Thursday, March 29, 2012

American Sociological Review 77(2)

American Sociological Review, April 2012: Volume 77, Issue 2

Politicization of Science in the Public Sphere: A Study of Public Trust in the United States, 1974 to 2010
Gordon Gauchat
This study explores time trends in public trust in science in the United States from 1974 to 2010. More precisely, I test Mooney’s (2005) claim that conservatives in the United States have become increasingly distrustful of science. Using data from the 1974 to 2010 General Social Survey, I examine group differences in trust in science and group-specific change in these attitudes over time. Results show that group differences in trust in science are largely stable over the period, except for respondents identifying as conservative. Conservatives began the period with the highest trust in science, relative to liberals and moderates, and ended the period with the lowest. The patterns for science are also unique when compared to public trust in other secular institutions. Results show enduring differences in trust in science by social class, ethnicity, gender, church attendance, and region. I explore the implications of these findings, specifically, the potential for political divisions to emerge over the cultural authority of science and the social role of experts in the formation of public policy.

Structure and Dynamics of Religious Insurgency: Students and the Spread of the Reformation
Hyojoung Kim and Steven Pfaff
The Protestant Reformation swept across Central Europe in the early-sixteenth century, leaving cities divided into Evangelical and Catholic camps as some instituted reforms and others remained loyal to the Roman Church. In offering a new explanation of the Reformation, we develop a theory that identifies ideologically mobilized students as bridge actors—that is, agents of religious contention who helped concatenate incidents of local insurgency into a loosely organized Evangelical movement by bridging structural holes. Building on existing literature, we offer a novel way to measure the influence of contending religious movements through university enrollments; we propose that the institution of reform can be partially explained by the varying degree of exposure that cities had to Evangelical activist and Catholic loyalist university students. Based on statistical analysis of a novel dataset comprising cities in the Holy Roman Empire with a population of 2,000 or more from 1523 to 1545, we find support for the role of university students as bridge actors linking critical communities at universities to arenas of urban contention. The greater a city’s exposure to heterodox ideology through city-to-university ties, the greater its odds of instituting the Reformation.

Despair by Association? The Mental Health of Mothers with Children by Recently Incarcerated Fathers
Christopher Wildeman, Jason Schnittker, and Kristin Turney
A burgeoning literature considers the consequences of mass imprisonment for the well-being of adult men and—albeit to a lesser degree—their children. Yet virtually no quantitative research considers the consequences of mass imprisonment for the well-being of the women who are the link between (former) prisoners and their children. This article extends research on the collateral consequences of mass imprisonment by considering the association between paternal incarceration and maternal mental health using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study. Results show that recent paternal incarceration increases a mother’s risk of a major depressive episode and her level of life dissatisfaction, net of a variety of influences including prior mental health. The empirical design lends confidence to a causal interpretation: effects of recent incarceration persist even when the sample is limited to mothers attached to previously incarcerated men, which provides a rigorous counterfactual. In addition, the empirical design is comprehensive; after isolating key mechanisms anticipated in the literature, we reduce the relationship between recent paternal incarceration and maternal mental health to statistical insignificance. These results imply that the penal system may have important effects on poor women’s well-being beyond increasing their economic insecurity, compromising their marriage markets, or magnifying their risk of divorce.

Is Breastfeeding Truly Cost Free? Income Consequences of Breastfeeding for Women
Phyllis L. F. Rippeyoung and Mary C. Noonan
Based on studies showing health advantages for breastfeeding mothers and their infants, pediatricians and other breastfeeding advocates encourage new mothers to breastfeed their babies for at least the first six months of their infants’ lives, arguing that breast milk is best for infants, families, and society, and it is cost free. Few empirical studies, however, document how the decision to breastfeed instead of formula-feed is associated with women’s post-birth earnings. This is an important omission, given that the majority of women today work for pay, and many work in job environments incompatible with breastfeeding. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, our results show that mothers who breastfeed for six months or longer suffer more severe and more prolonged earnings losses than do mothers who breastfeed for shorter durations or not at all. The larger post-birth drop in earnings for long-duration breastfeeders is due to a larger reduction in labor supply. We discuss the implications of these findings for gender equality at home and at work.

Revenge of the Managers: Labor Cost-Cutting and the Paradoxical Resurgence of Managerialism in the Shareholder Value Era, 1984 to 2001
Adam Goldstein
Institutional changes associated with the rise of shareholder value capitalism have had seemingly contradictory effects on managers and managerialism in the United States economy. Financial critiques of inefficient corporate bureaucracies and the resulting wave of downsizing, mergers, and computerization subjected managers to unprecedented layoffs during the 1980s and 1990s as firms sought to become lean and mean. Yet the proportion of managers and their average compensation continued to increase during this period. How did the rise of anti-managerial investor ideologies and strategies oriented toward reducing companies’ labor costs coincide with increasing numbers of ever more highly paid managerial employees? This article examines the paradoxical relationship between shareholder value and managerialism by analyzing the effects of shareholder value strategies on the growth of managerial employment and managerial earnings in 59 major industries in the U.S. private sector from 1984 to 2001. Results from industry-level dynamic panel models show that layoffs, mergers, computerization, deunionization, and the increasing predominance of publicly traded firms all contributed to broad-based increases in the number of managerial positions and the valuation of managerial labor. Results are generally consistent with David Gordon’s (1996) fat and mean thesis.

Mass Privatization, State Capacity, and Economic Growth in Post-Communist Countries
Patrick Hamm, Lawrence P. King, and David Stuckler
Why did the transition from socialism to capitalism result in improved growth in some countries and significant economic decline in others? Scholars have advanced three main arguments: (1) successful countries rapidly implemented neoliberal policies; (2) failures were not due to policies but to poor institutional environments; and (3) policies were counterproductive because they damaged the state. We present a state-centered theory and empirically demonstrate for the first time one of several possible mechanisms linking neoliberal policies to poor economic performance: mass privatization programs, where implemented, created a massive fiscal shock for post-communist governments, thereby undermining the development of private-sector governance institutions and severely exacerbating the transformational recession. We performed cross-national panel regressions for a sample of 25 post-communist countries between 1990 and 2000 and found that mass privatization programs negatively affected economic growth, state capacity, and property rights protection. We further tested these findings with firm-level data from a representative survey of managers in 3,550 companies operating in 24 post-communist countries. Within countries that implemented mass-privatized programs, newly privatized firms were substantially less likely to engage in industrial restructuring but considerably more likely to use barter and accumulate tax arrears than their state-owned counterparts.

Sunday, March 25, 2012

Journal of Marriage and Family 74(2)

Journal of Marriage and Family, April 2012: Volume 74, Issue 2

Brief Reports

Spousal Network Overlap as a Basis for Spousal Support  
Benjamin Cornwell

Older Parents Providing Child Care for Adult Children: Does It Pay Off?  
Teun Geurts, Anne-Rigt Poortman and Theo G. van Tilburg

Parents and Children Over the Life Course

Single Mothers' Religious Participation and Early Childhood Behavior  
Richard J. Petts

Life Course Changes of Children and Well-being of Parents  
Matthijs Kalmijn and Paul M. De Graaf

Paternal Child Care and Relationship Quality: A Longitudinal Analysis of Reciprocal Associations  
Pia S. Schober

Farewell to Moms? Maternal Contact for Seven Countries in 1986 and 2001  
Judith Treas and Zoya Gubernskaya

Familism, Interparental Conflict, and Parenting in Mexican-Origin Families: A Cultural–Contextual Framework  
Zoe E. Taylor, Dannelle Larsen-Rife, Rand D. Conger and Keith F. Widaman

Education of Children Left Behind in Rural China  
Yao Lu

Understanding Unique Effects of Parental Incarceration on Children: Challenges, Progress, and Recommendations  
Elizabeth I. Johnson and Beth Easterling

Cohabitation and Marriage

Investments in Marriage and Cohabitation: The Role of Legal and Interpersonal Commitment  
Anne-Rigt Poortman and Melinda Mills

Premarital Cohabitation and Marital Dissolution: An Examination of Recent Marriages  
Wendy D. Manning and Jessica A. Cohen

Thursday, March 1, 2012

Theoretical Criminology 16(1)

Theoretical Criminology, February 2012: Volume 16, Issue 1

Editorial
Mary Bosworth and Simon Cole

'The Earth is one but the world is not': Criminological theory and its geopolitical divisions
Katja Franko Aas
The article addresses the prevailing assumptions about geo-political context in criminological theory. It draws on a well-developed and prolonged critique within sociology, gender and postcolonial studies, of the seemingly context-free nature of western social theory and its assumptions about the universality of its knowledge production. The article’s particular concern is criminology’s engagement with the global. By examining the ‘situated identity’ of criminological theory, and its claims to universality, the article raises questions about who produces theory, who has access to the universal, and what are the potential consequences for our understanding of the global.

Dire forecast: A theoretical model of the impact of climate change on crime
Robert Agnew
After providing an overview of climate change and its effects, this article draws on the leading crime theories to discuss the potential impact of climate change on crime. It is argued that climate change will increase strain, reduce social control, weaken social support, foster beliefs favorable to crime, contribute to traits conducive to crime, increase certain opportunities for crime, and create social conflict. An overall model of climate change and crime is then presented, along with suggestions for research. Even though neglected by criminologists, there is good reason to believe that climate change will become one of the major forces driving crime as the century progresses.

Democracy and punishment: A radical view
Mike Rowan
This article begins by arguing against the claim of some scholars that the opinions and attitudes of ordinary citizens about criminal justice policy are bounded either by feelings of hostility toward criminal offenders or by indifference toward their rights as human beings. The purpose of this discussion will be to demonstrate that there is sufficient cause to think that meaningful democratic engagement on criminal justice issues is possible, such that an inquiry into the democratic legitimacy of criminal justice policy is worth taking up. This discussion sets the stage for an inquiry into the conditions of democratic legitimacy. The article critiques the view that institutionalized deliberation is a sufficient condition for regarding criminal justice policies as legitimate and argues instead for a radical-democratic approach to evaluating the democratic legitimacy of criminal justice policies.

Jane Jacobs? framing of public disorder and its relation to the 'broken windows' theory
Prashan Ranasinghe
Though much has been written about the ‘broken windows’ theory, very little effort has been made to locate and contextualize it within an historical perspective. This article serves as a corrective to this void. I explore the way the concerns about public disorder, which (re)emerged in the US academic literature beginning in the 1960s, were important forerunners for the concerns that would be raised in ‘broken windows’. Specifically, I locate the significance of Jane Jacobs’ seminal The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and explore its relation to the ‘broken windows’ theory, explicating the (dis)connections and (dis)similarities between the way these two texts frame the problem of public disorder and the normative agendas that are espoused.

The new political economy of private security
Adam White
This article maps out a new research agenda for interpreting the trajectory and dynamics of domestic private security provision in advanced democratic countries: the ‘new political economy of private security’. It proceeds on the basis that the key challenge in this field is to construct an agenda which takes account of how both the economic context (shifts in supply and demand) and the political context (state-centric conceptions of legitimacy) of domestic security simultaneously serve to shape the conduct of contemporary private security providers. In attempting to meet this challenge, the article not only builds upon the important theoretical research already undertaken in the form of the nodal governance and anchored pluralism models, but also sheds new light on the nature of domestic private security today.