Social Problems 57(2)

Union Threat, Countermovement Organization, and Labor Policy in the States, 1944–1960
Marc Dixon

This article evaluates social movement perspectives on repression and movement-countermovement organization relative to the wave of policy setbacks that unions experienced in the pivotal two decades following the New Deal. An event history analysis of the adoption of right-to-work laws across states between 1944 and 1960 supports social movement perspectives that emphasize the relative threat posed by challenging groups, but the impact of threat is uneven. The findings advance a more contextualized and historically grounded understanding, demonstrating how union threat takes on greater meaning in contexts where authorities side with employers relative to labor. This study improves upon prior labor scholarship by including data on both union and employer organization, each of which are shown to be influential for right-to-work outcomes independent of notable political opportunities. I conclude by discussing the implications of the findings for scholarship on labor and social movements more generally. Keywords: labor unions, labor politics, social movements, political repression, protest.

 
Shared Visions? Diversity and Cultural Membership in American Life
Penny Edgell, Eric Tranby

Sociological theory and public discourse raise concerns about division, fragmentation, or attenuation in our collective life rooted in, among other things, racial or religious differences, but we know very little about how ordinary Americans imagine themselves as similar to and different from their fellow citizens. In a recent, nationally representative telephone survey (2003, N = 2081) we asked over 2,000 Americans whether the members of ten different racial/ethnic, religious, or social groups "share your vision of America." We used cluster analysis and found three patterns of responses to this set of questions, patterns that reflect differences in social location and correspond to different views of diversity, group stereotypes, and understandings of American society. We argue that what we find reveals different dimensions along which Americans draw symbolic boundaries in public life, and that how these boundaries are drawn is rooted in three different visions of America. Optimistic pluralists believe in the positive value of diversity and are unwilling to exclude people on the basis of religion, ethnicity, or lifestyle; critics of multiculturalism are critical of diversity and are wary about contemporary social changes and political and social "out-groups;" and cultural preservationists imagine an America with a moral order underpinned by shared values and a history of a unified white, Christian culture. In the conclusion, we discuss the implications of these findings for scholarship on multiculturalism and the "culture wars," and we call for more research on how ordinary Americans interpret the meanings and implications of social differences in public life.

 
A Dynamic View of Neighborhoods: The Reciprocal Relationship between Crime and Neighborhood Structural Characteristics
John R. Hipp

Prior research frequently observes a positive cross-sectional relationship between various neighborhood structural characteristics and crime rates, and attributes the causal explanation entirely to these structural characteristics. We question this assumption theoretically, proposing a household-level model showing that neighborhood crime might also change these structural characteristics. We test these hypotheses using data on census tracts in 13 cities over a ten-year period, and our cross-lagged models generally find that, if anything, crime is the stronger causal force in these possible relationships. Neighborhoods with more crime tend to experience increasing levels of residential instability, more concentrated disadvantage, a diminishing retail environment, and more African Americans ten years later. Although we find that neighborhoods with more concentrated disadvantage experience increases in violent and property crime, there is no evidence that residential instability or the presence of African Americans increases crime rates ten years later.

 
Morality and Health: News Media Constructions of Overweight and Eating Disorders
Abigail C. Saguy, Kjerstin Gruys

This article examines how widely shared cultural values shape social problem construction and, in turn, can reproduce social inequality. To do so, we draw on a comparative case study of American news reporting on eating disorders and overweight/obesity between 1995 and 2005. In the contemporary United States, thinness is associated with high social status and taken as evidence of moral virtue. In contrast, fatness is linked to low status and seen as a sign of sloth and gluttony. Drawing on an original data set of news reports, we examine how such social and moral meanings of body size inform news reporting on eating disorders and overweight. We find that the news media in our sample typically discuss how a host of complex factors beyond individual control contribute to anorexia and bulimia. In that anorexics and bulimics are typically portrayed as young white women or girls, this reinforces cultural images of young white female victims. In contrast, the media predominantly attribute overweight to bad individual choices and tend to treat binge eating disorder as ordinary and blameworthy overeating. In that the poor and minorities are more likely to be heavy, such reporting reinforces social stereotypes of fat people, ethnic minorities, and the poor as out of control and lazy. While appreciation for bigger female bodies among African Americans is hailed as protecting against thinness-oriented eating disorders, this same cultural preference is partially blamed for overweight and obesity among African American women and girls.

 
Are Some Emotions Marked "Whites Only"? Racialized Feeling Rules in Professional Workplaces
Adia Harvey Wingfield

Much of the research on emotion work in organizations has focused on the ways in which emotional performance reproduces gender inequality. Yet, most of these studies overlook the racial character of professional workplaces and how emotion work is experienced by racial/ethnic minorities. In this article, I examine how the normative feeling rules that guide emotional performance in professional workplaces are racialized rather than neutral or objective criteria. Based on 25 semistructured interviews with black professionals, I contend that feeling rules have different implications for black workers and ultimately reinforce racial difference. This research contributes to the sociological literature on emotion work by further developing the racial components of emotional performance.

 
Race and Ethnic Representations of Lawbreakers and Victims in Crime News: A National Study of Television Coverage

Research on racial-ethnic portrayals in television crime news is limited and questions remain about the sources of representations and how these vary for perpetrators versus victims. We draw from power structure, market share, normal crimes, racial threat, and racial privileging perspectives to further this research. The reported race or ethnicity of violent crime perpetrators and victims are modeled as functions of: (1) situational characteristics of crime stories and (2) contextual characteristics of television market areas. The primary data are from a stratified random sample of television newscasts in 2002–2003 (Long et al. 2005). An important innovation of our work is the use of a national, more generalizeable, sample of local news stories than prior researchers who tended to focus on single market areas. Results indicate that both the context of the story itself and the social structural context within which news stories are reported are relevant to ethnic and racial portrayals in crime news. We find limited support for power structure, market share, normal crimes, and racial threat explanations of patterns of reporting. Racial privileging arguments receive more extensive support.

 
Talking Race, Marketing Culture: The Racial Habitus In and Out of Apartheid
Jeffrey J. Sallaz

This article uses the concept of habitus to address the puzzle of past-in-present racial formations. Although formal ideologies of white supremacy may be suddenly overturned, the embodied dispositions of the habitus should prove durable and may even improvise new practices that transpose old racial schemata into new settings. Evidence for these propositions derives from an ethnography of marketing practices inside a leisure firm in postapartheid South Africa. In the organizational backstage, veteran white managers routinely categorize consumers as desired "whities" versus denigrated "darkies." But a second discourse of marketing, found in the frontstage, uses survey data to divide the market into "blue-collar" and "jazz" types. By structuring marketing strategy to attract the former and repel the latter, managers exclude black consumers and euphemize such exclusion vis-à-vis the state and other public audiences. Findings extend not only racial formation theory, but also U.S.-based understandings of discrimination.

Social Problems, May 2010: Volume 57, Issue 2