Urban Growth Machine

Whatever else organizes city politics, economies, or modes of governance, dedication to growth is the main political force at work—according to the widely influential “growth machine” thesis. Growth interests, it argues, especially dominate in countries like the United States, where land and buildings operate as private markets, rather than held in common by government or some other entity; most studies have been US based but many commentaries and analyses have followed on from research elsewhere. Researchers describe pursuit of growth in payrolls, capital spending, or construction activity. As in the classic Marxian framework, such would enhance “exchange value.” In the political sphere, growth interests form up at nested scales where they pressure for advantageous zoning and public infrastructure investments at relevant administrative levels—in roads, sewer lines, and so forth. They lobby and help finance campaigns. Opposition forms up, in turn, from those whose interest in the city is primarily for home life or shared enhancements—represented by civic groups or, increasingly, environmental organizations. They strive for gains, again from the extended Marxian lexicon, in “use value”—substantive public benefits, as in health care, libraries, schools, safety, and parks. The resulting debates, studies, and applications are subjects of hundreds of articles, reviews, and books.

Historic Preservation

Historic preservation is an idea and a practice, an academic discipline and a field of political and cultural action. For social scientists, a critical approach to historic preservation means to interrogate the underlying assumptions about history, community, and culture that drive preservation contests as well as the sociospatial outcomes: how places are made, branded, and changed as a result of historic preservation. A number of key questions can be raised about any given preservation effort: What kinds of claims are being made when mnemonic activists declare a building or a neighborhood to be “historic”? Whose vision of history is being wielded when monuments and other spaces of consecration are laid down in the urban fabric? What are the cultural frames that are mobilized to socially construct such landscapes as “historic” versus those are simply “historical”? What are the debates that ensnare all kinds of social actors—urban planners and historians, community activists and politicians—in decisions about which historical landscapes to conserve, and which to leave as unprotected commodities? Lastly, what are the spatial scales where preservation and memorialization are enacted, contested, and materialized? This entry considers historic preservation from these many angles, presenting readers with a critical overview of the topic and raising questions and presenting important readings for further consideration.

Gendered Sexuality

Sexuality encompasses diverse sexual practices including sexual behaviors, their sequencing, meanings, effects, pleasures, and risks, sexual identities, preferences or orientations, and the social construction of sexual acts and communities over history. Sexuality is undeniably shaped by gender as an individual, interpersonal, and institutional force. It is also shaped by intersecting axes of difference including class, race, ethnicity, age, and body morphology or disability status. These are in turn also affected by sexuality. The study of gendered sexuality has been an interdisciplinary undertaking. The sociological field incorporates insights from anthropology, feminist philosophy, gender and women’s studies, history, LGBTQIA+ studies, cultural studies, media studies, psychology, and queer studies. Early sociology failed to recognize sexuality as a domain of social study, so the subject only gained relevance in sociology in the second half of the 20th century. Touchstone texts from the subfield’s formation often draw on non-sociological works as well as biological, medical, and psychoanalytic approaches. Newer advances in the study of sexuality were initially spurred by feminisms and activist-scholars from the lesbian, bisexual, and gay liberation movement. As such, alongside theoretical development and empirical study, some work in the discipline retains a normative approach, seeking to clarify and advance varying definitions of sexual liberation. Contemporary sociological research on sexuality focuses on resultant inequalities: whether between genders (mostly still conceived of as either men and women) between sexual orientations (mostly still understood as either straight or gay) or between different races or ethnicities. As such, sociological study on sexualities focuses on the collective consequences of sexuality as a varied and changing institutional and normative force.

Ethnic Enclaves

Ethnic enclaves have been defined in numerous ways. The word “ethnic” is often used to refer to a particular group with a shared nationality or cultural background. Enclaves sometimes refer to the concentration of ethnic groups within a geographic area. Academic inquiry of ethnic enclaves began with Kenneth Wilson and Alejandro Portes’s study of the “immigrant enclave” formed by Cubans in Miami, which they define as a concentration of ethnic businesses employing people from the same ethnic group. Researchers have tested, expanded, and modified the “enclave hypothesis”—ethnic concentration having a protective effect against a generally hostile climate facing immigrants and ethnic minorities. Depending on the author an enclave may refer to the geographic concentration of migrants and coethnics in a neighborhood; a place with social and economic structures that diverge from those in the surrounding area; or a concentration of economic activity, particularly businesses owned and staffed by members of a single ethnic group. In the strictest sense, ethnic enclaves are made up of a high concentration of an ethnic group within a geographic space, including a large number of business owners from that community. There have been examples throughout US history of ethnic enclaves, including Cubans in Miami, New York’s Chinatown, Japanese and Korean enclaves in California, and Jewish communities in Manhattan. There are also immigrant enclaves across the world. The protective effects of enclaves are largely related to the concentration of economic power to support social, cultural, and political development for immigrant communities committed to sustaining community life within the country where an enclave is formed. Many researchers have used a partial definition of ethnic enclaves only in terms of residential concentration. From this point of view, the existing evidence shows mixed effects for living in an enclave depending on the context, aspects of the enclave studied, and relative outcomes of interest. When applied and compared, the similarities between enclaves and other community formations, such as barrios and ghettos, become relevant. Segregation most frequently serves dominant groups who use isolation to disproportionately apportion resources and exploit marginalized workers. Yet, as Cathy Yang Liu has shown, a concentration of opportunities can lead to strong social and cultural networks within ethnic enclaves. Researchers using the concept of ethnic enclaves can benefit from considering the multilayered factors of immigration, ethnic difference, urban environments, economic systems, health, and power differentials between and among residents in ethnic enclave communities and beyond.

Conservatism

Conservatism refers to one of the constituent political positions found in all contemporary democracies. It can be construed as a philosophy, an ideology, a political party, a movement, a disposition, a mode of discourse, performance style, and an emotional relationship to the political. Since the birth of modern democracies in the aftermath of the French Revolution, it has become commonplace to describe the range of political options available to the citizenry as occupying a spectrum from left to right, with a range of alternatives between the extreme poles, including a centrist position in the middle that straddles the divide. The left was associated with promoting challenges to established authorities and existing hierarchies, along with calls for increased economic equality and expanded social and political rights to all citizens, including the heretofore marginalized. This contrasts with the right, which was defined as defending inequalities and differential entitlements, concentrating matters involving rights around preserving property rights, shoring up public and social order, and promoting traditional values and conventional social relations. In this context, liberalism became a mark of political identity associated with the left, as did socialism, while conservatism, broadly construed, represented the right. This framing of politics also includes the possibility of underminings by extremism on both the left and right. For the former, the main threat since the Russian Revolution has been posed by revolutionary communism, while right-wing extremism has manifested itself in reactionary movements, including fascism and illiberal populism. Since liberalism and conservatism must be understood in relational terms, the spatial and temporal settings for the politics of opposition will vary considerably. It is impossible to do justice to the vast literature on conservatism in a bibliography such as this. What follows is a more delimited, and thus manageable examination of work on conservatism. First, it focuses on conservatism in the United States, and not elsewhere. Second, it is chiefly concerned with conservatism since the end of World War II. Third, it concentrates on the study of conservatism by sociologists and those working in cognate disciplines; while not all the authors are card-carrying sociologists, their works reflect a sociological character, although the exception to this third point is the overview section, which presents key readings by advocates of conservatism, and thus offers insider depictions of the meaning of conservatism. Fourth, this article does not concentrate solely on extremist right-wing movements; rather, in surveying the relevant literature on American conservatism broadly construed, it points to a growing consensus that the radical right wing has pushed mainstream conservatism increasingly further to the right.

Economic Institutions and Institutional Change

Interest in the institutions that structure economic behavior has a long history in sociology, extending back to the work of Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and Polanyi. With the rise of new economic sociology in the 1980s, scholars have direct renewed attention toward the informal and formal rules and conventions that structure economic life. Money, financial markets, complex organizations, and economic policies have received particular attention. One branch of scholarship in this area focuses on uncovering factors that drive the emergence or development of economic institutions. Another branch of scholarship examines the role of institutions in structuring economic behavior. A third line of research takes up the puzzle of institutional change: how stable economic conventions crumble and come to be replaced with new ones. The present article offers a broad survey of scholarship on economic institutions, with a particular focus on institutional variation and institutional change.

Gender and Social Movements

The sociological study of gender and social movements is relatively new. Until the 1970s, scholarship on social movements largely neglected questions of feminism and gender, and the fields of gender and social movements consisted of separate literatures. As a result, the major theories of social movements failed to take into account the impact of gender on the emergence, nature, and outcomes of social movements. But as mass feminist activism flourished in the United States and around the globe, so too did scholarship on gender and social movements. The earliest work in this area focused on women’s movements, both feminist and antifeminist, and applied the concepts and perspectives of social movement theory without explicitly taking into consideration the impact of gender. These studies, along with research on men’s movements, brought gender to the attention of social movement scholars by acknowledging women’s participation in political protest and men’s political experiences in gender movements, which had been ignored by mainstream social movement theory. But this body of work failed to consider systematically the effects of gender on political activism. By the 1990s, a new wave of research began to reconceptualize the relationship between gender and social movements by attending not only to how gender affects social movement structures and processes, but how social movements, in turn, affect gender. Many social movements have targeted the structures, cultural practices, and interactional norms that sustain gender inequality. Further, movements that are not oriented specifically around gender issues are also shaped by gender as a central feature of social structure, culture, and everyday life. Scholarship at the intersection of the fields of gender and social movements has had a significant impact on the cultural turn in social movement research, as well as on mainstream theories of social movements. Examining social movements through a gender lens has advanced several areas of social movement inquiry: (1) collective identity and intersectionality, (2) collective action frames, (3) movement leadership and organizations, (4) political and cultural opportunity structures and constraints, (5) movement tactics and strategies, and (6) movement outcomes. The research in this subfield and, correspondingly, this article, focuses primarily—but not exclusively—on the United States. The literature on gender and social movements has exposed many underexplored dimensions of social activism and has been foundational for the development of intersectional approaches to social movements. There is still much to learn by applying an intersectional approach that considers how power structures such as race, class, gender, and nationality intersect and the implications for social movement processes.

Urban Ethnography

If ethnography is the study of people as they negotiate their everyday lives, then urban ethnography is the study of how urban residents and other inhabitants make sense of their daily social worlds, navigate surrounding communities, and manage the broader forces that structure the urban experience. Methodologically, it privileges deep, immersive fieldwork alongside research participants. Substantively, it focuses on interactions and institutions that define urban space, whether those are public streets, neighborhood organizations, or community events. Urban ethnographies have traditionally thought of “communities” geographically, examining how the central topics of poverty, crime, culture, and peer group formation play out in delimited spaces such as neighborhoods, wards, and districts. Theoretically, it has historically tended to draw on social-constructionist and interactionist orientations, conceiving of the urban life as something “built up,” so to speak, from repeated and ritualized encounters. As one of the longest-standing and iconic subfields of sociology, anthropology, and other humanistic social sciences, urban ethnography remains one of the most influential modes of understanding social life in cities. True to form as one of the most conflictual and controversial subfields, an increasing number of scholars are pushing back on convention, insisting on the need to embrace theoretical orientations that are more critical and structurally focused, and to more adequately consider the global forces and relational dynamics that exist beyond, but fatefully impinge upon, bounded field sites. As urban ethnography’s readership has grown, so too have methodological critiques regarding replicability, as well as concerns about potential exploitation and voyeurism among its practitioners and readership.

Mass Incarceration in the United States and its Collateral Consequences

Mass incarceration is characterized by comparatively and historically extreme rates of imprisonment in the United States, which rose drastically from the early 1970s through 2007 or so. Disproportionately affecting young, Black men from neighborhoods of concentrated disadvantage, many factors contributed to the steady increase in incarceration from the early 1970s forward. While rising crime rates and harsh societal attitudes toward those convicted of crimes played a part, scholars largely argue that increases in both the likelihood of imprisonment for committing a crime and the length of prison sentences drove the increase in incarceration. Supported by more-intensive and place-based forms of policing, individuals and entire communities faced increasing contact with the criminal justice system. Underlying these policy changes lay deeper social, political, and economic drivers, which often varied by state or other jurisdictions. Ultimately, policy changes mandating longer sentences for repeat offenses (such as three-strike laws) and state and federal laws that increased the length of prison sentences for drug-related and violent crime led to a rising incarceration rate, which meant that far more Americans were serving time and for much-longer sentences than ever before. While the rate of incarceration for men has started to decline slightly, rates for women have risen. During the first two decades of the 21st century, researchers have increasingly focused their efforts on understanding and documenting the collateral consequences of mass incarceration. Beyond the individuals directly impacted, incarceration affects the lives of children and families, neighborhoods, communities, and broader society. Individuals and families especially experience detrimental effects in the education, labor market, and health spheres, while communities suffer “spillover effects,” with even those not directly touched by incarceration affected. With nearly one in thirty-six adults living under some form of correctional supervision (whether in prison or jail, or on probation or parole), and many others “marked” by their past experience with the system, mass incarceration has touched the lives of millions of Americans. Further, racial disparities throughout each phase of the criminal justice system, including in policing, arrest, conviction, and sentencing, have resulted in Americans of color disproportionately experiencing incarceration and its attendant effects. As such, mass incarceration is understood to be a major contributor to 21st-century American inequality along lines of race, class, and gender.

Women’s Employment and Economic Inequality Between Households

This article provides an overview of the emerging literature on how trends in women’s employment have affected levels of inequality between households. It also sets the stage for future research endeavors. The rise in female labor force participation, and in conjunction the rise in women’s earnings, has been one of the biggest changes in economic activity in recent decades and in many countries. These long-term trends in women’s employment and associated changes in families are discussed in the section on Family Revolution(s). As such, it is remarkable how little attention mainstream analyses of high and rising levels of economic inequality have paid to gender and women’s employment. The first section, on Economic Inequality: Horizontal versus Vertical Perspectives, sets out the distinction between two perspectives on economic inequality. The first pertains to economic differences between households across the income distribution, referred to as Vertical Economic Inequality. The second pertains to economic differences between groups, such as between women and men, referred to as Horizontal Economic Inequality. The next section, on Integrating Horizontal and Vertical Inequality, demonstrates that levels of vertical inequality are affected by horizontal inequality, in this case specifically applied to how economic differences between households are directly related to economic differences between women and men. There is by now a literature that clearly shows how the rise in women’s employment and earnings (and thus smaller horizontal differences between women and men) reduces vertical inequality between households. This has been demonstrated in a vast amount of Country-Specific Studies as well as in Country-Comparative Studies, a consensus that also resonates in a number of Research Overviews. The next section argues that although it has been convincingly demonstrated that women’s employment and earnings have had an attenuating effect on inequality between households, less is known about how and why this is the case and under which conditions. As such, it combines literature from various fields (including sociology, demography, and economics) to develop a Research Agenda to further the literature on the relationship between women’s employment and economic inequality between households. This section addresses six different questions: Who? is employed and has certain levels of earnings, and with whom do they form a household (With Whom? Homogamy and With Whom? Household Formation). These sections also cover determinants of women’s paid work, such as unpaid care- or housework. The next section covers What Income Effect? can be expected from, for instance, motherhood and housework, and whether these effects vary across the income distribution. The section on What Context? brings into focus the welfare state and public policies, and a final subsection briefly addresses the question of Which Methods? may be particularly effective to further this research agenda. This article concludes by acknowledging a few Outstanding Questions that are less developed in the literature and therefore less integrated into this article—but may nevertheless point to interesting venues for further research.