Encyclopedia of SociologyVol._3

as one of discerning how European societies shifted from preferred kinship endogamy (e.g., firstcousin marriage) to prescribed exogamy.

In his analysis of European kinship, Goody considers the changes introduced by the Christian (i.e., Roman Catholic) church from its beginnings to the late medieval period. He interprets the shift from kinship endogamy to exogamy mainly as a strategic move by the church to gain control over the lives of its members. As part of this effort, it had to wrest access to resources (especially productive land) from enduring control by family and kin. As a result, church laws evolved favoring those norms that might enhance allegiance to the church and weaken competition from the family and the state. In consequence, the church favored (1) the use of testation permitting bequests to the church;

(2) the prescription of kinship exogamy as a means for inhibiting both the reinforcement of close kin ties and the passing down of resources exclusively within lineages; (3) the requirement of the consent of both bride and groom in marriage; (4) late marriage as a means for weakening family control over mate selection; (5) prohibition of divorce even for childless couples; and so on.

Goody seems to overstate his case in trying to interpret the shifts in kinship in ways that are consistent with his basic typology. For example, in giving primacy to inheritance patterns, Goody asserts that the ban on divorce in Roman Catholicism was devised primarily to encourage bequeathing estates to the church in case of childlessness. But, in fact, when there were no children, bequests usually were made ‘‘to brothers and sisters and to nieces and nephews’’ (Sheehan 1963, p. 75). Moreover, Goody’s explanation of the ban ignores the widespread practice of bequeathing a portion of one’s estate to the church even when one left a widow, children, or both. Sheehan (1963) reports that these bequests were made for the good of the soul: ‘‘Among the Anglo-Saxons, bequests to the palish church became so general that they were eventually required by law’’ (p. 292). This practice was not restricted to England. According to Sheehan, ‘‘Christians in the Mediterranean basin had developed the practice of bequeathing part of their estate in alms’’ (p. 303). Thus, church heirship in medieval Christian Europe was tied to repentance regardless of the existence of familial beneficiaries. Since church acquisition did not have to depend on bequests from childless couples, it is

unlikely that the ban on divorce derives primarily from the desire of the church for additional benefices.

In addition, Goody dismisses the intermittent presence of kinship endogamy in medieval Europe as opportunistic deviations from the moral injunctions of the church. Yet, as Duby (1977) indicates, in medieval Europe the ebb and flow in kinship endogamy was tied to the amount of emphasis given to strengthening lines of descent. For example, Duby notes that in northern France, from before the tenth century to about the middle of the eleventh century, there was little utilization of the concept of lineage and only vague awareness of genealogy and knowledge about ancestors. Prior to that time, even members of the aristocracy considered their family to consist of ‘‘a horizontal grouping’’ of neighbors and kin ‘‘whose bonds were as much the result of marriage alliances as of blood’’ (Duby 1977, p. 147). Then, beginning in the tenth century, there was a change in ideas and norms regarding kinship—a conscious strengthening of lineage by controlling marriage, which frequently took place between close relatives despite impediments in canon law (Canon Law Society 1983). To summarize, Goody’s argument is that medieval deviation from canon law consisted of opportunistic economic decisions and did not derive from a different set of norms. But Duby describes the coordination of kinship endogamy with the emerging notion of the legitimacy of lineage—a complex of ideas that requires a consensus among the kin in order to be effective. Hence, it appears that the change in marriage rules and the significance of lineage signaled more that ad hoc departures from church law.

There is still another reason for questioning Goody’s conclusions: Goody makes the point that through bequests the Catholic church became the largest landowner in Europe. In his focus on the growth of exogamy as a consequence of the devolution of estates to both sexes, he has overlooked the church’s own involvement as a major heir in the inheritance system. Particularly in the light of the church’s view that ties through faith are equivalent to blood ties, the church is identified with spiritual kinship (Goody 1983, pp. 194ff). However, if it is legitimate to consider the church as an heir on a par with familial heirs, the system becomes one of trilateral devolution—sons, daughters, and the church. In that case, the European

system differs markedly from the Eastern kinship system described by Guichard. Indeed, in contrast to Judaism and Islam, Christianity, at least until the end of the medieval period, saw family and kinship ties as competitive with church interests, and the strategies the church applied to weaken these ties altered both the marriage and the inheritance systems. The data imply that, despite their contradictory implications, the marriage, the alliance component, and the descent component should be addressed as equal factors in organizing family life. A task that remains is to integrate typologies of the emergence of modern kinship systems with transhistorical, structural typologies.

(SEE ALSO: Alternative Life Styles; American Families; Family and Household Structure; Family Roles)

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BERNARD FARBER

LABELING THEORY

See Deviance Theories.

LABOR FORCE

Although labor-force concepts were originally designed to study economic activity and guide government policies, economic activities are a form of social behavior with numerous social determinants and consequences. Hence labor-force behavior has been the subject of a substantial body of sociological research.

MEASUREMENT

The U.S. Bureau of the Census developed the labor-force concept to measure the number of working-age people who were economically active during a particular time period—the calendar week preceding the sample interview (Cain 1979; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics 1982). It has two components: (1) The employed: those who, during the reference week, did any work at all as paid employees, were self-employed, or worked as unpaid family workers at least fifteen hours in a family-operat- ed enterprise; included also are those who were employed but on vacation, home sick, etc. (2) The unemployed: those who were not employed during the reference week but who were available for work and had actively sought employment sometime within the preceding four-week period. All those who are neither employed nor unemployed

are defined as being out of the labor force and primarily include students, housewives, the retired, and the disabled. Since the size of the population affects the number of people who work, labor-force measures are usually expressed in ratio form. The labor-force participation rate is the percentage of the total working-age population that is in the labor force, while the unemployment rate is the percentage of the labor force that is unemployed. In order to compare particular subgroups in the population, analysts compute group-specific measures such as the percentage of all women versus men who are in the labor force or the percentage of black versus white labor-force members who are unemployed.

The Census Bureau developed the labor-force concepts during the Great Depression of the 1930s in response to the government’s difficulty in charting the severity of unemployment during that crisis. Prior to 1940, measures of economic activity were collected only at the time of the decennial censuses, making it impossible to track businesscycle fluctuations in unemployment; for example, most of the Great Depression came between the 1930 and the 1940 censuses. Hence, in order to provide ongoing unemployment data, the Census Bureau initiated the monthly Current Population Survey in the 1940s.

A second problem was the ambiguity of the previously used measure of economic activity— the ‘‘gainful worker concept’’—which was designed to ascertain individuals’ usual occupation, if they had one, rather than whether they were actually working at any given time (Hauser 1949). In fact,

census enumerators were often specifically instructed to record an occupation, even if the individual was currently unemployed, thus overstating the number employed. On the other hand, some kinds of employment were often underestimated because people who considered their market work to be secondary to their other activities, such as taking care of the home and children or going to school, were less likely to report themselves as employed in response to a question on their usual occupation. Misreporting of this type is unlikely with the labor-force measure since most people will remember whether they had worked at all the previous week or, if not, whether they had been looking for a job. Information on occupation and on other important characteristics of their employment, such as hours worked, was then obtained separately in response to additional questions.

While labor-force concepts are relatively unambiguous measures of current economic activity, they too exhibit problems. One general concern is the adequacy of the unemployment measure. The extent of unemployment may be understated if persistently unemployed persons eventually give up trying and drop out of the labor force. The Census Bureau has therefore included additional questions to try to ascertain the number of such ‘‘discouraged workers’’ as well as to measure additional aspects of unemployment or underemployment (Cain 1979; Bregger and Haugen 1995). Clifford Clogg and Teresa Sullivan have extended this approach to address the larger question of ‘‘underemployment’’ (Sullivan 1978; Clogg and Sullivan 1983). They have developed and applied a variety of indicators of underemployment in order to achieve a more extensive assessment of the problem. In addition to the usual unemployment rate and estimates of discouraged workers, they use three other indicators—a measure of involuntary part-time work (due to economic factors); low work-related income relative to the poverty level, and a measure of the proportion of workers who are ‘‘overeducated’’ (‘‘mismatched’’) for the jobs they hold. The ‘‘adequately employed’’ are all those who are not underemployed in any one of these five categories. Their results indicate that underemployment is more common among the young and the old, and appears to have increased in recent years. While several of the indexes, particularly the mismatch measure, are somewhat

controversial (Keyfitz 1981), the work of Sullivan and Clogg represents an important innovation in the multidimensional measurement of underemployment.

A major characteristic of the labor-force concept is that it is a measure of market-oriented economic activities. People are considered employed only if they work for pay (or in the production of goods or services for sale). Yet there is a considerable amount of economic production for home consumption. Hence, labor-force status per se is an imperfect indicator of whether an individual is economically productive; for example, fulltime homemakers are never counted as employed although they usually put in long hours producing goods and services for their families. However, if the market-oriented nature of the measure is kept in mind, this limitation is not too serious in a modern industrial society. Increases in married women’s labor-force participation can then be interpreted as indicating their growing participation in the market sector of the economy, usually in addition to their home productive activities, although working wives do less housework than nonworking wives (Vanek 1974; Berardo et al. 1987).

More serious problems arise in comparing societies at different levels of economic development (Moore 1953). Preindustrial subsistence economies produce few goods or services for a market. As societies develop economically, an increasing proportion of labor is sold in the marketplace, and the goods and services families consume are also increasingly purchased rather than home-produced. It is often difficult to undertake a meaningful comparison of labor force or unemployment rates among such different economies. The measurement of agricultural employment, especially that of women and youth, can be particularly problematic in countries with a large subsistence sector, and measurement inconsistencies are common (Dixon 1982). Moreover, unemployment, especially in rural areas, is often manifested as underemployment, and its extensiveness is difficult to determine.

Although best suited for examining whether people are currently economically active, labor force and employment status measures have also been invaluable in the analysis of more complex sociological and economic concepts because of

the ready availability of these data in time series. However, here it is important to recognize the ambiguities and limitations of such measures at the same time we exploit their utility. One example of this problem has to do with charting the extensiveness of changes in married women’s economic role in the family; another concerns the measurement of life-course transitions such as the transition to work or to retirement. In the first case, the frequently reported time series of the changes in the average proportion of married women who were in the labor force in any given week each year, or even of the proportion who had worked at some time during a year, are valuable but also imperfect indicators of how extensively women’s economic role has changed over time. For example, the proportion of married women with children under age 18 who were employed at some point during the year rose from 51 to 73 percent between 1970 and 1990. However, although the proportion who worked full-time, yearround had also increased considerably, it had only reached 34 percent by 1990; of women with children under age 6, only 28 percent had worked fulltime year-round in 1990 (Bianchi 1995, p. 117). Hence, the commonly used time series of married women’s labor-force status during as short a time period as a week will exaggerate the magnitude of the changes in wives’ economic role in the family. And neither annual labor-force participation rates nor the weeks and hours worked during a whole year provide longitudinal data on the extensiveness of individual women’s labor-market involvement over their adult life courses. Yet it is this sort of information that we would really like to have in assessing the changing nature of women’s economic roles.

Although commonly used for this purpose, labor-force or employment status data also have their limitations as indicators of the timing of lifecourse transitions. The problem is that life-course transitions are not as clear-cut as the data make them appear (Oppenheimer and Kalmijn 1995; Oppenheimer et al. 1997). Students are increasingly likely to be working, at least part time, and young people go in and out of the labor force before they are able—or willing—to make a regular commitment to year-round full-time employment. Hence, the proportion of young people employed in any given week overstates whether they have completed the transition to work. Changes

in the proportion of older persons who are currently employed is also an ambiguous indicator because of a fair amount of labor-market turnover among this age group as well. Hence, some studies of retirement use information on when individuals start to receive pensions. However, older persons may be receiving private pensions and/or Social Security but still be working, if only part time; moreover, the retirement these pensions signify may not be entirely voluntary, complicating our interpretation of the phenomenon. So the goal of measuring when ‘‘permanent’’ withdrawal from work occurs can be quite elusive (Guillemard and Rein 1993; Henretta 1992).

DETERMINANTS AND CONSEQUENCES OF

LABOR-FORCE CHANGES

The size and rate of growth of the labor force are dependent on three factors:

1.The size and rate of population growth. A large and/or rapidly growing population will produce a large and/or growing labor force.

2.The propensity of the population to enter the labor force and how this varies among population subgroups. Age and sex, and what these signify biologically and socially, are the major reasons for varying propensities. Infants and young children do not work, but, generally starting in adolescence, labor-force participation increases with age, peaking for those in their late thirties and early forties and starting an accelerating decline thereafter. Married women, particularly mothers of young children, have historically had lower laborforce participation rates than adult males, although this is much less so now than in the past (U.S. Bureau of the Census 1998, pp. 408–409).

3.The composition of the population: Since different population segments have different work propensities, the composition of the population will affect the overall proportions who are in the labor force. Sharp short-run fluctuations in the U.S. birthrate have led to corresponding variations in the relative size of the working-age population. Baby booms greatly increase

the number of new labor-force entrants after 16–18 years, while baby busts reduce this number. However, the overall long-run declines in U.S. fertility, combined with declines in mortality among the elderly, have increased the relative number of elderly in the population, an age group with low work propensities. On the other hand, foreign migration to the United States somewhat counteracts the effects of an aging population, since it has historically been disproportionately composed of young working-age adults, drawn to the United States by job opportunities.

One important long-term trend in labor-force participation in the United States has been the decline in the employment rate of young men, on the one hand, and of older men, on the other. In part, the decline for younger males has been due to more extended schooling, although this was somewhat offset by a rise in student employment (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics 1988). However, an additionally significant factor has been a decrease in the employment of moderately to less educated males, itself just one aspect of a trend in rising labor market inequality, encompassing declines in earnings as well as levels of employment (Burtless 1990; Levy 1998).

Another important long-term shift is the decline in the labor-force participation of older males, primarily due to the institution and spread of the social security system combined with the greater availability of disability benefits and private pensions. However, these declines have been observed not only for men aged 65 and older but also for men in their fifties and early sixties, although not to the same extent. Thus the labor-force participation rates for men aged 65–69 decreased from 64 percent in 1950 to 26 percent in 1990, but during these years the rates of men 60–64 and 55–59 also substantially declined, from 83 to 56 and from 90 to 80 percent, respectively (Gendell and Siegel 1992, p. 24). The increasing coverage of Social Security benefits for men retiring at age 65 and the institution of early retirement, at age 62, under the Social Security Act of 1962 has played the major role in the decreasing rates for those in their sixties. However, the declines for men in their fifties must be for other reasons. One important factor seems to be the growth of private pension

plans and employers’ utilization of early retirement provisions to help downsize and restructure their firms (Guillemard and Rein 1993; Henretta 1992).

An important question is: How will the rapid raise in the older population affect the labor-force participation of older people? There is by no means an obvious answer to this question. For one thing, given the sensitivity of older persons’ employment behavior to when Social Security is available, future changes in how old individuals must be in order to qualify for Social Security benefits will play an important role. Already the 1983 amendments to the Social Security Act have set in motion a rise in the age of entitlement to a full pension—from age 65 to 66 by 2009, and to 67 by 2027—and a higher rate of reduction will gradually be applied to pensions for those who retire earlier than 65. These changes in the law should operate to increase labor-force participation among the elderly. Other factors may also increase the employment of men in their fifties and sixties. Traditionally, the decline in employment over time has been disproportionately concentrated among the less educated who have fewer marketable skills and for whom the Social Security pension is relatively more attractive. However, with the rising educational attainment of the population, older adults in the twenty-first century might be expected to remain employed longer (Besl and Kale 1996). On the other hand, the state and structure of the economy is an important factor in the extent to which employers use private pension plans to encourage earlier retirement in periods of downturns or rapid structural change.

Probably the most substantial postwar change in employment behavior has been the enormous increase in married women’s labor-force participation. While paid employment used to be generally limited to the period between school and marriage, since the 1940s married women’s employment has become so prevalent that by 1997 between 66 and 76 percent of those in the 20–44 age groups were in the labor force. Moreover, 64 percent of married mothers of children under age 6 were also in the labor force (Oppenheimer 1970; U.S. Bureau of the Census 1998).

There are several reasons for this rapid rise in women’s employment. One is that the bureaucratization of government and industry has raised the

demand for clerical workers; population growth, prosperity, and rising living standards have greatly expanded the consumption of services. This, in turn, raises the demand for sales workers and for those in the ‘‘helping’’ professions, such as teachers and social workers, as well as nurses and others in health-related occupations. All these are occupations that have been dominated by women workers for over a century. However, because the great majority of young, single, out-of-school women have worked throughout the twentieth century, the result of this increasing demand in the postwar period has been a strong and continuing demand for a previously underutilized source of female labor—married women (Oppenheimer 1970).

Married women have often had several major reasons for wanting to work—the need, early in marriage, to help set up a new household and perhaps to save money for a down payment on a house; the increasing importance of saving for children’s schooling; the couple’s aspiration to achieve a high level of living; and the desire for greater personal economic security and autonomy. Periodic rises in the cost of living and the stagnating or even declining economic position of many men since the 1970s have also increased the importance of having two earners in a family (Levy 1998).

The effects of changing labor-force behavior are not just limited to the economic realm; a number of sociologists (as well as economists) have argued that this behavior has also had an important impact on marriage and the family. Since the late 1960s the average age at marriage has risen substantially, after having first declined through most of the twentieth century; nonmarital cohabitation has become increasingly prevalent; and marital instability has accelerated its longterm upward trend after a sharp reversal in the early post–World War II period. However, the divorce rate appears to have stabilized recently. Two competing employment-related explanations for these trends are currently under debate. In one, the argument is that married women’s rapidly rising labor-force participation has increased their economic independence of males (Becker 1981; Espenshade 1985; Goldscheider and Waite 1986; Farley 1988; McLanahan and Casper 1995). The result, it is argued, is a decreasing desire on the part of women to remain in an unhappy marriage or even to marry at all. In addition, since women’s

traditional timeand energy-consuming familial roles of childbearing and childrearing compete with the pursuit of individual career goals, more women are either forgoing childbearing entirely or settling for one or two children at most.

While the women’s ‘‘independence’’ hypothesis appears plausible and the juxtaposition of time series data on marriage and family behavior with that of women’s labor-force participation appears to support it, this is largely because the time series utilized have typically been limited to the postwar period, the period during which married women’s employment was rising rapidly. The problem with these comparisons is that they use the family behavior of the early 1950s as the model of ‘‘traditional’’ family behavior against which to compare subsequent trends. However, the marriage and fertility behavior of the 1950s was by no means traditional (Cherlin 1992; Oppenheimer 1994). This was the baby boom era when, after a 150-year decline, the total fertility rate reversed itself and rose so much that, by the 1950s, it was back up to the level of 1900. Moreover, age at marriage had been decreasing throughout the twentieth century, at the same time that women’s employment was rising, so that the early postwar age at marriage was much younger than what was ‘‘traditional’’ before married women’s employment began its historic climb (Cherlin 1992; Oppenheimer 1994). In sum, the changes since the 1960s are more of a return to traditional patterns than a major departure from them. The independence hypothesis has also not held up to more recent micro-level empirical analyses using longitudinal data. For example, as summarized by Oppenheimer (1997), the evidence from several studies indicates that single women’s labor-market position tends to have little effect on marriage formation, but that what effect it does have is positive.

A characteristic of the women’s independence explanation of recent trends in family behavior is that it ignores the possible role of men’s changing economic position in these changes. Yet it is well known that marriage and family behavior are related to men’s employment characteristics (Cherlin 1979; Goldscheider and Waite 1986; Ross and Sawhill 1975; Teachman et al. 1987). Furthermore, there is a long demographic tradition, dating back to Malthus, which argues that changes in men’s economic position has an effect on marriage and fertility behavior. Supporting the view that these

changes might also be an important factor in the rise in both men’s and women’s age at marriage since the early 1970s is the well-documented finding that there has been a large absolute and relative decline in the labor-market position of young men with a high school education or less. In addition, there has been an increase in economic inequality within each educational group, including those with a college education (Levy 1998; Juhn et al. 1993). The reasons for these trends appear to be quite complex, and, to date, no general consensus has yet been reached regarding the relative importance of several proposed explanations. A variety of factors appear to be making a contribution. The globalization of manufacturing and the resulting competition from cheap semiskilled labor in developing countries may be decreasing the demand for less skilled American workers, workers who previously were able to command relatively high wages in manufacturing; moreover, this same globalization has weakened the position of unions and hence their ability to protect such workers from an erosion in their job security and wages. All this has fostered the continued decline in the proportion of workers in manufacturing and the rapid rise in the proportion in service industries. However, the growth of service industries per se cannot be driving these changes because the growth in some service industries has increased the demand for more highly skilled labor while the expansion of other service industries has only resulted in a rising demand for lowwage unskilled labor, leaving the semiskilled in an increasingly poor position. Moreover, it does not appear that industrial restructuring alone can satisfactorily account for all or perhaps even most of these changes because, within industries, there is evidence of a sharp rise in the demand for more skilled labor pointing to an important role for technological change in both the manufacturing process and the production of services (Levy 1998; Meisenheimer 1998).

Whatever the reasons for the declining economic position of young, less educated males, recent research provides evidence that men in a poorer labor-market position do tend to delay marriage (Mare and Winship 1991; Lloyd and South 1996; Oppenheimer et al. 1997). Oppenheimer’s work, in particular, has indicated that substantial inequalities in the length and difficulty of the career-entry process exist both within

and between race-schooling groups and lead to substantial differences in the marriage timing of young men.

This article has reviewed the history of laborforce measures as well as several important current issues in labor-force analysis. First, the study of the labor force reveals the changing significance of work in the lives of different segments of the population. Second, since economic behavior impacts on other social systems, such as the family and stratification systems, labor-force analysis will continue to be an essential field for sociological analysis.

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