front cover of An Ugly Word
An Ugly Word
Rethinking Race in Italy and the United States
Ann Morning
Russell Sage Foundation, 2022
Scholars and politicians often assume a significant gap between the ways that Americans and Europeans think about race. According to this template, in the U.S. race is associated with physical characteristics, while in Western Europe race has disappeared, and discrimination is based on insurmountable cultural differences. However, little research has addressed how average Americans and Europeans actually think and talk about race. In An Ugly Word, sociologists Ann Morning and Marcello Maneri examine American and Italian understandings of group difference in order to determine if and how they may differ.
 
Morning and Maneri interviewed over 150 people across the two countries about differences among what they refer to as “descent-based groups.” Using this concept allowed them to sidestep the language of “race” and “ethnicity,” which can be unnecessarily narrow, poorly defined, or even offensive to some. Drawing on these interviews, the authors find that while ways of speaking about group difference vary considerably across the Atlantic, underlying beliefs about it do not. The similarity in American and Italian understandings of difference was particularly evident when discussing sports. Both groups relied heavily on traditional stereotypes of Black physicality to explain Black athletes’ overrepresentation in sports like U.S. football and their underrepresentation in sports like swimming – contradicting the claims that a biological notion of race is a distinctly American phenomenon.
 
While American and Italian concepts of difference may overlap extensively, they are not identical. Interviews in Italy were more likely to reveal beliefs about groups’ innate, unchangeable temperaments, such as friendly Senegalese and dishonest Roma. And where physical difference was seen by Italians as superficial and unimportant, cultural difference was perceived as deeply meaningful and consequential. In contrast, U.S. interviewees saw cultural difference as supremely malleable—and often ascribed the same fluidity to racial identity, which they believed stemmed from culture as well as biology. In light of their findings, Morning and Maneri propose a new approach to understanding cross-cultural beliefs about descent-based difference that includes identifying the traits people believe differentiate groups, how they believe those traits are acquired, and whether they believe these traits can change.
 
An Ugly Word is an illuminating, cross-national examination of the ways in which people around the world make sense of race and difference.
 
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The Uneasy Partnership
Gene Martin Lyons
Russell Sage Foundation, 1969
This comprehensive work—relevant to the major issue of the relation of social knowledge to political power—argues for strengthening the role of the social sciences in the federal government. It calls for a central organization for the social sciences and for better integration of research within the federal agencies. It underscores the various factors that might help to bring about this goal.
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Unequal City
Race, Schools, and Perceptions of Injustice
Carla Shedd is assistant professor of sociology and African American studies at Columbia University.
Russell Sage Foundation, 2015
Chicago has long struggled with racial residential segregation, high rates of poverty, and deepening class stratification, and it can be a challenging place for adolescents to grow up. Unequal City examines the ways in which Chicago’s most vulnerable residents navigate their neighborhoods, life opportunities, and encounters with the law. In this pioneering analysis of the intersection of race, place, and opportunity, sociologist and criminal justice expert Carla Shedd illuminates how schools either reinforce or ameliorate the social inequalities that shape the worlds of these adolescents.

Shedd draws from an array of data and in-depth interviews with Chicago youth to offer new insight into this understudied group. Focusing on four public high schools with differing student bodies, Shedd reveals how the predominantly low-income African American students at one school encounter obstacles their more affluent, white counterparts on the other side of the city do not face. Teens often travel long distances to attend school which, due to Chicago’s segregated and highly unequal neighborhoods, can involve crossing class, race, and gang lines. As Shedd explains, the disadvantaged teens who traverse these boundaries daily develop a keen “perception of injustice,” or the recognition that their economic and educational opportunities are restricted by their place in the social hierarchy.

Adolescents’ worldviews are also influenced by encounters with law enforcement while traveling to school and during school hours. Shedd tracks the rise of metal detectors, surveillance cameras, and pat-downs at certain Chicago schools. Along with police procedures like stop-and-frisk, these prison-like practices lead to distrust of authority and feelings of powerlessness among the adolescents who experience mistreatment either firsthand or vicariously. Shedd finds that the racial composition of the student body profoundly shapes students’ perceptions of injustice. The more diverse a school is, the more likely its students of color will recognize whether they are subject to discriminatory treatment. By contrast, African American and Hispanic youth whose schools and neighborhoods are both highly segregated and highly policed are less likely to understand their individual and group disadvantage due to their lack of exposure to youth of differing backgrounds.
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Unequal Time
Gender, Class, and Family in Employment Schedules
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.
Russell Sage Foundation, 2014
Life is unpredictable. Control over one’s time is a crucial 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, shaping employees’ capacities to determine both their work schedules and home lives, and exacerbating differences between men and women, and the economically privileged and disadvantaged. Unequal Time investigates the interconnected schedules of four occupations in the health sector—professional-class doctors and nurses, and working-class EMTs and nursing assistants. While doctors and EMTs are predominantly men, nurses and nursing assistants are overwhelmingly women. In all four occupations, workers routinely confront schedule uncertainty, or unexpected events that interrupt, reduce, or extend work hours. Yet, Clawson and Gerstel show that members of these four occupations experience the effects of schedule uncertainty in very distinct ways, depending on both gender and class. But doctors, who are professional-class and largely male, have significant control over their schedules and tend to work long hours because they earn respect from their peers for doing so. By contrast, nursing assistants, who are primarily female and working-class, work demanding hours because they are most likely to be penalized for taking time off, no matter how valid the reasons. Unequal Time also shows that the degree of control that workers hold over their schedules can either reinforce or challenge conventional gender roles. Male doctors frequently work overtime and rely heavily 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 in order to dedicate more time to home life. Surprisingly, Clawson and Gerstel find that in the working class occupations, workers frequently undermine traditional gender roles, with male EMTs taking significant time from work for child care and women nursing assistants working extra hours to financially support their children and other relatives. Employers often underscore these disparities by allowing their upper-tier workers (doctors and nurses) the flexibility that enables their gender roles at home, including, for example, reshaping their workplaces in order to accommodate female nurses’ family obligations. Low-wage workers, on the other hand, are pressured to put their jobs before the unpredictable events they might face outside of work. Though we tend to consider personal and work scheduling an individual affair, Clawson and Gerstel present a provocative new case that time in the workplace also collective. A valuable resource for workers’ advocates and policymakers alike, Unequal Time exposes how social inequalities reverberate through a web of interconnected professional relationships and schedules, significantly shaping the lives of workers and their families.
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Uneven Tides
Rising Inequality in America
Sheldon H. Danziger
Russell Sage Foundation, 1993
Inequality has been on the rise in America for more than two decades. This socially divisive trend began in the economic doldrums of the 1970s and continued through the booming 1980s, when surging economic tides clearly failed to lift all ships. Instead, escalating inequality in both individual earnings and family income widened the gulf between rich and poor and led to the much-publicized decline of the middle class. Uneven Tides brings together a distinguished group of economists to confront the crucial questions about this unprecedented rise in inequality. Just how large and pervasive was it? What were its principal causes? And why did it continue in the 1980s, when previous periods of national economic growth have generally reduced inequality? Reviewing the best current evidence, the essays in Uneven Tides show that rising inequality is a complex phenomenon, the result of a web of circumstances inherent in the nation's current industrial, social, and political situation. Once attributed to the rising supply of inexperienced workers—as baby boomers, new immigrants, and women entered the labor market—the growing inequality in individual earnings is revealed in Uneven Tides to be the direct result of the economy's increasing demand for skilled workers. The authors explore many of the possible causes of this trend, including the employment shift from manufacturing to the service sector, the heightened importance of technology in the workplace, the decline of unionization, and the intensified efforts to compete in a global marketplace. Uneven Tides also examines the equally dramatic growth in the inequality of family income, and reviews the effects of family size, the age and education of household heads, and the transition to both two-earner and single-parent families. Although these demographic shifts played a role, what emerges most clearly is an understanding of the powerful influence of public policy, as increasingly regressive taxes, declining welfare benefits, and a stagnant minimum wage continue to amplify the effects of market forces on income. With the rise in inequality now much in the headlines, it is clear that our nation's ability to reverse these shifting currents requires deeper understanding of their causes and consequences. Uneven Tides is the first book to get beyond the news stories to a clear analysis of the changing fortunes of America's families. It should be required reading for anyone with a serious interest in the economic underpinnings of the country's social problems.
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Union Representation Elections
Law and Reality
Julius Getman
Russell Sage Foundation, 1976
Provides the first major effort to test the rules and regulations that underlie current practices in union elections and, at the same time, explores the role played by the National Labor Relations Board in regulating these elections. The book reports the findings of an empirical field study of thirty-one union representation elections involving over 1,000 employees to determine their pre-campaign attitudes, voting intent, actual vote, and the effect of the campaign on voting. It focuses on campaign issues, unlawful campaigning, working conditions, demographic factors, job-related variables, and other topics.
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Universal Coverage of Long-Term Care in the United States
Can We Get There from Here?
Douglas A. Wolfe
Russell Sage Foundation, 2013
As millions of baby boomers retire and age in the coming years, more American families will confront difficult choices about the long-term care of their loved ones. The swelling ranks of the disabled and elderly who need such care—including home care, adult day care, or a nursing home stay—are faced with a strained, inequitable and expensive system. How will American society and policy adapt to this demographic transition? In Universal Coverage of Long-Term Care in the United States, editors Nancy Folbre and Douglas Wolf and an expert group of care researchers assess the current U.S. long-term care policies and exercise what can be learned from other countries facing similar care demands. After the high-profile suspension of the Obama Administration’s public long-term insurance program in 2011, Robert Hudson and Howard Gleckman provide concrete suggestions for lowering the cost and improving the quality of long-term care coverage in America. In a deeply personal and empirically rigorous analysis, family care expert Carol Levine draws crucial lessons from her experience as a caregiver for her ailing husband. She sheds light on the often fraught interactions that occur between the formal care system and family caregivers and analyzes how public policy can best support long-term family care. The volume next examines recent reforms in other developed countries and finds valuable lessons for American policy-makers. Contributors David Bell and Alison Bowes discuss the provision of personal care services in Scotland, which have been publicly financed since 2002. Their analysis shows that the new program reduced costs improved efficiency and allowed more recipients to receive care. The volume assesses the political and institutional prospects for moving towards a truly universal long-term care system in the United States. Robyn Stone provides a sobering overview of the formal, paid long-term care workforce in America, which is in crisis due to increasing demand and a shortage of qualified workers. Economist Leonard Burman focuses on public finances of the long-term care system, which will come under increasing strain as more Americans rely on Medicaid to pay for their long-term care. In the volume’s concluding chapter, Folbre and Wolf summarize criticisms of existing long-term care policies and outline particular reforms that can move the United States toward a universal system of long-term care insurance. Universal Coverage of Long-Term Care in the United States provides an essential resource on how to improve the long-term care sector in America and helps advance the national debate on this pressing topic. This volume is available for free download on the Foundation’s website, as are the volume’s individual chapters.
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Unmarried Couples with Children
Paula England
Russell Sage Foundation, 2007
Today, a third of American children are born outside of marriage, up from one child in twenty in the 1950s, and rates are even higher among low-income Americans. Many herald this trend as one of the most troubling of our time. But the decline in marriage does not necessarily signal the demise of the two parent family—over 80 percent of unmarried couples are still romantically involved when their child is born and nearly half are living together. Most claim they plan to marry eventually. Yet half have broken up by their child's third birthday. What keeps some couples together and what tears others apart? After a breakup, how do fathers so often disappear from their children's lives? An intimate portrait of the challenges of partnering and parenting in these families, Unmarried Couples with Children presents a variety of unique findings. Most of the pregnancies were not explicitly planned, but some couples feel having a child is the natural course of a serious relationship. Many of the parents are living with their child plus the mother's child from a previous relationship. When the father also has children from a previous relationship, his visits to see them at their mother's house often cause his current partner to be jealous. Breakups are more often driven by sexual infidelity or conflict than economic problems. After couples break up, many fathers complain they are shut out, especially when the mother has a new partner. For their part, mothers claim to limit dads' access to their children because of their involvement with crime, drugs, or other dangers. For couples living together with their child several years after the birth, marriage remains an aspiration, but something couples are resolutely unwilling to enter without the financial stability they see as a sine qua non of marriage. They also hold marriage to a high relational standard, and not enough emotional attention from their partners is women's number one complaint. Unmarried Couples with Children is a landmark study of the family lives of nearly fifty American children born outside of a marital union at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Based on personal narratives gathered from both mothers and fathers over the first four years of their children's lives, and told partly in the couples' own words, the story begins before the child is conceived, takes the reader through the tumultuous months of pregnancy to the moment of birth, and on through the child's fourth birthday. It captures in rich detail the complex relationship dynamics and powerful social forces that derail the plans of so many unmarried parents. The volume injects some much-needed reality into the national discussion about family values, and reveals that the issues are more complex than our political discourse suggests.
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Unveiling Inequality
A World-Historical Perspective
Roberto Patricio Korzeniewicz
Russell Sage Foundation, 2009
Despite the vast expansion of global markets during the last half of the twentieth century, social science still most often examines and measures inequality and social mobility within individual nations rather than across national boundaries. Every country has both rich and poor populations making demands—via institutions, political processes, or even conflict—on how their resources will be distributed. But shifts in inequality in one country can precipitate accompanying shifts in another. Unveiling Inequality authors Roberto Patricio Korzeniewicz and Timothy Patrick Moran make the case that within-country analyses alone have not adequately illuminated our understanding of global stratification. The authors present a comprehensive new framework that moves beyond national boundaries to analyze economic inequality and social mobility on a global scale and from a historical perspective. Assembling data on patterns of inequality in more than ninety-six countries, Unveiling Inequality reframes the relationship between globalization and inequality within and between nations. Korzeniewicz and Moran first examine two different historical patterns—"High Inequality Equilibrium" and "Low Inequality Equilibrium"—and question whether increasing equality, democracy, and economic growth are inextricably linked as nations modernize. Inequality is best understood as a complex set of relational interactions that unfold globally over time. So the same institutional mechanisms that have historically reduced inequality within some nations have also often accentuated the selective exclusion of populations from poorer countries and enhanced high inequality equilibrium between nations. National identity and citizenship are the fundamental contemporary bases of stratification and inequality in the world, the authors conclude. Drawing on these insights, the book recasts patterns of mobility within global stratification. The authors detail the three principal paths available for social mobility from a global perspective: within-country mobility, mobility through national economic growth, and mobility through migration. Korzeniewicz and Moran provide strong evidence that the nation where we are born is the single greatest deter-mining factor of how we will live. Too much sociological literature on inequality focuses on the plight of "have-nots" in wealthy nations who have more opportunity for social mobility than even the average individual in nations perennially at the bottom of the wealth distribution scale. Unveiling Inequality represents a major paradigm shift in thinking about social inequality and a clarion call to reorient discussions of economic justice in world-historical global terms.
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Urban Inequality
Evidence From Four Cities
Alice O'Connor
Russell Sage Foundation, 2001
Despite today's booming economy, secure work and upward mobility remain out of reach for many central-city residents. Urban Inequality presents an authoritative new look at the racial and economic divisions that continue to beset our nation's cities. Drawing upon a landmark survey of employers and households in four U.S. metropolises, Atlanta, Boston, Detroit, and Los Angeles, the study links both sides of the labor market, inquiring into the job requirements and hiring procedures of employers, as well as the skills, housing situation, and job search strategies of workers. Using this wealth of evidence, the authors discuss the merits of rival explanations of urban inequality. Do racial minorities lack the skills and education demanded by employers in today's global economy? Have the jobs best matched to the skills of inner-city workers moved to outlying suburbs? Or is inequality the result of racial discrimination in hiring, pay, and housing? Each of these explanations may provide part of the story, and the authors shed new light on the links between labor market disadvantage, residential segregation, and exclusionary racial attitudes. In each of the four cities, old industries have declined and new commercial centers have sprung up outside the traditional city limits, while new immigrant groups have entered all levels of the labor market. Despite these transformations, longstanding hostilities and lines of segregation between racial and ethnic communities are still apparent in each city. This book reveals how the disadvantaged position of many minority workers is compounded by racial antipathies and stereotypes that count against them in their search for housing and jobs. Until now, there has been little agreement on the sources of urban disadvantage and no convincing way of adjudicating between rival theories. Urban Inequality aims to advance our understanding of the causes of urban inequality as a first step toward ensuring that the nation's cities can prosper in the future without leaving their minority residents further behind. A Volume in the Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality
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