Social Problems 61(4)

Social Problems, November 2014: Volume 61, Issue 4

Flirting with Capital: Negotiating Perceptions of Pan-Asian Ascendency and Western Decline in Global Sex Work
Kimberly Kay Hoang

This study highlights how two developments in global finance—the 2008 financial crisis centered in the United States and Central Europe and the expansion of East Asian economies—created new openings for us to rethink the multiply inflected hierarchies woven through racialized, national, and class-based relations, which produce competing hierarchies of global masculinities. Drawing on 23 months of participant observation and ethnographic research from 2006-2007 and 2009-2010 in four niche markets of Vietnam’s global sex industry catering to Western budget tourists, Western transnational businessmen, Viet Kieu (overseas Vietnamese) men, and wealthy local Vietnamese entrepreneurs, I strategically bring together multiple performances of masculinities that simultaneously affirm and contest Western superiority. In lower-paying niche markets that cater to Western businessmen and Western budget travelers, sex bars provide men with the space to project their status anxieties onto women’s bodies, affirming Western superiority. In contrast, more expensive bars catering to Viet Kieu and local elite Vietnamese businessmen provide men with the stage to contest Western superiority by capitalizing on this particular moment of economic flux and engaging in acts of conspicuous consumption to display their financial dominance. Together, these four niche markets of Vietnam’s global sex industry provide a unique window to examine how multiple performances of masculinity unfold in relation to each other in the context of rapid economic change.

The “State” of Equal Employment Opportunity Law and Managerial Gender Diversity
Julie A. Kmec and Sheryl L. Skaggs

Women’s underrepresentation in management is a persistent social problem. We take a new approach to understanding the lack of managerial gender diversity by investigating how U.S. state equal employment opportunity laws are related to women’s presence in upper and lower management. We draw on data from 2010 EEO-1 reports documenting managerial sex composition in U.S. work establishments and a state employment law database to answer our research questions. State mandates are found to be differentially associated with upper- versus lower-level managerial gender diversity. Establishments in states with an equal pay law, or that once ratified the ERA, employ more women in upper management than those in states without such a law or in nonratifying states, but this holds only in establishments in industries that typically employ women. In contrast, establishments in states that require anti-discrimination workplace postings employ fewer women in upper-management than those in states without such a requirement. State equal pay laws, especially those adopted before federal equal pay legislation, family responsibility discrimination protections, and past ERA ratification are positively associated with women’s lower-level managerial presence. Conversely, state expanded family and medical leave coverage, prohibited sex discrimination, and specific posting rules are negatively associated with women’s presence in lower management. Results hold net of establishment, state, firm, and industry factors. We discuss the meaning behind differences across managerial level and the role of state regulation in moving toward greater managerial gender equity.

A Battleground of Identity: Racial Formation and the African American Discourse on Interracial Marriage
Jan Doering

This article utilizes a sample of letters to the editor from African American newspapers to investigate racial identity formation. Drawing on an analysis of 234 letters, published predominantly between 1925 and 1965, I examine how African American writers discussed black-white intermarriage. Writers used the issue of intermarriage to negotiate conceptions of racial identity and the politics of racial emancipation. Because of its strong symbolic implications, the intermarriage discourse became a “battleground of identity” for the conflict between two competing racial ideologies: integrationism and separatism. The battleground concept elucidates why some debates become polarized, and why it is so difficult to arbitrate them. I argue that identity battlegrounds may emerge around emotionally charged and concrete but heavily symbolic issues that densely link to key ideas in the ideological systems of two or more conflicting movements. They must be issues that none of the movements can cease to compete over without surrendering their political essence.

Old Times Are Not Forgotten: The Institutionalization of Segregationist
Academies in the American South
Jeremy R. Porter, Frank M. Howell and Lynn M. Hempel

Brown v. Board of Education is considered a crowning achievement of racial equality yet, to date, there remains marked racial segregation in U.S. public schools. One explanation for continuing segregation lies in the reproduction of racialized institutions initially designed to preserve the color line. In this article, we examine the persistence of one such institution, drawing on historical institutionalism and rational choice theory to identify forces potentially linked to the reproduction of segregationist academies in the South. Using spatial analyses of National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) data on public and private schools, we observe a process of the elite preservation of hierarchical advantage with linkages to former plantation economies, a legacy of lynching, and organization of white countermovement groups in response to civil rights mobilization. The findings highlight the reproduction of racialized institutions through organizational creation and adaptation and underscore the continuing relevance of spatial and temporal context in shaping specific manifestations of the color line.

Family Socioeconomic Status, Peers, and the Path to College
Robert Crosnoe and Chandra Muller

Drawing on the primary/secondary effects perspective of educational inequality, this mixed methods study investigated connections between high school students’ trajectories through college preparatory course work and their relationships with parents and peers as a channel in the intergenerational transmission of socioeconomic inequality. Growth curve and multilevel analyses of national survey and transcript data revealed that having college-educated parents differentiated students’ enrollment in advanced course work at the start of high school and that this initial disparity was stably maintained over subsequent years. During this starting period of high school, exposure to school-based peer groups characterized by higher levels of parent education appeared to amplify these course work disparities between students with and without college-educated parents. Ethnographic data from a single high school pointed to possible mechanisms for these patterns, including the tendency for students with college-educated parents to have more information about the relative weight of grades, core courses, and electives in college going and for academically relevant information from school peers with college-educated parents to matter most to students’ course work when it matched what was coming from their own parents.

Marrying Ain't Hard When You Got A Union Card? Labor Union Membership and First Marriage
Daniel Schneider and Adam Reich

Over the past five decades, marriage has changed dramatically, as young people began marrying later or never getting married at all. Scholars have shown how this decline is less a result of changing cultural definitions of marriage, and more a result of men’s changing access to social and economic prerequisites for marriage. Specifically, men’s current economic standing and men’s future economic security have been shown to affect their marriageability. Traditionally, labor unions provided economic standing and security to male workers. Yet during the same period that marriage has declined among young people, membership in labor unions has declined precipitously, particularly for men. In this article, we examine the relationship between union membership and first marriage and discuss the possible mechanisms by which union membership might lead to first marriage. We draw on longitudinal data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth-79 to estimate discrete time event-history models of first marriage entry and find that, controlling for many factors, union membership is positively and significantly associated with marriage. We show then that this relationship is largely explained by the increased income, regularity and stability of employment, and fringe benefits that come with union membership.

Privatization, Business Attraction, and Social Services across the United States: Local Governments' Use of Market-Oriented, Neoliberal Policies in the Post-2000 Period
Linda Lobao, Lazarus Adua and Gregory Hooks

Privatization, business attraction incentives, and limited social service provision are market-oriented policies that broadly concern social scientists. These policies are conventionally assumed to be widely implemented across the United States, a world model of neoliberal development. This study takes a new look at these policies, providing a first view of how they unfold across the nation at a geographic scale that drills down to the local state. We document the extent to which localities privatized their public services, used business attraction, and limited social service delivery in the last decade. Extending national-level theories of the welfare state, we focus on two sets of factors to explain where these policies are most likely to be utilized. The first, derived from the class-politics approach, emphasizes class interests such as business and unions and political-ideological context, and anticipates that these policies are utilized most in Republican leaning, pro-business, and distressed contexts. The second, derived from the political-institutional approach, emphasizes state capacity and path dependency as determinants. The analyses are based on over 1,700 localities, the majority of county governments, using unique policy data. Class-politics variables have modest relationship to neoliberal policies and show that business sector influence and public sector unions matter. The findings strongly support the importance of state capacity and path dependency. Overall our study challenges assumptions that acquiescence to neoliberal policies is widespread. Rather, we find evidence of resilience to these policies among communities across the United States.

Undocumented Immigrant Threat and Support for Social Controls
Ted Chiricos, Elizabeth K. Stupi, Brian J. Stults and Marc Gertz

Popular support for enhanced border and internal controls to deal with undocumented immigration is examined in relation to contextual measures of group threat as well as perceived levels of cultural and economic threat posed by undocumented immigrants. Results from a national survey of non-Latino respondents (N = 1,364) indicate that presumed threatening context measured in static terms is inconsequential. But when context is measured in dynamic terms that also reflect dispersion and potential contact, it significantly predicts support for border controls. Perceived threats are stronger predictors of support for enhanced controls than either contextual indicators of presumed threat or individual characteristics of respondents. Results also show that perceived economic and cultural threats mediate the effects of individual respondent characteristics and dynamic contextual conditions as well. Implications for future research on immigrant threat emphasize the importance of context measured in both change and dispersion-related terms and responses to threat that distinguish alternative dimensions of control. Future work should also consider that perceptions of threat may not only have direct influence on immigration policy preferences but can mediate the effects of context and individual characteristics on those preferences.

Theory and Society 43(6)

Theory and Society, November 2014: Volume 43, Issue 6

Islam and the legal enforcement of morality
Christian Joppke

Over 60 years ago, British high court judge Patrick Devlin and legal philosopher H.L.A. Hart fought out a famous debate over the legal enforcement of morality, which was generated by the question of whether homosexuality should be legalized or not. Jurists agree that this debate was won by Hart, also evidenced in the fact that the state has since been retreating from its previous role of moral watchdog. I argue in this article that the two most conflicted and essentially unresolved issues in the integration of Islam, the regulation of the female body and of free speech, have reopened this debate anew, pushing the liberal state toward the legal regulation of morality, thus potentially putting at risk its liberalness. I use the Hart-Devlin debate as a template for comparing and contrasting the Muslim quest for restricting free speech with the host-society quest for restricting the Islamic veil. Accordingly, there is a double threat to liberalism, which this paper brings into view in tandem, one originating from Islam and another from a hypertrophied defense of liberalism.

Preserving the unpreservable: docile and unruly objects at MoMA
Fernando Domínguez Rubio

The aim of this article is to theorize how materials can play an active, constitutive, and causally effective role in the production and sustenance of cultural forms and meanings. It does so through an empirical exploration of the Museum of Modern Art of New York (MoMA). The article describes the museum as an “objectification machine” that endeavors to transform and to stabilize artworks as meaningful “objects” that can be exhibited, classified, and circulated. The article explains how the extent to which the museum succeeds in this process of stabilization ultimately depends on the material properties of artworks and, more specially, on whether these behave as “docile” or “unruly” objects. Drawing on different empirical examples, the article explores how docile and unruly objects shape organizational dynamics within the museum and, through them, the wider processes of institutional and cultural reproduction. The article uses this empirical example to highlight the importance of developing a new “material sensibility” that restores heuristic dignity to the material within cultural sociology.

Social desire paths: a new theoretical concept to increase the usability of social science research in society
Laura Nichols

Social scientists are well-trained to observe and chart social trends, but less experienced at presenting scientific findings in formats that can inform social change work. In this article, I propose a new theoretical concept that provides a mechanism by which social science research can be more effectively applied for proactive policy, organizational, and program development. The approach is to use the metaphor of “desire paths” from landscape architecture to show how social scientists can identify and analyze social desire paths that appear on the social structural landscape. Social desire paths usually emerge because existing formal structures do not meet individual or group needs. Such paths are generally started at the individual level, followed by others through individual actions, and ultimately leave an (usually informal) imprint on the social structure, even though the motivations behind those actions are not usually social change. Using what we know about the sociology of interests and what we have learned from trying to apply social science findings to policy, I propose seven criteria for phenomena to be defined as social desire paths. I then apply the criteria to two case studies related to housing, and discuss social desire paths usefulness to social scientists involved in any research that captures interests, deviance, or innovation; and that also has the potential to inform formal structures such as policy, organizations, program development, and participatory democracy.

Durkheim: via Fournier, via Lukes
Randall Collins

Lukes’s great biography came out when Durkheim’s reputation was at its nadir. Fournier’s even bigger biography appears as neo-Durkheimian influence animates many branches of today’s sociology. We now have an almost day-to-day account of Durkheim building a network of scholars and researchers, simultaneously being shaped by and reshaping its milieu. The result was a sophisticated intellectual movement that could jocularly refer to Durkheim as its sacred object, a symbol of itself. In effect, we have the collective production of the biography of a collective movement making new discoveries, which is what the intellectual world at its best is about.

The British Journal of Criminology 54(6)

The British Journal of Criminology, November 2014: Volume 54, Issue 6

Editor's Choice: We Need to Talk About Mohammad: Criminology, Theistic Violence and the Murder of Theo Van Gogh
Simon Cottee

On 2 November 2004, Mohammad Bouyeri murdered the Dutch film-maker Theo Van Gogh. At his trial, Bouyeri proclaimed that he acted out of a religious duty. Van Gogh’s killing provoked fierce debate in the Netherlands over its meaning and significance and once again the question of violent religious fundamentalism came to dominate public discourse across Europe and beyond, just as it had in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Criminologists, however, have largely neglected the issue of jihadi violence and the broader question it raises of the relationship between religion and violent activism. This article critiques this neglect. It also offers an account of Van Gogh’s murder, using Jock Young’s later work as a starting point for an interdisciplinary analysis of its possible meanings and motivations.

Post-crisis Policing and Public–Private Partnerships: The Case of Lincolnshire Police and G4S
Adam White

The post-financial crisis ‘politics of austerity’ have prompted many police forces to explore a range of radical new budget-reducing policies, including outsourcing key service areas to the private sector on an unprecedented scale. This article analyses the largest outsourcing contract to date: the £229 million Lincolnshire Police–G4S strategic partnership. It addresses the question: to what extent has the outsourcing process engendered a shift from the logic of the public good to the logic of the market in the delivery of those frontline operations covered in the contract? In arguing that these operations are characterized more by a complex blurring of logics than a straightforward unidirectional shift, the article contributes towards both explanatory and normative dimensions of the ‘transformation of policing’ debate.

Self-legitimacy, Police Culture and Support for Democratic Policing in an English Constabulary
Ben Bradford and Paul Quinton

When do police officers feel confident in their own authority? What factors influence their sense of their own legitimacy? What is the effect of such ‘self-legitimacy’ on the way they think about policing? This article addresses these questions using a survey of police officers working in an English Constabulary. We find that the most powerful predictor of officers’ confidence in their own authority is identification with their organization, itself something strongly associated with perceptions of the procedural justice of senior management. A greater sense of self-legitimacy is in turn linked to greater commitment to democratic modes of policing. Finally, we find that this sense of legitimacy is embedded in a matrix of identities and cultural adaptations within the police organization.

A Shared Narrative?: A Case Study of the Contested Legacy of Policing in the North of Ireland
Kevin Hearty

This article critically examines the difficulty with creating a shared narrative in post-conflict Northern Ireland. Using the legacy of policing as a case study for drawing more general conclusions about creating a shared narrative, the article interrogates how disagreement over where to start and end the discussion and exclusivist approaches to victimhood are obstructing attainment of a shared narrative. The article analyses competing policing narratives as constructed from the lived reality of opposing ethno-nationalist collectives with different experiences in a heated ‘memory politics’ domain. Concluding with the argument that the prerequisite to successfully building a shared narrative is departure from competing ‘memory politics’ understandings of the past, the article suggests a new understanding of victimhood and perpetratorship in Northern Ireland.

Corruption and Police Legitimacy in Lahore, Pakistan
Jonathan Jackson, Muhammad Asif, Ben Bradford, and Muhammad Zakria Zakar

Police legitimacy is an important topic of criminological research, yet it has received only sporadic study in societies where there is widespread police corruption, where the position of the police is less secure, and where social order is more tenuous. Analysing data from a probability sample survey of adults in Lahore, Pakistan, we examine the empirical links between people’s experience of police corruption, their perceptions of the fairness and effectiveness of the police, and their beliefs about the legitimacy of the police. Our findings suggest that in a context in which minimal effectiveness and integrity is yet to be established, police legitimacy may rest not just on the procedural fairness of officers, but also on their demonstrated ability to control crime and avoid corruption.

‘My Life Is Separated’: An Examination Of The Challenges And Barriers To Parenting For Indigenous Fathers In Prison
Susan Dennison, Holly Smallbone, Anna Stewart, Kate Freiberg, and Rosie Teague

Paternal imprisonment creates a significant risk for the intergenerational transmission of offending. However, there is little research on the mechanisms underpinning this risk, including how paternal imprisonment interrupts parenting and father–child relationships. Culturally relevant research is also essential in the context of high imprisonment rates of Indigenous Australian men. We conducted interviews with 41 Indigenous Australian fathers from two prisons in North Queensland to examine their identities as fathers in prison and the barriers associated with maintaining relationships with their children. Findings are discussed in relation to contact and distance; intergenerational absence of fathers; paternal involvement through play, care and culture; and diminished opportunities for men’s parental and cultural generativity. We consider the implications of the findings for children’s well-being.

Civilised Communities: Reconsidering the ‘Gloomy Tale’ of Immigration and Social Order in a Changing Town
Clare E. Griffiths

Immigration and its effects on crime, social disorder and community tensions remains a pervasive feature of public, government and academic discourse. This discourse often considers immigration, and immigrants themselves, as a threat to the community’s existing moral and social order. This article presents the findings of a case study that used quantitative and qualitative methods to explore the experiences of social order following a recent wave of Polish migration in a small working class town in the North West of England. The key findings show that the assumed association of migration with a disruption to social order receives little support. Rather, the social order in the studied locale is predominantly managed and maintained through ‘civilised relationships’ between migrants and established residents, thus failing to culminate into conflict between the two groups. This situation of ‘civility’ provides an alternative to the preponderance of previous research telling a ‘gloomy tale’ of immigration and its impact on local communities.

Are All Cases Treated Equal?: Using Goffman’s Frame Analysis to Understand How Homicide Detectives Orient to Their Work
Shila R. Hawk and Dean A. Dabney

Drawing upon ethnographic data from one US metropolitan police department’s homicide unit, this study employs Goffman’s frame analysis to explore two questions: (1) What types of cases are prioritized in homicide investigations? and (2) How are those prioritizations operationalized and justified? Themes within the data suggest that although detectives struggle to ‘work every case the same’, their approach and effort on cases is nonetheless influenced largely by unit culture and perceptions of victim deservedness. Furthermore, we demonstrate that framing techniques enable investigators to compartmentalize and manage the emotional strain of deprioritizing some homicides while rigorously investigating other cases. These findings add to our understanding of the administration of homicide work, theorize the moral complexities of said work and point to frame analysis as a potentially useful framework for crime researchers.

Criminologizing Wrongful Convictions
Michael Naughton

This article considers the apparent lack of serious engagement with issues pertaining to wrongful convictions by criminology at present. It seeks to address this by criminologizing wrongful convictions in two senses: firstly, by highlighting a variety of forms of intentional law or rule breaking by police officers and prosecutors in the causation of wrongful convictions that in other circumstances would likely be treated as crime and dealt with as such; and, secondly, to reveal the extent to which such powerful criminal justice system agents can cause profound and wide-ranging forms of harm to victims of wrongful convictions, their families and society as a whole with almost total impunity. In so doing, the relevance of the study of the intentional forms of crime and deviance committed by criminal justice system agents in the manufacture of wrongful convictions to both arms of the criminological divide is emphasized: mainstream and critical criminology. The overall aim is to show that the study of wrongful convictions can further extend and enrich existing criminological epistemology in vital and important ways and can even contribute to the prevention and possible elimination of those that are caused deliberately.

Is the ‘Shadow of Sexual Assault’ Responsible for Women’s Higher Fear of Burglary?
Helmut Hirtenlehner and Stephen Farrall

This article examines the ‘shadow of sexual assault hypothesis’ which posits that women’s higher fear of crime, compared to males, can be attributed to their elevated fear of sexual victimization. We argue that the previous, overwhelmingly supportive, research on this issue is incomplete in three ways: (1) the thesis has not yet been extensively tested outside of North America, (2) competing, possibly overlaying, shadow effects of physical violence have widely been ignored and (3) perceptually contemporaneous offences have always been measured in an indirect manner. Drawing on the example of fear of burglary, this work tackles the afore-mentioned deficiencies. Results from a crime survey conducted in the United Kingdom indicate that, when relying on a rather traditional test strategy, the ‘shadow of sexual assault hypothesis’ is supported. However, the findings are highly contingent on the employed methodology. When utilizing direct measures of perceptually contemporaneous offences, only physical, not sexual, assault turns out to cast a shadow over fear of burglary. The impact of fear of rape would appear to be reduced considerably once fear of broader physical harm is taken into account. We conclude that much of the existing evidence for the shadow thesis can be challenged on the grounds of failing to control for the effects of non-sexual physical assault and drawing on an inadequate operationalization of perceptually contemporaneous offences.

Internet Adoption and Online Behaviour Among American Street Gangs: Integrating Gangs and Organizational Theory
Richard K. Moule, Jr, David C. Pyrooz, and Scott H. Decker

The globalization of street gangs has drawn attention to the mechanisms associated with the diffusion of gang culture. One mechanism, the Internet, is of growing interest to gang researchers. Yet, research on the online behaviours of street gangs remains descriptive, failing to elaborate on the factors that distinguish gangs that adopt, or do not adopt, technology and engage in online behaviours. The present study integrates insights from organizational theory to examine whether and to what extent gang organization influences the online presence and behaviour of gangs. Using data collected from gang members in five US cities, the results from a series of logistic and Poisson regression models indicate that higher levels of gang organization increase the likelihood that gangs have a website, post videos and recruit members online. Results support integrating research on gang behaviour with organizational theory. Directions for future research on the relationship between gang organization and offending are discussed.

The Dynamic Risk of Heavy Episodic Drinking on Interpersonal Assault in Young Adolescence and Early Adulthood
Carly Lightowlers, Mark Elliot, and Mark Tranmer

This study examines the extent to which variation in violent behaviour can be explained by variation in drinking patterns in late adolescence and early adulthood using panel data of regular drinkers aged between 16 and 29 in England and Wales. Multilevel models explore individuals’ propensity to commit assault controlling for their drinking behaviour. Results suggest that males and younger people are more likely to commit assault offences and that around 60 per cent of the variation in assault is between people, the remainder being within people between occasions. Heavy episodic drinking is a significant predictor of assault in all models. Collectively, the findings point to a periodic association between drinking patterns and violent outcomes, supporting evidence of other forms of contemporaneous association.

Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 51(6)

Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, November 2014: Volume 51, Issue 6

Social Attachment and Juvenile Attitudes toward the Police in China: Bridging Eastern and Western Wisdom
Hongwei Zhang, Ruohui Zhao, Jihong Solomon Zhao, and Ling Ren

Objectives: The purpose of this study is to examine the correlates of juvenile attitudes toward the police in the Chinese setting. It borrows from the prevailing criminological wisdom developed in the West and Confucian philosophical doctrines to shed light on how attachment to social institutions helps explain variation in juvenile sentiments of the police. Method: The data were collected from a sample of 2,679 high school students in a southwestern Chinese city. A second-order latent variable labeled social attachment is constructed and comprised of three lower order factors representing family attachment, neighborhood attachment, and school attachment. Traditional demographic background, victimization, and contact with the police variables commonly used in U.S. studies are included in the analysis. Structural equation modeling is employed to test hypothesized relationships among explanatory variables and juvenile attitudes toward the police. Results: The findings suggest that the higher order factor social attachment is the most robust predictor of juvenile evaluations of the police in China. Other commonly used demographic, socioeconomic, and police contact factors show limited utility. Conclusion: The findings lend support to propositions derived from the Western criminological theories and the eastern philosophical doctrine to a major extent. Both confirmations of expected findings and noteworthy surprises are discussed.

Partnership Transitions and Antisocial Behavior in Young Adulthood: A Within-person, Multi-Cohort Analysis
Sonja E. Siennick, Jeremy Staff, D. Wayne Osgood, John E. Schulenberg, Jerald G. Bachman, and Matthew VanEseltine

Objectives: This study examines the effects of young adult transitions into marriage and cohabitation on criminal offending and substance use, and whether those effects changed since the 1970s, as marriage rates declined and cohabitation rates rose dramatically. It also examines whether any beneficial effects of cohabitation depend on marriage intentions. Methods: Using multi-cohort national panel data from the Monitoring the Future (N = 15,875) study, the authors estimated fixed effects models relating within-person changes in marriage and cohabitation to changes in criminal offending and substance use. Results: Marriage predicts lower levels of criminal offending and substance use, but the effects of cohabitation are limited to substance use outcomes and to engaged cohabiters. There are no cohort differences in the associations of marriage and cohabitation with criminal offending, and no consistent cohort differences in their associations with substance use. There is little evidence of differences in effects by gender or parenthood. Conclusions: Young adults are increasingly likely to enter romantic partnership statuses that do not appear as effective in reducing antisocial behavior. Although cohabitation itself does not reduce antisocial behavior, engagement might. Future research should examine the mechanisms behind these effects, and why nonmarital partnerships reduce substance use and not crime.

Criminal Trajectories of White-collar Offenders
Joost H. R. van Onna, Victor R. van der Geest, Wim Huisman, and Adriaan J. M. Denkers

Objectives: This article analyzes the criminal development and sociodemographic and criminal profile of a sample of prosecuted white-collar offenders. It identifies trajectory groups and describes their profiles based on crime, sociodemographic, and selection offence characteristics. Methods: The criminal development of 644 prosecuted white-collar offenders in the Netherlands was examined using all registered offences from age 12 onward. In addition, sociodemographic background information was gathered from the Netherlands Internal Revenue Service and Municipal Personal Records Office. Trajectory analysis was conducted to approximate the underlying continuous distribution in criminal development by a discrete number of groups. Results: The criminal career characteristics and sociodemographic profile show a heterogeneous sample of white-collar offenders. Trajectory analysis distinguished four trajectory groups. Two low-frequency offender groups, totaling 78 percent, are characterized by their adult onset. The two high-frequency offender groups, totaling 22 percent, are characterized by their adolescent onset. Distinct and internally consistent offender profiles emerged for the four trajectory groups on the basis of crime, sociodemographic, and selection offence characteristics. Conclusions: The diversity in offence patterns and offender profiles points to different (developmental) causes for white-collar crime and underlines the importance of further longitudinal research on white-collar offending from an integrated white-collar and life-course perspective.

Gender, Family Functioning, and Violence across Immigrant Generations
Stephanie M. DiPietro and Jaclyn Cwick

Objectives: Despite growing empirical and theoretical interest in the role of the family in immigrant offending, gender remains a traditionally overlooked dimension in the study of generational differences in crime. The present study examines the uniquely gendered pathways linking generational status, family functioning, and violence. Methods: Using ordinary least-squares (OLS) regression and overdispersed Poisson regression, the authors examine predictors of family functioning and violence using data from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods study. Results: Generational status influences family dynamics for both males and females, although the strength and significance of the effects vary by gender. For boys, generational status is a significant predictor of conflict and harsh parenting, net of other factors; for girls, it is associated with religiosity and conflict. Further, family processes attenuate the relationship between generational status and violence for girls only, implying alternative mechanisms for boys. Conclusions: The associations among immigrant generational status, family functioning, and violence differ for males and females, which has implications for intervention strategies aimed at promoting the well-being of immigrant youth. A noted limitation of this work is the inability to consider how gender interacts with ethnicity to impact these patterns.

The Impact of Life Domains on Juvenile Offending in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Direct, Indirect, and Moderating Effects in Agnew’s Integrated General Theory
Lisa R. Muftić, Jonathan A. Grubb, Leana Allen Bouffard, and Almir Maljević

Objectives: Agnew has proposed an integrative theoretical construct composed of the most influential predictors of crime concentrated within multiple life domains, including the self, family, school, peer, and work. Limited research has explored the impact of life domains on offending. This study presents a partial test of the theory using an international sample. Methods: Nationally representative self-reported data are derived from 1,756 juveniles residing in Bosnia and Herzegovina who participated in wave 2 of the International Self Report Delinquency Study. A series of multivariate models were run to examine the impact life domains have on crime directly and indirectly, as well as looking at interaction effects among the life domains. Results: Data showcased varying levels of support for the life domains. Across bivariate and multivariate models, the most significant positive relationships between offending and the life domains were evident in the self and peer domains, with the school and family domains exhibiting a negative impact on offending. Furthermore, significant interactive and indirect effects were discovered, primarily for the self and peer domains. Conclusions: This research discovered a moderate level of support for life domains contained within Agnew’s integrated theory for offending within an international context.

Critical Criminology 22(4)

Critical Criminology, November 2014: Volume 22, Issue 4

Intersectionality, Rural Criminology, and Re-imaging the Boundaries of Critical Criminology
Kerry Carrington , Joseph F. Donnermeyer & Walter S. DeKeseredy

One of the significant shortcomings of the criminological canon, including its critical strands—feminist, cultural and green—has been its urbancentric bias. In this theoretical model, rural communities are idealised as conforming to the typical small-scale traditional societies based on cohesive organic forms of solidarity and close density acquaintance networks. This article challenges the myth that rural communities are relatively crime free places of ‘moral virtue’ with no need for a closer scrutiny of rural context, rural places, and rural peoples about crime and other social problems. This challenge is likewise woven into the conceptual and empirical narratives of the other articles in this Special Edition, which we argue constitute an important body of innovative work, not just for reinvigorating debates in rural criminology, but also critical criminology. For without a critical perspective of place, the realities of context are too easily overlooked. A new criminology of crime and place will help keep both critical criminology and rural criminology firmly anchored in both the sociological and the criminological imagination. We argue that intersectionality, a framework that resists privileging any particular social structural category of analysis, but is cognisant of the power effects of colonialism, class, race and gender, can provide the theoretical scaffolding to further develop such a project.

Toward a Green-Cultural Criminology of “the Rural”
Avi Brisman , Bill McClanahan & Nigel South

There are many connections between the various strands of critical criminology. Previously, we highlighted common issues between green and cultural criminology, while also noting some of the ways that each perspective could potentially benefit from cross-fertilization (Brisman and South in Crime Media Cult 9(2):115–135, 2013, Green cultural criminology: constructions of environmental harm, consumerism and resistance to ecocide. Routledge, Oxford, 2014; McClanahan in Crit Criminol. doi:10.1007/s10612-014-9241-8, 2014). In this article, we extend our analysis to consider green, cultural and rural criminologies through the exposition of several key issues, including “the rural” as local context in which exploitative global forces may exercise power; agribusiness and the food/profit chain; farming and the pollution of land, water and air; and finally, cultural/media images and narratives of rural life. We focus more specifically on this final intersectionality through an analysis of Jonathan Franzen’s novel Freedom (2010), analyzing his depictions of rural people, environmental activists, and the rural environment through the issue of mountaintop removal. We conclude our article by identifying several examples of key directions in which the intersectionality of green, cultural and rural criminologies might proceed, including trafficking and abuse of farmworkers, harms associated with the cultivation of quinoa, and a critical interpretation of media and popular narrative depictions of environmental issues within rural contexts.

Male Peer Support, Hunting, and Separation/Divorce Sexual Assault in Rural Ohio
Amanda K. Hall-Sanchez

Male peer support is one of the most powerful determinants of woman abuse across the globe. Still, key gaps remain in rural male peer support literature, such as overlooking the importance of hunting as a public male-bonding ritual that serves to reinforce abusive behaviors against women in private settings. The main objective of this article is to present findings from an exploratory, qualitative, back-talk study of twelve women’s experiences of separation/divorce sexual assault in rural Ohio. The results reveal a relationship between rural hunting subculture dynamics and core elements of male peer support (i.e. frequent drinking with male friends, informational support, attachment to abusive peers, and patriarchal masculine identity). Male peer support in hunting subcultures coupled with the availability and access to ‘legitimate’ weapons creates a fertile breeding ground for woman abuse in some rural communities.

Injecting Drug Use and the Performance of Rural Femininity: An Ethnographic Study of Female Injecting Drug Users in Rural North Wales
Catrin Smith

In this article I explore, through the analysis of ethnographic data, the demands of gender and place as they play themselves out in the lives of female injecting drug users (IDUs) in the rural communities of North Wales. The findings point to the array of role-relationships which women (attempt to) manage whilst also pursuing an IDU career and highlight how living in a rural community of place shapes how women attribute meaning to, and experience, injecting drug use. By incorporating theoretical ideas around gender performativity and gender spatiality, the analysis provides some understanding of how female IDUs construct their ‘risk’ behaviour within their own socially embedded and culturally meaningful discourses. The findings suggest the importance of an understanding of gender and place dynamics in the development of effective intervention strategies.

“I Don’t Want to Go Back to That Town:” Incarcerated Mothers and Their Return Home to Rural Communities
Dawn Beichner & Cara Rabe-Hemp

The increased representation of women in prisons and its consequences has been constructed as an urban, inner-city problem. Lost in this conversation, is the acknowledgement of how the limited socioeconomic opportunities, spatial isolation, and stigma which characterize rural America, lead to the vulnerabilities that mark the lives of rural women (Pruitt in Utah Law Rev 2:421–488, 2007). Through the lens of the Vulnerability Conceptual Model, this study explores the ways that community context shapes women’s experiences of mothering, the effect of incarceration on their children, and plans for returning home. Results of the study contribute to the limited research dedicated to rural women, usually obscured by society’s dominant urban perspective.

‘Constant Violence from Everywhere’: Psychodynamics of Power and Abuse Amongst Rural and Small-Town Youth
Robin A. Robinson & Judith A. Ryder

Informed by psychosocial theoretical constructs, this study explores dynamic processes that underlie behaviors of what we call youth relational violence. The paper challenges earlier studies about teen dating violence that use models of adult domestic violence to inform the work, and posits, instead, that youth relational violence is not domestic, occurs beyond the scope of committed partnerships, and varies broadly in the degree and qualities of the relational dyads in which it occurs. Data from participants in targeted and random focus groups (n = 84) consider the social and economic context of a rural and small-town region. The study makes no gender assumptions about abusive teen relationships, nor does it limit data sources and analyses to heterosexual dyads. It conceptualizes elements of power and attachment, and operationalizes them into analyzable data forms, toward the development of a theoretical model that will inform research and practice about violence between teens in relational dyads. Whereas research in the last decade has focused principally on prevalence and evaluation, this paper introduces an exploration of dynamic processes that underlie power, tolerance of abuse, vulnerability to perpetration and victimization, and degree of attachment as it relates to abuse and power dynamics.

Energy Crime, Harm, and Problematic State Response in Colorado: A Case of the Fox Guarding the Hen House?
Tara Opsal & Tara O’Connor Shelley

Crime related to energy extraction is an emerging area of interest among green and critical criminologists. This paper contributes to that developing work by examining the political economy of harm and crime associated with the oil and natural gas industry in rural Colorado. Specifically, we examine problematic state regulatory response to citizens’ complaints regarding a range of harms caused by private industry (e.g., water pollution, adverse human health consequences, and domestic livestock death). In this paper, we draw on content analysis of formal complaints filed by citizens to the state, ethnographic work, and intensive interviews with citizens seeking relief from problematic or abusive industry practices. Our analysis illuminates how the state documents these practices, how citizens experience them, and how the state dilutes and deflects the externalities of energy extraction to produce additional harm.

Renewing Criminalized and Hegemonic Cultural Landscapes
Baris Cayli

The Mafia’s long historical pedigree in Mezzogiorno, Southern Italy, has empowered the Mafioso as a notorious, uncontested, and hegemonic figure. The counter-cultural resistance against the mafiosi culture began to be institutionalized in the early 1990s. Today, Libera Terra is the largest civil society organization in the country that uses the lands confiscated from the Mafia as a space of cultural repertoire to realize its ideals. Deploying labor force through volunteer participation, producing biological fruits and vegetables, and providing information to the students on the fields are the principal cultural practices of this struggle. The confiscated lands make the Italian experience of anti-Mafia resistance a unique example by connecting the land with the ideals of cultural change. The sociocultural resistance of Libera Terra conveys a political message through these practices and utters that the Mafia is not invincible. This study draws the complex panorama of the Mafia and anti-Mafia movement that uses the ‘confiscated lands’ as cultural and public spaces for resistance and socio-cultural change. In doing so, this article sheds new light on the relationship between rural criminology and crime prevention policies in Southern Italy by demonstrating how community development practice of Libera Terra changes the meaning of landscape through iconographic symbolism and ethnographic performance.

Sociological Theory 32(3)

Sociological Theory, September 2014: Volume 32, Issue 3

A Symposium on “The Genomic Challenge to the Social Construction of Race”

Does Genomics Challenge the Social Construction of Race?
Ann Morning

Shiao, Bode, Beyer, and Selvig argue that the theory of race as a social construct should be revisited in light of recent genetic research, which they interpret as demonstrating that human biological variation is patterned in “clinal classes” that are homologous to races. In this reply, I examine both their claims and the genetics literature they cite, concluding that not only does constructivist theory already accommodate the contemporary study of human biology, but few geneticists portray their work as bearing on race. Equally important, methods for statistically identifying DNA-based clusters within the human species are shaped by several design features that offer opportunities for the incorporation of cultural assumptions about difference. As a result, Shiao et al.’s theoretical distinction between social race and biological “clinal class” is empirically jeopardized by the fact that even our best attempts at objectively recording “natural” human groupings are socially conditioned.

Clines Without Classes: How to Make Sense of Human Variation
Joan H. Fujimura, Deborah A. Bolnick, Ramya Rajagopalan, Jay S. Kaufman, Richard C. Lewontin, Troy Duster, Pilar Ossorio, and Jonathan Marks

This article examines Shiao, Bode, Beyer, and Selvig’s (2012) arguments in their article “The Genomic Challenge to the Social Construction of Race” and finds that their claims are based on fundamentally flawed interpretations of current genetic research. We discuss current genomic and genetic knowledge about human biological variation to demonstrate why and how Shiao et al.’s recommendations for future sociological studies and social policy, based on their inadequate understanding of genomic methods and evidence, are similarly flawed and will lead sociology astray.

On Racial Speculation and Racial Science: A Response to Shiao et al.
Daniel Martinez HoSang

In June 2012, Sociological Theory published “The Genomic Challenge to the Social Construction of Race” by Jiannbin Lee Shiao, Thomas Bode, Amber Beyer, and Daniel Selvig. The article argues that “recent research on the human genome challenges the basic assumption that human races have no biological basis” (p. 68). The authors advance a “bounded nature” account of race to suggest that “biological ancestry” might lead to “different frequencies of personality and cognitive characteristics” by race (p. 83). In this response I investigate three propositions central to Shiao et al.’s argument: (1) the contention that contemporary genetics research has documented a biological basis to race, (2) the assertion that such research warrants inquiries into the way “biological ancestry” might “contribute to average group differences” by race (p. 83), and (3) the claim that there is no “essential characteristic” of their findings that might be complicit with biological racism.

Response to HoSang; Fujimura, Bolnick, Rajagopalan, Kaufman, Lewontin, Duster, Ossorio, and Marks; and Morning
Jiannbin Lee Shiao

The ANNALS of the AAPSS 656

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, November 2014: Volume 656

Aid and Institution-Building in Fragile States: Findings from Comparative Cases

Aid and Institution-Building in Fragile States: What Do We Know? What Can Comparative Analysis Add?
Rachel M. Gisselquist

International Aid to Southern Europe in the Early Postwar Period: The Cases of Greece and Italy
Dimitri A. Sotiropoulos

U.S. Aid and Uneven Development in East Asia
Kevin Gray

Aid and Governance in Vulnerable States: Bangladesh and Pakistan since 1971
Mushtaq H. Khan

Foreign Aid, Resource Rents, and State Fragility in Mozambique and Angola
Helena Pérez Niño and Philippe Le Billon

Consociational Settlements and Reconstruction: Bosnia in Comparative Perspective (1995–Present)
Sherrill Stroschein

Kosovo and Timor-Leste: Neotrusteeship, Neighbors, and the United Nations
Lise Morjé Howard

Transition Regimes and Security Sector Reforms in Sierra Leone and Liberia
Ato Kwamena Onoma

State Failure, State-Building, and Prospects for a “Functional Failed State” in Somalia
Ken Menkhaus

Intervention and State-Building: Comparative Lessons from Japan, Iraq, and Afghanistan
Jonathan Monten

American Sociological Review 79(5)

American Sociological Review, October 2014: Volume 79, Issue 5

Citizenship and Punishment: The Salience of National Membership in U.S. Criminal Courts
Michael T. Light, Michael Massoglia, and Ryan D. King

When compared to research on the association between immigration and crime, far less attention has been given to the relationship between immigration, citizenship, and criminal punishment. As such, several fundamental questions about how noncitizens are sanctioned and whether citizenship is a marker of stratification in U.S. courts remain unanswered. Are citizens treated differently than noncitizens—both legal and undocumented—in U.S. federal criminal courts? Is the well-documented Hispanic-white sentencing disparity confounded by citizenship status? Has the association between citizenship and sentencing remained stable over time? And are punishment disparities contingent on the demographic context of the court? Analysis of several years of data from U.S. federal courts indicates that citizenship status is a salient predictor of sentencing outcomes—more powerful than race or ethnicity. Other notable findings include the following: accounting for citizenship substantially attenuates disparities between whites and Hispanics; the citizenship effect on sentencing has grown stronger over time; and the effect is most pronounced in districts with growing noncitizen populations. These findings suggest that as international migration increases, citizenship may be an emerging and powerful axis of sociolegal inequality.

The Effect of Status on Role-Taking Accuracy
Tony P. Love and Jenny L. Davis

We conducted two experiments to test the effects of status on the relationship between gender and role-taking accuracy. Role-taking accuracy denotes the accuracy with which one can predict another’s behavior. In Study 1, we examine self-evaluative measures of role-taking accuracy and find they do not correlate with actual role-taking accuracy. In addition, women were more accurate role-takers than men, regardless of interaction history. In Study 2, we disentangle gender differences from status differences, hypothesizing that role-taking accuracy is structurally situated. To test this hypothesis, we examine variations in role-taking accuracy when interaction partners are assigned differential status. Results indicate that status differentials account for variations in role-taking accuracy, whereas gender and gender composition of the dyad do not.

Public Emergency Room Overcrowding in the Era of Mass Imprisonment
Armando Lara-Millán

Although sociologists have long studied public emergency rooms (ERs) and their service delivery to the urban poor, little is known about how crime control and criminal justice contact affect ER admission decisions—a critical oversight given the documented increase in incarceration rates, intensification of policing, and proliferation of crime control language in public institutions. Using ethnographic methods and a count of ER admission decisions (N = 1,114), this article describes the continual rushing and delaying of medical resources to patients based on their perceived criminality or actual relationship to the criminal justice system. These dynamics develop through four processes: (1) widespread administration of pain medication, which associates waiting patients with criminal narcotics; (2) deployment of criminal stigma along race and gender lines to select some qualified patients over others; (3) patrolling of waiting rooms by police; and (4) rushing of beds to vast numbers of arrestees, inmates, and witnesses. Key to these findings is that if the urban poor happen to be wards of the criminal justice system, they receive rushed health care resources, but if they enter health care organizations on their own accord they are policed, delayed, and deterred from accessing care.

Economies of Dying: The Moralization of Economic Scarcity in U.S. Hospice Care
Roi Livne

As efforts are made to contain health care spending, the decision to stop trying to cure severely ill patients and focus on comfort care has become an economic as well as a moral issue. This article examines the intricate intersection of economics and morality in U.S. hospice care. Using historical, interview, and ethnographic methods, I explain the resonance between hospice practitioners’ moral motivations and policymakers’, insurers’, and providers’ efforts to economize near the end of life. Drawing on theoretical literature on morality in markets, I analyze the moralization of economic scarcity. I argue that rather than posing an external financial constraint on the achievement of moral goals, scarcity itself can bear moral meanings. In the case of hospice care, the view that “less is better” and the wish to save patients from over-treatment converge with financial interests to limit spending on end-of-life care and imbue financial constraints with positive moral meanings.

Brokerage Professions and Implementing Reform in an Age of Experts
Katherine C. Kellogg

In this comparative ethnographic case study of the implementation of a reform related to the Affordable Care Act in two community health centers, I find that professionals may not compete to claim new tasks (and thereby not implement reform) if these tasks require them to acquire information unrelated to their professional expertise, use work practices that conflict with their professional identity, or do impure or low-value tasks that threaten their professional interests. In such cases, reform may be implemented if lower-status workers fill in the gaps in the division of labor between the professions targeted by the reform, playing a brokerage role by protecting each profession’s information, meanings, and tasks in everyday work. When the new tasks represent professionally ill-defined problems, brokers can be more effective if they use buffering practices rather than connecting practices—managing information rather than transferring it, matching meanings rather than translating them, and maintaining interests rather than transforming them—to accomplish reform. By playing a buffering role in the interstices between existing professional jurisdictions, lower-status workers can carve out their own jurisdiction, becoming a brokerage profession between existing professions that need to collaborate with one another for reform to occur.

Varieties of Capitalism and Job Quality: The Attainment of Civic Principles at Work in the United States and Germany
Carola Frege and John Godard

This article explores how institutional differences matter to the quality of a nation’s jobs; job quality is conceived as a dimension of a national economy’s social performance and thus defined in accordance with civic principles. Focus is on the two archetypical varieties of capitalism, the United States and Germany. Using data from a 2009 telephone survey of U.S. and German workers, we find that the overall attainment of civic principles, as perceived by workers, is no different in Germany than in the United States, even though the German institutional environment should be more conducive to them. This is due to higher worker expectations in Germany and a tendency for employer practices to compensate for the weaker (liberal) institutional environment in the United States. Once these are controlled, German workers report substantially more positive outcomes. We find that institutional differences also matter in how various employer practices are adopted and hence have indirect as well as direct implications.

Prenatal Exposure to Violence and Birth Weight in Mexico: Selectivity, Exposure, and Behavioral Responses
Florencia Torche and Andrés Villarreal

This article examines the effect of maternal exposure to local homicides on birth weight. We create a monthly panel by merging all births in Mexico from 2008 to 2010 with homicide data at the municipality level. Findings from fixed-effects models indicate that exposure to homicides in the first trimester of gestation increases infant birth weight and reduces the proportion of low birth weight. The effect is not driven by fertility or migration responses to environmental violence. The mechanism driving this surprising positive effect appears to be an increase in mothers’ health-enhancing behaviors (particularly the use of prenatal care) as a result of exposure to violence. The positive effect of homicide exposure is heterogeneous across socioeconomic status (SES). It is strong among low-SES women—but only those living in urban areas—and null among the most advantaged women. This variation suggests that behavioral responses to an increase in local homicides depend on a combination of increased vulnerability and access to basic resources that allow women to obtain prenatal care.

The Parity Penalty in Life Course Perspective: Motherhood and Occupational Status in 13 European Countries
Anja-Kristin Abendroth, Matt L. Huffman, and Judith Treas

Research documents a wage penalty for mothers compared to childless women. We demonstrate there is also an occupational status penalty to motherhood. Interrogating supply- and demand-side explanations of the motherhood penalty from the life course perspective, we formulate and test original hypotheses about the short-term and long-run career implications of parity-specific births. We analyze longitudinal data from the European Community and Household Panel for 13 European countries and eight time points between 1994 and 2001. Our fixed-effects models show that status losses for a first birth are not just short-term but accumulate over the career. The timing of a birth in a woman’s life course matters only for older women, who experience a significant penalty to third births. Although the personal strategies that women use to minimize the career costs of motherhood (e.g., having only one child) prove ineffective, our cross-national evidence shows that public policies are linked to the motherhood penalty in occupational status.

Coached for the Classroom: Parents’ Cultural Transmission and Children’s Reproduction of Educational Inequalities
Jessica McCrory Calarco

Scholars typically view class socialization as an implicit process. This study instead shows how parents actively transmit class-based cultures to children and how these lessons reproduce inequalities. Through observations and interviews with children, parents, and teachers, I found that middle- and working-class parents expressed contrasting beliefs about appropriate classroom behavior, beliefs that shaped parents’ cultural coaching efforts. These efforts led children to activate class-based problem-solving strategies, which generated stratified profits at school. By showing how these processes vary along social class lines, this study reveals a key source of children’s class-based behaviors and highlights the efforts by which parents and children together reproduce inequalities.