Social Problems 60(4)

Social Problems, November 2013: Volume 60, Issue 4

Surviving the Great Recession: Growing Need and the Stigmatized Safety Net
Jennifer Sherman

Based on qualitative research, this article looks at the impacts of the Great Recession on low-income and poor families, focusing on their challenges and survival strategies in the wake of the downturn. For many individuals who have lost their jobs, work has long been an important source of pride and social standing, and letting go of this identity is often difficult and wrought with ambivalence and a sense of failure, contributing to multiple outcomes that include social isolation, self-esteem and mental health problems, and most problematically, unwillingness to fully utilize the available social safety net. This article investigates the ways in which the stigma associated with dependency in the American context contributes to the material and emotional suffering of vulnerable individuals and families as they weather the recession and its long, slow recovery.

Regulatory Rescaling in Neoliberal Markets
Josh Pacewicz

Neoliberal reforms substitute “self-regulating” markets for political coordination, but are often accompanied by an expansion of the state. Scholars argue that this is because market-facilitating regulations increase. Through a mixed-methods study of two urban production economies, I show that political actors also make markets through regulatory rescaling—intervention that suppresses market coordination in one arena to enable it in another. Local owners once used price competition and gift exchange to coordinate localized aspects of production, but many of their firms were acquired by larger corporations. Corporate subsidiaries lack the place-specific knowledge and relationships necessary to coordinate production with local owners. City-appointed development personnel solve this problem by rescaling the urban market: they provide firms with services and information that local owners once got from one another, thereby laying the foundations for national corporate competition and undercutting remaining owners’ ability to coordinate localized aspects of production themselves.

From the Outside In: Crossing Boundaries to Build Collective Identity in the New Atheist Movement
Katja M. Guenther, Kerry Mulligan and Cameron Papp

This article presents an analysis of collective identity formation within an organization that is part of the new atheist movement to illuminate how a nascent social movement organization successfully builds collective identity through the construction of permeable boundaries. The organization delineates clear boundaries from outsiders so that it can foster collective identity among its members. Group processes that take place within the social movement organization facilitate collective identity formation through contrast to an abstracted and maligned other and through inclusion of former outsiders, namely the formerly religious. In fact, those who cross the boundary between atheists and religious believers make core contributions to supporting boundary maintenance within the organization. The analysis evidences the importance of boundary permeability for understanding collective identity.

Chicano Gang Members in Recovery: The Public Talk of Negotiating Chicano Masculinities
Edward Orozco Flores and Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo

Using ethnographic data from Los Angeles, this article examines the ritualized forms of verbal communication used in two Chicano gang recovery programs, Homeboy Industries and Victory Outreach. These two distinctive programs facilitate recovery from gangs through contrasting models of communication anchored in religion and therapeutic rehabilitation. In recovery, ritualized verbal displays subordinate gang masculinity and elevate conventional notions of masculinity. Former gang members use sermons, group therapy, 12-step programs, and personal testimonials to articulate hegemonic ideals of masculinity, such as responsible fatherhood. A critical component of these gang rehabilitation programs rearticulates the meanings of Chicano masculinity to include abstaining from drug use, providing for family members, and engaging in nurturing behavior. Through these verbal rituals, reformed gang masculinity is repositioned as dominant, desirable, and accessible to marginalized Chicano men with past gang affiliations and addictions.

Race, Space, and the Spread of Violence Across the City
Elizabeth Griffiths

A central explanation for elevated violence in urban African American neighborhoods is that the relationship can be accounted for by race-related differences in socioeconomic conditions. Yet recent studies have shown that predominantly African American neighborhoods experience higher rates of violence relative to other ethno-racial communities, even when socioeconomic conditions can be held constant. Explanations for these differences center on the deleterious effects of extensive residential segregation and the existing racial order privileging whites and their communities. This study examines whether the concentration and spread of urban violence can be characterized as a racially invariant process over half a century. In a detailed case study of the prototypical “rustbelt” city of Buffalo, New York, between the 1950s and the 1990s, negative binomial regression analyses fail to support the racial invariance thesis for predicting intra-neighborhood homicide rates. Multinomial logit regression models show that racial composition is also associated with vulnerability to inclusion in a cluster of highly violent neighborhoods as homicide diffused across the city, especially in recent decades. Thus, the spatial organization of urban African American neighborhoods generates a unique racialized vulnerability to the extralocal diffusion of violence; there is, in effect, an ecological racial variance in the spread of violence across the city. Moreover, this process has become increasingly entrenched over time, undermining any assertion that the urban experience reflects a post-racial America.

A Multilevel Examination of Neighborhood Social Processes and College Enrollment
Mark T. Berg, Eric A. Stewart, Endya Stewart and Ronald L. Simons

Previous sociological research on the neighborhood context of youth educational attainment has focused almost exclusively on the effects of neighborhood compositional features. There is limited empirical information about the social processes that may explain why neighborhood disadvantage affects college enrollment decisions. Drawing on William Wilson’s (1987) framework and recent theorizing in urban sociology, we examine hypotheses about the explanatory role of neighborhood cultural heterogeneity in affecting college enrollment. We test three hypotheses derived from this literature using original data from a multilevel longitudinal sample of African American adolescents. Results revealed that cultural heterogeneity is an important neighborhood social process that affects adolescents’ decisions about college, particularly in disadvantaged neighborhoods. We discuss the implications of the findings with regard to future empirical and theoretical research on neighborhood effects and youth attainment.