How has the Japanese government persuaded its citizens to save substantial portions of their incomes? And to care for the elderly within the family? How did the public come to support legalized ...prostitution as in the national interest? What roles have women's groups played in Japan's "economic miracle"? What actually unites the Japanese to achieve so many economic and social goals that have eluded other polities? Here Sheldon Garon helps us to understand this mobilizing spirit as he taps into the intimate relationships everyday Japanese have with their government. To an extent inconceivable to most Westerners, state directives trickle into homes, religious groups, and even into individuals' sex lives, where they are frequently welcomed by the Japanese and reinforced by their neighbors. In a series of five compelling case studies, Garon demonstrates how average citizens have cooperated with government officials in the areas of welfare, prostitution, and household savings, and in controlling religious "cults" and promoting the political participation of women.The state's success in creating a nation of activists began before World War II, and has hinged on campaigns that mobilize the people behind various policies and encourage their involvement at the local level. For example, neighborhoods have been socially managed on a volunteer basis by small-business owners and housewives, who strive to rid their locales of indolence and to contain welfare costs. The story behind the state regulation of prostitution is a more turbulent one in which many lauded the flourishing brothels for preserving Japanese tradition and strengthening the "family system, " while others condemned the sexual enslavement of young women.In each case, we see Japanese citizens working closely with the state to recreate "community" and shape the thought and behavior of fellow citizens. The policies often originate at the top, but in the hands of activists they take on added vigor. This phenomenon, which challenges the conventional dichotomy of the "state" versus the "people, " is well worth exploring as Western governments consider how best to manage their own changing societies.
All societies must deal with the possibility of violence, and they do so in different ways. This book integrates the problem of violence into a larger social science and historical framework, showing ...how economic and political behavior are closely linked. Most societies, which we call natural states, limit violence by political manipulation of the economy to create privileged interests. These privileges limit the use of violence by powerful individuals, but doing so hinders both economic and political development. In contrast, modern societies create open access to economic and political organizations, fostering political and economic competition. The book provides a framework for understanding the two types of social orders, why open access societies are both politically and economically more developed, and how some 25 countries have made the transition between the two types.
Liberty's Prisonersexamines how changing attitudes about work, freedom, property, and family shaped the creation of the penitentiary system in the United States. The first penitentiary was founded in ...Philadelphia in 1790, a period of great optimism and turmoil in the Revolution's wake. Those who were previously dependents with no legal standing-women, enslaved people, and indentured servants-increasingly claimed their own right to life, liberty, and happiness. A diverse cast of women and men, including immigrants, African Americans, and the Irish and Anglo-American poor, struggled to make a living. Vagrancy laws were used to crack down on those who visibly challenged longstanding social hierarchies while criminal convictions carried severe sentences for even the most trivial property crimes.
The penitentiary was designed to reestablish order, both behind its walls and in society at large, but the promise of reformative incarceration failed from its earliest years. Within this system, women served a vital function, and Liberty's Prisoners is the first book to bring to life the experience of African American, immigrant, and poor white women imprisoned in early America. Always a minority of prisoners, women provided domestic labor within the institution and served as model inmates, more likely to submit to the authority of guards, inspectors, and reformers. White men, the primary targets of reformative incarceration, challenged authorities at every turn while African American men were increasingly segregated and denied access to reform.
Liberty's Prisonerschronicles how the penitentiary, though initially designed as an alternative to corporal punishment for the most egregious of offenders, quickly became a repository for those who attempted to lay claim to the new nation's promise of liberty.
Misdemeanorland Kohler-Hausmann, Issa
2018, 2018., 20180403, 2018-04-03
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An in-depth look at the consequences of New York City’s dramatically expanded policing of low-level offenses Felony conviction and mass incarceration attract considerable media attention these days, ...yet the most common criminal-justice encounters are for misdemeanors, not felonies, and the most common outcome is not prison. In the early 1990s, New York City launched an initiative under the banner of Broken Windows policing to dramatically expand enforcement against low-level offenses. Misdemeanorland is the first book to document the fates of the hundreds of thousands of people hauled into lower criminal courts as part of this policing experiment. Drawing on three years of fieldwork inside and outside of the courtroom, in-depth interviews, and analysis of trends in arrests and dispositions of misdemeanors going back three decades, Issa Kohler-Hausmann argues that lower courts have largely abandoned the adjudicative model of criminal law administration in which questions of factual guilt and legal punishment drive case outcomes. Due to the sheer volume of arrests, lower courts have adopted a managerial model--and the implications are troubling. Kohler-Hausmann shows how significant volumes of people are marked, tested, and subjected to surveillance and control even though about half the cases result in some form of legal dismissal. She describes in harrowing detail how the reach of America's penal state extends well beyond the shocking numbers of people incarcerated in prisons or stigmatized by a felony conviction. Revealing and innovative, Misdemeanorland shows how the lower reaches of our criminal justice system operate as a form of social control and surveillance, often without adjudicating cases or imposing formal punishment.
Evidence from a growing research literature on the causes and effects of informal social control (ISC) and bystander interventions carried out by nonprofessionals against intimate partner violence ...(IPV) shows anomalies and unexplained counterintuitive findings. This study employs a new experimental vignette design to examine the hypothesis: high bystander legitimacy (in the eyes of potential perpetrators) will moderate the effects of (1) incipient ISC and (2) perceived ISC, on parent's self‐estimated likelihood of perpetrating IPV. The data consist of 210 rural Korean parents randomly drawn from Kyunggi province using a three‐stage cluster probability proportional to size approach. Parents were randomly assigned to low and high incipient ISC, perceived ISC, and collective legitimacy conditions, following a 2 × 2 × 2 experimental vignette approach. Hypotheses were tested using regression models with standard errors corrected for district clusters. Incipient ISC was associated with significantly less self‐estimated likelihood of perpetrating IPV. An interaction between high bystander legitimacy and incipient ISC was negative (B = −8.88, p < 0.01). The interaction between perceived ISC and legitimacy was not significant. However, the interaction between perceived ISC and female gender was positively associated with self‐estimated likelihood of perpetrating IPV (B = 8.61, p < 0.05). The findings suggest that the presence of a legitimate bystander (whom the potential perpetrator believes has a legitimate right to be concerned about his or her family) may deter parents from perpetrating IPV. Programs to boost ISC and bystander intervention should include modules that strengthen collective legitimacy.
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Social control agents (SCAs) discipline organizations and draw the line between appropriate organizational behaviour and misconduct. While prior research focuses on the SCA‐organization relationship, ...we theorize how a key audience (people) interacts with an SCA depending on its decisions to sanction or not organizational misconduct. Building on sociological and organizational research on social norms and their enforcement, we expect that people are more likely to agree with an SCA that sanctions a behaviour that violates rule‐based as opposed to value‐based norms. Violations of rule‐based norms generate more agreement because such norms are less ambiguous and ascertaining when they are violated is easier to establish. As people agree more with SCA decisions to sanction rule‐based violations, we expect that the propensity of people to resort to the SCA increases. We find support for our hypotheses with a survey, a series of experiments, and the analysis of complete data on complaints by UK citizens to the Advertising Standards Authority – the UK SCA on advertising – over the period 2007–10. Our paper contributes to research in organizational misconduct by showing how SCAs are both an evaluating entity and an evaluated one and by shedding light on how people co‐determine what an acceptable or unacceptable behaviour is. Our paper uniquely links macro‐ and micro‐level studies on corporate misconduct, putting centre stage that SCA's authority essentially depends on a key audience's agreement with the SCAs' underlying norms that underpin their decisions.
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Oleg Kharkhordin has constructed a compelling, subtle, and complex genealogy of the Soviet individual that is as much about Michel Foucault as it is about Russia. Examining the period from the ...Russian Revolution to the fall of Gorbachev, Kharkhordin demonstrates that Party rituals—which forced each Communist to reflect intensely and repeatedly on his or her "self," an entirely novel experience for many of them—had their antecedents in the Orthodox Christian practices of doing penance in the public gaze. Individualization in Soviet Russia occurred through the intensification of these public penitential practices rather than the private confessional practices that are characteristic of Western Christianity. He also finds that objectification of the individual in Russia relied on practices of mutual surveillance among peers, rather than on the hierarchical surveillance of subordinates by superiors that characterized the West. The implications of this book expand well beyond its brilliant analysis of the connection between Bolshevism and Eastern Orthodoxy to shed light on many questions about the nature of Russian society and culture.
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