Week 5 Flashcards
(24 cards)
Research Chicago style
Official Data:
- Crime rates
- Census reports
- Housing records
- Welfare records
- Geographic charts
Ethnography:
- This is a study of the more intimate aspects of the world and social relationships.
- This involves interviewing people about their life and their history.
- It can also involve the observation of social behaviours.
Basic assumption of social disorganisation
- Views crime and deviance as caused by social or “environmental” factors, and not rational choices or pathological traits.
- SD perspective was the first primarily “social” explanation of deviance and crime
- Suggests that crime and deviance, while perhaps undesirable, are a “natural” result of rapid social change, the disintegration of social norms, and the breakdown of mechanisms of social control.
Solidification of classes in the 1920’s
- the working class
- the managerial class
- the elites
The working class
- Immigrants /Whites (Nativism)
- Strong labor suppression 1900 – 1930
- Crowded living conditions with increasing anonymity or social separation
The managerial class
- White, educated
- Growth of corporations creates wealth for this class (and the elite)
- Belief in bureaucratic solutions to both economic and social problems
- > Rise in political liberalism, or the belief that government, business, and science could work together to manage and solve economic, political and social problems.
- > Here, this is a long way from today, where government is seen by many “as the problem” and not a possible solution of social problems.
Elite class
Less than 1% of the population controlled a majority of corporate and private wealth
Early Chicago School theorists - Thomas & Znaniecki
The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1920)
- Inability of immigrant families to replicate or enforce social control mechanisms
- Difficult for immigrants to assimilate new norms, living in a world of “social disorganisation.”
Early Chicago School theorists - Parks & Burgess
- Park and Burgess spent much of their careers observing changes in urban Chicago.
- Viewed the city as a “super-organism” where neighbourhoods were connected to one another in symbiotic relationships (like plant communities, which is what the term ecology refers to).
- Argued that changes occur within cities through a process of invasion, dominance and succession.
- They suggested that ethnicities and industries moving into surrounding regions change the balance of the city.
- Immigration and Industrialisation are key to this process of equilibrium and change.
Parks and Burgess model
- Introduced the “ecological model” of social disorganisation
- Theorised that social change or disorder – including urbanisation, technological change, and immigration - caused disorganisation within communities
- “Each was said to produce conflict for dominance within symbolically interdependent human communities.”
- Thus, breakdown in social order and normative social control leads to deviance
- This proposition can be seen in their “concentric zone theory”
Concentric zone theory
While crime rates varied over time throughout the zones, they were stable relative to one another with transition zones as the highest rates of crime .
Understanding concentric zone theory and why it happens
As Siegel (2004: 8) notes
- “Social forces operating in urban areas create criminal interactions
- some neighbourhoods becomes ‘natural areas’ for crime. These urban neighbourhoods maintain such a high level of poverty that critical institutions such as the school and the family break down.
- The resulting social disorganisation reduces the ability of social institutions to control behaviour, and the outcome is a high crime rate.”
Clifford Shaw & Henry McKay
Juvenile Delinquency in Urban Areas (1931)
- Studied approximately 56,000 juvenile court records in Chicago over a period of about 30 years.
Concluded the following:
- Uneven spatial distribution of delinquency
- Delinquency occurs in the area closest to the expanding central business district
Findings of Shaw and McKay
- Delinquency rates decrease proportionally with the distance from the CBD
- Transition zones consistently highest rates of delinquency, regardless of demographic or ethnic composition
- Zones with the highest delinquency were also highest in indicators of social disorganisation
Indicators of social disorganisation - Shaw and McKay
- demographic instability
- high immigrant populations
- high percentage of minority residents
- low percentage of home ownership
- high percentage of families receiving governmental support
- low income
Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay - understanding their findings
- It was the characteristics of the neighbourhoods in the zone of transition, not of the people living there, which most affected crime. The people and ethnicities changed, but the crime rates did not.
- Shaw and McKay deduced that three variables were connected to this consistent pattern of juvenile arrest rates:
-> Residential instability.
-> Economic disadvantage.
-> Ethnic heterogeneity.
They speculated that the reasons disorganised areas have high crime rates is through: - Weak social controls (i.e. parents not monitoring their kids etc.)
- Learning delinquent values through gangs and criminal
Bernard Landers
- Followed Shaw and McKay’s thesis in Baltimore (1954)
- In Lander’s study, “The rate of delinquency increases as the percentage of nonwhites increases from 0 to 50 percent. It decreases as the nonwhite percentage increases from 50 to 100 percent” (Pfohl 1994: 192).
- David Bordua replicated this study in Detroit in 1959 - evidence was less conclusive for Lander’s theory
- Roland Chilton’s study in 1964 also did not find any clear evidence favouring the social disorganisation perspective, outside of the indicator of home ownership
Fall and return of SD theories
SD theory fell out of favour for a variety of reasons beginning in the 1960s including:
- the refinement of survey approaches to data collection
- an increased interest in social-psychological theories of offending and deterrence, particularly with younger offenders
- shift away from ecological and group explanations to more individual explanations of crime in the late 1970s and 1980s
Contemporary SD theories
Since the 1980s, SD theories have focused on two primary areas or concepts:
- Systemic model of social disorganisation (Bursik and Grasmick, 1993; 1996; Taylor 1997)
- Collective Efficacy/Social capital (Sampson and Groves, 1989; Sampson, Morenoff and Earls, 1999; Sampson, Raudenbush and Earls, 1997)
Systemic model - SD theory
Previous SD models lacked attention
to political and economic forces
-> Looks at THREE levels of resident-based
Control:
1. Private Level - family and close friends
2. Parochial level - acquaintances within a neighbourhood
3. Public Level - neighbourhoods to outside actors
Collective efficacy - SD theory
CE Model Suggests that social disorganization:
- Lessens Social Capital
- Impedes intergenerational networks
- Lessens mutual transferal of advice, material goods, and - knowledge about child rearing
- Impacts expectations for the joint sharing of informal control, support, and supervision of children and young people within neighbourhoods
Significance of SD theory
Combined two traditions of research within the social sciences
- Geo-spatial statistical methodology
- Qualitative and interpretive methodologies
- Divide is still strong in the social sciences today, with most researchers taking sides between the external-objective position (largely quantitative) and the internal-subjective position (largely qualitative)
Sociological significance of SD theory
Policy implications:
- Chicago school theorists didn’t see themselves as activists or as politically oriented researchers, but their research did have wide ranging policy implications
- This perspective suggests, “that it would be a major mistake to treat individuals in isolation from the societal roots of their disorganisational malaise” (Pfohl 1994: 197)
- SD theory suggested that effective social control strategies should strive towards the return of normative and stable social settings and organisational relationships
Strengths of SD theory
- Moves beyond the individualist and/or medical explanations of crime common in the 18th and 19th centuries
- Exemplifies the first serious social analysis of deviance and crime
- Suggests that deviants are not so different from other individuals, but rather live in different environments
Weaknesses of SD theory
- Problems in earlier research with the conceptualisation of “disorganisation” (i.e. “working women) and choice of indicators
- Measurement of disorganisation sometimes involved the use of statistics on deviance as an indicator of disorganisation
- Tautological problem (i.e. delinquency indicates SD, and SD leads to delinquency)
