J Roscigno
Biographic Data
| ID | 15948 |
|---|---|
| NAME | J Roscigno |
| GIVEN NAMES | J |
| FAMILY NAME | Roscigno |
| SIGNATURE | ROSCIGNO J |
| AFFILIATIONS | The Ohio State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8066-9761 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 92 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1771 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 92 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1994 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 25 |
Workplace injustice and inequality beliefs
Inequality scholarship has emphasized the tangible consequences of workplace position and status, focusing less attention on how experiences at work may influence individuals’ views about what is and ought to be. In this article, we explore the possibility that experiences with workplace injustice will shape beliefs about inequality. Our modeling builds on classic theory regarding organizational socialization experiences, recent conceptions conce…
Gender, First-Generation Vulnerability, and Help-Seeking
First-generation college students—that is, those for whom neither parent holds a bachelor’s degree—face important challenges that tend to undercut their completion of a 4-year degree, yet they also often engage in proactive behaviors aimed at stabilizing their college experiences. In this article, we interrogate specifically the gendered character of such processes by focusing on (1) potential differences in the vulnerabilities that first-generat…
Being First-Generation
Vincent J. Roscigno, Jasmine Whiteside, Erick Axxe, Anne McDaniel, and Oded Mcdossi on first-gen students’ vulnerabilities and resilience
First‐Generation Inequalities, Adaptation, and Resilience
First‐generation college students face systemic barriers to persistence, including lower campus engagement, delayed graduation, and higher departure rates compared to their continuing‐generation peers. While these disadvantages are well documented, less is known about how first‐generation students adapt to institutional contexts laden with inequality. Drawing on longitudinal qualitative interviews with 55 first‐generation students at a large publ…
Labor force attachment, college majors, and the gender earnings gap
Racial Discrimination, Interpretation, and Legal Adjudication
Since the Civil Rights Act, state oversight has constrained racial discrimination in employment to some degree. Interpretational gaps among victims and perpetrators, loopholes in the law, and adjudication by judges, however, arguably allow such discrimination to persist. Building on prior work and drawing on rich qualitative detail from judicial decisions from two states, the authors analyze in this article (1) how employees versus employers disc…
Inequality and Perceived Impacts of Class Background on Academic Careers
Social science researchers and higher-education personnel have begun to recognize the unique and unequal experiences of first-generation, low-income, and working-class students, but what of those from such backgrounds that manage to reach the professoriate? What can we learn from their mobility experiences? What obstacles do they and others perceive standing in their way? Using original data on faculty and graduate students collected between 2018…
The Unrealized Potential of Audits
Randomized audits and correspondence studies are widely regarded as a 'gold standard' for capturing discrimination and bias. However, gatekeepers (e.g., employers) are the analytic unit even though stated implications often center on group-level inequalities. Employing simple rules, we show that audits have the potential to uncover applicant-side inequalities and burdens beyond the gatekeeper biases standardly reported. Specifically, applicants f…
Gendered Employment Precarity and Refugee Resettlement in the United States
This article examines experiences of workplace precarity and employment vulnerability among resettled refugees in the United States. This study, which draws on eight months of participant observation at a refugee resettlement agency and in-depth interviews with refugees, provides important insights into the ways that refugees navigate (un)employment after initial resettlement and the precarities they encounter while on the job
The Graduate School Pipeline and First-Generation/Working-Class Inequalities
Sociological research has long been interested in inequalities generated by and within educational institutions. Although relatively rich as a literature, less analytic focus has centered on educational mobility and inequality experiences within graduate training specifically. In this article, we draw on a combination of survey and open-ended qualitative data from approximately 450 graduate students in the discipline of sociology to analyze gradu…
Collegiate Sports Participation, Academic Achievement, and Bachelor's Degree Completion 1
Popular attention to the multi‐million‐dollar enterprise of collegiate sports often centers on the extent to which student athletes are academically engaged. In this article, we draw on a national sample of approximately 5,000 college‐goers, employ key comparisons (i.e., high‐visibility student athletes, nonrevenue student athletes, and nonathletes), and consider background disadvantages and collegiate division levels relative to achievement (i.e…
Mobility and Inequality in the Professoriate
Social science research has long recognized the relevance of socioeconomic background for mobility and inequality. In this article we interrogate how and why working-class and first-generation backgrounds are especially meaningful and take as our case in point the professoriate and the discipline of sociology, - i.e., a field that intellectually prioritizes attention to group inequality and that arguably offers a conservative empirical test compa…
First-Generation Students, College Majors, and Gendered Pathways
Emerging literatures have highlighted the social- and resource-related inequalities among first-generation college students. Less attention has been devoted to the curricular pathways (i.e., college majors) these students follow and their potentially gendered character. We build on educational inequality and gender literatures in this article, and arguments surrounding habitus and class-based dispositions to address this gap. Our analyses draw on…
Workplace Age Discrimination and Social-psychological Well-being
The research literature on workplace inequality has given comparatively little attention to age discrimination and its social-psychological consequences. In this article, we highlight useful insights from critical gerontological, labor process, and mental health literatures and analyze the patterning of workplace age discrimination and its implications for sense of job insecurity, job-specific stress, and the overall mental health of full-time wo…
Mobility, Inequality, and Beliefs About Distribution and Redistribution
Classic theory has long been interested in mobility, but with limited attention to the implications of intergenerational movement for inequality-specific beliefs. In this article, we introduce a dynamic conception and modeling of the impact of intergenerational occupational mobility on inequality orientations generally and distributive and redistributive beliefs in particular. The diagonal models we employ using 2008–2010 General Social Survey sa…
First-generation inequality and college integration
Diversity Displays and Organizational Messaging
Diversity has simultaneously become a pervasive goal and euphemism for racial differences in higher education. Although discourses within the postsecondary context highlight the positive impact of diversity on learning outcomes, organizational diversity efforts nevertheless warrant interrogation, given their possible obfuscation if not reification of, racial inequality and hierarchy. How do Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs)—col…
Racist Cops, Vested 'Blue' Interests, or Both? Evidence from Four Decades of the General Social Survey
The murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer triggered U.S. and worldwide protests-protests that raised questions about police funding, use of force, and whether police officers are distinctly racist. In this article, the authors draw on nearly four decades of the General Social Survey to examine trends over time and specifically model whether those in law enforcement are more likely to hold racialized and arguably racist views, ves…
Gendered Dignity at Work
Racial/Ethnic Hierarchy and Urban Labor Market Inequality
The sociological literature, although rich on the topic of racial/ethnic hierarchy, often overlooks its spatially varying nature relative to group tensions and inequality. In this article, we address this gap by drawing on and analyzing four historically important U.S. urban cases (i.e., Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City) that reflect both compositional diversity and significant variation in racial/ethnic group sizes. Our analyses,…
Discrimination, Sexual Harassment, and the Impact of Workplace Power
Research on workplace discrimination has tended to focus on a singular axis of inequality or a discrete type of closure, with much less attention to how positional and relational power within the employment context can bolster or mitigate vulnerability. In this article, the author draws on nearly 6,000 full-time workers from five waves of the General Social Survey (2002-2018) to analyze discrimination, sexual harassment, and the extent to which o…
Rules, Relations, and Work
Classic theory is ambiguous regarding what is most meaningful for workers and workplaces. Are bureaucratic rules most consequential by providing predictability, as suggested by Weber, or problematic, owing to assaults on autonomy? And what of proximate social relations, seen as fundamental in ethnographic, resistance, and justice accounts? This article’s analyses, which draw on a unique sample of approximately 2,500 German workers across heteroge…
Race, ageism and the slide from privileged occupations
Job Authority and Emerging Racial Income Inequalities in the Public Sector
Has the adoption of "new governance" reforms over the last two decades eroded the public sector as a long-standing occupational niche for African Americans? Utilizing data from the General Social Survey, we address this issue in the context of earnings "returns" to three levels of job authority for African American men and women relative to their White counterparts. Findings, derived from analyses of three waves of the General Social Survey, indi…
A Gedenkschrift to Randy Hodson
Randy Hodson was one of contemporary sociology's central figures in the study of work, occupations, and inequality. This volume pays tribute to his important scholarly contributions. Chapters by other important scholars in these fields reflect and build on his research in work conditions, worker resistance, and social stratification
Race, Cultural Capital, and Educational Resources
Vincent J. Roscigno, James W. Ainsworth-Darnell, Race, Cultural Capital, and Educational Resources: Persistent Inequalities and Achievement Returns, Sociology of Education, Vol. 72, No. 3 (Jul., 1999), pp. 158-178
Shadow Education, American Style
Cross-national research finds that "shadow education" — educational activities outside of formal schooling — tends to confer advantages on already privileged students. Shadow education in the United States, such as test prep for college entrance exams, has received considerably less attention. Drawing on the National Education Longitudinal Study, we analyze the likelihood of participation in, and the implications of, SAT preparation. Social class…
Media and Mobilization
Collective action rests, in part, on group identity and political opportunity. Just how group identity is manifested and perceptions of political opportunity are altered, however, remain unclear, particularly in the case of a geographically dispersed population. An often overlooked mechanism is media technology. This article analyzes an important yet underexamined instance of worker mobilization in the United States: the southern textile strike c…
The Organizational and Social Foundations of Worker Resistance
The study of worker resistance has tended to focus either on organizational attributes that may alter actors' capacity to respond or on influential shop-floor social relations. This divide, partially driven by analytical and methodological preference, is also a function of different theoretical traditions. In this article, we suggest that organizational attributes and interpersonal relations in the workplace, in concert with union presence and co…
Education and the Inequalities of Place
Students living in inner city and rural areas of the United States exhibit lower educational achievement and a higher likelihood of dropping out of high school than do their suburban counterparts. Educational research and policy has tended to neglect these inequalities or, at best, focus on one type but not the other. In this article, we integrate literatures on spatial stratification and educational outcomes, and offer a framework in which resou…
Disparities within
The debate over whether educational spending shapes achievement has persisted for decades, largely because of methodological and analytical limitations associated with the use of districtlevel data. In this study, the authors analyzed unique within-district variations in spending and achievement among 89 public elementary schools in a large, North Central, urban district. The analyses reveal considerable disparities in spending within the distric…
Family/School Inequality and African-American/Hispanic Achievement
Analyses of educational achievement and racial gaps, in particular, have demonstrated the importance of family background and school attributes. Little of this work, however, incorporates a broad, multi-level, conceptual and analytic focus; one whereby disadvantages at, and potential linkages between, family and school levels are considered simultaneously. In this paper, I offer a framework that views individuals and societal subgroups as simulta…
Rurality, Institutional Disadvantage, and Achievement/Attainment
Students living in rural areas of the United States exhibit lower levels of educational achievement and a higher likelihood of dropping out of high school than do their nonrural counterparts. In this paper we extend the literature by offering a framework in which resources influencing achievement/attainment are viewed as embedded in, and varying across, rural and nonrural places because of differences in structures of local opportunity. We draw f…
The Complexities and Processes of Racial Housing Discrimination
Housing represents an important arena within which racial inequalities continue to manifest—a fact highlighted in housing audit studies and the substantial literature on racial residential segregation. In this article, we extend the insights of prior work by: (1) denoting the wide range of discriminatory practices that transpire at distinct stages of the rental/sales process and that are too varied to be captured by any singular audit design; (2)…
Racial inequality and college attendance
Racial Economic Subordination and White Gain in the U.S. South
Les AA. montrent que les inegalites economiques entre blancs et afro-americains tendent a croitre aux Etats-Unis. Ils soulignent toutefois que leur intensite varie en fonction des regions. Ils estiment que les differences liees au capital humain refletent avec une plus grande acuite ces inegalites et que celles-ci sont determinees par la competition economique et politique. Ils s'interessent plus particulierement a la situation des populations no…
Social Closure and Processes of Race/Sex Employment Discrimination
Research on race and gender inequalities in employment typically infers discrimination as an important causal mechanism. The authors' systematic explication of social closure as a discriminatory mechanism reveals that traditional analyses of structural effects and process are not competing, but rather complementary. Analyzing race and sex discrimination cases filed in Ohio from 1988 to 2003, the authors highlight dominant processes of social clos…
Charter School Policy, Implementation, and Diffusion Across the United States
This article applies theoretical and empirical insights on diffusion to a contemporary, important, and striking case in point: the groundswell of state legislation on and implementation of charter schools over the past decade. Drawing from several data sources and using event-history analyses, competing risks, and random-effects negative binomial regression, the analyses examine how interstate dynamics and intrastate attributes affect the adoptio…
Race and the Reproduction of Educational Disadvantage
Research has uncovered many mechanisms that exacerbate racial inequalities in achievement. Due to specialization within the field, however, little focus has been devoted to the multitiered and often interconnected institutional nature of these processes. Matching data from the restricted-use National Educational Longitudinal Survey and the Common Core of Data, I hierarchically model the influence of family/peer and educational institutional proce…
First-generation Disadvantage and College Enrollment/Completion
There are large inequalities in who enrolls in four-year collegiate programs, who finishes, and why. In this article, we draw on several waves of the Educational Longitudinal Study, explore family disadvantages, and uniquely highlight challenges first-generation students face. Family resources, cultural capital, and college-focused parental actions and their consequences for high school achievement explain most of the college attendance disadvant…
Age Discrimination, Social Closure and Employment
Age discrimination in employment has received mounting attention over the past two decades, and from various cross-cutting social science disciplines. Findings from survey and experimental analyses have revealed the pervasiveness of ageist stereotypes, while aggregate and life course analyses suggest trends toward downward occupational mobility for ageing workers, especially in the face of economic restructuring and global economic pressures. In …
Status, Networks, and Social Movement Participation
Individual participation has been at the core of much theorizing and research on social movements. Little of this attention, however, has focused on the labor movement and individual strike involvement. In this article, the authors extend the literature by employing rational choice and network perspectives on social movement participation and by analyzing strike mobilization in a recent action by the Communication Workers of America. The data are…
Stratification, School-Work Linkages and Vocational Education
Building on more classical status attainment and reproduction perspectives, this article examines the extent of class, race and gender inequality in high school vocational education, and the consequences for students' later educational and occupational trajectories. Analyses demonstrate significant class, race and gender disparities in vocational educational placement, even after accounting for prior achievement and educational expectations. The …
Legitimation, State Repression, and the Sioux Massacre at Wounded Knee
The Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890 and the Ghost Dance movement that preceded it offer a compelling sociological case for understanding legitimation, elite framing, and repression. Building on the social movements literature and theoretical insights on power, institutions, and inequality, we engage in multimethod, in-depth analyses of a rich body of archived correspondence from key institutional actors at the time. Doing so contributes to the lite…
Discrimination, Sexual Harassment, and the Impact of Workplace Power
Research on workplace discrimination has tended to focus on a singular axis of inequality or a discrete type of closure, with much less attention to how positional and relational power within the employment context can bolster or mitigate vulnerability. In this article, the author draws on nearly 6,000 full-time workers from five waves of the General Social Survey (2002-2018) to analyze discrimination, sexual harassment, and the extent to which o…
Racial Income Inequality and Public Sector Privatization
Social science accounts have only recently begun to recognize “new governance” shifts, including, but not limited to, privatization occurring in public sector institutions (e.g., education, prisons, the military) and in the functioning of federal and state sector jobs. This article, which presents unique analyses of wages across time using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) and retested on similarly representative data from the Integrated …
African American Men and the Experience of Employment Discrimination
White Supremacists, Oppositional Culture and the World Wide Web
Over the previous decade, white supremacist organizations have tapped into the ever emerging possibilities offered by the World Wide Web. Drawing from prior sociological work that has examined this medium and its uses by white supremacist organizations, this article advances the understanding of recruitment, identity and action by providing a synthesis of interpretive and more systematic analyses of thematic content, structure and associations wi…
Relational Power, Legitimation, and Pregnancy Discrimination
Pregnancy-based employment discrimination has long been a topic of interest for gender inequality scholars and civil rights agencies. Prior work suggests that employer stereotypes and financial interests leave pregnant women vulnerable to being fired. We still know little, however, about women's interpretations of their terminations and how employers justify such decisions in the face of arguably protective laws. This article provides much needed…
Chaos and the Abuse of Power
Bullying is a significant workplace problem-a fact highlighted by a growing body of social science literature. Its causes, however, have received little systematic attention beyond analyses of the personality attributes of bullies. This article explores the roles of relational power and organizational chaos in the emergence of workplace bullying. The analysis of content-coded organizational ethnographies integrates quantitative and qualitative te…
Racial Politics in the Contemporary South
While explanations of contemporary racial disparity in political participation and representation emphasize stratification differences between dominant and subordinate group members and mobilization-countermobilization patterns, they tend to neglect the often interrelated nature of race and class based processes. Drawing from socio-historical accounts of racial disadvantage in the U.S. South that deal explicitly with the interrelation of race and…
Racial inequality and social control
Research dealing with disproportionate criminality, arrest, and incarceration among African Americans has tended to emphasize cultural, familial, and structural differences between racial groups while at the same time neglecting patterns and processes of race‐ and class‐based antagonism and subordination that are central, especially in the case of the U.S. South historically. We attempt to address this limitation by posing a model of the contempo…
To the Editor
Elite Power, Race, and the Persistence of Low Unionization in the South
Sociohistorical accounts point out two fundamental features of the southern political economy that have dampened attempts at unionization: the exercise of elite power and the prevalence of racial division and animosity. Using unique county-level indicators of elite power and unionization across one southern state, we explore the extent to which the dynamics of race and class continue to shape worker mobilization. Findings suggest that historicall…
Managers vs. Owners
This book deals with a subject of profound importance to understanding the place of the modern corporation in a democratic society. This is the inherent conflicts between the interest of corporate owners (the shareholders), the interest of the larger society, and the interest of the managers who run the corporations. Managers have created a shared professional ideology that is designed to preserve their autonomy. To protect itself from unbridled …
Racial Economic Subordination and White Gain in the U.S. South
Les AA. montrent que les inegalites economiques entre blancs et afro-americains tendent a croitre aux Etats-Unis. Ils soulignent toutefois que leur intensite varie en fonction des regions. Ils estiment que les differences liees au capital humain refletent avec une plus grande acuite ces inegalites et que celles-ci sont determinees par la competition economique et politique. Ils s'interessent plus particulierement a la situation des populations no…
Structure, Context, and Agency in the Reproduction of Black-on-Black Violence
Violence has a substantial impact on morbidity and mortality within the African-American community. While certainly providing insight into macro- and micro-level forces, existing conceptualizations of the race and violence linkage are limited. We discuss these limitations and then offer a more comprehensive and integrated theoretical framework for understanding disparate patterns. Rather than reducing race-specific violence outcomes to social-psy…
Race and the Reproduction of Educational Disadvantage
Research has uncovered many mechanisms that exacerbate racial inequalities in achievement. Due to specialization within the field, however, little focus has been devoted to the multitiered and often interconnected institutional nature of these processes. Matching data from the restricted-use National Educational Longitudinal Survey and the Common Core of Data, I hierarchically model the influence of family/peer and educational institutional proce…
From School to Work
1. The institutional embededness of the stratification process: a comparative study of qualifications and occupations in thirteen countries 2. The transition from school to work in Australia 3. Education and occupation in Britain 4. From education to first job: the French case 6. Investment in education: educational qualifications and class of entry in the Republic of Ireland 7. The transition from school to work in Israel 8. Occupational returns…
Race, Cultural Capital, and Educational Resources
Vincent J. Roscigno, James W. Ainsworth-Darnell, Race, Cultural Capital, and Educational Resources: Persistent Inequalities and Achievement Returns, Sociology of Education, Vol. 72, No. 3 (Jul., 1999), pp. 158-178
The Black-White Achievement Gap, Family-School Links, and the Importance of Place
African American students continue to drop out of school at a level higher than that of their White counterparts and perform lower, on average, in math and reading achievement. Research has documented influences at the family and school levels, yet little work has dealt with both simultaneously. Equally important, few analyses acknowledge that family and school influences are themselves embedded in, and partially a function of, broader structures…
Local Labor-Market Opportunity and Adolescent Delinquency
In this article, weextend theliterature onadolescent delinquency by offeringa theoretical framework that integrates insights from labor-market and stratification research on theone handandmicrolevelfamily andcriminological research ontheother. Analyses draw from local labor-market data and nationally representative longitudinal survey data on adolescents and employ techniques that take intoaccount clustering within hierarchical structures. Findin…
Family/School Inequality and African-American/Hispanic Achievement
Analyses of educational achievement and racial gaps, in particular, have demonstrated the importance of family background and school attributes. Little of this work, however, incorporates a broad, multi-level, conceptual and analytic focus; one whereby disadvantages at, and potential linkages between, family and school levels are considered simultaneously. In this paper, I offer a framework that views individuals and societal subgroups as simulta…
Language minority achievement, family inequality, and the impact of bilingual education
Collaboration, Reputation, and Ethics in American Academic Life
The meteoric rise of the sociologist C. Wright Mills from a brash and ambitious graduate student to a leading figure in the American intellectual establishment was launched by his collaboration with Hans Gerth on two seminal works on Max Weber. The story of their thirteen-year partnership reveals a relationship of Shakespearean complexity in which respect, trust, generosity, and perhaps even love did not exclude envy, resentment, deceit, and betr…
Media and Mobilization
Collective action rests, in part, on group identity and political opportunity. Just how group identity is manifested and perceptions of political opportunity are altered, however, remain unclear, particularly in the case of a geographically dispersed population. An often overlooked mechanism is media technology. This article analyzes an important yet underexamined instance of worker mobilization in the United States: the southern textile strike c…
Rurality, Institutional Disadvantage, and Achievement/Attainment
Students living in rural areas of the United States exhibit lower levels of educational achievement and a higher likelihood of dropping out of high school than do their nonrural counterparts. In this paper we extend the literature by offering a framework in which resources influencing achievement/attainment are viewed as embedded in, and varying across, rural and nonrural places because of differences in structures of local opportunity. We draw f…
Music, culture and social movements
Highlights the importance of music in ritual and culture generally, extending the focus to collective action. Argues that music and its emotional and cognitive impacts can be fundamental to the construction of social movement culture. Analyses song lyrics from the southern textile strikes of 1929‐1934 in an attempt to show how music and song helped construct a collective identity across relatively dispersed mill villages, shifted accountability f…
Linking Local Labor Market Opportunity To Violent Adolescent Delinquency
Most criminological theory is cast at either the macro or micro level. Developmental and integrated theories are an exception as they combine community characteristics such as neighborhood poverty with micro-level processes. What remains lacking, however, is attention to labor market conditions. The authors address this gap by testing a contextual model that links local labor market structure, adolescent attachments, and violent delinquency. Anal…
Disparities within
The debate over whether educational spending shapes achievement has persisted for decades, largely because of methodological and analytical limitations associated with the use of districtlevel data. In this study, the authors analyzed unique within-district variations in spending and achievement among 89 public elementary schools in a large, North Central, urban district. The analyses reveal considerable disparities in spending within the distric…
Status, Networks, and Social Movement Participation
Individual participation has been at the core of much theorizing and research on social movements. Little of this attention, however, has focused on the labor movement and individual strike involvement. In this article, the authors extend the literature by employing rational choice and network perspectives on social movement participation and by analyzing strike mobilization in a recent action by the Communication Workers of America. The data are…
Product Review
Cultural production, media, and meaning
The Organizational and Social Foundations of Worker Resistance
The study of worker resistance has tended to focus either on organizational attributes that may alter actors' capacity to respond or on influential shop-floor social relations. This divide, partially driven by analytical and methodological preference, is also a function of different theoretical traditions. In this article, we suggest that organizational attributes and interpersonal relations in the workplace, in concert with union presence and co…
Unions, Solidarity, and Striking
Organizational resources and group solidarity are central foci in literature on social movements generally and worker insurgency specifically. Research, however, seldom deals with both simultaneously and their potential interrelations. In this article, we examine the complex relationships between union organization and worker solidarity relative to strike action. We draw on a data set of 133 content-coded workplace ethnographies and use a combina…
Sociology (79 works) · Political science (62 works) · Psychology (44 works) · Economics (40 works) · Inequality (40 works) · Law (30 works) · Social science (29 works) · Demographic economics (26 works) · Gender Studies (25 works) · Social Psychology (23 works)