This article presents a theoretical framework of how intergroup violence may figure into the activation and maintenance of group categories, boundaries, and identities, as well as the mediating role played by organizations in such processes. The framework's analytical advantages are demonstrated in an application to southern lynchings. Findings from event- and community-level analyses suggest that "public" lynchings, carried out by larger mobs with ceremonial violence, but not "private" ones, perpetrated by smaller bands without public or ceremonial violence, fed off and into the racial group boundaries, categories, and identities promoted by the southern Democratic Party at the turn of the 20th century and on which the emerging Jim Crow system rested. Highlighting that racialized inequalities cannot be properly understood apart from collective processes of racial group boundary and identity making, the article offers clues to the mechanisms by which past racial domination influences contemporary race relations.

This article takes as its point of departure the ambiguous and inconsistent way in which the concept of the ‘business group’ and other associated concepts has been used in the literature to describe and label different types of interfirm relationships. To remedy this state of affairs, a preliminary conception of the business group is presented and elaborated upon, in which the business group is conceptualized as comprising three analytically separable elements: network(s) of interrelated firms, the institutionalized logic of reciprocity, and the intersubjective interpretation of actors inside as well as outside the group. Further, a social network perspective on organizations is suggested for the analysis of business groups.

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Research in sociology and history on the lynching of African Americans by White mobs in the U.S. South around 1900 has in recent decades grown and matured into a substantive research area in its own right. This article has four purposes. The first purpose is to review dominant sociological and historical approaches in the lynching literature. One key feature of this literature is its bifurcation into one strand of social scientific sociological lynching research and one strand of culturalist historical lynching research. As a consequence of this bifurcation, the study of lynching long lacked sustained interdisciplinary dialogue between sociology and history. The second purpose of this article is to review recent sociological studies that attempt to bridge the disjuncture between sociological and historical approaches otherwise characterizing lynching scholarship. The third purpose of this article is to review other recent studies moving sociological lynching scholarship beyond dominant approaches and foci, including investigations of averted lynchings and investigations of the individual-level characteristics that made African Americans more or less vulnerable to White lynch mobs. The last purpose is to suggest how the contributions of lynching research have implications for understanding present-day racial injustices and inequalities.

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