Social Forces 90(2)

Social Forces, December 2011: Volume 90, Issue 2

Social Stratification

Power, Revisited
Vincent J. Roscigno

Power is a core theoretical construct in the field with amazing utility across substantive areas, levels of analysis and methodologies. Yet, its use along with associated assumptions – assumptions surrounding constraint vs. action and specifically organizational structure and rationality – remain problematic. In this article, and following an overview of important divides on the topic, I develop a dynamic relational theory of power. My framework, which builds on several strands of literature and my own in-depth investigations of workplace discrimination, challenges prevailing top-down conceptions of bureaucratic organizational constraint and rationality (derived from Weber). It also makes explicit the constitutive interplay of structure, culture and action, and provides significant insight into the relational nature of power. Relational, in these regards, entails often-assumed interpersonal interactions but also the capacities of actors to invoke structure (and thus leverage) and legitimate inequality through a two-pronged process of symbolic vilification and amplification. Contemporary bureaucracy and its structural and cultural foundations can provide the leverage for doing so and in a manner whereby hierarchical projects surrounding race, sex, age and social class are systematically reified.

Cohort Change and Racial Differences in Educational and Income Mobility
Deirdre Bloome, Bruce Western

Policy reforms and rising income inequality transformed educational and economic opportunities for Americans approaching midlife in the 1990s. Rising income inequality may have reduced mobility, as income gaps increased between rich and poor children. Against the effects of rising inequality, Civil Rights reforms may have increased mobility, as opportunities expanded across cohorts of black students and workers. We compare educational and income mobility for two cohorts of black and white men, the older born in the late 1940s and the younger born in the early 1960s. We find that educational mobility increased for black men, but income mobility declined for both races. Economic mobility declined despite unchanged or improved educational mobility because of increased returns to schooling and increased intergenerational income correlations, independent of schooling.

The Unequal Burden of Weight Gain: An Intersectional A
Jennifer A. Ailshire, James S. House

The implications of recent weight gain trends for widening social disparities in body weight in the United States are unclear. Using an intersectional approach to studying inequality, and the longitudinal and nationally representative American’s Changing Lives study (1986–2001/2002), we examine social disparities in body mass index trajectories during a time of rapid weight gain in the United States. Results reveal complex interactive effects of gender, race, socioeconomic position and age, and provide evidence for increasing social disparities, particularly among younger adults. Most notably, among individuals who aged from 25–39 to 45–54 during the study interval, low-educated and low-income black women experienced the greatest increase in BMI, while high-educated and high-income white men experienced the least BMI growth. These new findings highlight the importance of investigating changing disparities in weight intersectionally, using multiple dimensions of inequality as well as age, and also presage increasing BMI disparities in the U.S. adult population.

Social Movements

Movements, Markets and Fields: The Effects of Anti-Sweatshop Campaigns on U.S. Firms, 1993–2000
Tim Bartley, Curtis Child

How do social movements influence corporations? Recent work suggests that movements can inflict material damage on their targets and shape categories of evaluation in organizational fields. Extending these ideas, we examine the effects of anti-sweatshop campaigns on sales, stock performance, reputation and specialized ratings of U.S. firms, using fixed-effects regression models and event study methods. The analysis demonstrates that social movements can in some circumstances shape both the markets and fields that firms inhabit. Specifically, anti-sweatshop campaigns (1. had negative effects on sales (though only among certain types of firms), (2. influenced stock prices, and (3. shaped specialized ratings of corporate responsibility. They also diminished previously positive corporate reputations (to a modest degree) but did not radically alter reputational hierarchies in the business community.

Understanding Activist Leadership Effort in the Movement O
Cassandra R. Dorius, John D. McCarthy

Why do some social movement leaders work harder than others? And, how does gender affect the patterns we uncover? Utilizing historical case study evidence of local chapters in the emerging movement opposing drinking and driving we are able to develop and test theoretical expectations about predictors of weekly effort among MADD and RID leaders. Taken together, our model explains 45 percent of the variation in leadership effort. We find bureaucratic complexity and victim support activities are more powerful predictors of effort than are individual leader characteristics, although all are important. Further analysis reveals that gender almost wholly conditions the strong effect of bureaucratic complexity on leadership effort so that increasingly complex chapter structures are associated with substantial increases in work hours for women but not men.

Subsidizing the Cost of Collective Action: International Organizations and Protest among Polish Farmers during Democratic Transition
Sarah Valdez

Polish farmers became politically contentious after democratization in 1989, despite their minimal involvement in the Solidarity movement. I test the effectiveness of social movement theories in explaining this phenomenon by examining frequency and intensity of protest from 1980–1995. I find that grievance models have little explanatory power, political opportunity accounts for the frequency of protest, and resource mobilization offers insight into both frequency and intensity of protests. Supplementing existing theories, I offer qualitative evidence that development programs designed to restructure agricultural cooperatives created mobilizing structures. The reforms were intended to help family farmers adapt to the new market economy, but because most protests targeted liberalization policies, I conclude that in their short-term success, development agencies inadvertently subsidized the cost of collection action against their long-term goals.

Education

Adoption? Adaptation?: Evaluating the Formation of Educational Expectations
Megan Andrew, Robert M. Hauser

Sociologists have long used educational expectations to understand the complex mental processes underlying individuals’ educational decision making. Yet, little research evaluates how students actually formulate their educational expectations. Status attainment theory asserts that students adopt their educational expectations early based on family background and social influences, and that their educational expectations are driven by a static mental construct as a result. In contrast, recent research based on Bayesian learning theory hypothesizes that students mostly adapt their educational expectations in light of new information about their academic potential. Comparing models of expectations formation in adolescence, we find that students’ expectations do not derive from a static mental construct. However, students adapt their educational expectations only modestly and only in response to very large changes in grade point averages. Thus, adolescent educational expectations stabilize early and are rather persistent over time.

The Complexity of Non-Completion: Being Pushed or Pulled to Drop Out of High School
Christen L. Bradley, Linda A. Renzulli

Using a model of student dropout with only two possible outcomes – “still in school” or “dropout” – hides the complex reasons that students leave high school. We offer a model with three outcomes: in school, pushed out or pulled out. Using data from the Educational Longitudinal Survey, we find that for black students, differences in SES explain higher likelihoods of being either pushed or pulled out as compared to white students, but Latino students remain more likely to be pulled out even after we control for SES. We also find that SES moderates the relationship between race/gender and being pushed out, and that higher levels of SES may be detrimental to students of color in the context of high poverty schools.

Student-Centeredness in Social Science Textbooks, 1970–2008: A Cross-National Study
Patricia Bromley, John W. Meyer, Francisco O. Ramirez

A striking feature of modern societies is the extent to which individual persons are culturally validated as equal and empowered actors. The expansion of a wide range of rights in recent decades, given prominence in current discussions of world society, supports an expanded conception of the individual. We examine the extent to which broad global changes promoting human empowerment are associated with expanded ideas of the status and capacities of students. We hypothesize that there are substantial increases in student-centered educational foci in countries around the world. First, the rights of students as children are directly asserted. Second, an emphasis on empowered human agency supports forms of socialization that promote active participation as well as the capacities and interests of the student. Examining a unique dataset of 533 secondary school social science textbooks from 74 countries published over the past 40 years, we find that textbooks have indeed become more student-centered, and that this shift is associated with the rising status of individuals and children in global human rights treaties and organizations. Student-centered texts are more common in countries with greater individualism embodied in political and socio-economic institutions and ideologies, and with more links to world society. The study contributes to both political and educational sociology, examining how global changes lead to increased emphasis on empowered individual agency in intended curricula.

Intergenerational Family Relationships

Intergenerational Ties in Context: Grandparents Caring for Grandchildren in China
Feinian Chen, Guangya Liu, Christine A. Mair

Guided by theories and empirical research on intergenerational relationships, we examine the phenomenon of grandparents caring for grandchildren in contemporary China. Using a longitudinal dataset (China Health and Nutrition Survey), we document a high level of structural and functional solidarity in grandparent-grandchildren relationships. Intergenerational solidarity is indicated by a high rate of coresidence between grandchildren and grandparents, a sizable number of skipped-generation households (no parent present), extensive childcare involvement by non-coresidential grandparents, and a large amount of care provided by coresidential grandparents. Multivariate analysis further suggests that grandparents’ childcare load is adaptive to familial needs, as reflected by the characteristics of the household, household members and work activities of the mothers.

Family Events and the Timing of Intergenerational Transfers
Thomas Leopold, Thorsten Schneider

This research investigates how family events in adult children’s lives influence the timing of their parents’ financial transfers. We draw on retrospective data collected by the German Socio-Economic Panel Study and use event history models to study the effects of marriage, divorce and childbirth on the receipt of large gifts from parents. We find increased chances of receiving real estate at marriage and in subsequent years, at childbirth, but not in the event of divorce. Large gifts of money are received in the years of marriage and divorce, but not at childbirth. Our findings indicate that parental gifts are triggered by adult children’s economic need, but also point to a plurality of transfer motives and meanings for parents, adult children and their relationships.

Social Relations

(Re)Integrating Simmel in Contemporary Social Exchange: The Effect of Nonpartisans on Relational Outcomes
Jessica L. Collett

Despite the increased prevalence of neutral third parties in both formal and informal exchange processes, social exchange theory has yet to consider the effect of nonpartisans on important cognitive and affective outcomes of exchange. This research integrates Simmel’s conceptualization of small groups and nonpartisans with contemporary theory and research in social exchange to explore how different levels of neutral third party intervention in an exchange process affect the “relational outcomes” of exchange (perceptions of fairness of, general positive regard toward, the exchange partner and optimism about the tone of future interactions). Experimental results indicate that increased third party intervention is positively related to favorable relational outcomes. The increased likelihood of external attributions and decreased salience of conflict associated with high levels of third-party intervention partially explain this result.

A Theoretical Model and New Test of Managerial Legitimacy in Work Teams
Jeongkoo Yoon, Shane Thye

This study examines endorsement and authorization as two social mechanisms that can induce perceptions of legitimacy for individuals who manage work teams. Endorsement is the support of a manager by one’s own team members, whereas authorization is the support of a team manager stemming from a higher bureaucratic level. Applying these mechanisms to specific work teams we hypothesize that (1. a team member who observes that other team members endorse a manager and the upper management authorizes the manager will perceive that manager’s acts to be more legitimate; (2. in the context of the team environment the effect of endorsement will be greater than that of authorization; and (3. perceived legitimacy will mediate the effects of endorsement and authorization on positive outcomes such as team members’ efficacy and commitment. These hypotheses were tested using 320 respondents from 56 Korean work teams. The results provide overall support of these hypotheses. As predicted, endorsement and authorization are key mechanisms significantly enhancing legitimacy. Further, the effect of endorsement on legitimacy is greater than that of authorization, and legitimacy partially mediates the effects of both endorsement and authorization on team efficacy and commitment. The implications of these findings are discussed in the context of prevailing theories of legitimacy.

Migration

Development and the Urban and Rural Geography of Mexican Emigration to the United States
Erin R. Hamilton, Andrés Villarreal

Past research on international migration from Mexico to the United States uses geographically-limited data and analyzes emigrant-sending communities in isolation. Theories supported by this research may not explain urban emigration, and this research does not consider connections between rural and urban Mexico. In this study we use national data from Mexico to investigate rural and urban emigration. We find that a central motivation for emigration – self-insurance through labor market diversification – is most relevant to less rural, non-metropolitan places. Paradoxically, while Mexican cities have the lowest rates of emigration, the rural places that are spatially proximate to cities have the highest rates. These findings suggest that while urban development retains emigrants within city borders, it may generate emigration out of neighboring rural places.

American Journal of Sociology 117(4)

American Journal of Sociology, January 2012: Volume 117, Issue 4

Gender Deviance and Household Work: The Role of Occupation
Daniel Schneider

This article takes a new approach to gender and housework by identifying a new measure of gender deviance—work in gender-atypical occupations—and by arguing that men who do “women’s work” and women who do “men’s work” in the labor market may seek to neutralize their gender deviance by doing male- and female-typed work at home. Analysis of data from the National Survey of Families and Households and the 2003–7 waves of the American Time Use Survey shows that men who do “women’s work” in the market spend more time on male-typed housework relative to men in gender-balanced occupations and their wives spend more time on female-typed housework. Women in gender-atypical occupations also do more female-typed housework than women in gender-balanced occupations. The article provides clearer evidence about the important ways in which cultural conceptions of gender shape and are shaped by economic processes.

Settler Colonial Power and the American Indian Sovereignty Movement: Forms of Domination, Strategies of Transformation
Erich Steinman

The article extends the multi-institutional model of power and change through an analysis of the American Indian Sovereignty Movement. Drawing upon cultural models of the state, and articulating institutionalist conceptions of political opportunities and resources, the analysis demonstrates that this framework can be applied to challenges addressing the state as well as nonstate fields. The rational-legal diminishment of tribal rights, bureaucratic paternalism, commonsense views of tribes as racial/ethnic minorities, and the binary construction of American and Indian as oppositional identities diminished the appeal of “contentious” political action. Instead, to establish tribes’ status as sovereign nations, tribal leaders aggressively enacted infrastructural power, transposed favorable legal rulings across social fields to legitimize sovereignty discourses, and promoted a pragmatic coexistence with state and local governments. Identifying the United States as a settler colonial society, the study suggests that a decolonizing framework is more apt than racial/ethnicity approaches in conceptualizing the struggle of American Indians.

Human Rights as Myth and Ceremony? Reevaluating the Effectiveness of Human Rights Treaties, 1981–2007
Wade M. Cole

Much research has shown human rights treaties to be ineffective or even counterproductive, often contributing to greater levels of abuse among countries that ratify them. This article reevaluates the effect of four core human rights treaties on a variety of human rights outcomes. Unlike previous studies, it disaggregates treaty membership to examine the effect of relatively “stronger” and “weaker” commitments. Two-stage regression analyses that control for the endogeneity of treaty membership show that stronger commitments in the form of optional provisions that allow states and individuals to complain about human rights abuses are often associated with improved practices. The article discusses the scholarly and practical implications of these findings.

Lustration Systems and Trust: Evidence from Survey Experiments in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland
Susanne Y. P. Choi, Roman David

Dealing with personnel inherited from prior regimes in the administration of transitional states is critical for democratic consolidation, a problem traditionally addressed by the dichotomy of continuation or dismissal. However, major organizational innovations to deal with tainted officials appear in postcommunist Central Europe. Using the concept of lustration systems, this study differentiates three archetypes: dismissal, exposure, and confession. The authors propose that each system carries different symbolic meanings, which produce different outcomes for citizens’ trust in government and in tainted officials. The hypothesized effects of different lustration systems on trust are tested by an experiment embedded in nationwide representative surveys conducted in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland. The results show that dismissal and confession increase citizens’ trust in government and trust in tainted officials. However, exposure reduces citizens’ trust in tainted officials.

Citizenship Rights for Immigrants: National Political Processes and Cross-National Convergence in Western Europe, 1980–2008
Ruud Koopmans, Ines Michalowski, Stine Waibel

Immigrant citizenship rights in the nation-state reference both theories of cross-national convergence and the resilience of national political processes. This article investigates European countries’ attribution of rights to immigrants: Have these rights become more inclusive and more similar across countries? Are they affected by EU membership, the role of the judiciary, the party in power, the size of the immigrant electorate, or pressure exerted by anti-immigrant parties? Original data on 10 European countries, 1980–2008, reveal no evidence for cross-national convergence. Rights tended to become more inclusive until 2002, but stagnated afterward. Electoral changes drive these trends: growth of the immigrant electorate led to expansion, but countermobilization by right-wing parties slowed or reversed liberalizations. These electoral mechanisms are in turn shaped by long-standing policy traditions, leading to strong path dependence and the reproduction of preexisting cross-national differences.

Social Psychology Quarterly 75(1)

Social Psychology Quarterly, March 2012: Volume 75, Issue 1

Introduction of Jeylan T. Mortimer: 2011 Recipient of the Cooley-Mead Award
Michael J. Shanahan

The Evolution, Contributions, and Prospects of the Youth Development Study: An Investigation in Life Course Social Psychology
Jeylan T. Mortimer

Secondary Transfer Effects of Intergroup Contact: A Cross-National Comparison in Europe
Katharina Schmid, Miles Hewstone, Beate Küpper, Andreas Zick, and Ulrich Wagner

The Interactional Organization of Self-praise: Epistemics, Preference Organization, and Implications for Identity Research
Susan A. Speer

The Impact of Education on Intergroup Attitudes: A Multiracial Analysis
Geoffrey T. Wodtke

British Journal of Criminology 52(2)

British Journal of Criminology, March 2012: Volume 52, Issue 2

How Mafias Take Advantage of Globalization: The Russian Mafia in Italy
Federico Varese

How do mafias operate across territories? The paper is an in-depth study of the foreign operations of a Russian mafia group. It relies on a unique set of data manually extracted from an extensive police investigation that lasted several years, including a set of phone intercepts over nine months. Using quantitative content analysis and multiple correspondence analyses (homals), the study reconstructs the activities of the group and its organizational structure in Italy. The paper shows that the core activity of the group––protecting racketeering––remains located in the territory of origin, while the Italian branch was monitoring investments in the legal economy. The structure of the group abroad indicates that a division of labour developed, alongside extensive contacts with local criminals and entrepreneurs. The paper contributes to broader debates on globalization and organized crime, moral panics, the structure of informal groups and the role of women in organized crime.

Cheap Capitalism: A Sociological Study of Food Crime in China
Hongming Cheng

This article reports on an archival analysis of cases and policy documents in China and a survey and oral interviews with food safety regulators, food industry members, consumer organization representatives, food safety observers and scholars in Zhejiang province of China, on the nature and extent of food crime, the composition of offenders and factors associated with food crime. Results indicate that the prevalence of food crime occurs in the context of ‘cheap capitalism’, which is characterized by low price, inferior quality of products and degraded social morality and business ethics. A closer interaction among government, industry and academia, forming a triple helix, is playing an increasingly significant role in causing food crime.

‘This is not Justice’: Ian Tomlinson, Institutional Failure and the Press Politics of Outrage
Chris Greer and Eugene McLaughlin

This article contributes to research on the sociology of scandal and the role of national newspapers and, more particularly, newspaper editorials in setting the agenda for public debate around police accountability and miscarriages of justice. In previous work, we analysed how citizen journalism framed news coverage of the policing of the G20 Summit, London 2009, and the death of Ian Tomlinson (Greer and McLaughlin 2010). In this article, we consider the next stage of the Ian Tomlinson case. Our empirical focus is the controversy surrounding the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) decision not to prosecute the police officer filmed striking Tomlinson shortly before he collapsed and died. We illustrate how the press's relentless agenda-setting around ‘institutional failure’, initially targeted at the Metropolitan Police Service, expanded to implicate a network of criminal justice institutions. The Tomlinson case offers insights into the shifting nature of contemporary relations between the British press and institutional power. It is a paradigmatic example of a politically ambitious form of ‘attack journalism’, the scope of which extends beyond the criminal justice system. In a volatile information-communications marketplace, journalistic distrust of institutional power is generating a ‘press politics of outrage’, characterized by ‘scandal amplification’.

The Legitimization of Cctv as a Policy Tool: Genesis and Stabilization of a Socio-Technical Device in Three French Cities
Séverine Germain, Anne-Cécile Douillet, and Laurence Dumoulin

This article deals with the widespread use of open-street close-circuit television (CCTV) systems as a safety policy tool in French cities. To investigate this diffusion, we suggest tackling CCTV as a socio-technical device able to enrol allies beyond the initial circle of technology promoters, including former opponents. Through an empirical analysis of three case studies, we show that a device can spread on a site provided that the actors in charge of the device appropriate it and discover new practical uses. As appropriation practices give CCTV supporters new arguments to justify its use, CCTV is therefore more legitimized by the possible combinations of different arguments and uses than by its strictly speaking effectiveness to fight against crime.

Violence and Carceral Masculinities in Felony Fights
Michael Salter and Stephen Tomsen

Contemporary culture is replete with carnivalesque representations of violence and this has accelerated with the development of online technology. Felony Fights is a website and set of DVDs depicting real combat between male former convicts and other men. Viewer responses to these clips reflect a complexity of meaning and symbolic associations between violence, power and masculine identities. Nevertheless, profoundly unequal relations of power shape their production and viewing appeal. The embodied and affective dimensions of marginality and poverty are presented in Felony Fights as evidence of the animal brutality and carceral character of the fighters. This resonates with populist explanations for criminal violence and mainstream portrayals of male masochism in which white men are depicted as a victimized social group.

The Sonics of Crimmigration in Australia: Wall of Noise and Quiet Manoeuvring
Michael Welch

Further exploring moral panic, Cohen points out that claims-making can range from loud to quiet. That phenomenon is particularly evident within the merging of crime and immigration control (or crimmigration). This project focuses on Australia, where claims-making on asylum seekers contains both loud panic as well as quiet manoeuvring by the state, including such tactics as stonewalling, privatization and offshore detention. In pursuit of a nuanced interpretation of crimmigration, the analysis sorts out key legal and human rights alongside a recent High Court ruling on the processing of asylum seekers.

Security and Disappointment: Policing, Freedom and Xenophobia in South Africa
Jonny Steinberg

In May 2008, 62 people, most of them foreign nationals, were killed during episodes of public violence in South Africa's major cities. This article accounts for the relationship between the mob violence and policing practices that emerged after apartheid. I argue policing practice has recast much of urban life, in this instance, the disappointments of the poor, into matters of security. Struggling to maintain its bond with the poor, the government signalled, through police practices, that a quotient of South Africans’ freedom was being stolen and that the perpetrators should be punished. It is this that led mobs into the streets, for it gave purchase to the idea that the business of making the city secure was forever unfinished.

Civil Disputes and Crime Recording: Refusals, Disinterest And Power In Police Witcraft
Nick Lynn and Susan J. Lea

This paper explores the rhetorical skills or witcraft of police officers as they adjudicate on disputes and crimes reported to them. The first author accompanied officers ‘on the beat’ to record these interactions with members of the public. A discourse analysis of the data revealed officers regularly use a discursive strategy that we term the that’s civil device. Exploiting an epistemological imbalance that exists in police/public interactions, the device not only allows officers to externalize their judgments as matters of law; it also assists them to manage the conversationally and operationally difficult task of refusing. Moreover, it allows officers to resist claims of disinterestedness or neglect of duty as they limit or disbar their involvement in potentially insoluble disputes.

‘Keeping the Peace’: Social Identity, Procedural Justice and the Policing of Football Crowds
Clifford Stott, James Hoggett, and Geoff Pearson

This paper explores the relevance of the Elaborated Social Identity Model of Crowd Behaviour and Procedural Justice Theory to an understanding of both the presence and absence of collective conflict during football (soccer) crowd events. It provides an analysis of data gathered during longitudinal ethnographic study of fans of Cardiff City Football Club—a group of supporters with a notorious history of involvement in ‘hooliganism’ within the English domestic Football Leagues. The analysis suggests that the perceived legitimacy among fans of the way they were policed affected the internal dynamics, patterns of collective action and overall levels of ‘compliance’ among the fan group. On this basis, we contend that these processes mediated both a long-term decline but also the sporadic re-emergence of collective conflict during crowd events involving the fans. The paper concludes by exploring the implications of our analysis for informing policy, practice and theory, particularly with respect to the importance of policing with consent as a route to conflict reduction in domestic football.

What is an ‘Ethics Committee’?: Academic Governance in an Epoch of Belief and Incredulity
Simon Winlow and Steve Hall

We want to make one very simple claim that we hope might contribute to the developing discourse on the disciplinary and institutional governance of academic criminology: the Ethics Committee is one of a growing number of little others that attempt to compensate for the loss of the traditional symbolic order. While our focus is on the Ethics Committee and criminology, we believe that much of what we have to say is also applicable to other forms of academic governance that characterize the social sciences in the contemporary university. We will take a rather circuitous route to this conclusion in the hope that we might encourage criminological researchers to think seriously about the ways in which Slavoj Žižek’s philosophical framework can be used to theorize criminology’s position in the current post-political social order.

Critical Criminology 20(1)

Critical Criminology, March 2012: Volume 20, Issue 1

A special issue on restorative justice: unravelling the mystery
Diane Sivasubramaniam

Restoring the Victim: Emotional Reactions, Justice Beliefs, and Support for Reparation and Punishment
Dena M. Gromet

Psychological responses to criminal wrongdoing have primarily focused on the offender, particularly on how (and why) offender punishment satisfies people’s need for justice. However, the restoration of the victim presents another way in which the “psychological itch” that injustice creates can be addressed. In the present article, I discuss two lay theories of how crime victims can be restored: a belief that the harm caused to crime victims should be directly repaired (a restorative justice approach) versus a belief that victim harm should be addressed via the punishment of the offender (a retributive justice approach). These two lay theories are discussed with regard to their emotional and ideological determinants, as well as situational and chronic factors that can affect whether people adopt a reparative or punitive “justice mindset” in dealing with victim concerns (and crime in general).

Do Retributive and Restorative Justice Processes Address Different Symbolic Concerns?
Michael Wenzel, Tyler G. Okimoto and Kate Cameron

In support of a unitary conceptualization of retributive justice (justice through the imposition of punishment) and restorative justice (justice through dialogue aimed at consensus), three studies using hypothetical and recalled experiences of victimization found that people’s endorsement of, and satisfaction with, either justice notion depends on the symbolic meaning of the transgression. In Study 1, perceiving the transgression as a status/power violation was uniquely related to the endorsement of retributive justice, whereas perceiving it as a violation of shared values was uniquely related to restorative justice. In Study 2, motivation to restore status/power was related to retributive responses, whereas motivation to restore value consensus with the offender was uniquely related to restorative responses. In Study 3, a scenario experiment, respondents called for greater additional sanction when the applied justice process (retributive vs. restorative) did not fit the salient meaning of the transgressions compared to when it did (status/power vs. values).

Offer and Acceptance of Apology in Victim-Offender Mediation
Mandeep K. Dhami

Past research on restorative justice (RJ) has highlighted the importance of apology for both victims and offenders and the prevalence of apology during the RJ process. The present study moves this work further by examining the nature of the apologies that are offered during victim-offender mediation, as well as the individual-, case-, and mediation-level factors that can affect the offer and acceptance of apology. In addition, we measure the implications that the offer and acceptance of apology can have on satisfaction with the mediation outcome. We conducted a content analysis of 57 records of mediations occurring between 2008 and 2010 at a UK mediation centre. Perpetrators said “I’m sorry” in over one-third of cases, and full apologies were offered in nearly one-fifth of cases. Apologies were accepted in over 90% of cases, although forgiveness was much less common. The offer of apology was most closely associated with the type of incident/offence, and number of previous mediations in a case. There was also some support for the relationship between the offer of apology and victim age, perpetrator gender, formal sanction, and the number of participants attending the mediation meeting. None of the factors studied were associated with the acceptance of apology. The offer of apology was associated with satisfaction with the mediation outcome, and in all of the cases where the apology was accepted, the victim was satisfied with the mediation outcome. The findings thus shed light on the role that apology can play in the effectiveness of RJ.

Restorative Justice: The Ideals and Realities of Conferencing for Young People
Jane J. Bolitho

This paper is concerned with the nature and complexities of restorative justice. It uses Braithwaite’s (Br J Criminol 42:563–577, 2002a) framework of constraining, maximising and emerging restorative standards to understand the interactions that underpin success and failure in practice, i.e., ‘restorativeness’. Using qualitative data from observations of youth justice conferences in New South Wales, Australia, the roles of empowerment (as an example of a constraining standard), restoration of communities (as an example of a maximising standard) and remorse over injustice (as an example of an emergent standard) are examined. Findings confirm that restorative justice is best conceived as a continuum of dynamic process and outcome related values. Non-domination is paramount to achieving restorative justice. However, the presence, absence, and nature of other values such as storytelling, respectful listening, victim and support attendance, and apology are also important. They affect where a restorative event falls on the restorative continuum, and they affect the likelihood of other standards being met.

Learning to Manage Shame in School Bullying: Lessons for Restorative Justice Interventions
Eliza Ahmed and Valerie Braithwaite

Shame management is purported to be part of the healing process that is a goal of restorative justice. However, the development of shame management capacities and how they are engaged in conflict resolution remains a relatively understudied phenomenon. This study examines how shame management (acknowledgment and displacement) is employed by children as they move into and out of cultures of school bullying. The analysis is based on self-reported changes in bullying experiences of 335 Australian children over a three-year period. Children were classified into bully, victim, bully-victim, nonbully-nonvictim, or residual conflict groups. Shame displacement and bullying tolerance accompanied transition into bullying. Shame acknowledgment and control of bullying marked desistence from bullying. Effects of shame management and social control were not uniform across groups. Findings indicate that interventions to change behaviour need to be flexible and responsive to prior bullying experiences so specific risk and protective factors can be targeted. This study demonstrates that responsiveness to context, building socially responsible relationships, and adaptive shame management are all integral to behaviour change, supporting the use of restorative justice as a way of dealing with school bullying as well as other forms of harm.

Laboratory Experiments: A Meaningful Contribution to Restorative Justice Research?
Alana Saulnier, Kiri Lutchman and Diane Sivasubramaniam

Advocates of restorative justice (RJ) argue that the process offers a more effective means of responding to crime than the formal criminal justice system, and many studies have evaluated RJ positively across a variety of outcome measures, particularly in comparison to court based procedures. However, the RJ literature contains few studies that directly test the factors affecting RJ participants’ behaviours and experiences, so little is known about the specific factors that influence how, and for whom, RJ works. In this paper, we argue that the expanded use of experimental laboratory methodologies will broaden and strengthen our understanding of the basic mechanisms by which RJ operates. We describe some ways in which experimental laboratory research may enhance understandings of apology in restorative settings as well as public support for RJ, and we emphasise the need and the potential to overcome barriers of artificiality in laboratory settings. This analysis of laboratory methodologies and the field of RJ research indicates that creative and well-designed experimental laboratory studies can advance knowledge in this area, allowing researchers to investigate how particular components of RJ contribute to the success or failure of RJ processes.

Critical Criminology 19(4)

Critical Criminology, November 2011: Volume 19, Issue 4

From Safety to Danger: Constructions of Crime in a Women’s Magazine
Delthia E. Miller and John L. McMullan

This study examines how the print media constructs signifiers of safety and danger for women. We analyze 155 news articles regarding crime and criminal justice from 1970 to 1990 in Chatelaine magazine, a Canadian women’s periodical. Both content and textual analyses are deployed to evaluate the media representations of crime and their role in facilitating images of fear and safety. We show that the meanings associated with women’s danger and safety in news narratives are socially constructed through claims, sources, content and culture. We find that news reporting did not initially incorporate signifiers of fear. However, crime messages increasingly included images of fear in the later reporting period. We argue that the transformations surrounding these images and texts are influenced by the rise in neoliberal thought in the 1980s. Our results indicate that ideological struggles external to the media are crucial to the representation of crime, which ultimately influence signifiers of danger and safety for women.

Enemies and Citizens of the State: Die Boeremag as the Face of Postapartheid Otherness
Kathryn Henne

This examination is a case study analysis of the Mail & Guardian’s news coverage surrounding the ongoing trial of members of the separatist group, die Boeremag. The 22 defendants stand accused of treason and 41 other criminal charges for the 2002 bombings of Soweto and conspiring to establish an independent Boer state. Utilizing a race critical lens, this analysis looks at these news representations of Afrikaner nationalists to glean insight into how law, race and racism can imbricate public understandings crime, specifically, in this case, domestic terrorism. It draws attention to the ways in which this fundamentalist group emerges as a repugnant Other and interrogates their roles within the “imagined” postapartheid South African community, the newspaper’s target audience. After explicating these dynamics, the paper concludes with a discussion of how this case study relates to practical dilemmas that stem from the utopian ideologies of reconciliation and nonracialism.

A False Sense of Security: Moral Panic Driven Sex Offender Legislation
Mary Maguire and Jennie Kaufman Singer

Data collected from correctional files of sex offenders managed by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation were analyzed to explore the degree to which sex offender behavior meets the assumptions of the legislation intended to regulate their behavior. The study asked where offenders commit their sex crimes and the likelihood of choosing a known vs. a stranger victim. The concept of moral panic is used as a framework to discuss possible motivations for current sex offender legislation.

A General Theories of Hate Crime? Strain, Doing Difference and Self Control
Mark Austin Walters

This article attempts to put forward a more holistic vision of hate crime causation by exploring the intersections which exist between three separate criminological theories. Within the extant literature both Robert Merton’s strain theory and Barbara Perry’s structured action theory of ‘doing difference’ have been widely used to explain why prejudice motivated crimes continue to pervade most communities. Together the theories help to illuminate the sociological factors which act to create immense fear of, and hatred towards, various minority identity groups. However, neither of these theories adequately explain why some individuals commit hate crimes while others, equally affected by socio-economic strains and social constructions of ‘difference’, do not. This article therefore moves beyond such macro explanations of hate crime by drawing upon Gottfredson and Hirschi’s A General Theory of Crime (1990). Using typology research carried out by various academics, the article attempts to illustrate how socio-economic strains and general fears of ‘difference’ become mutually reinforcing determinants, promulgating a culture of prejudice against certain ‘others', which in turn ultimately triggers the hate motivated behaviours of individuals with low self control.

Critical Criminology Meets Radical Constructivism
Nicolas Carrier

Critical criminology and radical constructivism are frequently regarded as an impossible pair—or, at least, as a rather schizophrenic one. This is so, notably, because radical constructivism rests on the (paradoxical) abandonment of what Jean-François Lyotard named méta-récits. It rests on the refusal to distinguish between the phenomenal and the symbolic, and thus implies the complete vanishing of the classical difference between ontology and epistemology. This would consequently deprive criminology (or, more generally, the social sciences) of any anchoring point enabling a critical utterance. The present contribution’s thesis is that, on the contrary, radical constructivism can catalyze critical criminology. Among the possible contributions of a radically constructivist sociology of criminalization, this paper focuses on: its call for a reworking of the concept of social control, which avoids problems related to its contemporary usage; its focus on power and force, in a way which avoids Foucaultian perspectives’ aporetic elements, and problematizes every instance of legitimized authoritarian practices.

Journal of Quantitative Criminology 28(1)

Journal of Quantitative Criminology, March 2012: Volume 28, Issue 1

Editor’s Introduction: Quantitative Approaches to the Study of Terrorism
Gary LaFree & Joshua D. Freilich

Spatial and Temporal Patterns of Terrorist Attacks by ETA 1970 to 2007
Gary LaFree, Laura Dugan, Min Xie & Piyusha Singh

Rational choice perspectives maintain that seemingly irrational behavior on the part of terrorist organizations may nevertheless reflect strategic planning. In this paper we examine spatial and temporal patterns of terrorist attacks by the Spanish group ETA between 1970 and 2007. Our analysis is guided by a public announcement by ETA in 1978 that the group would shift from emphasizing attacks in the Basque territory to instead launch attacks more widely in the hopes of exhausting the Spanish government and forcing it to abandon the Basque territory. This announcement suggests that prior to the end of 1978 ETA attacks were based mostly on controlling territory in the Basque region that they hoped to rule; and after 1978 the organization decided to instead undertake a prolonged war of attrition. Accordingly, we argue that before the end of 1978 ETA was mostly perpetrating control attacks (attacking only within the Basque territories) and that the diffusion of attacks between provinces was mostly contagious (spreading contiguously). After the 1978 proclamation, we argue that the attack strategy shifted toward attrition (attacking in areas outside of the Basque territories) and that the attacks were more likely to diffuse hierarchically (spreading to more distant locations). As predicted, we find that after ETA moved toward a more attrition based attack strategy, subsequent attacks were significantly more likely to occur outside the Basque region and to target non-adjacent regions (consistent with hierarchical diffusion). We also find that hierarchical diffusion was more common when a longer time elapsed between attacks (a likely consequence of the fact that more distant attacks require more resources and planning) and that attacks against Madrid were unlikely to be followed immediately by more attacks on Madrid or surrounding provinces. After ETA announced a shift in policy, they maintained a highly dispersed attack strategy even during their period of decline. Using information about where and when prior attacks occurred could provide useful information for policy makers countering groups like ETA.

Space–Time Modeling of Insurgency and Counterinsurgency in Iraq
Alex Braithwaite & Shane D. Johnson

The US and its Coalition partners concluded combat operations in Iraq in August 2010. Rather surprisingly, little empirical evidence exists as to the factors that contributed to the ebb and flow in levels of violence and the emergence and disappearance of hot spots of hostilities during the campaign. Building upon a tradition of criminology scholarship, recent work demonstrates that Improvised Explosive Device (IED) attacks are clustered in space and time and that these trends decay in a manner similar to that observed in the spread of disease and crime. The current study extends this work by addressing a key potential correlate of these observed patterns across Iraq—namely, the timing and location of a variety of Coalition counterinsurgency (COIN) operations. This is achieved by assessing the co-evolving space–time distributions of insurgency and counterinsurgency in the first 6 months of 2005. To do so, we employ a novel analytic technique that helps us to assess the sequential relationship between these two event types. Our analyses suggest that the number of COIN operations that follow insurgent IED attacks (moderately) exceeds expectation (assuming that events are independent) for localities in the vicinity of an attack. This pattern is more consistent than is observed for the relationship in the opposite direction. The findings also suggest that less discriminatory COIN operations are associated with an elevated occurrence of subsequent insurgency in the vicinity of COIN operations in the medium to long term, whilst for more discriminatory and capacity-reducing COIN operations the reverse appears to be true.

Microcycles of Violence: Evidence from Terrorist Attacks by ETA and the FMLN
Brandon Behlendorf, Gary LaFree & Richard Legault

Recent research has demonstrated that individual crimes elevate the risk for subsequent crimes nearby, a phenomenon termed “near-repeats.” Yet these assessments only reveal global patterns of event interdependence, ignoring the possibility that individual events may be part of localized bursts of activity, or microcycles. In this study, we propose a method for identifying and analyzing criminal microcycles; groups of events that are proximate to each other in both space and time. We use the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) to analyze over 4,000 terrorist attacks attributed to the FMLN in El Salvador and the ETA in Spain; two terrorist organizations that were both extremely active and violent but differed greatly in terms of history, grievances and motives. Based on the definition developed, we find strong support for the conclusion that many of the terrorist attacks attributed to these two distinctive groups were part of violent microcycles and that the spatio-temporal attack patterns of these two groups exhibit substantial similarities. Our logistic regression analysis shows that for both ETA and the FMLN, compared to other tactics used by terrorists, bombings and non-lethal attacks are more likely to be part of microcycles and that compared to attacks which occur elsewhere, attacks aimed at national or provincial capitals or areas of specific strategic interest to the terrorist organization are more likely to be part of microcycles. Finally, for the FMLN only, compared to other attacks, those on military and government targets were more likely part of microcycles. We argue that these methods could be useful more generally for understanding the situational and temporal distribution of crime.

Patterns of Onset and Decline Among Terrorist Organizations
Erin Miller

Despite considerable speculation among terrorism researchers regarding the conditions leading to organizational desistance from terrorism, quantitative analysis of terrorism frequently focuses on terrorist attacks as the unit of analysis, resulting in a near complete absence of analyses of terrorist organizations themselves. Moreover, research on organizations that engage in terrorism has generally been limited to case studies of individual organizations. Toward a more general understanding of what conditions predict organizational desistance from terrorism, this study uses newly available data from the Global Terrorism Database to analyze the terrorist activity of 557 organizations that were active for at least 365 days between 1970 and 2008. Much like research on conventional crime, prior research on terrorism has focused almost exclusively on the onset of criminal behavior and has neglected determinants of declining activity. Here I use group-based trajectory models to investigate patterns of decline in organization-level terrorist activity. In particular I examine how patterns of onset relate to patterns of decline among these organizations. I first estimate the trajectory models for the organizations’ frequency of attacks, and then calculate the annual ratio of attacks to attacks-at-peak for each organization in order to isolate patterns of decline, independent of the magnitude of activity. I then repeat the trajectory analysis to determine if the relative shape of the organizational trajectory has significance beyond the overall frequency of attacks. I find that the speed and magnitude of an organization’s emergence are correlated with its longevity such that those organizations characterized by rapid onset are two to three times more likely than those characterized by moderate onset to reach moderate or high levels of attacks per year. Likewise, as the rate and overall volume of attacks at onset increase, so does the likelihood that the group will follow a persistent pattern of decline. I conclude with a discussion of the implications of patterns of decline among terrorist organizations for research and policy.

Estimating Country-Level Terrorism Trends Using Group-Based Trajectory Analyses: Latent Class Growth Analysis and General Mixture Modeling
Nancy A. Morris & Lee Ann Slocum

Recent criminological research has used latent class growth analysis (LCGA), a form of group-based trajectory analysis, to identify distinct terrorism trends and areas of high terrorism activity at the country-level. The current study contributes to the literature by assessing the robustness of recent findings generated by one type of group-based analysis, LCGA, to changes in measurement and statistical methodology. Using data from the Global Terrorism Database (GTD), we consider the challenges and advantages of applying group-based analysis to macro-level terrorism data. We summarize and classify country-level patterns of domestic and transnational terrorism using two types of group-based analyses, LCGA and an alternative yet similar modeling approach, general mixture modeling (GMM). We evaluate the results from each approach using both substantive and empirical criteria, highlighting the similarities and differences provided by both techniques. We conclude that both group-based models have utility for terrorism research, yet for the purposes of identifying hot spots of terrorist activity, LCGA results provide greater policy utility.

A Comparison of Ideologically-Motivated Homicides from the New Extremist Crime Database and Homicides from the Supplementary Homicide Reports Using Multiple Imputation by Chained Equations to Handle Missing Values
Jeff Gruenewald & William Alex Pridemore

This study took advantage of the new open-source Extremist Crime Database (ECDB) to overcome obstacles to studying domestic far-right terrorism from a criminological perspective. In the past, exclusive definitions and inclusion criteria have limited available data on violent crimes committed by domestic far-right terrorists, and official data on violent crimes fail to capture offenders’ links to domestic far-right terrorism and ideological motivation (e.g., anti-government, anti-abortion, anti-religion). Therefore, little is known about the nature of far-right terrorist violence and how such violence is similar to and different from routine or more common forms of violence. Focusing on homicides, this study addressed why and how open-source terrorism data and official crime data can be comparatively analyzed. In doing so, we also demonstrate the utility of synthesizing terrorism and official crime data sources. Data on 108 far-right terrorist homicides were taken from the ECDB. Data on 540 common homicides (five comparison homicides for each far-right terrorist homicide) were randomly sampled from the 2000 Supplementary Homicide Reports. Using multiple imputation by chained equations and logistic regression, we imputed missing values and estimated models to compare the two homicide types on 12 different victim, offender, and event characteristics. Relative to common homicides, we found that far-right terrorist homicides were significantly more likely to have white offenders, multiple victims, multiple offenders, and to occur between strangers, and they were significantly less likely to have white victims, to be carried out with a firearm, and to occur in cities with more than 100,000 residents.

Cross-Classified Multilevel Models: An Application to the Criminal Case Processing of Indicted Terrorists
Brian D. Johnson

This study provides an application of cross-classified multilevel models to the study of early case processing outcomes for suspected terrorists in U.S. federal district courts. Because suspected terrorists are simultaneously nested within terrorist organizations and criminal court environments, they are characterized by overlapping data hierarchies that involve cross-nested ecological contexts. Cross-classified models provide a useful but underutilized approach for analyzing such data. Using the American Terrorism Study (ATS), this research examines case dismissals, trial adjudications and criminal convictions for a sample of 574 terrorist suspects. Findings indicate that diverse factors affect case processing outcomes, including legal factors such as the number of counts, number of co-defendants, and statute of indictment, extralegal factors such as the ethnicity of the offender, and incident characteristics such as the type of terrorism target. Case processing outcomes also vary significantly across both terrorist groups and criminal courts and are partially explained by select group and court characteristics including the type of terrorist organization and the terrorism trial rate of the court. Results are discussed vis-à-vis contemporary research on terrorism punishments and future directions are suggested for additional applications of cross-classified models in criminological research.

American Terrorism and Extremist Crime Data Sources and Selectivity Bias: An Investigation Focusing on Homicide Events Committed by Far-Right Extremists
Steven M. Chermak, Joshua D. Freilich, William S. Parkin & James P. Lynch

This paper examines the reliability of the methods used to capture homicide events committed by far-right extremists in a number of open source terrorism data sources. Although the number of research studies that use open source data to examine terrorism has grown dramatically in the last 10 years, there has yet to be a study that examines issues related to selectivity bias. After reviewing limitations of existing terrorism studies and the major sources of data on terrorism and violent extremist criminal activity, we compare the estimates of these homicide events from 10 sources used to create the United States Extremist Crime Database (ECDB). We document incidents that sources either incorrectly exclude or include based upon their inclusion criteria. We use a “catchment-re-catchment” analysis and find that the inclusion of additional sources result in decreasing numbers of target events not identified in previous sources and a steadily increasing number of events that were identified in any of the previous data sources. This finding indicates that collectively the sources are approaching capturing the universe of eligible events. Next, we assess the effects of procedural differences on these estimates. We find considerable variation in the number of events captured by sources. Sources include some events that are contrary to their inclusion criteria and exclude others that meet their criteria. Importantly, though, the attributes of victim, suspect, and incident characteristics are generally similar across data source. This finding supports the notion that scholars using open-source data are using data that is representative of the larger universe they are interested in. The implications for terrorism and open source research are discussed.

Crime & Delinquency 58(2)

Crime & Delinquency, March 2012: Volume 58, Issue 2

Political Culture Versus Socioeconomic Approaches to Predicting Police Strength in U.S. Police Agencies: Results of a Longitudinal Study, 1993 to 2003
Jihong Zhao, Ling Ren, and Nicholas P. Lovrich

A variety of theories have emerged that offer plausible explanations, one from the political institutional perspective and others from sociological perspective. There has been renewed interest in the effect of local political structure on police strength in the policing literature. The purpose of this study, therefore, is to assess the two main competing approaches that can explain variation in police employment across cities. The authors used a longitudinal data set collected from the same 280 cities in 1993, 1996, 2000, and 2003. A two-way fixed-effects panel model, used in the statistical analysis, indicates that the political culture approach, which focuses on local government structures, largely fails to contribute to the variation of police strength. The alternative socioeconomic approach better predicts police force levels across U.S. municipal police departments.

Contagious Fire? An Empirical Assessment of the Problem of Multi-shooter, Multi-shot Deadly Force Incidents in Police Work
Michael D. White and David Klinger

Recent police shootings in which multiple officers fired numerous rounds at suspects have led some observers to assert that such situations involve “contagious fire,” where an initial officer’s shots launch a cascade of gunfire from other officers present. Although there is anecdotal recognition of the contagious fire phenomenon among police and the media, there is not a single empirical study documenting its existence in more than 50 years of deadly force research. This article uses Philadelphia Police Department shooting data to explore the potential for police shootings to become contagious. The article provides a testable definition of contagious shootings and identifies predictors of three outcomes: multiple officer shootings, the average number of shots fired per officer, and multi-officer, multi-shot incidents. Findings show that the requisite preconditions for a contagious shooting rarely occur, and when the preconditions were met, there is no evidence to support the existence of a contagion effect.

The Effectiveness of Policies and Programs That Attempt to Reduce Firearm Violence: A Meta-Analysis
Matthew D. Makarios and Travis C. Pratt

In response to rising rates of firearms violence that peaked in the mid-1990s, a wide range of policy interventions have been developed in an attempt to reduce violent crimes committed with firearms. Although some of these approaches appear to be effective at reducing gun violence, methodological variations make comparing effects across program evaluations difficult. Accordingly, in this article, the authors use meta-analytic techniques to determine what works in reducing gun violence. The results indicate that comprehensive community-based law enforcement initiatives have performed the best at reducing gun violence.

Neighborhood Disadvantage and Reliance on the Police
Lonnie M. Schaible and Lorine A. Hughes

Contemporary theories suggest that, due to limited access and generalized distrust, residents of disadvantaged neighborhoods are relatively unlikely to report matters to police. Although existing studies reveal few ecological differences in crime reporting, findings may be limited to victim/offense subsets represented in aggregated victimization data. Using calls-for-service (CFS) data from a Pacific Northwest city, this study assesses the degree to which neighborhood block groups (N = 164) vary in incidents reported to police overall and subsequent to the elimination of a major nonemergency-reporting mechanism. Two hypotheses are assessed: First, CFS rates will vary inversely with neighborhood disadvantage, net of the effect of objective levels of crime and other control variables; second, CFS originating in affluent neighborhoods will exhibit greater year-to-year decreases relative to disadvantaged neighborhoods following reduction of local reporting services in 2004. Findings from spatial analyses indicate that residents of disadvantaged neighborhoods tend to rely on police for assistance as much as, if not more than, people elsewhere.

Racial Threat, Suspicion, and Police Behavior: The Impact of Race and Place in Traffic Enforcement
Kenneth J. Novak and Mitchell B. Chamlin

Racial bias in traffic enforcement has become a popular line of inquiry, but examinations into explanations for the disparity have been scant. The current research integrates theoretical insights from the racial threat hypothesis with inferences drawn from the empirical analyses of the factors that stimulate officer suspicion. The most intriguing finding from this beat-level examination of the structural predictors of several traffic stop outcome measures concerns the conditional effect of the racial composition of the beat on search rates. The analyses reveal that the search rate increases in areas where the proportion of Black residents is higher; however, this finding is observed only for White motorists. This finding is interpreted as indicating that structural characteristics of an area can provide cues to officers regarding who belongs in that environment. As a result, social control increases among groups whose racial characteristics are inconsistent with the neighborhood racial composition.

Examining Officer and Citizen Accounts of Police Use-of-Force Incidents
Jeff Rojek, Geoffrey P. Alpert, and Hayden P. Smith

This study contributes to the body of knowledge of police–citizen contacts by investigating perceptions and behaviors during encounters that result in physical resistance and force. The authors use the accounts literature as a way to understand police–citizen interactions. The data include interviews with citizens who resisted or were accused of resisting lawful police commands and those officers who used force to control these citizens. The goals are to understand the dynamics of police–citizen interactions that use force, to make sense of the actors’ perspectives, and, finally, to examine the processes within the deference–resistance continuum. The data show that officers and citizens focus on different issues when interacting and justify their behavior by the identification and maintenance of their self-prescribed roles.

The ANNALS of the AAPSS 640

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, March 2012: Volume 640

Advancing Reasoned Action Theory

Preface
Michael Hennessy

Martin Fishbein's Legacy: The Reasoned Action Approach
Icek Ajzen

The Quantitative Analysis of Reasoned Action Theory
Amy Bleakley and Michael Hennessy

Measurement Models for Reasoned Action Theory
Michael Hennessy, Amy Bleakley, and Martin Fishbein

The Reasoned Action Model: Directions for Future Research
James Jaccard

Beliefs Underlying Eating Better and Moving More: Lessons Learned from Comparative Salient Belief Elicitations with Adults and Youths
Susan E. Middlestadt

Perceived Behavioral Control in Reasoned Action Theory: A Dual-Aspect Interpretation
Marco Yzer

Developing Media Interventions to Reduce Household Sugar-Sweetened Beverage Consumption
Amy Jordan, Jessica Taylor Piotrowski, Amy Bleakley, and Giridhar Mallya

Understanding Tailored Internet Smoking Cessation Messages: A Reasoned Action Approach
Brenda Curtis

The Reasoned Action Approach in HIV Risk-Reduction Strategies for Adolescents
John B. Jemmott, III

A Reasoned Action Approach to HIV Prevention for Persons with Serious Mental Illness
Michael B. Blank and Michael Hennessy

Theory and Society 41(2)

Theory and Society, March 2012: Volume 41, Issue 2

Why are professors liberal?
Neil Gross & Ethan Fosse

The warlord as arbitrageur
Ariel I. Ahram & Charles King

The trap of intellectual success: Robert N. Bellah, the American civil religion debate, and the sociology of knowledge
Matteo Bortolini

Justice Quarterly 40(1)

Justice Quarterly, January 2012: Volume 40, Issue 1

Youth violence at school and the intersection of gender, race, and ethnicity
Anthony A. Peguero, Ann Marie Popp

The intersection of gender, race, and ethnicity is significant when examining youth violence at school. Sports are an insulating factor against victimization for girls regardless of race/ethnicity. Sports are a protective for White American boys while a risk for racial/ethnic minority boys against victimization. Academic activity for Asian American girls is a risk factor for victimization.

Taxometrics and Criminal Justi Assessing the Latent Structure of Crime-Related Constructs
Glenn D. Walters

Taxometric method capable of shedding light on key criminal justice concepts. Sample and indicator preconditions discussed. Principal procedures include MAMBAC, MAXCOV/MAXEIG, and L-Mode. Taxometrics illustrated with delinquency cohort data.

Pornographic exposure over the life course and the severity of sexual offenses: Imitation and cathartic effects
Christina Mancini, Amy Reckdenwald, Eric Beauregard

We examine whether pornography exposure elevates the violence of a sexual crime. Only adolescence exposure was associated with increased victim harm. Immediately prior exposure decreased the extent of victim physical injury. Research and policy implications are discussed.

Low Resting Heart Rate and Rational Choi Integrating Biological Correlates of Crime in Criminological Theories
Todd A. Armstrong, Brian B. Boutwell

We test the relationship between low resting heart rate and perceptions of the costs and benefits of offending. Those with low resting heart rate anticipate a lower risk of sanction and less guilt/shame as a result of offending. LRHR is related to an increased intent to commit assault. The relationship between low resting heart rate and intent to commit assault is mediated by guilt/shame.

Shades of blue: Confidence in the police in the world
Liqun Cao, Yung-Lien Lai, Ruohui Zhao

The impact of political regime on the confidence in the police is examined. Results show that there is a convex curvilinear relationship between political regime and confidence in the police. Stability, regardless of regime nature, promotes confidence in the police while political unrest demotes it.

Public opinion on crime causation: An exploratory study of Philadelphia area residents
Shaun L. Gabbidon, Danielle Boisvert

Philadelphia area residents were asked their opinions on crime causation. There were significant gender differences in opinions on crime causation. There were significant across-race differences in opinions on crime causation. There were few within-race differences in opinions on crime causation. Public opinion on crime causation significantly differed based on one's political ideology.

Assessing the effectiveness of drug courts on recidivism: A meta-analytic review of traditional and non-traditional drug courts
Ojmarrh Mitchell, David B. Wilson, Amy Eggers, Doris L. MacKenzie

We meta-analytically synthesized the results of 154 drug court evaluations. This meta-analysis is the largest of its kind. Evaluations of adult and DWI drug courts reveal substantial reductions in recidivism. The mean effect of these courts is a 12-percentage point drop in recidivism. Evaluations of juvenile drug courts reveal much smaller reductions in recidivism.

Problematic alcohol consumption by police officers and other protective service employees: A comparative analysis
Henriikka Weir, Daniel M. Stewart, Robert G. Morris

Members of protective service occupations (PSOs) do not consume alcohol more often than members of other occupational groups. PSO members do not exhibit higher likelihood of alcohol abuse/dependency when compared to other occupational groups. PSO members report a higher occurrence of binge drinking than members of other occupations. The relationship between PSO members and binge drinking is not mediated by mental health but gender. The correlates of alcohol abuse/dependency do not substantially differ for PSOs when compared to non-PSOs.

Take the car keys away: Metropolitan structure and the long road to delinquency
Gisela Bichler, Carlena A. Orosco, Joseph A. Schwartz

This study compares delinquent and at-risk youth travel within the context of urban structure with a multilevel model. It is the first scholarship to examine offender travel within the urban structure. The findings show that distinctive population subgroups do exist within youths involved in juvenile probation. Regional metropolitan structure and vehicle accessibility increase the potential for delinquent youth to escape supervision The travel range of at-risk youth is significantly restricted and associated with the popularity of youth hangouts.

On the relationship of past to future involvement in crime and delinquency: A behavior genetic analysis
J.C. Barnes, Brian B. Boutwell

This study analyzed stability and change in criminal behavior across a 13-year span. Genetic factors explained the majority of stability in antisocial behavior. Genetic and nonshared environmental factors explained changes. Population heterogeneity explanations of stability are consistent with the findings. State dependence theories may be salient for explaining behavioral change.

Social Problems 59(1)

Social Problems, February 2012: Volume 59, Issue 1

Presidential Address: The Challenge of Service Sociology
A. Javier Treviño

Laboring Underground: The Employment Patterns of Hispanic Immigrant Men in Durham, NC
Chenoa A. Flippen

The dramatic increase in Hispanic immigration to the United States in recent decades has been coterminous with fundamental shifts in the labor market towards heightened flexibility, instability, and informality. As a result, the low-wage labor market is increasingly occupied by Hispanic immigrants, many of whom are undocumented. While numerous studies examine the implications for natives' employment prospects, our understanding of low-wage immigrants themselves remains underdeveloped. Drawing on original data collected in Durham, North Carolina, this article provides a more holistic account of immigrant Hispanic's labor market experiences, examining not only wages but also employment instability and benefit coverage. The analysis evaluates the role of human capital and immigration characteristics, including legal status, in shaping compensation outcomes, as well as the influence of other employment characteristics. Findings highlight the salience of nonstandard work arrangements such as subcontracting and informal employment to the labor market experiences of immigrant Hispanic men, and describe the constellation of risk factors that powerfully bound immigrant employment outcomes.

Explaining Frame Variation: More Moderate and Radical Demands for Women's Citizenship in the U.S. Women's Jury Movements
Holly J. McCammon

While social movement scholars have added immeasurably to our knowledge of activist framing, few researchers analyze the circumstances leading to variation in the frames articulated by movement actors. In this study, I explore an important and understudied form of frame variation, whether activists use more moderate or more radical frames. Using framing data from the early twentieth-century U.S. women's jury movements, I first show that activists offered both a more traditional and moderate difference frame, arguing that women should be permitted on juries because they would provide a unique female perspective in jury deliberations, and a more radical equality frame, stating that women had an equal right to sit on juries and they were as intellectually capable as men to do so. Second, I demonstrate that a combination of circumstances explains whether the jury activists were likely to articulate more moderate or more radical arguments. I find that frame variation is driven by activist organizational identities, a cultural and political resonance process, and a counterframing process. Findings from multinomial and binary logistic regression analyses reveal that all three processes influenced jury activist framing.

The Paradox of Protection: National Identity, Global Commodity Chains, and the Tequila Industry
Sarah Bowen, Marie Sarita Gaytán

Nations and nationalism remain relevant even in the context of increased global integration. At the same time, as commodity chains become longer, more transnational, and increasingly complex, the linkages between national identity, global capitalism, and political and economic elites are evolving. In this article, we show how culture—expressed in terms of national attachment and collective heritage—is a key means by which elites assert their power along global commodity chains. Specifically, we use the tequila commodity chain as a lens for analyzing how notions of patrimony, and the attendant reliance on the language of shared collective experience, are mobilized to forward corporate agendas in the global marketplace. Focusing on the interplay between global processes and local responses, we argue that the Mexican state and tequila companies promote notions of nationalness at the expense of the agave farmers, small-scale distillers, and communities where tequila is produced. We show how three central themes are part of this process: the protection of place, the maintenance of quality, and the defense of national interests. This article illustrates how new forms of national attachments are emerging under globalization by integrating an analysis of culture into commodity chain research.

Weak Coffee: Certification and Co-Optation in the Fair Trade Movement
Daniel Jaffee

The sociological literature on social movement organizations (SMOs) has come to recognize that under neoliberal globalization many SMOs have moved from an emphasis on the state as the locus of change toward a focus on corporations as targets. This shift has led some SMOs to turn to forms of market-based private regulatory action. The use of one such tactic—voluntary, third-party product certification—has grown substantially, as SMOs seek ways to hold stateless firms accountable. This article explores the case of the international fair trade movement, which aims to change the inequitable terms of global trade in commodities for small farmers, artisans, and waged laborers. Drawing from interviews with a range of fair trade participants, document analysis, and media coverage, the article describes fair trade's growing relationship with multinational coffee firms, particularly Starbucks and Nestlé. It explores intra-movement conflicts over the terms for and the effects of corporate participation in fair trade, and illuminates tensions between conceptualizations of fair trade as movement, market, and system. The article makes two arguments. First, while fair trade has succeeded partially in reembedding market exchange within systems of social and moral relations, it has also proved susceptible to the power of corporate actors to disembed the alternative through a process of movement co-optation. Second, it argues that co-optation takes a unique form in the context of social movements whose principal tools to achieve social change are certification and labeling: it occurs primarily on the terrain of standards, in the form of weakening or dilution.

Neighborhood Ethnic Composition and Resident Perceptions of Safety in European Countries
Moshe Semyonov, Anastasia Gorodzeisky, Anya Glikman

Employing data from the 2002 European Social Survey for 21 national representative samples, we provide the first cross-national analysis of the relations between ethnic composition of neighborhood and perception of neighborhood safety in the European context. The data reveal considerable variation both across countries and across individuals in perceived safety. Bi-level regression analysis shows that perceived safety tends to be lower in countries characterized by a high imprisonment rate and among Europeans who are physically and socially vulnerable (e.g., among women and elderly people, and among populations of low income and low education). Net of individual-level and country-level attributes, the analysis shows that perceived safety is lowest in neighborhoods mostly populated by non-European ethnic minorities and highest in neighborhoods mostly populated by Europeans. The effect of ethnic composition of neighborhood on perceived safety holds even after controlling for previous personal exposure to crime and views toward minorities' impact on crime. We discuss the results in comparison to findings in the United States and in the light of theory in order to delineate the ways that views and perceptions about places are formed and shaped.

Big Books and Social Movements: A Myth of Ideas and Social Change
David S. Meyer, Deana A. Rohlinger

Explanations of the past both reflect and influence the way we think about the present and future. Like artists and politicians, social movements develop a “reputation” that includes a capsule history of a movement's origins, goals, and impact. Both popular narratives and scholarly treatments identify four books published in the early 1960s as having spurred important social movements and government action. This “big book myth” provides a simple origins story for social movements, a version of an “immaculate conception” notion of social change. We compare the mythic accounts of feminist, environmental, anti-poverty, and consumer movements of the 1960s to fuller histories of these movements and find consistent distortions in the common big book narratives. Mythic accounts shorten the incubation time of social movements and omit the initiating efforts of government and political organizations. The myths develop and persist because they allow interested actors to package and contain a movement's origins, explicitly suggesting that broad social dynamics replicate idealized individual conversion stories. They also allow actors to edit out complicated histories that could compromise the legitimacy of a movement or a set of policy reforms. These mythic accounts spread and persist because they simplify complicated social processes and offer analogues to the individual process of becoming active, but they may lead us to misunderstand the past and make misjudgments about collective action and social change in the future. We consider those implications and call for more research on the construction of myths about the past.

Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 49(1)

Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, February 2012: Volume 49, Issue 1

The Conditional Effects of Race and Politics on Social Control: Black Violent Crime Arrests in Large Cities, 1970 to 1990
Thomas D. Stucky

Numerous studies of the determinants of formal social control of Blacks focus on racial threat arguments, which contain implicit or explicit political elements. Using insights from research on politics and social control more generally, this article argues that the relationship between variation in the racial composition of a city and social control of minorities will be conditional on characteristics of the local political system. Hypotheses are tested using pooled cross-sectional time-series data on 100 large U.S. cities in 1970, 1980, and 1990. Contrary to expectations, Black violent crime arrest rates are curvilinearly negatively associated with larger percentages of Black residents. As predicted, the relationship between the percentage of Black residents and Black violent crime arrest rates is conditional on city political system characteristics (elected mayors, district council elections, and partisan ballots), the race of the mayor, and the percentage of city council members who are Black.

Age Matters: Race Differences in Police Searches of Young and Older Male Drivers
Richard Rosenfeld, Jeff Rojek, and Scott Decker

Prior research on police searches of motorists has consistently found that Black drivers are more likely to be searched than White drivers. The authors argue that race differences in police searches depend on the driver’s age. In logistic regression and propensity-score matching analyses of St. Louis police traffic stops, the authors find that young Black males are subjected to discretionary searches at higher rates than are young White males. By contrast, among drivers age 30 and older, Black males are no more likely, and in some analyses are less likely, than White males to be subjected to a discretionary search. The study findings are consistent with studies of young Black males’ negative experience with and attitudes toward the police. If replicated in future research, however, the findings suggest that it may be difficult to prove that police searches of young Black males result primarily from racial bias or unlawful discrimination.

The Imprisonment Penalty for Young Black and Hispanic Males: A Crime-Specific Analysis
Patricia Warren, Ted Chiricos, and William Bales

In the United States, there are well-known racial, ethnic, age, and sex differences in incarceration rates. Younger offenders are more likely to be sentenced to prison than are older offenders. Black and Hispanic rates of incarceration are six to eight times that of White offenders and males are 14 times as likely as women to be sentenced to prison. This research explores how the combined effects of race, ethnicity, age, and sex, net of legally relevant factors, influence the decision to incarcerate. We examine these effects across nine offense categories. The analysis is based on Florida felony conviction data for the years 2000 to 2006. We find that legally relevant factors significantly influence the incarceration decision. Young Black males are most disadvantaged at the incarceration decision.

The Long-Term Effects of Paternal Imprisonment on Criminal Trajectories of Children
Marieke van de Rakt, Joseph Murray, and Paul Nieuwbeerta

This study investigates the effects of fathers’ imprisonment on criminal convictions of their children (aged 18 to 30). Unique official data of the Criminal Career and Life Course Study (CCLS) are used on a nationally representative sample of Dutch men convicted in 1977. Growth curve analysis is used to establish the influence of paternal imprisonment on the development of criminal careers of children. Special attention is paid to the timing and the duration of the imprisonment. The authors demonstrate an association between fathers’ imprisonment and child convictions, especially when fathers are imprisoned when the child is between 0 and 12 years old. When fathers’ criminal history is controlled for, the influence of paternal imprisonment becomes much weaker, although it remains significant. The dose–response relationship between the length of the father’s imprisonment and children’s convictions disappears after controlling for other variables. In the Netherlands, effects of paternal imprisonment on children are very weak and similar to the effects found in another study in Sweden. More research is needed to adequately test the mechanisms causing the relationship between paternal imprisonment and child crime.

Delinquency Balance and Time Use: A Research Note
Jean Marie McGloin

McGloin (2009) recently demonstrated that an imbalance in delinquency between a subject and his or her best friend predicted within-individual changes in offending behavior. Still, the precise mechanism(s) whereby subjects moved toward delinquency balance remained unclear. It is possible that this process has little to do with the transmission of deviant values, but instead is a reflection of unstructured and unsupervised time spent with peers. The results suggest that an imbalance in time use between peers predicts an imbalance in deviance between peers, but not within-individual change in delinquency. The discussion considers the implication of these findings for theory and research on peer processes.

Are Parrots CRAVED? An Analysis of Parrot Poaching in Mexico
Stephen Pires and Ronald V. Clarke

Poaching significantly contributes to the endangerment of protected wildlife but has rarely been studied by criminologists. This study examines whether CRAVED, a general model of theft choices drawn from routine activity and rational choice theory, can help to explain parrot poaching. It correlates estimates of the numbers poached for the 22 species of Mexican parrots with measures of CRAVED components (concealable, removable, available, valuable, enjoyable, and disposable). Widely available species and those whose chicks are easily removable from the nest are more commonly poached, a pattern suggesting that most poachers are opportunistic villagers. More valuable/disposable and more enjoyable species are rarely taken because few remain in the wild after being heavily poached for export in the 1980s. Apart from helping to explain parrot poaching and consider conservation options, the application of CRAVED suggested a possible contribution to understanding theft choices. This was that “abundant” and “accessible” might replace “available.”

Crime & Delinquency 58(1)

Crime & Delinquency, January 2012: Volume 58, Issue 1

Differential Deterrence: Studying Heterogeneity and Changes in Perceptual Deterrence Among Serious Youthful Offenders
Thomas A. Loughran, Alex R. Piquero, Jeffrey Fagan, and Edward P. Mulvey

Perceptual deterrence has been an enduring focus of interest in criminology. Although recent research has generated important new insights about how risks, costs, and rewards of offending are perceived and internalized, there remain two specific limitations to advancing theories of deterrence: (a) the lack of panel data to show whether issues of changes in perceptions over age and time are linked to changes in offending and (b) the lack of research on perceptual deterrence of active offenders, arguably the most policy-relevant group for these studies. Using longitudinal data on offending and perceptions of risks and punishment costs for a large sample of serious youthful offenders, the authors identify significant heterogeneity in sanction threat perceptions generally and across different types of offenders. These differences in perception reflect variation among offenders in the amount of prior information on offending on which individuals may be basing their perceptions. There likely exists a potential “ceiling” and “floor” of sanction threat perceptions, indicating that there are deterrence boundaries beyond which some types of offenders may be more amenable to sanction threats whereas others may be undeterred by sanction threats. Directions for future theoretical and empirical research are discussed.

Cultures of Violence and Acts of Terror: Applying a Legitimation–Habituation Model to Terrorism
Christopher W. Mullins and Joseph K. Young

Although uniquely positioned to provide insight into the nature and dynamics of terrorism, overall the field of criminology has seen few empirically focused analyses of this form of political violence. This article seeks to add to the understanding of terror through an exploration of how general levels of violence within a given society influence the probability of political dissidents within that society resorting to terror as a form of political action. Drawing on the legitimation–habituation thesis, the authors explore whether general levels of legitimate and illegitimate violence within a society predict terrorist violence (both internal and external in direction) within that society. To do so, the authors use zero-inflated negative binomial regression models to perform time series cross-sectional analysis on predictors of terrorist events from the Global Terrorism Database. The authors find support for their core hypothesis and provide a discussion of the implications for the findings within their data and for future criminological research on terrorism.

Crisis Intervention Teams and People With Mental Illness: Exploring the Factors That Influence the Use of Force
Melissa S. Morabito, Amy N. Kerr, Amy Watson, Jeffrey Draine, Victor Ottati, and Beth Angell

The Crisis Intervention Team (CIT) program was first developed to reduce violence in encounters between the police and people with mental illness as well as provide improved access to mental health services. Although there is overwhelming popular support for this intervention, scant empirical evidence of its effectiveness is available—particularly whether the program can reduce the use of force. This investigation seeks to fill this gap in the literature by exploring the factors that influence use of force in encounters involving people with mental illness and evaluating whether CIT can reduce the likelihood of its use.

Public Attitudes Toward Juveniles Who Commit Crimes: The Relationship Between Assessments of Adolescent Development and Attitudes Toward Severity of Punishment
Terrence T. Allen, Eileen Trzcinski, and Sheryl Pimlott Kubiak

In this article, the authors used a statewide survey to investigate the extent to which beliefs regarding the age at which youth reach maturity, the role of peer influences, and other factors, such as abuse during childhood, are associated with measures of how harshly juveniles should be treated by the justice system. The results of this study provide strong support for the hypothesis that assessments of adolescent development are important predictors of attitudes about how juveniles should be treated in the justice system. In all cases, variables measuring attitudes surrounding adolescent development explained substantially more of the variance in attitudes toward punishment than did demographic and socioeconomic variables.

Gender and Relational-Distance Effects in Arrests for Domestic Violence
William Lally and Alfred DeMaris

This study tests two hypotheses regarding factors affecting arrest of the perpetrator in domestic violence incidents. Black’s relational-distance thesis is that the probability of arrest increases with increasing relational distance between perpetrator and victim. Klinger’s leniency principle suggests that the probability of arrest is lower for male perpetrators assaulting female intimate partners, compared with other scenarios. The authors employed marginal logistic regression models using incident-based data from the National Survey of Violence and Threats of Violence Against Women and Men in the United States, 1994-1996, to test both effects. They found support for Black’s thesis: The likelihood of arrest was lower when the perpetrator was an acquaintance, a relative, or a romantic partner of the victim, versus a stranger. However, the authors’ results failed to support Klinger’s hypothesis. They found that men were more likely to be arrested when assaulting a female—regardless of relationship status—compared with assaulting another male.

Exploring Inmate Reentry in a Local Jail Setting: Implications for Outreach, Service Use, and Recidivism
Michael D. White, Jessica Saunders, Christopher Fisher, and Jeff Mellow

Although prisoner reentry has taken center stage in correctional research and policy discussions, there has been little emphasis on reentry among jail populations. This paper examines a jail-based reentry program in New York City that begins while individuals are incarcerated and includes 90 days of postrelease services. This article explores these assumptions through an evaluation of a jail-based reentry program in New York City that begins while individuals are incarcerated and includes 90 days of postrelease services. To determine program impact, the authors compare samples of participants with nonparticipants and program completers with noncompleters. The groups are matched using developmental trajectories derived from group-based trajectory modeling, in addition to propensity score matching. Findings show that participants perform no better than nonparticipants over a 1-year follow-up, but those who stay engaged for at least 90 days of postrelease services experience significantly fewer (and slower) returns to jail. The findings regarding program completion are tempered by several methodological concerns, however. The article concludes with a discussion of how the study may offer insights for program implementation and operation with this target population.

Reevaluating Interrater Reliability in Offender Risk Assessment
Leontien M. van der Knaap, Laura E.W. Leenarts, Marise Ph. Born, and Paul Oosterveld

Offender risk and needs assessment, one of the pillars of the risk–need-responsivity model of offender rehabilitation, usually depends on raters assessing offender risk and needs. The few available studies of interrater reliability in offender risk assessment are, however, limited in the generalizability of their results. The present study examined interrater reliability in Dutch offender risk assessment by 38 raters who independently assessed 75 offenders. The results show substantial reliability (Tinsley and Weiss’s T value ≥ .61) for risk of reconviction and moderate (T value ≥ .41) to substantial reliability for offender needs, such as accommodation, finances, or education. These results are discussed in light of a recent British study on the interrater reliability of a comparable risk assessment instrument. The results from the present study show similar to better reliability, leading to the conclusion that greater external validity does not negatively influence interrater reliability results.