The present historical moment may seem a particularly inopportune time to review Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam's latest exploration of civic decline in America. After all, the outpouring of volunteerism, solidarity, patriotism, and self-sacrifice displayed by Americans in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks appears to fly in the face of Putnam's central argument: that \"social capital\" -defined as \"social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them\" (p. 19)'has declined to dangerously low levels in America over the last three decades. However, Putnam is not fazed in the least by the recent effusion of solidarity. Quite the contrary, he sees in it the potential to \"reverse what has been a 30to 40-year steady decline in most measures of connectedness or community.\"' As an example of how the current \"war on terrorism\" could generate a durable civic renewal, Putnam points to the burst in civic practices that occurred during and after World War II, which he says \"permanently marked\" the generation that lived through it and had a \"terrific effect on American public life over the last half-century.\" 3 If Americans can follow this example and channel their current civic

Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community

A Treatise on the Family. G. S. Becker. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 1981. Gary Becker is one of the most famous and influential economists of the second half of the 20th century, a fervent contributor to and expounder of the University of Chicago free-market philosophy, and winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in economics. Although any book with the word "treatise" in its title is clearly intended to have an impact, one coming from someone as brilliant and controversial as Becker certainly had such a lofty goal. It has received many article-length reviews in several disciplines (Ben-Porath, 1982; Bergmann, 1995; Foster, 1993; Hannan, 1982), which is one measure of its scholarly importance, and yet its impact is, I think, less than it may have initially appeared, especially for scholars with substantive interests in the family. This book is, its title notwithstanding, more about economics and the economic approach to behavior than about the family. In the first sentence of the preface, Becker writes "In this book, I develop an economic or rational choice approach to the family." Lest anyone accuse him of focusing on traditional (i.e., material) economics topics, such as family income, poverty, and labor supply, he immediately emphasizes that those topics are not his focus. "My intent is more ambitious: to analyze marriage, births, divorce, division of labor in households, prestige, and other non-material behavior with the tools and framework developed for material behavior." Indeed, the book includes chapters on many of these issues. One chapter examines the principles of the efficient division of labor in households, three analyze marriage and divorce, three analyze various child-related issues (fertility and intergenerational mobility), and others focus on broader family issues, such as intrafamily resource allocation. His analysis is not, he believes, constrained by time or place. His intention is "to present a comprehensive analysis that is applicable, at least in part, to families in the past as well as the present, in primitive as well as modern societies, and in Eastern as well as Western cultures." His tone is profoundly conservative and utterly skeptical of any constructive role for government programs. There is a clear sense of how much better things were in the old days of a genderbased division of labor and low market-work rates for married women. Indeed, Becker is ready and able to show in Chapter 2 that such a state of affairs was efficient and induced not by market or societal discrimination (although he allows that it might exist) but by small underlying household productivity differences that arise primarily from what he refers to as "complementarities" between caring for young children while carrying another to term. Most family scholars would probably find that an unconvincingly simple explanation for a profound and complex phenomenon. What, then, is the salient contribution of Treatise on the Family? It is not literally the idea that economics could be applied to the nonmarket sector and to family life because Becker had already established that with considerable success and influence. At its core, microeconomics is simple, characterized by a belief in the importance of prices and markets, the role of self-interested or rational behavior, and, somewhat less centrally, the stability of preferences. It was Becker's singular and invaluable contribution to appreciate that the behaviors potentially amenable to the economic approach were not limited to phenomenon with explicit monetary prices and formal markets. Indeed, during the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, he did undeniably important and pioneering work extending the domain of economics to such topics as labor market discrimination, fertility, crime, human capital, household production, and the allocation of time. Nor is Becker's contribution the detailed analyses themselves. Many of them are, frankly, odd, idiosyncratic, and off-putting. …

A Treatise on the Family

This 1966 paperback edition of a publication which first appeared in 1963 has by now been widely reviewed as a worthy contribution to the sociological study of deviant behavior. Its current appearance as a paperback is a testimonial both to the quality of the work and to the prominence of deviant behavior in this generation. In general the author places deviance in perspective, identifies types of deviant behavior, considers the role of rule makers and enforcers, and some of the problems in studying deviance. In addition, he develops a sequential model of deviance relying on the concept of career, a concept originally developed in studies of occupations. In his study of a particular kind of deviance, the use of marihuana, the author posits and tests systematically an hypothesis about the genesis of marihuana use for pleasure. The hypothesis traces the sequence of changes in individual attitude

Outsiders Studies in the Sociology of Deviance.

A sweeping examination of the core issues of sexual politics, bell hook's new book Feminist Theory: from margin to center argues that the contemporary feminist movement must establish a new direction for the 1980s. Continuing the debates surrounding her controversial first book, Ain't I A Woman, bell hooks suggests that feminists have not succeeded in creating a mass movem A sweeping examination of the core issues of sexual politics, bell hook's new book Feminist Theory: from margin to center argues that the contemporary feminist movement must establish a new direction for the 1980s. Continuing the debates surrounding her controversial first book, Ain't I A Woman, bell hooks suggests that feminists have not succeeded in creating a mass movement against sexist oppression because the very foundation of women's liberation has, until now, not accounted for the complexity and diversity of female experience.

/pdf/feminist-theory-from-margin-to-center-2g1w0whgub.pdf

Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center

Preface (1999) Preface (1990) 1. Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire I. 'Women' as the Subject of Feminism II. The Compulsory Order of Sex/Gender/Desire III. Gender: The Circular Ruins of Contemporary Debate IV. Theorizing the Binary, the Unitary and Beyond V. Identity, Sex and the Metaphysics of Substance VI. Language, Power and the Strategies of Displacement 2. Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and the Production of the Heterosexual Matrix I. Structuralism's Critical Exchange II. Lacan, Riviere, and the Strategies of Masquerade III. Freud and the Melancholia of Gender IV. Gender Complexity and the Limits of Identification V. Reformulating Prohibition as Power 3. Subversive Bodily Acts I. The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva II. Foucault, Herculine, and the Politics of Sexual Discontinuity III. Monique Wittig - Bodily Disintegration and Fictive Sex IV. Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions Conclusion - From Parody to Politics

Postmodern Subjects, Postmodern BodiesThinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary WestYearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural PoliticsGender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

Develop the concept of differential institutional engagement and test its ability to explain discrepant findings regarding the relationship between the age structure and homicide rates across ecological studies of crime. We hypothesize that differential degrees of institutional engagement—youths with ties to mainstream social institutions such as school, work or the military on one end of the spectrum and youths without such bonds on the other end—account for the direction of the relationship between homicide rates and age structure (high crime prone ages, such as 15–29). Cross sectional, Ordinary Least Squares regression analyses using robust standard errors are conducted using large samples of cities characterized by varying degrees of youths’ differential institutional engagement for the years 1980, 1990 and 2000. The concept is operationalized with the percent of the population enrolled in college and the percent of 16–19 year olds who are simultaneously not enrolled in school, not in the labor market (not in the labor force or unemployed), and not in the military. Consistent and invariant results emerged. Positive effects of age structure on homicide rates are found in cities that have high percentages of disengaged youth and negative effects are found among cities characterized with high percentages of youth participating in mainstream social institutions. This conceptualization of differential institutional engagement explains the discrepant findings in prior studies, and the findings demonstrate the influence of these contextual effects and the nature of the age structure-crime relationship.

The Age Structure-Crime Rate Relationship: Solving a Long-Standing Puzzle

Racial threat theory was developed as a way to explain how population composition influences discriminatory social control practices and has become one of the most acknowledged frameworks for explaining racial disparity in criminal justice outcomes. This paper provides a thorough review of racial threat theory and empirical assessments of the theory and demonstrates that while scholars often cite inconsistent support for the theory, empirical discrepancies may be due to insufficient attention to the conceptual complexity of racial threat. I organize and present the following review around 4 forms of state-sanctioned control mechanisms: police expenditures, arrests, sentencing, and capital punishment. Arguing that the pervasiveness of racialization in state controls warrants continued inquiry, I provide suggestions for future scholarship that will help us develop enhanced understanding of how racial threat may be operating.

/pdf/racial-threat-theory-assessing-the-evidence-requesting-1cvn8vghy6.pdf

Racial Threat Theory: Assessing the Evidence, Requesting Redesign

https://libres.uncg.edu/ir/uncg/f/C_Dollar_Observations_2011.pdf

Observations of reintegrative shaming in a mental health court.

Sociologists have long-raised concern about disparate treatment in the justice system. Focal concerns have become the dominant perspective in explaining these disparities in legal processing decisions. Despite the growth of problem-solving courts, little research has examined how this perspective operates in nontraditional court settings. This article used a mixed-method approach to examine focal concerns in a mental health court (MHC).
Observational findings indicate that gender and length of time in court influence the court's contextualization of noncompliance. While discussions of race were absent in observational data, competing-risk survival analysis finds that gender and race interact to predict MHC termination.

Examining Mental Health Court Completion: A Focal Concerns Perspective

Sociologists have long-raised concern about disparate treatment in the justice system. Focal concerns have become the dominant perspective in explaining these disparities in legal processing decisions. Despite the growth of problem-solving courts, little research has examined how this perspective operates in nontraditional court settings. This article used a mixed-method approach to examine focal concerns in a mental health court (MHC). Observational findings indicate that gender and length of time in court influence the court's contextualization of noncompliance. While discussions of race were absent in observational data, competing-risk survival analysis finds that gender and race interact to predict MHC termination.

/pdf/examining-mental-health-court-completion-a-focal-concerns-5dycd8neoo.pdf

Cindy Brooks Dollar

Papers

The Age Structure-Crime Rate Relationship: Solving a Long-Standing Puzzle

Racial Threat Theory: Assessing the Evidence, Requesting Redesign

Observations of reintegrative shaming in a mental health court.

Examining Mental Health Court Completion: A Focal Concerns Perspective

Examining Mental Health Court Completion: A Focal Concerns Perspective