Where Movements Matter: Examining Unintended Consequences of the Pain Management Movement in Medical,Criminal Justice,and Public Health Fields

Social movement scholars have rarely considered professional fields as sites of social movement consequences and have overlooked how social movement consequences traverse field boundaries. This research examines where movements matter by examining unintended consequences across professional fields. Drawing on a case study of the pain management movement, this study asks (1) under what conditions do movements targeting a focal professional field create consequences in adjacent fields; (2) what factors affect how adeptly the adjacent field responds; and (3) how do social movement impacts on adjacent fields affect the focal field? Findings demonstrate how the success of the pain management movement in medicine helped to fuel the opioid epidemic, which detrimentally affected the adjacent fields of criminal justice and public health. These adjacent fields' strategies for curbing spillover, in turn, created a new set of consequences for medicine. Their responses depended on material and moral resources and authority structures that differed significantly across the two adjacent fields. This article concludes with a discussion of factors that may facilitate or deter cross‐field contagion effects and offers suggestions for future research.     

Repoliticising multi-stakeholder standards processes: the Roundtable on Sustainable Biomaterials’ standards and certification scheme

The Roundtable on Sustainable Biomaterials (RSB) is one of a number of sustainability standards schemes that have been approved by the European Union under its 2009 Renewable Energy Directive (EU RED). The RSB scheme is often referred to positively not only because the sustainability standard is considered to exemplify greater rigour than many of the other EU-approved standards in terms of their claims to protect ‘sustainability’, but also because it provides an example of a ‘multi-stakeholder’ model of standards development that is assumed to confer greater legitimacy on the sustainability standards that are produced. In recognising that standards processes are part of wider processes of neoliberalisation, this paper explores the process in which the RSB standard was produced. In doing so it considers how notions of sustainability embodied in the RSB standards were shaped not only by its ‘multi-stakeholder’ process, but also by wider influences that were brought to bear in that process, including the growing spectre of a ‘standards market’ produced by the EU’s approval of different schemes.     

Sex isn’t Gender: Reforming Concepts and Measurements in the Study of Public Opinion

The importance of sex and gender to political behavior is reflected in the volume of work examining gender gaps in public opinion and partisan choice. Despite their centrality, sex and gender are poorly measured in survey research. The principal problem is the conflation of gender with sex in survey research. Consequently, gender is typically treated as a dichotomy, with no response options for androgynous gender identities, or indeed degrees of identification with masculine or feminine identities. We compare a new measure of genuine gender identification with a conventional measure of biological sex to determine whether the practice of using sex as a proxy for gender is sound. Sex is a fair proxy for gender, but for about a quarter of our sample, it is not. Moreover, greater nuance is gained when analyses incorporate a finer-grained measure of gender than is possible by using biological sex as a substitute. We argue that this is simply the start to an important conversation and that more research is needed to ascertain how we might best measure “gender” in the future.     

The alibi‐generation effect: Alibi‐generation experience influences alibi evaluation

Purpose. Post‐conviction DNA exonerations demonstrate a failure of alibis to protect innocent suspects. We contend one reason alibis are not believed is because evaluators underestimate how difficult it is for an innocent person to generate a convincing alibi. We hypothesized that asking evaluators to first generate an alibi of their own would lead evaluators to consider a suspect's alibi as more believable. Methods. Participants (N= 147) were randomly assigned to either evaluate a suspect's alibi before generating their own alibi (evaluate‐first) or generate their own alibi before evaluating the suspect's alibi (generate‐first). Participants provided alibis from either 3 days previous or 30 days previous. In Experiment 2, participants (N= 255) were randomly assigned to either generate‐first, evaluate‐first, or read‐experience (in which they read about alibi‐generation difficulty) conditions. Half the participants were primed to think empathetically with Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) subscales, and half were not. All participants evaluated the believability of the suspect's alibi as well as their own alibis. Results. Across both experiments, participants who generated their own alibi first rated the suspect's alibi as more believable. This alibi‐generation effect overshadowed alibi latency in Experiment 1 and the empathy manipulation in Experiment 2. Conclusions. Alibi‐generation experience seems to change the expectations evaluators have of alibis from criminal suspects. This effect likely emanates from increased awareness that alibis are difficult for innocent people to generate and from the emotional experience of having difficulty generating alibis.     

Reviews and notes

A response to block and Hirschhorn ? This piece grew out of discussions between the author and several (but not all) members of the editorial collective.

The Capitalist State: Its ‘Relative Autonomy’ Reexamined ? Presented at the 1981 Annual Meeting of the Midwest Sociological Society in Minneapolis, Minnesota, April 8–11, 1981.

Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America by Bertram Gross, New York: M. Evans and Co., Inc., 1980, $15.95. ISBN 0–87131–317–0.

Wealth and Power in America by Gabriel Kolko, New York: Praeger Publishers, 1962, 178 pp.; American Class Society in Numbers edited by Bob Howard and John Logue, Kent, OH: Kent Popular Press, 1978, 98 pp.; Class in the United States: Workers Against Capitalists by Charles Loren, Davis, CA: Cardinal Publishers, 296 pp., 1977.

Feminism and Materialism. Women and Modes of Production, edited by Annette Kohn and AnnMarie Wolpe (London, Boston and Henley: Rout‐ledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), viii, 328 pp., paperback $9.00.

An Interview with Jacques Attali ? Jacques Attali was chief economic adviser to Mitterand before the Socialist Party victory in France.      

Overcoming Barriers to Mediation in Intake Calls to Services: Research‐Based Strategies for Mediators

In this article, I investigate intake calls to community mediation services in which disputing neighbors ask mediators to help them resolve their conflicts. These calls are the first point of contact between potential clients and mediators. To maintain their organization's funding, mediators must convert a sufficient number of these callers into clients of the service. Intake calls, however, are not treated as part of the mediation process proper, and mediators are not trained to handle them. I audio‐recorded and transcribed approximately two hundred calls to mediation services based in the United Kingdom and then analyzed them using conversation analysis. I identified several factors routinely present in these intake calls that seemed to prevent disputants from ultimately engaging in the mediation process; I characterize these factors as “barriers to mediation.” These barriers include callers' lack of knowledge about mediation as a service and mediators' often ineffective methods of explaining the process. In particular, callers rejected mediation services when the mediators explained that mediation is an impartial service. Some of the mediators, however, managed intake calls differently, describing it more effectively, expressing empathy or affiliation with callers, and thus were able to overcome many of the callers' most common concerns about the process. In this article, I also discuss this study's implications for understanding the institution of mediation and for training mediators.