Organizational and environmental sociology contain surprisingly few studies of the corporation as one of the sources of environmental pollution. To fill this gap, we focus on the parent company as the unit of analysis and elaborate environmental theories that focus on the organizational and political-legal causes of pollution. Using a compiled…

International migration yields pervasive cross-border social engagements, yet homeland political involvements are modest to minimal. This contrast reflects the ways in which the distinctive characteristics of expatriate political life impede participation in the polity that emigrants have left behind. As polities are bounded, moving to the…

We examine the relational model of inequality using samples of employer-employee matched data from manufacturing plants in the United States and Japan. We argue that gender is a salient status characteristic in both the United States and Japan, but because of differences in gender politics, wage inequality will vary more across U.S. workplaces…

This article demonstrates that the Cultural Revolution led to a temporary decline in educational homogamy in urban China, which was reversed when the Cultural Revolution ended. Previous studies on educational homogamy in China have paid incomplete attention to China's shifting institutional structures. This research applies institutional theory to…

Formal organizations share a common set of characteristics that include identifiable operating principles and coordinating mechanisms as well as lines of authority and communication. However, some organizations--especially those on the margins of institutional fields--creatively combine institutional and anti-institutional characteristics. This…

This paper examines the reasons behind a historic shift in the language couching the wage demands of two North American labor movements during the last twenty years of the 19th century--the Knights of Labor and the American Federation of Labor. We trace how the once dominant imagery of "wage slavery" lost its connection to producerist labor…

This article combines a statistical analysis with qualitative research to investigate the dynamics of collective violence in one of its most recurrent forms--the food riot. Using an original dataset collected by the authors on 289 food riot episodes occurring in Argentina in December 2001, the article argues for the need to dissect the local,…

This article explores how the interlocking of formal and informal political institutions has affected the dynamics and performance of the Argentine democracy. Key institutional features of the Argentine political system have been a competitive form of federalism, loosely structured and political parties that are not ideologically unified,…

The forced resignation of Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada from the presidency in October 2003 attests to the fragility of the process of democratization in Bolivia. A period of political and economic stability following the 1985 economic austerity measures prevailed for over ten years, but social discontent with the inadequacies of the political and…

When revolutionaries or insurgents, broadly defined, indiscriminately attack civilians, they generally attack "complicitous civilians," i.e., those categories of noncombatants which the revolutionaries see as benefiting from, supporting and/or having a substantial capacity to influence the states that the revolutionaries are attempting to displace…

This study employs a resource mobilization model to explain racial differences in congregation-based political activism. The fewer resources (i.e., members, income, clergy leadership, civic ties) that black congregations possess relative to white congregations largely accounts for racial differences in congregation-based lobbying and protest…

We evaluate the argument that Islamist terrorist attacks represent a distinctive "4th wave" of transnational terrorism that has supplanted Leftist terrorism. Drawing on ITERATE data for 1968-2003, the annual count of Leftist attacks has declined since the end of the Cold War while Islamist attacks have persisted and spiked upward in 2002-03.…

How non-Christian religious groups should be politically recognized within Western multicultural societies has proved to be a pressing contemporary issue. This article examines some ways in which American policies regarding religion and multiculturalism have shaped Hindu Indian American organizations, forms of public expression and activism.…

Takes issue with the notion that black political activity can be explained either by an isolation, an indirect effects, or an ethnic community argument. Suggests, rather, that a theory of political climate, incorporating arguments from all three theories, best accounts for the variability in black political participation levels from one time and…

I examine fundamental elements of the cultural and relational environments of the organizations that produce electoral forecasts in the Spanish parliamentary elections. The analysis reveals how these elements shape the interests and decisions in a collectivity of organizations that share a common technology. I investigate the reasons for the…