This study considers the role of religious habitus and self-concept in educational stratification. We follow 3,238 adolescents for 13 years by linking the National Study of Youth and Religion to the National Student Clearinghouse. Survey data reveal that girls with a Jewish upbringing have two distinct postsecondary patterns compared to girls with a non-Jewish upbringing, even after controlling for social origins: (1) they are 23 percentage points more likely to graduate college, and (2) they graduate from much more selective colleges. We then analyze 107 interviews with 33 girls from comparable social origins interviewed repeatedly between adolescence and emerging adulthood. Girls raised by Jewish parents articulate a self-concept marked by ambitious career goals and an eagerness to have new experiences. For these girls, elite higher education and graduate school are central to attaining self-concept congruence. In contrast, girls raised by non-Jewish parents tend to prioritize motherhood and have humbler employment aims. For them, graduating from college, regardless of its prestige, is sufficient for self-concept congruence. We conclude that religious subculture is a key factor in educational stratification, and divergent paths to self-concept congruence can help explain why educational outcomes vary by religion in gendered ways.
Sociologists have shown causal effects of the community presence of organizations on connectedness, crime, entrepreneurship, and crisis resilience. But city- and community-level studies conceal how organizational features shape the production of urban integration. We contend that organizations may produce social integration, creating social ties among constituents, as well as systemic integration, connecting constituents to institutional resources. We argue that organizations’ ability to produce social and systemic integration is principally due to whether organizational members draw on suite-level expertise (“I know the system”) or street-level expertise (“I know the people”) when they relate to their constituents. Representative survey data of nonprofits in the San Francisco Bay Area collected over 15 years shows that nonprofits’ production of urban integration depends on these forms of expertise. Comparative interviews explain why professional staff and managers boost systemic integration, whereas volunteer staff and members foster social integration. The paper contributes to scholarship in organizational and urban sociology by examining the organizational production of social and systemic integration and by shedding light on unintended consequences of professionalization. Our results challenge the stylized fact that nonprofits necessarily create community and suggest alternative ways to understand and operationalize how organizations are embedded in their urban environment.
The topics of differential recruitment to activism and its longer-term impacts have generated substantial empirical research. Yet, the lack of longitudinal studies of movement participation have limited our understanding of individual activism’s dynamics over time. Here, we use six years of longitudinal survey data and two waves of interview data from a class of college students before, throughout, and after college to examine predictors of variation in college activism, the ebb and flow of activism over the course of college, and the effect of college activism on activism two years post-graduation. Our findings dispute one consistent empirical claim in social movement studies and confirm another. Counter to the scholarly finding on the weak impact of predisposition on recruitment, we find that predisposition powerfully predicts variation in college activism. Consistent with the claim that significant early activism is linked with future activism, we find that students’ activism at the end of college significantly predicts their engagement in activism after graduation.
Nonprofit organizations (NPOs) contribute to vital neighborhoods by building communities of citizens and acting as intermediaries between citizens and organizations. We investigate how NPOs’ engagement in social and systemic integration is shaped by neighborhood characteristics, and how it relates to the organizational practices of managerialism and organizational democracy. We combine survey data with administrative data from a representative sample of NPOs in a major European city. To measure the effect of neighborhood on organizational integration, we separated the city into 7,840 grid cells characterized by population, per capita income, share of immigrant population, and density of organizations. Findings indicate that managerialism positively relates with systemic integration, as organizational democracy relates with social integration. Neighborhood characteristics, however, are not related with NPOs’ engagement in integration. Our findings contribute to research on urban social cohesion by illuminating the interplay between NPOs’ organizing practices, local neighborhoods, and contributions to both forms of integration.
Researchers have investigated the demography and styles of engagement of those who enroll in MOOCs but have lent little attention to how learners navigate MOOCs' ambiguity as academic certifications. Analyzing semi-structured interviews with 60 people who devoted substantial time to at least one MOOC between 2014-2017, we find that people use MOOCs to build skills for application at work and home, build relationships, navigate life transitions, and enhance formal presentations of self, at the same time that they disagree on the meaning of MOOC completions as official academic accomplishments. Our findings build theory on the multi-dimensional character of credential prestige that can inform educational social scientists and credential providers in an increasingly complicated postsecondary ecosystem.
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