This paper reviews current information on wealth trends, with particular attention to the role of household wealth in the stratification system. The first section considers the relevance of wealth for stratification processes and examines why an appreciation of household wealth has been slow to materialize in stratification research. Subsequent sections discuss aspects of the distribution of household wealth in the United States, the transmission of inequality across generations, and implications of a consideration of wealth for stratification theory and social policy. The concluding section conveys some observations about the need for developing models of consumption potential and living standards, akin to the socioeconomic attainment formulation, which incorporate measures of household wealth and the transmission of wealth.

The objective of this paper is to develop the notion of the career as a strategic link between structural features of the labor market and the socioeconomic attainments of individuals. In the first section we review the treatment of careers in the occupational sociology literature and consider limitations of the traditional conceptualization. In the second section the main features of career lines, their structures and reward trajectories, are described. In conjunction with this discussion, the virtues and drawbacks of several strategies for delineating career lines from empirical data are addressed. In the next section we sketch the determinants of career-line structures as they reside in industry organization and labor market composition. In the concluding pages we consider the implications of a labor market overlaid with career lines for investigations of the socioeconomic-achievement process. There are many points of convergence in the literatures of occupational sociology, industrial sociology, organization theory, and labor economics. In this paper we employ the perspectives of these subdisciplines to illuminate the nature of work careers; as a second concern, we discuss the relevance of the career concept to a comprehension of the socioeconomicattainment process. By a "career line" or "job trajectory" we shall mean a work history that is common to a portion of the labor force.2 Our focus, therefore, is on a life-cycle phenomenon, typically a sequence of jobs, rather than on the employment situations of individuals at a given time or at a particular age. Elucidating the properties of these job sequencestheir entry portals, number of constituent positions, availability of transfer options to alternative career lines, and shapes of their returns in earnings,

A range of hypotheses of varying specificity is exmnined in this paper in an attempt to account for the location of racial disorders. The initial sections consider what general assumptions must be met by any satisfactory explanation of the distribution of disorders. Mathematical models are constructed which embody the most prevalent assumptions as to the determinants of community riot-proneness, and their predictions are compared with empirical data. The specific assumptions considered are: (a) all cities have an identical probability of experiencing a disorder; (b) communities are heterogeneous in their underlying riot-proneness. (c) a process of reinforcement characterizes the occurrence of disorders; (d) contagion among communities contributes to the distribution of racial disturbances. Only the heterogeneity assumption is supported by the data. The concluding sections consider the explanatory abilities of several additional theories, each of which argues the importance of particular cowmunity characteristics. All are rejected in favor of an explanation vn1ich locates disorders in the essential conditions of Negro life in America.

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