Sociological Perspectives

Political control in Chinese universities had depended mainly on the cooperation of students with nonprofessional political workers. In the process of economic reform in China, the ideological legitimation of the communist state greatly declined while other avenues of status attainment outside the realm of state control opened up. Participating actively in mutual supervision became neither moral nor necessarily profitable. As a result, a campus environment which had once facilitated political control over students became conducive to student mobilization. Some students and political workers even captured political control institutions to spread nonconforming and dissident ideas. This paper argues that this decline in political control over students made a significant contribution to the rise of the 1989 Chinese Student Movement.

Leading theories of power in exchange networks make assumptions about actors' reactions to being included in or excluded from exchanges. These assumptions, that actors consistently included increase their demands on others and that actors consistently excluded decrease their demands, provide the behavioral mechanism by which structural differences in position convert into power advantages or disadvantages. We test these assumptions with data gathered by experiment from five different networks. We find that while actors generally respond as assumed, the parameters of response to inclusion and to exclusion are not symmetric, depend on the level of experience of the subjects, and interact both with type of network (strong power versus weak power) and with network position.

This study investigates four hypotheses concerning relationships between values or beliefs and attitudes toward cohabitation, family and gender roles. These are the Social Concerns Hypothesis, the Political Ideology Hypothesis, the Higher Order Needs Hypothesis, and the Consumerism Hypothesis. Each hypothesis has been tested, using data from several nationally representative subsamples of white high school seniors. As predicted by the Social Concerns Hypothesis, students with more social concerns had more favorable attitudes toward gender equality and nontraditional gender roles, particularly among males. This finding suggests that, for males, concern for fairness and the well-being of others may be an important motive for support for gender equality and acceptance of nontraditional gender roles. As predicted by the Political Ideology Hypothesis, conservative political beliefs were associated with traditional attitudes toward cohabitation, family, and gender roles. In contrast, our findings provide only weak support for the Higher Order Needs Hypothesis, and our findings suggest that the Consumerism Hypothesis should be reformulated.

The Second Malaysian Family Life Survey is used to explore one of the most important components of interfamily inequality of school attainment: Sibship size. The survey data document the differences in the effects of sibship size on children's secondary school attainment among Malaysia's three ethnic communities. They also show the response of the sibship size effect to public policies targeting the ethnic Malay population. Three broad questions can be addressed using the available data: First, how important is sibship size as a determinant of educational attainment, ceteris paribus, within the Malay and nonMalay populations? Second, how have the effects of sibship size changed over time? Third, are there ethnic differences in any such changes, differences that could be interpreted in light of the government's regulation of school supply and employment opportunities for each group? Addressing these questions in the case of Malaysia illuminates the extent to which public policy more generally can alter the effect of sibship size on educational attainment. The findings indicate that restrictions on family size by each of Malaysia's ethnic groups were a rational attempt by parents to compensate for constraints on their ability to invest in their children's education.

Epistemological reflection has been a major source of innovation in the human sciences while having very little influence on the arts or sciences. This variation is explained using a sociological framework emphasizing the organizational forms that underpin or are implicit in epistemological positions. The fine arts and the harder sciences are, respectively, too weakly and too strongly organized to be open to epistemological influence. By contrast, the human sciences might plausibly be organized either more loosely or more tightly, and epistemological argument is used in part to urge movement in one or the other direction. This perspective is applied to the academic study of literature both historically and in relation to a current epistemological dispute between realist and relativist scholars. The argument is unresolvable in practice, it is argued, because of constraints on scholarly interpretation set by consumers. Parallels are drawn with circumstances in sociology.

Bonnie Mitchell and Joe Feagin (1995) build on the theory of oppositional culture, arguing that African Americans, American Indians, and Mexican Americans draw on their own cultural resources to resist oppression under internal colonialism. In this paper, rap music is identified as an important African American popular cultural form that also emerges as a form of oppositional culture. A brief analysis of the lyrics of political and gangsta rappers of the late 1980s and early 1990s, provides key themes of distrust, anger, resistance, and critique of a perceived racist and discriminatory society. Rap music is discussed as music with a message of resistance, empowerment, and social critique, and as a herald of the Los Angeles riots of 1992.

Traditionally, research on the class-crime relationship has ignored gender, while much of the past research on the gender-delinquency relationship has ignored class. Both feminist criminologists and social psychologists, such as House (1981), suggest that analyses of class and gender should involve the examination of how these factors shape individual lives. In this paper we explore the role of educational expectations as one factor shaped by both class and gender. We consider three issues. First, is social class significantly related to female, as well as male, delinquency? Second, does social class shape educational expectations and do they, in turn, enhance the likelihood of delinquent involvement? Third, are there differences by gender in the ways that social class conditions educational expectations? The findings suggest that gender and class are both important factors shaping educational expectations and through them, delinquency.