Core Sociological Dichotomies/ Chris Jenks

[herbertmarcuse]

Howdy:

 

I was wondering if it might be possible for some of the current sociology instructors and advanced PhD fellows in the gradforum to share some of the favorite sociology teaching books. While many like to use those heavy Soci introduction books by Pearson and Norton, I'm really stuck with this core dichotomy sociology book and enjoy using it for 1st semester and 2nd semester sociology students. Core Sociological dichotomies also make for excellent little homework assignments which can be used throughout the entire semester!

 

http://books.google.com/books/about/Core_Sociological_Dichotomies.html?id=DEExO1mBv1EC

 

 

Let me know what you think of this book,

 

HM

Edited May 2, 2013 by herbertmarcuse

[gilbertrollins]

To add to this -- I need a strong introduction to the inequality and strat literature.  A link to a syllabus from a grad level strat/inequality course with lots of journal articles would be great.  Thanks.

[SocioEd]

To add to this -- I need a strong introduction to the inequality and strat literature.  A link to a syllabus from a grad level strat/inequality course with lots of journal articles would be great.  Thanks.

Madison's soc dept has a syllabus archive, from where you should be able to find something you want.

http://ssc.wisc.edu/soc/courses/syllabi.php

Edited May 7, 2013 by SocioEd

[gilbertrollins]

That's perfect thanks!

[ohgoodness]

Posted this before but just use the chapters in this to find who to read and what to read further into.

 

http://www.amazon.com/Inequality-Reader-Contemporary-Foundational-Readings/dp/0813344840

[gilbertrollins]

Does anyone in sociology entertain the alternative hypothesis that race, class, and gender are outcome rather than explanatory variables?  I was talking to Terry Clark and he pointed out that when you throw race, SES, gender, and other traditional sociological variables on the RHS of a regression, you get pretty abysmal r^2 (I know r^2 is a touchy statistic, but still, it seems like for Foundational Causal Variables, race, SES, and gender should fit variation in social outcomes better).  He also pointed out that Pearson correlations are quite small between traditional sociological variables and the different rates of participation in behaviors measured by that big survey they do at NORC (Pearsons also bad because of a lack of control for confounds, but roughly informative statistics).  Clearly herds develop around race, gender, SES, and other cultural signifiers -- but it seems strange to allege that these variables cause such herding, an potentially the inequality which results as well.

 

Also, I've seen so far a lot of statements like, "social inequality is caused by stratification," which to me sounds like a mere tautology.  Maybe I'm not understanding the difference between "stratification" and "inequality" as taxa.  

 

If anyone can help me along the learning curve, it's of course much appreciated.  Cheers!

[RefurbedScientist]

SES outcomes are often estimated as dependent variables, as with studies on the effects of education. Usually there's a control for parents' SES, though. It makes sense, though, that you can't study what determines SES in the first instance. 

 

I think more recently people have studied race as an endogenous variable. For example, people indicate a more-white race as they ascend socio-economic strata in Brazil. Here's just one paper on that, but I think there are others. 

 

I've never seen anything on gender as an outcome, but that's really interesting. I'd like to see a discussion of that if anyone has thoughts. 

 

As for the explanatory power (or lack thereof) of race, class, and gender in a regression equation, I don't make too much of it. Usually regression is used for hypothesis testing, where the point is not to discover the universe of exogenous variables affecting an outcome. The goal is to estimate the effect of a specific set of correlates. So when you estimate y=a+b(race), you can at least estimate whether race matters for y or not, which is one of sociology's great findings. We might also figure that class, gender, education, cognitive ability, height, neighborhood, birth order, peer group, etc., matter too, and still we wouldn't explain 100% of the variation in y. As they say, the goal of regression is not to measure the cause of an effect, but the effect of a cause. 

 

As for your point about characteristics causing behaviors: Yeah, always hard to claim causality. Luckily, we have fancy statistical techniques that get beyond "mere" correlation. But all we're really doing is excluding possible confounders, and maybe showing that x logically and temporally precedes y. So say there's some GSS question about opinions on abortion and we estimate the effect of being Christian on that. Maybe the two are correlated, but does being Christian cause a particular opinion on abortion? It's plausible. But maybe being Christian and a particular opinion on abortion are both correlated with living in a certain geographical area, for example. Maybe the peer effects of living in that area causes the abortion opinion. Maybe living in a traditionally agricultural region creates a culture that says population growth is always good. This is where historical analysis and qualitative methods complement stats nicely.

 

There's certainly more, epistemologically, to causation than is captured by these techniques. But that stuff is over my head. 

 

Sorry if this came off as an intro to causal inference. That wasn't my intention, starting out. You clearly already have that intuition down. You raise great questions. 

[gilbertrollins]

I've never seen anything on gender as an outcome, but that's really interesting. I'd like to see a discussion of that if anyone has thoughts.

 

HA!  Typing a little fast there. 

 

Clark's observation seems to make some sense to me.  My basic intuition here is that agents aren't walking around identifying one another, exclusively or even majorly, by race, class, and gender and then deciding how to behave toward one another (e.g. discriminating, boundary-maintaining, etc).  Standard sociological variables like race and gender emerged because of (necessary) political movements in the 19th and 20th century.  But these historically local and therefore rather anomolous movements are not sufficient evidence to support the idea (which the conflict theorists seem to have run with, mouths frothing), that they are the generalizeable Big Variables causing social phenomena. 

 

Rather, I suspect that the groupings, or network clusters, codify by more fundamental processes (path dependencies on networks, coordinating and informational efficiencies, public goods problems, etc) -- and that we hence end up with a world where we can easily identify and label, on the surface, certain salient clusters of behavior by class, gender, and race.  These clusters are merely subsets of many other clusters of behaviors, and of the regularized symbols and rituals which denote those behaviors. 

 

This would seem to explain why identifying race, class, and gender as explanatory (independent) variables actually gives quite small magnitudes and large error terms -- again these independent variables are just particularly salient variables because of quite public political battles in the last two centuries.  It's worth noting that these actually ought to be poor predictors of long-run stable social structure considering what made these variables salient in the first place was the enormous variation, that is redefinition and renogotiation of these categories.  How's that for a dialectical inversion? )

 

You make an absolutely correct point, that the point of every regression is not to just keep throwing variables in the pot in order to boost r^2.  That's an undergraduate mistake, and one that's hard to shake people of.  Clearly we're testing specific hypotheses, not the universe of all social determinates in every paper.  And clearly race does matter, and its social-scientific reification is one of the largest and deserved accomplishments of modern sociology.  But the question, empirically, is always how much, not whether.  If sociologists were going to just answer whether questions, they might as well just go do existence and uniqueness theorems all day like economists (I don't recommend this; sociology is beautifully empirical -- in 1982 it was found that over half of economics papers in its major journals contained no data).  And my point is that the how much in how much race matters, is not nearly as much as it's been hyped up to matter, if the Betas on race are deterministic, but small, and still leave tons of unknowns in the error term. 

 

I'd like to see how much sociologists end up exploiting natural experiements and instrument variables in order to establish causation -- it's been quite profitable in econometrics -- but there has been recent criticism that even the instrument variable exercise has gotten a little out of control, by encouraging researchers to make finding nice clean natural experiments the priority, rather than socially (or in their case economically) relevant issues (which may not yield to neat identification exercises). 

 

So yeah, my suspicion is that race, class, and gender are symptoms, not causes, of social forces, and that we have yet to really nail down social forces themselves.  Frankly I suspect that the focus in sociology on deeply politicized theories of social conflict and social movements (and the edge-of-seat excitement to go out and change the world before understanding it) have slowed the progress toward understanding these underlying, generalized, social forces. 

Edited May 22, 2013 by gilbertrollins

[gilbertrollins]

To respondants so far: I sincerely appreciate all the discussion and links so far.  This kind of internetting makes learning go extroardinarily faster for me.

[gilbertrollins]

So say there's some GSS question about opinions on abortion and we estimate the effect of being Christian on that. Maybe the two are correlated, but does being Christian cause a particular opinion on abortion? It's plausible. But maybe being Christian and a particular opinion on abortion are both correlated with living in a certain geographical area, for example. Maybe the peer effects of living in that area causes the abortion opinion. Maybe living in a traditionally agricultural region creates a culture that says population growth is always good.

 

The economic explanation, which I find particularly compelling, is that kids are cheaper to raise in rural areas, and actually provide revenue to the family in the form of unskilled, and unpaid labor.  The theory of demand thus predicts people will demand more kids.  Clearly cultural mechanisms are at work here as well, potentially even dominating and swamping the economic, materialistic explanation.  But it's an important alternative hypothesis to consider.

[ohgoodness]

To add to this -- I need a strong introduction to the inequality and strat literature.  A link to a syllabus from a grad level strat/inequality course with lots of journal articles would be great.  Thanks.

 

 

here you go as well

[gilbertrollins]

I keep seeing this phrase over and over again, and in textbooks: "stratification causes inequality."  What am I missing here?  That statement looks like a complete tautology to me.  Inequality and stratification could be caused by capital accumulation.  Homophillic preferences.  Structural characteristics of languages.  

 

But aren't inequality and stratification the same thing?

[ohgoodness]

I keep seeing this phrase over and over again, and in textbooks: "stratification causes inequality."  What am I missing here?  That statement looks like a complete tautology to me.  Inequality and stratification could be caused by capital accumulation.  Homophillic preferences.  Structural characteristics of languages.  

 

But aren't inequality and stratification the same thing?

 

A.  http://www.brynmawr.edu/socialwork/GSSW/schram/davis&moore.pdf

 

B.  http://homepages.rpi.edu/~eglash/eglash.dir/design.dir/readings%20questions/Fischer.pdf

 

C.  A draft of Breen's Social Mobility in Europe: http://www.uvm.edu/~pdodds/files/papers/others/2004/breen2004a.pdf  and Non-persistent inequality in educational attainment: http://www.ccpr.ucla.edu/publications/conference-proceedings/CP-05-001.pdf

 

D. Grusky's summary of Social Stratification: http://inequality.cornell.edu/publications/working_papers/Grusky2.pdf

 

I just figured I would post this (again) since you seem to be missing the basics.

 

 

and I am sorry for posting that video.  Krugman sure is a silly excuse for an academic.. 

Edited June 5, 2013 by ohgoodness

[gilbertrollins]

Krugman's academic work is good, and I'm all for scholars moonlighting as public intellectuals.  Academics should encourage journalistic dialogue that translates results.  It's just pretentious and insular to sneer at anything that isn't said by an "expert."  There are, anyway, a lot of incredibly stupid people with Ph.D's and "expertise."

 

And at least half of what drives people's derision of scholars who actually make it into the lime light as public intellectuals is just -- jealousy.  "Gasp!  An academic with public influence!  But that's what I want!  And he doesn't agree with me either!  What a rip!"

 

I just took the "strat causes inequality" quote from Lisa Kiester's new book, and remember hearing it somewhere else too -- a syllabus for a U of Maryland soc course I think, from the policy school.  Not totally sure on the second one.  

Edited June 5, 2013 by gilbertrollins

[gilbertrollins]

I found the Davis and Moore paper a little haphazard. In a very vague way, they essentially lay down the principles of supply and demand as determining functional payoffs to different social roles -- going so far as to talk explicitly about scarcity and the costs one sacrifices in attaining the skills (totems?) required to assume a new social role. They give no definition of what makes a social role "important" to society, other than to say that important roles are more functional and therefore receive higher payoffs both monetarily and in terms of prestige and esteem. That definition is circular. Then they introduce some interesting bits about religion, and finish with a kind of watered down recapitulation of Marx's criterion for strata: the ownership of property and command of workers. Didn't learn a lot from that one.

The race and IQ paper is good, but outlines what are now (I think, at least) pretty commonly understood arguments in the IQ gender gap debate, considering it's been going on for so long. In any event, I'm eager to get to know more of Swidler's work. I keep hearing her name everywhere. An interesting rebut to the idea that "intelligence maps to skills, which map to economic payoffs" debate, and the philosophical issues it presents for the ethics of redistribution, is Hayek's "Equality, Merit, and Value." I'm as skeptical as anyone that measured g has a large impact on social outcomes, and broadly sympathize with the position in the Swidler paper. But the Hayek paper is very good food for thought, regardless.

Grusky's paper is much more sophisticated, both in language and in the pointedness of his logic, than the other two papers, which I like. But the origin story he tells about communal ownership in primitive groups, meritocracy, and equal distributions of power, is just plain wrong -- and as much has been known and said by anthropologists since at least Malinowski in the 20s.

I don't agree that I'm missing "the basics," considering most of what i've read in these papers tonight I've encountered either in introductory sociology courses or independent reading. Me proffering an alternative hypothesis about the origin of inequality shouldn't by necessity signal that I've just never heard the commonly-accepted stories before.

Also -- the absolute minority of what's stated in any of those papers is supported with any material evidence. Though they may be theoretically oriented papers.

Edited June 6, 2013 by gilbertrollins

[gilbertrollins]

Reading in further -- the Grusky paper is actually excellent, and I recommend it to anyone.  The historical section is poor, but the rest of the review of the field of stratification scholarship is superior, as are his cleanly delineated turns in how one development in a field led to another, and how the subfields contrast with one another.