Stacy De Coster

Sexual Harassment in the Workplace Unanticipated Consequences of Modern Social Control in Organizations

The authors integrate research on the causes and consequences of sexual harassment victimization with organizational research to better understand the relationship between harassment and the work outcomes of job satisfaction, job stress, and intention to quit an organization. In doing so, the authors broaden the narrow conceptualization of organizational context that has been considered in previous research on sexual harassment. This broadened conceptualization incorporates features of modern organizational structure, including social integration, structural differentiation, decentralization, and formalization—all argued to indirectly control employees by increasing employee job satisfaction and commitment (and to ultimately increase productivity and reduce turnover). Although these features of modern organizational structure are not intended to reduce sexual harassment, the authors propose and find with a national sample of almost 6,000 employees that they have the unintended consequence of doing so. The authors also propose and find that this context-harassment linkage improves understanding of the often reported relationship between sexual harassment and job dissatisfaction, job stress, and intention to quit.

NEIGHBORHOOD DISADVANTAGE, SOCIAL CAPITAL, STREET CONTEXT, AND YOUTH VIOLENCE

This article integrates arguments from three perspectives on the relationship between communities and crime—constrained residential choices, social capital, and street context perspectives—to specify a conceptual model of community disadvantage and the violence of individual adolescents. Specifically, we propose that status characteristics (e.g., race, poverty, female headship) restrict the residential choices of families. Residence in extremely disadvantaged communities, in turn, increases the chances of violent behavior by youths by influencing the development and maintenance of community and family social capital, and by influencing the chances that youths are exposed to a criminogenic street context. We assess our conceptual model using community contextual and individual-level data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. Our findings suggest that individual or family status characteristics influence violence largely because of the communities in which disadvantaged persons and families reside. Although we find that community social capital does not predict individual violence, both family social capital and measures of an alternative street milieu are strong predictors of individual violence. Moreover, our street context variables appear to be more important than the social capital variables in explaining how community disadvantage affects violence.

Routine Activities and Sexual Harassment in the Workplace

This article draws from criminological research on victimization and on organizational models of the social context of sexual harassment to propose a routine activities explanation of sexual harassment victimization. The authors propose that certain features of organizations can be used to conceptualize guardianship as well as the proximity component of target suitability in the routine activities framework. The authors also discuss the features of individuals (target attractiveness) that may make them more or less susceptible to victimization, holding organizational features constant. They test hypotheses from a routine activities explanation of sexual harassment using data from a national company in the U.S. telephone industry. The authors find general support for the importance of both organizational features and individual characteristics in the prediction of sexual harassment victimization. However, they find little evidence that individual characteristics and organizational features interact in the production of harassment victimization, which is counter to a routine activities approach.

Gender and General Strain Theory: The Gendering of Emotional Experiences and Expressions

In their strain theory explanation for the gender gap in delinquency, Broidy and Agnew posit that the joint experience of anger and depression, which is more typical among females than males, should help explain gender differences in delinquency. The authors extend and test their claim using data from a southeastern middle school. Their findings show that females are more likely than males to experience anger and depression concomitantly and that the interaction between anger and depression is important for understanding the gender gap in delinquency. This is not because depression alleviates the impact of anger on delinquency among females, as suggested by gendered strain theory. Instead, depression exacerbates the effect of anger on delinquency among males. This article concludes that the key to understanding links between gender, emotions, and delinquency resides in gendered expressions of emotional responses to stress rather than in gendered experiences of emotions.In their strain theory explanation for the gender gap in delinquency, Broidy and Agnew posit that the joint experience of anger and depression, which is more typical among females than males, should help explain gender differences in delinquency. The authors extend and test their claim using data from a southeastern middle school. Their findings show that females are more likely than males to experience anger and depression concomitantly and that the interaction between anger and depression is important for understanding the gender gap in delinquency. This is not because depression alleviates the impact of anger on delinquency among females, as suggested by gendered strain theory. Instead, depression exacerbates the effect of anger on delinquency among males. This article concludes that the key to understanding links between gender, emotions, and delinquency resides in gendered expressions of emotional responses to stress rather than in gendered experiences of emotions.

Depression and Law Violation: Gendered Responses to Gendered Stresses:

This article unites arguments from the sociology of mental health, criminology, and the sociology of gender to explore the role of gender in the stress process. The author proposes that gender acts upon the stress process in three ways. First, males and females may report exposure to different types of stresses. Second, males and females may be vulnerable to different types of stresses. Third, males and females may respond to stress in different ways—law violation versus depression. Arguments are tested about the relative importance of differential exposure versus differential vulnerability to various stresses for understanding the gender gaps in law violation and depression using the National Youth Survey, OLS regression, and Kesslers method for decomposing differences in exposure and vulnerability to stress. The results provide limited support for these arguments, suggesting that females report more exposure than do males to some communal stresses, whereas males report more exposure than do females to the agentic stresses included in this study. Vulnerability to these stresses also varies across gender, with females generally expressing greater vulnerability to communal stresses in the form of depression and males expressing greater vulnerability to agentic stresses in the form of law violation. Some deviations from this general pattern are discussed, and recommendations for future research follow.

How General Is General Strain Theory? Assessing Determinacy and Indeterminacy across Life Domains:

This article explores how assumptions of determinacy and indeterminacy apply to general strain theory. Theories assuming determinacy assert that motivational conditions determine specific forms of deviant adaptations, whereas those assuming indeterminacy propose that a given social circumstance can predispose a person toward many forms of deviance. The authors propose that strain theory posits a strong tendency for the domains in which stresses occur to match those in which delinquency takes place. This is a source of determinacy. Drawing on stress spillover and aggression displacement arguments, the authors also discuss sources of indeterminacy—or domain crossover effects. The tendency toward domain matching that is tempered by stress spillover and aggression displacement is what the authors refer to as soft determinacy. The authors derive hypotheses from their soft determinacy argument and test them on a sample of middle school students. The results support the arguments and suggest that discussion of soft determinacy is worthy of further attention.

Social Relationships and Delinquency: Revisiting Parent and Peer Influence during Adolescence

Scholars interested in delinquency have focused much attention on the influence of parent and peer relationships. Prior research has assumed that parents control delinquency because they value convention, whereas peers promote delinquency because they value and model nonconvention. We argue that it is important to assess the normative and behavioral orientations of those to whom adolescents feel close to accurately model how relationships operate. Drawing on social control, social learning, and a prominent developmental perspective, we derive and test alternative hypotheses about the manner in which attachments to significant others and the normative and behavioral orientations of these others operate either independently or in tandem to influence delinquency. Empirical findings based on tobit regressions and National Youth Survey (NYS) data suggest that social learning theory is best equipped to explain peer influence; however, the developmental perspective appears more applicable to parent influence.

Mothers’ Work and Family Roles, Gender Ideologies, Distress, and Parenting

This article develops a theoretical model that links the gendered ideologies and work and family roles of mothers to juvenile delinquency. I test the model using the National Survey of Children and covariance structure analysis. The results demonstrate that adolescents of mothers who are employed and hold nontraditional ideologies, as well as those whose mothers are homemakers and hold traditional ideologies, are less likely than others to be delinquent. This is because their mothers are not susceptible to distress, enabling them to foster emotional bonds with their children. Emotional bonds ultimately protect youths from delinquent peer associations and delinquency.

The Paradox of Youth Violence

The Spectacular State explores the production of national identity in post-Soviet Uzbekistan. The main protagonists are the cultural elites involved in the elaboration of new state-sponsored mass-spectacle national holidays: Navro’z (Zoroastrian New Year) and Independence Day. The overall argument is that despite their aspirations to reinvigorate national identity, mass spectacle creators in Uzbekistan have reproduced much of the Soviet cultural production. National identity has been one of the most fraught questions in Central Asia, where nationality was a contradictory and complicated product of the Soviet rule. Although the category of nationality was initiated, produced, and imposed by the Soviet state in the 1920s, it eventually became a source of power and authority for local elites, including cultural producers. The collapse of the Soviet Union opened up possibilities for revising and reversing many understandings manufactured by the socialist regime. Yet, upon her arrival in Tashkent to conduct her research on the renegotiation of national identity in 1995, Laura Adams discovered that instead of embracing newly-found freedom to recover a more authentic history, most Uzbek intellectuals, especially cultural producers working with the state, avoided probing too far in this direction. Rather than entirely discarding the Soviet colonial legacies, they revised their history selectively. Whereas the ideological content of their cultural production shifted from socialism to nationalism, many of the previous cultural ‘‘forms’’ have remained. Similarly, the Uzbek government continued to employ cultural elites to implement the task of reinforcing its nation-building program, thus following the Soviet model of cultural production. The book consists of four chapters. The first chapter delineates the broad themes of national identity building, and the remaining chapters explore mass spectacle creation by distinguishing between three elements: form (Chapter Two), content (Chapter Three), and the mode of production (Chapter Four). The study is based on content analysis of two Olympic Games-style national holidays, interviews with cultural producers, and participation observation of festivals and behind-the-scenes preparation meetings. Although Adams provides a few references to viewers and their attitude toward the public holiday performances, her book does not offer an extended engagement with reception and consumption of these holidays. The comprehensive and multi-layered overview of the process of revising national identity in Uzbekistan is one of the book’s major accomplishments. For Adams, the production of national identity is not a selfevident and seamless production forced by the state but instead a dynamic, complex, and dialogical process of negotiation between various parties (intellectual factions, state officials, mass spectacle producers, etc.). Her account reveals the messy and often contradictory nature of national identity production and thus moves away from the tendency to reify the state and its policies. The book makes a significant contribution to studies of nationalism by suggesting that the production of national identity in Uzbekistan was centrally constituted by the consideration of the ‘‘international audience.’’ Although public holidays, studied by Adams, aimed at fostering national identification, the forms in which these celebrations are performed (including national dances and music) indicate the aspiration of cultural producers to be part of the international community. This kind of national production self-consciously oriented toward the international viewer has been the legacy of the Soviet nationalities policy where all cultural producers had to produce art ‘‘socialist in content, national in form.’’ Notwithstanding the difference in generations or genres,

Choice within constraint: An explanation of crime at the intersections

Intersectionalities have become central to theory and research on sex, gender and crime. Viewing crime through an intersectionalities lens allows us to move beyond deterministic views of the relationship between social structures and offending by emphasizing that structures of gender, race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality weave together to create a complex tapestry of opportunities and motivations that shape variation in crime and violence across groups and situations. In this essay, we propose a “choice within constraint” framework that focuses on how multiple, interlocking inequalities come together to shape micro-level interactions while also allowing room for agency in how people choose to respond to social and structural opportunities and constraints. More specifically, we cull insights from qualitative studies to build a framework emphasizing how individuals’ active engagement with intersecting cultural meanings of gender (masculinities and femininities) explain variability in decisions to offend across and within hierarchies of sex, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and age.