Katherine S. Newman

Repeat Tragedy Rampage Shootings in American High School and College Settings, 2002-2008

The authors examine rampage shootings in American high schools after 2002 and consider whether factors identified in their prior research on rampages from 1974 to 2002 account for the more recent cases. The authors find that the five factors—social marginality, individual predisposing factors, cultural scripts, failure of the surveillance system, and availability of guns—remain important features. The authors then contrast these high school shootings with the recent spate of college rampage shootings that resemble the high school cases in some ways but differ in others. College shooters are older and therefore typically further along in the development of serious mental illness.

No Shame: The View from the Left Bank1

Wacquant’s essay is less a review of three ethnographies about the inner city than a throwback to the sectarian days when leftists who failed to toe the Party line were deemed objective enemies of the working class. In this instance, we are told that research by Duneier (1999), Anderson (1999), and Newman is exhibit A for the charge “that U.S. sociology is now tied and party to ...t heneoliberal state and its ‘carceral-assistential complex’ for the punitive management of the poor” (p. 1471). The three of us do not hew to Wacquant’s politics, so we are indicted, along with the rest of American sociology, for a lockdown in the ghetto and the repression of the poor. Wacquant’s “review” is built upon a relentless distortion of the research and writing in these three books. Repeatedly, Wacquant tells AJS readers that an argument presented in them rests upon implausible assumptions when it does nothing of the kind. The position he puts in the writer’s mouth is consistently the opposite of what appears on the page. Having created a series of straw men, Wacquant then razes them, often by parroting the arguments made by the authors as if they were his own. He buttresses his critique of these books using data provided in them, crediting the evidence itself, while ignoring the fact that Anderson, Duneier, and Newman collected and carefully presented that evidence on purpose. He claims that our observations undermine the core analyses in these books, when they simply highlight the absurdity of the caricatures he has created. In the end, there is almost no link between these three books and what Wacquant makes of them. Long before its publication in AJS, Wacquant has been busy distributing his attack around the globe and across the profession. Inevitably many people who have received copies from Wacquant will not see this rebuttal, but we hope many others do. It is important for interested readers to form their own judgment, not only of the books discussed here, but

High stakes: Time poverty, testing, and the children of the working poor

Sociological interest in the implementation of policy generally focuses on the ways a single stream of policy creates a set of measurable consequences either for parents or children. This article takes an ethnographic approach to the study of conflicting policy mandates that collide in the lives of families moving from welfare to work at the same time that schools are implementing high stakes tests and the end of social promotion. We show that these two policies make contradictory demands on parents, to the potential detriment of children. Ethnographic research reveals the ways in which multiple and incompatible forms of policy impact poor families, putting them in the unhappy position of choosing between economic stability or mobility and childrens educational performance.

Adolescent Culture and the Tragedy of Rampage Shootings

School shootings are to a great extent driven by the culturally rooted status struggles of adolescents. Alongside material resources and physical attractiveness strategies of self-assertion and self-presentation play an absolutely central role in the struggle to achieve an acceptable place in the peer hierarchy. Especially within the lifeworlds of male adolescents, media-communicated cultural scripts of masculinity thus become the yardstick of their own action. Failure to live up to these prevalent norms creates increasing pressure within adolescents when feelings of powerlessness, desperation, and shame have to be overcome, and the contribution cites diverse examples illustrating the social mechanisms that reproduce, stabilize, and intensify this logic. Relevant case studies show how a school shooting can be read as a radicalization of society’s ideals of masculinity and a dramatic form of adolescent identity management.

The Family and Community Impacts of Underemployment

The consequences of underemployment do not end with the individual. Families are affected when a parent is forced into reduced working hours. Marital strain, difficulties with children, changing relationships with extended family and friends, and material hardship can all follow from underemployment. Communities also suffer when a plant closing forces an entire group of residents into jobs well below their education level. Accordingly, underemployment may impact crime rates and political participation, and put a drain on both material and social resources at the community level.

Trapped in America’s Safety Net: One Family’s Struggle

dinated market economy. Since the 1970s, however, there has emerged in Germany a ‘‘crisis of corporatism’’ that prompted the growth of new private policy research organizations and lobbyists and that fostered greater competition—a process that intensified after reunification. The authors speculate that Germany may now be ‘‘witnessing the initial salvos of an emergent war of ideas,’’ albeit a more tempered one than that found in the United States before the late 1990s. Last but not least, in Denmark there emerged a war of ideas that then waned relatively quickly, subsiding after the mid1980s. The authors explain this partly in terms of a realization among policymakers of the counter-productivity of left-right ideological battles, with a turn to objective empirical analysis in response. The more consensual knowledge regime that emerged was constructed on the basis of a high degree of national consensus as to the core aims of policymaking, state-centralized control, and a system of tripartite corporatism that had become more pluralist and expert-oriented. For those interested in the historical and comparative analysis of economic knowledge production in a CPE perspective, this book constitutes a very useful intervention. For those interested in the critical analysis of neoliberalism, however, Campbell and Pedersen’s account might seem strangely bereft of economic interests and ideological conflict. Some might also quibble with a too-simple notion of hegemony as acrossthe-board consensus, or a conceptual language that treats policymakers as a vaguely defined category of folks who share a more or less objective perspective on the strengths and weaknesses of their respective knowledge regimes such that, as the Keynesian order broke down, they set about rearranging things in a deliberate, problem-solving mode. But the book’s main contributions—to considerably expand the terrain of CPE, to break from a language of ideas that divorces them from the worlds in which they are produced, to forefront the usefulness of a meso-level focus in comparative historical analysis, and to lay important empirical groundwork on which future studies can build—undoubtedly outweigh these concerns. Trapped in America’s Safety Net: One Family’s Struggle, by Andrea Louise Campbell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. 194 pp.

Declining Fortunes: The Withering of the American Dream

15.00 paper. ISBN: 9780226140445.

Socioeconomic Disparities In Health: Pathways And Policies

The End of Entitlement Winners and Losers in the Eighties and Nineties The Making of the Boomers The Problem of the Moral Mother The Spoiled Generation Illegitimate Elites and the Parasitic Underclass The Fractured Generation The Politics of Generational Division