“My God Wants Me to Live Simply”: The Constructed Selfhood of Faith‐Based Simple Livers

This study examines how participants in the faith‐based voluntary simplicity movement, referred to here as “Simple Livers,” draw on the complex interactions of ideology and emotions as they construct a moral identity focused on social change. Drawing on qualitative data from participant observation and interviews, I examine the use of moral repertoires—combinations of principles, practices, and feelings, including guilt, pride, and frustration, grounded in both the Christian faith and the tenets of voluntary simplicity. I engage with the new literature on lifestyle movements to argue that the moral repertoires of Simple Livers reinforce these ideologies, resulting in the construction of an over‐conforming moral self.     

Accounting for the Performance of Environmentally Significant Behavior: The Symbolic Significance of Recycling

The scientific community has pronounced climate change unequivocal and its consequences disastrous. Yet Americans' behavioral response to the global social problem of environmental degradation has been largely confined to the individual act of recycling. This article examines why Americans are not doing more to address climate change and other environmental issues. Taking a cognitive sociological perspective, I describe how Americans think about environmental issues and pro‐environmental behavior. I draw on Swidler's concept of a “cultural tool kit,” to examine the cultural narratives Americans use to account for the small amount of pro‐environmental behavior they perform. The act of recycling functions as a synecdoche for pro‐environmental behavior in general, allowing individuals to over‐claim the significance of a modest amount of pro‐environmental behavior. I argue that Americans' failure to engage with environmental issues at a collective level is rooted in the individualized culture of American environmentalism.     

Practical Treatments Considering the Role of Sociocultural Factors on Problem Gambling

Reviews of problem gambling (PG) literature increasingly recognize the ways in which different ethnic groups are affected by gambling behaviors, yet discourse, which considers sociocultural factors within PG, remains limited. Literature on this topic is influenced by large inconsistencies amongst research studies, overlapping terminology, and variability in the validity of research studies, making conclusions difficult to draw. Despite these discrepancies, this paper explores how sociocultural factors influence PG among diverse cultural groups and provides specific practical implications for treating PG disorders in culturally diverse populations. Notable factors that exacerbate PG behavior cross-culturally include substance abuse, low socioeconomic status, lack of social activities, and geographic location. Culturally sensitive treatment options such as Motivational Interviewing and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy have been identified as effective treatments for PG with culturally diverse populations. This paper extends current thought by providing practical treatment recommendations that consider the subtle nuances of diverse populations. It explains how treatment providers and behavioral addiction professionals can increase their understanding and skills when conceptualizing PG clients from a diverse background.     

Drug Courts and the Logic of Coerced Treatment1

This article examines the social and historical significance of coerced drug treatment within the criminal justice system. Drug courts, the most prominent example of this approach, serve as a case study to explore how seemingly contradictory perspectives on substance use—therapeutic and punitive—are merged to justify increased criminal justice oversight of defendants in the name of facilitating recovery. Drawing on an analysis of drug court organizational documents and interviews with key advocates, this article (1) examines the punitive, therapeutic, and medical knowledge drug court advocates draw on and construct to justify an increased role for the courts in solving the problem of addiction, and (2) links these theories historically to broader discussions about the causes of crime and the courts’ role in solving social problems. Overall, this article considers how scientific theories are fused with moral considerations in the name of an “enlightened” criminal justice approach to complex social problems.     

DEMAND FOR DIFFERENTIATED DURABLE PRODUCTS: THE CASE OF THE U.S. COMPUTER PRINTER MARKET

This paper develops an estimation technique for analyzing the impact of technological change on the dynamics of consumer demand in a differentiated durable products industry. The paper presents a dynamic model of consumer demand for differentiated durable products that explicitly accounts for consumers' expectations of future product quality and consumers' outflow from the market that arises endogenously from their purchase decisions. The timing of consumers' purchases is formalized as an optimal stopping problem. A solution to that problem defines the hazard rate of product adoptions, while the nested discrete choice model determines the alternative‐specific purchase probabilities. Integrating individual decisions over the population distribution generates rich dynamics of aggregate and product‐level sales. The empirical part of the paper applies the model to data on the U.S. computer printer market for 1998–1999. The estimates support the hypothesis of consumers' forward‐looking behavior, allowing for better demand forecasts and improved measures of welfare gains from introducing new products. (JEL L11, C35, D91)     

OPTIMAL COPYRIGHT LENGTH AND EX POST INVESTMENT: A MICKEY MOUSE APPROACH

This paper considers a theoretical model of copyright protection in which the value of an intellectual work changes over time because of depreciation and value‐enhancing ex post investments. The first main finding is that, in the case of a single project, granting infinitely lived copyright protection maximizes social welfare when the return on ex post investments is high relative to the return on the initial investment. We also provide simulation results of our model for the case of multiple heterogeneous projects that show how social welfare varies with the length of copyright protection and the returns on initial and ex post investments. We then consider what our framework says concerning the social‐welfare effects of the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act. Here we show that, depending on the importance of ex post investments, the act may have either increased or decreased social welfare. Our final analysis considers the social‐welfare implications of replacing fixed‐length copyright protection with Landes and Posner's (University of Chicago Law Review, 70(2), 2003, 471–518) idea of indefinitely renewable copyright protection. We find that implementing indefinitely renewable copyright protection frequently increases social welfare provided the returns on ex post investments are sufficiently large. We also provide a brief history of Disney's Mickey Mouse and argue that the history of that character matches quite well with the predictions of our theoretical approach. (JEL O34, K00, L82)     

THE WELFARE EFFECT OF ACCESS TO CREDIT

I present a model in which credit and outside money can be used as means of payment in order to analyze how access to credit affects welfare when credit markets feature limited participation. Allowing more agents to use credit has an ambiguous effect on welfare because it may make consumption‐risk sharing more inefficient. I calibrate the model using U.S. data on credit‐card use and show that the increase in access to credit from 1990 to the near present has had a slightly negative impact on welfare. (JEL E51, E41)     

Nonmanipulable decision mechanisms for economic environments

In the social choice literature studying the problem of designing institutions for collective decision making, it is customary to (implicitly) assume that each dimension of the social outcome is of public interest (i.e., that each individual's welfare depends on every dimension of the outcome). Thus, the scope of the conclusions obtained is very limited. Here social decision problems with and without that public character are considered and it is shown that the same negative results arise in most cases; namely, that only dictatorial mechanisms are immune to the participants' manipulations. These results are obtained without requiring that the mechanisms produce Pareto optimal outcomes (they must simply be minimally responsive to the participants' preferences), which deepens their pessimistic character.I am deeply grateful to my advisor, Mark Walker, for his continuous guidance and encouragement. I wish also to thank Salvador Barberà, John Weymark, and two anonymous referees for helpful comments.     

Objects,Meanings, and Role Identities: The Practices that Establish Association in the Case of Home‐Based Employment1

Contemporary social theory suggests that the meaning of any object differs by how we, as social actors, respond and relate to it. The challenge for sociology lies in exploring the different strategies and practices recursively and productively embedded in these relationships. In this article, I present data from in‐depth interviews with 20 home‐based employees to illustrate how these individuals interact with familiar objects in their surroundings to form anchor points for diverse lines of conduct. Although I draw from a number of sociological theories in my analyses, I further utilize cognitive theory to outline three micro‐psychological practices (i.e., routinization, goal targeting, and emotional alignment) that respondents apply in their attempt to establish the desired association between objects and identities. In this way, the article both extends previous lines of inquiry into the relationship between objects and actors, and makes a new contribution to the growing literature on culture and cognition.     

RACIALIZED AUTHENTICATION: Constructing Representations of the Florida Highwaymen

This article explores how art world professionals and cultural publicists construct representations of a group of “rediscovered” black artists, who painted from the end of the Jim Crow era to the present. Examining their writings, statements from interviews, and their interactions with audiences at public events, I show how they represented the artists as both exotic self‐taught artists and achievers of the American Dream. I introduce the term “racialized authentication” to frame a branch of racial rhetoric through which the various actors draw from both traditional racial stereotypes and new racism ideology to construct authentic artists. In conclusion, I address how these findings have implications for the integration of contemporary research on race and sociological studies of art worlds.     

Desperately seeking fusion: on 'joined-up thinking', 'holistic practice' and the new economy of welfare professional power

This paper argues that social welfare research on joined-up thinking is underpinned by two theses. The 'systemic move' thesis suggests that joined-up thinking is needed to fill gaps in welfare service provision arising from a lack of interorganizational co-ordination. The 'epistemological move' thesis advises that joined-up thinking is needed to overcome deficiencies in the institutional division and distribution of welfare knowledge. Both theses macro-systematize blame for previous social welfare failures, and both are teleological because they present joined-up thinking as a progressive solution that results in a more effective (and thus less fallible) welfare system. In this paper, I argue thatjoined-up thinking can also create a new economy of welfare professional power. First, I show how some versions of 'joined-up' thinking manifest themselves in holistic practices that can 'see everything', 'know everything' and 'do anything', and thus a 'holistic power' to discipline and control every aspect of welfare recipients lives. Since holistic power is seen as infallible, its failure to produce 'active bodies' necessitates the creation of secondary 'joined-up powers' that individualize blame and exclude those to blame from welfare resources. These 'secondary powers' match the social disciplines enforced by one welfare agency (e.g. the responsibility to work enforced by the employment service) with legal rights under another agency (e.g. the right to housing from social landlords), so that breach of the former leads to exclusion from the latter. I conclude that this power strategy is primitive and punitive because it simply excludes welfare recipients. Exclusion is also uneconomic because it pushes welfare recipients into the shade of welfare institutional power.     

Risk Factors for Suicidal Behavior Among Alcoholics

Abstract

Four risk factors for parasuicide and suicide ideation in 197 male and female alcoholism inpatients were investigated: addiction severity, family addiction history, psychiatric symptomatology, and inadequate social support. Risk factors for suicide ideation were psychiatric symptom severity and social dysfunction; those for parasuicide were younger alcohol problem onset, more alcoholism symptoms, greater social dysfunction, and greater psychiatric symptom severity. Logistic regression was utilized to assess the independent effects of risk factors on both suicide ideation and parasuicide. The most efficient model for parasuicide prediction consisted of psychiatric severity, controlling for gender; the most efficient model for ideation was psychiatric severity.     

Punishment and status in collective action: How status hierarchies foster optimal punishment use

I provide a brief overview of the literature on human cooperation, punishment, and social dilemmas. After reviewing relevant literature, I move on to a series of predictions, intertwining findings on punishment, public goods, and social status. Leaning on Status Characteristics Theory, I explicate how the behavioral expectations that we derive from status positions foster a means of using punishment to secure public goods. Furthermore, I argue that we carry general expectations for high status actors to punish when deemed collectively necessary. Building on this expectation, I articulate how initially status‐homogenous groups can develop status ranks on the basis of punishment behavior, allowing task groups to mimic sanctioning institutions commonly seen in public goods research and everyday life.     

Interaction Ritual Chains and the Mobilization of Conscientious Consumers

Markets for “socially responsible” products are comprised of activists who lead protests, organize boycotts, and promote the consumption of these goods. However, the ultimate success of these movements is dependent upon the support of a large number of consumers whose self-professed values often contradict with their own purchasing patterns. Consumer support of socially responsible products cannot be explained by consumer culture theories, which privilege identity, attitudes, and behavior, or mass consumption theories, which emphasize location and advertising’s influence on consumption patterns. These perspectives are informative but unable to explain why some consumers will only buy socially responsible products while others with similar value systems possess much more contradictory consumption patterns. I extend Collin’s theory of “Interaction Ritual chains” to show that rituals and emotions—more than identity or coercive advertising—explain how ethical consumers are mobilized. I show how face-to-face interactions between consumers and producers produce solidarity and motivate support for the Fair Trade movement. This paper employs a micro-sociological approach to contribute to studies of ethical consumption in three notable ways: 1) it emphasizes the importance of “contexts” and is able to explain contradictions in consumer behavior; 2), it contributes to our understanding of “brand communities” by describing the micro-sociological processes that both help to build these communities and create value within the products that organize these groups; and 3) it offers the potential to develop a predictive model for the purchasing patterns of consumers.     

Crafting the Neoliberal State: Workfare,Prisonfare, and Social Insecurity1

In Punishing the Poor, I show that the ascent of the penal state in the United States and other advanced societies over the past quarter‐century is a response to rising social insecurity, not criminal insecurity; that changes in welfare and justice policies are interlinked, as restrictive “workfare” and expansive “prisonfare” are coupled into a single organizational contraption to discipline the precarious fractions of the postindustrial working class; and that a diligent carceral system is not a deviation from, but a constituent component of, the neoliberal Leviathan. In this article, I draw out the theoretical implications of this diagnosis of the emerging government of social insecurity. I deploy Bourdieu’s concept of “bureaucratic field” to revise Piven and Cloward’s classic thesis on the regulation of poverty via public assistance, and contrast the model of penalization as technique for the management of urban marginality to Michel Foucault’s vision of the “disciplinary society,” David Garland’s account of the “culture of control,” and David Harvey’s characterization of neoliberal politics. Against the thin economic conception of neoliberalism as market rule, I propose a thick sociological specification entailing supervisory workfare, a proactive penal state, and the cultural trope of “individual responsibility.” This suggests that we must theorize the prison not as a technical implement for law enforcement, but as a core political capacity whose selective and aggressive deployment in the lower regions of social space violates the ideals of democratic citizenship.     

Employment Insecurity and the Frayed American Dream

This paper reviews literature on employment insecurity and situates objective and subjective employment insecurity in the context of the contemporary economy. I draw on the argument about shifting social contracts to explain both real and perceived pervasive employment insecurity and the frayed American Dream. Employment insecurity derives from the macro‐economic changes that produced the social structure of accumulation identified as flexible accumulation that requires employment insecurity as both a form of labor discipline and profit‐enhancing strategy. This paper argues that contemporary employment insecurity is both objective and subjective and affects how individuals understand their world and their selves. To this latter point, I look at research on generational differences in the experience of employment insecurity.     

LIVING IN TWO NEIGHBORHOODS—SOCIAL INTERACTION EFFECTS IN THE LABORATORY

Field evidence suggests that people belonging to the same group often behave similarly, that is, behavior exhibits social interaction effects. We conduct a laboratory experiment that avoids the identification problem present in the field and allows us to study the behavioral logic of social interaction effects. Our novel design feature is that each subject is simultaneously a member of two randomly assigned and identical groups where only members (“neighbors”) are different. We study behavior in a coordination game with multiple equilibria and a public goods game, which has only one equilibrium in material payoffs. We speak of social interactions if the same subject at the same time makes group‐specific decisions that depend on their respective neighbors' decisions. We find that a majority of subjects exhibit social interaction effects both when the game has multiple equilibria in material payoffs and when it only has one equilibrium. (JEL C91, H41, K42, H26)     

Japan’s “New Homeless”

Since the mid-1990s, homelessness has become a major issue of public discussion in Japan, and is often viewed as a new social problem facing Japanese society. The issue of homelessness contrasts images of the absence of poverty and homelessness in postwar Japan, often explained based on the unique features of Japanese-style employment and welfare, containing poverty and unemployment. This paper contrasts these views with a perspective on the continuity ofpoverty, and homelessness in postwar Japan. Specifically, I discuss the characteristics of homelessness in Tokyo, how they relate to the structure of the economy and employment practices, and how the problems oftoday’shomeless are accommodated in the welfare system. I argue that the homeless cast light on patterns of loss of employment, housing, and means of subsistence, characteristic to Japan’s economy and welfare system, and contribute to a new understanding of the dynamics of poverty in contemporary Japan.     

When Bourgeois Utopias Meet Gentrification: Community and Diversity in a New Urbanist Neighborhood*

Abstract

Scholars have recently begun to explore how social and politically liberal gentrifiers make sense of the classed and racial inequalities linked to gentrification. In this article I ask how residents of one new urbanist “bourgeois utopia”—the Mueller Development in Austin, Texas—experience and give meaning to their neighborhood in a context of gentrification. Drawing on 31 in-depth interviews I explain how new urbanism has reimagined and marketed “diversity” and “community” to middle-class and wealthy consumers and provides these to affluent people as neighborhood amenities. I show how residents draw on diversity ideology and multicultural capital to neutralize what they see as their neighborhood’s role in gentrification. In doing so this article adds to our theoretical understanding of how contemporary urban development exploits pursuits for the social good as rhetorical tools to assuage privileged guilt while promoting profitable enterprises.     

INTERGENERATIONAL EFFECTS OF WELFARE REFORM: ADOLESCENT DELINQUENT AND RISKY BEHAVIORS

This study investigates effects of welfare reform in the United States on the next generation. Most previous studies of effects of welfare reform on adolescents focused on high‐school dropout of girls or fertility; little is known about how welfare reform has affected other teenage behaviors or boys. We use a difference‐in‐difference‐in‐differences framework to identify gender‐specific effects of welfare reform on skipping school, fighting, damaging property, stealing, hurting others, smoking, alcohol, marijuana, and other illicit drugs. Welfare reform led to increases in delinquent behaviors of boys as well as increases in substance use of boys and girls, with substantially larger effects for boys. (JEL K42, I12, I31, I38)