Wilson's Thesis Research Articles

$2\times n$ Grids have Unbounded Anagram-Free Chromatic Number

We show that anagram-free vertex colouring a $2\times n$ square grid requires a number of colours that increases with $n$. This answers an open question in Wilson's thesis and shows that there are even graphs of pathwidth $2$ that do not have anagram-free colourings with a bounded number of colours.

The Four Straw Men of the Apocalypse

Ward Wilson's thesis that nuclear weapons lack salience is cogently presented and supported by good sources. For the most part, however, his analysis is unconvincing and flawed.

“The Wire,” William Julius Wilson, and the Three Sobotkas: Conceptually Integrating “Season 2: The Port” into a Macro-Level Undergraduate Communities and Crime Course

A challenge in any undergraduate communities and crime course is helping students understand how macro-level context affects the lives of individuals. This article describes one approach based on three characters in Season 2 (“The Port”) of “The Wire.” A multi-layered framework is outlined which prominently features William Julius Wilson's unemployment thesis. Data sources for illustrating how different parts of the model apply to the surrounding region and neighborhoods close to the port are noted. The narrative arcs for three central characters in Season 2 are described and each is connected to Wilson's thesis. Even though in-class screening time was limited, students' written work and questionnaire responses suggested that the material clarified key concepts. The approach described here is just one approach of the many which are feasible for a macro-level communities and crime course, or for integrating “The Wire” into criminal justice or criminology courses.

Young, Jobless, and Black: Young Black Women and Economic Downturns

This research challenges William Julius Wilson's (1980) postulation that social class has superseded race in predicting economic outcomes among African Americans. Among the evidence Wilson used to support his claim was the strong position of black degree holders, particularly women. Shortly after the publication of The Declining Significance of Race, however, the United States experienced a severe recession and slow recovery, contributing to a marked growth in the black-white wage gap among women. Young black women were particularly hard hit. Over the 1980s, their cumulative work experience became increasingly correlated with educational attainment, leading to an absolute loss in experience among less educated black women. Although black degree holders were able to keep pace in cumulative work experience, their wage trajectories flattened over their twenties, relative to both a previous cohort and young white degree holders. The declining relative work experience and wage erosion of young black women during the 1980s does not bode wellfor young black women weathering the 2007-2009 recession. Initial indicators find an increase in the black-white wage gap and disproportionate growth in the length of unemployment spells among young black women, particularly degree holders. The losses sustained by young black degree holders during two severe recessions and their inability to regain ground during subsequent recoveries challenge Wilson's thesis that educational attainment and social class can insulate African Americans from racial inequality.

PART I: A CRITICAL EXAMINATION OF “THE MYTH OF NUCLEAR DETERRENCE”

Several years ago, Ward Wilson presented in this journal a wide-ranging challenge to what every generation of national security scholars and practitioners since the end of World War II has been taught about nuclear weapons. He asserted that nuclear deterrence amounts to far less than its proponents have claimed and provocatively suggested that nuclear deterrence is a myth. Relying upon both empirical and theoretical objections to nuclear deterrence, he concluded that its failures were clear-cut and indisputable, whereas its successes were speculative. Yet in spite of a flourishing trade in scholarly articles, think tank reports, blog posts, and opinion pieces concerning nuclear deterrence, nobody—including nuclear weapons scholars—has ventured more than a limited critique of Wilson's essay. There are, however, serious shortcomings in Wilson's arguments—deficiencies that make his essay an unpersuasive brief against nuclear deterrence. Wilson's thesis could be correct. His arguments, however, are unlikely to persuade any skeptical members of Congress, upon whom future progress in arms control depends, to reconsider the value they attach to nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence.

Quand le savant l’emporte sur le politique

In this article, I examine some of the reactions that William Julius Wilson’s The Declining Significance of Race has triggered among his colleagues and among black activists. I explain that some criticisms, clearly at odds with scientific research, are the result of ideological interpretations that completely divorce Wilson’s work from its scholarly context. Through my analysis of the controversy caused by Wilson thesis, I importantly address issues of methodology, analytical rigor, and objectivity in scholarly works and emphasize highly biased assumptions presented by myopic researchers who let racial and political ideology take precedence over objectivity.

Deindustrialization, Disadvantage and Suicide among Young Black Males

Wilson's deindustrialization thesis has been the focus of much recent research. This study is the first to empirically test his thesis as it relates to suicide among young black males, which has increased dramatically over the past two decades. Using 1998–2001 Mortality multiple Cause-of-Death Records and 2000 census data, we examine the influence of concentrated disadvantage on suicide among young black males across U.S. cities. After establishing its role in shaping suicide rates, we explore the extent to which industrial composition (the outcome of deindustrialization) affects concentrated disadvantage in urban communities. We perform similar analyses for whites to compare and contrast explanatory processes. Our findings show that while disadvantage is related to suicide for young black and white males, industrial composition only influences the structural covariates of suicide among blacks. These findings demonstrate the ability of Wilson's thesis to help explain a pressing social problem — rising rates of young black male suicide.

The Continuing Significance of Race in the Occupational Attainment of Whites and Blacks: A Segmented Labor Market Analysis*

In this article we posit that racial discrimination is not uniform across the U.S. labor market. While it is likely that patterns of racial discrimination occur in some types of jobs more than others, little empirical research has examined the effect of race across segmented labor markets. Incorporating two decades of comparable General Social Survey data, this article revisits William J. Wilson's hypothesis that the significance of race in determining labor market outcomes is declining. We examine the effect of race within two dissimilar labor segments over time, dividing the labor market into technique-versus social-skills-oriented segments. Using this theoretically useful dichotomy, we examine if the net effect of race (African American and white men) on occupational prestige has declined from the 1970s to the 1990s. Our multivariate analysis shows that the net effect of race is different in each labor market. This suggests that racial discrimination against African Americans is not uniform across the entire labor market, but instead is differentiately manifested within various labor market segments. Overall, our findings partially support Wilson's thesis indicating that while the effect of race is no longer a significant indicator of occupational prestige by the 1990s in a technique-oriented job segment, it remains a significant predictive variable within a social-skills-oriented job segment, even when controlling for a range of social class and structural variables.

Earnings over the Early Work Career among Males in the Middle Class: Has Race Declined in its Significance?

Within the context of William Wilson's “declining significance of race” thesis, this study uses data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to examine differences in the income gap among two cohorts of males through the early stages of their work careers in middle-class jobs during the periods 1975–82 and 1985–92. Findings indicate that the racial gap is structured in a manner that is contrary to predictions from the Wilson thesis. In particular, the gap increases over the seven-year period for both cohorts. Further, the gap is particularly pronounced among the more recent cohort. Specifically, it is larger at the outset of the seven-year period and increases more between 1985 and 1992 than between 1975 and 1982. Specific cohort and period effects that explain the racial differences in income are discussed, and directions for future research are identified.

A Fifty-Year Perspective on the Declining Significance of Race in the Occupational Attainment of White and Black Men

Using William J. Wilson's thesis of the declining significance of race as our theoretical context, we investigate comparable models of occupational attainment before and after the civil rights movement. The results indicate that in the later period the net disadvantage of being black is consistently lower than in the pre-civil rights period. Furthermore, in the later period the effects of class among black men are consistently greater than are the effects of race. These findings support Wilson's thesis of the declining significance of race.

Payoffs to Power Among Males in the Middle Class: Has Race Declined in its Significance?

This article specifies the parameters of William Wilson's “declining significance of race” thesis and within the context of the debate about it uses data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to examine racial differences among a cohort of males in the earnings returns to two separate dimensions of job authority in middle-class jobs between 1976 and 1985. Findings do not support the Wilson thesis. Specifically, the gap in returns has increased for both authority dimensions over the approximately ten-year period. In addition, the racial gap is greater at higher than at lower hierarchical levels across both authority dimensions. Specific employment practices that explain the increase in the earnings gap over the work-career are identified and the overall implications of the findings for the Wilson thesis are discussed.

A Cross-Racial Analysis of Single Female-Head Family Formation

Abstract This paper examines single female-head formation in large U. S. cities using William J. Wilson's (1987) thesis of structural determinants and Gary S. Becker's (1981) general neoclassical economic theory. We use the Social Science Research Council's Urban Underclass Database to explore differences in Black, Hispanic, and White female-head family formation for the 100 largest U. S. cities in 1970, 1980 and 1990. Our model draws on Wilson as rationale to include the male employment rate and the adult sex-ratio as predictors. From Becker, we add the female employment rate and access to public assistance as additional independent variables. Due to cross-cultural differences, we expect Wilson's thesis to better explain female family head formation among Blacks and Hispanics and Becker's to better explain White female family head formation. Results largely confirm these expectations.

Female Troubles and Troubled Men in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century France

Book Reviews Female Troubles and Troubled Men in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century France Lindsay Wilson. Women and Medicine in the French Enlightenment: The Debate over Maladies des Femmes. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. 246 pp. ISBN 0-8018-4438-x; $38.50 (d). Rachel G. Fuchs. Poor and Pregnant in Paris: Strategies for Survival in the Nineteenth Century. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992. 405 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-8135-1779-6 (cl); 0-8135-1780-x (pb); $45.00 (cl); $18.00 (pb). Barbara Conrado Pope In the 1960s and '70s Michel Foucault and Jacques Donzelot wrote powerful accounts of how helping professionals in France defined, pohced, and disciplined the poor, the sick, and the deviant.1 They reversed the old story, in which medicine, social work, and psychiatry evolved to the greater good of aU, and showed instead how the main benefactors of this alleged progress were the helpers themselves who gained the power to set the rules and inscribe specific fields of action, be they hospitals, asylums, prisons, or poor neighborhoods and local social agencies. Lindsay Wilson's Women and Medicine in the French Enlightenment and Rachel Fuchs's Poor and Pregnant in Paris revisit the same geographical and analytical territory. But their accounts are much more complex, in part because they excel where Donzelot and Foucault were at their weakest, in their analysis of gender and the roles that women played both as agents and subjects of the helping professions. Maladies des femmes are the diseases connected to women's reproductive cycles and sexual organs. Wilson's book focuses on three major controversies surrounding these maladies in the eighteenth century. Throughout the book, Wilson is careful to integrate the work of female commentators, demonstrating how important women—as salonieres, journalists, and pamphleteers—were to the formation of what she calls "public opinion." But the book's real subject is not women or female agency. It is the medical profession and the Enlightenment, which Wilson avers were more complex than some Foucaultian or feminist scholars might think. The first controversy concerned the pubhc clamor caused by the claims of miraculous healings at the St. Médard cemetery in Paris, where © 1994 Journal of Women's History, Vol 6 No. 3 (Fall) 1994 BOOK REVIEW: BARBARA CORRADO POPE 127 a certain Jansenist deacon, François de Paris, came to rest in 1727. Those who visited his grave were largely lower class and held radical communitarian and egalitarian beliefs. Since the healings were accompanied by cries, moans, and quaking, their beneficiaries became known as the Convulsionarles . One of the threads that Wilson weaves through her narrative is the theme of secularization. It is notable that the government called in doctors, not priests, to investigate. But it is not at all surprising that these learned men were motivated as much by the desire to queU pubhc disorder as by the search for physical proofs. Indeed, Philippe Hecquet, a doctor who wrote five books on the subject, did not even feel it necessary to examine any of the miraculés. He had God and science on his side. Later, although order and morality continued to inform medical opinion, rehgious orthodoxy would not. Because women were so prominent among the Convulsionarles, Hecquet and others had httle trouble proving that the so-called miracles were only a "natural" result of the female tendency to hysteria. Yet the doctors condemned women, despite their aUeged physical frailties, for willfully surrendering themselves to erotic and disorderly impulses. Thus the controversy became the vehicle by which the traditional link between women, disorder, and reUgious fanaticism was reinforced and brought into the enlightened age. The core of Wilson's book is devoted to an analysis of a series of court decisions on 'late births." On the face of it, this is the least dramatic of the three controversies: the cases were sprinkled throughout the century, and they affected only the individual families involved in the suits. Yet it is this controversy that is most central to Wilson's thesis that there was no single tendency that defined Enlightenment medicine. Governments and ruling class men would have liked a once-and-forall definition of "late...

Moral authority in law and criminal justice: Some reflections on Wilson'sThe Moral Sense

In his book The Moral Sense James Q. Wilson demonstrates the scope of people's moral concerns. His comments are striking for their range and for his compelling arguments about the centrality of moral concerns to people's lives. Wilson makes it clear that an important basis for people's evaluations of the authorities within organized groups is their assessment of the moral character of the authorities. His conclusion flows, in part, from an examination of research on legal authorities,[1] although the scope of his overall examination is much broader. Our goal in this comment is to explore some of the implications of Wilson's thesis in the area of law and criminal justice. We consider four areas: policing, juries, sentencing, and mediation. Each of these areas shares the common characteristic of being concerned about resolving social conflicts and regulating interactions among the members of society. Wilson's thesis is that these legal/criminal justice functions and the institutions and authorities who perform them will be judged by moral criteria. We accept this premise, but feel that it does not confront a further concern central to an analysis of the moral basis of social control: the sources of moral authority. Of course, we do not mean to suggest that legal authority is solely moral in character, and has no coercive elements.1 Rather, we support Wilson's thesis that there are important moral aspects to legal authority which need to be recognized and elaborated. Types of Moral Authority All societies recognize the need for authorities to establish and enforce social order. One important basis on which authorities operate is their moral legitimacy. However, moral authority is not always the same. We want to contrast two types of moral authority: personalized authority and professional authority. Our argument is that both are forms of moral authority, but that they represent two distinct and to some extent competing forms of moral authority. The two forms of authority involved differ in several ways (see Table 1). [TABULAR DATA OMITTED] The Basis of Authority The two forms of moral authority are distinguishable in terms of the basis of authority. Personalized authorities draw upon individualized knowledge about the person, their background, and their needs. This individualized knowledge flows from a background in the community and a knowledge of community norms. Typically, the community member subject to the authority personally knows or knows indirectly about the authority figure and that figure's history in the community. For example, in describing a highly regarded police officer in the community, Muir says that Marshall enjoyed what Tocqueville referred to as 'that respectable power which men willingly grant to the remembrance of a life spent in doing good before their eyes.'(3) In contrast, professional authority depends upon the knowledge and capacity to apply a body of specialized knowledge as well as knowing professional rules of conduct.(4) For example, sentencing guidelines provide rules for deciding how to punish those who commit various types of crimes. More broadly, it is knowledge of the law which indicates the appropriate response to various types of problems and which underlies the authority of judges. An example of the difference between these two sources of authority can be found in Elijah Anderson's discussion of life on contemporary ghetto streets.(5) Anderson says that ghetto youth are preoccupied with exaggerated concerns about receiving respect and deference from others, and are willing to enforce their demands in this regard with violence. This preoccupation has developed into a behavioral norm (a code of the streets) to which everyone in the community must respond. Personal appearance - dress and demeanor - are an integral part of this code and serve to display and enhance an image of fearlessness. …

THE LINK BETWEEN BLACK TEEN PREGNANCY AND ECONOMIC RESTRUCTURING IN DETROIT; A NEIGHBORHOOD SCALE ANALYSIS

Detroit's economy, based largely on automobile production, experienced a major downturn during the decade of the 1970s. With the collapse of jobs in this economic sector, the city's black community began to manifest the full range of behaviors said by Wilson to be associated with the underclass. In this paper attention is focused on a single behavior-teen pregnancy. A sample of neighborhoods were selected as a means of testing Wilson's thesis that a set of social dislocation variables were associated with increasing levels of intensity in teen fertility. Weak support for at least one variable was found in each time period. We concluded, however, that high levels of teen fertility was not confined to neighborhoods identified as underclass, thereby casting doubt on the use of the underclass label to describe selected neighborhoods.

Police Role Perceptions: Their Operationalization and Some Preliminary Findings

Several authors have noted that police do much more than capture criminals. Perhaps the most cited role typology was developed by James Q. Wilson, who divided the police role into three categories: law enforcement, order-maintenance and services. Wilson suggested that police departments assumed a particular role through depart mental policies consistent with community values communicated through the govern ment structure. Regardless of the method of communication, according to Wilson's thesis, there should be a consistent policy held by officers in a particular community, and this policy should differ according to the community characteristics within which the particular department is located. This study operationalized a police role perception instrument and conducted a preliminary correlational analysis with indicators of the community, the government structure, the nature of crime in the particular community, along with the personality and job characteristics of the police respondent. What was found was that police role perceptions cannot be characterized as easily as Wilson suggests. Principally, the role perception categories transcended law enforcement and order-maintenance and might best be labelled "proactive" and "reactive" in addition to "peacekeeping" and "service" roles. The categories were not mutually exclusive within the communities, and they were generally related to the level of serious crime in the community -an indication of how much time an officer could spend on the secondary aspects of his job.

The Revolution in the New York Party Systems, 1840-1860 (review)

276BOOK REVIEWS sion across space. In contrast to the importance of time to corporate freedom, there was a timeless element in federative freedom; the qualitative improvement stressed by the former gave way to quantitative improvement in the latter. A strict construction of the Constitution implied that a perfect order of freedom had been defined at the outset and only a rigid adherence to that order could insure progress for the nation. This neat dialectic between corporate and federative freedom was thrown into confusion in the late 1840's by the quarrel over the expansion of slavery and the "fruits of manifest destiny." A third concept, individual freedom, appeared and, as defined by the Free Soil position, dominated the following decade. Attacking the spread of slavery as a subversion of the national idea, mixing elements of both corporate and federative freedom, the Free Soilers added a sectional configuration and, more importantly, a moral imperative to the political debate, all of which added up, according to Wilson, to irrepressible conflict. The conflict's irrepressibility is rather assumed than conclusively demonstrated, although there is no doubt that, for Wilson, the Civil War was the inevitable consequence of the Free Soilers' alteration of the debate and their interjection into the discussion of factors that could not be resolved politically. Finally, the author offers an analysis of the political philosophy of William H. Seward, in whose career he finds the entire period summarized. Although identified with the phrase "irrepressible conflict," Seward provided the synthesis of the contending ideas of freedom and progress that might have saved the Union. No brief summary can possibly do justice to the many nuances of Wilson's thesis. Suffice it to say, that it makes much good sense. It is not, however, an easy book to read. There are simply too many threads to separate easily and the author's style occasionally obscures rather than clarifies them. For many scholars interested in this period, his study (as presented in this book) will not even be new, for it is based on eleven articles which Wilson published in a number of journals between 1967 and 1971. Focusing, as he does, on only one element of public expression (albeit a very important one), he does not, of course, tell the whole story but his work does add further dimension to other studies of American nationalism and the idea of progress during the early nineteenth century (among them the work of Somkin and Nagel, on which Wilson himself has relied to an extent). Robert W. Johannsen University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign The Revolution in the New York Party Systems, 1840-1860. By Mark L. Berger. (Port Washington, New York, and London: Kennikat Press, 1973. Pp. 172. $8.50.) BOOK REVIEWS277 This book describes the foundation and triumph of the Republican party in New York state during the years 1854-1856. Its thesis argues that by 1854 slavery, temperance, and nativism weakened the faction-ridden Whig and Democratic parties and thereby started a revolution that culminated in 1856, when the slavery issue pushed aside the other two issues and the Republicans emerged as the state's best organized and most sincere antislavery party. Most influential in helping along this process were the dramatic events of the slavery controversy in Kansas and the willingness of local factional leaders to use the slavery issue for their petty advantages. If we were to reduce the thesis to an equation it would read: factionalism plus slavery equals the New York Republicans. The men and events that dot this narrative are well known to all students of the period, and all play their familiar roles. Professor Berger offers a minor but welcome fresh insight when he credits Thurlow Weed as the master-builder who joined a varied array of factions into a winning Republican coalition. But the author strives for more than this insight; he attempts to show how the other two disruptive forces, temperance and nativism, lost out to slavery in the contest for political dominance. This he accomplishes by showing how Weed and his Republican allies took up temperance to attract that faction and then exploited the nativists' own factional divisions over slavery to bring them into...

Politics, the Police, and Arresting Policies in Salem, Massachusetts since the Civil War

This paper attempts to explain the wide-spread declines in arrest-levels reported by police departments in the Northeast after the 1870's, using Dahl's thesis that this was the period when businessmen began to dominate politics in many American cities and Wilson's thesis that intense political conflict tends to draw the police into politics and to undermine their effectiveness. The data of this research were drawn from Salem, Massachusetts, and take two forms: statistical accounts of the structure and activities of the Salem police; and historical accounts of the political organization of the town. The results lend strong support to the conclusion that both Dahl's and Wilson's theses are valid, explanations of the decline of the Salem department after the 1870's.