The ANNALS of the AAPSS 639

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, January 2012: Volume 639

Gender and Race Inequality in Management: Critical Issues, New Evidence

Introduction: Gender, Race, and Management
Matt L. Huffman

Minority Vulnerability in Privileged Occupations: Why Do African American Financial Advisers Earn Less than Whites in a Large Financial Services Firm?
William T. Bielby

Managing Ambivalent Prejudices: Smart-but-Cold and Warm-but-Dumb Stereotypes
Susan T. Fiske

Power, Influence, and Diversity in Organizations
Jeffrey W. Lucas and Amy R. Baxter

Diversity within Reach: Recruitment versus Hiring in Elite Firms
Lauren A. Rivera

Developmental Practices, Organizational Culture, and Minority Representation in Organizational Leadership: The Case of Partners in Large U.S. Law Firms
Fiona M. Kay and Elizabeth H. Gorman

If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You the Boss? Explaining the Persistent Vertical Gender Gap in Management
Heather A. Haveman and Lauren S. Beresford

Women’s Mobility into Upper-Tier Occupations: Do Determinants and Timing Differ by Race?
George Wilson

Money, Benefits, and Power: A Test of the Glass Ceiling and Glass Escalator Hypotheses
Ryan A. Smith

Do Female Top Managers Help Women to Advance? A Panel Study Using EEO-1 Records
Fidan Ana Kurtulus and Donald Tomaskovic-Devey

Minorities in Management: Effects on Income Inequality, Working Conditions, and Subordinate Career Prospects among Men
David Maume

Female Leaders, Organizational Power, and Sex Segregation
Kevin Stainback and Soyoung Kwon

Checking the Pulse of Diversity among Health Care Professionals: An Analysis of West Coast Hospitals
Sheryl L. Skaggs and Julie A. Kmec

The Gender Gap in Executive Compensation: The Role of Female Directors and Chief Executive Officers
Taekjin Shin

Criminology 49(4)

Criminology, November 2011: Volume 49, Issue 4

Examining the Genetic Underpinnings to Moffitt's Developmental Taxonomy: A Behavioral Genetic Analysis
J.C. Barnes, Kevin M. Beaver and Brian B. Boutwell

In recent years, criminological research has observed an increase in studies examining different offending trajectories. Much of this research has been guided by Moffitt's (1993) developmental taxonomy of life-course persistent offenders, adolescence-limited offenders, and abstainers. Moffitt (1993) argued that the etiologies of these different pathways could be traced to several biosocial factors, including perhaps genetic factors. To date, research has failed to address this possibility directly. The current study addressed this gap in the literature by examining the extent to which genetic factors explain variance in different offending patterns. Analysis of sibling pairs (N = 2,284; ages spanned between 11 and 27 years) drawn from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) revealed that genetic factors contributed significantly to being classified in each of the different offending patterns. Specifically, genetic factors explained between 56 and 70 percent of the variance in being classified as a life-course persistent offender across different coding strategies, 35 percent of the variance in being classified as an adolescence-limited offender, and 56 percent of the variance in being classified as an abstainer. We discuss the importance of integrating genetics into future studies examining offending trajectories.

Ghettos, Thresholds, and Crime: Does Concentrated Poverty Really Have an Accelerating Increasing Effect on Crime?
John R. Hipp and Daniel K. Yates

Theories make varying predictions regarding the functional form of the relationship between neighborhood poverty and crime rates, ranging from a diminishing positive effect, to a linear positive effect, to an exponentially increasing or even threshold effect. Nonetheless, surprisingly little empirical evidence exists testing this functional form. This study estimates the functional form of the relationship between poverty and various types of serious crime in a sample of census tracts for 25 cities, and it finds that a diminishing positive effect most appropriately characterizes this relationship whether estimating the models nonparametrically or parametrically. Only for the crime of murder does some evidence exist of an accelerating effect, although this occurs in the range of 20 to 40 percent in poverty, with a leveling effect on crime beyond this point of very high poverty. Thus, no evidence is found here in support of the postulate of scholars extending William Julius Wilson's (1987) insight that neighborhoods with very high levels of poverty will experience an exponentially higher rate of crime compared with other neighborhoods.

The Cascading Effects of Adolescent Gang Involvement across the Life Course
Marvin D. Krohn, Jeffrey T. Ward, Terence P. Thornberry, Alan J. Lizotte and Rebekah Chu

The short-run deleterious effects of gang involvement during adolescence have been well researched. However, surprisingly little empirical attention has been devoted to understanding how gang involvement in adolescence influences life chances and criminal behavior in adulthood. Drawing on the life-course perspective, this study argues that gang involvement will lead to precocious transitions that, in turn, will have adverse consequences on the fulfillment of adulthood roles and statuses in the economic and family spheres. Moreover, problems fulfilling these conventional roles are hypothesized then to lead to sustained involvement in criminal behavior in adulthood. Using data from a sample of males from the Rochester Youth Development Study, results from structural equation models support the indirect link between gang membership and noncriminal and criminal outcomes in adulthood. Specifically, gang involvement leads to an increase in the number of precocious transitions experienced that result in both economic hardship and family problems in adulthood. These failures in the economic and family realms, in turn, contribute to involvement in street crime and/or arrest in adulthood. Implications for the criminal desistance process are discussed.

On Ambiguity in Perceptions of Risk: Implications for Criminal Decision Making and Deterrence
Thomas A. Loughran, Raymond Paternoster, Alex R. Piquero and Greg Pogarsky

Deterrence theorists and researchers have argued that the critical dimension of sanction certainty is its level—increasing the certainty of punishment from a lower to a higher level will inhibit criminal conduct. However, the true certainty of punishment is rarely known with much precision. Both Sherman (1990) and Nagin (1998) have suggested that ambiguity about the level of punishment certainty is itself consequential in the decision to commit or refrain from crime. Here, we investigate this proposition. We find some evidence that individuals are “ambiguity averse” for decisions involving losses such as criminal punishments. This finding means that a more ambiguous perceived certainty of punishment is a greater deterrent of some crimes than a nominally equivalent but less ambiguous one. However, this effect depends on how large an individual's risk certainty perception is initially. That is, we find evidence for “boundary effects” (Casey and Scholz, 1991a, 1991b) in which this effect holds for lower probabilities but reverses for higher ones. For higher detection probabilities, individuals become “ambiguity seeking” such that a less ambiguous detection probability has more deterrent value than a nominally equivalent but more ambiguous detection probability. Results are presented from two distinct, but complementary, analysis samples and empirical approaches. These samples include a survey to college students with several hypothetical choice problems and data from the Pathways to Desistance study, a longitudinal investigation of serious adolescent offenders transitioning from adolescence to young adulthood.

Neuropsychological Measures of Executive Function and Antisocial Behavior: A Meta-Analysis
James M. Ogilvie, Anna L. Stewart, Raymond C. K. Chan and David H. K. Shum

A meta-analysis was performed to quantify the association between antisocial behavior (ASB) and performance on neuropsychological executive functioning (EF) measures. This meta-analysis built on Morgan and Lilienfeld's (2000) meta-analysis of the same topic by including recently published studies and by examining a wider range of EF measures. A total of 126 studies involving 14,786 participants were included in the analyses. Antisocial groups performed significantly worse on measures of EF compared with controls, with a grand mean effect size of d= .44. Significant variation occurred in the magnitude of effect sizes calculated across studies. The largest effect sizes were found for criminality (d= .61) and externalizing behavior disorder (d= .54) ASB groups, whereas the smallest effect sizes were found for antisocial personality disorder (d= .19) groups. Larger differences in EF performance were observed across studies involving participants from correctional settings and with comorbid attention deficit and hyperactivity problems. Overall, the results indicated that a robust association exists between ASB and poor EF that held across studies with varied methodological approaches. The methodological issues in the research literature and the implications of the meta-analysis results are discussed, and the directions for future research are proposed.

Associations of Fathers' History of Incarceration with Sons' Delinquency and Arrest Among Black, White, and Hispanic Males in the United States
Michael E. Roettger and Raymond R. Swisher

Nearly 13 percent of young adult men report that their biological father has served time in jail or prison; yet surprisingly little research has examined how a father's incarceration is associated with delinquency and arrest in the contemporary United States. Using a national panel of Black, White, and Hispanic males, this study examines whether experiencing paternal incarceration is associated with increased delinquency in adolescence and young adulthood. We find a positive association with paternal incarceration that is robust to controls for several structural, familial, and adolescent characteristics. Relative to males not experiencing a father's incarceration, our results show that those experiencing a father's incarceration have an increased propensity for delinquency that persists into young adulthood. Using a national probability sample, we also find that a father's incarceration is highly and significantly associated with an increased risk of incurring an adult arrest before 25 years of age. These observed associations are similar across groups of Black, White, and Hispanic males. Taken as a whole, our findings suggest benefits from public policies that focus on male youth “at risk” as a result of having an incarcerated father.

Does the Time Cause the Crime? An Examination of the Relationship Between Time Served and Reoffending in the Netherlands
G. Matthew Snodgrass, Arjan A. J. Blokland, Amelia Haviland, Paul Nieuwbeerta and Daniel S. Nagin

This work uses a sample of Dutch offenders, serving an average of 6.7 months of confinement, to examine the relationship between time served in prison and future criminality. To overcome the selection issues inherent in this examination, this article introduces a new method to the criminological literature that relies on a generalization of the propensity score to control for observed differences in offenders sentenced to different periods of confinement. On the whole, very little evidence of a relationship between time served and future offending was found. In particular, 3-year reconviction rate and the proportion of offenders reconvicted in the next 3 years do not seem to depend on incarceration length. Although a relationship between time served and future sentence length was found, the evidence is modest.

The Effects of Employment on Longitudinal Trajectories of Offending: A Follow-Up of High-Risk Youth from 18 to 32 Years of Age
Victor R. Van Der Geest, Catrien C. J. H. Bijleveld and Arjan A. J. Blokland

This article analyzes the effects of employment on delinquent development from 18 to 32 years of age in 270 high-risk males. Prior to 18 years of age, all men had undergone residential treatment for serious problem behavior in a juvenile justice institution in the Netherlands. We use semiparametric group-based models to investigate the effect of employment on their offending, taking into account static personality and background characteristics. We examine the effect of being employed and further distinguish the effects of job quality (“on the payroll” or being employed through temporary work agencies) and job stability (duration). We find that employment is significantly related to delinquent development among most (active) offender groups. Among high-frequency chronic offenders, only temporary employment is significantly associated with a reduction in offending, whereas among high-frequency desisters, the association is significantly stronger with regular employment. Stability in employment was limited in our sample, and it did not have an additional effect on offending.

Decomposing the Peer Effect on Adolescent Substance Use: Mediation, Nonlinearity, and Differential Nonlinearity
Gregory M. Zimmerman and Bob Edward Vásquez

Although the correlation between peer delinquency and delinquency is one of the most consistently demonstrated findings in delinquency research, researchers have focused primarily on the direct, linear, and additive effects of peers in statistical models, rather than on empirically modeling mediating, nonlinear, and moderating processes that are specified by theory. To address these issues, we measure respondent delinquency and peer delinquency with illegal substance use and then decompose the effect of peer substance use on self-reported substance use. Logistic hierarchical models on a sample of adolescents from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN) indicate that the effect of peer substance use on self-reported substance use is partially mediated by perceptions of the health risks of substance use. In addition, the direct statistical effect of peers is nonlinear: On average, the peer effect decreases at higher values of peer substance use, which is consistent with a “saturation” effect. We also find that the functional form of the peer substance use/substance use relationship is dependent on the neighborhood context. In neighborhoods with more opportunities for crime, the peer effect is initially strong but decreases as peer substance use increases, which is consistent with a saturation effect. Conversely, in neighborhoods with fewer opportunities for crime, the effect of peers is initially small, but as delinquent peer associations increase, the peer effect increases multiplicatively.

British Journal of Criminology 52(1)

British Journal of Criminology, January 2012: Volume 52, Issue 1

Using ‘Turning Points’ to Understand Processes of Change in Offending: Notes from a Swedish Study on Life Courses and Crime
Christoffer Carlsson

Processes of within-individual change in offending and desistance from crime can be very complex, often involving multiple, context-specific processes. But even in a generous reading of much research on turning points, while this is theoretically stated or inferred, it is less often shown or illustrated in empirical cases. I explore processes of change in offending with the help of the concept of ‘turning points’, through life story interviews conducted in the Stockholm Project, trying to make use of the possibilities inherent in qualitative inquiry. I show how life course processes and the turning points that emerge within them are often interdependent on each other, emerging in very context-specific circumstances, and need to be studied and understood and such. Future research areas are suggested.

History And Global Criminology: (Re)Inventing Delinquency in Vietnam
Pamela Cox

How might historical analysis enrich global criminology? More specifically, could histories of European crime contribute to understandings of social change in present-day Asia? How can evidence bases generated through distinct research practices—those used by historians, criminologists and criminal justice consultants—be combined? This article explores these challenges through an analysis of contemporary Vietnamese concerns about youth crime and a critique of local and international policy makers’ efforts to address these. It argues that historically informed analysis can enrich understanding in four key ways. The first is that this kind of analysis suggests how French colonialism and its legacies have shaped Vietnamese criminal justice practice through (in)direct policy transfer. The second is that it can help to defuse current moral panics by locating Vietnam's rising youth crime within a familiar historical pattern. The third is that it can broaden the narrow evidence base available to those searching for youth justice interventions that ‘work’. Finally, a historical view can expand existing spaces for difficult but critical dialogues around human rights in a reforming authoritarian state with its own traumatic past.

Informers and the Transition in Northern Ireland
Ron Dudai

Though criminological literature has paid attention to the use of informers in ordinary law enforcement, there is a research gap regarding their usage in contexts of conflict and political violence. This article explores the social, political and security functions of IRA informers in the transition from conflict in Northern Ireland. Based on that experience, it develops four heuristic models regarding informers that the paper argues may be of direct relevance to other conflicted and transitional societies. These are the informer as folk devil, the informer as rumour, the informer as political manipulator, and the informer as celebrity. All these themes demonstrate the long-term effects of the use of informers during the Northern Ireland conflict—an important finding given the increasing prevalence of the use of informers in a political context.

E-Resistance and Technological In/Security in Everyday Life: The Palestinian Case
Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian

This paper analyses the roles played by Information Computer Technologies (ICT) and the internet in areas of conflict, with a specific focus on the Palestinian context in Jerusalem. In particular, it examines the way the politics of everydayness in Jerusalem constructs Palestinians as security threats and, in turn, subjects them to technologized surveillance and spatial control. Examining the effect of the politics of everydayness when juxtaposed with the effect of technologized surveillance on a group of young Palestinian college women from Jerusalem and surrounding areas, the paper considers the ‘double-edged’ nature of new information technologies and the internet. On the one hand, Palestinian women’s narratives demonstrate the emancipatory possibilities of such technologies, in that they allow for and forge spaces of resistance and contestation. On the other hand, women participants indicated that such technologies increased their vulnerability and victimization. Looking closely at the Palestinian case study, it is argued, enables us to shed light on broader issues related to criminology, surveillance and ICT in militarized/occupied areas.

Compstat and The New Penology: A Paradigm Shift in Policing?
James J. Willis and Stephen D. Mastrofski

Using fieldwork data collected at seven police agencies in the United States, this study asks ‘To what extent is the operation of Compstat, a recent and highly touted police management and accountability system, consistent with the new penology?’. Examining a multidimensional reform in an area (police innovation) that has been relatively neglected helps illuminate to what degree Compstat is part of a new trend in criminal justice, and it gives theoretical insight into how the applicability of the new penology's elements may vary across different institutional settings. Our findings suggested support for the new penology at a general level but this weakened significantly upon closer examination. This article then provides a broader theoretical explanation for this looseness of fit with our observations of Compstat's operation.

Using Jurors to Explore Public Attitudes to Sentencing
Kate Warner and Julia Davis

This paper reports the findings of an innovative method of ascertaining public opinion about sentencing—namely using jurors in actual cases to explore both the appropriateness of the sentence imposed in the juror's trial and more general views about sentencing levels. Contrasting images of public opinion emerged: a punitive public in relation to general perceptions of leniency and a more merciful public in relation to individual cases. The extent and reasons for this dichotomy are explored, as are differences in levels of satisfaction for different offence types.

Executions, Imprisonment and Crime in Trinidad and Tobago
David F. Greenberg and Biko Agozino

The effect of death sentences, executions and imprisonment on crime rates in the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago is assessed using annual time series data from 1955 to 2005. Policy implications of the research findings are drawn, and speculations are offered as to the reasons for the recent large increase in homicide rates.

Sentencing for Murder: Exploring Public Knowledge and Public Opinion in England and Wales
Barry Mitchell and Julian V. Roberts

In 1965, it was thought that nothing less than a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment would be an acceptable replacement for the death penalty for murder in England and Wales. It was assumed that anything else would have led to a significant loss of public confidence in the criminal justice system. The authors have recently conducted what is believed to be the first survey in this country that tests this assumption, as well as the extent of public knowledge and belief of the current system for sentencing convicted murderers. The survey casts doubt over the assumption and highlights the misunderstanding and lack of knowledge on which public opinion is based.

Homicide Law Reform in Victoria, Australia: From Provocation to Defensive Homicide and Beyond
Kate Fitz-Gibbon and Sharon Pickering

Homicide law reform surrounding the partial defences to murder currently animates legal stakeholders in Australia and the United Kingdom, particularly in relation to cases of lethal intimate partner violence. In 2005, the Victorian Government implemented a series of homicide law reforms, central to which was the abolition of the partial defence of provocation and the instatement of an offence of defensive homicide. This article, based on a larger qualitative research study with British, Victorian and New South Wales legal stakeholders, explores experiences and perceptions of reforms in Victoria. An analysis of the impact of homicide law reform, using Hudson's principles of discursiveness and reflectiveness as a framework for analysis, reveals some dissonance between the intent and outcomes of these legal reforms. This study concludes that reforms crafted to counter gender bias in the operation of homicide law have produced mixed results for female victims of intimate partner homicide and related case law.

Understanding Cooperation With Police in a Diverse Society
Kristina Murphy and Adrian Cherney

Past research has shown that procedural justice enhances an authority's legitimacy and encourages people to cooperate with them. However, this past research has examined legitimacy by focusing solely on the perceived legitimacy of authorities and has ignored how people may perceive the legitimacy of the laws and rules authorities enforce. This distinction has relevance to the policing of ethnic minority groups who may come from different cultures or countries where distrust in the law and legal institutions is prevalent. Using survey data collected from a random sample of 1,203 Australians, this paper explores how procedural justice and both institutional and legal legitimacy impact on people's willingness to cooperate with police. The findings will be explained using Braithwaite's (2003; 2010) social distancing framework.

Review Article

A Symposium of Reviews of Peculiar Institution: America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition: By David Garland (Oxford University Press, Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 417pp.) Reviews by Anette Ballinger, David Brown, Pat Carlen, Richard Garside and Magnus Hörnquist

Law & Society Review 45(4)

Law & Society Review, December 2011: Volume 45, Issue 4

How an Authoritarian Regime in Burma Used Special Courts to Defeat Judicial Independence
Nick Cheesman

Why do authoritarian rulers establish special courts? One view is that they do so to insulate the judiciary from politically oriented cases and allow it continued, albeit limited, independence. In this article I present a contrary case study of an authoritarian regime in Burma that used special courts not to insulate the judiciary but to defeat it. Through comparison to other Asian cases I suggest that the Burmese regime's composition and character better explain its strategy than does extant judicial authority or formal ideology. The regime consisted of war fighters for whom the courts were enemy territory. But absent popular support, the regime's leaders could not embark immediately on a radical project for legal change that might compromise their hold on power. Consequently, they used special courts and other strategies to defeat judicial independence incrementally, until they could displace the professional judiciary and bring the courts fully under executive control.

Political Liberalism and Political Embeddedness: Understanding Politics in the Work of Chinese Criminal Defense Lawyers
Sida Liu and Terence C. Halliday

This article examines the meanings of politics in everyday legal practice using the case of Chinese criminal defense lawyers. Based on 194 in-depth interviews with criminal defense lawyers and other informants in 22 cities across China, we argue that lawyers’ everyday politics have two faces: on the one hand, lawyers potentially can challenge state power, protect citizen rights, and pursue proceduralism in their daily work; on the other hand, they often have to rely on political connections with state agencies to protect themselves and to solve problems in their legal practice. The double meanings of politics—namely, political liberalism and political embeddedness—explain the complex motivations and coping tactics that are frequently found in Chinese lawyers’ everyday work. Our data show that the Chinese criminal defense bar is differentiated along these two meanings of politics into five clusters of lawyers: progressive elites, pragmatic brokers, notable activists, grassroots activists, and routine practitioners. They also suggest that a principal manifestation of political lawyering is not merely short-term mobilization or revolutionary struggle against arbitrary state power, but also an incremental everyday process that often involves sophisticated tactics to manage interests that often conflict.

Going beyond Ascribed Identities: The Importance of Procedural Justice in Airport Security Screening in Israel
Badi Hasisi and David Weisburd

Today, passengers at every major Western airport are subjected to heightened levels of security screening that not only are inconvenient, but also raise important questions about the treatment of members of specific groups that are seen as presenting special security risks. Our study examines the importance of ethnic identity in explaining perceptions of legitimacy in airport screening among a random sample of Jewish and Arab passengers in Israel. The main hypothesis of our study is that ethnicity will play a major role in predicting passengers’ attitudes toward the airport security process. In fact, our survey shows that Israeli Arab passengers are, on average, significantly more negative regarding the legitimacy of security checks than Israeli Jewish passengers are. However, using a multivariate model, we find that ethnicity (Arab versus Jew) disappears as a significant predictor of legitimacy when we included factors of procedural justice and controlled for specific characteristics of the security process. The results of our research indicate that differences in legitimacy perceptions are by and large the result of the processes used in airport screening and not a direct result of ethnic identity. In concluding, we argue that profiling strategies aimed at preventing terrorism, which often include embarrassing public procedures, may actually jeopardize passengers’ trust in airport security. Such security is dependent on the cooperation of citizens, and heightened security procedures focused on particular groups may compromise legitimacy evaluations and thus the cooperation of the public.

Talking Law in Times of Reform: Paradoxes of Legal Entitlement in Cameroon
José-María Muñoz

Based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out between 2003 and 2005, this article examines how legality is constructed in present-day Adamaoua Province, Cameroon. Focusing on an instance of a process locally referred to as la concertation, I analyze how state officials and cattle traders gather to discuss the practical fate of law. As a heightened moment of suspended enforcement, la concertation is productive for both officials, who work out the limits of their respective spheres of authority and imagine a trade based on business norms and practices that severely limit the scope of regulatory action, and traders, who manage to stave off the increased scrutiny that income tax law presupposes, while asserting their concern for the integrity and consistency of the law.

What's So Private about Private Ordering?
Tehila Sagy

Private ordering—i.e., development of extralegal forums and forms of dispute processing by nonhierarchical groups—has preoccupied legal economists for nearly three decades. According to the prevailing analysis, private orders grow in socially-flat market communities without any intervention by the state. This article challenges the received view on two fronts: First, it establishes a causal connection between the development of private orders and a social hierarchy. Second, the article demonstrates that the state often intentionally assumes a proactive role in the creation of these orders. To illustrate this two-pronged theory of private ordering, this article offers a detailed analysis of three well-known cases that have been considered prototypes of private ordering by market communities: the Diamond Dealers Club of New York, the kibbutz in Israel, and ranch owners in Shasta County, California. Finally, the article argues for a need to re-evaluate the feasibility and desirability of private ordering and privatization of law.

Paying for the Past: Redressing the Legacy of Land Dispossession in South Africa
Bernadette Atuahene

The constitution of South Africa mandates equitable redress for individuals and communities evicted from their properties during colonialism and apartheid. The Commission on Restitution of Land Rights' institution-wide assumption is that the financial awards given as equitable redress had no long-term economic impact on recipients because the money is gone and they are still in poverty, whereas if people had received land, the economic impact would have been lasting. Consequently, in recent years, the commission has adopted a policy of using its soft power to force claimants to choose land restitution instead of financial awards. However, the interviews I conducted with financial award recipients show that in 30 percent of the cases, the award did produce a long-term economic benefit because respondents invested in their homes. This empirical evidence suggests that the commission should rethink its recent shift in policy and not totally discount the potential of financial awards to produce a lasting economic benefit.

Multiple Disadvantages: An Empirical Test of Intersectionality Theory in EEO Litigation
Rachel Kahn Best, Lauren B. Edelman, Linda Hamilton Krieger and Scott R. Eliason

A rich theoretical literature describes the disadvantages facing plaintiffs who suffer multiple, or intersecting, axes of discrimination. This article extends extant literature by distinguishing two forms of intersectionality: demographic intersectionality, in which overlapping demographic characteristics produce disadvantages that are more than the sum of their parts, and claim intersectionality, in which plaintiffs who allege discrimination on the basis of intersecting ascriptive characteristics (e.g., race and sex) are unlikely to win their cases. To date, there has been virtually no empirical research on the effects of either type of intersectionality on litigation outcomes. This article addresses that lacuna with an empirical analysis of a representative sample of judicial opinions in equal employment opportunity (EEO) cases in the U.S. federal courts from 1965 through 1999. Using generalized ordered logistic regression and controlling for numerous variables, we find that both intersectional demographic characteristics and legal claims are associated with dramatically reduced odds of plaintiff victory. Strikingly, plaintiffs who make intersectional claims are only half as likely to win their cases as plaintiffs who allege a single basis of discrimination. Our findings support and elaborate predictions about the sociolegal effects of intersectionality.

Justices and Legal Clarity: Analyzing the Complexity of U.S. Supreme Court Opinions
Ryan J. Owens and Justin P. Wedeking

Legal clarity is important to understand and measure because of its connection to the rule of law. We provide the first systematic examination of the clarity of Supreme Court opinions and discover five important results. First, certain justices systematically craft clearer opinions than others. Justices Scalia and Breyer write the clearest opinions, while Justice Ginsburg consistently writes the most complex opinions. Second, ideology does not predict clarity in majority or concurring opinions. Third, all justices write clearer dissents than majority opinions, while minimum winning coalitions produce the clearest majority opinions. Fourth, justices across the board write clearer opinions in criminal procedure cases than in any other issue area. Finally, opinions that formally alter Court precedent render less clear law, potentially leading to a cycle of legal ambiguity.

Sociological Theory 29(4)

Sociological Theory, December 2011: Volume 29, Issue 4

The Gift Revisited: Marcel Mauss on War, Debt, and the Politics of Reparations
Grégoire Mallard

This article offers a new interpretation of Marcel Mauss's The Gift. It situates Mauss's argument within his broader thinking on the politics of sovereign debt cancellation and the question of German reparations paid to the Allies after World War I. Mauss applauded the policies of reparation and debt cancellation proposed by the French “solidarist” activists who were responsible for inclusion of reparations provisions in the Versailles Treaty. But Mauss was also aware that their legal mobilization could not by itself restore a sense of solidarity among European peoples. Broader systems of political alliance and anthropological norms of gift-making were also necessary. In Mauss's writings on war reparations, as in The Gift, he described the legal, political, and macrostructural dynamics at work in the settlement of reparations and sovereign debts, which he differentiated from the dynamics at work in the speculative logics of financial capitalism. In doing so, Mauss provided insights into the settlement of sovereign debt crises, which still agitate the international community today.

The Jews, the Revolution, and the Old Regime in French Anti-Semitism and Durkheim's Sociology
Chad Alan Goldberg

The relationship between European sociology and European anti-Semitism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is investigated through a case study of one sociologist, Émile Durkheim, in a single country, France. Reactionary and radical forms of anti-Semitism are distinguished and contrasted to Durkheim's sociological perspective. Durkheim's remarks about the Jews directly addressed anti-Semitic claims about them, their role in French society, and their relationship to modernity. At the same time, Durkheim was engaged in a reinterpretation of the French Revolution and its legacies that indirectly challenged other tenets of French anti-Semitism. In sum, Durkheim's work contains direct and indirect responses to reactionary and radical forms of anti-Semitism, and together these responses form a coherent alternative vision of the relationship between modernity and the Jews.

The Question of Moral Action: A Formalist Position
Iddo Tavory

This article develops a research position that allows cultural sociologists to compare morality across sociohistorical cases. In order to do so, the article suggests focusing analytic attention on actions that fulfill the following criteria: (a) actions that define the actor as a certain kind of socially recognized person, both within and across fields; (b) actions that actors experience—or that they expect others to perceive—as defining the actor both intersituationally and to a greater extent than other available definitions of self; and (c) actions to which actors either have themselves, or expect others to have, a predictable emotional reaction. Such a position avoids both a realist moral sociology and descriptive-relativism, and provides sociologists with criteria for comparing moral action in different cases while staying attuned to social and historical specificity.

The Eventfulness of Social Reproduction
Adam Moore

The work of William Sewell and Marshall Sahlins has led to a growing interest in recent years in events as a category of analysis and their role in the transformation of social structures. I argue that tying events solely to instances of significant structural transformation entails problematic theoretical assumptions about stability and change and produces a circumscribed field of events, undercutting the goal of developing an “eventful” account of social life. Social continuity is a state that is achieved just as much as are structural transformations, and events may be constitutive of processes of reproduction as well as change.

A Path to Understanding Guanxi in China's Transitional Economy: Variations on Network Behavior
Kuang-chi Chang

Current research on guanxi (Chinese social connections) suffers from conceptual confusion. This article presents a new theoretical framework for understanding guanxi in the face of China's economic and social transformations. Guanxi is viewed as a purposive network behavior that can take different “strategic” forms, such as accessing, bridging, and embedding. Pairing this conceptualization with a social-evolutionary framework, I argue that the emergence and increasing or decreasing prevalence of each form over time result from (1) a combination of factors at three analytical levels—microagency, mesonetwork, and macroinstitutional—and (2) endogenous processes of selection. By focusing on behavioral forms and their evolution, this framework is able to bridge divides in the guanxi literature, provide a foundation for comparative studies of network behavior across societies, and connect the study of guanxi with economic sociology more broadly.

Social Psychology Quarterly 74(4)

Social Psychology Quarterly, December 2011: Volume 74, Issue 4

Culture, Cooperation, and the General Welfare
Nick Berigan and Kyle Irwin

Job Burnout and Couple Burnout in Dual-earner Couples in the Sandwiched Generation
Ayala Malach Pines, Margaret B. Neal, Leslie B. Hammer, and Tamar Icekson

The Emergence of Embedded Relations and Group Formation in Networks of Competition
Shane R. Thye, Edward J. Lawler, and Jeongkoo Yoon

Managing Emotional Manhood: Fighting and Fostering Fear in Mixed Martial Arts
Christian A. Vaccaro, Douglas P. Schrock, and Janice M. McCabe

American Sociological Review 76(6)

American Sociological Review, December 2011: Volume 76, Issue 6

Revisiting the Gender Gap in Time-Use Patterns: Multitasking and Well-Being among Mothers and Fathers in Dual-Earner Families
Shira Offer and Barbara Schneider

This study suggests that multitasking constitutes an important source of gender inequality, which can help explain previous findings that mothers feel more burdened and stressed than do fathers even when they have relatively similar workloads. Using data from the 500 Family Study, including surveys and the Experience Sampling Method, the study examines activities parents simultaneously engage in and how they feel when multitasking. We find that mothers spend 10 more hours a week multitasking compared to fathers and that these additional hours are mainly related to time spent on housework and childcare. For mothers, multitasking activities at home and in public are associated with an increase in negative emotions, stress, psychological distress, and work-family conflict. By contrast, fathers’ multitasking at home involves less housework and childcare and is not a negative experience. We also find several similarities by gender. Mothers’ and fathers’ multitasking in the company of a spouse or children are positive experiences, whereas multitasking at work, although associated with an increased sense of productivity, is perceived as a negative experience.

How Mothers and Fathers Share Childcare: A Cross-National Time-Use Comparison
Lyn Craig and Killian Mullan

In most families today, childcare remains divided unequally between fathers and mothers. Scholars argue that persistence of the gendered division of childcare is due to multiple causes, including values about gender and family, disparities in paid work, class, and social context. It is likely that all of these factors interact, but to date researchers have not explored such interactions. To address this gap, we analyze nationally representative time-use data from Australia, Denmark, France, and Italy. These countries have different employment patterns, social and family policies, and cultural attitudes toward parenting and gender equality. Using data from matched married couples, we conduct a cross-national study of mothers’ and fathers’ relative time in childcare, divided along dimensions of task (i.e., routine versus non-routine activities) and co-presence (i.e., caring for children together as a couple versus caring solo). Results show that mothers’ and fathers’ work arrangements and education relate modestly to shares of childcare, and this relationship differs across countries. We find cross-national variation in whether more equal shares result from the behavior of mothers, fathers, or both spouses. Results illustrate the relevance of social context in accentuating or minimizing the impact of individual- and household-level characteristics.

"I Need Help!" Social Class and Children's Help-Seeking in Elementary School
Jessica McCrory Calarco

What role do children play in education and stratification? Are they merely passive recipients of unequal opportunities that schools and parents create for them? Or do they actively shape their own opportunities? Through a longitudinal, ethnographic study of one socioeconomically diverse, public elementary school, I show that children’s social-class backgrounds affect when and how they seek help in the classroom. Compared to their working-class peers, middle-class children request more help from teachers and do so using different strategies. Rather than wait for assistance, they call out or approach teachers directly, even interrupting to make requests. In doing so, middle-class children receive more help from teachers, spend less time waiting, and are better able to complete assignments. By demonstrating these skills and strategies, middle-class children create their own advantages and contribute to inequalities in the classroom. These findings have implications for theories of cultural capital, stratification, and social reproduction.

Social Environment, Genes, and Aggression: Evidence Supporting the Differential Susceptibility Perspective
Ronald L. Simons, Man Kit Lei, Steven R. H. Beach, Gene H. Brody, Robert A. Philibert, and Frederick X. Gibbons

Although gene by environment studies are typically based on the assumption that some individuals possess genetic variants that enhance their vulnerability to environmental adversity, the differential susceptibility perspective posits that these individuals are simply more susceptible to environmental influence than others. An important implication of this perspective is that individuals most vulnerable to adverse social environments are the same ones who reap the most benefit from environmental support. Using longitudinal data from a sample of several hundred African Americans, we found that relatively common variants of the dopamine receptor gene and the serotonin transporter gene interact with social conditions to predict aggression in a manner consonant with the differential susceptibility perspective. When social conditions were adverse, individuals with these genetic variants manifested more aggression than other genotypes, whereas when the environment was favorable they demonstrated less aggression than other genotypes. Furthermore, we found that these genetic variants interact with environmental conditions to foster schemas and emotions consistent with the differential susceptibility perspective and that a latent construct formed by these schemas and emotions mediates the gene by environment interaction on aggression.

The Enduring Association between Education and Mortality: The Role of Widening and Narrowing Disparities
Richard Miech, Fred Pampel, Jinyoung Kim, and Richard G. Rogers

This article examines how educational disparities in mortality emerge, grow, decline, and disappear across causes of death in the United States, and how these changes contribute to the enduring association between education and mortality over time. Focusing on adults age 40 to 64 years, we first examine the extent to which educational disparities in mortality persisted from 1989 to 2007. We then test the fundamental cause prediction that educational disparities in mortality persist, in part, by shifting to new health outcomes over time. We focus on the period from 1999 to 2007, when all causes of death were coded to the same classification system. Results indicate (1) substantial widening and narrowing of educational disparities in mortality across causes of death, (2) almost all causes of death with increasing mortality rates also had widening educational disparities, and (3) the total educational disparity in mortality would be about 25 percent smaller today if not for newly emergent and growing educational disparities since 1999. These results point to the theoretical and policy importance of identifying social forces that cause health disparities to widen over time.

Uncertainty and Fertility in a Generalized AIDS Epidemic
Jenny Trinitapoli and Sara Yeatman

Sociologists widely acknowledge that uncertainty matters for decision making, but they rarely measure it directly. In this article, we demonstrate the importance of theorizing about, measuring, and analyzing uncertainty as experienced by individuals. We adapt a novel probabilistic solicitation technique to measure personal uncertainty about HIV status in a high HIV prevalence area of southern Malawi. Using data from 2,000 young adults (ages 15 to 25 years), we demonstrate that uncertainty about HIV status is widespread and that it expands as young adults assess their proximate and distant futures. In conceptualizing HIV status as something more than sero-status itself, we gain insight into how what individuals know they don’t know influences their lives. Young people who are uncertain about their HIV status express desires to accelerate their childbearing relative to their counterparts who are certain they are uninfected. Our approach and findings show that personal uncertainty is a measurable and meaningful phenomenon that can illuminate much about individuals’ aspirations and behaviors.

Variance Function Regression in Hierarchical Age-Period-Cohort Models: Applications to the Study of Self-Reported Health
Hui Zheng, Yang Yang, and Kenneth C. Land

Two long-standing research problems of interest to sociologists are sources of variations in social inequalities and differential contributions of the temporal dimensions of age, time period, and cohort to variations in social phenomena. Recently, scholars have introduced a model called Variance Function Regression for the study of the former problem, and a model called Hierarchical Age-Period-Cohort regression has been developed for the study of the latter. This article presents an integration of these two models as a means to study the evolution of social inequalities along distinct temporal dimensions. We apply the integrated model to survey data on subjective health status. We find substantial age, period, and cohort effects, as well as gender differences, not only for the conditional mean of self-rated health (i.e., between-group disparities), but also for the variance in this mean (i.e., within-group disparities)—and it is detection of age, period, and cohort variations in the latter disparities that application of the integrated model permits. Net of effects of age and individual-level covariates, in recent decades, cohort differences in conditional means of self-rated health have been less important than period differences that cut across all cohorts. By contrast, cohort differences of variances in these conditional means have dominated period differences. In particular, post-baby boom birth cohorts show significant and increasing levels of within-group disparities. These findings illustrate how the integrated model provides a powerful framework through which to identify and study the evolution of variations in social inequalities across age, period, and cohort temporal dimensions. Accordingly, this model should be broadly applicable to the study of social inequality in many different substantive contexts.

Theory and Society 41(1)

Theory and Society, January 2012: Volume 41, Issue 1

Theorizing in sociology and social science: turning to the context of discovery
Richard Swedberg

Bourdieu and Adorno: Converging theories of culture and inequality
David Gartman

Manufacturing national attachments: gift-giving, market exchange and the construction of Irish and Zionist diaspora bonds
Dan Lainer-Vos

Uncertainty, the problem of order, and markets: a critique of Beckert, Theory and Society, May 2009
Kurtulu? Gemici

The “social order of markets” approach: a reply to Kurtulu? Gemici
Jens Beckert

Journal of Criminal Justice 39(6)

Journal of Criminal Justice, November 2011: Volume 39, Issue 6

Where is the Evidence for Racial Profiling?  
Matt DeLisi

Community-level impacts of temperature on urban street robbery
Evan T. Sorg, Ralph B. Taylor

► First intra-urban examination into link between temperature and street robbery. ► Examine whether community SES and crime-relevant land use strengthen temperature impact. ► Fixed and random effects of temperature persist controlling for land use and community structure. ► Effects of temperature stronger in higher SES communities. ► Commercial land use/subway stops associated with heightened temperature impact on robbery.

Marked for Death: An Empirical Criminal Careers Analysis of Death Sentences in a Sample of Convicted Male Homicide Offenders
Monic P. Behnken, Jonathan W. Caudill, Mark T. Berg, Chad R. Trulson, Matt DeLisi

► Prior criminal history is importantly related to capital sentencing. ► Prior research has largely ignored linkages between criminal careers and the application of the death penalty. ► Poisson IRR models found that criminal careers were associated with death sentences. ► Variable effects were found for White, African American, and Hispanic males.

Naturally Occurring Social Support in Interventions for Former Prisoners with Substance Use Disorders: Conceptual Framework and Program Model
Carrie Pettus-Davis, Matthew Owen Howard, Amelia Roberts-Lewis, Anna M. Scheyett

► Few programs worldwide actively involve naturally-occurring support providers. ► Programs must address the match of social support needs and support provision. ► Conceptual framework for new practice approaches with former prisoners with SUDs. ► Detailed program model of a novel naturally-occurring social support intervention.

The Convergent and Discriminant Validity of Procedural Justice and Police Legitimacy: An Empirical Test of Core Theoretical Propositions
Jacinta M. Gau

► Confirmatory factor analyses assess procedural justice and police legitimacy. ► Problems with convergent and discriminant validity are found. ► Data-driven scales are constructed. ► Revised scales operate similarly to the originals. ► Need for further theoretical development of procedural justice and police legitimacy.

Testing Social Support Theory: A Multilevel Analysis of Recidivism
Erin A. Orrick, John L. Worrall, Robert G. Morris, Alex R. Piquero, William D. Bales, Xia Wang

► A multi-level test of social support theory focusing on individual-level recidivism. ► We test both public and private sources of social support. ► Social support explains little variation in individual-level recidivism. ► Interaction of support types reduces the likelihood of recidivism for drug offenses.

Evidence on the Effectiveness of Juvenile Court Sanctions
Daniel P. Mears, Joshua C. Cochran, Sarah J. Greenman, Avinash S. Bhati, Mark A. Greenwald

► Substantial heterogeneity in juvenile justice sanctions and interventions exists. ► The external validity of studies that evaluate them remains largely unknown. ► The evidence-base for existing sanctions and interventions is thus limited. ► Practiced-based evidence research can help to identify effective sanctions. ► Better systems for monitoring and assessing sanctions and outcomes are needed.

Does the measurement of peer deviance change the relationship between self-control and deviant behavior? An analysis of friendship pairs
John H. Boman, Chris L. Gibson

► Self-control's effect strength depends on the measurement of peer delinquency ► Self-control is weaker when perceptual measures of peer delinquency are used ► Self-control is stronger when measures of peer delinquency come straight from peers ► True for attitudinal and behavioral self-control ► Perceptions of peer delinquency are distinct from actual peer delinquency

Criminology & Public Policy 10(4)

Criminology & Public Policy, November 2011: Volume 10, Issue 4

MONTANA EARLY RELEASE PROGRAM

Good in theory
Beth M. Huebner

Too early is too soon
Kevin A. Wright and Jeffrey W. Rosky

What is my left hand doing?
Megan Kurlychek

More than just early release
Susan Turner

The cattle call of reentry
Faye S. Taxman

TRANSITIONAL JOBS PROGRAM

Transitional jobs program Putting employment-based reentry programs into context
Robert Apel

For whom does a transitional jobs program work?
Janine Zweig, Jennifer Yahner and Cindy Redcross

Why the risk and needs principles are relevant to correctional programs (even to employment programs)
Edward Latessa

Deconstructing the risk principle
Gerald G. Gaes and William D. Bales

COMMUNITY-DRIVEN VIOLENCE REDUCTION PROGRAMS

Community-based partnerships and crime prevention
Wesley G. Skogan

Community-driven violence reduction programs
Jeremy M. Wilson and Steven Chermak

Crime policy and informal social control
Megan Ferrier and Jens Ludwig

Comprehensive gang and violence reduction programs
Malcolm W. Klein

Whither streetwork?
David M. Kennedy

Too big to fail
Andrew V. Papachristos

RACIAL DISPARITY IN WAKE OF THE BOOKER/FANFAN DECISION

Racial disparity under the federal sentencing guidelines pre- and post-Booker
Raymond Paternoster

Racial disparity in the wake of the Booker/Fanfan decision
Jeffery T. Ulmer, Michael T. Light and John H. Kramer

Unwarranted disparity in the wake of the Booker/Fanfan decision
Cassia Spohn

Race disparity under advisory guidelines
Ryan W. Scott

Racial disparity in the wake of Booker/Fanfan Making sense of “messy” results and other challenges for sentencing research
Rodney Engen

Judicial discretion in federal sentencing
Celesta A. Albonetti

Social Problems 58(4)

Social Problems, November 2011: Volume 58, Issue 4

The Tactical Disruptiveness of Social Movements: Sources of Market and Mediated Disruption in Corporate Boycotts
Brayden G King

This article examines factors associated with social movements’ abilities to disrupt corporate targets. I identify two kinds of disruption: market disruption and mediated disruption. Market disruption deters the ability of the corporate target to effectively accrue and use market resources, while mediated disruption occurs as a tactic communicates a movement's claims about the target through third party intermediaries, like the media, thereby disrupting the target's image and reputation. Using data on corporate boycotts in the United States from 1990 to 2005, the analyses assess the extent to which movement characteristics or target characteristics cause stock price declines of boycotted companies—i.e., market disruption—and the frequency of national media attention given to boycotts—i.e., mediated disruption. The analyses indicate that target characteristics matter more in shaping a boycott's initial market disruption; however, both movement and target characteristics affect mediated disruption. Certain movement characteristics, like social movement organization (SMO) formality, public demonstrations, and celebrity endorsements, enable mediated disruption but have no effect on market disruption. A firm's size makes it vulnerable to both market and mediated disruption, while slack resources help a firm avoid market disruption. A target's reputational ranking initially buffers it from market disruption but increases its vulnerability to mediated disruption. The results indicate that the two kinds of disruption are interrelated. Market disruption has a marginal effect on the intensity of subsequent media coverage and ongoing media attention accentuates further market disruption.

The Politics of Acculturation: Female Genital Cutting and the Challenge of Building Multicultural Democracies
Lisa Wade

Understanding how the idea of culture is mobilized in discursive contests is crucial for both theorizing and building multicultural democracies. To investigate this, I analyze a debate over whether we should relieve the “cultural need” for infibulation among immigrants by offering a “nick” in U.S. hospitals. Using interviews, newspaper coverage, and primary documents, I show that physicians and opponents of the procedure with contrasting models of culture disagreed on whether it represented cultural change. Opponents argued that the “nick” was fairly described as “female genital mutilation” and symbolically identical to more extensive cutting. Using a reified model, they imagined Somalis to be “culture-bound”; the adoption of a “nick” was simply a move from one genital cutting procedure to another. Unable to envision meaningful cultural adaptation, and presupposing the incompatibility of multiculturalism and feminism, they supported forced assimilation. Physicians, drawing on a dynamic model of culture, believed that adoption of the “nick” was meaningful cultural change, but overly idealized their ability to protect Somali girls from both Somali and U.S. patriarchy. Unduly confident, they failed to take oppression seriously, dismissing relevant constituencies and their concerns. Both models, then, influenced the outcome of this cultural conflict by shaping the perceptions of cultural change in problematic ways. Given the high-profile nature of “culture” in contemporary politics, these findings may very well extend to other issues that crystallize the supposed incommensurability of feminism and multiculturalism, as well as the wider debates about how societies can be both diverse and socially just.

Bodily Signs of Academic Success: An Empirical Examination of Tattoos and Grooming
Eric Silver, Stacy Rogers Silver, Sonja Siennick, George Farkas

This study examined the relationship between bodily comportment (tattoos and grooming) and the likelihood of going to college among a national sample of 11,010 adolescents gathered as part of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. Results show that adolescents with tattoos and those judged as poorly groomed by Add Health interviewers were significantly less likely to go to college after graduating from high school. These effects were similar in magnitude to those of other well-known demographic correlates of educational attainment, including family SES and family structure. Results also show that involvement in deviant activities accounted for much of the lower likelihood of going to college among adolescents with tattoos. Similar results were observed across gender, SES, and race groups, with the exception of Asians, for whom the lower likelihood of going to college among those with tattoos was especially pronounced. Overall, this study supports the conclusion that bodily signs constitute an important and relatively untapped source of information for predicting college matriculation among adolescents.

World Income Inequality in the Global Era: New Estimates, 1990-2008
Rob Clark

Several studies have recently found that world income inequality declined during the closing years of the twentieth century. However, these studies feature a number of shortcomings, including the use of outdated national income estimates to measure inequality between countries, as well as sparse data to capture the smaller (but growing) component found within countries. The current study addresses these concerns and offers new estimates of world income inequality based on 151 countries covering 95 percent of the world's population during the 1990–2008 period. Overall, the results are fairly compatible with prior efforts, lending greater confidence to earlier findings. Nevertheless, the results suggest that prior studies covering the 1990s overestimate the decline in between-country inequality, but underestimate the rise in within-country inequality. Consequently, total inequality did not begin to decline substantially until the post-2000 era. After presenting these estimates, I then examine factors associated with income mobility among the 15,100 subnational percentile groups in my data set. The results suggest that (a) the negative effect of inequality is larger than the positive effect of economic growth among the poorest 25 percent of the world's population, and (b) late industrialization has contributed to income convergence between countries, while economic globalization has primarily served to stretch income distributions within nations.

Honest Brokers: The Politics of Expertise in the “Who Lost China?” Debate
Gary Alan Fine, Bin Xu

Complex social systems require knowledge specialists who provide information that political actors rely on to solve policy challenges. Successful advice is unproblematic; more significant is assigning institutional blame in the aftermath of advice considered wrong or harmful, undercutting state security. How do experts, operating within epistemic communities, preserve their reputation in the face of charges of incompetence or malice? Attacks on experts and their sponsors can be an effective form of contentious politics, a wedge to denounce other institutional players. To examine the politics of expertise we analyze the debate in the early 1950s over “Who Lost China?,” the congressional attempt to assign responsibility for the fall of the Nationalist regime to the Communists. Using a “strong case,” we examine political battles over the motives of Professor Owen Lattimore. For epistemic authority an expert must be defined as qualified (having appropriate credentials), influential (providing consequential information), and innocent (demonstrating epistemic neutrality). We focus on two forms of attack: smears (an oppositional presentation of a set of linked claims) and degradation ceremonies (the institutional awarding of stigma). We differentiate these by the critic's links to systems of power. Smears appear when reputational rivals lack power to make their claims stick, while degradation ceremonies operate through dominance within an institutional setting. Policy experts are awarded provisional credibility, but this access to an autonomous realm of knowledge can be countered by opponents with alternate sources of power. Ultimately expertise involves not only knowledge, but also the presentation of a validated self.

Urban Revitalization and Seattle Crime, 1982–2000
Derek A. Kreager, Christopher J. Lyons, Zachary R. Hays

This study examines the relationship between crime and processes of urban revitalization, or gentrification. Drawing on recent urban demography research, we hypothesize that gentrification progressed rapidly in many American cities over the last decade of the twentieth century, and that these changes had implications for area crime rates. Criminological theories hold competing hypotheses for the connections between gentrification and crime, and quantitative studies of this link remain infrequent and limited. Using two measures of gentrification and longitudinal tract-level demographic and crime data for the city of Seattle, we find that many of Seattle's downtown tracts underwent rapid revitalization during the 1990s, and that these areas (1) saw reductions in crime relative to similar tracts that did not gentrify, and (2) were areas with higher-than-average crime at the beginning of the decade. Moreover, using a within-tract longitudinal design, we find that yearly housing investments in the 1980s showed a modest positive association with crime change, while yearly investments in the 1990s showed the opposite pattern. Our findings suggest a curvilinear gentrification-crime relationship, whereby gentrification in its earlier stages is associated with small increases in crime, but gentrification in its more consolidated form is associated with modest crime declines. Implications of these results for criminological theory, urban development, and broader crime patterns are discussed.

Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 48(4)

Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, November 2011: Volume 48, Issue 4

Revisiting Risk Sensitivity in the Fear of Crime
Jonathan Jackson

This article considers the psychology of risk perception in worry about crime. A survey-based study replicates a long-standing finding that perceptions of the likelihood of criminal victimization predict levels of fear of crime. But perceived control and perceived consequence also play two roles: (a) each predicts perceived likelihood and (b) each moderates the relationship between perceived likelihood and worry about crime. Public perceptions of control and consequence thus drive what Mark Warr defines as “sensitivity to risk.” When individuals perceive crime to be especially serious in its personal impact, and when individuals perceive that they have little personal control over the victimization event occurring, a lower level of perceived likelihood is needed to stimulate worry about crime.

Gender Differences in Risk Factors for Violent Victimization: An Examination of Individual-, Family-, and Community-Level Predictors
Janet L. Lauritsen and Kristin Carbone-Lopez

While gender is a well-known correlate of victimization risk, there has been a tendency to study women’s experiences of violence separately from those of men. As a result, relatively little attention has been paid to the question of whether gender moderates well-known risk factors for violent victimization. In this article, the authors use data from the Area-Identified National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) to examine whether the relationships between individual, family, and neighborhood factors and victimization risk are similar in strength and direction for males and females. The findings show that most risk factors for violent victimization are similar across gender and crime type. In a few important instances, however, risk factors such as neighborhood disadvantage were found to vary some across gender. The implications of these findings for the assumptions about gender differences underlying various theoretical perspectives are discussed.

Problem Behavior in the Middle School Years: An Assessment of the Social Development Model
Christopher J. Sullivan and Paul Hirschfield

The Social Development Model (SDM) is a life course theory that integrates several extant criminological theories to specify the interactive social processes that lead to prosocial and antisocial behavior. Relatively little research has attempted to cross-validate this and other developmental theories of delinquency. The current study assesses the school and family processes that comprise SDM with a sample of Chicago public school students measured over three school years between fifth and eighth grades (n = 2,014). The data draw on student surveys tapping into multiple domains relevant to the explanation of problem behavior. Although overall model fit was marginal, the results of structural equation models largely support the SDM and its constituent paths. The implications for theoretical development and intervention are considered.

Measuring Community Risk and Protective Factors for Adolescent Problem Behaviors: Evidence from a Developing Nation
Edward R. Maguire, William Wells, and Charles M. Katz

Most published research on community risk and protective factors for adolescent problem behaviors has been carried out in developed nations. This article examines community risk and protective factors in a sample of more than 2,500 adolescents in Trinidad and Tobago, a developing Caribbean nation. The authors examine the construct and concurrent validity of five community risk factors and two community protective factors. The findings of this study suggest that existing measures of risk and protective factors have weak construct validity when applied to a sample of youth from Trinidad and Tobago. The revised model specifications this study developed fit the data better than the original models developed in the United States. However, the concurrent validity of both sets of measures is weak. Our findings suggest the need for caution when transplanting measures of risk and protective factors from developed to developing nations.

Theoretical Criminology 15(4)

Theoretical Criminology, November 2011: Volume 15, Issue 4

Crime prevention goes abroad: Policy transfer and policing in post-apartheid South Africa

Jonny Steinberg

Loader and Walker have warned that ideas about order ‘always travel with culturally specific baggage’, ‘never adapt easily to [their] new environment’ and thus ‘always risk hubristic failure’. My aim is to offer an exemplar of this hubristic failure. I chart the infusion of Anglo-American ideas of crime prevention into the policing institutions of South Africa’s young democracy. These ideas bore a bloated conception of urban security which inadvertently stimulated, and thus helped to keep alive, a similarly bloated conception of security that lay at the heart of apartheid thinking. Dressed in the garb of crime prevention, a modified version of the paramilitary policing practices that flourished under apartheid returned to the streets of democratic South Africa.

Prepression: The actuarial archive and new technologies of security
Willem Schinkel

This article argues, on the basis of a discussion of current Dutch databases, that we are witnessing what can be called prepression. This combination of prevention and repression entails the archiving of risky individuals and their selection for ‘early intervention’. Such databases can be seen in light of their work of social imagination: they visualize the constitutive outside of ‘society’, and in so doing function as part of a governing imaginary. Crucial in contemporary prepression is the archive, which is interpreted not as a recording but also as a recoding of the past, that is, as an ordering principle in the fields of law and order, social work and health. The cases on the basis of which this article develops a preliminary sketch of a theory of prepression are drawn from recent developments concerning actuarial archiving systems in the Netherlands.

Crime behind the glass: Exploring the sublime in crime at the Vienna Kriminalmuseum
Laura Huey

Scholars have noted an ever-increasing growth in the number of crime-themed leisure and tourism venues. Within this article I examine one such site: the Vienna Kriminalmuseum. An analysis of this site provides an opportunity to explore how the ‘sublime in crime’ is presented to the Museum’s visitors in ways that intentionally merge the macabre with the educational. This presentation says much, I suggest, not only about the Museum’s goals, but about its intended audience, an audience seeking to be exposed to elements of the darkest side of humanity, now sanitized for wider public consumption through the union of educational and entertainment strategies.

Penal tourism in Argentina: Bridging Foucauldian and neo-Durkheimian perspectives
Michael Welch and Melissa Macuare

In theoretical criminology, scholars continue to debate the significance of power-based perspectives in the face of semiotics and vice versa. Among the problems created by ‘taking sides’ is the missed opportunity that would allow for the synthesis of instrumentalist and culturalist work. Recognizing the merits of both perspectives, this project explores penal tourism in Argentina in ways that reveal key forms of state power alongside important cultural signs, symbols, and messages. In particular, our case study of the Argentine Penitentiary Museum in Buenos Aires delivers a thick description of its collection so as to bridge Foucault’s insights on systematic penal regimes with Durkheim’s socio-religious concepts: pollution; the sacred; the mythological; and the cult of the individual.

Punishment and the body in the ‘old’ and ‘new’ South Africa: A story of punitivist humanism
Gail Super

This paper analyses official discourse about punishment in South Africa, from 1976 to 2004. It frames punishment as a form of governance which is both connected to, and separate from, the Anglo/American/European examples that are generally referred to in the literature. The shift from corporal and capital punishment to the use of long-term imprisonment is discussed within a framework that emphasizes how both the apartheid and post-apartheid state explained and attempted to justify punishment policies during times of great upheaval and change. Penality under apartheid was a complex entity, and the punishment regime under the Nationalist Party government was starting to reform during the period analyzed. This liberalization was accompanied by a lengthening of terms of imprisonment, a trend that has continued in the ‘new’ South Africa. The prison in post-apartheid South Africa speaks to both humanism and punitivism. This duality has contributed to its enduring nature and endless capacity to reform.

Neutralizing sexual victimization: A typology of victims’ non-reporting accounts
Karen G. Weiss

Drawing its examples from National Crime Victimization Survey narratives, this article proposes a theoretical framework for elucidating victims’ non-reporting accounts, the rationales that victims use to justify why they do not report sexual victimization to police. The framework delineates four account types—denying criminal intent, denying serious injury, denying victim innocence, and rejecting a victim identity—that each problematize one or more critical elements of real and reportable crime. By delineating victims’ accounts of unwanted sexual incidents, along with each account’s distinct neutralization strategies, non-reporting rationales, and cognitive benefits, this article contributes theoretically to discourses on unreported and unacknowledged rape, as well as to a broader literature on non-reported crime.

Sociological Methodology 41

Sociological Methodology, 2011: Volume 41

Ethnographical Research

How Not To Lie With Ethnography
Mitchell Duneier

Inference And Bias

Dealing With Extreme Response Style In Cross-Cultural Research: A Restricted Latent Class Factor Analysis Approach
Meike Morren, John P.T.M. Gelissen And Jeroen K. Vermunt

Accounting For Misclassification Bias In Binary Outcome Measures Of Illness: The Case Of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder In Male Veterans
Elizabeth Savoca

Inferring Logit Models From Empirical Margins Using Proxy Data
Ju-Sung Lee And Kathleen M. Carley

Biases Of Parameter Estimates In Misspecified Structural Equation Models
Stanislav Kolenikov

Comparisons And Differences

Entropy-Based Segregation Indices
Ricardo Mora And Javier Ruiz-Castillo

Regression Analysis

A Transition-Oriented Approach To Optimal Matching
Torsten Biemann

Decomposition Of Inequality Among Groups By Counterfactual Modeling: An Analysis Of The Gender Wage Gap In Japan
Kazuo Yamaguchi

Social Network Analysis

Bayesian Meta-Analysis Of Social Network Data Via Conditional Uniform Graph Quantiles
Carter T. Butts

Bernoulli Graph Bounds For General Random Graphs
Carter T. Butts

Commentaries

Comment: On Respondent-Driven Sampling And Snowball Sampling In Hard-To-Reach Populations And Snowball Sampling Not In Hard-To-Reach Populations
Leo A. Goodman

Comment: Snowball Versus Respondent-Driven Sampling
Douglas D. Heckathorn

Comment: On The Concept Of Snowball Sampling
Mark S. Handcock And Krista J. Gile

American Journal of Sociology 117(3)

American Journal of Sociology, November 2011: Volume 117, Issue 3

“737-Cabriolet”: The Limits of Knowledge and the Sociology of Inevitable Failure
John Downer

This article looks at the fateful 1988 fuselage failure of Aloha Airlines Flight 243 to suggest and illustrate a new perspective on the sociology of technological accidents. Drawing on core insights from the sociology of scientific knowledge, it highlights, and then challenges, a fundamental principle underlying our understanding of technological risk: a realist epistemology that tacitly assumes that technological knowledge is objectively knowable and that “failures” always connote “errors” that are, in principle, foreseeable. From here, it suggests a new conceptual tool by proposing a novel category of man-made calamity: the “epistemic accident,” grounded in a constructivist understanding of knowledge. It concludes by exploring the implications of epistemic accidents and a constructivist approach to failure, sketching their relationship to broader issues concerning technology and society, and reexamining conventional ideas about technology, accountability, and governance

Is a College Degree Still the Great Equalizer? Intergenerational Mobility across Levels of Schooling in the United States
Florencia Torche

A quarter century ago, an important finding in stratification research showed that the intergenerational occupational association was much weaker among college graduates than among those with lower levels of education. This article provides a comprehensive assessment of the “meritocratic power” of a college degree. Drawing on five longitudinal data sets, the author analyzes intergenerational mobility in terms of class, occupational status, earnings, and household income for men and women. Findings indicate that the intergenerational association is strong among those with low educational attainment; it weakens or disappears among bachelor’s degree holders but reemerges among those with advanced degrees, leading to a U-shaped pattern of parental influence. Educational and labor market factors explain these differences in mobility: parental resources influence college selectivity, field of study, and earnings more strongly for advanced-degree holders than for those with a bachelor’s degree alone.

Educational Assortative Mating and Earnings Inequality in the United States
Richard Breen, Leire Salazar

This article investigates how changes in educational assortative mating affected the growth in earnings inequality among households in the United States between the late 1970s and early 2000s. The authors find that these changes had a small, negative effect on inequality: there would have been more inequality in earnings in the early 2000s if educational assortative mating patterns had remained as they were in the 1970s. Given the educational distribution of men and women in the United States, educational assortative mating can have only a weak impact on inequality, and educational sorting among partners is a poor proxy for sorting on earnings.

Practicing What They Preach? Lynching and Religion in the American South, 1890–1929
Amy Kate Bailey, Karen A. Snedker

This project employs a moral solidarity framework to explore the relationship between organized religion and lynching in the American South. The authors ask whether a county’s religious composition affected its rate of lynching, net of demographic and economic controls. The authors find evidence for the solidarity thesis, using three religious metrics. First, their findings show that counties with greater religious diversity experienced more lynching, supporting the notion that a pluralistic religious marketplace with competing religious denominations weakened the bonds of a cohesive moral community and might have enhanced white racial solidarity. Second, counties in which a larger share of the black population worshipped in churches controlled by blacks experienced higher levels of racial violence, indicating a threat to intergroup racially based solidarity. Finally, the authors find a lower incidence of lynching in counties where a larger share of church members belonged to racially mixed denominations, suggesting that cross-racial solidarity served to reduce racial violence.

When Organizations Rule: Judicial Deference to Institutionalized Employment Structures
Lauren B. Edelman, Linda H. Krieger, Scott R. Eliason, Catherine R. Albiston, Virginia Mellema

This article offers a theoretical and empirical analysis of legal endogeneity—a powerful process through which institutionalized organizational structures influence judicial conceptions of compliance with antidiscrimination law. It finds that organizational structures (e.g., grievance and evaluation procedures, antiharassment policies) become symbolic indicators of rational governance and compliance with antidiscrimination laws, first within organizations, but eventually in the judicial realm as well. Lawyers and judges tend to infer nondiscrimination from the mere presence of those structures. Judges increasingly defer to organizational structures in their opinions, ultimately inferring nondiscrimination from their presence. Legal endogeneity theory is tested by analyzing a random sample of 1,024 federal employment discrimination opinions (1965–99) and is found to have increased over time. Judicial deference is most likely when plaintiffs lack clout and when the legal theories require judges to rule on unobservable organizational attributes. The authors argue that legal endogeneity weakens the impact of law when organizational structures are viewed as indicators of legal compliance even in the face of discriminatory actions.

Causality and Statistical Learning
Andrew Gelman

Reviewed work(s):
Counterfactuals and Causal Inference: Methods and Principles for Social Research. By Stephen L. Morgan and Christopher Winship. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. xiii+319.
Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference, 2d ed. By Judea Pearl. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pp. xix+464.
Causal Models: How People Think About the World and Its Alternatives. By Steven A. Sloman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp. xi+212.

Journal of Quantitative Criminology 27(4)

Journal of Quantitative Criminology, December 2011: Volume 27, Issue 4

Static and Dynamic Indicators of Minority Threat in Sentencing Outcomes: A Multi-Level Analysis
Cyndy Caravelis, Ted Chiricos and William Bales

Designation as a “Habitual Offender” is an enhanced form of punishment which unlike, “Three Strikes” or “10-20-Life,” is entirely discretionary. We use Hierarchical Generalized Linear Modeling to assess the direct effects of race and Latino ethnicity on the designation of Habitual Offenders as well as the effect of both static and dynamic indicators of racial and ethnic threat on those outcomes. Our data include 26,740 adults sentenced to prison in Florida between 2002 and 2004 who were statutorily eligible to be sentenced as Habitual. The odds of receiving this designation are significantly increased for black and Latino defendants as compared to whites, though race and ethnicity effects vary substantially by crime type, being strongest for drug offenses and negligible for violent crimes. Static measures of group level threat (% black and % Latino) have no cross-level effect on sentencing by race or Latino ethnicity. However, increasing black population over time increases the odds of being sentenced as Habitual for both black and Latino defendants. Increasing Latino population increases the odds of Habitual Offender sentencing for Latinos, but decreases it for blacks. The prospect of engaging dynamic as opposed to static measures of threat in future criminal justice and other social control research is discussed.

Examining the Neighborhood Context of the Violent Offending-Victimization Relationship: A Prospective Investigation
Mark T. Berg and Rolf Loeber

The persistent link between offending and victimization is one of the most robust empirical findings in criminological research. Despite important efforts to isolate the sources of this phenomenon, it is not fully understood. Much attention has been paid to the role of individual-level factors; however, few studies have systematically integrated neighborhood conditions. Using prospective data from the Pittsburgh Youth Study the current research examines a set of hypotheses regarding the interplay of neighborhood structural conditions and the victim-offender overlap. A multilevel analytical technique is applied to the data which purges time-varying covariates of all time-stable unobserved heterogeneity. Results indicate that the relationship between offending and victimization is pronounced in disadvantaged neighborhoods, while offending is not significantly related to victimization risk in contexts marked by lower levels of disadvantage. The implications of the results for theory are discussed, along with recommendations for future research.

Racial Disparity in Police Stop and Searches in England and Wales
Vani K. Borooah

Data published by the United Kingdom’s Ministry for Justice clearly shows that, compared to persons who were White, members of racial minorities in England, particularly Blacks, were far more likely to be stopped and searched by the police. The question is whether such racial disparity in stops and searches could be justified by racial disparities in offending? Or whether the disparity in stop and searches exceeded the disparity in offending? This paper proposes a method for measuring the amount of excess in racial disparity in police stop and searches. Using the most recently published Ministry of Justice data (for 2007/08) for Police Areas in England and Wales it concludes that while in several Areas there was no excess to racial disparity in police stop and searches, there was, on the basis of the methodology proposed in the paper, evidence of such excess in some Police Areas of England and Wales.

Structural Determinants of Homicide: The Big Three
Maria Tcherni

Building upon and expanding the previous research into structural determinants of homicide, particularly the work of Land, McCall, and Cohen (1990), the current paper introduces a multilevel theoretical framework that outlines the influences of three major structural forces on homicidal violence. The Big Three are poverty/low education, racial composition, and the disruption of family structure. These three factors exert their effects on violence at the following levels: neighborhood/community level, family/social interpersonal level, and individual level. It is shown algebraically how individual-level and aggregate-level effects contribute to the size of regression coefficients in aggregate-level analyses. In the empirical part of the study, the presented theoretical model is tested using county-level data to estimate separate effects of each of the Big Three factors on homicide at two time periods: 1950–1960 and 1995–2005 (chosen to be as far removed from one another as the availability of data allows). All major variables typically used in homicide research are included as statistical controls. The results of analyses show that the effects of the three major structural forces—poverty/low education, race, and divorce rates—on homicide rates in US counties are remarkably strong. Moreover, the effect sizes of each of the Big Three are found to be identical for both time periods despite profound changes in the economic and social situation in the United States over the past half-century. This remarkable stability in the effect sizes implies the stability of homicidal violence in response to certain structural conditions.

Estimating the Impact of Classification Error on the “Statistical Accuracy” of Uniform Crime Reports
James J. Nolan, Stephen M. Haas and Jessica S. Napier

This paper offers a methodological approach for estimating classification error in police records then determining the statistical accuracy of official crime statistics reported to the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program. Classification error refers to the mistakes in UCR statistics caused by the misclassification of criminal offenses, for example recording a crime as aggravated assault when it should have been simple assault. Statistical accuracy refers to the estimated true total of each crime type based on cancelling effect of undercounting and overcounting crime due to misclassifications. The population for the study consists of the 12 largest municipal police agencies in a mostly rural southeastern state. Based on a sample of 2,663 records, the authors illustrate the impact of classification error on the total population of reported offenses. Misclassifications result in overcounting and undercounting certain crimes. The true number of each crime type, as well as the aggregate Index Crime, Violent Crime, and Property Crime totals, is estimated based the evaluation of offsetting misclassifications. The findings show that certain UCR crime categories are greatly undercounted while others are overcounted. The index crime and violent crime totals are also significantly undercounted; however, when simple assault is added to the index and violent crime categories, the error in these aggregate numbers is reduced to less than 1%. The results provide a benchmark for assessing the statistical accuracy of the UCR data.

Spatializing the Social Networks of Gangs to Explore Patterns of Violence
George E. Tita and Steven M. Radil

The majority of spatial studies of crime employ an inductive approach in both the modeling and interpretation of the mechanisms of influence thought to be responsible for the patterning of crime in space and time. In such studies, the spatial weights matrix is specified without regard to the theorized mechanisms of influence between the units of analysis. Recently, a more deductive approach has begun to gain traction in which the theory of influence is used to model influence in geographic space. Using data from Los Angeles, we model the spatial distribution of gang violence by considering both the relative location of the gangs in space while simultaneously capturing their position within an enmity network of gang rivalries. We find that the spatial distribution of gang violence is more strongly associated with the socio-spatial dimensions of gang rivalries than it is with adjacency-based measures of spatial autocorrelation.

A Comparison of Logistic Regression, Classification and Regression Tree, and Neural Networks Models in Predicting Violent Re-Offending
Yuan Y. Liu, Min Yang, Malcolm Ramsay, Xiao S. Li and Jeremy W. Coid

Previous studies that have compared logistic regression (LR), classification and regression tree (CART), and neural networks (NNs) models for their predictive validity have shown inconsistent results in demonstrating superiority of any one model. The three models were tested in a prospective sample of 1225 UK male prisoners followed up for a mean of 3.31 years after release. Items in a widely-used risk assessment instrument (the Historical, Clinical, Risk Management-20, or HCR-20) were used as predictors and violent reconvictions as outcome. Multi-validation procedure was used to reduce sampling error in reporting the predictive accuracy. The low base rate was controlled by using different measures in the three models to minimize prediction error and achieve a more balanced classification. Overall accuracy of the three models varied between 0.59 and 0.67, with an overall AUC range of 0.65–0.72. Although the performance of NNs was slightly better than that of LR and CART models, it did not demonstrate a significant improvement.