Attitudes of College Students Toward Women in Policing

Attitudes toward women in policing among undergraduate college students were examined. The findings revealed that feminist orientation was the most consistent predictor of support for women in policing, with academic major also having a significant influence. Gender, race/ethnicity, classification in school (i.e., academic year), and support for the police were generally not significant predictors. Separate analyses completed for men and women indicated that there was some difference in the factors that predicted support for women in policing. Implications of the research are discussed.     

Pilgrimage to wellness: an exploratory report of rural African American clergy perceptions of church health promotion capacity

Churches serve vital roles in African American communities, where disease burden is disproportionately greater and healthcare access is more limited. Although church leadership often must approve programs and activities conducted within churches, little is known about their perception of churches as health promotion organizations, or the impact of church-based health promotion on their own health. This exploratory study assessed perceptions of church capacity to promote health among 27 rural, African American clergy leaders and report the relationship between their own health and that of their congregation. Results indicate a perceived need to increase the capacity of their churches to promote health. Most common were conducting health programs, displaying health information, kitchen committee working with the health ministry, partnerships outside of the church, and funding. Findings lay the foundation for the development of future studies of key factors associated with organizational change and health promotion in these rural church settings.     

Unsettled Times for American Families

In Caring for Our Own: Why There Is No Political Demand for New American Social Welfare Rights (2014), Sandra Levitsky reveals how an enduring ideology of family responsibility and a decoupling of social support groups from organized advocacy constrains mass legal mobilization to address long‐term elderly care in the United States. This essay argues that American families have entered an unsettled period linked to social inequality, young adult living arrangements, immigration, and institutional shifts related to LGBTQ families, workplace‐family conflict, and the criminalization of elder abuse. These changes to the family may create the conditions for questioning the ideology of family responsibility and new possibilities for collective action with potentially contradictory meanings and lines of action, including politicization and legal mobilization.     

A multivariate analysis of sex offender recidivism

Sex offender recidivism risk is a multifaceted phenomenon requiring consideration across multiple risk factor domains. The impact of treatment involvement and subsequent recidivism is given limited attention in comparison to other forensic mental health issues. The present analysis is a retrospective study of sex offenders treated at a secure facility utilizing a cognitive-behavioral program matched with an untreated correctional sample. Variables studied included demographic, criminal history, offense related, and treatment progress. Recidivism was assessed through arrest data. Multivariate analysis suggests that recidivism is significantly related to quality of treatment involvement, offender demographics, offense characteristics, and criminal history. Successfully treated offenders were significantly less likely to subsequently reoffend. Recidivists were also significantly younger, less likely married, had engaged in more victim grooming or less violent offending behavior, and had significantly more prior property charges. The authors discuss the clinical and policy implications of the interrelationship between treatment involvement and recidivism.     

Self-Concept differences between single and married school-age mothers

This study examined differences in self-perceptions between single and married school-age mothers. The Tennessee Self Concept Scale was administered to 84 single and married girls who passed through a school-age parent program over a two-year period and who chose to keep and rear their babies. Data were subjected to a stepwise discriminant analysis to determine an optimal set of variables that would distinguish between the two groups. Results indicated that the single school-age mothers had extremely low self-concepts, suffered from serious emotional problems, had inappropriate coping behaviors, and exhibited significant differences from the comparison group on 11 of 26 variables. The single subjects, in contrast to their married counterparts, perceived themselves as undersirable, unworthy, morally bad, and unhappy with their behavior, physical selves, and social relationships. The married subjects had nominally low self-concepts, with their most negative perceptions focused on their moralethical selves. Their most positive feelings were expressed about family relationships.Received his Ed.D. from Texas Tech University in 1973. His research interests include adolescent pregnancy, hearing-impaired children and their families, and family therapy.     

Discussion Law & Society Review at Fifty: A Debate on the Future of Publishing by the Law & Society Association

This contribution presents a series of statements on the future of publishing by the Law & Society Review and the Law & Society Association generally. Framed by the first author's introductory and concluding comments are contributions by Halliday, Liu, Morrill, Seron, and Silbey. This debate, based on a LSR 50th anniversary panel held at the 2016 Annual Meeting of the LSA, is intended to open up a broader conversation among members of the Association. Positions by individual contributors can only be linked to them and not to the group of contributors.     

Hybrid Warfare,International Negotiation,and an Experiment in “Remote Convening”

The authors are leading a multinational effort to understand the effects of “hybrid” warfare on international commercial negotiation. The start-up process is itself essentially a negotiation, among about forty individual practitioners and scholars with very diverse backgrounds, over whether and how they will work together. In a pandemic, a key risk is that the necessary cooperation and trust will be harder to build, particularly among professionals who are dealing with security-sensitive issues and who have never met each other. This article discusses the current necessity of replacing the in-person model for eliciting such cooperation which the authors had developed previously for large collaborative projects, and describes a “remote convening” replacement process.     

Communist Legacies, Postcommunist Transformations, and the Fate of Organized Labor in Russia and China

This study aims to generate fresh hypotheses concerning emergent variations in labor politics across postcomunist settings. Although labor may be weak throughout the postcommunist world, a historical comparison of labor politics in Russia and China reveals consequential differences in the extent and sources of union weakness. Taking these differences seriously, the study asks why organized labor in Russia—in spite of a steeper decline in union membership, greater fragmentation, and a conspicuously low level of militancy—wasrelatively more effective in advancing working-class interests during economic liberalization than the growing, organizationally unified trade union apparatus in China. The comparisons suggest that some constraints on organized labor are more malleable than others, allowing for openins where labor can affect outcomes in ways that surprise, if not scare, state and business. Specifically, key differences in historical legacies and in the pace and ynamics of institutional transformation have conferred upon Russian unions key organizational, material, and symbolic resources that Chinese unions do not possess to the same degree. These differences reflect mechanisms capable of generating increasingly divergent prospects for organized labor mobilization over long-time horizons. Calvin Chen is Luce Assistant Professor of Politics at Mount Holyoke College. His research interests include the industrialization of the Chinese countryside, the political economy of East Asia, and labor politics in postsocialist countries. He is presently working on a book on the role of social ties and networks of trust in China’s township and village enterprises. Rudra Sil is associate professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests include the political economy of development, comparative labor relations, postcommunist transitions, Russian and Asian studies, and the history and philosophy of social science. He is author ofManaging “Modernity”: Work, Community, and Authority in Late-Industrializing Japan and Russia (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002) and coeditor ofThe Politics of Labor in a Global Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). He is presently working on a book comparing the evolution of labor politics across postcommunist countries. We gratefully acknowledge helpful comments and suggestions offered by Hilary Appel, Harley Balzer, Ruth Collier, Eileen Doherty, Todor Enev, Tulia Falleti, David Ost, Lü Xiaobo, and three anonymous reviewers on drafts of this article.