Dalton Conley - Career

Career

Conley is best known for his contributions to understanding how socioeconomic status is transmitted across generations.

His first book, Being Black, Living in the Red (1999), showed the important role of family wealth in perpetuating class advantages and racial inequalities in the post-Civil Rights era.

He has also studied the role of health in the status attainment process. A seminal article entitled, "Is Biology Destiny: Birth Weight and Life Chances" (with Neil G. Bennett, American Sociological Review 1999) and his second book, which emerged from this and related pieces, The Starting Gate: Birth Weight and Life Chances (with Kate Strully and Neil G. Bennett, 2003) showed the importance of birth weight and prenatal health to later socioeconomic outcomes, reversing the typical way sociologists viewed the health-economics relationship and anticipated a robust research literature on early life health conditions as they affect later socioeconomic processes and outcomes.

The Pecking Order, which followed in 2004, showed the importance of within-family, ascriptive factors in determining sibling differences in socioeconomic success, thereby challenging the usual association of intra-household differences with the greater salience of achievement and/or meritocracy.

In addition to these works, Conley is the author of the acclaimed sociological memoir Honky (2001), which examines Conley's own childhood growing up white in the inner city projects of New York City. Honky explores the intersection of race and class in America, outlining the subtle but profoundly important privileges even an impoverished white boy enjoys over his darker-skinned peers.

Elsewhere, U.S.A.: How We Got from the Company Man, Family Dinners and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms and Economic Anxiety (2009) is Conley's latest book, chronicling how American society has moved from embodying Max Weber's Protestant ethic in the 19th and early 20th Centuries to William H. Whyte's "social ethic" during the mid-20th Century to today's "elsewhere ethic."

He argues that thanks to the combination of technological changes, rising economic inequality, market logics and the wholesale entry of mothers into the labor force, we have transformed from a 9-to-5 culture that had clear delineations between work and leisure to the modern 24-hour workday culture that combines home and office as well as a number of other once-bounded and sacred spheres of social life. Conley coins the terms weisure to describe activities that combine work and leisure such as social networking with colleagues who are also friends or contributing to open source products or gambling or other activities that are both instrumental and pleasurable. Likewise, he suggests the portmanteau convestment to describe purchases, or consumption, often viewed and written off as investments or serve both purposes.

Finally, he argues that we have gone from a culture of American individualism—in which the imperative was to find our true, backstage self through disconnected time alone and then let that authentic self guide our life choices as a lodestar of sorts—to American "intravidualism", where the moral imperative is to manage multiple external and internal data streams (and selves) that compete for attention, with little concern for the notion of an authentic core or true, single self as our guide. In this vein, the frontstage / backstage dichotomy that formed the basis of intimacy in an earlier epoch has been erased by the delocalized social economy and network-society where a new form of "privacy" is obtained via a metaphorical "fun house of mirrors" where once-personal information is now part of a hyperlinked, recursive data overload—which may, in fact, offer its own form of protection.

Conley's work has also appeared in Salon.com, Feed Magazine. He has written several op-ed pieces for the New York Times and is frequently interviewed for articles on race, family, and socioeconomic status.