American Journal of Sociology 118(4)

American Journal of Sociology, January 2013: Volume 118, Issue 4

For a Sociology of Expertise: The Social Origins of the Autism Epidemic
Gil Eyal

This article endeavors to replace the sociology of professions with the more comprehensive and timely sociology of expertise. It suggests that we need to distinguish between experts and expertise as requiring two distinct modes of analysis that are not reducible to one another. It analyzes expertise as a network linking together agents, devices, concepts, and institutional and spatial arrangements. It also suggests rethinking how abstraction and power were analyzed in the sociology of professions. The utility of this approach is demonstrated by using it to explain the recent precipitous rise in autism diagnoses. This article shows that autism remained a rare disorder until the deinstitutionalization of mental retardation created a new institutional matrix within which a new set of actors—the parents of children with autism in alliance with psychologists and therapists—were able to forge an alternative network of expertise.

Coordinating Futures: Toward a Theory of Anticipation
Iddo Tavory and Nina Eliasoph

This article presents a theoretical approach for studying the coordination of futures. Building off theories of temporality and action, the authors map three different modes of future making—protentions, trajectories, and temporal landscapes—that actors need to coordinate in order to make sense of action together. Using a wide range of empirical evidence, they then show that these modes of future-coordination are autonomous from each other, so that although they are connected, they can clash or move in disjointed directions in interaction. By focusing on the coordination and disjunctures of those three modes, the authors argue that sociologists can provide a methodological axis of comparison between cases; depict mechanisms through which other theoretical or empirical constructs—such as racism or late modernity—operate; and open a window into the ways in which people organize and coordinate their futures, a topic of inquiry in its own right.

Exposure to Classroom Poverty and Test Score Achievement: Contextual Effects or Selection?
Douglas Lee Lauen and S. Michael Gaddis

It is widely believed that impoverished contexts harm children. Disentangling the effects of family background from the effects of other social contexts, however, is complex, making causal claims difficult to verify. This study examines the effect of exposure to classroom poverty on student test achievement using data on a cohort of children followed from third through eighth grade. Cross-sectional methods reveal a substantial negative association between exposure to high-poverty classrooms and test scores; this association grows with grade level, becoming especially large for middle school students. Growth models, however, produce much smaller effects of classroom poverty exposure on academic achievement. Even smaller effects emerge from student fixed-effects models that control for time-invariant unobservables and from marginal structural models that adjust for observable time-dependent confounding. These findings suggest that causal claims about the effects of classroom poverty exposure on achievement may be unwarranted.

Overdoing Gender: A Test of the Masculine Overcompensation Thesis
Robb Willer, Christabel L. Rogalin, Bridget Conlon, and Michael T. Wojnowicz

The masculine overcompensation thesis asserts that men react to masculinity threats with extreme demonstrations of masculinity, a proposition tested here across four studies. In study 1, men and women were randomly given feedback suggesting they were either masculine or feminine. Women showed no effects when told they were masculine; however, men given feedback suggesting they were feminine expressed more support for war, homophobic attitudes, and interest in purchasing an SUV. Study 2 found that threatened men expressed greater support for, and desire to advance in, dominance hierarchies. Study 3 showed in a large-scale survey on a diverse sample that men who reported that social changes threatened the status of men also reported more homophopic and prodominance attitudes, support for war, and belief in male superiority. Finally, study 4 found that higher testosterone men showed stronger reactions to masculinity threats than those lower in testosterone. Together, these results support the masculine overcompensation thesis, show how it can shape political and cultural attitudes, and identify a hormonal factor influencing the effect.

Betrayal as Market Barrier: Identity-Based Limits to Diversification among High-Status Corporate Law Firms
Damon J. Phillips, Catherine J. Turco, and Ezra W. Zuckerman

Why are some diversified market identities problematic but others are not? We examine this question in the context of high-status corporate law firms, which often diversify into one low-status area of work—family law (FL)—but face a barrier (strong disapproval from existing clients) that prevents diversification into another such area—plaintiffs’ personal injury law (PIL). Drawing on a qualitative study of the Boston legal market, we argue that this barrier reflects a situation where loyalty norms have been violated, and it surfaces because service to individual plaintiffs is tantamount to betraying the interests of corporate clients. Our analysis clarifies identity-based limits to diversification, indicating that they are rooted in concerns about the firm’s commitments as well as its capabilities, and suggests a more general refinement of theory on status and conformity.

Spanning the Institutional Abyss: The Intergovernmental Network and the Governance of Foreign Direct Investment
Juan Alcacer and Paul Ingram

Global economic transactions such as foreign direct investment (FDI) must extend over an institutional abyss between the jurisdiction, and therefore protection, of the states involved. Intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) represent an important attempt to span this abyss. The authors use a network approach to demonstrate that the connections between two countries, through joint membership in the same IGOs, are associated with a large positive influence on the FDI that flows between them. Moreover, they show that this effect occurs not only in the case of connections through economic IGOs but also through those with social and cultural mandates. This demonstrates that relational governance is important and feasible in the global context, even for the most risky transactions. The authors also examine the interdependence between the IGO network and the domestic institutions of states. Social and cultural IGO connections do more and economic IGO connections less to increase FDI when the target country is more democratic.

Quantitative Cross-National Sociology and the Methodological Abyss: Comment on Alcacer and Ingram
Andrew Schrank

Theory and Society 42(3)

Theory and Society, May 2013; Volume 42, Issue 3

Imagined futures: fictional expectations in the economy
Jens Beckert

Starting from the assumption that decision situations in economic contexts are characterized by fundamental uncertainty, this article argues that the decision-making of intentionally rational actors is anchored in fictions. “Fictionality” in economic action is the inhabitation in the mind of an imagined future state of the world and the beliefs in causal mechanisms leading to this future state. Actors are motivated in their actions by the imagined future and organize their activities based on these mental representations. Since these representations are not confined to empirical reality, fictional expectations are also a source of creativity in the economy. Fictionality opens up a way to an understanding of the microfoundations of the dynamics of the economy. The article develops the notion of fictional expectations. It discusses the role of fictional expectations for the dynamics of the economy and addresses the question of how fictional expectations motivate action. The last part relates the notion of fiction to calculation and social macrostructures, especially institutions and cultural frames. The conclusion hints at the research program developing from the concept of fictional expectations.

Inventing the axial age: the origins and uses of a historical concept
John D. Boy, John Torpey

The concept of the axial age, initially proposed by the philosopher Karl Jaspers to refer to a period in the first millennium BCE that saw the rise of major religious and philosophical figures and ideas throughout Eurasia, has gained an established position in a number of fields, including historical sociology, cultural sociology, and the sociology of religion. We explore whether the notion of an “axial age” has historical and intellectual cogency, or whether the authors who use the label of a more free-floating “axiality” to connote varied “breakthroughs” in human experience may have a more compelling case. Throughout, we draw attention to ways in which uses of the axial age concept in contemporary social science vary in these and other respects. In the conclusion, we reflect on the value of the concept and its current uses and their utility in making sense of human experience.

Powerful emotions: symbolic power and the (productive and punitive) force of collective feeling
Dawne Moon

This article argues that emotions can be a medium of social power. Using qualitative interview material from American Jews discussing anti-Semitism and its relationship to contemporary politics, it engages recent scholarship on emotions and political contention and shows how emotions make effective the various forms of symbolic exclusion by which group members exercise what Bourdieu calls symbolic power. It also explores the emotional connections to group membership by which some “excluded” members can engage in symbolic struggle over “the principles of vision and division” Bourdieu (Sociological Theory 7(1), 14–25, 1989) that define the group. Finally, it shows how emotions work to incite discipline in some group members, inspiring them to conform to dominant definitions of group membership so as to avoid both symbolic struggle and exclusion.

Insurgency and institutionalization: the Polanyian countermovement and Chinese labor politics
Eli Friedman

Why is it that in the nearly 10 years since the Chinese central government began making symbolic and material moves towards class compromise that labor unrest has expanded greatly? In this article I reconfigure Karl Polanyi’s theory of the coutermovement to account for recent developments in Chinese labor politics. Specifically, I argue that countermovements must be broken down into two constituent but intertwined “moments”: the insurgent moment that consists of spontaneous resistance to the market, and the institutional moment, when class compromise is established in the economic and political spheres. In China, the transition from insurgency to institutionalization has thus far been confounded by conditions of “appropriated representation,” where the only worker organizations allowed to exist are those within the state-run All China Federation of Trade Unions. However, in drawing on two case studies of strikes in capital-intensive industries in Guangdong province, I show that the relationship between insurgency and institutionalization shifted between 2007 and 2010.

Critical Criminology 21(2)

 Critical Criminology, May 2013: Volume 21, Issue 2

Brutal Serendipity: Criminological Verstehen and Victimization
Carl Root, Jeff Ferrell & Wilson R. Palacios

This article explores police use of force and its aftermath by focusing on the immediacy of police–citizen interactions via an autoethnographic account that invokes the concept of criminological verstehen. Specifically, the article explores issues of constructed meaning via Yuen’s interpretive constructs of ‘safe spaces’ and ‘creative analytic practice’ as a way of coming to terms with the first author’s lived experience of police brutality and its consequent legal process. Based on document analysis of official records such as police citations, medical files, and court transcripts, along with media accounts and the first author’s personal notes, the process of memoing provides an immersion into and an exploration of the data, and a tool for ascertaining meaning from it. Resultant themes of presentation of self, identity accomplishment, and silence are discussed in relation to the sorts of experiences and emotions necessary to a verstehen-oriented victimology. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of this exercise in criminological verstehen.

Resilience and Criminal Justice: Unsafe at Low Altitude
Willem de Lint & Nerida Chazal

Resilience is increasingly featuring in crime and justice policy discussions. It appears in the fusion of military, security and criminal justice. It offers an alignment by which individual actors are to be adaptive to the uncertain conditions of high risk societies. This article unpacks the application of resilience to criminal justice to reveal at least one negative implication: by placing the focus on self-directed change resilient subjects have limited transformative power. The concept of resilience involves discounting a longer view that challenges the dominant social institutions and orders of neoliberalism. In contrast, we propose the dignified subject and the re-assertion of the discounted institutional context at a level above the individual and community. This analysis supports renewing the transformative agenda of a critical criminology.

Examining the Ruggie Report: Can Voluntary Guidelines Tame Global Capitalism?
Steven Bittle & Laureen Snider

In recent years many academics, social activists and NGOs have turned to international bodies in an attempt to hold corporations accountable for their harmful and illegal acts. Significant amongst these is the UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General on issues of human rights and transnational corporations. In 2008, following extensive research and consultation with states, corporations and civil society groups, the Special Representative released a series of guidelines outlining the responsibilities of states and corporations to respect human rights, and of both to ensure access to effective judicial and non-judicial remedies for victims. This paper argues that the UN guidelines fail to recognize or incorporate the empirically and historically demonstrated imperatives that guide transnational global capitalism. While global capitalism is complex and rife with contradictions, its raison d’etre is rooted in profit maximization. The paper sets out alternative provisions with, we argue, greater potential to subject global capital to the rule of law.

You Say Regulation, I Say Punishment: The Semantics and Attributes of Punitive Activity
Karol Lucken

Recent trends in crime control have given new energy to an age-old question, namely what kinds of activity qualify as punishment. In addressing this question, jurists and scholars have often employed a logic that either restricts interpretations of punishment to traditional forms (e.g., prison, probation, death penalty) and functions (e.g., deterrence and retribution), or expands them to include the broader forms and functions of social control. This paper examines these opposing logics and considers an alternative logic based in common stipulations in power theory. Within this particular framework, punishment is conceived as action that is necessarily relational, intentional, personal and coercive.

How the News was Made: The Anti-Social Behaviour Day Count, Newsmaking Criminology and the Construction of Anti-Social Behaviour
Phil Edwards

‘Newsmaking criminology’ is an approach to criminological research characterised by critical engagement with topics being covered by the news media, offering greater engagement with public debate and reflexive critique of the objects of criminological knowledge. Two examples of Brisith criminological researchers taking an identifiable ‘newsmaking’ approach are discussed in this paper: the Anti-Social Behaviour One Day Count, a 24-h comprehensive survey of reports of anti-social behaviour carried out in 2003, and the 24-h Domestic Violence Audit, carried out in 2000. This paper analyses the construction of knowledge of anti-social behaviour through the Day Count, identifying continuities and discontinuities between the Day Count and the Domestic Violence Audit. This leads to a discussion of the strengths and limitations of the ‘newsmaking’ approach, suggesting that it may serve conservative as well as progressive ends.

Teaching Criminological Theory: The Power of Film and Music
Dawn L. Rothe & Victoria E. Collins

Interest in utilizing pop culture as a means of teaching and enhancing students’ understanding of complex or abstract ideas in the classroom has increased over the course of the past decade. This includes the use of film, television, fiction books, the internet, and music. The fields of criminology and criminal justice have also increasingly noted the value of using such means to teach about atrocities such as state crime, transnational crime and corporate crimes as well as issues of inequality, racism, and classism. Film, music and television can also be great tools to enhance the understanding of and ability to apply criminological theory. Most articles that have focused on incorporating the use of a ‘popular criminology’ within the classroom, however, have concentrated on one form or another of ‘pop culture’ (i.e., film). This article seeks to add to the existing literature by providing an example of how the use of film combined with music can not only enhance undergraduate criminology and criminal justice students’ ability to grasp criminological theory and apply it in their everyday lives, but also can be utilized as tools for exams.

British Journal of Criminology 53(3)

British Journal of Criminology, May 2013: Volume 53, Issue 3

‘Fighting is the Most Real and Honest Thing’: Violence and the Civilization/Barbarism Dialectic
John J. Brent and Peter B. Kraska

Over the past two decades, the activity of ‘cage-fighting’ has attracted massive audiences and significant attention from media and political outlets. Underlying the spectacle of these mass-consumed events is a growing world of underground sport fighting. By offering more brutal and less regulated forms of violence, this hidden variant of fighting lies at the blurry and shifting intersection between licit and illicit forms of recreation. This paper offers a theoretical and ethnographic exploration of the motivations and emotive frameworks of these unsanctioned fighters. We find that buried within the long-term process towards greater civility rest the seeds for social unrest, individual rebellion and ontological upheaval. By revealing the dialectical relationship between contemporary mechanisms of control and these uncivil performances, we argue these transgressions are a visceral reaction to today’s highly rationalized modes of state and social governance. More broadly, we attempt to understand the interrelationship between contemporary controls and sport fighting as a microcosm of the long-running struggle between civility and barbarism.

Making Sense of Disaster: Towards a Contextual, Phase-Based Understanding of Organizationally Based Acute Civilian Disasters
Howard Davis

Notwithstanding their visibility and the evident harm they cause, criminological attention to organizationally based acute civilian disasters (OBACDs) has been sporadic and the field has been left, in the main, to practitioners and scholars from other disciplines. This article suggests a research template for the contextual analysis of OBACDs examining the actions and omissions of key stakeholders through a succession of phases. A review of disaster literature was undertaken using this framework and used to develop a simple model of OBACDs elucidating issues around three criminological themes: the origins of OBACDs; the impact of and response to OBACDs; and the processes of sense-making, learning and accountability that follow OBACDs.

Former Refugees and Community Resilience: ‘Papering Over’ Domestic Violence
Gail Mason and Mariastella Pulvirenti

The efforts of new, former refugee communities to grow their legitimacy as citizens often in hostile host environments puts community needs at odds with individual needs. From an analysis of interviews with service providers across two states in Australia, and borrowing the concept of ‘papering over’, we demonstrate how these tensions impact on women in these communities building resilience to domestic violence. Despite community being vital for building individual resilience, ‘papering over’ operates to keep communities quiet about domestic violence and reliant on definitions of violence that serve to save the face of communities. While this is a challenge for how former refugee communities respond to domestic violence, it is also a challenge for how we conceptualize resilience across intersecting subject positions.

‘You Have to do it for Yourself’: Responsibilization in Youth Justice and Young People’s Situated Knowledge of Youth Justice Practice
Jo Phoenix and Laura Kelly

Drawing on governmentality theories, accounts of the responsibilizing effects of policy and practice have dominated recent studies of youth justice in England and Wales. This article develops this debate by asking: what can it mean to claim that young offenders are responsibilized by contemporary modes of governing youth offending? An exposition of the dominant ways in which ‘responsibilization’ is conceptualized highlights the theoretical foreclosures that, within such frameworks, make the subjective experiences of young offenders ‘unknowable’. We suggest that an empirical analysis of young people’s situated knowledge helps elucidate what responsibilization could mean in relation to young offenders: that they came to know there was no one else to help them change their lives.

Official Bias in Intergenerational Transmission of Criminal Behaviour
Sytske Besemer, David P. Farrington, and Catrien C.J.H. Bijleveld

We investigated to what extent children of convicted parents might have a higher risk of a conviction themselves because criminal justice systems, such as the police and courts, focus more attention towards certain criminal families—a concept called official bias. Bias was measured using several variables: a convicted parent, low family income, low family socio-economic status, poor housing and a father’s poor job record. A convicted parent as well as poorer social circumstances such as a father’s poor job record, low family income and poor housing predicted an increased conviction risk while controlling for self-reported offending. The results support the official bias mechanism, but also suggest that other mechanisms are needed to explain intergenerational transmission of criminal convictions.

Crime as a Price of Inequality?: The Gap in Registered Crime between Childhood Immigrants, Children of Immigrants and Children of Native Swedes
Martin Hällsten, Ryszard Szulkin, and Jerzy Sarnecki

We examine the gap in registered crime between the children of immigrants and the children of native Swedes. We follow all individuals who completed compulsory schooling during the period 1990–93 in the Stockholm Metropolitan area (N = 63,462) up to their thirties and analyse how family of origin and neighbourhood segregation during adolescence, subsequent to arriving in Sweden, influence the gap in recorded crimes. For males, we are able to explain between half and three-quarters of the gap in crime by reference to parental socio-economic resources and neighbourhood segregation. For females, we can explain even more, sometimes the entire gap. In addition, we tentatively examine the role of co-nationality or culture by comparing the crime rates of randomly chosen pairs of individuals originating from the same country. We find only a small correlation in the crime of individuals who share the same origin, indicating that culture is unlikely to be a strong cause of crime among immigrants.

China’s Death Penalty: The Supreme People’s Court, the Suspended Death Sentence and the Politics of Penal Reform
Susan Trevaskes

This paper examines the issue of judicial discretion and the role of the Supreme People’s Court (SPC) in death penalty reform since 2007. The SPC has been encouraging judges to give ‘suspended’ death sentences rather than ‘immediate execution’ for some homicide cases. Lower court judges are encouraged to use their discretion to recognize mitigating circumstances that would allow them to sentence offenders to a suspended death sentence. The SPC has used ‘guidance’ instruments which include ‘directives’ and other SPC interpretations and a new ‘case guidance’ system which provides case exemplars to follow. We explore these guidance instruments as a way of deepening our understanding of how law, politics and judicial practices are interwoven to achieve reform goals.

The Politics of China’s Death Penalty Reform in the Context of Global Abolitionism
Michelle Miao

This paper explores the influences of worldwide anti-death penalty campaigns in the local institutional environment in China and its implications for China’s capital punishment reforms in recent years. It found a ‘concentric pattern’ of the dissemination of human rights values and anti-death penalty activisms may explain the varying attitudes towards human rights and international activism among different social groups across the Chinese society. Divergent interests of and perceptions held by national-level and lower-level legal elites are likely to be one of the causes for China to adopt an incremental reformist stance. Further, this study shows that the Chinese legal elites were poorly informed of the current status of public opinion on capital punishment. A populist-sentiment-driven administration of capital punishment is closely tied to reliance on capital punishment.

The ANNALS of the AAPSS 647

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, May 2013: Volume 647

Reconsidering the Urban Disadvantaged: The Role of Systems, Institutions, and Organizations
Scott W. Allard and Mario L. Small

Organizations

Transnationalism and Community Building: Chinese Immigrant Organizations in the United States
Min Zhou and Rennie Lee

Studying the Roles of Nonprofits, Government, and Business in Providing Activities and Services to Youth in the Phoenix Metropolitan Area
Joseph Galaskiewicz, Olga V. Mayorova, and Beth M. Duckles

The Micro Dynamics of Support Seeking: The Social and Economic Utility of Institutional Ties for HIV-Positive Women
Celeste Watkins-Hayes

The Development of Sectoral Worker Center Networks
Héctor R. Cordero-Guzmán, Pamela A. Izvanariu, and Victor Narro

Systems

People, Place, and System: Organizations and the Renewal of Urban Social Theory
Nicole P. Marwell and Michael McQuarrie

Beyond Hierarchies and Markets: Are Decentralized Schools Lifting Poor Children?
Bruce Fuller and Danfeng Soto-Vigil Koon

Mass Incarceration, Macrosociology, and the Poor
Bruce Western and Christopher Muller

Can Drug Courts Help to Reduce Prison and Jail Populations?
Eric L. Sevigny, Harold A. Pollack, and Peter Reuter

Institutions

Home Is Hard to Find: Neighborhoods, Institutions, and the Residential Trajectories of Returning Prisoners
David J. Harding, Jeffrey D. Morenoff, and Claire W. Herbert

Integration and Exclusion: Urban Poverty, Public Housing Reform, and the Dynamics of Neighborhood Restructuring
Robert J. Chaskin

Segregating Shelter: How Housing Policies Shape the Residential Locations of Low-Income Minority Families
Stefanie DeLuca, Philip M. E. Garboden, and Peter Rosenblatt

Sociological Theory 31(1)

Sociological Theory, March 2013: Volume 31, Issue 1 

The Politics of Theory and the Constitution of Meaning
Peeter Selg

How should sociologists use the word theory? Gabriel Abend’s recent insistence that this question should be tackled politically raises two important issues: Is sociology political? And if so, what normative implications follow for its organization? Drawing on Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblance and post-Gramscian theories of hegemony, I argue that Abend’s proposal that semantic questions about theory can be addressed separately from ontological, evaluative, and teleological ones is untenable. Disagreements about the latter are constitutive, not merely supplementary to the meaning of theory. Against Abend’s deliberative-democratically oriented vision, I propose an agonistic politics of theory. In doing so, I consider both the internal inconsistencies of deliberativism and the practical advantages and sociological relevance of agonism.

Transnational State Formation and the Global Politics of Austerity
Aaron Major

A perennial concern among scholars of globalization is the relationship between global social formations and national and subnational political and economic developments. While sociological understanding of “the global” has become increasingly rich, stressing the complex relationship between material and cultural pressures, an undertheorized nation state often sits on the receiving end of the sociologist’s model of globalization. The goal of this article is to help move the sociology of globalization out of the analytical trap of global-national dualism by developing an account of the transnationalization of political authority. Building on neo-Marxist and Weberian theories of the transnational, or global state, which explicate the macro-structural dynamics that have led to the transnationalization of the state as such, I look at the process of the transnationalization of political authority from an institutional perspective, one that focuses on processes of transnationalization within, and across, specific state agencies. These theoretical points are empirically motivated through an historical investigation of the transnationalization of monetary authority and its relationship to the international diffusion of policies of austerity from the era of the classical gold standard through the economic crisis of 2008.

Decolonizing Bourdieu: Colonial and Postcolonial Theory in Pierre Bourdieu’s Early Work
Julian Go

While new scholarship on Pierre Bourdieu has recovered his early work on Algeria, this essay excavates his early thoughts on colonialism. Contrary to received wisdom, Bourdieu did in fact offer a theory of colonialism and a systematic understanding of its effects and logics. Bourdieu portrayed colonialism as a racialized system of domination, backed by force, which restructures social relations and creates hybrid cultures. His theory entailed insights on the limits and promises of colonial reform, anticolonial revolution, and postcolonial liberation. Bourdieu’s early thinking on colonialism drew upon but extended French colonial studies of the time. It also contains the seeds of later concepts like habitus, field, and reflexive sociology while prefiguring more recent disciplinary postcolonial studies. Bourdieusian sociology in this sense originates not just as a study of Algeria but more specifically a critique of colonialism. It can be seen as contributing to the larger project of postcolonial sociology.

The Invisible Animal: Anthrozoology and Macrosociology
Richard York and Philip Mancus

Animals have had a profound influence on human societies, playing a major role in the course of human history. However, their presence and theoretical significance has been overlooked in sociological theory, while being the central concern of the growing field of anthrozoology (the study of the interaction between humans and other animals). To illustrate how a focus on other animal species can improve our understanding of sociocultural evolution, we assess the influential work of Gerhard Lenski and Patrick Nolan and their materialist approach to macrosociology. Animals are largely invisible in Lenski and Nolan’s Ecological-Evolutionary Theory, yet they underlie the key subsistence technologies identified by Lenski and Nolan as crucial for explaining uneven development. By considering the history of domestication, the role animals played in the development of agricultural technology, and the translocation of Eurasian livestock during the colonial era, we show how sociocultural evolution is situated within a larger nexus of socioecological and historical conditions that reciprocally determine technological development and cultural heritage. Our analysis illustrates that anthrozoology, far from being an esoteric field of study, has the potential to contribute to a refined understanding of a wide array of social phenomena.

American Sociological Review 78(2)

American Sociological Review, April 2013: Volume 78, Issue 2

The Genomic Revolution and Beliefs about Essential Racial Differences: A Backdoor to Eugenics?
Jo C. Phelan, Bruce G. Link, and Naumi M. Feldman

Could the explosion of genetic research in recent decades affect our conceptions of race? In Backdoor to Eugenics, Duster argues that reports of specific racial differences in genetic bases of disease, in part because they are presented as objective facts whose social implications are not readily apparent, may heighten public belief in more pervasive racial differences. We tested this hypothesis with a multi-method study. A content analysis showed that news articles discussing racial differences in genetic bases of disease increased significantly between 1985 and 2008 and were significantly less likely than non–health-related articles about race and genetics to discuss social implications. A survey experiment conducted with a nationally representative sample of 559 adults found that a news-story vignette reporting a specific racial difference in genetic risk for heart attacks (the Backdoor Vignette) produced significantly greater belief in essential racial differences than did a vignette portraying race as a social construction or a no-vignette condition. The Backdoor Vignette produced beliefs in essential racial differences that were virtually identical to those produced by a vignette portraying race as a genetic reality. These results suggest that an unintended consequence of the genomic revolution may be the reinvigoration of age-old beliefs in essential racial differences.

Can Honorific Awards Give Us Clues about the Connection between Socioeconomic Status and Mortality?
Bruce G. Link, Richard M. Carpiano, and Margaret M. Weden

Social epidemiologists Marmot and Wilkinson argue that relative deprivation is the dominant mechanism through which socioeconomic status (SES) affects mortality. If such an argument is valid, we would expect to consistently see the influence of relative deprivation in situations where two or more highly qualified and very similar individuals are nominated in a status competition, but only one receives the status boost conferred by winning. We studied mortality experiences of Emmy Award winners, Baseball Hall of Fame inductees, and presidents and vice presidents—comparing each to nominated losers in the same competition. Our findings and results of similar studies fail to show consistent advantages for winners. The association between winning and longevity is sometimes positive, sometimes negative, and sometimes nonexistent. We conclude that the critical processes determining the strength and direction of any status effect on longevity are changes in life circumstances that result from winning or losing, rather than the processes that inexorably flow from one’s relative position in a status hierarchy.

How Macro-Historical Change Shapes Cultural Taste: Legacies of Democratization in Spain and Portugal
Robert M. Fishman and Omar Lizardo

In this article, we show that large-scale macro-political change can powerfully condition how institutional practices shape individual cultural choice. We study the paired comparison of Portugal and Spain, two long-similar societies that moved from authoritarianism to democracy through divergent pathways in the 1970s. Data from the 2001 Eurobarometer indicate that while the cultural choices of persons born before democratic transition are comparable across the two cases, Portuguese youth born under democracy are substantially more omnivorous than their Spanish counterparts. We shed light on this puzzle through a structured, focused comparison. Our argument is that whereas revolution in Portugal overturned hierarchies in numerous social institutions and unleashed an ambitious program of cultural transformation, Spain’s consensus-oriented transition was largely limited to remaking political institutions. We show that this macro-political divergence resulted in a key cross-case difference at the institutional level. Whereas pedagogical practices in Portugal encourage young people to adopt the post-canonical, anti-hierarchical orientation toward aesthetics constitutive of the omnivorous orientation, corresponding practices in Spain restrict omnivorousness by instilling a hierarchical, largely canonical attitude toward cultural works.

Increasing Rejection of Intimate Partner Violence: Evidence of Global Cultural Diffusion
Rachael S. Pierotti

This study extends existing world society research on ideational diffusion by going beyond examinations of national policy change to investigate the spread of ideas among nonelite individuals. Specifically, I test whether recent trends in women’s attitudes about intimate partner violence are converging toward global cultural scripts. Results suggest that global norms regarding violence against women are reaching citizens worldwide, including in some of the least privileged parts of the globe. During the first decade of the 2000s, women in 23 of the 26 countries studied became more likely to reject intimate partner violence. Structural socioeconomic or demographic changes, such as urbanization, rising educational attainment, increasing media access, and cohort replacement, fail to explain the majority of the observed trend. Rather, women of all ages and social locations became less likely to accept justifications for intimate partner violence. The near uniformity of the trend and speed of the change in attitudes about intimate partner violence suggest that global cultural diffusion has played an important role.

Only 15 Minutes? The Social Stratification of Fame in Printed Media
Arnout van de Rijt, Eran Shor, Charles Ward, and Steven Skiena

Contemporary scholarship has conceptualized modern fame as an open system in which people continually move in and out of celebrity status. This model stands in stark contrast to the traditional notion in the sociology of stratification that depicts stable hierarchies sustained through classic forces such as social structure and cumulative advantage. We investigate the mobility of fame using a unique data source containing daily records of references to person names in a large corpus of English-language media sources. These data reveal that only at the bottom of the public attention hierarchy do names exhibit fast turnover; at upper tiers, stable coverage persists around a fixed level and rank for decades. Fame exhibits strong continuity even in entertainment, on television, and on blogs, where it has been thought to be most ephemeral. We conclude that once a person’s name is decoupled from the initial event that lent it momentary attention, self-reinforcing processes, career structures, and commemorative practices perpetuate fame.

Race, Legality, and the Social Policy Consequences of Anti-Immigration Mobilization
Hana E. Brown

With the dramatic rise in the U.S. Hispanic population, scholars have struggled to explain how race affects welfare state development beyond the Black-White divide. This article uses a comparative analysis of welfare reforms in California and Arizona to examine how anti-Hispanic stereotypes affect social policy formation. Drawing on interviews, archival materials, and newspaper content analysis, I find that animus toward Hispanics is mobilized through two collective action frames: a legality frame and a racial frame. The legality frame lauds the contributions of documented noncitizens while demonizing illegal immigrants. The racial frame celebrates the moral worth of White citizens and uses explicit racial language to deride Hispanics as undeserving. These subtle differences in racialization and worth attribution create divergent political opportunities for welfare policy. When advocates employ the legality frame, they create openings for rights claims by documented noncitizens. Use of the racial frame, however, dampens cross-racial mobilization and effective claims-making for expansive welfare policies. These findings help to explain why the relationship between race and welfare policy is less predictable for Hispanics than for Blacks. They also reveal surprising ways in which race and immigration affect contemporary politics and political mobilization.

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Immigrant Unionization through the Great Recession
Peter Catron

Previous research has found that in recent years immigrants had a higher propensity to unionize than did native-born workers. However, little research shows that historically marginalized immigrant workers are able to maintain newly acquired union jobs, especially during times unfavorable to unionization more generally. This comment focuses on immigrant unionization during the Great Recession of 2008 to determine whether inroads that immigrants made through organizing were maintained in hostile union environments. Using the Current Population Survey (CPS), I extend Rosenfeld and Kleykamp’s (2009) models for Hispanic unionization (which end in 2007) through the recent downturn and beyond. I find that Hispanic immigrants, who held higher odds of union entry or membership in Rosenfeld and Kleykamp’s pre-recession analysis, lost union jobs at an increased rate during the Great Recession compared with native-born white workers. These effects for Hispanic immigrants filtered throughout various subcategories and control variables, including years since entry, citizenship status, and nationality. These results are likely not due to immigrants’ unfavorable labor market allocation, and to some degree undercut the hopes of those who view immigrants as the key to organized labor’s future and organized labor as the key to immigrant prosperity.

Immigration, Organization, and the Great Recession: Structural Change or Continuity?
Jake Rosenfeld and Meredith Kleykamp

Crime & Delinquency 59(3)

Crime & Delinquency, April 2013: Volume 59, Issue 3

Guns and Trafficking in Crack-Cocaine and Other Drug Markets
Richard B. Felson and Luke Bonkiewicz

This article examines the relationship between gun possession and the nature of an offender’s involvement in drug markets. The analyses are based on data obtained from drug offenders who participated in the 1997 Survey of Inmates of State and Federal Correctional Facilities. The authors find that participants in crack-cocaine markets are more likely to possess guns than participants in powdered-cocaine, opiate, and marijuana markets, particularly if they are street-level crack dealers. However, participants in barbiturates and amphetamine markets also have high rates of gun possession. The authors also find relatively high levels of gun possession among traffickers who handle stashes of moderately large market value, who have central roles in the trade, and who are members of drug organizations. Finally, offenders who are young, female, African American, and from lower economic status are more likely to traffic in crack cocaine than in other drugs.

Neighborhood Context and Police Vigor: A Multilevel Analysis
James J. Sobol, Yuning Wu, and Ivan Y. Sun

This study provides a partial test of Klinger’s ecological theory of police behavior using hierarchical linear modeling on 1,677 suspects who had encounters with police within 24 beats. The current study used data from four sources originally collected by the Project on Policing Neighborhoods (POPN), including systematic social observation, in-person interviews with officers, census data, and police crime records. It investigates the effects of neighborhood violent crime rates and concentrated disadvantage on officer vigor, controlling for individual-level officer characteristics and situational factors. The analyses reveal that police vigor was significantly shaped by beat-level crime rates, with high–crime rate neighborhoods experiencing higher levels of police vigor in handling suspects. The findings are not consistent with the ecological propositions set forth by Klinger. Implications of these findings and suggestions for future research and theoretical development are discussed.

The Impact of Drivers’ Race, Gender, and Age During Traffic Stops: Assessing Interaction Terms and the Social Conditioning Model
Rob Tillyer and Robin S. Engel

Recent research has demonstrated that minority drivers receive disparate traffic stop outcomes compared with similarly situated White drivers. This research, however, is often not grounded within a theoretical framework and fails to examine specific combinations of driver demographics. This study addresses those shortcomings by examining research questions based on the social conditioning model and investigating the relationship between specific combinations of drivers’ race/ethnicity, gender, and age, and traffic stop outcomes. Using alternative measures of stop outcomes and robust official traffic stop data collected from a state law enforcement agency, the results demonstrate that warnings and citations, but not arrests, are differentially issued to young, Black male drivers. The findings also confirm the influence of legal factors on police decision making during traffic stops. Research and policy implications are discussed.

Race, Pre- and Postdetention, and Juvenile Justice Decision Making
Michael J. Leiber

A detailed examination was conducted of the factors associated with pre- and postadjudication secure detention, including secure detention as a dispositional sentence and the effects of secure detention on decision making that further contribute to cumulative disadvantage for African Americans. The research was based on interpretations of the symbolic threat thesis, with emphasis on the stereotyping of African Americans as threatening, delinquent, and/or in need of confinement, to study decision making in one juvenile court jurisdiction. The results reveal that legal factors were most often predictors of each type of secure detention and decision making at other stages, but so too was race individually and in combination with legal and extralegal considerations and indirectly through secure detention. The relationships, however, did not always result in disadvantageous outcomes.

A Comparison of Robbers’ Use of Physical Coercion in Commercial and Street Robberies
John D. McCluskey

The face-to-face confrontation involved in the crime of robbery renders vast amounts of financial, physical, and psychological injury in the United States. This study developed hypotheses from existing literature regarding salient situational factors associated with the prevalence of overt physical coercion during commercial and street robberies. The study examined the effect of situational and personal characteristics on robbers’ use of coercion, with data coded from police reports of 1,281 street and commercial robberies in one precinct of Detroit, Michigan, between 2000 and 2003. The research results are relatively consistent with findings from the literature on robbery in the last 40 years: Street robberies involve a greater prevalence of physical force than do commercial robberies; guns reduce the likelihood of physical force; and victim resistance increases physical force. Additionally, characteristics of victims and offenders play a secondary role in predicting whether physical coercion is brought to bear on the victims of robbery.

A Multivariate Analysis of the Sociodemographic Predictors of Methamphetamine Production and Use
Todd A. Armstrong and Gaylene S. Armstrong

To date, research testing the community characteristics associated with methamphetamine production and use has found that the community-level sociodemographic predictors of methamphetamine production and use vary from those of drug use in general. In this study, the authors furthered the research in this area using data from all 102 counties in Illinois. These data included measures of sociodemographic characteristics taken from the U.S. census, measures of methamphetamine production and use, and a measure of arrests for controlled-substance violations. Negative binomial regression models showed that poverty and the racial and ethnic compositions of communities were the strongest and most consistent predictors of the authors’ methamphetamine measures. The results also showed that the sociodemographic characteristics associated with methamphetamine measures were different in important ways from those associated with arrests for controlled-substance violations.

Testing the Link Between Child Maltreatment and Family Violence Among Police Officers
Egbert Zavala

The purpose of this study is to document the relationship between physical abuse during childhood and family violence among a group of police officers from the Baltimore Police Department in the United States. Analyzing data from the Police and Domestic Violence in Police Families in Baltimore, Maryland, 1997-1999, this study found a positive relationship between physical abuse and family violence toward spouses and children. Specifically, this study found that police officers who indicated that their parents where physical with them were more likely to report being physical with their spouse and children. They were also more likely to report yelling or shouting toward family members. This study shows a positive relationship between physical abuse and involvement in family violence, and increases our knowledge regarding the cycle of violence in police families. This study points to the need for better recognition of physical abuse and the negative consequences children are likely to endure.

Theory and Society 42(2)

Theory and Society, March 2013; Volume 42, Issue 2

From social control to financial economics: the linked ecologies of economics and business in twentieth century America
Marion Fourcade and Rakesh Khurana

This article draws on historical material to examine the co-evolution of economic science and business education over the course of the twentieth century, showing that fields evolve not only through internal struggles but also through struggles taking place in adjacent fields. More specifically, we argue that the scientific strategies of business schools played an essential—if largely invisible and poorly understood—role in major transformations in the organization and substantive direction of social-scientific knowledge, and specifically economic knowledge, in twentieth century America. We use the Wharton School as an illustration of the earliest trends and dilemmas (ca. 1900–1930), when business schools found themselves caught between their business connections and their striving for moral legitimacy in higher education. Next, we look at the creation of the Carnegie Tech Graduate School of Industrial Administration after World War II. This episode illustrates the increasingly successful claims of social scientists, backed by philanthropic foundations, on business education and the growing appeal of “scientific” approaches to decision-making and management. Finally, we argue that the rise of the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago from the 1960s onwards (and its closely related cousin at the University of Rochester) marks the decisive ascendancy of economics, and particularly financial economics, in business education over the other behavioral disciplines. We document the key role of these institutions in diffusing “Chicago-style” economic approaches—offering support for deregulatory policies and popularizing narrowly financial understandings of the firm—that sociologists have described as characteristic of the modern neo liberal regime.

Security a la Mexicana: on the particularities of security governance in México’s War on Crime
Keith Guzik

Social scientists from different fields have identified security as a future-oriented mode of governance designed to preserve the social order from diverse types of global risk through international cooperation, militarization and privatization of the state security apparatus, surveillance technologies, community policing, and stigmatization of identities and behaviors deemed dangerous. This literature has largely been limited to English-speaking countries in the Global North, however, that are relatively “secure.”. To understand how security operates in a different context, this article focuses on the current War on Crime in México using newspaper and magazine articles, government documents, and extant academic research. In México, it is argued, the basic elements of security governance (international cooperation, militarized police, surveillance technologies, law, etc.) are present, but in modified form. Rather than focusing on external risks that could develop into future threats, security in México is turned inward against traditional forms of national economic, political, and cultural life thought to produce harm in the present. This, in turn, underscores security’s unique purpose in the country, which is not to preserve the prevailing social order, but to transform an emergent social order that through globalization has come to threaten the state’s legitimacy. These observations suggest an international divide in the operation of security that leaves those most vulnerable in the Global South to bear the greatest costs.

The true citizens of the city of God: the cult of saints, the Catholic social order, and the urban Reformation in Germany
Steven Pfaff

Historical scholarship suggests that a robust cult of the saints may have helped some European regions to resist inroads by Protestantism. Based on a neo-Durkheimian theory of rituals and social order, I propose that locally based cults of the saints that included public veneration lowered the odds that Protestantism would displace Catholicism in sixteenth-century German cities. To evaluate this proposition, I first turn to historical and theoretical reflection on the role of the cult of the saints in late medieval history. I then test the hypothesis with a data set of sixteenth-century German cities. Statistical analysis provides additional support for the ritual and social order thesis because even when several important variables identified by materialist accounts of the Reformation in the social scientific literature the presence of shrines as an indicator for the cult of the saints remains large and significant. Although large-scale social change is usually assumed to have politico-economic sources, this analysis suggests that cultural factors may be of equal or greater importance.

Journal of Marriage and Family 75(2)

Journal of Marriage and Family, April 2013: Volume 75, Issue 2

Brief Reports

Policymakers' Use of Social Science Research: Looking Within and Across Policy Actors
Karen Bogenschneider, Olivia M. Little and Kristen Johnson

Attitudes Toward Divorce, Commitment, and Divorce Proneness in First Marriages and Remarriages
Sarah W. Whitton, Scott M. Stanley, Howard J. Markman and Christine A. Johnson

Effect of Husbands' Employment Status on Their Wives' Subjective Well-being in Korea
Myoung-Hee Kim and Young Kyung Do

Intimate Partner Violence

The Continuation of Intimate Partner Violence From Adolescence to Young Adulthood
Ming Cui, Koji Ueno, Mellissa Gordon and Frank D. Fincham

Why Do We Fail to Ask “Why” About Gender and Intimate Partner Violence?
Kristin L. Anderson

What Comes Before Why: Specifying the Phenomenon of Intimate Partner Violence
Frank D. Fincham, Ming Cui, Mellissa Gordon and Koji Ueno

Genetic Moderation of the Impact of Parenting on Hostility Toward Romantic Partners
Ronald L. Simons, Leslie Gordon Simons, Man-Kit Lei, Steven R. H. Beach, Gene H. Brody, Frederick X. Gibbons and Robert A. Philibert

Marital History, Wealth, and Health

Marriage, Marital History, and Black – White Wealth Differentials Among Older Women
Fenaba R. Addo and Daniel T. Lichter

I've Got You Under My Skin: Marital Biography and Biological Risk
Michael J. McFarland, Mark D. Hayward and Dustin Brown

Grandparent Child Care

Motivations for Providing and Utilizing Child Care by Grandmothers in South Korea
Jaerim Lee and Jean W. Bauer

Child Care and Child Births: The Role of Grandparents in the Netherlands
Fleur Thomese and Aart C. Liefbroer

Of General Interest

Cohabitation in Spain: No Longer a Marginal Path to Family Formation
Marta Dominguez-Folgueras and Teresa Castro-Martin

“Life Still Isn't Fair”: Parental Differential Treatment of Young Adult Siblings
Alexander C. Jensen, Shawn D. Whiteman, Karen L. Fingerman and Kira S. Birditt

Schemas of Marital Change: From Arranged Marriages to Eloping for Love
Keera Allendorf

Can Family Relationships Explain the Race Paradox in Mental Health?
Dawne M. Mouzon

Poverty at a Racial Crossroads: Poverty Among Multiracial Children of Single Mothers
Jenifer L. Bratter and Sarah Damaske

Perceived Economic Uncertainty and Fertility: Evidence From a Labor Market Reform
Barbara Hofmann and Katrin Hohmeyer

Social Psychology Quarterly 76(1)

Social Psychology Quarterly, March 2013: Volume 76, Issue 1

Doing Ideology Amid a Crisis: Collective Actions and Discourses of the Chinese Falun Gong Movement
Cheris Shun-ching Chan

A Refinement of Collaborative Circles Theory: Resource Mobilization and Innovation in an Emerging Sport
Ugo Corte

Modeling Interactions in Small Groups
David R. Heise

Behavioral Consequences of Embeddedness: Effects of the Underlying Forms of Exchange
Linda D. Molm, David Melamed, and Monica M. Whitham

Crime & Delinquency 59(2)

Crime & Delinquency, March 2013: Volume 59, Issue 2

Disaggregating the Relationship Between Schools and Crime: A Spatial Analysis
Rebecca K. Murray and Marc L. Swatt

Although an extensive literature exists on crime in schools, surprisingly few studies have examined crime within the vicinity of schools. Schools, like other urban facilities, can generate crime by providing youth opportunities to congregate with little supervision, particularly before and after school hours. Some noteworthy studies have demonstrated that crime is more likely around schools, but the distinctive patterns based on school, time, and spatial contexts have not been fully addressed. The current study examines the differential crime generating potential of schools by type (public/private) and by level (elementary, middle, and high school), taking into account both spatial and temporal indicators. The authors employ a unique methodology for spatial modeling using the matrix exponential spatial expansion. Results indicate that there are distinct patterns of crime associated with schools, which suggests that disaggregating schools is important for understanding spatial patterns of crime.

Disentangling the Effects of Violent Victimization, Violent Behavior, and Gun Carrying for Minority Inner-City Youth Living in Extreme Poverty
Richard Spano and John Bolland

Two waves of longitudinal data were used to examine the sequencing between violent victimization, violent behavior, and gun carrying in a high-poverty sample of African American youth. Multivariate logistic regression results indicated that violent victimization T1 and violent behavior T1 increased the likelihood of initiation of gun carrying T2 when examined separately (by 132% and 91%, respectively). However, only violent victimization T1 was a significant predictor of initiation of gun carrying T2 after controlling for violent behavior T1. More nuanced analyses uncovered no significant difference in the likelihood of initiating gun carrying when comparing offensive versus defensive gun carriers. The theoretical and policy implications of these findings are also discussed.

Security at the Expense of Liberty: A Test of Predictions Deriving From the Culture of Control Thesis
Justin T. Pickett, Daniel P. Mears, Eric A. Stewart, and Marc Gertz

In The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society, David Garland linked contemporary crime control policies and welfare reforms to a cultural formation that he termed the “crime complex of late modernity.” According to Garland, once established, the crime complex exerts a contemporaneous effect on public views about both criminal justice and the welfare state, increasing popular support for security measures as well as more restrictive public assistance policies. Although Garland’s thesis has featured prominently in scholarship on crime and punishment, few empirical studies have tested the specific predictions that underlie his arguments. To address this research gap, this study uses public opinion data to assess the extent to which key dimensions of the crime complex are associated with public views about criminal justice policies and welfare reforms that emphasize security and control. The results support several of the theoretical underpinnings of Garland’s thesis. The authors discuss the implications of the findings for theory, research, and policy.

Joint Utility of Event-Dependent and Environmental Crime Analysis Techniques for Violent Crime Forecasting
Joel M. Caplan, Leslie W. Kennedy, and Eric L. Piza

Violent crime incidents occurring in Irvington, New Jersey, in 2007 and 2008 are used to assess the joint analytical capabilities of point pattern analysis, hotspot mapping, near-repeat analysis, and risk terrain modeling. One approach to crime analysis suggests that the best way to predict future crime occurrence is to use past behavior, such as actual incidents or collections of incidents, as indicators of future behavior. An alternative approach is to consider the environment in which crimes occur and identify features of the landscape that would be conducive to crime. Thanks to advances in geographic information system technology and federally funded (free) software applications such as CrimeStat III or the Near Repeat Calculator, these methods have recently been made more accessible to “average” users. This study explores the information products that each method offers for the purposes of place-based violent crime forecasting and resource allocation. Findings help to answer questions about where, when, and why violent crimes occur in a jurisdiction. Ways in which event-dependent and environmental crime analysis techniques can be utilized as complementary instruments in a crime analyst’s tool kit are discussed in detail.

Guns and Fear: A One-Way Street?
Will Hauser and Gary Kleck

Surveys show that more than one half of gun owners report owning their firearm for self-protection. Although research has examined the effect of fear of crime on gun ownership, the issue of reciprocity and temporal order has been largely ignored. Furthermore, the effect of firearm acquisition and relinquishment on fear has not been evaluated empirically. We hypothesize that the relationship between fear and gun ownership is reciprocal. As James Wright and Peter Rossi noted, it may be that “the initially most fearful may arm themselves and then feel psychologically safer because of it.” Using two-wave panel data, we found, as expected, that higher fear among nonowners encourages them to become gun owners, but lower fear among gun owners does not encourage gun relinquishment. We also found that gun acquisition does not reduce fear, but relinquishment increases fear, suggesting the relationship between guns and fear may be asymmetrical.

Schools, Neighborhood Risk Factors, and Crime
Dale Willits, Lisa Broidy, and Kristine Denman

Prior research has identified a link between schools (particularly high schools) and neighborhood crime rates. However, it remains unclear whether the relationship between schools and crime is a reflection of other criminogenic dynamics at the neighborhood level or whether schools influence neighborhood crime patterns independently of other established structural predictors. We address this question by investigating the relationship between schools and serious crime at the block group level while controlling for the potentially criminogenic effects of neighborhood instability and structural disadvantage. We find that, net of other structural correlates, neighborhoods with high schools and middle schools experience more violent, property, and narcotics crimes than those without middle or high schools. Conversely, neighborhoods with elementary schools exhibit less property crime than those not containing elementary schools. These results, which are consistent with prior research and with explanations derived from the routine activities and social disorganization perspectives, suggest some strategies for police deployment and community involvement to control crime.

Critical Criminology 21(1)

Critical Criminology, March 2013: Volume 21, Issue 1

Are We Human? Edgework in Defiance of the Mundane and Measurable
Deborah Landry

Edgework can be a useful heuristic tool in producing counter-statements about Orthodox Criminology, where the measurable has arguably become more important than the meaningful. This paper focuses on the embodied experiential nexus of culture and crime in which criminology is taught, administered, and investigated. The Burkean framework of Dramatism is used to reveal how collective creative productions by students can provide insight into the political context of the contemporary criminology classroom. Through an analysis of instant ethnographies penned by participants of a flash mob I illustrate how the role of autonomy and responsibility are not resources that students readily draw upon to understand themselves in relation to the production of knowledge and social change. These observations support some of the concerns raised by Cultural Criminologist about the rise of administrative criminology. In the spirit of detournement, I argue that one way to facilitate student engagement with knowledge production differently is to invite them to experience moments of embodied transgressions.

Regulating CCTV?: We Can’t Solve Problems by Using the Same Kind of Thinking We Used When We Created Them
Heather May Morgan

This paper considers the lack of a universal CCTV policy across the United Kingdom and Europe and how this apparent omission is being addressed in the context of increased surveillance, and the omnipresence of CCTV in particular. Special attention is paid to the role of academics within the apparently long, drawn-out process of a current move from fragmented to collective regulation. What it seems exists is individual, independent policy that implicates wider legislation. What it seems is desired is a more comprehensive and codified decree. Starting with the issues that underpin CCTV and surveillance in general, this paper acknowledges the opposing arguments that CCTV can be helpful to policing as those that demonstrate how well it can facilitate a means of social control. The paper moves to consider the possibility of a ‘surveillance policy’ applicable and effective for CCTV’s balanced regulation, and discusses the means by which this might be realised, paying special attention to who is involved and to what extent, especially where this involves academic input. Academic input to date is problematized on one hand on account of its arguably narrow scope (source/personnel) and the trends yet ostensible wavering it entails on the other. Therefore, the author’s reservations around the place of academics in the process, especially because they appear to be key to developments, whilst variously demonstrating both influential flippancy and seriousness, lead to the conclusion that there is difficulty with trying to solve the ‘problem’ with the same thinking that created it.

Bourdieu and Foucault: A Conceptual Integration Toward an Empirical Sociology of Prisons
Jennifer A. Schlosser

Although the similarities between them are under analyzed, Pierre Bourdieu’s and Michel Foucault’s theories of culture and power are interrelated in some compelling ways. Outline of a Theory of Practice (1977) and Discipline and Punish (1979) are two of the most influential contributions in post-structural and postmodern theory. Yet, far more attention is paid to Foucault’s contributions in criminology than to Bourdieu’s. This essay brings together the work of these influential theorists to argue for a critical examination of the sociology of prisons. Bourdieu’s concepts of: (1) habitus, (2) ethos, (3) doxa, and (4) the theory of practice are related to Foucault’s ideas about (1) discipline, (2) docile bodies, (3) panopticism, and (4) history of the present by comparing specific examples from the original works. Then, the combination of those primary concepts is used to address specific methodological concerns researchers should consider when doing empirical research in prison.

The Race to Punish in American Schools: Class and Race Predictors of Punitive School-Crime Control
Katherine Irwin, Janet Davidson, Amanda Hall-Sanchez

Despite the general agreement that US schools have become increasingly punitive since the 1980s, researchers are uncertain about what types of schools use tough-on-crime measures. Some assert that punitive control is concentrated in poor, predominantly ethnic minority schools. Governing-through-crime scholars argue that US schools with mostly middle-class and white students are also punitive, but in less harsh ways using soft surveillance techniques. Relying on data from large, stratified samples of middle and secondary US public schools, we found that high rates of ethnic minority enrollment predicted heavy reliance on law enforcement and security personnel. As rates of student poverty increased, use of soft surveillance techniques as well as reporting students to the police significantly increased. Implications for governing-through-crime, racial control, and reproduction of inequalities theories are discussed.

Suburbia’s “Crime Experts”: The Neo-Conservatism of Control Theory and the Ethos of Crime
Guido Giacomo Preparata

This essay tackles the relationship between morality and crime by way of the debate surrounding Travis Hirschi’s double contribution to so-called “control theory,” first as “social bonding theory,” and subsequently as a “general theory” of crime. The assessment conducted herein construes the first version of “control” as an expression of patriotism, and its late formulation, on account of its emphasis on varying individual levels of self-mastery, as an implicit reaffirmation of the inevitability of class division. Over the years, the fixation with “self-control” has become a rubric for the suburban anxieties of an upper-middle class surrounded by expanding (ghetto) poverty and plagued by familial dysfunction and the alienation of its own offspring. In the final analysis, these reflections form the basis for a general reformulation, inspired by the sociology of Thorstein Veblen, of the relationship between class and crime and condign punishment by leveraging the notion of ethos (a common mindset peculiar to each class), and proving thereby that crime is systematically determined by this very mindset, which is the spiritual complement to class formation, rather than by the conventionally classless categories of rational self-interest or idiosyncratic proneness to violence.

Giuliani in Izmir: Restructuring of the Izmir Public Order Police and Criminalization of the Urban Poor
Zeynep Gönen

This paper examines the recent restructuring of the Izmir Public Order Police, launched in 2006 to address the rise in urban crime in Izmir, Turkey. Transforming itself into a professionalized and effective organization against ‘criminals’ and claiming to institute a proactive policing strategy, the Izmir police have expanded their control over the urban space, while specifically targeting the poor segments and populations in the city, and carefully distinguishing them from the ‘respectable’ and ‘innocent’ citizens. The paper details the elements of the new policing in Izmir and demonstrates that it has rested on profiling and criminalization of the ethno-racially differentiated urban poor populations, especially Kurdish migrants. The new policing in Izmir, the paper argues, is not an isolated case but an example of the neoliberal transformations around the globe, where regulation and management of urban poor populations are increasingly relegated to the penal rather than the social state.

Young Adult Offending: Intersectionality of Gender and Race
Kerryn E. Bell

It is an accepted criminological fact that gender and race affect involvement in crime. What has been examined less frequently is the effect of intersectionality of gender and race across the early life course. This research uses Delinquency in a Birth Cohort II: Philadelphia, 1958 to examine the longer term effects on crime of intersectionality during the adolescent and young adult portions of the life course. Findings indicate that intersectionality of gender and race is fundamental for young adults. It is argued that multiracial feminism can best explain why intersectionality must be taken into consideration when looking at offending across the early life course.

Progress or More of the Same? Electronic Monitoring and Parole in the Age of Mass Incarceration
James Kilgore

Often billed as an “alternative to incarceration”, electronic monitoring (EM) is widely trumpeted as a key method of reducing incarceration costs while maintaining public safety. However, little research has been done which closely examines EM in the historical context of mass incarceration and the paradigm of punishment. This article focuses on the use of EM in parole in that broader context. Through research into the legal and policy frameworks for EM as well as via personal interviews with people who have been on EM while on parole, the author concludes that the present EM practice reinforces the dominant punishment paradigm and places major obstacles in the way of the successful re-entry for people returning from prison. He concludes with some concrete recommendations about changes in law, policy and implementation guidelines that would allow EM to operate in an environment more conducive to rehabilitation.

Social Forces 91(3)

Social Forces, March 2013: Volume 91, Issue 3

Stratification

The Time Divide in Cross-National Perspective: The Work Week, Education and Institutions That Matter
Peter Frase, Janet C. Gornick

Prior empirical studies have found that American workers report longer hours than do workers in other highly industrialized countries, and that the highly educated report the longest hours relative to other educational levels. This paper analyzes disparities in working hours by education levels in 17 high- and middle-income countries to assess whether this finding holds cross-nationally, for both men and women. In contrast to many prior studies of working time, we use a measure of weekly rather than annual hours worked, which we argue provides a better window on the discretionary time available to individuals and households. We find that the within-country gradient in average hours by education is not uniform: higher income countries are more likely to show the U.S. pattern, and middle-income countries show the reverse pattern, with the less educated reporting longer hours. We conclude by assessing some possible macrolevel explanations for this variation, including per capita gross domestic product, tax rates, unionization, country-level regulations, earnings inequality, and the regulation of weekly work hours.

All Work and No Pay: Violations of Employment and Labor Laws in Chicago, Los Angeles and New York City
Annette Bernhardt, Michael W. Spiller, Diana Polson

Despite three decades of scholarship on economic restructuring in the United States, employers’ violations of minimum wage, overtime and other workplace laws remain understudied. This article begins to fill the gap by presenting evidence from a large-scale, original worker survey that draws on recent advances in sampling methodology to reach vulnerable workers. Our findings suggest that in America’s three largest cities, violations of employment and labor laws are pervasive across low-wage industries and occupations, affecting a wide range of workers. But while worker characteristics are correlated with violations, job and employer characteristics play the stronger role, including industry, occupation and measures of informality and nonstandard work. We therefore propose a framework in which employers’ noncompliance with labor regulations is one axis of a competitive strategy based on labor cost reduction, contributing to the reorganization of work and production in the 21st century labor market.

Employment and Earnings in High-Tech Ethnic Niches
Jennifer C. Lee

The increase in high-skilled immigrants to the United States coincided with the expansion of the high-technology sector, and now a large share of Asian immigrants concentrate in high-tech industries. Despite much research on the relationship between ethnic concentration and labor market outcomes, the association between ethnic niche employment and earnings within the high-technology sector of the labor market has yet to be examined. This study compares the relationship between employment in ethnic niches and earnings within high- and low-tech industries among Asian immigrants. In low-technology industries, ethnic niches are generally associated with lower earnings compared with non-niches, but in high-technology industries, employment in an ethnic niche is associated with higher earnings. These patterns vary by gender and ethnic group. This association is partly explained by the industries that comprise ethnic niches, as non-Hispanic white immigrants also experience some of the same advantages and disadvantages.

Economic Sociology

Is Deindustrialization Causing High Unemployment in Affluent Countries?: Evidence from 16 OECD Countries, 1970–2003
Christopher Kollmeyer, Florian Pichler

This study assesses the possibility that deindustrialization has been contributing to the persistently high unemployment rates experienced by most affluent countries since the mid-1970s. Combining insights from Lilien’s (1982) “sectoral shift” thesis and the literature on deindustrialization, the authors assert that the decades-long contraction of the manufacturing sector has been a significant source of high unemployment in affluent countries. This assertion is tested against the literature’s existing explanations for unemployment using data from 16 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries over a recent 34-year period. Two-way, fixed-effects regression models suggest that deindustrialization has not only contributed to unemployment in these countries, but that it has been one of the more important causes of this phenomenon. These findings are robust across various model specifications and estimating strategies. The study concludes by suggesting further ways to investigate this important topic.

Eat, Drink, Man, Woman: Gender, Income Share and Household Expenditure in South Africa
Elizabeth Gummerson, Daniel Schneider

This study examines how gendered household bargaining occurs in non-nuclear family households. We employ two South African data sets and use linear regression and household fixed effects to investigate the relationship between women’s income shares and household expenditures. In married couple households, when women garner larger shares of income, spending on food is higher and spending on alcohol is lower. However, the relationship between women’s income shares and expenditures attenuates with additional adults in the household. We find that in households with multiple adults, men and women bargain in gender groups to realize gendered preferences for expenditures. Future work should consider household members outside of the married dyad when modeling bargaining processes.

Political Sociology

Who Gets Designated a Terrorist and Why?
Colin J. Beck, Emily Miner

This study examines formal terrorism designations by governments through the lens of organization studies research on categorization processes. It is argued that designations hinge on markers from the organizational profile of a militant group. Using cross-sectional data on militant organizations and designations by the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union, multivariate analyses find that listed organizations do not merely have a track record of violence against a government’s citizens, but also tend to target aviation and have an Islamic ideological basis. Mixed support for geopolitical factors is found, but imageries of hegemonic interest are not confirmed. Secondary analyses suggest that newer images of terrorism may replace older ones in classification schemes but further research is needed to know whether this is because of policy adaptation or the effect of spectacular events like September 11th.

Discursive Obstruction and Elite Opposition to Environmental Activism in the Czech Republic
Thomas E. Shriver, Alison E. Adams, Sherry Cable

Extant research on social movements has highlighted activists’ discursive tactics to challenge the state, yet little analytical attention focuses on elite efforts to dominate the discourse arena through the deployment of oppositional frames. This paper analyzes elite oppositional framing surrounding the placement of a highway bypass in the Czech Republic. Our research examines how democratic states deploy oppositional frames and enlist elite countermovement support for their efforts to obstruct challenges. Using a range of data sources, we delineate the mechanisms used by these elite actors to vilify and stigmatize environmental activists, paving the way for more violent forms of public harassment. The concept we initiate, discursive obstruction, adds the critical dimension of power relations to analyses of both framing processes and discursive opportunity structures. We conclude by discussing the implications of our results for social movement research.

Civic and Political Participation

Union Membership and Political Participation in the United States
Jasmine Kerrissey, Evan Schofer

This article examines the effect of union membership on civic and political participation in the late 20th century in the United States. We discuss why and how unions seek to mobilize their members and where mobilization is channeled. We argue that union membership affects electoral and collective action outcomes and will be larger for low socioeconomic status individuals. Statistical analyses find that union membership is associated with many forms of political activity, including voting, protesting, association membership, and others. Union effects are larger for less educated individuals, a group that otherwise exhibits low levels of participation. Union membership is not associated with outcomes distant from union political agendas, such as general volunteering and charitable giving, suggesting that unions generate political capital rather than generalized social capital.

Are Homeowners Better Citizens?: Homeownership and Community Participation in the United States
Brian J. McCabe

Proponents of homeownership policies often argue that homeowners participate more actively in community life and civic affairs than renters. Although research suggests higher rates of participation among homeowners, the underlying mechanisms driving this relationship are unclear. On one hand, the locally dependent financial investments homeowners make in their communities could lead them to participate as a means of protecting their principal investment. On the other hand, home-ownership could stimulate participation by increasing residential stability, enabling households to overcome the institutional barriers and to develop the social networks that drive community participation. The failure to differentiate between these pathways muddies our understanding of how homeownership matters for community life. Drawing on the November supplement of the Current Population Survey, this article investigates whether homeowners are more likely to vote in local elections, participate in neighborhood groups and join civic associations. A falsification strategy compares these outcomes to a set of placebo measures to address concerns that the findings are driven by selection. The research identifies an independent role for residential stability and locally dependent financial investments in explaining why homeowners participate in their communities.

Race

W. E. B. Du Bois: Reform, Will, and the Veil
Lynn England, W. Keith Warner

While W. E. B. Du Bois is widely recognized for his contributions to the sociology of race, his contributions to the foundations of sociology are largely ignored. His sociology is based on African American reformism, a version of pragmatism, and a contingent historicism. The basic view of sociology is one that emphasizes the role of chance and will as opposed to law and certainty. He called sociology “the science of free will.” His view of society is one that focuses on the historical contingency of the structure of society, the malleability of society, and the fundamental feature of American society: a society built around the “color line” or “veil.” This view of society is not merely an interesting historical anomaly, but has significant implications for the understanding of and development of contemporary sociology.

Public Sector Transformation, Racial Inequality and Downward Occupational Mobility
George Wilson, Vincent J. Roscigno, Matt L. Huffman

“New governance” reforms entailing shifts toward privatization have permeated the public sector over the last decade, possibly affecting workplace-based attainments. We examine the consequences of this reform for African American men, who during the civil rights era reached relative parity with whites. We analyze race-based inequities on one socioeconomic outcome–downward occupational mobility–among professionals, managers and executives. Results from a Panel Study of Income Dynamics sample indicate that the “new government business model,” characterized by increased employer discretion has disproportionately disadvantaged African Americans. Narrower racial gaps in the incidence, determinants and timing of downward mobility found in the public sector, relative to the private sector, during the pre-reform period (1985–90) eroded during the reform period (2002–07) because of widening racial gaps in the public sector.

Health

Childhood (Mis)fortune, Educational Attainment, and Adult Health: Contingent Benefits of a College Degree?
Markus H. Schafer, Lindsay R. Wilkinson, Kenneth F. Ferraro

College-educated adults are healthier than other people in the United States, but selection bias complicates our understanding of how education influences health. This article focuses on the possibility that the health benefits of college may vary according to childhood (mis)fortune and people’s propensity to attain a college degree in the first place. Several perspectives from life course sociology offer competing hypotheses as to whether the most or the least advantaged see the greatest return of a college education. The authors use a national survey of middle-age American adults to assess risk of two cardiovascular health problems and mortality. Results from propensity score and hierarchical regression analysis indicate that the protective effect of college attainment is indeed heterogeneous. Further, the greatest returns are among those least likely to experience this life course transition (i.e., compensatory leveling). Explanations for this selection effect are offered, along with several directions for future research on the health benefits of completing college.

The Social Consequences of Postcommunist Structural Change: An Analysis of Suicide Trends in Eastern Europe
Yuka Minagawa

Guided by Durkheim’s classic theory of suicide, this article examines suicide trends and determinants in Eastern European countries for the period of 1989–2006, with particular attention given to the association between postcommunist social change and suicide mortality. I find that countries characterized by more drastic structural change experienced increased suicide rates during the period immediately after the fall of communism. Yet continued reforms were associated with reductions in suicide in more recent years. Further, I observe large gender differences in suicide patterns. Male suicide rates are consistently and strongly related to structural change, while female rates remain almost unaffected. By directly and statistically substantiating the relationship between postcommunist transition and suicide death rates, this study provides a more thorough and textured account of the social consequences of the fall of communism in Eastern Europe.

Experimental Research

Do Descriptive Norms Solve Social Dilemmas?: Conformity and Contributions in Collective Action Groups
Kyle Irwin, Brent Simpson

Collective action researchers have focused on injunctive norms that specify approved behavior as a panacea for collective action problems. We investigate whether descriptive norms (similar behavior) can also solve these problems. We argue that descriptive norms generate social identification, which then sustains conformity to expectations. Consequently, descriptive norms can characterize both cooperation and noncooperation, such that cooperative norms sustain successful collective action while noncooperative norms result in collective action failure. Results from two laboratory experiments supported the hypothesis that descriptive norms can sustain collective action success and failure. Further, while normative non-cooperation eroded cooperation for high contributors, normative cooperation had little affect on low contributors. This asymmetry points to a paradox: because they promote group identification, noncooperative descriptive norms can be self-sustaining, with deleterious outcomes.

Status, Numbers and Influence
David Melamed, Scott V. Savage

We develop a theoretical model of social influence in n-person groups. We argue that disagreement between group members introduces uncertainty into the social situation, and this uncertainty motivates people to use status characteristics to evaluate the merits of a particular opinion. Our model takes the numerical distribution of opinions and the relative status of the opinion holders as factors that contribute to social influence, such that the effect of status becomes stronger as uncertainty about a particular position rises due to the distribution of opinions in the group. Our theoretical model implies three hypotheses, which we empirically evaluate with data from a controlled laboratory experiment. The results support the theoretical model. We conclude with limitations, implications and several directions for future research.

Criminology 51(1)

Criminology, February 2013: Volume 51, Issue 1

The Place Of Context: A Theory And Strategy For Criminology's Hard Problems
Robert J. Sampson

I present a theoretical framework and analytic strategy for the study of place as a fundamental context in criminology, with a focus on neighborhood effects. My approach builds on the past 15 years of research from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods and from a recent book unifying the results. I argue that “ecometrics” can be applied at multiple scales, and I elaborate core principles and guiding hypotheses for five problems: 1) legacies of inequality and developmental neighborhood effects; 2) race, crime, and the new diversity; 3) cognition and context, above all the social meaning of disorder; 4) the measurement and sources of collective efficacy in a cosmopolitan world; and 5) higher order structures beyond the neighborhood that arise in complex urban systems. Although conceptually distinct, these hard problems are interdependent and ultimately linked to a frontier in criminology: contextual causality.

Shaping Citizen Perceptions of Police Legitimacy: A Randomized Field Trial of Procedural Justice
Lorraine Mazerolle, Emma Antrobus, Sarah Bennett and Tom R. Tyler

Exploring the relationship between procedural justice and citizen perceptions of police is a well-trodden pathway. Studies show that when citizens perceive the police acting in a procedurally just manner—by treating people with dignity and respect, and by being fair and neutral in their actions—they view the police as legitimate and are more likely to comply with directives and cooperate with police. Our article examines both the direct and the indirect outcomes of procedural justice policing, tested under randomized field trial conditions. We assess whether police can enhance perceptions of legitimacy during a short, police-initiated and procedurally just traffic encounter and how this single encounter shapes general views of police. Our results show significant differences between the control and experimental conditions: Procedurally just traffic encounters with police (experimental condition) shape citizen views about the actual encounter directly and general orientations toward the police relative to business-as-usual traffic stops in the control group. The theorized model is supported by our research, demonstrating that the police have much to gain from acting fairly during even short encounters with citizens.

Foot Patrol in Violent Crime Hot Spots: The Longitudinal Impact of Deterrence and Posttreatment Effects of Displacement
Evan T. Sorg, Cory P. Haberman, Jerry H. Ratcliffe and Elizabeth R. Groff

This study revisited the Philadelphia Foot Patrol Experiment and explored the longitudinal deterrent effects of foot patrol in violent crime hot spots using Sherman's (1990) concepts of initial and residual deterrence decay as a theoretical framework. It also explored whether the displacement uncovered during the initial evaluation decayed after the experiment ended. Multilevel growth curve models revealed that beats staffed for 22 weeks had a decaying deterrent effect during the course of the experiment, whereas those staffed for 12 weeks did not. None of the beats had residual deterrence effects relative to the control areas. The displacement uncovered had decayed during the 3 months after the experiment, and it is theoretically plausible that previously displaced offenders returned to the original target areas causing inverse displacement. These results are discussed in the context of Durlauf and Nagin's (2011) recent proposal that prison sentences should be shortened, mandatory minimum statutes repealed, and the cost savings generated by these policy changes shifted into policing budgets to convey more effectively the certainty of detection. It is concluded that if Durlauf and Nagin's proposal is to succeed, then more holistic policing strategies would likely be necessary. Foot patrol as a specific policing tactic seems to fit nicely into a variety of policing paradigms, and suggestions for incorporating them to move beyond strictly enforcement-based responses are presented.

Viewing Things Differently: The Dimensions of Public Perceptions of Police Legitimacy
Justice Tankebe

Legitimacy (or “the right to exercise power”) is now an established concept in criminological analysis, especially in relation to policing. Substantial empirical evidence shows the importance of legitimacy in securing law-abiding behavior and cooperation from citizens. Yet adequate theorization has lagged behind empirical evidence, and there has been a conflation of legitimacy with the cognate concepts of “trust” and of “obligation to obey the law.” By drawing on the work of Beetham (1991) and others (e.g., Bottoms and Tankebe, ), this study tests the hypothesis that the contents of the multiple dimensions of police legitimacy comprise procedural fairness, distributive fairness, lawfulness, and effectiveness. The study also investigates the relative influence of legitimacy and feelings of obligation on citizens’ willingness to cooperate with the police. Using data from London, the results substantiate the hypothesized dimensions of police legitimacy. In addition, legitimacy was found to exhibit both a direct influence on cooperation that is independent of obligation and an indirect influence that flows through people's felt obligations to obey the police. Implications for future research are discussed.

Does Imprisonment Alter The Life Course? Evidence On Crime And Employment From A Natural Experiment
Charles E. Loeffler

Ex-prisoners consistently manifest high rates of criminal recidivism and unemployment. Existing explanations for these poor outcomes emphasize the stigmatizing effects of imprisonment on prisoners seeking postrelease employment as well as the deleterious effects of imprisonment on prisoners’ attitudes and capabilities. However, these explanations must be distinguished from selection effects in the criminal sentencing process, which also could explain some or all of these poor outcomes. To distinguish between criminogenic and selection explanations for ex-prisoners’ postrelease experience, I analyze data from a natural experiment in which criminal cases were assigned randomly to judges with sizable sentencing disparities. Using these exogenous sentencing disparities, I produce unbiased estimates of the causal effects of imprisonment on the life course. The results of this analysis suggest that selection effects could be sufficiently large to account for prisoners’ poor postrelease outcomes because judges with large sentencing disparities in their use of imprisonment had similarly high caseload unemployment and criminal recidivism rates.

The Elusive Relationship Between Community Organizations And Crime: An Assessment Across Disadvantaged Areas Of The South Bronx
Lee Ann Slocum, Andres F. Rengifo, Tiffany Choi And Christopher R. Herrmann

Several theoretical perspectives posit a negative association between the extent of a neighborhood's organizational infrastructure and crime; yet, empirical support for this proposition has been limited in that researchers generally examine only a few types of organizations or combine them into one aggregate measure. Studies with few measures may omit organizations that are effective at reducing crime, whereas those using aggregate measures obscure differences across organizations in their ability to control crime. Using data from 74 block groups in the South Bronx, NY, this research seeks to specify more clearly the relationship between organizations and crime in a disadvantaged urban environment. We examine the relationship among nine different types of organizations and violent and property crime controlling for prior crime, land use, and area sociodemographic characteristics. Consistent with theories that highlight the importance of organizations for establishing ties outside the neighborhood, we find that block groups with more organizations that bridge to the larger community experience a decrease in crime. Property crime also is reduced in block groups with more organizations that promote the well-being of families and children. We find that schools are associated with an increase in property crime, whereas the effects of other organizations are context specific and vary based on neighborhood racial composition, commercial land use, and disadvantage.