Bart Bonikowski

Make Money Surfing the Web? The Impact of Internet Use on the Earnings of U.S. Workers

Much research on the “digital divide” presumes that adults who do not use the Internet are economically disadvantaged, yet little research has tested this premise. After discussing several mechanisms that might produce differences in earnings growth between workers who do and do not use the Internet, we use data from the Current Population Survey to examine the impact of Internet use on changes in earnings over 13-month intervals at the end of the “Internet boom.” Our analyses reveal robustly significant positive associations between Web use and earnings growth, indicating that some skills and behaviors associated with Internet use were rewarded by the labor market. Consistent with human-capital theory, current use at work had the strongest effect on earnings. In contrast to economic theory (which has led economists to focus exclusively on effects of contemporaneous workplace technology use), workers who used the Internet only at home also did better, suggesting that users may have benefited from superior access to job information or from signaling effects of using a fashionable technology. The positive association between computer use and earnings appears to reflect the effect of Internet use, rather than use of computers for offline tasks. These results suggest that inequality in access to and mastery of technology is a valid concern for students of social stratification.

Varieties of American Popular Nationalism

Despite the relevance of nationalism for politics and intergroup relations, sociologists have devoted surprisingly little attention to the phenomenon in the United States, and historians and political psychologists who do study the United States have limited their focus to specific forms of nationalist sentiment: ethnocultural or civic nationalism, patriotism, or national pride. This article innovates, first, by examining an unusually broad set of measures (from the 2004 GSS) tapping national identification, ethnocultural and civic criteria for national membership, domain-specific national pride, and invidious comparisons to other nations, thus providing a fuller depiction of Americans’ national self-understanding. Second, we use latent class analysis to explore heterogeneity, partitioning the sample into classes characterized by distinctive patterns of attitudes. Conventional distinctions between ethnocultural and civic nationalism describe just about half of the U.S. population and do not account for the unexpectedly low levels of national pride found among respondents who hold restrictive definitions of American nationhood. A subset of primarily younger and well-educated Americans lacks any strong form of patriotic sentiment; a larger class, primarily older and less well educated, embraces every form of nationalist sentiment. Controlling for sociodemographic characteristics and partisan identification, these classes vary significantly in attitudes toward ethnic minorities, immigration, and national sovereignty. Finally, using comparable data from 1996 and 2012, we find structural continuity and distributional change in national sentiments over a period marked by terrorist attacks, war, economic crisis, and political contention.

Cross-national interaction and cultural similarity: A relational analysis

The study examines the relationship between the structure of cross-national relations and the dyadic cultural similarity of 19 countries over 10 years, based on the assumption that patterns of interaction between state, private sector, and civil society actors influence national cultures. The relations analyzed include trade, military alliances, IGO memberships, phone calls, and military conflicts. The findings demonstrate that cross-national interactions, particularly trade and IGO memberships, are strong predictors of cultural similarity that complement the modernizing effects of economic development. In addition to explaining variation in cultural similarity between country dyads, the study challenges primordialist approaches to comparative cultural research that rely on civilizational country classifications. Instead, systematic measures of religious tradition, geographic region, linguistic heritage, and imperial history are used to identify factors that shape countries’ dyadic cultural similarities. Of these, only membership in former empires is a significant predictor of cultural similarity.

Nationhood as Cultural Repertoire: Collective Identities and Political Attitudes in France and Germany

This chapter outlines a new approach to comparative research on nationalist beliefs in established democracies, using evidence from France and Germany. Instead of assuming the existence of a unitary and homogeneous national identity at the country level or reducing nationalism to isolated variables, I identify subsets of survey respondents in each country who espouse distinctive combinations of attitudes toward the nation. The resulting repertoires of nationhood are strikingly similar in content—but not prevalence—across the two countries, which helps shed light on aggregate patterns of nationalist beliefs in the two populations. Moreover, adherence to each type of nationalism consistently predicts support for anti-immigrant attitudes, Euroscepticism, economic protectionism, and radical-right party support. The results suggest that competing popular understandings of the nation are likely to constitute salient and mobilizable cultural cleavages in contemporary European politics.

Business Owner Demography, Human Capital, and Social Networks

While early work on the topic of entrepreneurship tended to portray entrepreneurs as heroic individuals (e.g., see Raines & Leathers, 2000, on Schumpeter’s description), more recent perspectives have come to recognize that new business activity is often initiated by groups of startup owners. Starting in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a new generation of scholars in the entrepreneurship field called for a systematic program of research that would document the prevalence of startup teams, describe their properties, and assess their impact on business performance (e.g., Gartner, Shaver, Gatewood, & Katz, 1994; Kamm, Shuman, Seeger, & Nurick, 1990). In a review of developments in entrepreneur research and theory, Gartner et al. (1994) noted that “the ‘entrepreneur’ in entrepreneurship is more likely to be plural, rather than singular” (p. 6). They offered an expansive definition of startup teams, which included owners, investors, organizational decision-makers, family members, advisors, critical suppliers, and buyers as possible candidates for the role of “entrepreneur.”

Nation-State as Symbolic Construct

Research on nationalism has been especially preoccupied with those aspects of the phenomenon that are most destabilizing for existing institutions, thereby assuming that in the absence of violent upheavals, nationalism in established democracies is simply a fait accompli rather than a source of continued social and political change. In contrast, more recent studies have turned their attention to everyday forms of nationalism, arguing that the primacy of the nation-state as a unit of political governance and collective identification is continually reinforced – and sometimes subtly altered – through routine cognitive and affective orientations that are themselves products of institutional and ritual practices. This article provides an analytical overview of this literature, identifying its contributions, limitations, and potential for achieving a more complete understanding of nationalism in contemporary societies.