Disorganization Theory Research Articles

Disorder Oriented Policing: A Revealing Case Study of a Special Differential Response Unit in the Houston Police Department

Proactive policing has been a preferred approach among American law enforcement agencies for decades. While most of the systematic studies done in this area focus on the effect of proactive policing programs, limited research has analyzed factors that cause police departments to adopt a particular style of proactive policing. Using propositions primarily derived from social disorganization and broken windows theories and path analysis, this study examines the characteristics and associates of everyday activities of the Differential Response Team (DRT)—a proactive policing team—in Houston, Texas. Our findings suggest that DRT activities are driven mostly by neighborhood characteristics and the occurrence of reported serious crimes. The most significant predictor of DRT activities is violent crime rate of a neighborhood.

Influence of community characteristics on serious police use of force events in an Australian policing jurisdiction: a test of minority threat, social disorganisation, and ecological contamination theories

ABSTRACTExtant research on police use of force has established that force is not distributed evenly across communities, with minority threat, ecological contamination, and social disorganisation some of the most common theories used to understand the distribution of police use of force in the US. The current study aimed to test the relevance of these theories for explaining the distribution of serious police use of force events in Australia. We tested a use of force frequency model using negative binomial regression, and a use of force severity model using ordered logistic multilevel modelling. Results demonstrated support for ecological contamination theory, social disorganisation and partial support for socio-economic disadvantage in predicting the frequency of serious police use of force events across communities, while minority threat theory was not supported. In contrast, results suggested that individual and situational factors are more influential in predicting force severity than community characteristics.

“Racialized masculinities”: A gendered response to marginalization among Malay boys in Singapore

While social disorganization and anomie theories are generally employed to explain the disproportionate representation of racial minorities in the offending population, such perspectives often fail to address the intersectionalities of class, race, religion, gender, and historicity that structurally marginalize the Malay youth in Singapore. This article hence adopts a neocolonial criminological approach in explaining racial disparity in crime, particularly how the Malay youth establish their dominance in gangs through hyper- and exaggerated forms of masculinity. Drawing on interviews with Singaporean Malay and Chinese individuals who were current and former gang members, this study shows that Malay youth tended to exhibit a blended masculinity comprising “Malayness” and “Chineseness” to compensate for their marginal status, highlighting their agentic capacity in strategically tapping upon an inventory of race resources to negotiate their gendered identities and attain status and economic mobility in the illegitimate society.

Disorganization Theory, Neighborhood Social Capital, and Ethnic Inequalities in Intimate Partner Violence between Arab and Jewish Women Citizens of Israel.

We draw on social disorganization (SD) theory and social capital to examine the impact of neighborhood environment on the ethnic gap in intimate partner violence (IPV) between Arab and Jewish women in Israel. We linked census data on neighborhood socioeconomic status (SES) to national data we gathered in 2014-2015 on 1401 women (436 Arab, 965 Jewish) age 16-48. Women were interviewed while visiting 65 maternal and child health clinics throughout Israel. We used General Estimated Equation (GEE) multivariate logistic regression models to adjust for clinic cluster effects and estimated the contribution of neighborhood collective efficacy, problems, relative socioeconomic status (SES), bridging and linking social capital, and social support to explaining ethnic inequalities in IPV, while adjusting for women's socioeconomic and socio-demographic characteristics. We found that any IPV is higher among Arab compared to Jewish women (odds ratio (OR) and 95% confidence intervals (CI)=4.19 (2.72,6.42)). Collective efficacy and social group membership (bridging social capital) had no effect on the ethnic inequality in any IPV and types of IPV. Women's active participation in social groups (linking social capital), higher social support, and living in neighborhoods with relative SES similar to the ethnic group average) had a protective effect from any IPV and physical IPV. Neighborhood problems were associated with increased any IPV and physical IPV. In the final model, the ethnic gap in IPV was reduced but not eliminated (OR (95%CI)=3.28 (2.01, 5.35). Collective efficacy did not explain the ethnic gap in IPV, while women's active participation (linking social capital) had a protective effect from IPV. Given the protective nature of women's activism in this population, future research should investigate how this might be incorporated into solutions to IPV. In addition, reducing neighborhood problems, improving neighborhood SES, and increasing social support might help reduce IPV among Arab women, thus decreasing the ethnic gap in IPV.

Theorizing Youth Violence in Socially Disadvantaged Neighborhoods in Nigeria

Nigerian urban centers, especially the socially disadvantaged neighborhoods (sdns), like other disadvantaged communities across Africa, are increasingly becoming breeding grounds for youth violence and Armed Non-State Actors (ansas). The increasing waves of violence in socially disadvantaged communities in Nigeria and the inability of security apparatus to curtail them, suggests a ‘nation’ bewildered and a comatose state. This article attempts to dissect the root causes of youth violence in socially disadvantaged urban areas of Nigeria using relevant sociological theories. The paper subjects the current waves of youth violence across ethnic cleavages in Nigeria to a more nuanced and pragmatic analysis in order to dissect and unravel the socio-structural and political factors responsible. The paper argues that the inherent social structural maladies embedded in socially disadvantaged communities appear to have provided an impetus for youth violence and the emergence ofansas in Nigeria. These social structural maladies are captured within the context of social disorganization, relative deprivation, and broken windows theories. The assumptions of these theories provide insights into understanding the predisposing and enabling factors to youth violence and the emergence ofansas in socially disadvantaged communities in Nigeria and beyond. They also provide fundamental policy and research options to nip the contours of violence in socially disadvantaged environments in Nigeria and beyond in the bud.

Integrated Theory and Crimes of Trust

The integrated theory first proposed by Elliott et al. (1979), combining strain, social control, and social learning (and sometimes social disorganization) theories, has been repeatedly tested and consistently supported for a wide range of behaviors including licit and illicit substance use, violence, and other forms of illegal behavior. It has not, however, been tested for a class of illegal behaviors best described as crimes of trust, which include different types of fraud, workplace theft, and income tax evasion. This category of offending includes offenses commonly regarded as white collar crime, and also offenses that have been more or less marginal to the study of white collar crime. The present paper tests the integrated theory specifically for crimes of trust in the National Youth Survey Family Study, a national, multigenerational sample of individuals whose focal respondents were 11–17 years old in 1976–1977, and who are now in middle adulthood. Relying on structural equation modeling (SEM), parallel tests are performed for two generations, the focal respondents in early middle age (ages 38–45) and their adult offspring (ages 18–24) for the period 2002–2004.

Truancy Programs: Are the Effects Too Easily Washed Away?

Truancy has been identified as a risk factor of criminal behavior but results are mixed as to the best means to reduce this school-based concern. The Truancy Prevention Initiative has been implemented in New Orleans post-Hurricane Katrina under the direction of the Recovery School District to reduce levels of truancy, increase graduation rates, and decrease youth crime. This article emphasizes the statutes and ordinances behind this initiative in order for it to be compared to current evidence-based literature to forecast its effectiveness. In addition, social disorganization and deterrence theories are used to analyze the foundational elements of the Truancy Prevention Initiative. The Truancy Prevention Initiative is a promising program that requires process and outcome evaluations to draw a stronger conclusion of its effectiveness.

A Multilevel Analysis of Neighbourhood Contextual Effects on Serious Juvenile Offending

The extent and nature of contextual effects on juvenile offending are frequent subjects of current research, mainly in the USA. After a short literature review, this paper presents empirical results of a new study which hints at the existence of neighbourhood contextual effects on serious offending by adolescents. The study is based on three types of cross-sectional data on 61 neighbourhoods in two German cities and a rural area: a self-report survey of students aged about 13 to 16, a separate survey of residents in the survey neighbourhoods, and census and administrative data on the same neighbourhoods. Multilevel analysis is applied to identify and explain the neighbourhood-level variance of selfreported serious juvenile offending. Hypotheses from both main traditions of theoretical reasoning about contextual effects on juvenile delinquency - subcultural and disorganization theories - are supported by the empirical findings. The spatial concentration of adolescents with attitudes typical of delinquent subcultures increases the likelihood of serious offending net of relevant individual predictors, whereas the social capital of neighbourhoods (as measured by the independent survey of residents) reduces it. Methodological problems of applying multilevel analysis to delinquency research are discussed.

Disorganization theory and disorganizational behavior: Towards an etiology of messes

This article develops a theory of messes, defined as disorderly accumulations of varied entities. More specifically, it examines disorder caused by individual, or collective human agents, in hierarchically-ordered and complex systems - systems composed of sub-systems that, in turn, have their own subsystems, and so on. Such hierarchical-complex systems include filing systems (filing cabinet, drawers, and folders), formal organizational systems (Presidents, Senior Vice Presidents, and Vice Presidents), as well as cognitive categorization systems (the category bird, big and small birds, big blue birds and so on). The article distinguishes different types of messes, their genesis, and their efficiency and effectiveness consequences, both negative and positive. Messes in offices are used at the individual level of analysis to illustrate the theory and the propositions derived from it, whereas messes in formal organizations are used to illustrate them at the collective level. The conclusion to the article raises the possibility that the theory and the propositions it suggests might be applicable to messes in cognitive systems and to the evolution of cognitive brain functions.

Modeling delinquent behavior: Social disorganization, perceived blocked opportunity, and social control

The linkages among several popular theories in the delinquency literature—social disorganization, strain, and social control theory—as well as their effects on delinquent behavior are investigated in this study. Social disorganization has been primarily studied with aggregate‐level data in prior work, and we note certain theoretical and empirical issues associated with this approach. In this study of public high school students in Mississippi (n = 8,338), social disorganization is measured by observed indicators of juveniles’ perceptions of neighborhood deterioration. Social strain is operationalized through perceptions of blocked opportunity, whereas social control is measured through the respondents’ reported level of attachment, commitment, and involvement in school. Structural equation models with latent variables are estimated separately by race and residence in order to more fully compare the linkages among these constructs. This study is the first to extend the analysis of those theoretical linkages to rural populations in making across‐race comparisons. The results suggest that an integrated theoretical model is more effective in explaining delinquency than are separate single theory explanations. Specifically, social disorganization increases perceptions of blocked opportunity which, in turn, decreases social control, thereby increasing delinquent behavior. The results also show that the experience of a family receiving public assistance increases perceptions of social disorganization, thereby leading ultimately to more delinquent behaviors. Although there are departures from invariance in the structural parameter estimates, the hypothesized causal sequence was supported across all four groups. Future studies using this approach are delineated.

Nuclear Pacifism as Collective Action

Nuclear pacifism as a social movement has received inadequate attention from North American sociolo gists. The author analyzes the growth and crisis phases of contemporary nuclear pacifism using the social disorganization and resource mobilization paradigms of collective behavior theory. He identifies certain growth stimuli ranging from particular precipitating, dramatizing, and encounter events to the dis appearance of major non-nuclear events that were competing with nuclear war for the attention and energy of the politically conscious segment of the US population. The author examines the conducive- ness and social control factors in US society that have stimulated and restrained nuclear protest in the 1975-1985 period. The ideological diversity within nuclear pacifism is seen as both a strength, in that it indicates imagination and widespread initiative, and a weakness in its vagueness and lack of goal clarity. The movement's low capacity for sustained resource mobilization is judged by the author to be its most serious shortcoming, which can be traced primarily to its underdeveloped organizational structures of leadership and decentralized decision making. The author concludes that indirect institutionalization and social invention hold the greatest promise of survival and policy impact for nuclear pacifism. While he found both the social disorganization and resource mobilization theories useful, the metamovement character, and size and heterogeneity of nuclear pacifism suggest that prescription for its increased ef fectiveness might better be approached through analysis of individual and small group protest.

An Introduction to the Theory of Deviant Behavior

The science of sociology has not yet developed a theoretical framework effective in analyzing such social pathological phenomena as crime or delinquency. The present article is intended to fill the gap by attempting to integrate the existing theories of anomie and of social disorganization in to comprehensive sociological hypothesis, on the basis of which a new conceptual framework for the analysis of social deviation is to be advanced.First, we will interpret the theories of anomie and of social disorganization in terms of the social climate the main proponents of these theories found themselves in. As to the two outstanding teachers of the anomie theory, namely E. Durkheim and R. Merton, the former analyzed the anomie as a personality controlled by the conditions of laissez-faire capitalism and the corresponding social ethic of Protestantism, while the latter's conception of anomie was developed on the basis of capitalism now in its monopolistic stage and the spirit of Puritanism in the United States. Merton's main contribution lies in that he tries to see systematically the relationships between personal frustration and socio-cultural structure. When we turn to the social disorganization theory, the view points of the Chicago School especially of R. Park and L. Wirth, are conspicuous, Park stressed that in rapidly developing urban centers the social control of primary groups through folkways and mores is no longer effective as it was befoe. Wirth, on the other hand, grasped social disorganization as the consequence of the conflict between different value systems characteristic of immigrant groups with different national background. Those viewpoints of the Chicago School are to be understood against the background of social change occurring in the United States in the nineteen twenties, especially in its Mid-Western area. The social pathological phenomena can be approached on the basis of either of these theories, The anomie theory includes in its scope the frustration-deviation hypothesis, while the disorganization theory would explain deviant behavior in terms of the conflict among value systems. At present there is still a considerable distance between these two ways of explaining deviant behavior, and a good deal of difficulty is yet to be overcome before we are able to integrate them to arrive at a systematic theory of deviation.If we, however, turn to compare the basic implications of these anomie and disorganization theories, we can't but be astonished to find how, for example, Durkheim and Park were alike in their way of presenting the problems as well as of constructing theoretical frameworks. Both of these men analyzed anomie and disorganization within the wider scope of comprehensive social change of rapid industrialzation and urbanization. Since there exisit these essential similarities, our next step must be to develop, on the basis of these theories, an integrative theory of the change of social structure. We will note that, in order to do this, it will be necessary to introduce first the theory of reference groups as to the social psychological aspect, and the consepts of legality and illegality with regard to the values, attitudes and techniques of the deviant.Finally, we would like to emphasize that we, as Japanese sociologists, will have to build such an integrative framework against the background of the actual structure of Japanese society differing from that of the modern West, which has imprinted peculiarly Western character on the anomie and disorganization theories.