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Social capital is a variable resource embedded in all social networks. Although the majority of work on social capital describes it as contributing to socially beneficial outcomes, it also contributes to deviant activities. In addition to laying a theoretical basis for understanding the deviant potentials of social capital, this paper argues that a change in social networks results in a change in social capital. Using data collected from adult drug courts in Wyoming, multivariate ordinary least squares (OLS) regression analyses and analyses of personal interviews were used to explore changes in the social capital of drug court participants. However, as a result of deficiencies in available data, questions remain as to the long-term social circumstances of participants after graduating from the programs and differences in social outcomes among minority groups. The results from this project have implications for future research conducted on drug courts and the theory of social capital.

Some of the best-known social scientific theories of risks are those that have been elaborated by Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck. Although their arguments differ greatly, they agree in seeing the technologically induced risks of today's "Risk Society" as global - so pervasive that they transcend all socioeconomic as well as geopolitical and national boundaries. Most empirical work, however, provides greater support for a theoretical tradition exemplified by Short and Erikson. In this paper, we argue that many of the technological mega-risks described by Giddens and Beck as "transcending" social boundaries are better described as "Titanic risks," referring not so much to their colossal impact as to the fact that - as was the case for the majority of the victims on the Titanic - actual risks are related to victims' socioeconomic as well as sociogeographic locations. Previous research has shown this to be the case with high-risk technologies, such as nuclear energy and weaponry, and also with localized ones, such as toxic waste disposal. This article illustrates that the same is true even for the most genuinely "global" risks of all, namely those associated with global climate disruption.

The efforts of the Reagan Administration to cut government funding for the arts and the social sciences reflects not only a general desire to curtail government spending but also a specific conservative effort to “defund the Left” by eliminating especially those programs regarded by conservatives as the basic source of liberal and radical social change in the United States. This paper examines the conservative animus against government support for the arts and the social sciences. The discussion has four parts: The first traces the history of contemporary American conservatism and identifies its central ideological themes. The second argues that the belief that government and intellectuals are the two main sources of liberal social change has led conservatives to target government programs allegedly guilty of social activism and to develop their own relatively autonomous counterintellectual network. The third examines how this political agenda and institutional structure have influenced conservative opposition to government funding of the social sciences and the arts. The final part suggests some implications our analysis has for defending the social sciences and the arts.

This paper presents a model of the mobilization of people into movements that is compatible with a resource mobilization perspective on social movement organizations as the unit of analysis, but substitutes a cognitive social psychology based on attribution theory and the sociology of knowledge for the incentive model typically used in this perspective. We focus on the problem, neglected by resource mobilization theorists, of explaining the translation of objective social relationships into subjectively experienced, collectively defined grievances. On a macro level, our model gives independent causal weight to ideology without discounting the role that resources also play in defining group goals. On a social psychological level, we identify three distinct organizational strategies–conversion, coalition, and direct action–for mobilizing persons as participants and examine some cognitive and organizational consequences of each strategy. We conclude that incorporation of a more adequate social psychology of individual participation is not only compatible with the organizational focus and emphasis on rationality of the resource mobilization perspective, but can provide important insights into problems both social movement theorists and social movement organizers see as significant.

The concept of “generalized symbolic media of social interaction” was introduced by Parsons five years ago in his two articles on the concepts of power and influence.1 I believe that it represents a theoretical development of the first importance, which has received much less attention—particularly in my own field of social anthropology—than it deserves. The purpose of the present paper is to review and criticize the concept itself and to point out its relevance to certain problems in social anthropology.