Sociology 441: Stratification

Required Reading

There are four very different books to read for the course. Usually, the class discussion question will be taken from the reading.

• Jay MacLeod, Ain't No Makin' It. 1995. Boulder, CO: Westview. "I ain't goin' to college. Who wants to go to college? I'd just end up gettin' a shitty job anyway." So said Freddie Piniella, an eleven-year-old boy from Clarendon Heights low-income housing project, to Jay MacLeod, his counselor in a youth program. MacLeod was struck by the seeming self-defeatism of Freddie and his friends. How is it that in America, a nation of dreams and opportunities, a boy of eleven can feel trapped in a position of inherited poverty? The author immersed himself in the teenage underworld of Clarendon Heights. MacLeod provides a provocative account of how poverty is perpetuated from one generation to the next. Part One tells the story of the boys' teenage aspirations. Part Two follows the Hallway Hangers and the Brothers into adulthood. Eight years later the author returns to Clarendon Heights to find the members of both gangs struggling in the labor market or on the streets. This edition retains the vivid accounts of friendships, families, school, and work that made the first edition so popular. The ethnography resonates with feeling and vivid dialogue. But the book also addresses one of the most important issues in modern social theory and policy: how social inequality is reproduced from one generation to the next.

• Lawrence Mishel, Jared Bernstein, and Heather Boushey 2002. O The State of Working America 2002/2003. Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute.

• Kathryn Edin and Laura Lein. 1991. Making Ends Meet. How Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low-Wage Work. New York: Russell Sage.

• Thomas Geoghegan. 1991. Which Side Are You On? Trying To Be for Labor When It's Flat on Its Back. New York:Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Geoghegan is an easy read. He is funny; he hardly ever uses numbers; and he tells good stories. He is not a sociologist, alas. (Perhaps there is a causal hypothesis here.) He is often quite sarcastic -- don't take his sarcastic observations as the truth! Our job will be to" translate" Geoghegan's arguments into sociologically relevant causal theories and then to use data to evaluate these theories. See study questions