Sociologists have disagreed sharply over whether rapid, resource-related community growth leads to disproportionate increases in criminal activities. Enough studies have now accumulated, however, to ...permit a more comprehensive assessment. The existing studies fall into three categories. The first two, which employ county-level data and victimization surveys, have encountered inconclusive and mixed results. By contrast, the 23 before-and-after comparisons in specific communities have been highly consistent: All but 2 of the 23 report greater increases in criminal activity than in population (p < .0001 by the sign test). The mean ratio of increased crime to increased population is over 4.4 to 1; regression analyses lead to more conservative ratios ranging as low as 3.2 to 1 and as high as 3.6 to 1. Despite considerable variations in approaches, methods, and study communities, sufficiently consistent findings show that simple regression equations explain 85-98 percent of the variance. The weight of the accumulated evidence indicates that increases in criminal behaviors are significantly more than proportional to increases in populations in rapid-growth communities. Data from other studies would argue against a generic "social pathology" hypothesis; instead, the accumulated findings may best be explained by narrowly focusing on changes in community social structure that accompany rapid growth and result in impairment of informal social controls, particularly the declines in a community's density of acquaintanceship.
The implications of natural resource extraction for local economic development have become the subject of sharply conflicting expectations, with long-term outcomes predicted to range from regional ...economic growth and development to "progressive underdevelopment." These differences in longer-term expectations cannot be satisfactorily resolved through the use of cross-sectional or short-term data. In addition, existing theories tend to be stated in universalistic terms that discourage rather than facilitate the examination of differences across cases. These points are illustrated through a case-study examination of what has been called the first mining boom in the United States, involving lead mines in the Upper Mississippi Valley during the first half of the 19th century. The developmental consequences of this mining boom appear neither to have been as favorable as predicted by the most enthusiastic proponents of extraction nor as negative as those predicted by the harshest critics. Instead, outcomes appear to have reflected intersecting configurations of physical resource characteristics, the organizational form/scale of extractive activities, the historical period in question, and the nature of relationships among competing resource uses and users
One of the most serious challenges facing "advanced" industrial societies is the management of technological risks. Recently, a number of sociologists have called attention to the topic, noting the ...significant contributions sociologists can offer to the ongoing risk debate. This article takes a complementary approach, suggesting that it is important to ask not just what sociology can do for the study of risk, but what the study of risk can do for sociology. Particular promise is evident in studies that go beyond a focus on individuals' risk perceptions, dealing with the behaviors and interests of societal institutions entrusted with the management of risks. Still lacking, however, is a more explicit and coherent conceptual framework, one that can help guide future research toward the testing of sociologically important questions, not just the questions and issues that technologists and policymakers define as important. Working from an explicitly sociological orientation, this article outlines a conceptual perspective that focuses on the "framing" of risk debates by institutional actors. This approach suggests that, given the profound growth of technological efficacy, in the face of modest, if any growth in the efficacy of social control mechanisms, the management of technological risk is likely to become increasingly problematic for sociology as well as for society.
This chapter applauds the growing move toward social science collaboration with colleagues in other fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Drawing on several decades of ...experience in working with biophysical scientists and engineers, as well as on prior literature, I offer three main observations. First, STEM colleagues will often expect social scientists to play the role of public relations specialists, helping to “educate” the public, or to convince people that our STEM colleagues already have the right answers. Second, part of our job is a different kind of “science education” – educating STEM colleagues about basic principles of democratic governance. Third, we have an opportunity and an obligation to ask not just what social science can contribute to STEM, but also, what working with STEM colleagues can contribute to the social sciences. There appear to be particularly important opportunities for gaining insights into some of the less visible or obvious dynamics of power and privilege.
Despite the warnings of risk communication specialists, members of the technical community often urge that technological risks should be "put in context" by comparisons against risks that are more ...familiar. Little quantitative evidence is available on the actual behavioral consequences of such risk comparison efforts. In the present study, subjects were presented with two types of information about a hazardous waste incinerator--a simplified statistical summary and a comparison of incinerator risks against the risks of smoking. Statistical information led to a modest increase in the reported willingness to vote in favor of the incinerator in a community referendum, but the comparison against cigarettes led to a slight decrease in support; the difference between the two messages is statistically significant (p < .001). In combination with other results, this study's findings suggest that an implicit assumption of risk comparisons is in error: Opposition to controversial technologies may have little to do with citizens' levels of information about technology, having more to do with citizens' levels of trust in governmental and industrial actors.
This paper focuses on bureaucratic slippage-the tendency for broad policies to be altered through successive reinterpretation, such that the ultimate implementation may bear little resemblance to ...legislated or other broad statements of policy intent. It is well known that policy enforcement can be constrained by funding limitations, or by the fact that an apparently strong statement of intent can be coupled with a level of funding that is too low to do the job. A clearer test, however, involves cases where clear policy statements are coupled with substantial levels of funding. The Environmental Studies Program (ESP) of the U.S. Minerals Management Service provides such a case. The program, which is explicitly required to study impacts of offshore development on "the human, marine, and coastal environments," has spent roughly $500 million on such studies over the past two decades. Independent evaluations, however, have found the studies to be lacking. The reasons go beyond mere difficulty, and instead include considerable bureaucratic slippage. The broad mandates of the law are whittled away at successive stages of translation, such that, by the time of the agency's actual "implementation," the ESP is virtually prohibited from fulfilling some of the law's clear requirements. The findings suggest the need to go beyond the analysis of policies and to devote far greater attention to the "details" of implementation. Those details have the distinct potential to be not just administrative, but effectively political.
Social Impact Assessment Freudenburg, William R.
Annual review of sociology,
01/1986, Letnik:
12, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This article reviews the large and growing literature on social or socioeconomic impact assessment (SIA). Sociologists and other social scientists have been examining various "impacts" or ...consequences for decades, but the field of SIA emerged during the 1970s as a response to new environmental legislation. Both in its origins and its contributions, SIA is thus a hybrid, a field of social science and a component of the policy-making process. SIAs are generally anticipatory--efforts to project likely impacts before they occur--but empirical SIA work has looked at a broad range of social consequences. The largest subset of empirical SIA work has focused on relatively specific construction projects, particularly large-scale energy development projects in rural areas. Important advances have taken place in documenting economic/demographic and also social and cultural impacts. Further developments in findings, theory, and techniques will be necessary to meet the challenges of the future. The field is showing increasing consensus on a number of earlier controversies, e.g. on the need for SIAs to cross the usual disciplinary boundaries and to develop original data where "available" data are not sufficient. The main issue on which consensus has not yet emerged involves the question of how best to incorporate scientific input in what will remain largely political decisions. The field's efforts to deal with this fundamental and perhaps enduring question, however, may provide useful guidance for other efforts to include scientific input in political decision-making--efforts that may take on growing importance as society begins to deal with the increasingly complex risks posed by technological developments.
Residents and leaders of rural or less-developed regions often believe that the exploitation of natural resources will provide an antidote to regional poverty, but the research literature on the ...topic is decidedly mixed. While many development economists have predicted regional benefits from resource extraction, other analysts have differed; in particular, many dependency scholars have predicted increasing "underdevelopment," and a number of natural resource sociologists have predicted a more specific problem of "overadaptation." Obviously, it is not likely that all of these competing expectations are equally accurate. To clarify the conditions under which extraction leads to prosperity or poverty, it is necessary to devote greater attention to the ways in which the developmental dynamics of resource extraction have changed over time - and if possible, to do so in a way that identifies relatively specific causal factors. As an initial step in that direction, this paper calls attention to four such factors, all of which have changed substantially over the past several centuries - historically contingent levels of resource-extraction capacities, pre-existing competition, linkage specialization, and transportation. For all of these factors, the overall pattern of change has been toward decreasing the likelihood that natural resource extraction will lead to local or regional "development." The net effect is that expectations for local prosperity appear to have been reasonably accurate in earlier years, up through roughly the first half of the 19th century, but increasingly inaccurate thereafter. This preliminary argument is illustrated with three case studies of some of the most "successful" extraction-based development experiences we have been able to identify from the past four centuries, involving British coal mines of the 17th-18th centuries, upper Midwest lead mines of the 19th century, and offshore oil extraction along the U.S. Gulf Coast in the 20th. We conclude by noting the relevance of the experiences from earlier centuries for resource-related decisions of the 21st.
Catastrophe in the Making Freudenburg, William R; Gramling, Robert B; Laska, Shirley ...
09/2009
eBook
When houses are flattened, towns submerged, and people stranded without electricity or even food, we attribute the suffering to natural disasters or acts of God. But what if they're neither? What if ...we, as a society, are bringing these catastrophes on ourselves?That's the provocative theory of Catastrophe in the Making, the first book to recognize Hurricane Katrina not as a perfect storm, but a tragedy of our own making-and one that could become commonplace.The authors, one a longtime New Orleans resident, argue that breached levees and sloppy emergency response are just the most obvious examples of government failure. The true problem is more deeply rooted and insidious, and stretches far beyond the Gulf Coast.Based on the false promise of widespread prosperity, communities across the U.S. have embraced all brands of economic development at all costs. In Louisiana, that meant development interests turning wetlands into shipping lanes. By replacing a natural buffer against storm surges with a 75-mile long, obsolete canal that cost hundreds of millions of dollars, they guided the hurricane into the heart of New Orleans and adjacent communities. The authors reveal why, despite their geographic differences, California and Missouri are building-quite literally-toward similar destruction.Too often, the U.S. growth machine generates wealth for a few and misery for many. Drawing lessons from the most expensive natural disaster in American history, Catastrophe in the Making shows why thoughtless development comes at a price we can ill afford.
