Voluntary risk taking is an activity that attracts a sizable number of people in American society but has been largely ignored by sociologists. A literature review is presented that points to a number of shortcomings in existing studies, most of which are associated with the psychological reductionism that predominates in this area of study. An effort is made to provide a sociological account of voluntary risk taking by (1) introducing a new classifyin concept- edgework-based on numerous themes emerging from primary and secondary data on risk taking and (2) explaining edgework in terms of the newly emerging social psychological perspective produced from the synthesis of the Marxian and Meadian frameworks. The concept of edgework highlights the most sociologically relevant features of voluntary risk taking, while the connections between various aspects of risk-taking behaviour and structural characteristic of modern American society at both the micro and macro levels. This approach ties together such factors as political economic variables, at one end of the continuum, and individual sensations and feelings, at the other end.

Theories of interpretation must explain not only the accuracy of interpretation but also the divergence between readings that arises from the socially situated nature of any reading. In this article, the sources of variant readings of a single novel ( The Late Bourgeois World, by Nadine Gordimer) are examined. Analysis of published statements (reviews and critical analyses) and comparison of these professional accounts with the author's own "lay" reading highlight the effects of the readers' genders, historical contexts, and purposes for reading on their constructions of the novel's content. The analysis demonstrates the collective character and significance of "novel readings," specially those produced by cultural "outsiders."

This study demonstrate that the empirical literature on the structural convariates of homicide rates contains inconsistent findings across different time periods and different geographical units. This apparent variance of findings may be due to statistical or methodological artifacts of particular studies, such as different time periods covered, units of analysis, samples, model specification, and problems of statistical analysis and inference. A baseline regression model using 11 structural covariates is estimated for cities, metropolitan areas, and states in 1960, 1970, and 1980. The empirical estimates of this model exhibit instability because of high levels of collinearity among several regressors. Principal components analysis is applied to simplify the dimensionally of the structural covariate space. Reestimation of the regression model then indicates that the apparent inconsistencies across time and social space are greatly reduced. The theoretical significance of the findings for substantive theories of violent crime are discussed.

This article conceptualizes and indexes social class for a Western capitalist country (the United States), a non-Western capitalist country (Japan), and a socialist country (Poland). The idea that social classes are to be distinguished in terms of ownership, control of the means of production, and control over the labor power of others is adapted to the historical, cultural, economic, and political circumstances of each country. It is hypothesized that men who are more advantageously located in the class structure of their society are more likely to value self-direction for their children, to be intellectually flexible, and to be self-directed in their orientations than men who are less advantageously located. The hypothesis that occupational self-direction plays a crucial role in explaining the psychological effect of social class in all three countries is also confirmed. There was no firm basis for hypothesizing the relationships between social class and a sense of distress. The pattern is cross-nationally inconsistent, in part because occupational self-direction does not have the cross-nationally consistent effect on the sense of distress that it has on other facets of psychological functioning.

In recent issues of this journal, J. Hagan, A. R. Gillis, and J. Simpson elaborate a power- control theory of common deliquency. They propose a positive relationship between neo-Marxist conceptions of class and common forms of delinquency, patterns of variation in gender differences by class, and intervening variables to explain these variations. An examination of class, gender, and delinquency in three U.S. data sets did not reveal the same patterns. A neo- Marxist categorization of the labor force was generally unrelated to common delinquency, and there was no evidence of paterned class-gender variations of the sort reported in their 1985 analysis. Gender differences by race were consistent with their theory, while racial differences were not. Moreover, an attempted reconstruction of data for the full set of household categories reported in the 1987 analysis raises important questions about the nature of class variations and the role of patriarchal imbalance in generating gender differences.

This article responds to Jensen and Thompson's analysis of power control theory by placing the analysis within the context of Jensen's previous work and offering new findings from a wealthy Canadian community. This new analysis further contextualizes the theory by operationalizing, patriarchy in terms of a direct and parsimonious measure of marital power. Jensen and Thompson's analysis notwithstanding, the core of the power-control model performs well here and in serveral other data sets. Yet further specification of the model is needed in terms of both gender itself and of the family structures and power relationships that establish its scope.