Dual Routes from Social Identity to Collective Opposition against Criminal Organisations: Intracultural Appropriation Theory and the roles of Honour Codes and Social Change Beliefs

Italian criminal organisations (COs) are a serious global threat. Intracultural Appropriation Theory (ICAT) holds that such groups exploit cultural codes of masculinity and honour to legitimise and lower resistance to their actions. Such codes are an important feature of Southern Italian group membership. A large survey (N = 1173) investigated the role of two previously under-examined facets of honour cultures – personal concerns for reputation, and female honour ideology. In addition, drawing on social identity theory, and testing a dual route hypothesis, this research investigated the role of beliefs about the necessity of social change in the articulation between identification, honour, and collective action intentions. Consistent with ICAT, and with previous research, male-honour related values uniquely predicted collective action intentions against criminal organisations. In addition, consistent with the dual route hypothesis: a) regional identification positively predicted social change beliefs which in turn explained stronger intentions to oppose COs collectively, and, b) regional identification was also positively associated with masculine honour which in turn predicted weaker intentions to oppose COs. The evidence supports the idea that social identity can have opposing effects on collective action in the same context, depending on which beliefs are mobilised

Don’t Tread on Me: Masculine Honor Ideology in the U.S. and Militant Responses to Terrorism

Using both college students and a national sample of adults, the authors report evidence linking the ideology of masculine honor in the U.S. with militant responses to terrorism. In Study 1, individuals’ honor ideology endorsement predicted, among other outcomes, open-ended hostile responses to a fictitious attack on the Statue of Liberty and support for the use of extreme counterterrorism measures (e.g., severe interrogations), controlling for right-wing authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, and other covariates. In Study 2, the authors used a regional classification to distinguish honor state respondents from nonhonor state respondents, as has traditionally been done in the literature, and showed that students attending a southwestern university desired the death of the terrorists responsible for 9/11 more than did their northern counterparts. These studies are the first to show that masculine honor ideology in the U.S. has implications for the intergroup phenomenon of people’s responses to terrorism.Yeshttps://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guideline

Counting and seeing the social action of literary form: Franco Moretti and the sociology of literature

This paper reviews Franco Moretti's use of statistics and techniques for visualizing the action of literary forms, and assesses their implications for the development of cultural sociology. It compares Moretti's use of such methods with the work of Pierre Bourdieu, contrasting the principles of sociological analysis developed by Bourdieu with Moretti's preoccupation with the analysis of literary form as illustrated by his accounts of the development of the English novel and the role of clues in the organization of detective stories. His attempt to use evolutionary principles of explanation to account for the development of literary forms is probed by considering its similarities to earlier evolutionary accounts of the development of design traits. While welcoming the methodological challenge posed by Moretti's work, its lack of an adequate account of the role of literary institutions is criticized, as are the effects of the forms of abstraction that his analyses rest upon