Wesley Longhofer

National and Global Origins of Environmental Association

We examine the origins of voluntary associations devoted to environmental protection, focusing on the divergent trajectories of industrialized versus developing countries. We consider a wide range of domestic economic, political, and institutional dynamics that give rise to environmental associations. Developing and extending neo-institutional world polity arguments, we characterize domestic association in the developing world as the product of global cultural models, legitimation, and resources. Using event history and dynamic panel models, we analyze the formation of domestic environmental associations for a large sample of countries in the contemporary period. Among highly industrialized countries, domestic factors—resources and political institutions that afford favorable opportunities—largely explain the prevalence of environmental associations. In contrast, global forces are a powerful catalyst for environmental organizing in the developing world. The environmental movement, which had domestic origins in the West, became institutionalized in the world polity, generating new associations on a global scale. We also find positive effects of democratic institutions and philanthropic foundations. Environmental degradation and societal affluence are not primary drivers of environmental association. We conclude by reflecting on the implications of globally-sponsored voluntary associations, which appear to be common in the developing world.

The Structural Sources of Association1

Where do associations come from? The authors argue that the expansion and openness of state institutions encourage the formation of associations. Moreover, the institutional structures of world society provide important resources and legitimation for association. Longitudinal cross-national data on voluntary associations are analyzed using panel models with fixed-effects and instrumental variables models to address possible endogeneity. Institutional features of the state and the structures of world society are linked to higher levels of association, as are wealth and education. These factors differentially affect specific types of association, helping make sense of the distinctive configurations of civil society observed around the globe.

Abortion Liberalization in World Society, 1960-2009.

Controversy sets abortion apart from other issues studied by world society theorists, who consider the tendency for policies institutionalized at the global level to diffuse across very different countries. The authors conduct an event history analysis of the spread (however limited) of abortion liberalization policies from 1960 to 2009. After identifying three dominant frames (a women’s rights frame, a medical frame, and a religious, natural family frame), the authors find that indicators of a scientific, medical frame show consistent association with liberalization of policies specifying acceptable grounds for abortion. Women’s leadership roles have a stronger and more consistent liberalizing effect than do countries’ links to a global women’s rights discourse. Somewhat different patterns emerge around the likelihood of adopting an additional policy, controlling for first policy adoption. Even as support for women’s autonomy has grown globally, with respect to abortion liberalization, persistent, powerful frames compete at the global level, preventing robust policy diffusion.

Decoupling reconsidered: Does world society integration influence the relationship between the environment and economic development?

This study advances scholarship on environment and development by examining whether nations more embedded in the pro-environmental world society are more or less likely to experience a relative decoupling between economic development and carbon emissions over time. The authors calculate a network centrality measure using national-level membership data on environmental international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs), and then employ the measure to create four subsamples of nations that are relatively more or less integrated in the environmental world society. The authors use interactions between measures of economic development and time in two-way fixed effects models to estimate the potentially changing effects of development on carbon emissions for the four subsamples of nations from 1970 to 2009. Results indicate that nations that are the most embedded in the environmental world society experienced a moderate decrease through time in the effect of development on carbon emissions, while the effect of development on emissions increased through time in the most peripheral nations.

Disproportionality in Power Plants' Carbon Emissions: A Cross-National Study.

Past research on the disproportionality of pollution suggests a small subset of a sector’s facilities often produces the lion’s share of toxic emissions. Here we extend this idea to the world’s electricity sectors by calculating national-level disproportionality Gini coefficients for plant-level carbon emissions in 161 nations based on data from 19,941 fossil-fuel burning power plants. We also evaluate if disproportionalities in plant-level emissions are associated with increased national carbon emissions from fossil-fuel based electricity production, while accounting for other well-established human drivers of greenhouse gas emissions. Results suggest that one potential pathway to decreasing nations’ greenhouse gas emissions could involve reducing disproportionality among fossil-fuel power plants by targeting those plants in the upper end of the distribution that burn fuels more inefficiently to produce electricity.

Discoveries: New and Noteworthy Social Research:

Welfare critics have argued that reliance on government assistance instead of “legitimate” work has created a class of people so dependent on help that they lack the ability to care for themselves. These are the people, the party line goes, who failed to evacuate prior to Hurricane Katrina. To test this “welfare dependency” theory, Timothy Brezina (Social Problems, February 2008) used data from the Survey of Hurricane Katrina Evacuees to examine the characteristics of the New Orleanians hit hardest by the storm. His findings indicate, contrary to the claims of welfare dependency theorists, that more than half of these New Orleanians were employed full time before Katrina and many showed great initiative after the storm. Upwards of 60 percent, for example, were already seeking new jobs just two weeks after the evacuation. Brezina found the best predictor of pre-storm evacuation was awareness of the evacuation order, not employment or welfare status, a result consistent with previous research on evacuation. J.W.

Social Theory Re-Wired : New Connections to Classical and Contemporary Perspectives

Social Theory Rewired | New Connections to Classical and ... Thu, 30 May 2019 19:22:00 GMT A rich collection of web-based materials—including interactive versions of key texts, open spaces to write and reflect on readings, biographical sketches of authors, and dozens of supplementary sources—that transports social theory from its classic period to the vibrant and complex world of now. Social Theory Re-Wired: New Connections to Classical and ... Tue, 30 Apr 2019 01:57:00 GMT

Mystification of rock

This chapter compares and contrasts the British invasion and punk rock as mystified, post-performance products. Expanding on Goffmans notion of mystification to discuss texts that emerged from performances and drawing on Mannheims distinction between ideological and utopian perspectives, we discuss the British invasion as bound to elite interpretations of mystified products and punk rock as bound to more provincial and anti-elitist interpretations. We note that despite differences, both genres involve, to varying degrees, mystifying differences, mystifying legendary status, and mystifying popularity itself. The discussion of both musical genres compliments and affirms previous analyses, especially the analysis of punk rock as a dramaturgical and utopian version of play.

The Third Sector: Community Organizations, NGOs, and NonprofitsThe Third Sector: Community Organizations, NGOs, and Nonprofits, by KallmanMeghan ElizabethClarkTerry Nichols. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016. 251 pp.

Near the end of The Third Sector: Community Organizations, NGOs, and Nonprofits, Meghan Kallman and Terry Clark recall the story of Guo Meimei, a Chinese internet celebrity who in 2011 found herself amid a scandal involving the Chinese Red Cross (with which she was associated) and her penchant for Maseratis and luxury handbags. The scandal unraveled to reveal further expenditures of a questionable nature by the Chinese charity, which is—like most other civil society organizations in China—a government-organized nongovernmental organization (or GONGO). This example is worth mentioning not for its salaciousness but for what it can reveal about state-society relations. As Kallman and Clark note, the Guo scandal illustrates the challenge of ‘‘integrating a strong state with a robust civil society’’ (p. 183); that is, how can a strong state like China remain flexible enough to allow an increasingly independent nonprofit sector to flourish? Even the most mundane aspects of civic life have long been considered the building blocks of democracy. American associations charmed Alexis de Tocqueville in the 1830s. Jürgen Habermas described the importance of coffee houses to the public sphere in 1700s England. More recently, Robert Putnam has warned of the risks posed by declining social capital (as revealed in dwindling bowling leagues). Kallman and Clark build on this tradition with a comparative analysis of third sectors in the United States, France, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and China. The authors also identify five institutional logics—clientelism, paternalism, bureaucracy, activism, and professionalism—that operate within country contexts to reveal third sectors that are ‘‘fragmented, pluralistic, and semi-professionalized’’ (p. 11). Readers acquainted with Clark’s previous work on the New Political Culture or the Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project will find much in this book to like. Many factors that gave rise to the New Political Culture’s mélange of social liberalism and fiscal conservatism, such as rising education and rapid technological change, also produced an explosion of nonprofit activity and nongovernmental organizations around the globe. By drawing from the institutional logics perspective, Kallman and Clark call attention to how structural conditions interact with cognitive belief systems to shape the contours of the nonprofit sector in each country, particularly regarding its relationship to the state. The immense and mostly independent nonprofit sector in the United States is characterized by a high degree of professionalization and rationalization, which risks depoliticizing some of its more activist origins. In France, the nonprofit sector remains largely a part of the market-based social economy, which produces a more bureaucratic (though increasingly professionalized and activist) third sector by contrast. The Third Sector was originally written at the request of the Chinese government (and was originally published in Mandarin in 2011). So perhaps it is not surprising that the most compelling chapters are the case studies of East Asian civil societies originally written for that audience. The chapter on Japan reveals the downsides of a heavily bureaucratized third sector. (Japan passed a nonprofit law in 1998 intended to make registering nonprofits more transparent; the new rules were so unwieldy that one prefecture received only eight applications in the first year.) South Korea exemplifies an activist sector that emerged through contentious political periods but is now becoming more professionalized. There is more clientelism in the less mature Taiwanese third sector, due to its relationship to the Kuomintang. And in China, the logic of bureaucracy is rapidly giving way to more activism and professionalism. The balance of the book is at times uneven. Some newly emergent organizational forms, like social enterprises, are discussed in the introduction but receive scant attention in 194 Reviews

60.00 cloth. ISBN: 9780252040436.

We examine changes in the effectiveness of local civic action in relation to changes over time in racial diversity and income inequality. Local civic action comprises situations in which community members come together—typically with support from local organizations—to address common issues. The collective orientation of local civic action makes it sensitive to changes in local social conditions. As these changes unfold, local organizations become differentially able to support civic action. Here, our core argument features the process through which community members associate with different local organizations and how mandated versus voluntary association results in distinct responses to increased social and economic heterogeneity. We test this argument using three decades of data describing local campaigns of the annual Trick-or-Treat for UNICEF program. A baseline model shows that within-county increases in racial diversity and income inequality are associated with diminished campaign effectiveness. Subsequent models that separate out campaigns organized by schools, churches, and clubs show that schools are relatively more effective mobilizers as racial diversity and income inequality increase, arguably due to the greater demographic matching that is induced by mandated school participation.