Both popular media and research often frame mass shootings as an individual issue having to do with mental illness or other individual differences. This work has unfolded in much the same fashion as that on other negative or anti‐social behaviors—such as the individual pathologization of suicide or rape. However, what this work has shown empirically is that there are often a set of circumstances that are uniquely social that motivate such actions. Following work in sociology, which offers social psychological and cultural explanations for gun violence, we argue that mass shooter motivations reflect social conditions—especially those that instantiate toxic masculinity, social exclusion, and racism—conducive to these events. This article uses a computational textual modeling approach to analyze the distinct social logics that motivate mass shooters. To do this, we identify a sample of 27 publicly available mass shooter “manifestos,” or documents left behind by shooters following their actions. Using topic models, we show that mass shooters exhibit a variety of preoccupations that underlie their actions. While shooters can exhibit a multitude of possible motivations, we find that expressions of masculine overcompensation, ritualistic responses to exclusion, and racialized status threat are prominent features of mass shooter manifestos, corroborating recent sociological explanations of mass shootings.
This is an article that draws on the institutional work literature about provisional institutions. To date, nearly every U.S. sector has been impacted by COVID-19. To sustain their core missions, highly institutionalized organizations such as universities have had to rethink foundational structures and policies. Using a historical ethnographic approach to investigate records from faculty senate deliberations at “Rural State University” (RSU), the authors examine the implementation of a temporary grading policy to supplement traditional, qualitative grades spring 2020 during the outbreak. The authors find that RSU implemented a temporary, supplemental grading policy as a provisional institution to momentarily supersede traditional grading as a means to—as soon as possible—return to it. This finding contrasts with the common understanding that provisional institutions operate primarily as a temporary solution to a social problem that leads to more stable and enduring, ostensibly nonprovisional institutions. The temporary grading policy, the authors argue, constitutes a “late-stage” provisional institution and, with this new lens, subsequently characterize the more commonplace understanding of provisional institutions as “early-stage.” This contribution has theoretical implications for studies of institutions and empirical implications for research on shared governance and disruption in higher education.
This article presents a case study of commercial cannabis in the United States. Drawing on 56 interviews with cannabis stakeholders collected between 2018–2020, I examine how different governmentalities of surveillance became distorted by the contradiction between state and federal cannabis laws. As in other regulated markets, these governmentalities informed state-sponsored surveillance initiatives to stop, contain, or support certain forms of deviance by commercial cannabis businesses. Due to fragmented governance, the efficacy of these initiatives depended in part upon the actions of the regulated cannabis industry. Commercial cannabis businesses looked to how surveillance was configured to develop strategies that could help them overcome challenges stemming from their semi-legality. These strategies included incorporating practices that were not required by law, partnering with the state in surveillance efforts, and engaging in activities to combat the black market. I argue that the embedded relationship between governmentalities, surveillance initiatives, and commercial cannabis activities transformed these strategies into mechanisms through which structure emerged in this nascent market. This paper introduces a set of surveillance categories, proposes new directions for research on social control and markets, and offers a novel study of commercial cannabis that can help to explain the trajectory of this market.
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