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Cover image of the book The Long Shadow
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The Long Shadow

Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth, and the Transition to Adulthood
Authors
Karl Alexander
Doris Entwisle
Linda Olson
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$45.00
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6 in. × 9 in. 288 pages
ISBN
978-0-87154-033-1
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A Volume in the American Sociological Association’s Rose Series in Sociology

Winner of the 2015 Grawemeyer Award for the Best Book in Education

Honorable Mention, 2016 Robert E. Park Award Presented by the American Sociological Association’s Community and Urban Sociology Section

“A fitting capstone for the efforts of a remarkable team of collaborators and their longitudinalstudy of working class children growing up in Baltimore.”

—GREG J. DUNCAN, Distinguished Professor, University of California, Irvine

The Long Shadow profoundly challenges our understanding of schooling in the lives of disadvantaged urban children, black and white. They and their more privileged classmates are followed from first grade into young adulthood. Numerous policy- relevant observations emerge, including the
persistence of first grade inequalities and the recurrence of summer setbacks in learning. This is an essential book for all who care about children’s education.”

—GLEN H. ELDER, JR., Howard W. Odum Research Professor of Sociology and Research Professor of Psychology, Carolina Population Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

West Baltimore stands out in the popular imagination as the quintessential “inner city”—gritty, run-down, and marred by drugs and gang violence. Indeed, with the collapse of manufacturing jobs in the 1970s, the area experienced a rapid onset of poverty and high unemployment, with few public resources available to alleviate economic distress. But in stark contrast to the image of a perpetual “urban underclass” depicted in television by shows like The Wire, sociologists Karl Alexander, Doris Entwisle, and Linda Olson present a more nuanced portrait of Baltimore’s inner city residents that employs important new research on the significance of early-life opportunities available to low-income populations. The Long Shadow focuses on children who grew up in west Baltimore neighborhoods and others like them throughout the city, tracing how their early lives in the inner city have affected their long-term well-being. Although research for this book was conducted in Baltimore, that city’s struggles with deindustrialization, white flight, and concentrated poverty were characteristic of most East Coast and Midwest manufacturing cities. The experience of Baltimore’s children who came of age during this era is mirrored in the experiences of urban children across the nation.

For 25 years, the authors of The Long Shadow tracked the life progress of a group of almost 800 predominantly low-income Baltimore school children through the Beginning School Study Youth Panel (BSSYP). The study monitored the children’s transitions to young adulthood with special attention to how opportunities available to them as early as first grade shaped their socioeconomic status as adults. The authors’ fine-grained analysis confirms that the children who lived in more cohesive neighborhoods, had stronger families, and attended better schools tended to maintain a higher economic status later in life. As young adults, they held higher-income jobs and had achieved more personal milestones (such as marriage) than their lower-status counterparts. Differences in race and gender further stratified life opportunities for the Baltimore children. As one of the first studies to closely examine the outcomes of inner-city whites in addition to African Americans, data from the BSSYP shows that by adulthood, white men of lower status family background, despite attaining less education on average, were more likely to be employed than any other group in part due to family connections and long-standing racial biases in Baltimore’s industrial economy. Gender imbalances were also evident: the women, who were more likely to be working in low-wage service and clerical jobs, earned less than men. African American women were doubly disadvantaged insofar as they were less likely to be in a stable relationship than white women, and therefore less likely to benefit from a second income.

Combining original interviews with Baltimore families, teachers, and other community members with the empirical data gathered from the authors’ groundbreaking research, The Long Shadow unravels the complex connections between socioeconomic origins and socioeconomic destinations to reveal a startling and much-needed examination of who succeeds and why.

KARL ALEXANDER is John Dewey Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University.

The late DORIS ENTWISLE was Research Professor in Sociology at Johns Hopkins University.

LINDA OLSEN is associate research scientist at Johns Hopkins University.

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Cover image of the book Choosing Homes, Choosing Schools
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Choosing Homes, Choosing Schools

Editors
Annette Lareau
Kimberly Goyette
Paperback
$59.95
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6 in. × 9 in. 352 pages
ISBN
978-0-87154-496-4
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“Where children live and attend school can exert powerful influences on their educational and social development. Understanding the forces at work in shaping patterns of residential and school segregation, therefore, is essential to understanding educational and social inequality in America. This thoughtful, theoretically rich, and empirically-grounded volume combines careful statistical analyses with rich, evocative parental interviews to provide a wealth of new evidence and insight into these complex forces. It is a ‘must-read’ for urban sociologists and education policy makers interested in understanding modern American inequality, segregation, and educational opportunity.”

—Sean Reardon, professor of sociology and director, Stanford Interdisciplinary Doctoral Training Program in Quantitative Education Policy Analysis

Choosing Homes, Choosing Schools is an outstanding volume with contributions from prominent scholars that provides a detailed accounting of how residential and school sorting processes are intricately linked. The central theme is that residential segregation directly contributes to educational inequality, which in turn reinforces segregation when affluent (often white) families seek to avoid poor and minority schools. The book describes these processes in a changing social, demographic, economic, and policy context, and is informed by an excellent mix of theory, quantitative analysis, and qualitative work.”

                       —John Iceland, professor of sociology and demography, Penn State University

A series of policy shifts over the past decade promises to change how Americans decide where to send their children to school. In theory, the expanded use of standardized test scores and the boom in charter schools will allow parents to evaluate their assigned neighborhood school, or move in search of a better option. But what kind of data do parents actually use while choosing schools? Are there differences among suburban and urban families? How do parents’ choices influence school and residential segregation? Choosing Homes, Choosing Schools presents a breakthrough analysis of the new era of school choice, and what it portends for American neighborhoods.

The distinguished contributors to Choosing Homes, Choosing Schools investigate the complex relationships among education, neighborhood social networks, and larger patterns of inequality. Paul Jargowsky reviews recent trends in segregation by race and class, and shows that while segregation between blacks and whites has declined overall since 1970, white parents are still more likely to choose to live in predominantly white neighborhoods. This skewed residential selection in turn drives racial inequality in public schools. Annette Lareau draws on interviews with parents in three suburban neighborhoods to analyze school-choice decisions. Surprisingly, she finds that middle- and upper-class parents do not rely on active research, such as school tours or test scores. Instead, their decision-making was largely informal and passive, with most simply trusting advice from friends and others in their network. Elliot Weinginer looks at how class differences among urban parents affect their approaches to choosing schools. He finds that while parents of all backgrounds actively consider their children’s education choices, middle- and upper-class parents relied more on federally mandated school report cards, district websites, and online forums, while working-class parents used network contacts to gain information on school quality. Amy Schwartz and Leanna Stiefel explore the connections between housing policy and education reform. They demonstrate the shortcomings of policies focused exclusively on “school choice”—or the practice of allowing students to cross district boundaries to better schools—and instead advocate for reducing educational inequality by expanding residential choice through measures such as housing subsidies and the redevelopment of public housing to include schools and community centers.

Little previous research has explored what role school concerns play in the preferences of white and minority parents for particular neighborhoods, and how the racial and economic makeup of both neighborhoods and schools mutually reinforce each other. Choosing Homes, Choosing Schools adroitly addresses this gap and provides a firmer understanding of how Americans choose where to live and send their children to school.

ANNETTE LAREAU is Stanley I. Sheerr Term Professor in the Social Sciences and professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania.

KIMBERLY GOYETTE is associate professor of sociology at Temple University.

CONTRIBUTORS: Michael D. M. Bader, Felicia Butts, Kyle Crowder, Lori Delale-O’Connor, Stefanie DeLuca, Kimberly Goyette, Caroline Hanley, Paul A. Jargowsky, Shelley McDonough Kimelberg, Maria Krysan, Annette Lareau, Mary Pattillo, Anna Rhodes, Salvatore Saporito, Amy Ellen Schwartz, Leanna Stiefel, Elliot B. Weininger

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Cover image of the book What Works for Workers?
Books

What Works for Workers?

Public Policies and Innovative Strategies for Low-Wage Workers
Editors
Stephanie Luce
Jennifer Luff
Joseph A. McCartin
Ruth Milkman
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6 in. × 9 in. 362 pages
ISBN
978-0-87154-571-8
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The majority of new jobs created in the United States today are low-wage jobs, and a fourth of the labor force earns no more than poverty-level wages. Policymakers and citizens alike agree that declining real wages and constrained spending among such a large segment of workers imperil economic prosperity and living standards for all Americans. Though many policies to assist low-wage workers have been proposed, there is little agreement across the political spectrum about which policies actually reduce poverty and raise income among the working poor. What Works for Workers provides a comprehensive analysis of policy measures designed to address the widening income gap in the United States.

Featuring contributions from an eminent group of social scientists, What Works for Workers evaluates the most high-profile strategies for poverty reduction, including innovative “living wage” ordinances, education programs for African American youth, and better regulation of labor laws pertaining to immigrants. The contributors delve into an extensive body of scholarship on low-wage work to reveal a number of surprising findings. Richard Freeman suggests that labor unions, long assumed to be moribund, have a fighting chance to reclaim their historic redistributive role if they move beyond traditional collective bargaining and establish new ties with other community actors. John Schmitt predicts that the Affordable Care Act will substantially increase insurance coverage for low-wage workers, 38 percent of whom currently lack any kind of health insurance.

Other contributors explore the shortcomings of popular solutions: Stephanie Luce shows that while living wage ordinances rarely lead to job losses, they have not yet covered most low-wage workers. And Jennifer Gordon corrects the notion that a path to legalization alone will fix the plight of immigrant workers. Without energetic regulatory enforcement, she argues, legalization may have limited impact on the exploitation of undocumented workers. Ruth Milkman and Eileen Appelbaum conclude with an analysis of California’s paid family leave program, a policy designed to benefit the working poor, who have few resources that allow them to take time off work to care for children or ill family members. Despite initial opposition, the paid leave program proved more acceptable than expected among employers and provided a much-needed system of wage replacement for low-income workers. In the wake of its success, the initiative has emerged as a useful blueprint for paid leave programs in other states.

Alleviating the low-wage crisis will require a comprehensive set of programs rather than piecemeal interventions. With its rigorous analysis of what works and what doesn’t, What Works for Workers points the way toward effective reform. For social scientists, policymakers, and activists grappling with the practical realities of low-wage work, this book provides a valuable guide for narrowing the gap separating rich and poor.

STEPHANIE LUCE is associate professor of labor studies at the Murphy Institute, CUNY School for Professional Studies.

JENNIFER LUFF is lecturer in the department of history, Durham University, U.K.

JOSEPH A. McCARTIN is professor of history at Georgetown University.

RUTH MILKMAN is professor of sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center.

CONTRIBUTORS: Eileen Appelbaum, Peter B. Edelman, Richard B. Freeman, Jennifer Gordon, Sarah Hamersma, Harry J. Holzer, Stephanie Luce, Jennifer Luff, Joseph McCartin, Ruth Milkman, Alice O’Connor, John Schmitt, Paul Osterman, David Weil, Jeffrey B. Wenger

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Cover image of the book The Color Bind
Books

The Color Bind

Talking (and Not Talking) About Race at Work
Authors
Erica Gabrielle Foldy
Tamara R. Buckley
Paperback
$47.50
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6 in. × 9 in. 216 pages
ISBN
978-0-87154-472-8
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“Erica Foldy and Tamara Buckley offer us an extraordinary book designed to explore what is, and push the conversation about race and organizational life forward. The Color Bind is a strong synthesis of theory, research, and analytic reflections on organizational practice. Their ‘case’ is a provocative example of an institution under enormous pressure to ‘not screw up’ made particularly salient in times of high surveillance, risk analyses, and social anxiety—precisely the conditions under which racial stereotypes flare and are circulated in the popular unconscious.”

—MICHELLE FINE, Distinguished Professor of Psychology, CUNY Graduate Center

The Color Bind will help people in organizations and institutions break the unbearable silence about race and culture. It tackles the basic belief that silence about race makes it less present, but, as the authors eloquently argue, we end up in a color bind. The growth experience of the teams in this book illustrates how, with courage, we can build understanding and trust across race and culture.”

—STELLA NKOMO, professor of human resource management, University of Pretoria

Since the 1960s, the dominant model for fostering diversity and inclusion in the United States has been the “color blind” approach, which emphasizes similarity and assimilation and insists that people should be understood as individuals, not as members of racial or cultural groups. This approach is especially prevalent in the workplace, where discussions about race and ethnicity are considered taboo. Yet, as widespread as “color blindness” has become, many studies show that the practice has damaging repercussions, including reinforcing the existing racial hierarchy by ignoring the significance of racism and discrimination. In The Color Bind, workplace experts Erica Foldy and Tamara Buckley investigate race relations in office settings, looking at how both color blindness and what they call “color cognizance” have profound effects on the ways coworkers think and interact with each other.

Based on an intensive two-and-a-half-year study of employees at a child welfare agency, The Color Bind shows how color cognizance—the practice of recognizing the profound impact of race and ethnicity on life experiences while affirming the importance of racial diversity—can help workers move beyond silence on the issue of race toward more inclusive workplace practices. Drawing from existing psychological and sociological research that demonstrates the success of color-cognizant approaches in dyads, workgroups and organizations, Foldy and Buckley analyzed the behavior of work teams within a child protection agency. The behaviors of three teams in particular reveal the factors that enable color cognizance to flourish. While two of the teams largely avoided explicitly discussing race, one group, “Team North,” openly talked about race and ethnicity in team meetings. By acknowledging these differences when discussing how to work with their clients and with each other, the members of Team North were able to dig into challenges related to race and culture instead of avoiding them. The key to achieving color cognizance within the group was twofold: It required both the presence of at least a few members who were already color cognizant, as well as an environment in which all team members felt relatively safe and behaved in ways that strengthened learning, including productively resolving conflict and reflecting on their practice.

The Color Bind provides a useful lens for policy makers, researchers and practitioners pursuing in a wide variety of goals, from addressing racial disparities in health and education to creating diverse and inclusive organizations to providing culturally competent services to clients and customers. By foregrounding open conversations about race and ethnicity, Foldy and Buckley show that institutions can transcend the color bind in order to better acknowledge and reflect the diverse populations they serve.

ERICA GABRIELLE FOLDY is associate professor of public and nonprofit management at New York University.

TAMARA R. BUCKLEY is associate professor of counseling at Hunter College and psychology at The Graduate Center, City University of New York.

 

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Cover image of the book The Obama Effect
Books

The Obama Effect

How the 2008 Campaign Changed White Racial Attitudes
Authors
Seth K. Goldman
Diana C. Mutz
Paperback
$42.50
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6 in. × 9 in. 202 pages
ISBN
978-0-87154-572-5
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Winner of the 2014 Frank Luther Mott-Kappa Tau Alpha Research Award

“Based on a unique sequence of national surveys tracking the 2008 presidential election, The Obama Effect is a breakthrough study. Vividly written, it simultaneously demonstrates the resilience of racial prejudice and the reality of racial progress.”

—PAUL SNIDERMAN, Fairleigh S. Dickinson Jr. Professor of Public Policy and senior fellow, Hoover Institution and the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University

“Seth Goldman and Diana Mutz’s rigorous demonstration of the positive Obama effect gives us reason for optimism that racial attitudes, although difficult to change, are nonetheless susceptible to conventional political communications and campaigns. This fine book also validates efforts to combat stereotypical portrayals in the media by showing the power of exemplary images and role models to influence how people think about race in this country.”

—DENNIS CHONG, chair and professor of political science, University of Southern California

Barack Obama’s historic 2008 campaign exposed many white Americans more than ever before to a black individual who defied negative stereotypes. While Obama’s politics divided voters, Americans uniformly perceived Obama as highly successful, intelligent, and charismatic. What effect, if any, did the innumerable images of Obama and his family have on racial attitudes among whites? In The Obama Effect, Seth K. Goldman and Diana C. Mutz uncover persuasive evidence that white racial prejudice toward blacks significantly declined during the Obama campaign. Their innovative research rigorously examines how racial attitudes form, and whether they can be changed for the better.

The Obama Effect draws from a survey of 20,000 people, whom the authors interviewed up to five times over the course of a year. This panel survey sets the volume apart from most research on racial attitudes. From the summer of 2008 through Obama’s inauguration in 2009, there was a gradual but clear trend toward lower levels of white prejudice against blacks. Goldman and Mutz argue that these changes occurred largely without people’s conscious awareness. Instead, as Obama became increasingly prominent in the media, he emerged as an “exemplar” that countered negative stereotypes in the minds of white Americans. Unfortunately, this change in attitudes did not last. By 2010, racial prejudice among whites had largely returned to pre-2008 levels. Mutz and Goldman argue that news coverage of Obama declined substantially after his election, allowing other, more negative images of African Americans to re-emerge in the media. The Obama Effect arrives at two key conclusions: Racial attitudes can change even within relatively short periods of time, and how African Americans are portrayed in the mass media affects how they change.

While Obama’s election did not usher in a “post-racial America,” The Obama Effect provides hopeful evidence that racial attitudes can—and, for a time, did—improve during Obama’s campaign. Engaging and thorough, this volume offers a new understanding of the relationship between the mass media and racial attitudes in America.

SETH K. GOLDMAN is Honors Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

DIANA C. MUTZ is Samuel A. Stouffer Professor of Political Science and Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.

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Cover image of the book Private Equity at Work
Books

Private Equity at Work

When Wall Street Manages Main Street
Authors
Eileen Appelbaum
Rosemary Batt
Paperback
$45.00
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Publication Date
6 in. × 9 in. 396 pages
ISBN
978-0-87154-039-3
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Finalist for the 2016 Academy of Management's George R. Terry Book Award

Private Equity at Work is the first comprehensive examination of private equity—its history, economic performance, and social consequences, especially for employees. The authors cast a gimlet eye on private equity’s business model, whose shortcomings are dissected with razor-sharp analysis. The material is timely and original. It includes detailed case studies as well as proposals to better regulate this invisible but omnipresent industry.

—SANFORD M. JACOBY, Distinguished Professor, UCLA

“In this brilliant new book, Eileen Appelbaum and Rosemary Batt pull back the curtain on the shadowy world of private equity and its role in the management and mismanagement of our economy. Their rigorous, balanced, and well-written study shows how inadequate government regulation, biases in the tax code, and a permissive Wall Street culture combine to put private equity financiers in charge of important American companies, often to the detriment of the long-term interests of workers, investors and the broader economy. Appelbaum and Batt develop a program of common sense policy changes that will help us tap the socially productive potential of private equity while trimming its worst excesses. This terrific book will be of interest to policymakers, students, and scholars, and should be read anyone wanting to understand why America's widely shared prosperity got derailed and how to get it back on track.”

—GERALD EPSTEIN, professor of economics and codirector, Political Economy Research Institute, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Private equity firms have long been at the center of public debates on the impact of the financial sector on Main Street companies. Are these firms financial innovators that save failing businesses or financial predators that bankrupt otherwise healthy companies and destroy jobs? The first comprehensive examination of this topic, Private Equity at Work provides a detailed yet accessible guide to this controversial business model. Economist Eileen Appelbaum and Professor Rosemary Batt carefully evaluate the evidence—including original case studies and interviews, legal documents, bankruptcy proceedings, media coverage, and existing academic scholarship—to demonstrate the effects of private equity on American businesses and workers. They document that while private equity firms have had positive effects on the operations and growth of small and mid-sized companies and in turning around failing companies, the interventions of private equity more often than not lead to significant negative consequences for many businesses and workers.

Prior research on private equity has focused almost exclusively on the financial performance of private equity funds and the returns to their investors. Private Equity at Work provides a new roadmap to the largely hidden internal operations of these firms, showing how their business strategies disproportionately benefit the partners in private equity firms at the expense of other stakeholders and taxpayers. In the 1980s, leveraged buyouts by private equity firms saw high returns and were widely considered the solution to corporate wastefulness and mismanagement. And since 2000, nearly 11,500 companies—representing almost 8 million employees—have been purchased by private equity firms. As their role in the economy has increased, they have come under fire from labor unions and community advocates who argue that the proliferation of leveraged buyouts destroys jobs, causes wages to stagnate, saddles otherwise healthy companies with debt, and leads to subsidies from taxpayers.

Appelbaum and Batt show that private equity firms’ financial strategies are designed to extract maximum value from the companies they buy and sell, often to the detriment of those companies and their employees and suppliers. Their risky decisions include buying companies and extracting dividends by loading them with high levels of debt and selling assets. These actions often lead to financial distress and a disproportionate focus on cost-cutting, outsourcing, and wage and benefit losses for workers, especially if they are unionized.

Because the law views private equity firms as investors rather than employers, private equity owners are not held accountable for their actions in ways that public corporations are. And their actions are not transparent because private equity owned companies are not regulated by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Thus, any debts or costs of bankruptcy incurred fall on businesses owned by private equity and their workers, not the private equity firms that govern them. For employees this often means loss of jobs, health and pension benefits, and retirement income. Appelbaum and Batt conclude with a set of policy recommendations intended to curb the negative effects of private equity while preserving its constructive role in the economy. These include policies to improve transparency and accountability, as well as changes that would reduce the excessive use of financial engineering strategies by firms.

A groundbreaking analysis of a hotly contested business model, Private Equity at Work provides an unprecedented analysis of the little-understood inner workings of private equity and of the effects of leveraged buyouts on American companies and workers. This important new work will be a valuable resource for scholars, policymakers, and the informed public alike.

EILEEN APPELBAUM is senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, Washington, D.C. and Visiting Professor in the Management Department, University of Leicester, UK.

ROSEMARY BATT is the Alice Hanson Cook Professor of Women and Work at the Industrial and Labor Relations School, Cornell University.

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