Social Stratication: Class, Family, and Community
This is a review of the literature seminar designed to cover some of the major topics in the stratication literature. It is organized topically, much like the literature itself. The eld is so vast that it has been been segmented into mostly self-contained issues with surprisingly little cross-fertilization between issues. We will acknowledge this segmentation while still trying to draw some overarching lessons about how to think about stratication issues. Each week we will take up a different topic, looking at a handful of important contributions -- mostly journal articles. The topics selected are not meant to be comprehensive but are chosen in large part to ll in the holes of the graduate strat curriculum. For instance, none of the topics deal centrally with race and gender since the department offers several excellent courses focusing on those dimensions of stratication (although we cannot, of course, ignore how each of these issues below intersect with race and gender!). Also, we do not focus much on income inequality and how that varies over time and across space -- although that is one of the central stratication issues of our time. Partly as a result, many of the topics we do cover have a more micro than macro focus. They tend to ask how individuals are allocated to positions with the class structure rather than how that structure itself changes. This micro focus reects the orientation of much of the stratication literature, but, as we will see, this has been one of its principal weaknesses. Our answer to this micro-focus of the literature will be to emphasize the contextual factors that often determine how individual stratication processes operate. Individuals are nested within families, communities, and different poles in the global economy, and those contexts alter how the individual relationships play out. For example, William J. Wilsons great contribution to poverty analyses has been that growing up in a poor family has very different consequences if that family lives in a poor neighborhood than in a mixed or middle-class neighborhood. And Dalton Conley has argued that family effects on sibling outcomes are very different in middle-class and working-class families. What we will be especially interested in is not merely how family and community contexts have direct effects on individual outcomes, but how they condition other factors that affect those outcomes. Topics Date: January 27 February 3 February 10 February 17 February 24 March 3 March 10 March 17 Topic: Introduction Outliers Homelessness Poverty Welfare Politics Health and Happiness Spring Break
Stratication: Social Class, Family, and Community: Topics
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March 24 March 31 April 7 April 14 April 21 April 28 May 5
Status orders and Cultural Capital Elites Mobility, the classics Family structure Family and class cultures Schools and human capital Social capital
Class discussion For each topic, we will spend a good part of the class period discussing the assigned reading. I will also introduce some additional material, but you should be concerned primarily with being ready to discuss each reading when you enter. Through a random process, students will be called on to summarize the main points of each reading. Learning how to extract the important sociological essentials of journal articles and other scholarly publications will be an important part of the skills you should be developing this semester. The presentation of your summary should take about sixty seconds. Obviously, that doesnt give you time to go into details, elaborate on the theory, or evaluate evidence. the What were aiming for is just the facts. Well evaluate each piece together, but rst we have to agree what the article is saying. As a general guide, a summary should identify the following: What is the most important causal relationship being tested? What data are used? What is the level of empirical support?
1. 2. 3. Papers
As part of developing your skills in reviewing journal literature, each student will write a review of the literature paper. The paper will focus on a specic causal relationship (e.g., the effect of marriage on earnings -- or better: gender differences in the effect of marriage on earnings). Only one student per topic, so you will need to "claim" topics beginning at our second meeting. Your task will be to review everything we know about that relationship. The paper should not just be an annotated bibliography. A paper that sequentially reviews each article will be automatically suspect. Instead, your paper should have a thesis: what is the main conclusion you draw about the existence of that causal relationship? Usually you will want to cover at least three other issues: 1. 2. Are there intervening variables that help explain how that relationship occurs? Are there prior causal variables that might make the relationship spurious?
Stratication: Social Class, Family, and Community: Papers
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Are there any conditions (i.e., interaction effects) that determine whether the relationship exists or how strong it is?
Organize your review around these issues, not around who did the research. Final exam There will be a nal exam given during the ofcial exam week. The exam will be ve short essays chosen randomly from a longer list of questions distributed prior to exam week. Grades Review papers: Final exam: Class discussion: 40% 40% 20%
Books to purchase This is primarily an article-oriented review of the literature (or sometimes, chapters from books). But there are at least two books you will need whose arguments cant be easily summarized by excerpts or articles. Malcom Gladwells popular best seller, Outliers is a convenient way to ease into the issues we will be discussing this semester. We will...