Current Table of Contents

• Contributors
  American Journal of Sociology, Volume 113, Issue 5, Page i, March 2008. <br/>
• Conservative Protestants and Wealth: How Religion Perpetuates Asset Poverty
  American Journal of Sociology, Volume 113, Issue 5, Page 1237-1271, March 2008. <br/> The association between cultural orientation and material outcomes is fundamental to sociology research. This article contributes to the understanding of this relationship by exploring how religious affiliation affects wealth ownership for conservative Protestants (CPs). The results demonstrate that religion affects wealth indirectly through educational attainment, fertility, and female labor force participation. The results also provide evidence of a direct effect of religion on wealth. Low rates of asset accumulation and unique economic values combine to reduce CP wealth beyond the effects of demographics. The findings improve understanding of the relationship between religious beliefs and inequality.
• Growing Church Organizations in Diverse U.S. Communities, 1890–1926
  American Journal of Sociology, Volume 113, Issue 5, Page 1272-1315, March 2008. <br/> This article examines the classic question of how religious diversity in a community affects church membership in a period of high growth and social change. Using panel data on local U.S. communities from 1890 to 1926, the authors estimate models specified to overcome likely artifactual problems, deal with unobserved community‐specific heterogeneity, and model state dependence. In general, the findings support the plausibility of mechanisms based on pluralistic deobjectivation and identity activation; they do not support predictions from mechanisms based on organization‐environment matching and interdenominational competition. The findings also show that the overall effect of urbanization on church participation was positive in all but the most religiously diverse communities.
• From the ¡Ya Basta! to the Caracoles: Zapatista Mobilization under Transitional Conditions
  American Journal of Sociology, Volume 113, Issue 5, Page 1316-1350, March 2008. <br/> This study draws on the literature on political opportunity structures to investigate the effects of local and national factors on the Zapatista cycle of protest from 1994 to 2003. A cross‐sectional, time‐series, negative binomial model for event counts is used to analyze the ebb and flow of Zapatista protests across the 111 municipios (municipalities) of Chiapas during this 10‐year period. The results show that while all types of demands appear to have been significant triggers of protest activity, Zapatistas concentrated their protest events in larger and more closed localities that had a history of protest activity, stable elite alignments, and a larger military presence. Openings in the political system at the local and national levels lessened protest activity in the more democratic scenarios. These results suggest that the curvilinear relationship between the structure of political opportunities and protest mobilization posited to explain social movements in well‐developed Western democracies does not explain the development of the protest cycle of a new social movement in an emerging electoral democracy.
• Conservatism, Institutionalism, and the Social Control of Intergroup Conflict
  American Journal of Sociology, Volume 113, Issue 5, Page 1351-1393, March 2008. <br/> This research investigates the state social control of intergroup conflict by assessing the sociopolitical determinants of hate crime prosecutions. Consistent with insights from the political sociology of punishment, group‐threat accounts of intergroup relations and the state, and neoinstitutional theory, the findings suggest that hate crime prosecutions are fewer where political conservatism, Christian fundamentalism, and black population size are higher, although this last effect is nonlinear. Linkages between district attorneys' offices and communities, on the other hand, increase hate crime prosecutions and the likelihood of offices' creating hate crime policies. Yet these policies are sometimes decoupled from actual enforcement, and such decoupling is more likely in politically conservative districts. The results indicate that common correlates of criminal punishment have very different effects on types of state social control that are protective of minority groups, and also suggest conditions under which policy and practice become decoupled in organizational settings.
• The Context of Discrimination: Workplace Conditions, Institutional Environments, and Sex and Race Discrimination Charges
  American Journal of Sociology, Volume 113, Issue 5, Page 1394-1432, March 2008. <br/> This article explores the organizational conditions under which discrimination charges occur. Drawing on structural and organizational theories of the workplace, the authors demonstrate how organizational conditions affect workers’ and regulatory agents’ understandings of unlawful discrimination. Using a national sample of work establishments, matched to discrimination‐charge data obtained from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the authors examine how characteristics of the workplace and institutional environment affect variation in the incidence of workers’ charges of sex and race discrimination and in the subset of discrimination claims that are verified by EEOC investigators. The findings indicate that workplace conditions, including size, composition, and minority management, affect workers’ charges as well as verified claims; the latter are also affected by institutional factors, such as affirmative action requirements, subsidiary status, and industrial sector. These results suggest that internal workplace conditions affect both workers’ and regulatory agents’ interpretations of potentially discriminatory experiences, while institutional conditions matter only for regulatory agents’ interpretations of those events.
• Book Review: The Challenge of Affluence: Self‐Control and Well‐Being in the United States and Britain since 1950 by Avner Offer
  American Journal of Sociology, Volume 113, Issue 5, Page 1433-1435, March 2008. <br/>
• Book Review: Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology from Chicago to London by Caitlin Zaloom
  American Journal of Sociology, Volume 113, Issue 5, Page 1435-1437, March 2008. <br/>
• Book Review: Privileged Places: Race, Residence, and the Structure of Opportunity by Gregory D. Squires and Charis E. Kubrin
  American Journal of Sociology, Volume 113, Issue 5, Page 1437-1439, March 2008. <br/>
• Book Review: Identities, Boundaries, and Social Ties by Charles Tilly
  American Journal of Sociology, Volume 113, Issue 5, Page 1439-1441, March 2008. <br/>
• Book Review: The Trouble with Culture: How Computers Are Calming the Culture Wars by F. Allen Hanson
  American Journal of Sociology, Volume 113, Issue 5, Page 1441-1443, March 2008. <br/>
• Book Review: The Politics of Working Life by Paul Edwards and Judy Wajcman
  American Journal of Sociology, Volume 113, Issue 5, Page 1443-1445, March 2008. <br/>
• Book Review: Alone Together: How Marriage in America Is Changing by Paul R. Amato, Alan Booth, David R. Johnson, and Stacy J. Rogers
  American Journal of Sociology, Volume 113, Issue 5, Page 1446-1448, March 2008. <br/>
• Book Review: Working the Boundaries: Race, Space, and “Illegality” in Mexican Chicago by Nicholas De Genova
  American Journal of Sociology, Volume 113, Issue 5, Page 1448-1450, March 2008. <br/>
• Book Review: Racial Transformations: Latinos and Asians Remaking the United States, edited by Nicholas De Genova
  American Journal of Sociology, Volume 113, Issue 5, Page 1450-1452, March 2008. <br/>
• Book Review: Immigration and the Transformation of Europe, edited by Craig A. Parsons and Timothy M. Smeeding
  American Journal of Sociology, Volume 113, Issue 5, Page 1452-1454, March 2008. <br/>
• Book Review: State Formation and Radical Democracy in India by Manali Desai
  American Journal of Sociology, Volume 113, Issue 5, Page 1454-1456, March 2008. <br/>
• Book Review: Fragile Rights within Cities: Government, Housing, and Fairness, edited by John Goering
  American Journal of Sociology, Volume 113, Issue 5, Page 1456-1458, March 2008. <br/>
• Book Review: The Housing Divide: How Generations of Immigrants Fare in New York’s Housing Market by Emily Rosenbaum and Samantha Friedman
  American Journal of Sociology, Volume 113, Issue 5, Page 1458-1461, March 2008. <br/>
• Book Review: Richard Nixon and the Rise of Affirmative Action: The Pursuit of Equality in an Era of Limits by Kevin L. Yuill
  American Journal of Sociology, Volume 113, Issue 5, Page 1461-1464, March 2008. <br/>
• Book Review: The Civil Sphere by Jeffrey C. Alexander
  American Journal of Sociology, Volume 113, Issue 5, Page 1464-1468, March 2008. <br/>
• Book Review: Purpose, Meaning, and Action: Control Systems Theories in Sociology, edited by Kent A. McClelland and Thomas J. Fararo
  American Journal of Sociology, Volume 113, Issue 5, Page 1469-1470, March 2008. <br/>
• Book Review: The Power of Privilege: Yale and America’s Elite Colleges by Joseph A. Soares
  American Journal of Sociology, Volume 113, Issue 5, Page 1470-1472, March 2008. <br/>
• Book Review: Dolly Mixtures: The Remaking of Genealogy by Sarah Franklin
  American Journal of Sociology, Volume 113, Issue 5, Page 1473-1474, March 2008. <br/>
• Book Review: Against Prediction: Profiling, Policing, and Punishing in an Actuarial Age by Bernard E. Harcourt
  American Journal of Sociology, Volume 113, Issue 5, Page 1475-1477, March 2008. <br/>
• Erratum: Erratum
  American Journal of Sociology, Volume 113, Issue 5, Page 1478, March 2008. <br/>