Gang activity and membership were noted to be significantly related to financial rewards. As such, gang membership and gang activity should also be understood from an economic perspective. In this article, Pierre Bourdieu's framework of capital is used to analyze two separate samples of Latino and Asian gang members. Stark contrasts in socioeconomic backgrounds are recorded among the two samples of gang members, and gang membership and activities are also noticeably dissimilar. Accessibility to economic, cultural, and social capital is argued to affect gang membership and activities. The results suggest that the availability of legitimate and illegitimate capital greatly affects the trajectory and the length of gang involvement. Also, gangs provide significant material and social capital for the respondents of the study. Keywordsgangs; Asian; Latino; Bourdieu; capital Gang research has experienced notable advancement throughout the twentieth century. A great deal of understanding on gangs, gang members, and the favorable social conditions that generate gangs has been analyzed through a variety of theoretical assumptions and strategies: alienation and conflict with mainstream society (Lopez and O'Donnell

No abstract

As industrialized animal agriculture expanded rapidly in the last decade, the resultant pollution has generated widespread despoliation of natural resources and environmental victimization in rural China. This study examines the formulation and implementation of national environmental regulations from 2014 to 2019 and finds that the juxtaposing ministerial and provincial jurisdictions resulted in conflicting interpretations of the scale and evaluation criteria of the national policy. We argue that the regulations are more than centralized conservation programs designed to reduce environmental pollution caused by the expansion of animal husbandry. Instead, these regulations are fundamentally state-led rural development initiatives that utilize the designations of ecological protection zones to reconfigure land use and promote scale-up production in agricultural structural adjustment initiatives. The enforcement of these environmental regulations, therefore, constitutes a treadmill of law (ToL) that accelerated the geographical specialization and function intensification of the Chinese husbandry sector.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

This paper examines the organizational structure and operations of Taiwanese organized crime and youth gangs in Southern California. In-depth interviews were used as the principle method of research. In contrast to transnational criminal conspiracy claims and the La Cosa Nostra model of vertically integrated organizations, our findings suggest that these criminal groups consist of discrete local Taiwanese youth gangs which operate as largely independent economic units that show no substantive and operational ties to criminal organizations in Taiwan. The formation of Taiwanese criminal organizations and gangs in Southern California is primarily governed by the availability of financial opportunities. Furthermore, both the inter-gang relations and intra-gang structures exhibit a distinct form of contractor arrangement which consists of market-like weak ties that are simultaneously circumscribed by the criminal embeddedness. We argue that that these economic weak ties, which seem to render conventionally understood criminal organizational boundaries administratively less meaningful, still function as an operationally significant governance mechanism of the organizational structures of American Taiwanese youth gangs. In addition, the paper discusses the implications that the embeddedness has on the somewhat paradoxical and incoherent organizational structure.

Abstract:Following the collective forest tenure reforms in China, many households pursued entrepreneurial activities creating substantial pressure on the environment. This study examines data collected from 462 informants in 10 provinces in Southern China to understand how changes in attitudes toward ecological protection behavior occur. The internal mechanisms of ecological attitudes were explored using structural equation modeling to obtain a function path. Ecological emotion has a direct effect on ecological protection behavior by acting as an intermediary between ecological knowledge and ecological protection. Perceived ecological severity mediates between ecological knowledge and emotion influencing entrepreneurial farmers' ecological protection behavior. The perception of individual effect is mediated by perceptions of ecological severity and ecological emotion, eventually affecting ecological protection behavior. A model of cognition-emotion-practice is proposed based on the findings.