Theory and Society 41(6)

Theory and Society, November 2012: Volume 41, Issue 6

Mutual halo effects in cultural production: the case of modernist architecture
Randall Collins & Mauro F. Guillén

Previous research has suggested that in cultural production fields the concatenation of eminence explains success, defined as influence and innovation. We propose that individuals in fields as diverse as philosophy, literature, mathematics, painting, or architecture gain visibility by cumulating the eminence of others connected to them across and within generations. We draw on interaction ritual chain and social movement theories, and use evidence from the field of modernist architecture, to formulate a model of how networks of very strong ties generate motivations and emotional enthusiasm, change reputations, and form collective movements that over time transform the structure of cultural fields. Because major aesthetic innovations break sharply with older styles, they need very strong group solidarity over a long period of time to propagate a new standard of practice. We propose mutual halo effects, i.e., the reciprocal reinforcement of upstream and downstream prestige on a given individual node, as the key factor accounting for success in a cultural production field. We discuss the relevance of these results for building a model of influence and innovation in cultural production fields in which networks—reshaped by shifting technological, political, and economic conditions—trigger new styles.

Virtue and the material culture of the nineteenth century: the debate over the mass marketplace in France in the aftermath of the 1848 revolution
Richard Kim

This article treats the intellectual problem of revolution, agency, and the advent of liberal democracy from the standpoint of mid-nineteenth century France in the aftermath of the 1848 revolutions. After a discussion of the theoretical and historiographical problem—in particular the relevance for this period in history of science studies—the article discusses the views of former Saint-Simonian and political economist, Michel Chevalier, eventually turning to the debate over the free market of goods and labor between the early French socialist Louis Blanc and Chevalier in Chevalier’s new role of liberal free trade activist who trumpeted the ideology of the mass marketplace. Chevalier’s engagement of the social question turned on a distinctively moral, ideological, and, ultimately, technocratic defense of the free market—this free market utopianism became both starker and more ideologically refined as a result of Chevalier’s engagement with Blanc, especially in regard to worker-education. Both referred to the new mass marketplace of cheap, retail goods created by the rapid advance of mass transport, modern logistics, as le bon marché. French political economists went so far as to invoke a new way of life: la vie a bon marché (literally, “life on the cheap”). This notion of work and life was opposed by Blanc on the grounds of fraternal social solidarity. Finally, and potently, the moral virtues of the free market were conceived by Chevalier as a direct answer to social revolution, a means for affording social stability.

Popular sovereignty and the historical origin of the social movement
Jens Rudbeck

This article seeks to explain why the social movement had its historical origin in the 1760s. It argues that the rise of the social movement as a particular form of political action was closely linked to a new interpretation of sovereignty that emerged within eighteenth century British politics. This interpretation, which drew inspiration from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s social contract thinking, not only resonated with the radicalism of John Wilkes and his followers’ struggle to promote civil liberties to Englishmen of all classes, it also spurred a transformation of the repertoire of popular contention. The article traces the evolution of the concept of sovereignty in British political thought from the Restoration to the Wilkites and discusses how this evolution informed the contentious actions of the Wilkites as they formed the first mass movement to promote a specific political issue.

Talk of work: transatlantic divergences in justifications for hard work among French, Norwegian, and American professionals
Jeremy Schulz

This article approaches work talk, a neglected but vital object of sociological inquiry, as a possible key to unlocking the mystery of the contemporary work ethic as it appears among male professionals living and working in the United States and Western Europe. This analytical task is carried out through a close examination of the contrasting rhetorics, scripts, and vocabularies anchoring French, Norwegian, and American forms of hard work talk. This comparative exercise capitalizes on material from over one hundred in-depth interviews with comparable French, Norwegian, and American male business professionals working in finance, law, consulting, engineering and other professional fields. Scrutinizing the scripts that members of these three groups use to address their motives for working hard in demanding jobs, this article maps a legitimation divide between the American respondents and their French and Norwegian counterparts. The hard work commentaries of the French and Norwegian respondents feature script repertoires that focus exclusively on the stimulating and enriching character of their work activities. By contrast, the commentaries of the American respondents incorporate overachievement scripts addressing both the extrinsic rewards of work and the personality traits that make hard work a natural expression of personality. These hard work commentaries invoke career success and moneymaking as inducements to hard work. But they also invoke personality traits such as drive and the innate aversion to leisure. This transatlantic divide reflects the greater cultural resonance of self-realization in the two European contexts and the fact that the French and Norwegians have embraced a more Maslowian approach to working life. As I argue in the article’s conclusion, these transatlantic differences in script repertoires can be viewed as the product of the societally specific cultural configurations at work in the three countries. Such cultural configurations define what it means—in terms of status and authenticity—to work hard in a remunerative and rewarding job.

Critical Criminology 20(4)

Critical Criminology, November 2012: Volume 20, Issue 4

Cross-Examining the Race-Neutral Frameworks of Prisoner Re-Entry
Olaoluwa Olusanya & Jeffrey M. Cancino

Prisoner re-entry literature has primarily been framed as a problem that affects all types of ex-offenders, regardless of race. Surprisingly, the issue of race has been ignored in most of the literature on prisoner re-entry. In this paper, we maintain that the effect of contextual racial stratification is so powerful that for the majority of White ex-offenders the large social capital at their disposal might buffer against the collateral consequences of a criminal conviction. By contrast, Black ex-prisoners might be more vulnerable to the collateral consequences of a criminal conviction precisely because of their greater individual-level, accumulated disadvantage. We contend that structural-level factors have more explanatory power than individual-level factors and identify causal mechanisms that link social context with the large Black-White disparity in recidivism. Finally, we propose a racial/ethnic integration model for successful re-entry and reintegration.

Rehabilitation, Risk, and the Carceral Mother: Subjectivity and Parenting Classes in Prisons
Marilyn Brown

Parenting education classes are ubiquitous in the correctional system, particularly for female inmates. This approach to reforming women embodies a maternal subjectivity far removed from the poverty-stricken, criminalized, largely Native Hawai‘ian population in Hawaii’s prisons. Neoliberal governance views poor parenting as the reason for crime, poverty, and a host of social ills. Parenting classes, while well meant and popular among female inmates, foster a reality grounded in notions of middle-class family life. Prisons and other disciplinary systems (such as child welfare) target women’s maternal concerns in order to manage risk, both among female inmates and, potentially, among their children through parenting education. Using data from 240 prison case files and 25 in-depth interviews of mothers on parole supervision, this study finds that the white, middle-class notions embodied by the parenting class are largely at odds with the lived experience of parenting women who are incarcerated.

Punishing from a Sense of Innocence: An Essay on Guilt, Innocence, and Punishment in America
Mike Rowan

This essay explores the connections between, on the one hand, how Americans conceive of their society’s moral culpability for historical transgressions like slavery and Jim Crow segregation and, on the other hand, the hyper-punitive policies and practices which have come to define the American criminal justice system over the past four decades. The essay offers two arguments. First, it submits that, beginning in the late 1960s, the politics and everyday rituals of punishment functioned to reaffirm a “sense of innocence” about American society in the wake of what arguably was and still remains the society’s most self-critical moment. Second, the essay contends that this sense of collective innocence, once reestablished, has functioned as a firm ideological foundation for hyper-punitive criminal justice policies. In essence, the society that imagines itself as innocent may punish offenders with impunity, since neither it nor the criminal justice machinery that operates on its behalf has to trouble itself with guilty second-guessing.

“Society Must be Protected from the Child”: The Construction of US Juvenile Detention as Necessary and Normal
R. Ross Myers

Scholarship on televised representations of juvenile punishment is missing from the literature. By way of an ethnographic content analysis of forty US representations, the current work fills this void. Through three related themes, I argue that these representations paint the US system, one unmatched in either size or punitiveness, as a necessary and normal social institution. First, coverage depicts detained youth as worthy of incarceration through a focus on their supposed violent nature and rationality. Second, it normalizes the practice of juvenile incarceration by tacitly accepting harsh custodial tactics. Finally, by using detention centers as backdrops for comedy and drama, representations relegate juvenile justice to a position outside the political arena. This work serves as a reminder that in the age of mass incarceration, it is not only media moments that incite fear or spur panic that are of importance: those that normalize the peculiar policies of the United States may be just as consequential.

Debunking the Myths of American Corrections: An Exploratory Analysis
Jeffrey Ian Ross

This article briefly reviews the literature on the myths of corrections and then identifies sixteen of the most prominent misrepresentations about jails, prisons, correctional workers, and convicts in the United States. It then systematically examines the reality of each. The article uses scholarly research, governmental and news reports, and personal experience of former inmates to cast doubt on many of the myths that have been developed. It argues that most of the misrepresentations about corrections can be called into question.

Across Crimes, Criminals, and Contexts: Traps Along the Troubled Path Towards a General Theory of Crime
Eric Madfis

In the search for the etiology of transgression, one theoretical venture is prized above all others: a general theory of crime. However, the term itself is inconsistently defined and its feasibility rarely questioned. This paper forms an explicit definition of general theory as that which purports to explain one or more of the following: (1) all types of crime, (2) crime committed by all types of people, and (3) crime across all contexts. While the search for a general theory has refined theoretical thinking and guided decades of empirical research, each of these three goals constitutes a conceptual trap wherein the desire for parsimonious universality inherently discounts the complex and multifaceted nature of human behavior. Thus, theorists of the etiology of crime must begin to explicitly acknowledge and further explore the justifications for and ramifications of general theories of crime.

The Empire of Scrounge Meets the Warm City: Danger, Civility, Cooperation and Community among Strangers in the Urban Public World
Thaddeus Müller

This article offers alternative views on scrounging—looking through garbage to find valuable objects—as a disorderly activity, and on urban public life as dangerous because of disorderly people. The European micro sociological perspective on the fleeting but positive moments of urban public life, as developed in’ The Warm City’ (Müller in De warme stad: betrokkenheid bij het publieke domein. Jan van Arkel, Utrecht, 2002), is used to reread and reconstruct Ferrell’s ethnographic work in the ‘Empire of Scrounge.’ The focus of my article is to more deeply examine the public interactions scroungers have with scroungers and non-scrounging citizens. Ferrell’s interest in, and presentation of, his material leaves out this kind of micro analysis of stranger-interactions while scrounging in public space. My article shows that, in contrast to the belief that scroungers disrupt social order (and therefore need ‘policing’), scroungers often interact in a civil and careful way with strangers in order to purposively sustain public order, which allows them to continue their informal waste management. The overall image of urban public life which comes with these interactions is that of a ‘Warm City’, a social environment that consists of civility, cooperation and community among strangers.

Young White British Men and Knife-Carrying in Public: Discourses of Masculinity, Protection and Vulnerability
Marek Palasinski & Damien W. Riggs

Whilst quantitative research to date gives us some indication of the prevalence at which knife-carrying occurs among young British men, there have been few explanations for why it occurs, and for what the relationship might be between broader social issues of control and power and the behaviours of young men themselves. Drawing on interviews with 16 young white British men, the present paper explores the ways in which the sample accounted for knife-carrying. Two interpretative repertoires were identified: (1) attributions of blame to authorities for a lack of protection and a subsequent justification of knife-carrying, and (2) discussions of masculinity in relation to knife-carrying. The findings suggest that what is required are policy and practice responses that take into account the symbolic functions of knives for young white men, and which recognise the dilemmatic bind that such men are caught in when they attempt to negotiate competing demands of protection and control.

Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 49(4)

Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, November 2012: Volume 49, Issue 4

Carjacking and Copresence
Bruce A. Jacobs

Drawing from in-depth qualitative interviews, this research note explores how carjacking offenders establish copresence with victims. Two tactics are explored: normalcy illusions and blitzes. The paper links these tactics conceptually to the delivery of coercive actions. Discussion focuses on the offenders' manipulation of celerity and publicity in the approach process and its implications for compliance generation in an alternative coercive climate.

Structural Covariates of Gang Homicide in Large U.S. Cities
David C. Pyrooz

Objectives: This study examined the structural covariates of gang homicide in large U.S. cities and whether the structural conditions associated with gang homicide differed from non-gang homicide. Methods: Several national data sources were used to gather information on the structural conditions of the 88 largest U.S. cities, including the U.S. Census Bureau, Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics, Uniform Crime Report, and National Gang Center. Negative binomial regression was used to model the relationship between the structural conditions of cities and homicide rates. Results: Socioeconomic deprivation, official rates of gang membership, and population density explained between-city variability in gang homicide rates. In addition, quadratic associations were observed for socioeconomic deprivation and population density. Equality of coefficients tests revealed that the structural covariates of gang homicide differed in magnitude from non-gang homicide. Conclusions: Prior to this study, the etiology of gang homicide was found to differ from other homicide types in terms of event characteristics and sub-city correlates. This macro-level study extended this line of research to cities, providing evidence that the structural correlates of violence operated differently for gang homicide.

White Perceptions of Whether African Americans and Hispanics are Prone to Violence and Support for the Death Penalty
James D. Unnever and Francis T. Cullen

Objective: To explore whether the impact of racial and ethnic pejorative stereotypes and prejudice on White support for the death penalty changes over time. Methods: The data were drawn from the 1990 and 2000 General Social Surveys. This trend analysis included a four-item racial–ethnic prejudice scale and two stereotype or “typification” measures that assessed the extent to which the respondents believed that African Americans and Hispanics were more prone to violence than Whites. Controls were introduced for standard demographic measures and for known covariates of punitiveness, such as conservative political ideology and religious beliefs and involvement. The dependent variable was whether the respondents favored the death penalty for persons convicted of murder. Results: The analyses revealed that racial and ethnic prejudice increases Whites' embrace of capital punishment in both periods of time. By contrast, the negative stereotypes that typify African Americans and Hispanics as prone to violence exerted a significant impact on support for the death penalty in 1990 but not in 2000. Conclusions: These findings suggest that Whites' views on minority group members' proneness to violence potentially shift over time and exert significant impacts on death penalty support depending on the broader social context that prevails at a given historical juncture. Racial–ethnic feelings of animus appear to be a stable, if not intractable source of punitiveness. Future research should continue to unpack the complex nature of Whites' racial and ethnic views and to explore how, in given sociopolitical contexts, they potentially serve to justify punitive policy agendas.

Partners in Crime? Criminal Offending, Marriage Formation, and Partner Selection
Marieke van Schellen, Anne-Rigt Poortman, and Paul Nieuwbeerta

Objectives. This study aims to examine the impact of criminal offending on marriage formation and partner selection. Although it is well established that marriage has the potential to foster desistance from crime, far less attention has been paid to offenders' marital chances. The few studies that did investigate the effects of crime on marriage formation have not taken into account spouses' criminal behavior. However, desistance from crime may strongly depend on the criminal history of the spouse. Method. We employ data from a unique longitudinal study: The Criminal Career and Life-course Study (CCLS). The CCLS contains data on the officially registered criminal careers of 4,615 Dutch offenders and their spouses. To analyze the relationship between criminal offending and outcomes in the marriage market, we use event history models. Results. The results show that not only the seriousness of a criminal history but also the timing of criminal convictions affects offenders' outcomes in the marriage market. The more criminal offenses individuals have committed, the lower the chances of marrying and, given marriage, the higher the chances of marrying a criminal partner. The impact of a criminal record on marriage likelihood becomes weaker when offenders have been convicted a longer time ago. Conclusions. On the basis of our findings, we have to nuance the prominent idea that marriage reduces criminal behavior. Because of their lower marital chances and their tendency to marry criminal partners, offenders are less likely to experience protective effects of marriage.

The Influence of Travel Distance on Treatment Noncompletion for Juvenile Offenders
Brian Lockwood

Objectives: This study seeks to identify the effects of travel distance on treatment noncompletion for juveniles attending community-based offender programs. Methods: A population of more than 6,000 juvenile offenders adjudicated in Philadelphia’s Family Court is analyzed using hierarchical linear models. Distance to treatment is operationalized with Euclidean distance. Treatment noncompletion is disaggregated by type to distinguish between noncompletion due to dropout and expulsion. Results: Results indicate that distance to treatment influences noncompletion due to dropout, but not due to expulsion. In the cross-classified models, an increase of approximately 3 miles to treatment is shown to increase the odds of treatment noncompletion due to dropout by nearly 100 percent. Conclusions: Implications of this research suggest that Euclidean distance is an appropriate measure with which to estimate the travel of young offenders in urban space and that juvenile justice policymakers should consider distance to treatment when matching young offenders to treatment facilities.

On the Operational Validity of Perceptual Peer Delinquency: Exploring Projection and Elements Contained in Perceptions
John H. Boman, IV, John M. Stogner, Bryan Lee Miller, O. Hayden Griffin, III, and Marvin D. Krohn

Objectives. The authors examine perceptions of a peer’s substance use to determine whether and to what degree individuals project their own behavior onto their perceptions of peer’s delinquency, and to determine whether the constructs of self-control and peer attachment are related to perceptions. Methods. Using a sample of 2,154 young adult respondents within friendship pairs in which each respondent reported their own substance use and their perception of the friend’s use, the authors estimate a series of regression models with perceptions of a peer’s alcohol, marijuana, Salvia divinorum, and hard drug use as dependent variables. Results. Perceptions of a peer’s substance use are approximately equally related to a peer’s and a respondent’s use of each substance. Projection occurs to a greater extent when perceiving low-frequency behaviors. Low self-control is sporadically associated with higher perceived substance use. Conclusions. Peer self-reported delinquency and perceptions of peer delinquency are distinct constructs. Because projection appears to be worse for infrequent behaviors, researchers should use caution when using low-frequency behaviors to measure perceptual peer delinquency. Although the data used are cross sectional, the perceptual measure is confounded by too many variables other than a peer’s actual delinquency to be considered a valid measure of the sole construct of peer delinquency.

American Journal of Sociology 118(2)

American Journal of Sociology, September 2012: Volume 118, Issue 2

Northward Migration and the Rise of Racial Disparity in American Incarceration, 1880–1950
Christopher Muller

Of all facets of American racial inequality studied by social scientists, racial disparity in incarceration has proved one of the most difficult to explain. This article traces a portion of the rise of racial inequality in incarceration in northern and southern states to increasing rates of African-American migration to the North between 1880 and 1950. It employs three analytical strategies. First, it introduces a decomposition to assess the relative contributions of geographic shifts in the population and regional changes in the incarceration rate to the increase in racial disparity. Second, it estimates the effect of the rate of white and nonwhite migration on the change in the white and nonwhite incarceration rates of the North. Finally, it uses macro- and microdata to evaluate the mechanisms proposed to explain this effect.

Defining America’s Racial Boundaries: Blacks, Mexicans, and European Immigrants, 1890–1945
Cybelle Fox and Thomas A. Guglielmo

Contemporary race and immigration scholars often rely on historical analogies to help them analyze America’s current and future color lines. If European immigrants became white, they claim, perhaps today’s immigrants can as well. But too often these scholars ignore ongoing debates in the historical literature about America’s past racial boundaries. Meanwhile, the historical literature is itself needlessly muddled. In order to address these problems, the authors borrow concepts from the social science literature on boundaries to systematically compare the experiences of blacks, Mexicans, and southern and eastern Europeans (SEEs) in the first half of the 20th century. Their findings challenge whiteness historiography; caution against making broad claims about the reinvention, blurring, or shifting of America’s color lines; and suggest that the Mexican story might have more to teach us about these current and future lines than the SEE one.

Difficult Decoupling: Employee Resistance to the Commercialization of Personal Settings
Catherine Turco

The market’s tendency to organize personal spheres of life is not always unfettered, and while past studies have identified public discomfort as a bar to market expansion, this study considers a commercialization project that gained public acceptance yet nevertheless failed. The study’s key theoretical insight is that the organizational decoupling required for successful commercialization may complicate companies’ ability to gain employee acceptance. Rich ethnographic data from Motherhood, Inc., an organization offering support and services for new mothers, is leveraged to identify two conditions under which employee resistance may arise and undermine successful commercialization. This article contributes to sociological understandings by theorizing the important role of employees in commercialization and to organizational theory more generally by specifying conditions under which decoupling may be difficult to achieve.

Cohort Change, Diffusion, and Support for Environmental Spending in the United States
Fred C. Pampel and Lori M. Hunter

Long-standing debates over the effect of socioeconomic status (SES) on environmental concern contrast postmaterialist and affluence arguments, suggesting a positive relationship in high-income nations, with counterarguments for a negative or near zero relationship. A diffusion-of-innovations approach adapts parts of both arguments and predicts initial adoption of proenvironmental views by high-SES groups; however, environmentalism diffuses over time to other SES groups, weakening the association. This argument is tested with General Social Survey data (1973–2008) across 83 cohorts, whose attitudes before, during, and after the emergence of environmentalism identify long-term changes in environmental concern. Multilevel age, period, and cohort models support diffusion arguments by demonstrating that the effects across cohorts of education, income, and occupational prestige first strengthen, then weaken. This finding suggests that diffusion of environmental concern first produces positive relationships consistent with postmaterialism arguments and later produces null or negative relationships consistent with global environmentalism arguments.

Building Europe on a Weak Field: Law, Economics, and Scholarly Avatars in Transnational Politics
Stephanie Lee Mudge and Antoine Vauchez

The present article mobilizes the concepts of “weak field” and “avatar” to explain Europe’s historically variable meanings, analyzing two successful reinventions (as a “community of law” and a “single market”) and one failure (“social Europe”). Focusing on law and economics, the authors first show that the weak field of EU studies serves as a crossroads between nationally anchored scholarly professions and Europe’s political field; second, they show that under certain conditions legal and economic constructions have exerted performative effects via scholarly avatars. Depending on their strategic positioning, scholarly avatars facilitate symbolic exchange across political, technocratic, and scholarly boundaries and endow theoretical constructions with performative potential.

British Journal of Criminology, September 2012: Volume 52, Issue 5

British Journal of Criminology, November 2012: Volume 52, Issue 6

The Oven Builders Of The Holocaust: A Case Study of Corporate Complicity in International Crimes
Annika Van Baar and Wim Huisman

Corporate complicity in international crimes is a largely neglected phenomenon that exists on the border of the criminological study of international crimes and the study of corporate crime. In this article, the German corporation Topf & Söhne is analysed as a case study of corporate involvement in international crimes. Topf built the cremation ovens for various concentration and extermination camps in Nazi Germany. It is clear that existing explanations of corporate crime such as the urge to survive, competition between sub-units, corporate culture, normalization and neutralization are applicable. However, the extraordinary circumstances of the Nazi regime had a crucial influence on the motivations, opportunity and lack of control that caused Topf’s involvement in the Holocaust.

Why do People Comply with the Law?: Legitimacy and the Influence of Legal Institutions
Jonathan Jackson, Ben Bradford, Mike Hough, Andy Myhill, Paul Quinton, and Tom R. Tyler

This paper extends Tyler’s procedural justice model of public compliance with the law. Analysing data from a national probability sample of adults in England and Wales, we present a new conceptualization of legitimacy based on not just the recognition of power, but also the justification of power. We find that people accept the police’s right to dictate appropriate behaviour not only when they feel a duty to obey officers, but also when they believe that the institution acts according to a shared moral purpose with citizens. Highlighting a number of different routes by which institutions can influence citizen behaviour, our broader normative model provides a better framework for explaining why people are willing to comply with the law.

Public Opinion Towards the Lay Magistracy and the Sentencing Council Guidelines: The Effects of Information on Attitudes
Julian Roberts, Mike Hough, Jonathan Jackson, and Monica M. Gerber

Public opinion surveys have long documented public criticism of ‘lenient’ sentencers. There are two principal perceptions contributing to negative attitudes: a lack of community input and the view that sentencers determine sentence according to their own views. This study embeds an experimental design within a representative survey of respondents in England and Wales (n = 1,004), supplemented by laboratory-based work (n = 230) and focus groups. Results demonstrated that the public is ill-informed about both the magistracy and the sentencing guidelines. In addition, providing information about sentencing changed public attitudes to sentencing and reduced public punitiveness. Respondents were less critical of disposals and less punitive in their own sentence recommendations when they had been given context about the structure of sentencing.

Police Stations, Architecture and Public Reassurance
Andrew Millie

Architecture has for many years been of interest to criminology in terms of its role in social control and crime prevention. This article focuses on architecture as reassurance and the specific example of the police station—what is an under-researched topic. Supporting evidence is presented from a study of police stations in three English police forces. The study’s aims were modest and exploratory, to draw on theoretical and empirical evidence to consider whether police stations are a worthwhile area of criminological/architectural study, and to investigate the possibility that police stations could contribute to public reassurance. Using the language of semiotics, the article argues that meanings attached to police stations can contribute to reassurance by affecting people’s emotive ‘readings’ of security and safety; yet, to do this, there has to be a rethink for many existing stations in terms of what these buildings communicate. The article adopts an interpretivist view of meaning acknowledging that buildings can mean different things to different people. It is suggested that numerous police stations can be read as intimidating fortresses; many others are secret places; while others are potentially public buildings where the public are welcomed. Implications for a policy of reassurance are discussed in light of the current cuts to police budgets. An agenda for further systematic research is suggested.

‘I Don’t Dial 911’’: American Gun Politics and the Problem of Policing
Jennifer D. Carlson

In what sense does American pro-gun sentiment constitute a ‘politics’? I use in-depth interviews with 60 male gun carriers to propose that pro-gun politics not only involve claims to the state, but also centre on particular understandings about the proper role of the state, particularly public law enforcement. I argue that, within the contemporary US context of neo-liberalism (particularly the War on Crime), guns are a complex response to police failure amid anxieties regarding crime and insecurity. Specifically, guns serve as political tools used to critique the state’s power to police. Most of the time, gun advocates articulate guns as a response to the police’s inability to protect citizens; however, they sometimes also describe guns as a response to the police’s propensity to violate. I identify two sets of pro-gun, police-suspicious beliefs that emerge along racialized, masculine lines, which I denote ‘neo-liberal gun politics’ and ‘neo-radical gun politics’. I explain these political beliefs as responses to the state’s power to police by showing how neo-liberal ideology alongside the War on Crime has shaped American perceptions of public law enforcement.

The Importance of Culture for Cannabis Markets: Towards an Economic Sociology of Illegal Drug Markets
Sveinung Sandberg

This paper reports findings from six years of ethnographic and qualitative research on cannabis markets. Data include interviews with 60 cannabis dealers and 60 customers. The paper describes the vertical and horizontal organization of the cannabis economy, seen from the perspective of Norway. It further distinguishes between private, semi-public and public cannabis markets. The most important cultural influences in the cannabis economy are a non-commercial cannabis culture in private markets and a violent street culture in public markets. These coexist with a general market culture. The difference between markets and market cultures illustrates how illegal drug markets are performed, not ‘natural’, and thus the importance of economic sociology for the study of illegal drug markets.

The Truth, The Half-Truth, and Nothing Like the Truth: Reconceptualizing False Allegations of Rape
Candida L. Saunders

There is a longstanding dispute between criminal justice professionals on the one hand and researchers and commentators on the other regarding the prevalence of false allegations of rape. Prevalence, however, is contingent upon definition. If the various protagonists’ definitions of a ‘false allegation’ do not coincide, it is virtually inevitable that their estimates will diverge. Drawing on original empirical data from in-depth research interviews conducted with police and Crown Prosecutors, this article explores the following important but much-neglected question: When criminal justice professionals tell us that false allegations of rape are common, what precisely are they talking about? What ‘counts’ as a false allegation?

Spaces of Male Fear: The Sexual Politics of Being Watched
Sarah E. H. Moore and Simon Breeze

This article makes a contribution to the sparse literature on the ethnography of fear. Using observation and focus groups, we compare men and women’s perceptions of danger in relation to a specific civic space—public toilets. Here, it is men, rather than women, who express a marked concern about the threat of physical assault. We attempt to understand the nature and social origin of this fear, and its relationship to the arrangement of space. In so doing, we help sketch out what Tuan (1979) called ‘landscapes of fear’. Places that take us outside of, or lie at the margins of, regular social space can be particularly fear-inducing. Civil inattention is a core means of dealing with this problem and we analyse its functions in allaying fear. We also suggest that spaces in which private behaviour can be surreptitiously surveyed or where there is an indeterminate relationship between private and public space can prompt a pernicious sense of worry. Indeed, being watched and being mistakenly perceived to be watching emerge from our data as really important correlates of fear of violence. We employ Sartre, Berger and Mulveys’s ideas about the gaze to analyse the psychosocial effects of this. Finally, we stress the importance of seeing the experience of fear—including its relationship to spatial arrangement—as socially contingent. The discussion section of this paper suggests that we understand men’s fear of violence in public toilets as a reaction to what Turner calls an ‘inter-structural’ social situation, namely the temporary suspension of the usual gender hierarchy.

Socio-Economic Status and Criminality as Predictors of Male Violence: Does Victim’s Gender or Place of Occurrence Matter?
Mikko Aaltonen, Janne Kivivuori, Pekka Martikainen, and Venla Salmi

While low socio-economic status (SES) is generally accepted as a risk factor for violence, some have argued that intimate partner violence (IPV) is a ‘classless’ crime. We examine the effects of SES and prior criminal record on different types of police-reported violence committed in 2005–07 by Finnish men using a register-based general population sample that offers exceptionally good population coverage. While IPV against women appears somewhat less determined by offender’s low SES than other types of violent crime, we demonstrate considerable SES effects for all examined types of violence. Offenders in male-to-male violence in private settings appear the most marginalized. We conclude that social disadvantage contributes to male violence against both men and women.

What Makes A Homicide Newsworthy?: UK National Tabloid Newspaper Journalists Tell All
Anna Gekoski, Jacqueline M. Gray, and Joanna R. Adler

Homicide is the most newsworthy of all crimes. Yet not all homicides are reported equally: some receive extensive coverage while others receive little or none. Qualitative questionnaires, completed by ten UK national tabloid journalists, explored the criteria that determine the newsworthiness of homicide. Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis revealed that, with certain exceptions, homicides involving ‘perfect’ victims, statistically deviant features, killers on the run, sensational elements and/or serial killers will almost always be newsworthy, while those involving ‘undeserving’ victims in commonplace circumstances will almost always not. However, analysis further revealed that there will always be caveats to this, with some, normally under-reported, homicides gaining widespread coverage through unpredictable factors such as current societal issues or interest from a particular editor.

Crime & Delinquency 58(5)

Crime & Delinquency, September 2012: Volume 58, Issue 5

Special Issue: Terrorism (James Forest, Ed.)

Terrorism Research in Criminology: Current Topics and Future Prospects
Paul E. Tracy

Close Cousins or Distant Relatives? The Relationship Between Terrorism and Hate Crime
Kathleen Deloughery, Ryan D. King, and Victor Asal

Does Legitimacy Matter?: Attitudes Toward Anti-American Violence in Egypt, Morocco, and Indonesia
Gary LaFree and Nancy A. Morris

Elements of Terrorism Preparedness in Local Police Agencies, 2003-2007: Impact of Vulnerability, Organizational Characteristics, and Contagion in the Post-9/11 Era
Aki Roberts, John M. Roberts, Jr., and Raymond V. Liedka

Does Watching the News Affect Fear of Terrorism? The Importance of Media Exposure on Terrorism Fear
Ashley Marie Nellis and Joanne Savage

Kidnapping by Terrorist Groups, 1970-2010: Is Ideological Orientation Relevant?
James J. F. Forest

Examining Willingness to Attack Critical Infrastructure Online and Offline
Thomas J. Holt and Max Kilger

The ANNALS of the AAPSS 644

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, November 2012: Volume 644

Communication, Consumers, and Citizens: Revisiting the Politics of Consumption
Dhavan V. Shah, Lewis A. Friedland, Chris Wells, Young Mie Kim, and Hernando Rojas

Situating Consumption in Politics

The Personalization of Politics: Political Identity, Social Media, and Changing Patterns of Participation
W. Lance Bennett

The Politics of Consumer Debt: U.S. State Policy and the Rise of Investment in Consumer Credit, 1920–2008
Louis Hyman

Working-Class Cast: Images of the Working Class in Advertising, 1950–2010
Erika L. Paulson and Thomas C. O’Guinn

What Does It Mean to Be a Good Citizen? Citizenship Vocabularies as Resources for Action
Kjerstin Thorson

Sustainable Citizenship and Social Capital

Sustainable Citizenship and the New Politics of Consumption
Michele Micheletti and Dietlind Stolle

Political Consumerism and New Forms of Political Participation: The Gruppi di Acquisto Solidale in Italy
Paolo R. Graziano and Francesca Forno

Gender and Generation in the Social Positioning of Taste
Nam-Jin Lee, Christine L. Garlough, Lewis A. Friedland, and Dhavan V. Shah

The Shifting Sands of Citizenship: Toward a Model of the Citizenry in Life Politics
Young Mie Kim

Conscious Consumption and Activism

Does Changing a Light Bulb Lead to Changing the World? Political Action and the Conscious Consumer
Margaret M. Willis and Juliet B. Schor

Buying In to Social Change: How Private Consumption Choices Engender Concern for the Collective
Lucy Atkinson

From Concerned Shopper to Dutiful Citizen: Implications of Individual and Collective Orientations toward Political Consumerism
Melissa R. Gotlieb and Chris Wells

Examining Overconsumption, Competitive Consumption, and Conscious Consumption from 1994 to 2004: Disentangling Cohort and Period Effects
D. Jasun Carr, Melissa R. Gotlieb, Nam-Jin Lee, and Dhavan V. Shah

Questioning Assumptions about the Citizen-Consumer

Constructing Sustainable Consumption: From Ethical Values to the Cultural Transformation of Unsustainable Markets
Douglas B. Holt

The Civic Consequences of "Going Negative": Attack Ads and Adolescents’ Knowledge, Consumption, and Participation
Ming Wang, Itay Gabay, and Dhavan V. Shah

Between Complacency and Paternalism: Ethical Controversies over Influencing Political and Consumer Choice
Thomas Hove

Consuming Ourselves to Dearth: Escalating Inequality and Public Opinion
Lewis A. Friedland, Hernando Rojas, and Leticia Bode

American Sociological Review 77(5)

American Sociological Review, October 2012: Volume 77, Issue 5

The Rise of the Super-Rich: Power Resources, Taxes, Financial Markets, and the Dynamics of the Top 1 Percent, 1949 to 2008
Thomas W. Volscho and Nathan J. Kelly

The income share of the super-rich in the United States has grown rapidly since the early 1980s after a period of postwar stability. What factors drove this change? In this study, we investigate the institutional, policy, and economic shifts that may explain rising income concentration. We use single-equation error correction models to estimate the long- and short-run effects of politics, policy, and economic factors on pretax top income shares between 1949 and 2008. We find that the rise of the super-rich is the result of rightward-shifts in Congress, the decline of labor unions, lower tax rates on high incomes, increased trade openness, and asset bubbles in stock and real estate markets.

Political Holes in the Economy: The Business Network of Partisan Firms in Hungary
David Stark and Balazs Vedres

This article redirects attention from the question of how business ties have an impact on politics to the question of how political ties have an impact on business. Specifically, do divisions within the field of politics become divisions in the field of business networks? To study co-evolution of political and economic fields, we conducted a historical network analysis of the relationship between firm-to-party ties and firm-to-firm ties in the Hungarian economy. We constructed a dataset of all senior managers and boards of directors of 1,696 corporations and the complete set of all political officeholders from 1987 to 2001. Findings from our field interviews and dyadic logistic regression models demonstrate that director interlocks depend, to a significant extent, on political affiliations. Although the political and economic fields have been institutionally separated, firms and parties have become organizationally entangled. Firms of either left or right political affiliation exhibit a preference for partnerships with firms in the same political camp and increasingly avoid ties with firms in the opposite camp. Our analysis reveals that political camps in the Hungarian economy occurred not as a direct legacy of state socialism but as the product of electoral party competition.

Religion and Sexual Behaviors: Understanding the Influence of Islamic Cultures and Religious Affiliation for Explaining Sex Outside of Marriage
Amy Adamczyk and Brittany E. Hayes

Social scientists have long been interested in how cultural and structural characteristics shape individuals’ actions. We investigate this relationship by examining how macro- and micro-level religious effects shape individuals’ reports of premarital and extramarital sex. We look at how identifying with one of the major world religions—Islam, Hinduism, Christianity, Buddhism, or Judaism—and living in a nation with a Muslim culture shape the likelihood of sex outside of marriage. Using hierarchical modeling techniques and cross-national data from the Demographic and Health Surveys, we find that ever married Hindus and Muslims are less likely to report having had premarital sex than are ever married Jews and Christians, and an earlier age at marriage does not appear to explain the relationship. Married Muslims are also less likely than affiliates of all other religions, except Buddhists, to report extramarital sex. The percentage Muslim within a nation decreases the odds of reports of premarital sex and this relationship is not explained by restrictions on women’s mobility. These findings contribute to research on religion, culture, policy, and health, as well as our understanding of the macro-micro relationship.

Religion and Volunteering in Context: Disentangling the Contextual Effects of Religion on Voluntary Behavior
Chaeyoon Lim and Carol Ann MacGregor

This study examines whether religion’s effect on volunteering spills over to nonreligious individuals through personal ties between religious and nonreligious individuals. We use three different analytic strategies that focus on national, local, and personal network level contexts to identify the network spillover effect of religion on volunteering. We find that if nonreligious people have close friends with religious affiliations, they are more likely to volunteer for religious and nonreligious causes. However, this network spillover effect cannot be inferred from the relationship between volunteering and national or local level religious context—a common approach in the literature. In fact, we find that the average level of local religious participation is negatively associated with volunteering among the nonreligious in the United States. This novel finding suggests that to fully understand religion’s civic role in the wider community, we need to consider how religion might influence the civic life of people outside religious communities, not just those within them. Our findings also suggest that in spite of methodological advances, studies that purport to test mechanisms at one level of analysis by using data at a larger level of aggregation run a high risk of committing an ecological fallacy.

Disease Politics and Medical Research Funding: Three Ways Advocacy Shapes Policy
Rachel Kahn Best

In the 1980s and 1990s, single-disease interest groups emerged as an influential force in U.S. politics. This article explores their effects on federal medical research priority-setting. Previous studies of advocacy organizations’ political effects focused narrowly on direct benefits for constituents. Using data on 53 diseases over 19 years, I find that in addition to securing direct benefits, advocacy organizations have aggregate effects and can systemically change the culture of policy arenas. Disease advocacy reshaped funding distributions, changed the perceived beneficiaries of policies, promoted metrics for commensuration, and made cultural categories of worth increasingly relevant to policymaking.

Academic Entrepreneurship and Exchange of Scientific Resources: Material Transfer in Life and Materials Sciences in Japanese Universities
Sotaro Shibayama, John P. Walsh, and Yasunori Baba

This study uses a sample of Japanese university scientists in life and materials sciences to examine how academic entrepreneurship has affected the norms and behaviors of academic scientists regarding sharing scientific resources. Results indicate that high levels of academic entrepreneurship in a scientific field are associated with less reliance on the gift-giving form of sharing (i.e., generalized exchange) traditionally recommended by scientific communities, and with a greater emphasis on direct benefits for givers (i.e., direct exchange), as well as a lower overall frequency of sharing. We observe these shifts in sharing behavior even among individual scientists who are not themselves entrepreneurially active; this suggests a general shift in scientific norms contingent on institutional contexts. These findings reflect contradictions inherent in current science policies that simultaneously encourage open science as well as commercial application of research results, and they suggest that the increasing emphasis on commercial activity may fundamentally change the normative structure of science.

Changing Global Norms through Reactive Diffusion: The Case of Intellectual Property Protection of AIDS Drugs
Nitsan Chorev

This article explores conditions under which global norms change. I use a case study in which the original interpretation of an international agreement on intellectual property rights was modified to address demands for improved access to affordable AIDS drugs. Conventional theories that focus on international negotiations cannot fully account for the events in this case. Drawing on the theory of recursivity and insights from the literature on diffusion, I suggest that shifts in global norms occur through reactive diffusion of policies across states. Experiences accumulated in this ongoing process of reinvention eventually lead to a new, globally accepted reinterpretation of the original obligation.