Seymour Spilerman

Careers, Labor Market Structure, and Socioeconomic Achievement

The objective of this paper is to develop the notion of the career as a strategic link between structural features of the labor market and the socioeconomic attainments of individuals. In the first section we review the treatment of careers in the occupational sociology literature and consider limitations of the traditional conceptualization. In the second section the main features of career lines, their structures and reward trajectories, are described. In conjunction with this discussion, the virtues and drawbacks of several strategies for delineating career lines from empirical data are addressed. In the nex section we sketch the determinants of career-line structures as they reside in industry organization and labor maket compostion. In the concluding pages we consider the implications of a labor market ovelaid with career lines for investigations of the socioeconomic-achievement process.

The Causes of Racial Disturbances: A Comparison of Alternative Explanations

A range of hypotheses of varying specificity is examined in this paper in an attempt to account for the location of racial disorders during the 1960s. The initial sections consider what general assumptions must be met by any satisfactory explanation of the distribution of the disorders. Mathematical models are constructed which embody the most prevalent assumptions as to the determinants of community disorder-proneness, and their predictions are compared with empirical data. The specific assumptions considered are: (1) all cities have an identical probability of experiencing a disorder; (2) communities are heterogeneous in their underlying disorder propensities; (3) a process of reinforcement characterizes the occurrence of disorders; (4) contagion among communities contributes to the distribution of racial disturbances. Only the heterogeneity assumption is supported by the data. The concluding sections consider the explanatory abilities of several additional theories, each of which assumes the importance of particular community characteristics. All are rejected in favor of an explanation which argues that the racial disorders of the 1960s were responses to frustrations which are uniformly felt by Negroes, irrespective of their community situations.

Structural characteristics of cities and the severity of racial disorders.

This study attempts to ascertain whether particular structural arrangements and demographic features of a community were responsible for especially severe disturbances during the 1960s. Preliminary to addressing this question, consideration is given to the manner of measuring severity and to the volatile components of this phenomenon. With respect to the latter, it is found that (1) disorder severity declined as a function of the number of prior outbreaks in a city and (2) there is evidence for a temporal effect, with the post-Martin Luther King-assassination disturbances having been unusually destructive. Regarding the more stable (community) determinants of disorder severity, only Negro population size and a dummy term for South were found to be related to severity. Net of these variables, various indicators of Negro disadvantage in a community failed to reveal significant associations with severity. This result is interpreted as further evidence for the distinctly national character of the disturbances in the 1960s.

The Age Structures of Occupations and Jobs

Age segmentation in the labor force can be analyzed in terms of the age distributions of occupations. In this paper we show that the majority of detailed census occupations conform to one of five basic age profiles. Further, these age profiles have meaning as they derive from the operation of well-defined institutional forces. We discuss the relevance of industry for a refined understanding of occupational-age patterns and conclude with some observations about the likely consequence of a change in teh age of compulsory retirement for the age distributions of different occupations.

Organizational Rules and the Features of Work Careers

Although the features of individual careers are influenced by the personnel administrative rules of work organizations, the rules themselves rarely have been examined. Rather, one generally attempts to infer the nature of the attainment process by investigating the results of the process, as seen in the salary and status trajectories of a population sample, and by relating this to individual background characteristics. In this paper, in contrast, we directly examine organizational rules. We investigate administrative specifications with respect to salary advancement and promotion in a variety of work settings; in particular, in police departments, public school systems, the construction industry, and several private-sector organizations. The sources of the organizational rules are union contracts and company data about their human resource systems. Based on this material we introduce the concepts of simple structure, unitary structure, and amalgam structure to summarize the alternate formulations of career evolution that appear in the administrative rules. Finally, we discuss the extent to which the adResearch in Social Stratification and Mobility, volume 5, pages 41-102 Copyright

The Impact of Parental Wealth on Early Living Standards in Israel

This article examines the role of parental wealth as a determinant of the living standards of young adults in Israel. Living standards were examined in terms of four measures: home ownership, car ownership, schooling after marriage, and a subjective evaluation by the respondent. Israel is a strategic site for examining the interplay between parental wealth and living standards because of the particular organization of its housing market. The study focuses on the role of parental wealth in the early years of marriage because young couples in Israel have great financial need at that time but are liquidity constrained. The main finding is that, net of indicators of parental SES and a couples own income, parental wealth plays a substantial role in the living standards of young adults.

Intergenerational Influences of Wealth in Mexico

Using the 2006 Mexican Social Mobility Survey, this article evaluates the influence of parental wealth on several outcomes of adult children, including educational attainment, consumption level, asset holdings, home ownership, and home value. Three main findings emerge from the analysis. First, parental wealth is a strong determinant of educational attainment, net of the standard indicators of socioeconomic advantage. Furthermore, the influence of parental wealth appears to be stronger among the most disadvantaged children—those with low cultural capital residing in rural areas. Second, the mechanism of parental influence on adult children’s economic well-being differs depending on the outcome: in the case of consumption level, the influence is largely indirect, mediated by offspring’s human capital, while the opposite is true for children’s asset holdings, where a direct transfer of resources predominates. Third, access to homeownership is only weakly stratified by economic resources, but parental wealth significantly affects home value. The findings here highlight the critical but largely neglected impact of wealth on inequality and mobility in Latin America.

Transfers from Migrants to Their Children: Evidence that Altruism and Cultural Factors Matter

This paper focuses on the determinants of financial inter vivos transfers by migrants living in France in 2003 to their adult children. From a theoretical viewpoint, such transfers may be explained either by altruism or by exchange. While parents would direct their assistance to their less well off children under altruism, support should be channeled to children who live nearby their parents under the exchange motive. We assess the relevance of these two motives using the French PRI survey. Unequal sharing is frequently observed and children are more likely to receive financial transfers when they are in poor circumstance, but not necessarily when living in proximity to parents. We also emphasize the role of cultural factors as determinants of the parental allocation among children. Muslim parents, in particular, are more likely to make transfers to sons than to daughters.

The Structure of Employment Terminations among Clerical Employees in a Large Bureaucracya

In this paper we study departure rates among clerical employees in a large hierarchical organization, a US insurance company. Two aspects of the turnover process are considered. First, we study how the departure rate is determined by promotion opportunities in the organization We ask: In structural positions where the promotion rates are low, are the departure rates high, and vice-versa? Second, we distinguish between different types of departures: those that occur for career reasons, such as better job options and higher earnings outside the organization, those that occur for personal reasons, such as having to tend to the needs of ones family; and involuntary departures, that is, dismissals and abolished positions We attempt to assess which type of departure is most influenced by the presence of promotion opportunities and particular organizational structures The main findings are: (1) Departure rates are lower in company positions with high promotion rates than in positions with low promotion rates, keeping the level of current achievement constant This finding suggests that the study of organizational careers and the study of organizational departures need to be integrated. (2) Promotion opportunities in the company have a stronger influence on departures for career-related reasons than on departures for personal reasons. This suggests that organizational opportunity structures are more effective in controlling career-related turnover than in influencing other types of terminations

The Labor-Supply Response of Husbands.

The labor-supply or work-effort response of male heads of families eligible for or receiving income subsidies such as a negative income tax is crucial from two points of view. First, the earnings of the male are typically the major source of earnings for poor and near-poor husband-wife families, and few such families have important amounts of income other than earnings. As the major earner, then, the husband has a large potential for labor-force withdrawal in response to a transfer payment. In other words, a negative response large enough to negate the augmentation in money income from the transfer is possible for the primary earner, but less so for the secondary earners. Second, there is a popular view that any reduction in work-for-pay on the part of husbands with heavy family responsibilities is unrelieved either by the offsetting gains in output of work-athome expected from wives, or by investments toward future income on the part