Social Problems 59(3)

Social Problems, August 2012: Volume 59, Issue 3

Street Gang Recruitment: Signaling, Screening, and Selection
James A. Densley

By applying signaling theory to the strategies gangs and their prospective members adopt during the recruitment process, this article addresses one of the most crucial unanswered questions in the literature on street gangs: why, in any given pool of individuals with similar sociological profiles and motivations, do only some gain entry into gangs? Based upon two years of ethnographic fieldwork with gang members in London, UK, this article argues that gangs face a primary trust dilemma in their uncertainty over the quality of recruits. Given that none of the desirable trust-warranting properties for gang membership can be readily discovered from observation, gangs look for observable signs correlated with these properties. Gangs then face a secondary trust dilemma in their uncertainty over the reliability of signs because certain agents (e.g., police informants, rival gang members, and adventure seekers) might mimic them. Thus, gangs look for signs that are too costly for mimics to fake but affordable for the genuine article. This article thus demonstrates how gangs overcome their informational handicap ex ante by screening and selecting among prospective members based on “hard-to-fake” signals.

Organizational Frames for Professional Claims: Private Military Corporations and the Rise of the Military Paraprofessional
Katherine E. McCoy

Corporations, nongovernmental organizations, and other organizational forms are major players in the social world. Recently, sociological scholarship on organizations has converged with research on the professions to discuss the ways in which professions are shaped or influenced by different organizational forms. In this article, I borrow from the notion of framing within social movement research to argue that organizational forms frame the bids of aspiring professionals. More specifically, I argue that certain organizational forms—such as that of the modern corporation—can aid would-be professionals in making their claims for professional recognition. Organizations do this, I argue, by providing aspiring professionals with a ready-made setting, rationale, and guarantees that make the newcomers more easily recognizable as professionals to outside audiences. I explore this argument by examining how the corporate form has facilitated private military contractors in their attempts to legitimate and develop this highly controversial new industry. The data are drawn from my interviews with private military contractors, state officials, and other interested parties surrounding private military corporations, as well as from archival data that detail the rise of the private military industry.

Acculturation and Self-Rated Health among Latino and Asian Immigrants to the United States
Rachel Tolbert Kimbro, Bridget K. Gorman and Ariela Schachter

The ways in which immigrant health profiles change with shifts in acculturation is of increasing interest to scholars and policy makers in the United States, but little is known about the mechanisms that may link acculturation and self-rated health, particularly for Asians. Utilizing the National Latino and Asian American Study (NLAAS) and its data on foreign-born Latinos (N = 1,199) and Asians (N = 1,323) (Pennell et al. 2004), we investigate and compare the associations between acculturation and self-rated health for immigrants to the United States from six major ethnic subgroups (Chinese, Filipino, Vietnamese, Mexican, Cuban, and Puerto Rican). Using comprehensive measures of acculturation, we demonstrate that across ethnic groups, and despite the widely varying contexts of the sending countries and receiving communities, native-language dominance is associated with worse self-rated health relative to bilingualism, and measures of lower acculturation—coethnic ties and remittances—are associated with better self-rated health; and moreover, these associations are only partially mediated by socioeconomic status, and not mediated by acculturative stress, discrimination, social support, or health behaviors. We speculate that immigrants who maintain a native language while also acquiring English, as has been shown for other immigrant outcomes, attain a bicultural fluency, which also enables good health. Surprisingly, we do not find strong associations between duration of time in the United States or age at migration—measures frequently used to proxy acculturation—with self-rated health. Our findings illustrate the complexity of measuring acculturation and its influence on health for immigrants.

The Geography of Exclusion: Race, Segregation, and Concentrated Poverty
Daniel T. Lichter, Domenico Parisi and Michael C. Taquino

The late 2000s Great Recession brought rising neighborhood poverty in the midst of affluence, and the reemergence of a racial and ethnic “underclass” living in inner-city neighborhoods. Our approach redirects attention to a level of geography—cities, suburbs, and small rural towns—where local political and economic decisions effectively exclude the poor and minority populations. It uses newly released poverty data from the 2005–2009 American Community Survey to provide evidence of changing macro patterns of spatially concentrated poverty. We show that roughly one in four U.S. places had poverty rates exceeding 20 percent in 2005 through 2009, up 31 percent since 2000. Roughly 30 percent of America's poor reside in poor places, and concentrated poverty is especially high among poor African Americans. Overall increases in place-based poverty nonetheless were muted over the decade by declines in concentrated poverty among poor Hispanics (a pattern that reflects spatial diffusion to new destinations). We also show that America's poor were sorted unevenly from place-to-place within local labor markets (i.e., counties); poor-nonpoor segregation rates between places increased from 12.6 to 18.4 between 1990 and the 2005–2009 period. Segregation was especially high among disadvantaged blacks and Hispanics. Our empirical results make a case for more scholarly attention on newly emerging patterns of concentrated poverty at the place level.

Tokenism, Organizational Segregation, and Coworker Relations in Law Firms
Jean E. Wallace and Fiona M. Kay

Although occupational segregation by sex has declined in recent decades with the rising numbers of women entering traditionally male occupations (e.g., law and medicine), the achievement of women within male-dominated occupations continues to lag behind that of their male colleagues. In this article, we draw on theories of proportional rarity, expectations states, and social support as three dimensions that provide a structural understanding of tokenism. We examine tokenism in the legal profession through: (1) organizational context in terms of gender composition and gender ratios at upper echelons of the organizational hierarchy; (2) status characteristics of the minority and dominant groups; and (3) the content of communications (emotional and informational support) that women receive from their colleagues. These communications may act to integrate, or conversely, through their absence, exclude women and heighten boundaries to women's career advancement within the traditionally male profession of law. We used questionnaire data collected from a sample of 740 married lawyers working in law firms to examine these aspects of tokenism. The results reveal that women's rising representation in law firms leads to enhanced communication through informational and emotional support, benefiting both men and women lawyers. Yet, a more gender balanced organizational context, in terms of gender composition, does little to shift the expectation states associated with women lawyers and the professional disadvantage women face when they have family responsibilities.

The Unequal Weight of Discrimination: Gender, Body Size, and Income Inequality
Katherine Mason

At present, most work examining the well-documented relationship between social inequality and body size treats fatness as an effect, caused either by some factor that determines weight and social class simultaneously, or by social class itself. However, the relationship between weight and social inequality is more complex than these explanations suggest. Recent studies by John Cawley (2004) and Charles Baum and William Ford (2004) suggest that fatness is often a contributor to inequality, not merely an effect. This article examines the causes of income inequalities between obese and nonobese workers, focusing on how gender interacts with body size to determine the size and duration of those inequalities. Drawing on data from the 1997–2008 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY97), I introduce a positive test for discrimination, which provides a methodological advantage over previous research in this area. I then pose two questions: first, is anti-obesity discrimination to blame for income inequalities between obese and nonobese workers? Second, do women and men's experiences of those inequalities differ? The results indicate that very obese men do face one form of discrimination—statistical discrimination—but that they can overcome initial disadvantages with time. In contrast, obese women's income disadvantages persist over time, suggesting the presence of prejudicial discrimination. In combination with previous studies illustrating how fat women are disadvantaged in educational attainment and marriage outcomes—two important means of accessing economic resources—this research shows one mechanism by which weight, particularly in combination with gender, is a major vector of U.S. inequality.