Suchergebnisse

Daniel H. Krymkowski documents the extent and causes of African American underrepresentation in the cultural realms of golf, hiking, hunting and fishing, water and winter sports, classical music, art, ballet, and theater. He argues racial-ethnic inequality in these areas is extensive and results mainly from historic and contemporary discrimination.

This article responds to calls for more attention to theoretical issues in the study of social stratification and mobility. As a starting point, I reconsider Lenski's Power and Privilege, the last bold effort to create a general theory of social stratification. One of Lenski's most interesting assertions was that the amount of inequality would `vary directly with the size of a society's surplus'. However, the mechanisms underlying this relation were not specified and, as Lenski himself noted, direct portionality fails to hold when one moves from agrarian to industrial societies. Utilizing game theory and a rate of return model, I suggest mechanisms that account for Lenski's curve (the observed curvilinear relationship between the size of the surplus and the amount of inequality).

This paper tests hypotheses concerning the relationship between social change and occupational and earnings attainment among men and women in contemporary Poland. Utilizing national-level survey data from 1982, 1987, and 1991—3, we examine the effects of social background, educational attainment, and work experience on occupational prestige and earnings. Findings from regression and multilevel models reveal complex patterns of stability and change over time, and a number of interesting results emerge. Most significantly, the effect of years of education on both earnings and occupational prestige was fairly stable before 1989, but has been increasing — concurrently with the rise in the share of the private sector — since the end of state socialism. This increase occurred only among workers outside the service sector of the economy, however. In addition, the results for men and women are highly similar.

National Heritage Areas (NHAs) are an alternative and increasingly popular form of protected area management in the United States. NHAs seek to integrate environmental objectives with community and economic objectives at regional or landscape scales. NHA designations have increased rapidly in the last 20 years, generating a substantial need for evaluative information about (a) how NHAs work; (b) outcomes associated with the NHA process; and (c) the costs and benefits of investing public moneys into the NHA approach. Qualitative evaluation studies recently conducted at three NHAs have identified the importance of understanding network structure and function in the context of evaluating NHA management effectiveness. This article extends these case studies by examining quantitative network data from each of the sites. The authors analyze these data using both a descriptive approach and a statistically more robust approach known as exponential random graph modeling. Study findings indicate the presence of transitive structures and the absence of three-cycle structures in each of these networks. This suggests that these networks are relatively ''open,'' which may be desirable, given the uncertainty of the environments in which they operate. These findings also suggest, at least at the sites reported here, that the NHA approach may be an effective way to activate and develop networks of intersectoral organizational partners. Finally, this study demonstrates the utility of using quantitative network analysis to better understand the effectiveness of protected area management models that rely on partnership networks to achieve their intended outcomes.