Generating Social Stratification: Toward a New Research Agenda - Review

Administrative Science Quarterly,  March, 1999  by Ronald Breiger

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Alan C. Kerckhoff, ed. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1996. 358 pp. $59.00 cloth.

This volume is the result of a conference organized by Alan Kerckhoff with the aim of bringing together specialists on stratification processes that occur early in life, especially in educational institutions, and those who focus on labor-force processes in an integrative effort to take stock of important research and to set the agenda for continuing investigations of "the entire stratification process." The 21 authors succeed in providing a wide-ranging collection of 15 insightful chapters, focused on the institutional contexts that shape careers.

In contrast to the emphasis of the early stratification research on father-son mobility tables, or to concerns limited by the "basic model" of stratification begun by Blau and Duncan, or to a focus on recent "more sophisticated theories, new analytical models, and much better data" encouraging a return to tables of parent-child comparisons, Kerckhoff (p. xi) prefers to see this volume as heralding "an emerging fourth generation" of stratification research, distinctive owing to its stress on stratification "processes" as well as structures. In the opening chapter, Angela O'Rand provides an insightful and masterful distillation of both "traditional institutional approaches" and the newer "relational approaches" as she seeks to set the agenda of stratification research on "the essential tension between the structuration and the individualization of the life course across institutional contexts" (p. 4). The life course perspective provides the central organizing principle for O'Rand's integrative effort of research on culture, networks, demography, and social psychology. The volume's title is specified for this reader in O'Rand's assertion (p. 7) that "the synchronization of educational, family, work, leisure, health and other transitions is the central generating mechanism of the life course."

Part 1 of the volume, devoted to conceptualizing careers and stratification processes, moves on with Jeylan Mortimer's call for joining social psychological and structural approaches in the study of linkages between school and work and their implications for achievement over the life course and Kerckhoff's opening up of the school-work nexus in a comparative context by following up his observation that the U.S. boasts highly decentralized control of education and relative autonomy of employing organizations. Other agenda-setting reviews of research in this book are by Adam Gamoran (a review and assessment of research on stratification within levels of schooling and its effect on students' careers), Maureen Hallinan (on school reforms, including magnet schools and school-to-work programs, and their relation to student learning and achievement), and Arne Kalleberg, who speculates on the national and global conditions that might lead to an overall upgrading of the skills of the labor force, versus a "pessimistic" scenario in which a small, highly skilled core of employees benefiting from firm "flexibility" would coexist with a large, residualized periphery.

Each of the remaining chapters provides a research report as well as welcome conceptualization. Part 2 focuses on school contexts and processes, part 3 on linkages between education and the labor force, and part 4 on comparative and global contexts.

In his substantive chapter, Kerckhoff (p. 38) proposes that "we can use the concepts of career, career line and trajectory as tools to generate a map of stratification processes throughout the life course." To this reader, the focus on concrete specification of career structures and processes - a concern with how life course issues get worked out within specific institutions or times and places, rather than a rush to generalizations of high degree and little context - is the main integrative thread and great contribution of this volume. I will cite several of the major examples of this fine-grained institutional specificity, with reference to each part of the volume beyond the first.

In their chapter in part 2, Karl Alexander and Doris Entwistle follow students in Baltimore from first grade to middle school to describe inertial effects of low early placement, gaining the research benefit of studying sequences of moves through the institutionalized pathways and switches. Charles Bidwell, Stephen Plank, and Chandra Muller report findings from their multi-wave study of the adolescent and early adult life course, in which students in twelve schools were queried about their friendship networks; in contrast to literature on the importance of families relative to schools, a suggestion that cautiously emerges from this research is that high school may be seen "as an array of formal and informal social structures that make it an important locus for interventions designed to increase the occupational information effectively available to young people" (p. 126). Douglas Willms provides a case study from Scotland on a policy change, new legislation allowing school choice, and its effect on the subsequent increase in school segregation by social class.