SAGE Podcast

This article reports an experiment in which college students and professional combat air controllers performed a simulated team interaction task designed to explore the effects of the degree of politeness used by a directive giver and the degree of "social distance"(roughly, team affiliation and affinity between the directive giver and the recipient), on directive compliance behaviors and attitudes. The design and experimental approach was informed by the functional theory of politeness in social interactions developed by Brown and Levinson, although hypotheses are advanced that extend this essentially perceptual model to effects on behaviors and attitudes. Results showed that increased politeness in a directive significantly improved attitudes toward the directive giver. Social "nearness” operated similarly and influenced the degree of politeness perceived even when the request itself was unchanged. Both effects operate similarly for novices and experts. Compliance rates (and one portion of reaction time) were similarly affected by the politeness of the directive giver but, interestingly, were affected differently for novices and experts. The politeness of the directive giver increased compliance for novices but decreased it for experts. This result suggests that politeness perceptions are an important influence on work performance but that their interpretation can be influenced through training and/or work "culture."

Because families are primary venues for self construction, they are also common sites of identity disruption, loss, and inner turmoil. Sociologists have a long tradition of studying the personal effects of troublesome family circumstances such as separation or divorce, illness, and death. However, scholars of these topics contribute to separate lines of research and rarely build on one another’s work. Drawing from interviews with middle-class parents whose children suffered from a range of problems, this article introduces "family trouble" as a concept that captures the similar social psychological elements of disruptive family events. On a broader level, the article highlights the relationship between the disruption of social order and the disruption of selves.

The recently released film, The Help, based on Kathryn Stockett’s best-selling novel, foregrounds domestic service in the American imagination. Both the film and the novel have been met with both praise and criticism. The story is set in 1963 Mississippi during the era of Jim Crow laws and the rising Civil Rights Movement. Skeeter, an aspiring writer and naive young white women, is the center of the story. Uncomfortable with the racist treatment of African American women hired as maids in her family and friends' homes, she confronts the racism of white Mississippians indirectly by writing a book on domestic workers' experiences of racism and abuse in white employers’ homes. One of the central tensions in the story is the danger Skeeter places these maids in as a result of telling their stories. In the end, she triumphs as a hero by exposing the cruelty of Jim Crow laws and white employers' attitudes and prejudices and lands a coveted journalism job in New York City.

Violence against women (VAW) in South Africa remains rampant, irrespective of human rights– focused laws passed by the government. This article reflects on the position of two acts: the Domestic Violence Act No 116 of 1998 and Criminal Law (Sexual Offense and Related Matters) Act No 32 of 2007. Both are framed to protect women against all forms of violence. The article discusses the prisms of the two laws, an account of the position taken or interpreted by the reviewed literature regarding the acts, and the findings and recommendations regarding the infrastructure and supports needed to appropriately implement the two acts.

This study explored self-reports of five childhood maltreatment (CM) subtypes and their associations with current suicide risk in a sample of 500 homeless persons. Participants completed the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire and the Mini-International Neuropsychiatric Interview. Individual, unique, and cumulative associations of CM subtypes and subtype combinations with suicide risk (no vs. low vs. moderate/high) were examined. In multivariate analyses, four of the five CM subtypes were associated with suicide risk in individual models, but not in a model that included all CM subtypes. The strongest associations were found for reports of multitype CM involving all five subtypes. Mental disorders and female sex were independently associated with suicide risk. Clinicians working with CM victims should be aware that homeless clients are likely to report multitype maltreatment and should assess a variety of CM experiences. Future studies need to further examine multitype maltreatment and suicidal behaviors in homeless populations with complex conditions.

Jennifer L. Kohn of Drew University discusses her paper about James Madison's Federalist 10, a seminal work in political theory on the causes, consequences, and management of factions, with JME associate editor Gordon Meyer of Canisius College.

Editor Jim Palmer interviews the guest editor and two contributors to the April 2012 special issue on Creating Future Directions for Community Colleges Using Today's Research.

This article addresses the use of art in the University of Puerto Rico student movement of 2010 to achieve social movement outcomes, such as mobilization and collective identity. More specifically, this paper addresses two major research questions. One, what forms of art were present in the UPR student movement? Two, what impact do artistic objects and performances have on the movement, from the perspective of student activists and artists? Drawing upon 25 hours of observational data and 19 interviews with student activists, faculty, and artists, this paper demonstrates how activists incorporate multiple art forms, not only traditional forms like protest songs, but also innovative forms like street theatre. Incorporating a broad repertoire of art, the movement appealed to a broad population, as well as created a dynamic movement. These questions are critical for understanding recent global movements that rely upon creative and artistic tactics for resistance. However, despite the "cultural turn" among social movement scholars, few have taken seriously the use of art in activism, particularly the ways in which multiple forms of art may be used within one single movement. The case of the student movement of the UPR provides an opportunity to explore up-close the various ways that art may be present within a movement, as well as to uncover how these forms of art operate within the movement and impact on the overall movement.

Dr. Jörn Block discusses "How to Pay Nonfamily Managers in Large Family Firms: A Principal—Agent Model."

Why do working class women in India choose to become surrogate mothers? Sociologist Sharmila Rudrappa explains that these decisions make sense when contexualized within larger changes in the economy, the appallingly low wages these women command for their labor, and the lack of meaningful work.

In recent years, policy efforts to alleviate poverty have focused on marriage and relationship education. Orit Avishai’s, Melanie Heath’s,and Jennifer Randles’s research finds that efforts to address poverty via relationship skills training are misguided because this approach does not address the structural causes of poverty.

African American spoken word art offers a window through which to explore how a cultural site of creative and artistic inquiry can simultaneously serve as a site of social analysis and change. Specifically, moving beyond the realm of pure aesthetics, the author explores the ways African American verbal art has functioned as a site of public knowledge and everyday politics—important though commonly overlooked features of social change projects. To make this case, the author conceptualizes culture, knowledge, and politics as a tightly connected trinity of social phenomena, thereby opening the door for an analysis of how a cultural object such as spoken word can simultaneously operate as a site of knowledge production and political practice. Next, using a genealogical approach, the author identifies patterns that appear across different black American verbal art forms in order to develop a typology of features characteristic of African American spoken word traditions. This typology highlights a constellation of themes that, collectively, shed light on how public knowledge and everyday politics can contribute to social change. Throughout this analysis, the author considers how this typology provides a broader framework for understanding the specialized political practices and public knowledge projects employed by present-day young adult spoken word performance poets, drawing upon her ethnographic fieldwork for support. Such a framework can encourage us to rethink existing models of social activism and invite us to consider the unique role of art in the pursuit of social justice and change.

There is an impressive amount of research indicating that spouses and mates tend be highly similar on a range of characteristics. Much of this literature has examined mate similarity in demographic characteristics, such as age and race, but there is also evidence indicating that mates tend to be similar in terms of their behaviors and personality traits. Criminological research, however, has been slow to examine how, and in what ways, mates might resemble each other for various types of antisocial outcomes. The current study addresses this gap in the literature by analyzing a national sample of mates drawn from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Birth Cohort. The results of the latent factor analyses reveal a high degree of similarity for antisocial behavior and for substance abuse between mates. The implications that these findings have for criminological theory and research are discussed.

Jurisdictions in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia now have laws that enable preventive detention of post-sentence sex offenders based on an assessment of the offender's likely recidivism. Measures of recidivism, or risk assessments, rely on the criminal justice process to produce the "pool" of sex offenders studied. This article argues that recidivism research needs to be placed in the context of attrition studies that document the disproportionate and patterned attrition of sexual offenses and sexual offenders from the criminal justice process. Understanding the common biases that affect criminal prosecution of sex offenses would improve sexual violence prevention policies.

Jay Simpson, Editorial Assistant for Urban Education, interviews Dr. Judson Laughter, of the University of Tennessee, about his article, "Culturally Relevant Science Teaching in Middle School." This article appears in the September 2012 issue of Urban Education.