Mary C. Brinton

The New Institutionalism in Sociology

Foreword Robert K. Kerton Introduction 1. Sources of the new institutionalism Victor Nee Part I. Institutions and Social Norms: 2. Embeddedness and beyond: institutions, exchange and social structure Victor Nee and Paul Ingram 3. Of coase and cattle: dispute resolution among neighbors in Shasta County Robert C. Ellickson 4. Cultural beliefs and the organization of society: a historical and theoretical reflection on collectivist and individualist societies Avner Greif 5. Conflict over changing social norms: bargaining, ideology, and enforcement Jack Knight and Jean Ensminger 6. Embeddedness and immigration: notes on the social determinants of economic action Alejandro Portes and Julia Sensenbrenner Part II. Institutional Embeddedness in Capitalist Economies: 7. The organization of economies Gary G. Hamilton and Robert Feenstra 8. Institutional embeddedness in Japanese labor markets Mary C. Brinton and Takehiko Kariya 9. Winner-take-all markets and wage discrimination Robert H. Frank 10. Institutions and the labor market Bruce Western Part III. Institutional Change and Economic Performance: 11. Economic performance through time Douglass C. North 12. changing the rules interests, organizations, and institutional change in the US hospitality Paul Ingram 13. The importance of the local: rural institutions and economic change in preindustrial England Rosemary L. Hopcroft 14. Outline of an institutionalist theory of inequality: the case of socialist and postcommunist Eastern Europe Ivan Szelenyi and Eric Kostello Index.

The Social-Institutional Bases of Gender Stratification: Japan as an Illustrative Case

Gender stratification theory can be informed by a cross-cultural perspective and greater attention to the embeddedness of stratification processes within the social context. This article focuses on how the development and evaluation of human capital varies across cultural settings and on the implications this has for the degree of gender stratification in the economy. An argument is made for the theoretical utility of the concept of a human capital development system, constituded by the way social institutions-and social actors in those institutions-share the responsibilities of human capital development across the individuals life cycle. Japan is seen as having a system of human capital development that encourages the maintenance of greater gender stratification than the American system.

Microclass mobility: social reproduction in four countries.

In the sociological literature on social mobility, the long‐standing convention has been to assume that intergenerational reproduction takes one of two forms: a categorical form that has parents passing on a big‐class position to their children or a gradational form that has parents passing on their socioeconomic standing. These approaches ignore in their own ways the important role that occupations play in transferring opportunities from one generation to the next. In new analyses of nationally representative data from the United States, Sweden, Germany, and Japan, the authors show that (a) occupations are an important conduit for social reproduction, (b) the most extreme rigidities in the mobility regime are only revealed when analyses are carried out at the occupational level, and (c) much of what shows up as big‐class reproduction in conventional mobility analyses is in fact occupational reproduction in disguise.

Married Women's Employment in Rapidly Industrializing Societies: Examples from East Asia

A variety of explanations have addressed the phenomenon of secular change in married womens employment in rapidly industrializing countries. These include theoretical frameworks that emphasize female labor supply, the conditions of labor demand, patriarchal values, the international division of labor, and the effects of exported industrialization. This article examines two societies (South Korea and Taiwan) that showed considerable similarity in female labor supply conditions, female labor force participation, and cultural values 20 years ago but have since diverged in dramatic and puzziling ways. Using aggregate and microlevel data, this article shows that the emergent differences in married womens employment are best explained by the intersection of labor supply (similar in the two cases) and demand (markedly different). The article highlights the impact of government policy and foreign loan investment in shaping the nature of labor demand during rapid export-led industrialization in both countries.

Cultural Capital in East Asian Educational Systems: The Case of Japan

Cultural capital has been an important but often elusive concept in the study of educational processes and social class reproduction. The authors suggest that this is partly because a country’s educational system and ways of evaluating students at different educational transitions set the context for the mechanisms through which embodied and objectified cultural capital operate. Moreover, parents in some societies invest in children’s “shadow education” (extracurricular classes or tutoring) at key educational transitions, and it is not clear whether this replaces cultural capital or supplements it. The authors use data from Japan, a country whose educational system depends heavily but not exclusively on standardized examinations, to examine how cultural capital affects students’ progress at three points in the educational process that involve different relative emphasis on examinations and on teachers’ subjective judgment. In this way, the authors clarify the ways that embodied and objectified cultural capital exert effects on educational outcomes.

GENDER STRATIFICATION IN CONTEMPORARY URBAN JAPAN

Japanese women participate in the labor force at rates similar to women in Western industrial nations but gender stratification patterns are sharper. Women in Japan are less apt to work as employees a tendency that increases with age. Likewise female employees tend to shift from larger to smaller firms across the life cycle whereas male employees do not. These aggregate patterns imply that Japanese women are seldom placed in career-track positions in large firms early in their careers. Analyses on labor market entry data from the 1984 Survey on Work Patterns substantiate this view. Although Japanese men and women enter large firms at equivalent rates upon leaving school 22% of men and only 7% of women enter career ladders. The majority of women enter large firms as clerical workers 3/4 of whom are in low-level assistant clerical positions. Causal processes governing entrance to large firms and career tracks are examined in the paper with particular attention to the relative returns to different levels and types of education for Japanese men and women. (authors)

One Egalitarianism or Several? Two Decades of Gender-Role Attitude Change in Europe1

This article challenges the implicit assumption of many cross-national studies that gender-role attitudes fall along a single continuum between traditional and egalitarian. The authors argue that this approach obscures theoretically important distinctions in attitudes and renders analyses of change over time incomplete. Using latent class analysis, they investigate the multidimensional nature of gender-role attitudes in 17 postindustrial European countries. They identify three distinct varieties of egalitarianism that they designate as liberal egalitarianism, egalitarian familism, and flexible egalitarianism. They show that while traditional gender-role attitudes have precipitously and uniformly declined in accordance with the “rising tide” narrative toward greater egalitarianism, the relative prevalence of different egalitarianisms varies markedly across countries. Furthermore, they find that European nations are not converging toward one dominant egalitarian model but rather, remain differentiated by varieties of egalitarianism.

From High School to Work in Japan: Lessons for the United States?

Youth employment problems have received considerable public and scholarly attention in the United States in recent years. A chief concern is the worsening situation of high school‐educated youth versus their college‐educated counterparts in terms of wages, turnover rates, and unemployment. Japan has been cited as an example of a country that demonstrates how high school‐employer linkages can facilitate the successful and stable transition from high school to work. This article explains this system of linkages and critically evaluates its operation and results.

Intentions Into Actions Norms as Mechanisms Linking Macro- and Micro-Levels

This article addresses the emergence of “lowest-low” fertility in some countries, primarily in Southern Europe and East Asia, and poses the question of why we find such large differences in birth rates across postindustrial societies. A set of macro–micro mechanisms are identified, which are examined empirically using comparative data for seven countries from the Gender and Generations Survey. Social norms, and in particular social norms related to gender roles, are at the center of the analysis as a mechanism that conditions the translation of intentions into behavior. Societies that discourage gender equity in the private sphere of the household tend to be characterized by a strong breadwinner ideology. In these societies, the valorization of women’s role as household manager and mother is mirrored by the valorization of men’s role as breadwinner for the household. In these societies, there is a strong norm that a young man should be able to support a family prior to getting married and becoming a parent, that is, that males should prove themselves to be adequate breadwinners. When combined with changing structural conditions, such as high unemployment rates, prolonged periods of education, and increasingly insecure terms of employment in flexible labor markets, this norm will lead to declining birth rates. Hence, norms work as a mechanism that filters the effect of structural conditions so that structural constraints on fertility, such as limited labor market opportunities for young men, will affect fertility outcomes via the mechanism of gender-role norms.

Marriage and Fertility Behaviour in Japan: Economic Status and Value-OrientationMarriage and Fertility Behaviour in Japan: Economic Status and Value-Orientation, by FukudaNobutaka. Singapore: Springer, 2016. 183 pp.

Postindustrial societies have experienced substantial demographic change in the past several decades. Of particular significance is the unforeseen decline to birth rates well below population-replacement level in many countries, including Japan. While a voluminous research literature addresses fertility decline in Europe, the Englishlanguage literature on fertility in East Asia is more limited despite the fact that every society in the region is now experiencing very low birth rates. Nobutaka Fukuda’s Marriage and Fertility Behaviour in Japan: Economic Status and Value-Orientation takes up the challenge of explaining the changes in marriage and fertility behaviors that have produced this outcome for Japan. Fukuda’s approach is to juxtapose two theoretical frameworks on marriage and fertility: the economic framework of Gary Becker and the new household economics, and the ideational framework of Ron Inglehart, Ron Lesthaeghe, and others. He presents these two theoretical perspectives as contrasting variants of rational (purposive) action. While the economic approach prioritizes the utility maximization of the household and the concept of children as consumer goods, the ideational approach emphasizes the value changes related to individualization and self-actualization that are described in Second Demographic Transition theory. This juxtaposition of economic versus attitudinal and value influences on family behavior constitutes the main theme running throughout Fukuda’s analysis of Japanese marriage and fertility behaviors. As is well known, one of the most distinctive characteristics of family behavior in Japan is the persistent tight coupling of marriage and fertility. This means that Japanese fertility rates can mainly be accounted for by the timing of entry into marriage (or the choice of non-marriage) and the level of marital fertility. Fukuda analyzes the determinants of each of these. With regard to marital fertility, nearly all couples transition to a first birth, regardless of their economic circumstances; variation occurs principally in the transition to second or higher-order births. One of the book’s most striking findings is that economic considerations seemingly provide little explanatory power in predicting such births: neither husbands’ nor wives’ incomes are related to the transition to a(nother) child over the time span of the panel data Fukuda uses. Instead, the biggest determinant of transitioning to a subsequent birth is wife’s employment status, with fulltime working wives having the lowest probability of doing so. An important corollary is that while husband’s contribution to housework affects this likelihood, the effect is minimal and is not enough to offset wife’s fulltime employment. Fukuda therefore concludes that there is little support for an economic explanation of marital fertility. The results for a values explanation are not terribly strong either, with the exception that wives’ progressive gender-role attitudes exert a particularly negative effect on the probability of a subsequent birth if they are employed full time. This highlights the seeming incompatibility within a family model in Japan where both partners work full time and simultaneously have two or more children. Economic considerations are related to Japanese fertility instead through a more indirect path: the effect on marriage. Consistent with a male-breadwinner model, men in professional and managerial jobs show the highest propensity to marry, and men’s income is also strongly related to marriage probability. However, these results hold for women too, which would not be predicted by such a model. A second purpose of the book is more descriptive: to analyze change in attitudes related to gender roles and intergenerational relations. Fukuda reports strikingly different findings across these two realms. Relying on a repeated cross-sectional survey of married women conducted every five years since 1993, he demonstrates a marked shift away from attitudinal support of coresidence for Reviews 555