1. A Note on Social Theory and the American Street Gang

Venkatesh, Sudhir; Kontos, Louis; Barrios, Luis

doi:10.7312/kont12140-001

Cited by 15 publications

(15 citation statements)

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“…As Venkatesh (2003) argues, an individual’s motivations for, and investments in time and energy into the gang may change over time, “especially over the life course as youth mature and move in and through other social institutions. This basic principle of sociological reasoning, the hallmark in life-course research, has been missing in street gang scholarship” (p. 9).…”

Section: Turning Points and Desistance From Crimementioning

confidence: 99%

The Path and Promise of Fatherhood for Gang Members

Moloney¹,

MacKenzie²,

Hunt³

et al. 2009

British Journal of Criminology

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While an increase in research on criminal desistance has occurred in recent years, little research has been applied to the gang field. Using qualitative interview data, this article examines fatherhood as a potential turning point in the lives of 91 gang members in the San Francisco Bay Area. Fatherhood initiated important subjective and affective transformations that led to changes in outlook, priorities and future orientation. However, these subjective changes were not sufficient unless accompanied by two additional features: first, changes in the amount of time spent on the streets and, second, an ability to support oneself or one's family with legal income. Though fatherhood is no panacea, becoming a father did act as an important turning point toward desistance and motivator for change for some.

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Section: Turning Points and Desistance From Crimementioning

confidence: 99%

The Path and Promise of Fatherhood for Gang Members

Moloney¹,

MacKenzie²,

Hunt³

et al. 2009

British Journal of Criminology

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“…SeeCurry (2001) for a discussion of research on the proliferation of gangs in the United States and Bookin-Weiner &Horowitz (1983) andVenkatesh (2002) on the role of ideology and forms of knowledge production in gang research.Annu.Rev. Sociol.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Urban Street Gang after 1970

Coughlin

Venkatesh

2003

Annu. Rev. Sociol.

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This review discusses research on the urban street gang after the 1960s, the period in which social scientists began to conceptualize the gang outside of the social-problems framework. Street-gang research has changed dramatically in the past three decades in accordance with general shifts in sociological research, including developments in gender studies, economic sociology, and race and ethnic relations. This review addresses these major trends and debates and highlights suggestions for areas of future inquiry that build on innovations of contemporary scholars. 42 COUGHLIN VENKATESH American cities drew the country's attention to the status of its most disenfranchised youth. The inner-city, minority youth gang became the principal empirical object, and the gang was viewed primarily as a social problem, one involving the challenges to social integration faced by disenfranchised inner-city minorities. In effect, the fields of criminology and social work laid claim to gang research, to the diminution of those working in sociology departments. This review discusses street-gang research after the 1960s, the most recent significant period of change in this field. In this time, movements in cultural and gender studies, economics, and social history radically altered sociology. The reliance on human ecology theory and the social-problems approach to street gangs have both been called into question, and new perspectives have emerged. This review addresses some of the most important directions taken by social scientists in response to both shifts in the organization of sociological research and changes to the street gang. Two caveats are in order: First, although it is instructive to compare the intellectual historical development of street-gang research in America with other cities and countries (Hazlehurst & Hazlehurst 1998b), any such comparison would exceed the boundaries of this review. Comparative, cross-cultural, and global investigations of gang activity are beginning to emerge (see Hazlehurst & Hazelhurst 1998a and Klein et al. 2001 for two recent edited volumes), but they are not directly reviewed here. 1 Second, there are many studies of delinquency, psychology of deviance, youth violence, and so forth that touch on gangs indirectly or loosely consider gang activity as either a determining variable or an outcome. Because this review is directed primarily at identifying critical trends in gang research, i.e., those studies that take gang activity as a direct object of analysis, these tangential studies are not considered. We organize this review by outlining several of the most interesting debates in research and substantial bodies of work in emergent subfields that are dramatically altering our understanding of urban street gangs. We begin by reviewing the debate on the gang's involvement in entrepreneurial activity. We then turn to studies on female gangs and gang members and on broader issues related to gender. This subfield has not only produced one of the more substantial sets of studies on gangs in a vari...

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“…One can only understand the effect of any aspect of boys' lives in relation to others. Indeed, although this book is of course "about" gangs, it is more wide ranging in scope than much work in the delimited field of "criminology" (a point made, as well, by Venkatesh, 2003). It does not prefigure the role and importance of gangs in young people's lives but situates these organizations in a broader institutional matrix.…”

Section: The Situation Complexmentioning

confidence: 94%

The Situation Complex: Revisiting Frederic Thrasher’s The Gang: A Study of 1,313 Gangs in Chicago

Dimitriadis

2006

Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies

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Originally published in 1927, Frederic Thrasher's The Gang: A Study of 1,313 Gangs in Chicago is a panoramic, multilayered, richly detailed account of youth gangs-a milestone text of the Chicago School of Sociology. The most widely available version of The Gang is a highly edited edition published in 1963, which contained an extensive new introduction by noted sociologist James Short. I argue here for a return to the original text, as well as the work of Thrasher more broadly. Rereading this classic text in full, original form, I maintain, gives us fresh perspective on contemporary research and commentary on gang life. So commonly (now)the purview of the postpositivist and highly delimited field of criminology, The Gang returns us to questions of radical context, the multiple webs of influence and association that so marked studies of the period-a move long overdue.

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1. A Note on Social Theory and the American Street Gang

Cited by 15 publications

References 0 publications

The Path and Promise of Fatherhood for Gang Members

The Path and Promise of Fatherhood for Gang Members

The Urban Street Gang after 1970

The Situation Complex: Revisiting Frederic Thrasher’s The Gang: A Study of 1,313 Gangs in Chicago

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