Conley is best known for his contributions to understanding how health and socioeconomic status are transmitted across generations.[2] His first book, Being Black, Living in the Red (1999), focuses on the role of family wealth in perpetuating class advantages and racial inequalities in the post-Civil Rights era.[3]
He has also studied the role of health in the status attainment process. An article, "Is Biology Destiny: Birth Weight and Life Chances" (with Neil G. Bennett, American Sociological Review 1999) and his second book, The Starting Gate: Birth Weight and Life Chances (with Kate Strully and Neil G. Bennett, 2003) addressed the importance of birth weight and prenatal health to later socioeconomic outcomes.[4] Conley's next book, The Pecking Order, which followed in 2004, argued for the importance of within-family, ascriptive factors in determining sibling differences in socioeconomic success.[5] Conley's subsequent book, Elsewhere, U.S.A., published in 2009, describes changes in American work-life attitudes and social ethics in the information economy.[6] In 2014, he published the satirical book, Parentology: Everything You Wanted to Know About the Science of Raising Children but Were Too Exhausted to Ask, using his own parenting decisions as examples.[7][8]
In 2017, Conley published The Genome Factor, co-authored with Jason Fletcher. This book discusses the nature versus nurture debate and the influence of genes on social life.[9] Conley has also written an introductory sociology textbook, entitled You May Ask Yourself, currently in its 7th edition.[10] He has also penned a memoir, Honky (2000) that examines Conley's own childhood growing up white in an inner-city neighborhood of housing projects of New York City.[11]
Conley is the Henry Putnam University Professor of Sociology at Princeton University.[12]
