Social Problems 57(1)

Toward a New Abolitionism: Race, Ethnicity, and Social Transformation
Steven E. Barkan

Social Capital and Political Consumerism: A Multilevel Analysis
Lisa A. Neilson, Pamela Paxton

Does social capital-trust and association involvement-predict political consumerism-boycotting and buycotting? Using data from the 2002/2003 European Social Survey we conduct a multilevel logit analysis of 24,854 individuals nested in 228 within-country regions to evaluate whether social capital and political consumerism are positively related at both the individual and regional level. Findings indicate that individuals with greater personal social capital and those who live in regions with higher average levels of social capital are more likely to be political consumers. These results support previous fndings that link social capital with other forms of civic engagement.

Racial Threat and Punitive School Discipline
Kelly Welch, Allison Ann Payne

Tests of the racial threat hypothesis, linking the racial composition of place to various measures of social control, find that where there are greater percentages of blacks, more punitive criminal justice policies are implemented. Just as the criminal justice system continues to get tougher on crime despite stagnant crime rates, it is also clear that schools are becoming harsher toward student misbehavior and delinquency despite decreases in these school-based occurrences. However, only a very limited number of studies have been able to partially explain this trend of intensifying social control in schools. Using a national sample of 294 public schools, the present study is the first to test the racial threat hypothesis within schools to determine if the racial composition of students predicts greater use of punitive controls, regardless of levels of misbehavior and delinquency. Results of multivariate analyses support the racial threat perspective, finding that schools with a larger percentage of black students are not only more likely to use punitive disciplinary responses, but also more likely to use extremely punitive discipline and to implement zero tolerance policies. They also use fewer mild disciplinary practices and restitutive techniques. In addition, racial threat is more influential when school delinquency and disorder are lower.

Elite Status and Social Change: Using Field Analysis to Explain Policy Formation and Implementation
Meghan M. Duffy, Amy J. Binder, John D. Skrentny

Integrating an analysis of fields into studies of social change provides a better understanding of the outcomes achieved by challengers. We demonstrate the value of field analysis through a case study of a social change effort regarding urban land use. An organization led by wealthy and well-connected individuals pressed city government and a powerful for-profit developer to incorporate progressive social goals into a new urban development project. We show how the organization was able to achieve success in the policy formation field but faced significantly more obstacles when trying to enter another field (policy implementation), despite its elite status. Thus, using fields to study the case can bolster scholars' understanding of elite power and status, as well as help explain outcomes. The advantages enjoyed by elites can be field specific rather than universal, and so do not translate automatically into successful challenge results.

Situation or Social Problem: The Infuence of Events on Media Coverage of Homelessness
Rachel Best

Despite a strong interest in media coverage of social problems, sociologists have failed to examine when and why news outlets present issues as problems in need of public action within short time periods. Through content analysis of 475 newspaper articles and negative binomial regression, I show that coverage of homelessness varies in the extent to which it presents homelessness as a social problem. The fact that not all news coverage discusses social problems challenges the claim that social problems necessarily compete for attention in a zero-sum game. I also examine the effects of three types of events (events promoted to the media by their actors and high- and low-profle events not promoted by their actors) on newspapers' likelihood of describing homelessness as a social problem. While previous researchers predicted that events not promoted by their actors would lead to media coverage that challenged the status quo, I fnd that actor-promoted events are much more likely to do so. This fnding highlights the importance of institutionalized action in calling attention to social problems.

The Race of a Criminal Record: How Incarceration Colors Racial Perceptions
Aliya Saperstein, Andrew M. Penner

In the United States, racial disparities in incarceration and their consequences are widely discussed and debated. Previous research suggests that perceptions of crime and the operations of the criminal justice system play an important role in shaping how Americans think about race. This study extends the conversation by exploring whether being incarcerated affects how individuals perceive their own race as well as how they are perceived by others, using unique longitudinal data from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Results show that respondents who have been incarcerated are more likely to identify and be seen as black, and less likely to identify and be seen as white, regardless of how they were perceived or identifed previously. This suggests that race is not a fxed characteristic of individuals but is fexible and continually negotiated in everyday interactions.

Poverty, Prosperity, and Place: The Shape of Class Segregation in the Age of Extremes
Rachel E. Dwyer

Rising economic disparities in the United States at the end of the twentieth century make understanding the severity and determinants of residential segregation between the affluent and poor increasingly important. Existing studies are limited, however, by little attention to the spatial configuration of class segregation. Segregation occurs along multiple spatial dimensions-the affluent and poor may be split not only between different neighborhoods, but concentrated over more or less land, more or less centralized, and clustered near or far from other similar neighborhoods. Each dimension affects the amount of contact and shared resources between groups differently, and overlaps between them produce particularly severe social isolation. Theories conflict over the spatial form of class segregation, with the concentric zone model expecting the affluent to be clustered in large-lot developments on the metropolitan fringe and critics proposing alternative spatial forms in a more patchwork pattern. I use U.S. Census summary data for all metropolitan areas in 2000 to test competing theories of the patterns and determinants of the spatial form of affluent-poor segregation using cluster and regression analysis. I identify two dominant spatial forms of affluent-poor segregation in U.S. metropolitan areas in 2000, and find that racial diversity and segregation are key determinants of which spatial form characterizes a metropolitan area. The links between poverty, prosperity, and place were therefore crucially shaped by race as well as economic disparities in the age of extremes.

Does Whitening Happen? Distinguishing between Race and Color Labels in an African-Descended Community in Peru
Tanya Golash-Boza

This article explores how race and color labels are used to describe people in an Afro-Peruvian community. This article is based on analyses of 88 interviews and 18 months of fieldwork in an African-descended community in Peru. The analyses of these data reveal that, if we consider race and color to be conceptually distinct, there is no "mulatto escape hatch," no social or cultural whitening, and no continuum of racial categories in the black Peruvian community under study. This article considers the implications of drawing a conceptual distinction between race and color for research on racial classifications in Latin America.

Social Problems, February 2010: Volume 57, Issue 1