Latino Crime and Latinos in the Criminal Justice System: Trends,Policy Implications,and Future Research Initiatives

With exponential growth in the Latino population over the past decade, both social scientists and politicians have directed their attention toward understanding Latino behavior(s) ranging from purchasing power and marketing to voting. Less is known, however, about the extent to which Latino population growth might be associated with patterns of criminal justice or violent criminal outcomes. One objective of this research is to provide a contemporary overview of the Latino experiences with the criminal justice system by highlighting racial/ethnic disparities in incarceration and sentencing. Using racial-/ethnic-specific homicide victimization data provided by the Centers for Disease Control, we also examine the impact of Latino concentration on levels of group-specific homicide, both regionally and nationally. Results from our negative binomial multivariate analyses indicate that the concentration of Latinos tends to be associated with lower levels of homicide victimization, a finding that holds across racial/ethnic groups and geographic specification. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of these findings with an eye toward future research in this area.     

How Much More XXX is Generation X Consuming? Evidence of Changing Attitudes and Behaviors Related to Pornography Since 1973

We use data from the General Social Survey (GSS) over a 40-year period (1973–2012) to evaluate changes in attitudes about pornography and pornography consumption among American young adults. One of the major challenges in making comparisons across birth generations is separating the effect of birth cohort from age and period effects. We use an intrinsic estimator to separately identify the effects of age, birth cohort, and time period using 40 years of repeated cross-section data. We find that, relative to the general population, young people's beliefs about whether pornography should be illegal have stayed relatively constant over this 40-year period and, if anything, have slightly increased. We also find that pornography consumption has been increasing across birth generations, though this increase has been smaller than would be inferred based on differences across generations at a single point in time, due to a strong age component in consumption patterns.     

Objective and subjective indicators of community evaluation: A Pennsylvania assessment

The relationships between subjective and objective measures of well-being were assessedusing data from a survey of Pennsylvania residents and county-level statistical measures complied from secondary sources. Following Ross, Bluestone, and Hines (1979), objective social indicators were derived to measure socioeconomic status, family status, health status, and alienation for Pennsylvania countries. These indices were only modestly intercorrelated, suggesting that they measured somewhat different ideas. Subjective well-being was assessed by asking more than 3000 individual respondents to a mail survey to rate the quality of their communities. Responses were dichotomized and logistic regression used to assess the effects of the objective indicators of county well-being to individual community evaluations. The relationships were small, and inconsistent. Implications of the findings are discussed.     

Consumers' subjective perception of price in times of inflation

This article suggests that inflation blurs the information content of prices, affecting consumers' subjective perception of prices. Preliminary evidence is provided by examining consumers' upper and lower price limits—concepts closely related to price quality perceptions—under extreme inflationary conditions taking place in Israel in 1980. The findings indicate that lower price limit distributions exhibit consistently greater dispersion across three income groups and the overall sample, compared to upper price limits. This effect is attributed to consumers' greater difficulties to provide lower price limits which are based solely on quality judgements, compared to upper limit responses which are partly anchored in more clearly defined budget constraints.     

Misdirection on the road to Shangri-La

Will life expectancy in the United States rise or fall in this century? The implications of either scenario are far reaching. We contend that the rise of childhood obesity in the United States in the past three decades has been so dramatic that it will soon lead to higher than expected death rates at middle ages and a possible decline in life expectancy by midcentury. The most detrimental health and longevity effects will not be seen for decades--a phenomenon that cannot be detected by current methods used to forecast life expectancy or estimate the number of deaths currently attributable to obesity. This scenario contrasts sharply with the views of mathematical demographers who generate forecasts by relying on the assumption that the U.S. pattern of longevity will follow that of other longer lived nations and on the extrapolation of historical trends in life expectancy into the future.     

Derrida and messianic subjectivity: a hauntology of revealability

In Specters of Marx, Jacques Derrida argues that the category of hauntology should replace the canonical understanding of ontology. By invoking the trope of the ghost, hauntology helps to demonstrate how there still lingers in the absence of a thing, a spectral element that is more real than its corporeal counterpart. Thus, the ontological category of time is replaced by deconstruction with an anticipatory temporality abstracted from the transcultural messianisms of planet Earth, which is called messianicity. By framing this analysis through the epochal deployment of what Derrida coins as globalatinisation, I will argue that the concept of messianicity can be applied to a specific mode of subjective production, subjectivation, to help demonstrate the failings of not only the event of revelation (Offenbarung), but also, by pushing towards its paroxysm in an hauntological spirit, the so-called originarity of revealability (Offenbarkeit) – its still entanglement in the politics of light. Going beyond Derrida here, what this amounts to is a certain ‘hauntology of revealability’ whereby the arrivant, the First, is accepted under the umbrella of the messianic pledge of faith just to have itself doubled by a darker power that has never had to haunt itself into its eschatological or teleological throne.     

Nature and role of customer satisfaction in the solution business

The paper focuses on the solution business. Here we argue that the strategy can only lead a company to perform better if it encompasses a direct and positive effect on satisfaction with a supplier’s consulting capabilities. Hence we introduce the concept of consulting satisfaction, identify antecedents and analyze its consequences. To do so, we apply a mixed-methods approach. Content analysis from open interviews with company professionals yields a list of antecedents of consulting satisfaction used to devise a set of hypotheses. The latter was translated into a questionnaire based measurement instrument in order to first collect and then analyze data from a larger sample survey. Since three of the antecedents could not be supported by our study, possible explanations are presented. With our approach we tap new dimensions of solutions research. First, we inaugurate research on buying behavior within the field of solutions. Second, we stress the role of capabilities in this field and extend service–profit chain thinking. And third, we present consulting satisfaction as a lever to translate the S-D logic of marketing into more practical applications. To our knowledge this is a novel insight and can help industry decision makers better prepare for the solution business.