JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. This content downloaded from 146.This study shows how places, and by implication other societal units as well, achieve and reproduce distinctiveness. It does this by specifying how actors in two California urban areas, over approximately 100 years, responded differently to the same exogenous forces. Each place is examined to determine how unlike elements conjoin to produce a particular "character" at any given moment and how this character travels through time to constitute a local "tradition. " Borrowing from advances in analyses of structure and agency, this study displays character and tradition as accomplished interaction and helps make an elusive process empirically evident and accessible for study.(EOGRAPHIC units-like cities and \...~regions, but also like other types of social entities, such as corporations, academic departments, or whole societiesseem to exhibit overarching qualities that, however difficult to measure, make them durably distinct. Using "place difference" as our empirical focus, we strive here to make what might otherwise seem ineffable distinctions amenable to systematic empirical investigation.In their personal lives, social scientists are as likely as anyone to be sensitive to holistic qualities that make Chicago the "city of the broad shoulders" rather than, like Paris, the "city of light." More prosaically, they presume that overarching attributes distinguish, say, Denver from Toledo as a place to live or work. Despite the fact that, in the words of geographer Entrikin (1991:13), "these differences are not imaginary, but rather are actual features of the world," social scientists, perhaps wary of facile descriptions of "national character" (Inkeles 1996) or the "invention" (Hobsbawn 1983) of hegemonic traditions, do not much take them up.1 They more typically fall back on the apparent "solidity" of quantitative indictors-thus economic urban categories like "manufacturing center," "port town," "affluent suburb," or a position on the "center-periphery continuum" are common. Such material variables do matter in making up place differences, but they cannot, any

Accumulated research findings show that women tend to express higher levels of concern toward technology and the environment than do men, but that the tendency is not universal. The findings are particularly clear-cut for local facilities and/or nuclear and other technologies that are often seen as posing nisks of contamination; findings appear to be more mixed for broader patterns of environmental concern. Although the differing patterns have been reported with enough consistency to be considered relatively robust, less progress has been made to date in explaining the underlying dynamics. Five main hypotheses can be identified. One hypothesis, the expectation that increased knowledge will lead to decreased concern, has received so little support, despite repeated examination, that it can be discarded. Another, that women tend to express greater concern than do men about the health and safety implications of any given level of technological risk, has received consistent support. The remaining 3 hypotheses require additional empincal examination.

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