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The changing demographic landscape of the United States calls for a reassessment of the societal impacts and consequences of so called "natural" and technological disasters. An increasing trend towards greater demographic and socio-economic diversity (in part due to high rates of international immigration), combined with mounting disaster losses, have brought about a more serious focus among scholars on how changing population patterns shape the vulnerability and resiliency of social systems. Recent disasters, such as the Indian Ocean Tsunami (2004) and Hurricane Katrina (2005), point to the differential impacts of disasters on certain communities, particularly those that do not have the necessary resources to cope with and recover from such events. This paper interprets these impacts within the context of economic, cultural, and social capital, as well as broader human ecological forces. The paper also makes important contributions to the social science disaster research literature by examining population growth, composition, and distribution in the context of disaster risk and vulnerability. Population dynamics (e.g., population growth, migration, and urbanization) are perhaps one of the most important factors that have increased our exposure to disasters and have contributed to the devastating impacts of these events, as the case of Hurricane Katrina illustrates. Nevertheless, the scientific literature exploring these issues is quite limited. We argue that if we fail to acknowledge and act on the mounting evidence regarding population composition, migration, inequality, and disaster vulnerability, we will continue to experience disasters with greater regularity and intensity. (Contains 8 figures and 2 notes.)

The 1960s' dreams--of a color-blind society, of Black power, of reparations for oppression--had significant social impact but were unfulfilled. The latest report on Blacks in American society shows economic stagnation and even decline. There is no prospect for the radical economic reforms needed to reduce inequalities of class and race. Contains 25 references. (Author/SV)

Extant research on social movements has highlighted activists' discursive tactics to challenge the state, yet little analytical attention focuses on elite efforts to dominate the discourse arena through the deployment of oppositional frames. This paper analyzes elite oppositional framing surrounding the placement of a highway bypass in the Czech Republic. Our research examines how democratic states deploy oppositional frames and enlist elite countermovement support for their efforts to obstruct challenges. Using a range of data sources, we delineate the mechanisms used by these elite actors to vilify and stigmatize environmental activists, paving the way for more violent forms of public harassment. The concept we initiate, "discursive obstruction", adds the critical dimension of power relations to analyses of both framing processes and discursive opportunity structures. We conclude by discussing the implications of our results for social movement research.

We commend the measured tone and clearly stated arguments in Alba, Kasinitz and Waters' commentary on our article. It is particularly welcome because, in combination with our own conclusions, it lays out before the relevant audiences the substance of the debate in this field. Based on the commentary's opening statement, it would appear that there are many points of agreement and that the remaining differences are mostly a matter of emphasis, a case of the glass being half full or half empty. If this were the case, there would be little justification for our original article or for this reply. On the contrary, our results and those of other researchers cited in the article's conclusion indicate that the attempt to normalize the situation by celebrating the progress achieved by the second generation is an instance of misplaced optimism. Not all kids are doing "all right," and the substantial number at risk of social and economic stagnation or downward mobility looms as a significant social problem. It is true that right-wing commentators may pick on these findings for their own purposes, but this is certainly no reason to obscure the facts. Laying a rosy veil over them is a dangerous strategy.

From 1980 to 2000, child labor rates across the world fell by more than a quarter. Much of the explanation for this decrease resides in development processes broadly associated with the demographic transition. Net of these internal dynamics, however, globalization may also have played a role. Previous studies have examined the effect of trade and investment flows on child labor rates. However, the impact of cultural models spread by world polity institutions has yet to be examined. In this study, I argue that international organizations have confronted child labor practices, diffusing a "labor-to-schooling" model of child development. Analyzing an unbalanced dataset with 428 observations from 116 states across four waves during the 1980-2000 period, I assess the impact of economic and cultural globalization on a state's child labor rate using random effects tobit models. Net of a country's development experience, I find that foreign investment exerts a small, positive effect on child labor, while international organizations exert a larger negative effect. These results are robust to a number of specifications, including first-difference models that restrict attention to longitudinal variation. (Contains 5 tables and 2 notes.)

Arguments about the spread of gender egalitarian values through the population highlight several sources of change. First, structural arguments point to increases in the proportion of women with high education, jobs with good pay, commitment to careers outside the family, and direct interests in gender equality. Second, value shift arguments contend that gender norms change with social and economic development among women and men in diverse positions--traditional and non-traditional alike. Third, diffusion arguments suggest that structural change leads to adoption of new ideas and values supportive of gender equality by non-traditional and innovative groups in society, but that the new ideas later diffuse to other groups through cultural processes. Using the General Social Survey from 1977 to 2006 and comparing the determinants of gender egalitarianism across 86 cohorts born from roughly 1900 through 1985 time frame, multilevel models support the diffusion arguments. (Contains 1 figure, 2 tables and 7 notes.)

In this article I argue that evolutionary theorizing can help sociologists and feminists better understand gender inequality. Evolutionary theory explains why control of the sexuality of young women is a priority across most human societies both past and present. Evolutionary psychology has extended our understanding of male violence against women. Here I add to these theories and present a sexual selection argument to postulate possible evolved predispositions that promote young female deference to adult males in interaction and the converse, lack of male deference to young females. According to this argument, the pattern of greater female deference disappears when the women involved are past menopause. Put together, these ideas form an evolutionary account of gender inequality that complements and extends traditional sociological and feminist theories.

Focusing on post-Soviet Ukraine, this paper examines how social transformations changed family formation, leading to the world's lowest fertility rate. The findings show that before Ukraine gained independence, highly educated women had higher first birth rates after controlling for school enrollment and marriage. After independence, highly educated women began to delay childbearing. In contrast, second birth and marriage rates declined after independence, but the effect of education on these events did not change. Explanations for the changing effects of education on first births include the restructured educational system, shifting opportunity costs, reduction in childcare benefits, and exposure to new ideas and values. This study demonstrates how societal-level change not only alters the composition of individual-level characteristics in a population, but also affects the relationship between factors and behavior. (Contains 3 tables, 3 figures and 6 notes.)

The sociology of religion today faces new and remarkable opportunities to contribute interesting and important knowledge and understanding about the role of religion in social, political, economic and cultural life for scholarly and public audiences. But in order to meet and capitalize successfully upon those opportunities, the field at present needs to shake off some besetting habits of mind, expand its horizons, re-orient its debates, construct a new agenda for priority investigations, and rethink some of its larger theoretical assumptions, frameworks and paradigms. The author's purpose in this article is to help the field move forward toward a greater clarity of vision and purpose, to help solidify a firmer sense of the substantive and theoretical agendas that matter most in the field's endeavor to make its contribution to the larger discipline of sociology and to public understanding. First, he outlines a series of specific substantive and methodological concerns that deserve greater scholarly attention by sociologists in the coming years and sets the stage for the eight separate articles in this special section. Second, he considers a recent theoretical innovation concerning the model of modernity and social change--the hypothesis of "multiple modernities"--that in his view deserves much greater attention and development, particularly when it comes to the study of religion in modernity and post-modernity. Third, he advocates an alternative meta-theoretical basis on which to better pursue the sociology of religion--in fact, actually, all of sociology--in a way that he believes will be more fruitful than the two background approaches that currently govern most scholarship, namely, positivist empiricism and hermeneutical interpretivism. That alternative is the philosophy of (social) science known as critical realism.

One shortcoming in the literature on policy framing has been the absence of analytic models through which to explicate change. This paper advances research in this area in three related ways. First, it links policy frames to the actors who employ them. Second, based upon this linkage it proposes two complementary approaches for examining longitudinal change in policy framing: an actor representation approach and a frame adoption approach. Third, it assesses the relative contribution of each process using demographic decomposition analysis. This analytic framework is illustrated using the case of debates over welfare reform in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. The findings are consistent with expectations from the frame adoption approach, suggesting that ideational diffusion was largely responsible for changing discourse during this period. (Contains 4 tables, 2 figures, and 7 notes.)

This paper examines a cognitive bias whereby respondents in postcommunist Bulgaria systematically decrease their self estimates on material welfare in contrast to the well-established status-enhancement bias. The analysis shows that the main reason for the occurrence of status-devaluation is the experience of relative deprivation in postcommunism, reflected in unfulfilled expectations and the perception of status loss relative to socialism. The bias is reinforced by a process of network closure under conditions of high uncertainty and accelerated social change. More homogeneous personal networks provide reference points, which make high-status actors more likely to see themselves as low-status.

Recent institutional and cultural changes have allowed individuals to gradually (but persistently) follow more complex, less uniform, and less predictable work and family patterns than the patterns often assumed to be the norm in Western settings. However, we identify important gaps in this literature: (i) a persistent focus on high-income countries in Western Europe and North America, (ii) an emphasis on narrowed periods of adulthood, and (iii) a disregard for coresidential histories when analyzing the family domain. In this paper, we aim to address these shortcomings in two ways. First, we identify lifetime employment and coresidential trajectories of individuals living currently in Santiago, Chile, born between 1944 and 1954—a cohort that faced several political, economic, and cultural changes across their lives. Second, we explore how gender and socioeconomic disadvantages are associated with individuals' life trajectories. We conduct a multichannel sequence analysis of a comprehensive life history dataset and find that about a quarter of the sample (27.2%) follows a modal pattern of continuous formal full-time employment and coresidence with a partner and children. The remaining proportion of individuals follow more complex, unstable, and interrupted patterns, which vary in their levels of work attachment, work informality, solo parenthood, and intergenerational households. Our findings question the idea that socially advantaged individuals opt for more complex life courses and instead confirm the association between socially disadvantaged individuals, particularly women and those lower educated, and complex trajectories. Rather than deliberate individualistic choices, life course instability appears as an additional layer of social disadvantage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Compares the social structuring of birth and death and proposes a more general framework: transitions into and out of life. Discusses changes in these events fostered by modernization, exploring the role of dying and birthing individuals, the family's place, control of information, medical components, collective action, and the uses of ritual. (Author/GC)

This article presents the thesis that social workers are effectively promoting social reorganization. Social workers, of course, like professors and members of other professions, have their limitations from the standpoint of promoting social change and there are conservative influences operative in social work, but these will be presented in another paper. It is the assignment of this paper to present the influence of social workers toward social reorganization. Only a few aspects of the subject, however, can be here presented. The fields of public health, housing, leisure time, and child welfare will necessarily be neglected and the major attention given to social workers in the family welfare and relief field as these have related themselves to the matter of social reorganization. Unfortunately relief is still the principal resource in this country for meeting the needs of the unemployed. Although the majority of social workers are still engaged in such relief work, they recognize it as a symptom of social maladjustment and this paper will indicate that they are generally interested in such social reorganization as will make relief unnecessary.

This paper considers some sociological aspects of aging within contemporary society and is concerned most specifically with the process by which the aging male assumes and maintains appropriate statuses and roles in his social world. This study is based on two assumptions. First, a person, as a member of society, must progress during his life through a series of more or less sequentially compatible and harmonious social statuses. The second assumption which must be stated is that in a rapidly changing society, the role requirements of the status series are not static. This has been an attempt to approach the phenomenon of aging in contemporary society through theories of socialization, decision making, prestige age groups, and social roles. This research paper applies the concept of socialization to later life stages, and the exploration of the significance of self-other role-reversal of socializing agent and object (parent and child) in terms of necessary revisions in the oldster's self-definitions, concepts, and evaluations of his status.

Diffusion studies of the "adoption of innovation" can potentially provide a basis for a quantitative, empirically-based theory of social change. However, before significant advances can be made in this direction, rigorous attention must be directed toward clarifying the meaning of the principal concepts of diffusion studies and toward increasing consistency in the use of standardized terms from one writer to another. Also, theoretical concepts from diffusion research need to be linked to more general sociological theory, insofar as this is available. The present paper suggests possible ways in which these tasks can be undertaken. It makes use of mass communication data on the diffusion of the major media through the American society to illustrate the advantages of the conceptual framework which it proposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the primary functions of sociological research is to provide understanding of the process of culture change. In the past, sociologists have been interested in several aspects of the problem, e.g., the invention process, the effects of innovation, and the description of change over extended periods of history. The factor of compatibility was examined as it operated in the acceptance and rejection of several innovations by families in New Haven, Connecticut. The innovations considered were those which survived a culling of several score of possibilities according to criteria imposed by methodological considerations. The innovations meeting these requirements included two types of medical insurance plans, supermarkets, canasta, and television. This paper reports on the investigation of television. An analysis of television revealed that the cultural equipment required for its use included an average education, a minimum income, and a penchant for passive recreation of the spectator kind. Very briefly, the comparison of the accepting and rejecting groups showed that the culture patterns of the accepters coincided with that behavior required for use of television, while the patterns of rejecters diverged.

Increases in women's labor-force participation and the time families spend at work have reduced the time families have available to care for one another. Recent evidence suggests that responses to these challenges vary for different types of care. While time spent on housework has declined, time devoted to care of children has increased. This paper examines cohort changes in another form of unpaid work, care for ill or disabled friends or family members, and assesses the influence of employment, attitudes, and need for care on age and cohort trends in carework. Using data from the National Longitudinal Surveys, we estimate age and cohort differences in carework among women born between 1922 and 1952. We find a decline in overall levels of carework among more recent birth cohorts of women. However, we do not find cohort changes in the probability that women will provide more intense levels of care, defined as nine or more hours of care per week. The amount of illness and disability among family members partially reduces differences between cohorts, but women's employment and attitudes about work and family do little to clarify changing patterns of care. Overall, our findings suggest that, even after the large-scale social changes of the twentieth century, women will continue to provide carework when necessary. Thus, the real concern for families is not whether ill or disabled members will have care, but rather, whether their careworkers receive the institutional support required to successfully balance paid and unpaid work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]