that the analysis, and especially the explanation of the analysis, is not as thoroughly developed as it could be. The book makes several compelling arguments, particularly about the relationship between race and technology, that merited further analysis and explanation, and I simply wished that Villa-Nicholas had written more. In the earlier chapters focusing on why it is important to understand the stories of Latina telecommunication workers, Villa-Nicholas does exemplary work of demonstrating how to show what is important by focusing on the experiences of a single group. She explains how and why Latina workers were left out of both women’s rights and Chicano rights movements and the consequences this had for their incorporation in telecommunications. In later chapters, though, it becomes less clear how Latina workers’ experiences and contributions were distinct from other workers through, for example, the tumultuous internal migration that came after divestiture. In sum, the biggest weakness of the book is that, at only 158 pages total, it did not say more. The book would be of interest to scholars of Latinx technology studies specifically, but also to readers interested in the history of telecommunications, the relationship between race and technology, or the development of technology generally. I particularly appreciated the way the book demonstrated the deep entanglement between the development of technological systems and the lives of the people whose labor went into developing those systems.

Existing literature regards flexibility and authority as key characteristics of informal justice. We further contend that the combination of the two is crucial for informal justice to be effective. We investigate the process of dispute resolution by a Chinese labor agency. Following the life cycles of a sample of 810 labor disputes, we find that this informal justice forum was efficient and effective, made possible by the combination of flexibility and authority. Flexibility means that the agency attracts certain types of cases that are usually screened out of the formal legal system and that agency officials use “informal,” hence flexible, techniques. Authority means that the administrative agency possesses additional powers over the disputants; hence, the disputants are under pressure to follow its suggestions and decisions. A comparative analysis of various cases of informal justice reinforces the importance of combining flexibility and authority. We further demonstrate that flexibility without authority is insufficient and that some informal justice forums are effective because they enjoy both.

The way in which citizens in developing countries conceptualize legality is a critical but understudied question for legal consciousness and legal mobilization studies. Drawing on participatory observations and extensive interviews from western China, this article explores the subjective interpretations of migrant wage claimants on law and justice behind their disruptive actions. Their perception of justice differs starkly from what the law stipulates as target, evidence and proper procedures. Who shall be held responsible? What constitutes evidence? When shall they be paid? How much? Their perceptions also differ from the attitude “against the law? found among members from disadvantaged social groups in the United States. The Chinese case of legal perception is shaped by the moral precepts ingrained in the culture, and more importantly, by the lopsided relationship between migrant workers and the political and business elite. It thus points to the daunting barriers in channeling the ever-growing number of social conflicts into court.

In order to respond to the ongoing debate over the Chinese people's sense of happiness and to assess the effects of macro-economic and policy changes on the life of ordinary people over the past decade, this study employs data from the Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS) to analyze the development and trends in the happiness (or subjective well-being) of the Chinese people over this period. Based on 5 time points and 44,166 samples, the study finds that the Chinese people's sense of happiness has risen steadily over the past decade, and that groups with different political affiliations, household registration, age, income, marital status and ethnicity have all witnessed, to varying degrees, a growing sense of happiness. Economic growth may be the crucial driving force here; if the economy contracts, people's sense of happiness may also fall. To maintain the coordinated development of the economy and society, more numerous and more detailed follow-up research on happiness needs to be conducted.

This article reviews social scientific research on the occurrence of genocide and mass killing, focusing on the underlying, contributing processes. Relevant studies are grouped by their primary analytic focus: (a) macro-level state and institutional processes, (b) political elites and policy decisions, (c) nonelite perpetrator motivation and participation, (d) social construction of victim group identity, and (e) local and regional variation within larger episodes. We also discuss issues relating to the conceptualization and definition of genocide, the utilization of different sources of data, methodological tendencies, and general analytic trends. Although recent studies show a promising move toward greater analytic disaggregation and engagement with various causal processes and outcomes at the meso and micro levels, genocide scholars must broaden their theoretical engagement with parallel fields of inquiry, continue to be creative in locating original data sources, and account for both positive and negative cases.

Drawing on 2,724 documents of adjudication decisions from Shanghai courts, this article tests the Galanter thesis that the stronger party tends to prevail over the weaker party in litigation. We find that the stronger parties not only win more often, but also do so by a large margin. Overall, institutional litigants fare better than individual litigants. When the litigants are classified by their organizational and social status, government agencies or government-related companies are the biggest winners, enjoying an enormous advantage, and farmers are the most disadvantaged underdogs, with other individuals and companies in between. When controlling for legal representation, these winning gaps remain significant and sizable. The edge of the stronger parties recurs across categories of cases in different issue areas of the law. Echoing previous comparative studies, we cast doubt on the party capability theory. We speculate that the causes of judicial inequality in China lie not only in resource gaps but also in the roots of the law and the nature of the court.

We study the propensity for protest in the context of individuals’ alternative choices in urban China. Depending on the number and quality of social ties (or guanxi in Chinese), individuals may resort to one of two alternatives: to engineer life-changing events through personal connections or to join others in labor protest. We call one “adaptation” and the other “voice.” As our working hypothesis, we first expect them to be mutually exclusive. That is, adaptation through guanxi networks may help diffuse the will to protest, as those who enjoy better guanxi networks would advance their class status through such networks. With data from a national survey, our analysis rejects this working hypothesis. Those who are better connected are not only more likely to adapt but also more inclined to voice, and the effect of social ties on protest is significantly smaller for those who are connected to people with power. The implications are twofold. First, our data not only confirm the well-known effect of social connections on protest, but also specify the effects caused by high-class versus low-class connections. Second, in a comparative vein, the individual decision making on adaptation and/or voice offers a glimpse into the intertwining domains of social space in contemporary China.

In Chapter 1, I propose two contrasting models of collective killings. The state-policy model traces the source of killings to a state's policy of elimination and expects the policy to be carried out by state organizations and military personnel. My community model, conversely, suggests that collective killings could occur absent a genocidal state policy, and local conditions could turn conflict into atrocities, perpetrated by civilian killers. In Chapter 1, I also present a series of factors based on aspects of state mobilization and state breakdown, which I argued would help promote killings at the local level. In Chapters 2 through 7, I present extensive evidence supporting the community model and casting doubt on the state-policy model. In 1967 and 1968, there was no central Chinese policy calling for the wholesale destruction of any segment of the population. Neither were the collective killings committed by professional execution squads coordinated by a central command. There are vast variations in the collective killings across provinces, counties, townships, and villages. The state-policy model is generally concerned only with national-level atrocities and conditions, but these patterns of killings call for serious attention to local conditions to explain them. Exploring the implications of these variations is the task I take up in this chapter. I address why some communities had extensive collective killings while similar communities did not – or, to put it differently, which factors account for the cross-unit variations?

The twin tasks of this book are to make historical and theoretical cases about collective killings in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. I want to explain what happened and why. For the historical case, I establish the facts and patterns of collective killings in 1967 and 1968 in two provinces during the Cultural Revolution. I also document key aspects of Maoism between the 1949 revolution and the eve of the extreme atrocities. These aspects – the formation and transformation of a rural culture, the creation and maintenance of a class divide, the social mobility of the rural population, and the demobilization of legal institutions – provide a historical narrative and backdrop for understanding the collective killings. A central theme in this narrative is “actually existing Maoism”: a set of practices that were not only inspired by the communist ideology but also shaped by real-life challenges and contradictions. The leaders, their cadres, and ordinary citizens did not follow a master plan in the revolutionary transformations but rather reacted to reality – in specific times and places – in a pragmatic and often ad hoc fashion, improvising as they went along. In this context, collective killings, like many other actions, were emergent actions rather than part of routine politics. The overall nature of the regime and its explicit policies are insufficient to account for these emergent outcomes.

In this appendix, I provide greater detail regarding the quantitative analyses of collective killings across counties in Guangxi and Guangdong Provinces, as analyzed in Chapter 8. I use two dependent variables: that is, whether the county had collective killings (used in the bivariate analysis in Tables 8.3 and 8.4) and the number of deaths caused by collective killings (used in the Poisson regression models in Table 8.5 and Table A3 herein). The source for the first variable is described in Chapter 2. I read the narratives in the xianzhi (i.e., county gazetteers) and decided whether there were collective-killing events in a county based on the number of deaths (i.e., ten or more in a given event) and the manner of killings. To compute the number of collective-killing deaths, I first obtained the total number of deaths during the entire Cultural Revolution. I then subtracted the deaths caused by the earlier persecutions and those caused by armed battles.

Three major narratives are spun in this wel come addition to the limited but ongoing analysis of the genocide in Darfur, and to the scholarly study of genocide more gener ally. One narrative concerns the absence of the criminological voice in accounting for genocide, not only in Darfur but more broadly and historically. The second con cerns the debate and politics shrouding the determination of the number of genocidal deaths in Darfur. And the third concerns the causes of the genocide and their inter connection, with an emphasis on the racial aspect of the genocide. The first narrative, written from the van tage point of two sociological criminologists,

Research on the political consequences of social movements has recently accelerated. We take stock of this research with a focus on movements in democratic polities and the United States in comparative and historical perspective. Although most studies demonstrate the influence of the largest movements, this research has not addressed how much movements matter. As for the conditions under which movements matter, scholars have been revising their initial hypotheses that the strategies, organizational forms, and political contexts that aid mobilization also aid in gaining and exerting political influence. Scholars are exploring alternative arguments about the productivity of different actions and characteristics of movements and movement organizations in the varied political contexts and institutional settings they face. Researchers are also employing more innovative research designs to appraise these more complex arguments. Scholarship will advance best if scholars continue to think through the interactions between strategies, organizations, and contexts; address movement influences on processes in institutional politics beyond the agenda-setting stage; situate case studies in comparative and historical perspective; and make more comparisons across movements and issues.

Drawing on data collected from district-level governments, this article studies how the Chinese state responds to labor protests in South China. It examines both the internal logic and operational patterns of the state response involving the local courts and an assortment of government agencies. Internal documents and interviews reveal an emerging mode of state reaction. In the context of protest, the courts and related government agencies engage protesters on the street, which often grants a favorable resolution. This "street as court-room'' is a result of the weak capacity of the legal system coupled with a government-wide campaign to build a "harmonious society.'' These findings compel researchers to reconsider the institutional boundaries of the prototypical court, the outcome of social protest, and the appropriate role of the courts in China.

Time-series analysis is used to assess the relationship between antiwar protests and congressional voting on war-related roll calls during the Vietnam era. Using protest event data coded from The New York Times and counts of roll-call votes generated from congressional voting data, we test for three specific mechanisms: disruptive protest, signaling, and public opinion shift. Extreme forms of disruptive protest are hypothesized as having a direct positive effect on congressional voting. Lohmann's signaling model posits exactly the opposite relationship between protest and policy. Especially extreme protests are expected to have a negative effect on both the pace and pro-peace direction of congressional action. Conversely, large (and more moderate) protests are expected to have a positive effect on House and Senate voting. The final mechanism, public opinion shift, depicts the relationship as indirect, with protest encouraging public opinion change, which, in turn, encourages increasingly favorable congressional voting. The results are somewhat mixed with respect to all three mechanisms, but suggest an interesting general pattern. The most extreme or threatening forms of protest (e. g., those featuring violence by demonstrators and/or property damage) simultaneously increase pro-peace voting while depressing the overall pace of congressional action. The reverse is true for more persuasive forms of protest (e.g., large demonstrations), which appear to increase the pace of voting while depressing the likelihood of pro-peace outcomes

Using data compiled from a variety of different sources, we seek to answer questions about the emergence and outcomes of women's collective action in the United States between 1956 and 1979. In particular, we examine hypotheses derived from political opportunity and resource mobilization theories about the emergence of women's protest. We also examine the consequence of women's collective action on congressional hearings and House and Senate roll call votes on women's issues. We find support for arguments about the effects of resources on the emergence of protest. We also find mixed support for arguments about the effects of political opportunity on the emergence of protest. Finally, we find little support for arguments about the effects of women's collective action on congressional hearings and House and Senate roll call votes on women's issues.