Undisciplined: Tracing Criminology's Growing Divergence From Sociology

Several influential sociologists have questioned the wisdom of criminology's departure from sociology. Omitted from these reflections are the rationale explaining the schism. The present work grants a historical account to fill that absence. Oral histories with 17 leading criminologists, 13 of whom trained as sociologists, have been collected and analyzed. Two domains are explored, professional/organizational and informal/intellectual. First, the departments evidence different hiring patterns, journal content preferences, and journal structures over the past half‐century. Second, there are contrasts regarding ideology; sociology trends leftward. Criminological research concentrates on a dependent variable; sociology links to a unifying orientation. There are concerns that the field's training and research may be too narrow and that the lure of influencing policy could undermine its opportunity to offer critical commentary. Criminology's focus on addressing crime as a practical concern serves some advantages. However, many respondents were conflicted over the loss of an abiding identity. If the field fails to confront its preference for multitheoretical, policy‐driven discussion, it risks being pruned or subsumed without a more fixed sense of identity.     

The impact of infertility on men's work and finances: Findings from a qualitative questionnaire study

The impact of infertility on the emotional, social and relational aspects of men's lives is now more widely understood. Yet the impact of infertility on men's working lives and financial status remains largely overlooked. Drawing on a qualitative questionnaire study into men's experiences of infertility (n = 41), this article examines how work and finances are managed and negotiated during infertility, including treatment cycles. Three key themes were identified from our thematic analysis: managing infertility in the workplace; compromised job performance, (in)security and progression; the financial burden of infertility, suggesting that infertility can have significant implications for men's working lives, including their identities as productive workers. The impact had a gendered dimension, with threats to masculine‐relevant breadwinner roles and career ambitions. Awareness and management of infertility as a chronic health condition could be a useful way for employers to support disclosure of infertility and to allow men to navigate infertility and their working lives and identities in less stress‐inducing ways. This article contributes to our growing understanding of the stigma men experience in relation to infertility and how such stigma may intersect with masculinity in general and breadwinning in particular.     

‘What the country wanted’: The houses of parliament,the press and the origins of media management in Britain,c. 1780–1900

This paper considers a topic that has received scant attention in the historiography of public relations: official attempts to manage the press in Britain in the Houses of Parliament in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Existing accounts of the emergence of government public relations in the UK have tended to focus on the civil service in the first half of the twentieth century, but this article sheds light on a series of earlier developments, including the allocation of seats for reporters in the viewing gallery of the Commons in 1803, the construction of dedicated Reporters’ Galleries in both parliamentary chambers in 1847–52 and the creation of a Westminster Lobby in 1884. Taken together, these reforms improved journalists’ access to parliament in an era in which direct governmental control over newspapers lapsed. Yet, they also allowed politicians to influence media commentary by determining who was permitted access to parliament and what type of content made its way into print. A case can thus be made that Westminster, not Whitehall, played host to the earliest official attempts to manage the media in Britain, and this has important repercussions for current understandings of public relations history.     

Reevaluating the Concrete–Explanatory Animation Creation as a Digital Catalyst for Cross-Modal Cognition

This article explores the relationship between abstract and concrete as categories of knowledge and Wilensky’s (1991) theory that all ideas are abstract until they become concrete. Dewey (1910/1997) made a similar claim by suggesting that ideas are initially beyond our comprehension until they have become consolidated. This article documents the evolving mental models of 11- and 12-year-old children as they designed and made explanatory animations for the sake of their own learning. The conclusion from this research is that transferring ideas from thought to word, word to image, or transmediation of any kind, is a semiotic tool for cross-modal cognition.     

The Puzzle of Intelligence Expertise: Spaces of Intelligence Analysis and the Production of “Political” Knowledge

Intelligence expertise presents a theoretical puzzle that challenges ideal-typical understandings of professional fields. Intelligence is not a strongly autonomous field where experts control the production and accreditation of knowledge. Yet, intelligence is not a field in decline. This paper explores this puzzle through the example of fusion centers, a national network of 78 interagency intelligence centers recognized by the Department of Homeland Security. It draws from over a year of fieldwork and interviews with 75 people who work in fusion centers in New York and New Jersey. It finds that the jurisdictional rivalries within fusion centers produce a dialectic tension: Efforts to secure professional autonomy are frustrated by forces that marshal intelligence expertise as a resource in larger battles in the bureaucratic field. This dialectic produces continual battles over institutional resources and a deeper definitional struggle over the nature of intelligence. Theoretically, this paper suggests that intelligence expertise is located in “spaces between fields.” While some have positioned “spaces between fields” as a transitional stage in the formation or decline of a field, intelligence expertise constitutes a unique form of expert knowledge that persists in the interstices between more established fields. As a result of this liminal and ambiguous position, intelligence expertise does not produce “rational” knowledge on its own terms. Instead, it produces “political” knowledge shaped by the shifting dynamics of the bureaucratic field.     

'We are Irish Everywhere': Irish Immigrant Networks in Charleston, South Carolina, and Savannah, Georgia

In the nineteenth century, Irish immigrants in Charleston, South Carolina, and Savannah, Georgia, showed a strong interest in the affairs of Ireland and its residents. Although a distinct minority in these 'southern' cities, they formed networks through societies, clubs, militias and Irish nationalist organisations to encourage social activities and ethnic connections among their fellow countrymen and those friendly towards Irish interests. These groups provided opportunities for upwardly-mobile immigrants to improve their social status in America, while retaining their 'Irishness'. Charity towards new migrants was thus an important element in retaining ethnicity. Irish Protestants initially dominated these networks, but increasingly, as the century progressed, Irish and Irish-American Catholics came to prominence. Nonetheless, interdenominational networks remained strong. Class and sectarian divisions within the Irish communities of these two cities were not as deep or rigid as they were in some other Irish-American communities. Overall this study highlights the great importance of immigrant networks in assuring Irish integration into host societies.     

Identification of the Direction of a Causal Effect by Instrumental Variables

This article provides a strategy to identify the existence and direction of a causal effect in a generalized nonparametric and nonseparable model identified by instrumental variables. The causal effect concerns how the outcome depends on the endogenous treatment variable. The outcome variable, treatment variable, other explanatory variables, and the instrumental variable can be essentially any combination of continuous, discrete, or “other” variables. In particular, it is not necessary to have any continuous variables, none of the variables need to have large support, and the instrument can be binary even if the corresponding endogenous treatment variable and/or outcome is continuous. The outcome can be mismeasured or interval-measured, and the endogenous treatment variable need not even be observed. The identification results are constructive, and can be empirically implemented using standard estimation results.     

A mixture of experts latent position cluster model for social network data

Social network data represent the interactions between a group of social actors. Interactions between colleagues and friendship networks are typical examples of such data.The latent space model for social network data locates each actor in a network in a latent (social) space and models the probability of an interaction between two actors as a function of their locations. The latent position cluster model extends the latent space model to deal with network data in which clusters of actors exist — actor locations are drawn from a finite mixture model, each component of which represents a cluster of actors.A mixture of experts model builds on the structure of a mixture model by taking account of both observations and associated covariates when modeling a heterogeneous population. Herein, a mixture of experts extension of the latent position cluster model is developed. The mixture of experts framework allows covariates to enter the latent position cluster model in a number of ways, yielding different model interpretations.Estimates of the model parameters are derived in a Bayesian framework using a Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithm. The algorithm is generally computationally expensive — surrogate proposal distributions which shadow the target distributions are derived, reducing the computational burden.The methodology is demonstrated through an illustrative example detailing relationships between a group of lawyers in the USA.