structural Effects in Education 109
and by lateral ones from peers. Together these propositions identify Wilson's position on how
schools exert normative influence on individual aspirations.
Blau's (1955,1960) view of structure was more complex and nuanced than Wilson's, and
was not limited to normative force. The logic of structural effects reasoning in both works was
identical, but the conceptual development differed. Blau drew attention to Durkheimian social
facts. He distinguished social facts based on "common values and norms embodied in a culture
or subculture" from those based on "networks of social relations" (1960, p. 78) expressed
in social interactions organized around individuals' social positions and subgroup memberships.
Wilson (1959) expressed structure narrowly as normative climate, with his infusion of
school structure with normative meaning being entirely speculative. Blau extended the meaning
to include social cohesiveness and networks of worker interaction, within and across levels
of hierarchy and between workers and clients, and identified through empirical observation.
THE DURKHEIMIAN TRADITION
Juxtaposing collective and individual considerations to explain conduct is central to Durkheim's
analysis of social facts: "ways of acting, thinking, and feeling, external to the individual, and
endowed with a power of coercion, by reason of which they control him" (Durkheim, 1895/
1938, p. 3). Social facts can include, for example, systems of currency, professional practices
(p. 2), technical methods of production (p. 3), "legal and moral regulations, religious faiths,
financial systems, etc." (p. 4), and forces external to individuals that constrain their conduct.
Social facts vary from the most to the least articulated and structured (pp. 8-12). He stressed
that even though individuals act freely according to their own dispositions, their conduct in
the context of social facts showed "astonishing regularity" (p. 94).
Durkheim, (1897/1951) employed the concept of social facts in Suicide, which contains
apposite examples of structural effects reasoning; namely, a state of society, a rate of individual
conduct, and a linking mechanism. For example, he examined the impact of family
circumstances on suicide rates, taking into account sex, marital condition, the presence of
children, and age (p. 197-198). To demonstrate the causative impact of social states, he showed,
against a baseline rate among the unmarried, in the relevant age categories, how the presence
of children reduced the suicide rate among husbands and widowers with children, compared
to those without children; the same pattern held among wives and widows, with rates differing
in magnitude by sex. His explanation for the prevention of (egoistic) suicide emphasized the
integrative state of domestic society (p. 201) and "the intensity of the collective life circulating
in it" (p. 202); it discounted one based on the affectionate feelings of parents for their
children.
Durkheim (1897/1951) did not observe social integration or the events of family life
indicative of it; he conjectured about them to identify a social mechanism that linked structural
properties of families with conduct (rates of spousal and parental suicide). He applied a
similar explanatory logic to analyze varying suicide rates in geographical regions that differed
in the proportion of Catholics and Protestants and to suicide rates in the military (as well as to
other topics), demonstrating the importance of both deviance from and conformity to social
norms (e.g., the proscription against suicide in both confessions). Later work on school effects
grew from his conception of social facts and structural effects, cultivated by sociologists at
Columbia, in an oddly inconspicuous way.
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