Julian Tanner

Whatever Happened to Yesterday's Rebels? Longitudinal Effects of Youth Delinquency on Education and Employment

This paper examines whether and how teen delinquency is consequential for a variety of educational and employment outcomes. From the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth we measure five forms of delinquency from 1979 when respondents were 14–17 years old, and investigate whether they predict five different outcomes when those individuals were aged twenty-five to thirty. We measure delinquency as the prevalence of skipping school, drug use, violent behavior, engaging in property crime, and contact with the criminal justice system. Using a variety of regression models, we explore whether delinquency has negative zero-order effects, and negative partial effects net of standard status attainment variables. We find that all types of delinquency have consistently significant and negative impacts on educational attainment among both males and females, net of status attainment variables. Delinquency also has a fairly consistent impact on male occupational outcomes, but has weaker effects on female occupational outcomes. Overall, the data suggest that delinquency has autonomous and negative effects on later life chances. We discuss these findings in light of links between status attainment models and theories of crime and delinquency.

The Long Arm of the Law: Effects of Labeling on Employment

This article offers a test of labeling theory by exploring whether contact with school and justice system authorities has long-term, negative, and independent effects on an individuals labor market success. We use the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79), a large and nationally representative sample, to examine whether experiences ranging from school suspension to incarceration during ages 15–23 can predict occupational status, income, and employment during ages 29–37. Unlike previous studies, we control for an exhaustive list of variables: social background, human capital, prior deviant behavior, family status, and local context. Our findings generally support labelling theory. Severe forms of labeling like sentencing and incaraceration have the strongest negative effects, though among females suspension or expulsion from school also has consistently negative effects. We conclude with a discussion of how labeling might reduce employment chances, with a focus on gender differences.

Our favourite melodies: musical consumption and teenage lifestyles.

The present study explores the determinants and lifestyle correletes of musical preferences among a large sample of high school students in Toronto, Ontario. Our work is informed by theory and research on cultural stratification and adolescent subcultures. In terms of cultural stratification, we engage with Bourdieus (1984) and Petersons (1996) conceptualizations of elite taste, while subcultural theory encourages us to focus upon more dissenting tastes and to explore connections between musical tastes and peer group activity. Our findings suggest that racial and ethnic identity, school experiences and cultural capital are significant sources of variation in musical tastes that loosely correspond to existing typologies; they also confirm what has often been inferred - that musical tastes and peer group cultural practices are closely linked. Our findings are then discussed in the light of current debates about the nature and dimensions of listening audiences for music.

Listening to Rap: Cultures of Crime, Cultures of Resistance

This research compares representations of rap music with the self-reported criminal behavior and resistant attitudes of the musics core audience. Our database is a large sample of Toronto high school students (n = 3,393) from which we identify a group of listeners, whose combination of musical likes and dislikes distinguish them as rap univores. We then examine the relationship between their cultural preference for rap music and involvement in a culture of crime and their perceptions of social injustice and inequity. We find that the rap univores, also known as urban music enthusiasts, report significantly more delinquent behavior and stronger feelings of inequity and injustice than listeners with other musical tastes. However, we also find that the nature and strengths of those relationships vary according to the racial identity of different groups within urban music enthusiasts. Black and white subgroups align themselves with resistance representations while Asians do not; whites and Asians report significant involvement in crime and delinquency, while blacks do not. Finally, we discuss our findings in light of research on media effects and audience reception, youth subcultures and post-subcultural analysis, and the sociology of cultural consumption.

Fractured transitions from school to work : revisiting the dropout problem

This is the first Canadian study to investigate the cause and consequences of the drop-out problem from the perspectives of the participants themselves.

Gender, social change, and the professions : The case of pharmacy

This paper examines the nature of increasing female entry into the profession of pharmacy. Using data from a survey of Ontario pharmacists, it compares the work experiences and career paths of 668 men and women in the profession. In terms of hours worked, where they work, and the nature of the work that they do, we found considerable differences between males and females that are becoming increasingly pronounced as more women enter the profession. These findings are then discussed in terms of available theories of gender, professions and social change.

FLIGHT PATHS AND REVOLVING DOORS: A CASE STUDY OF GENDER DESEGREGATION IN PHARMACY

This paper examines practitioner reactions to occupational desegregation in pharmacy-the effects, for women and men, of a rapid female entry into the profession. The topic is documented in terms of processes of integration, ghettoisation, and re-segregation. With data collected from licensed pharmacists in Ontario, Canada, we find little evidence of either genuine gender integration in the profession or gender re-segregation precipitated by collective male discontent. While female practitioners are more positive in their evaluation of their jobs and their profession, there is no indication that current satisfaction and dissatisfaction is a harbinger of male-or female-flight from pharmacy. We discuss these findings in the light of arguments about a job and gender queue in the labour market.

Immanence Changes Everything: A Critical Comment on the Labour Process and Class Consciousness

This paper discusses a number of problems with labour process accounts of worker subjectivity. They are manifested as ambiguities about the meaning of worker behaviour, and have their origins in conflicting ideological requirements of Marxism and assumptions of immanence. We argue that it is these theoretical precepts, rather than cumulating empirical knowledge, which have driven debates on the labour process and interpretations of behaviour in the workplace. We show how essentially similar activities are construed as either reproducing capitalist relations or resisting them, according to the theoretical needs of the labour process pardigm. Compounding this interpretive problem is the insistence of labour process theorists that the point of production is the key source of worker consciousness in capitalist society. We conclude that labour process is incapable of theoretical growth because of its non-cumulative circulation of explanations and fixation on the workplace. In its place we advocate more inductive empirical approaches to the study of consciousness.

Leisure Worlds Situations, Motivations and Young People’s Encounters With Offending and Victimization

With information supplied by a large (n = 3393) sample of high school students from Toronto, this paper tests the assumption that three forms of leisure activity—peer, risky, and self-improving leisure—have a relatively independent impact upon patterns of offending and victimization. Although we find significant support for this proposition, we also find that traditional criminal motivations are still strongly related to criminal incidents, particularly offending behavior. The positive association between leisure and victimization includes, counter intuitively, the sort of self-improving leisure that might have been expected to reduce the risk of victimization. We discuss our findings in terms of the relationship between traditional motivational explanations of crime and newer, more situational ones.

Health-Compromising Behaviors Among a Multi-Ethnic Sample of Canadian High School Students: Risk-Enhancing Effects of Discrimination and Acculturation

This article examines whether acculturation and experiences of discrimination help to explain observed ethnic disparities in rates of three health-compromising behaviors: interpersonal violence, drinking, and cannabis use. Data were drawn from a cross-sectional survey of 3,400 high school students from Toronto, Canada, sampled in 1998–2000. Multivariate ordinary least squares and logistic regression models tested for baseline differences in the health-compromising behaviors by ethnic identity. Subsequent models adjusted for control measures and introduced acculturation and discrimination measures. Results confirm that experiences of discrimination and acculturation are risk enhancing, whereas active cultural retention appears to protect ethnic youth from participation in health-compromising activities.