September 2007, Volume 86, Number 1

The Complexity of Trust-Control Relationships in Creative Organizations:
Insights From a Qualitative Analysis of a Conductorless Orchestra

Dmitry M. Khodyakov, Rutgers University

Using a qualitative approach, I study two processes of intra-organizational cooperation and coordination – control and trust – in creative organizations. Specifically, I analyze the complex nature of trust-control relationships in Orpheus orchestra, the world's largest contemporary conductorless orchestra. I discuss how it rehearses and performs without a baton holder and benefits from the creativity of all musicians. This study supports the duality perspective of trust-control relationships. While competence trust and goodwill trust enable musicians to participate in organizational decision-making and be creative, it is behavioral, input, output and social control strategies that facilitate the development of trust and help ensure the orchestra's long-term success. Trust-control duality allows Orpheus to achieve "optimal distinctiveness," which aligns creativity and artistic freedoms with the goals of economic stability.

The Radius of Trust:
Religion, Social Embeddedness and Trust in Strangers

Michael R. Welch, University of Notre Dame
David Sikkink, University of Notre Dame
Matthew T. Loveland, LeMoyne College

Data from the 2002 Religion and Public Activism Survey were used to examine relationships among measures of religious orientation, embeddedness in social networks and the level of trust individuals direct toward others. Results from ordered logistic regression analysis demonstrate that Catholics and members of other denominations show significantly less trust in strangers than mainline Protestants, while older persons and those who are more trusting of acquaintances show greater trust. Although measures of personal religiosity and activity within a congregation show no statistically significant relationship to trust once important controls are taken into account, measures of embeddedness within secular social networks do.

 
Association Memberships and Generalized Trust:
A Multilevel Model Across 31 Countries

Pamela Paxton, Ohio State University

This paper presents a large-scale, comprehensive test of generalized trust across 31 nations. I pay particular attention to the theory and measurement of voluntary associations in promoting trust, hypothesizing that voluntary associations connected to other voluntary associations are more beneficial for the creation of generalized trust than associations isolated from other associations. The theory is tested with a multi-level, cross-national model, including both individual-level and country-level variables to predict the placement of trust. At the individual level, I find that membership in connected associations creates more trust than membership in isolated associations. At the national level, having more connected voluntary associations increases trust, while having more isolated associations decreases trust.

Income Inequality, Global Economy and the State

Cheol-Sung Lee, University of Utah
François Nielsen, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Arthur S. Alderson, Indiana University, Bloomington

We investigate interrelationship among income inequality, global economy and the role of the state using an unbalanced panel data set with 311 observations on 60 countries, dated from 1970 to 1994. The analysis proceeds in two stages. First, we test for effects on income inequality of variables characterizing the situation of a society in the world system: world system position (core, semi-periphery, periphery), foreign trade structure, export commodity concentration, export partner concentration and size of the state (measured as government expenditure or revenue). Second, we analyze the role of the interaction between foreign direct investment and government size in the inverted-U shaped relationship of income inequality with foreign investment. We find that most traditional measures of trade dependence have inconsistent or weak positive effects on inequality, while export commodity concentration has a negative effect. We also find that the effects of foreign direct investment on inequality is positive at low to intermediate levels of government size, but that this effect is substantially attenuated or negative in societies with a larger public sector. We conclude that distributional outcomes are dependent upon how the state reacts to growing globalization-related pressures.

Thinking Globally, Planning Nationally and Acting Locally: Nested Organizational Fields and the Adoption of Environmental Practices

Ion Bogdan Vasi, Columbia University

The study of the adoption of activities to protect the natural environment has tended to focus on the role of organizational fields. This article advances existing research by simultaneously examining conflicting processes that operate in nested organizational fields at local, national and supra-national levels. It examines the recent spread of an environmental program for reducing emissions of greenhouse gases among local governments in three countries: United States, Canada and Australia. Qualitative data is used to identify the main factors that contribute to municipalities' decision to adopt this program, while event history analysis is used to test hypotheses regarding the effect of local governments' attributes, as well as of ties to state and global associations. Results show that widespread adoption of this environmental program is contingent on the development of national change agencies.

Protest and Policymaking: Explaining Fluctuation in Congressional Attention to Rights Issues, 1960-1986

Brayden G. King, Brigham Young University
Keith G. Bentele, University of Arizona
Sarah A. Soule, Cornell University

Although past research has failed to establish a link between protest and policy change, we reexamine the relationship at the agenda-setting stage of policymaking. We assert that protestors compete for attention among lawmakers at the agenda-setting stage. An issue receives more attention when the frequency of protest activity around a particular issue is sufficiently high for that issue to stand out within the field of competing issues. We examine this process by analyzing the factors associated with increasing and fluctuating attention to rights-related issues in Congress. We find that protest, issue legitimacy and issue competition account for variation in the number of congressional hearings granted to rights issues.

Competitive Embeddedness and the Emergence of Interfirm Cooperation

Denis Trapido, Stanford University

How does a history of competition between two economic actors affect their willingness and ability to work together for mutual benefit? Existing theory and research offer mixed predictions and answers. The competitive embeddedness hypothesis suggested here postulates that the likelihood of cooperation between two firms is positively related to the intensity of competition between these firms in the preceding period. The likely mechanisms leading to this are familiarity and knowledge-based trust, both of which are greater between competitors than between non-competitors or two randomly selected actors. Analysis of investment syndicates in venture capital industry supports the competitive embeddedness hypothesis. The hypothesis holds independently of business culture and of the industry's development stage.

Manufacturing Dissent: Labor Revitalization, Union Summer and Student Protest

Nella Van Dyke, Washington State University
Marc Dixon, Florida State University
Helen Carlon, Ohio Department of Job and Family Services

During the late 1990s, college students across the United States mobilized around labor issues. Our research explores whether this explosion of student protest activity was generated, in part, by concerted efforts of the AFL-CIO through its Union Summer college student internship program. A statistical analysis of factors influencing the location of Students Against Sweatshops chapters and student labor protest confirms that the Union Summer program has successfully mobilized a generation of college students for labor activism. This research extends the labor literature by providing evidence of the revitalized labor federation's success in forming bridges to non-traditional constituencies. Our findings inform social movement scholarship and studies of inter-organizational influence by demonstrating that a professional social movement organization can strategically generate mobilization among a new constituency.

Modeling States’ Enactment of High School Exit Examination Policies

John Robert Warren, University of Minnesota
Rachael B. Kulick, University of Minnesota

We present five frameworks for explaining which U.S. states adopted high school exit examination policies at particular points in time. The frameworks correspond to issues of academic achievement, education spending, economic conditions, racial/ethnic heterogeneity and policy diffusion. Using event history techniques we find that states with higher unemployment rates and higher proportions of racial/ethnic minority youth are more likely to have adopted HSEE policies than otherwise similar states.

Internal and External Ethnic Assessments in Eastern Europe

Patricia Ahmed, University of Kentucky, Lexington
Cynthia Feliciano, University of California, Irvine
Rebecca Jean Emigh, University of California, Los Angeles

Survey data for majority and minority ethnicities in Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania and Russia illustrate how internal ethnic identification and other social characteristics influence external ethnic classification. Logistic regressions show how interviewers use negative social characteristics (poverty, low education) to classify respondents as Roma (Gypsies) who did not self-identify as such. In contrast, for other minorities (Hungarians in Romania, Ukrainians in Russia) and majorities, these characteristics had the opposite or little effect, though self-identification, parents' ethnicity and language were influential. Interviewers' classifications tend to include, not exclude, these ethnicities as majorities. Thus, classifications are external and exclusionary for the racialized ethnicity, Roma, while classifications are optional and inclusive for other ethnicities.

*Advancing the Sociology of Ageism

A Special Section edited by:

Victor W. Marshall, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

*Age, Cohort and Perceived Age Discrimination:
Using the Life Course to Assess Self-reported Age Discrimination

Gilbert C. Gee, University of Michigan
Eliza K. Pavalko, Indiana University
J. Scott Long, Indiana University

Self-reported discrimination is linked to diminished well-being, but the processes generating these reports remain poorly understood. Employing the life course perspective, this paper examines the correspondence between expected age preferences for workers and perceived age discrimination among a nationally representative sample of 7,225 working women, followed between 1972-1989. Analyses find that perceived age discrimination is high in the 20s, drops in the 30s and peaks in the 50s. This curvilinear pattern matches external reports of age preferences and is robust to a variety of controls and model specifications. Additionally, the primary driver of perceived age discrimination is age – not cohort or historical period. These findings suggest that perceived age discrimination is a useful indicator of population-level exposure to work-related age discrimination among women.

*Perceived Age Discrimination and Mental Health

Anastasia S. Vogt Yuan, Virginia Tech

Although perceived discrimination (especially due to race-ethnicity) decreases mental health, the influence of perceived discrimination due to other reasons on mental health needs to be explored. This study examines the relationship between perceived age discrimination and mental health and determines whether psychosocial resources explain or buffer (i.e., reduce the strength of) this relationship. Using a nationally-representative sample of persons aged 25-74 from the Midlife Development in the United States survey, this study finds that perceived age discrimination is associated with higher psychological distress and lower positive well-being. Perceived age discrimination is more negatively associated with women's mental health than men's. Although sense of control buffers the relationship between perceived age discrimination and psychological distress, perceived age discrimination decreases sense of control and social support.

*Age Discrimination, Social Closure and Employment

Vincent J. Roscigno, Ohio State University
Sherry Mong, Ohio State University
Reginald Byron, Ohio State University
Griff Tester, Georgia State University

Age discrimination in employment has received mounting attention over the past two decades, and from various cross-cutting social science disciplines. Findings from survey and experimental analyses have revealed the pervasiveness of ageist stereotypes, while aggregate and life course analyses suggest trends toward downward occupational mobility for ageing workers, especially in the face of economic restructuring and global economic pressures. In this article, we extend the literature by offering explicit theoretical conceptualization of age discrimination in employment – conceptualization that builds on prior social closure perspectives dealing with social stratification, broadly – and then analyzing unique quantitative and qualitative data on verified cases of workplace age discrimination occurring between 1988 and 2003. Our analyses center on 1.) the interactional nature of workplace age discrimination and its relation to status, 2.) how explicit ageist stereotypes both invoke discrimination and help gatekeepers justify such behavior, and 3.) the ways in which supposedly age-neutral ideologies, centering specifically on corporate costs and well-being, may also spur ageist discriminatory treatment. Results reveal vulnerability for skilled and semi-skilled workers, particularly those nearing 50 years old and retirement. Qualitative immersion into a subsample of cases reveals precisely how stereotypes are used, how employers rationalize discrimination by invoking business costs, and how the workers are affected. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings as well as the utility of social closure theory for future research and theorizing on age discrimination and inequality.

*Bodacious Berry, Potency Wood and the Aging Monster:
Gender and Age Relations in Anti-Aging Ads

Toni Calasanti, Virginia Tech

This paper situates age discrimination within a broader system of age relations that intersects with other inequalities, and then uses that framework to analyze internet advertisements for the anti-aging industry. Such ads reinforce age and gender relations by positing old people as worthwhile only to the extent that they look and act like those who are middle aged or younger, by defining manhood and womanhood in opposition to each other, and by defining old age as an unhealthy loss of gender identity. These ads promote a reversion to middle age and white, middle-class, heterosexual norms of male performance and female beauty. The analysis demonstrates the utility of understanding age discrimination in terms of intersecting relations of inequality rather than learned attitudes alone.