We explore racial differences in multigenerational living arrangements in 1910, focusing on trigenerational kin structures. Coresidence across generations represents a public function of the family, and we observe this across different ages or life-course stages through which adults came to be at risk for providing simultaneous household support for multiple generations of kin dependents. Using data from the 1.4 percent 1910 Integrated Public Use Microdata Sample, our comparisons adjust for marital turnover, including widow(er)hood/divorce and remarriage, as rates are known to be historically higher among African Americans in this period. Across subgroups defined by age and sex, we find that African Americans are virtually always as likely as or more likely than European Americans (of both native and foreign parentage) to live as grandparents in trigenerational households. Widow(er)hood/divorce generally increased the likelihood of trigenerational coresidence, while remarriage sometimes increased, sometimes decreased, and sometimes had no association with this living arrangement. Also, we find that the life-course staging of household kin support in 1910 differed across race/generation partly due to different economic and demographic circumstances, suggesting more complexity in kin support than previously considered. We discuss these findings in relation to the histories of African American and European American families as well as their implications for future research.

A novel brand of laissez-faire that lay outside the political mainstream in the early postwar years was broadly hailed at the dawn of the twenty-first century as the common sense of a global age. Yet how to understand neoliberalism as a specifically political thing, especially in the unlikely terrains of Western European and leftist politics, is unclear. This article mobilizes field theory to conceptualize and investigate neoliberal politics in Western democracies, treating the left-right axis as a variable but fundamental organizing dichotomy over which mainstream political parties exert a unique definitional influence. To trace how this dichotomy has shifted over time, I develop a novel index of political neoliberalism using data on the electoral programs of mainstream parties across 22 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries between 1945 and 2004. I find that between the 1970s and 2004 a revised political center emerged, featuring a new concept of state responsibility and the means by which it should govern: a historical shift that took root across the left-right spectrum among mainstream parties and that was as much in evidence in Continental, Nordic, and southern countries as in Anglo-liberal countries. The overall trend can be fairly characterized as the rise of a specifically neoliberal politics. I suggest that a full explanation requires both a political sociology and a sociology of knowledge, attending to the organizational and cultural bases of Western party systems.

Neoliberal urban development, as a set of governance practices and regulations intended to valorize cities as sites for capital accumulation, has increased social polarization and produced enclaves or “cities within cities.” Local governments have relinquished administrative and legal control to private corporations over how certain areas in the city are developed and used (or “consumed”) and by whom. In this article I examine the emergence of governance strategies around urban fragmentation in Chester, an older, former industrial city in southeastern Pennsylvania. My analysis focuses primarily on modes of state (de)regulation and intervention in privatized urban redevelopment, emphasizing how common patterns in governance have surfaced despite changing definitions of “urban redevelopment” over different time periods. In doing so, this analysis fits within critical studies of actually existing neoliberalism, in which the forms and practices of neoliberalism are examined as historically contingent and geographically specific.

Recent interpretations of the neoliberal transformation of welfare states emphasize the formative role of crises in which old institutions are rolled back to make way for the “rollout” of neoliberalism’s program of austerity, markets, and privatization. Policy scholars and social historians argue, however, that major social changes combine long-term institutional development, sudden pivots, and cyclical trends. This article draws on a case study of municipal employee labor relations in New York City to examine the temporality of neoliberal transition. It acknowledges that actual neoliberalism involves a mix of policies that depart from its market-liberal ideal type and that include elements of statist, communitarian, and/or corporatist policies. Thus the article engages a puzzle: if paths to neoliberalism are not always sudden and are populated by policies that are not necessarily driven by neoliberal assumptions, how should we understand what neoliberalism is and how it develops? The article traces the history of municipal labor relations from the 1950s through the present to show that the transition to neoliberalism was characterized by the transition from a contentious corporatism that took shape in the 1950s and went through a neocorporatism forged in the fiscal crisis of the 1970s and that kept corporatist institutions in place while undermining their social power and laying the groundwork for neoliberal policies from the 1990s forward. The article shows how longer-term trajectories and shorter-term crises intertwine to produce a neoliberalism better understood as a repertoire of governance than as an undifferentiated set of policy preferences for market mechanisms.