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This paper explores the opening of a discursive space within the etiquette literature in the United States during the 19th century and how women used this space as a vehicle of empowerment. It identifies two major strategies of empowerment. First, the use or appropriation of existing discourses that can help redefine the "other" within an hegemonic space. Second, and more importantly, the transformation of that space in shifting the lines by which differentiation is produced to begin with. Admittedly, these strategies are neither unique nor the most important in the history of women's empowerment. But this paper argues that the new discourses formulated by women helped forge a new space within which women ceased being the "other," and helped give body to a concept of womanhood as defined by a group of women, regardless of how idiosyncratic that group might have been. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a residual methods approach to identifying social mobility across race/ethnic categories. In traditional demographic accounting models, population growth is limited to changes in natural increase and migration. Other sources of population change are absorbed by the model residual and can be estimated only indirectly. While these residual estimates have been used to illuminate a number of elusive demographic processes, there has been little effort to incorporate shifts in racial identification into formal accounts of population change. In light of growing evidence that a number of Americans view race/ethnic identities as a personal choice, not as a fixed characteristic, mobility across racial categories may play important roles in the growth of race/ethnic subpopulations and changes to the composition of the United States. To examine this potential, we derive a reduced-form population balancing equation that treats fertility and international migration as given and estimates survival from period life table data. After subtracting out national increase and net international migration and adjusting for changes in racial measurement and census coverage, we argue that the remaining error of closure provides a reasonable estimate of net interracial mobility among the native born. Using recent U.S. Census and ACS microdata, we illustrate the impact that identity shifts may have had on the growth of race/ethnic subpopulations in the past quarter century. Findings suggest a small drift from the non-Hispanic white population into race/ethnic minority groups, though the pattern varies by age and between time periods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses holy New York City's workfare program has structured opportunities for collective action by welfare recipients. As workfare blurs the distinction between wage workers and welfare recipients, it calls into question accepted understandings of the rights and obligations of welfare recipients and fosters new claims on the state. The concept of "cultural opportunity structures" can help to explain the political mobilization of workfare participants if it is linked to a Durkheimian tradition of cultural analysis attentive to symbolic classification. The dramaturgic approach to culture exemplified in the work of Erving Goffman can usefully complement this structural approach if a narrowfocus on frames and framing processes is broadened to include interaction rituals and ceremonial profanation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the direction and magnitude of the effects of personal, kinship, market, and contextual attributes of visa applicants on their desirability as immigrants to the United States, as judged by members of the professional staff of the U.S. Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy. Two classic sociological questions underlie this politically relevant topic: how do societies choose their members? and how do societies allocate scarce benefits? Using the factorial survey pioneered by P.H. Rossi, we obtained from the Commission staff, numerical ratings of the desirability as immigrants of fictitious visa applicants embodying the full range of potentially relevant characteristics discussed in the political arena. Although the ratings were obtained by a number-assignment technique believed to generate a continuous variable, we accommodate the variable's possible ordinality by performing all analyses twice- using both ordinary-least-squares techniques and maximum-likelihood ordered. response techniques. The results are unambiguous: although a lawful and coherent set of rules guides each respondent's ratings, leading to a personal point system for the selection of immigrants, no two staff members' point systems are alike, not even qualitatively. In the complex weave of agreements and disagreements, three conclusions emerge. First, there is unanimous support for granting preference to visa applicants who have a job offer or a United States-citizen sibling. Second, there is severe disagreement by applicant's region of origin. Third, there is a range of disagreement on other attributes, for example, on whether the United States should favor the immigration, ceteris paribus, of older versus younger applicants or of male versus female applicants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of rethinking the social meaning and uses of education. historicizing its organized firms. and seeing educational knowledge as fully cultural has required a long detour. The current revitalization, which is believed that the critical sociology of education returns to the entire discipline flourished largely not in sociology but in educational fields like curriculum. It first appeared not in the U.S. but abroad particularly in England. It did not draw sustenance from the center of' American sociological discourse but was nurtured at its periphery in European structuralist and cultural theory. The result of a combined historic exclusion and current valuation is the danger of an apparently truncated narrative and a false impression that there is no developmental history or tradition of the work presented in this article. These papers can be said to represent a third generation in critical sociology of education. They follow the first ideology critique and general theory phase and then the more education-centered. but still diffuse structuralist derivations of the middle period.