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eclectic economists a few who work in another discipline and then return immediately to the home discipline. Intriligator (1991) has presented in a schematic way the patterns of cross-fertiliza- tion among the behavioral sciences by identifying concepts and theories developed in economics and adopted by others. He traces in terms of input–output the itinerary of social choice theory, structural models, decision theory, organization theory, bounded rationality, utility theory, game theory, the concept of balance of power, and anomie.

The interactions between economics and political science are deeper than those between economics and sociology. Many economists are better known in political science than in economics, particularly in the domain of political economy. In A New Handbook of Political Science (Goodin and Klingemann 1996), the new economic sociology receives great attention, but it is not clear how it is different from the older political economy. This work should be confronted with Handbook of Economic Sociology (Smelser and Swedberg 1994). For instance, Offe describes the ‘‘asymmetry’’ between the two disciplines: ‘‘Political economists do have an economic theory of institutions and tend to disregard this demarcation line separating spheres. Sociologists have perhaps only the rudiments of a sociological theory of what is going on in markets and firms, while the most ambitious argument that sociologists do have to offer effectively demonstrates that non-economic spheres of society are not only constituted in different ways than the economy, but that the economy itself depends on non-economic spheres’’ (Offe 1992, p. 687).

Social Psychology. Most sociologists are not involved in the kind of research that interests most psychologists, and vice versa. For the majority of sociologists and the majority of psychologists, their respective territories are clearly separated. Nevertheless, between the two disciplines there is a condominium, social psychology, inhabited by hybrid scholars, some of whom have began their scientific activity in one of the two disciplines while others started as ‘‘hybrids.’’ In addition, for many sociologists who are not social psychologists, psychology is the nearest and most important disciplinary neighbor. What Inkeles wrote three decades ago is still valid: ‘‘It would not be at all difficult to assemble a set of fifty or one hundred recent articles in social psychology, chosen half from the psychological and half from the sociological jour-

nals, which would be so much alike that no one, judging without knowledge of source or author, could with any precision discriminate those written by professional sociologists from those written by psychologists. Several considerations follow from this simple fact. Clearly, the two disciplines cannot be defined in terms of what psychologists and sociologists respectively do, since they so often do the same thing’’ (Inkeles 1970, p. 404).

The growth of social psychology during the last two generations makes Durkheim’s arguments in favor of the supremacy of sociology over psychology irrelevant, along with the old debate about the individual–society dichotomy: ‘‘The claim to a principled distinction of sociology from psychology based on the distinction of individual from society is challenged by the substantial attention that at least some sociologists pay to individuals, by difficulties in describing psychology as the study of individuals, and by difficulties in the very conceptual distinction of individual from society’’ (Calhoun 1992, p. 175). At the early stages of the discipline’s postwar history, psychology had been the most cited cognate discipline by sociologists, but during the last two decades, it was partly overtaken by political science and economics. Meanwhile social psychology has become an autonomous discipline.

Relations with Ecological Geography. As a reaction against the exaggerations of the sociologist Huntington (1924), who was criticized by Pitirim Sorokin in 1928, an entire generation of American sociologists was dissuaded from taking geographic factors into consideration. Even today, most sociologists and geographers ignore each other.

Until recently, sociologists neglected environmental and climatic factors, but many prominent hybrid scholars did not remain silent. Lewis noted that: ‘‘it is important to identify the reasons why tropical countries have lagged during the last two hundred years in the process of modern economic growth’’ (Lewis 1955, p. 53). Galbraith wrote: ‘‘If one marks off a belt a couple of thousand miles in width encircling the earth at the equator one finds within it no developed countries . . . Everywhere the standard of living is low and the span of human life is short’’ (Galbraith 1957, p. 39–41). The book published by Kamarck, director of the Economic Development Institute of the World Bank, challenges the common perception of tropical areas.

Trypanosomiasis, carried by the tsetse fly, prevented much of Africa from progressing beyond the subsistence level: ‘‘For centuries, by killing transport animals, it abetted the isolation of Tropical Africa from the rest of the world and the isolation of the various African peoples from one another’’ (Kamarck 1976, p. 38). An area of Africa larger than the United States thus had been denied to cattle (Kamarck 1976, p. 39). Agricultural production in the humid tropics is limited by the condition of the soil, which has become laterite (Kamarck 1976, p. 25). Surveys by the World Health Organization and the World Food Organization estimated that parasitic worms infected over one billion people throughout the tropics and subtropics. Hookworm disease, characterized by anemia, weakness, and fever, infected 500 million in those areas (Kamarck 1976, p. 75).

These ecological factors are confirmed by a considerable amount of research in tropical areas during the last several decades by geologists, geographers, biologists, zoologists, botanists, agronomists, epidemiologists, parasitologists, climatologists, experts of the World Bank and several agencies of the United Nations, and hybrid scientists well versed in tropical agriculture, the exploitation of minerals, and the sanitary conditions in those countries. The situation has improved, according to dozens of reports prepared by international organizations. To explain the economic underdevelopment of tropical Africa and other tropical areas, natural sciences and demography are brought into the picture. Dependency theory may be of some help for Latin America and eastern Europe, though much less so for tropical Africa.

The literature on the ecological parameters of the tropics can be contrasted with the literature on the transfer of flora and fauna from one temperate zone to another. For instance, Crosby’s Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe 900– 1900 (1986), casts new light on the building of American power.

This is an example of what can happen when a discipline neglects an important topic. The vacuum left by the absence of sociological studies of this geographic-ecological-economic issue has been filled by eclectic economists and hybrid ecologists.

Sociologists and geographers have met not in vast ‘‘interdisciplinary’’ work but in a series of individual fields such as urban studies. In the

history of this hybrid in the United States, important work came from sociologists in the subfields of ‘‘human ecology,’’ geographers influenced by sociologists, and scholars in both disciplines working on spatial statistics. Once a hybrid, urban studies is now a department at many large universities in Europe and the United States.

Urban studies as a quasi-discipline includes subfields that overlap specialties in sociology, geography, and anthropology. It also encompasses architecture, which covers engineering (building design and methods), the natural sciences (climatology, energy conservation), the social sciences (social-physical research), the humanities (history of architecture), and some hybrids of its own (urban planning). Some architects today are well versed in engineering, the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities, as well as urban planning.

Urban studies also has been influenced by economics and economic geography. This hybrid has made its major contribution in the area of location theories for agricultural, industrial, and commercial activities. Communication seems to be much better with geographers and even sociologists than it is with economists, partly because the inductive nature of much of this work makes it difficult to integrate into deductive economic theory.

Other sociologists have drawn from sectors of geography in conjunction with history and economy. Rokkan (1995) has suggested a conceptual framework for comparative political analysis. He weaves together Parsonian pattern variables, the sequence of various kinds of ‘‘crises,’’ and the typically Scandinavian notion of center–periphery relations into a geographic schema built around the main Hansa–Rhine–Italy trade routes, the notion of a country’s distance from Rome, and whether a state faces seaward or is landbound. This schema is very suggestive not only because it can clarify the different political outcomes in the states of modern Europe but also because it can help one understand why many once-powerful states have disappeared, such as Scotland, Wales, Brittany, Bohemia, Bavaria, and Aragon.

Today, geography’s breadth can be seen in the multiplication of hybrid subfields. The discipline now encompasses the subfields of human geography, cultural geography, biogeography, geomorphology, climatology, medical geography, economic

geography, political geography, urban geography, environmental science, regional geography, and cartography. Each subfield relates directly to specialties outside the discipline. Different interests have favored closer contacts sometimes with one field and sometimes with another. These outside fields have made some of geography’s most important advances.

As a result of all these trends, there is an incredible fragmentation that has made geography span large areas in both the natural and social sciences, with a general tendency to drift from the former to the latter. From studying habitats, geographers have turned to studying societies. Many traditional geographers have become social scientists.

As in other disciplines, interaction has kept geography on the move. Many geographers have developed their method and have penetrated other disciplines to such a degree that they have become specialists in another discipline (geology, hydrology or ethnology) or one sector of another discipline. Such emigration leaves the old core of the discipline empty. At a symposium on the social sciences in Paris in 1982, a geographer asked, ‘‘With the progress of the other social sciences, what remains proper to geography? A residual part, or a boring nomenclature?. . . Does geography still have its own domain, or is it a relic . . . of an old division of labor? Has geography an identity and, if so, of what is it made?’’ (Brunet 1982, pp. 383, 402). As is true for the other social sciences, its identity can be found in hybrid specialties, not in disciplinary unity.

CONCLUSION

The contemporary social sciences have experienced three major trends: rapid expansion, fragmentation of formal disciplines by increasing specialization, and recombination of specialties in new hybrid domains. The social sciences have expanded enormously over the last four decades. During the years 1956–1960, the number of citations in the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) for all social sciences amounted to 2,400,000. Thirty years later, in the years 1986–1990 the number of articles cited in this thesaurus rose to about 18,000,000, increasing by a factor of 7.5 (SSCI 1994, pp. 61–63).

It is difficult to evaluate the number of articles rooted in sociology or relevant for sociologists even if one can locate the origin of the articles and adopt criteria for what is relevant and what is not. The main difficulty comes from the ambiguity and arbitrariness of the borders of these disciplines. Between one-quarter and one-third of the articles cited by sociologists in the last few decades were written by economists, political scientists, psychologists, historians, geographers, and other social scientists.

In 1994, the SSCI contained almost two million citations involving 400,000 authors from fifteen disciplines and from many countries, an average of five citations per author. Among those citations, between 5 and 8 percent referred to articles written by sociologists. Obviously, no one can master the entire spectrum of sociology. There are no paradigms in the discipline, only partial and contested theories and moving borders. One can succeed in finding one’s way in the bibliographical labyrinth because the scientific patrimony is structured in sectors, subdisciplines, areas, fields, subfields, specialties, topics, and niches in spite of the fact that the borders are blurred. This increasing specialization within sociology is the main route of scientific advancement. Some scholars recommend an interdisciplinary approach. Just as some seem to believe that the social sciences can be neatly categorized, many others persist in pursuing interdisciplinarity. That recommendation is not realistic because it overlooks an essential phenomenon in the history of science: specialization through a process of fragmentation.

To understand scientific creativity, another phenomenon is even more important than the expansion of the scientific literature and the increase in specialization: the recombination of specialties into new hybrid domains, a phenomenon called the hybridization of scientific knowledge.

A hybrid scholar is a specialist who crosses the borders of her or his home discipline by integrating into her or his research factors, variables, theories, concepts, methods, and substance generated in other disciplines. Different disciplines may proceed from different foci to examine the same phenomenon. This multidisciplinarity implies a division of territories between disciplines. In contrast, hybridization implies an overlapping of segments of disciplines, a recombination of knowl-

edge in new and specialized fields. Innovation in each discipline depends largely on exchanges with other fields belonging to other disciplines. At the highest levels, most researchers belong to a hybrid subdiscipline. Alternatively, they may belong to a hybrid field or subfield.

An innovative recombination is a blending of fragments of sciences. When old fields grow, they accumulate such masses of material that they split up. Each fragment of the discipline then confronts the fragments of other fields across disciplinary boundaries, losing contact with its siblings in the old discipline. A specialist in urbanization has less in common with a sociologist studying elite recruitment than he or she does with a geographer doing research on the distribution of cities, who in turn has more in common with a colleague in economics analyzing urban income inequality.

Most hybrid specialties and domains recognize their genealogical roots: political economy, social psychology, social geography, historical sociology, genetic demography, psycholinguistics, political anthropology, social ecology, biogeography, and many others. The hybrid specialties branch out in turn, giving rise, to an even larger member of hybrids (Dogan and Pahre 1990, pp. 63–76).

Among the ISA research committees and study groups, about half focus on hybrid specialties. The number of sociologists who work across disciplinary borders is so high that there is more communication between various fields of sociology and their cognates outside the discipline than there is between fields within sociology.

One can find in the literature of each social science, with the possible exception of linguistics and econometrics, complaints about the ‘‘lack of core’’: ‘‘The substantive core of the discipline may have dissolved’’ (Halliday and Janowitz 1992, p. 3). Dozens of similar testimonies could be collected. If so many scholars formulate the same diagnosis, that means that most disciplines are facing a problem of self-identity. However, if one considers that the real world cannot be cut into disciplinary pieces, this issue of disciplinary identity may appear fallacious.

It is difficult or impossible to inquire into the large social phenomena within a strictly monodisciplinary framework. Only by taking a position at the crossroads of many branches of

knowledge can one explain the impact of technological advancement on structural unemployment in western Europe, the proliferation of giant cities in the third world, the economic decline of the United Kingdom and the economic growth of Japan, or how a child learns to speak. Whenever a question of such magnitude is raised, one finds oneself at the intersection of numerous disciplines and specialities. All major issues cross the formal borders of disciplines: war and peace, generational change, the freedom–equality nexus, individualism in advanced societies, and fundamentalism in traditional societies. Most specialists are not located in the so-called core of a discipline. They are in the outer rings, in contact with specialists from other disciplines. They borrow and lend at the frontiers; they are hybrid scholars. The notion of hybridization does not mean ‘‘two whole disciplines in a single skull’’ but a recombination of two or several domains of knowledge originating from different disciplines.

Most classical sociologists were interdisciplinary generalists, but in recent times, cross-discipli- nary advancements have been achieved not by generalists but by hybrid specialists. The hybrid specialist today may be in reality a ‘‘marginal’’ scholar in each of the disciplines from which he or she borrows, including his or her original discipline, but such a specialist becomes central to the intersection of two or several disciplines (Dogan 1999).

Today most social scientists admit that the best alternative to the difficulty of experimentation in their disciplines is the comparative method, which is one of the few ways to validate or falsify generalizations in the ‘‘soft’’ sciences. The comparative method is the key to circulation among sciences.

Comparative sociologists and comparative political scientists have developed methods to a greater extent than have workers in other social sciences. One of them wrote: ‘‘There is no noncomparative sociological theory. All scientific analyses are a subset of the general set entitled comparitive analysis . . . any generalized statement involving variables implies a comparison’’ (Levy 1970, p. 100).

Major social phenomena cannot be explained in a strictly monodisciplinary framework or in the absence of a comparative perspective. It is only by taking up a position at the crossroad of various branches of knowledge and simultaneously adopt-

ing comparative perspective that social scientists can advance knowledge. The intersections of hybrid specialties and comparative approaches are privileged sites in the social sciences.

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SOCIOLOGY OF EDUCATION

In the broadest perspective, education refers to all efforts to impart knowledge and shape values; hence, it has essentially the same meaning as socialization. However, when sociologists speak of education, they generally use a more specific meaning: the deliberate process, outside the family, by which societies transmit knowledge, values, and norms to prepare young people for adult roles (and, to a lesser extent, prepare adults for new roles). This process acquires institutional status when these activities make instruction the central defining purpose, are differentiated from other social realms, and involve defined roles of teacher and learner (Clark 1968). Schools exemplify this type of institutionalization.

The central insight of the sociology of education is that schools are socially embedded institutions that are crucially shaped by their social environment and crucially shape it. The field encompasses both microand macro-sociological concerns in diverse subfields such as stratification, economic development, socialization and the family, organi-

zations, culture, and the sociology of knowledge. To understand modern society, it is essential to understand the role of education. Not only is education a primary agent of socialization and allocation, modern societies have developed formidable ideologies that suggest that education should have this defining impact (Meyer 1977).

Durkheim (1977) was the intellectual pioneer in this field, tracing the historical connections between the form and content of schools and larger social forces such as the rise of the bourgeoisie and the trend toward individualism. Largely because the field focuses so intensively on stratifi- cation-related issues (e.g., the impact of family background on educational attainment), the larger issues raised by Marx and Weber are readily evident in current scholarship. However, as Dreeben’s (1994) historical account indicates, the direct contribution of the discipline’s founders to the development of the sociology of education in the United States was minimal; indeed, even the foremost early American sociologists in the field did not decisively shape its development.

In The Sociology of Teaching, Waller (1932) examined teaching as an occupational role and school organization as a mechanism of social control. He emphasized the role of the school in the conflict-ridden socialization of the young as well as the interpersonal and organizational mechanisms that furthered students’ acceptance of the normative order. Although now recognized as a classic, Waller’s analysis stimulated little work for several decades.

Although less focused on education per se, Sorokin (1927) portrayed schools as a key channel of mobility with their own distinctive form of social testing. He argued that increasing opportunities for schooling would stratify the society, not level it. However, Blau and Duncan’s (1967) para- digm-setting study of status attainment (see below) did not refer to Sorokin’s analysis of education despite their appreciation of his larger concern for the significance of social mobility. Warner’s and Hollingshead’s community studies considered education integral to community social organization, especially through its connection to the stratification system, but their influence, like that of Waller and Sorokin, was more a matter of suggesting general ideas than of establishing a cumulative research tradition.

As a subfield within the sociological discipline, the sociology of education has been propelled largely by a host of practical, policy-related issues that emerged with the development of the mass educational system. Essentially, research has focused on whether education has delivered on its promise of creating more rational, culturally adapted, and productive individuals and, by extension, a ‘‘better’’ society. The field was particularly energized by the egalitarian concerns of the 1960s: How ‘‘fair’’ is the distribution of opportunity in schools and in the larger society, and how can disparities be reduced? These questions continue to animate the field.

THEORETICAL DEBATES

Much research, even the most policy-oriented, has been grounded, often implicitly, in more general analytic perspectives on the role of education in modern society. The two main orientations are functionalism and conflict theory, though other, less encompassing perspectives also have shaped the field significantly.

Functionalism. In the functionalist view, schools serve the presumed needs of a social order committed to rationality, meritocracy, and democracy. They provide individuals with the necessary cognitive skills and cultural outlook to be successful workers and citizens (Parsons 1959; Dreeben 1968) and provide society with an efficient, fair way of sorting and selecting ‘‘talents’’ so that the most capable can assume the most responsible positions (Clark 1962). Complementing this sociological work is human capital theory in economics, which contends that investment in education enhances individual productivity and aggregate economic growth (Schultz 1961). The criticism in the 1980s that poor schooling had contributed significantly to America’s decline in the international economy reflects a popular version of this theoretical orientation.

However, in the 1970s, both the increasing prominence of critical political forces and the accumulated weight of research spurred a theoretical challenge. Important parts of the empirical base of functionalism were questioned: that schools taught productive skills, that mass education had ushered in a meritocratic social order, and that education had furthered social equality. A number of conflict-oriented approaches emerged.

Neo-Marxist Theory. Neo-Marxist scholars have provided the most thorough challenge to the functionalist position. For all the diversity within this conflict theory, the main point is that the organization of schools largely reflects the dictates of the corporate-capitalist economy. In the most noted formulation, Bowles and Gintis (1976) argue that education must fulfill the needs of capitalism: efficiently allocating differently socialized individuals to appropriate slots in the corporate hierarchy, transferring privilege from generation to generation, and accomplishing both while maintaining a semblance of legitimacy. Thus, the changing demands of capitalist production and the power of capitalist elites determine the nature of the educational system.

More recent neo-Marxist scholarship (Willis 1981) emphasized that schools are not only agents of social reproduction but also important sites of resistance to the capitalist order. Many neo-Marx- ists also have emphasized the ‘‘relative autonomy’’ of the state from economic forces and, correspondingly, the partial responsiveness of schools to demands from subordinate groups (Carnoy and Levin 1985). Other scholars in this general critical tradition have turned in ‘‘post-Marxist’’ directions, emphasizing inequities related to gender and race along with class, but the common, defining point remains that educational inequities reflect and perpetuate the inequities of capitalist society and that oppressed groups have an objective interest in fundamental social transformation (Aronowitz and Giroux 1985). This newer critical approach has developed with relatively little connection to mainstream approaches (i.e, positivistic, often reformoriented research) despite some similarities in concerns (e.g., student disruptions and challenges to authority in schools) (Davies 1995).

Obviously, neo-Marxists do not share the essentially benign vision of the social order in functionalist thought, but both perspectives view the organization of schooling as ‘‘intimately connected with the changing character of work and the larger process of industrialization in modern society’’ (Hurn 1993, p. 86). These competing perspectives are rooted in similar logical forms of causal argument: To explain educational organization and change, functionalists invoke the ‘‘needs’’ of the society, while neo-Marxists invoke the ‘‘needs’’ of the capitalist order for the same purpose. Critics contend that both perspectives posit

an overly tight, rational link between schools and the economy and concomitantly downplay the institutional autonomy as schools as well as the complexity of political struggles over education (Kingston 1986).

Status Conflict. Arising out of the Weberian tradition, the status conflict approach emphasizes the attempts of various groups—primarily defined by ethnicity, race, and class—to use education as a mechanism to win or maintain privilege (Collins 1979). The evolving structure of the educational system reflects the outcomes of these struggles as groups attempt to control the system for their own benefit. With varying success, status groups use education both to build group cohesion and to restrict entry to desired positions to those certified by ‘‘their’’ schools. However, as lower-status groups seek social mobility by acquiring more educational credentials, enrollments may expand beyond what is technically necessary. In this view, then, the educational system is not necessarily functional to capitalist interests or other imputed system needs.

Consistent with this view, a primary effect of schools, especially at the elite level, is to provide cultural capital, of which educational credentials are the main markers (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977). This form of capital refers to the personal style, social outlooks and values, and aesthetic tastes that make a person suitable for socially valued positions. (The point of comparison is human capital, an individual’s productive, technical skills.) In this perspective, education is rewarded because occupational gatekeepers value particular forms of cultural capital, and thus education is a key mechanism of class and status reproduction.

The Interpretative Tradition. Sociologists in the interpretative tradition view schools as places where meaning is socially constructed through everyday interactions. This tradition incorporates the general orientations of phenomenology, symbolic interactionism, and ethnomethodology. Accordingly, micro-level concerns predominate—for example, what do teachers expect their students to learn, and how do those expectations condition their conduct in class?—and research tends to rely on qualitative techniques. This tradition is unified by a general sense of what kinds of questions to ask (and how to ask them) rather than a set of related

theoretical propositions or a body of accumulated findings.

EMPIRICAL STUDIES

The highly selective review of empirical studies that follows focuses on the two key questions in contemporary American sociology of education:

(1) How is education involved in the distribution of life chances? (2) How are family status and school characteristics connected to educational attainment and/or academic achievement? With few exceptions, analyses of education in other countries are not considered. The field is dominated by American research, and American sociologists have engaged in relatively little comparative research. Baker (1994) speculates that this lack of a comparative research tradition in the United States reflects both a belief in American ‘‘exceptionalism’’ (for instance, an extreme emphasis on mass access) and a strong focus on micro-level issues that do not necessarily call for comparative research designs.

Schooling and Life Chances. Throughout the twentieth century in all industrial countries, there has been a dramatic upgrading in the occupational structure and a dramatic expansion in educational systems. Ever more jobs have come to require academic qualifications, a process that usually is interpreted as being driven by the rationalism and universalism of modernization. In this functionalist perspective, academic skills are presumed to be technically required and meritocratically rewarded, transforming the stratification system so that individual achievements rather than ascriptive characteristics determine life chances.

This interpretation has been subject to empirical test at two levels: (1) the individual level—to what extent, absolutely and relatively, does education affect economic attainment? and (2) the macro level—to what extent have educational expansion and the increasing significance of schools for occupational attainment increased overall equality of opportunity?

At the first level, as part of the general analysis of status attainment, researchers have concentrated on measuring the connection between individuals’ schooling and their economic position. Building on Blau and Duncan’s (1967) work, researchers have repeatedly documented in multivariate mod-

els that education (measured in years of schooling and degree completion) has by far the largest independent impact on adult attainment (Featherman and Hauser 1978; Jencks et al. 1979). By comparison, the net direct effects of family status (usually measured in terms of parental education and occupation) are modest. Indeed, among the collegeeducated in recent years, higher family status confers no extra advantage at all (Hout 1988).

Earlier in life, however, family status is substantially related to educational attainment. The total effect (direct and indirect) of family status on occupational attainment is therefore substantial, though its impact is mediated very largely through educational attainment. In effect, then, education plays a double-sided role in the stratification process. Education is the great equalizer: It confers largely similar benefits to all regardless of family origins. However, it is also the great reproducer: Higher-status families transmit their position across generations largely through the educational attainment of their children.

The strong connection between schooling and occupational attainment is open to diverse interpretations. Most prominently, human capital theory suggests that education enhances productivity, and because people are paid in accordance with their marginal productivity, the well educated enjoy greater prospects. In favor of this interpretation is the fact that schooling is demonstrably linked to the enhancement of academic competencies (Fischer et al. 1996) and that basic academic skills are substantially correlated with job performance in a wide variety of settings (Hunter 1986).

By contrast, credentials theory portrays the educational institution as a sorting device in which individuals are slotted to particular positions in the occupational hierarchy on the basis of academic credentials, often with little regard for their individual productive capacities. The fact that possessing specific credentials (especially a college degree) has positive career effects, net of both years of schooling and measured academic ability, provides indirect support for this view. That is, there appears to be a ‘‘sheepskin effect,’’ so that employers value the degree per se, although people with degrees may have unmeasured productive capacities or dispositions that account for their success ( Jencks et al. 1979). Moreover, the credentialist argument is strengthened by the fact

that in some elite segments of the labor market, employers primarily recruit graduates of certain prestigious programs and make little effort to discern differences in the academic-based skills of those included in the restricted applicant pool (Kingston and Clawson 1990).

Both views seem to have some merit; indeed, they may be partially complementary. Employers may generally use educational attainment as a lowcost, rough proxy for productive skill, and for certain positions they may favor holders of particular degrees because of their presumed cultural dispositions and the prestige that their presence lends the organization. The relative explanatory power of the human capital and credentialist perspectives may vary across segments of the labor market.

At the macro level, it might be expected that the great expansion of access to education has reduced the impact of family origins on educational attainment, increasing equality of opportunity, but that has proved to be more the exception than the rule. A rigorous thirteen-country comparative study identified two patterns: greater equalization among socioeconomic strata in the Netherlands and Sweden and virtual stability in the rest, including the United States (Shavit and Blossfeld 1993), where the strata have largely maintained their relative positions as average attainment has increased. Thus, the impact of educational policies designed to promote equality appears minimal; even in Sweden and the Netherlands, the trend toward equalization emerged before reforms were introduced.

Socioeconomic Status and Achievement. Given the centrality of educational attainment in the general attainment process, researchers have focused on the substantial relationship between socioeconomic status and educational attainment. (This relationship appears to be stronger in highly developed societies than in developing societies.) The best predictor of educational attainment is academic achievement (i.e., higher grades and test scores); the school system consistently rewards academic performance and in that sense is meritocratic. Regardless of academic performance, children from socially advantaged families have somewhat disproportionate success in moving through the educational system, but the main

reason higher-status students have this success is that they achieve better in schools.

The question here is, Why do higher-status students achieve better in schools? Clearly, there is no simple answer. Research has pointed to the following family-related factors, among others:

1.Material resources. Richer families can purchase the materials (e.g., books) and experiences that foster intellectual development.

2.Parental expectations and/or encouragement. Well-educated parents more actively stress the importance of academic achievement, and their own success through school-

ing encourages their children to accept that value.

3.Direct parental involvement in home learning activities. Higher-status parents are more willing and able to teach academic lessons at home and help with homework.

4.Verbal and analytic stimulation. In high- er-status families, interactions between parents and children are more likely to promote verbal sophistication and reasoning.

5.Family structure and parenting style. The presence of two parents and parenting styles involving warm interactions favor academic achievement, and both factors are related to socioeconomic status (SES).

6.Parental involvement in schools. Higherstatus parents are better able to interact effectively with teachers and administrators to secure favorable treatment and understand expectations.

7.Cultural ‘‘fit’’ with schools. The cultural styles of higher-status students are more compatible with the prevailing norms and values in schools.

8.Social capital. Initially Coleman’s (1988) idea, this refers to the extent and nature of the connections between parents and children as well as the connections with other family and community members. By providing informational, emotional, and other resources, these connections facilitate adaptions to the demands of schools.