After virtue, a study in moral theory

Criminologists agree that the gender gap in crime is universal: Women are always and everywhere less likely than men to commit criminal acts. The experts disagree, however, on a number of key issues: Is the gender gap stable or variant over time and across space? If there is variance, how may it best be explained? Are the causes of female crime distinct from or similar to those of male crime? Can traditional sociological theories of crime explain female crime and the gender gap in crime? Do gender-neutral or gender-specific theories hold the most explanatory promise? In this chapter we first examine patterns of female offending and the gender gap. Second, we review the “gender equality hypothesis” as well as several recent developments in theorizing about gender differences in crime. Third, we expand on a gendered paradigm for explaining female crime first sketched elsewhere. We conclude with recommendations for future work.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2083439.pdf

Gender and crime: Toward a gendered theory of female offending.

This study applies Agnew's general strain theory (GST) to two fundamental questions about gender and crime: (1) How can we explain the higher rate of crime among males? (2) How can we explain why females engage in crime? With respect to the first question, the authors suggest that gender differences in types of strain and the reaction to strain help one understand the gender gap in criminal behavior. With respect to the second question, it is argued that several types of strain may lead to female crime under the proper circumstances. In this area, GST has much in common with numerous accounts that explain female crime in terms of oppression.

Gender and Crime: A General Strain Theory Perspective

After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory

a summary of the subject of the narrative); the orientation (time, place, situation, participants); the complicating action (what actually happened); the evaluation (the meaning and significance of the action); the resolution (what finally happened); and lastly the coda, which returns the perspective to the present. Labov and Waletzky (1997) argued that these structures are typically used by the teller to construct a story out of past experiences, and to make sense of those experiences both for himor herself and for the audience.Although not all narratives necessarily include all of these six elements, at a minimum a narrative must include the complicating action, i.e. a temporal component, while it is the evaluation that has been highlighted as crucial for establishing the point or the meaning of the story. A number of authors have argued that the evaluation is socially the most important component of the narrative (Linde, 1993; Polanyi, 1985). In a conversational setting, for example, the narrator must guard against the ‘so what?’ response to a story. This is accomplished by providing an adequate evaluation of the events that have been recounted (Polanyi, 1985). It is the evaluation that conveys to an audience how they are to understand the meaning of the events that constitute the narrative, and simultaneously indicates what type of response is required.The evaluation should not therefore be understood as simply provided by the narrator; rather the achievement of agreement on the evaluation of a narrative is the product of a process of negotiation. While the speaker can be understood as responsible for producing a narrative with an acceptable evaluation, the addressee or audience must collaborate by demonstrating that the evaluation has been understood. Labov and Waletzky (1997) have suggested that the evaluation is typically placed between the complicating action and the resolution, and in this position creates an element of tension and suspense in a well-formed narrative, as the audience wait to hear ‘what happened next’. However, subsequent writers have underlined that the structural analysis of narrative provided by Labov and Waletzky is in many respects too rigid. The evaluation may in some cases be explicit, and may be located prior to the resolution, but the expression of the evaluation within a narrative need not take this form. A narrator may communicate evaluative elements more implicitly.As Tannen (1980) has argued, not only do narratives make explicit evaluations of actions and characters but judgements can be communicated in more subtle ways as well. She suggested that lexical choice (i.e. the use of specific words) within the other components of the narrative is a clear example of this type of implicit evaluation. In addition, it could be argued that the very telling of a narrative represents an evaluative act. It suggests that certain events and decisions are reportable by virtue of their significance or their unusual or unexpected qualities. Obvious examples here would be stories about the death of a parent, or the birth of a child.Within modern culture, these events are understood to have an emotional significance for the individual that makes them worthy of recounting.Alternatively many conversational stories are centred upon a coincidence, which while relatively trivial is seen as sufficiently unexpected to make it interesting to relate. NARRATIVE AND NEW DEVELOPMENTS IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES 9 Elliot-01.qxd 4/8/2005 11:57 AM Page 9

Using Narrative in Social Research

The Girls in the Gang.

The articles in this symposium critically reflect upon the methodological strengths and limitations of several diverse yet important works of qualitative sociology, broadly defined:Michael Schwalbe’sUnlocking the IronCage: TheMen’s Movement, Gender Politics, and American Culture (1996); Paul Willis’s Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs (1977); Perry Anderson’s Lineages of the Absolutist State (1974); Doug McAdam’s Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency, 1930–1970 (1982); and Julian McAllisterGroves’sHearts andMinds: TheControversyOverLaboratoryAnimals (1997). Among the questions addressed in this symposium are the following: Are the general theoretical or empirical claims of these books persuasive, and are they well supported by the data that are presented by the authors? Are these books persuasive because they adhere to certain methodological rules or standards, if only implicitly? And what are those rules or standards? Or are these books powerful or persuasive despite, or even because of, their lack of methodological rigor, conventionally understood? And would these books have been improved appreciably had they been more methodologically self-conscious or differently designed? This symposium thus addresses the concern—shared by quantitative social scientists, general readers, and not a few qualitative sociologists themselves—that qualitative sociology lacks methodological rigor and, accordingly, truly reliable or generalizable findings. Some social scientists view qualitative sociology, in no uncertain terms, as methodologically and empirically “soft” and highly subjective, if not completely solipsistic—a characterization that a few qualitative researchers have ironically embraced.At best, according to certain critics, qualitative sociology might generate provisional hypotheses that more rigorous social scientists can then go forth to test and revise, but it cannot itself glean much solid understanding of the social world. We believe that this view of qualitative sociology is badly mistaken, and the essays in this symposium collectively refute it. Qualitative sociology is not— or need not be—merely literature or navel-gazing, and its findings have proven

Introduction: The Methodological Strengths and Dilemmas of Qualitative Sociology

In The Tender Cut, Patricia Adler and Peter Adler present the largest, to date, qualitative sociologically-grounded investigation of the lived experience of a non-clinical population of people who self-injure. Drawing on data from over 135 in-depth life history interviews, the authors go beyond the interpersonal and psychological dynamics behind the ‘‘self-injurer’’ to examine the larger world that situates, provokes, and even reinforces the need to engage in self-injury for people who clearly are not a homogeneous population. The social transformation of the practice of self-injury as it has increased in social acceptability and moved beyond the act of an isolated individual to that of a person embedded in a ‘‘real’’ or cyber community (where they note it is still possible for a self-injurer to feel excluded) is documented, as well as the self-presentation of self-injurers on the internet (e.g., the roles different people take in the groups) and the relationships between people who self-injure. The patience, empathy, and understanding of the authors is also evident as they neither demonize the act, nor stigmatize or alienate those who shared their stories; rather they expose in a dignified manner the turmoil, angst, fear, impulsivity, ritual, stress and pain, among other factors, behind the act of self-injury. The strengths of the book are multifold. Adler and Adler present self-injury (broadly defined to include behaviors such as cutting, burning, hair pulling, picking, and bone breaking) as a way some people cope with the challenges, stresses, and difficulties they experience in life. They explain that there is no typical self-injurer or typical start to the injurious career; the only commonality among many self-injurers is the experience of stress. They note the role of social living and personal experiences or exposure in the instigation of the self-injurious career. The authors also take into account how selfinjuring has moved from a psychological ‘‘disorder’’ into a learned social trend— a ‘‘sociological occurrence’’ (p. 3) situated in subcultures and, even at times, resembling a ‘‘fad.’’ It is established, via sampling a ‘‘sociological population’’ of self-injurers that ranged from youths to persons in their mid-fifties, that self-injury is more common among the population than the authors initially anticipated. They noted similarities and differences between the struggles of self-injurers across all ages and described the increased alienation felt by older selfcutters, as the normative attitude suggests these older self-cutters should have ‘‘grown out of it’’ (p. 34). Theoretically, the manuscript adds support to the feminist critique of the medical model’s ‘‘disempowerment of self-injurers,’’ theoretically addresses the gendered context in which self-injury is framed, and expands interactionist and other theoretical views. Although methodologically strong, the authors do not provide an overview of the demographics of their sample. Given that the experiences of people who self-injure appear, on many levels, to parallel those of people who self-harm through other means or use other negative coping behaviors (e.g., alcoholics, drug users, bulimics, anorexics, etc.) and that some interviewees were noted to practice other negative coping behaviors, extended reporting of demographics could assist the reader to substantiate the sample. Moreover, providing additional information on these explicit factors may clarify what aspects of the self-injurer experience result from their injurious career, or if some part of their experience or motivation to continue to self-injure is more appropriately viewed as a consequence of other negative coping mechanisms. The weakest point of the book is the lack of an explicitly embodied analysis of self-injury. The reader is left wondering how the scaring

Epidemic City: The Politics of Public Health in New York

Field Research: A Manual for Logistics and Management of Scientific Studies in Natural Settings.

The Chicago School and the roots of urban ethnography An intergenerational conversation with Gerald D. Jaynes, David E. Apter, Herbert J. Gans, William Kornblum, Ruth Horowitz, James F. Short, Jr, Gerald D. Suttles and Robert E. Washington

Ruth Horowitz

Papers

The Girls in the Gang.

Introduction: The Methodological Strengths and Dilemmas of Qualitative Sociology

Epidemic City: The Politics of Public Health in New York

Field Research: A Manual for Logistics and Management of Scientific Studies in Natural Settings.

The Chicago School and the roots of urban ethnography An intergenerational conversation with Gerald D. Jaynes, David E. Apter, Herbert J. Gans, William Kornblum, Ruth Horowitz, James F. Short, Jr, Gerald D. Suttles and Robert E. Washington