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Abstract
Although the American corporation is now taken for granted as a private market actor, the corporation was once just as readily accepted as a quasi-public 'creature of the state.' This conceptual shift marks one of the most historically consequential instances of conceptual reclassification in American economic history. How was an understanding of the corporation as subordinate to the state replaced with an understanding of the corporation as prior to the state? In this article, I demonstrate that the symbolic privatization of the corporation was the joint product of both liberal and progressive legal theorizing. Further, I show that 'naturalizing analogies' are key to understanding this conceptual transformation. In tracing the legal theorization of the corporation, I show how the instability of naturalizing analogies, and their ability to entail associations beyond those intended by their proponents, played a role in corporate reclassification and are therefore critical to understanding the symbolic structure of corporate capitalism.

Numerous scholars have noted the disproportionately high number of gay and lesbian workers in certain occupations, but systematic explanations for this type of occupational segregation remain elusive. Drawing on the literatures on concealable stigma and stigma management, we develop a theoretical framework predicting that gay men and lesbians will concentrate in occupations that provide a high degree of task independence or require a high level of social perceptiveness, or both. Using several distinct measures of sexual orientation, and controlling for potential confounds, such as education, urban location, and regional and demographic differences, we find support for these predictions across two nationally representative surveys in the United States for the period 2008–2010. Gay men are more likely to be in female-majority occupations than are heterosexual men, and lesbians are more represented in male-majority occupations than are heterosexual women, but even after accounting for this tendency, common to both gay men and lesbians is a propensity to concentrate in occupations that provide task independence or require social perceptiveness, or both. This study offers a theory of occupational segregation on the basis of minority sexual orientation and holds implications for the literatures on stigma, occupations, and labor markets.