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 resources influential for achievement/attainment are viewed as embedded within, and varying across, inner city, rural and suburban places. We draw from the National Educational Longitudinal Survey and the Common Core of Data, and employ hierarchical linear and hierarchical logistic modeling techniques to test our arguments. Results reveal inner city and rural disadvantages in both family and school resources. These resource inequalities translate into important educational investments at both family and school levels, and help explain deficits in attainment and standardized achievement. We conclude by discussing the implications of our approach and findings for analyses of educational stratification specifically and spatial patterning of inequality more generally.Educational success, measured by achievement on standardized tests, has become the central focus of U.S. educational politics and particularly the No Child Left Behind Act. Indeed, much of the current political rhetoric revolves around evaluating the competency of teachers or schools, introducing "competition" and "choice" to current public schooling options, and increasing mandatory student testing (Renzulli and Roscigno 2005). The assumption is that such changes within public education will somehow enhance student achievement. What remains overlooked, however, is the fact that "poorly performing" schools tend to serve the most impoverished populations in the United States and are located in the most disadvantaged rural and urban areas of the country (College Entrance Examination Board 1995; U.S. Dept. of Education 1992, 1997Lichter, Cornwell and Eggebeen 1993).In this article, we develop a conceptual model to explain local advantages and disadvantages and their role in generating, and perhaps reproducing, inequality. Prior educational research has laid the foundation by highlighting two key institutional spheres, the family and the school, that influence educational performance (e.g., Alexander, Entwisle and Thompson 1988;Roscigno 1998;Teachman 1987). We build upon this literature and embed its emphases within a theoretical account of rural, urban and suburban places and the educational opportunities they afford. Moreover, we differentiate between the resources available to students and investment decisions made by parents and schools within the constraints of resource availability. This distinction is theoretically important as it makes explicit our assumptions regarding institutional (i.e., family/school) decision-making and,The authors gratefully acknowledge the useful feedback and insights provided by Caroline ...

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Focusing on U.S. nonfinance industries, we examine the connection between financialization and rising income inequality. We argue that the increasing reliance on earnings realized through financial channels decoupled the generation of surplus from production, strengthening owners' and elite workers' negotiating power relative to other workers. The result was an incremental exclusion of the general workforce from revenue-generating and compensation-setting processes. Using timeseries cross-section data at the industry level, we find that increasing dependence on financial income, in the long run, is associated with reducing labor's share of income, increasing top executives' share of compensation, and increasing earnings dispersion among workers. Net of conventional explanations such as deunionization, globalization, technological change, and capital investment, the effects of financialization on all three dimensions of income inequality are substantial. Our counterfactual analysis suggests that financialization could account for more than half of the decline in labor's share of income, 9.6% of the growth in officers' share of compensation, and 10.2% of the growth in earnings dispersion between 1970 and 2008.

Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act made employment discrimination and segregation on the basis of race, ethnicity, or sex illegal in the United States. Previous research based on analyses of aggregate national trends in occupational segregation suggests that sex and race/ethnic employment segregation has declined in the United States since the 1960s. We add to the existing knowledge base by documenting for the first time male-female, black-white, and Hispanic-white segregation trends using private sector workplace data. The general pattern is that segregation declined for all three categorical comparisons between 1966 and 1980, but after 1980 only sex segregation continued to decline markedly. We estimate regression-based decompositions in the time trends for workplace desegregation to determine whether the observed changes represent change in segregation behavior at the level of workplaces or merely changes in the sectoral and regional distribution of workplaces with stable industrial or local labor market practices. These decompositions suggest that, in addition to desegregation caused by changes in the composition of the population of Equal Employment Opportunity Commission monitored private sector firms, there has been real workplace-level desegregation since 1964.

This article reviews recent theoretical and empirical research addressing organizations and workplace stratification, with an emphasis on the generic organizational mechanisms responsible for producing both stability and change in workplace inequality. We propose that an organizational approach to the study of stratification should examine status- and class-based inequalities at the intersection of (a) the inertial tendencies of organizational structure, logic, and practice; (b) the relative power of actors within workplaces; and (c) organizations' institutional and competitive environments. The interplay of these generic forces either reproduces static practices and structures or leads to dynamic processes of change. We conclude with theoretical and methodological implications for analyzing social stratification through an organizational lens.