The Causes of Racial Disturbances: A Comparison of Alternative Explanations
Reads0
Chats0
TLDR
A range of hypotheses of varying specificity are examined in this paper in an attempt to account for the location of racial disorders during the 1960's, and the explanatory abilities of several additional theories, each of which assumes the importance of particular community characteristics.Abstract:
A range of hypotheses of varying specificity is examined in this paper in an attempt to account for the location of racial disorders during the 1960's. The initial sections consider what general assumptions must be met by any satisfactory explanation of the distribution of the disorders. Mathematical models are constructed which embody the most prevalent assumptions as to the determinants of community disorder-proneness, and their predictions are compared with empirical data. The specific assumptions considered are: (1) all cities have an identical probability of experiencing a disorder; (2) communities are heterogeneous in their underlying disorder propensities; (3) a process of reinforcement characterizes the occurrence of disorders; (4) contagion among communities contributes to the distribution of racial disturbances. Only the heterogeneity assumption is supported by the data. The concluding sections consider the explanatory abilities of several additional theories, each of which assumes the importance of particular community characteristics. All are rejected in favor of an explanation which argues that the racial disorders of the 1960's were responses to frustrations which are uniformly felt by Negroes, irrespective of their community situations.read more
Citations
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
Threshold models of collective behavior.
TL;DR: This article developed models of collective behavior for situations where actors have two alternatives and the costs and/or benefits of each depend on how many other actors choose which alternative, and the key...
Journal ArticleDOI
DIFFUSION IN ORGANIZATIONS AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS: From Hybrid Corn to Poison Pills
David Strang,Sarah A. Soule +1 more
TL;DR: In this article, the authors present a sociologically grounded account of change emphasizing the channels along which practices flow and argue for closer theoretical attention to why practices diffuse at different rates and via different pathways in different settings.
Book
Dissecting the Social: On the Principles of Analytical Sociology
TL;DR: Hedstrom as mentioned in this paper argues for a systematic development of sociological theory so that it has the explanatory power and precision to inform sociological research and understanding, and shows how strong links can be forged between the micro and the macro, and between theory and empirical research.
Journal ArticleDOI
Productivity Differences Among Scientists: Evidence for Accumulative Advantage
Paul D. Allison,John Stewart +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors show that the distribution of productivity becomes increasingly unequal as a cohort of scientists ages, and that this increase is highly associated with a changing distribution of time spent on research.
References
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
An Introduction to Probability Theory and Its Applications
William Feller,Philip M. Morse +1 more