Theory and Society 39(6)

Sociology, narrative, and the quality versus quantity debate (Goethe versus Newton): Can computer-assisted story grammars help us understand the rise of Italian fascism (1919–1922)?
Roberto P. Franzosi

Individuals as authors of human rights: not only addressees
Benjamin Gregg

Beyond the antinomies of structure: Levi-Strauss, Giddens, Bourdieu, and Sewell
Omar Lizardo

Theory and Society, November 2010: Volume 39, Issue 6

Social Forces 88(5)

Three on Gender

Trends in Global Gender Inequality
Shawn F. Dorius, Glenn Firebaugh

This study investigates trends in gender inequality throughout the world. Using data encompassing a large majority of the world's population, we examine trends in recent decades for key indicators of gender inequality in education, mortality, political representation and economic activity. We find that gender inequality is declining in virtually all major domains, that the decline is occurring across diverse religious and cultural traditions, and that population growth is slowing the decline because populations are growing faster in countries where there is the greatest gender inequality.

The Shifting Supply of Men and Women to Occupations: Feminization in Veterinary Education
Anne E. Lincoln

A confining limitation for the occupational sex segregation literature has been the inability to determine how many persons of one sex would have entered an occupation had the other sex not successfully entered instead. Using panel data from all American colleges of veterinary medicine (1976-1995), a fixed-effects model with lagged independent variables finds support for the concurrent effects of many hypothesized feminization mechanisms. Declining relative earnings and policies aimed at increasing production of graduates affect applications from men and women similarly, but feminization is driven by the decline in men's college graduation and their avoidance of fields dominated by women. The findings demonstrate the relative contributions and interdependence of supply and demand to occupational sex composition and the job search process more broadly.

Sex Typing of Jobs in Hiring: Evidence from Japan
Eunmi Mun

Using unique data on employers' pre-hire preferences, this article examines the effect of sex typing on the gender gap in offered wages and training. Previous studies using post-hire data have not been able to focus directly on the effects of employer behavior, distinct from employee preferences. By analyzing gender-designated job requisitions for the entry-level labor market in a Japanese city, this study investigates employers' pre-hire decisions about the wage level and on-the-job training that accompany the sex typing of jobs. Results show that employers' sex typing excludes women in advance from jobs that provide higher wages and longer training.

Stratification Processes

Framing the Future: Revisiting the Place of Educational Expectations in Status Attainment
Robert Bozick, Karl Alexander, Doris Entwisle, Susan Dauber, Kerri Kerr

This study revisits the Wisconsin model of status attainment from a life course developmental perspective. Fixed-effects regression analyses lend strong support to the Wisconsin framework's core proposition that academic performance and significant others' influence shape educational expectations. However, investigating the process of expectation formation back to the elementary grades yields insights not evident when analyses are limited to the high school years: (1. many youth consistently expect to attend college from as early as fourth grade; (2. the expectations of middle- and low-SES youth are less stable, and across years the preponderance of their exposure to socialization influences mitigates against sustained college ambitions; (3. long-term stable expectations are more efficacious in forecasting college enrollment than are changing, volatile expectations. As anticipated in the Wisconsin framework, family-and school-based socialization processes indeed contribute to social reproduction through children's educational expectations, but the process starts much earlier and includes dynamics outside the scope of the original status attainment studies.

Do Changes in Job Mobility Explain the Growth of Wage Inequality among Men in the United States, 1977-2005?
Ted Mouw, Arne L. Kalleberg

To what extent did the increase in wage inequality among men in the United States over the past three decades result from job loss and/or employment instability? We propose a simple method for decomposing the change in wage inequality into components due to upward and downward between-employer mobility and within-employer wage changes using data on men's wages and job mobility from the 1977-2005 waves of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. We find that downward employer mobility—a proxy for job displacement based on movement to a lower paid job with a new employer—has the largest effect on inequality over a two-year period. However, the effect of job displacement declines with time. We find that the effect of job loss accounts for 39 percent of the increase in wage inequality during the average eight-year period from 1977 through 2005, compared to 52 percent that is attributable to wage changes for workers who stay with the same employer.

Occupational Status and the Experience of Anger
Jessica L. Collett, Omar Lizardo

Current theories in the sociology of emotions posit contradictory expectations regarding the relationship between status and the relative experience of anger, with some predicting a negative relationship and others proposing a positive one. We test the compatibility of these opposing hypotheses by examining the relationship between anger and a key dimension of socioeconomic status—the occupational status score of an individual's occupation—for a representative sample of Americans. We connect different strands of theory and research in the social psychology of emotions to posit a non-linear relationship between occupational status and the experience of anger. Analyses of data from the 1996 General Social Survey's emotions module (N = 1460) are consistent with this integrative account. Individuals located at the two opposite ends of the status and prestige hierarchy are more likely to experience anger than those of middle status. We use insight from Blau's macro-structural theory to help elucidate this complex relationship.

Political Capital in a Market Economy
Victor Nee, Sonja Opper

This research applies a transaction-focused institutional analysis to compare the value of political capital in different institutional domains of China's market economy. Our results show that the value of political capital is associated with institutional domains of the economy in which agents can use political connections to secure advantages. Political capital is most fungible in institutional domains where government restricts economic activity. In this sense, the value of political connections in China does not differ fundamentally from patterns observable in established market economies. We interpret this as evidence suggesting China may have experienced a tipping point in its transition to a market economy around the turn of the new century.

How Socio-Economic Change Shapes Income Inequality in Post-Socialist Europe
Nina Bandelj, Matthew C. Mahutga

Although income inequality in Central and Eastern Europe was considerably lower during socialism than in other countries at comparable levels of development, it increased significantly in all Central and East European states after the fall of communist regimes. However, some of these countries managed to maintain comparatively low inequality levels 10 years into the transition period while inequalities have skyrocketed in others. What explains this variation? This article presents one of the first longitudinal cross-national analyses of the factors that determine changes in income inequality in 10 Central and East European countries during the first decade after 1989. Results suggest that rising income inequality is principally related to (1. the expansion of the private sector, (2. retrenchment of the redistributive state, (3. the social exclusion of ethno-national minorities, and (4. penetration of foreign capital. Moreover, the analyses suggest that privatization strategies promoting foreign investment created more inequality than those promoting domestic investment. These findings reveal the social, political and cultural foundations of the income inequality dynamic during post-socialist transition in Central and Eastern Europe.

Culture and Organization

The Ecology of Technological Progress: How Symbiosis and Competition Affect the Growth of Technology Domains
Gianluca Carnabuci

We show that the progress of technological knowledge is an inherently ecological process, wherein the growth rate of each technology domain depends on dynamics occurring in other technology domains. We identify two sources of ecological interdependence among technology domains. First, there are symbiotic interdependencies, implying that the rate of growth of one technology domain is driven by the advances made in other technology domains. Second, some technology domains compete with each other, implying that the rate at which a given technology domain advances varies inversely with the competitive pressure it receives from other technology domains. Based on all the technological knowledge patented in the United States between 1975 and 1999, we find statistical support for our argument and hypotheses.

The Deviant Organization and the Bad Apple CEO: Ideology and Accountability in Media Coverage of Corporate Scandals
Mike Owen Benediktsson

What role do the media play in the identification and construction of white-collar crimes? Few studies have examined media coverage of corporate deviance. This study investigates news coverage of six large-scale accounting scandals that broke in 2001 and 2002. Using a variety of empirical methods to analyze the 51 largest U.S. newspapers, the study tests several explanations for tendencies to run more or less coverage of the scandals in question. The study then examines the substantive focus of coverage. First, the results suggest that scandal coverage was influenced by the political ideology of newspapers, as opposed to economic interests or social structural ties between firms. Second, the analysis shows that attention to the adjudication of individual crimes and the punishment of individual offenders received the bulk of media attention.

Socio-demographic Determinants of Economic Growth: Age-Structure, Preindustrial Heritage and Sociolinguistic Integration
Edward Crenshaw, Kristopher Robison

This study establishes a socio-demographic theory of international development derived from selected classical and contemporary sociological theories. Four hypotheses are tested: (1. population growth's effect on development depends on age-structure; (2. historic population density (used here as an indicator of preindustrial social complexity) boosts contemporary economic performance; (3. ethnic polarization impairs economic growth; and (4. a nation's degree of sociolinguistic integration positively influences economic performance. Investigating annual changes in real gross domestic product per capita from 1970 to 2000, our pooled time-series analyses of 101 developed and developing countries generally support these hypotheses net of common alternative explanations, suggesting that the etiology of economic growth could benefit from the reintroduction of classic and contemporary sociological theories.

Perspectives on the Environment

No Safe Place: Environmental Hazards & Injustice along Mexico's Northern Border
Sara E. Grineski, Timothy W. Collins, María de Lourdes Romo Aguilar, Raed Aldouri

This article examines spatial relationships between environmental hazards (i.e., pork feed lots, brick kilns, final assembly plants and a rail line) and markers of social marginality in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. Juárez represents an opportunity for researchers to test for patterns of injustice in a recently urbanizing metropolis of the Global South. We use spatial-econometric modeling to predict the four unique hazard variables and a composite hazard variable using socio-demographic variables at the neighborhood level. Lower class and higher percentages of children and migrants were statistically significant predictors of composite hazard density. These results align with previous studies in the North. However, disaggregating these results by hazard type reveals important and counterintuitive differences in groups at risk based on the market-orientation of the hazard (i.e., domestic vs. transnational) and its location within the urban structure.

Movement Organizations, Synergistic Tactics and Environmental Public Policy
Erik W. Johnson, Jon Agnone, John D. McCarthy

This study builds on political mediation and movement infrastructure models to highlight contingent and synergistic ways in which social movements may impinge upon the U.S. national policy-making process. Analyses employ a variety of datasets to examine the role of environmental movement organizational capacity, protest and institutional activity in garnering Congressional attention to, and action on, salient issues from 1961 through 1990. We find all types of movement activity, but especially the development of national organizational infrastructures, to be positively associated with the convening of Congressional hearings on the environment. Only when there are high levels of both protest and institutional activity is there any evidence that the environmental movement directly influences the passage of environmental laws.

Other Papers

Scenes: Social Context in an Age of Contingency
Daniel Silver, Terry Nichols Clark, Clemente Jesus Navarro Yanez

This article builds on an important but underdeveloped social science concept—the "scene" as a cluster of urban amenities—to contribute to social science theory and subspecialties such as urban and rural, class, race and gender studies. Scenes grow more important in less industrial, more expressively-oriented and contingent societies where traditional constraints fall and self-motivated action around consumption, leisure and amenities is a more important feature of social cohesiveness and interaction. Scenes contextualize the individual through amenities and consumption-based expressions of shared sensibilities as to what is right, beautiful and genuine. This framework adds to concepts such as neighborhood and workplace by specifying 15 dimensions of the urban scenescape. Like neighborhood and workplace, scenes reduce anomie, but because of their focus on consumption and the use of specific amenities, they are more consistent with today's ethos of contingency, moving beyond traditional ideas of the fundamental power of social, family and occupational background. We introduce a new amenities-focused database to measure and analyze scenes and their dimensions for each of 40,000 U.S. zip codes. We illustrate the framework by applying it to one distinct type of scene, bohemia, and analyze its position in the broader social system.

Measuring Government Effectiveness and Its Consequences for Social Welfare in Sub-Saharan African Countries
Audrey Sacks, Margaret Levi

We introduce a method for measuring effective government and modeling its consequences for social welfare at the individual level. Our focus is on the experiences of citizens living in African countries where famine remains a serious threat. If a government is effective, it will be able to deliver goods that individuals need to improve their social welfare. At a minimum, effective governments facilitate reliable access to food for its citizens. We assess this conception of effective government via a multi-level model from 17 sub-Saharan countries sampled in 2005 by Afrobarometer. We find that citizens who live in regions and in countries with a civil bureaucracy, reliable law enforcement and good infrastructure enjoy higher levels of food security than those who live in regions with weaker institutional penetration.

The Lasting Effect of Civic Talk on Civic Participation: Evidence from a Panel Study
Casey A. Klofstad

Extant research shows that individuals who discuss politics and current events with their peers also participate more actively in civil society. However, this correlation is not sufficient evidence of causation due to a number of analytical biases. To address this problem, data were collected through a panel study conducted on students who were randomly assigned to dormitories during their first year of college. In addition, the data were preprocessed before analysis with a matching procedure. These data show that discussing politics and current events caused these students to participate in civic activities during their first year of college. A follow-up study conducted on the same population during their fourth year of college shows that the positive effect of civic talk on civic participation still exists despite the passage of three years. Further analysis shows that the boost in civic participation initially after engaging in civic talk is the mechanism by which the effect of civic talk lasts into the future.

Social Forces, July 2010: Volume 88, Issue 5

British Journal of Criminology 50(6)

What Can We Learn From The Portuguese Decriminalization of Illicit Drugs?
Caitlin Elizabeth Hughes and Alex Stevens

The issue of decriminalizing illicit drugs is hotly debated, but is rarely subject to evidence-based analysis. This paper examines the case of Portugal, a nation that decriminalized the use and possession of all illicit drugs on 1 July 2001. Drawing upon independent evaluations and interviews conducted with 13 key stakeholders in 2007 and 2009, it critically analyses the criminal justice and health impacts against trends from neighbouring Spain and Italy. It concludes that contrary to predictions, the Portuguese decriminalization did not lead to major increases in drug use. Indeed, evidence indicates reductions in problematic use, drug-related harms and criminal justice overcrowding. The article discusses these developments in the context of drug law debates and criminological discussions on late modern governance.

Preventing Suicide in French Prisons
Gaetan Cliquennois

This paper shows that preventing ‘suicide risks’ in French prison regulations is thwarted in two prisons by professional criteria regarding credibility and solidarity, as well as by the balance of power between prisoners and guards, in addition to the realization, on the part of the judges responsible for sentencing, of the risks posed by recidivists. The results of this study should provoke a re-evaluation of suicide prevention programmes when considered in the light of the numerous mediations and transcriptions between these programmes and their subsequent concretization in the culture and practices of prison employees.

We Predict a Riot?: Public Order Policing, New Media Environments and the Rise of the Citizen Journalist
Chris Greer and Eugene McLaughlin

This article explores the rise of ‘citizen journalism’ and considers its implications for the policing and news media reporting of public protests in the twenty-first century. Our research focuses on the use and impact of multi-media technologies during the 2009 G20 Summit Protests in London and evaluates their role in shaping the subsequent representation of ‘protest as news’. The classic concepts of ‘inferential structure’ (Lang and Lang 1955) and ‘hierarchy of credibility’ (Becker 1967) are re-situated within the context of the 24–7 news mediasphere to analyse the transition in news media focus at G20 from ‘protester violence’ to ‘police violence’. This transition is understood in terms of three key issues: the capacity of technologically empowered citizen journalists to produce information that challenges the ‘official’ version of events; the inclination of professional and citizen journalists to actively seek out and use that information; and the existence of an information-communications marketplace that sustains the commodification and mass consumption of adversarial, anti-establishment news.

Chibnall Revisited: Crime Reporters, the Police and ‘Law-and-Order News’
Rob C. Mawby

The relationship between the police and the news media is an integral part of how police forces communicate into the public sphere. Using, as a benchmark, Chibnall's influential account of English crime reporting, Law-and-Order News, and drawing on Habermas's concept of the public sphere, this paper examines the contemporary police–media relationship. It analyses the rise of police corporate communications against the apparent decline of specialist crime reporting drawing on interviews with crime reporters, police communications managers and a survey of police forces in England, Wales and Scotland. The paper concludes that ‘law-and-order news’ currently remains contested but the relationship is increasingly asymmetrical in favour of the police.

Women and the Provision of Criminal Justice Advice: Lessons from England and Wales 1944–1964
Anne Logan

This article provides an analysis of the role of the Advisory Council on the Treatment of Offenders in the provision of policy advice to the government in the years after the Second World War and highlights the role of its women members, who mainly owed their appointment as advisors to their expertise gained in the voluntary role of Justice of the Peace. The article first contrasts the voluntary workers’ supposedly ‘amateur’ status with the mainly ‘professional’ credentials of the Council's other members and the relevance of the conventional distinctions made between the two types of experience is questioned. There follows an evaluation of the Council's impact on criminal justice policy in the period 1944–64. The article concludes that the clearest case for the Council's effectiveness can be made with regard to its early years but that the replacement of ‘amateur’ policy advice by criminological research in the post-1945 era was by no means a sudden process, and certainly not one that was completed by the 1960s. It suggests that in the light of the formation of Britain's first peace-time coalition government in nearly 80 years, the time might be ripe for a reconsideration of the role of voluntary sector representatives in the provision of policy advice.

Jailhouse Frocks: Locating the Public Interest in Policing Counterfeit Luxury Fashion Goods
David S. Wall and Joanna Large

Counterfeiting raises some interesting intellectual questions for criminologists, policy makers and brand owners, not least that it differs from the types of offending that traditionally form the crime diet of the criminal justice system. Whilst it is growing in prevalence due to the enormous returns on investment, it is unlikely that the public purse will fund major anti-counterfeiting initiatives in a climate of public sector cut-backs, emphasizing the need to allocate resources effectively. This article seeks to locate the public interest in policing counterfeit luxury fashion goods by separating it out from the broader debate over safety-critical counterfeits such as aircraft parts. It then maps out what is, in effect, the criminology of desire for counterfeit goods, before outlining the market incentives for counterfeiting and related criminal activity.

The Prüm Regime: Situated Dis/Empowerment in Transnational DNA Profile Exchange
Barbara Prainsack and Victor Toom

This paper takes critique of surveillance studies scholars of the shortcomings of the panoptic model for analysing contemporary systems of surveillance as a starting point. We argue that core conceptual tools, in conjunction with an under-conceptualization of agency, privilege a focus on the oppressive elements of surveillance. This often yields unsatisfying insights to why surveillance works, for whom, and at whose costs. We discuss the so-called Prüm regime, pertaining to transnational data exchange for forensic and police use in the EU, to illustrate how—by articulating instances of what we call ‘situated dis/empowerment’—agency can be better conceptualized, sharpening our gaze for the large extent to which the empowering and disempowering effects of surveillance depend on each other.

Crime Control and Due Process in Confidence-Building Strategies: A Governmentality Perspective
Daniel Gilling

This article employs a governmentality framework to make sense of approaches to building public confidence, based upon a performance management regime that includes the British Crime Survey and a range of communicative technologies intended to raise public confidence. Whilst there are two discursive threads running throughout that broadly correspond with models of crime control and due process, priority has been afforded at the level of governmental ‘talk’ to the crime control model. Reflecting upon the strengths and limitations of the governmentality framework, the article questions the likelihood of the crime control discourse being enacted in practice, as well as the appropriateness of such a policy emphasis.

Community Service Versus Electronic Monitoring—What Works Better?: Results of a Randomized Trial
Martin Killias, Gwladys Gilliéron, Izumi Kissling, and Patrice Villettaz

The present study is based on a controlled experiment in Switzerland with 240 subjects randomly assigned either to community service or to electronic monitoring. Measures of outcome include reconvictions, self-reported delinquency and several measures of social integration such as marriage, income and debts. The findings, based on subjects who successfully completed their sanction, suggest, with marginal significance (p < 0.10), that those assigned to electronic monitoring reoffended less than those assigned to community service, that they were more often married and lived under more favourable financial circumstances. Electronic monitoring may be an alternative to non-custodial sanctions. With increasing demands for non-custodial sanctions, it is crucial having more alternatives available.

Anti-Terrorist Laws and the United Kingdom's ‘Suspect Muslim Community’: A Reply to Pantazis and Pemberton
Steven Greer

In an article in a recent issue of this journal, Pantazis and Pemberton claim that anti-terrorist laws passed in the United Kingdom in the context of a post-9/11 official political discourse have turned Muslims into a ‘suspect community’ (Pantazis and Pemberton 2009). Regrettably, this thesis is built on a series of analytical, methodological, conceptual, logical, empirical, evidential and interpretive errors. There is no evidence to support it and a great deal that points in the opposite direction. This reply argues that the ‘suspect community’ thesis should, therefore, be rejected by social science, public policy and progressive politics in favour of a much more nuanced, multidimensional, accurate and productive account of the relationship between Muslims and the United Kingdom's anti-terrorist laws.

British Journal of Criminology, November 2010: Volume 50, Issue 6

Law & Society Review 44(3–4)

Presidential Address

A Personal Odyssey Toward a Theme: Race and Equality in the United States: 1948–2009
Richard Lempert

This 2009 Law & Society Association presidential address combines the personal and political to address issues relating to race relations in the United States. Combining narrative methods and quantitative data the article traces the roots of the author's commitment to racial equality and evaluates the degree to which over the past 60 years anti-black prejudice has diminished and black-white equality increased. The conclusion is that important progress toward black-white equality has occurred and prejudice is less of a barrier than it once was, but large gaps remain, and the progress achieved is fragile. Moreover, the greatest progress is in areas where the government has most strongly intervened, meaning that the racial jurisprudence of the current Supreme Court and conservative economic policies may present major impediments to further closing black-white gaps. Law and society scholars are urged to attend more to racial equality issues than they have in the past.

Commentators

Commentary on Professor Lempert's Presidential Address
Ralph Richard Banks

Racial Paradox in a Law and Society Odyssey
Mario L. Barnes

The Personal, the Political, and Race
Jeannine Bell

The Struggle for Racial Justice: The Personal, the Political, and … the Economic
Kitty Calavita

The Personal and the Professional: Assessing the Ambivalent Commitment to Racial Justice in the United States
Malcolm M. Feeley

Articles

What Counts As Knowledge? A Reflection on Race, Social Science, and the Law
Rachel F. Moran

In the years since the U.S. Supreme Court handed down Brown v. Board of Education (1954), most discussions of the case have focused on whether it was effective in promoting lasting equality of opportunity in the public schools. Although this profoundly important question dominates retrospectives on Brown, another unresolved controversy relates to whether the ruling has altered in any fundamental way the role of social science evidence in constitutional litigation. More than 50 years later, substantial disagreement persists about whether this kind of research has played or should play any important role in the jurisprudence of race. Today, social scientists face increasing doubts about their neutrality and objectivity, struggle to be heard in a marketplace of ideas increasingly flooded with information of questionable quality, and encounter growing resistance to the notion that expertise provides a proper foundation for legal decisionmaking. For those who still believe that social science has a role to play in advancing racial justice, the strategy used in Brown can no longer be taken for granted. The time is ripe to reassess what counts as knowledge so that social science is not increasingly marginalized in courts of law.

Experiencing Discrimination: Race and Retention in America's Largest Law Firms
Monique R. Payne-Pikus, John Hagan and Robert L. Nelson

Although the number of racial and ethnic minority lawyers in the legal profession has greatly increased, concern remains about their low percentage among partners in elite law firms. Using a nationally representative sample of young American lawyers, we compare a human capital–based theory, which emphasizes measures of merit, and an institutional discrimination–based theory, which focuses on differences in partner contact and mentoring. The results indicate that institutional discrimination theory is the better way of understanding racial and ethnic differences in lawyer retention. Future affirmative action programs need to focus not just on access but also the processes within large firms if minority presence is to be increased.

Do Blind People See Race? Social, Legal, and Theoretical Considerations
Osagie K. Obasogie

Although the meaning, significance, and definition of race have been debated for centuries, one thread of thought unifies almost all of the many diverging perspectives: a largely unquestioned belief that race is self-evident and visually obvious, defined largely by skin color, facial features, and other visual cues. This suggests that “seeing race” is an experience largely unmediated by broader social forces; we simply know it when we see it. It also suggests that those who cannot see are likely to have a diminished understanding of race. But is this empirically accurate?

I examine these questions by interviewing people who have been totally blind since birth about race and compare their responses to sighted individuals. I not only find that blind people have as significant an understanding of race as anyone else and that they understand race visually, but that this visual understanding of race stems from interpersonal and institutional socializations that profoundly shape their racial perceptions. These findings highlight how race and racial thinking are encoded into individuals through iterative social practices that train people to think a certain way about the world around them. In short, these practices are so strong that even blind people, in a conceptual sense, “see” race. Rather than being self-evident, these interviews draw attention to how race becomes visually salient through constitutive social practices that give rise to visual understandings of racial difference for blind and sighted people alike. This article concludes with a discussion of these findings' significance for understanding the role of race in law and society.

Race Categorization and the Regulation of Business and Science
Catherine Lee and John D. Skrentny

Despite the lack of consensus regarding the meaning or significance of race or ethnicity amongst scientists and the lay public, there are legal requirements and guidelines that dictate the collection of racial and ethnic data across a range of institutions. Legal regulations are typically created through a political process and then face varying kinds of resistance when the state tries to implement them. We explore the nature of this opposition by comparing responses from businesses, scientists, and science-oriented businesses (pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies) to U.S. state regulations that used politically derived racial categorizations, originally created to pursue civil rights goals. We argue that insights from cultural sociology regarding institutional and cultural boundaries can aid understanding of the nature of resistance to regulation. The Food and Drug Administration's guidelines for research by pharmaceutical companies imposed race categories on science-based businesses, leading to objections that emphasized the autonomy and validity of science. In contrast, similar race categories regulating first business by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and later scientific research sponsored by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) encountered little challenge. We argue that pharmaceutical companies had the motive (profit) that NIH-supported scientists lacked and a legitimate discourse (boundary work of science) that businesses regulated by the EEOC did not have. The study suggests the utility of a comparative cultural sociology of the politics of legal regulation, particularly when understanding race-related regulation and the importance of examining legal regulations for exploring how the meaning of race or ethnicity are contested and constructed in law.

Legal Mobilization in Schools: The Paradox of Rights and Race Among Youth
Calvin Morrill, Karolyn Tyson, Lauren B. Edelman and Richard Arum

In this article, we analyze ethnoracial patterns in youth perceptions and responses to rights violations and advance a new model of legal mobilization that includes formal, quasi-, and extralegal action. Slightly more than half of the 5,461 students in our sample reported past rights violations involving discrimination, harassment, freedom of expression/assembly, and due process violations in disciplinary procedures. Students, regardless of race, are more likely to take extralegal than formal legal actions in response to perceived rights violations. Self-identified African American and Latino/a students are significantly more likely than white and Asian American students to perceive rights violations and are more likely to claim they would take formal legal action in response to hypothetical rights violations. However, when they perceive rights violations, African American and Asian American students are no more likely than whites to take formal legal action and Latino/a students are less likely than whites to take formal legal action. We draw on in-depth interviews with youth and adults—which we interlace with our quantitative findings—to explore the interpretive dynamics underlying these survey findings, and we offer several theoretical and methodological implications of our work.

The Penology of Racial Innocence: The Erasure of Racism in the Study and Practice of Punishment
Naomi Murakawa and Katherine Beckett

In post–civil rights America, the ascendance of “law-and-order” politics and “postracial” ideology have given rise to what we call the penology of racial innocence. The penology of racial innocence is a framework for assessing the role of race in penal policies and institutions, one that begins with the presumption that criminal justice is innocent of racial power until proven otherwise. Countervailing sociolegal changes render this framework particularly problematic. On the one hand, the definition of racism has contracted in antidiscrimination law and in many social scientific studies of criminal justice, so that racism is defined narrowly as intentional and causally discrete harm. On the other hand, criminal justice institutions have expanded to affect historically unprecedented numbers of people of color, with penal policies broadening in ways that render the identification of racial intent and causation especially difficult. Analyses employing the penology of racial innocence examine the ever-expanding criminal justice system with limited definitions of racism, ultimately contributing to the erasure of racial power. Both racism and criminal justice operate in systemic and serpentine ways; our conceptual tools and methods, therefore, need to be equally systemic and capacious.

Mass Incarceration and the Paradox of Prison Conditions Litigation
Heather Schoenfeld

In this article I examine how prison conditions litigation in the 1970s, as an outgrowth of the civil rights movement, inadvertently contributed to the rise of mass incarceration in the United States. Using Florida as a case study, I detail how prison conditions litigation that aimed to reduce incarceration was translated in the political arena as a court order to build prisons. Drawing on insights from historical institutionalist scholarship, I argue that this paradox can be explained by considering the different historical and political contexts of the initial legal framing and the final compliance with the court order. In addition, I demonstrate how the choices made by policy makers around court compliance created policy feedback effects that further expanded the coercive capacity of the state and transformed political calculations around crime control. The findings suggest how “successful” court challenges for institutional change can have long-term outcomes that are contrary to social justice goals. The paradox of prison litigation is especially compelling because inmates' lawyers were specifically concerned about racial injustice, yet mass incarceration is arguably the greatest obstacle to racial equality in the twenty-first century.

Race, Urban Governance, and Crime Control: Creating Model Cities
Elizabeth Brown

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the city of Seattle received federal Department of Housing and Urban Development “Model cities” funds to address issues of racial disenfranchisement in the city. Premised under the “Great Society” ethos, Model cities sought to remedy the strained relationship between local governments and disenfranchised urban communities. Though police-community relations were not initially slated as an area of concern in the city's grant application, residents of the designated “model neighborhood” pressed for the formation of a law and justice task force to address the issue. This article examines the process and outcome of the two law-and-justice projects proposed by residents of the designated “model neighborhood”: the Consumer Protection program and the Community Service Officer project. Drawing on the work of legal geographies scholars, I argue that the failure of each of these efforts to achieve residents' intentions stems from the geographical imagination of urban problems. Like law-and-order projects today, the geographical imagination of the model neighborhood produced a discourse of exceptionality that subjected residents to extraordinary state interventions. The Model cities project thus provides an example of a “history of the present” of mass incarceration in which the geographical imagination of crime helps facilitate the re-creation of a racialized power structure.

The Invisible Black Victim: How American Federalism Perpetuates Racial Inequality in Criminal Justice
Lisa L. Miller

The promise of civil rights is the promise of inclusion; yet the vast disparity in incarceration rates between blacks, Latinos, and whites stands as an ugly reminder of the nation's long history of race-based exclusionary practices. In this article, I argue that an important aspect of understanding race and the law in the twenty-first century is an appreciation of the American federal system that structures legal authority, political mobilization, and policy solutions and serves as an important and overlooked obstacle to more complete and sustained racial equality in crime and punishment in the United States. In contrast to the conventional wisdom about the role of the national government in protecting the rights of minorities and other disadvantaged groups, I suggest that crime and justice are arenas where the nationalization of issues has left the most important constituents behind. In fact, local crime politics provides a space where there is regular and ongoing articulation of the inclusionary goals of the civil rights agenda and sustained efforts to move forward in realizing that agenda through meaningful community involvement in promoting public safety, economic development, and social justice. This article explores these themes and offers a discussion of the linkages between federalism, racial inequality and crime, victimization and punishment.

From the Myth of Formal Equality to the Politics of Social Justice: Race and the Legal Attack on Native Entitlements
Courtenay W. Daum and Eric Ishiwata

This article examines how the conservative legal movement's successful countermobilization of the politics of rights enables U.S. Supreme Court outcomes that exacerbate racial and ethnic inequities while solidifying the privileged position of others in the name of equality. A comparison of two pivotal Supreme Court cases involving native entitlements—Morton v. Mancari (1974) and Rice v. Cayetano (2000)—illustrates how appeals to formal, as opposed to substantive, equality work in effect to support existing hierarchies. At the same time, the conservative legal movement's success provides progressive social actors with opportunities to reframe the discourse. We suggest that a critical questioning of strategies predicated on appeals for equal rights may be necessary to advance the interests of native populations in the current environment, and we identify an alternative way of working for native interests, one that escapes the constraints of equality doctrine by appealing to broader claims of social justice.

Law & Society Review, September/December 2010: Volume 44, Issues 3–4

Social Problems 57(4)

Reporting Conventions: Journalists, Activists, and the Thorny Struggle for Political Visibility
Sarah Sobieraj

This article draws upon 134 in-depth interviews with activists and journalists in an effort to reconcile the extensive activism taking place in the shadows of presidential campaigns with its near invisibility in the news. In his classic work, Todd Gitlin (1980) demonstrated that activists become newsworthy only by submitting to the "implicit rules of news making" (p. 3). This research supports his finding, but demonstrates that unbeknownst to activists, coverage of political outsiders is governed by a set of rules quite different from (and often diametrically opposed to) those employed in routine news-gathering. Taking cues from news creation practices that go on daily between journalists, parajournalists, and subjects, activist groups work assiduously to prepare members to fit the needs of political reporters. They bend over backwards to be media-friendly, which they perceive as professional, quotable, and credible, but ironically these studied attempts to conform to the norms of routine political reporting make them less appealing to journalists. While journalists may attend eagerly to elected officials' press conferences and official statements, they demand authenticity, particularly in the form of emotion and spontaneity, from outsiders—the very attributes activists work to erase in their media trainings. In the end, the activist groups fail to obtain coverage, not because they can't conform to the rules of news making, but because they are following the wrong rules. This article maps the contradictory sets of norms at play in the negotiation over news, and shows how they work together to create nearly insurmountable cultural boundaries for political outsiders.

Beyond the Ballot: Immigrant Collective Action in Gateways and New Destinations in the United States
Dina Okamoto and Kim Ebert

Most studies that attempt to understand immigrant political incorporation focus on patterns of electoral participation and citizenship acquisition. Given that nearly 60 percent of the foreign-born population in the United States is comprised of noncitizens, we argue that past studies miss an important dimension of the immigrant political incorporation process. In this article, we move beyond the ballot by documenting patterns of immigrant protest and conducting an analysis of the conditions under which immigrant organizing occurs in traditional gateways and new destinations. In addition to political opportunities and resources, we argue that conditions heightening group boundaries between immigrants and natives—what we call boundary markers—should play an important role in encouraging immigrants to develop a shared minority status and make collective claims on behalf of the larger group. Using hurdle models, we test our theoretical ideas with a new data set comprised of over 200 immigrant protest events in 52 metropolitan areas across the United States. Our results challenge past studies of immigrant mobilization because we find that inclusionary contexts characterized by greater access to formal political and economic incorporation both hinder and facilitate immigrant organizing, while boundary markers—measured here as threats and segregation—tend to encourage immigrant protest.

More Than Just Nickels and Dimes: A Cross-National Analysis of Working Poverty in Affluent Democracies
David Brady, Andrew S. Fullerton, and Jennifer Moren Cross

Despite its centrality to contemporary inequality, working poverty is often popularly discussed but rarely studied by sociologists. Using the Luxembourg Income Study (2009), we analyze whether an individual is working poor across 18 affluent democracies circa 2000. We demonstrate that working poverty does not simply mirror overall poverty and that there is greater cross-national variation in working than overall poverty. We then examine four explanations for working poverty: demographic characteristics, economic performance, unified theory, and welfare generosity. We utilize Heckman probit models to jointly model the likelihood of employment and poverty among the employed. Our analyses provide the least support for the economic performance explanation. There is modest support for unified theory as unionization reduces working poverty in some models. However, most of these effects appear to be mediated by welfare generosity. More substantial evidence exists for the demographic characteristics and welfare generosity explanations. An individual's likelihood of being working poor can be explained by (a) a lack of multiple earners or other adults in one's household, low education, single motherhood, having children and youth; and (b) the generosity of the welfare state in which he or she resides. Also, welfare generosity does not undermine employment and reduces working poverty even among demographically vulnerable groups. Ultimately, we encourage a greater role for the welfare state in debates about working poverty.

Social Problem Construction and National Context: News Reporting on "Overweight" and "Obesity" in the United States and France
Abigail C. Saguy, Kjerstin Gruys, and Shanna Gong

Drawing on analyses of American and French news reports on "overweight" and "obesity," this article examines how national context—including position in a global field of nation states, as well as different national politics and culture—shapes the framing of social problems. As has been shown in previous research, news reports from France—the economically dominated but culturally dominant nation of the two—discuss the United States more often than vice versa, typically in a negative way. Our contribution is to highlight the flexibility of anti-American rhetoric, which provides powerful ammunition for a variety of social problem frames. Specifically, depending on elite interests, French news reports may invoke anti-American rhetoric to reject a given phenomenon as a veritable public problem, or they may use such rhetoric to drum up concern over an issue. We further show how diverse cultural factors shape news reporting. Despite earlier work showing that a group-based discrimination frame is more common in the United States than in France, we find that the U.S. news sample is no more likely to discuss weight-based discrimination than the French news sample. We attribute this to specific barriers to this particular framing, namely the widespread view that body size is a behavior, akin to smoking, rather than an ascribed characteristic, like race. This discussion points, more generally, to some of the mechanisms limiting the diffusion of frames across social problems.

The state of the Economy and the Relationship Between prisoner Reentry and Crime
Lance Hannon and Robert DeFina

Previous research has identified a positive relationship between prisoner reentry and crime rates. The relationship potentially reflects both the recidivism of reentering offenders and the broader impact of the releases on the social organization of the areas to which they return. This article explores how economic conditions moderate the association between the size of the reentering population and crime rates. Using a state-level panel spanning the years 1978 through 2003, and two alternative measures of economic strength, the results demonstrate that the amount of increase in property and violent crime associated with prisoner societal reentry is substantially lessened by strong economic conditions. The findings suggest that economic conditions and criminal justice policies should not be pitted against each other as simply competing explanations for variation in crime rates. Instead, they should be recognized as irreducibly interdependent.

Who Lives and Dies on Death Row? Race, Ethnicity, and Post-Sentence Outcomes in Texas
Michelle A. Petrie and James E. Coverdill

A substantial body of research has explored the extent to which the race of offenders and victims influences who receives a death sentence for capital crimes. Little is known about how race and ethnicity might pattern death-row outcomes. Drawing upon evidence from male offenders sentenced to death in Texas during the years 1974 through 2009, we extend recent research by examining whether the race and ethnicity of offenders and victims and a number of offender, victim, and crime attributes influence the likelihood of executions and sentence relief (whereby prisoners leave death row). Cox regression analyses are used in conjunction with a multiple-imputation method for handling a modest amount of missing data. The results show that cases involving minorities—with black or Latino offenders or victims—have lower hazards of execution than cases in which both offenders and victims are white. Victim and offender race and ethnicity have little to no independent effect upon the hazard of sentence relief.

A Paradox of Participation: Nonwhites in White Sororities and Fraternities
Matthew W. Hughey

Although law prohibits race-based exclusion in college sororities and fraternities in the United States, racial segregation prevails. As a result, nonwhite membership in white Greek-letter organizations (WGLOs) is often hailed as a transformative step toward equality and unity. The bulk of work on such cross-racial membership centers on comparative-historical and survey data and treats integrated membership as the successful end, rather than a problematic beginning, of analysis. Drawing upon in-depth interviews and ethnographic fieldwork in three university campuses on the East Coast, I shift the focus from resource factors that either prevent or enable membership to the strategies of action that nonwhite members employ in their everyday lives in order to be perceived as full, belonging members. By drawing upon the insights of the sociology of culture, I argue that robust racialized schemas simultaneously enable and constrain inclusion. Rather than hide explicit racial-ethnic difference or accede to traditional expectations of Anglo conformity, I find that nonwhite members are enmeshed in a paradox of participation: their ability to frame themselves as equal and belonging Greek "brothers and sisters" remains tied to a patterned reproduction of their racial and ethnic identities as essentially different and inferior. Such a paradox emerges as an important theoretical and pragmatic dilemma with implications for an array of institutional contexts.

Social Problems, November 2010: Volume 57, Issue 4

Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 47(4)

Betwixt and Between: The Role of Psychosocial Factors in the Early Stages of Desistance
Deirdre Healy

This article presents the results of an investigation into the psychosocial changes involved in the early stages of desistance, which to date have attracted little empirical or theoretical attention. The study used a mixed-methods design to produce a nuanced account of the shifts that occur in cognitions and social circumstances as offenders make the transition to desistance. Three psychometric instruments were completed by 73 adult males aged 18 to 35 who had acquired at least two previous convictions and were living in Dublin, Ireland. Participants who reported no offending in the past month were defined as ‘‘primary desisters.’’ In a regression analysis, age, age at onset of offending, and criminal thinking styles emerged as important predictors of primary desistance, whereas social circumstances and pro-criminal attitudes did not. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.

Are Teen Delinquency Abstainers Social Introverts?: A Test of Moffitt’s Theory
Xiaojin Chen and Michele Adams

Prior research has identified a small group of adolescents who completely refrain from delinquent behavior. Researchers have hypothesized that these adolescents may be excluded from normative peer activities and are thus insulated from delinquent peer role models. A central argument in Moffitt’s account of delinquency abstention, for example, is that delinquency abstainers are socially isolated due to certain unappealing physical/personality characteristics. Using the detailed friendship network data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), the authors attempt to test Moffitt’s account of delinquency abstention, particularly the association between social exclusion and delinquency. Their results do not suggest strong empirical support for the hypothesis that delinquency abstention is ‘‘correlated with unpopularity and social isolation.’’ The complex associations between adolescent friendship network characteristics and delinquency abstention highlight the necessity for future research on peer contexts in which adolescents are embedded. The authors’ findings appear to challenge Moffitt’s theory, suggesting the need for certain modifications.

Effects of Hurricane Katrina and Other Adverse Life Events on Adolescent Female Offenders: A Test of General Strain Theory
Angela R. Robertson, Judith A. Stein, and Lacey Schaefer-Rohleder

This study tested Agnew’s General Strain Theory (GST) by examining the roles of anger, anxiety, and maladaptive coping in mediating the relationship between strain and three outcomes (serious delinquency, minor delinquency, and continued involvement in the juvenile justice system) among adolescent female offenders (N = 261). Strains consisted of adverse life events and exposure to Hurricane Katrina. Greater exposure to Hurricane Katrina was directly related to serious delinquency and maladaptive coping. Hurricane Katrina also had an indirect effect on minor delinquency and Post— Katrina juvenile justice involvement mediated through maladaptive coping. Adverse life events were associated with increased anger, anxiety, and maladaptive coping. Anger mediated the relationship between adverse life events and serious delinquency. Anxiety mediated the relationship between adverse life events and minor delinquency. Maladaptive coping strategies were associated with minor delinquency and juvenile justice involvement. Findings lend support to GST.

Contemporary Disorganization Research: An Assessment and Further Test of the Systemic Model of Neighborhood Crime
Paul E. Bellair and Christopher R. Browning

The systemic model posits that informal control reduces crime and that social networks reduce crime indirectly by stimulating informal control. The systemic literature consistently supports the informal control-crime relationship but reveals wider variation in the measurement and effects of network dimensions. Recognizing this pattern, some scholars advocate an explicit distinction between networks and informal control. We formally address that issue with analysis of the measurement structure of multiple network and informal control indicators using data collected in 300 Seattle neighborhoods. Results reveal several distinct network dimensions that are themselves distinct from informal control. Regression analysis supports the systemic model: informal control reduces crime victimization, and networks exhibit an indirect, negative effect through informal control. Consistent with prior research, some network measures have a positive, direct effect on crime. We conclude that a distinction between networks and informal control is essential when testing and evaluating the systemic model.

Examining the Direct and Interactive Effects of Changes in Racial and Ethnic Threat on Sentencing Decisions
Xia Wang and Daniel P. Mears

Minority threat theory has been used to explain sentencing decisions, but rarely has the theory’s logic been assessed by examining changes in threat. Building on prior theoretical and empirical research, we develop hypotheses about the direct and interactive effects of changes in racial and ethnic threat on sentencing. We test the hypotheses using data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ State Court Processing Statistics program and other sources. The results indicate that increased racial threat contributes to a greater probability of receiving a prison sentence when baseline levels of threat are high. Less support is found for an effect of changes in ethnic threat. We find no support for arguments that minority threat effects are greater among minority defendants, but we do find support for the argument that threat effects are greater among violent and drug offenders. We discuss the implications of the findings for theory, research, and policy.

Are Sex Offenders Moving into Social Disorganization? Analyzing the Residential Mobility of California Parolees
John R. Hipp, Susan Turner, and Jesse Jannetta

This study focuses on the relationship between returning offender residential mobility and neighborhood structural factors characteristic of socially disorganized neighborhoods. It uses a unique data set that combines information on parolees released in the state of California during the 2005-2006 time period with their geocoded addresses to view the types of neighborhoods they are moving to. The authors find that sex offenders are entering neighborhoods with more concentrated disadvantage and residential instability upon reentry from prison and upon subsequent moves. This effect for sex offender status is particularly strong for whites and Latinos, leading them into more socially disorganized neighborhoods. The authors also find that sex offenders are more likely to enter neighborhoods with more minorities as measured by Latinos and African Americans and less likely to enter neighborhoods with more whites.

Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, November 2010: Volume 47, Issue 4

American Sociological Review 75(5)

Racial Segregation and the American Foreclosure Crisis
Jacob S. Rugh and Douglas S. Massey

The rise in subprime lending and the ensuing wave of foreclosures was partly a result of market forces that have been well-identified in the literature, but it was also a highly racialized process. We argue that residential segregation created a unique niche of minority clients who were differentially marketed risky subprime loans that were in great demand for use in mortgage-backed securities that could be sold on secondary markets. We test this argument by regressing foreclosure actions in the top 100 U.S. metropolitan areas on measures of black, Hispanic, and Asian segregation while controlling for a variety of housing market conditions, including average creditworthiness, the extent of coverage under the Community Reinvestment Act, the degree of zoning regulation, and the overall rate of subprime lending. We find that black residential dissimilarity and spatial isolation are powerful predictors of foreclosures across U.S. metropolitan areas. To isolate subprime lending as the causal mechanism through which segregation influences foreclosures, we estimate a two-stage least squares model that confirms the causal effect of black segregation on the number and rate of foreclosures across metropolitan areas. We thus conclude that segregation was an important contributing cause of the foreclosure crisis, along with overbuilding, risky lending practices, lax regulation, and the bursting of the housing price bubble.

Stratification by Skin Color in Contemporary Mexico
Andrés Villarreal

Latin America is often used as a backdrop against which U.S. race relations are compared. Yet research on race in Latin America focuses almost exclusively on countries in the region with a large recognized presence of individuals of African descent such as Brazil. Racial categories in these countries are based on skin color distinctions along a black-white continuum. By contrast, the main socially recognized ethnic distinction in Indo-Latin American countries such as Mexico, between indigenous and non-indigenous residents, is not based primarily on phenotypical differences, but rather on cultural practices and language use. Many Mexicans today nevertheless express a preference for whiter skin and European features, even though no clear system of skin color categorization appears to exist. In this study, I use data from a nationally-representative panel survey of Mexican adults to examine the extent of skin-color-based social stratification in contemporary Mexico. Despite extreme ambiguity in skin color classification, I find considerable agreement among survey interviewers about who belongs to three skin color categories. The results also provide evidence of profound social stratification by skin color. Individuals with darker skin tone have significantly lower levels of educational attainment and occupational status, and they are more likely to live in poverty and less likely to be affluent, even after controlling for other individual characteristics.

Personal Characteristics, Sexual Behaviors, and Male Sex Work: A Quantitative Approach
Trevon D. Logan

Male sex workers serve multiple groups (i.e., gay-identified men, heterosexually-identified men, and their own sexual partners), making them a unique source to test theories of gender, masculinity, and sexuality. To date, most scholarship on this topic has been qualitative. I assembled a dataset from the largest online male sex worker website to conduct the first quantitative analysis of male escorts in the United States. I find the geographic distribution of male sex workers is more strongly correlated with the general population than with the gay male population. In addition, I estimate the value of sexual behaviors and personal characteristics in this market to test sociological theories of gender and masculinity. Consistent with hegemonic masculinity, I find that male escorts who advertise masculine behavior charge higher prices for their services, whereas escorts who advertise less masculine behavior charge significantly less, a differential on the order of 17 percent. Results show that race and sexual behavior interactions exert a strong influence on prices charged by male sex workers, confirming aspects of intersectionality theory.

Differences in Disadvantage: Variation in the Motherhood Penalty across White Women’s Earnings Distribution
Michelle J. Budig and Melissa J. Hodges

Earnings inequality has grown in recent decades in the United States, yet research investigating the motherhood wage penalty has not fully considered how the penalty itself, and the mechanisms producing it, may vary among low-wage, middle-wage, and high-wage workers. Pooling data from the 1979 to 2004 waves of the NLSY and using simultaneous quantile regression methods with fixed effects, we test whether the size of the motherhood penalty differs across the distribution of white women’s earnings, and whether the mechanisms explaining this penalty vary by earnings level. Results show that having children inflicts the largest penalty on low-wage women, proportionately, although a significant motherhood penalty persists at all earnings levels. We also find that the mechanisms creating the motherhood penalty vary by earnings level. Family resources, work effort, and compensating differentials account for a greater portion of the penalty among low earners. Among highly paid women, by contrast, the motherhood penalty is significantly smaller and largely explained by lost human capital due to childbearing. Our findings show that estimates of average motherhood penalties obscure the compounded disadvantage mothers face at the bottom of the earnings distribution, as well as differences in the type and strength of mechanisms that produce the penalty.

Good Times, Bad Times: Postwar Labor’s Share of National Income in Capitalist Democracies
Tali Kristal

This article returns to a classic question of political economy: the zero-sum conflict between capital and labor over the division of the national income pie. A detailed description of labor’s share of national income in 16 industrialized democracies from 1960 to 2005 uncovers two long-term trends: an increase in labor’s share in the aftermath of World War II, followed by a decrease since the early 1980s. I argue that the working class’s relative bargaining power explains the dynamics of labor’s share, and I model inter- and intra-class bargaining power in the economic, political, and global spheres. Time-series cross-section equations predicting the short- and long-term determinants of labor’s share support most of my theoretical arguments and the main findings are robust to alternative specifications. Results suggest that the common trend in the dynamics of labor’s share of national income is largely explained by indicators for working-class organizational power in the economic (i.e., unionization and strike activity) and political (i.e., government civilian spending) spheres, working-class structural power in the global sphere (i.e., southern imports and foreign direct investments), and indirectly by an indicator for working-class integration in the intra-class sphere (i.e., bargaining centralization).

The Rise of the Nation-State across the World, 1816 to 2001
Andreas Wimmer and Yuval Feinstein

Why did the nation-state proliferate across the world over the past 200 years, replacing empires, kingdoms, city-states, and the like? Using a new dataset with information on 145 of today’s states from 1816 to the year they achieved nation-statehood, we test key aspects of modernization, world polity, and historical institutionalist theories. Event history analysis shows that a nation-state is more likely to emerge when a power shift allows nationalists to overthrow or absorb the established regime. Diffusion of the nation-state within an empire or among neighbors also tilts the balance of power in favor of nationalists. We find no evidence for the effects of industrialization, the advent of mass literacy, or increasingly direct rule, which are associated with the modernization theories of Gellner, Anderson, Tilly, and Hechter. Nor is the growing global hegemony of the nation-state model a good predictor of individual instances of nation-state formation, as Meyer’s world polity theory would suggest. We conclude that the global rise of the nation-state is driven by proximate and contextual political factors situated at the local and regional levels, in line with historical institutionalist arguments, rather than by domestic or global structural forces that operate over the long durée.

Calling for Participation: Requests, Blocking Moves, and Rational (Inter)action in Survey Introductions
Douglas W. Maynard, Jeremy Freese, and Nora Cate Schaeffer

We draw on conversation analytic methods and research to explicate the interactional phenomenon of requesting in general and the specific case of requesting participation in survey interviews. Recent work on survey participation gives much attention to leverage-saliency theory but does not explore how the key concepts of this theory are exhibited in the actual unfolding interaction of interviewers and potential respondents. We examine interaction using digitally recorded and transcribed calls to recruit participation in the 2004 Wisconsin Longitudinal Study. We describe how potential respondents present interactional environments that are relatively discouraging or encouraging, and how, in response, interviewers may be relatively cautious or presumptive in their requesting actions. We consider how interviewers’ ability to tailor their behavior to their interactional environments can affect whether an introduction reaches the point at which a request to participate is made, the form that this request takes, and the sample person’s response. This article contributes to understanding the social action of requesting and specifically how we might use insights from analyses of interaction to increase cooperation with requests to participate in surveys.

American Sociological Review, October 2010: Volume 75, Issue 5

Social Psychology Quarterly 73(3)

Openings

Urban Desolation and Symbolic Denigration in the Hyperghetto
Loïc Wacquant

Identity through a Glass Darkly: Review Essay of Peter J. Burke and Jan E. Stets, Identity Theory
Mabel Berezin


Two on Age

Emigration, Generation, and Collective Memories: The Presence of the Past for Emigrants from the Former Soviet Union
Amy D. Corning

Age Identity in Context: Stress and the Subjective Side of Aging
Markus H. Schafer and Tetyana Pylypiv Shippee
  
Articles

Advice-implicative Interrogatives: Building “Client-centered” Support in a Children’s Helpline
Carly W. Butler, Jonathan Potter, Susan Danby, Michael Emmison, and Alexa Hepburn

Gender and Entrepreneurship as a Career Choice: Do Self-assessments of Ability Matter?
Sarah Thébaud

Social Psychology Quarterly, September 2010: Volume 73, Issue 3

The Annals of the AAPSS 631

The Federal Statistical System: Its Vulnerability Matters More Than You Think

Science Starts Not after Measurement, but with Measurement
Kenneth Prewitt

Social Science Data and the Shaping of National Policy
John P. Holdren

Federal Statistics: Understanding a Crucial Resource
Katherine K. Wallman

The Importance of Federal Statistics for Advancing Science and Identifying Policy Options
Ralph Cicerone

The Need to Get the Right Health Statistics and to Get the Health Statistics Right
Harvey Fineberg

In Engineering: Why It Is Critical to Have Quality Statistics and Scientifically Sound Statistical Analysis
Charles Vest

Federal Statistics in the Policy making Process
Peter R. Orszag

The Government Accountability Office and Congressional Uses of Federal Statistics
Nancy Kingsbury

Designing a New Architecture for the U.S. National Accounts
Dale W. Jorgenson

The Federal Statistical System: The Local Government Perspective
Joseph J. Salvo and Arun Peter Lobo

Indicators and the Federal Statistical System: An Essential but Fraught Partnership
Norman M. Bradburn and Carolyn J.E. Fuqua

The Media as Consumers of Statistics
Paul Overberg

Immigration Statistics for the Twenty-First Century
Douglas S. Massey

Why American Families Need the Census
Stephanie Coontz

The Census and the Federal Statistical System: Historical Perspectives
Margo Anderson

The Structure and Activities of the U.S. Federal Statistical System: History and Recurrent Challenges
Robert M. Groves

The Role of the Federal Statistical System in Evidence-based Policymaking, or How to Make the Statistical System Essential
Michael J. O'Grady

The Federal Statistical System and the Four “I”s
Stephen E. Fienberg

Future of Innovation in the Federal Statistical System
Hermann Habermann

Why We Need One Statistical Agency
Janet L. Norwood

Principles and Practices for the Federal Statistical System: The View from the Committee on National Statistics
William F. Eddy, Constance F. Citro, and Daniel L. Cork

What Is Political Interference in Federal Statistics?
Kenneth Prewitt

The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, September 2010: Volume 631

Journal of Quantitative Criminology Forthcoming

Titles of forthcoming articles currently available in Journal of Quantitative Criminology's "Online First" section:

A New Twist on an Old Approach: A Random-Interaction Approach for Estimating Rates of Inter-Group Interaction
John R. Hipp, George E. Tita and Lyndsay N. Boggess

Thoughtfully Reflective Decision Making and the Accumulation of Capital: Bringing Choice Back In
Ray Paternoster, Greg Pogarsky and Gregory Zimmerman

Asymmetric Loss Functions for Forecasting in Criminal Justice Settings
Richard Berk

Something Old, Something New: Revisiting Competing Hypotheses of the Victimization-Offending Relationship Among Adolescents
Graham C. Ousey, Pamela Wilcox and Bonnie S. Fisher

The Effects of Genetics, the Environment, and Low Self-Control on Perceived Maternal and Paternal Socialization: Results from a Longitudinal Sample of Twins
Kevin M. Beaver

Reliability and Validity of Prisoner Self-Reports Gathered Using the Life Event Calendar Method
James E. Sutton, Paul E. Bellair, Brian R. Kowalski, Ryan Light and Donald T. Hutcherson

A Longitudinal Study of Escalation in Crime Seriousness
Jiayi Liu, Brian Francis and Keith Soothill

One Bad Apple May Not Spoil the Whole Bunch: Best Friends and Adolescent Delinquency
Carter Rees and Greg Pogarsky

How Do They ‘End Up Together’? A Social Network Analysis of Self-Control, Homophily, and Adolescent Relationships
Jacob T. N. Young

Reciprocal Effects of Victimization and Routine Activities
Margit Averdijk

Advances and Challenges in Empirical Studies of Victimization
Janet L. Lauritsen

Gold Standard Myths: Observations on the Experimental Turn in Quantitative Criminology
Robert J. Sampson

The Development and Impact of Self-Report Measures of Crime and Delinquency
Marvin D. Krohn, Terence P. Thornberry, Chris L. Gibson and Julie M. Baldwin

The Present and Possible Future of Quantitative Criminology
David McDowall

Editorial Introduction
Alex R. Piquero and James P. Lynch

Picturing JQC’s Future
Michael D. Maltz

Criminal Contemplation, National Context, and Deterrence
Charles R. Tittle, Ekaterina V. Botchkovar and Olena Antonaccio

Nurturing the Journal of Quantitative Criminology Through Late Childhood: Retrospective Memories (Distorted?) from a Former Editor
John H. Laub

Longitudinal Criminology
David F. Greenberg

Communities, Crime, and Reactions to Crime Multilevel Models: Accomplishments and Meta-Challenges
Ralph B. Taylor

Making Space for Theory: The Challenges of Theorizing Space and Place for Spatial Analysis in Criminology
George E. Tita and Steven M. Radil

The Use of Official Records to Measure Crime and Delinquency
Colin Loftin and David McDowall

What You Can and Can’t Properly Do with Regression
Richard Berk

Journal of Quantitative Criminology, October 2010: Forthcoming

Critical Criminology Forthcoming

Titles of forthcoming articles currently available in Critical Criminology's "Online First" section:


Green Criminology and Dirty Collar Crime
Vincenzo Ruggiero and Nigel South

Criminalizing Ecological Harm: Crimes Against Carrying Capacity and the Criminalization of Eco-Sinners
Dennis Mares

OxyContin and a Regulation Deficiency of the Pharmaceutical Industry: Rethinking State-Corporate Crime
O. Hayden Griffin and Bryan Lee Miller

Deforestation Crimes and Conflicts in the Amazon
Tim Boekhout van Solinge

Toxic Atmospheres Air Pollution, Trade and the Politics of Regulation
Reece Walters

The Death Penalty: An Unusual Punishment America is Inflicting Upon Itself
Stephanie Boys

How an Elite-Engineered Moral Panic Led to the U.S. War on Iraq
Scott A. Bonn

Family Leave and Law Enforcement: A Survey of Parents in U.S. Police Departments
Corina Schulze

Cultural Criminology: An Invitation… to What?
Dale Spencer

Embracing Emotionality: Clothing My “Naked Truths”
Felice Yuen

Critical Criminology and Crimes Against the Environment
Vincenzo Ruggiero and Nigel South

The Corporate Crimes of Dow Chemical and the Failure to Regulate Environmental Pollution
Rebecca S. Katz

High Policing Theory and the Question of ‘What is to be Done?’
Warwick Tie

Restorative Justice and “Empowerment”: Producing and Governing Active Subjects through “Empowering” Practices
Kelly Richards

Structuration Theory and Wrongful Imprisonment: From ‘Victimhood’ to ‘Survivorship’?
Gabe Tan

Vandalizing Meaning, Stealing Memory: Artistic, Cultural, and Theoretical Implications of Crime in Galleries and Museums
Avi Brisman

Above the Law? A Comparative Study of National Prosecutions of Heads of State
Napoleon C. Reyes and Jurg Gerber

Deciphering the Ambiguous Menace of Sexuality for the Innocence of Childhood
J. C. W. Gooren

Qualitative Research and Intersectionality
Adam Trahan


Critical Criminology, October 2010: Forthcoming