Suchergebnisse

From the Publisher: "Thou shalt not kill" is arguably the most basic moral and legal principle in any society. Yet while some killers are pilloried and punished, others are absolved and acquitted, and still others are lauded and lionized. Why? The traditional answer is that how killers are treated depends on the nature of their killing, whether it was aggressive or defensive, intentional or accidental. But those factors cannot explain the enormous variation in legal officials' and citizens' responses to real-life homicides. Cooney argues that a radically new style of thought-pure sociology-can. Conceived by the sociologist Donald Black, pure sociology makes no reference to psychology, to any single person's intent, or even to individuals as such. Instead, pure sociology explains behavior in terms of its social geometry-its location and direction in a multidimensional social space. Is Killing Wrong? Provides the most comprehensive assessment of pure sociology yet attempted. Drawing on data from well over one hundred societies, including the modern day United States, it represents the most thorough account yet of case-level social control, or the response to conduct defined as wrong. In doing so, it demonstrates that the law and morality of homicide are neither universal nor relative but geometrical, as predicted by Black's theory

Why do some conflicts escalate into violence while others dissipate harmlessly? Under what circumstances will people kill, and why?. While homicide has been viewed largely in the pathological terms of "crime" and "deviance," violence, Mark Cooney contends, is a naturally-occurring form of conflict found throughout history and across cultures under certain social conditions. Cooney has analyzed the social control of homicide within and across over 30 societies and interviewed several dozens of prisoners incarcerated for murder or manslaughter, as well as members of their fam

Why do some conflicts escalate into violence while others dissipate harmlessly? Under what circumstances will people kill, and why? While homicide has been viewed largely in the pathological terms of "crime" and "deviance, " violence, Mark Cooney contends, is a naturally-occurring form of conflict found throughout history and across cultures under certain social conditions. Cooney has analyzed the social control of homicide within and across over 30 societies and interviewed several dozens of prisoners incarcerated for murder or manslaughter, as well as members of their families. Violence such as homicide can only be understood, he argues, by transcending the traditional focus on the social characteristics of the killer and victims, and by looking at the role played by family members, friends, neighbors, onlookers, police officers, and judges. These third parties can be a source of peace or violence, depending on how they are configured in particular cases. Violence flourishes, Cooney demonstrates, when authority is either very strong or very weak and when third-party ties are strong and boundaries between groups sharply defined. Drawing on recent theory in the lively new sociological speciality of conflict management, Mark Cooney has culled a vast array of evidence from modern and preindustrial societies to provide us with the first general sociological analysis of human violence

Occurring in a broad range of non-western and western countries, violence committed against women in the name of family honor has been viewed in several ways, including as a crime, as gendered violence, or as a violation of human rights. But from a purely explanatory point of view, family honor violence is most profitably viewed as a type of social control, specifically penal social control. As punishment, honor violence appears to obey the same principles as other forms of punishment. Drawing on the theoretical strategy of pure sociology, the present article highlights two such principles: punishment increases with the social distance and social inferiority of the offender. These twin principles help to explain a broad range of facts about when and where family honor violence will occur, and how severe – in particular, how lethal – it will be.

Greenberg's (2003) Comment fails to address the substance or spirit of "The Privatization of Violence."

Norbert Elias's (1939) work on "the civilizing process" highlighted the long‐term decline in violence within Western societies. A substantial amount of more recent anthropological and historical evidence suggests that violence has evolved not just quantitatively but qualitatively as well. In particular, the social characteristics of the parties to violence have changed over time. Drawing on Donald Black's (1976, 1993a) theoretical ideas on conflict management, the present paper proposes that as intimate social ties weakened and the state strengthened, collective and nonintimate forms of (nonpolitical) violence declined significantly. Consequently, violence increasingly became less public, more private. Pockets of residual public violence can, however, still be found within modern state societies. Privatization varies, then, across time and social space.