Police Crime: The Criminal Behavior of Sworn Law Enforcement Officers

This essay examines the criminological conceptualizations and research on police crime, that is, the criminal behavior of sworn law enforcement officers. It starts with an overview of the conceptualization of police crime as it relates to organizational and scholarly perspectives of social deviance. Police deviance is often conceptualized to include various misconduct, corruption, and/or crime committed by police organizations and police officers. This essay focuses on police crime resulting in the arrest of a sworn law enforcement officer and is organized within a conceptual framework that incorporates five types of police crime: sex‐related police crime, alcohol‐related police crime, drug‐related police crime, violence‐related police crime, and profit‐motivated police crime.     

The Network Structure of Crime

From theoretical physics to field‐driven anthropology, researchers are increasingly exploring how the connections among individuals, amoebas, brain cells, organizations, and institutions affect what we feel, think, and do. However, the application of social network analysis to the study of crime, deviance, and violence has arrived a bit late to this network turn in the social and behavioral science. I argue that this network turn in the social sciences be an important turning point in the study of crime and deviance, but only if taken as an opportunity to evaluate our core theoretical principles and consider new ways to understand and measure them. The goal of this essay is to take stock of the state of the field, while also providing a moment of pause to consider some fruitful ways of advancing this line of inquiry.     

Toward professional civility: An analysis of rejection letters front sociology departments

I received 124 rejection letters from 124 sociology departments across the United Slates during my job search in 1996 and 1997. In this article, I analyze those rejection letters with regard lo the messages they send to individuals and organizations. I argue: (a) that rejection letters constitute a unique form of mass media in contemporary life as they are sent and read massively by individuals and organizations; and (b) that they may socialize entering practitioners into a specific discourse of attitudes and behaviors, sustaining a particular tradition of collegiality, morality, and interpersonal relationships for an organization, discipline, and profession. On the basis of this analysis, I offer suggestions lor positive change that will promote professional civility. Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Hawaii-Manoa. He is now assistant professor in sociology at California State University-Northridge. Dr. Shaw is interested in the study of deviance, crime, social problems, social control, and organizational behavior. He has published widely in those areas.     

Saints and Sinners: Elite Tattoo Collectors and Tattooists as Positive and Negative Deviants

Arguing that the deviance literature has presented an overly negative image of norm breaking, some researchers in the 1980s and 1990s began to argue for a category of positive deviance that included studies of individuals who exceed social norms (Ben-Yehuda 1990; Dodge 1985; Heckert 1989, 1997, 1998). The positive deviance perspective inspired several strong theoretical statements suggesting that deviance can only be conceptualized as a negative response to norm breaking (Best and Luckenbill 1982; Goode 1991; Sagarin 1985). The result is a schism between researchers studying positive deviants and those investigating negative deviants. This article looks at two groups within the most elite realm of tattooing, tattoo collectors and tattooists, and identifies how they use both positive and negative deviant attributes to maintain a privileged status on the fringe of society. By exploring an example of individuals who exceed and fall below social norms, I offer two new categories of positive deviance: high culture icon and popular celebrity. In addition, I examine how individuals who occupy both positive and negative deviant statuses challenge assumptions within normative and social response perspectives of deviants and point to larger processes of social change and social stability.     

Why we should think some more. A response to ‘When you’re boxing you don’t think so much’: pugilism,transitional masculinities and criminal desistance among young Danish gang members

This paper forms part of a discussion with scholars working in the field of criminology and youth crime, in particular those who are interested in sport, gender, and desistance from violence. Furthermore, this paper challenges previous work into the sport of boxing and desistance from violence, and therefore argues for a more nuanced approach, by incorporating more feminist epistemologies, and inclusive masculinities into this complex phenomenon. Drawing upon contemporary research, this paper discusses prior literature on sport and desistance from violence, and further develops the concept of sport as a tool for reduction in violent youth crime.     

Language Use and Violence: Assessing the Relationship Between Linguistic Context and Macrolevel Violence

Scholars have produced a sizable body of research assessing the macrolevel links between immigration and crime. However, researchers have given far less attention to related questions about the effects of language use on aggregate levels of violence. The current study addresses this gap in research by exploring the ways that patterns of language use—specifically, language heterogeneity and Spanish‐language concentration—are related to year 2010 serious violent crime rates for nearly 2,900 census places across the United States. Results of our analysis reveal that linguistic heterogeneity is associated with increased violence and that this relationship is stronger in disadvantaged contexts. In contrast, Spanish‐language concentration appears to be protective against violence and mitigates the violence‐generating effects of structural disadvantage, net of immigration and other macrostructural characteristics. Implications of these findings for research on immigration, communities and crime, and related theoretical perspectives on immigrant revitalization and macrostructural theories of crime are discussed.     

Social media and the doping of sport surveillance

Reviewing literatures from sociology of sport, surveillance, and internet studies, we consider the processes by which social media regulate the behavior of athletes. Nowhere is this more evident than in the current regulation of anti‐doping in elite sport where athletes' social media postings have been highly critical of fellow competitors. As social media becomes increasingly blended into everyday routines, this form of surveillance extends the gaze of those who watch and increases the pressure for online disclosure while making traditional distinctions between formal and informal social control less meaningful. Contemporary social media acts as a form of social control that has become more preemptive and grassroots. When athletes internalize surveillance and disclosure as consistent with their professional norms, the power relationships that surround sport performance become increasingly difficult to discern. This article helps to illuminate the ways in which surveillance through social media have become a part of everyday routines, extends and amplifies the power of more traditional agents of surveillance, and calls for continued research into the role of contemporary social media as a surveillance practice.     

“Nothing More Than the Usual Injury”: Debating Hockey Violence During the Manslaughter Trials of Allan Loney (1905) and Charles Masson (1907)

This historical case study of violence in Canadian hockey examines media coverage of two manslaughter trials: the 1905 trial of Allan Loney and the 1907 trial of Charles Masson. Both players stood accused of killing opposing players by striking them in the head with their hockey sticks. In each case, the offending player was acquitted in the courts, mainly because such violence was deemed intrinsic to the sport. Injuries that resulted from violent acts were downplayed or ignored; even death from a deliberate stick attack could be rationalized as an unfortunate accident. Newspaper accounts of the deaths, trials, and subsequent acquittals offer valuable insight into the cultural narratives surrounding hockey violence and notions of masculinity in early twentieth‐century Canada. These cases generated considerable debate around the issue of what constituted “clean” and “rough” hockey. The game reports, trial coverage, and public opinion examined in this case study suggest that stick‐swinging incidents and aggressive play have been regarded as ordinary and “proper” aspects of “strenuous hockey” for more than a century. The historical examination of such cases is important because the justifications for violence that were articulated in the context of the deaths continue to be voiced in contemporary discussions of hockey violence. As long as fighting and aggression remain markers of masculinity – and hockey continues to be seen as a training ground for manhood – it will be difficult to remove such forms of violence from the sport.     

Race,Hyper‐Incarceration,and US Poverty Policy in Historic Perspective

In this article, I bring scholarship on welfare reform into discussion with work on crime control and racial and ethnic relations. I locate the genesis of hyper‐incarceration and the moral suasion imposed on the recipients of contemporary social welfare services through the poverty policies of the Victorian era and later the postbellum south, implicating the checkered history of racial domination in the United States in the development of social welfare and criminal justice policy. I conclude by discussing the ways in which the United States has been reconfigured to facilitate these trends and of new terrain in the study of marginality in the neoliberal age. Doing so demonstrates the long‐standing collusion between welfare state and criminal justice actors, identifies the racialized target of punishment and poverty management, highlights the significance of race in the development of social policy, and exhibits the importance of social welfare policy in contemporary race and ethnic relations.     

Crime,Politics, and Punishment: Criminological Research for Political Sociologists

As a sociologist studying the intersection of crime, punishment, and politics, it is often surprising to me how many aspects of political sociology and the study of crime and punishment overlap, and yet, there is often limited cross‐fertilization of the two fields. For the sake of brevity in this discussion, I refer to those who study crime, deviance, law, criminal justice, and punishment as criminologists. My goal is to provide an extremely brief “primer” on criminology for political sociologists, in the hopes that a short reading of some issues and research in criminology may stimulate additional theorizing and research, as has so often happened when I have read political sociological work. To do this, I begin with a brief discussion of overlaps in political sociological and criminological perspectives. Following this, I highlight some examples of criminological research which incorporates politics, and would likely interest political sociologists, Then, I highlight a hot button issue in criminology – sex offenses – and suggest some ways that political sociologists could examine recent legislation on sex offenders and conclude with brief discussions of a few additional areas of overlap for the two disciplines.     

Round up the usual suspects: Crime,deviance, and the limits of constructionism

In the 1960s and early 1970s, the sociological study of deviance underwent a sharp break in orientation; many observers in the field began to shift their focus away from an examination of etiology to the study of social control. Examining the social construction of deviance and crime to the exclusion of crucial and unavoidable material features that cannot be defined away lead to certain conclusions that could not be sustained and were vulnerable to successful challenge from later approaches. The lives and work of Frank Tannenbaum, Jack Henry Abbott, and Alvin Gouldner, as well as the work of other labelists and Marxists, offer testimony to the limits of constructionism in the sociological study of deviance and crime.     

Carceral politics as gender justice? The “traffic in women” and neoliberal circuits of crime,sex, and rights

This article draws upon recent works in sociology, jurisprudence, and feminist theory in order to assess the ways in which feminism, and sex and gender more generally, have become intricately interwoven with punitive agendas in contemporary US politics. Melding existing theoretical discussions of penal trends with insights drawn from my own ethnographic research on the contemporary anti-trafficking movement in the United States—the most recent domain of feminist activism in which a crime frame has prevailed against competing models of social justice—I elaborate upon the ways that neoliberalism and the politics of sex and gender have intertwined to produce a carceral turn in feminist advocacy movements previously organized around struggles for economic justice and liberation. Taking the anti-trafficking movement as a case study, I further demonstrate how human rights discourse has become a key vehicle both for the transnationalization of carceral politics and for the reincorporation of these policies into the domestic terrain in a benevolent, feminist guise. I conclude by urging greater and more nuanced attention to the operations of gender and sexual politics within mainstream analyses of contemporary modes of punishment, as well as a careful consideration of the neoliberal carceral state within feminist discussions of gender, sexuality, and the law.     

A Postmodern Turn for Social Media Research: Theory and Research Directions for Public Relations Scholarship

The public relations literature on social media has focused primarily on how social media platforms can be leveraged to the advantage of organizations for relationship building and so-called dialogue with publics. Yet most research has positioned relationships in social media merely as opportunities for information exchange, perpetuating models of public relations grounded in systems theory that ignore power imbalances. Consequently, this article offers insights from postmodernist theories to first deconstruct existing research and then offer suggestions for future social media scholarship. The article argues that social media scholars have privileged dominant rational models of social engagement. Dissensus and disorder, according to Lyotard, may be as legitimate and more liberatory states of discourse for marginalized publics. Postmodern theories of language games and differential consciousness are also positioned as ways in which social media theory and practice may be advanced. The article thus complicates how relationships are theorized in contemporary scholarship and challenges both scholars and practitioners to rethink approaches to social media practice through a postmodern lens.     

Assault on Self: Intimate Partner Abuse and the Contestation of Identity

The complexities of intimate partner abuse and violence have been studied from a range of theoretical, conceptual, and methodological perspectives. It is argued here that symbolic interactionist analyses offer specific and powerful insights into this particular interactional domain. This article is based on data generated by a topical life‐history case study of a well‐educated, middle‐class, middle‐aged man, whose wife subjected him to sustained unilateral violence and abuse, resulting in deleterious consequences for his health and well‐being. Data were gathered via a series of in‐depth interviews and a personal diary. The analysis draws on Goffman's conceptualization of “possessional territory” as one of the “territories of the self,” in order to examine the role of possessions in the interactional routines of intimate partner abuse.     

A Dynamic Model of Racial Competition, Racial Inequality, and Interracial Violence

Race relations and stratification literatures offer explicit expectations concerning interracial conflict. Causal arguments derived from these perspectives are examined in this study to explore their ability to explain interracial violence above and beyond criminological perspectives of economic deprivation and racial inequality. The vast majority of previous aggregate-level studies on violence are cross-sectional, ignoring the importance of a dynamic model that incorporates the influence of changing structural conditions in urban areas on interracial violence. We explore theories that incorporate dynamic explanations for the influence of structural factors related to crime as well as racial conflict and employ a methodological approach that models the change in structural conditions for rare events such as interracial homicide. We find that changes between 1980 and 1990 in urban Black and Hispanic population composition, racial competition and racial inequality differentially explain the variation in White and Black interracial homicide offending.     

Nonviolent Civil Resistance and Social Movements

Research on non‐violent civil resistance has burgeoned in recent years. This field has much in common with the study of social movements, and yet there has been little cross‐fertilization between these literatures. In this article, I review the historical development of non‐violence studies from its Gandhian roots, through an emphasis on strategic non‐violence, to current empirical research that has generated new insights into the strategic interactions between non‐violent movements and their opponents, the effects of repression, the factors shaping movement outcomes, and cross‐national tactical diffusion. I summarize key findings and implications for the field of social movements. I conclude by charting out new areas of inquiry that future researchers ought to explore.     

Gender‐Related Violence and Young People: An Overview of Italian,Irish, Spanish,UK and EU Legislation

Do laws regarding violence against or sexual exploitation of young people recognise gendered and other power dynamics? Cross‐national comparison of legal texts can illustrate the benefits of framing issues of violence/gender/youth in certain ways and offer critical reflection on particular legal frameworks or cultural understandings. This policy review is based on an analysis of select laws regarding gender‐related violence (GRV) as relates to young people in Italy, Ireland, Spain and the UK. Here, GRV is defined as sexist, sexualising or norm‐driven bullying, harassment, discrimination or violence whoever is targeted. It therefore includes gender, sexuality and sex‐gender normativities, as well as violence against women and girls. A tension emerges between granting young people agency and recognising the multiple, intersecting power relations that might limit and shape that agency. This article draws out the implications for the UK in particular, highlighting the absence of preventative measures and the need for a broader approach to combat GRV.     

On the Need for an Anthropological Approach to Sport

Social relations of power are vital, embedded aspects of all sport. The Olympic credo of "Faster, Higher, Stronger" reflects the inherent ideological embodiment of power in sport. Sport, however, does not occur in a social vacuum, and therefore, who participates, and when, where, and how they participate, are all questions of socially embedded power critical to the study of sport. National states, across the entire ideological gamut, from fascist to Marxist, have tapped into the practices and symbolism of athletes and sport in order to aid in their legitimating discourses (Hoberman 1984). Yet the embedded power of sport is not limited to states and state-level societies, but is relevant to all societies. The relationships between sport and power extend from athletic bodies to social bodies in myriad, complex, intertwined patterns that penetrate and crosscut local specificities. This essay critically assesses recent contributions to the study of sport by suggesting how anthropological approaches to sport can complement existing sociological and historical perspectives within the burgeoning field of sport studies, while also making suggestions for other avenues of enquiry. With reference to four recent scholarly contributions, I will examine two general trends, globalization and sport and nationalism and sport that dominate the study of sport today. I also suggest ways in which these major themes incorporate perspectives on culture and power.     

More than just the media: Considering the role of public relations in the creation of sporting celebrity and the management of fan expectations

This article considers the complex nature of sporting celebrity and the role of media and public relations in the creation of both sports celebrity and the fan expectations associated with that celebrity. While public relations literature has traditionally considered PR as a promotion and communication tool, this article acknowledges that in the cultural and ideological world of sport, PR has a much more sophisticated role to play. In the event of either positive or negative media attention, a sporting celebrity is subjected to unprecedented scrutiny and the increasingly high expectations of fans. However, the expectations of fans are not based on the simple notion of hero worship and role models, and this exploratory study suggests that fans are capable of very complex reactions to the behaviours and marketing personas of sporting celebrities. The use of PR in sport deserves close examination and the reactive spin doctoring techniques of the past should give way to the strategic integration of public relations and media planning in both the creation of the sporting celebrity, balancing the sport vs. private sides of that celebrity, and the varying fan expectations associated with each.     

COMMITMENT, DEVIANCE, AND SOCIAL CONTROL

This article extends earlier work (Ulmer 1994) in applying Johnson's (1991) threefold commitment framework to deviance and social control. The central individual-level theories of deviance (differential association/social learning, opportunity, social control, and labeling) share the generic sociological goal of theorizing continuity in lines of action. This suggests the centrality of the concept of commitment, and in fact the concept is used throughout the study of deviance and social control. The threefold framework provides a superior conceptualization of commitment for the field of deviance. In addition, it integrates insights from the central deviance theories and directs attention to a wide variety of un- and underexplored directions for further research in deviance and social control. In addition, I briefly discuss broader implications of the commitment framework for other areas of inquiry, such as the study of social protest and the sociology of organizations.