Social Attainment II
Moving beyond the Classical
Attainment Model
Blau and Duncan (’67)
Status Attainment Model
• DV=person’s occupational prestige position in 1962
• Two basic variables to describe early stratification position
of each person; 1) father’s educational attainment status 2)
father’s occupational attainment status
• Two behavioral variables; 1) educational level of the
individual 2) prestige level of first job
Blau and Duncan (’67)
Status Attainment Model
(Information taken directly from Nielsen’s presentation)
• Direct occupational inheritance pRsOccFsOcc is only .115
• Most of rFsOccROcc = .405 is indirect, thru RsEd
• The major part of the total effect of RsEd on RsOc (.596)
is independent of social origins (.535 vs. only .061 thru
FsOc and FsEd) & driven by RsEd residual
Blau and Duncan (’67)
Status Attainment Model
Critiques of the B&D model
•
•
•
•
Class-Gender Critiques (and Featherman)
Social Psychological Critiques (and Bourdieu)
Social Capital Modifications
Genetic Critiques
Featherman and Hauser
Building on Blau and Duncan
• There treatment of manpower flows parallels Blau and
Duncan’s, but makes use of log-linear modeling of the
mobility table to describe a mobility regime that is free of
the distributions of occupational origins and destinations.
• They are following a similar inductive path to Blau and
Duncan.
• They are also building on the quasi-independence models
of Goodman in the sense that they are focusing on more
than just the traditional aspect of occupational inheritance.
They want to uncover the patterns of immobility and
exchange between occupational strata.
Featherman and Hauser
The Model
Featherman and Hauser
Broad results of the Model
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
Large immobility at the extremes of the hierarchy (farm occupations
and upper nonmanual jobs)
The transitional zones surrounding the extremes experience
homogenous chances of immobility
Data suggest barriers to movement across class boundaries (hard to
move between the extremes and the transitional zones)
No social distance variant seems to effect long-distance mobility
chances within the transitional zones
Immobility is almost non-existent in the middle of the hierarchy (no
evidence of class boundaries to chances of movement to or from
skilled manual occupations)
Roughly equal propensity to be moving up or down between
occupational strata.
Featherman and Hauser
Implications
• How do the results of this model differ from Blau and
Duncan’s model? (329)
• What are the implications of this observed difference on
attainment models?
Szelenyi and Sorensen
• Szelenyi critiques models which attempt to
deal with the unit of stratification systems
as either familial or individual and
concludes that the debate is more about
contextual effects than gender itself.
Szelenyi Model
The Conventional View
• The position that: “(1) the family rather than the
individual forms the basic unit of sociological
analysis, a (2) the social position of the family is
properly indexed by the status of its (usually) male
head” (681).
• - “it fails to appreciate the simple fact that women
are entering the labor force in ever-increasing
numbers” (683)
The Dominance Model
• A family centered model that “. . . identifies the class
position of the family with that of the individual who is
most highly ranked within a ‘dominance hierarchy,’ where
this hierarchy is established by ordering family members in
terms of their labor force participation and work situation”
(683).
• - like the Conventional View it fails because “ . . . no
single individual can possibly capture the total income of
the family when both spouses are working . . . no single
individual can adequately represent the work situations of
all family members” (684).
The Joint Classification Model
• Classifies families in terms of the employment
situation of both spouses, with the result thus
being a ‘joint classification’ that represents all
possible combinations of their individual work
statuses” (684).
• - introduces a new family-based approach which
attends to the influence of the positions of both
spouses and is thus superior to other singular
family member based models.
Marxist Models
• Classifies women with their relation to the means of
production or as “explicitly involved in sustaining
capitalist relations of production” as housewives (684-5)
• - “women thus facilitate the exploitation of men, but are
not themselves exploited in a classical Marxian sense”
contrary to “the domestic labor theorists [who] argue that
housewives are indirectly exploited by capital because
their husbands are paid a ‘family wage’ that reimburses
them not only for their direct contribution to profit on the
shopfloor, but also for the daily reproduction of their labor
power at home” (685).
Production-Based Models
• Like the Marxist models insofar as it
“assign[s] employed women to a class
position that reflects their own job but treat
housewives as outside the labor force and
therefore ignore[s] them”
• - considered as a step that stratification
researchers use to distance themselves from
the conventional view.
Dual System Models
• “The dual systems approach considers economic
and sex-based inequalities simultaneously and
posits that ‘a healthy and strong partnership exists
between patriarchy and capital’ (685). It
incorporates women who are housewives into the
model by formulating a “domestic mode of
production” (686).
• the approach is difficult to work with because it is
highly abstract but it does bring housewives into
the model and is thus an improvement on pervious
classifications (686).
Dual System Models
• In what ways is this approach abstract?
Are there ways to empiricize dual system
models?
Findings
• 1. “Family-based models of class are especially difficult to
evaluate, because their proponents sometimes fail to
specify the dimensions of inequality that they ultimately
seek to capture” (686).
• 2. The Joint classifications model “appears to take us in a
fruitful direction, if only because it begins forecast the
class-gender debate in the language of contextual effects”
(686). This is the direction Szelenyi feels is necessary to
accurately assess the gender-class issue, it is illustrated in
figure 2 (687).
• 3. “We need to rethink the debate as pertaining not so
much to the ‘woman problem’ as to the strength of
contextual effects, especially those embedded in the
family” (686).
Question?
• Szelenyi says, “I doubt that much headway can be made in the genderclass debate without operationalizing the model” (686). How could we
operationalize Szelenyi’s contextual model of class identification?
(below)
Friends
Actor
Spouse
Lifestyles
Consumption Practices
Politics
Identities
Class Action
Sorensen
“ . . . a replacement of the conventional approach to
determining the family’s class position will make it
possible to address many questions that are central to our
understanding of the class position of families” (45)
Sorensen reviews studies on voting behavior and social
mobility to evaluate the conventional, or classical, view of
stratification in which the male head of the household is
used to determine the family’s social class.
Findings
• - With regard to voting behavior most studies support the
conventional view, however, Sorensen finds that such a
conclusion can “easily lead to different conclusions
regarding the performance for the conventional approach,
and, [that] . . . it is not clear what a rejection of the
conventional view means” (36)
• - “Research on intergenerational mobility has also shown
that the conventional analysis of male-only tables to
represent the whole population underestimates the degree
of openness in the mobility regime” (45)
Findings and Questions
• - While there is general support for the
conventional approach, there remains uncertainty
with regard to women’s employment and class.
Empirical evidence of women’s employment and
its relation to class is required to explain
inadequacies of the conventional view.
• - Do you think that studies in Sorensen’s article
should be interpreted as supporting the continued
use of the conventional view or as highlights of the
small, but significant, inadequacies of it?
Sewell, Haller, and Portes
Main Critiques of B&D
• Needed to include explanation of “mental ability” that was present in
the literature
• Omitted all social psychological factors which may have mediated the
influence of the input variables on attainment
• Fail to explicitly state why there should be any observed connection
between the input factors and the dependent variable
• Did not address opportunities to change the attainment behaviors of
persons
• Inclusion of social psychological variables will better explain the
variance in the dependent variables
***********************************************************
Sewell’s Goal: “…To link stratification and mental ability inputs through
a set of social psychological and behavioral mechanisms to educational
and occupational attainments.” (411)
Sewell, Haller, and Portes
Hypotheses
1.
2.
3.
4.
Initial stratification position and mental ability affect
both the type of SOI bearing on the youth and the
youth’s personal observations of his ability
SOI and self-assessed ability affect levels of educational
and occupational aspiration
Levels of aspiration affect levels of educational
attainment
Education affects levels of occupational attainment
Sewell, Haller, and Portes
Social Psychological Model
Sewell, Haller, and Portes
Important Methodological Points
• Their sampling frame was Wisconsin high school seniors
who; a) had completed both the ’57 and ’64 survey, b)
were males, c) whose fathers were farmers in ’57.
- What are the implications of this sampling frame on
their results?
- Can their results be compared to Blau and Duncan?
Sewell, Haller, and Portes
Results and Questions
• They find that, “There is a pair of perhaps consequential
direct paths from academic performance to educational
aspiration and to educational attainment.” (416)
- What does this finding suggest?
• They offer no speculation for the finding that there is an
unexpected path between mental ability and level of
occupational aspiration.
- Does this suggest anything? What might be a
possible explanation using what we know from other
studies we have read?
MacLeod
Main Arguments
• Makes an analytical distinction between aspirations and
expectations. (422)
- What is this difference?
- Which does the author believe takes primacy?
• MacLeod speculates that the immediate social world
influences actors in different ways (differences between
Hallway Hangers and The Brothers)
MacLeod
Findings
•
Hallway Hangers
1.
2.
3.
4.
•
“..Own job experiences as well as those of family members have
contributed to a deeply entrenched cynicism about their futures”
(422).
Work is important to them only as a means to an end; namely
money.
Evaluation of the opportunity structure plays the dominant role.
Tend to blame others for their failures, not themselves.
The Brothers
1.
2.
3.
Do not hesitate to name their occupational goals, but may mask
them to prevent ridicule.
Tend to blame their failures on personal inadequacy
View their opportunity structure as open
MacLeod
The Theory of Social Reproduction
• MacLeod interprets and applies Bourdieu’s concept of
habitus as consitutive of factors such as ethnicity,
educational history, peer associations, and demographic
characteristics.
- While finding it theoretically useful, MacLeod sees
limitations to the use of the habitus. What are some of
these limitations? How does he apply it? (430-432)
MacLeod
Additional Questions
• Neither group has been very successful in achieving
occupational mobility.
- What does this imply about the importance of (or
lack thereof) social psychological influences on
occupational mobility? Would MacLeod argue that
structure takes primacy over social psychology.
Bourdieu
• “. . . the spaces defined by preferences in food, clothing or cosmetics
are organized according to the same fundamental structure, that of the
social space determined by volume and composition of capital”
• “Fully to construct the space of life-styles within which cultural
practices are defines, one would first have to establish, for each class
and class fraction, that is, for each other configurations of capital, the
generative formula of the habitus which retranslates the necessities and
facilities characteristic of that class of (relatively) homogeneous
conditions of existence into a particular life-style. One would then
have to determine how the dispositions of the habitus are specified, for
each of the major areas of practice, by implementing one of the
stylistic possibles offered by each field (the field of sport, or music, or
food, decoration, politics, language, ect.)” (522)
Bourdieu
• There is a direct relationship between possession
of quantities of types of capital and the cultural
expression of social class.
• “The dialectic of conditions and habitus is the
basis of an alchemy which transforms the
distribution of capital, the balance-sheet of a
power relation, into a system of perceived
differences, distinctive properties, that is, a
distribution of symbolic capital, legitimate capital,
whose objective truth is misrecognized” (504).
Bourdieu
• “Taste, the propensity and capacity to
appropriate (materially or symbolically) a
given class of classified, classifying objects
or practices, is the generative formula of
life-style, a unitary set of distinctive
preferences which express the same
expressive intention in the specific logic of
each of the symbolic subspaces, furniture,
clothing, language or body hexis” (504).
Bourdieu
• “This classificatory system, which is the product
of the internalization of the structure of social
space, the form in which it impinges through the
experience of a particular position in that space, is,
within the limits of economic possibilities and
impossibilities (which it tends to reproduce in its
own logic), the generator of practices adjusted to
the regularities inherent in a condition” (505).
Granovetter, Lin and Burt
• Granovetter
• - “whatever is to be diffused can reach a larger
number of people, and traverse greater social
distance . . .when passed through weak ties rather
than strong” (450).
• “To derive implications for large networks of
relations, it is necessary to frame the basic
hypothesis more precisely . . . by investigating the
possible triads consisting of strong, weak, or
absent ties among A, B, and any arbitrarily chosen
friend of either or both” (448).
Granovetter
• “ except under unlikely conditions, no strong tie is a bridge
. . . A strong tie can be a bridge, therefore, only if neither
party to it has any other strong ties . . . Weak ties suffer no
such restriction, though they are certainly not
automatically bridges . . . all bridges are weak ties” (448)
• The significance of weak ties, therefore, would be that
those which are local bridges create more, and shorter,
paths” [assuming Davis] (449).
• Do you think that such network effects account for some of
the error in Blau and Duncan’s work? If so, how?
Lin
• The emergence of a theory of social
resources where individuals are best served
in actions involving status attainment to
seek contacts with those high up on the
social network hierarchy. Nan deducts this
theory from Granovettter, Blau & Duncan
and Lin, Dayton, & Greenwald. (452).
Lin’s Theory
• The macro-social structure consist[s] of positions ranked according to
certain normatively valued resources such as wealth, status, and power.
• The structure has a pyramidal shape in terms of accessibility and
control of such resources. The higher the position, the fewer the
occupants; and the higher the position, the better the view it has of the
structure.
• For instrumental actions (attaining status in the social structure being
one prime example), the better strategy would be for ego to reach
toward contacts higher up in the hierarchy. These contacts would be
better able to exert influence on positions whose actions may benefit
ego’s interest.
• This reaching-up process may be facilitated if ego uses weaker ties,
because weaker ties are more likely to reach out vertically rather than
horizontally relative to ego’s position in the hierarchy (452-3)
Burt
• - “Managers with more social capital get higher
returns to their human capital because they are
positioned to identify and develop more rewarding
opportunities” (454).
• - Uses structural hole theory to connect social
capital and social network location to explain how
“managers with more social capital get higher
returns on their human capital because they are
positioned to identify and develop more rewarding
opportunities” (454).
Findings
• - “Managers with contact networks rich in
structural holes know about, have a hand in, and
exercise control over the more rewarding
opportunities . . . Mangers with networks rich in
structural holes operate somewhere between the
force of corporate authority and the dexterity of
markets, building bridges between disconnected
parts of the firm where it is valuable to do so” (
457).
Questions
• How might this finding relate to those of
Blau and Duncan?
• What does this suggest about strategies
which determine how people might attempt
to gain social capital?
Scarr and Weinberg
Genetic Influences on Attainment
• To prevent conflation of
genetic and
environmental influences,
the authors use adoptive
and biological families
controlling for selection
bias in adoptive parents.
• To the left is the
breakdown of the families
recruited. Thinking back
to the article, are there
any concerns with
external validity?
Scarr and Weinberg
Preliminary Observations
• Family distributions of IQ, SES, and mean age of children comparable
for both adoptive and biological groups.
• There were significant sex differences in tests, but this is not a concern
because of the approximately equal amount of males and females.
• No significant demographic differences in adoptive and biological
families for this study (679)
• Parental IQ scores were correlated with family demographic
characteristics.
• Adoptive families have slightly fewer children than biological families.
• Family size is unrelated to IQ in adoptive families, but slightly
negatively correlated for biological families.
- What is their reasoning for this?
• Later born or adopted children have a negatively correlated IQ scores.
Scarr and Weinberg
Findings (1)
• The author’s choose to focus on the R-squares of the models as
opposed to the coefficients of individual variables.
- What is the advantage to doing this?
• They find that when IQ scores for parents are added in, the R-square of
the biological families increases to .309 while the R-square of the
adoptive families only increased to .075. They claim the difference in
increase can be attributed to the “genetic contribution of the biological
parent IQ” (682)
• The R-squares for the adoptive models do improve when educational
information is added on the biological mother of the adopted child,
confirming the above result.
• This late-adolescent study confirms the results of earlier childhood
studies, thus adding more evidence to the biological argument.
Scarr and Weinberg
Findings (2)
• While the authors provide some evidence for inheritable
traits, they continue on to claim that “…it seems evident to
us that the study of adoptive and biological families
provides extensive support for the idea that half or more of
the long-term effects of “family background” on children’s
intellectual attainment depend upon genetic, not
environmental, transmission.” (686)
- Do they perhaps overstate themselves here, or does
their argument support this stronger assertion?
Nielsen
Behavior Genetic Model
• Behavior genetic models improve upon earlier attainment
models by separating a measurable trait into 3 components;
1) genetic inheritance (affects both siblings in accordance
to their proportion of shared genes), 2) common
environment (SES, ethnic culture, neighborhood, etc.), 3)
specific environment (birth order, a disease that only
affects one child, etc.).
• This division allows a clearer distinction to be made
between achievement and ascription.
• Nielsen’s model is looking at school achievement among
adolescents
Nielsen
Methodology
• Uses AddHealth data and examines siblings living in the
same household who are related/not related as MZ, DZ,
FS, HS, CO, and NR.
• Sampling Frame only included blacks and non-Hispanic
whites to control for second-language influences.
• Controlled for race and sex differences in verbal scores
Nielsen
The Model
Nielsen
Results
• Nielsen finds that the association between GPA and VIQ is
largely explained by genetic factors.
• The findings suggest that the three measures of schooling
are highly heritable, strongly affected by specific
environmental factors, and unaffected by common
environmental factors.
Nielsen
Generalizability
• Behavior genetics requires that heritability,
environmentality, and specificity are not fixed properties
but vary depending upon the empirical context.
• THUS, to use the behavior genetic approach as a tool for
comparative stratification research means finding
comparable heritability and enivronmentality estimates for
school or occupational outcomes in different social
systems.