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Major world agencies have identified a serious contemporary food insecurity problem, and sound even louder alarms that by the year 2050 around one billion people will be "food insecure." The solution proposed by the World Bank in a 2012 Report is that the world grow significantly more food. Eyes certainly are on the us to remediate this problem by growing more livestock. Is "more food" the answer? This study uses World Bank data and path/structural equation modeling to determine the veracity of this position versus another. It is counter argued that food distribution and waste prevent food from reaching substantial segments of the world's population. That is, the poor and dependent are unable to gain access to food that is privateered by governance systems that permit rulers and the wealthy to access food, and set food prices at unreachable levels for the poorest of the poor and, sometimes, even the middle class. Further, wages are set below the level needed to purchase basic food stuffs. The reaction has been food riots in countries ranging from Venezuela to the Middle East countries such as Lebanon, Jordan, Libya, and Egypt, among others.

US and world military expenditures have increased dramatically in the last decade. Some cross-national treatments identify positive impacts of military spending on a range of domestic outcomes, while many others point to the converse. We review the literature and then focus on under examined relationships, including the impact of military expenditures on the intensity of food deprivation worldwide. We employ a structural equation modeling technique that permits synthetic analyses of direct and indirect impacts of a range of factors specified by the theories. We find world-system context indirectly matters a great deal to the intensity of food deprivation in nations, both in our sample of developed and developing nations, and of developing countries only. So do intra-national and international conflicts, especially insofar as they impact national modernization and military spending. While modernization is moderately enhanced by military spending for our cross-national sample of developed and developing countries, it is not for the sample of developing countries only. This may point to military technology's spill over effects on other sectors of the economy, but solely for developed nations. For the world over, national modernization, itself a consequence of global power and dependency, directly reduces the intensity of food deprivation, while military expenditures directly heighten it. These differential relationships lead us to advocate for a more synthetic theorizing in studies of food security and hunger, while accounting for global circumstances that produce both similar and different consequences in richer and poorer countries.

This exploratory study of the US Postal Service examines worker perceptions of 'management citizenship' in a high performance workplace, and assesses the impact of management citizenship on worker commitment. Qualitative data from employee narratives show many workers view performance management practices as unjust and at a disjuncture with perceived organizational and broader societal goals. Especially salient are issues of worker voice, equity and the non-universalistic treatment of employees by managers. Worker perceptions vary across race and gender. Effects of such perceptions on the organizational commitment of workers have been insuf.ciently studied, but regression analyses show that net of other predictors, worker perceptions of management citizenship are consequential to organizational commitment, as are the intersection of their gender and race for black women, and worker views of workplace heterogeneity, colleague citizenship and personal citizenship in the organization. The implications of these .ndings are drawn out generally and globally, with a focus on ameliorative management citizenship strategies.

Building on prior work in world-system analysis and human ecology, we test a macro-level theory that social and demographic causes of deforestation will vary across zones of the modern world-system. Using multivariate regression analysis, we examine models of deforestation over the period 1990-2000. We test for main effects of world-system posmon, two different population variables (urbanization and proportion under working age), and economic development within zone, as well as for the contextual effects of these variables as they operate differently across world-system positions. Our findings indicate that generic models of deforestation need to be qualified, because the particular social factors most closely associated with deforestation tend to vary by position in the global hierarchy. Deforestation at the macro level is best explained by considering effects of socio-demographic processes contextually, in terms of world-system dynamics. We discuss the findings in a more general world-systems and behavioral ecological framework, and suggest the field will be well served with more precise theorizing and closer attention to scope conditions.

The dominant framework of neighborhood revitalization in the United States that emerged in the 1990s is the comprehensive community‐building approach based on a "theory of change" model. This framework posits that to improve neighborhoods and the quality of life of residents, programmatic efforts are needed that are "resident‐driven" and holistic in their focus. While these types of initiatives flourish, neighborhood revitalization often results in the displacement of low‐income families and marginal return for existing residents. Why this occurs in the context of initiatives purporting to aid existing residents is underexamined in the evaluation literature. We argue that researchers engaged in documentation and evaluation of revitalization initiatives need a broader framework to examine heretofore marginalized issues. We use a "margin research" methodology to demonstrate how this alternative form provides a more expansive representation of revitalization activities and outcomes.

Despite the apparent importance of these dynamics, there is relatively little social science theorization and cross-national research on such global environmental issues. There is especially a paucity of cross-national, quantitative research in sociology that focuses on the social antecedents to environmental outcomes (for exceptions, see Burns et al. 1994, 1995; Kick et al. 1996; Grimes and Roberts 1995). We find this condition surprising given the substantial initial work of environmental sociologists (Dunlap and Catton 1978, 1979; Buttel 1987) and the key role social scientists might in principle play in addressing such worldwide problems (Laska 1993). As a consequence, we propose and assess a perspective on the global and national social causes of one environmental dynamic, the greenhouse effect.

With new relationships between state and civil society, community building has arisen as a preferred mechanism to ameliorate urban poverty. Community building is a much-supported but undercriticized paradigm, especially with respect to questions about the benefits that impoverished neighborhood residents actually acquire from these initiatives. The authors examine community building as a process that is related to larger agendas meant to enact certain productions of urban space and challenge many taken-for-granted notions about the realized benefits of this form of antipoverty work. Moreover, they argue that community-building initiatives occur in an increasingly globalized context, providing opportunities for stakeholders other than residents to promote certain productions of space and place. A case study is presented of an initiative occurring in a southern city in the United States to highlight the theoretical framework presented.