Title IX: Consequences for Gender Relations in Sport

Legal interventions have succeeded in creating new opportunities for female athletes, but some argue that this is at the expense of opportunities for male athletes. In this review, we examine the consequences of a particular legal intervention in sport, the US education law Title IX, for female athletes, male athletes, and the construction of gender. Research indicates that sport participation is linked to important attainment outcomes, such as completing education and receiving higher salaries, for both male and female athletes. In addition, playing sports has several protective effects for women’s and girls’ mental and physical health. While positive effects for male athletes are important, courts’ interpretations of Title IX do not require the elimination of men’s opportunities but also do not protect those opportunities in current enforcement. Legal interventions that assure female sports participation also challenge the ways sport is used to create and reproduce definitions of masculinity, exposing dangerous emphases on toughness, aggressiveness, and heterosexual conquest that are damaging to both female and male athletes.     

Short Notices

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D. W. Howell, Land and People in Nineteenth‐Century Wales (1977), xv+207 (Routledge &; Kegan Paul, £6.95).

Murray Tolmie, The Triumph of the Saints: The Separate Churches of London 1616–1649 (1977), xii+251 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, £9.00).

George Huppert, Les Bourgeois Gentilshommes. An Essay on the Definition of Élites in Renaissance France (1977), xii+237 (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, £12.95).

Robert Currie, Alan Gilbert and Lee Horsley, Churches and Churchgoers ‐ Patterns of Church Growth in the British Isles since 1700 (1977), 244 (Clarendon Press, Oxford, £12.50).

D. Philips, Crime and Authority in Victorian England: The Black Country 1835–1860 (1977), 321 (Croom Helm, £8.50).

Brenda Swann and Maureen Turnbull, Records of Interest to Social Scientists 1919–1919: Employment and Unemployment (1978), v+590 (HMSO, paperback, £13.50).     

Making Firefighters Deployable

Although sociologists have devoted a considerable amount of research to exploring high-risk organizations, they have not yet developed an adequate explanation as to why individuals working within such organizations place themselves in harm’s way and how organizations ensure they remain there. This article addresses this gap by analyzing how the United States Forest Service motivates wildland firefighters to participate in life-threatening activity. Drawing on ethnographic research and content analyses of official documents, it describes the process by which firefighters come to develop a specific disposition towards risk taking, a disposition through which they view firefighting as an activity void of danger, and how this disposition maintains its shape, and even grows stronger, after confronting its biggest challenge: the death of a firefighter.     

Regional Religions?: Extending the “Semi-involuntary” Thesis of African-American Religious Participation

This research examines religious affiliation and church attendance among African-Americans in three different regions of the United States to evaluate the thesis that the Black church represents a semi-involuntary institution shaped by historical dynamics of segregation in the rural South. We extend the analyses of others who have found the rural South to have distinctive church participation patterns by examining two nationally representative data sets (the 1972–1996 General Social Surveys and the 1984 National Alcohol Study). We explore both level and type of church attendance of African-Americans, and how patterns differ by region. Further, we refine prior analyses by (1) differentiating between members of historically White and conservative churches from those in the black mainline, (2) examining racial segregation, and (3) focusing on the type of church attendance (rather than just overall level). Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) and logistic regression models support the thesis that the rural South exhibits some distinctive patterns that make the semi-involuntary institution notion a useful concept, although patterns not predicted by the thesis are also found. The semi-involuntary thesis is also used to illuminate some church attendance patterns observed outside the rural South.     

Assessing Engineering Resilience for Systems with Multiple Performance Measures

Recently, efforts to model and assess a system's resilience to disruptions due to environmental and adversarial threats have increased substantially. Researchers have investigated resilience in many disciplines, including sociology, psychology, computer networks, and engineering systems, to name a few. When assessing engineering system resilience, the resilience assessment typically considers a single performance measure, a disruption, a loss of performance, the time required to recover, or a combination of these elements. We define and use a resilient engineered system definition that separates system resilience into platform and mission resilience. Most complex systems have multiple performance measures; this research proposes using multiple objective decision analysis to assess system resilience for systems with multiple performance measures using two distinct methods. The first method quantifies platform resilience and includes resilience and other “ilities” directly in the value hierarchy, while the second method quantifies mission resilience and uses the “ilities” in the calculation of the expected mission performance for every performance measure in the value hierarchy. We illustrate the mission resilience method using a transportation systems‐of‐systems network with varying levels of resilience due to the level of connectivity and autonomy of the vehicles and platform resilience by using a notional military example. Our analysis found that it is necessary to quantify performance in context with specific mission(s) and scenario(s) under specific threat(s) and then use modeling and simulation to help determine the resilience of a system for a given set of conditions. The example demonstrates how incorporating system mission resilience can improve performance for some performance measures while negatively affecting others.     

Rules in Organizational Context: Narcotics Law Enforcement in Two Settings*

Studies of organizational action tend to isolate actors, structures, and goals as if they were not concretely interdigitated in organizational conduct. In many cases, actors are omitted as relevant units of analysis; goals are stated as abstracted entities unrelated to complex collective processes of defining, clarifying and evaluating goal-attainment, and often rules are not studied as continuously negotiated through and by interaction. Unless a close analysis of how broadly defined rules emerge as narrowly defined procedures sanctioned as reasonable and proper conduct is undertaken, the assumptive nature of the concept “bureaucracy” is left unexamined, operates invisibly, and thus impedes sociological analysis. This paper, based on fieldwork and interviews in three police organizations, identifies the processes by which an abstract organizational goal is defined, deferred to and becomes actionable. The organizational contexts of the two narcotics enforcement units (from which most of the data presented here are derived) embed the rules said to guide the pursuit of major violators of narcotics laws and systematically make certain aspects of the work either visible or obscure. Thus, some members are exposed to negative sanctioning while others experience positive sanctioning. This suggests that since the context of rules, not the rules themselves, nor the rules about the rules (so characteristic of formal organizations), determine the consequential (i.e., actionable) meanings of acts, situated interactions, accounts and shared understandings should be examined in the sociological analysis of organizations.     

Willingness to speak out about gay laws reform: some cause for optimism

We examined the extent to which people's private attitudes to gay law reform are influenced by the attitudes of others. Ninety-six university students were told that they were either in a minority or in a majority relative to their university group on their attitudes to gay law reform. Contrary to a number of assumptions made in the social psychological literature, participants who supported gay law reform were more prepared to act in line with their attitudes than were those who opposed gay law reform. Furthermore, anti-gay law reform participants appeared to reassess their attitudes when they were told they were in a minority; in contrast, pro-gay law reform participants were unaffected by the group norm. This suggests that anti-gay law reform attitudes are softer and more easily influenced than are pro-gay law reform attitudes. The implications of these results for activists are discussed.