Class/status Flashcards
Reskin 2003 – Mechanisms
How do inequalities occur? On four possible levels: intrapsychic, societal, organizational, and interpersonal.
Binder and Abel (2019) – Symbolically Maintained Inequality: How elites draw boundaries
Interview 59 students from Harvard and Stanford on why their schools are the best. Other schools are too intellectual, technical, pre-professional, social, or elite. These views support why these students believe they deserve the most prestigious positions in society upon graduation. Authors propose computational tools to better capture boundary-making processes.
Domina, Penner, and Penner 2017 – Categorical Inequality: Schools as sorting mechanisms
Schools have powerful sorting mechanisms within their everyday processes: age, intellectual ability, race, gender, employment avenues, etc and solidify these boundaries in the larger society. Schools create, emulate, and reinforce boundaries. This occurs through opportunity hoarding, incentives and student motivation, signaling and identity, and emulation of outside practices.
Espeland and Sauder 2007 – Rankings and Reactivity: How Public Measures Recreate the social world
Numerous interviews with various stakeholders in law schools. They show that rankings can become self-fulfilling prophecies where orgs work to improve rankings rather than work to improve performance that initially underlined the rankings. Reactivity to rankings include: redistribution of resources (pamphlets), gaming the system (allowing sabbatical on certain semesters), and the redefinition of work (focusing on employment data). Rankings can become the goal and need to continually be updated to be a “valid” representation of reality.
Frye (2012) – Bright Futures in Malawi’s New Dawn: Educational Aspirations as Assertions of Identity
Interviews with young girls and archive data of pamphlets/info books while combining culture as a toolkit, pragmatist, and cognitive theory. The cultural schema people present will oftentimes be factually unlikely or incompatible with other plans, but people remain attached to them because they signal virtue and morality. In this setting, it has four features: ambitious career goals, sustained effort, unflagging optimism, and resistance to temptation. Her main point in the article is to show how rational choice model (econometricians) is inherently flawed because even in the face of overwhelming evidence against one’s plan, people will stick to these plans because they signal moral superiority and offer other idealistic outcomes.
Gerber and Cheung (2008): Horizontal Strat in Post-secondary
No causal relationship yet found between elite unis and strat. Four possible causes of why elite grads are paid better: human capital, signal effect, social capital, and the selection effect.
Hurst 2010 – Burden of Academic Success
Interviews with college students of working class origins. They find three ideal types: renegades, loyalist, and double agents. Double agents develop a dual habitus to traverse both worlds. Renegades reject their class backgrounds - when they fail, they fall hard. Loyalists remain true to class background and wish education weren’t tied to inequality.
Lamont, Beljean, and Clair 2014 – Cultural processes and causal pathways to inequality
The authors differentiate between material, symbolic, and place-based inequalities. They propose that cultural processes intermediate may of these inequalities by shaping the tool-kits and schemas we have to interact with the social world. This plays out through identification (socialization, genderization, and stigmatization) and rationalization (standardization and evaluation). Cultural processes connect the micro and macro.
Lee and Kramer 2013 – Habitus and Social Mobility as Selective Colleges
Do upwardly mobile students at elite universities experience a ‘cleft habitus’? Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Freshmen and 28 interviews with students at Linden College, authors find class background predicts a schism between collegiate and home habitus, but not race. Boys have more loss than girls in the survey. Interviews show girls: have trouble communicating with family, censor themselves, limit home visits, and judge families.
Lehmann 2014 – Habitus Transformation and Hidden Injuries
Interviews 22 high-achieving working-class students across three waves to detail how habitus adapts throughout collegiate careers. Students are skeptical of their origins and demean people from home. Students look forward to their transformations, seeing them as a part of social mobility. This reduces relationship quality with family and friends.
Ridgeway and Nakagawa 2017 – Deference the Price of Being Seen as Reasonable?
Authors conduct experiments using MTurk and YouGive on whether individuals of lower status are incentivized to defer in status expectation situations (clear goal, achievement improves outcome). They conducted four experiments, in the first, they test whether low-status group members defer. In the second, they test whether deferment of a low-status group member improves respectability. In the third, they test whether this increased respect improves group cohesion. In the fourth, they test these results on a nationally representative sample. Each experiment confirms their hypothesis: low-status individuals defer to improve group relations and this deferment improves their respectability and leverages them to stay in the group.
Saguy 2020 – Come out come out whoever you are
The author interviews five groups (undocumented, polygamous families, body positivity, MeToo, and LGBTQ) to better understand how groups utilize the “coming out” rhetoric in similar ways. It developed from the gay rights movement and now is seen as a social movement strategy to resist mainstream narratives and support people of that identitiy.
Silva 2019 – We’re Still Here: Pain and Politics in the Heart of America
The author conducts interviews and ethnography with a small town in Pennsylvania to better understand how adults cope with limited economic opportunities (although they started by studying political extremism). This group was often politically detached and instead focus on survival. People rely on narratives that improve survival opportunities: detachment and therapeutic ideals (overcoming previous troubles). These individuals do not connect the social structure to their personal experiences.
Stephens, Markus, and Phillips 2014 – Social Class Culture Cycles: How 3 Gateway Contexts Shape Selves and Fuel Inequality
Three institutions are gateways into class identitiies: home, school, and the workplace. They socialize differently by class (expressive interdependence and hard interdependence). Middle-class institutions expect students to reflect the norms of expressive interdependence: focus on individual self, self-expression, influencing situations, distinct and separate, assumption of equality. People with hard interdependence (socially responsive, tough, strong, resilient, adjusting to situations, similar and connected, awareness of social hierarchy) have trouble navigate MC institutions.
Tomaskovic-Devey and Avent-Holt 2019 – Relational Inequalities: An Orgaizational Approach
Resources are generated and pool in organizations. Actors with legitimated claims gain access to those resources. Some people and potential trading partners are denied access to organizational resources through processes of social closure. Others appropriate organizational resources based on their ability to exploit weaker actors in interactional and exchange relationships. To the extent that they have cultural, status, and material advantages in resource-distributing relationships, actors are more or less powerful in these claims-making processes. These power-generating resources tend to be associated with categorical distinctions such as class, occupation, gender, education, citizenship, race, and the like. Which categorical distinctions are the basis for claims-making are institutionally and organizationally variable. Institutions, markets, and organizational fields influence, but do not determine, action and opportunities. Rather, actors use cultural and other tools to invent local strategies of action within field level constraints.` Relational Inequality Theory
