Vagrancy as a Penal Problem: The Logistics of Administering Punishment in Late‐Nineteenth‐Century Canada

There exists a voluminous literature on the history of vagrancy and vagrancy legislation. However, virtually all of its focus has been on the manifestations of vagrancy as a social problem. What has not received attention is another important aspect to this history, one that finds its roots and geneses directly out of its construction as a social problem. This is the problem associated with the logistics surrounding the administration of punishment within correctional institutions, what I call vagrancy as a penal problem. The day‐to‐day operations of the criminal justice system, especially that part which was responsible for the administration of punishment, were immensely burdened because of the sheer number of vagrants who came through the system. This created logistical problems with respect to housing, classifying, maintaining and regulating prisoners, and especially with respect to vagrants, putting them to hard labour. This paper seeks to elucidate the penal problem of vagrancy by narrating the voices of the personnel who worked in correctional institutions.     

Fourteen‐Month‐Olds Know What “We” Have Shared in a Special Way

People often express excitement to each other when encountering an object that they have shared together previously in some special way. This study investigated whether 14‐month‐old infants know precisely what they have and have not shared in a special way (and with whom). In the experimental condition an adult and infant shared an object (the target) excitedly because it unexpectedly reappeared in several places. They then shared 2 other objects (the distractors) in a more normal fashion. Later, the adult reacted excitedly to a tray containing all 3 objects and then made an ambiguous request for the infant to hand “it” to her. There were 2 control conditions. In 1 of them, a different adult, who knew none of the 3 objects, made the ambiguous request. In the other control condition, the adult who made the request had previously experienced the objects only alone, while the infant looked on unengaged. Infants in the experimental condition chose the target object more often than the distractors and more often than they chose it in either control condition. These results demonstrate that 14‐month‐old infants can identify which one of a set of objects “we”—and not just I or you alone—have had a special experience with in the past.     

Environmental Risks and Environmental Justice,Or How Titanic Risks Are Not So Titanic After All*

Some of the best‐known social scientific theories of risks are those that have been elaborated by Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck. Although their arguments differ greatly, they agree in seeing the technologically induced risks of today’s “Risk Society” as global—so pervasive that they transcend all socioeconomic as well as geopolitical and national boundaries. Most empirical work, however, provides greater support for a theoretical tradition exemplified by Short and Erikson. In this paper, we argue that many of the technological mega‐risks described by Giddens and Beck as “transcending” social boundaries are better described as “Titanic risks,” referring not so much to their colossal impact as to the fact that—as was the case for the majority of the victims on the Titanic—actual risks are related to victims’ socioeconomic as well as sociogeographic locations. Previous research has shown this to be the case with high‐risk technologies, such as nuclear energy and weaponry, and also with localized ones, such as toxic waste disposal. This article illustrates that the same is true even for the most genuinely “global” risks of all, namely those associated with global climate disruption.     

“Revenge” and “Rescue”: Workplace Deviance in the Taxicab Industry*

This study explores taxicab drivers’ acts of “revenge” and “rescue,” some of which are expressive acts, while others are more instrumental. This article builds on earlier theories of workplace deviance, demonstrating how deviance can serve different purposes and expanding the concept of “deviance admiration” ( Heckert and Heckert 2004 ). It examines deviance in a circumstance—the taxicab industry—which introduces a tension between mandated conformity and necessary deviance: employees must conform to the employers’ rules and yet, to accomplish their jobs well, they need to abandon those rules occasionally. In addition to its theoretical contributions, this work has important practical applications for managers.     

The Turn from “What” to “How”: Garfinkel's Reach Beyond Description

John Heritage described Harold Garfinkel's central question as “how do social actors come to know, and know in common what they are doing and the circumstances in which they are doing it.” The case of Agnes illuminates the methods by which members produce intelligible actions and recognizable—even “natural”—gender orderliness. With this central interest as a starting point, this article offers some observations about transgender women in prison and their creative adaptation to life behind bars.     

An evaluation model for the development of more humane correctional institutions: Evidence from Penghu Prison

Over time, correctional institutions have actively implemented innovations in prison administration. Most correctional institutions constitute conservative and closed societies. Generally, people do not have sufficient knowledge or understanding of penal correction. Therefore, it is difficult but necessary to break the stereotyped impression people hold about correctional institutions, actively integrate them into society, and encourage people to assume a more humane attitude towards correctional institutions. We conducted an inductive analysis of Penghu Prison administered by the Agency of Corrections, Ministry of Justice, Taiwan. After creating evaluation indices for the development of more humane correctional institutions, we conducted a survey to classify the evaluation indices into criteria under the four major evaluation dimensions. Using DEMATEL, we determined the causal relationship among different evaluation indicators and generated an influential network relation map about the evaluation criteria. Using DANP, we subsequently calculated weightings for the influence of each criterion. Finally, using the modified VIKOR, we conducted a gap analysis. The results of this study can be used to build a more positive and human reputation for correctional institutions and enable their sustainable creation.     

A Civil Religion for World Society: The Direct and Diffuse Effects of Human Rights Treaties, 1981–20071

Much research has concluded that human rights treaties have a null or negative effect on governments’ human rights practices. This article reexamines the influence of human rights treaties, with a focus on two kinds of treaty effects: direct—the effect of treaties on the countries that ratified them; and diffuse—the effect of treaties on countries regardless of ratification. My analysis of two prominent human rights treaties finds that they often reduce levels of repression and abuse over time and independently of ratification. Some of these effects are nonlinear, reversing direction as time elapses or as more countries become party to the treaties. These findings are interpreted with reference to world polity institutionalism in sociology, and especially the “Durkheimian” strains of this approach. Human rights norms as embodied in treaties operate as a kind of civil religion for world society. These norms not only have long‐term direct effects among countries that ritualistically ratify human rights treaties, but they also diffusely impact countries irrespective of formal endorsement.     

“Where the Danger Lies”: Race,Gender, and Chinese and Japanese Exclusion in the United States, 1870–19241

Race too often is used as the explanatory variable for understanding immigration exclusion, marginalizing the significance of race making, ethnic differentiation, and gender construction in particular. This article explores these processes by examining exclusionary policies implemented against Chinese and Japanese immigrants from the mid‐1870s to 1924, the year the National Origins Act was passed. Politicians, intellectuals, and moral reformers used a gendered logic—the construction of idealized gender norms, roles, and sexual propriety and the attachment of these meanings to male and female bodies—to distinguish Japanese immigrants from the Chinese immigrants they followed, allowing for ethnic differentiation and dissimilar policies. The convergence toward exclusion rested on a racialized logic—the construction and attachment of inferior status and meanings to immigrant groups through discourse, formal and informal categorization, or social closure—which claimed that the Japanese were unassimilable and racially undesirable like the Chinese. Exclusionists focused on the immigrant women, decrying their sexual and gender impropriety as evidence of the groups’ threats to the sanctity of white families, which imperiled the nation. Gender and race both mattered in these logics and their meanings were constructed as their salience interconnected.     

“It’s a Dignity Thing”: Nursing Home Care Workers’ Use of Emotions1

This article examines how nursing home care workers use emotions to construct dignity at work. Previous scholarship has shown how the financial and organizational characteristics of nursing homes shape and constrain emotion work among staff. Using evidence gathered during 18 months of participant observation in two nursing homes and 65 interviews with staff, this article analyzes how, despite obstacles, nursing home care workers generated authentic emotional attachments to residents. Surprisingly, some staff members said they particularly appreciated working with residents difficult to control. They felt accomplished when such residents successfully transitioned from life at home to life in institutional care. Emotions created dignity for staff and induced compliance among residents. Emotions are not only generated by organizations and imposed on workers; staff themselves produced emotions—sometimes in ways consistent with organizational demands, and sometimes not—and they consistently found in their emotions a resource to manage the strains of their work lives.     

“It's Only Sport”—The Symbolic Neutralization of “Violence”

Within the commodified world of professional ice hockey, athletes sell their bodily performances in return for a salary. A central feature of this transaction is the very real risk of physical injury—a risk inherent within most contact sports, but particularly so within those that feature seemingly “violent” confrontations between competitors, as ice hockey is widely reputed to do. Yet, within the spectacle of sport, where physicality can be constructed as playful and unserious, it is possible for the consequences of such action to be concealed behind a symbolic, ludic veneer. Within this article, we explore this process with a particular focus on ice hockey spectators, for whom notions of sport violence as in some important way “mimetic” of the “real” enabled their propensity to both enjoy, and find moral validation through, potentially deleterious behaviors among athletes.     

Single Mothers “Do” Family

This paper explores how single mothers both incorporate others into family life (e.g., when they ask others to care for their children) and simultaneously “do families” in a manner that holds out a vision of a “traditional” family structure. Drawing on research with White, rural single mothers, the author explores the manner in which these women both endorse their children’s attachment to other caregivers and maintain boundaries around issues of discipline and attachment vis‐à‐vis these others. The author demonstrates that single mothers are willing to share this protected realm of family life with a new man (a fiancé or cohabiting boyfriend) as they pursue the goal of what has been called the “Standard North American Family.”     

“When You Wake Up It'll All Be Over”: Communication in the Anaesthetic Room

This article focuses upon communication between medical professionals and patients within anaesthetic rooms—rooms in which patients are anaesthetized prior to entry into operating theaters. The most closely related field of sociological study is research on surgery, which tends to consider anaesthesia as a secondary specialism. Using video data collected from anaesthetic rooms and operating theaters in the United Kingdom, this article suggests that, while the processes that have been identified in surgery have some relevance for anaesthetic practice, there are important variations and differing interactional contingencies which need to be taken into account. In particular, the concept of “depersonalization” or “objectification” becomes particularly problematic in anaesthesia in ways that have not been broached in the study of surgery.     

The myth of the “data‐driven” society: Exploring the interactions of data interfaces,circulations, and abstractions

The prominence of data and data technologies in society, such as algorithms, social media, mobile technology, and artificial intelligence, have heralded numerous claims of the revolutionary potential of these systems. From public policy, to business management, to scientific research, a “data‐driven” society is apparently imminent—or currently happening—where “objective” and asocial data systems are believed to be comprehensively improving human life. Through a review of existing sociological literature, in this article, we critically examine the relationship between data and society and propose a new model for understanding these dynamics. “Using the concept of the informatic,” we argue the relationship between data and society can be understood as representing the interaction of several different social trends around data; that of data interfaces (that connect individuals to digital contexts), data circulation (trends in the movement and storage of data), and data abstraction (data manipulation practices). Data and data technologies are founded to be entwined and embedded in numerous social relationships, and while not all are fair and equitable relationships, there is ample evidence of the deeply social nature of data across many streams of social life. Our three‐part informatic framework allows these complex relationships to be understood in the social dynamic through which they are witnessed and experienced.     

Making Coolies, (Un)making Workers: “Globalizing” Labour in the Late‐19th and Early‐20th Centuries

This paper explores the social relationships of wage labour formed or stabilized in British merchant shipping in the course of “off‐shoring” employment in the late‐19^th century. It argues that Asian wage‐workers were mobilized for employment on British merchant vessels as “coolies”, i.e. nominally free but mediated labouring subjects who could only be stabilized through legal, penal, social, debt, or other forms of coercion. Once introduced “coolie” relations were not confined to Indian crews. They also affected wage labour relations more generally in British shipping. While occurring against the backdrop of anti‐colonial struggles, the seafaring coolie's transformation into maritime worker was closely mediated by employers and the colonial state and produced hybrid outcomes. The creation of the modern seafaring “coolie” and the nature and context of his transformation into a “worker” thus shed interesting light on wage labour relations in the modern and contemporary global economy.     

“Swapping” Families: Serial Parenting and Economic Support for Children

The claim that fathers “swap” families when they form new ones—that is, they shift allegiances from nonresident children to new residential children (e.g., Furstenberg, 1995 )—has not been directly evaluated empirically. Drawing on data from the two waves of the National Survey of Families and Households, we test Furstenberg's argument in terms of child‐support transfers to nonresidential children, and we also test an elaboration of his approach that distinguishes between resident biological children and stepchildren. Using static‐score models, our findings indicate that fathers do swap families but only when the trade‐off is between new biological children living inside fathers' households and existing biological children living outside fathers' households. Even though our analytic sample is small, our findings have important implications for child well‐being, child‐support policy, and the meaning of fatherhood.     

Making It “Count”: Mental Weighing and Identity Attribution

Research on identity suggests that a critical factor in identity concerns presentation or the behaviors actors perform in order to convince others of their identity. Yet identity also involves the attributions others make on the basis of these behaviors. In this paper, I argue that all acts do not fare equally in the process of attribution. Rather, individuals making attributions engage in a process of mental weighing as a way to determine which acts “count” toward identity and to what extent. While various components of the act contribute to its social weight—its presence or absence, markedness, frequency, context, and the manner in which it is performed—the lens through which the attributer views the act also influences the weighing process.     

Teaching and Learning Guide for “Gender In/equality in Worker‐owned Businesses”

This teaching and learning guide accompanies the article, “Gender In/equality in Worker‐owned Businesses,” which reviews existing literature on gender in businesses with employee stock ownership plans, worker cooperatives, and communes. Worker ownership has attracted renewed interest as a possible solution to the social and economic problems confronting our society. In worker‐owned businesses, workers have greater control over what they produce, how they produce it, and how they are compensated. If workers ran things themselves, so the story goes, jobs would be better and workplaces would be more equal. What do we actually know about work in alternative organizations? Do women fare better? Can they offer alternatives or solutions to the gender inequality that permeates working life? This teaching and learning guide provides supplemental information to facilitate the use of this article in the classroom. This includes a list of recommended readings, online resources, a sample syllabus, focus questions, and project suggestions.