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gerial class’’ by virtue of their authority over workers (Wright 1978). The dividing lines proposed in this model thus rest on concepts (e.g., autonomy and authority relations) that once were purely the province of Weberian or neo-Weberian sociology. As Parkin (1979) puts it, ‘‘inside every neo-Marxist there seems to be a Weberian struggling to get out’’ (p. 25).

These early class models, which once were quite popular, have been superseded by various second-generation models that rely more explicitly on the concept of exploitation. In effect, Roemer (1988) and others (Wright 1997; Sørensen 1996) have redefined exploitation as the extraction of ‘‘rent,’’ which refers to the excess earnings that are secured by limiting access to positions and thus artificially restricting the supply of qualified labor. If an approach of this sort is adopted, one can test for skill-based exploitation by calculating whether the cumulated lifetime earnings of skilled laborers exceed those of unskilled laborers by an amount larger than the implied training costs (e.g., school tuition and forgone earnings). In a perfectly competitive market, labor will flow to the most rewarding occupations, equalizing the lifetime earnings of workers and eliminating exploitative returns. However, when opportunities are limited by the imposition of restrictions on entry (e.g., qualifying examinations), the equilibrating flow of labor is disrupted and the potential for exploitation emerges. By implication, the working class can no longer be viewed as a wholly cohesive and unitary force, as some workers presumably have an interest in preserving and extending the institutional mechanisms (e.g., schools) that allow them to reap exploitative returns.

Weberians and Post-Weberians The rise of the ‘‘new middle class’’ has proved less problematic for scholars working within a Weberian framework. Indeed, the class model advanced by Weber suggests a multiplicity of class cleavages, since it equates the economic class of workers with their ‘‘market situation’’ in the competition for jobs and valued goods (Weber [1922] 1968, pp. 926–40). In this formulation, the class of skilled workers is privileged because its incumbents are in high demand on the labor market and because its economic power can be parlayed into high wages, job security, and an advantaged position in commodity markets (Weber [1922] 1968, pp. 927–928). At the same time, the stratification system is compli-

cated by the existence of ‘‘status groupings,’’ which Weber saw as forms of social affiliation that can compete, coexist, or overlap with class-based groupings. Although an economic class is merely an aggregate of individuals in a similar market situation, a status grouping is defined as a community of individuals who share a style of life and interact as status equals (e.g., the nobility, an ethnic caste). In some circumstances, the boundaries of a status grouping are determined by purely economic criteria, yet Weber notes that ‘‘status honor normally stands in sharp opposition to the pretensions of sheer property’’ (Weber [1922] 1968, p. 932).

The Weberian approach has been elaborated and extended by sociologists attempting to understand the ‘‘American form’’ of stratification. In the postwar decades, American sociologists typically dismissed the Marxist model of class as overly simplistic and one-dimensional, whereas they celebrated the Weberian model as properly distinguishing between the numerous variables Marx had conflated in his approach. These scholars often disaggregated the stratification dimensions identified by Weber into a multiplicity of variables (e.g., income, education, ethnicity) and then showed that the correlations between those variables were weak enough to generate various forms of ‘‘status inconsistency’’ (e.g., a poorly educated millionaire). The resulting picture suggested a ‘‘pluralistic model’’ of stratification; that is, the class system was represented as intrinsically multidimensional, with a host of cross-cutting affiliations producing a complex patchwork of internal class cleavages. While one critic has remarked that the multidimensionalists provided a ‘‘sociological portrait of America as drawn by Norman Rockwell’’ (Parkin 1979, p. 604), some post-Weberians also emphasized the ‘‘seamy side’’ of pluralism. In fact, Lenski (1954) and others (e.g., Lipset 1959) have argued that modern stratification systems can be seen as breeding grounds for personal stress and political radicalism, since individuals with contradictory statuses may feel relatively deprived and thus support ‘‘movements designed to alter the political status quo’’ (Lenski 1966, p. 88). This line of research died out in the early-1970s under the force of negative and inconclusive findings ( Jackson and Curtis 1972). Althoughthere has been a resurgence of theorizing about issues of status disparity and relative deprivation (e.g., Baron 1994), much of this work focuses on the generic proper-

ties of all ‘‘post modern’’ stratification systems rather than the allegedly exceptional features of the American case.

In recent years, the standard multidimensionalist interpretation of ‘‘Class, Status, and Party’’ (Weber 1946, pp. 180–95) has fallen into disfavor, and an alternative version of neo-Weberian stratification theory has gradually taken shape. This revised reading of Weber draws on the concept of social closure as defined and discussed in the essay ‘‘Open and Closed Relationships’’ (Weber [1922] 1968, pp. 43–46; 341–348). By social closure, Weber is referring to the processes by which groups devise and enforce rules of membership, typically with the objective of improving the position [of the group] by monopolistic tactics’’ (Weber [1922] 1968, p. 43). While Weber does not directly link this discussion with his other contributions to stratification theory, later commentators pointed out that social classes and status groupings are generated by simple exclusionary processes operating at the macro-structural level (e.g., Giddens 1973). Under modern industrialism, there are obviously no formal sanctions that prevent labor from crossing class boundaries, yet various institutional forces (e.g., private property, union shops) are quite effective in limiting the amount of class mobility over the life course and between generations. These exclusionary mechanisms not only ‘‘maximize claims to rewards and opportunities’’ among the members of closed classes (Parkin 1979, p. 44), but also provide the demographic continuity needed to generate distinctive class cultures and ‘‘reproduce common life experience over the generations’’ (Giddens 1973, p. 107). As is noted by Giddens (1973, pp. 107–12), barriers of this sort are not the only source of ‘‘class structuration,’’ yet they clearly play a contributing role in the formation of identifiable classes under modern industrialism. This revisionist interpretation of Weber has reoriented the discipline toward examining the causes and sources of class formation rather than the potentially fragmenting effects of cross-cutting affiliations and cleavages.

Gradational Status Groupings The theorists discussed above have all proceeded by mapping individuals or families into mutually exclusive and exhaustive categories (‘‘classes’’). As this review indicates, there continues to be much debate about the location of the boundaries separating these categories, yet the shared assumption is that fun-

damental class boundaries of some kind are present, if only in a latent or incipient form. By contrast, the implicit claim underlying gradational approaches is that such ‘‘dividing lines’’ are largely the construction of overzealous sociologists and that the underlying structure of modern stratification can be more closely approximated with gradational measures of income, status, or prestige. The standard concepts of class action and consciousness are similarly discarded; that is, whereas most categorical models are based on the (realist) assumption that the constituent categories are ‘‘structures of interest that provide the basis for collective action’’ (Wright 1979, p. 7), gradational models usually are represented as taxonomic or statistical classifications of purely heuristic interest.

This approach has been pursued in various ways, but typically not by operationalizing social standing in terms of income alone. It does not follow that distinctions of income are sociologically uninteresting; in fact, if one is intent on assessing the ‘‘market situation’’ of workers (Weber [1922] 1968), there is much to recommend a direct measurement of their income and wealth. The preferred approach has nonetheless been to define classes as ‘‘groups of persons who are members of effective kinship units which, as units, are approximately equally valued’’ (Parsons 1954, p. 77). This formulation was first operationalized in postwar community studies (e.g., Warner 1949) by constructing broadly defined categories of reputational equals (‘‘upper upper class,’’ ‘‘upper middle class,’’ etc.). However, when the disciplinary focus shifted to the national stratification system, the measure of choice soon became occupational scales of prestige (e.g., Treiman 1977), socioeconomic status (e.g., Blau and Duncan 1967), or global ‘‘success in the labor market’’ ( Jencks et al. 1988). Although there is much debate about the usefulness of such scales, they continue to serve as standard measures of class background in sociological research of all kinds.

GENERATING STRATIFICATION

The language of stratification theory makes a sharp distinction between the distribution of social rewards (e.g., the income distribution) and the distribution of opportunities for securing those rewards. As sociologists have noted, it is the latter

distribution that governs popular judgments about the legitimacy of stratification: the typical American, for example, is willing to tolerate substantial inequalities in power, wealth, or prestige if the opportunities for securing those social goods are distributed equally across all individuals. Whatever the wisdom of this popular logic, stratification researchers have long explored its factual underpinnings by describing and explaining the structure of mobility chances.

The study of social mobility is, then, a major sociological industry. The relevant literature is vast, yet much of this work can be classified into one of three traditions of scholarship.

1.The conventional starting point has been to analyze bivariate ‘‘mobility tables’’ formed by cross-classifying the occupational origins and destinations of individuals. These tables can be used to estimate the densities of occupational inheritance, describe patterns of mobility and exchange between occupations, and map the social distances between classes and their constituent occupations. Moreover, when comparable mobility tables are assembled for several countries, it becomes possible to address long-standing debates about the underlying contours of cross-national variation in stratification systems (e.g., Erikson and Goldthorpe 1992).

2.It is a sociological truism that Blau and Duncan (1967) and their colleagues (e.g., Sewell et al. 1969) revolutionized the field with their formal ‘‘path models’’ of stratification. These models were intended to represent, if only partially, the process

by which background advantages can be converted into socioeconomic status

through the mediating variables of schooling, aspirations, and parental encouragement. Under formulations of this kind, the main sociological objective was to show that socioeconomic outcomes are structured not only by ‘‘native ability’’ and family origins but also by various intervening variables (e.g., schooling) that are themselves only partly determined

by origins, race and gender, and other ascriptive forces (Blau and Duncan 1967, pp. 199–205). This line of research, which

had fallen out of favor by the mid-1980s, has been rediscovered and revived as stratification scholars react to the nowfashionable argument (i.e., Herrnstein and Murray 1994) that inherited intelligence is increasingly determinative of stratification outcomes.

3.These ‘‘status attainment’’ models have been criticized for failing to attend to the social structural constraints that operate on the stratification process independently of individual-level traits. The structuralist accounts that ultimately emerged from these critiques amounted in most cases to refurbished versions of the dual economy and market segmentation models that were introduced and popularized several decades ago by institutional economists. When these models were redeployed by sociologists in the early 1980s, the usual objective was to demonstrate that women and minorities were disadvantaged not only because of deficient investments in human capital (e.g., inadequate schooling and experience) but also by their consignment to ‘‘secondary’’ labor markets that on average paid lower wages and offered fewer opportunities for promotion or advancement.

These three approaches to stratification analysis typically are implemented with quantitative models of the most sophisticated sort. In a classic critique, Coser (1975) suggested that stratification researchers were so entranced by quantitative models of mobility, attainment, and dissimination that ‘‘the methodological tail was wagging the substantive dog’’ (p. 652). This latter argument can no longer be taken exclusively in the intended pejorative sense because new models and methods have raised important substantive questions that previously had been overlooked. In this sense, The development of structural equation, log-linear, and event history models are properly viewed as watershed events in the history of mobility research.

ASCRIPTIVE PROCESSES

The forces of race and gender have long been relegated to the sociological sidelines by class theorists of both Marxist and non-Marxist persuasions. In most versions of class-analytic theory,

status groups are treated as secondary forms of affiliation, whereas class-based ties are seen as more fundamental and decisive determinants of social and political action. Although Race and gender have not been ignored altogether in such treatments, they typically are represented as vestiges of traditional loyalties that will wither away under the rationalizing influence of socialism, industrialism, or modernization.

The first step in the intellectual breakdown of this model was the fashioning of a multidimensional approach to stratification. Whereas many class theorists gave theoretical or conceptual priority to the economic dimension of stratification, the early multidimensionalists emphasized that social behavior could be understood only by taking into account all status group memberships (e.g., race, gender) and the complex ways in which they interact with one another and with class outcomes. The class-analytic approach was further undermined by the apparent reemergence of racial, ethnic, and nationalist conflicts in the late postwar period. Far from withering away under the force of industrialism, the bonds of race and ethnicity seemed to be alive and well: The modern world was witnessing a ‘‘sudden increase in tendencies by people in many countries and many circumstances to insist on the significance of their group distinctiveness’’ (Glazer and Moynihan 1975, p. 3). This resurgence of status politics continues today. In one last several decades, ethnic and regional solidarities have intensified with the decline of conventional class politics in central Europe and elsewhere, and gender-based affiliations and loyalties have strengthened as feminist movements diffuse throughout much of the modern world.

This turn of events has led some commentators to proclaim that the factors of race, ethnicity, and gender are now the driving force behind the evolution of stratification systems. In one such formulation, Glazer and Moynihan (1975) conclude that ‘‘property relations [formerly] obscured ethnic ones’’ (p. 16), but now it is ‘‘property that begins to seem derivative, and ethnicity that becomes a more fundamental source of stratification’’ (p. 17). The analogous position favored by some feminists is that ‘‘men’s dominance over women is the cornerstone on which all other oppression (class, age, race) rests’’ (Hartmann 1981, p. 12; see also Firestone 1972). This formulation

begs the question of timing; that is, if the forces of gender or ethnicity are truly primordial, it is natural to ask why they began expressing themselves with real vigor in more recent history. In addressing this issue, Bell (1975) suggests that a trade-off exists between class-based and ethnic forms of solidarity, with the latter strengthening whenever the former weaken. As the conflict between labor and capital is institutionalized (via ‘‘trade unionism’’), Bell argues, class-based affiliations typically lose their affective content and workers must turn to racial or ethnic ties to provide them with a renewed sense of identification and commitment. It could be argued that gender politics often fill the same ‘‘moral vacuum’’ that this decline in class politics has allegedly generated.

It may be misleading to treat the competition between ascriptive and class-based forces as a sociological horse race that only one of the two principles can ultimately win. In a pluralist society of the American kind, workers can choose an identity appropriate to the situational context; a modern-day worker may behave as ‘‘an industrial laborer in the morning, a black in the afternoon, and an American in the evening’’ (Parkin 1979, p. 34). Although this situational model of status has not been adopted widely in contemporary research, there is some evidence of renewed interest in conceptualizing the diverse affiliations of individuals and the ‘‘multiple oppressions’’ (see Wright 1989, pp. 5–6) that those affiliations engender. It is now fashionable, for example, to assume that the major status groupings in contemporary stratification systems are defined by the intersection of ethnic, gender, and class affiliations (e.g., black working-class women, white middle-class men). The theoretical framework for this approach is not always well articulated, but the implicit claim seems to be that these subgroupings shape the ‘‘life chances and experiences’’ of individuals (Ransford and Miller 1983, p. 46) and thus define the social settings in which subcultures typically emerge. The obvious effect is to invert the traditional postWeberian perspective on status groupings; that is, whereas orthodox multidimensionalists described the stress experienced by individuals with inconsistent statuses (e.g., poorly educated doctors), the new multidimensionalists emphasize the shared interests and cultures generated within commonly encountered status sets (e.g., black workingclass women).

The sociological study of gender, race, and ethnicity has thus burgeoned. As is noted by Lieberson (1994, p. 649), there has been a certain faddishness in the types of research topics that scholars of gender and race have chosen for study, with the resulting body of literature having a correspondingly haphazard and scattered feel. The following research questions have nonetheless emerged as relatively central ones in the field:

1.How are class relations affected by ascriptive forms of stratification? Can capitalists exploit ethnic antagonisms and patriarchy to their advantage? Do male and majority group workers also benefit from stratification by gender and race?

2.What accounts for variability across time and space in ethnic conflict and solidarity? Will ethnic loyalties weaken as modernization diffuses across ethnically diverse populations? Does modernization instead produce a ‘‘cultural division of labor’’ that strengthens communal ties by making ethnicity the principal arbiter of life chances? Is ethnic conflict further intensified when ethnic groups compete for the same niche in the occupational structure?

3.What are the generative forces underlying ethnic, racial, and gender differentials in income and other socioeconomic outcomes? Do those differentials proceed from supply-side variability in the occupational aspirations or the human capital workers bring to the market? Alternatively, are they produced by demand-side forces such as market segmentation, statistical or institutional discrimination, and the seemingly irrational tastes and preferences of employers?

4.Is theunderlying structure of ascriptive stratification changing with the transition to advanced industrialism? Does the ‘‘logic’’ of industrialism require universalistic personnel practices and consequent declines in overt discrimination? Can this logic be reconciled with the rise of a modern ghetto underclass, the persistence of massive segregation by sex and race, and the emergence of new forms of poverty and hardship among women and recent immigrants?

These questions make it clear that ethnic, racial, and gender inequalities often are classed together and treated as analytically equivalent forms of ascription. Although Parsons (1951) and others (e.g., Tilly 1998) have emphasized the shared features of ‘‘communal ties,’’ such ties can be maintained (or subverted) in very different ways. It has long been argued, for example, that some forms of inequality can be rendered more palatable by the practice of pooling resources (e.g., income) across family members. As Lieberson (1994) points out, the family operates to bind males and females together in a single unit of consumption, whereas extrafamilial institutions (schools, labor markets, etc.) must be relied on to provide the same integrative functions for ethnic groups. If these functions are left wholly unfilled, one might expect ethnic separatist and nationalist movements to emerge. The same ‘‘nationalist’’ option is obviously less viable for single-sex groups; indeed, barring any revolutionary changes in family structure or kinship relations, it seems unlikely that separatist solutions will ever garner much support among men or women. These considerations may account for the absence of a well-developed literature on overt conflict between single-sex groups.

CONCLUSIONS

In recent years, criticisms of the class-analytic framework have escalated, with many scholars arguing that the concept of class is ‘‘ceasing to do any useful work for sociology’’ (Pahl 1989, p. 710). Although such postmodern accounts have taken many forms, most proceed from the assumption that social classes no longer definitively structure lifestyles and life chances and that ‘‘new theories, perhaps more cultural than structural, [are] in order’’ (Davis 1982, p. 585). In accounts of this sort, the labor movement is represented as a fading enterprise rooted in the old conflicts of the workplace and industrial capitalism, whereas new social movements (e.g., environmentalism) are assumed to provide a more appealing call for collective action by virtue of their emphasis on issues of lifestyle, personal identity, and normative change.

This argument has not been subjected to convincing empirical tests and may prove to be premature. However, even if lifestyles and life chances are truly ‘‘decoupling’’ from economic class, this should not be misunderstood as a more general

decline in stratification per se. The massive facts of economic, political, and honorific inequality will still be operative even if conventional models of class ultimately are found deficient in characterizing the postmodern condition. As is well known, some forms of inequality have increased in recent years (e.g., income inequality), while others show no signs of disappearing or withering away (e.g., political inequality).

This persistence and in some cases deepening of inequality is coupled with the continuing diffusion of antistratification values and a correspondingly heightened sensitivity to all things unequal. As egalitarianism spreads, the postmodern public becomes heavily involved in monitoring and exposing illegitimate (i.e., nonmeritocratic) forms of stratification, and even small departures from equality are increasingly viewed as problematic and intolerable (Meyer 1994). Moreover, because stratification systems are deeply institutionalized, there is good reason to anticipate that demands for egalitarian change will outpace actual changes in stratification practices. These dynamics imply that issues of stratification will continue to generate discord and conflict even in the unlikely event of a long-term trend toward diminishing inequality.

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DAVID B. GRUSKY

SOCIAL STRUCTURE

‘‘Social structure’’ is a general term for any collective social circumstance that cannot be altered by isolated actions and thus is fixed or given for the individual. It thus provides a context, environment, or fixed backdrop for action. The size of organizations, the distribution of activities in space, shared language, and the distribution of wealth all might be regarded as social structural circumstances that set limits on feasible activities for individuals.

Social structure is objective in the sense that it is the same for everyone and is beyond the capacity for alteration by any individual. Accordingly, social structure often is spoken of in the singular and as a thing apart, as if there were only one from whose effects no one can escape. This usage masks disagreement about the exact extension of the term but reflects the intention of authors to highlight abstract patterns as an inflexible collective circumstance to which individuals must adapt.

Social structure, or the weaker structural regularities, arises because of the prevalence of social routine. Many social patterns change very slowly either through unmotivated inertia, through willful efforts to renew or reproduce them, or as a collective consequence of individual efforts undertaken for independent reasons. An image or picture, such as a map colored by the linguistic practices of the inhabitants of geographic areas, will lose accuracy slowly and often would remain largely accurate after a century or more. Such substantial durability, along with the accompanying slow continuous change, suggests the possibility of regularities or even scientific laws governing the phenomena that underlie the description.

Routines endure and structural regularities persist for at least three general reasons. Social life is subject to physical constraints such as distance. Thus, most people live close to where they work or do both at one place. For related reasons, many persons maintain stable residences. Furthermore, many people need or desire the company or cooperation of representative social types, such as those who share their religious convictions, or particular work skills. Accordingly, one can associate social attributes with geographic maps. This was a central activity of the Chicago school of sociology (Park and Burgess 1924) and gave rise to the

perspective of human ecology (Hawley 1986). The specialization of social types and activities in space is subject to powerful incentives that induce similarity in the face of turnover among individuals. For example, ethnic concentrations result in specialized facilities, such as food shops, that attract replacements that conserve the ethnic character. Such patterns often persist beyond the lifetimes of the people who initiated them.

A second source of routine is limited learning capacity or the complexity of many social activities. Linguistic rules, moral codes, and work skills illustrate social capacities whose acquisition requires considerable time and effort. This socialization often requires extended exposure to others who know the routines well, especially when the delicate skills of interpretation are involved.

The difficulties of acquiring capacity can confound individual wills. Bernstein (1975) described how linguistic conventions acquired in the home reflect the conditions of adult work and render individuals unsuited for occupations that are not similar to those of their parents. In the same way, a New Yorker who wished to speak in Latin would have to make a huge investment in learning a novel linguistic code. However, this would not undo the investment in English by other New Yorkers, and thus Latin would be impractical for directing taxi drivers. Similar reasons impel the adoption of the abrasive social style of New Yorkers by newcomers. The general principle is that most people must adapt to many surrounding ways of doing things because those ways change so slowly.

A third source of structural regularity is laws governing averages. An example is the suicide rates studied by Durkheim. People commit suicide for a variety of personal motives and the act is never repeated by anyone, yet the frequency of the act is fairly stable over time and thus is stably different among different populations. This is the case because variable causes tend to average into stable totals whenever many instances are drawn from constant underlying conditions. Many of the rates that result are sufficiently stable to sustain plans and projections, which in turn can be embedded in routines, even though the underlying activity is very complex in its detailed causation.

The several sources of stable routines underlie the properties that frequently are associated with proposed structural regularities. Structural regu-

larities often are depicted as abstract, enduring, and operative across a large scale of units. These attributes reflect genesis, for many structural regularities ultimately stem from the long historical process of imposing routines that made a large scale feasible. For example, Tilly (1975) shows how the modern European state resulted from parallel decisions by state makers forced by military competition to pursue centralization by reordering the established routines of ordinary people. The history of collective contention (Tilly 1986) can be seen as the efforts of the victims to defend older patterns against intrusions by state agents such as tax collectors and against the vast reorganization of work and fortune implicit in the expansion of capitalism.

Mann (1986) argues that large-scale cooperation rests on enduring patterns of power. For example, shared religious ideology is a form of power because it makes people subject to claims on their activity. Rapid religious change is not infrequently the result of conquest. Once it has been established, religion is often compulsory. Coercion aside, religious conformity can provide insurance against the risks and pains of social isolation. Other large-scale patterns, such as the division of labor, are maintained in the face of considerable shifting by persons among different roles. This often is implemented by powerful actors who are motivated to induce (or coerce) approximate substitutes to fill in for those who withdraw (or die). In such terms, abstract stability, a large scale, and consequent duration often can be seen to be sustained through underlying causal regularities. In human terms, the reproduction of social structure consists of a myriad of modest efforts that sum to a stable result.

This interdependence underlies the transcendence of abstract structural regularity over individual will. Generally, one cannot learn more than locally applicable routines and must rely on others for critical needs. Thus, one assumes that the staff members in the emergency room will not all take the day off. This frees accountants from the necessity of acquiring medical skill to meet their own needs. As a result, the details of actual routines are known only locally, and the only possible knowledge of the overall pattern is coarse or abstract. Even accountants cannot count up the details they must count on. A further implication is that the alternatives to enacting the routines with which

one is familiar are often limited. It requires time on a historical scale to construct such a pattern. That history has happened, and if the conditions that made narrow, specialized learning practical suddenly came unglued most people would be in a terrible fix.

A special case of social routines consists of those worked out with others, who then are often hard to replace. Replacement is generally more troublesome as the duration is longer, such as many kinship bonds, which can be effectively irreplaceable for many adults. These social relations can be mapped as social networks describing the pattern of the links that surround individuals. The analysis of such patterns is not infrequently (or unreasonably) called ‘‘structural analysis,’’ though it hardly exhausts the term.

Elaborate routines, especially social ties, are subject to pressures toward isomorphy, which is defined as a common anatomy or structure. An example is the formation of families, which are different in detail but share common features partly in response to common problems that must be solved within a shared environment. Goode (1970) analyzes the sources and consequences of such regularities. In modern societies, assumptions about such features often are written into administrative procedures such as tax codes, which provide further impetus for individuals to adopt a variant of the pattern defined as normal. Changing and varied individual desires are often in conflict with those pressures to cooperate in the reproduction of the supposedly ‘‘normal’’ pattern.

Emergent properties that apply to wholes but not to parts often are attributed to social structure. Some properties, such as size distributions and complexity, do not have direct individual analogues. Others arise because the net result of many partially independent actions can be different from the intentions of individuals. Thus, markets with many participants can experience crashes in value when many people try to sell in anticipation that others are about to do so, producing a result that no one desires. Kindleberger (1980) describes the recurrence of such crises. Routines are executed by fallible humans and are only locally adapted, somewhat independent, and imperfectly flexible. Many properties of the resulting averages or combinations do not follow from the components in any simple sense.

As the preceding analysis suggests, structural visions are various. One unifying theme is an appeal to abstract, extraindividual patterns that change slowly or not at all. A second unifying theme is that those regularities cause or condition many of the choices and behaviors of individuals. A final common theme is less unifying than divisive. Some structural visions are accompanied by claims of centrality. A particular array of simple elements is proclaimed, often on metatheoretical or philosophic grounds, to be the central deep structure whose inevitable unfolding underlies a vast array of surface appearances. Such comprehensive views have inspired competing, incompatible schools of thought on whose behalf a claim is sometimes made to the structural vision of society or the human condition.

Most of these structural visions are comprehensive worldviews that require detailed study in their own right. Among the most prominent are those of Marx and Freud, but there have been structuralist movements in nearly every field of social studies. Nearly all proceed from some highly abstract characterization of the human mind, laws of thought, or the human condition. All of social or mental life is viewed as a manifestation of the reproduction of such elements, often unfolding dialectically. This is presented as the inevitable underpinnings of individual or collective biographies. Piaget (1970) has provided an unusually concise description of an interdisciplinary structuralism based on mathematical progress; this description parallels his more famous theory of discontinuous advancement in human cognitive development. Originators and their descendants often delight in such subtle and insightful reductions of familiar patterns to the chosen central supports.

The term ‘‘structure’’ is most commonly employed in sociology without these all-encompass- ing ambitions. In empirical sociology, especially quantitative studies based on random samples of persons, the term is invoked for varied efforts to use the larger and often more durable features of social life as explanatory factors for individual conduct and outcomes. The most common contrast is with individual-level causes, including attitudes and aspirations. Sometimes attributes such as race, gender, and class are labeled structural to imply that the underlying mechanism is an exter-

nal force imposed on individuals independently of their wills.

The reasoning behind this is not always explicit, but the usage is justifiable. Generally, the factors labeled structural are alternatives among a differentiated array of possibilities to which individuals are confined for substantial periods. ‘‘Structure’’ then refers to the differentiating average conditions in which people live their lives. At least implicitly, such differences correspond to differences in the routines employed to adapt to local conditions as well as to resources that render routines practical. Classifying people by indicators of the local conditions that surround them reflects the opportunities they have for association and hence for processes such as influence, cooperation, and victimization. Some characterizations also correspond to labels, most notably race and gender, and broadly indicate common tendencies in routines of others to which one is likely to be exposed. Such differences are quite stable, impersonal, and hard to evade. Taken together, these differences in conditions contribute to differences in average responses or individual behaviors.

There is some confusion about the nature of such structural causation, which often is framed as an alternative explanation to individual choice. Persuasive force often comes from stories in which the predominant outcome is made to feel inevitable. This is at odds with the normal empirical result of a difference in tendency or proportion. Rules that hold without exception are rare. This should be expected. Structural abstractions mask much detail that varies. The implicit reference is to averages over multiple executions of complex routines. To take an obvious example, racial discrimination involving job applicants is not invariant but occurs often enough to lead to considerable differences.

Structural causes are not literally the antithesis of individual choice. More precisely, they reflect patterns over which individuals have limited control. The binding force of structural regularity is intrinsically probabilistic. People almost invariably have options, and exceptions to regularities are somewhere in reach. However, established structure—ultimately routines acquired over time, bonds developed to particular others, and the meshed ways of doing that result—exerts a frictional tug. Friction is implicit in the pain of for-