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RSF Review

New Research on the Occupy Wall Street Movement

January 29, 2013

A new report funded by the Russell Sage Foundation offers an unprecedented analysis of the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York. Entitled "Changing the Subject: A Bottom-Up Account of Occupy Wall Street in New York City," the study draws on interviews with activists and a survey of more than 700 Occupy supporters at a May 1, 2012 rally. Here is the executive summary:

  • Highly educated young adults were overrepresented among OWS activists and supporters, a group with limited ethnic/racial or class diversity.
  • Many OWS activists and supporters were underemployed and/or had recently experienced layoffs or job loss; many were carrying substantial debt, especially those under 30. The issues our respondents cited in explaining their support for Occupy often reflected these personal experiences of economic hardship.
  • Most OWS activists and supporters were deeply skeptical of the mainstream political system as an effective vehicle for social change. For some, this skepticism intensified after the election of Barack Obama in 2008 failed to produce the changes they had been led to expect.
  • Despite being disillusioned with mainstream politics, many OWS activists and supporters remain politically active and civically engaged.
  • The occupation of Zuccotti Park had a pre-history, with strong links to previous U.S. social movements, as well as a post-history, with activities continuing long after the eviction of the Park.
  • OWS activists saw themselves as part of a global movement, linked to the Arab Spring and movements in Europe like that of the Spanish indignados, as well as to earlier protest movements in the United States.
  • The New York City OWS was consistently nonviolent, although this was the result of pragmatism rather than principle for many core activists.
  • OWS was committed to non-hierarchal “horizontalism.” This organizational form, as well as the structure of the occupation itself, were selfconsciously politically prefigurative.
  • OWS was able to attract supporters with a wide variety of specific concerns, many of whom had not worked together before, This was in large part because it made no formal “demands,” and united around the “We Are the 99%” slogan.
  • Occupy brought inequality into the mainstream of U.S. political debate, changing the national conversation.
  • OWS was organized mainly by politically experienced activists, but it also created new political subjects: young people with limited or no previous involvement in protest movements, who were transformed by their experiences and developed a commitment to working for social change.
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The Potential of Smart Disclosure

January 25, 2013

Late last year, the Russell Sage and Alfred P. Sloan Foundations sponsored a competition to solicit proposals for smart disclosure demonstration projects. "Smart disclosure" policies aim to improve consumer markets by providing decision-makers data about their their personal use patterns or histories. Here are some details on the winning proposals:

1. Efficient Web-Based Credit Markets

While the consumer credit market has grown dramatically in the past two decades, consumers find it difficult to systematically compare credit offers (many of which arrive in the mail). Consumers know that their credit score may be downgraded by repeated applications for credit, but a bigger challenge is sorting through lengthy contracts, complicated reward programs, and interest rates. This research project will investigate the potential of a recent policy shift in Sweden, where consumers can "shop" for credit using an online intermediary. When they submit their information -- for example, the amount of credit they seek and their credit score -- the online intermediary supplies their application to participating banks, which can decide to offer a bid to the consumer. The web intermediary standardizes all financial contracts, reduces search costs, and allows consumers to see competing bids in an accessible manner.

2. Doctor Finding Service

Finding a healthcare provider can be difficult: comprehensive information about a doctor -- that is, including malpractice history, patient feedback, outcomes -- is rarely available in one location, and websites often present data using arcane terminology and complicated designs. This research project aims to develop and test a smart disclosure service that captures information local area health care providers and provides consumers an easy to understand interface for finding and comparing health care resources.

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Praise for RSF's book Good Jobs, Bad Jobs

January 24, 2013

In the latest issue of the American Journal of Sociology, sociologist David Grusky reviews Arne Kalleberg's RSF book, Good Jobs, Bad Jobs, a wide-ranging, empirical investigation of polarization in the American labor market. Calling Kalleberg's account "masterful," Grusky writes:

The real contribution of Good Jobs, Bad Jobs lies in showing that economic and noneconomic forms of polarization are coming together, with the implication that those at the top are not just securing an ever-larger share of national earnings but also an ever-larger share of the available autonomy, authority, and other forms of control over the work situation. If once there was a substantial band of middle-class jobs with middling amounts of autonomy or authority, now that middle class has withered away and U.S. workers either have good jobs with much control over the work situation or bad jobs with virtually none. At the same time, Kalleberg shows that the mean level of many noneconomic rewards has increased over time, although job security has decreased and is accordingly an important exception to this overall upgrading trend.

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Racial Fluidity and Inequality in America

January 22, 2013

RSF grantees Aliya Saperstein and Andrew Penner recently published an important paper, entitled "Racial Fluidity and Inequality in the United States," in the American Journal of Sociology. Here is the abstract:

The authors link the literature on racial fluidity and inequality in the United States and offer new evidence of the reciprocal relationship between the two processes. Using two decades of longitudinal data from a national survey, they demonstrate that not only does an individual’s race change over time, it changes in response to myriad changes in social position, and the patterns are similar for both self-identification and classification by others. These findings suggest that, in the contemporary United States, microlevel racial fluidity serves to reinforce existing disparities by redefining successful or high-status people as white (or not black) and unsuccessful or low-status people as black (or not white). Thus, racial differences are both an input and an output in stratification processes; this relationship has implications for theorizing and measuring race in research, as well as for crafting policies that attempt to address racialized inequality.

At the Inequalities Blog, Brendan Saloner, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, explains the paper's significance:

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Teaching the Great Recession

January 17, 2013

The Society Pages, an online hub of sociology research, recently featured RSF's new website Recession Trends:

There are many ways you could use this informative website in the classroom. For example, you could ask students to form a research question about the recession (e.g., Did crime rates rise during the recession?) and use the website to help answer it. Specifically, the website includes a graphing utility with data on each of the 16 domains covered regarding the recession (housing, poverty, immigration, crime, health, etc.). The graphing utility is found here, and the domains are listed on the right-hand side. Note that students likely would need a few minutes to explore the domains before picking a research question that could be answered using the website.

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Cross-Deputization and Immigration Enforcement: An Interview with Dr. Liana Epstein

Rohan Mascarenhas, Russell Sage Foundation
January 16, 2013

cross-deputizationDr. Liana Epstein, a social psychologist connected with RSF's Racial Bias in Policing Working Group, recently co-published an article on cross-deputization, which mandates that police officers enforce immigration laws. The article, entitled "Safety or Liberty?: The Bogus Trade-Off of Cross-Deputization Policy" can be read here.


Q: Let's first define the issue -- what exactly is "cross-deputization" and why has it become such a prominent issue?

A: Cross-deputization (codified in 1996 as part of the Immigration and Nationality Act) is an optional federal training program that "deputizes" police officers to seek out undocumented immigrants and to charge them for their presence in the country without documents. This policy has gained significant popularity in recent years (U. S. Department of Homeland Security, 2008), culminating in laws such as Arizona’s SB 1070 (enacted in 2010). It has become a prominent issue because of its burgeoning popularity and the potentially negative consequences it engenders.

Q: Your paper argues that the debate over cross-deputization wrongly pits civil rights against safety. Instead, you say that ensuring civil rights is a "necessary precondition of public safety and lawfulness" because it protects police legitimacy. Why do you believe that police officers enforcing immigration laws would hurt the perception of police?

A: Our research operates from the premise that cross-deputization is "poisonous" because it is not applied equally across groups. When one is told to “find the illegal immigrant,” it is not Caucasians who have overstayed their visas who are likely to be asked for proof of their right to be in the country. We argue that as Latinos have become the accessible “picture in our heads” for undocumented immigrants there are no truly “race-blind” cues to documentation status, and thus any basis for enforcement will ultimately target Latinos disproportionately. Thus cross-deputization is inherently racialized and becomes not a question of legal versus illegal, but Latino versus non-Latino. Consequently police officers are then seen as racist. My dissertation explored this in more detail.

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Compliments and Positive Stereotypes

January 15, 2013

RSF Visiting Scholar Sapna Cheryan has co-published a new article in this month's Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Here is the abstract:

Five studies show that being the target of a positive stereotype is a negative interpersonal experience for those from individualistic cultures because positive stereotypes interfere with their desire to be seen as individuals separate from their groups. U.S.-born Asian Americans and women who heard a positive stereotype about their group in an intergroup interaction (e.g., “Asians are good at math,” “women are nurturing”) derogated their partner and experienced greater negative emotions than those who heard no stereotype. Negative reactions were mediated by a sense of being depersonalized, or “lumped together” with others in one's group, by the positive stereotype (Studies 1–3). Cross-cultural differences (Study 4) and an experimental manipulation of cultural self-construal (Study 5) demonstrated that those with an independent self-construal reacted more negatively to positive stereotypes than those with an interdependent self-construal. By bringing together research on stereotypes from the target's perspective with research on culture, this work demonstrates how cultural self-construals inform the way people interpret and respond to being the target of positive stereotypes.

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