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Sociological literature suggests a causal effect of poverty on the risk of social isolation. While previous research on this link is only based on cross-sectional data, this article presents more valid evidence for this assumption by applying fixed-effects regression methods and panel data (German Socio-economic Panel). First, the study shows that the poverty effect on isolation occurs regardless of time-constant unobserved heterogeneity. Second, it examines whether poverty and isolation are correlated because of a mutual association with critical life events (health deterioration, dissolutions of couple relationships, and job loss) that may increase both the risk for poverty and the risk for isolation. Regarding men, the effect of isolation on poverty is not attributable to the cited biographical transitions. Regarding women, it is only in part—but not in whole—attributable to dissolutions of couple relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data from the National Survey of Families and Households are used to compare the psychological well-being of the rural and urban poor. Overall, the urban poor are higher in perceived health than the rural poor. although no differences are apparent in happiness or depression. Significant interactions arc present between rural/urban poverty and sex, race, and family status. The psychological well-being of poor African Americans is higher in rural than urban areas. whereas the well-being of poor whites is higher in urban than rural areas. This trend is especially pronounced for depression among males. In addition, single men without children have especially high depression scores in rural areas, whereas married women without children have especially low depression scores in urban areas. The results arc interpreted in terms of the environmental quality of inner-city neighborhoods and attitudes toward poverty in urban and rural communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many researchers argue that lower-class individuals adapt to their deprivation by lowering their aspiration for success. Data provide only limited support for this position, however, and suggests that many lower-class individuals continue to hold high aspirations. This article points to a second method of adapting to deprivation: raising expectations for success to inflated levels-levels that have a low probability of realization. The extent and determinants of inflated educational expectations are explored using data from a national, longitudinal survey of high school seniors. Results indicate that almost half of all deprived individuals with high aspirations have inflated expectations. The primary determinants of inflated expectations appear to be pressure to attend college and the overestimation of one's abilities. These data are relevant to anomic or strain theories of deviance and social structure and personality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Indicators of 29 of Oscar Lewis' poverty traits were examined to see if poor and nonpoor families differed significantly in frequency of demonstrating the traits. Families representing six ethnic/residence population types were considered: metropolitan white, nonmetropolitan white, metropolitan black, nonmetropolitan black, metropolitan Spanish speaking, and nonmetropolitan Spanish-speaking. Of the 29 traits investigated, for 24 traits a significant difference was found between poor and non-poor in at least one ethnic/residence group. Significant differences between poor and non-poor in the two Spanish-speaking groups existed on considerably fewer traits than in the case of the two black or the two white groups, suggesting that the traits examined may be more broadly based in Spanish culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How might poor people today best improve their situation in life? What is the most effective path open to them? An answer that has received much attention in recent years is Piven and Cloward's proposal that poor people mobilize independently and engage in disruptive tactics. Their proposal is grounded in an historical analysis of the successes and failures of past movements of the poor. The core of our paper is a critique of their historical appraisal. We contend that their analysis and the implications they draw from it do not support and, in some ways, contradict the strategy they advocate. Our conclusion is that independent mobilization of poor people aimed at improving their status is of dubious merit. The possibility of substantial improvement in the lot of the poor would be best realized, we argue, through activists' working within organized labor. We provide a brief discussion of the nature of this work and its rationale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study addresses itself to the problems of "cultural difference" through a semantic feature analysis of the lexicon of the hard-core poor. The hard-core poor are an internally organized, often highly resourceful, deviant subculture, the members of which do not share common societal values and do not wish for social mobility. They have their own ideology concerning the middle-class striver, considering him "sick" and his values inimical. Although other types of slum residents appear to lack integrated social systems for surviving in conditions of economic marginality, the hard-core poor do not. Their neighbors refer to them as "the self-contained society." They have developed their own adaptive institutional forms, including those for religious expression, economic survival, and social aid. This subculture has its own economic strata (not all of the hard-core group are economically poor), as well as its own elites, its own methods of communication, and highly efficient system maintenance and group insulation mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article "Poor People's Movements" by Frances Piven and Richard Cloward looked for an answer to the question of how the poor can win anything in American politics by examining four movements among the 20th century American poor: the movements of industrial workers and of the unemployed in the Great Depression, and the post-war black unrest which took form in the southern civil rights movement and the northern welfare rights movement. The answer which seemed to emerge from the history of these movements is that the poor win, if they win at all, by disruptive political action, namely strikes, civil disobedience, riots, flooding the welfare rolls, and sometimes armed violence. The location of some groups gave them substantial capacities for disruption; others had little.

We read the 1912-1917 New York Time's "One Hundred Neediest Cases" charity campaigns in three ways. First, we examine campaigns as they formed an image of the "morally worthy" poor person who wa the propel recipient of modem charity. Second, we read these campaigns as moral tales promoting the goodness of the institutional order, particular types of subjects within that order, and particular relationships between subjects who have money and those who need it. Finally, we examine how mythologies, such as those transmitted through these charity campaigns, produce political legitimations, social hierarchy, and structures of domination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The availability of the mass media, or at least the potential for widespread use of them, is one of the major factors that makes the development setting of today's poor countries radically different from that of the developed countries a century ago. This has been widely recognized and has led to attempts to integrate communications factors into general theories of development. It has resulted in what may be called positive, negative, and neutral orientations or theories, that are held implicitly and sometimes simultaneously by media scholars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ideology of self-help and free enterprise has had as one of its consequences the fact that businessmen and other citizens have come to take for granted a host of ancillary services on which their enterprises depend, whether these be the law courts or fire departments or the customs offices on the one hand, or many "private" activities on the other hand which provide advice, maintenance, and other supports to a Durkheimian "organic" division of labor. To be sure, uneasiness as to whether one is really a self-made man may be an element in the attraction of radical right-wing thought for some corporate businessmen who are dimly aware that they are not as independent as their frontier outlook would demand of them; certainly, they do their best to conceal from themselves the support they derive from the governmental and corporate infrastructure. Such men in their civic capacities are apt to demand asceticism from governmental and other nonprofit institutions, while being themselves not at all reluctant to accept the perquisites of what they regard as their personal achievements, and in their corporate capacity to dress their institutions with the luxurious trappings of success, such as handsome modem air-conditioned buildings, college-educated and "charming" receptionists, and all other conceivable appurtenances for making the doing of business pleasant and at times even expeditious. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Poverty is unevenly distributed within the United States – – a fact demonstrated by a rich literature on inequality in the US. By ignoring such variation, research runs the risk of overlooking the geographical distribution of poverty and risks that increase the likelihood of poverty. In this article, I address this by: (1) building on the prevalence and penalties framework, developed in cross-national scholarship, and applying it to the U.S. case given state autonomy in poverty policy; and (2) conducting longitudinal analyses using high-quality data derived from the Census Bureau's Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement (CPS-ASEC). Through these analyses, I examine the extent of interstate variation in poverty and in the prevalence of risks and the penalties associated with those risks. Results confirm interstate variation in poverty similar to that seen across rich democracies – the focus of much cross-national comparative work – and demonstrate sizable differences in risks and their associated penalties that have grown rapidly since the welfare reforms of the 1990s. These findings have substantial implications for scholars and policymakers interested in understanding poverty and vulnerability in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior studies show affluence and trust increases economic support for environmental protections. However, despite widespread economic prosperity over the last two decades, variation in support for environmental protections persists across countries. We contend this variation is attributable to the growth of national income inequality which "traps" societies in environmental indifference by mitigating the effects of affluence and trust on the willingness-to-pay for environmental protections. Drawing on data from 45,000 adult respondents in 51 countries from multiple waves of the World Value Survey, we find economic development, socioeconomic status, and trust are important determinants of a respondent's willingness-to-pay for environmental protections. More importantly, we find disposable income inequality suppresses the effects of these determinants on willingness-to-pay. Overall, the study illustrates how economic inequality contextualizes the effects of affluence and trust on environmental support which creates a barrier to widespread environmental support across countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 data, a comprehensive treatment model indicates a strong positive influence of incarceration on premature death risk. Models adjust for numerous covariates of mortality, including demographics, family background, and a range of health and behavioral indicators measured during childhood, as well as selection into incarceration ("treatment"). This study expands extant research by observing much longer panel data, closer to the mortality curve. The main treatment effect reveals risk of premature death by one's mid-fifties being increased by 13.9 percentage-points. Results also indicate that young adulthood incarceration shortens lives equally for Blacks and non-Blacks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior research on legal repression shows how elites use criminal law to demobilize collective challenges, yet social control efforts based in civil law have received inadequate attention. In this study, we develop the concept of elite legal framing to examine how corporations deploy "soft" forms of repression within the civil justice system. Drawing on court, government, and media documents, we analyze a series of transnational civil litigation cases over pesticide exposure on Dole-contracted banana plantations in Nicaragua. Results highlight how the corporate defendants promoted a corruption narrative that diffused through the media and legal system to successfully discredit farmworker claims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the stigma associated with needing and receiving assistance after a natural disaster. I conducted a qualitative, longitudinal study of women who survived the 1997 Grand Forks, North Dakota, flood. Based on sixty in-depth interviews and observation, the data show the ways in which the stigma affected these women when they had to accept charity, many of them for the first time in their lives. Factors that played a role include the self-sufficient culture of North Dakota, the caregiving role of giving and self-sacrifice, the experience of downward mobility and loss of middleclass status, the utilization of impression management techniques, and the ways in which the women shifted their former views of poor people and welfare recipients. I conclude with a discussion of how the examination of the stigma of charity illuminates the construction of class, gender, and race in white, middle-class consciousness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Growth machine theory has provided an influential foundation for thinking about the political economy of place-making and related environmental transformations. It remains silent, however, on how such dynamics can connect through time and space to influence subsequent growth machine dynamics elsewhere. I address this gap by advancing a modified "incorporated comparison" of the Asian carp invasion, an invasive species event generating significant social turmoil in the American Midwest. Empirics draw from document analysis and 71 semi-structured interviews. Results illuminate how local place-making and landscape transformations can connect in contingent ways to render nature a powerful force in subsequent growth-machine battles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study draws on the theories of Emile Durkheim and the Stream Analogy of Lethal Violence to examine the effect of poverty on suicide rates across 15 Western European nations and the United States between 1993 and 2000. To achieve our goal, we take advantage of absolute and relative poverty measures, along with infant mortality rates, utilized in recent cross-national research on homicide rates. The results from fixed-effects regression models reveal that relative poverty rather than absolute poverty and infant mortality rates are positively related to suicide rates, net of economic development. In addition, we find relative poverty and infant mortality rates to yield significant effects on the suicide-homicide ratio and total violence rates. This study concludes with a discussion of the role of relative poverty in predicting different manifestations of lethal violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Family bonds and deviant peers constitute two important competing forces of socialization in migrants' social life. This study furthers the theory of family-peer relationship by arguing that migrants' social network homogeneity shapes the development of family bonds and peer deviance and is ultimately associated with increased likelihood of sexual risk behaviors. Applying regression techniques and structural equation modeling with bootstrapped estimates to survey data collected in 2011 among male Chinese migrant labors, this study found that 1) network homogeneity in terms of homeplace and occupation is associated with sexual risk behaviors, and 2) at least half portion of such association is significantly mediated by family bonds and peer deviance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is the corporate class fractured or it is able to transcend individual interest in favor of a collective interest? I address this debate through a unique application – how large corporations respond to social movement demands. Through a statistical examination of an original database of protests, I find mechanisms still exist that unify the interests of firms targeted by movements. Specifically, policy-planning groups shape and unify firm strategies over whether to concede to or resist protest demands. In addition, I find the impact of these networks is not limited to narrow industry logics, but transcends the broader business community. Together, these findings suggests that when it comes to shaping their politics in response to social movement challengers, large firms do not respond as atomistic actors but are able to draw on their social networks, fostering a broad collective interest. In asking how the social relations of large firms shape protest outcomes, this paper bridges broad questions in organizational, social movement, and class analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the question of whether the social impacts, especially increased socioeconomic inequality, and formalization of democracy generated by the neoliberal economization of politics is an important albeit not singular driver of resurgent ethnocracial populism and illiberal democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evidence suggests that some black residents in South Africa experience nostalgia for the racist and authoritarian apartheid regime. What dynamics generate apartheid nostalgia, and what work does it do? This article draws on in-depth interviews with black residents of impoverished urban townships and informal settlements. I argue that by eliminating formal racial discrimination and redirecting popular aspirations towards the state, South Africa's democratic transition encouraged apartheid nostalgia, which residents deployed to criticize the post-apartheid state and imagine alternative possibilities. Far from uniform, nostalgic expressions focused on four objects: social protection, migrant exclusion, bureaucratic integrity, and white governance. Each object represented an aspect of the apartheid state that residents sought to resurrect. The analysis calls for a shift from a politics of regret, focused on shame for past atrocities, to a politics of nostalgia, which understands idealized projections of past objects as a terrain of struggle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article extends prior research on right-wing ideology broadly and the ideology of the Tea Party specifically. Using data from 45 interviews with Tea Party activists and participant observation at Tea Party meetings, I map five distinct ideologies, used by subsets of the Tea Party Patriots membership: Christian Conservatism, Constitutionalism, Reformed Liberalism, Libertarianism, and Conspiracism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The percent black–inequality relationship and the unique position of the South have been cornerstones of research on U.S. racial inequality. Using an innovative methodological approach, I address how migration contributes to our understanding of the percent black–inequality relationship. I find that the educationally selective migration of blacks and whites significantly contributes to the percent black–inequality relationship via compositional changes. However, any explanatory power is limited to the non-South. Migration plays a role in understanding this relationship, yet processes related to black population concentration still generate black disadvantage anew, particularly within the South. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article uses the case of Iceland to study how neoliberal globalization impacts class discourse in the political field and broader perceptions of class division. Analyzing a leading newspaper and parliamentary debates from 1986-2012, I show how neoliberal globalization-especially by increasing economic inequality-created a disjuncture between an increasingly differentiated social space and a national habitus cultivated in a small, homogeneous, and egalitarian society. This undermined taken-for-granted assumptions of relative classlessness and heightened perceptions of class division during a neoliberal ascendancy period from 1995 to Iceland's economic collapse in September 2008. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociologists have spent a great deal of energy studying social inequality, but in this presentation I suggest that we need to refocus our efforts a bit. I examine four popular myths among the general public, and among some in sociology, regarding the drivers of extreme inequality: (1) that most inequality is generated by race and gender, (2) that most inequality is driven by educational inequality, (3) that most inequality is driven by differences in family structure, and (4) that most inequality results from face-to-face interactions. I provide preliminary evidence that our explanations need some work. That work involves recognizing that most inequality is generated within demographic groups and that this inequality is growing rapidly. It also involves recognizing that there are few ways to incorporate underrepresented groups into the mainstream of a social and economic system where extreme inequality is getting worse and substantial percentages of the population face economic stagnation and downward mobility. The conclusion represents a call to focus on the most important group gap-the widening gap between the wealthy and the poor-and the mechanisms through which most people gain access to economic goods, services, and social respect-jobs and money. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction to the section Democracy Now: Ethnographies of Contemporary Participation sketches a contemporary enthusiasm for participation that reaches across business, education, popular culture, and politics. The article tries to account for what makes this enthusiasm new and begins to sketch its implications for what people want and expect from their political and economic institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on trends in globalization, particularly its neoliberal variant, has exploded but sources linking these trends to gender equity are difficult to uncover. Discussed mainly in the context of development, gender issues tend to be marginalized from the larger globalization picture. With World Bank as a backdrop, this article disentangles development from the process to inspect the connection between neoliberal globalization ( NLG) and gender equity. This is accomplished through three cost-benefit analyses: an overall evaluation of NLG; how gender equity unfolds under NLG; and how it unfolds under NLG in China. Macroeconomic trends supplemented with examples documenting the plight of women under NLG policies, including garment industry workers in Bangladesh, suggest heightened gender peril ushered in with NLG. China's 'state capitalism' modification of NLG, however, tends to mitigate negative consequences for women. A paradigm shift from hegemonic NLG to state capitalism models may offer successful global economic policies that are especially beneficial to women. I conclude with an epilogue reflecting on my original remarks in light of the horrific factory collapse that occurred in Bangladesh less than a month after this address. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on Wax's concept of 'condition reciprocity,' this study draws on data from 35 in-depth interviews to examine how low-income women in Israel frame their reliance on personal networks for survival. Findings reveal that women used a similar rationale focusing on productivity with respect to their interpersonal relations. Consistent with the neoliberal principle of market citizenship, most women perceived themselves as worthy of support from personal networks based on their work commitment. By contrast, women who could not rely on a current, past, or future definition of productivity did not consider themselves as deserving support and experienced extreme social isolation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the 'culture wars' using the lens of attitudes toward soccer. Despite soccer's increasing popularity in the United States, anti-soccer rhetoric is fairly common. In his widely read book, How Soccer Explains the World (2004), Foer contends that the 'culture wars,' including divisions over soccer, are better explained by reactions to globalization than social class or political ideology. Using data from a survey of Nebraskans, we find that attitudes about cultural globalization are the best predictor of soccer sentiment. Contrary to popular claims about the 'culture wars,' most respondents were moderate in their attitudes toward both soccer and globalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have been slow to test welfare state theories on the extensive subnational variation in the United States during the recent period of retrenchment. We assess institutional politics theories, literature on race and social policy, and public opinion arguments relative to levels of support in states' Aid to Families Dependent Children programs from 1982 until its elimination in 1996. Pooled time-series results demonstrate that the determinants of spending during retrenchment are mostly similar to those driving development and expansion. Pro-spending actors and professionalized state institutions limit benefit curtailment, while jurisdictions with larger African- American populations have lower benefits. Additionally, liberal citizens positively impact support and strengthen the effects of state institutions, but this effect is attenuated in states with larger African-American populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Racial/ethnic residential segregation has been shown to contribute to violence and have harmful consequences for minority groups. However, research examining the segregation-crime relationship has focused almost exclusively on blacks and whites while largely ignoring Latinos and other race/ethnic groups and has rarely considered potential mediators (e.g., concentrated disadvantage) in segregation-violence relationships. This study uses year 2000 arrest data for California and New York census places to extend segregation-crime research by comparing the effects of racial/ethnic residential segregation from whites on black and Latino homicide. Results indicate that (1) racial/ethnic segregation contributes to both Latino and black homicide, and (2) the effects for both groups are mediated by concentrated disadvantage. Implications for segregation-violence relationships, the racial-invariance position, and the Latino paradox are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the individual and contextual roles of race on welfare sanctions: benefit cuts for failing to comply with work or other behavioral requirements under the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program. Using six years of federal administrative data, I advance previous welfare research by providing a nationally representative analysis of participant-, county-, and state-level predictors of welfare sanctioning. Using theories of racial classification, racialized social systems, and racial threat as guiding frameworks, I find that black and Latina women are at a greater risk of being sanctioned than white women. Further, although odds of a sanction are slightly reduced for black women living in counties with greater percentages of blacks, the opposite holds for Latinas, who are at an increased risk of being sanctioned in counties with greater percentages of Latinos. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent scholarship and public discourse highlight an apparent waning of civic engagement in the United States. Although the welfare state is generally thought to support democracy by reducing economic inequality, it may paradoxically contribute to political disempowerment of some groups. We examine the effects of state interventions on civic participation among young adults, hypothesizing that involvement with stigmatizing social programs, such as welfare, reduces political engagement, while receipt of nonstigmatizing government assistance does not dampen civic involvement. Using official voting records and survey data from the Youth Development Study (YDS), a longitudinal community sample of young adults, a series of regression models suggests that welfare recipients are less likely to vote than nonrecipients, whereas recipients of non-means-tested government assistance participate similarly to young adults who do not receive government help. These effects hold even when background factors, self-efficacy, and prior voting behavior are controlled. Welfare receipt is not associated, however, with suppressed participation in nonstate arenas such as volunteer work. Intensive interviews with YDS welfare recipients are used to illustrate and develop the analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I focus on problem substance use as one outcome of an underlying, "slow-motion disaster" caused by the long-term collision between corrosive structural processes, counterproductive social policies, and vulnerable populations. Using the city of Detroit as an illustration, I offer an original conceptual model for linking the causes and cascading consequences of slow-motion disasters. This model highlights the embedded connections between structural factors, such as racial segregation and systemic unemployment, and multiple destructive outcomes, including health and crime disparities, as well as problem substance use. Finally, I conclude that sociological researchers must engage with broader publics and diverse coalitions if they are to contribute to an alternative social policy--a holistic, regional "disaster response"--that takes multiple layers of causality into account, and addresses the core of vulnerabilities that make such disasters possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conventional wisdom has long held that widespread citizen concern for environmental quality is limited to wealthy nations. Both academics and policymakers assume that residents of poor nations are too preoccupied with satisfying their “material” needs to support the “postmaterialist” value of environmental protection. This view was challenged by results of Gallup's 24-nation “Health of the Planet” (HOP) survey conducted in 1992, as the HOP found highly inconsistent and often negative correlations between national affluence and environmental concern. The current article compares results from three waves of the “World Values Survey” (WVS) to those of the HOP. When appropriate measures of environmental concern are employed, the WVS results generally replicate those of the HOP, as in all three waves such concern correlates inconsistently with national affluence. The overall results suggest that citizen concern for the environment is not dependent on national affluence, nor on affluence-based postmaterialist values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I argue that the study of narrative identity would benefit from more sustained and explicit attention to relationships among cultural, institutional, organizational, and personal narratives of identity. I review what is known about these different types of narrative identity and argue that these narratives are created for different purposes, do different types of work, and are evaluated by different criteria. After exploring the inherently reflexive relationships between and among these various narratives of identity, I conclude with demonstrating how examining these relationships would allow a more complete understanding of the mutual relevance of social problem construction and culture, of the work of social service organizations attempting to change clients' personal narratives, and the possibilities of social change. Exploring relationships between and among different types of narrative identity would yield a better understanding of how narratives work and the work narratives do. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The theory of academic capitalism explains how federal, state, and university policies and people have expanded university–industry relationships (UIRs) and the commercialization of knowledge. These changes represent a profound shift in the way university research is expected to contribute to the public good. Because university administrators are responsible for creating organizational policies and infrastructures that are consistent with their organizational mission and with federal and state laws, it is critical to analyze how university administrators assess UIRs in relation to public-interest scientific research. Our in-depth interviews at six prominent land-grant universities with 59 key administrators having oversight responsibilities for agricultural biotechnology research programs and UIRs reveal how administrators justify their role in promoting UIRs. They tend to interpret their university’s mission to contribute to the public good in a way that is conducive to encouraging UIRs and to commercializing research discoveries. Their rationale emerges within a context of having to justify their budgets to state governments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The spread of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is believed to result from HIV- infected individuals who are unaware of their infection and, thus, the possible consequences of their sexual behavior for others. However, differential rates of HIV infection between countries may reflect a different set of circumstances. We obtained data from the World Bank and several other sources to test eight alternative explanations for the global differences in prevalence of HIV infection: (1) economic underdevelopment, (2) inadequate public health care, (3) insufficient media, (4) political instability, (5) overurbanization, (6) social inequity, (7) religion, and (8) region. Our regression findings showed that income inequality and political instability had statistically significant positive effects on HIV/AIDS prevalence and that gender equality had a negative effect on HIV/AIDS prevalence. Religion and region were also important predictors, as countries that were predominately Muslim and Christian Orthodox generally had lower prevalence of HIV/AIDS, whereas West Africa, Central Africa, and Southern Africa had a higher prevalence of HIV/AIDS. None of the public health and media indicators were statistically relevant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the question of how the socialization of people into a social movement occurs under repressive dictatorships. It takes as a case the socialization of shantytown women into the anti-Pinochet pro-democracy movement in Chile. Using ethnographic data gathered in Chile and Europe, the article concludes that socialization in repressive regimes can occur when organizers gather recruits into groups that do not have political change as their stated goal. Within these groups socialization occurs as a result of intentionally educational activities by the social movement organizers. These can take the form of the giving of talks, the introduction of informative publications, the use of the group as a model for how society should work, the organizing of testimonial get-togethers, and the inviting of other victims of the dictatorship to the groups to relate their experiences. Socialization also occurs as a result of processes that are not intentionally educational, including the directing of artwork production, the sharing of grievances by group members, and the involvement of group members with other social movement organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Frame analysis has been used to examine the ways in which movement groups articulate their goals, recruit participants, and respond to the counterframes of their opponents. But, with the notable exception of William Gamson's Talking Politics, theorists have not paid serious attention to the conversations of peer groups. This essay revisits some of Gamson's observations in an attempt to extend the scope of existing theory on frame analysis and peer group conversations. I begin with the premise that collective action frames are not only the product of shared, cultural narratives and personal experiences; they are also shaped by behavioral expectations, that are specific to the group, that regulate how the group "talks politics", and that delimit the boundaries of group-belonging. In exploring these group-specific dynamics, I draw attention to the relationship between "interaction frames", that are used to structure the dialogue of the group and "speaking positions", that are used to align new action-demands and political ideas with the preexisting frames of the group. My intent, in introducing these concepts, is not to provide a finished methodology but to present a beginning framework for future research and discussion. As I suggest here, the most promising answer to the questions posed by this essay lies in expanding the dialogue between the Goffmanian undercurrents of frame analysis and aspects of systems theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The level of political democracy is hypothesized to have an independent positive effect on social well-being irrespective of either level of economic development or level of disarticulation of economies of developing countries, which is considered to be the most socially harmful structural feature, created by dependency. In addition, political democracy is hypothesized to buffer the negative effects of disarticulation on social well-being. Findings from the analysis of data from eighty-two developing countries confirm these hypotheses. Political democracy showed a consistent positive effect on social well-being measures, and the least democratic countries were more vulnerable to the negative effects of disarticulation. These findings underscore the independent positive role that political democracy may play in improving social well-being in developing countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a framework for examining how the conditions of urban, low-income, single motherhood and the resources available through personal networks shape mothers' conduct in work-welfare programs. It suggests how research on welfare programs ignores work-family linkages and misses the ways economic action is embedded in social structures and communal constraints. Three rubrics of proximate context, referring to personal networks, urban environments, and moral economies, organize material indicating how patterns of personal life shape work efforts. Data from a qualitative study of mothers in AFDC work-welfare programs provide illustrations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines race and gender differences in class consciousness and union support among a random sample of textile workers in a small North Carolina city. Class consciousness is treated as an ordinal variable consisting of class verbalization, class action orientation, and endorsement of egalitarian change. Union support denotes a recognition of the union's instrumental role in improving work and working conditions. The analysis reveals that blacks are significantly more class conscious and prounion than whites. On the other hand. males and females tend to share similar levels of class consciousness and union support. Comparisons by race, within gender and by gender, within race, are provided for finer distinctions and extended discussion. A multiple classification analysis reveals that racial differences persist and that gender differences remain unimportant when the covariates of age, job dissatisfaction, education, income, and skill are considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literature on population density and infrastructure has generally used an ecological/economic model to identify the determinants of the distribution of infrastructural resources. While this approach has been fruitful, a political-economic approach suggests the importance of an alternative set of determinants of resource distribution: the needs of elites. This paper operationalizes both political-economic and ecological/ economic explanations and compares their efficacy in predicting infrastructural development in the provinces of Thailand. Overall. our data suggest that the distribution of infrastructural resources is primarily a function of two ecological-economic variables--gross provincial product and density, and the political-economic factors of presence of governmental and non-governmental elites in the province. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study tests Roof's (1972, 1976, 1978) local-cosmopolitan theory of religious commitment using a sample of Catholics living in west Tennessee. Consistent with Roof's theory, local community reference (localism) had significant positive effects on four measures of religious beliefs and played a limited role in mediating the effects of education, size of hometown, and length of residence on these measures. However, localism had inconsequential effects on four behavioral measures of religiosity. Possible explanations for these findings and implications they have for the generalizability of the theory are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aspirations may be measured in absolute terms, by asking individuals how much of a given goal they desire, or in relative terms, by asking individuals how much they desire a given goal relative to other goals. Prior studies on the relationship between social class and success goals have always employed either relative or absolute measures alone, with the absolute measures focusing on desire for education, occupational prestige, or income and the relative measures usually focusing on such goals as job security, advancement, and importance. This paper argues that a focus on absolute or relative aspirations alone can produce a misleading image of the relationship between social class and success goals, and it remedies the above neglect by examining the absolute and relative aspirations of different social classes for the same set of goals. Using a sample of males from Detroit and Baltimore, it was found that the lower class places more emphasis on economic security, while the upper class places more emphasis on self-actualization goals like job advancement and importance. However, when absolute aspirations were examined, it was found that lower-class people have a strong desire for self-actualization and that middle-class people do not have a strong desire for security. These findings provide a more complete picture of the relationship between social class and success goals, and they are relevant to such topics as Rodman's "lower-class value stretch," social mobility, anomie theories of deviance, and explanations of social movements based on relative deprivation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Students of neighborhood satisfaction have traditionally regarded the individual as the appropriate unit of analysis. In this present paper we break with tradition, proposing that satisfaction can also be viewed as a property of populations. Data from the 1974-76 U.S. Annual Housing Surveys are employed to test three alternative explanations of variation in aggregate levels of satisfaction across 60 metropolitan areas. Consistent with the urban-scale hypothesis, a negative relationship is found between metropolitan population size and the percentage of residents who rate their neighborhoods "excellent." Further analysis reveals that variables representing the compositional and quality-of-life perspectives affect satisfaction in the expected directions as well: the more residents who are incentive or resource-deficient and the more residents who perceive local conditions as problems, the lower the level of neighborhood satisfaction tends to be. In terms of relative explanatory power, the quality-of-life variables appear dominant, although the persistent effects of the urbanscale measure may prove of greatest theoretical interest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our nation's policy to reduce poverty reflects the belief that poverty is caused by institutional discrimination. This study first identifies the ideological and political nature of this position in relation to the classically ideological individualistic and structural beliefs about poverty. Second, it tests a block variable regression model of popular support for the various belief sets to determine how deeply Americans divide along traditional ideological lines. This model includes not only objective status and demographic factors but subjective variables as well. The results indicate only shallow cleavages in beliefs about poverty and account for why previous studies found deeper ones. Support for the institutional discrimination position is especially broad and is independent of support for individualistic or structural beliefs. These findings suggest that this position and its policy represent a successful political compromise and a viable way for people to resolve their ideological inconsistencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]