Mincer's Overtaking Point and the Life Cycle Earnings Distribution

In 1958 Jacob Mincer pioneered an important approach to understand earnings distribution. In the years since Mincer's seminal work, he as well as his students and colleagues extended the original human capital model, reaching important conclusions about a whole array of observations pertaining to human well-being. This line of research explained why education enhances earnings; why earnings rise at a diminishing rate throughout one's life; why earnings growth is smaller for those anticipating intermittent labor force participation; why men earn more than women; why Whites earn more than Blacks; why occupational distributions differ by gender; why geographic and job mobility predominate among the young; why unemployment is lower among the skilled; and why numerous other labor market phenomena occur. This paper surveys the answers to these and other questions based on research emanating from Mincer's original discovery. In addition, this paper provides new empirical evidence regarding Mincer's concept of the overtaking age–a topic not currently well-explored in the literature. In this latter vein, the paper shows that Mincer's original finding of a U-shaped (log) variance of earnings over the life cycle is upheld in recent data, both for the United States as well as at least seven other countries.     

The Experience-Earnings Profile: Productivity-Augmenting or Purely Contractual? Evidence from the UK

We test the human capital interpretation of the experience-earnings profile. Does the upward sloping portion of the experience-earnings profile reflect on-the-job training which in turn causes the experience-productivity profile to slope upwards, or do purely contractual factors determine the nature of life-cycle earnings. Herein, we provide additional evidence on the relationship between productivity and earnings by examining earnings differentials in the UK academic labor market for economists. Using a test first suggested by Mincer, we find that the empirical results are consistent with human capital theory. We find that, although the positive relationship between earnings and experience persists when individual productivity measures are included in the salary equations for lecturers and senior lecturers, the positive relationship becomes statistically insignificant when the same productivity measures are included in the salary equations for professors. For lecturers and senior lecturers, the experience-salary profile properly reflects the structure of the national pay scale rather than variations in individual research productivity. At the professor level, where individual salaries are not determined by a pay scale, the data support the human capital explanation of the positive experience-earnings profile.

Culture,Race, and the Economic Assimilation of Immigrants

The economic assimilation of European-origin immigrants is fairly rapid but selectively culture contingent; the economic assimilation of racial minority immigrants is less rapid and less culture contingent. Regression analysis of survey data examines occupational status and earnings effects of eight ethnic attachments among men and women in seven ethnic and racial minorities in mainstream and enclave employment in Toronto (N = 1792), controlling for foreign and domestically acquired human capital. Assimilationist pressures that the survey showed to be widely perceived may apply more to Europeans than to racial minorities. Economic assimilation is affected when foreignness is most pronounced: very selectively for European immigrants and universally for racial minorities treated as foreign, presumably based on skin color, regardless of specific culture, identity, behaviors, or network affiliations.     

This is my ...: How Cohabitants introduce their partners

Cohabitors were asked by questionnaire to indicate how they introduced their partners to parents, friends, acquaintances and employers. Findings from 76 male and 79 female subjects suggest that, when introducing a partner in social interactions, the relationship between a cohabitor and the person to whom the introduction is made has an effect upon the title used to describe her or his partner. The most common mode of introduction was boyfriend or girlfriend, the term lover being reserved generally for close friends. Over 10% of the remaining responses conveyed varying degrees of information concerning the emotional and physical nature of the relationship and/or the cohabitor's household.The authors wish to express their thanks to Jim Kerr, morning announcer of WPLJ-FM, for his cooperation in this study.     

Manufacturing Motherhood: The Shadow Work of Nannies and Au Pairs

This paper explores how working mothers and paid child care providers interpret the division of mothering labor in the context of in-home care. The nannies, au pairs, and working mothers interviewed for this study make sense of their shared mother-work in the context of a dominant belief system that values intensive mothering. Consequently, in addition to negotiating the allocation of mothering tasks, they must also negotiate the meanings assigned to these tasks: specifically, they manufacture an image of shared mothering that contradicts their day-to-day practice.     

From depth psychology to depth sociology: Freud,Jung, and Lévi-Strauss

Conclusion In conclusion, I would like to consider some of the common themes in the writings of Freud, Jung, and Lévi-Strauss, and to offer some observations on their historical significance. Firstly, all three theorists were historical pessimists. While it may be true that their historical pessimism reflected their class position as bourgeois social theorists in the age of mass society, I think it is equally important to recognize that utilization of the theory of the unconscious itself creates a paradigm with strongly conservative and anti-utopian implications. Their dependence on the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer is significant. His work, early in the nineteenth century, lay the foundations both for the theory of the unconscious and for the historical pessimism that went with it. His metaphysical pessimism lies behind not only Freud's Libidolehre and Jung's psychic energy, but also behind the somber prophetic, cataclysmic imagery employed by Claude Lévi-Strauss from Tristes Tropiques to L'Homme Nu.The following passage, which draws to a finale the pessimism of Tristes Tropiques, a very Schopenhauerian book, is typical: The world began without the human race and it will end without it. The institutions, manners, and customs which I shall have spent my life cataloguing and trying to understand are an ephemeral efflorescence of a creative process in relation to which they are meaningless, unless it be that they allow humanity to play its destined role. That role does not, however assign to our race a position of independence. Nor, even if man himself is condemned, are his vain efforts directed towards the arresting of a universal process of decline. Far from it: his role is itself a machine, brought perhaps to a greater point of perfection than any other, whose activity hastens the disintegration of an initial order and precipitates a powerfully organized Matter towards a condition of inertia which grows even greater and will one day prove definitive. From the day when he first learned how to breath and how to keep himself alive through the discovery of fire and right up to the invention of the atomic and thermonuclear devices of the present day, man has never-save only when he reproduces himself-done other than cheerfully dismantle million upon million of structures and reduce their elements to a state in which they can no longer be reintegrated. No doubt he has built cities and brought the soil to fruition; but if we examine these activities closely we shall find that they also are inertia-producing machines, whose scale and speed of action are infinitely greater than the amount of organization implied in them. As for the creations of the human mind, they are meaningful only in relation to that mind, and will disappear into nothingness as soon as it ceases to exist. Taken as a whole, therefore, civilization can be described as a prodigiously complicated mechanism: tempting as it would be to regard it as our universe's best hope of survival, its true function is to produce what physicists call entropy: inertia, that is to say. Every scrap of conversation, every line set up in type, establishes a communication between two interlocutors, levelling what had previously existed on two different planes and had had for that reason, a greater degree of organization. Entropology, not anthropology, should be the word for the discipline that devotes itself to the study of this process of disintegration in its most highly evolved forms.And yet I exist. Not in any way, admittedly, as an individual: for what am I, in that respect, but a constantly renewed stake in the struggle between the society, formed by the several million nerve-cells which take shelter in the anthill of the brain, and my body, which serves that society as a robot?I have quoted this passage at length because it gives a vivid feeling of the profound metaphysical despair that lies at the roots of Lévi-Strauss' work. In his recent writings and interviews his pessimism has become even more pronounced; he seems convinced that the entire civilized world is moving rapidly and inexorably towards its ecological self-destruction.A second theme that runs through the writings of Freud, Jung, and Lévi-Strauss is the concern with polarities and their dialectical reconciliation or transcendence. Freud's theory was shot through with polarities-one thinks of the dualism of instincts, and the polarities of pleasure/unpleasure, active/passive, subject/object, etc. In the eternal struggle between these immortal adversaries, Life and Death, Super-Ego and Id, Mind and Body, Freud placed the Ego as an integrating and synthesizing principle. Freud's proclivity for dualistic ideas was shared by Jung. The interests of Jung and Lévi-Strauss in the dialectical reconciliation of the opposites was already discussed above. Once opposites are seen to be in relationship, as parts of a system, they cease to be opposites and become polarities.Schopenhauer provides a link to another common theme shared by these writers, the belief that everything is inter-related and mutually attuned. Schopenhauer believed that physical causality was only one of the rulers of the world; at a deeper level there was a kind of universal consciousness, compared to which individual consciousness was rather like a dream compared to wakefulness. For all of these thinkers individual consciousness was based on a larger system of intercommunications, but whereas this theme was not stressed by Freud, it became central in the works of Jung and Lévi-Strauss.As we have seen throughout this essay, Freud, Jung, and Lévi-Strauss were committed to the notion that there is a hidden order in the mental and cultural life of mankind, and they were convinced that this hidden order can be discovered by human reason. Behind the diversity of human cultures they believed that they saw an underlying unity, and they explained this unity in terms of what they believed to be a universality of unconscious processes of the human mind. Freud and Jung tried to explain their notions of the unconscious in terms of energy, drawing their models from physics. Freud's libido theory was more physical, Jung's more psychical, but they both remained tied to an energy model. I believe that one of Claude Lévi-Strauss' most important contributions to the social sciences was to liberate the notion of the unconscious from this energy theory. Instead, he spoke of it as being like a language, employing the ideas of system and structure and particularly the concept of the symbolic function drawn from structural linguistics and information theory.In Lévi-Strauss' Structural Anthropology System and Structure are treated as belonging to the realm of Information/Communication rather than as belonging to the realm of matter/energy. Structure is the ensemble of laws which govern the behavior of the system, and the components in the system are largely interchangeable. They do not necessarily derive from the same level of organization as the system which controls their various combinations, permutations and structural transformations. As we saw above, for Lévi-Strauss the unconscious is empty. It is simply a universe of rules similar to the phonological laws that govern languages. In this usage, the unconscious is a term designating a process of the human mind, a process which operates in all human cultures according to the same laws. In fact, the unconscious is nothing but the totality of these laws and relationships. Even the world of symbolism—though it exhibits an infinite variety of contents-is always bound and limited by these structural laws, because all human beings are bound by the same mental constraints. In the Kantian tradition, Lévi-Strauss sees his task as analyzing the operations of the human mind (l'esprit humain) within these contraints, and I think it is fair to say that his work is a kind of critique of sociological and anthropological reason in the same sense that Wilhelm Dilthey's was a critique of historical reason.In this paper I have attempted to show that there was a progressive development in the theory of the unconscious from Freud, through Jung, to Lévi-Strauss. Jung, working in German Switzerland, was more sympathetic to German idealism and historicism than was Freud. In his work Jung blended this German philosophical tradition with French sociological theory. This unique amalgam could have led him to elaborate a depth sociology correlative with his depth psychology, but his search for his own historical predecessors led him to investigate the psycho-historical significance of mysticism, spiritualism and alchemy instead. He was always convinced of the power, importance and significance of the collective representations that guide and shape our perception and experience. Jung wrote: We should never forget that in any psychological discussion, we are not saying anything about the psyche, but that the psyche is always speaking about itself. Modern civilized man's belief in the sole reality of the individual, along with his belief that he is born a tabula rasa, was simply an illusion, a modern myth. At our deepest core level, each of us is united to all mankind and to the history of the human race. Whether we call this deepest level society with Durkheim and George Herbert Mead, the will and its representations with Schopenhauer, the wider self through which saving experiences come with William James, the Unconscious with Freud, or the Psyche with Jung, or the structures of the human mind with Lévi-Strauss, depends on our primary assumptions, metaphysics and temperament. They are but different terms pointing towards the one common transpersonal background structure that makes possible both human experience and communication of that experience.Lévi-Strauss: Tristes Tropiques, p. 397. Compare L'Homme Nu, p. 620.Anthony Wilden: System and Structure. Essays in Communication and Exchange (London, 1972), pp. 242–243.Jung: The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious. Collected Works, Vol. 9, 1. (Princeton, 1969), p. 268. Theory and Society, 3 (1976) 303–338     

Social differentiation and organic solidarity: Thedivision of labor revisited

This paper argues for the classicity of Durkheim's first book: the innovative way viewing the compatibility of social order and individual autonomy; his sensitive perception of uneasiness with regards to the crisis of anomie; the lucid sociological account, especially the tripartite explanation of the division of labor in terms of its functioning, emergence, and consequences; and the conceptualization of the problem of order—i.e., the relationship of differentiation and integration. In all of these respects, Durkheim's book is a classic. Yet classical neither means original nor flawless. This is shown with respect to the relationship of division of labor and organic solidarity by looking at the historical debate on the division of labor, by elucidating mechanical and organic solidarity, and by carving out some of the problems inside organic solidarity.     

Gouldner's theoretical method and reflexive sociology

Conclusion There is a further, more substantial proof that Gouldner, somewhere in the deep metaphorically of his thought, recognized the digression of his sociolinguistic phase. It turns out that the Culture of Critical Discourse did reappear one more time after its repression in The Two Marxisms. In the book on Marxism and intellectuals, left unpublished at the time of his death, CCD reenters in a crucial chapter The Origins of Marxist Theory in the New Class. How and where it reappears is most telling.In The Future of Intellectuals one of the most objectivistic sections is Thesis Eleven, The Alienation of Intellectuals and Intelligentsia. Here, still in the sociolinguistic phase, Gouldner tried, it seems, to answer the troubling question of his New Class theory. How, if CCD is classicist and thus deeply flawed, is the New Class to be a source of revolutionary change? He offers two answers: one, CCD is radicalizing partly because... it experiences itself as distant from (and superior to) ordinary languages; and, two, because intellectuals are structurally blocked with respect to their ascendency to power, status, and the fulfillment of their interests. In other words, the New Class is a source of critique, hence, change because it is alienated, by its discourse, and its structural location. It is crucial to note, however, that Gouldner provides no comprehensive discussion of the nature and effects of that alienation, which is left as a presumably self-evident potential tied to a property (CCD) and a structural effect — two very objectivistic explanations. This theme is picked up in the chapter in the book on Marxism and intellectuals. Here Gouldner provides a full account of alienation. After a very brief discussion of CCD (now presented as dynamically interacting with the second alienating effect, career blockages), Gouldner says: Alienation, then, is a statement about the Subject's failure to have acquired the power and control over his world — including the means of production — inherent in the very notion of the Subject. It is a grievance about the constraint to which the Subject has been exposed. Alienation would not be problematic without the premise that man is and should be a Subject, that persons should control their activity.... The aim of such a Subject, then, is not simply self-control and self-development; he also seeks domination over the object world. The Subject reenters, now capitalized, as if to make up for lost time. Even though, in the same place, Gouldner warns of the humanistic imperialism of this view of the alienated Subject, it is quite clear that the same process is at work here as in The Two Marxisms. Though presenting a superficially balanced appraisal of the subject in its objective context, of critical, voluntaristic Marxism against deterministic objectivist Marxism, Gouldner's prose decidedly favors the revolutionary potential of the Subject. Control over human activity, even domination of the object world, is, virtually, an inherent right of the Subject — a conviction that, Gouldner regrets, loses salience with the emergence of Scientific Marxism. It might be too harsh to interpret the sociolinguistic phase as an objectivistic digression. If Gouldner's work is taken as a whole, it could, more fairly, be said that his Reflexive Sociology was, among other things, an attempt to overcome the limitations placed on social theory by its weddedness to the classical, subject-object dichotomy. Though, from one point of view, he remained within the terms of that debate, from another he employed his own dichotomizing method in an attempt to transcend it. If he was, himself, and for good reasons, on the side of critique, the subject, and voluntarism, this does not mean that he ignored the object world. Whether or not his solution prevails remains to be seen. But it is evident that a problem which today is debated widely among social theorists, was tackled by Gouldner a full generation before Foucault, Bourdieu, and Giddens took up this same question. Such was Gouldner's genius. He left a rich legacy precisely because he trusted his own individuating impulses, personal experiences, unique aptitudes and all of the fainter powers of apprehension, and thus could often see what needed to be seen, and say what needed to be said, long before the rest of us.     

Collective violence in China, 1880–1980

Conclusion This article began by noting that certain current theories of rural violence, predicated upon the demise of the peasantry, are of limited applicability to China. However, it is not my intention to argue that China scholars should therefore feel free to ignore general theories altogether. Quite the contrary. As the preceding discussion has tried to show, general theories are of considerable value in illuminating our understanding of specific cases of raphy cleaves to a rigid five modes of production approach, in recent years alternative arguments have gained some currency. The least innovative of these alternatives is a resurrected Asiatic Mode of Production theory, an approach whose main appeal lies in its claim to Marxist legitimacy. Though Marx and Engels should be credited for the recognition that hypotheses developed to account for West European history may be ill-suited to explain the social history of India or China, their resort to an Asiatic Mode has, quite properly, drawn criticism. For one thing, Asian societies differed markedly among themselves. For another, the allegedly despotic political systems of Asian countries did not in fact prevent substantial socioeconomic change over time.Despite these familiar criticisms, however, in some respects the theory is of interest to the student of China. As Marx described it, the foundation of Oriental despotism was actually collective property, in most cases created through a combination of manufacture and agriculture within the small community which thus becomes entirely self-sustaining... The key to a powerful state, in other words, was the strength and isolation of local corporate communities. The theory is interesting for the attention it focuses upon two elements: the state and local collectivities.Recently in China, a number of theorists - while rejecting many of the assumptions of the Asiatic Mode - have nevertheless retained its concern with state and local society. Some theorists, characterizing the Chinese polity as an ultrastable system (chaowending xitong), have stressed bureaucratic continuity. They emphasize the homeostatic properties of the imperial political system: flexibility provided through peasant rebellions, migration, partible inheritance, and the like. Such safety-valves, these theorists suggest, allowed periodic changes in the ruling elite, but no fundamental alteration of the strong state structure itself.Other theorists, emphasizing China's small-peasant economy (xiaonong jingji), look to the peculiarities of traditional Chinese agriculture for the key to her historical experience. Chen Ping, for example, identifies the Chinese concentration on grain production, in contrast to Europe or the United States where grain production has been balanced by animal husbandry and forestry, as a critical factor. By his account, the mixture of agricultural pursuits in the West encouraged a division of labor, commercialization, and scientific progress. The Chinese system, by contrast, stunted such developments and served instead as a secure foundation for landlord-bureaucratic domination. According to Chen Ping, it was small-peasant agriculture that constituted an ultrastable economic structure (chaowending de jingji jiegou). Although particular dynasties came and went in periodic peasant rebellions, the limiting economic system continued to reproduce despotism. Chen Ping's lessons for contemporary China are basically economic: utilize the international market, diversify beyond grain production to develop an ecologically balanced agriculture, encourage a type of industrialization that complements agricultural needs.Though the critique presented by the small-peasant economy theorists remains largely in the realm of economics, another group offers a more directly political challenge. These are the writers who characterize contemporary China as operating under a system of agricultural socialism (nongye shehuizhuyi). According to their analysis, the persistence of small-scale production has given rise to a pernicious bureaucratism that permeates all facets of socialist China. Cadres - chosen for their peasant class origins rather than for any expertise - are said to operate by principles opposed to economic progress. Administrative fiat, maintained by political force, overshadows efficiency as the criterion of operational feasibility. While arguing that the root of the problem lies in small-scale peasant production, the agricultural socialism critics insist that bureaucratism has become a major barrier to further development.Limited as these various formulations are, their attention to state and local peasant society resonates with a central theme of this essay. Much more research is needed to delineate the precise structure of state and local collectivities, interactions between them, and variations over time and from one geographical setting to another. But eventually such work promises to take us nearer to the reality of the Chinese case than we can hope to approach through the wholesale transfer of theories devised to explain quite different historical developments. The peasant studies school, whose central thesis hinges - ironically enough - on the demise of the peasantry, offers but partial explanations for a society whose peasants refuse to die.

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Yes-no voting

Yes-No (Y-N) voting is a voting method for choosing a governing coalition in a parliament after the seating of its members. Each member can designate a party to be Y (it must be included in the governing coalition), N (it must be excluded from the governing coalition), or neither (it may be either in or out of the governing coalition). The majority coalition acceptable to the most voters, because it includes all parties that these voters designate Y and no parties that they designate N, is given the first opportunity to form a government. Possible combinations of majority coalitions that a member might vote for are derived, including ones based on consistent and interval voting strategies. Examples illustrate a number of different phenomena, such as when a rational voter might not be loyal to his or her party by designating it Y.     

Structure and process in interpersonal “distancing”

The present paper focuses on awho-why-where-when-how-what-whom structural model of interpersonal distancing. The term distancing denotes either approach or avoidance movement along an intimacy-immediacy dimension. This dimension itself is defined as an integration across proxemic, kinesic, paralinguistic, and linguistic interpersonal modalities. Parallels are drawn between the concepts of intimacy disequilibrium and cognitive dissonance; the latter deals with attitude-behavior discrepancies and the former with attraction-approach discrepancies. A compensatory model is expanded acrosswho's partners as well as across his sensory modalities, and the concept of intimacy overload is offered as a clarifying tool for the social refractoriness and information overload explanations appearing in various aspects of the literature.Paper presented at the Symposium on Some New Approaches for Studying and Measuring Interpersonal Communication, 82d Annual Meeting of the American Psychological Association, New Orleans, September 1974.The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance of Department 1229, Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, New Jersey, in the writing of this paper. Much of the work was supported by NSF Grant 2852A at Wayne State University.     

“Brain Says You're a Girl, But I Think You're a Sissy Boy”: Cultural Origins of Transphobia

The author argues that transphobia—fear and hatred of transgender persons—is a variant of homophobia understood as hatred of the queer, where queer means any formation of sexuality and/or gender that deviates from the norm of reproductive heterosexuality. The male-to-female transgender incites transphobia through her implicit challenge to the binary division of gender upon which male cultural and political hegemony depends, and through her capacity to initiate an uncanny rememoration, in the heterosexual or homosexual male, of his own primal (pre- and postnatal) participation in the female. Medical/sexological discourse and films such as To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar have struggled to curtail the freedom of self-actualization, and to discipline the meaning, of the m-t-f transgender, especially through the institution of regimes of binarism (male/female, heterosexual/homosexual, healthy/perverse, appropriate/inappropriate). The film Paris Is Burning documents the subversion of binaries of gender and sexuality by trans persons and other queers.     

First Contact: Queer Theory, Sexual Identity, and “Mainstream” Film

This paper begins by raising questions about the role of queer theory in media critique, centering on a discussion of four recent mainstream mass-circulation films with significant lesbian and/or gay content. It is asserted that these films operate within accepted discourses on sexuality that require both the notions of public self-disclosure and of the truth of the hetero/homo binary. The methods used by media productions to disseminate that discourse from a lesbian/gay point of view are discussed in terms of the implications of such mass-circulation films being for many persons a first contact point with that discourse.     

Privacy and privilege: Patients', professionals', and the public's rights

Conflict between the individual's right to privacy and the public's right to know is increasing as insurance companies and other third parties are demanding more information about patients and clients and data banks are storing it for retrieval and later use. Social workers are ethically bound to protect the privacy of their relationships with patients and clients and the confidentiality of their communications. But there are situations in which the obligation to society is deemed greater than the individual's right to privacy, and even in states in which their patients' and clients' communications are granted privilege by law, the social worker can be required by law to divulge confidential information or risk being held in contempt of court. This paper will discuss the individual's right to privacy, privilege and its exceptions, and present examples of court decisions related to these issues.     

Physiographic gestures as decoding facilitators: Three experiments exploring a neglected facet of communication

There is a dearth of studies exploring the role of gestures in the communication of experience, i.e., events external to the speaker; whereas much research has been concerned with gestures as expressions of attitudes and emotion. This state of affairs has tended to reinforce the premature assumption that gestures serve functions quite different from those of speech. Three experiments reported here were designed to investigate this neglected role examining specifically, physiographic gestures (pgs). A variety of tasks were devised; information pertaining to each being recorded on videotape and presented under varying modal conditions. It was found that pgs do contribute to the communication of events external to the speaker. Possible mechanisms are discussed.This is a more extensive version of a paper entitled A Clarificatory Paper on the Role of Gestures in Communication, presented at the British Psychological Society London Conference, 1977, Imperial College.     

Beyond the nature/society divide: Learning to think about a mountain

Sociological efforts to understand environment-society relationships fall primarily into four conceptual categories. The first three, involving analytical separation, analytical primacy, and balanced dualism, all draw distinctions between biophysical and social aspects of human experience, with subsequent analyses being based on thesea priori distinctions. The fourth or constructivist approach questions this naturalized dichotomy, calling attention instead to mutual contingency or conjoint constitution: What we take to be physical facts are likely to be strongly shaped by social construction processes, and at the same time, what we take to be strictly social will often have been shaped in part by taken-for-granted realities of the physical world. Technology offers important opportunities for tracing these interconnections, being an embodiment of both the physical and the social. The point is illustrated with a long-term historical analysis of a specific physiographic feature—a mountain—that has undergone little overtphysical change over the centuries, but has undergone repeated changes in its social meanings and uses. Few of the changes would have been possible in the absence of the mountain's physiographic characteristics; similarly, few would have occurred in the absence of changing sociocultural definitions and possibilities. The challenge for sociology is not just to recognize the importance of both the physical and the social factors, and certainly not to argue over the relative importance of the two, but to recognize the extent to which what we take to be physical and social factors can be conjointly constituted.The paper's subtitle is intended as a tribute to Aldo Leopold and to one of his most famous essays (1949).     

Durkheim'sdivision of labor in society

The source of social life, according to Durkheim, is the similitude of consciousnesses and the division of labor. The former is best evident among primitive societies where a mechanical solidarity, evidenced by repressive law, prevails; the latter in advanced societies where populations evidence greater dynamic density, and juridical rules define the nature and relations of functions. In combating individualism and basing the existence of societies on a consensus of parts, Durkheim refutes his positivistic emphasis which denies the relevance of ends to a scientific study of society. In his discussion of social ends is a latent anti-mechanistic trend. The theory of unilinear development is established on deficient ethnographic data. It assumes the absence of division of labor among primitive societies and of any mechanical solidarity among modern societies. Repressive and restitutive law Durkheim seeks to use as indexes of mechanical and organic solidarity, but he does not establish with any precision the perfect associations which he assumes obtain between his types of solidarity and of law.Reproduced from theAmerican Journal of Sociology, Vol. 40 (1934), pp. 319–328. (© 1934 by the University of Chicago. All rights reserved.)     

“Racing for Innocence”: Whiteness,Corporate Culture,and the Backlash Against Affirmative Action

This paper argues that racing for innocence is a discursive practice which functions simultaneously to disavow accountability for racist practices at the same time that everyday racism is practiced. Drawing from both fieldwork and interviews in a corporate legal department over two different time periods (in 1988–89 and in 1999), I explore the meaning and consequence of this race in my interviews with white and African-American lawyers. Further, I follow the trajectory of one African-American lawyer, Randall Kingsley, and tell his story along with the stories constructed by the white men who still work there about Randall's departure from the company. I do so to make an argument about why these white men, by virtue of their social location, cannot see how they contributed to the unfriendly climate that forced Randall out of the department. Further, I argue it is through such everyday practices that whiteness is reproduced as a structural relationship of inequality in workplaces.     

Vicissitudes of the sacred

Conclusions Since the late 1960s and early 1970s, American sociologists have been made increasingly aware, mostly by Marxist and phenomenological critics, of the latent moral or practical implications of what often purports to be objectively impersonal scientific theories. Whereas Goffman's imaginative writing style and intensely personal observational technique never allowed him to be easily placed in the camp of the positivist objectivists, the profound moral issues and assumptions of his work, as Friedson's statement implied, never fully appeared in a clear light either, probably because of Goffman's strategic decision to accommodate his moral insights somewhat to the positivist intellectual milieu of the 1950s. The present analysis reveals, however, that, even more than allowing tacit moral assumptions to operate in the back-ground of his work, Goffman focussed centrally on an investigation of the various levels of moral understanding, a project for which he used the Book of Job as his signpost. Goffman's inquiry, it should be emphasized, was not conducted through an external observation of other people's consciousness but rather by means of an intensely personal reflection upon the governing frames of his own consciousness as it looked out upon the everyday social world. What we have chronicled in this essay is the dramatic evolution of Goffman's own moral consciousness, not the moral understandings of the subjects of his studies, the latter, of course, changing as Goffman's own moral understandings evolved. exact nature and purpose of his moral investigation. As we have seen, an ongoing reference for Goffman's moral inquiry was not a rationalist philosophical treatise, but rather one of the most poetic and profound narratives of the Bible, a work in which the radical mystery and transcendence of the Sacred, beyond all structures of nature, society, and the human ego, are asserted. The symbolic and narrative features of the Job text accord well with its emphasis on the mystery of Being, whose fundamental depth and power could not easily be compressed within the outlines of abstract rationalist propositions. Goffman, likewise, combines a final emphasis on the mystery of Being, beyond all finite frames and fabrications, with a pervasively symbolic and narrative style in his writing. In directing our attention toward the ultimate mystery of Being, of which finite frames provide only a tentative revelation, Goffman mounts an additional critique of Durkheim, not only for naively assuming that sacred representations must always reflect the social rather than the individual inclinations of human nature, but also for assuming that the social dimension of homo duplex alone serves as the ultimate and final reference for sacred forms. Much like contemporary existentialists who emphasize human finitude and the mystery of Being, Goffman uses Job's increasingly open psyche as his basis for understanding that beyond nature, beyond society, and beyond the individual lies a mystery of Being that continually surpasses, indeed itself engenders the ever-changing outlines of these other finite structures of existence. In the end, Goffman is perhaps more mythmaker than moralist, a religious poet who, for an age in which the traditional symbols of Being have been displaced by new cognitive forms, particularly those of science, magically transformed contemporary scientific language into archetypal symbols of the Sacred. Goffman's task was extremely difficult, one that would have strained the intellectual ingenuity and linguistic resources of a less talented man, namely the task of conveying to large numbers of relatively unprepared, deeply preoccupied and increasingly self-absorbed moderns a message about a completely unfashionable, economically useless and essentially ego-threatening mystery. Let us hope the large silence that now exists in his absence will not be filled by words less meaningful than his own.     

“Just a hunch”: Accuracy and awareness in person perception

Person perception tasks involving nonverbal communication have a mystified reputation. It is frequently argued that nonverbal cues are accurately, but only unconsciously, perceived. This may explain the frequent response of judges who, when asked to decode a sample of nonverbal behavior, reply that it was just a hunch—i.e., show little or no awareness of how they arrived at a judgment, even a correct one. Two alternative models, the Unconsciousness hypothesis and the Inarticulation hypothesis are posited to describe the possible relationship between accuracy and awareness. Two studies are reported on the relationship between accuracy and awareness, both using the Interpersonal Perception Task (IPT). In the first study, the IPT was given to a sample of 476 undergraduates. Accuracy was measured by how many of the 30 IPT questions these judges answered correctly. Global awareness was indexed by having each judge guess how many of the 30 scenes they had answered correctly. In this coarse analysis, the accuracy-awareness relationship was positive but weak. A second experiment was conducted to produce more fine-grained tests of the accuracy-awareness relationship. Different versions of the IPT were presented to 134 undergraduates. Judges given each version of the IPT were asked to indicate their degree of confidence in each one of their answers. This second experiment found a positive, substantial relationship between accuracy and awareness, and this relationship was particularly strong when analyzed across experimental conditions as a whole. These findings support the Inarticulation hypothesis, and cast doubt on the Unconsciousness hypothesis. Implications for an emerging understanding of how nonverbal communication is processed are discussed.We wish to thank Robin Akert and Bob Rosenthal for helpful advice and inspiration.