JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.Major hypotheses about temporal change in the skill levels of work correspond to notions of upgrading, downgrading, and little net change. This paper identifies reasons why research has been equivocal on the larger question. Research designs yield differing conclusions: aggregate studies suggest little net change in recent years; case studies portray more volatile upgrading and downgrading within subsectors. A comprehensive answer to the question of skill transformation will require more systematic assessment of compositional and work content shifts, more complete sampling of the temporal and spatial domain, and better concepts and measures for skill. An improved approach includes direct measurement of two primary dimensions of skill, substantive complexity and autonomy-control. A review of existing aggregate studies illustrates the methodological problems and suggests future directions and hypotheses.

We argue that once we take into account the students' rational enrollment decisions, mismatch in the sense that the intended beneficiary of affirmative action admission policies are made worse off could occur only if selective universities possess private information about students' post-enrollment treatment effects. This necessary condition for mismatch provides the basis for a new test. We propose an empirical methodology to test for private information in such a setting. The test is implemented using data from Campus Life and Learning Project (CLL) at Duke. Evidence shows that Duke does possess private information that is a statistically significant predictor of the students' post-enrollment academic performance. We also propose strategies to evaluate more conclusively whether the evidence of Duke private information has generated mismatch.

Previous research has found considerable mobility between “male” and “female” occupations across the work life. This article uses employment histories from the Washington State Career Development Study to examine the frequency and determinants of jobs shifts that take women across gender-type boundaries. It was found that many women go between sex-typical and sex-atypical occupations with a change of jobs. Higher work commitment tends to slow moves from male to female occupations, and higher job rewards slow moves across occupational gender types. But family variables do not constrain moves to male occupations nor speed moves to female ones. Thus the results do not always fit with stereotypes about characteristics of predominately male and female jobs. The article suggests that further research is needed to identify career lines and career-line segments by gender type, rather than relying on the sex composition of a particular occupation or even job.

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The last decade saw considerable advances in the state of research on social stratification, work, and personality. The program carried out by Kohn, Schooler, and colleagues was central to refocusing research on social structure and personality, and generating new knowledge about social stratification, work, and personality. The review is organized around the Kohn-Schooler program and considers other research and issues in relation to this centerpiece. It includes central features and findings of the Kohn-Schooler models, replication support and extensions, scope conditions and limitations, alternate hypotheses and relationships to other explanatory models, and other forms of unattended heterogeneity. The review concludes with a summary of the ways in which the field can and should move beyond this central program; the summary is organized in terms of a research agenda at multiple levels of time and space in social structure.