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INEQUALITY AND OPPORTUNITY: TOWARD A
STRATEGY FOR FINESSING STRUCTURAL
CONSTRAINTS
I. An American Success Story A. Irish Immigrant in 1896
- his son the Met. Life executive a. his son the utility supervisor b. his daughter who married an accountant
- his son the mentally retarded teacher a. his son the computer analyst b. his son the college professor II. Status Attainment and Occupational Mobility^ c. his daughter the politician A. The Status Attainment Model (Blau and Duncan) B. Race, Occupation, and Industry (Stolzenberg) III. Changes Over Time^ D. Race, Gender, and Class (Wright and Perrone) A. Opportunities: 1896- B. Opportunities: 1946-1973 C. Opportunities in the 1990s and Beyond IV. Toward a Model of Structural Inequality A. Components of Class: Ownership and Control B: Capital Flows and Employment Processes C. Frontiers and Secure Employment Alternative
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INEQUALITY AND OPPORTUNITY: TOWARD A
STRATEGY FOR FINESSING STRUCTURAL
CONSTRAINTS
Today I'd like to talk to you about inequality and opportunity, particularly with regard to how you might get maximum benefit from your education in your efforts to find a good job, earn lots of money, and retire in relative comfort. As will become apparent, you are, in general, privileged. Most of you chose the right parents. You are already getting more education than the average American, and you are probably headed for a favorable occupation (or class position), so you should be relieved to know that you will probably continue to lead lives of privilege, even if you don't choose the right industrial sector and firm.
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university, with tenure, two published books, a series of published articles, a nice house, an excellent retirement package, a decent income, and a lovely wife and daughter. You too could be an American success story. In some ways, most of you already have a headstart. My grandfather was born in Ireland in 1876. He was a landless farmer (or peasant) who managed, in 1896, at the age of twenty, to book passage for New York, working as a waiter on a passenger ship, serving meals to rich folks in order to pay his way to America. When he got here he was able to find work as a waiter (the skill he had learned on board). Although he didn't have much education, he was able to make a living and to raise a family of five children before he died in 1929 (at the age of fifty-three). Three of his five children were teenagers when he died, and most of them worked their way through high school during the
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depression (the stock market crashed in 1929 and the economy remained in a deep depression until about 1941, when the U.S. mobilization for WWII revitalized the American economy). Before the war, two of his sons worked at the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company in New York. After the war, one son returned to the Met and worked his way up through the ranks, retiring as a vice-president, with stock options and excellent retirement benefits. The other son (my father) went to college at Fordham University (using the benefits of the GI Bill) and obtained a master's degree in special education. He was proud to be the first Hogan to graduate from college and the most educated Hogan of his generation. Of course, the children of these two sons now have children of their own and have benefitted from the advantages of a middle (or upper-middle) class upbringing. The oldest boys of each of the two brothers joined the military, but only the school
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salary before he and his wife retired, also in North Carolina, where they bought a condo on the beach. The school teacher's eldest daughter (my big sister) graduated from Berkeley and tried unsuccessfully to survive as a small business owner. She then married a furniture upholsterer (with an engineering degree from Purdue) and, more recently, was elected city auditor. She makes more than me (and probably even more than my brother), but I don't know what kind of retirement benefits she has accumulated. So what lessons might we draw from this tale of three generations of Irish American workers? Clearly, we have come a long way from the days when our ancestors lost the family farm. Generally, each generation has experienced mobility through some combination of education and employment experience, but it seems that the most educated men in my father's generation did not earn the most money or achieve the
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most prestigious occupations (the businessmen made more than the professionals). In my generation, the effects of education are unclear. Most of the children of the college educated Hogans also attended college. A few exceeded their parents' education, but it is not clear that the most educated (myself and one of my cousins) are making the most money. We do, however, have the most employment security (we both have tenure). Before we try to explain the divergent paths of the Hogans, let's turn to some theory and some data that might suggest a more general pattern of intergenerational mobililty from 1896 to
Status Attainment and Occupational Mobility Unfortunately, sociology was an infant discipline in 1896, when my grandfather started working as a waiter. By the time my father returned from World War II, however, sociology was
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my father's generation. Father's occupation had a direct effect on son's education and occupation. Father's education had a direct effect on son's education. Father's income had a direct effect on son's education and income (but no direct effect on his occupation). Nevertheless, despite some "inheritance" of occupation, education, and income, it was clear that son's education had a significant direct effect on his occupation, which had a significant effect on his income. The implications were clear. Although choosing the right parents was a tremendous advantage, those who obtained higher education and thus obtained high prestige jobs earned significantly higher incomes. No doubt, this finding, which has become conventional wisdom (if not common sense), has inspired your parents (and, perhaps, yourselves) to avail themselves of the opportunities for higher education.
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Since then, in response, at least partly, to the Civil Rights Movement and concerns about equal opportunity, sociologists have attempted to look at structural and status constraints on mobility--specifically, the effects of race and gender (status) and industry and class (structure) in predicting employment earnings. Stolzenberg (AJS Nov 1975) looked at education, occupation, and wage differences between black and white men, using data from the 1960 census. Specifically, he looked at the effects of education and work experience in predicting income for black and white men within specific occupations and across all occupations. What he found was that blacks and whites with similar education and work experience and within the same occupation earned comparable wages. Black-white income differences (which were considerable) were due to the lack of blacks in the better occupations--occupations that earned the
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equal access to the sheltered labor markets--the occupations and the industrial sectors that offer the greatest benefits and the greatest returns on education and work experience. Research has uniformly indicated that nonwhites and women are under- represented in the sheltered occupational and industrial labor markets. In February of 1977, Wright and Perrone (ASR, vol 42:32-
- published the results of their 1969 Survey of Working Conditions, in which they employed "Marxist" class categories in regression models that explained income inequality in terms of class (employer, manager, and worker), race (black, white), and gender (male, female). They found that racial differences in earnings for males could be explained by the fact that blacks were less likely to be employers and managers and that blacks generally earned less than whites. Blacks with comparable education and class position earned less than whites, but they
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obtained comparable returns on education (within class). Regardless of race, managers and employers earned more income and received greater returns on education, but within class, the return on education was comparable across races. When comparing men and women, however, the findings were distinctively different. White women earned less than men, even within class, but they also obtained significantly lower returns on education, even within class. Since then (1977), sociologists have been gathering more data and estimating new models to explain why racial and gender differences persist and why race and gender differences are qualitatively different. Simply stated, if the problem is discrimination, why are white women and black men so different? How do race and gender interact with the structure of inequality and opportunity, and how have the Civil Rights
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father (and his brothers) reaped the benefits of being upwardly mobile in a nation that was establishing itself as the leading Western industrial nation, which dominated international trade in the production of "high tech" goods and services. I graduated from high school in 1969 and enjoyed the tail-end of those benefits. I was able to get Guaranteed Student Loans and Work Study in the Seventies and Eighties, and I was invited to join the Teamsters in 1969 (just in case I didn't want to go back to school but decided, instead, to become a profesional truckdriver). You, of course, are less fortunate. The Cold War is over. Germany and Japan won. I drive a Toyota. You would probably like to drive a Porche or a BMW. I'd rather drive a Volvo or a Mercedes. We could continue down the list--from SONY to RCA, but I think you get the idea. You are entering a labor market in a nation in decline. That limits your opportunities and suggests that you might have been wise to
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learn either German or Japanese. Russian would have been a poor choice, but who could have guessed twenty years ago. That's your problem. America is a second-rate industrial power, but a first-rate fighting machine. Maybe you should have gone R.O.T.C.
Toward A Model of Structural Inequality So how can we pull these threads together and explain the structure and process of inequality and opportunity? First, we need to recognize the contradictory components of class. You are being educated to assume positions in the managerial- professional class, and it is important that you realize your options. Managers are privileged because they rationalize the production of goods and services. They work in large, "core" firms, where products are standardized and the return on investment is predictable. In these "sheltered" occupational and
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for their employer's profit, while professional are playing the game of search and you might find. Capital tends to flow toward reliable returns on investment (toward managers and away from professionals), but there are always entrepreneurialial capitalists willing to take the risk--investing in Apple rather than IBM, for example, at the frontier of micro-computer technology in the late 1970s. Ultimately, the reliable investments (and the large, core firms) provide the most reliable earnings and retirement benefits. Nevertheless, particularly for single white males, the prospects of windfall profits in industrial frontiers can be enticing. Unfortunately, for women who must also devote fulltime unpaid labor to their familes, and for nonwhites and others (particularly the upwardly mobile) who must support their poor relations (including their parents and siblings) and who don't have the benefits of inherited wealth, the prospects for windfall
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profits in the frontiers of industry and occupation are too risky. Furthermore, the responsibility for poor relations (or successful spouses) limits their ability to follow the "core" jobs across state or national boundaries. Women and nonwhites (or other traditionally disadvantaged workers) cannot follow the opportunities offered in industrial frontiers or stable core industries. Thus we reproduce inequality, generation after generation, but you should be happy. You are privileged, as I was. You Purdue students (particularly you white males in the engineering school) should be doing fine even as the American empire declines. You are privileged. You chose the right parents. You chose the right occupation. If only you could have chosen the right time to be born.
