Michael Hout

Maximally maintained inequality: expansion, reform, and opportunity in Irish education, 1921-75

Secondary education in Ireland has expanded steadily in the 20th century, with a big surge in the late 1960s. The AA. analyze the changes in the effect of social origin on educational transitions for the 1908-56 birth cohorts. Results show that overall class differences in educational attainment declined, but class barriers were not removed ; they simply became less consequential because the educational system expanded to the point where it could afford to be less selective. The results lead to the hypothesis of maximally maintained inequality and an explanation of it in terms of rational choice.

Why More Americans Have No Religious Preference: Politics and Generations

The proportion of Americans who reported no religious preference doubled from 7 percent to 14 percent in the 1990s. This dramatic change may have resulted from demographic shifts, increasing religious skepticism, or the mix of politics and religion that characterized the 1990s. One demographic factor is the succession of generations; the percentage of adults who had been raised with no religion increased from 2 percent to 6 percent. Delayed marriage and parenthood also contributed to the increase. Religious skepticism proved to be an unlikely explanation: Most people with no preference hold conventional religious beliefs, despite their alienation from organized religion. In fact, these “unchurched believers” made up most of the increase in the “no religion” preferences. Politics, too, was a significant factor. The increase in “no religion” responses was confined to political moderates and liberals; the religious preferences of political conservatives did not change. This political part of the increase in “nones” can be viewed as a symbolic statement against the Religious Right.

More Universalism, Less Structural Mobility: The American Occupational Structure in the 1980s

The association between mens and womens socioeconomic origins and destinations decreased by one-third between 1972 and 1985. This trend is related to the rising proportion of workers who have college degrees. Origin status effects destination status among workers who do not have bachelors degrees, but college graduation cancels the effect of background status. Therefore, the more college graduates in the work force, the weaker the association between origin status and destination status for the population as a whole. Overall mobility remains unchanged because a decline in structural mobility offsets the increased openness of the class structure. Upward mobility still exceeds downward mobility in the 1980s but by a smaller margin than it did in the 1960s and 1970s.

Distinguishing the geographic levels and social dimensions of U.S. metropolitan segregation, 1960–2000

In this article, we assess trends in residential segregation in the United States from 1960 to 2000 along several dimensions of race and ethnicity, class, and life cycle and present a method for attributing segregation to nested geographic levels. We measured segregation for metropolitan America using the Theil index, which is additively decomposed into contributions of regional, metropolitan, center city—suburban, place, and tract segregation. This procedure distinguishes whether groups live apart because members cluster in different neighborhoods, communities, metropolitan areas, or regions. Substantively, we found that the segregation of blacks decreased considerably after 1960 largely because neighborhoods became more integrated, but the foreign born became more segregated largely because they concentrated in particular metropolitan areas. Class segregation increased between 1970 and 1990 mainly because the affluent increasingly clustered in specific metropolitan areas and in specific municipalities within metropolitan areas. The unmarried increasingly congregated in center cities. The main purpose of this article is to describe and illustrate this multilevel approach to studying segregation.

More shock than therapy : Market transition, employment, and income in Russia, 1991-1995

Sixteen predictions from market transition theory are assessed using survey data on employment, earnings, and income in Russia, during the first five years of market reform. Although the private sector has grown, self‐employment is still rare. Incomes are down, and unemployment is up. A distended income distribution reflects unprecedented income inequality. Distinctive features of late Soviet‐era stratification persist: low returns to education, a gender gap in earnings, and low earnings among professionals. The Russian market transition offers more opportunity in trade, consumer services, and speculation and less in manufacturing than do other emerging makets. This corresponds to “merchat capitalism” and contradicts the predictions of market transition theory. Everything the Communists told us about communism was a lie. Everything they told us about capitalism turns out to be true. (Popular Russian joke, circa 1996)

THE PERSISTENCE OF CLASSES IN POST-INDUSTRIAL SOCIETIES

Class structures have undergone important changes in recent decades with the rise of post-industrial societies. Clark and Lipset have recently interpreted these changs as evidence that class is fragmenting and losing its importance. We reject their analysis. The birth of new sources of inequality does not imply the death of the old ones. We review empirical evidence that shows how class-based stratification continues to be a central factor in social stratification. Clark and Lipset also argue that class affects politics, the economy and the family less than it used to. Their conclusion is based on a selective reading of the empirical literature. We discuss the countervailing evidence and conclude that class effects persist.

The Center Doesn't Hold: Church Attendance in the United States, 1940-1984

Theories about the secularization of society notwithstanding, basic indicators of participation in organized religion show little change over the 50 years covered by the survey research record. Among Protestants, we find that 1950 was a point of low attendance with no prior or subsequent deviation from an average of 40 percent weekly attendance. Among Catholics, attendance rates fell rapidly between 1968 and 1975 but not before or after. Since there are few other trends in the data, we focus on this period of falling attendance among Catholics. The key to falling attendance was the conjuncture of vocal defense of traditional sexual teaching by the Pope and other leaders in the face of rapidly growing opposition to that position among the church-going population. Many Catholics who disagreed with Church teachings on sexuality reduced their attendance (very few actually left the Church). Among active Catholics, opposition to the hierarchy continues to grow, but there has been no decline in attendance rates since 1975. From a latent variable analysis, we conclude that loyalty to the community and communal values is the factor that separates the active from the lapsed Catholics in the 1980s.

The demographic imperative in religious change in the United States

U.S. Protestants are less likely to belong to “mainline” denominations and more likely to belong to “conservative” ones than used to be the case. Evidence from the General Social Survey indicates that higher fertility and earlier childbearing among women from conservative denominations explains 76% of the observed trend for cohorts born between 1903 and 1973: conservative denominations have grown their own. Mainline decline would have slowed in recent cohorts, but a drop‐off in conversions from conservative to mainline denominations prolonged the decline. A recent rise in apostasy added a few percentage points to mainline decline. Conversions from mainline to conservative denominations have not changed, so they played no role in the restructuring.

Status, Autonomy, and Training in Occupational Mobility

The effect of socioeconomic background on occupational attainment is well established. But the effect of status does not account for all of the association between occupational origins and destinations. The amount of autonomy accorded to workers and the degree of specialization in the training required of them are also important for mobility. Men whose fathers were entrepreneurs or were employed in other positions that require little supervision are more likely than men whose fathers were closely supervised to enter occupations that offer at least some degree of on-the-job autonomy. Autonomy and training are especially important for immobility. Men whose fathers were autonomous or specially trained are more likely than other men to be immobile. A model incorporating the effects of socioeconomic status, on-the-job autonomy, and specialized training is fitted to the 1962 and 1973 Occupational Changes in a Generation data. The models fits the data well with few parameters. Subpopulations defined by race, age, and education are also analyzed. The analysis provides new insight into the weakening of the association between origins and destinations between 1962 and 1973, the convergence of black and white mobility patterns, and the role of education as an intervening variable in the mobility process.

Occupational Mobility of Black Men: 1962-1973

William Julius Wilson argues that the gains in employment and occupational status that blacks made during the 1960s bred class cleavages that did not exist within the black population prior to 1960. This paper presents a new analysis of data on interand intragenerational mobility of black menfrom the OCG surveys of 1962 and 1973 that supports Wilsons argument. Three important class effects of the type hypothesized by Wilson arefound. First, class effects on intragenerational mobility between 1962 and 1973 were significantfor blacks; these class effects were similar to class effects among whites. Second, class differences in intergenerational mobility increased between 1962 and 1973. Finally, upward mobility between 1962 and 1973 was greatest among men from the most advantaged socioeconomic backgrounds. The analysis also reveals an important role for public-sector employment in both occupational upgrading among black men and the emergence of class cleavages within the black population. The public sector provided more highand middle-status occupations for black men than did the private sector. On the other hand, the public sector was more selective in recruiting blacks from middle class and skilled manual backgrounds than was the private sector.