Brint
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 31674 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Brint |
| APELLIDO | Brint |
| FIRMA | BRINT |
| AFILIACIONES | University of California, Riverside |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3475-6661 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 72 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 408 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 72 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1980 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 12 |
High-leverage sociological concepts
The paper demonstrates the utility of the project to identify and deploy high-leverage sociological concepts that I recently advocated in these pages (Brint 2025). The paper takes up two of the high-leverage concepts identified in that paper: (1) interaction ritual chains, and (2) social closure mechanisms. The paper begins with a summary of my 2025 argument. The paper then discusses the two concepts using the framework advanced there. I show how…
US Universities in the Age of Trump
The paper begins with a discussion of the attacks of the Trump Administration on US universities and why these attacks are likely to place the USA at a disadvantage in international economic competition. The paper describes the essential role universities play in economic growth both as a producer of technological innovations and as the primary source of education for workers who require academic skills and technical expertise. The paper also dis…
The Causes and Consequences of the Academic Reformation, 2025-2060
American research universities experienced fragmentation and decline following the populist uprising of the mid-2020s. This article examines the causes and consequences of the academic reformation, analogizing the weaknesses of research universities in the 2020s to the weaknesses of the Roman Catholic Church of the sixteenth century. The article highlights several ruinous trends dating from the 2010s. These included high costs, the rise of just-i…
High-leverage sociological concepts and the progress of theory, part one
Sociological theory, as represented in the two main U.S. theory journals, has been diverted from the project of generalized explanation by a propensity for over-refinement, a preference for small-scale conceptual innovations linked to specific and sometimes quite obscure cases, a tendency to focus on heroes of theory rather than their generalizable ideas, and too much attention to the flux and instability of social life. These conclusions are bas…
An Uneasy Peace
In recent years an uneasy peace has descended in U.S. academe between those who feel research universities have done too little to advance the representation of minority groups and women and those who feel that the administrative policies developed to improve representation can and sometimes do come into conflict with core intellectual commitments of universities. Using quantitative and qualitative evidence from interviews with 47 natural science…
Profesiones y mercado
Las profesiones y los profesionales estan diferenciados en sus posiciones en el mercado y en sus posiciones de poder. Este articulo discutira las razones que hacen que algunas profesiones y algunos profesionales esten mejor situados en el mercado y mejor pagados que otros. Argumento que las fuentes principales de valor y poder en el mercado son la capacidad de las profesiones para organizarse en el ejercicio privado, la contribucion a los interes…
College Enrollments Are Still Falling
Steven Brint on the costs of a know-less society
Which Way Universities
Are we nearing the end of a worldwide era of university expansion and influence – and, if so, why? The two books under consideration suggest very different answers to these questions. David John Frank and John W. Meyer’s The University and the Global Knowledge Society anticipates continued expansion and influence as university enrollments grow throughout the world and as the university’s knowledge practices rationalize ever more remote areas of h…
U.S. Universities Under the Microscope
Four environmental forces will influence the future trajectory of U.S. universities: federal patronage, state subsidies, new technologies, and social movements promoting greater equity across racial-ethnic and gender lines. The article describes how they will influence universities and how their impact is influenced by the positional strength of universities, the interests of departments, and the strategic assessments of senior managers. I show h…
Challenges for higher education in the United States
The costs of attending four‐year colleges and universities in the United States have steadily increased over four decades leading to high levels of student debt and many obstacles for low‐income students. The analysis presented appraises the extent of the cost and affordability problems, debunking the sensationalistic claims that are common in mass media. It considers the sources of cost increases such as the growth of administration and the decl…
Conceptions of Professionalism in U.S. Research Universities
Recent scholars of the professions have argued that a new hybrid form of professionalism is becoming dominant. This new form combines traditional commitments to ethics and community service with new commitments to managerial and entrepreneurial objectives. We analyze the perceptions of 4,300 U.S. graduate students in 21 fields concerning how well their programs have prepared them for leadership and management and for ethics and community service.…
The Disruption in U.S. Public Higher Education Enrollments, 2009–2019
The trend toward continuous expansion of U.S. post-secondary enrollments was reversed in the 2010s. Using pooled state-level data in between-within models, we examine public higher education enrollment trends during the 2009–2019 period. We emphasize variation in the net associations of covariates by tiers. State economic conditions showed stronger net associations with regional comprehensive and community college enrollments than with research u…
Are U.S. Professionals and Managers More Left Than Blue-Collar Workers? An Analysis of the General Social Survey, 1974 to 2018
Social science interest in professionals and managers as a left- and liberal-trending stratum has increased in recent years. Using General Social Survey data over a 44-year period, the authors examine 15 attitudes spanning social, economic, and political identity liberalism. On nearly all attitudes, professionals and managers have trended in a liberal direction, have liberalized more quickly than blue-collar workers, and are either as or more lib…
Does Cluster Hiring Enhance Faculty Research Output, Collaborations, and Impact? Results from a National Study of U.S. Research Universities
Where Ivy Matters
Status transmission theory argues that leading educational institutions prepare individuals from privileged backgrounds for positions of prestige and power in their societies. We examine the educational backgrounds of more than 2,900 members of the U.S. cultural elite and compare these backgrounds to a sample of nearly 4,000 business and political leaders. We find that the leading U.S. educational institutions are substantially more important for…
Interdisciplinary Cluster Hiring Initiatives in U.S. Research Universities
Over the last three decades, interdisciplinary cluster hiring programs have become popular on research university campuses as an approach to fostering interdisciplinary collaboration. These programs have not yet been rigorously evaluated across multiple institutions and multiple thematic fields. The paper reports the results of a survey of 199 cluster hires across 20 research universities, supplemented by interviews with 18 administrators and clu…
Guide for the Perplexed
In this chapter the author focuses on the best known of Michael Burawoy's works on "public sociology", the version of his presidential address published in the American Sociological Review under the title "For Public Sociology". Burawoy hopes to turn the focus of more sociology in the direction of disciplinary self-criticism and concrete contributions to society. The doctoral degree is, at bottom, a research degree. In the humanities and social s…
The Educational Backgrounds of American Business and Government Leaders
The paper provides new empirical evidence on the educational backgrounds of US business and government leaders. Analyzing a sample of 3,990 senior executives drawn from 15 sectors, including government, we find significant industry variation. Industries whose products depend primarily on the manipulation of symbolic media were the most likely to recruit from elite colleges. By contrast, industries involved in the transformation of the material wo…
The Scientific Research Output of U.S. Research Universities, 1980–2010
New Concepts, Expanding Audiences
New Concepts, Expanding Audiences:What Highly Cited Texts Tell Us about Scholarly Knowledge in the Social Sciences Steven Brint (bio) what does the future hold for scholarly knowledge in the social sciences? Some have argued that the social sciences will be marginalized in a future that focuses much more heavily even than our current era does on knowledge produced by the natural sciences and engineering. Others have argued that the future of the …
Overview of the Volume
The chapters in this volume add new empirical evidence and new thinking to issues of system-level, campus-level, and classroom-level effectiveness. They were chosen by the editors from among sixty-two proposals submitted to the Russell Sage Foundation. Our choices were based on the quality of the
U.S. Higher Education Effectiveness
Steven Brint, Charles T. Clotfelter, U.S. Higher Education Effectiveness, RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, Vol. 2, No. 1, Higher Education Effectiveness (April 2016), pp. 2-37
Surviving and Thriving
Press reports and industry statistics both give incomplete pictures of the outcomes of the Great Recession for U.S. four-year colleges and universities. To address these gaps, we conducted a statistical analysis of all articles that appeared in Lexis-Nexis on a sample of more than 300 U.S. colleges and universities during the Recession years. We identify four clusters of institutional responses, which we label “consumer service,” “market search,”…
The Schooled Society
The Light Bulb Test
My vision of the sociology of education comes out of identification with the aspirations of the nineteenth-century founders of sociology, many of whom, in Comte’s ([1851–1854] 1896) words, saw the new discipline as the ‘‘queen of the sciences.’’ For this founding generation, sociology could aspire to be the most important of the social sciences because it took the widest view, focusing not on a single set of social institutions but on all social …
Gemeinschaft Revisited
Community remains a potent symbol and aspiration in political and intellectual life. However, it has largely passed out of sociological analysis. The paper shows why this has occurred, and it develops a new typology that can make the concept useful again in sociology. The new typology is based on identifying structurally distinct subtypes of community using a small number of partitioning variables. The first partition is defined by the ultimate c…
New-Class' and Cumulative Trend Explanations of the Liberal Political Attitudes of Professionals
Recent discussions of political divisions in American society have sometimes highlighted the rise of a "new class" of salaried professionals and technically trained managers. New-class theorists have depicted these "knowledge workers" as engaged in a contest for power and status with traditionally powerful business elites. However, the liberal attitudes of knowledge workers may also be interpreted as the result of a conjunction of several general…
Creating the Future
From the Liberal to the Practical Arts in American Colleges and Universities
Additional informationNotes on contributorsSteven BrintSteven Brint is a professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Riverside. Mark Riddle, Lori Turk-Bicakci, and Charles S. Levy are graduate students in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Riverside.Mark RiddleSteven Brint is a professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Riverside. Mark Riddle, Lori Turk-Bicakci…
The Political Attitudes of Professionals
In the 1960s and 1970s, political events and polling data indicated a significant rise in liberal and dissenting political attitudes among American professionals. These data seem to run counter to the historically typical connection between social privilege and conservative politics. The major purpose of this paper is to provide a descriptive portrait of the politics of professionals since 1960, through a review of American survey research. Busin…
Professionals and the 'Knowledge Economy
This article argues that four distinct streams of thought flow into current conceptions of the knowledge economy. Drawing on these four streams of thought and on labor force data from the USA, the article develops a synthetic view of the knowledge economy. The analysis suggests that the knowledge economy, while of growing importance, remains smaller in the aggregate than other parts of the economy. The article also defines five sectors of the kno…
The Diverted Dream
In the twentieth century, Americans have increasingly looked to the schools--and, in particular, to the nation's colleges and universities--as guardians of the cherished national ideal of equality of opportunity. With the best jobs increasingly monopolized by those with higher education, the opportunity to attend college has become an integral part of the American dream of upward mobility. The two-year college--which now enrolls more than four mi…
Rethinking the policy influence of experts
Who's Right About the Right? Comparing Competing Explanations of the Link Between White Evangelicals and Conservative Politics in the United States
Five competing explanations for why white evangelicals hold right-of-center political attitudes are examined using data from the 2000–2004 National Election Studies. Dependent variables include attitudes about abortion, homosexuality, immigration, national defense, and social spending. The five competing explanations accounting for conservative positions are: religiosity, moral standards traditionalism, gender and family ideology, class culture, …
Socialization Messages in Primary Schools
Using the tools of organizational analysis, this article presents a framework for understanding the volume and content of socialization messages expressed in 64 primary school classrooms. This framework specifies five levels of classroom and school organization in which socialization messages are embedded. It links the behavioral ideals expressed at two of these levels—teacher-initiated interactions in the classroom and schoolwide programs—to the…
Hidden Meanings
This paper is about structural sociology as practiced by one of the more important sociologists and social thinkers of our day-Harrison White, lately of Columbia University. I have chosen this topic because thinking is an important, perhaps the most important, feature of contemporary social thought; because Professor White's approach to the study of social structure is particularly influential; and because, frankly, I have misgivings about certai…
Reference Sets, Identities, and Aspirations in a Complex Organizational Field
This article introduces cluster analysis and reference set analysis as tools for understanding structure, identity, and aspiration in complex organizational fields. Cluster analysis is used to identify the structure of the organizational field in American four-year colleges and universities. The article shows that presidential choices of reference institutions closely parallel the major locations in this structure. By contrast, several widely use…
The Educational Backgrounds of American Business and Government Leaders
The paper provides new empirical evidence on the educational backgrounds of US business and government leaders. Analyzing a sample of 3,990 senior executives drawn from 15 sectors, including government, we find significant industry variation. Industries whose products depend primarily on the manipulation of symbolic media were the most likely to recruit from elite colleges. By contrast, industries involved in the transformation of the material wo…
Few Remaining Dreams
In recent years, three schools of thought—human capital economics, sociological contradictions theory, and the new structuralism—have contributed to discussions of the role of community colleges in American postsecondary education. An evaluation of this work suggests that the circumstances of community colleges have, in several respects, changed for the worse in the years since publication of the author’s book, The Diverted Dream (with Jerome Kar…
Eliot Freidson's Contribution to the Sociology of Professions
This article discusses three major contributions of Eliot Freidson to the sociology of professions: (a) Freidson's work introduces a new concept of the professions rooted in the social organization of labor markets. This concept is far more harmonious with the contemporary situation of professions than any previous effort to conceptualize the differences between professions and other occupations. (b) The work provides an analysis of the spheres o…
Where Ivy Matters
Status transmission theory argues that leading educational institutions prepare individuals from privileged backgrounds for positions of prestige and power in their societies. We examine the educational backgrounds of more than 2,900 members of the U.S. cultural elite and compare these backgrounds to a sample of nearly 4,000 business and political leaders. We find that the leading U.S. educational institutions are substantially more important for…
General Education Models
General education requirements comprise, on average, approximately 30% of the undergraduate curriculum and therefore represent an important feature of the student academic experience in American colleges and universities. Previous studies have not fully examined the origins of the most important models of general education, the distribution of these models among higher education institutions, or the causes for change in general education requirem…
Guide for the perplexed
The 'Collective Mind' at Work
Declining Academic Fields in U.S. Four-Year Colleges and Universities, 1970—2006
View correction statement:Erratum Additional informationNotes on contributorsSteven BrintSteven Brint is Vice Provost, Undergraduate Education and Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Riverside.Kristopher ProctorKristopher Proctor is a post-doctoral scholar at Stanford University.Kerry MulliganKerry Mulligan and Matthew B. Rotondi are graduate students at the University of California, Riverside.Matthew B. RotondiKerry Mulligan …
Les community colleges américains et la politique de l'inégalité
Die «community colleges» und die Politik der Ungleichheit. Das amerikanische junior oder community college (zwei-jährige Ausbildung), dessen Gründung Anfang des Jahrhunderts den Einstieg in Langzeitstudiengänge im Hochschulbereich (vier Jahre) ermöglichen sollte, hat sich in den letzten zwanzig Jahren in eine Institution für berufliche Kurzausbildung verwandelt. Als Erkiärung für diesen Wandel schlagen die Autoren ein «Institutionsmodell» vor, da…
High-leverage sociological concepts and the progress of theory, part one
Sociological theory, as represented in the two main U.S. theory journals, has been diverted from the project of generalized explanation by a propensity for over-refinement, a preference for small-scale conceptual innovations linked to specific and sometimes quite obscure cases, a tendency to focus on heroes of theory rather than their generalizable ideas, and too much attention to the flux and instability of social life. These conclusions are bas…
The Market Model and the Growth and Decline of Academic Fields in U.S. Four‐Year Colleges and Universities, 1980–2000 1
Conventional sociological accounts of the rise and fall of academic fields have been challenged by accounts based on the idea of market‐responsive change. In this article, we focus on the period 1980–2000, the period during which, according to its proponents, the market model of change became dominant in academe. We find changes in the student market to be strongly associated with increased institutionalization of academic fields. We also find th…
The Diverted Dream
The Scientific Research Output of U.S. Research Universities, 1980–2010
"New Class" or New Scapegoat
Professions in Government
The Dynamics of Organizational Change in Education
New-Class' and Cumulative Trend Explanations of the Liberal Political Attitudes of Professionals
Recent discussions of political divisions in American society have sometimes highlighted the rise of a "new class" of salaried professionals and technically trained managers. New-class theorists have depicted these "knowledge workers" as engaged in a contest for power and status with traditionally powerful business elites. However, the liberal attitudes of knowledge workers may also be interpreted as the result of a conjunction of several general…
No Room at the Top
The Political Attitudes of Professionals
In the 1960s and 1970s, political events and polling data indicated a significant rise in liberal and dissenting political attitudes among American professionals. These data seem to run counter to the historically typical connection between social privilege and conservative politics. The major purpose of this paper is to provide a descriptive portrait of the politics of professionals since 1960, through a review of American survey research. Busin…
Classifications Struggles
Beyond Monopoly
The Diverted Dream
In the twentieth century, Americans have increasingly looked to the schools--and, in particular, to the nation's colleges and universities--as guardians of the cherished national ideal of equality of opportunity. With the best jobs increasingly monopolized by those with higher education, the opportunity to attend college has become an integral part of the American dream of upward mobility. The two-year college--which now enrolls more than four mi…
Italy observed
Socialist Entrepreneurs
Rethinking the policy influence of experts
Patterns of American Culture
The Diverted Dream
Journal Article The Diverted Dream: Community Colleges and the Promise of Educational Opportunity in America, 1900–1985. By Steven Brint and Jerome Karabel. (New Irbrk: Oxford University Press, 1989. xii + 312 pp. $24.95.) Get access David O. Levine David O. Levine Touch American History Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of American History, Volume 77, Issue 3, December 1990, Pages 1064–1065, https:/…
The Diverted Dream
Les community colleges américains et la politique de l'inégalité
Die «community colleges» und die Politik der Ungleichheit. Das amerikanische junior oder community college (zwei-jährige Ausbildung), dessen Gründung Anfang des Jahrhunderts den Einstieg in Langzeitstudiengänge im Hochschulbereich (vier Jahre) ermöglichen sollte, hat sich in den letzten zwanzig Jahren in eine Institution für berufliche Kurzausbildung verwandelt. Als Erkiärung für diesen Wandel schlagen die Autoren ein «Institutionsmodell» vor, da…
The Diverted Dream
The Diverted Dream
What If They Gave a War
Hidden Meanings
This paper is about structural sociology as practiced by one of the more important sociologists and social thinkers of our day-Harrison White, lately of Columbia University. I have chosen this topic because thinking is an important, perhaps the most important, feature of contemporary social thought; because Professor White's approach to the study of social structure is particularly influential; and because, frankly, I have misgivings about certai…
Eliot Freidson's Contribution to the Sociology of Professions
This article discusses three major contributions of Eliot Freidson to the sociology of professions: (a) Freidson's work introduces a new concept of the professions rooted in the social organization of labor markets. This concept is far more harmonious with the contemporary situation of professions than any previous effort to conceptualize the differences between professions and other occupations. (b) The work provides an analysis of the spheres o…
In an Age of Experts
Since the 1960s the number of highly educated professionals in America has grown dramatically. During this time scholars and journalists have described the group as exercising increasing influence over cultural values and public affairs. The rise of this putative "new class" has been greeted with idealistic hope or ideological suspicion on both the right and the left. In an Age of Experts challenges these characterizations, showing that claims ab…
Testing Testing
In an Age of Experts
Status and Sacredness
Political science (57 obras) · Sociology (54 obras) · Law (29 obras) · Economics (24 obras) · Psychology (20 obras) · Social science (19 obras) · Higher Education Governance and Development (18 obras) · Law (17 obras) · Politics (17 obras) · Public relations (17 obras)