The Pecking Order: A Bold New Look at How Family and Society Determine Who We Become
Dalton Conley
Language: English
Pages: 320
ISBN: 0375713816
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The family is our haven, the place where we all start off on equal footing — or so we like to think. But if that’s the case, why do so many siblings often diverge widely in social status, wealth, and education? In this groundbreaking and meticulously researched book, acclaimed sociologist Dalton Conley shatters our notions of how our childhoods affect us, and why we become who we are. Economic and social inequality among adult siblings is not the exception, Conley asserts, but the norm: over half of all inequality is within families, not between them. And it is each family’s own “pecking order” that helps to foster such disparities. Moving beyond traditionally accepted theories such as birth order or genetics to explain family dynamics, Conley instead draws upon three major studies to explore the impact of larger social forces that shape each family and the individuals within it.
From Bill and Roger Clinton to the stories of hundreds of average Americans, here we are introduced to an America where class identity is ever changing and where siblings cannot necessarily follow the same paths. This is a book that will forever alter our idea of family.
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environments. To add another layer of complexity to this experiment, the twins themselves would have to not know that they were special in any way. In other words, they should not be told that they are one-half of a twin set, that they are adopted, that they are participating in an experiment, and so forth. They cannot be allowed to figure this out themselves—by say, placing a blue-eyed, red-haired baby with an African-American family (or vice versa). Furthermore, the parents cannot know that
cognitive achievement. There were, though, unexplainable variations in these effects depending on race and type of nonresident paternity (i.e., divorce, never married, and so on). See Laura M. Argys, H. Elizabeth Peters, Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, and Judith R. Smith, “The Impact of Child Support on Cognitive Outcomes of Young Children,” Demography 35 (1998): 159—73. It appeared as though voluntary payments mattered more than court-ordered ones, but their evidence on this distinction was shaky, at best.
convenient—that Johanna had no college aspirations, for it is doubtful that her family would have been able to afford it. So the bottom line is that both resources and role models matter. Gender and Family Resources: The Case of Teen Pregnancy The thing to remember, again, is that resources matter in more ways than it may initially seem. Take the issue of pregnancy, for example. Pregnancy is one of the most easily identifiable ways that gender can come into play: simply put, teenage girls
She annulled her six-month-old marriage and, for the next four years, lived with the much older attorney, enjoying a very luxurious lifestyle as he showered her with jewels and furs. She was shuttled around in a chauffeured limousine. During this period, she met many famous people, including Jimmy Hoffa. Esther's relationship with her benefactor was less directly sexual than it was controlling—he seemed to enjoy being tortured by thoughts of her infidelity. They never even got around to actual
representative. Keeping in mind that we excluded only children, 24 percent came from families with two children; 41 percent from families with three children; 14 percent from families of four kids; 6 percent from families of five; 7 percent from families of six; and 8 percent from families often children. (Of course, there are fewer very large families, but we generally interviewed more siblings [though not all] from large families.) The sex distribution was biased moderately toward females: 58