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Organizations are increasingly adopting technologies to promote knowledge sharing across boundaries of specialized groups. Yet, prior research beginning with March (1991) suggests that such knowledge-sharing technologies actually inhibit organizational learning by reducing solution diversity. This line of reasoning stems from the prior literature’s assumption that the knowledge shared will be transferred from one member to another perfectly and without distortion. We challenge this assumption and argue, instead, that knowledge is often altered or transformed when it is shared between members and that the degree of this transformation increases as the social distance between the knowledge sender and receiver increases. Because the implementation of knowledge-sharing technologies encourages learning between members across greater social distances, it increases knowledge transformation. Thus, knowledge-sharing technologies present a new opportunity to diversify solutions and lead to innovation.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Brandy Aven: Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University
Email: aven@cmu.edu

Evelyn Ying Zhang: Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University
Email: yingzhang@cmu.edu

Acknowledgements: We are particularly grateful to Linda Argote for her extensive comments and suggestions. We also wish to thank all of the participants in the Strategy and Management Seminar Series at the Tuck School of Business, the Organizational Behavior and Theory Seminar at the Tepper School of Business, and the Carnegie School’s Organizational Learning Conference for the helpful suggestions and critiques. Please direct correspondence to Brandy Aven, Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University.

Citation: Aven, Brandy, and Evelyn Ying Zhang. 2016. “Social Distance and Knowledge Transformation: The Effects of Social Network Distance on Organizational Learning.” Sociological Science 3: 1103-1131.
Received: September 8, 2016
Accepted: October 28, 2016
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Olav Sorenson
DOI: 10.15195/v3.a48

Persistent Educational Advantage Across Three Generations: Empirical Evidence for Germany

By Parker Webservices on December 12, 2016 in Articles

Andrea Ziefle

Sociological Science, December 12, 2016
DOI 10.15195/v3.a47

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This article uses survey data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP) to analyze the persistence of educational attainment across three generations in Germany. I obtain evidence of a robust effect of grandparents’ education on respondents’ own educational attainment in West Germany, net of parental class, education, occupational status, family income, parents’ relationship history, and family size. I also test whether the grandparent effect results from resource compensation or cumulative advantage and find empirical support for both mechanisms. In comparison, the intergenerational association between grandparents’ and respondents’ education is considerably weaker in East Germany and is also mediated completely by parental education. There are hardly any gender differences in the role of grandparents for respondents’ educational attainment, except for the fact that resource compensation is found to be exclusively relevant for women’s attainment in both West Germany and in East Germany after German reunification and the associated transition to an open educational system.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Andrea Ziefle: School of Social Sciences (FB03), Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main
Email: aziefle@soz.uni-frankfurt.de

Acknowledgements: The data from the German Socio-Economic Panel survey have kindly been made available by the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW), Berlin. DIW bears no responsibility for the uses made of the data in the analyses reported in the present manuscript. This research has been supported by a research grant from the German Science Foundation (DFG) to the author for her project, “Family background and women’s changing life courses” (ZI 1495/1-1). I thank Markus Gangl for valuable comments on my work.

Citation: Ziefle, Andrea. 2016. “Persistent Educational Advantage Across Three Generations: Empirical Evidence for Germany.” Sociological Science 3: 1077-1102.
Received: September 14, 2016
Accepted: October 6, 2016
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Kim Weeden
DOI: 10.15195/v3.a47

Deporting the American Dream: Immigration Enforcement and Latino Foreclosures

By Parker Webservices on December 8, 2016 in Articles

Jacob S. Rugh, Matthew Hall

Sociological Science, December 8, 2016
DOI 10.15195/v3.a46

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Over the past decade, Latinos have been buffeted by two major forces: a record number of immigrant deportations and the housing foreclosure crisis. Yet, prior work has not assessed the link between the two. We hypothesize that deportations exacerbate rates of foreclosure among Latinos by removing income earners from owner-occupied households. We employ a quasi-experimental approach that leverages variation in county applications for 287(g) immigration enforcement agreements with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and data on foreclosure filings from 2005–2012. These models uncover a substantial association of enforcement with Hispanic foreclosure rates. The association is stronger in counties with more immigrant detentions and a larger share of undocumented persons in owner-occupied homes. The results imply that local immigration enforcement plays an important role in understanding why Latinos experienced foreclosures most often. The reduced home ownership and wealth that result illustrate how legal status and deportation perpetuate the racial stratification of Latinos.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Jacob S. Rugh: Department of Sociology, Brigham Young University
Email: jacob_rugh@byu.edu

Matthew Hall: Department of Policy Analysis and Management, Cornell University
Email: mhall@cornell.edu

Acknowledgements: We are very grateful to Jim Bachmeier for county unauthorized data and to Stephanie Potochnick, Juan Pedroza, and William Rosales for sharing 287(g) rejection FOIAs. We also thank Doug Massey, Jordan Matsudaira, Jody Vallejo, Scott Sanders, and Jon Jarvis for their helpful comments on earlier drafts.

Citation: Rugh, Jacob S., and Matthew Hall. 2016. “Deporting the American Dream: Immigration Enforcement and Latino Foreclosures.” Sociological Science 3: 1053-1076.
Received: September 26, 2016
Accepted: November 2, 2016
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Stephen Morgan
DOI: 10.15195/v3.a46

Consensus, Polarization, and Alignment in the Economics Profession

By Parker Webservices on December 5, 2016 in Articles

Tod S. Van Gunten, John Levi Martin, Misha Teplitskiy

Sociological Science, December 5, 2016
DOI 10.15195/v3.a45

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Scholars interested in the political influence of the economics profession debate whether the discipline is unified by policy consensus or divided among competing schools or factions. We address this question by reanalyzing a unique recent survey of elite economists. We present a theoretical framework based on a formal sociological approach to the structure of belief systems and propose alignment, rather than consensus or polarization, as a model for the structure of belief in the economics profession. Moreover, we argue that social clustering in a heterogeneous network topology is a better model for disciplinary social structure than discrete factionalization. Results show that there is a robust latent ideological dimension related to economists’ departmental affiliations and political partisanship. Furthermore, we show that economists closer to one another in informal social networks also share more similar ideologies.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Tod S. Van Gunten: Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies
Email: tvg@mpifg.de

John Levi Martin: Department of Sociology, University of Chicago
Email: jlmartin@uchicago.edu

Misha Teplitskiy: Institute for Quantitative Social Science, Harvard University
Email: mteplitskiy@fas.harvard.edu

Acknowledgements: The authors would like to thank Anil Kashyap, Brian Barry, and the Initiative on Global Markets at the Booth School of Business of the University of Chicago for providing data access.

Citation: Van Gunten, Tod S., John Levi Martin, and Misha Teplitskiy. 2016. “Consensus, Polarization, and Alignment in the Economics Profession.” Sociological Science 3: 1028-1052.
Received: October 8, 2016
Accepted: October 26, 2016
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Gabriel Rossman
DOI: 10.15195/v3.a45

Marrying Up by Marrying Down: Status Exchange between Social Origin and Education in the United States

By Parker Webservices on November 28, 2016 in Articles

Christine R. Schwartz, Zhen Zeng, Yu Xie

Sociological Science, November 28, 2016
DOI 10.15195/v3.a44

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Intermarriage plays a key role in stratification systems. Spousal resemblance reinforces social boundaries within and across generations, and the rules of intermarriage govern the ways that social mobility may occur. We examine intermarriage across social origin and education boundaries in the United States using data from the 1968–2013 Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Our evidence points to a pattern of status exchange—that is, persons with high education from modest backgrounds tend to marry those with lower education from more privileged backgrounds. Our study contributes to an active methodological debate by pinpointing the conditions under which the results pivot from evidence against exchange to evidence for exchange and advances theory by showing that the rules of exchange are more consistent with the notion of diminishing marginal utility than the more general theory of compensating differentials.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Christine R. Schwartz: Department of Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Email: cschwart@ssc.wisc.edu

Zhen Zeng: U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics
Email: Zhen.Zeng@ojp.usdoj.gov

Yu Xie: Department of Sociology, Princeton University; Center for Social Research, Peking University
Email: yuxie@princeton.edu

Acknowledgements: This research was carried out using the facilities of the Center for Demography and Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (R24 HD047873), the Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan (R24HD041028), and the Office of Population Research at Princeton University (R24H0047879). An earlier version of this article was presented at the 2012 Population Association of America meetings in San Francisco, CA. We are grateful to Aaron Gullickson for helpful comments and advice.

Citation: Schwartz, Christine R., Zhen Zeng, and Yu Xie. 2016. “Marrying Up by Marrying Down: Status Exchange between Social Origin and Education in the United States.” Sociological Science 3: 1003-1027.
Received: September 30, 2016
Accepted: October 9, 2016
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Stephen Morgan
DOI: 10.15195/v3.a44

Reliability of the Core Items in the General Social Survey: Estimates from the Three-Wave Panels, 2006–2014

By Parker Webservices on November 14, 2016 in Articles

Michael Hout, Orestes P. Hastings

Sociological Science, November 14, 2016
DOI 10.15195/v3.a43

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We used standard and multilevel models to assess the reliability of core items in the General Social Survey panel studies spanning 2006 to 2014. Most of the 293 core items scored well on the measure of reliability: 62 items (21 percent) had reliability measures greater than 0.85; another 71 (24 percent) had reliability measures between 0.70 and 0.85. Objective items, especially facts about demography and religion, were generally more reliable than subjective items. The economic recession of 2007–2009, the slow recovery afterward, and the election of Barack Obama in 2008 altered the social context in ways that may look like unreliability of items. For example, unemployment status, hours worked, and weeks worked have lower reliability than most work-related items, reflecting the consequences of the recession on the facts of peoples lives. Items regarding racial and gender discrimination and racial stereotypes scored as particularly unreliable, accounting for most of the 15 items with reliability coefficients less than 0.40. Our results allow scholars to more easily take measurement reliability into consideration in their own research, while also highlighting the limitations of these approaches.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Michael Hout: Department of Sociology, New York University
Email: mikehout@nyu.edu

Orestes P. Hastings: Department of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley
Email: ophastings@berkeley.edu

Acknowledgements: The National Science Foundation supported this research through its core grant to NORC for the Data Program for the Social Sciences (SES-12-60440); Hout received supplemental research support from New York University. We benefitted from comments of colleagues, especially Kenneth Bollen, Mark Chaves, the late James A. Davis, Andrew Gellman, Nora Cate Schaeffer, Judith Seltzer, Tom W. Smith, and Christopher Winship. Errors that remain are, of course, our own. Views expressed in the paper do not necessarily represent the views of the funders.

Citation: Hout, Michael, and Orestes P. Hastings. 2016. “Reliability of the Core Items in the General Social Survey: Estimates from the Three-Wave Panels, 2006–2014.” Sociological Science 3: 971-1002.
Received: August 27, 2016
Accepted: October 4, 2016
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Gabriel Rossman
DOI: 10.15195/v3.a43

Increases in Sex with Same-Sex Partners and Bisexual Identity Across Cohorts of Women (but Not Men)

By Parker Webservices on November 7, 2016 in Articles

Paula England, Emma Mishel, Mónica L. Caudillo

Sociological Science, November 7, 2016
DOI 10.15195/v3.a42

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We use data from the 2002–2013 National Surveys of Family Growth to examine change across U.S. cohorts born between 1966 and 1995 in whether individuals have had sex with same-sex partners only, or with both men and women, and in whether they have a bisexual or gay identity. Adjusted for age, race/ethnicity, immigrant status, and mother’s education, we find increases across cohorts in the proportion of women who report a bisexual identity, who report ever having had sex with both sexes, or who report having had sex with women only. By contrast, we find no cohort trend for men; roughly 5 percent of men in every cohort have ever had sex with a man, and the proportion claiming a gay or bisexual attraction changed little. We speculate that this gender difference is rooted in a broader pattern of asymmetry in gender change in which departures from traditional gender norms are more acceptable for women than men.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Paula England: Department of Sociology, New York University
Email: Pengland@nyu.edu

Emma Mishel: Department of Sociology, New York University
Email: Emmamishel@nyu.edu

Mónica L. Caudillo: Department of Sociology, New York University
Email: Monica.Caudillo@nyu.edu

Acknowledgements: We are grateful to Gary Gates for helpful comments.

Citation: England, Paula, Emma Mishel, and Mónica L. Caudillo. 2016. “Increases in Sex with Same-Sex Partners and Bisexual Identity Across Cohorts of Women (but Not Men).” Sociological Science 3: 951-970.
Received: August 2, 2016
Accepted: September 25, 2016
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Sarah Soule
DOI: 10.15195/v3.a42

Success-Breeds-Success in Collective Political Behavior: Evidence from a Field Experiment

By Parker Webservices on October 31, 2016 in Articles

Arnout van de Rijt, Idil Afife Akin, Robb Willer, Matthew Feinberg

Sociological Science, October 31, 2016
DOI 10.15195/v3.a41

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Scholars have proposed that the emergence of political movements is highly pathdependent, such that early mobilization successes may lead to disproportionately greater eventual success. This article replicates a unique field experiment testing for positive feedback in internet petition signing (van de Rijt et al. 2014). The prior study found no significant effect of signatures bestowed by the experimenters on the signing rate of 200 online petitions posted to a political petitions website (http://www.change.org), but this may have lacked power because of its sample size and variation across petitions. We report on results of a new field experiment in which we posted 400 petitions differing only in tightly controlled ways to the same website, varying the number of experimentally bestowed signatures across a wider range than in the original experiment. Subsequent petition signing increased monotonically with the treatment, confirming the presence of positive feedback. These results support the existence of success-breeds-success dynamics in the mobilization of collective political behavior, confirming that early success can increase the attractiveness of collective action to potential supporters. However, while significant, the effect of prior signatures was small, suggesting that cumulative advantage effects resulting from popularity metrics may play a minor role in collective action outcomes.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Arnout van de Rijt: Department of Sociology, Utrecht University; Department of Sociology, Stony Brook University; Institute for Advanced Computational Science, Stony Brook University
Email: arnoutvanderijt@gmail.com

Idil Afife Akin: Department of Sociology, Stony Brook University
Email: idilakin@gmail.com

Robb Willer: Department of Sociology, Stanford University
Email: willer@stanford.edu

Matthew Feinberg: Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto
Email: matthewfeinberg1@gmail.com

Acknowledgements: We thank the editors and consulting editors for helpful feedback on our initial manuscript, Crystal Redekopp and Michael Claffey for their organizational and technical support of the experiment, and the http://www.change.org team for allowing and hosting our experiment. This work was supported by National Science Foundation grant SES-1340122 (to A.v.d.R.).

Citation: van de Rijt, Arnout, Idil Afife Akin, Robb Willer, and Matthew Feinberg. 2016. “Success-Breeds-Success in Collective Political Behavior: Evidence from a Field Experiment.” Sociological Science 3: 940-950.
Received: August 17, 2016
Accepted: September 26, 2016
Editors: Delia Baldassarri
DOI: 10.15195/v3.a41

Timing Matters: How Social Influence Affects Adoption Pre- and Post-Product Release

By Parker Webservices on October 24, 2016 in Articles

Sara B. Soderstrom, Brian Uzzi, Derek D. Rucker, James H. Fowler, Daniel Diermeier

Sociological Science, October 24, 2016
DOI 10.15195/v3.a40

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Social influence is typically studied after a product is released. Yet, audience expectations and discussions begin before a product’s release. This observation suggests a need to understand adoption processes over a product’s life cycle. To explore pre- and postrelease social influence processes, this article uses survey data from Americans exposed to word of mouth for 309 Hollywood movies released over two and a half years. The data suggest pre- and postrelease social influences operate differently. Prerelease social influence displays a critical transition point with relation to adoption: before a critical value, any level of social influence is negligibly related to adoption, but after the critical value, the relationship between social influence and adoption is large and substantive. In contrast, postrelease social influence exhibits a positive linear relationship with adoption. Prerelease social influence is argued to require more exposures than postrelease social influence because of differences in the diagnosticity and accessibility of the information. To complement the survey data, computational models are used to test alternative hypotheses. Evidence from the computational models supports the proposed model of social influence.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Sara B. Soderstrom: Organizational Studies and Program in the Environment, University of Michigan
Email: capasb@umich.edu

Brian Uzzi: Management and Organizations, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University
Email: uzzi@kellogg.northwestern.edu

Derek D. Rucker: Marketing, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University
Email: d-rucker@kellogg.northwestern.edu

James H. Fowler: Political Science, University of California, San Diego
Email: fowler@ucsd.edu

Daniel Diermeier: Provost, The University of Chicago
Email: ddiermeier@uchicago.edu

Acknowledgements: This research was sponsored by the Northwestern University Institute on Complex Systems, the Army Research Laboratory under Cooperative Agreement Number W911NF-09-2-0053, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency grant BAA-11-64, Social Media in Strategic Communication. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the Army Research Laboratory or the U.S. government.

Citation: Soderstrom, Sara B., Brian Uzzi, Derek D. Rucker, James H. Fowler and Daniel Diermeier. 2016. “Timing Matters: How Social Influence Affects Adoption Pre- and Post-product Release.” Sociological Science 3: 915-939.
Received: February 24, 2016
Accepted: August 21, 2016
Editors: Jesper Sørensen, Gabriel Rossman
DOI: 10.15195/v3.a40

Stylized Facts and Experimentation

By Parker Webservices on October 12, 2016 in Articles

Charles Crabtree, Christopher J. Fariss

Sociological Science, October 12, 2016
DOI 10.15195/v3.a39

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