Recent studies suggest that parenthood may have negative consequences for the psychological well-being of adults. Adults with children at home report that they are less happy and less satisfied with their lives than other groups. They also appear to worry more and to experience higher levels of anxiety and depression. The overall difference between parents and nonparents appears to be small, although it has increased during the past two decades. Differences between parents and nonparents stem from economic and time constraints, which in turn arise from general social trends such as the increase in women’s labor force participation and the increase in marital disruption and single parenthood. We expect these trends to continue in the near future, reducing the desire for children and increasing gender conflict over the division of parental obligations. Parental strain might be alleviated by some form of state-supported childcare or child allowance.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. American Sociological Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to American Sociological Review.Patrimonial states and their chartered East India companies propelled the first wave of European colonialism in Asia during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The metropolitan principals of these organizations faced special problems in monitoring and controlling their own colonial agents. Focusing primarily on the Dutch United East Indies Company and secondarily on its English counterpart, I argue that the network structure of each organization affected the degree to which relationships between patrimonial principals and their agents could serve as a disciplinary device. Dutch decline was imminent when alternative opportunities for private gain, available via the ascending English East India Company, allowed Dutch colonial servants to evade their own patrimonial chain and encouraged its organizational breakdown. Features of network structure determined whether colonial agents saw better alternatives to the official patrimonial hierarchy, when they could act on them, and whether principals could respond. importance and one that illustrates the importance of network structures in epochal social change. The story of early modern European colonial enterprise should interest social theorists as well as students of the past on other grounds as well: It reveals both the potential fruitfulness of principal/agent models for comparative historical sociology and the need to better specify these models systemically and historically. WHY THE NETHERLANDS? SETTING THE SCENEIn its first, triumphant, phase, the seventeenth-century Golden Age (Gouden Eeuw), the Netherlands established an unprecedented position of world power. Dutch developments during this period illuminate the general character of the first wave of European colonial enterprise. The basic structure of early modern European colonialism was created when merchant capitalists and their home states joined together to charter largescale monopoly companies aimed at global commercial and imperial dominance. The Dutch pioneered key aspects of the chartered company form with the foundation of the United East Indies Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, or VOC) in 1602. The VOC merged individuals' assets into a single permanent ongoing enterprise, and was invested with sovereign rights over foreign territory and vassals. Chartered companies were quintessentially patrimonial forms, conjoining economic and sovereign political goals at the behest of the ruler's personal discretion. l

This paper documents and estimates the extent of underrepresentation of women and people of color on the pages of Wikipedia devoted to contemporary American sociologists. In contrast to the demographic diversity of the discipline, sociologists represented on Wikipedia are largely white men. The gender and racial/ethnic gaps in likelihood of representation have exhibited little change over time. Using novel data, we estimate the "risk" of having a Wikipedia page for a sample of contemporary sociologists. We show that the observed differences (in academic rank, length of career, and notability measured with both H-index and departmental reputation) between men and women sociologists and whites and nonwhites, respectively, explain only about half of the differences in the likelihood of being represented on Wikipedia. The article also enumerates both supply-and demand-side mechanisms that may account for these continuing gaps in representation.

This paper reviews and reconstructs recent feminist work on welfare states and social policy regimes. We argue that the concept of "regime" should be stretched to incorporate the way that signs organize the relations among subjects authorized to operate on the field of power. We focus on feminist debates over the status of "maternalism" in welfare movements and states to put forward our expanded, culturalist conceptualization of gender regimes. Feminist research on welfare states has been an intellectually adventurous as well as a passionately political enterprise. Feminists have boldly broken with key conventions that inform sociological explanations of state social provision and regulation. So, for example, feminists no longer assume, as modernization theorists and structuralist Marxists do, that the main contours of welfare state development can be explained by the requirements of capitalist economic reproduction; nor do they insist, a la power resource modelers, that what matters most is the balance of forces between labor, and capital. Feminist researchers do assume from the get-go that gender-that is, in the most minimal sense, definitions of femininity and masculinity-has a formative role in state making, as it does in all known social arenas. 1 But feminists have been increasingly open to Social Politics Spring 2001

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