Encyclopedia of SociologyVol._1

five assistants, addressed the effects on Muncie of certain events during the period between 1925 and 1935, some of which were economic boom times, a thirty-seven percent population increase, and the emergence of the Great Depression. The

Lynds’ fundamental questions in the later study addressed the persistence of the social fabric and culture of the community in the face of the ‘‘hard times’’ and other aspects of social change, the stability of community values concerning self-reli- ance and faith in the future when confronted by structurally-induced poverty and dependence, whether the Depression promoted a sense of community or undermined community solidarity by introducing new social cleavages, and the outcomes of latent conflicts observed in the mid1920s (Lynd and Lynd 1937, p. 4).

The conclusion reached by the Lynds was that the years of depression did little to diminish or otherwise change the essentially bourgeois value structure and way of life in Middletown, and that in almost all fundamental respects the community culture of Middletown remained much as it did a tumultuous decade earlier: ‘‘In the main, a Rip Van Winkle, fallen asleep in 1925 while addressing Rotary or the Central Labor Union, could have awakened in 1935 and gone right on with his interrupted address to the same people with much the same ideas’’ (Lynd and Lynd 1937, p. 490). Although this remark seems to reflect some amount of disappointment on the Lynds’ part that Middletown’s bourgeois value system and class structure remained so unchanged in the face of widespread and unprecedented destitution, the Lynds still remained convinced that the Middletown family was in jeopardy, as evidenced by (among other things) an ever-widening generation gap. The

Lynds’ apprehensions concerning the survival of the American family were (and are) in keeping with the popular belief concerning the decline of the American family as its socialization functions are assumed by other formal social institutions external to the family.

The Middletown III study undertaken from 1976 to 1978 by Theodore Caplow, Howard M.

Bahr, and Bruce A. Chadwick, attempted to closely replicate the methodology of the Lynds. However, their findings were at odds with the more pessimistic predictions of the Lynds. In contrast to the Lynds’ foreboding in 1935 and popular sociology since that time, Caplow and his associates

contend that Middletown’s families of the 1970s have ‘‘increased family solidarity, a smaller generation gap, closer marital communication, more religion, and less mobility’’ (Caplow et al. 1982, p. 323). The conclusions derived from the third Middletown studies also reject similar assumptions concerning consistent linear trends in equalization, secularization, bureaucratization, and depersonalization consistent with the relentless Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft theme (Bahr, Caplow, and Chadwick

1983).

Although many of the Lynds’ predictions concerning the social transformation of Middletown failed to pan out as history unfolded, their work and remarkable powers of observation remain unparalleled in many respects. Of equal importance, the early Middletown studies helped to inspire such other works as Street Corner Society and the Yankee City studies, and they remain the standard by which all other community studies are judged.

The largest scale community study undertaken remains W. Lloyd Warner’s Yankee City, published in a five volume series from 1941 through 1959 (W. Lloyd Warner and Paul S. Lund, The Social Life of a Modern Community 1941; W. Lloyd Warner and Paul S. Lund, The Status System of a Modern Community 1942; W. Lloyd Warner and

Leo Srole, The Social Systems of American Ethnic Groups 1945; W. Lloyd Warner and J. O. Low, The Social System of the Modern Factory 1947; and W. Lloyd Warner The Living and the Dead 1959). The Yankee City project was undertaken by Warner and his associates in Newburyport, Massachusetts during the late 1930s. Warner, an anthropologist, attempted to obtain a complete ethnographic account of a ‘‘representative’’ American small community with a population range from 10,000 to

20,000. To accomplish this task, Warner’s staff (numbering in the thirties) conducted aerial surveys of Newburyport and its surrounding communities, gathered some 17,000 ‘‘social personality’’ cards on every member of the community, gathered data on the professed and de facto reading preferences of its citizens, and even subjected plots of local plays to content analysis (Thernstrom

1964).

Warner’s conception of Yankee City was that of a stable, rather closed community with a social structure being transformed in very negative ways

by the latter stages of industrialization. According to Warner’s vision of Yankee City, the loss of local economic control over its industries through a factory system controlled by ‘‘outsiders’’ disrupted traditional management—labor relations and communal identification with local leadership. Moreover, the factory system was seen by Warner as promoting an increasingly rigid class structure and decreased opportunities for social mobility. In particular, Warner’s discussion of the loss of local economic control through horizontal and vertical affiliation, orientation, and delegation of authority seems to have offered a prophetic glimpse into the future for many American communities.

Although the Yankee City study produced a voluminous ethnographic record of an American city that has remained untouched in scale, Warner found little support for his contention that the ethnographic portrait of Newburyport produced by the Yankee City series could be generalized to other small American communities. Moreover, Warner’s contention that social mobility is reduced by industrial change was not supported by the quality of his data and was less true in Warner’s time than it probably is today. Other critiques of Warner’s Yankee City study primarily concern his nearly exclusive reliance on ethnographic information as the basis for all measures of social structure and his disdain for historical data (Thernstrom 1964).

Both Gerald Suttles’s The Social Order of the Slum (1968) and William Whyte’s Street Corner Society (1943) provide sociology with unparalleled ethnographic accounts of neighborhood social structure and communal life in urban environs. Suttles’s work focuses on the territorial relationships, neighborhood social structure, and communal life among Italian, Latino, and African American inhabitants of the slums of Chicago’s Near West Side in the 1960s. Whyte’s Street Corner Society, based on Whyte’s residence in a Chicago Italian slum district a generation earlier, provides sociology with an understanding of the complex and stable social organization that existed within slum neighborhoods conventionally believed to have epitomized social disorganization. Whyte’s observations and keen insights concerning small group behavior are pioneering contributions to that area of sociology. Both studies, in method, theory, and substance are classic examples of Chicago School

sociology. More contemporary community studies, while they draw heavily on Chicago School sociological traditions in theory and method, have as their primary concern aspects of community that relate to poverty, juvenile delinquency, and violence. For example, Robert Sampson and his colleagues conducted a large-scale study of Chicago neighborhoods that linked subjective definitions of neighborhood with social cohesion and violence inhibiting actions on the part of neighbors (Sampson 1997a, 1997b). Theoretically, Sampson’s work draws heavily on Robert Park’s conception of the social cohesion that exists within the ‘‘natural areas’’ of the city that are defined by both physical and sentimental boundaries (Park 1925), while methodologically Sampson and his colleagues employed the classic Chicago School preference for field observation—albeit with the modern advantages of a video camera located within a slowly moving van in place of the shoe leather sociology of their predecessors.

COMMUNITY IN THE CONTEXT OF

SOCIAL REFORM

Efforts to enhance the social context of human existence continuously take place at all levels of social organization, from the microcontext of the nuclear family to the macrocontext of relationships between nation-states. No unit of social organization has received more attention in theories and activities linked to social reform than the human community, however it is defined and measured. Community in the context of social reform is typically viewed or employed in one of the following four ways: as a unit of analysis for the purpose of broad generalization, as a critical mediating influence between the organization of mass society and individual outcomes, as a specific target of social reform efforts, or as a symbolic conception of whatever is ‘‘right’’ or ‘‘wrong’’ with society at large.

The use of rural and urban communities as the basis for reform-motivated generalization emerged in the United States during the Progressive era, when social activists affiliated with Chicago’s famous settlement house, Hull House, and the newly formed Department of Sociology at the

University of Chicago shared a common geographi- cally-rooted conception of social science and concern for the living conditions of Chicago’s urban

poor (Sklar 1998). Hull House Maps and Papers, published in 1895, provides a remarkably detailed description of the lives and living conditions within Chicago’s ethnic neighborhoods based on the

field research of university students and full-time residents of Hull House. In fact, the beginnings of

Chicago School sociology were clearly rooted in the methods if not the concerns of Hull House social reformers, despite the fact that as women they were excluded from holding academic appointments until the creation of the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy in 1907 (Muncy 1991).

In later years, small towns and neighborhoods within larger towns became a common unit of analysis as community studies conducted by the federal Children’s Bureau tried to assess the incidence and causes of infant mortality. The first of these studies, conducted in Johnstown, Pennsylvania in 1913, was the earliest scientific study of the incidence of infant mortality by social class, education, occupation, and specific living conditions conducted in the United States (Duke 1915). Re- form-driven community studies since then have addressed such social issues as child labor, juvenile delinquency, education, industrial working conditions, and adequate housing. Although single communities are still used by social reformers as a basis for broad generalization, such studies are enormously expensive to conduct, often of limited use for generalization, and altogether less frequent with the availability of national survey data.

Despite the conceptual ambiguities involved, the geographically-bounded community (e.g., census tract, city ward, resident defined neighborhood) is generally viewed by liberal and conservative social reformers alike as the critical mediating social context between the well-being of individuals, the effective functioning and stability of families, and society at large. Robert Hauser and his associates identify such factors as the physical infrastructure, the quality and quantity of neighborhood institutions, the demographic composition, and the degree of ‘‘social capital’’ present as measurable aspects of neighborhoods that are critical to the well-being of children and families

(Hauser, Brown, and Prosser 1997). The concept of social capital, introduced by James Coleman, refers to the beneficial normative context that arises in some neighborhoods based on the social ties among neighboring households and local institutions (Coleman 1988). In this vein, Robert

Sampson demonstrates that neighborhoods with evidence of more social capital are more effective in inhibiting adolescent delinquency (Sampson,

1997b). Speaking from the opposite perspective of social disorganization, William Julius Wilson (1987, 1996), and Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton

(1993) emphasize the deleterious effects on the normative context within communities created by such macrolevel exogenous factors as economic restructuring, concentrated poverty, and racial segregation. A related concern is the extent to which increased spatial stratification by social class may be promoting neighborhoods and larger communities, which function as distinct social worlds with ever more divergent values and opportunity structures (Massey 1996).

Efforts to effect social reform at the community level have a long tradition of sentiment, failure, and mixed success. There are a variety of reasons for failure, not the least of which is that communities, like individuals, both mirror and are shaped by complex exogenous social processes. Contemporary issues include conceptual differences in the measures used for community, the fact that community effects on individual outcomes are difficult to isolate and often weaker than popular theory would suggest (Plotnick and Hoffman 1999; Brooks-

Gunn, Duncan, and Aber 1997), and the limiting effect of macrolevel processes on community-level reform efforts (Wallace and Wallace 1990; Halpern

1991). Recent efforts at community-level social reform have placed more emphasis on understanding the unique social context within a target community before applying social prescriptions that appear logically appealing or may have worked elsewhere. For example, David Hawkins and Richard Catalano, in their work on juvenile drug and alcohol abuse, focus on a community assessment process that considers the risk and protective factors that are unique to each community before deciding upon specific community-level interventions (Hawkins and Catalano 1992).

SOCIAL THEORY AND THE

TRANSFORMATION OF COMMUNITY

Every generation of sociologists since the time of

Durkheim have concerned themselves with the social transformation and meaning of community in the face of industrial change and urbanization.

Roland Warren (1978) describes the modern social transformation of community as a change of orientation by the local community units toward the extracommunity systems of which they are a part, with a corresponding decrease in community cohesion and autonomy (Warren 1978, pp. 52– 53). Warren identifies seven areas through which social transformation can be analyzed: division of labor, differentiation of interests and association, increasing systemic relationships to the larger society, bureaucratization and impersonalization, transfer of functions to profit enterprise and government, urbanization and suburbanization, and changing value.

Bender (1978) proposes that the observations by various community scholars at different points in historical time, each suggesting that theirs is the historical tipping point from community to mass society, contradict linear decline or an interpretation of history that stresses the collapse of community. He suggests that a ‘‘bifurcation of social experience’’ or sharpening of the distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft realms of social interaction is a more accurate interpretation of the historical transformation of community than that provided by the linear Gemeinschaft-to-gesellschaft framework.

Barry Wellman and Barry Leighton (1979) suggest that there are three essential arguments concerning the fate of community in mass society: community ‘‘lost,’’ community ‘‘saved,’’ and community ‘‘liberated.’’ The community ‘‘lost’’ argument emerged during the Industrial Revolution, as traditional communal modes of production and interaction gave way to centralized, industrialized sources of production and dependence. According to this hypothesis and its variations, the intimate, sustained, and mutually interdependent human associations based on shared fate and shared consciousness observed in traditional communal society are relentlessly giving way to the casual, impersonal, transitory, and instrumental relationships based on self-interest that are characteristic of social existence in modern industrial society.

The classic essay in the community ‘‘lost’’ tradition is Louis Wirth’s ‘‘Urbanism as a Way of Life’’ (1938). Wirth’s eloquent essay presents a perspective of urban existence that continues to capture sociological thinking about the emergence

of a heterogeneous urban mass society characterized by a breakdown of informal, communal ways of meeting human need and the rise of human relationships that are best characterized as ‘‘largely anonymous, superficial, and transitory’’ (Wirth 1938, p. 1). Another important contribution in the decline of community tradition is the ‘‘community of limited liability’’ thesis (Janowitz 1952; Greer 1962). According to this thesis, networks of human association and interdependence exist at various levels of social organization, and there are social status characteristics associated with differentiated levels of participation in community life

(e.g., family life-cycle phase). The idea of ‘‘limited liability’’ poses the argument that, in a highly mobile society, the attachments to community tend to be based on rationalism rather than on sentiment and that even those ‘‘invested’’ in the community are limited in their sense of personal commitment.

In direct contrast to the community ‘‘lost’’ perspective, the community ‘‘saved’’ argument suggests that communities and communal relationships continue to exist within industrialized bureaucratic urban societies as people are increasingly motivated to seek ‘‘safe communal havens’’ (William and Lieghton 1979, p. 373). For example, Bahr, Caplow, and Chadwick (1983), forty years after the Lynds’ Middletown in Transition study, failed to find the singular trends in bureaucratization, secularization, mobility, and depersonalization that would be predicted from a linear decline of community hypothesis. Their observation of Middletown in the 1970s was more consistent with the perspective proposed by Robert Redfield (1955); that both urban ways and folkways coexist within contemporary small towns and cities: ‘‘In every isolated little community there is civilization; in every city there is the folk society’’ (Redfield 1955, p. 146).

The community ‘‘liberated’’ argument concedes and to some extent qualifies key aspects of both the community ‘‘lost’’ and community ‘‘saved’’ perspectives. While it acknowledges that neigh- borhood-level communal ties have been weakened in the face of urbanization, it argues that communal ties and folkways still flourish, albeit in alternative non-spatial forms. The community ‘‘liberated’’ argument suggests that the spatial dependence of communal ties have been replaced by ease of mobility and communication across boundaries of

both geographic and social distance. Although the community ‘‘liberated’’ argument preceeded the development of the Internet and cyberspace

‘‘chatrooms’’ by decades, it emphasizes the role of communication technology in the creation of such future manifestations of community and in that sense was strikingly prophetic.

Despite the fact that the decline of community or the community ‘‘lost’’ perspective continues to hold broad appeal (e.g., Robert Putnam’s ‘‘The Strange Disappearance of Civic America,’’ The American Prospect, Winter, 1996), the empirical evidence for a real decline in community is far from conclusive. A time trend analysis of national surveys concerning the persistence of community in American society by Avery Guest and Susan Wierzbicki (1999) suggests that while traditional intra-neighborhood forms of socializing have slowly declined over the past two decades, they have been largely replaced by communal ties outside the local neighborhood. Moreover, Guest and Wierzbicki’s findings also suggest that spatial ‘‘within neigborhood’’ communal ties continue to be important to a large segment of the population. Their findings imply that the major questions about the place of community in mass society should not be about whether communal forms of relationships will continue to exist, but rather under what conditions and in what form.

Duke, Emma 1914 Infant Mortality: Results of a Field Study in Johnstown, P.A., Based on Births in One Calendar Year. U.S.D.L. Children’s Bureau Publication No. 9. Washington D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Greer, Scott 1962 The Emerging City: Myth and Reality. New York: Free Press of Glencoe.

Guest, Avery, and Susan Wierzbicki 1999 ‘‘Social Ties at the Neighborhood Level: Two Decades of GSS Evidence.’’ Urban Affairs Review 35: forthcoming.

Halpern, Robert 1991 ‘‘Supportive Services for Families in Poverty: Dilemmas of Reform.’’ Social Service Review 65 (3):343–365.

Hauser, Robert, Brett Brown, and William Prosser 1997

Indicators of Children’s Well-Being. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

Hillary, George A., Jr. 1955 ‘‘Definitions of Community: Areas of Agreement.’’ Rural Sociology 20:111–123.

Janowitz, Morris 1952 The Community Press in an Urban Setting: The Social Elements of Urbanism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Jencks, Christopher and Susan Mayer 1996 ‘‘The Social Consequences of Growing Up in a Poor Neighborhood.’’ In Lynn Le and McGeary MGH, eds., Innercity Poverty in the United States. Washington D.C.: National Academy Press.

Lindeman, E. C. 1930 ‘‘Community.’’ In Edwin R. A. Seligman, ed., The Encyclopedia of Social Sciences. New York: Macmillan.

Lynd, Robert, and Helen Lynd 1929 Middletown: A Study in American Culture. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company.

REFERENCES

Bahr, Howard M., Theodore Caplow, and Bruce Chadwick 1983 ‘‘Middletown III: Problems of Replication, Longitudinal Measurement, and Triangulation.’’ Annual Review of Sociology 9:249–258.

Bender, Thomas 1978 Community and Social Change in America. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.

Brooks-Gunn, Jeanne, Greg Duncan, and Lawrence Aber 1997 Neighborhood Poverty: Context and Consequences for Children, Volume I. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

Caplow, Theodore, Howard M. Bahr, Bruce A. Chadwick, Reuben Hill, and Margaret Holmes Williamson 1982

Middletown Families: Fifty Years of Change and Continuity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Coleman, James 1988 ‘‘Social Capital in the Creation of Human Capital.’’ American Journal of Sociology, 94 (supp): S95–S120.

——— 1937 Middletown in Transition: A Study in Cultural Conflicts. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company.

Massey, Douglas 1996 ‘‘The Age of Extremes: Concentrated Affluence and Poverty in the Twenty-First Century.’’ Demography 33 (4):395–413.

——— and Nancy Denton 1993 American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

McMillan, David and David Chavis 1986 ‘‘Sense of Community: A Definition and Theory.’’ Journal of Community Psychology 14:6–23.

Muncy, Robyn 1991 Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform 1890–1935. New York: Oxford University Press.

Park, Robert 1925 ‘‘The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment.’’ In Robert Park, Ernest Burgess, and Roderick McKenzie, eds., The City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Plotnick, Robert and Saul Hoffman 1999 ‘‘The Effect of Neighborhood Characteristics on Young Adult Outcomes: Alternative Estimates.’’ Social Science Quarterly 80 (1):forthcoming.

Putnam, Robert 1996 ‘‘The Strange Disppearance of Civic America.’’ The American Prospect. Winter, 1996: 34–48.

Redfield, Robert 1955 The Little Community. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Sampson, Robert 1997a ‘‘Neighborhoods and Violent Crime: A Multilevel Study of Collective Efficacy.’’ Science 277:918–925.

——— 1997b ‘‘Collective Regulation of Adolescent Misbehavior: Validation Results from Eighty Chicago Neighborhoods.’’ Journal of Adolescent Research 12 (2):227–244.

Sklar, Kathryn 1998 ‘‘Hull-House Maps and Papers: Social Science as Women’s Work in the 1890’s.’’ In Helene Silverberg, ed., Gender and American Social Science: The Formative Years. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.

Suttles, Gerald 1972 The Social Construction of Communities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

——— 1968 The Social Order of the Slum: Ethnicity and Territory in the Inner City. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Thernstrom, Stephen 1964 Poverty and Progress. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Wallace, Roderick, and Deborah Wallace 1990 ‘‘Origins of Public Health Collapse in New York City: The Dynamics of Planned Shrinkage, Contagious Urban Decay, and Social Disintegration.’’ Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine 66:391–434.

Warner, W. Lloyd 1959 The Living and the Dead: A Study of the Symbolic Life of Americans. New Haven: Yale University Press.

———, and J.O. Low 1947 The Social System of the Modern Factory: The Strike, A Social Analysis. New Haven: Yale University Press.

———, Paul S. Lund, and Leo Srole 1963 Yankee City. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Warner, W. Lloyd, and Leo Srole 1945 The Social Systems of American Ethnic Groups. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Warner, W. Lloyd, and Paul S. Lund 1941 The Social Life of a Modern Community. New Haven: Yale University Press.

——— 1942 The Status System of a Modern Community. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Warren, Roland 1978 The Community in America. Chica-

go: Rand McNally.

Wellman, Barry, and Barry Leighton 1979 ‘‘Networks, Neighborhoods, and Community: Approaches to the Study of the Community Question.’’ Urban Affairs Quarterly 14 (3):363–390.

Whyte, William Foote 1943 Street Corner Society: The Social Structure of an Italian Slum. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Wilson, William 1996 When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor. New York: Knopf.

——— 1987 The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Wirth, Louis 1938 ‘‘Urbanism as a Way of Life.’’ American Journal of Sociology 44:1–24.

Zimmerman, Carle C. 1938 The Changing Community. New York: Harper and Brothers.

GUNNAR ALMGREN

COMMUNITY HEALTH

See Community; Comparative Health-Care Systems; Health Promotion and Health Status; Medical Sociology.

COMPARABLE WORTH

‘‘Comparable worth’’ is one approach to increasing pay equity between jobs done primarily by women and minorities and those done primarily by majority men. It refers to equalizing compensation for jobs requiring comparable levels of effort, skill, and responsibility. The concept of comparable worth defines ‘‘equal work’’ as ‘‘work of equivalent value,’’ a broader concept than limiting ‘‘equal work’’ to meaning the ‘‘same work.’’ Comparable worth uses job-evaluation methods to establish equivalencies of different jobs in order to identify and correct disparities in pay between jobs held primarily by women and minority men and jobs held primarily by nonminority men. It is worth noting that the term pay equity is often used in conjunction with discussions of comparable worth; it usually refers not only to comparable worth but also to other approaches to achieving equity and justice in wages. Pay equity is the best subject heading or ‘‘key word’’ to use when doing further research on the topic of comparable worth.

Proponents of using comparable worth to establish pay equity argue that 1) at least some part of the lower wages in female-dominated jobs and occupations is due to pay discrimination against women, and 2) job evaluation systems can determine the equivalency of different jobs and thus identify the jobs and occupations where this form of discrimination exists.

The issue of comparable worth arose in response to obvious differences in the rewards for jobs held primarily by women and those held primarily by men—even when those jobs required the same or similar levels of education, skill, and responsibility. Advocates of comparable worth and pay equity argue that these wage differences are based on historical and current discrimination in the setting of wages for jobs held primarily by women and minorities. That is, jobs in which workers are primarily women and minorities have been, and remain, systematically undervalued relative to equivalent jobs held by majority men. This undervaluation depresses the wages in jobs done by women and minorities relative to the wages for jobs historically performed by white men. Thus, discrimination is embedded in the current wage structure of jobs (Remick 1984; Marini 1989).

Continued job and occupational segregation by sex, combined with the continued systematic undervaluation of jobs held by women and minorities, is thereby a cause of continued inequality and a form of labor market discrimination.

The argument that discrimination is the basis for the inequality of wages between men’s and women’s jobs is not new. In the 1922 presidential address to the British Association of Economists, F.Y. Edgeworth spoke on ‘‘Equal Pay to Men and Women for Equal Work.’’ Edgeworth outlined three major conclusions regarding wage inequality between men and women. First, that men and women work in different jobs, albeit jobs that often require similar levels of effort and skill. Second, that jobs held by women are paid far less than those held by men. Third, that removing overt discrimination would be unlikely to equalize wages for men and women fully (Edgeworth 1922). The findings of recent empirical studies have generally supported these three conclusions.

There is considerable evidence demonstrating that men and women work in different occupations. Comparisons of occupational segregation

by sex in the United States since 1900 show that levels of segregation have been persistent through the 1960s and 1980s (Gross 1968; Jacobs 1989). During the 1980s more than half of the workers of one sex would have had to change occupations in order to equalize the distribution of men and women across all occupations (Jacobs 1989). Researchers using more specific job titles within firms have found that almost no men and women work together in the same job in the same firm (Bielby and Baron 1986).

On average, women continue to earn substantially less than men. Women earned 62 percent of what men earned in 1975 and just over 75 percent of what men earned in 1995 (Figart and Kahn 1997). The concentration of women in low-paying, female-dominated occupations has been found to account for a substantial portion of this income difference. The amount of the income gap between men and women explained by the sex segregation of occupations varies from 25 percent to over 33 percent across many studies of this issue (Sorensen 1986; Figart and Kahn 1997). The remainder of the difference between men’s and women’s average earnings is due to other factors, such as differences in the overall skills and experience individual men and women bring with them to the labor market.

Empirical studies have examined whether the gap in wages between female-dominated and maledominated occupations is based on differences in the occupations with regard to the skills required or the work environments. Treiman and colleagues (1984), in an evaluation of the effects of differences in characteristics of male and female occupations on wages, found that ‘‘about 40 percent of the earnings gap between maleand female-domi- nated occupations can be attributed to differences in job characteristics and 60 percent to differences in the rate of return on these characteristics.’’ That is, he found that the premium paid for skills in male-dominated occupations was higher than that paid for the same skills in female-dominated occupations. Other research has confirmed the findings that specific skills (such as dealing with the public) or requirements (such as having a high school diploma) increase wages more in a maledominated occupation than in a female-dominat- ed occupation (McLaughlin 1978; Beck and Kemp 1986). Other possible explanations for differences

in wages between male-dominated and femaledominated occupations—such as that female-domi- nated occupations have greater nonmonetary compensations (such as vacation, sick leave, flexibility in working hours) (Jencks, Perman and Rainwater

1988) or that they are more accommodating to intermittent careers (England 1982)—have not been supported by empirical studies.

The conclusion of J.S. Mill in 1865, as quoted by Edgeworth in 1922—‘‘The remuneration of the peculiar employments of women is always, I believe, greatly below that of employments of equal skill and equal disagreeableness carried on by men.’’—is similar to the conclusion reached by the National Research Council/National Academy of

Sciences committee report in 1981:

‘‘[Such] differential earnings patterns have existed for many decades. They may arise in part because women and minority men are paid less than white men for doing the same (or very similar) jobs within the same firm, or in part because the job structure is substantially segregated by sex, race, and ethnicity and the jobs held mainly by women and minority men pay less than the jobs held mainly by nonminority men’’ (Treiman and Hartmann

1981, p.92).

The evidence is fairly conclusive that occupa- tional-level wage discrimination exists—that is, that skills and requirements are less well rewarded in jobs held primarily by women than they are in jobs held primarily by men. Comparable worth advocates argue that applying job-evaluation methods is a viable method for reducing this form of wage discrimination. This is clarified in Helen Remick’s proposed working definition of comparable worth as ‘‘the application of a single, bias-free point factor job evaluation system within a given establishment, across job families, both to rank-order jobs and to set salaries‘‘(1984, p.99).

Job-evaluation methods are well established and have been used for decades to establish equivalencies across jobs. Actual methods of job evaluation differ, but the usual approach is to start by describing all jobs within a given organization. Next, a list of important job requirements is developed and jobs are rated on each requirement. For example, one requirement could be the use of mathematics. In this case each job would be rated from ‘‘low’’ (e.g. addition and subtraction of whole

numbers) to ‘‘high’’ (e.g., the use of differential equations). Most job-evaluation methods include job requirements such as level of education, skills, level of responsibility, and the environment in which the work is performed. Some job-evaluation methods also include such characteristics of job incumbents as average education, training, and experience. More complex job-evaluation systems also consider how jobs rank with regard to fringe benefits (e.g. sick leave), hours (e.g. shift work), training and promotion opportunities, hazards, autonomy (e.g. can leave work without permission), authority (e.g. supervises others), and organizational setting (e.g. organizational size) (see

Jencks et al. 1988). After each job is rated and given a certain number of ‘‘points’’ for each requirement, the points are then added into an overall ‘‘score’’ for each job. These scores are then weighted based on the importance assigned to a particular job attribute. Each job then receives a total number of points based on all of the appropiate factors in order to compare the value to the firm of different jobs. These composite scores are then used to rank jobs in order to help determine appropriate wages (Blau and Ferber 1986). This makes it possible to compare wages paid for jobs with very different—but comparable—content. In addition to considering the training and work requirements for jobs within the firm, systems of job evaluation often also take into account whatever information is available on prevailing wages for different types of labor. The use of job evaluation is neither new nor unusual, and currently job evaluation is often used to determine pay scales by governments and by many businesses. Job evaluations are primarily used when employers cannot rely on the market to establish wages. (See Spilerman

1986, for a discussion of the types of organizations that determine wages based on nonmarket mechanisms.) Employers must determine wages, for example, when positions are filled entirely from within an organizational unit (e.g. through promotion of an existing workforce) or when they fill jobs that are unique to a particular firm. In these cases, ‘‘going rates’’ for all jobs are not always available in local labor markets.

There are at least two critical limitations to using job-evaluation methods in establishing comparable worth. First, it is difficult to eliminate the effects of past practices on the identification and the weighting of important job characteristics.

Existing job-evaluation schemes have been criticized for undervaluing, or not even considering, the skills and abilities that are emphasized in some female jobs (Beatty and Beatty 1984; Stienberg 1992). For example, at one time the coding in the job-evaluation system used in the Dictionary of

Occupational Titles rated the primarily male occupation ‘‘Dog Pound Attendant’’ as requiring a higher level of complexity with regard to working with data, people, and things than the primarily female occupations of ‘‘Nursery School Teacher’’ and ‘‘Practical Nurse’’—which were rated as having minimal or no relationship with data, people, or things (Miller et al. 1980). Second, because jobevaluation methods are used within a particular firm or organization, they do not address wage inequalities across firms or organizations. This particularly limits the scope of comparable worth because, with the exception of governments (which often employ individuals across a wide range of occupational categories), most organizations are staffed by individuals in a relatively narrow span of occupations. For example, jobs in the textile and poultry-processing industries, usually held by women, and jobs in the lumber industry, usually held by men, could have the same overall scores in terms of job characteristics. However, because these jobs are usually not in the same organization, it is unlikely that job-evaluation methods could be used to equalize wages for these jobs.

Comparable-worth methods have been used in a number of legal actions in attempts to increase the equivalencies of wages for jobs held primarily by women and those held primarily by men. The outcomes of these cases have been mixed (see Remick 1984; Heen 1984; Steinberg 1987; and

Figart and Kahn 1997 for reviews and discussions of cases). In the United States, the right of ‘‘equal pay for equal work’’ is provided by Title VII of the

Civil Rights Act of 1964. An important legal action based on the premise of comparable worth was the Supreme Court ruling in the County of Washington v Gunther, 452 U.S. 161 (1981). This ruling removed a major legal obstacle to comparable worth as the basis of equalizing wages. Although it did not endorse the comparable worth approach, it did rule that a man and woman need not do ‘‘equal work’’ in order to establish pay discrimination under Title VII (Heen 1984). Subsequent lower court rulings have not resulted in clear-cut decisions regarding comparable worth, and at present

it seems unlikely that, in the United States, court decisions will mandate the comparable-worth approach. Legal and legislative actions based on comparable worth and pay equity also have emerged in countries other than the United States. Canada included a provision for equal pay for work of equal value in the Canadian Human Rights Act of

1977 (see Cadieux 1984; and Ontario Pay Equity

Commission 1998). The implementation of this legislation has resulted in significant decisions regarding the need to increase wages in femaledominated occupations—both in private industry and in the government. However, the implementation of these decisions has not been without difficulty. For example, the government and the gov- ernment-workers union of the Northwest Territories were, in early 1998, in disagreement with regard to whether the evaluation system used by the government to establish comparable worth was biased

(Government of the Northwest Territories 1998).

Despite its limitations and difficulties in implementation, the concept of comparable worth as a basis for pay equity remains important in public policy initiatives. The National Committee on Pay

Equity (1999), the American Federation of State,

County, and Municipal Employees (1999), and other organizations provide information and support for advocates of comparable worth. As one approach to increasing pay equity, comparableworth applications have the potential for identifying and correcting one of the most persistent bases for the disparity between earnings for majority men and earnings for women and minorities.

REFERENCES

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Bielby, W. T., and J. N. Baron 1986 ‘‘Men and Women at Work: Sex Segregation and Statistical Discrimination.’’ American Journal of Sociology 91:759–99.

Blau, F. D., and M. A. Ferber 1986 The Economics of Women, Men and Work. New York: Prentice-Hall.

Cadieux, Rita 1984 ‘‘Canada’s Equal Pay for Work of Equal Value Law.’’ In H. Remick, ed., Comparable Worth and Wage Discrimination: Technical Possibilities and Political Realities. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Edgeworth, F. Y. 1922 ‘‘Equal Pay to Men and Women for Equal Work.’’ The Economic Journal 32:431–56.

England, P. 1982 ‘‘The Failure of Human Capital Theory to Explain Occupational Sex Segregation.’’ Journal of Human Resources 17:358–70.

Figart, Sarah M., and Peggy Kahn 1997 Contesting the Market: Pay Equity and the Politics of Economic Restructuring. Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press.

Government of the Northwest Territories http:// www.gov.nt.ca/Executive/Pay_Equity, last edited April, 1998.

Gross, E. 1968 ‘‘Plus ça change. . . ? The Sexual Structure of Occupations Over Time.’’ Social Problems 16:198–208.

Heen, M. 1984 ‘‘A Review of Federal Court Decisions Under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.’’ In H. Remick, ed., Comparable Worth and Wage Discrimination: Technical Possibilities and Political Realities. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Jacobs, J. A. 1989 ‘‘Long Term Trends in Occupational Segregation by Sex.’’ American Journal of Sociology

95:160–73.

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Kemp, A. A., and E. M. Beck 1986 ‘‘Equal Work, Unequal Pay: Gender Discrimination Within Work-simi- lar Occupations.’’ Work and Occupations 13:324–347.

Marini, M. M. 1989 ‘‘Sex Differences in Earnings in the U.S.’’ In W. R. Scott, ed., Annual Review of Sociology, vol. 15. Palo Alto, Calif.: Annual Reviews.

McLaughlin, S. 1978 ‘‘Occupational Sex Identification and the Assessment of Male and Female Earnings Inequality.’’American Sociological Review 43:909–921.

Miller, Ann R., D. J. Treiman, P. S. Cain, and P. A. Roos 1980 Work, Jobs, and Occupations: A Critical Review of the Dictionary of Occupational Titles. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.

National Committee on Pay Equity, http://www.feminist.com/fairpay.htm, as of February, 1999.

Ontario Pay Equity Commission, http://www.gov.on.ca/ LAB/pec/acte.htm, last modified December 28, 1998.

Remick, H. (ed.) 1984 Comparable Worth and Wage Discrimination: Technical Possibilities and Political Realities. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

———1984 ‘‘Major Issues in a priori Applications.’’ In H. Remick, ed., Comparable Worth and Wage Discrimination: Technical Possibilities and Political Realities 99– 117. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Sorensen, E. 1986 ‘‘Implementing Comparable Worth: A Survey of Recent Job Evaluation Studies.’’ American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings 76:364–367.

Spilerman, S. 1986 ‘‘Organizational Rules and the Features of Work Careers.’’ Research in Social Stratification and Mobility 5:41–102.

Steinberg, Ronnie, et al. 1985 The New York State Comparable Worth Study: Final Report. New York: Center for Women in Government.

Treiman, D. J., and H. I. Hartman 1981 Woman, Work and Wages: Equal Pay for Jobs of Equal Value. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press.

U.S. Bureau of the Census 1987 Male-Female Differences in Work Experience Occupation and Earnings: 1984. Current Population Report P–70, no. 10. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.

——— 1986 Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1987, 107th ed. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.

NANCY E. DURBIN

BARBARA MELBER

COMPARATIVE HEALTH-CARE SYSTEMS

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, access to health-care services, their cost and quality constitute key social, political, and economic issues for virtually every country in the world. Identifying the conditions under which health-care systems function most effectively has become a vital, albeit elusive, goal. One point is certain: It is impossible to fully understand the dynamics of health-care systems without comparative health-care research.

Knowledge of systems other than one’s own provides the observer with multiple vantage points from which to gain a fresh perspective on strengths and weaknesses at home. Studying other systems, including their successful as well as failed healthreform efforts, provides a global laboratory for health-systems development. While some countries have been quick to draw upon the health-care innovations of their neighbors, the United States has been relatively slow to look internationally for health-reform ideas. Fortunately, the proliferation of comparative health-care studies promises that such insularity will be much less likely in the future.

The comparative study of health-care systems focuses on two broad types of issues. The first