Legal Issues in Intergroup Relations

Author(s):  
Charles W. Choi

An intergroup perspective in the legal context highlights the influence of group membership on the interaction between authorities and citizens. Social identity influences communication both in the field (e.g., police–civilian) and in the courtroom (e.g., juror deliberation). The research in the law enforcement context addresses trust in police officers, the communication accommodation between police and civilians, sociodemographic stereotypes impacting police–civilian encounters, the role of police media portrayals, and its influence on intergroup exchanges between police and civilians. Juries are inextricably influenced by group membership cues (e.g., race and gender), and differentiate those in the ingroup over the outgroup. The impact of stereotypes and intergroup bias is evident in the literature on jury decisions and the severity of punitive sentencing. These and other factors make the intergroup nature of the legal context significant, and they determine the interconnection between the parties involved. Specifically, the social identity approach brings focus to the biases, attributions, and overall evaluations of the perceived outgroup. The research indicates that diversity is necessary to alleviate the intergroup mindset, thereby encouraging a more interindividual viewpoint of those outgroup members.

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marlon B. Ross

In Sissy Insurgencies Marlon B. Ross focuses on the figure of the sissy in order to rethink how Americans have imagined, articulated, and negotiated manhood and boyhood from the 1880s to the present. Rather than collapsing sissiness into homosexuality, Ross shows how sissiness constitutes a historically fluid range of gender practices that are expressed as a physical manifestation, discursive epithet, social identity, and political phenomenon. He reconsiders several black leaders, intellectuals, musicians, and athletes within the context of sissiness, from Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver, and James Baldwin to Little Richard, Amiri Baraka, and Wilt Chamberlain. Whether examining Washington’s practice of cleaning as an iteration of sissiness, Baldwin’s self-fashioned sissy deportment, or sissiphobia in professional sports and black nationalism, Ross demonstrates that sissiness can be embraced and exploited to conform to American gender norms or disrupt racialized patriarchy. In this way, sissiness constitutes a central element in modern understandings of race and gender.


2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 59-76
Author(s):  
Donald N. Anderson

Abstract Critics of digitally mediated labour platforms (often called the “sharing” or “gig economy”) have focused on the character and extent of the control exerted by these platforms over both workers and customers, and in particular on the precarizing impact on the workers on whose labor the services depend. Less attention has been paid to the specifically spatial character of the forms of work targeted by mobile digital platforms. The production and maintenance of urban social space has always been dependent, to a large degree, on work that involves the crossing of spatial boundaries - particularly between public and private spaces, but also crossing spaces segregated by class, race, and gender. Delivery workers, cabdrivers, day labourers, home care providers, and similar boundary-crossers all perform spatial work: the work of moving between and connecting spaces physically, experientially, and through representation. Spatial work contributes to the production and reproduction of social space; it is also productive of three specific, though interrelated, products: physical movement from one place to another; the experience of this movement; and the articulation of these places, experiences, and movements with visions of society and of the social. Significantly, it is precisely such spatial work, and its products, which mobile digital platforms seek most urgently to transform. Drawing on several recent studies of “ridesharing” (or soft cab) labour platforms, I interrogate the impact of digital mediation on the actual practices involved in spatial work. I argue that the roll-out of digital labour platforms needs to be understood in terms of a struggle over the production of social space.


2021 ◽  
pp. 009102602110565
Author(s):  
Greg Lewis ◽  
Jonathan Boyd ◽  
Rahul Pathak

This study examines the impact of qualifications and hiring advantages on women’s and minorities’ access to state government jobs, both in managerial and high-salary positions and overall. It also looks at how race and gender differences in representation have changed since 1990 and how they compare with the private sector. All groups, except Latino and Asian men, are more likely than White men to work for state governments, and all groups are more likely to do so than comparable White men. White men remain more likely to be managers and to earn top-decile salaries than comparable White women and people of color. Differences in education, experience, veteran status, and citizenship contribute, in different ways, to each group’s underrepresentation at top levels, but sizable unexplained gaps remain. The good news is that access to top jobs is better in state governments than in the private sector and has improved since 1990.


Author(s):  
Andrew Ashworth ◽  
Julian V. Roberts

Sentencing represents the apex of the criminal process and is the most public stage of the criminal justice system. Controversial sentences attract widespread media coverage, intense public interest, and much public and political criticism. This chapter explores sentencing in the United Kingdom, and draws some conclusions with relevance to other common law jurisdictions. Sentencing has changed greatly in recent years, notably through the introduction of sentencing guidelines in England and Wales, and more recently, Scotland. However, there are still doubts about the fairness and consistency of sentencing practice, not least in the use of imprisonment. Among the key issues to be examined in this chapter are the tendency towards net-widening, the effects of race and gender, the impact of pleading guilty, the use of indeterminate sentences, the rise of mandatory sentences, and the role of the victim in the sentencing process. The chapter begins by outlining the methods by which cases come before the courts for sentencing. It then summarizes the specific sentences available to courts and examines current sentencing patterns, before turning to a more detailed exploration of sentencing guidelines, and of the key issues identified above. The chapter addresses two critical questions: What is sentencing (namely who exerts the power to punish)? Does sentencing in the UK measure up to appropriate standards of fairness and consistency?


2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (7) ◽  
pp. 115 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valerie Barker

Prior research underscores the value of social identity in adolescent development. Guided by social identity theory and employing an online survey, this study examined mobile phone use among older adolescents (18–19 years; n = 362), with special emphasis on social identity: group belonging, race identity, and group markers: race and gender. The findings confirmed that social identity markers play a role in popular forms of social mobile use (e.g., texting, phone camera, and music), especially among females. Nonwhite participants were more likely to report using generic phone apps for social compensation, although whites reported higher incidence of use than nonwhites for generic phone apps, texting, and taking pictures.


2002 ◽  
Vol 96 (3) ◽  
pp. 630-630
Author(s):  
Glenn Perusek

For more than a generation, as the authors rightly point out, the impact of organized labor on electoral politics has been neglected in scholarly literature. Indeed, only a tiny minority of social scientists explicitly focuses on organized labor in the United States. Although the impact of the social movements of the 1960s appeared to heighten awareness of the importance of class, race, and gender, class and its organized expression, the union movement, has received less attention, while studies of race and gender have flourished.


Author(s):  
Audrey Murrell

The concept of aversive racism has had a significant impact on theory, research, and practice devoted to better understanding bias, discrimination, and persistent disparities based on social identity group such as race, gender, social class, and so on. Originally developed to better explain subtle forms of bias toward racial and minoritized groups, this concept has been extended to understand the impact of disparities in a range of diverse settings, such as intergroup relations, health outcomes, fairness in employment setting, intergroup conflict, educational outcomes, racial bias in policing, experiences of stress and mental health issues, and persistent economic disparities. A core facet of the aversive framework paradigm is that because of human biases that are deeply rooted within a historical context and reinforced by ongoing societal ideologies, unintentional and subtle forms of discrimination emerge and persist. Given that these subtle forms of bias and discrimination exist within otherwise well-intentioned individuals, strategies to eliminate them require understanding the complexity of the aversive racism phenomenon in order to develop effective social interventions. This article reviews the foundation, research, and impact of this important body of work. In addition, the concept of aversive racism is discussed in connection to emerging research on microaggressions and unconscious (implicit) bias in order to create a more integrated framework that can shape future research and applications. Lastly, practical implications for organizations and future directions are explored, such as using social identity as a theoretical lens, including global perspectives on intergroup bias and leveraging emerging work on intersectionality, as useful perspectives to extend the aversive racism framework. Setting a future agenda for research and practice related to aversive racism is key to greater understanding of how to reduce intergroup bias and discrimination through interventions that cut across traditional academic and discipline boundaries as one approach to create meaningful and long-lasting social impact.


Author(s):  
Margaret Jane Pitts ◽  
Cindy Gallois

Social markers in language and speech are cues conveyed through verbal and nonverbal means that serve to identify individuals to the groups to which they belong. Social markers can be linguistic, paralinguistic, or extralinguistic in form, and can range from intentional and purposive (e.g., language selection or dialect accentuation) to unintentional and uncontrollable (e.g., vocal features that mark age or sex). They help to provide context for social organization. Extralinguistic cues are those that may be conveyed through gesture and physical appearance (i.e., skin color). However, social markers in language and speech focus on the paralinguistic (i.e., vocal cues such as pitch and tone) and linguistic cues (i.e., language choice, language style, accent, dialect, code-switching, and multilingualism) that mark social categories. Relevant social categories that are made distinctive through language and speech markers include age, sex and gender, social class, ethnicity, and many others. Scholars across disciplines of psychology, social psychology, linguistics, and communication have approached the study of social markers from different perspectives, resulting in theoretical (e.g., communication accommodation theory, ethnolinguistic vitality theory, linguistic intergroup bias) and methodological (e.g., matched-guise technique and ethnography of communication) advancements.


2020 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 123-142
Author(s):  
David Pichonnaz

Abstract This article explores the impact of experiences police officers went through before they joined the Force on how they see and perform their job. I propose a new approach to police culture and practices based on a Bourdieu-inspired model of analysis, which includes its subsequent development by Lahire’s ‘dispositional analysis’. The model looks at how dispositions interiorized—particularly through the experience of social mobility and gender socialization—have a great impact on how police officers see and perform their job. The results suggest that divisions within police culture, long acknowledged by criminologists and sociologists, can be explained by the prior socialization of police officers.


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