David B. Bills

Participation in Work-Related Education: Variations in Skill Enhancement among Workers, Employers, and Occupational Closure

Abstract Work-related education plays an increasingly important role in the lives of Americans as labor markets, technology, and organizations change, requiring of them more lifelong acquisition of skill. This paper examines how the behaviors of workers, employers, and occupational closure jointly influence the participation of workers in job-related coursework. Together, these actors construct training markets. I use the Adult Education Interview of the 1995 National Household Education Survey (NHES: 95) to examine the role of workers, employers, and closure processes. The findings show persistent patterns of inequality in access to job-related instruction originating in all the three domains of influence.

Labor Market Information and Selection in a Local Restaurant Industry: The Tenuous Balance Between Rewards, Commitments, and Costs

The restaurant industry is characterized as having high turnover, skill homogeneity, and distrust of standard sources of labor market information. We examine how in this context employers seek and evaluate information on potential job candidates (extensive search) and the hiring criteria they use to select new employees (intensive search). We find that employers in the restaurant sector are often passive or reactive about recruitment, distrust standard sources of information, and reject the use of educational credentials and work experience as hiring criteria. They do, however, find ways to signal workplace information to potential job candidates, develop schemes to gather reliable information, and closely evaluate job history data when hiring. Some develop signaling strategies to alert potential employees that their stores are sufficiently different from apparently similar stores to make them unusually attractive places to work. To help secure a sufficiently motivated work force, managers eschew standard measures of potential productive capacity or skills and adopt instead indicators of a modicum of employee motivation. Even under conditions of high turnover, skill homogeneity, and distrusted information, employers find ways to secure effort and commitment from potentially recalcitrant employees.

Social science computer labs as sites for teaching and learning: challenges and solutions in their design and maintenance

Electronic information technology is an increasingly important aspect of teaching and learning in the social sciences. While we have constructed a substantial body of scholarship on the use of this technology for direct instructional purposes, we know far less about how to design and maintain infrastructures capable of enabling and supporting good instructional principles and practice. We need to understand not only the pedagogy of teaching and learning with computer technology, but also a host of administrative, technical, training, and managerial issues. We describe our experience with the design, implementation, and operation of a social science computer laboratory at our own institution. There is little codified knowledge about how to go about establishing these labs. Our purpose is to provide advice and recommendations to those who wish to enhance the teaching mission at, their institutions by engaging in similar activities

Towards a Normal Stratification Order: Actual and Perceived Social Stratification in Post-Socialist Estonia

Perhaps it is the C. Wright Mills legacy, run through forty-some years of my teaching Introduction to Sociology, contrasting ‘‘troubles’’ with ‘‘issues,’’ biography with history, but I find myself particularly intrigued when a sociologist turns to (auto)biography. And not just any sociologist. This is Peter Berger who, along with Thomas Luckmann, changed my life and made me who I am— or at least let me understand who I am. I took my undergraduate theory class in the summer of my freshman year. And after reading Berger’s biography, I was shocked to learn that was just three years after Berger and Luckmann published The Social Construction of Reality. I still own that book; it is one of the few ‘‘theory’’ books that made the cut when I downsized my library to an apartment from a big house. That copy of The Social Construction of Reality, with its highlighting, underlining, exclamation points and scribbles all over the margins, is the document of my birth as a sociologist. So this is the most intimidating book review I have ever faced. I know just about nothing about the sociology of religion, nothing about many of the areas in which Berger has worked and published. I am, as almost anyone would be, impressed with his long list of books, the many areas in which he has worked and contributed, all around the world. A review of his work requires a group effort, just the kind of research group he himself has been so successful at convening. Berger’s tone, the engaging humor, reminds me of one of my elderly uncles. He describes his arrival at the New School to learn sociology as a kind of accident, not realizing how totally marginal it was to mainstream American sociology, offering us the old Jewish joke about the Chinese waiter speaking Yiddish. When a customer is surprised, the owner hushes him: ‘‘He thinks he’s learning English!’’ And we’re off—I am listening to one of my beloved uncles. As he recounts his extraordinarily productive life, I am sometimes in awe, but much as with my uncles, sometimes wincing with embarrassment. This is, as titled, a book of Berger’s adventures as a sociologist, not an autobiography of his life in full. A first marriage comes and goes in a sentence—his children do the same. Brigitte Berger, his wife, does show up now and again throughout the book, but his family life is dismissed with this reference to his early years at the Hartford Seminary Foundation: ‘‘The Hartford years were biographically important both personally and intellectually. I started life with Brigitte, and our two sons were born there.’’ He continues with a sentence or two on her writing, and his own leaving behind of neoorthodox theology and coming to ‘‘liberal Lutheranism’’ (p. 77). Berger spends some time explaining that his religious life is a very important part of who he is, but separate from his life as a sociologist, using as one of many Jewish references (those of us who did not follow his work in the sociology of religion can be forgiven for having thought he was Jewish): a Weberian notion of kosher cooking, keeping fleshy science separate from milky religion. I can respect and appreciate that, both the separation and the places where the separation utterly falls apart. What is most interesting is that it really does not even occur to him that other parts of his life/identity may be worth attending to in his intellectual development. He is, after all, a white man—and I gather that that identity and its privilege do not strike him as noteworthy. Berger was one of the gods of my life, but like many others, he crashes when feminism comes in. His tales of ‘‘militant feminists’’ in a chapter (wince) called ‘‘Politically Incorrect Excursions’’ all but breaks my heart. Militant? As one of my friends asked when

Living, Learning, and the New Higher Education

In the most recent edition of the Digest of Education Statistics (2015), the National Center for Education Statistics reported, with maybe a bit more precision than is warranted, that in 2011–12 there were 7,234 postsecondary Title IV institutions in the United States. About two-thirds of these institutions granted degrees, and a bit less than two-thirds of those were four-year colleges. This sprawling system enrolls well over twenty million students, employs over a million and a half faculty, and touches in some way or another virtually every community in the country, and indeed around the world. As institutions go, American higher education has to be considered a success— more than one observer has called it ‘‘the envy of the world.’’ Young people come from around the world to study in the United States. American universities do well on various ranking schemes intended to sort out which institutions are doing some usually vaguely specified thing better than are other institutions. One would never, though, get much of a sense of American higher education’s enviable status from following popular commentary on postsecondary schooling. The college experience in the United States is regularly blamed for being a ‘‘Five-Year Party’’ (Brandon 2010) that is ‘‘Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids’’ (Hacker and Dreifus 2011) while fomenting a ‘‘Crisis on Campus’’ (Taylor 2010). Mature industries, of course, can be given to calcification, and certainly American higher education is in many ways a mature industry. Observers are not altogether wrong to think of colleges and universities as too often being stubbornly resistant to change, aloof, and isolated. Still, any industry that can trace its roots to the eleventh century might merit a pass on being dismissed as little more than a disappointing defender of the status quo (as the president of the Board of Regents of my own university recently lamented about university ‘‘stakeholders,’’ by which he apparently meant ‘‘professors’’). Clearly, though, even with the hyperbole, not all is well on American campuses. This is particularly true of those whom higher education is most intended to serve—the students. Equitable access to advanced schooling is for too many young people no longer a possibility or even a dream. Debt loads of many of those fortunate enough to be admitted can be crushing. Surprisingly high numbers of those who begin college never finish, and for those who do the goal is often less the expansion of their intellectual horizons than the securing of a marketable credential. Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. 259 pp.

The work-to-college transition: postsecondary expectations and enrolment for young men and women in the US labour force

25.00 paper. ISBN: 9780226028569.

Altered States of the Collective Mind: A Response to Brint

This paper investigates early employment influences on postsecondary expectations and enrolment for working men and women who have recently completed high school in the United States. We find that young workers still have very high expectations for postsecondary education, but that women are more likely to enrol. However, this difference is primarily due to high rates of female enrolment in less-than-four-year institutions. Job training from one’s employer predicts higher odds of future postsecondary enrolment, but this relationship appears only for men. Recommendations are given for assisting young workers in realising postsecondary expectations and advancing social mobility, as well as how gender must be considered in these efforts.

Comments from the Editor The Sociology of Failure and Rejection

We are grateful to Steven Brint for his cogent and spirited challenge to the collective mind of the sociology of education, based on his analysis of the journal that we have been editing, Sociology of Education. Brint’s challenge is perhaps less to editors of Sociology of Education to strive to publish more of a different kind of work than it is to potential contributors to Sociology of Education to produce more of a different kind of work. Brint would like to see more work that, among other things, moves beyond the boundaries of the United States, moves away from a mechanical application of a limited set of statistical procedures, does more to produce theoretically generated knowledge, and looks beyond ‘‘schooling’s dependence on social inequalities’’ and toward ‘‘the dependence of society on the production of the carriers of school socialization and knowledge.’’ Editors come and go, and most have far less capacity to reshape a subdiscipline than many authors might suppose. What is ultimately published in a journal reflects both editorial decisions and what is submitted to that journal. So we write from the perspective of researchers, but researchers who have also had the benefit of observing both unpublished and published manuscripts submitted to Sociology of Education since 2009. In this brief response, we discuss our points of agreement and disagreement with Brint’s effort to nudge the collective mind in a direction more likely to advance the scientific study of schooling and offer a few more thoughts of our own. Our discussion will be very selective. Brint makes an important point about the kind of evidence that is offered up in Sociology of Education. He argues that the ready availability of high-quality, nationally representative data has a disproportionate influence on the shape of the field. He argues, if not quite this bluntly, that sociologists of education are slaves to High School and Beyond, the National Longitudinal Study, the National Household Education Surveys, and (increasingly, and sadly from the perspective of his call for a more comparative sociology of education) the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study and the Program for International Student Assessment. Although Brint concedes that there have been important empirical pay-offs to our use of these data, he believes that their hegemony has impeded theoretical development and narrowed the range of questions that scholars are willing to pursue. In large part, it is hard to disagree with this assessment. We have read too many manuscripts in which the questions of interest are trivial extensions of prior work, made possible by new waves of released data, modest alterations of the survey instruments designed by others, or the additions of new but underconceptualized variables to a garden-variety model predicting test scores. And many areas are underengaged. Perhaps most important, we agree with Brint that too little research is conducted on processes within classrooms and schools, and we suspect that the limitations of our national survey data are at least partly responsible for the current lack of attention. The sociology of education has been enriched by research on within-school processes, perhaps

The Collective Mind A Reassessment

This issue, which completes the 86th year of Sociology of Education, is the final issue produced under my editorship. In the four years that I’ve edited the journal, I’ve read something on the order of 750 papers. It would be nice to think that this exposure to the breadth and depth of what sociologists of education find interesting enough to write about has provided me with an exceptionally clear and comprehensive vision of our discipline. Perhaps there is some of that. But of course, as sociologists know from Neil Smelser (1998), social life is as ambivalent as it is rational, and I’m reminded of Robertson Davies’s reflection that ‘‘there are times when I think that the reading I have done in the past has had no effect except to cloud my mind and make me indecisive.’’ What about those 750 papers? Almost all of them were rejected for publication. I’m convinced that in the vast majority of cases, the authors of those papers sent me the best work they could. A few of those papers (a surprisingly small number, really) were pretty poor. But I think in most cases, even unambiguously unpublishable papers had at least something going for them: the seed of a good idea, capable or even innovative execution, the spotting of a genuine gap in our empirical or theoretical understanding of schools. In a distressingly large number of instances, I found myself rejecting papers I wished I had written. A rejection rate of 90 percent (a very common statistic among top-tier journals) means of course that most people who have mustered their often shaky self-confidence and put their scholarly selfimage at risk end up experiencing failure. The answer to who is getting rejected is pretty simple. Everyone is getting rejected: everyone is failing. The holders of endowed chairs and graduate students both receive rejection letters. But failure is not equally distributed. The ‘‘big’’ names—the household names in the sociology of education research community—get rejected more than anybody. That’s because they submit more papers for consideration than anybody. Although the path to success is writing good papers, the secret to success is to have a large denominator of good papers. Thus, maybe a little perversely, failure is positively correlated with success. This isn’t the way we normally think about failure—or teach our graduate students to think about it—but conceptualizing academic careers using a ‘‘sociology of failure’’ rather than a ‘‘sociology of success’’ strikes me as a much more promising way to understand our discipline. The most successful practitioners of academic sociology are regularly rejected. They are chronic failures. What does this tell us? How does a discipline made up of smart, well-trained, motivated people, all with an incentive to do well, cope with this level of rejection? There is more at stake here than advising aspiring authors to have a thick skin. As Winch (2013) noted, ‘‘rejections elicit emotional pain so sharp it affects our thinking, floods us with anger, erodes our confidence and self-esteem, and destabilizes our fundamental feeling of belonging.’’ Whew. A sociology of failure would begin with the social fact that failure is far more common than is success. In a very Durkheimian way, failure is normal. Nearly 20 years ago, in an article evidently rarely read by American sociologists, Malpas and Wickham (1995) observed that sociologists err in viewing failure as ‘‘an aberration, a temporary breakdown within the system’’ (p. 38). They added that failure is in fact central to social life, every bit as deeply embedded in social structures as is achievement, attainment, efficiency, or effectiveness. As a discipline, we need ways to persuade our newest recruits to the world of publication (and our veterans as well) that it’s both normal and acceptable to fail, that risking failure (and in fact, failing with some regularity) is the surest way to success, and that the clichés about persistence, perseverance, and belief in oneself in the face of empirical evidence that our work isn’t making the grade are in fact largely true. But one’s personal experience of and response to the ubiquity of failure is only a relatively small part of the sociological story. There are structural aspects of the sociology of failure and rejection. Although everyone fails most of the time, our judgments over who should fail are inconsistent. Editorial

2013 Sociology of Education Reviewer Awards

The spring 2009 issue of the newsletter of the Sociology of Education Section of the American Sociological Association featured a brief (about 4,000 words) essay by sociologist Steven Brint. In ‘‘The ‘Collective Mind’ at Work: A Decade in the Life of U.S. Sociology of Education,’’ Brint offered al ucid and empirically informed appraisal of American sociology of education as reflected in its primary journal, Sociology of Education .B rint’s essay is reprinted here as it appeared in the newsletter. 1 Brint based his essay on a content analysis of all of the articles that appeared in Sociology of Education between 1999 and 2008. By carefully coding each of the 168 articles that were published during this period into a variety of categories (as explained in his article), Brint reached several conclusions about the collective mind of the sociology of education research community. American sociology of education, according to Brint, focused on ‘‘studies of educational achievement and educational attainment as conditioned by social inequality, family and student behaviors, and school organization.’’ It did so in a way that Brint characterized as not exactly ‘‘abstract empiricism,’’ but certainly only mildly interested in the development and testing of sociological theory. Finally, Brint saw the collective mind of American sociology of education as generally indifferent to ‘‘most of the rest of the world, the U.S. capitalist market economy, or state-based policy coalitions struggling over the forms and functions of schooling.’’ Since its publication, Brint’s provocative but evenhanded criticisms of sociology of education have given members of the research community much to think about and talk about. His observations on where we succeed and where we fail as a subdiscipline are frequent topics of conversation at professional meetings, and (admittedly without looking at the data) the piece has been cited an unusual number of times for a non-peer-reviewed publication. Brint’s essay was much on the minds of the current editorial team when we assumed responsibility for the journal four years ago. We have been struck over the years how many of our colleagues have read Brint’s piece and were eager to discuss it. The transition from one editorial team to the next provides an opportunity to revisit Brint’s assessment of our shared enterprise as sociologists of education. We asked the incoming editorial team of Rob Warren, Amy Binder, Eric Grodsky, and Hyunjoon Park to prepare brief responses to Brint’s essay, 2 and the current team of David Bills, Steve Morgan, and Stefanie DeLuca jointly prepared its own response. Steven Brint, graciously and on very short notice, has written a response to the responses. We thank everyone for their participation in this exchange.