Encyclopedia of Sociology Vol

work, a great deal more is known about the ways in which race, gender, and class affect inequalities and the manner in which families and educational institutions operate to promote or deny access to opportunities for socioeconomic advancement. However, the study of social stratification and mobility is an arcane field of inquiry, and there is not always agreement among social scientists about the main factors that create socioeconomic inequalities (see Herrnstein and Murray 1994 and the debate it provoked, e.g., Fischer et al. 1996).

Sociologists often assume that there is a causal linkage between the structural conditions of society (e.g., the standard of living and economic inequality) and public beliefs and sentiments regarding the acceptability of those conditions, but little is known about the nature of that linkage. There is a growing body of empirical data regarding trends in income distribution and income inequality, much of which indicates growing economic inequality and hardship for segments of the population (e.g., Duncan and Rodgers 1991; Levy 1988; Levy and Murnane 1992; Thurow 1987), but much less is known about subjective interpretations of economic conditions. Thus, while social scientists attempt to understand the inner workings of the stratification system, there is much that remains to be understood, and it is important to realize that a person’s beliefs about sources of inequality affect evaluations of justice as much as if not more than objective conditions do (see Kluegel and Smith 1981, 1986; Robinson and Bell 1978; Kluegel et al. 1995).

SOCIAL JUSTICE RESEARCH

This article has argued that one can distinguish three components of the distributive justice process with regard to any primary good: (1) the principles for the allocation of goods, (2) the system that governs the application of those allocative principles, and (3) the resulting distribution. Justice sentiments derive from comparisons of what is received with what one believes should be received, that is, a comparison of the real with the ideal in a particular context.

According to Jasso and Wegener, empirical justice analysis has four major objectives:

(i) to obtain numerical approximations of the quantities and relations identified by jus-

tice theory; (ii) to gauge the extent of interindividual and intergroup variation in the quantities and relations; (iii) to explain their etiology, including the effects of social structure and of the observer’s position in the stratification structure; and (iv) to assess their behavioral and social consequences

(1997, p. 393).

Three fundamental quantities pertain to justice: the actual condition, the just condition, and the justice evaluation. While justice evaluations involve the comparison of the other two quantities, it is not clear that individuals actually quantify justice in the way theoretical formulations suggest, and it remains to be seen whether most people ‘‘calculate’’ more than a general ‘‘sense of justice’’ from this comparison.

To summarize current research on social justice, one would have to focus on a wide range of distributional issues with respect to the primary social goods of distributed in society, including basic freedoms, political rights, power, authority, status, income and wealth, education and employment opportunities, housing, health care, and the pursuit of happiness. Below, this article briefly mentions five areas in which a consideration of justice theory is relevant to sociological understanding: (1) income inequality and the welfare state, (2) discrimination and affirmative action, (3) gender, work, and comparable worth, (4) divorce, child custody, and child support, and (5) intergenerational relations.

Income Inequality and the Welfare State.

One of the central preoccupations of sociologists who study distributive justice has been the economic realm, with an explicit focus on wages or earnings (e.g. Alves and Rossi 1978; Gartrell 1982; Gartrell and Paille 1997; Jasso 1978, 1999; Jasso and Rossi 1977; Patchen 1961; Randall and Mueller 1995; Robinson and Bell 1978). Research in the United States shows convincingly that individualistic attributions for poverty and wealth predominate (Kluegel and Smith 1986). Such attributions are found across the spectrum of socioeconomic positions, and among lower socioeconomic status (SES) groups these beliefs are held concurrently with structural explanations. At the same time, Americans show considerable antagonism toward any form of systemwide redistribution of income

beyond current welfare assistance to children, the disabled, and the indigent and current forms of social security for senior members of the population.

Whereas Americans hold equality as the standard of justice in the political realm, inequality is the standard in the economic realm. A recent multinational comparison of a U.S. sample with comparable data from other Western nations showed that in assessing the deservingness of their own earnings, ‘‘what ought to be’’ is strongly linked to ‘‘what is’’ (Alwin et al. 1996). Thus, existential considerations play a strong role in the development of judgments about levels of deserved income, although there was considerable variation in the magnitude of those linkages. The weakest effects, as predicted on the basis of perceived system legitimacy, were in the postcommunist economies of eastern and central Europe and the former republics of the Soviet Union. The strongest effects were in the Western capitalist democracies. Indeed, the linkage between job desserts and job income was so strong in those countries (Germany, Great Britain, the Netherlands, the United States, and Japan) that it seemed hardly possible that any factors other than current income levels could contribute to variation in perceptions of justice. By contrast, the level of perceived family need played a much stronger role in evaluations of the justice of earnings in the eastern European countries than it did in the West (see Alwin et al. 1996, pp. 123–128).

Discrimination and Affirmative Action. Discrimination by dominant groups against ethnic minorities and women has been a significant concern of those interested in equality and justice. This set of issues can be addressed easily within the framework of social justice as an instance of the lack of congruence between justice principles such as equality of opportunity and the actual workings of society. Although considerable progress has been made in establishing constitutional prohibitions against discrimination on the grounds of race, ethnic origin, and sex in employment practices, education, and public accommodations, reality has lagged behind those ideals. Substantial inequalities among racial groups persist despite substantial opinion that racial discrimination is no longer a problem in American society (Blauner 1989). Considerable research has focused on the consequences of discrimination.

The concept of affirmative action has been used in the United States and other countries to refer to social policies that go beyond prohibitions against discriminatory practices that deprive minorities of their rights and aim social policy toward remedying the effects of past discrimination. Affirmative action represents an effort to restore equity to social groups, rather than to individuals, by targeting women and minorities for educational opportunities, jobs, promotion, government contracts, and other arenas where past discrimination has been documented. Affirmative action policies have been controversial because they appear to represent a form of reverse discrimination inasmuch as they violate the principle of of equal opportunity by giving preferential treatment on the basis of race and national origin. These policies have faced a number of legal challenges that are likely to continue as long as they are perceived to be unjust by some members of society. Regardless of how one views these policies, they have placed increased numbers of women and minorities in good jobs and selective educational institutions, but they may have increased tensions over these matters.

Gender, Work, and Comparable Worth. An important application of the social justice framework has been the examination of equity in the job rewards of men and women. In the United States, as in other countries, there are legislative guarantees to the right of equal pay for equal work, such as Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The concept of comparable worth was designed to go beyond this mandate to describe a situation of equal pay for work of equal value, that is, work that requires comparable levels of effort, skills, and responsibility. Rather than being a remedy for past discrimination, as in the case of affirmative action, this approach is aimed at developing policies that will guarantee equal treatment for men and women. While this idea seems to be catching on, there are still substantial gaps in the workplace authority and earnings of men and women throughout the world (see Wright et al., 1995; Jasso and Wegener, 1999), and researchers face a ‘‘paradox of the contented female worker’’ (Crosby 1982). Generally speaking, women have jobs with lower pay, less autonomy, and less authority than jobs held by men, but their level of earnings satisfaction is no different from that of men. Mueller and Wallace (1996) suggest that when levels of perceived justice are taken into account, substantial amounts of the

difference between men and women in their satisfaction with earnings can be explained. What remains to be understood are the factors that contribute to differences between men and women in perceptions of what is just.

Divorce, Child Custody, and Child Support.

Marital disruption is a conspicuous feature of the contemporary family that raises issues of justice not only for the people involved but for the public as well. Apart from justice matters arising from the division of property and assets in a divorce, when children are involved, the settlement becomes more complicated. Child custody disputes and child support issues present unique problems for justice analysis because in the first case the primary goods are indivisible and in the second case costs (or negative rewards) are being allocated. Procedures for resolving both sets of issues are governed by state and federal statutes or guidelines as well as by local customs and have varied considerably across time and culture. Historically, courts have employed justice principles involving parental entitlements to various degrees, but in recent times, the principle has evolved that the best interests of the child ought to be the sole or major consideration in custody decisions. As Elster (1989, p. 126) puts it, ‘‘although the child may to some extent and for some purposes be considered a consumption good for the parents, he is also and predominantly a person in his own right’’ who has an interest in the allocation. Elster argues, however, against the principle of the best interests of the child and suggests that in contemporary society, when joint custody is not feasible, three options present themselves: a presumption in favor of the mother, a presumption in favor of the primary caretaker (usually the mother), and tossing a coin.

Child support payments are vastly more determinate, and those judgments are considerably less Solomonic. Indeed, courts generally have allowed the participants, on the advice of counsel, to negotiate the nature of the awards. In child support situations, decision making occurs in two steps. There is a preliminary determination of an amount to be divided based on the needs of the child and then a decision on how that amount should be divided based on the relative resources of the parents. As Schaeffer (1980, p. 158) puts it, ‘‘beliefs abut child support awards differ in important ways from other beliefs about justice . . . [because] allocating child support obligations involves allo-

cating not rewards, but responsibilities expressed as contributions.’’ Schaeffer (1980) analyzed beliefs about the fairness of child support judgments by using a factorial survey involving vignettes. She found that child support awards are allocated according to a ‘‘proportional contribution-vari- able need’’ system in which parents’ contributions are proportional to their resources. She concluded that preferences for child support awards embody a ‘‘modified version of ‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs’’’ (1980, p. 172).

Intergenerational Relations. Relationships among generations are one of the most important structural features in all societies. Some authors have argued that the prevailing social contract between generations in Western society regarding expectations, obligations, and well-being is changing (Bengtson and Achenbaum 1993). This is due to the changing demography of age but also to shifting cultural understandings of age differences and issues of equity. Bengtson (1993, p. 4) argues that ‘‘we have reached a cultural watershed concerning the implicit understanding of rights and obligations between age groups and generations in human societies. Never before have so many elders lived so long; never before have so relatively fewer members of younger age groups lined up behind them in the succession of generations.’’ He argues further that as a consequence, ‘‘we are faced with new and historically unique dilemmas of family life and social policy agendas regarding the expectable life course and the succession of generations.’’

These observations raise a number of questions regarding the nature of intergenerational conflict and the linkage between age and economic expectations, economic performance, and evaluations of material well-being. The concept of justice has been applied to the study of intergenerational relations (see Norris 1987), but little work has explicitly linked social psychological theory regarding equity or justice evaluation to this range of issues. Moreover, researchers often have settled for conclusions based on conjecture or weak and inappropriate kinds of evidence. There is a wide range of intergenerational issues to which the justice framework can be applied, including not only the material well-being of older age groups but also the sense of obligation that adult children have about the support of their elderly parents as

well as public concern about the future health care and social security systems that will support the elderly in the future.

(SEE ALSO: Affirmative Action; Comparable Worth; DecisionMaking Theory and Research; Gender; Interpersonal Power; Poverty; Social Psychology; Utopian Analysis and Design)

———, and W. Andrew Achenbaum 1993 The Changing Contract across Generations. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.

Berger, Joseph, Maurice Zelditch, Bo Anderson, and Bernard P. Cohen 1972 ‘‘Structural Aspects of Distributive Justice: A Status-Value Formulation.’’ In J. Berger, M. Zelditch, and B. Anderson, eds., Sociological Theories in Progress, vol. 2. Boston: HoughtonMifflin.

REFERENCES

Adams, J. Stacy 1965 ‘‘Inequity in Social Exchange.’’ In L. Berkowitz, ed., Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, vol. 9. New York: Academic Press.

Alves, Wayne M., and Peter H. Rossi 1978 ‘‘Who Should Get What? Fairness Judgments of the Distribution of Earnings.’’ American Journal of Sociology 84:541–564.

Alwin, Duane F. 1987 ‘‘Distributive Justice and Satisfaction with Material Well-Being.’’ American Sociological Review 52:83–95.

——— 1994 ‘‘Aging, Personality and Social Change: The Stability of Individual Differences Across the Life-Span.’’ In D. L. Featherman, R. M. Lerner, and M. Permutter, eds., Life-Span Development and Behavior, vol. 12. Hillsdale N.J.: Erlbaum.

———, Galin Gornev, and Ludmilla Khakhulina 1996 ‘‘Comparative Referential Structures, System Legitimacy, and Justice Sentiments: An International Comparison.’’ In Social Justice and Political Change: Public Opinion in Capitalist and Post-Communist States. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.

Aristotle 1953 Nichomachean Ethics, trans. J. A. K. Thompson. London: George Allen and Unwin.

Austin, William 1977 ‘‘Equity Theory and Social Comparison Processes.’’ In J. M. Suls and R. L. Miller, eds., Social Comparison Processes: Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives. Washington D.C.: Hemisphere.

Axelrod, Robert 1984 The Evolution of Cooperation. New

York: Basic Books.

Barry, Brian 1981 ‘‘Social Science and Distributive Justice.’’ In Robert A. Solo and Charles W. Anderson, eds., Value Judgment and Income Distribution. New York: Praeger.

Becker, Gary S. 1996 Accounting for Tastes. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Bengtson, Vern L. 1993 ‘‘Is the ‘Contract across Generations’ Changing? Effects of Population Aging on Obligations and Expectations across Age Groups.’’ In V. L. Bengtson and W. A. Achenbaum, eds., The Changing Contract across Generations. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.

Berkowitz, Leonard, and Elaine Walster, eds. 1976 Equity Theory: Toward a General Theory of Social Interaction. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, vol. 9. New York: Academic Press.

Blau, Peter M. 1971 ‘‘Justice in Social Exchange.’’ In H. Turk and R. L. Simpson, eds., Institutions and Social Exchange: The Sociologies of Talcott Parsons and George C. Homans. New York: Bobbs-Merrill.

———, and Otis Dudley Duncan 1967 The American Occupational Structure. New York: Wiley.

Blauner, Robert 1989 Black Lives, White Lives. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Boulding, Kenneth E. 1981 ‘‘Allocation and Distribution: The Quarrelsome Twins.’’ In R. A. Solo and C. W. Anderson, eds., Value Judgment and Income Distribution. New York: Praeger.

Brickman, Philip 1977 ‘‘Preferences of Inequality.’’ Sociometry 40:303–310.

———, et al. 1981 ‘‘Micro-Justice and Macro-Justice.’’ In M. J. Lerner and S. C. Lerner, eds., The Justice Motive in Social Behavior. New York: Plenum.

Buchanan, Allen, and Deborah Mathieu 1986 ‘‘Philosophy and Justice.’’ In R. L. Cohen, ed., Justice: Views from the Social Sciences. New York: Plenum.

Cohen, Ronald L., ed. 1986. Justice: Views from the Social Sciences. New York: Plenum.

Cook, Karen S. 1975 ‘‘Expectations, Evaluations and Equity.’’ American Sociological Review 40:372–388.

———, and Karen A. Hegtvedt 1983 ‘‘Distributive Justice, Equity, and Equality.’’ Annual Review of Sociology 9:217–241.

———, and ——— 1986 ‘‘Justice and Power: An Exchange Analysis.’’ In H. W. Bierhoff, R. L. Cohen, and J. Greenberg, eds., Justice in Social Relations. New York: Plenum.

———, and Toshio Yamagishi 1983 ‘‘Social Determinants of Equity Judgments: The Problem of Multidimensional Input.’’ In D. M. Messick and K. A. Cook, eds., Equity Theory: Psychological and Sociological Perspectives. New York: Praeger.

Crosby, Faye 1976 ‘‘A Model of Egoistical Relative Deprivation.’’ Psychological Review 83:85–113.

——— 1982 Relative Deprivation and Working Women. New York: Oxford University Press.

Davis, James A. 1959 ‘‘A Formal Interpretation of the Theory of Relative Deprivation.’’ Sociometry 22:280–296.

Della Fave, L. Richard 1980 ‘‘The Meek Shall Not Inherit the Earth: Self-Evaluation and the Legitimacy of Social Stratification.’’ American Sociological Review

45:955–971.

Deutsch, Morton 1975 ‘‘Equity, Equality and Need: What Determines Which Value Will Be Used as the Basis of Distributive Justice.’’ Journal of Social Issues 31:137–149.

——— 1986 Distributive Justice: A Social Psychological Perspective. New Haven Conn.: Yale University Press.

DiQuattro, Arthur 1986 ‘‘Political Studies and Justice.’’ In R. L. Cohen, ed., Justice: Views from the Social Sciences. New York: Plenum.

Duncan, Greg, and Willard Rodgers 1991 ‘‘Has Children’s Poverty Become More Persistent?’’ American Sociological Review 56:538–550.

Elster, Jon 1984 Ulysses and the Sirens: Studies in Rationality and Irrationality, rev. ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

——— 1989 Solomonic Judgements: Studies in the Limitations of Rationality. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Farkas, Arthur J., and Norman H. Anderson 1979 ‘‘Multidimensional Input in Equity Theory.’’ Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 37:879–896.

Featherman, David L., and Robert M. Hauser 1978 Opportunity and Change. New York: Academic Press.

Festinger, Leon 1959 A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.

Fischer, Claude S., et al. 1996 Inequality by Design: Cracking the Bell Curve Myth. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Folger, Robert 1984 The Sense of Injustice: Social Psychological Perspectives. New York: Plenum.

Furby, Lita 1986 ‘‘Psychology and Justice.’’ In R. L. Cohen, ed., Justice: Views from the Social Sciences. New York: Plenum.

Gartrell, C. David 1982 ‘‘On the Visibility of Wage Referents.’’ Canadian Journal of Sociology 7:117–143.

———, and Bernard E. Paille 1997 ‘‘Wage Cuts and the Fairness of Pay in a Worker–Owned Plywood Cooperative.’’ Social Psychology Quarterly 60:103–117.

Greenberg, Jerald, and Ronald L. Cohen 1982 Equity and Justice in Social Behavior. New York: Academic Press.

Hamilton, V. Lee, and David Rauma 1995 ‘‘Social Psychology of Deviance and the Law.’’ In Karen Cook,

Gary Fine, and James House, eds., Sociological Perspectives on Social Psychology. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

Hauser, Robert M., and David L. Featherman 1977 The Process of Stratification: Trends and Analyses. New York: Academic Press.

Hegtvedt, Karen A., and Barry Markovsky 1995 ‘‘Justice and Injustice.’’ In Karen Cook, Gary Fine, and James House, eds., Sociological Perspectives on Social Psychology. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

Heider, Fritz 1958 The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations. New York: Wiley.

Herrnstein, Richard J., and Charles Murray 1994 The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. New York: Free Press.

Hochschild, Jennifer L. 1981 What’s Fair? American Beliefs about Distributive Justice. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Homans, George C. (1961) 1974 Social Behavior: Its Elementary Forms. New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanavich.

——— 1976 ‘‘Commentary.’’ In L. Berkowitz and E. Walster, eds., Equity Theory: Toward a General Theory of Social Interaction. New York: Academic Press.

Jasso, Guillermina 1978 ‘‘On the Justice of Earnings: A New Specification of the Justice Evaluation Function.’’ American Journal of Sociology 83:1398–1419.

———1980 ‘‘A New Theory of Distributive Justice.’’

American Sociological Review 45:3–32

———1999 ‘‘How Much Injustice Is There in the World? Two New Justice Indexes.’’ American Sociological Review 64:133–168.

———, and Peter H. Rossi 1977 ‘‘Distributive Justice and Earned Income.’’ American Sociological Review

42:639–651

———, and Bernd Wegener 1997 ‘‘Methods for Empirical Justice Analysis: Part 1. Framework, Models, and Quantities.’’ Social Justice Research 10:393–430.

——— 1999 ‘‘Gender and Country Differences in the Sense of Justice.’’ International Journal of Comparative Sociology 40:94–116.

Jencks, Christopher S., et al. 1972 Inequality: A Reassessment of the Effect of Family and Schooling in America. New York: Basic Books.

——— 1979 Who Gets Ahead? The Determinants of Economic Success in America. New York: Basic Books.

Kluegel, James R., David S. Mason, and Bernd Wegener 1995 Social Justice and Political Change: Public Opinion in Capitalist and Post-Communist States. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.

———, and Eliot R. Smith 1981 ‘‘Beliefs about Stratification.’’ Annual Review of Sociology 7:29–56.

——— 1986 Beliefs about Inequality: Americans’ Views of What Is and What Ought to Be. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.

Lane, Robert 1986 ‘‘Market Justice, Poltical Justice.’’

American Political Science Review 80:383–402.

Levy, Frank 1988 Dollars and Dreams: The Changing American Income Distribution. New York: Norton.

———, and Richard J. Murnane 1992 ‘‘U.S. Earnings Levels and Earnings Inequality: A Review of Recent Trends and Proposed Explanations.’’ Journal of the Economic Literature 30:1333–1381.

Major, Brenda, and Blythe Forcey 1985 ‘‘Social Comparisons and Pay Evaluations: Preferences for SameSex and Same-Job Wage Comparisons.’’ Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 21:393–405.

Markovsky, Barry 1985 ‘‘Toward a Multilevel Distributive Justice Theory.’’ American Sociological Review

50:822–839.

Messick, David M., and Karen A. Cook 1983 Equity Theory: Psychological and Sociological Perspectives. New York: Praeger.

Mikula, Gerald 1980 Justice and Social Interaction: Experimental and Theoretical Contributions from Psychological Research. New York: Springer-Verlag.

Molm, Linda D. 1991 ‘‘Affect and Social Exchange: Satisfaction in Power-Dependence Relations.’’ American Sociological Review 56:475–493.

Moynihan, Daniel Patrick 1968 On Understanding Poverty. New York: Basic Books.

Mueller, Charles W., and Jean E. Wallace 1996 ‘‘Justice and the Paradox of the Contented Female Worker.’’

Social Psychology Quarterly 59:338–349.

Nader, Laura, and Andree Sursock 1986 ‘‘Anthropology and Justice.’’ In R. L. Cohen, ed., Justice: Views from the Social Sciences. New York: Plenum.

Norris, Joan E. 1987 ‘‘Justice and Intergenerational Relations: An Introduction.’’ Social Justice Research 1:393–403.

Nozick, Robert 1974 Anarchy, State, and Utopia. New York: Basic Books.

Patchen, Martin 1961 The Choice of Wage Comparisons. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.

Pettigrew, Thomas F. 1967 ‘‘Social Evaluation Theory: Convergences and Applications.’’ In D. Levine, ed.,

Nebraska Symposium on Motivation. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

Rae, Douglas 1981 Equalities. Cambridge, Mass.: Har-

vard University Press.

Rainwater, Lee 1974 What Money Buys. New York: Ba-

sic Books.

Randall, Christina S., and Charles W. Mueller 1995 ‘‘Extensions of Justice Theory: Justice Evaluations and Employee Reactions in a Natural Setting.’’ Social Psychology Quarterly 58:178–194.

Rawls, John 1971 A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Robinson, Robert V., and Wendell Bell 1978 ‘‘Equality, Success and Social Justice in England and the United States.’’ American Sociological Review 43:125–143.

Runciman, W. 1966 Relative Deprivation and Social Justice. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Rytina, Steve 1986 ‘‘Sociology and Justice.’’ In R. L. Cohen, ed., Justice: Views from the Social Sciences. New York: Plenum.

Schaeffer, Nora Cate 1990 ‘‘Principles of Justice in Judgments about Child Support.’’ Social Forces 69:157–179.

Sennett, Richard, and Jonathan Cobb 1972 The Hidden Injuries of Class. New York: Vintage Books.

Sewell, William H., and Robert M. Hauser 1975 Education, Occupation, and Earnings: Achievement in the Early Career. New York: Academic Press.

Solo, Robert A., and Charles W. Anderson 1981 Value Judgment and Income Distribution. New York: Praeger.

Southwood, Kenneth E. 1978 ‘‘Substantive Theory and Statistical Interaction: Five Models.’’ American Journal of Sociology 83:1154–1203.

Stolte, John F. 1983. ‘‘The Legitimation of Structural Inequality.’’ American Sociological Review 48:331–342.

Thibaut, John W., and Harold H. Kelley 1959 The Social Psychology of Groups. New York: Wiley.

———, et al. 1975 Procedural Justice: A Psychological Analysis. Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum.

——— 1987 ‘‘A Surge in Inequality.’’ Scientific American 256:30–37.

Tyler, Tom R. 1984 ‘‘Justice in the Political Arena.’’ In R. Folger, ed., The Sense of Injustice: Social Psychological Perspectives. New York: Plenum.

——— 1986 ‘‘The Psychology of Leadership Evaluation.’’ In H. W. Bierhoff, R. L. Cohen, and J. Greenberg, eds., Justice in Social Relations. New York: Plenum.

Walster, Elaine, Ellen Berscheid, and G. William Walster 1973 ‘‘New Directions in Equity Research.’’ Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 25:151–176.

Walster, Elaine G., William Walster, and Ellen Berscheid 1978 Equity: Theory and Research. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

Walzer, Michael 1983 Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality. New York: Basic Books.

Williams, Robin M., Jr. 1975 ‘‘Relative Deprivation.’’ In L. A. Coser, ed., The Idea of Social Structure: Papers in Honor of Robert K. Merton. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Worland, Stephen T. 1986 ‘‘Economics and Justice.’’ In R. L. Cohen, ed., Justice: Views from the Social Sciences. New York: Plenum.

———, and Luca Perrone 1977 ‘‘Marxist Class Categories and Income Inequality.’’ American Sociological Review 42:32–55.

Wright, Eric Olin, Janeen Baxter, and Gunn Elisabeth Birkelund 1995 ‘‘The Gender Gap in Workplace Authority: A Cross-National Study.’’ American Sociological Review 60:407–435.

DUANE F. ALWIN

SOCIAL MOBILITY

The term ‘‘social mobility’’ describes the nature and amount of change in social position over time. In principle, this change can be defined for any social entity. Thus, one can study the ‘‘collective mobility’’ of classes, ethnic groups, or entire nations in terms of, for example, average health status, literacy, education, or gross domestic product per capita. More commonly, the term is used in connection with the movement of individuals or families. However, even though social mobility typically is defined with respect to micro units of society, the pattern of mobility across those units generally is considered a core characteristic of a society’s social structure, and the study of this mobility generally is recognized as a fundamental area of macro-level sociology.

Social mobility typically is conceptualized in terms of the quantity of movement and the distribution of its direction and distance. The different rates that together constitute the mobility structure of a society is highly complex, however, for several reasons. First, societies have more than one dimension along which mobility can occur. Thus, one can speak of occupational mobility, social class mobility, educational mobility, job mobility, income mobility, wealth mobility, and so on. In principle, one also can use the term ‘‘social mobility’’ to describe movement among nonhierarchical social statuses, such as religious affiliation mobility and geographic mobility or mobility across categories that describe attitudes, belief systems, life

styles, and the like. The dominant use of the term in the literature, however, concerns mobility along a social hierarchy that defines a dimension of social inequality in a society. Second, even with respect to a single hierarchy, the mobility structure is not easy to summarize. A different rate of mobility can be calculated with respect to each combination of origin and destination position along the social hierarchy in question. Empirically, it may be possible to summarize this collection of rates accurately in terms of a function of the social distance between origin and destination or in terms of specific relationships between the origin and destination categories. In general, however, an accurate summary cannot be expressed in terms of a single number. Thus, for each social hierarchy, there is not a single rate of social mobility but a core set of rates that, taken together, can be termed the structure of mobility with respect to the particular hierarchical dimension.

Social mobility is an important issue in sociology for several reasons. For one thing, it is relevant to social equity. Philosophical and moral evaluations of social inequality often depend not only on the level of inequality in a society but also on the extent to which individuals or families can leave disadvantaged states during their lifetimes or across generations. Social mobility is also an important explanatory factor in social theory. The basic stratification variables affect a wide variety of social outcomes and behaviors, but these effects accumulate over time; social mobility therefore affects outcomes by changing the states and durations of these key explanatory variables. The societal rate of mobility also may have macro-level consequences. An early conjecture in this area appears in the work of Werner Sombart, who argued that the failure of early twentieth century socialist parties in the United States stemmed in part from the high rate of American social mobility, which prevented the formation of strong class identification.

The longest-standing tradition in sociological mobility research concerns mobility in occupational groupings or social classes. Much of this work has used ‘‘mobility tables’’ (cross-classifica- tions of origin by destination position) to study ‘‘intergenerational mobility,’’ that is, the extent to which the social position of adults differs from that of their parents. Another large body of work has focused on ‘‘intragenerational mobility,’’ or the mobility experienced by individuals or families

over the course of their adult lives. Because male labor force participation generally has been higher and more persistent than female participation and because of the somewhat controversial presumption that the status of a family derives from the status of the male breadwinner, for many years these studies focused on intergenerational mobility between fathers and sons, although more recent literature has examined the structure of mobility for women as well.

An important question in intergenerational mobility research is whether overall rates of intergenerational social mobility differ by country. Earlier in the century, scholars hypothesized that the United States had especially high rates of mobility, and some argued that those rates were a consequence of the American meritocratic value system. More recently, it became clear that the primary factors in cross-national differences in mobility rates are structural, not cultural. Differences in socalled structural mobility across countries arise from the extent to which the distribution of positions for sons or daughters differs from the distribution of positions for their fathers. Changes in this distribution across generations (as well as more subtle factors such as class differences in fertility, death rates, and migration rates) necessarily produce intergenerational social mobility. Countries whose occupational distribution is changing rapidly (high rates of structural change) therefore have greater levels of mobility than do countries whose occupational distribution is changing slowly.

Not all social mobility occurs as a result of structural change. The component of social mobility that occurs beyond the amount produced by structural change is typically called circulation mobility, exchange mobility, or relative mobility. The Featherman, Jones, Hauser (FJH) hypothesis of the mid-1970s asserts that cross-national and historical differences in social mobility are accounted for almost completely by differences in levels of structural mobility. According to the strong form of this hypothesis, once structural mobility is taken into account, the pattern of relative mobility chances is invariant over time and across countries. This pattern has three principal features: (1) relatively high immobility at the top and bottom of the hierarchy, (2) higher levels of short-range mobility than long-range mobility (moves from the top to the bottom or from the bottom to the top of the hierarchy are especially rare), and (3) a rela-

tively small impact of origins on destinations in the middle of the hierarchy.

More recent research has determined that even though the weak form of the FJH hypothesis (overall mobility differences are due largely to differences in structural mobility) is supported by the data, the strong form (invariance of relative mobility chances) appears to be false. However, further progress on this issue has been elusive. In particular, the question of whether cross-national differences in relative mobility chances are the subject of such complex national historical differences that they are idiosyncratic or whether they are the product of a more parsimonious set of structural forces (e.g., the extent to which the political system is democratic, the level of modernization, and the level of social inequality) remains to be answered.

Another continuing challenge in mobility research concerns conceptualization and measurement of the component of mobility that is due to structural change. The specification of this causal force in terms of differences in the distribution of positions of fathers and their adult children is problematic for subtle but important reasons. Such an identification assumes that the observed destination distribution is caused by forces (such as technological change) that are not affected by (and therefore are a legitimate cause of) the observed mobility process. This amounts to assuming that the observed destination distribution constitutes a rigid supply constraint, a set of preexisting empty vacancies that are filled by the movement of sample members with respect to their origin positions. This assumption is never perfectly true. If the ‘‘supply constraint’’ is not rigid (and it is unlikely to be so), the observed distribution of destination positions (which by definition represents a summing up of the mobility outcomes for a particular statistical sample) is a consequence of the mobility process as well as of the ‘‘structural forces’’ that constrain the character of this destination distribution. It therefore cannot be taken to be a pure cause of social mobility. The logic of structural mobility becomes especially problematic when subgroups of the population are studied in this fashion. For example, if the distribution of women’s occupations shifts toward high-status occupations relative to the total occupational distribution, it is problematic to argue that the relative improvement of women’s destinations is a ‘‘cause’’ of

women’s higher levels of social mobility as opposed to being a consequence of that mobility. This problem, which is sometimes referred to as the ‘‘reflection’’ problem, has not had a satisfactory solution.

Although structural change is a major part of the explanation for overall levels of intergenerational social mobility in a society, it cannot explain differences in the likelihood that particular individuals will be upwardly or downwardly mobile. The prevailing pattern of circulation mobility that was noted above (relatively high levels of immobility at the top and bottom, the predominance of short-range over long-range mobility, etc.) implies that class of origin is a significant predictor of the types of mobility that do occur. However, an explanation for destination positions that relied solely on the status of origin would be unsatisfactory in two respects: First, the predictive power of social origins by itself is relatively weak; second, the explanation does not indicate how and why social origins matter.

Efforts to redress these deficiencies stem largely from the publication of Blau and Duncan’s The American Occupational Structure (1967). A major goal of that work was to understand whether the educational system operated primarily as a device that transmitted the status of parents to their children or as an engine of social mobility that freed children from the effects of the status of their parents. To accomplish that goal, Blau and Duncan developed what has come to be known as the status attainment model. Their approach to the study of mobility assumed a dominant metric to social hierarchy: the socioeconomic status of occupations. Their research showed that, at least for men (Blau and Duncan did not study the mobility of women), education was a more important determinant of a son’s adult socioeconomic status than were his socioeconomic origins. Furthermore, while educational attainment was strongly influenced by socioeconomic origin, most of the individual-level variation in educational attainment was not explained by socioeconomic origin. Those authors also showed that most of the effect of socioeconomic origins on outcomes was indirect, derived from the effect of those origins on education. Finally, the effect of education on occupational attainment regardless of social background was much larger in the United States than was the direct effect of father’s socioeconomic background

(regardless of the son’s education). These findings led many to interpret Blau and Duncan’s research to mean that the United States more closely approximated an ‘‘achievement’’ than an ‘‘ascription’’ society, although others pointed to the still large (even if not decisive) disadvantage arising from low socioeconomic origin along with the disadvantages associated with being a first-genera- tion immigrant, an African-American, or a woman as constituting important qualifications to such a generalization.

The Blau and Duncan approach essentially divided the intergenerational mobility process into three segments. The first segment concerned the process of educational attainment, the second concerned the transition from school to work, and the third concerned the ‘‘intragenerational’’ mobility that occurs over the working life. Leaving aside the powerful but difficult to specify force of structural change, this division may offer the best possibility for understanding the mechanisms that lie behind intergenerational social mobility as well as identifying possible policy interventions and shedding light on three processes that have great importance in their own right. Each of these processes calls attention to specific institutions (in particular, the educational system and the labor market) that facilitate, limit, or channel social mobility. The focus on how institutional forces constrain the impact of individual resources on individual outcomes sometimes is referred to as the ‘‘fourth generation’’ of social mobility research (with early mobility studies being the first generation, the status attainment tradition being the second, and statistically sophisticated analyses of mobility tables being the third).

A large body of literature has grown around each of these components of the intergenerational mobility process. With respect to education, scholars have conceptualized the educational career as a set of transitions to successively higher grades and have asked whether family background has the same influence at each grade level of this transition process. Results for the United States and several other countries suggest that the effects of family background decline at higher-grade transitions, though these findings are controversial. Assuming that the decline is real, some scholars have argued that the historical raising of the minimum school-leaving age should have reduced the impact of family of origin on outcomes over time.

Again, however, while there is some evidence that the effects of family background have declined during the twentieth century and that these declines are caused by the expansion of education, empirical studies have failed to confirm this conjecture decisively.

A second major focus in the literature concerns the reasons why socioeconomic background is associated with educational performance. It has been appreciated since Sewell and associates developed the ‘‘Wisconsin model’’ in the early 1970s that there is a social psychological component to mobility in which family status is related to parental expectations for the child. In combination with grades in school, peer group influences, and teachers’ expectations, this shapes a student’s educational and occupational aspirations. More recent work has reconceptualized these family advantages or disadvantages in terms of cultural resources (‘‘cultural capital’’), which sometimes are specified as a family’s participation in ‘‘high-cul- tural’’ activities (exposure to art museums, opera, theater, dance, etc.); in other studies, they are defined more broadly (and vaguely) as encompassing all the cultural advantages a family may possess that affect a child’s ability to do well in school. Other recent literature focuses on ‘‘social capital,’’ which sometimes is interpreted to mean the level and quality of interaction parents have with their children and at other times is interpreted to refer to the resources embedded in the parents’ social networks that could in principle influence a child’s outcomes. A third, rather controversial focus of attention in recent years concerns possible links between socioeconomic status and genes and the extent to which intergenerational correlations among status variables (particularly educational outcomes) indicate the presence of a genetic force. A fourth focus concerns the specific consequences of low income on children’s development and later socioeconomicoutcomes. A fifth focus concerns the extent to which the characteristics of schools, neighborhoods, and communities can mute or exaggerate the impact of family characteristics on educational outcomes.

The second mobility component is the transition from school to work. A large body of literature focuses specifically on aspects of this transition, including variation in the extent to which the diplomas, degrees, and advanced degrees provided by schools are linked by law or custom to

specific occupational careers; the extent to which credentials are standardized in a country; the extent to which the supply of those credentials is controlled by schools in light of estimated demand; and the extent to which students who graduate with these diplomas or degrees are provided with knowledge of the relevant job market. Many policy concerns in the United States focus on those who leave school before the tertiary level and the extent to which they are provided with a mix of academic and vocational skills and credentials that is valuable on the job market. Vocational education in particular is organized quite differently across industrialized societies, and in recent years comparative research on this transition has accelerated.

The third component concerns intragenerational mobility over the life course. This research has taken different forms. The Blau and Duncan approach largely emphasized the mean or typical pattern of life-course development as a function of education, first job, and father’s occupation. In this form, the question of mobility is reduced to a question about the average status ‘‘return’’ to the resources an individual possesses on first entering the labor market. Although this approach is informative about the typical level of status advancement during the work career as a function of origin conditions, it suffers from two deficiencies: First, it does not explain how education and the first job lead to the current job; second, it does not provide an explanation of the frequency or consequences of deviations from the typical amount of status advancement during the work career.

An understanding of the full distribution of outcomes (i.e., both upward and downward career mobility) is made possible through the use of the ‘‘mobility table’’ approach that has been applied to the study of intergenerational mobility between the status of the father and the status of the son or daughter. The prevalent approach in recent sociology, however, has been more institutional. One line of work has focused on structural linkages between jobs in particular occupational or organizational labor markets. This work has addressed the implications of entering these ‘‘internal labor markets’’ for subsequent career advancement, with an important subset of it directed at questions about whether these institutional mechanisms reproduce, enhance, or mute racial or gender differences. Because these job linkages generally are not