Winner of the Society for Research on Adolesence Social Policy Award for Best Authored Book, 2006-2008

"In his latest book, Furstenberg offers a valuable geneaology of American teen pregnancy, public policy, and America's unique moral politics that shaped the public debate. His book should be read in poverty and policy courses ... [and] by every scholar who aspires to conduct useful research, not only to reinforce the reasons for doing policy-relevant research but also to learn how to present it with honesty and humility."
-CONTEMPORARY SOCIOLOGY

"With this important and timely book a preeminent scholar of urban families seriously chal lenges conventional wisdom on the problems and consequences of teenage childbearing. Frank Furstenberg's empirically based and innovative arguments are provocative and compelling. Destinies of the Disadvantaged will be discussed and debated by researchers, policymakers, and practitioners for many years."
-WILLIAM JULIUS WILSON, Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor, Harvard University

"This masterful book on a remarkable thirty-year study will change the way people think about teenage pregnancy and childbearing."
-ANDREW CHERLIN, Griswold Professor of Sociology and Public Policy and director, Hopkins Population Center, Johns Hopkins University

"In his new book, Frank Furstenberg provides us with a masterful account of the causes, conse quences, and politics of teenage childbearing. Destinies of the Disadvantaged is essential reading for anyone who cares about the role of family formation in the reproduction of poverty."
-SARA S. MCLANAHAN, professor of sociology and public affairs, Princeton University

Teen childbearing has risen to frighteningly high levels over the last four decades, jeopardizing the life chances of young parents and their offspring alike, particularly among minority communities. Or at least, that’s what politicians on the right and left often tell us, and what the American public largely believes. But sociologist Frank Furstenberg argues that the conventional wisdom distorts reality. In Destinies of the Disadvantaged, Furstenberg traces the history of public concern over teen pregnancy, exploring why this topic has become so politically powerful, and so misunderstood.

Based on over forty years of Furstenberg’s research on teen childbearing, Destinies of the Disadvantaged relates how the issue emerged from obscurity to become one of the most heated social controversies in America. Both slipshod research by social scientists and opportunistic grandstanding by politicians have contributed to public misunderstanding of the issue. Although out-of-wedlock teen pregnancy rose notably between 1960 and 1990—a cause for concern given the burdens of single motherhood at a young age—this trend did not reflect a rise in the rate of overall teen pregnancies. In fact, teen pregnancy actually declined dramatically in the 1960s and 1970s. The number of unmarried teenage mothers rose after 1960, not because more young women became pregnant, but because those who did increasingly chose not to rush into marriage. Furstenberg shows how early social science research on this topic exaggerated the adverse consequences of early parenthood both for young parents and for their children. Researchers also inaccurately portrayed single teenage motherhood as a phenomenon concentrated among minorities. Both of these misapprehensions skewed subsequent political debates. The issue became a public obsession and remained so during the 1990s, even as rates of out-of-wedlock teen childbearing plummeted. Addressing teen pregnancy was originally a liberal cause, led by advocates of family planning services, legalized abortion, and social welfare programs for single mothers. The issue was later adopted by conservatives, who argued that those liberal remedies were encouraging teen parenthood. According to Furstenberg, the flexible political usefulness of the issue explains its hold on political discourse.

The politics of teen parenthood is a fascinating case study in the abuse of social science for political ends. In Destinies of the Disadvantaged, Furstenberg brings that tale to life with the perspective of a historian and the insight of an insider, and provides the straight facts needed to craft effective policies to address teen pregnancy.

FRANK F. FURSTENBERG is the Zellerbach Family Professor of Sociology and a research associate in the Population Studies Center at the University of Pennsylvania, and chair of the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Transitions to Adulthood.
 

Important differences persist between rural and urban America, despite profound economic changes and the notorious homogenizing influence of the media. As Glenn V. Fuguitt, David L. Brown, and Calvin L. Beale show in Rural and Small Town America, the much-heralded disappearance of small town life has not come to pass, and the nonmetropolitan population still constitutes a significant dimension of our nation's social structure.

Based on census and other recent survey data, this impressive study provides a detailed and comparative picture of rural America. The authors find that size of place is a critical demographic factor, affecting population composition (rural populations are older and more predominantly male than urban populations), the distribution of poverty (urban poverty tends to be concentrated in neighborhoods; rural poverty may extend over large blocks of counties), and employment opportunities (job quality and income are lower in rural areas, though rural occupational patterns are converging with those of urban areas). In general, rural and small town America still lags behind urban America on many indicators of social well-being. Pointing out that rural life is no longer synonymous with farming, the authors explore variations among nonmetropolitan populations. They also trace the impact of major national trends—the nonmetropolitan growth spurt of the 1970s and its current reversal, for example, or changing fertility rates—on rural life and on the relationship between metropolitan and nonmetropolitan communities.

By describing the special characteristics and needs of rural populations as well as the features they share with urban America, this book clearly demonstrates that a more accurate picture of nonmetropolitan life is essential to understanding the larger dynamics of our society.

GLENN V. FUGUITT is professor of rural sociology and sociology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

DAVID L. BROWN is associate director for research in the College of Agriculture and professor of rural sociology at Cornell University.

CALVIN L. BEALE is senior demographer, Economic Research Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture.

A Volume in the RSF Census Series

"For Better and For Worse is an important contribution to the field of social policy. Greg J. Duncan and P. Lindsay Chase-Lansdale have incorporated the work of some of the best researchers and policy analysts on poverty and welfare in the country. The net result is the most authoritative volume to date on the impact of welfare reform on children and families in the United States."
-WILLIAM JULIUS WILSON, Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor, Harvard University

"For Better or Worse provides a much-needed description of how children are faring since the welfare reforms of the 1990s. Perhaps even more important is the focus on family's responses to various policy packages being implemented across the country. The volume is a perfect blend of economic, sociological, and psychological perspectives on child policy and well- being."
-JEANNE BROOKS-GUNN, Virginia and Leonard Marx Professor of Child Development and Education, Teachers College, Columbia University

The 1996 welfare reform bill marked the beginning of a new era in public assistance. Although the new law has reduced welfare rolls, falling caseloads do not necessarily mean a better standard of living for families. In For Better and For Worse, editors Greg J. Duncan and P. Lindsay Chase-Lansdale and a roster of distinguished experts examine the evidence and evaluate whether welfare reform has met one of its chief goals-improving the well-being of the nation's poor children.

For Better and For Worse opens with a lively political history of the welfare reform legislation, which demonstrates how conservative politicians capitalize on public concern over such social problems as single parenthood to win support for the radical reforms. Part I reviews how individual states redesigned, implemented, and are managing their welfare systems. These chapters show that most states appear to view maternal employment, rather that income enhancement and marriage, as key to improving child well-being. Part II focuses on national and multistate evaluations of the changes in welfare to examine how families and children are actually faring under the new system. These chapters suggest that work-focused reforms have not hurt children, and that reforms that provide financial support for working families can actually enhance children's development. Part III presents a variety of perspectives on policy options for the future. Remarkable here is the common ground for both liberals and conservatives on the need to support work and at the same time strengthen safety-net programs such as Food Stamps.

Although welfare reform-along with the Earned Income Tax Credit and the booming economy of the nineties-has helped bring mothers into the labor force and some children out of poverty, the nation still faces daunting challenges in helping single parents become permanent members of the workforce. For Better and For Worse gathers the most recent data on the effects of welfare reform in one timely volume focused on improving the life chances of poor children.

GREG J. DUNCAN is professor of economics in the School of Education and Social Policy and a faculty fellow at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University.

P. LINDSAY CHASE-LANSDALE is professor of developmental psychology in the School of Education and Social Policy and a faculty fellow at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University.

CONTRIBUTORS: P. Lindsay Chase-Lansdale, Greg J. Duncan, David M. Casey, Danielle A. Crosby, Sandra K. Danziger, Kristina Daugirdas, Rachel E. Dunifon, Kathryn Edin, Paula England, Nancy Folbre, Thomas L. Gais, Ron Haskins, Ann E. Horvath-Rose, Aletha C. Huston, Cathy M. Johnson, Ariel Kalil, Andrew S. London, Joan Maya Mazelis, Rashmita S. Mistry, Kristin Anderson Moore, H. Elizabeth Peters, Wendell Primus, Marika N. Ripke, Jennifer L. Romich, Ellen K. Scott, Jack Tweedie, Morgan B. Ward Doran, Alan Weil, Thomas S. Weisner, and W. Jean Young.

"Company Doctor is a distressing cautionary tale that should be read by anyone professional or otherwise- employed by a large complex organization. On one hand, it alerts us to the ways in which the fundamental tenets of modern medicine, and by implication of other professions, can, in a corporate environment, mutate to serve employers' overridding interest in controlling workers and maximizing profits. On the other hand, the book also indirectly offers hope: if the social and legal context of professional work is responsible for the breakdown of professional ethical codes, then reform may be possible by changing that context."
-WILLIAM J. SONNENSTUHL, Industrial and Labor Relations Review

"Elaine Draper delivers a timely and probing examination of the conflicting interests of physicians who serve two masters: their patients and their employers. Her interviews reveal that fidelity, privacy, and trust are not just abstract principles, but deeply felt (though imperfectly realized) obligations. Draper's cross-disciplinary background lets her weave in-depth social science with careful legal analysis to provide an arresting picture of a topic-professional conflicts of interest-that has emerged as one of the most troubling issues of our time, not just for doctors but for all professionals ... and their clients."
-ALEXANDER M. CAPRON, University Professor, Henry W. Bruce Professor of Equity, and Professor of Law and Medicine, University of Southern California

"Given that today's world is one of increasing professionalization, but also of increasing corporate/bureaucratic conformity, there is much to be learned from the professional physicians who work for large corporations, or 'company doctors.' Professor Draper has done an impressive job of doing that learning and of sharing the relevant lessons with the rest of us. Her book provides insights not just into the doctors' own perceptions doing so in rich and well-written ways-but also into the deeper power of structural and organizational factors that the doctors often fail to recognize or acknowledge. As a result, the book is valuable not just for what it tells us about this important group of doctors but for what it tells us about the challenges of trust, expertise, and professional responsibility, and about the nature of the increasingly interdependent society we all seem destined to inhabit."
-WILLIAM R. FREUDENBURG, Dehlsen Professor of Environment and Society and Professor of Sociology, Environmental Studies Program, University of California, Santa Barbara

"Professor Draper has provided an in-depth, thoroughly researched and engaging look into a central issue of our times-can physicians maintain medical professionalism as employees of rich and powerful corporations? While this book specifically examines the field of contemporary U.S. occupational medicine in an increasingly corporatized overall American medical system, the book, through the example of this bellwether specialty, really applies to and informs the debates about the entire U.S. health care enterprise. If you are involved in that debate or affected by it-read this book."
-RICHARD A. LIPPIN, M.D., FACOEM, Former Corporate Medical Director, ARCO Chemical Company

To limit the skyrocketing costs of their employees' health insurance, companies such as Dow, Chevron, and IBM, as well as many large HMOs, have increasingly hired physicians to supervise the medical care they provide. As Elaine Draper argues in The Company Doctor, company doctors are bound by two conflicting ideals: serving the medical needs of their patients while protecting the company's bottom line. Draper analyzes the advent of the corporate physician both as an independent phenomenon, and as an index of contemporary culture, reaching startling conclusions about the intersection of corporate culture with professional autonomy.

Drawing on over 100 interviews with company physicians, scientists, and government and labor officials, as well as historical, legal, and statistical sources and medical trade association data, Draper presents an illuminating overview of the social context and meaning of professional work in corporations. Draper finds that while medical journals, speeches, and ethical codes proclaim the independent professional judgment of corporate physicians, the company doctors she interviewed often expressed anguish over the tightrope they must walk between their patients' health and the corporate oversight they face at every turn. Draper dissects the complex position occupied by company doctors to explore broad themes of doctor-patient trust, employee loyalty, privacy issues, and the future direction of medicine. She addresses such controversial topics as drug screening and the difficult position of company doctors when employees sue companies for health hazards in the workplace.

Company doctors are but one example of professionals who have at times ceded their autonomy to corporate management. Physicians provide the prototypical professional case for exploring this phenomenon, due to their traditional independence, extensive training, and high levels of prestige. But Draper expands the scope of the book—tracing parallel developments in the law, science, and technology—to draw insightful conclusions about changing conditions in the professional workplace, as corporate cultures everywhere adapt to the new realities of the global economy. The Company Doctor provides a compelling examination of the corporatization of American medicine with far-reaching implications for professionals in many other fields.

ELAINE DRAPER is a visiting scholar at the Institute for the Study of Social Change, University of California, Berkeley, and assistant professor of sociology at California State University, Los Angeles.

"As long as individuals continue to enter or desire admission to the United States, immigration will always be an issue that incites lively and controversial debates. Deaux brilliantly provides the first comprehensive text addressing immigration using a systematic social-psychological approach .... She skillfully presents and reviews scholarship that addresses both broad-level issues pertaining to policy and attitudes toward immigrants as well as micro-level issues such as ethnic identity, acculturation, and the immigrant's experience."
-ANALYSES OF SOCIAL ISSUES AND PUBLIC POLICY

"At last, we have a definitive social psychological treatment of American immigration. Kay Deaux's outstanding work is essential reading for all who care about this critical issue."
-THOMAS PETTIGREW, Research Professor of Social Psychology, University of California, Santa Cruz

"To Be an Immigrant offers a penetrating psychological treatment of immigrant adaptation and integration that is very welcome and long overdue. Although scholars have traditionally studied the social, economic, cultural, and political dimensions of immigration, Kay Deaux reminds us that assimilation has important psychological dimensions as well. Immigration researchers need to pay close attention to this book to incorporate psychological insights into the models of immigrant behavior they construct."
-DOUGLAS S. MASSEY, Henry G. Bryant Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University

"The migration of people within and between countries presents the world with one of the most urgent challenges of the twenty-first century. To help meet that challenge, an informed social science of the causes and consequences of migration will surely be needed. In Kay Deaux's wonderful book we have an important contribution to such migration studies. It combines a dispassionate and incisive analysis with a humane and interdisciplinary perspective, and it is elegantly and lucidly written."
-RUPERT BROWN, professor of social psychology, University of Sussex

Immigration is often discussed in broad, statistical terms, with a focus on how it affects labor markets, schools, and social services. But at its most basic level, immigration is a process that affects people and their identities in deeply personal ways. In To Be an Immigrant, social psychologist Kay Deaux explores the role of both social conditions and individual capacities in determining how well immigrants adapt to life in their new homelands, and makes a strong case for the relevance of social psychology in immigration studies.

To Be an Immigrant looks at how immigrants are defined, shaped, and challenged by the cultural environment they encounter in their new country and offers an integrated psychological framework for studying the immigrant experience. Deaux argues that in addition to looking at macro-level factors like public policies and social conditions and micro-level issues like individual choices, immigration scholars should also study influences that occur on an intermediate level, such as interpersonal encounters. Each of these three levels of analysis is essential to understanding how immigrants adapt to a new homeland and form distinct identities. As a case study for her framework, Deaux examines West Indians, exploring their perceptions of the stereotypes they face in the United States and their feelings of connection to their new home. Though race plays a limited role in the West Indies, it becomes more relevant to migrants once they arrive in the United States, where they are primarily identified by others as black, rather than Guyanese or Jamaican. Deaux’s research adds to a growing literature in social psychology on stereotype threat, which suggests that negative stereotypes about one’s group can hinder an individual’s performance. She finds that immigrants who have been in the United States longer and identify themselves as African American suffer from the negative effects of stereotype threat more than recent immigrants.
 
More than a discrete event, immigration can be understood as a life-long process that continues to affect people well after they have migrated. To Be an Immigrant takes a novel approach to the study of immigration, looking at how societal influences help shape immigrants and their understanding of who they are.

KAY DEAUX is a Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the Graduate Center,  City University of New York.

"The Russell Sage project on trust has been one of the most intellectually fecund enterprises anywhere in the social sciences over the last five years. This latest compendium of the fruits of that project is a wonderfully rich introduction to the research frontiers in the rapidly evolving study of trust, ranging across approaches as diverse as political philosophy, anthropological field work, microeconomic theory, and comparative survey research."
-ROBERT D. PUTNAM, Harvard University

"Drawing insights from a variety of social science disciplines, each essay in Trust in Society is a gem in its own right, but together, the package of chapters underscores how much we know about the dynamics of trust, and yet, how much there is to learn. It is rare for a book to stimulate a scholarly agenda for further theorizing and research, while at the same time, to provide so many leads for public policy and practice. I recommend this book to my fellow theorists, to researchers in search of important new lines of inquiry, and to policymakers.Trust in Society has something for all."
-JONATHAN H. TURNER, University of California, Riverside

"Trust in Society brings together a broad set of scholars from multiple disciplines, all of whom have something insightful to say about trust. Trust plays a crucial role in all social relationships as varying as those of incorporating immigrants in a society, building trust among members of corporate team, or creating a viable congregation. Readers from all disciplines will find many chapters that they can immediately use in their own research and in teaching graduate and undergraduate students."
-ELINOR OSTROM, Indiana University 

Trust plays a pervasive role in social affairs, even sustaining acts of cooperation among strangers who have no control over each other's actions. But the full importance of trust is rarely acknowledged until it begins to break down, threatening the stability of social relationships once taken for granted. Trust in Society uses the tools of experimental psychology, sociology, political science, and economics to shed light on the many functions trust performs in social and political life. The authors discuss different ways of conceptualizing trust and investigate the empirical effects of trust in a variety of social settings, from the local and personal to the national and institutional.

Drawing on experimental findings, this book examines how people decide whom to trust, and how a person proves his own trustworthiness to others. Placing trust in a person can be seen as a strategic act, a moral response, or even an expression of social solidarity. People often assume that strangers are trustworthy on the basis of crude social affinities, such as a shared race, religion, or hometown. Likewise, new immigrants are often able to draw heavily upon the trust of prior arrivals—frequently kin—to obtain work and start-up capital.

Trust in Society explains how trust is fostered among members of voluntary associations—such as soccer clubs, choirs, and church groups—and asks whether this trust spills over into other civic activities of wider benefit to society. The book also scrutinizes the relationship between trust and formal regulatory institutions, such as the law, that either substitute for trust when it is absent, or protect people from the worst consequences of trust when it is misplaced. Moreover, psychological research reveals how compliance with the law depends more on public trust in the motives of the police and courts than on fear of punishment.

The contributors to this volume demonstrate the growing analytical sophistication of trust research and its wide-ranging explanatory power. In the interests of analytical rigor, the social sciences all too often assume that people act as atomistic individuals without regard to the interests of others. Trust in Society demonstrates how we can think rigorously and analytically about the many aspects of social life that cannot be explained in those terms.

KAREN S. COOK is the Ray Lyman Wilbur Professor of Sociology at Stanford University.

CONTRIBUTORS: Michael Bacharach, Jean Ensminger, Diego Gambetta, Robert Gibbons, Russell Hardin, Carol A. Heimer, Jack Knight, Roderick M. Kramer, Gerry Mackie, David M. Messick, Gary Miller, Victor Nee, Jimy Sanders, Dietlind Stolle, Tom R. Tyler, Toshio Yamagishi.

A Volume in the Russell Sage Foundation Series on Trust