Donald Tomaskovic-Devey

Education and the Inequalities of Place

Students living in inner city and rural areas of the United States exhibit lower educational achievement and a higher likelihood of dropping out of high school than do their suburban counterparts. Educational research and policy has tended to neglect these inequalities or, at best, focus on one type but not the other. In this article, we integrate literatures on spatial stratification and educational outcomes, and offer a framework in which resources influential for achievement/attainment are viewed as embedded within, and varying across, inner city, rural and suburban places. We draw from the National Educational Longitudinal Survey and the Common Core of Data, and employ hierarchical linear and hierarchical logistic modeling techniques to test our arguments. Results reveal inner city and rural disadvantages in both family and school resources. These resource inequalities translate into important educational investments at both family and school levels, and help explain deficits in attainment and standardized achievement. We conclude by discussing the implications of our approach and findings for analyses of educational stratification specifically and spatial patterning of inequality more generally.

Sex segregation, labor process organization, and gender earnings inequality

This article revisits Tams finding that occupational sex composition does not influence wages. This problem is approached in two quite different ways. First, a potential conceptual and methodological weakness in all research that focuses on national occupational, rather than local job and organizational, processes is pointed out. Second, the implications of organizationally relevant social closure and gendered labor process theories for our understanding of wage determination models is developed. The gendered devaluation and specialized human capital theories, which are stressed by Tam and his critics, do not represent the entire story. We find that the sex composition effect on wages exists, but it is indirect and relatively weak, operating largely through lower access of typically female jobs to extensive training. There is no strong evidence for the existence of a more generic gendered labor process in these cross‐sectional data. The evidence for social closure processes in this article is limited to the gendered nature of access to on‐the‐job training.

Race and the Accumulation of Human Capital across the Career: A Theoretical Model and Fixed‐Effects Application1

The authors develop an explicitly sociological variant on human capital theory, emphasizing that most human capital acquisition is a social product, not an individual investment decision. The authors apply this model to racial earnings inequality, focusing on how exposure to discrimination influences both human capital acquisition and earnings inequalities as they develop across the career. The authors estimate models of career earnings trajectories, which show flatter trajectories for black and Hispanic men relative to white men, partial mediation by human capital acquired inside the labor market, and much larger race/ethnic career inequalities among the highly educated.

An Establishment-Level Test of the Statistical Discrimination Hypothesis

This article explores the basic assumption of statistical discrimination theory, which holds that women and minorities earn lower wages because they, on average, have lower productivity. Employer exploitation of women and minorities and social closure by advantaged employees are advanced as alternative explanations for the lower wages of women and minorities. The authors first demonstrate that there are substantial gender and racial wage penalties net of human capital for a sample of employees. The primary analysis focuses on the sample of private-for-profit establishments in which these individuals are employed. Establishment productivity as well as aggregate salaries and wages and profits are regressed on the sex and race composition of the establishment with other factors that may influence establishment productivity. Findings show that neither the sex nor race compositions of the workplace are associated with productivity. The authors interpret the results to be most consistent with a social closure account of gender and racial earnings inequality.

Financialization and U.S. Income Inequality, 1970-2008

Focusing on U.S. nonfinance industries, we examine the connection between financialization and rising income inequality. We argue that the increasing reliance on earnings realized through financial channels decoupled the generation of surplus from production, strengthening owners’ and elite workers’ negotiating power relative to other workers. The result was an incremental exclusion of the general workforce from revenue-generating and compensation-setting processes. Using time-series cross-section data at the industry level, we find that increasing dependence on financial income, in the long run, is associated with reducing labor’s share of income, increasing top executives’ share of compensation, and increasing earnings dispersion among workers. Net of conventional explanations such as deunionization, globalization, technological change, and capital investment, the effects of financialization on all three dimensions of income inequality are substantial. Our counterfactual analysis suggests that financialization could account for more than half of the decline in labor’s share of income, 9.6% of the growth in officers’ share of compensation, and 10.2% of the growth in earnings dispersion between 1970 and 2008.

Income Dynamics, Economic Rents and the Financialization of the US Economy

The 2008 collapse of the world financial system, while proximately linked to the housing bubble and risk laden mortgage backed securities, was a consequence of the financialization of the U.S. economy since the 1970s. This paper examines the institutional and income dynamics associated with financialization, advancing a sociological explanation of the large shifts of income into the finance sector. Complementary developments included banking deregulation, finance industry concentration, the increased size and scope of institutional investors, the shareholder value movement, and the dominance of the neoliberal policy model. As a result we estimate that since 1980 between 5.8 and 6.6 trillion dollars were transferred to the finance sector. We conclude that understanding inequality dynamics requires attention to market institutions and politics.

Intersections of power and privilege: Long-term trends in managerial representation.

This article examines post–Civil Rights Act trends in private sector managerial representation for white men, white women, black men, and black women. We examine how three factors affect changing access to managerial positions: (1) industrial restructuring, (2) the process of bottom-up ascription, and (3) organizational characteristics. Accounting for compositional shifts in the labor supply, we find that white male managerial overrepresentation remains virtually unchanged since 1966, even while other status groups make gains. A significant portion of the observed equal opportunity advance for women and blacks takes place in the expanding service sectors of the economy. We also find that female and minority gains are enhanced in larger and more managerially intensive workplaces. For all groups, managerial representation is increasingly tied to the presence of similar others in nonmanagerial jobs. Further examination reveals a new status hierarchy of managers and subordinates—a hierarchy wherein white men are likely to manage men of all races. White women, in comparison, are realizing a growing racial privilege in managing women of color.

Discrimination and Desegregation: Equal Opportunity Progress in U.S. Private Sector Workplaces since the Civil Rights Act:

Numerous commentators have concluded that the Civil Rights Act was effective in promoting increased access to quality jobs for racial minorities. Many have worried as well that the pace of change has been too slow or stalled, particularly after 1980. Few have directly discussed under what conditions we might expect equal employment opportunity (EEO) to flourish. Explanations of status inequalities in the workplace have primarily relied on theories of social conflict and discrimination. Organizational perspectives on stratification, while not completely absent from previous research, remain a road less traveled. In this paper we present trends in race-sex inequality in U.S. workplaces since the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and describe the organizational practices and discrimination processes that are likely to maintain status inequalities in the workplace and those which might be catalysts of change.

LOOKING FOR THE DRIVING WHILE BLACK PHENOMENA: CONCEPTUALIZING RACIAL BIAS PROCESSES AND THEIR ASSOCIATED DISTRIBUTIONS

This article describes four bias mechanisms that might produce the “driving while Black” phenomena. First, some officers may be racially prejudiced and so consciously target minority drivers. Second, most officers have access to cultural stereotypes and their associated cognitive biases. This mechanism will produce a diffuse tendency to stop minority drivers at higher rates than majority drivers. This bias mechanism should be present among both minority and majority officers but operate more strongly on average for majority officers. Racial profiling, the organizational practice of stopping individuals because they “fit” a profile that includes race/ethnic characteristics, will produce racial bias in stops at very high rates among both majority and minority officers. Finally, if the police are deployed more heavily in minority communities, this will also produce high rates of minority stops. Neither organizational mechanism requires any bias in officer or organizational intent, although they will produce biased policing.

Patriarchal pressures: an exploration of organizational processes that exacerbate and erode gender earnings inequality

The focus of this article is on the organizational contexts in which gender-based earnings inequalities are exacerbated or eroded. By conceptualizing patriarchy in workplaces as a process of dynamic struggles over organizational practices and rewards, we assume that the degree of gender inequality in workplaces should vary as a function of organizational structure, resources, and practices. We examine five organizational characteristics hypothesized to affect the level of gender inequality: organizational resources, regional gender culture, market sector, size of firm, and formalization of employment relations. Gender earnings inequality varies across organizational contexts, with the predicted female-to-male earnings ratio ranging from as little as 51 percent to parity. In particular, we find that gender earnings inequalities are higher where organizational resources are greater and lower where formalization of the employment relationship is greater and in medium-size firms. We conclude that the gendered wage determination process reflects an interaction between organization, job, and individual characteristics.