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【ASR】74(2),2009
2009-04-01

American Sociological Review  ASR


April 2009; 74 (2)


Condom Semiotics: Meaning and Condom Use in Rural Malawi

Iddo Tavory

Ann Swidler

Abstract: This article examines the widespread resistance to condom use in sub-Saharan Africa by describing the major semiotic axes that organize how people talk about condoms and condom use. These axes include the “sweetness” of sex, trust and love between sexual partners, and assessments of risk and danger. Using data from rural Malawi, we show that framing the meaning of condoms as a simple choice between risky behavior and rational attempts to protect one's health ignores the complex semiotic space that Malawians navigate. Based on data from more than 600 diaries that record rural Malawians' everyday conversations, our analysis charts the semiotic axes related to condom use. Semiotic constraints operate most powerfully at the level of relationships. Condom use signifies a risky, less serious, and less intimate partner. Even when people believe that condom use is appropriate, wise, or even a matter of life and death, the statement that condom use makes about a relationship usually trumps all other meanings. We call for a more nuanced analysis of culture, one that is attentive to the ways agents navigate multiple, contested meanings, and that demonstrates how specific semiotic axes are brought to bear in particular interactional contexts.

 

 

 

Normalizing Heterosexuality: Mothers' Assumptions, Talk, and Strategies with Young Children

Karin A. Martin

Abstract: In recent years, social scientists have identified not just heterosexism and homophobia as social problems, but also heteronormativity-the mundane, everyday ways that heterosexuality is privileged and taken for granted as normal and natural. There is little empirical research, however, on how heterosexuality is reproduced and then normalized for individuals. Using survey data from more than 600 mothers of young children, ages 3 to 6 years old, this article examines how mothers normalize heterosexuality for young children. The data suggest that most mothers, who are parenting in a gendered and heteronormative context to begin with, assume that their children are heterosexual, describe romantic and adult relationships to children as only heterosexual, and make gays and lesbians invisible to their children. Those who consider that their children could some day be gay tend to adopt one of three strategies in response: Most pursue a passive strategy of “crossing their fingers” and hoping otherwise. A very few try to prepare their children for the possibility of being gay. A larger group, primarily mothers from conservative Protestant religions, work to prevent homosexuality. I conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for understanding sexual identity development and the construction of heteronormativity.

 

 

 

Does Diversity Pay?: Race, Gender, and the Business Case for Diversity

Cedric Herring

Abstract: The value-in-diversity perspective argues that a diverse workforce, relative to a homogeneous one, is generally beneficial for business, including but not limited to corporate profits and earnings. This is in contrast to other accounts that view diversity as either nonconsequential to business success or actually detrimental by creating conflict, undermining cohesion, and thus decreasing productivity. Using data from the 1996 to 1997 National Organizations Survey, a national sample of for-profit business organizations, this article tests eight hypotheses derived from the value-in-diversity thesis. The results support seven of these hypotheses: racial diversity is associated with increased sales revenue, more customers, greater market share, and greater relative profits. Gender diversity is associated with increased sales revenue, more customers, and greater relative profits. I discuss the implications of these findings relative to alternative views of diversity in the workplace.

 

 

 

Legal-Political Pressures and African American Access to Managerial Jobs

Sheryl Skaggs

Abstract:Prior work on equal employment opportunity tends to focus on a limited set of factors that influence change in organizational structures and policies. This article considers a broader set of potentially influential legal and political coercive pressures—namely, discrimination lawsuits, federal court dynamics, and state political ideology—and analyzes their implications for concrete changes in organizational behavior. Using national establishment-level data on the supermarket industry from 1983 to 1998, I estimate African American managerial representation using a series of auto-distributed lag (ADL) models with fixed-effects. The results show that in the year following a lawsuit filing against a particular supermarket establishment, African Americans are more likely to enter management. Furthermore, over the long run, coercive isomorphism (whereby establishments subject to a lawsuit come to adopt industry averages for African American managerial representation) seems to prevail. Finally, legal pressures associated with federal court judges' gender and racial/ethnic diversity and state-level government ideology are also influential. I conclude by discussing these results and the importance of systematically incorporating political process into sociological theorizing and analyses of workplace diversity.

 

 

 

The Strength of Weak Enforcement: The Impact of Discrimination Charges, Legal Environments, and Organizational Conditions on Workplace Segregation

C. Elizabeth Hirsh

Abstract: Much research examines the organizational changes brought by equal employment opportunity (EEO) law, but it remains unclear whether establishments formally charged with employment discrimination and found in violation of EEO laws actually improve workplace conditions for women and racial minorities. Building on economic and institutional accounts of organizational responses to legal intervention, this article assesses the effects of discrimination charges and their resolutions on changes in establishment-level occupational segregation by sex and race from 1990 to 2002. Using data from a national random sample of work establishments matched to discrimination charge data, I examine the direct impact of charges on workplaces, as well as the indirect pressures that establishments experience in their legal and organizational environments. For sex segregation, I find that establishments do not desegregate in the wake of discrimination charges filed directly against them, but they do respond to EEO enforcement in their industrial fields and legal environments. For race segregation, organizational factors—rather than legal intervention—are the primary predictors of desegregation. To the extent that EEO enforcement encourages organizational change, it does so indirectly, operating through establishments' industrial and legal environments.

 

 

 

David John Frank

Tara Hardinge

Kassia Wosick-Correa

Abstract : Most studies of rape-law reform outcomes focus on single cases. We advance this literature by studying outcomes more systematically—leveraging new cross-national and longitudinal reform data—and showing that reform outcomes have both global and national determinants. Our exploratory analyses show three main findings: (1) Rape-law reforms are strongly associated with elevated police reporting between 1945 and 2005. (2) The strength of the association depends on domestic contexts. The association is stronger in countries characterized by individualism, women's mobilization, wealth, and education; it is weaker in countries with greater democracy and police strength. (3) The strength of the association also depends on global contexts. It is stronger in countries with dense linkages to world society and weaker under conditions of global institutionalization, as widespread diffusion gives rise to both ceremony without substance (i.e., domestic rape-law reforms without subsequent increases in reporting) and substance without ceremony (increased police reporting without antecedent reforms). In multivariate regression analyses, rape-law reforms, women's mobilization, and links to world society all have positive and significant effects on police reporting. It appears that both global and domestic contexts—together and independently—importantly shape policy and practice.

 

 

 

Contemporary Hate Crimes, Law Enforcement, and the Legacy of Racial Violence

Ryan D. King

Steven F. Messner

Robert D. Baller

Abstract: This article investigates the association between past lynchings (1882 to 1930) and contemporary law enforcement responses to hate crimes in the United States. While prior research indicates a positive correlation between past levels of lynching and current social control practices against minority groups, we posit an inverse relationship for facets of social control that are protective of minorities. Specifically, we hypothesize that contemporary hate crime policing and prosecution will be less vigorous where lynching was more prevalent prior to 1930. Analyses show that levels of past lynching are associated with three outcome variables germane to hate crime policing and prosecution, but the effect of lynching is partly contingent on the presence of a minority group threat. That is, past lynching combined with a sizeable black population largely suppresses (1) police compliance with federal hate crime law, (2) police reports of hate crimes that target blacks, and in some analyses (3) the likelihood of prosecuting a hate crime case. Our findings have implications for research on law and intergroup conflict, historical continuity in the exercise of state social control, and theories that emphasize minority group threat.

 

 

 

Ethnic Politics and Armed Conflict: A Configurational Analysis of a New Global Data Set

Andreas Wimmer

Lars-Erik Cederman

Brian Min

Abstract: Quantitative scholarship on civil wars has long debated whether ethnic diversity breeds armed conflict. We go beyond this debate and show that highly diverse societies are not more conflict prone. Rather, states characterized by certain ethnopolitical configurations of power are more likely to experience violent conflict. First, armed rebellions are more likely to challenge states that exclude large portions of the population on the basis of ethnic background. Second, when a large number of competing elites share power in a segmented state, the risk of violent infighting increases. Third, incohesive states with a short history of direct rule are more likely to experience secessionist conflicts. We test these hypotheses for all independent states since 1945 using the new Ethnic Power Relations (EPR) data set. Cross-national analysis demonstrates that ethnic politics is as powerful and robust in predicting civil wars as is a country's level of economic development. Using multinomial logit regression, we show that rebellion, infighting, and secession result from high degrees of exclusion, segmentation, and incohesion, respectively. More diverse states, on the other hand, are not more likely to suffer from violent conflict.