When is a social actor most strongly influenced by its peers? This article addresses this question by clarifying when computer firms were most strongly affected by the choices of their structurally equivalent rivals to adopt a well‐known technology: Intel’s sixth‐generation processor. The core hypothesis is that the effect of adoptions by structurally equivalent firms increases with the competitive pressure that a focal firm faces in its market position. The results show that a chosen firm is most strongly influenced by comparable others when it faces scale‐based competition and is diversified. The implications of this study are twofold: a social actor’s sensitivity to the conduct of others may depend not only on its place in a hierarchy but also on the nature of its ties to an external audience; and a contingent theory of social influence may be necessary to characterize diffusion processes correctly, particularly when external and time‐varying nonnetwork factors have significant effects.

This article presents evidence of the scale, relative intensity, and social determinants of immigrants’ transnational political engagement. It demonstrates that a stable and significant transnational field of political action connecting immigrants with their polities of origin does indeed exist. The results help temper celebratory images of the extent and effects of transnational engagement provided by some scholars. The article shows that migrants’ habitual transnational political engagement is far from being as extensive, socially unbounded, “deterritorialized,” and liberatory as previously argued. Transnational political action, then, is regularly undertaken by a small minority, is socially bounded across national borders, occurs in quite specific territorial jurisdictions, and appears to reproduce preexisting power asymmetries. The potential of transnationalism for transforming such asymmetries within and across countries has yet to be determined.

This article presents a five‐year ethnographic study of informal social control in the Chicago neighborhood “Beltway,” where controls at the private and what has traditionally been known as the parochial level are weaker and less important than heretofore assumed. In addition, the parochial and the public arenas are inseparable from each other, not independent as others have argued. Instead, informal social control in Beltway is characterized by what the author calls the “new parochialism,” where diminished private and traditionally parochial forms of social control are replaced by a combination of parochial and public controls. The new parochialism is occasioned by wider societal and local changes, and the concept is shown to have theoretical and empirical implications.

Individual participation has been at the core of much theorizing and research on social movements. Little of this attention, however, has focused on the labor movement and individual strike involvement. In this article, the authors extend the literature by employing rational choice and network perspectives on social movement participation and by analyzing strike mobilization in a recent action by the Communication Workers of America. The data are unique to social movement analyses as they include participants as well as nonparticipants, have significant heterogeneity across lines of status, and provide potentially influential individual background and network indicators. Findings show how race, income, and occupational distinctions are influential for strike behavior. Importantly, workers' networks at the point of production also impact strike involvement. The authors discuss the implications of these and related results for understanding worker insurgency and social movement participation more generally.

Using stories of citizens’ resistance to legalized authority, the authors propose that the act of storytelling extends temporally and socially what might otherwise be an individual, discrete, and ephemeral transaction. Adopting a concept of power as a contingent outcome in a social transaction, they emphasize that not only dominant, institutionalized power but also resistance to institutionalized authority draws from a common pool of sociocultural resources, including symbolic, linguistic, organizational, and material phenomena. Although such acts of resistance may not cumulate to produce institutional change, they may nonetheless have consequences beyond the specific social transaction: the authors propose that a chief means for extending the social consequences of resistance is to transform an act of resistance into a story about resistance. Based upon an appreciation of the structural conditions of power and authority, stories of resistance can become instructions about both the sources and the limitations of power. Because such stories are told in interaction with other stories, they become part of a stream of sociocultural knowledge about how social structures work to distribute power and disadvantage.

The editors are indebted to their many colleagues across the country who assist them in the assessment of manuscripts. The value of these referees cannot be overstated; their work is a continuous service to the profession. The following is a list of the people who read at least one manuscript in 2002. We take this opportunity to thank them.