Department of Sociology

Description

Christine Percheski, Associate Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University, will give a talk as part of the Sociology Colloquium spring series. 

Title:

Wealth, Sibship Size, and Economic Transfers between Siblings in Adulthood

Abstract:

Over 90% of U.S. adults have siblings, but we know little about how siblings affect each other’s economic resources in adulthood. I investigate how sibship size and wealth are linked in the United States and possible mechanisms underlying this association. With data from multiple datasets, I show that sibship size is predictive of wealth in adulthood, net of many individual characteristics. With data from the Survey of Consumer Finances and my own new data collection, I also show that economic transfers between siblings are relatively common, patterned along axes of inequalities, and vary by sibship size. I argue that sibship size an underappreciated mechanism in the reproduction of economic inequality in the contemporary U.S.

Description

Adam Reich, Professor of Sociology at Columbia University, will give a talk as part of the Sociology Colloquium spring series.

TALK TITLE: 

Inside Jobs: Prison Work in the American Labor Market

Abstract:  

It is easy to think of prison work as the opposite of work on the free market: The prisoner working without pay in the mess hall, or making license plates for $0.40 an hour, seems more comparable to an enslaved person than to someone working a job on the outside, however bad that job may be. Such a distinction is baked into our common sense and into our jurisprudence, and it has played an important symbolic role in American political and social life, from the earliest campaigns of the American labor movement to the modern-day prison reform movement.  But it obscures as much as it clarifies. It masks the coercion underlying systems of “free” labor, as well as the different forms of freedom that incarcerated people have occasionally exercised in relationship to their work inside. Rather than view prison work as the opposite of “free” labor, then, Inside Jobs considers the prison as an important site in which ideas and practices about the relationship between work, coercion, and freedom have been developed and contested across different periods of American economic history.

Description

David Melamed, Professor of Sociology at The Ohio State University, will give a talk as part of the Sociology Colloquium spring series: 

How to stop the emergence of segregation in cooperative networks

David Melamed, The Ohio State University

Abstract: Cooperation among animals is a paradox because individuals are better off not cooperating with others. One prevalent explanation for the high levels of cooperation we observe among humans is the effect of the network structures in which we are embedded. Clustering structurally insulates cooperators, enabling high rates of cooperation within network communities or clusters. At the same time, we know that networks are clustered by demographic attributes. Taken together, the result is demographically similar clusters with high rates of cooperation. That is, these two processes generate the emergence of cooperative but segregated clusters. Here we present two studies on these processes. Study 1 documents the results described above, and study two systematically varies types of reputations. We find that we can eliminate the emergence of segregation by altering the types of reputations that are used in the networks. I conclude with a discussion of reducing segregation in polarized contexts.