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Authors:Chris Carlson Abstract: American Sociological Review, Ahead of Print. The literature on development has long highlighted the role of international trade and developmental states as key factors in explaining divergent processes of economic development. A country’s position in the world economy and its state’s capacity to promote industrialization are seen as fundamental to understanding its development path. Yet, these approaches are often inadequate for explaining the actual contours of industrial and economic growth across the Global South. In this study, an in-depth case study of Brazil reveals the limits of the mainstream approaches and illustrates the centrality of the underlying agrarian economy for understanding the country’s development path. Archival and quantitative data show that both the timing and location of industrialization in Brazil are better explained by the agrarian dynamics that unfolded in the country in the twentieth century. This has broader implications for understanding development processes throughout the Global South. Citation: American Sociological Review PubDate: 2022-06-10T06:41:14Z DOI: 10.1177/00031224221095521
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Authors:Ozan Aksoy, Diego Gambetta Abstract: American Sociological Review, Ahead of Print. Religions seem to defy the law-of-demand, which suggests that all else equal, an increase in the cost of an activity will induce individuals to decrease the resources they spend on that activity. Rather than weakening religious organizations, evidence shows that the sacrifices exacted by religious practices are positively associated with the success of those organizations. We present the first strong evidence that this association is neither spurious nor endogenous. We use a natural experiment that rests on a peculiar time-shifting feature of Ramadan that makes the fasting duration—our measure of sacrifice—vary not just by latitude but from year-to-year. We find that a half-hour increase in fasting time during the median Ramadan day increases the vote shares of Islamist political parties by 11 percent in Turkey’s parliamentary elections between 1973 and 2018, and results in one additional attendee per 1,000 inhabitants for voluntary Quran courses. We further investigate two mechanisms, screening and commitment, that could explain the effects we find. By testing their divergent implications, we infer that commitment is the mechanism triggered by sacrifice, which drives up the intensity of religious beliefs and participation that in turn bolster the success of religious organizations. Citation: American Sociological Review PubDate: 2022-06-10T06:39:33Z DOI: 10.1177/00031224221101204
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Authors:Matthew Amengual, Tim Bartley First page: 383 Abstract: American Sociological Review, Ahead of Print. Collective perceptions of harm and impropriety channel the evolution of capitalism, as shown by research on the moral boundaries of markets. But how are boundaries perceived when harms are distant and observers face competing claims from advocacy organizations and corporations' These conditions are particularly salient in global supply chains, where private voluntary initiatives have been formed to address labor exploitation and environmental degradation. We argue that state intervention is now on the rise and that popular judgments about state intervention carry new insights for the sociology of markets, morality, policy, and globalization. Analyzing data from a conjoint survey experiment, we find that distant labor and environmental problems (e.g., forced labor, natural resource depletion) provoke varied levels of interest in state intervention as well as different justifications for state intervention. We also find an asymmetry of influence by strategic actors: transnational advocacy frames shape judgments to some degree, but they fall flat or backfire among conservatives. Corporate promises of reform reduce the perceived importance of state intervention—across political-ideological divides and regardless of credibility. Moving beyond stylized pro-/anti-trade attitudes, these findings reveal implicit logics of a contested moral field and the legitimacy of state intervention at a formative moment. Citation: American Sociological Review PubDate: 2022-04-29T12:33:35Z DOI: 10.1177/00031224221092340
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Authors:Nathan Wilmers, Letian Zhang First page: 415 Abstract: American Sociological Review, Ahead of Print. Employers often recruit workers by invoking corporate social responsibility, organizational purpose, or other claims to a prosocial mission. In an era of substantial labor market inequality, commentators typically dismiss these claims as hypocritical: prosocial employers often turn out to be no more generous with low-wage workers than are other employers. In this article, we argue that prosocial commitments in fact inadvertently reduce earnings inequality, but through a different channel than generosity. Building on research on job values, we hypothesize that college graduates are more willing than nongraduates to sacrifice pay for prosocial impact. When employers appeal to prosocial values, they can thus disproportionately reduce pay for higher-educated workers. We test this theory with data on online U.S. job postings. We find that prosocial jobs requiring a college degree post lower pay than do standard postings with exactly the same job requirements; prosocial jobs that do not require a college degree, however, pay no differently from other low-education jobs. This gap reduces the aggregate college wage premium by around 5 percent. We present a variety of supplementary evidence using labor market data, worker survey responses, and a vignette experiment with hiring managers. The findings reveal an unintended consequence of employers’ embrace of prosocial values: it offsets macro-level inequality. Citation: American Sociological Review PubDate: 2022-04-13T09:14:06Z DOI: 10.1177/00031224221089335
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Authors:Mathijs de Vaan, Toby Stuart First page: 443 Abstract: American Sociological Review, Ahead of Print. Stratification in professional careers arises in part from interpersonal dynamics in client-expert dyads. To reduce perceived uncertainty in judgments of the quality of experts, clients may rely on ascriptive characteristics of experts and on pairwise, relational factors to assess the advice they receive. Two such characteristics, expert gender and client-expert gender concordance, may lead to differences in clients’ trust in expert advice. To explore these issues, we investigate the incidence of patient-initiated second opinions (SOs) in medicine. In an examination of millions of medical claims in Massachusetts, we find that male patients are much more likely than female patients to obtain an SO if the first specialist they consult is female. Moreover, when the first specialist a patient consults is gender non-concordant and the patient seeks an SO, male patients are substantially more likely to switch to a same-gender specialist in the SO visit. Because patients who lack confidence in the advice of the first-seen specialist infrequently return to this specialist for medical services, female specialists generate lower billings. Analyses of medical spending in follow-up visits suggest that gendered patterns in questioning the advice of medical experts have the potential to contribute substantially to the gender pay gap in medicine. Citation: American Sociological Review PubDate: 2022-04-25T09:51:18Z DOI: 10.1177/00031224221087374
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Authors:Eric W. Schoon First page: 478 Abstract: American Sociological Review, Ahead of Print. Legitimacy is widely invoked as a condition, cause, and outcome of other social phenomena, yet measuring legitimacy is a persistent challenge. In this article, I synthesize existing approaches to conceptualizing legitimacy across the social sciences to identify widely agreed upon definitional properties. I then build on these points of consensus to develop a generalizable approach to operationalization. Legitimacy implies specific relationships among three empirical elements: an object of legitimacy, an audience that confers legitimacy, and a relationship between the two. Together, these empirical elements constitute a dyad (i.e., a single unit consisting of two nodes and a tie). I identify three necessary conditions for legitimacy—expectations, assent, and conformity—that specify how elements of the dyad interact. I detail how these conditions can be used to empirically establish legitimacy (and illegitimacy), distinguishing it from dissimilar phenomena that often appear similar empirically. Followed to its logical conclusion, this operationalization has novel implications for understanding the effects of legitimacy. I discuss these implications, and how they inform debates over the relevance of legitimacy as an explanation for socially significant outcomes. Citation: American Sociological Review PubDate: 2022-03-10T09:10:42Z DOI: 10.1177/00031224221081379
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Authors:Stefan Timmermans, Pamela J. Prickett First page: 504 Abstract: American Sociological Review, Ahead of Print. Building on Max Weber’s observation that the state’s reliance on formal tools leads to governance for some and dehumanization for others, we investigate administrative standards as a social mechanism of stratification that sorts people into categories and allocates symbolic and financial resources. Specifically, we examine how at a time of increased family diversity, the state’s use of family standards at the end-of-life discounts certain people as kin. Based on ethnographic and documentary data about government’s implementation of family standards to identify next-of-kin and task them with the disposition of dead bodies, we find that the use of family standards leads to three outcomes: a formal fit between standard and family forms; a formal misfit between who is designated next-of-kin and who is willing to handle disposition, leading to bodies going unclaimed; and a formal refit, where people not officially designated as next-of-kin overcome formal barriers to disposition. Our analysis offers a conceptual framework to examine how administrative standards include and exclude people from social groups. These bureaucratic tools produce a standard-specific governable life for some, and a diverse range of oppositional effects varying from non-recognition to opportunism for the non-standardized. Citation: American Sociological Review PubDate: 2022-04-29T05:55:30Z DOI: 10.1177/00031224221092303
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Authors:Devah Pager, Rebecca Goldstein, Helen Ho, Bruce Western First page: 529 Abstract: American Sociological Review, Ahead of Print. Court-related fines and fees are widely levied on criminal defendants who are frequently poor and have little capacity to pay. Such financial obligations may produce a criminalization of poverty, where later court involvement results not from crime but from an inability to meet the financial burdens of the legal process. We test this hypothesis using a randomized controlled trial of court-related fee relief for misdemeanor defendants in Oklahoma County, Oklahoma. We find that relief from fees does not affect new criminal charges, convictions, or jail bookings after 12 months. However, control respondents were subject to debt collection efforts at significantly higher rates that involved new warrants, additional court debt, tax refund garnishment, and referral to a private debt collector. Despite significant efforts at debt collection among those in the control group, payments to the court totaled less than 5 percent of outstanding debt. The evidence indicates that court debt charged to indigent defendants neither caused nor deterred new crime, and the government obtained little financial benefit. Yet, fines and fees contributed to a criminalization of low-income defendants, placing them at risk of ongoing court involvement through new warrants and debt collection. Citation: American Sociological Review PubDate: 2022-02-21T06:52:41Z DOI: 10.1177/00031224221075783
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