Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The purpose of this study was to discover whether teenage girls act as gendered beings online –or in other words, are they embodied while online? The proponents of disembodiment assert that cyberspace is an emancipatory sphere for women because gender does not exist online, while the proponents of embodiment assert that “the new cyberspaces may in fact be gendered spaces” because the internet “is reflective of our social values as a whole, and since gender bias exists in the broader culture, it surely exists in cyberspace” (Gurak “On Bob” 12).

Informed by the feminist paradigm, participant observation of an online bulletin and message board was conducted --each of the boards are on an online girls’ magazine web site. It was assumed here that because such magazines are the most popular web sites among teenage girls, they would be the best type of online content in which gendered behavior can be observed (jmm.com).

During the data collection period, the users of the bulletin and message board under study acted as gendered beings. This finding supports research started in the early 1990s by Herring, and radical cyberfeminism, according to which embodiment, or gendered behavior, online is natural. Radical cyberfeminism asserts that the internet merely reflects current social values as a whole. On a larger scale, the finding of this study supports the feminist belief that gender is socially constructed.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Implicit in many calls for fiscal decentralization is the assumption that it will revitalize the power and autonomy of lower levels of the federal system. The empirical strength of this relationship is an important factor in whether one can justify decentralization. The politics of public school finance reform offer an ideal venue to test it. This paper examines the effects of school finance centralization on local school board autonomy by undertaking case studies of 6 schools in Vermont. It concludes that centralization of school finance did not significantly curtail local autonomy, suggesting fiscal decentralization is not necessary to promote local government vitality.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: ABSTRACT
This paper examines how offenders interact with a state parole board. Using conversation analysis, I examine the excuses and justifications offenders employ as they attempt to achieve parole release. The vocabularies of motive offenders rely on in their appeals to the board materialize not as individual assertions that are unquestiongly accepted. Rather, the socially approved vocabularies are generated and altered in real time interaction. Analyzing regular parole and parole violation hearings, I provide illustrations of how offenders and the parole board negotiate vocabularies of motive (excuses and justifications) throughout the parole hearing.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper examines the collaborative nature of neutralization techniques (Sykes and Matza, 1957) in parole hearings. Prior research using neutralization theory has overlooked the role of other actors in the development of neutralizations, examining them through interviews or narratives where interaction is either scripted or limited and thus has little bearing on the production of accounts. In contrast, this study evaluates how parole board members propose neutralizations and modify those that are issued by inmates seeking parole. Ethnographic observations of 438 regular parole and parole revocation hearings, videotapes of 40 such hearings, and interviews with a state parole board are used to examine how neutralizations are shaped by interactions—interactions that may influence social control decision making and criminal justice outcomes.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Data on the size and composition of the editorial boards of the major general sociological journals of the USA, Canada and Britain from 1960-2005 are examined to throw light on the journal social system. It is shown that there are differences between the journals run by departments and by learned societies. However, both types have on the whole increased markedly in size over time, to an extent not apparently explained by their workloads, and recently have become more international in their composition. Board members are recruited from relatively prestigious positions, though the most prominent institutions there are not those generally appearing at the top of measured hierarchies; the number of slots available means that it is inevitable that only a minority can ever hold those positions, and in practice a minority within the minorityoccupied multiple slots. Some doubt is thrown on the existence of an integrated and homogeneous scientific system; more and more detailed historical data are required for satisfactory explanation of the outcomes observed.