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.