Sociological Perspectives

Vigilantism against political dissent is a common phenomenon which provokes intense reactions from a number of social sectors. But what shape do these reactions take? Two competing models, crystallized simplicity and fluid complexity, make differing predictions about the dimensionality of issues, social grouping, and temporal dynamics of public concern. Issue dimensions, sectoral clustering, and change of opinion over time are examined with data on counterinsurgent vigilantes in the Philippines. Seven dimensions of opinion were observable: displacement, unrepresentativeness, terror, elite mobilization, extralegality, grievance nonredress, and destabilization. With respect to these seven issue dimensions, social sectors fell into five coalitional clusters: counterinsurgent functionaries, lumpen class, peace and justice coalition, legal lobby, and populist organizations. Most sectors became alienated from the vigilantes over time and polarization occurred on the issues of displacement, unrepresentativeness, and grievance nonredress. The superiority of the fluid complexity model is suggested.

Although researchers have tried to explain the relatively high fertility of Mexican Americans with both individual and contextual ethnic characteristics, evidence for the effects of contextual factors has been more consistent. Still, the means by which ethnic context influences fertility is unclear. In this paper, we seek to further clarify the ways in which the ethnic context affects Mexican American fertility by incorporating several specific contextual measures into analyses of recent births. In addition to the relative size of the Mexican American population, we include an index comprised of several indicators of the cultural environment which may foster high fertility. We alternatively test the ratio of Hispanic-to-white female unemployment as an indicator of local limitations in economic opportunities. Analyses of 1980 census data provide little support for a cultural-contextual explanation of fertility, but some support for the notion that the local context affects fertility through limiting economic opportunities.

Two experiments compare simpler with more complex response categories in a telephone survey. The first experiment develops a method for predicting the effects of changing modifiers in labels for response categories. The experiment compares two response scales for rating the friendliness of parent-parent and parent-child relationships. The second experiment examines a flexible, self-documenting, procedure for recording answers to open questions about the frequency of events by comparing this procedure to a closed-frequency question. The open format for recording the frequency of events preserves more information about contact patterns than the closed question. Data are from 400–500 parents who participated in the Wisconsin Survey of Children, Income, and Program Participation, a random-digit-dialing household survey conducted in the spring of 1985.

This article reports results of an analysis of National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) regulatory activity from 1952 to 1986. Support is found for a synthesis of resource dependence and institutional theories of interorganizational regulation. Regulation maintains stable competitive relationships by tying competing orientations to resource exchange and the institutional norms that bind member organizations and legitimate their activities. A balance of tangible and symbolic resources, material interest, and belief, binds member organizations in a regulatory network. In the case of the NCAA, successful athletic schools are more likely to pursue instrumentally-rational athletic activity oriented toward winning and maximum profit, while academically selective schools pursue more value-rational athletic activity oriented toward the educational benefits of amateur athletic competition.

Using data from the National Survey of Families and Households (N = 3,472), the effect of the number of children on a husband's relative contribution to the household work is examined. When couples' mean age, employment status, income, education, employment hours, and gender-role attitudes are controlled, the number of children living in the home shows a nonlinear and U-shaped effect on the husband's relative share in the household work. The husband's share is the smallest when three children live in the home. It is largest when there are no children and when there are five or more children in the home. When the amount of time each spouse spends on the household work is examined, this U-shaped effect is found to be a result of the differential responses of the husband and wife to the increasing demand created by children.

Karl Polanyi remains one of the most trenchant critics of neoclassical economics. His “embeddedness” thesis, which holds that all economic activities and institutions are enmeshed in social relations and institutions, offers a sound theoretical basis for economic sociology. Nonetheless, he fails to embed the market concept. This theoretical lacuna manifests itself in his classic account of the rise of market society in England, The Great Transformation ([1944] 1957), where he neglects to consider institutional diversity and discontinuities in English commercial development. Polanyi's embeddedness thesis can be taken to its logical conclusion; that is, even the market can be embedded. “Markets” can be treated as social networks or organizations constituted by traders. I offer as an empirical illustration a brief case study of the rise of “market society” in England.