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The Pecking Order: A Bold New Look at How Family and Society Determine Who We Become, by Dalton Conley
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The family is our haven, the place where we all start off on equal footing — or so we like to think. But if that’s the case, why do so many siblings often diverge widely in social status, wealth, and education? In this groundbreaking and meticulously researched book, acclaimed sociologist Dalton Conley shatters our notions of how our childhoods affect us, and why we become who we are. Economic and social inequality among adult siblings is not the exception, Conley asserts, but the norm: over half of all inequality is within families, not between them. And it is each family’s own “pecking order” that helps to foster such disparities. Moving beyond traditionally accepted theories such as birth order or genetics to explain family dynamics, Conley instead draws upon three major studies to explore the impact of larger social forces that shape each family and the individuals within it.
From Bill and Roger Clinton to the stories of hundreds of average Americans, here we are introduced to an America where class identity is ever changing and where siblings cannot necessarily follow the same paths. This is a book that will forever alter our idea of family.
- Sales Rank: #746143 in Books
- Brand: Conley, Dalton
- Published on: 2005-04-12
- Released on: 2005-04-12
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.99" h x .69" w x 5.19" l, .54 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 320 pages
Features
- Used Book in Good Condition
Amazon.com Review
In recent years, people have begun to examine family dynamics for clues to individual success. Birth order, in particular, has been a favored explanation for the differences between siblings in everything from leadership skills to romantic conquests. Now Dalton Conley, a sociology professor at NYU, reveals that indeed our siblings may affect how our lives turn out, but not in the ways we might think. Conley made an effort not to simplify the very complex familial data collected by both the United States Census, a long-term study conducted by the University of Michigan, and the University of Chicago's General Social Survey. What he found was that the differences between siblings outweigh almost every other kind of difference between any two individuals in the United States. Every family has a pecking order independent of birth order, and the differences between siblings are magnified by poverty and disenfranchisement. In these situations, families invest in the sibling most likely to succeed, leading to stark divides, even class differences between family members. Oddly, the choice of successful sibling is made independent of birth order, parental attention, or innate talents, and becomes a tacit agreement among family members. Conley uses a plethora of examples, including Bill and Roger Clinton, to illustrate his findings, and readers will nod knowingly at many of the ubiquitous family behaviors that set siblings up for differing life paths. Ultimately, what The Pecking Order reveals is that there is no single factor that can predict one's success or failure in life, but that complex, multilayered familial dynamics play the biggest part in determining our fate. --Therese Littleton
From Publishers Weekly
The surprising fact that sibling differences account for three-quarters of all differences between individuals in explaining American economic inequality acts as a challenge for NYU sociology professor Conley. Drawing on economic studies conducted by the U.S. Census, University of Michigan and University of Chicago, and interviewing hundreds of subjects, Conley illuminates provocative findings. Counter to the belief that birth order predicts a child's success and role within a family, he argues that what really matters is family size, parental time and attention, and how much of the family's financial resources are available for the child. Conley concludes from his findings that parents can more easily affect their children's development by their choices of family size and spacing of births than by attempts to move up the economic ladder. He is candid about the limitations of current surveys and discusses the complexities of studying an institution whose modern workings are contingent on slippery factors (e.g., gender, race, class). Despite all he's learned, the staggering number of factors affecting the workings of a family frustrates Conley's desire to come up with hard and fast rules. Yet from what he has found thus far, he can proclaim, "the family is not a haven in a harsh world. It is part and parcel of that world, rat race and all. Inequality, after all, starts at home." Although Conley's academic prose may challenge general readers , graduate students looking for thesis topics will be well served: he has tons of ideas where research could go to get more answers.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Conley challenges conventional wisdom and preconceived explanations about individual success by examining divergent success rates within nuclear families, specifically between siblings. Rather than comparing two successful but nonrelated people, he concentrates on comparisons between brothers and sisters who have experienced vastly different rates of achievement. Arguing convincingly that "inequality starts at home" among siblings who share the same parents, the same socioeconomic status, and the same environment, he analyzes the different ways in which social mores and societal pressures affect various members of the same family, predetermining who will have the greater chance for personal and professional fulfillment. All but abandoning the birth-order theories that have dominated sibling studies and the personality-based explanations for success and failure, he offers a revolutionary new theory--grounded in facts and statistics--detailing the complexities of both the familial and the societal sorting processes. Margaret Flanagan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Most helpful customer reviews
48 of 50 people found the following review helpful.
Interesting Premise Weakly Presented
By Amazon Customer
Dalton Conley presents a very interesting idea - that is, one's level of success relative to one's siblings is less the result of birth order or genetics (as is popularly believed) and more the result how much family resources (time, money, love) one receives while growing up. Along the way, he rescues the theory that parental influence is a factor, an idea that has recently been discounted.
Although his theories are interesting, the book does not do them justice. It is repetitive and, while there are many interesting profiles of siblings to illustrate Conley's premise, he does not seem to make use of all the text to give a solid foundation to his ideas. For example we learn of sisters with ineffectual parents who ended up supporting each other, financial and emotionally. After college, one went on to become a success while the other stuggled in many ways. After a page or two of reading their case we learn that one of the sisters suffered terrible injuries in an automobile accident and required two years to physically recover and more years to emotionally recover. When Conley states that it's impossible to speculate why one sister has done better the reader is incredulous - didn't he just say that one sister had catastrophic injuries? Might not that have something to do with it? It's an interesting story, but one that takes up space and is seemling unrelated to the thesis. The book is riddled with such time wasters added perhaps to flesh out meager content or study results.
Still, the book is intermittently interesting and if the reader is patient to work through the superfluous content, it could be an enjoyable and informative read. Those looking to cut to the chase about inter-familial class or economic differences would do well to look elsewhere.
44 of 55 people found the following review helpful.
The Common Sense Approach to Siblings' Success
By JK
You and your siblings probably grew up together in the same areas, attending relatively the same schools, with the same set of parents/step-parents/step-siblings, etc., and you both were set in probably a similar socioeconomic background for most of your lives before the age of 18. Yet you are very different people, with very different careers, experiences, higher education backgrounds, and families.
Why. Some researchers claim that birth order makes all the difference- others like to throw gender into the equation. Even others say that the ever mystifying gene pool is responsible for every difference between siblings.
In "The Pecking Order", Dalton Conley proposes a new idea; Not so much that one variable is responsible for all differences, but that many variables factor into siblings' different experiences growing up and make them the adults they grow to be. You say, this is common sense! Yes it is, and it's hard to believe it's taken this long for a researcher to propose that idea.
The extensive research of Conley and his team is manifested in this book. Conley explains the many different variables in detail and how they affect siblings- the gene pool, birth order, family size, gender, death, desertion, divorce, immigration, family migration, socioeconomic change, and random acts of kindness/cruelty performed by those not within the family circle.
The book not only contains the factual research of Conley's team but also the interviews and stories of sets of siblings from every background imaginable, and how their different experiences affected their outcome as an adult. The interviews add a level of the personal to the book, and they validate the authenticity of the research findings.
The information is impressive in and of itself, but Conley's writing style makes for a casual, one-on-one teacher to student type reading environment. He also includes an expansive, 100+ page assortment of his appendix, notes, sources, and index. These are very helpful if you'd like to dive more into the subject.
Conley also reminds us that how siblings turn out is truly subjective- to all of the reasons he lists as well as how people turn out in general.
Very well-written, very informative, and by the end you are examining yours and your siblings' childhood experiences in a new light.
JK
25 of 31 people found the following review helpful.
Disappointing
By ra2sky
I loved the blurb on the cover and looked forward to reading this book. When Conley described how he wanted his book to be different from every other "birth order" book out there, and would use lots of statistical studies to back up his points, I was totally hooked!
Unfortunately the book just didn't amount to much. The author gives lots of anecdotes and statistics, but never manages to draw any conclusions more interesting than (1) only children and oldest children have the greatest chance for success (2) youngest children have the next greatest chance for success. Now, this is reasonably intriguing, but it only takes Conley a couple chapters to make this point. Beyond that, all the chapters are totally inconclusive. He deliberately includes an anecdote to show "a", followed by another anecdote showing "not a." After while this is pretty tiresome to read. I suppose if the reader had bought into every pop theory out there, Conley's book might serve as a good counterpoint, but otherwise it is disappointing.
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