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This book looks at how sociological concepts that were first invented and applied to describe social inequality in Europe were also used to understand and explain inequality in the US. Hess analyzes changing uses of concepts and measurements of social inequality by looking at how some of the most prominent American sociologists have tried to conceptualize their own society while at the same time addressing the complex relationship between an assumed political equality and de facto social inequality. ... Read more

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With reference to the Bhil, Indic people, from Banswara District, Rajasthan. ... Read more

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This volume brings together former students, colleagues, and others influenced by the sociological scholarship of Archibald O. Haller to celebrate Haller's many contributions to theory and research on social stratification and mobility. All of the chapters respond to Haller's programmatic agenda for stratification research: "A full program aimed at understanding stratification requires: first, that we know what stratification structures consist of and how they may vary; second, that we identify the individual and collective consequences of the different states and rates of change of such structures; and third, seeing that some degree of stratification seems to be present everywhere, that we identify the factors that make stratification structures change." The contributors to this Festschrift address such topics as the changing nature of stratification regimes, the enduring significance of class analysis, the stratifying dimensions of race, ethnicity, and gender, and the interplay between educational systems and labor market outcomes. Many of the chapters adopt an explicitly cross-societal comparative perspective on processes and consequences of social stratification.The volume offers both conceptually and empirically important new analyses of the shape of social stratification. ... Read more

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Scientific analyses of social inequality
In my not unbiased opinion (I am co-author of one of the chapters), this is a superb book with rigorous, scientific analyses of many aspects of social inequality and stratification in the USA and other nations. It is not always easy reading, but it is insightful and authoritative.

The book is part of an annual series, which is now the official journal of the International Sociological Association's Research Committee on Social Stratification and Mobility (RC-28), the most important academic society in the field of social stratification. This volume, the 22nd, is also a Festschrift for the distinguished sociologist, A. O. Haller.

The chapters fall in three groups:

CONCEPTS:
Are There Any Big Classes at All? (K.A. Weeden, D.B. Grusky).
Spaces and Networks: Concepts for Social Stratification. (J. Woelfel, M. Murero).
Some Demographic Aspects of Rurality. (G.V. Fuguitt).

STRATIFICATION IN THE USA:
Assimilation in American Society: Occupational Achievement and Earnings for Ethnic Minorities in the United States, 1970 to 1990. (C.M. Snipp, C. Hirschman).
Changes in the Structure of Status Systems: Employment Shifts in the Wake of Deindustrialization. (W.J. Haller).
Physical and Mental Health Status of Adolescent Girls: A Comparative Ethnic Perspective. (M. Kleykamp, M. Tienda).
The Black-White Achievement Gap in the First College Year: Evidence from a New Longitudinal Case Study. (K.I. Spenner, C. Buchmann, L.R. Landerman).

A COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE:
Status Allocation in Village India. (B.D. Sharda).
The Future of Gender in Mexico and the United states: Economic Transformation and Changing Definitions. (P. Fenandez-Kelly).
Do Ethnic Enclaves Benefit or Harm Linguistically Isolated Employees? (M.D.R. Evans).
Economic Change and the Legitimation of Inequality: The Transition from Socialism to the Free Market in Central-East Europe. (J. Kelley, K. Zagorski).
Race, Socioeconomic Development and the Educational Stratification Process in Brazil. (D. Cireno Fernandes).
Labor Force Classes and the Earnings Determination of the Farm Population in Brazil: 1973, 1982, and 1988. (J.A Neves).

The chapter by Zagorski and myself takes advantage of a unique historical opportunity, the transformation of Central-East Europe with the collapse of Communism, to address a fundamental question in the social justice-equity-legitimation research tradition: how strong is the link between a nation's economy and its citizens' normative judgments concerning income inequality? We argue (1) that the transition from a socialist economy to a free market economy should increase normative support for income inequality; (2) that to the extent that people perceive differences in pay actually to be large,they will believe more inequality to be morally legitimate; and (3) that normative support for income inequality will be higher among better educated people and among those in higher status jobs.

We find that normative support for inequality increased dramatically. In Communist times the Polish and Hungarian publics favored less inequality than citizens of Western nations thought right; but within a decade after the fall of Communism they favored much more inequality than Westerners think right. These normative changes did not arise from socioeconomic or demographicchange in population structure but in large part from perceived changes in actual income inequality. Our data are from the World Inequality Study, which pools data from the International Social Survey Programme and other projects; there are 18 representative national samples in six Central-East Europe nations (N=23,260) and, for comparison, 32 in Western nations (N=39,956).

Many of the chapters look at racial and ethnic differences. Sociologists often take for granted that segregation and social closure automatically entail disadvantage, so the hypothesis that partially separated ethnic sub-economies, or "ethnic enclaves," might thrive and benefit their workers and employers was a radical departure from past thinking. Since then, controversy has raged over why entrepreneurs set up businesses in immigrant enclaves, and over the consequences enclave-based business has for employers and employees. The bulk of the evidence suggests that most immigrant entrepreneurs are "pulled" by the opportunities presented by ethnic resources to open enclave businesses, although some are also "pushed" by mainstream employers' discrimination.

The consequences of enclave employment are less clearly established. The chapter by M.D.R. Evans seeks to clarify the issue by usingCensus data to assess the impact of availability of co-ethnic employment on job quality for immigrant employees from all the wide variety of non-Anglophone countries represented in Australia. She controls for the effects of human capital characteristics by using a detailed specification of location and quantity of education and work force experience. The results show a strong interaction between availability of co-ethnic employment and individual English-language skill such that immigrants not fluent in English get substantially better jobs if they belong to a group containing a large proportion of entrepreneurs. The effect of availability of ethnic employment is much weaker among immigrants with middling levels of English fluency, and the quality of job opportunities of immigrants fully fluent in English are unrelated to the availability of co-ethnic employment. These results are fully consistent with the "communications costs" hypothesis, but inconsistent with either the co-ethnic predation hypothesis or the discrimination hypothesis.

These are only a sample of the many valuable analyses in this splendid volume.

Professor Jonathan Kelley
University of Melbourne
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Analyzes how private enterprises have gradually gained momentum and are now a cornerstone in China's rural transformation. The text also presents field study results on how these household-based enterprises affect local community development. ... Read more

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Distinctions between occupations underlie all sociological attempts to explain the stratification of society and assess the process of social mobility. Coxon and Davies set out to determine how people perceive and evaluate occupations and to discover whether the much vaunted consensus over existing schemes of occupational prestige stood up to empirical test. None of the assumptions and findings of the conventional accounts emerges from this investigation unscathed.

The authors present a new approach to the description of social stratification and social mobility; one which is based on the actual judgements about occupations made by ordinary people. They contend that basic divisions in society can be discovered from people's accounts and that an analysis of the belief systems which underlie occupational judgements is both possible and illuminating.

The consequences of this approach -- a synthesis between the insights of the positivist and ethnographic perspectives -- are considerable. Coxon and Davies outline the implications for sociological debates about stratification, status and class and for areas as diverse as job evaluation, personnel management and careers guidance.

The book is based on the Edinburgh project on Occupational Cognition. The basic aims and findings of this project stimulated considerable controversy when they were published, in highly-technical form, in 1978-9. Images of Social Stratification will widen this debate by presenting the full results in a very readable and non-technical manner.

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The study of social cohesion and solidarity and their antitheses, social fragmentation and dissension, are central components of sociology. From the very beginnings of sociology right through to the present day, sociologists have endeavoured to identify the forces that either unite people into particular social configurations, or force them apart into diverse and often antagonistic groups. Any adequate understanding of social life must foreground issues of social coherence and divergence, unity and disunity, cohesion and fracture, order and disorder.

This set brings together for the first time, in a thoroughly systematic and comprehensive fashion, the major sociological works on the above themes, from the period of the infancy of the discipline through to the present.