemes.     

Careers Open to Talent: Educational Credentials,Cultural Talent,and Skilled Employment1

In the status attainment and social mobility literatures, “talent” is often conceptualized as educational attainment or mental ability. We adapt Bourdieu’s notion of embodied cultural capital and Goffman’s notion of “staging a character” into another dimension of talent, what we call “cultural talent,” and hypothesize that an ability to wield cultural talent in hiring or promotion scenarios facilitates attainment of skilled, complex jobs. Bivariate analyses and multiple regression modeling performed on data from an original survey show that educational credentials and cultural talent both predict occupational skill and complexity.