Six sociologists are among the 19 leading social scientists recently appointed as 2016–2017 Visiting Scholars at the Russell Sage Foundation. During their tenure at the Foundation, the Visiting Scholars will pursue research and writing projects that will promote the Foundation’s commitment to strengthening the social sciences. All Visiting Scholars undertake timely social science research and apply their research to significant social problems. While Visiting Scholars typically work on projects related to the Foundation’s current programs, a number of scholars whose research falls outside the Foundation’s active programs also participate.
Katharine Donato (Vanderbilt University) will analyze how race and gender affect immigrant incorporation in the U.S. She will investigate immigrant women’s participation in the labor force, tracking how marital status and education affect economic outcomes of immigrants in comparison to the native-born. She will also draw from a set of interviews to explore how immigrants assimilate by constructing and reconstructing their identities based on the existing racial hierarchy.
Cynthia Feliciano (University of California-Irvine) and Rubén Rumbaut (University of California-Irvine) will work on a book that explores the socioeconomic, cultural, and political incorporation of the immigrant second generation and how they completed their adult transitions during and after the Great Recession. Based on a unique panel study of respondents now in their late thirties, spanning a quarter of a century of their life course from mid adolescence to middle adulthood, the project examines their educational and occupational attainment, intergenerational mobility, family and identity formation, political views, and linguistic patterns in a context of widening economic inequality.
Arne L. Kalleberg (University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill) will trace the historical evolution of corporate power and inequality in the United States. He will examine how shifts in the balance of power among corporations, labor, and government have led to changes in economic and social inequality throughout different periods. He will explore the relationship between increasing corporate power and the rise of low-wage jobs, polarization of the economy, and the shrinking of the middle class.
Chandra Muller (University of Texas-Austin) will examine how education and skills development influence midlife labor force participation among a racially and ethnically diverse group of workers. She will examine how high school and postsecondary education contribute to labor force success and flexibility in midlife work. She will also investigate how the relationships between educational training and labor force success may differ for workers based on race, gender, and immigration status.
Cecilia L. Ridgeway (Stanford University) will investigate the ways that social status functions as a de facto system of inequality and how this system is related to larger structures of inequality. She will analyze a broad range of empirical evidence to understand how status matters to people and how hierarchies are formed. She will also study how these processes help transform group differences based on power or resources into systems of inequality based on gender, race, and class.
One of the oldest American foundations, the Russell Sage Foundation was established by Margaret Olivia Sage in 1907 for “the improvement of social and living conditions in the United States.” The Foundation dedicates itself exclusively to strengthening the methods, data, and theoretical core of the social sciences as a means of diagnosing social problems and improving social policies. The Foundation is the current publisher of volumes in the ASA Rose Series in Sociology. For additional information on the Russell Sage Foundation Visiting Scholars Program, visit www.russellsage.org/visiting-scholars.
This article is from the February 2016 Footnotes
