Research assessing the capacity of a cultural explanation to account for the relationship between certain structural positions and high rates of criminal violence has ignored a significant intervening variable. That variable is disputatiousness—the likelihood of being offended by a negative outcome and seeking reparation through protest. This article develops a cultural model of disputatiousness and aggressiveness. It hypothesizes that individuals who occupy positions featuring high rates of violence are more likely than their counterparts to be offended by a negative outcome, to protest the injury, and to use force when the protest fails. It also hypothesizes that differential disputatiousness and aggressiveness are most pronounced when the negative outcome involves an attack on the self by an equal in a public setting. Testing these hypotheses calls for individual level data bearing on behavioral dispositions under a variety of circumstances. A methodological procedure for collecting such data is proposed, and suggestions for future research are discussed.
Donald Black's theory of law states that the quantity of law can be explained in terms of stratification, morphology, culture, organization, and social control. Empirical tests of this theory have produced disparate findings. For the most part, previous tests have focused on criminal law and on the use of law to deal with personal problems. In the present study, survey data are used to test the effect of stratification, morphology, culture, organization, and social control on the willingness of people to mobilize law in response to various neighborhood problems. The only strong and consistent finding is that other social control is positively associated with mobilization of law while Black's theory predicts a negative association. We suggest a distinction between societal and personal social control to explain the pattern of results.
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