Joel Best
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 78233 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Joel Best |
| PRENOMES | Joel |
| SOBRENOME | Best |
| ASSINATURA | BEST J |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of Delaware |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8943-5427 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 136 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 1923 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 133 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 3 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1966 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 12 |
Mind the gap
Constructionist social problems theory argues that social problems are best understood as processes: they emerge when people define certain conditions as troubling and make claims to persuade others that action is needed. Despite this focus on claimsmaking, relatively little attention has been devoted to how analysts decide which claims warrant investigation. We argue that analysts are often drawn to what we term “the gap”: a disconnect between w…
Constructing Sex Panics
This critical review examines the emergence of the term “sex panic,” its definitions and uses, and its relationship to the concept of moral panic. Sex panics can be triggered by both social changes and technological innovation. Social shifts include changes in gender norms, race relations and sexual scripts as well as increasingly liberal attitudes on pre-marital sex and LGBTQ behaviors, which led to concerns over the contexts for sexual behavior…
The Introduction of Chickens Into Norway and Their Early Use
Chickens reached areas of northern Europe by the 6th to 5th century bce , but their dispersal into Scandinavia appears delayed. Here we present a thorough assessment of chicken remains recovered from Borgund, a deserted late Viking Age–Medieval urban site located near Ålesund on the west coast of Norway. Direct and indirect dating of 20 chicken bones gives an age range from the Viking Age to the boundary between the High and Late Medieval. The Bo…
Empire of Purity
I read banned books
Sociologists should encourage dissenting voices about public issues
How I Became an Expert—and Came to Understand Its Limits
Denial
Thinking about Unsettling Times
Dreams of a Lifetime
Dreams of a Lifetime: How Who We Are Shapes How We Imagine Our Future. Karen A. Cerulo and Janet M. Ruane. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022. Sociology often trades on a sort of exoticism; it expands our horizons by exploring relatively unfamiliar social scenes. But there is another sociological tradition that asks us to consider what seems at first glance to be mundane, ordinary. This was the turf Erving Goffman staked out in his v…
Clocks, Calendars, and Claims
Social problems claims use rhetoric and other tools of symbolic communication to persuade audiences that some troubling condition is important and needs to be addressed. This paper considers how common measures of social time are employed as rhetorical elements in social problems claims. It is argued that time units operate as temporal frames that contribute to the structure of claims, articulate core meanings, and facilitate spread into relevant…
Covid ‐19 and U.S. Disputes Over Authority, 2020–2021
COVID-19 is very different from the cases typically studied by constructionist analysts of social problems: it emerged quickly, spread widely, and affected many aspects of social life. As such, it offers important opportunities to reconsider the constructionist model. We focus on three issues-metrics, masks, and vaccines-where COVID-19 disputes about authority led to different alliances among several categories of claimsmakers. Our point is that …
Redefining the timing and circumstances of the chicken's introduction to Europe and north-west Africa
Little is known about the early history of the chicken ( Gallus gallus domesticus ), including the timing and circumstances of its introduction into new cultural environments. To evaluate its spatio-temporal spread across Eurasia and north-west Africa, the authors radiocarbon dated 23 chicken bones from presumed early contexts. Three-quarters returned dates later than those suggested by stratigraphy, indicating the importance of direct dating. Th…
Estimating the age of domestic fowl (Gallus gallus domesticusL. 1758) cockerels through spur development
Determining the age of bird remains after the cessation of growth is challenging due to the absence of techniques such as tooth eruption and wear available for mammals. Without these techniques, it is difficult to reconstruct hunting strategies, husbandry regimes, and wider human-animal relationships. This paper presents a new method, developed from a collection (n = 71) of known-age specimens of domestic fowl (Gallus gallus domesticusL. 1758), f…
The role of birds at Çatalhöyük revealed by the analysis of eggshell
Frank Furedi, How Fear Works
Social Problems
Can Normalization Save Society-or at Least the Sociology of Deviance
One of the critiques of the sociology of deviance has come from what Kitsuse (1980) called “tertiary deviants”–individuals and movements objecting to their classification as deviants. In the forty
Middle-Range Future Claims
The extraordinary social and economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has generated many claims about the middle-range future-the period beginning in the late summer or early fall of 2020 and projected to last for some months or years. This paper surveys those assertions and seeks to explain the factors that led to them. Exploring questions about future claims can expand the scope of social problems theory
The Bumblebee Flies Anyway
Incubated eggs in a Roman burial? A preliminary investigation on how to distinguish between the effects of incubation and taphonomy on avian eggshell from archaeological sites
Society of Fear
Knock, Knock-Who's Scared
The "knockout game"--youths assaulting strangers at random with the goal of knocking them unconscious with a single blow—attracted intense attention in the United States for a brief period near the end of 2013. This paper examines the history of a set of claims about similar behaviors preceded that knockout game's eventual celebrity. It demonstrates the difficulty of successfully constructing a new crime problem; it took decades before a combinat…
Big Pictures
American Nightmares
In an accessible and droll style, well-known sociologist Joel Best shines a light on how we navigate these anxious, insecure social times. While most of us still strive for the American Dream—to graduate from college, own a home, work toward early retirement—recent generations have been told that the next generation will not be able to achieve these goals, that things are getting—or are on the verge of getting—worse. In American Nightmares , Best…
Beth Akers and Matthew M. Chingos, Game of Loans
Interaction Ritual
"Not then, men and their moments. Rather, moment and their men," writes Erving Goffman in the introduction to his groundbreaking 1967 Interaction Ritual, a study of face-to-face interaction in natural settings, that class of events which occurs during co-presence and by virtue of co-presence. The ultimate behavioral materials are the glances, gestures, positionings, and verbal statements that people continuously feed into situations, whether inte…
Rhetoric in Claims-Making
Journal Article Rhetoric in Claims-Making: Constructing the Missing Children Problem Get access Joel Best Joel Best California State University Correspondence to: Department of Sociology, California State University, Fresno, Fresno, CA 93740. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Social Problems, Volume 34, Issue 2, 1 April 1987, Pages 101–121, https://doi.org/10.2307/800710 Published: 31 July 2014
The Razor Blade in the Apple
This paper examines the widespread belief that anonymous sadists give children dangerous treats on Halloween. A review of news stories about Halloween sadism from 1958 to 1983 suggests that the threat has been greatly exaggerated. Halloween sadism can be viewed as an urban legend, which emerged during the early 1970s to give expression to growing fears about the safety of children, the danger of crime, and other sources of social strain. Urban le…
Careers in Deviance and Respectability
By examining the analogy between deviant and respectable careers, this paper refines the concept of deviant career. Compared to respectable careers, especially occupational careers in formal organizations, deviant careers develop within an ambiguous and unstable structural context. Deviant careers do not move through established sequences of well-defined positions; career pathways do not always lead upward; career progress does not always bring i…
Justice Ignited
Victimization and the victim industry
The identification of poultry processing in archaeological ceramic vessels using in-situ isotope references for organic residue analysis
Poultry products are rarely considered when reconstructing pottery use through organic residue analysis, impinging upon our understanding of the changing role of these animals in the past. Here we evaluate an isotopic approach for distinguishing chicken fats from other animal products. We compare the carbon isotopes of fatty acids extracted from modern tissues and archaeological bones and demonstrate that archaeological bones from contexts associ…
First words
Killing the Messenger
Journal Article Killing the Messenger: The Social Problems of Sociology Get access Joel Best Joel Best University of Delaware Direct correspondence to: Joel Best, Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice, University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19716-2580. E-mail: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Social Problems, Volume 50, Issue 1, 1 February 2003, Pages 1–13, https://doi.org/10.152…
The Disadvantage of A Good Reputation
Social scientists generally presume that a good reputation has advantages. Yet the Walt Disney Corporation, a firm that has long benefited from a reputation for producing wholesome popular culture, attracts more than its share of efforts to link it to various social problems. In particular, conservative moralists argue that Disney in fact produces morally questionable products, progressive critics claim that Disney's messages help preserve social…
Giving it away
The Social Organization of Deviants
In this paper, we present a framework for understanding the social organization of deviants—the patterns of relationships between deviant actors. Deviants organize in forms of varying sophistication. Beginning with the least sophisticated form, we discuss loners, colleagues, peers, mobs and formal organizations. A comparative analysis of these five forms suggests that organizational sophistication has several consequences for deviants and social …
Prize Proliferation 1
Recent decades have been characterized by growing numbers of awards, prizes, and honors distributed by a wide range of social worlds—prize proliferation. This article examines how claims for—and counterclaims against—establishing prizes lead to more awards being given. Unlike most constructionist analyses that explore how centralized claims‐making campaigns construct social problems, this study of prize proliferation illustrates how localized, in…
Why Don't They Listen to Us? Fashion Notes on the Imperial Wardrobe
For sociology to successfully “go public,” its voices need to be heard. This article offers lessons about bringing attention to sociological texts. It suggests strategies for getting non-sociologists to heed what sociologists have to say
Deviance May Be Alive, but Is It Intellectually Lively? A Reaction to Goode
In a recent article in this journal, Goode (2003) Goode, Erich. 2003. "The MacGuffin That Refuses to Die: An Investigation into the Condition of the Sociology of Deviance.". Deviant Behavior, 24: 507–33. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar] counters claims that deviance is "dead" by arguing that (a) deviance classes continue to enroll large numbers of students, (b) people continue committing deviant acts, and (c) socio…
Road Warriors' on 'Hair-Tragger Highways
Media constructions of social problems usually rework the claims of activists and other primary claimsmakers. However, the news media acted as primary claims-makers in discovering and reporting the 1987 Los Angeles freeway violence problem. The press drew upon cultural resources in constructing this problem, applying a conventional template for social problems stories and using familiar imagery to depict freeway shootings. The social organization…
Beyond Case Studies
Most constructionist analyses of social problems are case studies; these focus attention on the particulars of the case at hand. Analysts have devoted less attention to the ways cases can be connected. This paper presents a typology of such connections, based on five elements: the problem, the frame, the claims-makers, place, and time. The typology identifies ways each of these elements can serve as a basis for connecting different campaigns to c…
Too Much Fun
Toys are a frequent subject of contemporary claims concerning social problems. Rooted in our culture's longstanding ambivalence regarding leisure and its concerns about children's vulnerability, claims about troublesome toys also reflect anxiety about children's increased susceptibility to non-familial influences, their growing access to toys, and an expanded toy industry, as well as an active social movement sector. Typically, these claims argue…
Reflections
What, We Worry
Inevitably, more is forgotten than is remembered; what is lost to memory may be viewed as collective amnesia. This article considers the development of qualitative sociology as a distinct social world within the discipline; its emergence reflects sociology's growth and shifts in publishing practices that encouraged sociology's division into separate specialties. However, these developments have costs: ethnography is increasingly divorced from its…
Redefining the timing and circumstances of the chicken's introduction to Europe and north-west Africa
Little is known about the early history of the chicken ( Gallus gallus domesticus ), including the timing and circumstances of its introduction into new cultural environments. To evaluate its spatio-temporal spread across Eurasia and north-west Africa, the authors radiocarbon dated 23 chicken bones from presumed early contexts. Three-quarters returned dates later than those suggested by stratigraphy, indicating the importance of direct dating. Th…
Whatever Happened to Social Pathology? Conceptual Fashions and the Sociology of Deviance
Social scientific concepts go in and out of fashion. Social pathology was once a popular title for undergraduate sociology courses and textbooks, but it fell out of favor about fifty years ago. Similarly, there is evidence that fewer contemporary sociologists are using the concept of deviance in their analyses. This article sketches a natural history of sociological concepts that denote categories of troubling conditions; it argues that such conc…
Social Progress and Social Problems
Although significant social progress characterized the twentieth century, sociologists usually avoid acknowledging progress for fear of encouraging complacency about social problems. In four paradoxical ways, progress raises concern about social problems. The paradox of perfectionism is that optimistic beliefs in social perfectability highlight failures to achieve perfection and thereby foster pessimism. The paradox of proportion is that reducing…
Blumer’s dilemma
The Emergence of Trendsetters for Fashions and Fads
Analyses of fads and fashions often note the importance of trendsetters whose early adoption of novelties provides an example for others to follow. However, trendsetting is usually taken for granted; there is no effort to explain why some groups assume fashion leadership. This article seeks to account for the rise of kogaru (stylish high-school girls) as trendsetters in 1990s Japan. We argue that trendsetting requires resources—particularly leisu…
The Public Servaivt
Police Reform in the United State
The Labelling of Deviance
The Introductory Sociology Survey
Economic Interests and the Vindication of Deviance
Sociologists have tended to neglect vindication, the process by which deviant behavior becomes redefined as respectable or legitimate. The few studies emphasize the importance of moral persuasion in bringing about vindication. Tobacco's early history suggests that economic interests can also play an important role. In the early seventeenth century, Europeans viewed tobacco as a deviant drug; but in spite of continued moral opposition, it was vind…
The Social Organization of Deviants
In this paper, we present a framework for understanding the social organization of deviants—the patterns of relationships between deviant actors. Deviants organize in forms of varying sophistication. Beginning with the least sophisticated form, we discuss loners, colleagues, peers, mobs and formal organizations. A comparative analysis of these five forms suggests that organizational sophistication has several consequences for deviants and social …
The Social Control of Media Content
Careers in Deviance and Respectability
By examining the analogy between deviant and respectable careers, this paper refines the concept of deviant career. Compared to respectable careers, especially occupational careers in formal organizations, deviant careers develop within an ambiguous and unstable structural context. Deviant careers do not move through established sequences of well-defined positions; career pathways do not always lead upward; career progress does not always bring i…
The social organization of deviance
The social organization of deviance refers to the structure of the deviant transaction, the pattern of relations among its roles. Deviant transactions can be arrayed along a dimension of complexity. Three forms are distinguished: individual deviance can be carried out by a single actor; deviant exchange requires two deviant actors in reciprocal roles; and deviant exploitation needs an offender and a target Organizational complexity has consequenc…
Careers in Brothel Prostitution
The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 12, No. 4 (Spring, 1982), pp. 597-619. ??1982 by The MIT Press. Journal homepage https://www.mitpressjournals.org/loi/jinh
Crime as Strategic Interaction
Extortion's social organization can be distinguished from that of other predatory crimes In extortion, an extortionist threatens to injure a hostage unless the target agrees to pay a ransom The target must cooperate for the exchange to take place. Extortion features considerable tactical maneuvering; control of information, presentation of character, deceit, the nature of the hostage and the ransom, and the possibility of repeated extortionate tr…
Studying Deviance
Organizing Deviance
The Razor Blade in the Apple
This paper examines the widespread belief that anonymous sadists give children dangerous treats on Halloween. A review of news stories about Halloween sadism from 1958 to 1983 suggests that the threat has been greatly exaggerated. Halloween sadism can be viewed as an urban legend, which emerged during the early 1970s to give expression to growing fears about the safety of children, the danger of crime, and other sources of social strain. Urban le…
New Ethnographies
Reflections
Guerrilla Minstrels
Rhetoric in Claims-Making
Journal Article Rhetoric in Claims-Making: Constructing the Missing Children Problem Get access Joel Best Joel Best California State University Correspondence to: Department of Sociology, California State University, Fresno, Fresno, CA 93740. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Social Problems, Volume 34, Issue 2, 1 April 1987, Pages 101–121, https://doi.org/10.2307/800710 Published: 31 July 2014
New Ethnographies
Jewish Settler Violence
Crime, Shame and Reintegration
Male Dominance and Female Criminality
Harris's theory of deviant type-scripts predicts higher female participation in deviance when male dominance is low. This paper offers two tests of the theory. Arrest statistics show the proportion of homicides committed by females is higher in states with high male dominance, while imprisonment statistics reveal no relationship between male dominance and the sex ratio of inmates. The discussion suggests that there may be multiple type-scripts fo…
Images of Issues
Road Warriors' on 'Hair-Tragger Highways
Media constructions of social problems usually rework the claims of activists and other primary claimsmakers. However, the news media acted as primary claims-makers in discovering and reporting the 1987 Los Angeles freeway violence problem. The press drew upon cultural resources in constructing this problem, applying a conventional template for social problems stories and using familiar imagery to depict freeway shootings. The social organization…
Missing Children
Sociology (94 obras) · Political science (59 obras) · Psychology (49 obras) · Criminology (37 obras) · Computer Science (35 obras) · Law (28 obras) · History (26 obras) · Philosophy (26 obras) · Epistemology (25 obras) · Social science (25 obras)