Unionization and faculty salaries: New evidence from the 1990s

The literature on how unionization affects faculty salaries and compensation is inconclusive. I use the 1993 National Survey of Postsecondary Faculty to investigate how collective bargaining affects faculty salaries. Union representation significantly alters the returns to individual and institutional characteristics, and unionized faculty receive a premium of between 7 and 14 percent, an earnings differential that is substantially larger than those found in most earlier studies.     

Latinos and the Skin Color Paradox

For African Americans and Latinos, skin color is a significant predictor of many social and economic stratification variables including income, education, housing, occupational status, spousal status, poverty rates, criminal justice sentencing, and rates of depression. Given these patterns, some scholars have surprisingly found that skin color is not a significant predictor of many political attitudes for African Americans, and called this phenomenon the “skin color paradox.” This article investigates the role of skin color, race, and national origin in predicting political marginality and political commonality among Latinos. The models suggest that skin color is not a significant predictor of political attitudes, consistent with the skin color paradox theory but that national origin does predict some political attitudes.     

Reports of Conferences,Institutes, and Seminars

A busy time for librarians was late May through early July 2008 with the Ohio Valley Group of Technical Services Librarians meeting May 14–16, the North American Serials Interest Group meeting June 5–8, and an American Library Association preconference Electronic Serials 101: What I Wished I’d Known Before I Got in Over My Head, June 27.     

Louis Sullivan, architectural modernism, and the creation of democratic space

This article examines the architectural thought of Louis Sullivan, commonly regarded as the prophet of architectural modernism and the inspiration for the stark Chicago-style skyscraper. Sullivan regarded sociology to he the most urgent of the disciplines as America sought to realize its democratic promise. Animated by certain understandings of self and community that would later define the Chicago School of Sociology, Sullivan saw himself as a kind of social engineer whose architecture would generate democratic space and encourage authentic interaction. Chicago was his laboratory where he fervently called for the escape from the fetters of tradition in order to give form to a democratic present. While the movement he helped inspire reshaped the landscapes where humans labored and lived, few today would confuse the architectural space of a skyscraper, or architectural modernism in general, with the cultivation of authenticity; even fewer would confuse modernism and the sky-scraper with the fulfillment of democracy. Sullivan’s unbridled hopes lor the future have been quelled by postmodern criticisms of the spatial dynamics he espoused. It is argued that this dramatic sea change was a function of a fundamental Haw in Sullivan’s social theory. Following Leo Strauss, it is argued that implicit in Sullivan’s famous dictum“form follows function” was the collapse of the distinction between the real and the ideal. This undermined Sullivan’s voice while framing his sense ol democracy in strictly processional terms. In the end, Sullivan sought an architecture according to which control over circumstance served no higher purpose save control, an architecture whose escape from the past concealed from view the kind of direction that could lend meaning to the control Sullivan was desperate to secure. It is suggested that sociologists are not unlike Sullivan, and that their calls for autonomy and empowerment speak to process and movement rather than ends or destinations. A version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, August 1998, San Francisco, CA. He is currently working on a critique of value-driven and value-neutral sociologies from the perspective of Leo Strauss. I am indebted to Harold Bershady, Natalie Slavens Abbott, Mark Hutter, Hui Huang, and Tony Sommo for their critical comments and suggestions.     

Fear

Qualitative Sociology -     

Bounds and approximations for pairwise comparisons of independent multinormal means

Properties and relationships of some commonly used probability bounds, along with other recently developed bounds and approximations, are evaluated for their performance with pairwise comparisons. The comparisons are of independent sample means obtained from normal random variables with a common variance. Computational methods are presented and numerical results are used to further evaluate the performance of the bounds.     

Estimation of river and stream temperature trends under haphazard sampling

Long-term temporal trends in water temperature in rivers and streams are typically estimated under the assumption of evenly-spaced space-time measurements. However, sampling times and dates associated with historical water temperature datasets and some sampling designs may be haphazard. As a result, trends in temperature may be confounded with trends in time or space of sampling which, in turn, may yield biased trend estimators and thus unreliable conclusions. We address this concern using multilevel (hierarchical) linear models, where time effects are allowed to vary randomly by day and date effects by year. We evaluate the proposed approach by Monte Carlo simulations with imbalance, sparse data and confounding by trend in time and date of sampling. Simulation results indicate unbiased trend estimators while results from a case study of temperature data from the Illinois River, USA conform to river thermal assumptions. We also propose a new nonparametric bootstrap inference on multilevel models that allows for a relatively flexible and distribution-free quantification of uncertainties. The proposed multilevel modeling approach may be elaborated to accommodate nonlinearities within days and years when sampling times or dates typically span temperature extremes.