Robin Stryker

Rules, Resources, and Legitimacy Processes: Some Implications for Social Conflict, Order, and Change

Current scholarship on how science affects laws legitimacy in advanced capitalist democracies yields inconsistent predictions and findings. This article resolves inconsistent and provides new insights by constructing a general framework relating laws legitimacy to the mix of legal and scientific rationalities in law. Consistent with dualistic visions of structure as both rules/schemas and resources, the theory specifies how competing legal and scientific rule/resource sets shape action and produce order and change through conflict in and over legal institutions. The theorys guiding orientations illuminate legitimacy processes, order, and change in other institutions including the economy, the polity, and education.

Political culture wars 1960s style : Equal employment opportunity-affirmative action law and the Philadelphia Plan

This article empirically examines contextually conditioned construction of symbolic resources during political debate over the 1969 revised Philadelphia Plan–a crucial moment in the shaping of federal equal employment law. Tying together political sociologys concept of policy feedback with legal and cultural sociologys concept of culture as a resource, the article explains how actors who were hampered by the explicit language used to embed equal opportunity values into law turned apparent constraint into an opportunity to transform law. The article simultaneously illuminates an underdeveloped aspect of equal employment laws unfolding and builds more general theory to help explain how laws language, general cultural values expressed in law, and alternative methods used to interpret law mediate the effects of past law on future law. Defining concepts of value centrality and explicitness of legal language, the article uses its case study to suggest hypotheses about how variation in centrality of cultural values and explicitness of language used to incorporate these values into law affect variation in mobilization of different types of cultural strategies by actors struggling over law interpretation and enforcement.

Beyond History Versus Theory Strategic Narrative and Sociological Explanation

Strategic narrative is a useful frame for the history-theory relationship in qualitative, historical research. It suggests that some stories and ways of constructing stories will promote theory building more than will others, enabling historical sociologists to help cumulate knowledge more effectively. Four aspects of strategic narrative are discussed and illustrated: (a) concurrent construction and mutual adjustment of history and theory, with each defined and built with reference to the other; (b) selection and construction of history in response to a clearly developed abstract, general theoretical backdrop, with attention to how that backdrop conditions building of history; (c) construction of a theoretical and historical anomaly as the starting point for a phased-in comparative research design, with each phase building narratives and comparisons around key events to answer specific theoretical questions, and all phases cumulating to respond to the full range of general theoretical issues motivating the design; and (d) formulation of clear, precise concepts, measures, and coding techniques to build history as both path-dependent action sequence and complex institutional and cultural context/conjuncture.

The Strength of a Weak Agency: Enforcement of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Expansion of State Capacity, 1965–1971

This article analyzes the anomalous case of early Title VII enforcement to challenge the standard political‐institutional (PI) account of state capacity. Title VII prohibited employment discrimination, but the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was granted scant enforcement resources. Yet the early EEOC aggressively enforced and developed Title VII. To solve the anomaly, the authors integrate insights from the literatures on social movements and the sociology of law. In the absence of conventional administrative resources, apparently weak state agencies can expand their capacity through the legal strategy of broad statutory construction. This strategy is more likely with the presence of social movement pressure from below. The authors argue that state capacity is a “moving target,” with state and societal actors building on legal as well as administrative resources to construct and transform capacity. By reconceptualizing state capacity, the authors contribute to nuanced explanations of state policy that are both “political” and “institutional” and that highlight the centrality of legal interpretation and judicial review to political sociology.

Goodness-of-Fit Tests and Descriptive Measures in Fuzzy-Set Analysis

In this article the authors develop goodness-of-fit tests for fuzzy-set analyses to formally assess the fit between empirical information and various causal hypotheses while accounting for measurement error in membership scores. These goodness-of-fit tests, and the accompanying logic, provide a sound inferential foundation for fuzzy-set methodology. The authors also develop descriptive measures to complement these tests. Examples from Stryker and Eliason (2003) and Mahoney (2003) show how goodness-of-fit tests and descriptive measures may be used to assess individual causal factors as well as conjunctions of factors. The authors show how these tools provide more information in a fuzzy-set analysis than do tests currently in use. In providing this inferential foundation, the authors also show that fuzzy-set methods (a) are no less amenable to falsificationist methods of the Neyman-Pearson type than are standard statistical techniques and (b) may be usefully applied in either an exploratory/inductive or a confirmatory/deductive research design.

Religio-Ethnic Effects on Attainments in the Early Career

A cultural explanation for religio-ethnic effects on attainments is tested by a structural equation model applied to a sample of white males who were seniors in Wisconsin high schools in 1957. Jews have a highly positive cultural orientation to education and occupational status, while that of Irish and Anglo-Saxon Catholics is mostly positive, that of Italian Catholics is mixed, and that of German Lutherans is mostly negative. Cultural mediation through high-school academic performance, significant others, and educational plans accounts for part of the religio-ethnic effect on education. Structural factors may account for remaining direct effects. Educational and occupational aspirations are critical cultural mediators of religio-ethnic effects on early occupational attainment. Religio-ethnic effects on achievements-particularly first job-are heightened in an urban subsample. Context-specific group cultural patterns may partly account for this finding, but historically rooted patterns of differential occupational opportunity unique to this city may also be at work.

Globalization and the welfare state

Introduces a special issue on globalization and the welfare state. Asserts that economic globalization constrains national economic and social policy far more now than ever before, although the level of international trade has not increased that much compared to levels at the beginning of this century. Talks about the political consequences of economic globalization, particularly welfare state retrenchment in the advanced capitalist world. Outlines the papers included in this issue – comparing welfare system changes in Sweden, the UK and the USA; urban bias in state policy‐making in Mexico; and the developing of the Israeli welfare state. Concludes that economic globalization has a limited effect in shaping social welfare policy in advanced capitalist countries; nevertheless, recommends further research into which aspects of economic globalization shape social welfare policy.

Class Context and Pension Response to Demographic Structure in Advanced Industrial Democracies

This paper readdresses debates over the competing influence of class power and size of the aged population on pension spending by considering how the corporatist/pluralist dimension of interest representation shapes the effects of age and class. Corporatism, taken as the degree to which officially-designated representatives of class groups are integrated within and organized by the state for mediation in national policy formation, provides the context in which age and class mobilization may influence pension spending. After measuring the degree of corporatism for 18 advanced industrial democracies, we estimate pooled time-series cross-section models for the period 1959-1980 in which dynamic determinants of pension spending vary with corporatist context. The results support the theoretical predictions that (1) the positive effects of age structure on pension spending are diminished by corporatism (and increased with pluralism) and (2) the effect of class variables such as partisan party rule and business profits are increased by corporatism (and decreased by pluralism). This suggests theoretical integration of diverse explanations of pension spending by specifying the context in which each best applies.

DISPARATE IMPACT AND THE QUOTA DEBATES: Law, Labor Market Sociology, and Equal Employment Policies

Bringing sociological theory and research to bear on the “quota debates” dogging discussion of federal civil rights legislation in the early 1990s, this article highlights sociologys role in shaping employment law and shows how apparently technical legal arguments about allocating burdens of proof affect labor market resource allocation among the classes, races, and genders. Contrasting institutional-sociological with liberal-legal concepts of discrimination, the article shows why disparate impact theory has been the most sociological approach to Title VII enforcement. It also shows how disparate impact—a theory and method for establishing legally cognizable employment discrimination injurious to women and minorities—is, and is not, related to affirmative action—a policy encompassing a broad range of procedures intended to provide positive consideration to members of groups discriminated against in the past. Finally, a competing incentive framework is used to show that, although disparate impact creates some incentives for employers to adopt quota hiring, such incentives are counter-balanced by major incentives working against race- and gender-based quotas. Major counterincentives stem from disparate impact itself, from other aspects of equal employment law, and from organizational goals shaping business response to the legal environment.

The Welfare State, Family Policies, and Women’s Labor Force Participation: Combining Fuzzy-Set and Statistical Methods to Assess Causal Relations and Estimate Causal Effects

In Why We Need a New Welfare State (2002), four long-time male scholars of the twentieth-century welfare state — Gosta Esping-Andersen, John Myles, Anton Hemerijck, and Duncan Gallie — argue that the welfare state of the twenty-first century requires “comprehensive redesign.” The twenty-first-century welfare state must be redesigned around not just government-market relations and the life-course patterns of men, but also work-family interactions and the life-course patterns of women. Similarly, as Myles and Quadagno (2002) argue in their recent review of literature on social policy and the welfare state, gender relations, family forms, and women’s employment are central to contemporary welfare state restructuring in a way that they were not during the “golden age” of welfare expansion.