Sandra Susan Smith

Assistant Professor
Department of Sociology
University of California, Berkeley

AREAS OF SPECIALIZATION

I am a social stratification scholar who specializes in the study of urban poverty, joblessness, race and ethnicity, and social networks and social capital. Although I have a range of interests, I am primarily concerned with how social inequalities are reproduced through micro-level interactions, with an emerging interest in how macro- and meso-level forces affect these. I entered the Ph.D. degree program at the University of Chicago in 1992. Since then I have begun three major projects (two of which are now complete), and I am now embarking on two more. What follows is a brief summary of each of these projects.

Intraracial Conflict. My research involving the study of intraracial relations began while I was a doctoral candidate at the University of Chicago. Using a Spencer Foundation Mentor Grant, in collaboration with Mignon Moore, I collected survey data through questionnaires and in-depth interviews to study intraracial dynamics among black students attending a predominantly white university. From this investigation, two co-authored papers emerged. The first paper, “Intraracial Diversity and Relations among African Americans: Feelings of Closeness among Black Students at a Predominantly White University,” was published in the American Journal of Sociology (2000). In it we explored the effect of intraracial diversity on relations between blacks in a context in which the saliency and meaning of race were particularly heightened. In so doing, the study uncovered several contingencies to the “closeness” conceptualization that had not been thoroughly considered in previous work. These include context, presentation, and socialization. The second paper, “Expectations of Campus Racial Climate and Social Adjustment among African-American College Students,” also co-authored with Mignon Moore, was published in the edited volume, African American Education: Race, Community, Inequality and Achievement. In this chapter we show that black students’ experiences of adjustment on campus were not so much related to their perception of the campus’ racial climate as it was their expectation before arriving on campus of what the racial climate would be like. Transitions were most difficult for those students whose expectations differed markedly from their experiences on campus. This was especially true among students who expected a great deal of interracial dialogue and openness but who experienced instead silence, social distance, and marginality.

Since arriving at Berkeley, I have continued to conduct research on this topic. With Jennifer Jones, graduate student in the department, I am making progress on two working papers. In both, we interrogate the causes of intraracial conflict. In the first, we examine intraracial conflict as a function of limited social and psychological support among same-race peers, specifically through a case study of black students on a predominantly white campus. We find that among those who are express strong black identities, isolation and alienation from the larger college campus leads them to malign their black peers for not being black enough by having friendship networks that are predominantly black and by participating more in black-sponsored campus events. Thus, we show that alienation from the larger campus community leads not only to interracial conflict, the subject of most research in this area; it also feeds intraracial conflict. In the second paper we draw from the National Longitudinal Survey of Freshman to examine the effect of different institutional structures on intraracial conflict among black, Latino, and Asian students.

How Social Capital Affects Employment: A Comparative Study of Blacks, Latinos, and Whites. In my dissertation, entitled Employment Status and Outcomes as a Function of Social Capital: The Case of Whites, Blacks, and Latinos in the Greater Boston Area, I used the Greater Boston Survey of the Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality to examine the effect of social capital access on racial and ethnic differences in the likelihood of being employed, using a personal contact to find work, receiving a promotion, and hourly wages. Through this research, I was able to demonstrate that social capital access does affect the quantity and quality of opportunities that become available to individuals in ways that help to reproduce racial and ethnic inequality. My key findings were as follows: First, the odds of being employed are positively and significantly related to the proportion of working ties in one’s network of relations. Second, the greater the number of employed ties in one’s network, the greater the odds that they are matched to their jobs by a personal contact. Third, the likelihood of being promoted is significantly affected by the race of the job contact. And fourth, job contact’s method of assistance significantly affected the hourly wages individual’s garnered. My 2000 publication in The Sociological Quarterly, “Mobilizing Social Resources: Race, Ethnic, and Gender Differences in Social Capital and Persisting Wage Inequalities” represents the published work that emerged from this project. However, intellectually dissatisfied with this line of research, a shift that is apparent in my 2003 publication in Ethnic and Racial Studies, I embarked on another project, qualitative in nature, designed to uncover the interpersonal dynamics underpinning labor market processes. This project has resulted in my first book publication, Lone Pursuit.

Social Capital (Im)Mobilization among the Black Poor. In Lone Pursuit: Distrust and Defensive Individualism among the Black Poor (Russell Sage Foundation), I engage debates about the causes of persistent and chronic black joblessness by examining the process of finding work that low-income black men and women engage. Through in-depth interviews with 105 low-income black men and women, I find that in a context of vanishing opportunities and employer discrimination, and crippled by multiple barriers to employment, including low basic skills and high rates of previous incarceration, job-matching assistance between informal and formal labor market intermediaries on the one hand and black poor job-seekers on the other did not always or often occur because relations between these two important nodes in the job search process were often characterized by pervasive distrust and defensive individualism. Job-holders feared that their jobseeking relations would be unmotivated, needy, and too irresponsible to trust their own reputations with employers. As a result, many were reluctant to assist, and so they strongly encouraged job-seekers to find work on their own. When job-holders did assist, they often chose methods of assistance that removed their names from the job matching process. A significant minority of job-seekers, fearful of being maligned by those who could help, chose to go it alone, searching for work without the aid of personal contacts in a low-wage labor markets where employers rely heavily on employees for applicant screening and recruitment. Thus I found that access to personal social capital did not guarantee its mobilization. Unfortunately, though, neither did access to institutional social capital. As I report in Lone Pursuit, even in the context of the job center, center staff did not always provide assistance because they perceived many among the black poor to be too unmotivated, too needy, and too irresponsible to assist, immobilization incentivized by an institutional reward system that made providing useful assistance to job-seekers with multiple barriers to employment difficult to justify.

My findings highlight the centrality of interpersonal dynamics and shed light on the role that micro-level processes play in the reproduction of racial inequality. My work contributes to the urban poverty, joblessness, and social capital debates in the following ways: I challenge assumptions that the black poor lack access to social ties who can link them to jobs, especially when they reside in neighborhoods of concentrated disadvantage. Instead, my research suggests that the black poor’s problems are as much about the mobilization or activation of resources that they do have as it is about limited access. In so illustrating, my work reminds us of the importance of the interactionist perspective. Even if structural factors are largely to blame for persistent and chronic black joblessness, the black poor don’t necessarily understand their experiences in this way. Although prior work has suggested as much (Hochschild 1995; Young 2004), my study shows the consequences of them holding these views. The meanings that the black poor attach to their experiences affect how they respond to their situation and relate to each other in ways that further disadvantage them in labor market competition. Also, as highlighted in my 2005 American Journal of Sociology publication, “Don’t put my name on it,” my work provides a baseline theoretical framework to understand social capital activation. Drawing from various literatures, I suggest that we must look to attributes of the individual (reputation and status), the dyad (strength of the tie), the network (closure), and the community (community SES and resource density) in order to make sense of the conditions that facilitate social capital activation, centralizing individual reputation in job search theory, both for giving assistance and seeking/accepting it. Finally, in my forthcoming article, “A Question of Access or Mobilization?” in the Oxford University Press edited volume, Social Capital: Advances in Research (Nan Lin and Bonnie Erickson, editors), I unpack the relationship between social capital access and activation.

I have two additional working papers that push this research agenda forward. As mentioned in my brief description of the findings reported in Lone Pursuit, a significant minority of job-seekers were disinclined to seek assistance or accept in when offered because they feared losing face. Reluctant personal contact users were disproportionately men. In the working paper, “I like doing things on my own: Explaining Black Men’s Reluctance to Use Personal Contacts to Find Work,” I argue that men’s greater reluctance is in great part a result of having a narrower set of discourses available to them that legitimate their claims to assistance while also legitimating their claims to masculinity. In my second working paper, I move from an examination of the job-seeker to an examination of labor market intermediaries, comparing and contrasting the conditions that facilitate the mobilization of personal and institutional forms of social capital for a black poor population beleaguered by multiple barriers to employment. Through this study, I hope to elaborate and refine the baseline theoretical model that I put forth in earlier work in a way that takes into deeper consideration the role of constraints imposed by third-parties, such as employers.

Racial Ideologies at the Bottom of the Social Hierarchy. Prior survey and ethnographic research suggests that among the black poor, structural factors such as discrimination, while important, do not register as major impediments to achieving their goals. Paradoxically, even as employers are loathe to hire blacks, except under the tightest of labor market conditions, even as blacks perceive widespread prejudice and discrimination from employers specifically, and even as blacks confess how little control they feel they have over their own lives, the black poor are far more likely than the black middle-class, and in some cases than even poor whites, to explain their own relatively low socioeconomic attainment in terms of deficient motivation and individual effort. In collaboration with Alford Young, Jr., I seek to understand why. Young and I will examine the continuum of thought about stratification, inequality, personal mobility, and attainment and will explore the link between conceptions of inequality and racial ideologies on the one hand and social isolation and institutional embeddedness on the other.

Race, Stigma, and Job Network Efficacy: My Next Book Project. I was inspired to do this project in good part because the findings I report in Lone Pursuit cry out for a comparative analysis. But equally if not more important is the following observation based on almost two decades of research: Although the overwhelming majority of black, Latino and white jobseekers search for work through friends, relatives, and acquaintances, blacks are significantly less likely to get matched to jobs by a personal contact, and even when they are, their personal contacts are far less likely to assist them proactively. In other words, Latinos’ and whites’ networks are more likely to yield job matches than those of blacks. The question, of course, is why don’t blacks as much?

Although convincing evidence has emerged correlating black job-holders’ distrust with little or no assistance, to date, there is no empirical evidence that jobholders’ calculations of risks and costs differ by race and ethnicity and helps to explain racial and ethnic differences in job network efficacy. To fill this empirical gap in the literature, I will examine racial and ethnic differences in the extent and nature of assistance that job-holders provide their job-seeking relations; determine racial and ethnic differences in job-holders’ perceived and actual costs, benefits, and risks associated with providing job-matching assistance; and investigate the factors that drive racial and ethnic differences in the extent and nature of assisting, focusing on social psychological factors (psychologies of (dis)trust; cognitive assessments of trustworthiness, and stereotype threat), cultural orientations (individualist versus collectivist approaches to getting things done), and structural factors (employers’ racial/ethnic tastes and preferences). With funding from the Hellman Family Faculty Fund, I will be able to get this project off of the ground.

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