Browsing by Author "Cao, Michael"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2

Open Access
Family Cost in the Modern American Carceral State: A Descriptive Study from a North Carolina Jail
(2024-04) Cao, Michael
The shadow of mass incarceration in the United States casts over the lives of the justice-involved, but also, at twilight, over the lives of their families. Drawing on family demography and carceral studies, I study the financial effects of incarceration on survivor (nonincarcerated) families in the ambit of a local North Carolina jail. Often born of necessity, a domain of costs threaten the family economy when a member is incarcerated, with the potential to worsen or create economic disadvantage. This vulnerability, I contend, is particularly manifest for families that must interact with jail systems, understudied locales that nevertheless contribute to the calculus of inequality as much as prisons. Here, previous work on the financial costs of imprisonment become emblematic of the issues at hand, but also inaugurate new analysis. Using a descriptive survey strategy, I examine the demographics, relationships, and expenditures of an exploratory sample of individuals supporting a jail-incarcerated family member in Durham, North Carolina. Study results magnified a narrative of incarceration as an engine for gender and racial stratification—specifically of Black mothers at odds with costs of keeping their incarcerated sons fed, safe, and dignified. Comparison of jail-related expenditure across a spectrum of income groups also revealed class disparity—whereby low-income families were furnishing the most to support the incarcerated. Subsequent consideration is then given to the apparatus of jail in a system of financial extraction, and how families find intelligibility in its imposed paradigm of costs and burdens.
Open Access
Relations of and between Family Business and Private Enterprise
(Vertices: Duke's Undergraduate Research Journal, 2023) Cao, Michael
In this paper, I draw from economic and organizational sociology to study a psychosocial dimension of modern entrepreneurial dynamics. Namely, I employ a mixed-methods approach to the study of family business members in the U.S and their corresponding economic attitudes about private enterprise as a superlative solution to economic problems. I incorporate quantitative cross tabulation analyses of multivariate relationships derived from data provided by the 2021 General Social Survey (GSS), as well as original qualitative interview data collected from family business members. Based on my findings, I argue role involvement in family business has a significant bearing towards generally positive views of private enterprise ideology. However, the relationship between family business involvement and belief in private enterprise is specified along lines of social class. I further argue how private enterprise belief is differentially associated with the lower and upper class of family business members, an important finding given the systematic impact family businesses can have on the economic fabric of American society.