The Urban Street Gang after 1970

Abstract

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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