The book’s scope is sweeping: it details a half century of the political landscape of social change and also attends to the micro–organizational and local–levels. In other words, the authors successfully position themselves both on the balcony and the dance floor: The balcony gives them the wide-ranging view, and the dance floor lets them show off the intricate footwork at the local and organizational levels.
Given the ambitious intent and complex analyses, it is inevitable that there are questions about the narrative or the interpretations of the link between context and analyses. No one book can do everything, and indeed, books that try to cover too much often lose impact in a forest for the trees problem. Although there are clearly broad themes that are evident throughout this work, it is easy to lose the overall thread because the argument spans types of inequality across time periods, context, and levels of analysis.
I’d like to focus on two issues that are not addressed in-depth in this otherwise wonderful book. First, the book overlooks the importance of the substantive legal doctrine that emerged between 1966 and the 1980s. Title VII says that employers may not “discriminate against any individual with respect to . . . employment, because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.” But what exactly does it mean to “discriminate . . . because of”? Over time, the courts converged on the view that the employer must have been consciously motivated by the relevant characteristic at the time of making the adverse employment decision. Under this definition, only a very narrow range of behavior gives rise to legal liability.
In making sense of the desegregation trajectories that have developed since passage of the Civil Rights Act, the book makes highly creative use of social closure theory, applied alongside the shifting American political landscape. The book finds that racial and gender segregation has remained especially pronounced in higher paying industries and occupations (much as closure theory would predict). But the book also finds that organizations that rely on formal professional credentials exhibit a much more level playing field than do firms that rely on less formal markers of skill and expertise. This finding calls for important modifications in social closure theory, since it suggests that educational credentials can enable (and not merely block) access to job rewards among historically excluded groups. This is a vital and important finding. But in presenting these results, the book does not always show us why this pattern is the case. Did the class or racial advantages that white women enjoy give them easier access to credentialing institutions? Was the effect of meritocracy also apparent in industries that rely heavily personnel in STEM fields? Or are the leveling effects of educational credentials limited to professional contexts such as law, accounting, social work and teaching? Arguably, heavily feminized professions account for much of this meritocracy effect. My point is that the nature and sources of the meritocracy trend need more discussion than the authors provide.
One of the fundamental social contracts that under girds American society is that between individuals and the larger society, that we are a land of opportunity, that what one does—rather than who one is—predicts how one will fare in the ongoing effort to achieve social status, security and economic and social well-being.
On occasion, I find myself engaged in a conversation with a complete stranger—in an airport, on the bus, or in a bar. More often than not this stranger is demographically similar to me, white, college educated, and male. These discussions generally start off with greetings, introductions, and a conversation about what each party does for a living. Once the stranger learns that I am a sociologist who studies labor markets, work, and organizations, I can be fairly certain that the topic of race, employment, and Affirmative Action will soon ensue.
The OOW team is delighted to welcome a new regular contributor, Kevin Stainback, Associate Professor of Sociology at Purdue University.
Kevin has published leading research on inequality, work, and organizations. His recent book Documenting Desegregation (2012 Russell Sage), with Don Tomaskovic-Devey, explores changes in racial and gender segregation in Private sector U. S. workplaces since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
In his first post, soon to be up, Kevin exposes the “myth of reverse discrimination” and discusses how the narratives underlying this belief function to maintain individual identities in ways that reinforce racial hierarchy.
This month I completed what the Australians call a ‘FIFO’ – a fly in, fly out visit to London. I was there to participate in a review of the ESRC-funded research centre SKOPE, based at Oxford University. The visit coincided with the funeral in London of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Reading through the UK press obituaries, I think that a fair summary of Thatcher political life was that while she loved Britain, she loathed the British. It’s interesting that if, as many of the right-wing commentators claimed, she changed Britain for the better, her offspring now live in the US and South Africa and also flew in for the occasion.
John F. Padgett and Walter W. Powell. 2012. The Emergence of Organizations and Markets. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Innovation in the sense of product design is a popular research topic today, because there is a lot of money in that. Innovation, however, in the deeper sense of new actors—new types of people, new organizational forms—is not even much on the research radar screen of contemporary social scientists, even though “speciation” (to use the biologists’ term for this) lies at the heart of historical change over the longue durée, both in biological evolution and in human history. Social science—meaning mostly economics, political science and sociology—is very good at understanding selection, both at the micro level of individual choice and at the macro level of institutional regulation and lock-in. But novelty, especially of actors but also of alternatives, has first to enter from off the stage of our collective imaginary for our existing theories to be able to go to work. Our analytical shears for trimming are sharp, but the life forces that push up novelty to be trimmed tend to escape our attention, much less our understanding. If this book accomplishes anything, we at least hope to put the research topic of speciation—the emergence of new organizational forms and people—on our collective agenda.
Amy J. Binder and Kate Wood.
2013.
Becoming Right: How Campuses Shape Young Conservatives.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
For more than half a century, critics located in right-leaning think tanks, foundations, and the media have championed the cause of conservative undergraduates who, they say, suffer on college campuses. In books with such titles as Freefall of the American University and The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, conservative critics charge that American higher education has become the playpen of radical faculty who seek to spread their anti-religious, big government, liberal ideas to their young undergraduate charges. In this portrait of the politicized university, middle-of-the road students complacently consume their professors’ calculated misinformation, liberal students smugly revel in feeling that they are on the righteous side of the political divide, and conservative students must decide whether to endure their professors’ tirades quietly or give voice to their outrage, running the risk of sacrificing their grades. Administrators, according to the critics, do little to stop the madness.
To mitigate the effects of what they perceive to be an overwhelmingly liberal environment, conservative organizations such as the Young America’s Foundation and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute have sprung up to help right-leaning students. Yet over the period of time that these organizations have flourished, scholars have taken little systematic notice. In Becoming Right: How Campuses Shape Young Conservatives, we fill this gap. Our book—a comparative case study of “Eastern Elite Univerity” and “Western Public University”—covers several themes, including the demographic background characteristics of today’s conservative college students, the organizations that have worked for the past 50 years to mobilize and fund conservative students’ activities, an account of how young women on different campuses vary in their “conservative femininity,” and an analysis of students’ own thoughts about liberal bias.
Work in Progress 