MIDNIGHT BASKETBALL AND THE 1994 CRIME BILL DEBATES: The Operation of a Racial Code

This study examines the symbolic politics associated with the adoption of the omnibus $30 billion federal crime bill of 1994. Based upon critical race theory and close readings of Congressional hearings and print media coverage, we argue that race was the key to midnight basketball's prominence in the legislative debates and that its introduction ultimately reduced prevention-oriented provisions included in the final legislation. The central empirical contribution is a content analysis that specifies how racially coded references to midnight basketball exerted their impact on the political process through the discursive framing of the bill. We find that while midnight basketball directly increased attention to race in the debates, its real impact was more indirect, serving to heighten fears of crime and produce images of criminals that made prevention appear misguided. In contrast to bottom-up theoretical approaches, these discursive shifts worked at the level of elite decision makers, the legislators themselves. The article concludes by drawing out the implications of this case study for theories of how the politics of race operate in the contemporary American political arena, especially those concerning crime control.     

Sample Size Formulas for Normal Theory T Tests

Formulas that yield minimum sample size for standard T tests are presented. Although the results are approximations, they usually yield the exact solution. Involving only standard normal quantiles, they could be used in an elementary course.     

Making Sense of “Quality?” — Toward a Review and Critique of Quality Initiatives in Financial Services

This article provides a broad classification and critique of the theoretical and empirical approaches toward quality initiatives. These are the technical managerialist, social managerialist, and critical nonmanagerialist approaches. The technical managerialist approach is based upon the flawed assumption that practice follows policy almost like night follows day. By contrast, focusing on intraorganizational politics and the tensions of hierarchy, social managerialists recognize that outcomes are always a negotiated compromise. A majority of these authors are concerned with rendering quality initiatives more effective for management. In contrast, critical nonmanagerialists refuse to take on uncritically the assumptions and attitudes of management, and are concerned with understanding the forms and content of quality initiatives. The article provides a conceptual framework for guiding and advancing research on quality initiatives, and it offers themes and issues which warrant exploring.     

Circuits of education,rural gentrification,and family migration from the global city

Although there is recurring empirical evidence of gentrifier families with young children, the importance of education-related factors in the migration and residential decision-making of rural gentrifiers have yet to be fully examined. Using the case study of Cranbrook, Kent, processes of education-led rural gentrification are revealed that are dominated by ‘counter-Londonising’ in-migrants paying premium property prices to buy into exclusive rural school catchment areas. A rural expression of circuits of education is identified, which, to date, are represented as urban-specific strands of gentrification. Conceptually, the paper sheds light on links between education-led urban and rural gentrification; illuminating counterurban population movements tied to the prioritisation of familial relations and domesticity in perceived child-friendly rural environments.     

‘I Can't Put a Smiley Face On’: Working‐Class Masculinity,Emotional Labour and Service Work in the ‘New Economy’

The growth of the ‘service economy’ has coincided with the large‐scale detachment from the labour market of low‐skilled men. Yet little research has explored exactly what it is about service work that is leading such men to drop out of the labour market during periods of sustained service sector employment growth. Based on interviews with 35 unemployed low‐skilled men, this article explores the men's attitudes to entry‐level service work and suggests that such work requires skills, dispositions and demeanours that are antithetical to the masculine working‐class habitus. This antipathy is manifest in a reluctance to engage in emotional labour and appear deferential in the service encounter and in the rejection of many forms of low‐skilled service work as a future source of employment.     

Volunteers' Power and Resistance in the Struggle for Shelter Animal Survival

This article presents an analysis of how volunteers use different forms of capital to resist the practices and discourses of the organization for which they volunteer. Volunteers at a large public animal shelter do not share the shelter's institutionally held belief that shelter death is an inevitable result of homelessness among companion animals; to reduce shelter death, they craft challenges to the shelter practice of putting dogs down and work to construct shelter death as an avoidable and problematic outcome. Their repertoire of resistance includes educational, health‐based, relational, moral, reputational, and legal strategies. The findings illuminate that volunteers’ social location outside of the shelter provides them with capital to engage in resistance within the shelter.     

The interactive effects of political skill and future time perspective on career and community networking behavior

Scholars have suggested that skill (Ferris et al., 2007) and motivation (Forret and Dougherty, 2001) need to be considered in predicting the direction and intensity of networking behaviors. Congruently, the present study argues that skill and motivation operate interactively and assesses the interactive impact of political skill (i.e., the ability to interact effectively with others) and future time perspective on differentially predicting community-based and career-based networking behavior. Results from a sample of managers from a national retail chain (n = 291) indicated that politically skilled individuals who possessed a deep future time perspective were more involved in career-related networking than politically skilled individuals who perceived a shallow future time perspective. Additionally, politically skilled respondents with shallow organizational time perspectives engaged in higher levels of community-based networking than did their counterparts with deeper organizational time perspectives. The implications of these findings are discussed in terms of political skill, social networks, and socioemotional selectivity theory.