Sociology Compass

Publications in this journal

• Article: Social Movements, Protest and Mainstream Media

  Patrick McCurdy
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  ABSTRACT: This article provides a broad, cross-disciplinary overview of scholarship which has explored the dynamics between social movements, protests and their coverage by mainstream media across sociology, social movement studies, political science and media and communications. Two general approaches are identified ‘representational’ and ‘relational’ research. ‘Representational’ scholarship is that which has concerned itself with how social movements are portrayed or ‘framed’ in the media, how the media production process facilitates this, and the consequences thereof. ‘Relational’ scholarship concentrates on the asymmetrical ‘relationship’ between social movements, the contestation of media representation and the media strategies of social movements. Within these two broad approaches different perspectives and areas of emphasis are highlighted along with their strengths and weaknesses. The conclusion reflects on current developments in this area of study and offers avenues for future research.
  Sociology Compass 02/2012; 6(3):244 - 255.
• Article: Embodied Heterosexual Masculinities, Part 1: Confluent Intimacies, Emotions and Health

  Lee F. Monaghan, Steve Robertson
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  ABSTRACT: This and an accompanying article (Robertson and Monaghan 2012) constitute a developmental ‘think piece’ on embodied heterosexual masculinities, emotions and health. After highlighting the imbrications of heterosexual intimacy, hegemonic masculinity and health – alongside a note on the relevance and limitations of existing literature – our discussion includes: a critical acknowledgement of (different) feminist scholarship and queer theory; reflections on the ‘pure relationship’ and ‘confluent’ or ‘liquid love’; the ‘individualisation thesis’ and the rise of ‘abstract knowledge’; the separation of love from sex as a possible masculine ruse; corporeality, eroticism and the rationalisation of sex. In conclusion, we underscore the need for more research on embodied masculinities, heterosexualities and emotions.
  Sociology Compass 01/2012; 6(2):134 - 150.
• Article: Hegemonic Masculinity on the Sidelines of Sport

  Laura Grindstaff, Emily West
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  ABSTRACT: Nearly a quarter of a century old, the concept of hegemonic masculinity as developed by R. W. Connell remains both influential and contested among gender scholars. In this essay, we use our research on coed cheerleading in the United States as a springboard to explore the bounds and limits of hegemonic masculinity as both cultural script and analytic construct. Cheerleading constitutes a public stage for ‘doing gender’ in ways that highlight normative, taken-for-granted notions of gender difference; consequently, we use cheerleading as a vehicle for asking under what circumstances and to what degree heterosexuality remains central to the enactment of hegemonic masculinity, which reflects a larger question about the flexibility of the concept and its openness to contestation and change. Building on the work of Connell and others, we stress the need for relational analyses of gender when studying both masculinities and femininities, as well as the importance of linking individual-level data to broader structures of gendered power and inequality.
  Sociology Compass 10/2011; 5(10):859 - 881.
• Article: Racist Nativism in the 21st Century

  Cameron D. Lippard
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  ABSTRACT: Since the 1960s, academia and the public have frequently used racism as the catch-all phrase to explain any racial or ethnic injustice identified in America. However, are the disparities domestic minorities face the same as those faced by immigrant minorities? For example, journalists have suggested that the various state immigration policies targeting Hispanic immigrants in the United States recently are as racist as the Jim Crow laws enacted decades ago. In this essay, I contend that while nativism and racism are kissing cousins, distinguishing and using these concepts may lend to more precise explanations of the issues many racial and ethnic minorities face who exist outside of the Black–White dichotomy that has traditionally characterized United States. To untangle these terms, I review recent scholarship to provide up-to-date definitions, as well as reintroduce the concept of ‘racist nativism’ to better explain the variability that characterizes racial or ethnic prejudice and discrimination in 21st century America.
  Sociology Compass 07/2011; 5(7):591 - 606.
• Article: Children’s Media Culture in a Digital Age

  Stuart R. Poyntz, Michael Hoechsmann
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  ABSTRACT: Digital mediation is central to how children and youth grow up in the global North and in much of the global South today. In taking account of this situation, of late researchers have tended to draw on a sociology of the child in conjunction with an examination of how digitization is changing the experience of childhood itself. This article also begins by tracking key social, economic and cultural changes in young people’s lives. We then link these changes to the immersive media life many children around the world are living today, and note the worries this raises among parents, educators and others. To conclude, we identify the paradox of participation that is shaping children’s digital culture and forcing researchers and others to reconsider the relationships between consumerism and civic life.
  Sociology Compass 07/2011; 5(7):488 - 498.
• Source

  Available from: jetcityorange.com

  Article: Securitizing America: Strategic Incapacitation and the Policing of Protest Since the 11 September 2001 Terrorist Attacks

  Patrick F. Gillham
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  ABSTRACT: During the 1970s, the predominant strategy of protest policing shifted from ‘escalated force’ and repression of protesters to one of ‘negotiated management’ and mutual cooperation with protesters. Following the failures of negotiated management at the 1999 World Trade Organization demonstrations in Seattle, law enforcement quickly developed a new social control strategy, referred to here as ‘strategic incapacitation’. The US police response to the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks quickened the pace of police adoption of this new strategy, which emphasizes the goals of ‘securitizing society’ and isolating or neutralizing the sources of potential disruption. These goals are accomplished through (1) the use of surveillance and information sharing as a way to assess and monitor risks, (2) the use of pre-emptive arrests and less-lethal weapons to selectively disrupt or incapacitate protesters that engage in disruptive protest tactics or might do so, and (3) the extensive control of space in order to isolate and contain disruptive protesters actual or potential. In a comparative fashion, this paper examines the shifts in United States policing strategies over the last 50 years and uses illustrative cases from national conventions, the global justice movement and the anti-war movement to show how strategic incapacitation has become a leading social control strategy used in the policing of protests since 9/11. It concludes by identifying promising questions for future research.
  Sociology Compass 06/2011; 5(7):636 - 652.
• Source

  Available from: vt.edu

  Article: From Organizational Sexuality to Queer Organizations: Research on Homosexuality and the Workplace

  Christine Williams, Patti Giuffre
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  ABSTRACT: Organization scholars historically ignored the crucial importance of sexuality in the workplace. But in the last 20 years, scholars influenced by the ‘sexuality in organizations’ perspective have documented the ways that the management and deployment of workers’ sexuality are key elements in organizational life. While most of these studies have documented persistent privileging of heterosexuality in work organizations, a recent trend is to investigate a new organizational form: the gay-friendly workplace. We review legal and policy changes in US workplaces that have made them more accepting of gay and lesbian employees. Then we examine ethnographic studies of gay-friendly organizations. Although they are certainly an advance over previous homophobic workplaces, the literature suggests that they may reproduce inequalities of race, class, and gender. Few studies have investigated ‘queer organizations’, which we identify as a rich area for future scholarship.
  Sociology Compass 06/2011; 5(7):551 - 563.
• Source

  Available from: klimacampus.de

  Article: Sources, Characteristics and Effects of Mass Media Communication on Science: A Review of the Literature, Current Trends and Areas for Future Research

  Mike S. Schäfer
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  ABSTRACT: A significant amount of science coverage can be found nowadays in the mass media and is the main source of information about science for many. Accordingly, the relation between science and the media has been intensively analyzed within the social scientific community. It is difficult to keep track of this research, however, as a flurry of studies has been published on the issue. This article provides such an overview. First, it lays out the main theoretical models of science communication, that is, the ‘public understanding of science’ and the ‘mediatization’ model. Second, it describes existing empirical research. In this section, it demonstrates how science’s agenda-building has improved, how science journalists working routines are described, how different scientific disciplines are presented in the mass media and what effects these media representations (might) have on the audience. Third, the article points out future fields of research.
  Sociology Compass 05/2011; 5(6):399 - 412.
• Article: ‘Our Diagnoses, Our Selves’: The Rise of the Technoscientific Illness Identity

  Gayle A. Sulik
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  ABSTRACT: Biomedicine situates the definitions, practices, and controls of the medical system within the field of technoscience, which relies on new knowledge, high technology, and biomedical health and risk surveillance. Since the middle of the 20th century technoscientific efforts to understand human phenomena at the microbiological level have secured the place of the biomedical model of disease and the technology used to understand and manage human bodies, selves, and socialities. Specifically, high technology has provoked a paradigm shift from controlling disease and finding cures (medicalization) to transforming bodies and managing risk through technoscientific means (biomedicalization). Though there has been a major shift in the role of the medical consumer since the 1970s and a general recognition of patients’ rights to meaningful information about their health and illness conditions, biomedicine holds significant authority over peoples’ lives to the degree that biomedicalization now involves the production of individual and collective identities that are constructed through technoscientific means. The technoscientific identity has even become a type of illness identity that involves applying biomedical information and characteristics to a person’s sense of self in the face of illness.
  Sociology Compass 05/2011; 5(6):463 - 477.
• Article: Sociological Perspectives on Addiction

  Darin Weinberg
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  ABSTRACT: This article provides a critical survey of sociological research on addiction. It begins with the seminal research of Alfred Lindesmith on heroin addiction then proceeds through discussions of functionalist contributions, research that exemplifies what David Matza called the ‘appreciative’ turn in the sociology of deviance, rational choice theories, and social constructionist approaches. It is confined to research on addiction in its original meaning as putative enslavement to a substance or activity rather than merely deviant or disapproved activity more broadly. As will be seen, though, there is a ubiquitous and theoretically interesting tendency even among those who contend to be writing about addiction as such to slip into modes of analysis that effectively substitute questions regarding the social approval of an activity for questions concerning whether it is voluntary or involuntary. Hence, one purpose of this article is to explore whether, and how, this slippage might be avoided.
  Sociology Compass 04/2011; 5(4):298 - 310.
• Source

  Available from: kcl.ac.uk

  Article: Reworking Postfordism: Labor Process Versus Employment Relations

  Matt Vidal
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  ABSTRACT: The Fordism/postfordism framework has been widely used, but also heavily criticized, in the social sciences. I outline the central points of debate over the use of this framework for analysis of work organization, including the range of models offered as successors to Fordism. I then suggest that, while some criticisms of the concept of postfordism have highlighted important problems and issues, the Fordist/postfordist framework can be elaborated as an analytically coherent, theoretically illuminating approach to the historical, institutional, and comparative analysis of work and employment. Although researchers appear to be using the concept of postfordism increasingly less frequently over the last decade, I argue that it provides a unifying framework within which to analyze work and employment relations in the current phase of capitalism, which is characterized by an apparent variety of new organizational forms within a broader context of increasing disconnectedness of economic institutions. Lean production has become established as the predominant postfordist labor process, widespread in manufacturing but also increasingly being implemented in services. However, this must be distinguished from a broader set of changes in employment relations.
  Sociology Compass 03/2011; 5(4):273 - 286.
• Article: Examining Race and Sex Inequality in Recidivism

  Michael M. Wehrman
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  ABSTRACT: A low recidivism rate is a goal for any criminal justice system. Poor post-release outcomes are not random events, however. Some groups are more likely than others to recidivate. This paper will review the literature on inequality in recidivism rates, concentrating on the effects of race and sex. The probability of recidivating is not a randomly distributed event; men are more likely than women to recidivate, and Blacks more likely than Whites, with Hispanics in between. This paper will also address some of the promises (and challenges) that researchers face when trying to identify the causes of race and sex gaps in recidivism rates. This paper will end with recommendations for how to study inequality in recidivism in the future, with the key being to identify the social mechanisms that underlie these consistently unequal outcomes of our corrections system.
  Sociology Compass 03/2011; 5(3):179 - 189.
• Article: Inequality as an Explanation for Obesity in the United States

  Hedwig Lee
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  ABSTRACT: Over the past several decades, there has been a sharp increase in obesity across all population groups in the United States. In fact, the United States has one of the highest rates of obesity compared to other countries throughout the world. Obesity has become a national public health concern because it is related to a number of negative health, social, psychological, and economic outcomes. It is particularly concerning because racial/ethnic minorities and populations with the least education and highest poverty rates bear the largest burden of obesity. In addition, disparities in obesity tend to be gendered, with women experiencing the largest disparities in obesity by income, education, and race/ethnicity. In this review, I describe how social inequality is linked to obesity in the United States. I highlight elements of disadvantage at the individual-, family-, school-, and neighborhood-level that are linked to energy intake and expenditure, which are directly related to obesity, and draw from evidence and theories from multiple fields of the social and medical sciences. I also highlight the important role stress may play in linking disadvantage to obesity, particularly for women. I argue that understanding the complex mechanisms and processes that link social inequality to obesity requires multidisciplinary and multilevel frameworks.
  Sociology Compass 03/2011; 5(3):215 - 232.
• Article: Politics and Celebrity: A Sociological Understanding

  Brian McKernan
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  ABSTRACT: Many social commentators have denounced the election of entertainment celebrities such as Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jesse Venture, and Al Franken to political offices as indicative of American democracy’s collapse, treating the political victories by these celebrities as evidence of America’s preference for entertainment over political deliberation. This essay reviews the scholarly literature on celebrity and politics to provide a better understanding of this important topic. As the literature demonstrates, this conflation of celebrity and politics is not a recent phenomenon, as politicians have long employed dramaturgical elements to mobilize constituencies. Indeed, celebrities and politicians share many similarities. Both must construct public personalities appealing to their audiences and employ similar actors and strategies to help create these personalities. While some scholars working in this field agree with the concern that celebrity’s presence in politics inhibits serious political discourse, other scholars contend that the use of celebrity performances by politicians may actually attract a wider segment of society to meaningfully participate in politics. The essay concludes by suggesting that future works in this area should adopt a cultural sociology framework to empirically study the meaning of celebrity for different social groups in order to gain a stronger understanding of celebrity’s sociopolitical impact.
  Sociology Compass 03/2011; 5(3):190 - 202.
• Article: How are Work–Family Policies Related to the Gendered Division of Domestic Labor?

  Sarah Beth Estes
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  ABSTRACT: Work–family policies are commonly thought to aid parents in attending to their conflicting work and family responsibilities. Some scholars postulate that policies might detract from the gendered division of domestic labor, in which women take a greater responsibility for housework and childcare than men, while others expect that policies encourage women to maintain traditional family roles even while employed. A review of cross-national research in market economies shows that policies are not uniformly related to the gendered division of domestic labor, although parental leave offers the most promising avenue through which the gendered division of domestic labor may be diminished.
  Sociology Compass 03/2011; 5(3):233 - 243.
• Source

  Available from: uti.at

  Article: New Media, Web 2.0 and Surveillance

  Christian Fuchs
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  ABSTRACT: This article outlines some basic foundations and academic controversies about Web 2.0 surveillance. Contemporary web platforms, such as Google or Facebook store, process, analyse, and sell large amounts of personal data and user behaviour data. This phenomenon makes studying Internet surveillance and web 2.0 surveillance important. Surveillance can either be defined in a neutral or a negative way. Depending on which surveillance concept one chooses, Internet/web 2.0 surveillance will be defined in different ways. Web 2.0 surveillance studies are in an early stage of development. The debate thus far suggests that one might distinguish between a cultural studies approach and a critical political economy approach in studying web 2.0 surveillance. Web 2.0 surveillance is a form of surveillance that exerts power and domination by making use specific qualities of the contemporary Internet, such as user-generated content and permanent dynamic communication flows. It can be characterized as a system of panoptic sorting, mass self-surveillance and personal mass dataveillance. Facebook is a prototypical example of web 2.0 surveillance that serves economic ends. The problems of Facebook surveillance in particular and web 2.0 surveillance in general include: the complexity of the terms of use and privacy policies, digital inequality, lack of democracy, the commercialization of the Internet, the advancement of market concentration, the attempted manipulation of needs, limitation of the freedom to choose, unpaid value creation of users and intransparency.
  Sociology Compass 01/2011; 5(2):134 - 147.
• Article: The Role of Social Networks in Getting a Job

  Lindsey B. Trimble, Julie A. Kmec
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  ABSTRACT: This article reviews recent research on the effects of social networks on access to job information and getting a job in the United States. Drawing on network ties from friends, family members, acquaintances, employers, or coworkers can improve the job search because individuals gain access to and make use of their network’s social capital. While this job searching strategy can result in a successful job search for some, not all job seekers benefit from reliance on social networks. We spotlight research that documents how reliance on social networks as a means to find work can actually maintain sex and racial/ethnic inequality at work. We discuss research documenting the important role social networks play in the job acquisition process. The last half of this review focuses on several new developments in the literature that promise to further our understanding of social networks’ lasting effects on employment outcomes.
  Sociology Compass 01/2011; 5(2):165 - 178.
• Article: Military Occupations: Methodological Approaches and the Military–Academy Research Nexus

  K. Neil Jenkings, Rachel Woodward, Alison J. Williams, Matthew F. Rech, Ann L. Murphy, Daniel Bos
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  ABSTRACT: Military occupations are continually evolving in relation to the geopolitical changes of societies, their conflicts and conflict management strategies, and technological developments in military hardware and software. Military occupations studies undertaken by the academy have been key to informing government strategy towards the maintenance of functioning armed forces. Since the 1950s, such studies have prioritised ‘top-down’ quantitative sociological methodologies. This paper reviews these studies and the role of the dominant Institutional/Occupational model. The paper then considers less influential ‘bottom up’ interpretive methodological studies of military occupations. It is suggested that the reliance on ‘top down’ modelling approaches has led to the paucity of studies describing the range and experiential detail of military occupations. The Military–Academy nexus, and the priorities of the discipline of sociology are suggested as reasons for this emphasis.
  Sociology Compass 01/2011; 5(1):37 - 51.