Constructing the Racial Hierarchy of Labor: The Role of Race in Occupational Prestige Judgments*

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lauren Valentino
Author(s):  
Jennifer M. Chacón ◽  
Susan Bibler Coutin

Immigration law and enforcement choices have enhanced the salience of Latino racial identity in the United States. Yet, to date, courts and administrative agencies have proven remarkably reluctant to confront head on the role of race in immigration enforcement practices. Courts improperly conflate legal nationality and ‘national origin’, thereby cloaking in legality impermissible profiling based on national origin. Courts also maintain the primacy of purported security concerns over the equal protection concerns raised by racial profiling in routine immigration enforcement activities. This, in turn, promotes racially motivated policing practices, reifying both racial distinctions and racial discrimination. Drawing on textual analysis of judicial decisions as well as on interviews with immigrants and immigrant justice organization staff in California, this chapter illustrates how courts contribute to racialized immigration enforcement practices, and explores how those practices affect individual immigrants’ articulation of racial identity and their perceptions of race and racial hierarchy in their communities.


2018 ◽  
Vol 55 (5) ◽  
pp. 1456-1486 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arun Peter Lobo ◽  
Ronald J. O. Flores ◽  
Joseph J. Salvo

We examine New York’s components of population change—net migration and natural increase—by race and space to explain increases in integrated and minority neighborhoods, in this era of greater ethnoracial diversity. The city has net outflows of Whites, Blacks, and Hispanics, and net Asian inflows, a new dynamic that has reordered its neighborhoods. Asians, often joined by Hispanics, moved into White neighborhoods without triggering White flight, resulting in integrated neighborhoods without Blacks. These neighborhoods constitute a plurality, furthering Black exclusion. Minority neighborhoods saw net outflows, an overlooked phenomenon, but expanded thanks to natural increase, which maintains the existing racial structure. White inflows have helped transition some minority neighborhoods to integrated areas, though integrated neighborhoods with Blacks declined overall. As Asians and Hispanics occupy historically White spaces, this warrants a reconceptualization of race and the emerging racial hierarchy, and a focus on the gatekeeper role of Asians and Hispanics.


Social Forces ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 99 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-58
Author(s):  
Lauren Valentino

Abstract Symbolic valuation is an important but overlooked aspect of gendered processes of inequality in the occupation structure. Prior work has largely focused on the material valuation of gendered work, such as how much predominantly-female versus predominantly-male occupations pay. Less research has examined the symbolic valuation of work, such as how prestigious predominantly-female versus predominantly-male occupations are. What research has examined this question has remained inconclusive at best. Drawing on insights into and techniques from the sociology of culture and cognition, this study examines the role of an occupation’s gender composition in how Americans judge the prestige of jobs, testing key predictions from theories of gender and status. Using 2012 General Social Survey and federal occupation-level data, it finds evidence for a segregation premium: people view gender-segregated occupations as the most symbolically valuable jobs. Both men and women reward gender-segregated occupations with symbolic value, although there is evidence of a gendered in-group bias in which women in particular see women’s work as more prestigious, while men see men’s work as more prestigious.


2020 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Tomo ◽  
Davide de Gennaro

Purpose In a period of profound crisis for professions, this paper aims to develop knowledge about the role of proactive personality in the relationship between accountants’ occupational prestige and goal orientation. Design/methodology/approach The study draws upon the literature on professions and employs a multiple linear regression analysis to test the mediating role of proactive personality when accountants challenge external events threatening their profession. The study focuses on Italy, an area characterized by a high degree of precariousness where, over the past 30 years, accountants have been facing many threats undermining their occupational prestige. Findings The findings show that proactive accountants are more goal-oriented, unless they perceive that others consider their career to be prestigious. Therefore, the study demonstrates that occupational prestige – more volatile and subject to external forces– can shape proactive personality – usually internally determined and more stable – insofar a perceived low occupational prestige can be mediated by a proactive personality towards goal orientation. Practical implications The study has both academic and practical implications, showing that context-related factors are buffered by personal characteristics when professionals react to external events affecting their prestige. Originality/value The paper sheds lights on the critical issues of setting and achieving goals in uncertain situations, and enhances our understanding of the accounting profession, by identifying new reactions and behaviours based on personal factors as well as exogenous and contextual factors.


2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kimberly A. S. Howard ◽  
Aaron Carlstrom ◽  
Andrew D. Katz ◽  
G. Christopher Ray ◽  
Aaronson Chew ◽  
...  

2017 ◽  
Vol 46 (5) ◽  
pp. 961-979
Author(s):  
Eric C. Schneider ◽  
Christopher Agee ◽  
Themis Chronopoulos

Police abuse of African Americans was an immediate trigger for the urban uprisings of the 1960s, and civilian review of police actions became a central tenet of civil rights liberalism. The failure of Philadelphia’s Police Advisory Board (PAB), the nation’s first independent civilian review board (1958), to meliorate police–community tensions suggests the limitations of civil rights liberalism: an inability to confront the role of police as “dirty workers,” who performed the unacknowledged but widely demanded function of maintaining racial hierarchy in the postwar city. Working-class African Americans, the most frequent victims of police brutality, came to see civilian review as a charade and rejected the limited vision of civil rights liberals. The PAB’s failure shows that police reform is impossible without a broader commitment to overturning racial hierarchy.


2017 ◽  
Vol 51 (5) ◽  
pp. 1626-1655
Author(s):  
STAN NEAL

AbstractThis article examines the role of the private merchant firm Jardine Matheson in procuring Chinese tea cultivators for the East India Company's experimental tea plantations in Assam in the 1830s. Where existing literature has detailed the establishment of a Tea Committee by the East India Company to oversee these tea plantations, the focus of this article is on the way that the illicit opium-distribution network of Jardine Matheson was used to extract labour, tea specimens, and knowledge from China. The colonial state's experimental tea plantations were directly connected to the devastation of the opium trade. The multiple uses of Jardine Matheson's drug-distribution networks and skilled employees becomes evident upon examination of their role in facilitating Chinese migration. The recruitment of tea cultivators from China in the 1830s also impacted on colonial concepts of racial hierarchy and the perceived contrast between savagery and civilization. Ultimately, Jardine Matheson's extraction of skilled labour from the China coast informs our understanding of the evolving private networks that became crucial to British imperialism in Asia, and through which labour, capital, people, information, and ideas could be exchanged.


Author(s):  
Alessa K. Durst

AbstractPeople care about their relative standing in society and therefore compare themselves to relevant others. Empirical findings suggest that there are concerns for relative standing for different goods and life domains such as income, cars, attractiveness, and supervisor’s praise. Even education has been mentioned as having a (partially) positional character. However, there has been only small consideration of education as a positional good in the empirical literature so far. Based on the literature on positional concerns and the role of education on relative position, I use German panel data to investigate the relationship between education and life satisfaction beyond the effect education might have through other variables such as income, health, or occupational prestige. Additionally, I consider the possibility that the consumption of education is subject to positional concerns. I discover a positive relationship between education and life satisfaction, indicating that education has a consumption component. Moreover, the relationship depends on the distribution of particular levels of education, suggesting that education has a positional character.


Author(s):  
Liza A. Hoveling ◽  
Aart C. Liefbroer ◽  
Ute Bültmann ◽  
Nynke Smidt

Abstract Background Although the incidence of metabolic syndrome (MetS) strongly varies based on individuals’ socioeconomic position (SEP), as yet no studies have examined the SEP-MetS remission relationship. Our aim is to longitudinally assess the associations between SEP measures education, income and occupational prestige, and MetS remission, and whether these associations are mediated by health behaviors, including physical activity, smoking, alcohol intake and diet quality. Methods A subsample (n = 16,818) of the adult Lifelines Cohort Study with MetS at baseline was used. MetS remission was measured upon second assessment (median follow-up time 3.8 years), defined according to NCEP-ATPIII criteria. To estimate direct associations between SEP, health behaviors and MetS remission multivariable logistic regression analyses were used. To estimate the mediating percentages of health behaviors that explain the SEP-MetS remission relationship the Karlson-Holm-Breen method was used. Analyses were adjusted for age, sex, the other SEP measures and follow-up time. Results At the second assessment, 42.7% of the participants experienced MetS remission. Education and income were positively associated with MetS remission, but occupational prestige was not. The association between education and MetS remission could partly (11.9%) be explained by health behaviors, but not the association between income and MetS remission. Conclusions Individuals with higher education more often experienced remission from MetS, mainly because individuals with higher education were more likely to have healthier behaviors. However, individuals with higher income more often experienced MetS remissions, regardless of their health behaviors. The occupational prestige of individuals was not associated with MetS remission.


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