A Lack of Security or of Cultural Capital? Acculturative Conservatism in the Naming Choices of Early 20th-Century US Jews

Past research demonstrates a marked tendency toward “acculturative conservatism,” whereby immigrants select given names for their children that are established—that is, popular in an earlier generation of the native population. Prior research has generally understood such conservatism as reflecting a lack of “mainstream” cultural capital; established names are popular among immigrants because they are unaware of current fashion. But we argue and show that even when they are aware of current fashion, immigrants may favor established names to affirm their membership in the host society. Comparing given names among World War II Jewish servicemen (born around 1918) with given names in the general US population in 1920, we show that the parents of these servicemen exhibited a pattern of acculturation that was (1) selective (in avoiding popular native names with strong Christian associations, and embracing certain unpopular native names) and (2) conservative (in their tendency to favor established names relative to newly popular names). In addition, our key finding is that these parents favored those established names whose popularity was rising and avoided those whose popularity was declining. This suggests that Jewish immigrants were aware of mainstream fashion, but deliberately chose established names so as to express their membership in American society. More generally, this result indicates that the acculturation process is as much about gaining social acceptance as about becoming adept in the mainstream culture

When Politics Froze Fashion: The Effect of the Cultural Revolution on Naming in Beijing

The authors examine the popularity of boys’ given names in Beijing before and after the onset of the Cultural Revolution to clarify how exogenous and endogenous factors interact to shape fashion. Whereas recent work in the sociology of culture emphasizes the importance of endogenous processes in explaining fashion, their analysis demonstrates two ways in which politics shaped cultural expression during the Cultural Revolution: by promoting forms of expression reflecting prevailing political ideology and by limiting individuals’ willingness to act differently. As argued by Lieberson and developed further in this article, the second condition is important because endogenous fashion cycles require a critical mass of individuals who seek to differentiate themselves from common practice. Exogenous factors can influence the operation of the endogenous factors. The authors discuss the implications of their study for understanding the nature of conformity under authoritarian regimes and social conditions supporting individual expression

Constructing the Image of Feminism in Russian Media: A Corpus Study

As any social movement, feminism finds its reflection in the media. Media are a full-fledged institution capable of shaping public consciousness, targeting particular social groups, setting standards of mass behavior, and determining the main directions of social development. This research featured Russian news about feminism in terms of event structure.  It covered news headlines published in Russian media in 2014-2021 and retrieved via the Smi2.ru media aggregator. Feminism-related headlines were automatically extracted from a dataset of 8,954 headlines. The subcorpus was analyzed in the Semograph Information System, which made it possible to classify texts, obtain frequency data on certain classes, and establish connections between them. The frequency data analysis was represented as a graphical model of the news space in the field of feminism using the SciVi visualizer. The event and thematic analyses revealed a three-level classification. The media usually informed about events where participants belonged to various social groups that protested against something, e.g., people or performances. The news informed about the actions and reactions of media people and about art sphere. The article introduces a graphical model that shows the links between event components in the headlines. It demonstrated three main areas of action in the field of feminism: art, media, and feminist movements. Each of these fields has its own core and structure. The media sphere appeared to be closed on itself; the art-related news agenda focused mostly on social matters; the field of feminist movements was associated with counteracting and involved descriptions of radical actions. When informing about feminism, the media construct an alternative reality that differs from the real issues that feminism aims at resolving

Motivation vs. relevance: Using strong ties to find a job in Urban China

While the idea that contacts matter in finding a job is intuitively appealing, we still do not know—after decades of research—how and why strong ties benefit job seekers. To resolve this confusion, we need to theorize how specific characteristics of ties are related to the mechanisms that make job search through contacts effective. We have reasons to expect that, while a contact’s motivation influences the likelihood that a job seeker receives an offer, her homophily with the job seeker on occupation and other job-relevant attributes influences the quality of the offer. The use of strong ties among university students to find jobs in China provides a unique opportunity to empirically isolate the relationship between contact characteristics and the mechanisms through which contacts benefit the job seeker. I tested my hypotheses with data on both the successful and unsuccessful job searches of 478 graduates of China’s flagship universities, who, as first-time job seekers, primarily used strong ties. Survey results are consistent with my hypotheses: job seekers who used strong ties to look for jobs had more offers—but not better offers—than those who used only formal methods.Social Science Research Council (U.S.) (International Pre-dissertation Fellowship)Social Science Research Council (U.S.) (Blakemore Fellowship for the Study of East Asian Languages