Influenced by Park and Burgess, Shaw and McKay grounded their ecological model of delinquency exclusively in the dynamics of local communities. Although recent developments in human ecology have emphasized the adaptation of cummunities to external contingencies, this internal emphasis has continued to dominate the criminological literature. This paper examines the effects of radical change in adjoining areas on local delinquency rates. Evidence is presented that such external processes have a significant effect on local rates of delinquency. The consideration of these processes may explain why some stable, organized communities are nevertheless characterized by high rates of delinquency. Suttle's concept of the defended community provides a promising means of incorporating these findings into general ecological models of crime and delinquency.

This paper extends a power-control theory of common delinquent behavior developed by Hagan, Gillis, and Simpson in 1985. It does so by bringing the class analysis of delinquency into the household, using a new model of class relations based on the relative positions of husbands and wives in the workplace. In patriarchal families, wives have little power relative to husbands, daughters have little freedom relative to sons, and daughters are less delinquent than sons. These differences are diminished in egalitarian families. Power-control theory explains this variation in terms of (1) gender divisions in domestic social control and (2) the resulting attitudes toward risk taking. Power-control theory thereby accoutns for class-specific declines in gender-delinquency relationships that previously required separate deprivation and liberation theories of gender and delinquency. The new theory calls for major changes in the study of class, gender, and delinquency, as well as for a new appreciation of the importance of gender and structures of patriarchi in many other social processes.

Several authors have recently challenged the conception that violent crimes in the United States are disproportionately intraracial. They have posited a special propensity for black offenders to seek out white victims because of black rage and have pointed to the desirable characteristics of white victims. In this paper, three models of the race of offender and victim are developed using aggregate national data on homicide (from the Uniform Crime Reports), rape, aggravated assault, simple assault, and robbery (from the National Crime Surveys.) Whatever measures are used, violent crimes are found to be intraracial to a far greater extent than statistically expected under these models. A structural explanation of these findings is presented.

Life and drug histories collected in a longitudinal cohort of young adults age 24-25 are analyzed to specify the dynamic relationships between patterns of drug use and job separations. Three patterns of drug use are investigated: daily alcohol use, monthly use of marijuana, and monthly use of other illicit drugs. Job changes followed immediately by another job are distinghished from job losses not followed by new employment within a month. Two processes assumed to underlie the relationship between drug use and job mobility are distinguished: selection, in which individual predispositions account the self-selection into job separation, and causation, which reflects the specific effects of drug use on job separation. Drug use has a strong effect on job separation, which appears to be mainly a selection effect, however. The results document the importance of drug use in predicting high job mobility and subsequent unemployment in late adolescence and early adulthood. The neglect of this life-style factor in prior analyses has led to overestimations of the negative effects of job duration and marital status and the positive effect of prior experience of a job separation on future separations.

The Hollywood film industry is considered as a system of recurrent ties among the various major participants who usually work under short-term contracts for single films. This form of project-based organization in seen as a response to uncertainty and risk in the film industry. The Paper examines the ways in which independent contractors-producers, directors, cinematographers, and actors-organize and operate to reduce uncertainty and risk and to increase profits. The analysis of data from 2,430 films made in the period 1965-80 establishes patterns of recurrent ties among participants who are at comparable levels of cumulative productivity with respect to earnings, Oscars, Oscar nominations, and number of previous films. The paper also considers the degree to which film earnings are influenced by the past productivity of the major participants.

This paper analyzes the founding rate of national labor unions in the United States for the period 1836-1985. It investigates the effects of competitive processes and environmental effects on this rate. A number of stochastics models embodying different assumptions about the ecology of foundings are estimated. The best-fitting models posit that the effect of density (the number of unions in existence) and the number of recent foundings on the foundig rate is curvilinear. Analysis of more complicated models reveals that the growth of industrial unions inhibited the founding rate of craft unions. However, the founding rate of industrial unions was unaffected by the number of craft unions in existence.

Western research on interpersonal behavior patterns and rules of exchange needs to move beyond the assumption of isolated individuals socialized to make rational decisions on the basis of self-interest. A review of recent research shows that Chinese society and other similar societies follow rules that deviate from those of the West. In such societies, norms of reciprocity (bao) are intense, but these norms are heavily shaped by the hierarchically structured network of social relations (guanxi) in which people are embedded, by the public nature of obligations, and by the long time period over which obligations are incurred through a self-conscious manipulation of face and related symbols. These special cultural symbols, as well as the historical monopoly of valuable resources by powerful leaders, help explain he origin of these patterns. There are several forces leading to change but also some sources of continuity, which help maintain these patterns regardless of political and economic context.