Stephen Lippmann

Entrepreneurship and Inequality

Nations with high levels of economic inequality tend to have high rates of entrepreneurial activity. In this paper, we develop propositions about this relationship, based upon current research. Although we provide some descriptive analyses to support our propositions, our paper is not an empirical test but rather a theoretical exploration of new ideas related to this topic. We first define entrepreneurship at the individual and societal level and distinguish between entrepreneurship undertaken out of necessity and entrepreneurship that takes advantage of market opportunities. We then explore the roles that various causes of economic inequality play in increasing entrepreneurial activity, including economic development, state policies, foreign investment, sector shifts, labor market and employment characteristics, and class structures. The relationship between inequality and entrepreneurship poses a potentially disturbing message for countries with strong egalitarian norms and political and social policies that also wish to increase entrepreneurial activity. We conclude by noting the conditions under which entrepreneurship can be a source of upward social and economic mobility for individuals.

The Timing of Childbirth and Family-to-Work Conflict

A growing pattern, assumed to reflect efforts to balance work and family, is the delaying of childbirth by some working women. This article examines the relationship between the timing of fertility and family-to-work conflict among working women, and the occupational, organizational, and family contexts that influence this relationship. We analyze data from the 2002 wave of the National Study of the Changing Workforce to determine if, to what degree, and among whom the decision to delay entry into parenthood is related to lower degrees of family-to-work conflict. Our findings indicate that delaying childbirth does result in less work-family conflict for working mothers, and highlights the importance of family-level factors in predicting family-to-work conflict.

Boys to Men: Age, Identity, and the Legitimation of Amateur Wireless in the United States, 1909–1927

Although amateur radio remained popular for 100 years, it faced a crisis of legitimacy during the 1910s. The damaging behaviors of some operators threatened amateurs with banishment from the airwaves. Through an analysis of archival material from various sources, this paper demonstrates that in order to distance themselves from the actions of malevolent pranksters, responsible wireless operators tapped into contemporary cultural debates about maturity and the emergence of adolescence. As a result, amateur operators legitimated themselves in the eyes of the public while carving out a distinct space for youth hobbyists.

Responding from that Vantage Point: Field Position and Discursive Strategies of Legitimation in the U.S. Wireless Telegraphy Field

Our study explores the discursive strategies of legitimation that organizations employ as they occupy different positions in an emergent institutional field. By examining both the frame-alignment strategies and the frame targets of two organizations in the U.S. wireless telegraphy field, we show how an organization’s position – and its positional changes over time – affects the discursive strategies it uses to promote or protect its goals in the face of pressure from other field actors. Our results indicate that three distinct field positions – peripheral, central, and niche – are associated with three different legitimation strategies – which we label “robust,” “co-optive,” and “focused” – around which the discursive strategies coalesced. Organizations at the periphery attempt to break in to a field by employing a diverse range of frame-alignment strategies targeted toward a variety of relevant field actors. Those in a central position target fewer actors, but pursue a similar variety of frame-alignment strategies. Those in a niche position use fewer alignment strategies and target a smaller number of field-level actors. Our study enriches the literature on discursive strategies of legitimation by focusing on the ways in which central and non-central actors employ them, and the ways in which these strategies evolve alongside the field itself. More broadly, our work contributes to our understanding of discursive skills required to confront complex institutional pressures. These efforts depend on the interactive nature of discursive strategies from the vantage point of different field positions.

The McDonaldization of Everything: Teaching Weber to Undergraduates

Max Weber argued that the process of rationalization transformed social life forever. By loosening the hold of tradition, rationalization led to new practices that were chosen due to their efficiency. He proposed that the superiority of the bureaucratic form would cause it to dominate all forms of human organization. And indeed, social order in the Western world changed drastically with the rise of two great forces of modernity: capitalism and bureaucracy. Notably, however, Weber did not include “entrepreneurship” as one of those great forces.

Workplace Flexibility: Realigning 20th-Century Jobs for a 21st-Century Workforce

The Professional Guinea Pig belongs to a social science growth area investigating the pharmaceutical industry in contemporary health care. This literature is united by a prevailing consensus that views the drug industry as the villain du jour in health policy. After focusing on unbridled professional power and the for-profit insurance industry, the critical social gaze is turned to Big Pharma. Consequently, most social scientists see it as their job to expose the scientific manipulation, the chase of profit margins, the dehumanization, the ethical transgressions, and the inequities that flow from drug industry involvement. In engaging prose, Roberto Abadie delivers the expected social science message. Abadie conducted an eighteen-month ethnography of a group of healthy people who made a living as research subjects in Phase One clinical trials in Philadelphia. Most trial participants are African-American and Latino, but Abadie spent time with a group of young, non-Hispanic white anarchists who enrolled in clinical trials. He compares these trial participants with people enrolling in HIV trials. The book examines the motivations, reflections, and practices of professionalized clinical trial participation. What does Abadie make from this data? He highlights the ‘‘commodification’’ (p. 15) of the trial subjects’ bodies in a ‘‘slow torture economy’’ (p. 46). He pays attention to the ‘‘revolt’’ (p. 54) of the professional research subjects when they felt underpaid and threatened to walk out. Instead they received an

Book Review: Social Theory: The Multicultural and Classic Readings

800 bonus. He notes the ‘‘resistance of the weak’’ (p. 60), when ‘‘guinea pigs’’ (p. 21) smuggle in forbidden foods or engage in other acts of ‘‘sabotage’’ (p. 61). Abadie also examines the risk-management strategies of the trial subjects: they weigh money against potential long-term effects but tend to believe that drugs wash out of their bodies in a couple of days. He then compares the professional trial participants to those involved in HIV trials and argues that the latter are motivated by deeper existential concerns but, of course, they also have a disease and participate in different kinds of trials. In a final empirical chapter, Abadie examines the professional trial subject’s limited understanding of informed consent procedures, and argues that the drug industry deliberately uses the consent form to obfuscate the commodified relationship with research subjects. Abadie’s book has two glaring weaknesses. First, he brings much rhetorical bluster to his study but the interview quotes and observations do not bear out the core themes of ‘‘alienation’’ (p. 6) and ‘‘exploitation’’ (p. 154). The fascinating empirical puzzle of his study is that anarchists are willing to swallow their principles and vegan diet to take money from this most controversial industry. In the conclusion, Abadie pays attention to the paradox between anarchist politics and pragmatics, but throughout most of the book he tries to rationalize the anarchists’ justifications for the blood money that sustains their lifestyle of leisure. Some of his friends even minimize the trial risk because they assume that strong government oversight protects them from harm! Abadie writes: ‘‘[these] views of governmental regulation are not totally at odds with their radical [anarchist] beliefs’’ (p. 143). Really? Rather than reconcile the dissonance between what anarchists do and belief in theoretical constructs of exploitation, the explanation seems more mundane. People end up in trial after trial by choice or circumstances because it is easy money. Compared to flipping burgers, cleaning toilets, or being homeless, testing pills is extremely attractive. The job stinks, but the money is good. Abadie also wrote the wrong book. While he lived in the anarchist community, he never participated along with his research subjects in the trials. Abadie’s information comes largely from casual conversations

LOCAL LABOR MARKET DYNAMICS AND SELF-EMPLOYMENT IN RURAL NEW ENGLAND

nates in some kind of regeneration’’ (p. xi; an elaboration appears on pp. 10-21). In the academic world (see pp. 117-36), instances of such interludes would be moving away from home to attend college, study-abroad excursions, sabbaticals and research leaves, and residential fellowships. Yet the odyssey, Smelser maintains, is not confined to episodes that qualify as what some wit, twisting Veblen, called ‘‘the leisure of the theory class.’’ It is instead ‘‘a fundamental, ever-present, and indestructible feature of organized human life’’ (p. 208). The author quite correctly describes the contribution of this work as ‘‘bringing together phenomena not before gathered or compared under a common rubric’’ (p. 27). Most of the chapters adhere to a pattern of first situating the odyssey concept in a particular sociological setting and then measuring its degree of fit with the concrete illustration. The first and last segments of the book are enough to suggest the extent of its scope: On just a single early page (p. 5), Smelser passes from Marco Polo to Mao Zedong, with intervening mention of Magellan, Lewis and Clark, and the Gold Rush. In the references (p. 239), the inclusion of a theoretical work on the family coauthored by Talcott Parsons in 1955 is followed by an entry for a 2003 study on the ‘‘spirituality’’ of belief in visitations to earth by UFOs. Smelser confesses at the outset (p. 26) that because of his subject he has allowed himself ‘‘a certain methodological license,’’ which, he pleads, under the circumstances ‘‘is, I think, legitimate.’’ Thus liberated, we accompany the author on a voyage that turns out to be less about the destination than about the trip. (Smelser in fact leaves it until a brief final chapter to establish the real-world significance of the odyssey idea.) His key concept, hammered together loosely in his mind’s workshop, rolls contentedly on its test drive through the empirical countryside along the path to a formal theory—without actually getting there. No matter. The vehicle looks a bit funny; it also pings and pops, and clicks and clanks, when it moves. Nevertheless, its shambling progress is charming to witness as it takes the reader to some interesting junctions of ideas (‘‘otherwise noncomparable kinds of events and episodes’’; p. xiii) in examples drawn from the human universals of birth and death and their associated rites; from participation in religious pilgrimages, in transformative social movements, and in psychotherapy; and from the rarer (one hopes) experiences of prison camps, ‘‘show’’ trials, and alleged abductions by space aliens (no kidding: see pp. 172-79). In The Odyssey Experience, Smelser combines deep learning, broad reading, and sustained reflection on his own life as a scholar, academic citizen, think-tank administrator, and psychoanalyst. The result is more a meditation than a monograph, an exploration at once wide-ranging and speculative, a creative collision of personal thinking with the published literature on a series of highly bounded and improbably juxtaposed subjects. Smelser seems in these pages to be enjoying himself as he stretches his idea to its limits. Indeed, this book might be useful in the sociological classroom as a model of how to formulate, apply, and refine an ideal type. Attentive scholars and students who share Smelser’s Odyssey with him will be stretched, too—and they will have some fun as well.

Student Entitlement: Issues and Strategies for Confronting Entitlement in the Classroom and Beyond

As rates of self-employment and entrepreneurial activity grow in the U.S., sociologists are beginning to consider the causes and consequences of this form of employment more seriously. While the sociological contributions to entrepreneurial research take seriously the social context in which self-employment occurs, few studies focus explicitly on the effects of social and economic contexts on rates of self-employment in particular regions. I fill this gap by examining the effects of a variety of local labor-market, population, and economic characteristics on county-level self-employment rates in three predominantly rural states: Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. I find that counties with higher proportions of their labor forces in extractive industries and that have experienced greater declines in the primary sector had higher rates of poverty and unemployment; however, self-employment is negatively related to county-level poverty rates, indicating that self-employment may provide opportunities for those in rural counties undergoing economic transformations.