Within classical sociological accounts of capitalism, families are curious remnants of the past. Contemporary elite sociology dismisses the family in a different way: by primarily focusing on individual men. When the family does appear within elite studies, scholars frequently follow a stratification framework, which focuses on the transmission of social position from parents to children. This paper breaks with these dominant tendencies to understand the elite family as a shared site of work. Families are social phenomenon in their own right: they are the makers of capitalist enterprises, and they endure and thrive within capitalism. Children do not simply receive potential positions from their parents; their actions can augment or diminish family social positions. Families are impacted by previous generations' material, socio‐cultural and narrative work, and by the work done by various members within a generation. The approach we offer is part of a recent development within the sociology of elites to understand the family as the central unit of analysis, with multiple members (children, siblings, spouses, parents, etc.) serving as units of observation. Our approach foregrounds how gender and sexuality structures he work that families do. We develop our approach by tracing multiple generations of the Astor family.

In the mid-twentieth century, specific characteristics of informal labor markets facilitated the development of lesbian desire among African American women with those attractions. We analyze archival materials on Black lesbians in Detroit, Michigan, to theorize underground economies as liminal spaces that served three key functions. First, off-the-books jobs provided income-generating opportunities to reduce financial precarity. Second, workspaces in urban leisure industries attracted Black sexual minorities as both laborers and consumers, offering the potential for self-discovery and a sense of belonging. During this period, the temporal nature that defined work in underground labor markets was consistent with the transitional state of lesbian sexuality as an identity around which to cohere alongside race. The liminality inherent in Black women’s self-definitions was supported by the temporal attributes of physical spaces where their work took place. Together, those experiences laid the groundwork for a nascent sexual community that could center African American culture.

This work investigates the experiences of African American lesbians who came into adulthood in the mid-twentieth century and were at or approaching retirement age at the time of study. It draws from sociological frameworks of aging, analyzing oral histories, group interviews, and archival materials to consider how the socio-historical contexts of inequalities based in race, gender, and sexual orientation have impacted Black lesbian women in older age. First, African Americans were subjected to labor market discrimination on several fronts and were varied in their ability to access stable employment and advanced education as young adults. Now there is a bifurcation, with some experiencing economic security and others experiencing precarity in their later years. Second, many who lived their young adulthood as lesbians did not become parents or experienced long periods of absence in child rearing. As they advance in age, they lack a crucial source of support that others with adult children can rely on. Finally, while initially fraught relationships with kin became less strained over time, lesbian sexuality was still an “open secret” for many of these women and a measure of vulnerability persists in their familial attachments. When care needs call for aid from or to extended family members, Black lesbians in older age may not receive sufficient support to mitigate experiences of social isolation or health crises, the likelihood of both increasing over the life course.

Prior research has described how middle-class and affluent families draw on private supplemental educational resources to help their children maintain an advantage in an unequal educational landscape. As the market for these privatized services continues to grow, we turn our attention to those supplying supplemental educational services. In this paper, we draw on research theorizing moral understandings of work to examine how private admissions consultants perceive popular concerns about inequality, and how these understandings shape how they view their work. We draw on a cross-study comparison of two original datasets: first, 50 interviews with college admissions consultants in New York and California; and second, a two-year ethnography of an educational consulting firm with preschool and kindergarten admissions consultants in New York City. We find that to make sense of their role in the unequal supplemental education marketplace, admissions consultants define their roles in ways that position themselves as qualified, ethical, and properly motivated, and they justify their roles by describing how they are similar to other legitimate professions and how they can help to alleviate or atone for inequality. These moral meaning-making processes are shaped by the distinctive features of the admissions consulting profession.

Historically, elite schools have selected students in ways that reproduce advantages for dominant groups and exclude groups deemed undesirable. The specific outgroup in question has changed over time, but the underlying logic used to exclude these groups is often related to disability. Yet, disability as a social category has received minimal attention in discussions of elite reproduction. In this article, we draw on qualitative data collected from elite independent pre-K–12 schools to show that disability is indeed a salient basis of selection into elite educational environments, one that begins at the earliest moments of educational sorting: admission to elite early childhood programs. Through interviews with admissions personnel, we show that elite independent schools explicitly structure their admissions processes to identify—and exclude—children who are perceived as having or being at risk of developing any type of disability, regardless of impairment type or support needs. We argue that admissions practices at elite independent schools (1) serve as a form of social closure intended to restrict enrollment to young children perceived as able-bodied and neurotypical, and (2) represent a case of essentializing merit, in which elite gatekeepers construct merit as an intrinsic, rather than achieved, property of individuals.

Mexican Americans are the largest immigrant and second-generation group in the country. Their sheer size coupled with their low educational attainment have generated concerns that, unlike Asian groups like Chinese Americans, Mexican Americans do not value education—a claim wielded by opponents of affirmative action. Drawing on analyses of the Immigration and Intergenerational Mobility in Metropolitan Los Angeles study, we challenge two underlying presumptions of this claim: the children of Mexican immigrants are less successful than the children of Chinese immigrants; and they are less committed to success. Centering our analyses on the hypo-selectivity of U.S. Mexican immigration, we maintain that how we measure success determines which group is more successful. Moreover, we show that second-generation Mexicans adopt diverse success frames that stem from cultural heterogeneity. Consequently, they pursue variegated strategies of action that include class-specific ethnic resources in their quest for success. Despite their remarkable intergenerational gains, the racialization of low achievement and the mark of a criminal record can be a death knell for mobility for the children of Mexican immigrants. Our research provides fruitful context to inform the current debate about affirmative action.