Social Problems 60(1)

Social Problems, February 2013: Volume 60, Issue 1

Presidential Address: The Art of Activism
Wendy Simonds

Controlling Sex in the Name of “Public Health”: Social Control and Michigan HIV Law
Trevor Hoppe

In the state of Michigan, people infected with HIV are required by law to disclose their HIV-positive status to their sexual partners. Michigan public health laws enacted in the 1980s provide guidance for health officials tasked with investigating and managing what are termed “health threat to others” cases. Based on interviews with local health officials responsible for managing “health-threat” cases, I argue that the surveillance strategies employed by officials to identify these cases can be understood as an important site of social control. The first, “formal” technique for controlling HIV-positive residents involves health officials in a minority of participating jurisdictions actively cross-referencing epidemiological surveillance technologies such as HIV testing and contact tracing in order to identify potential health-threat cases. The second, “informal” technique is characterized by “third party” phone reports received by health officials from local residents who accuse others in their community, who they suspect are HIV positive, of not disclosing. Through an original analysis of the strategies employed by health officials to control HIV-positive residents, this article brings the theoretical insights of the sociological literature on social control to bear on the field of public health.

Inside the Pyramid of Disputes: Naming Problems and Filing Grievances in California Prisons
Kitty Calavita and Valerie Jenness

Previous literature on disputing and legal mobilization suggests that stigmatized, self-blaming, and/or vulnerable populations often face insurmountable barriers to naming a situation as injurious and claiming redress. Contrary to what one would expect from this literature, prisoners in the United States—among the most stigmatized and vulnerable of populations—file tens of thousands of grievances annually. To explore this apparent paradox, we draw on an unprecedented data set comprised of interviews with a random sample of 120 men in three California prisons. Our data reveal that these prisoners are willing and able to name problems, and most of them have filed at least one grievance. While some expressed self-blame and most said there was retaliation for filing a grievance, the majority overcame these impediments to filing. We argue that the context of prison—a total institution in which law is a hypervisible force—enhances this form of legal mobilization by prisoners, trumping the social and psychological factors that the context otherwise produces and that in other populations tamp down claims making. The pattern of these prisoners' claims, however, reveals that they are by no means immune to the countervailing pressures. While staff disrespect was named frequently as a problem in prison, grievances against staff were relatively rare. In concluding, we note that the U.S. Supreme Court recently found California prisons violate the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment, a finding that reveals the inadequacy of the inmate appeals system despite prisoners' repeated efforts to hold the state accountable.

Class in Name Only: Subjective Class Identity, Objective Class Position, and Vote Choice in American Presidential Elections
Benjamin Sosnaud, David Brady and Steven M. Frenk

Partly because of the widespread tendency for Americans to think of themselves as “middle class,” subjective class identity often does not correspond to objective class position. This study evaluates the extent to which American voters' subjective class identities differ from their objective class positions. We then evaluate the implications of such differences for voting behavior using American National Election Studies data from eight recent presidential elections. Coding respondents according to whether subjective class identity is higher or lower than objective class position, we construct a novel schema of inflated, deflated, and concordant class perceptions. We find that there are substantial differences between Americans' subjective and objective social class: over two-thirds of the upper-middle class have a deflated perception of their class position, only half of the middle class have concordant perceptions, and more than a third of the working class have inflated perceptions. We also find that this divergence varies depending on sociodemographic factors, and especially race and education. The analyses initially show a pattern that those with inflated class perceptions are more likely to vote Republican. However, this relationship is not significant once we control for race and income.

Slicing the Pie: State Policy, Class Organization, Class Integration, and Labor's Share of Israeli National Income
Tali Kristal

In this article, I underline a less commonly acknowledged outcome of the neoliberal revolution. Following the shift from social protection to economic liberalism, in many rich countries workers' share of national income has declined and capitalists' share has increased. To better understand this link between neoliberalism and workers' share of national income, I develop a new political economy approach that stresses the importance of state policy, class organization, and organizational unity for determining how national income is distributed between workers and capitalists. I apply this conceptualization to the dynamics of labor's share in Israel, once a socialist economy with little inequality, which today has become one of the world's most unequal. A detailed account of three stages in the Israeli political economy characterized by distinct inequality outcomes and time-series equations estimating the changes in labor's share from 1955 to 2005 reveal that market-oriented state policies, workers' disorganization, and the growing fragmentation within organized labor led to a decline in labor's share during the current stage of liberal capitalism.

The Determinants of the Number of White Supremacist Groups: A Pooled Time-Series Analysis
Rachel M. Durso and David Jacobs

What social and political conditions help explain the number of white supremacist groups? This study uses pooled time-series cross-sectional methods to assess the explanatory power of three racial threat accounts. First, since lynchings indicated intense animosity against blacks that may persist, anti-black hate groups should be especially numerous where lynching rates were substantial in the distant past. Second, where or when white political and cultural dominance is threatened by large or growing black populations, additional white supremacist groups should be present. And third, these anti-black movements often recruit by emphasizing the links between race and violent street crime. Since the public mistakenly believes that most violent crimes are committed by blacks who victimize whites, larger numbers of hate groups should be present where murder rates are most substantial. With other theoretically plausible determinants such as unemployment and college completion rates held constant, the results confirm these three threat theory predictions.