In contrast to a recent survey conducted by Miller and Simpson, two earlier surveys of adults, one conducted in 1972 and the other in 1982, reported that women scored higher than men on measures of what Grasmick and Bursik recently have called perceived threats of shame and embarrassment, as well as legal sanctions, for violating the law. Hagan's power-control theory, coupled with trends in labor force and household composition, is used to predict a decline over time in the magnitude of the effect of sex on perceived threats of sanctions. The 1982 survey is merged with an identical one conducted in 1992 to determine whether men and women have become more alike in their perception of these threats. Evidence supporting the predictions from power-control theory is found for theft but not for assault. The findings are discussed in the context of various theories and previous research concerning gender, crime, and social control.

Focusing on the independent and powerful pre–martial law Philippine Supreme Court, we investigate the impact of the establishment and breakdown of authoritarianism on the court's performance of the functions of conflict resolution, social control, and administration. We develop hypotheses concerning and models of the impacts of the onset, consolidation, and breakdown of martial law authoritarianism under Ferdinand Marcos on that court's handling of the three functions. Using Box-Jenkins time series analysis methods, we assess the impacts of the onset, consolidation, and breakdown of Marcos's authoritarianism on the Supreme Court's functional performance. In our analysis, authoritarianism had no impact on the Court's performance of the conflict resolution function; authoritarianism's onset increased and its breakdown decreased the Court's performance of the routine administrative function; and authoritarianism's onset decreased but its consolidation increased the Court's performance of the social control function.

This study examines the development of organizational probation. That this sanction emerged from the long process of developing organizational sentencing guidelines as a clearly specified, widely available, and often binding sanction represents an unexpected statutory outcome: an interventionist, nonmarket sanction during a time of deregulatory free market policy and ideology. This outcome is explained through a multi-theoretical framework emphasizing the structural capacity of the primary lawmaking agency, the United States Sentencing Commission, the role of middle-level state workers, and the bounded rationality of strategic decisions made by business strategists and lobbyists.

Origin stories are a distinctive form of narrative. In their account of how something “began to be,” such stories connect past and present, clarify the meanings of important events, reaffirm core norms and values, and assert particular understandings of social order and individual identity. The parents of children with disabilities tell strikingly similar origin stories about the day their child was first diagnosed. Such stories not only explore the meanings of a transformative event but also draw implicit connections between past encounters with medical specialists and present encounters with educational specialists as mandated by an important federal statute. This article, based on an ethnographic study of parents, children, and educators, traces the implicit references in the parents' origin myths to a set of key oppositions that reflect their experiences within the statutory framework of special education: cooperative versus unilateral decisionmaking, lay versus professional knowledge, and authority versus legal empowerment. The article also compares the ways in which law and myth address the conflicting perspectives of disability specialists and of the parents and children themselves.