Suchergebnisse

A time-series analysis of individual level, perceptual data disconfirms the J-curve theory of the black urban riots (i.e., that they arise because a period of progress was followed by a sharp decline) and suggests that ambiguities surrounding black people's perceptions of their economic situation probably led to the frustration that culminated in urban violence.The methodological component of the research deals with such problems of relative deprivation-based research as: (1) the substitution of aggregate, objective-level indicators for perceptual theoretical concepts; (2) the correspondences between objective and perceptual data on both a point-by-point basis and across time-series patterns; (3) the empirical implications of failing to look at important subgroup distinctions; and (4) the crucial assumption of all forms of relative deprivation theory that future expectations of need fulfillment, especially in the period of rising satisfactions, are a function of current levels of need fulfillment. The research calls for modifications in the structure and application of relative deprivation theory in light of the findings in these areas.

America has long been notorious for its vio lence, but illegitimate criminal violence has received rela tively little attention. Vigilantism is the best known of the specifically American forms of social violence. Woven deeply into our history, bound up in the westward movement, the gun culture, and slavery, vigilantism in its wider sense was an important form of political expression. Mob violence reached its apogee in the North before the Civil War, but con tinued to flourish in the South and West through 1876 and gave the whole nation a heritage of direct action in the name of justice. Gunfighting has been less important in our actual history, but very significant in our national imagination. The gunfighting mystique, and our fascination with it, has con tributed heavily to our tradition of violence. Urban riot and crime are new fields of study, drawing heavily on interdisci plinary methods. Recent work on the city of Philadelphia, for example, may be used in several ways. The nature of collective violence reveals something about the city's own polity and, in connection with other studies of individual violence, something about social and economic stages of development. In brief, all sorts of street violence decreased with the Industrial Revolution, and the Centennial City was quieter than any earlier.

In a recent article, Heribert Adam argued that the 'prevalent view of South Africa combines conceptual errors with false methodological emphasis and, often, wishful thinking', and that the 'popular perspective represents a gross over-simplification of a far more complex situation.'1The analysis to which he was objecting views South Africa as an outdated colonial society, in which white settlers enforce a racially defined domination upon an exploited mass of the black population, which is reduced to serving primarily as a source of cheap labour for white capital by an immense battery of totalitarian controls. Linked to this view - and now fuelled by the widespread riots during mid-1976 throughout African urban areas - is the assumption that substantive political change will necessarily come about by violent revolution, motivated by the growing determination of a burgeoning black population to force a redistribution of power and wealth. However, as Adam further pointed out, analysis of South Africa purely in terms of racial conflict leaves important questions unanswered, for there is need to explore how the differential distribution of wealth and resources - political and economic - originated, and how they are maintained.