Culture influences action not by providing the ultimate values toward which action is oriented, but by shaping a repertoire or "tool kit" of habits, skills, and styles from which people construct "strategies of action." Two models of cultural influence are developed, for settled and unsettled cultural periods. In settled periods, culture independently influences action, but only by providing resources from which people can construct diverse lines of action. In unsettled cultural periods, explicit ideologies directly govern action, but structural opportunities for action determine which among competing ideologies survive in the long run. This alternative view of culture offers new opportunities for systematic, differentiated arguments about culture's causal role in shaping action. The reigning model used to understand culture's effects on action is fundamentally misleading. It assumes that culture shapes action by supplying ultimate ends or values toward which action is directed, thus making values the central causal element of culture. This paper analyzes the conceptual difficulties into which this traditional view of culture leads and offers an alternative model. Among sociologists and anthropologists, debate has raged for several academic generations over defining the term "culture." Since the seminal work of Clifford Geertz (1973a), the older definition of culture as the entire way of life of a people, including their technology and material artifacts, or that (associated with the name of Ward Goodenough) as everything one would need to know to become a functioning member of a society, have been displaced in favor of defining culture as the publicly available symbolic forms through which people experience and express meaning (see Keesing, 1974). For purposes of this paper, culture consists of such symbolic vehicles of meaning, including beliefs, ritual practices, art forms, and ceremonies, as well as informal cultural practices such as language, gossip, stories, and rituals of daily life. These symbolic forms are the means through which "social processes of sharing modes of behavior and outlook within [a] community" (Hannerz, 1969:184) take place.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2095521.pdf

Culture in action: symbols and strategies*

The Logic of Violence in Civil War: List of Tables and Figures

Previous empirical studies have typically uncovered little evidence that police reduce crime. One problem with those studies is a failure to adequately deal with the simultaneity between police and crime: while police may or may not reduce crime, there is little doubt that expenditures on police forces are an increasing function of the crime rate. In this study, the timing of mayoral and gubernatorial elections is used to identify the effect of police on crime. This paper first demonstrates that increases in the size of police forces disproportionately occur in mayoral and gubernatorial election years, a relationship that had previously gone undocumented. After controlling for changes in government spending on other social programs, there is little reason to think that elections will be otherwise correlated with crime, making elections ideal instruments. Using a panel of large U.S. cities from 1970-1992, police are shown to reduce crime for six of the seven crime categories examined. Each additional police officer is estimated to eliminate eight to ten serious crimes. Existing estimates of the costs of crime suggest that the social benefit of reduced crime is approximately $100,000 per officer per year, implying that the current number of police is below the optimal level.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/nber_w4991.pdf?abstractid=226589&mirid=1

Using Electoral Cycles in Police Hiring to Estimate the Effect of Police on Crime

Geographic research on parks has been wide-ranging but has seldom examined how and why people use parks, leaving these questions to leisure science, which privileges socio-demographic variables over urban socio-spatial explanations (eg, historical, political-economic, and location factors). This article examines recent geographic perspectives on park use, drawing upon environmental justice, cultural landscape, and political ecology paradigms to redirect our attention from park users to a more critical appreciation of the historical, socio-ecological, and political-economic processes that operate through, and in turn shape, park spaces and park-going behaviors. We challenge partial, user-orientated approaches and suggest new directions for geographic research on parks.

/pdf/nature-race-and-parks-past-research-and-future-directions-4gjdcf63c8.pdf

Nature, race, and parks: past research and future directions for geographic research

The boundaries of the self and the unhealthy other: reflections on health, culture and AIDS.

Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-1920.

Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in the social history of crime an-long a variety of disciplines. This book examines the rapid spread of uniformed police forces throughout late nineteenth-century urban America. It suggests that, initially, the new kind of police in industrial cities served primarily as agents of class control, dispensing and administering welfare services as an unintentioned consequence of their uniformed presence on the streets. This narrowed role hampered their ability to control crime, and, as modern social services developed and the police came increasingly to concentrate on crime control, they acquired a functional speciality at which they had never been particularly successful.

Police in Urban America, 1860–1920

Cops and Bobbies: Police Authority in New York and London, 1830-1870.

The local state

Scholars from North America and Europe show that, however violent some large cities may be now, both rural and urban communities in Sweden, Holland, England, and other countries were far more violent during the late Middle Ages. The book also challenges a number of other historical-sociological theories, among them that contemporary organized crime is new, and addresses continuing debate about the meaning and usefulness of crime statistics.

Eric H. Monkkonen

Papers

Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-1920.

Police in Urban America, 1860–1920

Cops and Bobbies: Police Authority in New York and London, 1830-1870.

The local state

The Civilization of Crime: Violence in Town and Country since the Middle Ages