▪ Abstract The United States in the 1990s has experienced the greatest sustained decline in violent crime rates since World War II—even though rates thus far have not fallen as rapidly as they increased during the crime boom of the 1960s and early 1970s. I review a set of exogenous and policy-related explanations for the earlier crime boom and for the crime bust of the 1990s. I argue that our understanding of crime trends is hampered by a lack of longitudinal analysis and by ahistorical approaches. I identify a set of questions, concepts, and research opportunities raised by taking a more comprehensive look at crime waves.

▪ Abstract In keeping with traditional sociological concerns about order and disorder, this essay addresses the dark side of organizations. To build a theoretical basis for the dark side as an integrated field of study, I review four literatures in order to make core ideas of each available to specialists in the others. Using a Simmelian-based case comparison method of analogical theorizing, I first consider sociological constructs that identify both the generic social form and the generic origin of routine nonconformity: how things go wrong in socially organized settings. Then I examine three types of routine nonconformity with adverse outcomes that harm the public: mistake, misconduct, and disaster produced in and by organizations. Searching for analogies and differences, I find that in common, routine nonconformity, mistake, misconduct, and disaster are systematically produced by the interconnection between environment, organizations, cognition, and choice. These patterns amplify what is known about so...

РЕФЕРАТ Актуальность. Статья посвящена рассмотрению вопроса, казалось бы, чисто медикофилософского характера, когда человек, под агрессивным воздействием и изощренным давлением средств массовой информации, выбирает такой паттерн своего пищевого поведения, который заметно отличается от общепринятого, называемого нормальным. Придерживаясь избранного способа пищевого поведения, потребитель доводит свой организм до известных степеней обессиливания, психического истязания и с диагнозом «нервная орторексия» превращается в пациента специализированных клиник реабилитации, становится подопечным узко ориентированных мозгоправов. Для любого организма последствия такого диагноза носят, как правило, разрушительный характер. Цели работы. Авторы статьи пытаются исследовать генезис этой малоизученной проблемы и обнаружить какие-либо связи с уровнем и качеством жизни россиян последних лет, с качеством потребляемых пищевых продуктов и с общим психологическим состоянием социума в период его испытания избыточно долгим кризисом. Методики и выборка. В качестве методов исследования были использованы диагностические пакеты, тестирование функционального состояния пациентов по схемам Donini&Marsili, ОRТО-15 и клинические опросы их уже в качестве респондентов. Большая статистическая выборка онлайн-опроса представлена 612 респондентами разного пола и разных возрастных групп. Для оценки уровня жизни и заболеваемости нервной орторексией использованы статистические методы измерения связи Спирмена, Пирсона, структурных средних и пр. Результаты. Обнаружено, что нервной орторексии присущ феномен избегающего поведения, входящего в группу неспецифических пищевых расстройств пациента. Выводы. Полученные результаты ретроспективного периода подтверждают рабочую гипотезу о существовании статистически значимой связи между снижением уровня жизни городского населения Северо-Западного федерального округа и частотой заболевания нервной орторексией в разных ее проявлениях.

crimes? Prior research is inconclusive because work effects have been biased by selectivity and obscured by the interaction of age and employment. This study yields more refined estimates by specifying event history models to analyze assignment to, eligibility for, and current participation in a national work experiment for criminal offenders. Age is found to interact with employment to affect the rate of self-reported recidivism: Those aged 27 or older are less likely to report crime and arrest when provided with marginal employment opportunities than when such opportunities are not provided. Among young participants, those in their teens and early twenties, the experimental job treatment had little effect on crime. Work thus appears to be a turning point for older, but not younger, offenders.

ZusammenfassungDie Einwerbung von Drittmitteln ist in Deutschland zum dominanten Indikator zur Messung von Forschungsqualität geworden. Diese Entwicklung hat allerdings eine Reihe von Nebeneffekten mit sich gebracht, die diese Methode der Messung von Forschungsqualität erheblich in Frage stellen. Wenn diese Effekte verrnieden werden sollen, ist Publikationen als Nachweis von Forschungsqualität eine herausragende Bedeutung beizumessen. Aber such deren Messung in bibliometrischen Verfahren wirft erhebliche Probleme auf. Urn die Forschung nicht vollständig durch Begutachtungsverfahren zu normalisieren, müssen bibliometrische Messverfahren Anreize so setzen, dass genügend Spielraum für Kreativität, Originalität und Innovation bleibt.AbstractRecruiting third-party funds has become the primary indicator when it comes to measuring research quality in Germany. Nevertheless, this development has involved a whole series of side-effects that challenge this method of assessing research quality substantially. If such effects are to be avoided publications should acquire major significance in providing evidence of research quality. Yet, assessing these by means of bibliometric methods also presents considerable problems. To avoid complete standardization of research through assessment procedures, bibliometric measuring processes have to provide stimuli in such a way that there is enough scope left for the unfolding of creativity, originality and innovation.

With more than half a century of development, Geographic Information Science (GIS) has evolved to become an interdisciplinary field of spatial thinking, geographic knowledge, geospatial technologies, and application practices. However, the integration of GIS in social science research is yet fully developed and more proactive emperical research examples are needed to continuously advance the application of GIS in social science research. To meet this challenge, in this article, the authors use the investigation of urban neighborhood crime as an experiment to examine the capability of geospatial technologies in the investigation of neighborhood crime in Oakland, CA, United States. First, a comprehensive theoretical framework is constructed with major neighborhood criminology theories to guide the empirical experiment. Second, a GIS-based methodological framework integrates geospatial data collection, integration, processing, and modeling on the one hand and advanced statistical methods on the other, to lead a data-driven examination of neighborhood crime. Specifically, a Random Neighborhood Sampling Matrix enables the generation of Hierarchical Adjustable Spatial Neighborhoods (HASNs). Areal Interpolation Matrixes allow the transformation of raw data in various geographic units to that in the HASN unit. Furthermore, a Neighborhood Accessibility Matrix accommodates the modeling of accessibility to nearest location-based crime factors from sampled neighborhoods. Third, multivariate statistics and multiple regression statistics are used to examine the relations between different types of neighborhood crime and their explanatory factors. Research rsesults indicate that the GIS-based methodological framework generates research findings highly consistent with those reported in the literature.

With his theory of differential association, Sutherland attempted to identify universal mechanisms that explain the genesis of crime regardless of the specific concrete structural, social, and individual conditions involved. In this article, I discuss the development of the theory and then assess its strengths and weaknesses. After finding Kornhauser's (1978) influential critique of differential association theory to be oversimplified and misguided, I review recent empirical tests. I argue that the theory appears supported, but requires additional research to specify the concrete content of its abstract principles. Such respecification will improve the theory's predictions, empirical tests, and implications for public policy. I conclude by proposing several avenues for theoretical and empirical research.

Why do people believe that violence is acceptable? In this paper we study people’s normative beliefs about the acceptability of violence to achieve social control (as a substitute for the police, for self-protection and the resolution of disputes) and social change (through violent protests and acts to achieve political goals). Addressing attitudes towards violence among young men from various ethnic minority communities in London, we find that procedural justice is strongly correlated with police legitimacy, and that positive judgments about police legitimacy predicts more negative views about the use of violence. We conclude with the idea that police legitimacy has an additional, hitherto unrecognized, empirical property – by constituting the belief that the police monopolise rightful force in society, legitimacy can create a ‘crowding out’ effect on positive views of private violence. [131 words]

While there is considerable evidence that blacks experience school in qualitatively distinct ways from whites, there has been a general failure to examine racial variation in the impact of school variables on juvenile misconduct. The purpose of this research is to describe the manner in which school bonding affects delinquent conduct, focusing in particular on the role of the school in the delinquent involvement of black youths. Our orientation is primarily a control theory one that suggests that the greater the degree of school bonding the lesser the likelihood of involvement in delinquent activities. Our review of the literature leads us to expect differential levels of bonding by race and across varying racial environments of schools, with resulting differential effects on delinquency. On the basis of a neighborhood sample of 942 adolescents, we identijj seven distinct dimensions of school bonding. The analysis reveals that blacks are at least as strongly bonded to the school as whites, that our model explains comparable amounts of variance in delinquency across race-sex subgroups, and that the racial composition of the school is generally unimportant in conditioning the effect of school bonding on delinquency. While our findings are generally supportive of control theory, a model that purports to be invariant across race, gender, and socioeconomic boundaries, we caution that such a conclusion may be both premature and mistaken. We discuss the implications of these findings and suggest that they be interpreted within a framework that also considers family and peer bonding.

While a growing body of empirical literature supports many key predictions of General Strain Theory (GST), the subjective perception of injustice remains a theoretically important but empirically under-researched type of strain. The present study therefore examines the relations among perceived injustice, anger, and rule-violation.

We study the relationship between suicide rates and socioeconomic factors by using a panel data at Italian province level in the time span 1996–2005. Our analysis focuses on the impact of social norms on suicidal behaviors. In particular, beyond the usual social correlates of suicide rates, we propose an aggregate measure of social conformity which refers to the religious sphere as an area of conflict between individual and social behaviors. GMM and dynamic spatial panel data approach are implemented to control for serial and spatial autocorrelation. The results confirm the primary role of family, alcohol consumption and population density in explaining the suicide rates in Italy, while the economic variables, namely income per capita and economic growth, do not appear to have any effects.

We study social comparisons and status seeking in an interconnected society. Individuals take costly actions that have direct benefits and also confer social status. A new measure of interconnectedness--cohesion--captures the intensity of incentives for seeking status. Equilibria stratify players into social classes, with each class's action pinned down by cohesion. A network decomposition algorithm characterizes the highest (and most inefficient) equilibrium. Members of the largest maximally cohesive set form the highest class. Alternatively, players not belonging to sets more cohesive than the set of all nodes constitute the lowest class. Intermediate classes are identified by iterating a cohesion operator. We also characterize networks that accommodate multiple-class equilibria.

We observe that countries where belief in the "American dream" (i.e., effort pays) prevails also set harsher punishment for criminals. We know from previous work that beliefs are also correlated with several features of the economic system (taxation, social insurance, etc). Our objective is to study the joint determination of these three features (beliefs, punitiveness and economic system) in a way that replicates the observed empirical patterns. We present a model where beliefs determine the types of contracts that firms offer and whether workers exert effort. Some workers become criminals, depending on their luck in the labor market, the expected punishment, and an individual shock that we call "meanness". It is this meanness level that a penal system based on "retribution" tries to detect when deciding the severity of the punishment. We find that when initial beliefs differ, two equilibria can emerge out of identical fundamentals. In the "American" (as opposed to the "French") equilibrium, belief in the "American dream" is commonplace, workers exert effort, there are high powered contracts (and income is unequally distributed) and punishments are harsh. Economists who believe that deterrence (rather than retribution) shapes punishment can interpret the meanness parameter as pessimism about future economic opportunities and verify that two similar equilibria emerge.

We examine the evolution of Latin American cities in the last two decades of the twentieth century and in the first years of the twenty-first on the basis of comparable data from six countries comprising over 80 percent of the region’s population. These years correspond to the shift in hegemonic models of development in the region, from import-substitution industrialization to neoliberal “open markets” adjustment. We examine how the application of the new policies correlates with change patterns in four areas: urban systems and urban primacy; urban unemployment and informal employment; poverty and inequality; and crime, victimization, and urban insecurity. We present detailed analyses of each of these topics based on the latest available data for the six countries. We conclude that significant changes in patterns of urbanization have taken place in the region, reflecting, in part, the expected and unexpected consequences of the application of the new model of development. Implications of our findings for each of the four areas examined and for the future of the region are discussed.

We estimate multiwave panel models for the effect of clearance rates and a vector of socioeconomic control variables on index crimes, using a sample of 98 U.S. cities for the years 1964-70. No consistent evidence of a substantial effect is found. The effect of police practices on rates of law violation is a matter that has a practical bearing on crime prevention strategies. It can also enhance our understanding of the contributions made by formal methods of social control to conformity. Despite the importance of these concerns, surprisingly little is known about the effects of criminal justice institutions on crime rates. Indeed, only in recent years have researchers begun to study the degree to which crime can be reduced by marginal changes in police employment, expenditure, patrolling strategies, or efficiency in solving crimes. I Statistical investigations of the relationship between aggregated rates of crimes known to the police and various indicators of police activity have employed various analytic strategies. Some researchers have analyzed cross-sectional data (Brown; Geerken and Gove; Sjoquist; Wilson and Boland, a, b); others have analyzed time series (Cloninger and Sartorius; Phillips and Votey) or panel data (Greenberg et al., a; Logan). The present analysis has been designed to meet methodological criticism of this body of research. Critics of research dealing with the effect of law enforcement on

We attempt to investigate the generality of general strain theory (GST) by exploring the operation of general strain in an offending population. Data are obtained from self-report interviews of approximately 150 youths who had been adjudicated for a variety of offenses; all had been identified as chemically abusing or dependent. Using measures of strain and negative affect, as well as strain-exacerbating factors such as peer delinquency and strain-alleviating factors such as family communication and cognitive, social, physical, emotional, and spiritual coping skills, we find support for some of the basic tenets of GST. Implications of the findings for future research are discussed.

We argue that two society-level properties—resistance to change and diversity within a culture—significantly affect agents' degrees of marginalization, which is here defined as access to cultural knowledge and institutional means for accomplishing cultural goals. We develop an agent-based model using findings from Norasakkunkit et al. (Norasakkunkit and Uchida, 2011, 2014; Norasakkunkit et al., 2012). We found that varying the degrees of resistance to change and diversity affected similarities between the mainstream subculture and other subcultures, changes in subcultures over time, and the relative population proportion of each subculture. In particular, we found that high diversity and low resistance to change created the greatest cultural changes within the marginalized subculture over time and allowed for maximal growth of rebellious subcultures. Also, low diversity and high resistance to change allowed for maximal growth of the marginalized subcultures and the greatest overlap between the marginalized and mainstream subcultures. These have important implications for understanding the emergence and maintenance of marginalization in post-industrial societies.

We advance and test an institutional anomie theory of opportunity entrepreneurship for understanding the combinative effects of selected cultural values and social institutions to explain national differences in rates of opportunity entrepreneurship. We theorize opportunity entrepreneurship as a creatively deviant response to anomic conditions in societies, i.e., when social institutions block traditional means of achievement. Using 10 years of data for a pooled time series cross–sectional analysis, we examined a unique mixture of cultural and institutional variables and their interactions as predictors of nation–level opportunity entrepreneurship rates. We found support for most hypotheses showing that specific institutional contexts mitigate or enhance the effects of cultural drivers of opportunity entrepreneurship.

Video games constitute a major sector of computing with distinctive social implications. Analysis of video game programming errors, design limitations, and rule ambiguities suggests a range of positive functions that glitches and cheats may perform. Glitches are software errors, either programming bugs or design flaws. Cheats are tricks for mastering games by circumventing the official rules for play. This article is based on the study of 751 glitches in 155 popular video games plus examination of web sites that disseminate cheats. It compares the standard computer science response to errors, which is to eliminate them, with a common video gamer response, which is to exploit them. The theoretical analysis contrasts games (in which victory is achieving set goals by following given rules) with metagames (in which victory is having the power to define the nature and rules of the game). Several related theoretical concepts are used to describe the complex subculture of video game players, for whom glitches and cheats are socially significant.

Validity arguments for assessment tools intended to measure medical professionalism suffer for lack of a clear theoretical statement of what professionalism is and how it should behave. Drawing on several decades of field research addressing deviance and informal social control among physicians, a theoretical sketch of professionalism is presented that can be used to predict how individual adjustment to professional norms should co-vary with other social and psychological phenomena. Physicians may understand and value professional norms but fail to enact them in practice because of conflicting normative demands. Physicians’ social networks are predicted to act as conduits of social learning and social pressure, driving the resolution of normative conflicts in specific directions. A valid assessment of professionalism requires an adequate accounting of the social reaction to an individual’s professional conduct, because the reaction and the conduct itself are inseparable.