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Cover image of the book Redefining Race
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Redefining Race

Asian American Panethnicity and Shifting Ethnic Boundaries
Author
Dina G. Okamoto
Paperback
$42.50
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Publication Date
262 pages
ISBN
978-0-87154-676-0
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Winner of the 2016 American Sociological Association’s Asia and Asian America Section Book Award

“In this well written and wide ranging book, Dina Okamoto puts forward a new theory describing the relationship between race, ethnicity, and assimilation among Asian Americans. This provocative racial boundary approach to understanding the identities and the incorporation of Asian Americans is a sophisticated and welcome contribution to the field. Using the case of Asian Americans it contributes to our understanding of the concepts and changing nature of race and ethnicity in general.”

—MARY C. WATERS, M.E. Zukerman Professor of Sociology, Harvard University

Redefining Race redefines our understanding of the making of Asian America. By carefully articulating a theory of panethnicity as a process of shaping and shifting group boundaries, collecting data apposite to that theory, and designing demanding empirical tests, Okamoto expertly shows that Americans of diverse Asian backgrounds did not become panethnic overnight and ex nihilo as a passive response to state- constructed racial categories. Rather, Okamoto presents a vivid account of the accidents, opportunities, and contexts that fire up panethnic moments of collective action and douse them back into quiescence. Redefining Race is a major advancement and original contribution to the fields of immigrant incorporation, racial and ethnic formation, and Asian American studies.”

—TAEKU LEE, professor of political science and professor of law, University of California, Berkeley

“Through a sophisticated marshaling of theory and evidence from historical archives, interviews and social surveys, Dina Okamoto demonstrates how Americans of Japanese, Filipino, Korean, Chinese, Indian, Vietnamese, and other origins created an Asian American identity and Asian American institutions in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Despite disparate languages and conflicting histories, leaders of ethnic organizations defined by their nation of origin and others would strategically organize along panethnic lines when they found common interests rather than simply respond to the wider American society’s imposition of race. Okamoto’s Redefining Race is a new benchmark for understanding the social construction of ethnicity and ethnic identity.”

—EDWARD TELLES, professor of sociology, Princeton University

In 2012, the Pew Research Center issued a report that named Asian Americans as the “highest-income, best-educated, and fastest-growing racial group in the United States.” Despite this optimistic conclusion, over thirty Asian American advocacy groups challenged the findings, noting that the term “Asian American” is complicated. It includes a wide range of ethnicities, national origins, and languages, and encompasses groups that differ greatly in their economic and social status. In Redefining Race, sociologist Dina G. Okamoto traces the complex evolution of “Asian American” as a panethnic label and identity, emphasizing how it is a deliberate social achievement negotiated by group members, rather than an organic and inevitable process.

Drawing on original research and a series of interviews, Okamoto investigates how different Asian ethnic groups created this collective identity in the wake of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. Okamoto documents the social forces that encouraged the development of this panethnic identity. The racial segregation of Asians in similar occupations and industries, for example, produced a shared experience of racial discrimination, which led Asians of different national origins to develop shared interests and identities. By constructing a panethnic label and identity, ethnic group members created their own collective histories, and in the process challenged and redefined current notions of race.

The emergence of a panethnic racial identity also depended, somewhat paradoxically, on different groups organizing along distinct ethnic lines to gain recognition and rights from the larger society. According to Okamoto, ethnic organizations provided the foundation necessary to build solidarity within different Asian-origin communities. Leaders and community members who created inclusive narratives and advocated policies that benefited groups beyond their own moved their discrete ethnic organizations toward a panethnic model. For example, a number of ethnic-specific organizations in San Francisco expanded their services and programs to include other ethnic group members after their original constituencies dwindled in size or assimilated. A Laotian organization included refugees from different parts of Asia, a Japanese organization began to advocate for South Asian populations, and a Chinese organization opened its doors to Filipinos and Vietnamese. As Okamoto shows, the process of building ties between ethnic communities while also recognizing ethnic diversity is the hallmark of panethnicity.

Redefining Race is a groundbreaking analysis of the processes through which group boundaries are drawn and contested. In mapping the genesis of a panethnic Asian American identity, Okamoto illustrates the ways in which concepts of race continue to shape how ethnic and immigrant groups view themselves and organize for representation in the public arena.

DINA G. OKAMOTO is an associate professor of sociology and director of the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society at Indiana University.

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Cover image of the book Labor's Love Lost
Books

Labor's Love Lost

The Rise and Fall of the Working-Class Family in America
Author
Andrew J. Cherlin
Paperback
$45.00
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Publication Date
6 in. × 9 in. 272 pages
ISBN
978-0-87154-030-0
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Winner of the 2016 William T. Goode Distinguished Book Award from the Family Section of the American Sociological Association

“A cogent, balanced analysis of why the gap between the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ has grown in family life as well as economic life. Culture counts in family out-comes, Cherlin explains, but its impact is filtered through income inequality and job instability in ways that can’t be solved by a return to ‘traditional’ values. A must-read for policy-makers and concerned citizens.”

—STEPHANIE COONTZ, Evergreen State University

“Without a doubt, Cherlin’s account of the changing circumstance of working- class families is the most comprehensive, engaging, and convincing explanation of why and how our family system has changed in the past half century. His book will be relished by historians and sociologists alike.”

—FRANK F. FURSTENBERG, University of Pennsylvania

“America’s top scholar of families has given us a masterful and sobering overview of the changing fate of the working class. Their relational standards for marriage sound ever more middle class, while their nonmarital births and unstable relation-ships are reminiscent of patterns limited to the poor decades ago.”

—PAULA ENGLAND, New York University

Two generations ago, young men and women with only a high-school degree would have entered the plentiful industrial occupations which then sustained the middle-class ideal of a male-breadwinner family. Such jobs have all but vanished over the past forty years, and in their absence ever-growing numbers of young adults now hold precarious, low-paid jobs with few fringe benefits. Facing such insecure economic prospects, less-educated young adults are increasingly forgoing marriage and are having children within unstable cohabiting relationships. This has created a large marriage gap between them and their more affluent, college-educated peers. In Labor’s Love Lost, noted sociologist Andrew Cherlin offers a new historical assessment of the rise and fall of working-class families in America, demonstrating how momentous social and economic transformations have contributed to the collapse of this once-stable social class and what this seismic cultural shift means for the nation’s future.

Drawing from more than a hundred years of census data, Cherlin documents how today’s marriage gap mirrors that of the Gilded Age of the late-nineteenth century, a time of high inequality much like our own. Cherlin demonstrates that the widespread prosperity of working-class families in the mid-twentieth century, when both income inequality and the marriage gap were low, is the true outlier in the history of the American family. In fact, changes in the economy, culture, and family formation in recent decades have been so great that Cherlin suggests that the working-class family pattern has largely disappeared.

Labor's Love Lost shows that the primary problem of the fall of the working-class family from its mid-twentieth century peak is not that the male-breadwinner family has declined, but that nothing stable has replaced it. The breakdown of a stable family structure has serious consequences for low-income families, particularly for children, many of whom underperform in school, thereby reducing their future employment prospects and perpetuating an intergenerational cycle of economic disadvantage. To address this disparity, Cherlin recommends policies to foster educational opportunities for children and adolescents from disadvantaged families. He also stresses the need for labor market interventions, such as subsidizing low wages through tax credits and raising the minimum wage.

Labor's Love Lost provides a compelling analysis of the historical dynamics and ramifications of the growing number of young adults disconnected from steady, decent-paying jobs and from marriage. Cherlin’s investigation of today’s “would-be working class” shines a much-needed spotlight on the struggling middle of our society in today’s new Gilded Age.

ANDREW J. CHERLIN is the Benjamin H. Griswold III Professor of Public Policy in the Department of Sociology at the Johns Hopkins University.

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Cover image of the book Unequal Time
Books

Unequal Time

Gender, Class, and Family in Employment Schedules
Authors
Dan Clawson
Naomi Gerstel
Paperback
$45.00
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Publication Date
6 in. × 9 in. 340 pages
ISBN
978-0-87154-014-0
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About This Book

Winner of the 2015 Max Weber Award from the Organizations, Occupations, and Work Section of the American Sociological Association

Winner of the 2015 William T. Goode Distinguished Book Award from the Family Section of the American Sociological Association

Winner of the 2015 Distinguished Scholarly Book Award from the Labor and Labor Movements Section of the American Sociological Association

“How long is the workday, and how thick the paycheck? To these questions, scholars have offered answers. But the key questions, Dan Clawson and Naomi Gerstel propose in this fascinating book, are: how shielded are we from unpredictable demands? And how do we control the unpredictability we’re made to face? Comparing doctors, nurses, EMTs and nursing assistants, men and women, the authors explore the lives of the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ of such control, as well as the friends, co-workers and family on whom they call to create orderly lives in an increasingly disorderly world. A thought-provoking and very important read.”

—Arlie Hochschild, professor emerita, University of California, Berkeley

Unequal Time is a meticulously and creatively researched study of how time at home and work is understood and managed. Time is not only an individual possession, but is relational. ‘Normal unpredictability’ rules. Dan Clawson and Naomi Gerstel explore the gaps between the rhetoric and realities of workplace flexibility. They find that flexibility is not just a matter of choice, but power.”

—Robert Aronowitz, M.D., professor and chair, History and Sociology of Science,
University of Pennsylvania

“Dan Clawson and Naomi Gerstel provide a powerful account of how inequalities are at the core of many of the vexing problems of work and family. Based on in-depth multi-method research in the health care industry, and this compelling book will change the way you think about work time issues. Essential reading for scholars and practitioners alike.”

—Juliet Schor, professor of sociology, Boston College

“This book's careful research design pays enormous dividends: comparing four critical occupations in the health care sector, Dan Clawson and Naomi Gerstel generate important new insights into the ways class and gender inequalities interact to shape struggles for control over working time. Unequal Time demonstrates that gender and class advantage and disadvantage are deeply implicated in the dynamics of ‘work-family balance’ and ‘flexibility,’ complicating the conventional wisdom in a provocative and fruitful way. This book is indispensable for scholars, policymakers, and anyone who cares about working families.”

 —Ruth Milkman, professor of sociology, The Graduate Center, CUNY

Life is routinely unpredictable. Control over one's time is a critical resource for managing that unpredictability, keeping a job, and raising a family. But the ability to control one's time, much like one's income, is determined to a significant degree by both gender and class. In Unequal Time, sociologists Dan Clawson and Naomi Gerstel explore the ways in which social inequalities permeate the workplace, reverberating through a web of time in which the schedules of one person shape the schedules of others in ways that exemplify and often exacerbate differences between men and women, the privileged and disadvantaged.

Unequal Time investigates the connected schedules of four health sector occupations: professional doctors and nurses, and working-class EMTs and nursing assistants. While the work-family literature mostly examines the hours people work, Clawson and Gerstel delve into the process through which schedules are set, negotiated, and contested. They show how workers in all four occupations experience the effects of schedule uncertainty but do so in distinct ways, largely shaped by the intersection of gender and class. Doctors, who are largely male and professional, have significant control over their schedules, though they often claim otherwise, and tend to work long hours because they earn respect from their peers for doing so. By contrast, nursing assistants, primarily female and working-class, work demanding hours because they face penalties for taking time off, no matter how valid the reasons. Without institutional support, they often turn to co-workers to help create more orderly lives.

Unequal Time shows that the degree of control that workers hold over their schedules can either reinforce or challenge conventional gender roles. When male doctors work overtime, they often rely on their wives and domestic workers to care for their families. Female nurses are more likely to handle the bulk of their family responsibilities, and use the control they have over their work schedules to dedicate more time to home life. Surprisingly, the authors find that in the working class occupations, workers frequently undermine traditional gender roles. Male EMTs often take significant time off for child care, and female nursing assistants sometimes choose to work more hours to provide extra financial support for their families. Employers often underscore these disparities by allowing their upper-tier workers the flexibility that enables their gender roles at home, while low-wage workers are pressured to put their jobs before any unpredictable events they might face outside of work.

We tend to consider personal and work scheduling an individual affair, but Clawson and Gerstel put forward the provocative hypothesis that time in the workplace is both collective and highly unequal. A valuable resource for workers' advocates and policymakers alike, Unequal Time illustrates how social inequalities in the workplace shape the lives of workers and their families.

DAN CLAWSON is professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

NAOMI GERSTEL is a distinguished university professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

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Cover image of the book Diversity and Disparities
Books

Diversity and Disparities

America Enters a New Century
Editor
John Logan
Ebook
$10.00
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Publication Date
492 pages
ISBN
978-1-61044-846-8
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FM
Front Matter
1
Diversity and Inequality: Recent Shocks and Continuing Trends
John R. Logan
2
A Very Uneven Road: U.S. Labor Markets in the Past Thirty Years
Harry J. Holzer and Marek Hlavac
3
The Middle Class: Losing Ground, Losing Wealth
Edward N. Wolff
4
Median Income and Income Inequality: From 2000 and Beyond
Richard V. Burkhauser and Jeff Larrimore
5
Residential Mobility in the United States and the Great Recession: A Shift to Local Moves
Michael A. Stoll
6
Cohort Trends in Housing and Household Formation Since 1990
Emily Rosenbaum
7
Residential Segregation by Income, 1970–2009
Kendra Bischoff and Sean F. Reardon
8
The Divergent Paths of American Families
Zhenchao Qian
9
Diversity in Old Age: The Elderly in Changing Economic and Family Contexts
Judith A. Seltzer and Jenjira J. Yahirun
10
U.S. High-Skill Immigration
John Bound and Sarah Turner
11
Unauthorized Mexican Migration and the Socioeconomic Integration of Mexican Americans
Frank D. Bean, James D. Bachmeier, Susan K. Brown, Jennifer Van Hook, and Mark A. Leach
12
Gender Disparities in Educational Attainment in the New Century: Trends, Causes, and Consequences
Thomas A. DiPrete and Claudia Buchmann
13
Is Ethnoracial Residential Integration on the Rise? Evidence from Metropolitan and Micropolitan America Since 1980
Barrett A. Lee, John Iceland, and Chad R. Farrell
Index

The United States is more diverse than ever before. Increased immigration has added to a vibrant cultural fabric, and women and minorities have made significant strides in overcoming overt discrimination. At the same time, economic inequality has increased significantly in recent decades, and the Great Recession substantially weakened the economic standing not only of the poor but also of the middle class. Diversity and Disparities, edited by sociologist John Logan, assembles impressive new studies that interpret the social and economic changes in the U.S. over the last decade. The authors, leading social scientists from many disciplines, analyze changes in the labor market, family structure, immigration, and race. They find that while America has grown more diverse, the opportunities available to disadvantaged groups have become more unequal.

Drawing on detailed data from the decennial census, the American Community Survey, and other sources, the authors chart the growing diversity and the deepening disparities among different groups in the U.S. Harry J. Holzer and Marek Hlavac document that although the economy always rises and falls over the business cycle, the Great Recession of 2007–2009 was a catastrophic event that saw record levels of unemployment, especially among less-educated workers, young people, and minorities. Emily Rosenbaum shows how the Great Recession amplified disparities in access to home ownership, and demonstrates that young adults, especially African Americans, are falling behind previous cohorts not only in home ownership and wealth but even in starting their own families and households.

Sean F. Reardon and Kendra Bischoff explore the rise of class segregation as higher-income Americans are moving away from others into separate and privileged neighborhoods and communities. Immigration has also seen class polarization, with an increase in both highly skilled workers and undocumented immigrants. As Frank D. Bean and his colleagues show, the lack of a path to legal status for undocumented immigrants inhibits the educational and economic opportunities for their children and grandchildren. Barrett Lee and colleagues demonstrate that the nation and most cities and towns are becoming more diverse by race and ethnicity. However, while black-white segregation is slowly falling, Hispanics and Asians remain as segregated today as they were in 1980.

Diversity and Disparities raises concerns about the extent of socioeconomic immobility in the United States today. This volume provides valuable information for policymakers, journalists, and researchers seeking to understand the current state of the nation.

JOHN LOGAN is professor of sociology and director of the Research Initiative on Spatial Structures in the Social Sciences at Brown University.

CONTRIBUTORS: James D. Bachmeier, Frank D. Bean, Kendra Bischoff, John Bound, Susan K. Brown, Claudia Buchmann, Richard V. Burkhauser, Thomas A. DiPrete, Chad R. Farrell, Marek Hlavac, Harry J. Holzer, John Iceland, Jeff Larrimore, Mark A. Leach, Barrett A. Lee, John R. Logan, Zhenchao Qian, Sean F. Reardon, Emily Rosenbaum, Judith A. Seltzer, Michael A. Stoll, Sarah Turner, Jennifer Van Hook, Edward N. Wolff , Jenjira J. Yahirun

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