Joyce McCarl Nielsen

Recycling as Altruistic Behavior Normative and Behavioral Strategies to Expand Participation in a Community Recycling Program

Experimental and survey data were gathered from residents of a large urban neighborhood with a community wide curbside recycling program in order to determine the extent to which recycling could be conceptualized as altruistic behavior. Results confirmed that recycling behavior is consistent with Schwartzs altruism model, according to which behavior is influenced by social norms, personal norms, and awareness of consequences. Data further showed that a block-leader program, in which residents encouraged their neighbors to recycle, influenced altruistic norms and increased recycling behavior. Prompting and information strategies were also introduced into the community recycling program as experimental interventions in order to com- pare their effects with the block-leader approach. Results showed that prompting and information increased recycling behavior but did not affect norms and attitudes. Further- more, all the intervention strategies influenced behavior independently of the measured norms; block leaders had the most substantial impact, prompts had the next greatest impact, and information had the least.

Sex-role stereotypes of feminists and nonfeminists

In light of recent attempts by feminists to upgrade the status of women by stressing the positive aspects of femininity, a comparison of sex-role stereotyping by women who endorse womens liberation with those who do not was made. Feminists showed a more positive perception of women; both groups stressed positive feminine traits in describing an ideal woman, but feminists would like to see more dominance in women. Two negative stereotypes, not previously documented, emerged from this analysis: the depiction of men as cooler, more boastful, awkward, and insensitive by the feminists and womens liberationists as more boastful, excitable, and unattractive by the nonfeminists.

Gender, residual deviance, and social control

Focusing on gendered aspects of informal social control, we use a societal reaction approach to examine 15 years of students’ gender norm violation projects. Three predictions regarding differential reaction to womens and mens residual deviance are (a) that there will be no gender differences, (b) that those with less power and status (women) will be sanctioned more or (c) that those with more status resources (men) will be monitored and reacted to more. We discuss methodological advantages of using norm violations to study informal social control. Findings contribute to a more complete theory of how societal reactions to residual deviance are mediated by gender. There were large gender differences in what students chose to do regarding norm violations and little change over time. Male “deviants” were censured more in terms of negativity, strength of reaction, laughter, and homophobia; female “deviants” were censured more as targets of verbal and sexual remarks. We discuss the need for more attention to...

What's Wrong Is Right: A Response to the State of the Discipline

In the June issue ofSociological Forum, several authors addressed the question, “Whats Wrong with Sociology.” Answers included increased fragmentation of the discipline, and the lack of an identifiable cumulative core of sociological knowledge. This paper examines many of the claims made by the contributors to the June 1994Sociological Forum, reframes their arguments, and by placing debates regarding the problems in sociology in a broader perspective, identifies many of the recent advances made by the discipline. Focusing on such notable contributions to the field as feminist and postmodern scholarship, we locate the positive side of multiple perspective research.

Student-faculty sexual relationships: An empirical test of two explanatory models

Media reports, stereotypes in popular literature, and a limited number of research studies describe student-faculty sexual relationships as either an exchange of sex for grades (initiated either by a lascivious professor or a self-serving student) and/or as the result of the psychological process of transference. Results from in-depth interviews with 11 students and 14 faculty members who had had student-teacher sexual affairs show only minimal support for either the exchange or transference models. We present two case histories that are typical of the student-faculty sexual liaisons we studied; they illustrate that these relationships are in many ways like other sexual relationships insofar as they are based on mutual attraction, as well as sex-related, power-discrepant roles. Student-faculty relationships are problematic (i.e., unethical) not so much because of the power discrepancy between a (usually male) professor and a (usually female) student, but because there is a confounding of public and private roles. This study contributes to this largely unresearched subject area in that it seriously questions the validity of negative sex stereotypes explicit in the exchange model and examines student-faculty relationships in sociological terms.