The social disorganization model of crime and delinquency generally has argued that the socioeconomic composition of neighborhoods is related to rates of illegal behavior only to the extent that it increases the likelihood of residential turnover and racial/ethnic heterogeneity. Such an orientation reflects the traditional assumption of human ecology that urban areas are characterized by continual processes of residential upgrading as groups become progressively assimilated into the economic structure of the community and have more economic resources at their disposal. However, the validity of the indirect effect hypothesis may have become questionable in the many cities that have experienced a significant economic decline during the last few decades, thereby leading to the creation of an immobile underclass population. We examine here the relative validity of the indirect effect hypothesis in Chicago's neighborhoods during 1960 and 1980. While the findings generally support the traditional indirect effect assumption of social disorganization, they also emphasize the need to consider the economic and political contexts in which these communities are embedded.

This article develops a macrolevel framework on inequality and juvenile court processing by integrating ideas drawn from conflict theory, research on urban poverty, and recent race-specific trends in drug enforcement. Using 1985 data for more than 200 U.S. counties, we examine how structural context—especially racial inequality and the concentration of “underclass” poverty—influence the formal petitioning, predisposition detention, and out-of-home placement of juveniles. The data are generally consistent with the hypothesis that underclass blacks are viewed as a threatening group to middle-class populations and are thus subjected to increased control by the juvenile justice system. We discuss the implications of our results for a better understanding of the relationship between larger societal forces of increasing poverty and racial inequality and local systems of formal social control.

This article extends recent theorizing on 19th- and early 20th-century social control to the punishment of minor offenders in the American South. Despite surface differences in state control and in court contexts, the punishment of convicted misdemeanants strikingly resembled its more serious counterpart. The racial composition of both chain-gang and penitentiary populations was similar, as were trends in the rate at which the public and private sector forcefully expropriated the labor of black and white males. Depressed economic conditions adversely affected all punishment rates, regardless of race. Although more circumscribed in impact, racial inequality and labor supply and demand also affected incarceration in the chain gang. The author considers directions for future research and theory.

Although always an integral part of sociology, the study of social control has waxed and waned. Originally, the concept was defined broadly as any structure, process, relationship, or act that contributes to the social order; indeed, the concepts of social order and control were indistinguishable. A consensus is now emerging that distinguishes social control from the social order it is meant to explain and that distinguishes among social control processes. One basic distinction is between processes of internal control or socialization and processes of external control. Recently, the study of social control is equated more with the latter than the former.

Despite the obvious and repeated failures of biopsycho-criminologies, looking at and inside individuals for the causes of crime persists as the politically more tolerable and economically more rewarding (for grantsmen) alternative to the kind of theoretical and empirical work featured in this symposium. Instead of looking for what is wrong with people, these researchers are looking for what is wrong with society—and why. Once again the causal importance of contextual factors and social forces is being investigated and demonstrated. To theorists who have perceived and posited causal linkages among structured inequalities, social conflicts, and the definition as well as the occurrence of crimes, such research deserves the highest priority. These are indeed welcome contributions because they are asking the right questions. Now let us consider the answers they offer.

This study situates the response of various segments of the bar to the New Deal era of administrative expansion in the context of contemporary theories of the legal profession. I focus on the theoretical formulations of a market monopoly approach, a functionalist approach, and a systems approach to the study of professionalism and professional competition. I consider each approach in light of two foundational prisms: (1) the stratified composition of the bar necessarily leads to a corresponding variation in the response to changes in the legal environment; (2) at the elite level of the profession, there is considerable attention to changes that affect the law as a system of knowledge and as a resource around which lawyers establish their professional legitimacy as exclusive experts. I draw attention to the strategic mechanisms that lawyers invoked in order to deal with the inter- and intraprofessional competition that accompanied the expansion of the regulatory state.

A survey of a random sample of attorneys in the New York Regional Metropolitan Area reveals that they have a lukewarm attitude toward newer, more businesslike client-getting strategies—advertising, prepaid legal plans, nonprofit plans, and closed legal plans; respondents also strongly agree that these techniques have a negative impact on the public's image of the profession. Do structural factors of the profession explain attitudes toward professional practices? To find out, I examined the effect of three dimensions of the profession: organization of work, geographical location of organization, and demographic factors. The findings show both persistent intraprofessional tensions around the impact of these new practices on the image of the profession and tension between older and younger attorneys over advertising and development of legal plans. Also these analyses document a structural dimension of the legal profession not identified in earlier research: suburban practitioners are much more skeptical about the newer client-getting practices than are their urban colleagues.

Recent developments in higher education and in microelectronics have converged to alter the work and status of the legal profession. In this study of the subject of these far-reaching trends on lawyers in the German insurance industry, the professional jurisdiction of lawyers is found to have been greatly weakened. The need for the professional expertise of lawyers is greatly reduced because qualified nonlawyer business clerks have access through the legal data banks to legal knowledge once only available to them after many years of experience. Ironically, however, the excess supply of lawyers has led insurance companies to hire them to do work below their qualification level that can be done by qualified nonlawyer clerks; thus these over-credentialed lawyers find it almost impossible to establish or maintain any professional legal jurisdiction.