This volume is concerned with the question of how the United States educates and utilizes its intellectually gifted youth. It examines the manpower system from the point of view of supply and demand. It brings a deep understanding of the set of interrelated forces that determine the education and utilization of trained manpower.

JOHN K. FOLGER is director of the Tennessee Commission on Higher Education.

HELEN S. ASTIN is from the Bureau of Social Science Research.

ALAN E. BAYER is research sociologist with the American Council on Education in Washington.
 

"Immigrants and Welfare assembles the authoritative set of papers on the history, law, and social science of immigration and welfare reform. It is required reading as the United States prepares for an epic exploration of immigration and immigrants in a well-ordered society: How do societies recruit their members? What are the criteria for membership? What characteristics are desirable and undesirable in recruits? What characteristics merit differential treatment? How do societies mentor their recruits? How do societies put boundaries on their bounty?"
-GUILLERMINA JASSO, Silver Professor, Department of Sociology, New York University

"In the mid-1990s, the U.S. government not only 'ended welfare as we know it,' but it also fundamentally altered its relationships with immigrants and their progeny through changes in welfare and immigration law that have been much less well-regarded in policy and research circles. The legislative changes created new distinctions in the definition of what it meant to be a member of U.S. society and to be eligible for needed assistance, drawing sharper lines between immigrants and natives, and within groups of immigrants. In this incisive volume, Michael E. Fix and his colleagues give us the most comprehensive compilation of the evidence on immigrants' use of public benefits before and after welfare reform. It both challenges some of the popular misconceptions about immigrants' costs to the polity that fueled a backlash against newcomers to the country in the welfare and immigration law changes of the 1990s, and vigorously informs us about the impacts of those changes for immigrants and their children. Immigrants and Welfare is timely and much-needed. Just as the nation prepares in the coming year to debate necessary comprehensive immigration reform, we can only hope that our leaders take these facts into account and lead us to where the evidence and our values suggest is a better place."
-AJAY CHAUDRY, director, Center on Labor, Human Services, and Population, The Urban Institute

"Immigrants and Welfare takes a careful look at the aftermath of the landmark welfare reform legislation of the mid-1990s. The volume's contributors examine the reweaving of the American safety net for immigrants and their families, both citizens and noncitizens. The research challenges oft-made assertions that the U.S. welfare system provides a strong magnet for immigrants destined to become dependent on public assistance, and instead points to the potential benefits of providing more coherent and less restrictive policies for new arrivals and their families. This informed volume is necessary reading for those interested in the continuing debate of U.S. immigration policy."
-MICHAEL J. WHITE, professor of sociology and director, Population Studies and Training Center, Brown University 

The lore of the immigrant who comes to the United States to take advantage of our welfare system has a long history in America’s collective mythology, but it has little basis in fact. The so-called problem of immigrants on the dole was nonetheless a major concern of the 1996 welfare reform law, the impact of which is still playing out today. While legal immigrants continue to pay taxes and are eligible for the draft, welfare reform has severely limited their access to government supports in times of crisis. Edited by Michael Fix, Immigrants and Welfare rigorously assesses the welfare reform law, questions whether its immigrant provisions were ever really necessary, and examines its impact on legal immigrants’ ability to integrate into American society.

Immigrants and Welfare draws on fields from demography and law to developmental psychology. The first part of the volume probes the politics behind the welfare reform law, its legal underpinnings, and what it may mean for integration policy. Contributor Ron Haskins makes a case for welfare reform’s ultimate success but cautions that excluding noncitizen children (future workers) from benefits today will inevitably have serious repercussions for the American economy down the road. Michael Wishnie describes the implications of the law for equal protection of immigrants under the U.S. Constitution.

The second part of the book focuses on empirical research regarding immigrants’ propensity to use benefits before the law passed, and immigrants’ use and hardship levels afterwards. Jennifer Van Hook and Frank Bean analyze immigrants’ benefit use before the law was passed in order to address the contested sociological theories that immigrants are inclined to welfare use and that it slows their assimilation. Randy Capps, Michael Fix, and Everett Henderson track trends before and after welfare reform in legal immigrants’ use of the major federal benefit programs affected by the law. Leighton Ku looks specifically at trends in food stamps and Medicaid use among noncitizen children and adults and documents the declining health insurance coverage of noncitizen parents and children. Finally, Ariel Kalil and Danielle Crosby use longitudinal data from Chicago to examine the health of children in immigrant families that left welfare.

Even though few states took the federal government’s invitation with the 1996 welfare reform law to completely freeze legal immigrants out of the social safety net, many of the law’s most far-reaching provisions remain in place and have significant implications for immigrants. Immigrants and Welfare takes a balanced look at the politics and history of immigrant access to safety-net supports and the ongoing impacts of welfare.

MICHAEL E. FIX is senior vice president and director of studies at the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) and co-director of MPI’s National Center on Immigrant Integration Policy.

CONTRIBUTORS: Michael E. Fix, Frank D. Bean, Randy Capps, Danielle A. Crosby, Ron Haskins, Everett Henderson, Ariel Kalil, Neeraj Kaushal, Leighton Ku, Jennifer Van Hook, and Michael J. Wishnie.

Copublished with the Migration Policy Institute

Winner of the 2007 Otis Dudley Duncan Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Social Demography

"Claude S. Fischer and Michael Hout have written an imaginative chronicle of the century that just ended. While there are palpable differences in how the country looked in 1900 and 2000, they point to some striking similarities ... [They] argue that the amount of schooling a person receives now overshadows nativity, race, or income as the nation's prime divide. 'Since mid-century,' they suggest, 'education became a key sorter of Americans.' 'Differences in living standards and lifestyles' between those with a bachelor's degree and those without it 'had widened greatly.' The years ahead, they say, will see a deep divide separating 'education haves and have-nots.' While this is a widely accepted view, it hasn't had the scrutiny it needs."
-THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

"Century of Difference is extraordinarily ambitious. Claude S. Fischer and Michael Hout set out to describe the key changes in American society over the course of a century, focusing on family composition, urbanization and suburbanization, income, employment, race and ethnicity, religion, and the culture wars. Their main challenge was to identify the salient changes in American society and to describe them clearly, showing how different subpopulations were affected. The book succeeds brilliantly. The writing is remarkably engaging, even though it is all about numbers. This will become a classic of historical sociology."
-STEVEN RUGGLES, University of Minnesota

"This landmark study carefully charts major social changes over the twentieth century that have profoundly affected our American lives. Like all good sociology, it provides a big picture interpretation that helps us better understand our own experiences in the context of larger social realities. History here illuminates the important, current trajectories of life. Century of Difference will serve social scientists and historians alike for many years to come as the authoritative reference on the previous century's key social changes."
-CHRISTIAN SMITH, University of Notre Dame

"Claude S. Fischer and Michael Hout have written the definitive history of social and economic change in twentieth-century America. They document how we have gone from a society where ethnicity and race shaped our lives to one where education shapes our lives. Must reading for all policymakers and social scientists."
-DORA L. COSTA, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

In every generation, Americans have worried about the solidarity of the nation. Since the days of the Mayflower, those already settled here have wondered how newcomers with different cultures, values, and (frequently) skin color would influence America. Would the new groups create polarization and disharmony? Thus far, the United States has a remarkable track record of incorporating new people into American society, but acceptance and assimilation have never meant equality. In Century of Difference, Claude Fischer and Michael Hout provide a compelling—and often surprising—new take on the divisions and commonalities among the American public over the tumultuous course of the twentieth century.

Using a hundred years worth of census and opinion poll data, Century of Difference shows how the social, cultural, and economic fault lines in American life shifted in the last century. It demonstrates how distinctions that once loomed large later dissipated, only to be replaced by new ones. Fischer and Hout find that differences among groups by education, age, and income expanded, while those by gender, region, national origin, and, even in some ways, race narrowed. As the twentieth century opened, a person’s national origin was of paramount importance, with hostilities running high against Africans, Chinese, and southern and eastern Europeans. Today, diverse ancestries are celebrated with parades. More important than ancestry for today’s Americans is their level of schooling. Americans with advanced degrees are increasingly putting distance between themselves and the rest of society—in both a literal and a figurative sense. Differences in educational attainment are tied to expanding inequalities in earnings, job quality, and neighborhoods. Still, there is much that ties all Americans together. Century of Difference knocks down myths about a growing culture war. Using seventy years of survey data, Fischer and Hout show that Americans did not become more fragmented over values in the late-twentieth century, but rather were united over shared ideals of self-reliance, family, and even religion.

As public debate has flared up over such matters as immigration restrictions, the role of government in redistributing resources to the poor, and the role of religion in public life, it is important to take stock of the divisions and linkages that have typified the U.S. population over time. Century of Difference lucidly profiles the evolution of American social and cultural differences over the last century, examining the shifting importance of education, marital status, race, ancestry, gender, and other factors on the lives of Americans past and present.

CLAUDE S. FISCHER is professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley.

MICHAEL HOUT is professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley.

A Volume in the RSF Census Series

Provides a selection of existing and new measures of family change. The statistical time series are presented and organized around the topics of marriage, marital status, households, fertility, divorce, dependency, work and income, and poverty. The series selected for inclusion were chosen because of an apparent or assumed significant change which they displayed. They are illustrated by graphs and accompanied by a brief commentary. The statistical series are numbered in an appendix, and sources of the data are cited at the foot of the page of commentary.

ABBOTT L. FERRISS was Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Emory University.

Presents statistical evidence of trends in the status of women relative to the status of men. Organized around the major life activities and concerns of women, the book deals with such topics as education, marriage, fertility, employment, health and illness, and death. The author interprets the statistical findings and presents suggestions for further analytical methods and interpretations. The two major surveys from which much of the data in this study are drawn, the Current Population Survey and the National Health Survey, are reviewed in two appendices.

ABBOTT L. FERRISS was Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Emory University.

Assembles, collates, and analyzes data bearing on trends in American education. The author presents the basic data on school enrollment, retention, and attainment, indicating changes in the educational characteristics of the population and comparable time-series statistics on teachers and school finances reflecting change within the school system itself. Dr. Ferriss then relates these data to a statement of educational goals set some ten years ago, utilizing the data to provide an assessment of progress toward those goals.

ABBOTT L. FERRISS was Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Emory University.

"The book's findings are well worth the attention of the serious criminal justice student, and the analyses reveal a thoughtful, probing, and provocative intelligence .... Feeley's strong argument on behalf of the informality of lower criminal courts contributes importantly to a long-standing debate in American criminal justice .... deserves to be read by all those who are interested in the outcome of the debate."
- Jerome H. Skolnick, American Bar Foundation Research Journal

"An eminently readable account of the processing of misdemeanors and minor felonies in an American criminal court .... manages to convey the gestalt of the criminal courts more generally, with all the nuances and subtleties that are so important to understanding the essence of the criminal process .... In sum, this study is a major contribution to understanding the distribution of criminal justice with many of its more elusive elements exposed."
- Frances Kahn Zemans, Judicature

"The author's status as a trained and deeply insightful political scientist enriches our understanding of a vital institution ... The result is a report that can be used in a variety of ways: as collateral reading in a judicial systems or judicial administration course or as a book that can be read for sheer enjoyment. Court watchers and scholars alike will profit from it." 
- Choice

"[Feeley] spices provocative analysis with fascinating vignettes .... His combination of thorough empirical research with thoughtful analysis demands to be read, criticized, and savored."
- Michigan Law Review

It is conventional wisdom that there is a grave crisis in our criminal courts: the widespread reliance on plea-bargaining and the settlement of most cases with just a few seconds before the judge endanger the rights of defendants. Not so, says Malcolm Feeley in this provocative and original book. Basing his argument on intensive study of the lower criminal court system, Feeley demonstrates that the absence of formal “due process” is preferred by all of the court’s participants, and especially by defendants. Moreover, he argues, “it is not all clear that as a group defendants would be better off in a more ‘formal’ court system,” since the real costs to those accused of misdemeanors and lesser felonies are not the fines and prison sentences meted out by the court, but the costs incurred before the case even comes before the judge—lost wages from missed work, commissions to bail bondsmen, attorney’s fees, and wasted time. Therefore, the overriding interest of the accused is not to secure the formal trappings of the judicial process, but to minimize the time, and money, spent dealing with the court.

Focusing on New Haven, Connecticut’s, lower court, Feeley found that the defense and prosecution often agreed that the pre-trial process was sufficient to “teach the defendant a lesson.” In effect, Feeley demonstrates that the informal practices of the lower courts as they are presently constituted are more “just” than they are usually given credit for being.

“... a book that should be read by anyone who is interested in understanding how courts work and how the criminal sanction is administered in modern, complex societies.”— Barry Mahoney, Institute for Court Management, Denver

“It is grounded in a firm grasp of theory as well as thorough field research.”—Jack B. Weinstein, U.S. District Court Judge.

"… a feature that has long been the hallmark of good American sociology: it recreates a believable world of real men and women.”—Paul Wiles, Law & Society Review.

"This book's findings are well worth the attention of the serious criminal justice student, and the analyses reveal a thoughtful, probing, and provocative intelligence....an important contribution to the debate on the role and limits of discretion in American criminal justice. It deserves to be read by all those who are interested in the outcome of the debate." —Jerome H. Skolnick, American Bar Foundation Research Journal

MALCOLM M. FEELEY is professor of law and director of the Center for the Study of Law and Society at the University of California, Berkeley.

Winner of the 1998 Otis Dudley Duncan Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Social Demography

"A fascinating and authoritative account of American social history since 1960 as viewed through the prism of government statistics....[Farley] uses publicly available data, straight forward methods, and modest...language, to provide more information and insight about recent social trends than any other volume in print." —American Journal of Sociology

"A brilliant piece of work. Farley is absolutely masterful at taking tens of thousands of national survey statistics and weaving from them a fascinating and beautifully illustrated tapestry of who we are." —Barry Bluestone, Frank L. Boyden Professor of Political Economy, University of Massachusetts, Boston

The New American Reality presents a compelling portrait of an America strikingly different from what it was just forty years ago.Gone is the idealized vision of a two-parent, father-supported Ozzie and Harriet society. In its place is an America of varied races andethnic backgrounds, where families take on many forms and mothers frequently work outside the home. Drawing on a definitive analysis of the past four U.S. censuses, author Reynolds Farley reveals a country that offers new opportunities for a broader spectrum of people, while at the same time generating frustration and apprehension for many who once thought their futures secure.

The trends that have so transformed the nation were kindled in the 1960s, a watershed period during which many Americans redefined their attitudes toward the rights of women and blacks. The New American Reality describes the activism, federal policymaking, and legal victories that eliminated overtracial and sexual discrimination. But along with open doors came new challenges. Divorce and out-of-wedlock births grew commonplace, forcing more women to raise children alone and—despite improved wages—increasing their chances of falling into poverty. Residential segregation, inadequate schooling, and a particularly high ratio of female-headed families severely impaired the economic progress of African Americans, many of whom were left behind in declining central cities as businesses migrated to suburbs. A new generation of immigrants from many nations joined the ranks of those working to support families and improve their prospects, and rapidly transformed the nation's ethnic composition.

In the 1970s, unprecedented economic restructuring on a global scale created unexpected setbacks for the middle class. The long era of postwar prosperity ended as the nation's dominant industry shifted from manufacturing to services, competition from foreign producers increased, interest rates rose, and a new emphasis on technology and cost-cutting created a demand for more sophisticated skills in the workplace. The economic recovery of the 1980s generated greater prosperity for the well-educated and highly skilled, and created many low paying jobs, but offered little to remedy the stagnant and declining wages of the middle class. Income inequalitybecame a defining feature in the economic life of America: overall, the rich got richer while the poor and middle class found it increasingly difficult to meet their financial demands.

The New American Reality reports some good news about America. Our lives are longer and healthier, the elderly are much better off than ever before, consumer spending power has increased, and minorities and women have many more opportunities. But this book does not shy away from the significant problems facing large portions of the population, and provides a valuable perspective on efforts to remedy them. The New American Reality offers the information necessary to understandthe critical trends affecting America today, from how we earn a living to how and when we form families, where we live, and whether or not we will continue to prosper.

REYNOLDS FARLEY is professor of sociology at the University of Michigan and research scientist at its Population Studies Center.

A Volume in the RSF Census Series

"Fighting for Time ... is an enlightening contribution to the growing analysis of and policy debate on working time issues ... On the whole, this salient and illuminating book highlights the growing need for policymakers and researchers alike to reevaluate what time means in their societies ... and should stimulate further theoretical work exploring the sociology of time."
-INTERNATIONAL LABOUR REVIEW

"Moving beyond the elusive space-time compression, Fighting for Time makes giant steps toward a new paradigm of work in which time transcends space, dictating effort and survival, with uneven consequences for class and gender. Cynthia Fuchs Epstein and Arne L. Kalleberg have put together a splendid set of case studies, with disturbing insights into the multiple economies of time."
-MICHAEL BURAWOY, professor of sociology, University of California, Berkeley

"Fighting for Time is a welcome addition to the small but important literature on the role of time in human affairs. The volume's contributors and editors pursue the trail blazed by such scholars as Merton and Zerubavel, developing a constructionist perspective on time in a range of research sites and using a diverse set of research methods. Whether analyzing the experiences and perceptions of bicycle messengers, software writers, or pit traders, or summarizing ambitious and innovative analyses of national sample surveys to understand the effects of emerging work patterns on workers and their families, the authors build a coherent and distinctly sociological approach to the ways in which changing temporal norms embody the exercise of power and impose new forms of inequality in workplaces and homes."
-PAUL DIMAGGIO, professor of sociology, Princeton University

"Cynthia Fuchs Epstein, Arne Kalleberg, and their supremely qualified collaborators show us that Americans are not only fighting for time, they are fighting over and about time, trying to establish control over the matching of persons, activities, places, and social ties in a world where church bells and factory whistles no longer set the pace. Paradoxically, they demonstrate, the decline of lockstep and central coordination increases the difficulty of committing high quality time to the social relationships that matter most."
-CHARLES TILLY, Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science, Columbia University

Though there are still just twenty-four hours in a day, society’s idea of who should be doing what and when has shifted. Time, the ultimate scarce resource, has become an increasingly contested battle zone in American life, with work, family, and personal obligations pulling individuals in conflicting directions. In Fighting for Time, editors Cynthia Fuchs Epstein and Arne Kalleberg bring together a team of distinguished sociologists and management analysts to examine the social construction of time and its importance in American culture.

Fighting for Time opens with an exploration of changes in time spent at work—both when people are on the job and the number of hours they spend there—and the consequences of those changes for individuals and families. Contributors Jerry Jacobs and Kathleen Gerson find that the relative constancy of the average workweek in America over the last thirty years hides the fact that blue-collar workers are putting in fewer hours while more educated white-collar workers are putting in more. Rudy Fenwick and Mark Tausig look at the effect of nonstandard schedules on workers’ health and family life. They find that working unconventional hours can increase family stress, but that control over one’s work schedule improves family, social, and health outcomes for workers. The book then turns to an examination of how time influences the organization and control of work. The British insurance company studied by David Collinson and Margaret Collinson is an example of a culture where employees are judged on the number of hours they work rather than on their productivity. There, managers are under intense pressure not to take legally guaranteed parental leave, and clocks are banned from the office walls so that employees will work without regard to the time. In the book’s final section, the contributors examine how time can have different meanings for men and women. Cynthia Fuchs Epstein points out that professional women and stay-at-home fathers face social disapproval for spending too much time on activities that do not conform to socially prescribed gender roles—men are mocked by coworkers for taking paternity leave, while working mothers are chastised for leaving their children to the care of others.

Fighting for Time challenges assumptions about the relationship between time and work, revealing that time is a fluid concept that derives its importance from cultural attitudes, social psychological processes, and the exercise of power. Its insight will be of interest to sociologists, economists, social psychologists, business leaders, and anyone interested in the work-life balance.

CYNTHIA FUCHS EPSTEIN is distinguished professor of Sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

ARNE L. KALLEBERG is Kenan Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

CONTRIBUTORS: Cynthia Fuchs Epstein, Arne L. Kalleberg, Mary Blair-Loy, Allen C. Bluedorn, David L. Collinson, Margaret Collinson, Rudy Fenwick, Stephen P. Ferris, Kathleen Gerson, Jerry A. Jacobs, Peter Levin, Harriet B. Presser, Ofer Sharone, Benjamin Stewart, and Mark Tausig.

"Detroit Divided is a deeply researched and compelling book. Farley, Danziger, and Holzer have written, far and away, the best informed and most rigorous survey of race and economics in an American metropolis today. Their book is an essential starting point for those who want to understand and solve the problem of persistent racial inequality in America. Everyone concerned with Detroit and the fate of our troubled cities should read and re-read Detroit Divided."
- THOMAS J. SUGRUE, Bicentennial Class of 1940 Professor of History and Sociology, University of Pennsylvania

"Detroit is the quintessential "divided city" -racially, economically, politically, geographically. The distinguished interdisciplinary trio of Farley, Danziger, and Holzer parlay a unique, rich database into an unparalleled analysis of the nature and causes of these divides in Detroit Divided. The authors' unprecedented ability to link demand- and supply-sides of the metropolitan labor market provides exciting new insights into race-class divisions."
- GEORGE GALSTER, Clarence Hilberry Professor of Urban Affairs, Wayne State University

Unskilled workers once flocked to Detroit, attracted by manufacturing jobs paying union wages, but the passing of Detroit's manufacturing heyday has left many of those workers stranded. Manufacturing continues to employ high-skilled workers, and new work can be found in suburban service jobs, but the urban plants that used to employ legions of unskilled men are a thing of the past.

The authors explain why white auto workers adjusted to these new conditions more easily than blacks. Taking advantage of better access to education and suburban home loans, white men migrated into skilled jobs on the city's outskirts, while blacks faced the twin barriers of higher skill demands and hostile suburban neighborhoods.

Some blacks have prospered despite this racial divide: a black elite has emerged, and the shift in the city toward municipal and service jobs has allowed black women to approach parity of earnings with white women. But Detroit remains polarized racially, economically, and geographically to a degree seen in few other American cities.

REYNOLDS FARLEY is Otis Dudley Duncan Collegiate Professor of Sociology, University of Michigan, and research scientist at the Population Studies Center of the Institute for Social Research

SHELDON DANZIGER is Henry J. Meyer Collegiate Professor of Social Work and Public Policy and director of the Center on Poverty Risk and Mental Health at the University of Michigan.

HARRY J. HOLZER is professor of economics at Michigan State University

A Volume in the Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality