Rebecca Jean Emigh

Household composition in post‐socialist Eastern Europe

Two perspectives provide alternative insights into household composition in contemporary Eastern Europe. The first stresses that individuals have relatively fixed preferences about living arrangements and diverge from them only when they cannot attain their ideal. The second major approach, the adaptive strategies perspective, predicts that individuals have few preferences. Instead, they use household composition to cope with economic hardship, deploy labor, or care for children or the elderly. This article evaluates these approaches in five post‐socialist East‐European countries, Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Russia, using descriptive statistics and logistic regression. The results suggest that household extension is common in these countries and provide the most evidence for the adaptive strategies perspective. In particular, the results show that variables operationalizing the adaptive strategies perspective, including measures of single motherhood, retirement status, agricultural cultivation, and poverty, increase the odds of household extension.

Polygynous Fertility: Sexual Competition Versus Progeny

Three theoretical explanations for the effects of polygyny on marital fertility are investigated through an analysis of birth intervals in polygynous marriages of a 19th-century Utah population. Through the use of life-course fertility histories, behavior among polygynous wives is shown to depend on the number of children born to all wives rather than on biological factors such as the competition among greater numbers of wives for reproductive attention or age related infecundity. When biological effects are controlled, a greater (lesser) number of children born to earlier wives reduces (increases) fertility of more recent wives later in their life courses. Thus, it is argued that largely data-driven studies of polygyny may benefit from fertility theory, which emphasizes the role of the demand for children.

Economic Interests and Sectoral Relations: The Undevelopment of Capitalism in Fifteenth‐Century Tuscany1

Many preconditions for a rapid transition to industrial capitalism existed in Tuscany in the late medieval/early modern period, including relatively efficient agricultural production; a well‐developed, commercial manufacturing sector; the absence of a powerful feudal nobility and feudal obligations; a large, precocious urban economy; and the development of a territorial state. No such transition occurred, however. Previous explanations for this are inadequate, because they discount the strength of the Tuscany economy or downplay the presence of these preconditions. To explain the Tuscan outcome, this article draws on sectoral theories (agriculture vs. manufacturing) from the neoclassical and Marxist literature. Since these theories often give the wrong prediction, because they are based on formal attributes of actors, the author combines them with a Weberian conceptualization of substantively specific economic interests.

Labor Use and Landlord Control: Sharecropping and Household Structure in Fifteenth‐Century Tuscany

This study examined the relationship between sharecropping and household structure in 15th century Tuscany. It is demonstrated that the same form of property right (sharecropping) can lead to different demographic outcomes. Property rights to agricultural yield may not determine tenants household structure. The effect of the tenure form is mediated by other social factors. Landlords may use their power to choose large extended families in order to increase yields or to change production processes. Landlords support of large families is exemplified in practices in 18th and 19th century northern and central Italy while landlords in 15th century Tuscany used management techniques. Historical evidence suggests that household extension was less widespread in the 15th century. Landlords gave loans for capital improvements and consolidated land into larger farms. Landlords competed for tenants who were mobile and scarce. Rents were lower; risk was shared and more favorable to tenants. Evidence is provided from two parishes with asymmetrical sharecropping (San Piero a Sieve and Santa Maria a Spugnole) and personal correspondence from one typical landlord. There were fewer extended households than in the rest of rural Tuscany. Leases were negotiated each year. The letters suggest that the landlord moved the tenants between farms to match existing family and domestic situations. Landlords reorganized and recombined existing farms into different individual plots. A lower proportion of extended families is attributed to less power over tenants a dynamic process of landholding change and a recent strategy of sharecropping.

Theorizing strategies: Households and markets in 15th-century Tuscany

This article uses empirical evidence from rural Tuscany in the 15th century to compare three frameworks for conceptualizing household strategies: Chayanovs analysis of the domestic economy, Bourdieus treatment of social reproduction, and Webers distinction between budgetary units and profit-making enterprises. Although Bourdieus framework did not work well in this context because there was little evidence that peasants employed strategies to prevent the division of land, there was considerable evidence to support Chayanov and Weber. As Chayanov predicted, many households allocated labor according to a tradeoff between providing for family members and avoiding drudgery. The Weberian perspective also worked well because it explained why these smallholders often divided their holdings and used money in their household strategies.

Post-Colonial Journeys: Historical Roots of Immigration and Integration

The effect of Italian colonialism on migration to Italy differed according to the pre-colonial social structure, a factor previously neglected by immigration theories. In Eritrea, precolonial Christianity, sharp class distinctions, and a strong state promoted interaction between colonizers and colonized. Eritrean nationalism emerged against Ethiopia; thus, no sharp break between Eritreans and Italians emerged. Two outgrowths of colonialism, the Eritrean national movement and religious ties, facilitate immigration and integration. In contrast, in Somalia, there was no strong state, few class differences, the dominant religion was Islam, and nationalists opposed Italian rule. Consequently, Somali developed few institutional ties to colonial authorities and few institutions provided resources to immigrants. Thus, Somali immigrants are few and are not well integrated into Italian society.

Changes in Censuses from Imperialist to Welfare States

1. Introduction 2. The Interactive Effects of States and Societies on Censuses 3. The Rise of the Racial Census in the United States 4. Italy and the Regions 5. Interventionist Censuses Develop in the Twentieth Century 6. The Post World War II United States: The Census and Identity Mobilization 7. The Insulation of the Italian Census 8. Conclusions

A State-Centered Perspective on Censuses

With the rise of the sociology of statistics, it is perhaps almost commonplace to view censuses as social constructions (Starr 1987:7; Thevenot 1990:1276). A naive—or bottom-up—positivism suggesting that censuses reflect immutable realities of populations is mostly discredited (Alonso and Starr 1987:1; Burke 1987:27; Desrosieres 1998:324–325; Espeland and Stevens 1998:338–339; Kertzer and Arel 2002:2; Nobles 2000:1; Petersen 1969:868; Porter 1995:33–34). The census is not merely an objective tool for realizing the Enlightenment ideals of democratic representation (Sussman 2004:98). Instead, the census is shaped by political and cultural forces that surround it, that is, it is “socially constructed.”

States, Societies, and Censuses

To start, we review relevant work that explains the relations between the state, society, and science. These literatures were long dominated by state-centered perspectives, but they have recently taken a more interactionist turn. We then turn to summarizing the general theoretical model that we developed in Volume 1. We argue that it represents a fully interactive view of the way that societies and states affect censuses. Our model thus draws on the interactionist turn exhibited by the larger literature on states, societies, and science. However, we argue that we develop this interactive view much more fully than this previous literature.

The Interactive Effects of States and Societies on Censuses

This chapter lays out our general model explaining how states and societies influence information gathering. We first develop a society-centered perspective, using micro-Weberian theories to understand how knowledge stems from social interaction at a micro level that is embedded within a macro context, Marxist theories to understand social actors’ explicit creation of knowledge within social locations and institutions at the meso level, and macro-Weberian theories of bureaucracy to understand states’ uses of information at the macro level. We then develop a fully interactive model that combines our society-centered model developed here with the state-centered one described in the previous chapter.