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In these selections from Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City (1999), sociologist Elijah Anderson uses ethnography – the close observation of people interacting in social situations – to examine the minute details of African-American urban experience and culture. He is concerned about urban policy issues but lets the reality of ghetto life speak for itself in ways that are sometimes startling and always brutally honest. Anderson sees two kinds of cultures operating within the African-American inner-city community: the “decent” life characterized by adherence to middle-class norms of behavior and the “street” life characterized by boisterousness, lawlessness, violence, and disregard of the rights of others. The core problem of ghetto life, writes Anderson, is the pattern of “interpersonal violence and aggression” that “wreaks havoc daily on the lives of community residents and increasingly spills over into downtown and residential middle-class areas.” The sources of this violence are “the lack of jobs … limited basic public services, the stigma of race, drug use, social alienation, and the absence of hope for the future.” Young people are the victims of this system of social pathology, and its effects can only be counteracted by “a strong, loving, ‘decent’ (as the inner-city residents put it) family that is committed to middle-class values.” But standing against middle-class decency is “the code of the street,” informal rules governing interpersonal public behavior. “At the heart of the code,” writes Anderson, “is the issue of respect – loosely defined as being treated ‘right’… or the deference one deserves.” The code is “a cultural adaptation to a profound lack of faith in the police and the judicial system” and an “oppositional culture … whose norms are often consciously opposed to those of mainstream society.”

This chapter focuses on the future of the queer pub and whether it is vital to the maintenance of the evolving queer community. It seeks to ask what can be learned from London’s historic queer pubs: what important principles do they advocate for wider societies that are increasingly at risk of being lost altogether. Unlike many queer bars and clubs that are located in concentrated urban nodes, queer pubs form a small and diffuse network, littered throughout the marginalised, cheaper areas of the city, often associated with ‘the discarded, the derelict’. ‘Queer space may be a contradiction in terms. Some would argue that queerness, as an ineffable ideal of oppositional culture, is so fluid and contingent that the idea of a concrete queer space is an oxymoron.’ The democratic business model of London’s historic queer pubs has recently become subject to the threat of regeneration, labelled as unsustainable in the contemporary socioeconomic climate.

This article is the final stage of seven years of research dedicated to understanding the theoretical backgrounds of Brazilian electroacoustic music in which a significant amount of data was gathered from a series of questionnaires and interviews with Brazilian composers. Our research focuses mainly on the influence of what we have called the historical matrices: musique concrète, elektronische musik and computer music. We were able to determine to some extent how much each of these matrices weigh on the poetic andpoiesisof the Brazilian electroacoustic production. We were also able to shed some light on how (and if) Brazilian composers relate to these matrices aesthetically and if their relation to them is merely technical, as well as trying to understand how clear cut the borders are between these two aspects of musical creation. The concepts ofoppositional culture(Ogbu 1978) andestablished and outsiders(Elias and Scotson 2000) also helped us understand the dynamics between academia and a certain anti-academic stance seen in some composers of the genre. Using these same concepts, we elaborate, in a final note, on some brief comments about a newer generation of composers who, due to various aspects, were filtered out during the early methodological stages.

The goal of the early republican elite was to form a new national identity supporting westernization and the consciousness of secular Turkishness while excluding the Ottoman- Islamic legacy as much as possible. Turkish History Thesis was, above all, an ideological instrument for supporting and legitimizing these objectives. The influence of the Turkish History Thesis on music debates of the early republican period is reflected by the arguments on the Central Asian and archaic Anatolian origins of Turkish music, the alleged impact of this archaic Turkish music on the other great music traditions of the world such as Western music and the famous pentatonism thesis. In these debates, the Turkish History Thesis has been employed as an ideological instrument rather than a scientific explanation. The ideological background underlying the Turkish History Thesis and its various extensions in the field of music has dominated not only the official view but also the oppositional discourse, despite its weak scientific basis. This fact points to the extent of ideological hegemony exercised by the dominant cultural discourse on the oppositional one and also presents a good case of how the survival strategies of the oppositional culture against the attacks of an official discourse pave the way for the internalization of this dominant discourse by it.

Using nationally representative data from the High School Longitudinal Study (HSLS), I assess the oppositional culture explanation for Mexican students. First, I examine if there are differences between Mexican and White students in their academic behaviors, attitudes, and friends' academic orientation. Second, I examine if these measures account for the racial disparity in academic outcomes between Mexican and White students. The results show that there are few differences between Mexican and White students in measures of school-related behaviors, attitudes, and friends' academic orientation. The second part of the analysis suggests that, in general, these measures for behaviors, attitudes, and friends' academic orientation do not explain much of the differences in academic achievement between Mexican and White students. The findings from the study indicate that the oppositional culture explanation does not account for this disparity in achievement.

According to the influential “oppositional culture” account, we should expect black students as a group to be less likely to engage in school than their white counterparts because they are more likely to believe and act in opposition to academics. In contrast to this prediction, qualitative and quantitative researchers have almost uniformly deduced that black students hold similar or higher educational values, attitudes, and expectations as compared to whites. I pull from the rich literature on racial differences in educational attitudes and expectations to posit that instead of black students shirking education, black students are actually more likely to act in favor of education, and that this might help explain their higher net rates of college attendance as indicated in prior research. Using the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 (ELS), I find that black students’ higher rates of engagement in college-going behaviors mediate the relationship between race and college attendance so that race is no longer a significant predictor of attendance. Implications for how these results can address racial disparities in college entry and completion will be discussed.

Research has established that adolescents both befriend peers based on their academic achievement and adjust their own achievement to that of their friends’ over time. However, these processes may be different for ethnic minority students, because some of them may adhere to an oppositional culture that rejects striving for academic success. We examine respective differences between self-identified ethnic minority and majority students using longitudinal social network analysis (stochastic actor-oriented models) in a sample of 1175 students (aged 13) from 12 grade-level networks in Germany secondary schools. Among the students, we find that academically successful students in particular prefer friends with high grades, but that students with poor grades exert more social influence on their friends to adjust their performance. Moreover, while minority students are indeed less inclined to select friends with higher grades, both ethnic majority and minority youth prefer friends with similar academic achievement and are similarly influenced by their friends’ achievement. However, social influence is stronger from same-ethnic than from inter-ethnic friends. In sum, there is mixed evidence for an oppositional culture among ethnic minority students in our sample.

Three leading theories of racial achievement gaps in education include cultural capital match/mismatch, oppositional culture, and teacher bias. Cultural capital match/mismatch theory suggests that students and teachers do not share the same understanding of the standards, norms, and expectations required for achievement. Oppositional culture theory suggests that students may resist the standards, norms, and expectations of achievement, and teacher bias theory suggests that teachers have standards, norms, and expectations that privilege some students, but not others. The unifying thread in all three of these theories is how teachers and students perceive and execute the standards, norms, and expectations of schooling. This study offers a unique way of operationalizing whether and how cultural capital, oppositional culture, and/or teacher bias occur in everyday classroom practice and behavior by examining racialized patterns of student–teacher effort assessment match/mismatch. Using data from the Educational Longitudinal Study (Base Year 2002), I find no evidence for oppositional culture; net of other background characteristics, black students are less, and Hispanic students are no more likely than white students to agree with their teachers that they have low effort. Black and Hispanic students are more likely than white students to believe they are working hard when their teacher disagrees, but, consistent with cultural capital theory, socioeconomic background and academic skills account for all of their effort misalignment. Lastly, white and Asian students seem to benefit from positive teacher bias; net of background and skill, black and Hispanic students are less likely than white and Asian students to receive positive teacher effort assessment when they admit to not working hard.

In many Western countries, increasing levels of immigration have raised concerns over the outcomes of social–ethnic segregation in schools. This study relates social–ethnic school composition to students’ behavioral, emotional, and cognitive disengagement. While previous research mostly remains atheoretical, this current study investigates the applicability of the perceived control explanation, with the expectation that attending low socioeconomic status (SES) schools and schools with a higher proportion of ethnic minority pupils lowers students’ perceived control and hence produces disengagement. Multilevel analyses on data from the Flemish Educational Assessment, consisting of 11,759 students in 83 Flemish secondary schools, show that students in lower SES schools are more likely to disengage behaviorally and emotionally from school. This association is, as expected, mediated by feelings of perceived control. Higher ethnic minority concentration, however, yields lower disengagement, especially for ethnic minority students. The implications are discussed.

In this article, against John Ogbu’s oppositional culture theory and Claude Steele’s disidentification hypothesis, this work offers a more appropriate neo-Marxian her meneutical framework for contextualizing, conceptualizing, and evaluating the locus of causality for the black male/female intra-racial gender academic achievement gap in the United States of America and the United Kingdom. Positing that in general the origins of the black/white academic achievement gap is grounded in what Paul C. Mocombe refers to as a ‘mismatch of linguistic structure and social class function’. Within Mocombe’s neo-Marxist theoretical framework the intra-racial gender academic achievement gap between black boys and girls is a result of the social class functions associated with the urban street life where the majority of urban black males achieve their status, social mobility, and economic gain, and the black church where black females are overwhelmingly more likely to achieve their status, social mobility, and drive for economic gain via education and professionalization.

Recent studies suggest that anti-achievement attitudes and behaviors that are specific to black students occur most commonly in integrated or predominantly white school contexts. Accordingly, this study examines the degree to which racial differences in achievement-related attitudes and behaviors (collectively called academic orientations) actually contribute to corresponding differences in academic performance among nearly 25,000 students attending integrated secondary schools in the United States. The findings suggest that when controlling for socioeconomic status indicators, black students exhibit more pro-academic orientations than their white counterparts. School racial composition did not significantly influence these dynamics, and the racial composition of black students’ friend groups showed modest but inconsistent influence on academic orientations. Finally, the authors demonstrate that racial differences in expressed academic orientations have only negligible consequences for student performance, and thus do not show much promise for explaining or remedying black/white achievement disparities in secondary schools.

Do African American students really have to act White to achieve academically? Will they then be ridiculed by their communities and viewed as “sellouts” if they succeed? What does it mean to act Wh...

Little media attention has been devoted to the burgeoning punk scene that has raised alarm abroad in areas such as Banda Aceh, Indonesia and Moscow, Russia. While the punk subculture has been analyzed in-depth by such notable theorists as Dick Hebdige and Stuart Hall, their work has been limited to examining the rise and apparent decline of the subculture in England, rendering any further investigations into punk as looking back at a nostalgic novelty of postWorld War II British milieu. Furthermore, the commodification of punk music and style has relegated punk to the realm of an alternative culture in Britain and locally in the U.S. In these current international incarnations, however, a social space for this alternative culture is threatened by severe punishment including what Indonesian police officials have label “moral rehabilitation” and, in the case of Russian punks, imprisonment. Punk today is once more—or, for the first time, truly becoming—an oppositional culture as described by Raymond Williams, rather than a non-threatening alternative. The international punk scene has become deeply connected to other punks through the internet, creating a growing global community. Through musical and stylistic culture, punk offers its members much more: a voice that questions established values, that screams for change. In these nations where punks have little agency in political and social matters, a guitar and a microphone offer a means of speaking. The communal aspect of punk creates an arena for those involved to foster a culture of dialogue and

Against Ogbu's oppositional culture hypothesis, this article offers a class or structural/relational framework to contextualizing and understanding why it is that Blacks have more limited skills in processing information from articles, books, tables, charts, and graphs compared with their White counterparts in the United States and United Kingdom. We synthesize Marxian conceptions of identity construction within capitalist relations of production with the Wittgensteinian notion of “language games” to offer a more appropriate relational framework within which scholars ought to understand this Black–White academic achievement gap in America and the United Kingdom.

This paper offers a sociological critique of the perceived Black-White gap in education and of the theory of “opposition” that underpins it. The literature extending back a century discusses how oppressed and segregated groups adopt attitudes opposed to those who oppress and contain them. Failure to situate the current oppositional culture in this larger body of literature makes opposition seem specific to Black Americans; it is not. Further, among people with similar economic resources, Black Americans have higher educational aspirations and go to college more than comparable Whites. The continued framing of a “race gap” without reference to economic circumstances reifies race and lays the blame for educational failure on schools, teachers, families, and students, when the real culprits are social and economic issues like jobs, wages, and residential segregation. But because politically we are unwilling to deal with these larger socioeconomic issues, educational professionals are compelled to practice as if economic inequality and poverty do not matter, but in fact they do. Because Black Americans are disproportionately represented in lower economic strata, a spurious correlation exists in professional and popular discourse that mistakenly identifies Black people as “opposed” to education. Net of socioeconomic status, Black Americans are no more opposed than anyone else.

So what is the answer to these multifarious problems identified in the simple words ‘disruptive behaviour’? Which theorists should trainees or practitioners follow? Should they believe in Kohn or Kounin, use intrinsic motivation procedures, be managerial facilitators or become more draconian? Be more like Fred Jones or Harry Wong? With the growing complexity, problematic and stressful nature of many issues concerning vulnerable or even aggressive learners, should teachers be using therapy models or behavioural rewards and punishments? As we have seen, causes of ‘bad behaviour’ may not be easily determined. There might be socio-economic, biological or gender issues or differences in ethnicity that might impact on group or cultural atmospheres or identities in classrooms. There might be an oppositional culture between the teacher and students, assumptions about class difference. Wars in other parts of the world could be replicated in the classrooms of England. On the other hand, the teacher and student can come from the same culture or background, but this can also be a source of dislike, resentment, self-hate or even contempt. As has been reiterated throughout, it is not easy to legislate or pre-determine why difficulties happen. Although practical solutions have been discussed, the underlying attitude has been to examine the complex nature of these challenging situations, view different sets of recommendations and try to unravel the key elements that have emerged in each area of research undertaken.

Resumo: Esta é uma reflexão que, aproveitando-se do ensejo comemorativo dos oitenta anos do Serviço Social no Brasil, faz um retrospecto da performance desta profissão na ordem burguesa, partindo dos países capitalistas que lhes serviram de berço. Esse périplo, no entanto, pretendeu realçar um denominador comum no Serviço Social mundializado, que é a sua propensão a remar, em qualquer contexto, contra os ditames do sistema que o engendrou. E com essa tendência - que não é unânime, mas historicamente persistente - ele tem sido um profícuo "ponto fora da curva" das profissões sucumbentes ao conservadorismo. Abstract: This is a reflection that, taking advantage of the commemorative occasion of the eighty years of Social Work in Brazil, does a retrospect of the performance of this profession, in the bourgeois order, starting with the capitalist countries that served as its birthplace. This tour, however, intended to highlight a common denominator in the globalized Social Work, which is its tendency to row, in any context, against the system dictates that engendered it. And with this trend - which is not unanimous, but historically persistent - it has been a fruitful "point off the curve" of the rendered professions to conservatism.

In spite of criminal justice efforts to deter gang membership, gangs appear to be flourishing. This leaves justice systems struggling to devise effective strategies to deter gangs and reduce their impact on communities. This chapter outlines a number of gang deterrence strategies employed by the USA and UK and offers psychological explanations as to why they may not be effective. It begins by examining the theoretical perspectives of general and individual deterrence. It then evaluates the deterrence effects of suppression, and multi-faceted anti-gang programs along with the impact of policies such as gang injunctions and joint enterprise on gang membership. The chapter then moves on to consider some of the psychological explanations as to why criminal justice anti-gang tactics may be ineffective. It considers the need of gang members to forge an identity and how identifying with a gang can impact on members’ behavior. It outlines how pluralistic ignorance may underpin members’ adherence to a gang’s social norms, how members’ ability to morally disengage may ameliorate their feelings of cognitive dissonance, and how group commitment and cohesion may be constructed. The role of reputation and status enhancement are also explored as influential in gang members’ responses to deterrence strategies, and it is considered how deterrence strategies may backfire to foster an oppositional culture in gang members. The chapter concludes by calling for more psychological research into how group processes in gang membership may inoculate gang members from even the most concerted criminal justice efforts to deter them.

Elijah Anderson's (1999) Code of the Street thesis argues that joblessness, alienation, structural disadvantage, and black status converge to explain higher rates of violence among African-American, inner-city males. Few studies examine whether a similar phenomenon extends to females. Additionally, few studies investigate how family attachment affects belief in an oppositional culture that Anderson calls “street codes.” Using data from the National Youth Survey, the present study addresses these issues by examining whether boys actually embrace street codes more than girls, whether family attachment reduces the likelihood of street code adoption for both boys and girls, and whether the magnitude of the effect of family attachment on street code adoption differs between boys and girls. Ordinary least squares regression results indicate that boys embrace street codes more than girls, but a substantial number of females embrace them as well. Moreover, family attachment reduces street code adoption for both g...

This article argues that the Depression era musical, Swing Time (1936), provides access to understanding some of the forms of socially constructed desire that shaped working class solidarity in the 1930s. In the first part of this article, I explore the roots of Swing Time’s critique of vested forms of desire in Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class. I argue that Swing Time offers an extension of Veblen’s theory by analyzing the power of mass communication to rewire social circuits of desire. I then explore the meaning of the stylistic realism and the language of protest operating in Swing Time’s narrative. From this I conclude Swing Time offers a critique of capitalism precisely in order to affiliate itself with a new, working class oppositional culture. But in affiliating itself with this oppositional community, Swing Time accepts and reinforces the language of racial privilege circulating within the ‘white’ working class. With a final critical act, however, Swing Time symptomatically reveals the invidious character of white privilege, as well as the fact that the cultural heritage of the (white) working class (swing music itself) comes from the theft and plunder of African American originality.

The most common lay explanation for the racial gap in educational achievement in the US is the ‘oppositional culture hypothesis’, which holds that Black students tend to undervalue education and stigmatize their high-achieving peers, accusing them of ‘acting White’. Many believe that, insofar as this hypothesis is true, Black underachievement is unproblematic from the perspective of justice, because Black students are simply not taking the fair opportunities presented to them. This article offers a systematic critique of the normative aspects of this view and some conceptual clarifications regarding the nature of opportunity.

The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, aka ‘Wobblies’) developed a rich, extensive movement culture. Focusing on one genre – cartoons – within the Wobbly cultural arsenal, we extend social movement theory in two interrelated ways. First, by asking why Wobblies were attracted to cartoons as a key cultural form of insurgent media, we open the question of genre selection for social movement scholars. In this, Wobblies deployed cartoon art extensively because it was a form widely available in prevailing popular culture, corresponded well with IWW oppositional culture, and fitted nicely with production, circulation, and consumption considerations. Second, we ask what sort of work cartoons performed for this movement. We highlight the use of visual arts of protest as an important vehicle for extending movement framing work and develop the concept of visual frame amplification. Drawing on more than 300 IWW cartoons printed in the Industrial Worker between 1909 and 1913, we show that Wobblies used cartoons to ...

Is the acting white hypothesis empirically viable? The strong version of this hypothesis—that African American students are negatively sanctioned by peers for academic success, while their similar white peers are not sanctioned—misses the possibility that some students preemptively pull back academic effort without having received sanctions. This article tests a weak version of the hypothesis—that some academically engaged African American students perceive the costs of peer sanctions to be sufficiently high to scale back overt academic engagement before receiving peer sanctions. The weak version predicts sufficiently high costs of sanctions in schools with racialized social norms about academic engagement. The author uses multilevel modeling to test strong and weak versions of the hypothesis on a nationally representative sample of African American and white students. While the results do not support the strong version of the acting white hypothesis, they point to a mild form of the weak version of the hypothesis.

This article assesses whether social-ethnic composition influences students' school misconduct. Based on general strain theory, we expect to find that individual sense of futility acts as an intermediate mechanism. Starting from cultural deprivation and oppositional culture theory, however, we hypothesize that a shared school culture of futility acts as mediator. Multilevel analyses of data from the Flemish Educational Assessment, consisting of 11,872 students in 85 schools, showed that ethnic composition has an impact on school misconduct: there is more deviance in ethnically mixed schools than in ethnic concentration schools due to a greater student sense of futility. The presence of a culture of futility did not affect the probability of being deviant. These results were true only for natives: school factors did not affect migrants' deviancy. We conclude that, although a dispersal of ethnically diverse students across all schools is favorable, this can yield negative side effects.

Research has documented important connections between ethnic identity and academic success. In the multiethnic context of the US, ethnic self-identification is a dynamic process that develops through social interaction within institutions. Understanding the emergence of a Latino self-identity within schools can provide insight into the meanings adolescents confer to a “Latino” identity and the relationship between a Latino self-identity and academic success. This study uses data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health to examine (1) the association between a Latino self-identification in-school but not at home and academic well-being, (2) the association between a Latino self-identification in-school but not at home and school processes, and (3) whether school processes help to mediate the relationship between Latino self-identification in-school but not at home and academic well-being. Results suggest that while adolescents who identify as Latino at school but not at home come from families and neighborhoods with higher levels of economic and human capital, by the end of high school they have accumulated less educational capital then either consistently identifying Latinos or non-Latino whites. Much of this association can be explained by prior academic experiences, yet other factors associated with resistance to institutional norms and attending low performing schools may also be important. Results suggest that non-minority, underachieving adolescents may choose to self-identify as Latino in schools as a way to save face and avert identity crises and that perhaps youth in schools have come to associate a Latino identity with poor school performance.

This article uses the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health to establish that once socioeconomic status is considered, black Americans go to college at higher rates than whites. The outcome replicates numerous other studies that use different datasets and varying methods. Combining statistics and literature, I propose that blacks’ superior educational investment is an “empirical generalization.” This leads to discussions of the black-white “gap” in education and the “attitude-achievement paradox.” The latter claims that black people have high educational aspirations but fail to act on those attitudes. But when considering the choice to invest in education, the “attitude-achievement paradox” evaporates. Black Americans have high educational aspirations and, when there are enough resources, act on those aspirations by going to college at higher rates than whites. The paper concludes with a theoretical explanation of why black people, more than whites, efficiently translate resources into educational investment. I use literature to show that in the United States, the bearers of light skin are afforded numerous informal opportunities that allow them to get higher returns out of a given level of human capital. Non-whites, on the other hand, have fewer informal opportunities, and they therefore deploy “supra-normal efforts” of skill acquisition as a strategy to overcome their informal disadvantage.

Some theories have posited that African American youth are academic underachievers because of sociocultural factors. We label this point of view the cultural incompatibility perspective. Ogbu’s oppositional culture theory and Steele’s stereotype threat theory are selected as popular examples of this viewpoint. A critical review of the literature on these particular theories was conducted. It was concluded that there is limited empirical support for the cultural incompatibility perspective on African American academic achievement. This raises questions about the focus on academic underachievement among African Americans versus high achievement among other ethnic/racial groups. Implications of the empirical findings on the incompatibility perspective for the role of African American culture in Black student achievement are discussed.

Using a newly available data set, which allows one to construct a novel measure of a student's social status, we demonstrate that there are potentially important racial differences in the relationship between social status and academic achievement. The effect is concentrated among students with a grade point average (GPA) of 3.5 or higher and more pronounced in schools with more interracial contact. Earlier studies showing a positive relationship between popularity and academic achievement for blacks are sensitive to the inclusion of more continuous achievement measures. We argue that the data are most consistent with a model of ‘acting white’ in which investments in education are taken as a signal of one's opportunity costs of peer-group loyalty, though imprecise estimates make definitive conclusions difficult.