Search results

Research has found a subgroup of conservative white males have lower perceptions of risk across a variety of environmental and health hazards. Less research has looked at the views of these “low risk” individuals in group interactions. Through qualitative analysis of a technology deliberation, we note that white men expressing low risk views regarding technologies for energy and the environment also often express high social risks around potential loss of control. We argue these risk perceptions reflect identification with corporate concerns, usually framed in opposition to government and mirroring arguments made by conservative organizations. We situate these views within the broader cultural struggle over who has the power to name and address risks.

After multiple decades stumbling in the status attainment wilderness, the sociological study of inequality is now cultivating a new garden: the workplace generation of inequalities. While our theories have long focused on contextually embedded social relations – often in production – as generating inequality, our methods have lagged, focusing instead on individual status attainment, abstracted from social relations including those at work. In this chapter, we outline first how we got into this mess, and then advocate a principled comparative methodological framework for studying the organizational generation of durable inequalities. We highlight the particular contribution of Randy Hodson to the original critique of individualistic status attainment research and his role in developing alternative methodologies, some of which we think should be further developed today.

Members of Congress become involved in scandals on a regular basis. These range from personal imbroglios, like sexual affairs or substance abuse, to professional scandals like embezzlement of campaign funds, abuse of office, or insider trading. As a common feature of congressional life, scholars have shown that scandals frequently disrupt the electoral and legislative trajectories of representatives' careers.

However, it must be remembered that congressional offices are comprised of more than just an individual member. Congressional offices are legislative enterprises, and a representative's staff are integral to his or her political and lawmaking activities. Accordingly, studying how scandals relate to the careers of congressional staff is an important but overlooked topic.

In this chapter, the authors investigate the relationship between members' malfeasances and the careers of the staff around them. The authors combine a list of congressional scandals with a dataset that captures the turnover of staff in congressional offices. The chapter proceeds in four parts. First, the authors describe the structure of a congressional office and the relationship between members and their staff. Next, the authors provide an overview of scandals in Congress and what previous literature has uncovered about their effects. Third, the authors examine staffing patterns and turnover in offices hit by scandal, uncovering evidence that scandals are associated with staff departures. The authors end by considering how Congress as an institution could help to protect and support employees who are caught up in a member's poor choices.

Aldo Leopold's idea of a land ethic was inspired by his work in game management. The land ethic merged ecology with an aesthetic and ethical sensibility. This chapter traces the origins of the idea to Leopold's efforts to devise incentives for private landowners to share their land with wildlife. Scholars have failed to account for how Leopold's affection for the institution of private property shaped his ethical philosophy. Although the land ethic is conventionally understood as a defense of the rights of animals, plants, and the environment they inhabit, it was also a defense of property rights. The limitations of the land ethic as philosophical basis of wildlife management and conservation stem from these contradictory purposes. Although Leopold's ecological aesthetic may help people to visualize an alternative to the violent simplification and diminished biodiversity of the modern form of capitalist agricultural commodity production, his emphasis on voluntary mechanisms has detracted from the objective of liberating wildlife and the land they inhabit from human exploitation.

In this article, I propose a theory of network opportunity emergence. The core of the argument is that as an overall industry network structure becomes centralized, opportunities emerge for new entrants. As the institutional environment evolves toward a centralized network flow structure, innovators can identify newly emerged rich resource niches that serve as the perfect breeding ground for an entrepreneurial start-up. While the framework is an aggregate level conceptualization of market opportunities, it also identifies specific actionable opportunities at a very micro level. Examples from the networks of the airline industry illustrate the logic. I conclude by discussing the innovation and entrepreneurship implications for a wide variety of industries and network tie types, calling for utilization of the framework to answer a broad variety of research questions.

Drawing on empirical data from two studies of 119 Japanese affiliates located in the United States and Europe, this chapter focuses on three fundamental questions: (1) What organizational factors influence performance of the overseas affiliates of Japanese MNCs? (2) What impact does expatriate staffing have on the affiliate’s performance? (3) What factors influence expatriate staffing patterns in Japanese MNCs? The empirical results lend support to the hypothesis that MNCs characterized by global integration and local responsiveness will outperform less transnational competitors, although there are significant differences between the American and European subsamples on the impact of expatriate presence on affiliate performance. In addition, there is no support for the life-cycle prediction that age or parent company experience influences expatriate staffing levels or for the resource dependence prediction that integration with the parent influences expatriate presence. These results and their implications are discussed.

This essay explores an instructional application of Wikipedia within the context of an undergraduate capstone course in historical studies, entitled “Revisiting the Weather Underground.” I wanted student research writing to find a wider audience than the classroom, so devised an assignment which called upon students in this senior seminar to research, write, and publish (via Wikipedia) biographies of individuals associated with this antiwar, anti-imperialist organization. Course membership included both traditional-aged college students and returning students. None had prior experience with social history, biography, publishing, or writing/editing on Wikipedia. Despite the fact that all participants (and I include myself here) had a steep learning curve when it came to the technology necessary to address a reading public through Wikipedia, the students rose to the challenge. The use of Wikipedia as venue shaped the manner in which students thought about their biographical subjects (some of whom could conceivably – and do, in fact – read and respond to the biographies), their subject matter (the Weather Underground), their audience (which included Wikipedia readers and editors internationally), their responsibilities as researchers to be accountable for their characterizations of others’ life stories, their accountability in sourcing information, and their sense of authorship (which all needed to learn to share with strangers encountered through Wikipedia). In reflecting on the assignment, students valued the experience as authentic scholarly communication and lasting historical learning. The featured assignment demanded close partnerships among students, faculty, librarians, educational technologists, and Wikipedia editors/administrators, and served also to dramatize the perils and possibilities of shared inquiry.

South Africa has long been an intriguing subject of study, particularly for scholars from the United States. The intensification and dismantling of the apartheid state offers a wealth of material to political scientists and social movement theorists. As the African country with the highest White population, race relations are always in the foreground, as they are in most studies of U.S. urban (and suburban) policy, while they are only just beginning to be taken as a serious ‘issue’ in European social science. U.S. scholars may occasionally look at South Africa as if it were a distorted mirror.¹ Depending on one's perspective, as well as the focus of the study, South Africa can be taken as a hopeful symbol of reconciliation or as a warning of the great difficulty in overcoming decades of oppression and systemic inequality. This chapter focuses on the generally overlooked aspect of suburbanization in South Africa, which, surprisingly enough, in certain respects looks very much like U.S. suburbanization.