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.