Sociology Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2804
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Item WARRIORS, GUARDIANS, WOLVES, AND SHEEP: OFFICER PERCEPTIONS OF POLICE-CIVILIAN IDENTITIES AND THE PERSISTENCE OF ORGANIZED INEQUITY(2024) Powelson, Connor Reed; Ray, Rashawn; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Despite nearly a decade of community engagement and police reform efforts guided by the Warrior/Guardian paradigm, there remains little evidence of police culture change and rates of racially disproportionate police misconduct remain a social problem. In this work, I bring officers into this conversation and leverage the Warrior/Guardian paradigm as a starting point for an exploration of how identity structures constitute police organizational culture and practice, its consequences, and its potential for change. The present work contributes to the public and scholarly discourse on police culture and the role of identity processes in the reproduction of organizational practices. I characterize police culture as a set of identity schemas that connect people, practices, and social resources. I chart three domains of symbolic interaction that characterize the intersection of police structure, police culture, and public culture and account for police organizational rules and practices that distribute law enforcement outcomes and pattern organized inequity.Item Income Inequality and Caste in India: Evidence from India Human Development Surveys(2021) Joshi, Omkar; Vanneman, Reeve D; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The problem of income inequality has become a defining problem in today’s world yet, the implications of overall income inequality for different social groups remain understudied. The sociological literature on stratification has treated these two important facets of inequality, namely overall income inequality and group income gaps, separately. I study these two problems together in this dissertation by examining overall income inequality and caste and religious groups in the context of Indian society. Using the nationally representative data from India Human Development Surveys, I first examine in detail, overall income and consumption changes and inequality from 2004-05 to 2011-12. Then, I look at changes in income and consumption for different caste and religious groups and study inequality changes between these groups. In the end, I evaluate the role played by educational expansion and returns to education in explaining changes in overall income inequality as well as group income gaps using OLS and Quintile regression models.I find that income inequality based on both income as well as consumption measures has increased in India between 2004-05 and 2011-12. But contrary to the global pattern of increasing income inequality, income inequality in India was driven not just because of high growth for households at the top, but more so due to low growth of incomes for households at the bottom of the income distribution. Despite this rise in overall income inequality, income gaps and inequality between the forward caste and disadvantaged caste groups are getting closed. Though caste disadvantage is operational at all parts of income distribution, it becomes less oppressive over time. I find that while education helps explain the declining between-caste income inequality, it does not satisfactorily answer why overall income inequality is growing. I also find that socially disadvantaged groups as well as low educational households who are concentrated disproportionately at lower incomes did better in terms of their income growth over time. Yet, the low-income households as a whole somehow did not grow much over time. These opposite trends among lower income households, is a puzzling result.Item The Effect of Age Structure on US Income Inequality, 1976 to 2007(2008) Albrecht, Scott; Iceland, John; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This paper examines the relationship between age structure and income inequality. As a cohort ages, incomes become more unequally distributed within it. Consequently, as the age structure of a population evolves, it may have real effects on the aggregate distribution of incomes in that population. Using March CPS data from 1976 to 2007, I decompose inequality change by age and education. Changes in the age structure have had a net negative impact on inequality since 1976. The aging of the large baby boom cohort has been offset by the aging of the relatively small birth dearth cohort and by trends in mean income by age. I also find some evidence that inequality patterns by education are influenced by the age structure of education groups.