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As world society develops and nations become embedded in it, cultural patterns that began as properties of Western modernity diffuse to other areas. Individualism has long been noted as a unique feature of American nationalism (Arieli, 1964; Greene, 1993; Lipset, 1963, 1996). But both the spread of democracy and the declining legitimacy of dictatorship and racism after WW II opened the gates for forms of egalitarianism and individualism to spread transnationally (see Elliott & Lemert, 2006; Gaddis, 2005, p. 164ff). This chapter considers the consequences of this transformation.

In this chapter, we review how scenes theory can be related to civic participation and how the relationship differs across Seoul, Tokyo, and Chicago. The discussion begins with the major Western theory of Tocqueville/Putnam that participation drives legitimacy. However, it can be briefly relativized by introducing alternative paths. These ideas link to results from Kim (Kim, S. 2008) that show different paths for legitimacy and trust according to different political development and different cultural structure in the society. As shown in Fig. 1 of Chapter 2, most of Northwest Europe and North America supports Model 1: more participation leads to more trust. Obversely, Latin Americans have such low participation and trust that even if participation “works” for a few it misses the great majority. However, the model grows more complex when we shift to Korea, Portugal, and Eastern Europe, as the participation to trust path coefficient falls to zero: no impact. For some subgroups, the coefficient even becomes negative (Model 4). How can we codify these results and link them to our cumulative theorizing? This question cannot be answered with a simplistic generalization. Instead, we need to introduce a different conceptual framing to ask where and why and how much this happens.

In this chapter, we try to suggest various propositions to explain differences in civic participation in the three cities by using various concepts related to scenes.

We discuss the contributions of Jack Katz to the field of criminology with a particular focus on his 1988 book, Seductions of Crime. This book emerged out of a time in American history when criminal justice policy was shaped in part by moral panic over the 1980s’ American crime wave. We argue that SOC’s pragmatic approach to phenomenology owes much to this historical context. The vision outlined in the book represents an ideal foundation on which to build a future criminology in tune with the direction of innovation in the field. In making this case, we review the core contributions of the work from our perspective. We then explore the complicated “politics” of Katz’s argument – defying easy labels of left and right, and discuss the significance of a growing divide between the opinions of lay persons and expert accounts of crime. The modes of inquiry that Katz reawakened with his analysis have many as of yet untapped riches to offer, not only to criminological theory but also to criminal justice reform. In particular, we argue that urgent contemporary trends toward “public criminology,” “convict criminology” both could find, in SOC, an ideal epistemological starting place.

Drawing from two years of multi-sited fieldwork about international backpacking in Central America, I make important connections between the backpacking escape motive, the backpacker hostel, and tourism. I explain how backpackers experience the hostel as their “home base” and “home away from home” to escape into local cultures and natural environments that exist outside of it and an international community of travelers that convenes inside of it. I refer to theories on modern tourism, the backpacking escape motive, and the concept of community. I also theorize how the global spread of modern amenities and tourism shapes backpackers' escape experiences.

The concept of risk is often approached as if it is self-defining. Yet placing an event or activity in the category of “risk” is a categorization with consequences. Framing normatively complex problems like immigration, terrorism, or monetary crisis as risks that require regulating suggests that certain cognitive tools are best suited for analyzing them. It suggests that the problems are measurable or quantifiable, that they lend themselves to utilitarian calculus, and that they have ascertainably correct solutions that require no value judgments. This article employs emotion theory to illustrate the difficulties with approaching normatively complex areas of governmental policy through the framework of risk regulation. It argues that interdisciplinary inquiry into the role of emotion in human behavior sheds light on how risks are assessed, prioritized, and ameliorated, on how the category of risk is constructed, and on how that categorization affects the cognitive tools and approaches we bring to normatively complex problems. The article begins with a brief discussion of behavioral law and economics, which styles itself a corrective to law and economics, but which replicates its fatal flaw: its unrealistic view of human behavior. Next it turns to two more specific problems with the standard notion of risk formulation. First, the standard notion reads out the essential role of emotion in deliberation about risk regulation and overvalues top-down expert knowledge. Second, it reads out the heuristics that erase patterns and maintain the status quo. Finally, the article will focus on two illustrative case studies, the Chicago heat wave of 1995, and Hurricane Katrina.