Department of Sociology Podcasts

Luis Miller (University of the Basque Country) presentsaAn experimental sociology study on people's understanding of distributive justice, relative to their economic statuses (unemployed/employed).

Ted Gerber (University of Wisconsin) presents the ethnic, socio-economic, linguistic and political sources of ideational cleavages in contemporary Estonia between Estonians and the Russian minority.

Professor Beckfield discusses whether the welfare state convergence is really taking place, or it is just regional integration, especially in the European context. The contemporary institutionalization of a transnational regional political economy in Europe raises questions about the role of regional integration in the convergence of European welfare states. To date, sociological work has emphasized processes of industrialization and globalization as the social changes that may drive increasing similarity among welfare states. Building on neoinstitutionalist theory and the Europeanization literature, we develop the argument that regional integration drives welfare-state convergence by generating, diffusing, and enforcing the adoption of policy scripts concerning "appropriate" European social policy. The hypothesis that deepening regional integration drives growing welfare-state convergence is tested with a three-stage analysis. The first stage examines trends in population-weighted and un-weighted dispersion for the OECD, the set of liberal market economies, and the set of EU-15 member states, since 1960. The second stage examines associations between regional integration and welfare-state dispersion using time-series data. The third stage employs fixed-effects models of dyad-year data. The results support the hypothesis: welfare-state convergence appears only among the EU-15; regional integration trends are associated with convergence; and pairs of countries belonging to the EU develop welfare states that are more similar, on average, than other pairs of countries. The findings are robust to three broad measures of the welfare state. Based on our results, we argue that in theorizing contemporary changes in the welfare state, sociologists should attend to the institutionalization of regional political economy. Welfare states can be conceptualized as embedded in regional, as well as global, systems and institutions.

The author addresses the question how the distribution of household income has been changing in recent decades. After situating contemporary trends in inequality in the context of global income inequality, we turn to address the question how the distribution of household income has been changing in recent decades. We use data from the Luxemburg Income Study and methods based on the relative distribution to decompose overall distributional change into changes in location and shape. We do so for a heterogeneous group of countries: five transitional and middleincome societies the Czech and Slovak Republics, Poland, Russia, and Taiwan and four high-income societies the U.K., U.S., Sweden, and Germany. In the U.K. and U.S., we also describe the changing position of households at interesting social locations i.e., femaleheaded households and households whose heads and spouses/partners lack university qualifications. Focusing on changes in shape, we utilize full distributional information to examine how income inequality grew across the period stretching from the late 1970s to the mid2000s.

The author describes sweeping changes in the gender system and offers explanations for why change has been uneven. In this article, the author describes sweeping changes in the gender system and offers explanations for why change has been uneven. Because the devaluation of activities done by women has changed little, women have had strong incentive to enter male jobs, but men have had little incentive to take on female activities or jobs. The gender egalitarianism that gained traction was the notion that women should have access to upward mobility and to all areas of schooling and jobs. But persistent gender essentialism means that most people follow gender-typical paths except when upward mobility is impossible otherwise. Middle-class women entered managerial and professional jobs more than working-class women integrated blue-collar jobs because the latter were able to move up while choosing a "female" occupation; many mothers of middle-class women were already in the highest-status female occupations. The author also notes a number of gender-egalitarian trends that have stalled.

Ethnic Labour market discrimination in China, with a particular focus on the Uyghur Minority. This paper analyzes a sample from the 2005 mini-census data to examine ethnic inequalities in labor markets, with a special focus on how ethnic inequality varies by different employment sectors. Results show a clear disparity between Han and Uyghur in employment segregation by sector: more than 70 percent Uyghur in Xinjiang, compared to only 35 percent of local Han Chinese, are engaged in agricultural work; within the non-agricultural sector, Uyghur are nonetheless more likely to work in government agencies/institutions than both Han locals and migrants, and also more likely to become self-employed. Furthermore, while Han-Uyghur earnings gap is negligible in government/institution, it increases with the marketization of employment sector. In other words, the earnings disparity is the largest among self-employed, followed by employees in private enterprises and then by employees in public enterprises. Han migrants in economic sectors enjoy particular earnings advantages and hukou registration has no effect on earnings attainment except in government/institutions. The overall income disadvantages of Uyghur, nevertheless, mainly stem from within-sector difference rather than from sector segregation. The paper concludes that the pattern of ethnic stratification is a mixed result from the market force that tends to enlarge ethnic inequality and government efforts in promoting ethnic equality.

Lecture delivered by Florencia Torche, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Faculty Affiliate at the Steinhardt School of Education, NYU and Research Affiliate at INSPIRES, NYU School of Medicine. A growing literature highlights that in-utero conditions are consequential for individual outcomes throughout the life cycle, but research assessing causal processes is scarce. This paper examines the causal effect of one such condition (maternal stress) on one such outcomes (birth weight). Birth weight is a key outcomes because it has been shown to affect cognitive, educational, and socioeconomic attainment throughout the individual lifecycle. Using a major earthquake as a natural experiment and a difference in difference methodology, we show that maternal stress has a substantial detrimental effect on birth weight. This effect is focused on the first trimester of gestation, and it is mediated by reduced gestational age rather than intra-uterine growth restriction. Several robustness checks reject the hypothesis that the association is driven by unobserved selectivity of mothers. The findings highlight the relevance of understanding the early emergence of unequal opportunity and of investing in maternal wellbeing since the onset of pregnancy.

Lecture delivered by Jennifer Flashman (University of Oxford). Adolescents experience different levels of exposure to individuals of other races. Their exposure may shape their racial preferences for friends in important ways, with serious implications for school integration, bussing, and tracking policies. A small body of work studies the impact of school racial composition on racial preferences for friends using discrete choice models. This work uniformly shows that preferences for friends of a particular racial group decline as the size of that group increases within a school. However, the validity of these estimates rests on the assumption that the odds of choosing one possible friend over another remain constant regardless of the other friend alternatives included in or excluded from the set of possible choices. This assumption is known as the IIA assumption (independence of irrelevant alternatives). Violations of IIA can dramatically affect estimations of individuals? preferences. Given that adolescents have a racial preference for friends, if racially identical friend alternatives are included in the choice set, the preference an individual has for friends of that race are distributed across those identical alternatives. If IIA is violated, choice models will provide an underestimate of preferences for black friends when there are many black students within a school and an overestimate of preferences for black friends when there are few black students within a school. Consequently, results from past research suggesting that blacks have stronger preferences for black friends when there are few blacks in a school may be an artifact of violations of the assumption inherent in the modeling strategy. Through a careful analysis of both simulated and actual data, this presentation provides a corrective to past research on friendship choice by showing 1) that key model assumptions are violated when discrete choice analysis is used to model friendship choice, 2) that results are extremely sensitive to violations of model assumptions, and 3) that after correcting models, estimations show that increased contact between racial groups leads to stronger preferences for cross-race friends.

Lecture delivered by Jonathan Gershuny, Department of Sociology, University of Oxford.

Lecture delivered by Tim Horton, Research Director and Deputy General Secretary of the Fabian Society, Britain's leading left of centre think tank and political society.