Girls, guys, and gangs: Convergence or divergence in the gendered construction of gangs and groups

Despite recent efforts to examine and understand female gang membership, the research literature lacks a complete picture of how gender and gang membership work to shape perceptions of the structural characteristics of gangs, gang values, and gang activities. A questionnaire was administered to 103 youths (seventy-four male and twenty-nine female juvenile detainees) in St. Louis, Missouri, to disentangle the effects of gender and gang membership on perceptions of values, activities, and organizational characteristics of gangs. Gang members differed from nongang members more than males from females. This suggests that gender alone may not be able to account for differential perceptions of gang and nongang youth and that underlying social processes affect both groups.     

'Adorned with the Mix of Faith and Profanity that Intoxicates the People': The Festival of the Senhor do Bonfim in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, 1930–19541

This essay looks at a formative period in the history of the festival of the Senhor do Bonfim, one of Salvador's most important religious festivals. The essay focuses on the public ritual washing of the Church of Bonfim and the tensions between the Catholic Church, who periodically banned the washing from the larger festival, and a variety of historical actors including politicians, journalists, authors and working-class Salvadorans whose efforts eventually contributed to the lifting of the prohibition once and for all in 1953. The author suggests that the defence of the washing both reflected and contributed to a larger hegemonic process taking place in Salvador after 1930, as actors within Salvador's dominant class accepted and even praised Afro-Bahian cultural practices, including them as integral parts of a larger Bahian identity.     

On the bottom rung: A discussion of women's work in sociology

Women, Women's Work and ‘Women's Studies’ are in a disadvantaged and marginal position within academic settings. This is a reflection of women's position in society in general, and it should be no surprise to find it to be the case in sociology as elsewhere. Women's studies has achieved some respectability within the social sciences, but rather than this being seen as a straightforward success, the disadvantages of this ‘respectability’ must be understood, as must the subtlety of male incorporation of feminist ideas not at a conscious level but within and through the male defined ethos of academia. The use of a qualitative methodology to get behind the ‘facts’ of qualitative differences in women's and men's positions is important. The lives of women postgraduates and researchers in Great Britain, those women on the bottom rung, can give us insights into the difficulties for women's studies and into the possibilities for the direction that attempts to redress the imbalances between men and women in academia might take.     

Calling the cops: Police telephone operators and citizen calls for service

Citizen calls for police service represent direct demands on government. It is the job of police phone operators to translate these demands into official, bureaucratically recognized inputs. As “street-level” bureaucrats, police phone operators enjoy considerable discretion in how they recieve, process, and transmit information. Operators screen all calls, categorize the citizen's problem, and by that process they determine much of the initial police response to that call. This article analyzes data on citizen requests and operator responses coded from a sample of over 26,000 phone calls to police in 21 jurisdictions in three metropolitan areas. The data indicate that most citizen calls to police involve the provision of information or assistance, nuisance abatement, traffic problems, or the regulation of interpersonal disputes. Citizen calls cover a wide range of topics, but only about 20 percent involve predatory crime of any type. The typical operator response to the problems described by most citizens was to promise the dispatch of a patrol unit, although this varied by problem type and by the apparent seriousness of the call. Complaint operators seem to follow a decision rule that a patrol unit will always be sent to the scene except in those situations where it is clear that none is needed. The article concludes with a discussion of the possible impact of operator demeanor on policy-community relations.