Crime

Wherever people have lived together, they have found it necessary to develop rules of conduct. They need rules for the settlement of disputes. They also need rules for the organization of their governments. Law is the set of rules that the government enforces through its police, its courts, and its other agencies. In To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee demonstrates the importance of law in our communities, especially criminal law. Law makes it possible for men to live together peaceably in a community.

If there were no law, every man could do just as he pleased, with law, the people in a community know that the government will enforce rules that will make it possible for them to live together without conflict. The philosophy or science of law is called jurisprudence. There are two main kinds of laws. Civil or public law helps settle disputes between people or companies. Criminal law deals with crimes, or actions that cause serious harm to an individual or group.

Public law is the body of rules in which the government is directly involved. Public law regulates the relationships between individuals and the government. One group of rules in public law defines and limits the powers of the government. The part of public law most familiar to many persons is criminal law, which is the body of rules that we are commanded to obey. The government may fine those who do not obey, send them to jail, or even execute them. A number of smaller groups of rules also come under the general heading of public law.

International law is concerned with agreements among nations, problems of boundaries, and other questions arising from the relationships of one country with another. Constitutional law deals with the problems that have arisen about various clauses in the United States Constitution. Problems in constitutional law include the organization of the government and the guarantees of our liberties. Administrative law is the body of rules made by administrative or executive agencies of government.

The Interstate Commerce Commission, the Federal Aviation Administration, and the Federal Communications Commission are all examples of such an agency. Civil law includes the rules that regulate the relationships among people. Private law includes many smaller groups of rules. Some examples are the rules relating to contracts, personal injuries, and real estate. Most people think of only criminal law when they hear the word law. However, most lawyers and courts spend most of their time dealing with problems of private law.

These private law problems includes taxation, business affairs, the transfer of property, and the collection of money for people injured through the fault of others. Cases or proceedings in civil courts are often called lawsuits. Social conditions continually change, and so the law must also change or become outdated. Every nation changes its laws in the manner that its political system prescribes. In a dictatorship, only the top government leaders can change the law. Democracies, however, have developed four main methods of changing the law.

Democratic laws change by court decision, by legislation, by administrative action, and by the direct action of the people. Every independent country has its own legal system. The systems vary according to each country’s social traditions and form of government. However, most systems can be classed as either a common-law system or a civil-law system. The United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and other English-speaking countries have a common-law system. Most other countries have a civil-law system. Many countries combine features of both systems.

Law enforcement is one of the most important ways a government has of protecting its citizens. It usually refers to the action of police and the courts in catching and punishing criminals. However, a broad use of the term also includes the administration of justice in all law cases by the courts. Law enforcement is necessary to maintain order in a community, state, or country. Private citizens have more to do with law enforcement than simply obeying the laws. They should report to the authorities whenever they see a law being broken.

Every citizen has the right to arrest a person he sees committing a crime. In conclusion, law is one of the most basic social institutions and one of the most necessary. No society could exist if all people did just as they pleased, without regard for the rights of others, nor could a society exist if its members did not recognize that they also have certain obligations toward one another. The law thus establishes the rules that define a person’s rights and obligations. The law also sets penalties for people who violate these rules and states how government shall enforce the rules and penalties.

Listening to rap:

Cultures of Crime, Cultures of Resistance Julian Tanner, University of Toronto Mark Asbridge, Dalhousie University Scot Wortley, University of Toronto This research compares representations of rap music with the self-reported criminal behavior and resistant artirudes of the music’s core audience. Our database is a large sample of Toronro high school studenrs (n = 3,393) from which we identify a group of listeners, whose combination of musical likes and dislikes distinguish them as rap univores.

We then examine the relationship between their cultural preference for rap music and involvement in a culture of crime and their perceptions of social injustice and inequity. We find thar the rap univores, also known as urban music enthusiasts, report significantly more delinquent behavior and stronger feelings of inequity and injustice than listeners with other musical tastes. However, we also find thar the nature and strengths of those relationships vary according to rhe racial identity of different groups within urban music enthusiasts.

Black and white subgroups align themselves with resistance representations while Asians do not; whites and Asians report significant involvement in crime and , while blacks do not. Finally, we discuss our findings in light of research on media effects and audience reception, youth subcultures and post-subcultural analysis, and the sociology of cultural consumption. Thinking About Rap The emergence and spectacular growth of rap is probably the most important development in popular music since the rise of rock ‘n’ roll in the late 1940s.

Radio airplay, music video programming and sales figures are obvious testimonies to its popularity and commercial success. This was made particularly evident in October 2003 when, according to the recording industry bible Billboard mzgnzme, all top 10 acts in the United States were rap or hip-hop artists;’ and again in 2006, when the Academy award for Best Song went to It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp, a rap song by the group Husde & Flow. Such developments may also signal rap’s increasing social acceptance and cultural legitimization (Baumann 2007). However, its reputation and status in the musical field has, hitherto, been a controversial one.

Like new music before it (jazz, rock ‘n’ roll), rap has been critically reviewed as a corrosive influence on young and impressionable listeners (Best 1990; Tatum 1999; Tanner 2001; Sacco and Kennedy 2002; Alexander 2003). Whether rap has been reviled as much as jazz and rock ‘n’ roll once were is a moot point; rather more certain is its pre-eminent role as a problematic contemporary musical genre. Direct correspondence to Julian Tanner, Department of Social Science University of Toronto at Scarborough, 1265Military Trail, Scarborough, Ontario, Canada, MIC 1A4. Telephone: (416) 287-7293.

E-mail: Julian. Tanner@utoronto. ca. ” rh8 Uniiersily of North Carolina Press Social Forces 88121 693-722, December 2009 694 • Social Forces 88(2) In an important study of representations of popular music. Binder (1993) examined how print journalists wrote about rap and heavy metal in the 1980s and 1990s. While both are devalued genres (Roe 1995), she nevertheless contends that they are framed differently: the presumed harmful effects of heavy metal are limited to the listeners themselves, whereas rap is seen as more socially damaging (for a similar distinction, see Rose 1994).

The lyrical content of the two genres is established as one source of this differential framing: rap lyrics are found to be more explicit and provocative (greater usage of “hard” swear words, for example) than heavy metal lyrics. The second factor involves assumptions made (by journalists) about the racial composition of audiences for heavy metal and rap-the former believed to be white suburban youth, the latter urban black youth. According to Binder, rap invites more public concern and censorious complaint than heavy metal because of what was assumed to be its largely black fan base.

At the same time, she identifies an important counter frame, one component of which elevates rap (but not heavy metal) to the status of an art form with serious political content. In both the mainstream press (i. e.. The New York Times) and publications targeting a predominately black readership (i. e.. Ebony and/^i), she finds rap lauded for the salutary lessons that it imparts to black youth regarding the realities of urban living; likewise, rap artists are applauded for their importance as and mentors to inner-city black youth.

Thus, while rap has been framed negatively, as a contributor to an array of social problems, crime and delinquency in particular, it has also been celebrated and championed as an authentic expression of cultural resistance by underdogs against racial exploitation and disadvantage. How these differing representations of rap might resonate with audience members was not part of Binder’s research mandate. ^ Furthermore, while she does acknowledge that ournalistic perceptions of the racial composition of the rap audience are not necessarily accurate-that more white suburban youth, even in the 1980s and 1990s, might have been consuming the music than black inner-city youth-this acknowledgment does not alter her enterprise or her argument. At this point in time, when the listening audience for rap music has both expanded and become increasingly diverse, our research concerns how young black, white and Asian rap fans in Toronto, Canada relate to a musical form still viewed primarily in terms of its criminal and resistant meanings.

Researching Rap Much of the early work on audiences preoccupied itself with investigating the harmful exposure, especially the effects of depictions of violence in movies and TV on real life criminal events. Results have generally been inconclusive, with considerable disagreement in the social science research community regarding the influence of the media on those watching the large ot small screen (Curran 1990; and Longhurst 1998; Freedman 2002; Sacco and Kennedy 2002; Alexander 2003; Newman 2004; Savage 2004; Longhurst 2007).

Listening to rap

Listening to popular music has, on occasion, been said to produce similarly negative effects, although these too have proven difficult to verify. For example, in one high profile case in the 1980s, the heavy metal band Judas Priest was accused of producing recorded material (songs) that contained subliminal messaging diat led to the suicides of two fans. This claim was not, however, legally validated because the judge hearing the case remained unconvinced about a causal linkage between the music and the self-destructive behavior of two individuals (Walser 1993).

Strong arguments for the ill effects of media consumption rest on the assumption that audiences are easily and direcdy influenced by the media, with frequent analogies made to hypodermic syringes that inject messages into gullible and homogenous audiences (Abercrombie and Longhurst 1998; Alexander 2003; Longhurst 2007). In contesting this view of audience passivity, critics also propose that texts are open to more than one interpretation. Again, TV udiences have been studied more frequently than audiences for popular music, although research on the latter has illustrated how song lyrics are not necessarily construed the same way by adolescents and adults. Research conducted by Prinsky and Rosenbaum (1987) indicates that songs identified by adults as containing deviant content (references to sex, violence, alcohol and drug use, Satanism) were not similarly categorized by adolescents.

Evidence that there are diflferent ways of watching television or listening to recorded music has led to an alternative conception of audiences-one more concerned with what audiences do with the media than what the media does to audiences. The development within communications research of the uses and gratifications model (McQuail 1984) is one result, with TV once more the media form most commonly investigated.

Nonetheless, a few studies have documented how young people listen to popular music in order to satisfy needs for entertainment and relaxation (among other priorities), and utilize it as an accompaniment to other everyday activities, such as homework and household chores (Roe 1985; Prinsky and Rosenbaum 1987). More recent research has added identity construction as a need that popular music might fill for young listeners (Roe 1999; Gracyk 2001; Laughey 2006).

One particular usage emphasized by British cultural Marxists associated with the now Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies has focused attention on how active media audiences counter dominant cultural messages in their consumption of popular culture. In what has, by now, become a familiar story, a series of music-based, post-war youth cultures (Teddy Boys, Mods, Rockers, Skinheads, Punks) in the United Kingdom have been represented as symbolically resisting the dominant normative order (Hall and Jefferson 1976; Hebdige 1979).

This argument has, however, relied on a reading of cultural texts and artifacts for its evidentiary base, rather than observations of, or information from, subcultural participants themselves (Cohen 1980; Frith 1985; Tanner 2001; Bennett 2002; Alexander 2003). 696 • Social Forces 8S(2) More recently, the utility of the term subculture for understanding young people’s collective involvements in music has been questioned. The focus of this criticism is, once again, the Birmingham school and its conceptualization of subculture. Its critics argue that, nder conditions of post modernity, music audiences have fragmented, and young people are no longer participants in distinctive subcultural groups (Bennett 1999b; Muggleton 2000). Instead of subcultures, they are now involved v^^ith neo tribes and scenes (i. e. , Bennett 1999b; Bennett and Kahn-Harris 2004; Hesmondhalgh 2005; Longhurst 2007; Hodkinson 2008). Post subcultural research has been much less inclined than the Birmingham era researchers to decode and decipher texts, and much more likely to engage in studies of music and youth groups (Bennett 2002).

However, while there has been occasional work on modes of (female) resistance in the “tween scene” (Lowe 2004) and “riot girrrl scene” (Schily 2004), there has been no equivalent research on rap scenes and resistance. Examinations of audience receptions of rap are not numerous and have been of two main kinds: a few studies have explored how young people perceive and evaluate the music, while others have studied the harmful effects of rap by trying to link consumption of the music with various negative consequences.

An early study by Kuwahara (1992) finds rap to be more popular with black than white college students, and more popular among males than females. However, reasons for liking the music varied little by race, with both black and white audience members prioritizing the beat over the message. A more recent study by Sullivan (2003) reports few racial differences in liking the music, although black teenagers were more committed to the genre and more likely to view rap as life affirming (Berry 1994) than those from other racial backgrounds.

In a small but important study conducted in California, Mahiri and Connor (2003) investigated 41 black middle school students’ perceptions of violence and thoughts about rap music. In focus group sessions and personal interviews, informants revealed a strong liking for rap music, valuing the fact that it spoke to their everyday concerns about growing up in a poorly resourced community. They did not, however, like the way that rap music on occasion (mis)represented the experiences of black people in the United States.

They challenged the misogyny evident in some rap videos and rejected what they saw as the glamorization of violence. Overall, their critical and nuanced engagement with rap music fitted poorly with depictions of media audiences as easily swayed by popular culture (Sacco 2005). The search for the harmful effects of rap music has yielded no more definitive results than earlier quests for media effects.

While some studies report evidence of increased violence, delinquency, substance use, and unsafe sexual activity resulting from young people’s exposure to rap music (Wingood et al. 2003; Chen et al. 2006), other researchers have failed to find such a link or have exercised extreme caution when interpreting apparent links. One review of the literature, conducted in the 1990s, could find a total of only nine investigations-all of them Listening to Rap • 697 mall-scale, none involving the general adolescent population-and concluded that there was an even split hetween those that found some sort of an association between exposure to the music and various deviant or undesirable outcomes, and those that could find no connection at all Moreover, in those studies where the music and the wrongdoing were linked, investigators were very circumspect about whether or not they were observing a causal relationship, and if so, which came first, the music or the violent dispositions (Tatum 1999). A mote recent investigation conducted in Montreal is illustrative of such interpretative problems.

While a preference for rap was found to predict deviant behavior among 348 Frenchspeaking adolescents, causal ordering could not be established, nor an additional possibility ruled out: that other factors might be responsible for both the musical taste and the deviant behavior (Miranda and Claes 2004). The notion that rap is or can be represented as cultural resistance-the counter frame identified by Binder-has become increasingly prominent in the rap literature over the past 20 years (Rose 1994; Krims 2000; Keyes 2002; Quinn 2005). In his influential book.

Why White Kids Love Hip Hop: Wankstas, Wiggers, Wannabes, and the new Reality ofRace in America, Kitwana (2005) expounds at length on his emancipatory view of rap’s history and development. Kitwana sees hip-hop as a form of protest music, offering its listeners a message ofresistance. He also makes the additional claim that the resistive appeal of hip-hop is not restricted to black youth. Indeed, as the tide of his book suggests, he is patticularly interested in the patronage of rap music by white youth, those young people who might be seen as the contemporary equivalents of Mailer’s “White Negro” or Keys’ “Negro Wannabes. (Keyes 2002:250) In his view, the global diffusion of rap rests on the music’s capacity for resonating with the experiences ofthe downtrodden and marginalized in a variety of cultural contexts. Quinn (2005) similarly explains the crossover appeal of gangsta rap in the United States in terms ofthe “common sensibilities and insecurities shated by post Fordist youth. ” She continues: “many young whites, facing bleak labor market prospects, were also eager for stories about fast money and authentic belonging to ward off a creeping sense of placelessness and dispossession. (Quinn 2005:85-86) Thus, rap’s appeal is as much about class as it is about race. Nor is the resistive view of rap restricted to the North American continent. At least one French study-conducted in advance ofthe riots in the fall of 2005 -has noted how French Rap has become the music of choice for young people of visible minority descent who have grown up in the suburban ghettos (Les Cities) of major cities. They have been routinely exposed to police harassment on the streets, subjected to prejudice and discrimination at school, and struggled to find decent housing and appropriate jobs (Bouchier 1999, cited in Miranda and Claes 2004).

The idea that popular music might serve as an important reference point for rebellious or resistive adolescents is not a new one. As we have already noted, this is how a British school of subcultural analysis once interpreted the cultural activity of wotking-class youth in the United Kingdom (Hall and Jefferson 1976; Hebdige

Social Forces 88(2) 1979). Some attempt has been made to understand rap fandom in similar terms. Bennett’s (1999a) ethnographic study, set in Newcastle, reveals how one group of white rappers translate the racial politics of blacks into the language of class divisions in the United Kingdom.

However, for the most part there has been limited application of this kind of analysis to young people’s involvement with rap music. Rap scholars who construe the music as an authentic expression of cultural resistance directed against exploitation and disadvantages at school, on the streets, or in the labor market, do so primarily without much input from the young people who make up its listening audience. Because they have not often been canvassed for their views about the music, we do not know to what degree they share in or identify with the message of resistance readily ound in content analysis of the rap idiom (Martinez 1997; Negus 1997; Krims 2000; Stephens and Wright 2000; Bennett 2001; Sullivan 2003; Kubrin 2005; Quinn 2005; Lena 2006). Thus contemporary rap scholarship follows British subcultural theory in gleaning evidence of resistance from the texts, not the audience. Resistance is sought, and found, in the words and music rather than in the activities and ideologies of subcultures or audience members. We can suggest, echoing Alexander’s (2003) earlier critique of British cultural studies, that the audience for rap music has been theorized rather more thoroughly than it has been investigated.

The Present Study The present study is concerned with three key questions: First, is there a relationship between audiences for rap and representations of the music? Second, as compared to other listening audiences, are serious rap fans participants in cultures of crime and resistance? Third, if such a link is found, what are the sources of variation in their participation in these cultures of crime and resistance? The need to address these questions, as we see it, emerges from several limitations in the existing research on rap.

These limitations are as follows: First, there is a significant disjuncture between dominant representations of the music as a source of social harms and evidence unambiguously supportive of this proposition. Second, the case for a resistant view of rap music is usually advanced, as we have already intimated, by examination of the designs and intentions of musical creators, both artists and producers, as well as music critics. We do not know whether or not resistant messages register and resonate with those who listen to the music.

Third, we do not have an accurate gauging of the sociodemographic composition, particularly racial and ethnic, of the audience for rap music. Rap’s dominance of the youth market is widely understood as a crossover effect-the original black audience now joined by legions of white fans (Spiegler 1996; Yousman 2003). However, purchasing habits-the usual arbiter for claims about rap’s increasing popularity with white consumers-may not be an entirely reliable measure of either rap’s popularity or racial and ethnic variations therein (Krims 2000; Quinn 2005).

The system devised by the recording industry to gauge record Listening to Rap • 699 sales-Nielson Soundscape-does not gather data on the race, or indeed any other personal characteristic, of purchasers. What it does do is categorize sales in terms of whether they were made in retail stores in high-income locations or in lowincome locations. Record companies, journalists or academics then choose to equate those high-income sales with white suburban youth, and low-income sales with inner-city black youth, but are doing so without any direct measures of the racial background or identity of buyers (Kitwana 2005).

Moreover, it has been argued that sales figures “under represent the taste preferences of the poor. ” (Quinn 2005:83) As Rose (1994) explains it, in the black community, particularly in impoverished neighborhoods, many more rap CDs are listened to than bought-a single purchase being passed on from one fan to another. Similarly, homemade tapes and bootleg CDs are often produced and shared within local fan networks.

The implications of this point are clear enough: the appropriation of rap music by suburban white teens might not be as extensive as is commonly supposed. Finally, we do not know whether or how the rap audience relates to the dominant frame of the music as a catalyst for crime and delinquency or to the counter frame of the music as an articulator of social inequity. The mainstreaming of rap may have cost the genre its underground or counter-culture status as protest music, or made it less attractive to delinquent rebels.

Rap also may play no part in crime or resistance subcultures because, under post modern conditions, young people have become increasingly eclectic and individualized in their musical tastes; the close relationship between musical tastes and lifestyles, implied by subcultural theory, no longer applies. On this formulation, therefore, we would not expect to find strong connections between a preference for rap music and subcultures of crime and subcultures of resistance. On the other hand, reasons for believing that rap music may be a basis for subcultural lifestyles, at least among black youth, are more compelling.

At the time that we were conducting our research there was considerable debate, in the local media and among local politicians, about issues involving race and crime- and the desirability of collecting race-based crime statistics, for example. Contributing to this debate were findings from another study, confirming what black youths in Canada have always suspected, namely that they are much more likely to be arbitrarily stopped and searched by police officers than are members of other racial and ethnic groups-even when their own self-repotted deviant activity is statistically controlled for (Wordey and Tanner 2005).

In addition, contemporaneous research on the media coverage of race and crime in Toronto newspapers carried out by Wortley (2002), found black people disproportionately portrayed in a narrow range of roles and activities (principally those involving crime, sports and entertainment) than members of other racial and ethnic groups; and when featured in crime stories, depicted primarily as offenders. Capricious policing and media may therefore contribute to a sense of injustice among black youth, a sense of injustice that has them gravitating to rap as an emblem of cultural resistance. 00 • Social Forces SS{2) Commercial success and artistic valorization has not diminished rap music’s capacity to provoke moral panic. The music is still seen as threatening, dangerous and socially damaging by many political figures and established authority. ‘ Previous research suggests that negative media coverage ofthe cultural preferences and practices of adolescents often intensifies subcultural identifications (Cohen 1973; Fine and Kleinman 1979; Thornton 1995). Rap based moral panics may therefore tighten connections between the music and delinquent lifestyles and/or resistive attitudes and behaviors.

The lack of attention paid to rap’s consumers renders these questions relatively open ones, the meaning of rap music still to be discovered. Methods Whereas most contemporary research on rap focuses on those who create the music-artists and producers, and those who write about it, music critics-we pose questions about rap’s audience. Further, while audience studies usually employ qualitative data-gathering techniques (for example, Morley 1980; Radway 1984; Shively 1992), we use the methods of survey research. We are more concerned with how audience members interact with the music than with the issue of cause and effect.

We are interested in how music might be used as a resource in their everyday lives (Willis 1990; DeNora 2000), how it might contribute to identity formation (Roe 1999) and, especially, how audiences might align themselves with (or distance themselves from) cultures of crime and resistance. Nonetheless, in our analyses, we treat rap fandom as a dependent variable. While there is considerable academic and public debate about whether music produces or is a product of cultural activities, legal or otherwise, existing research has failed to provide a compelling or consistent rationale for any particular causal logic.

As we have seen, the idea that exposure to rap music causes crime is not unequivocally supported in the research literature. Research on resistant youth cultures, by contrast, is much more likely to reverse the relationship and see musical style as a result of subcultural activity (Willis 1978; Hebdige 1979). Hebdige, for example, infers that punk rock in the United Kingdom was a cultural response to the subordination of existing working-class youth groups. Laing (1985) has countered that punk the musical genre existed before punk the subculture.

In the absence of agreement about the direction of the relationship between musical taste and cultural practices, our decision to operationalize rap appreciation as a dependent variable is made more for pragmatic, heuristic reasons than unassailable theoretical ones. Our strategy is to focus on listening preferences rather than purchasing habits. By asking students to report on and evaluate the music that they like, dislike and in what combinations, we gain a clearer and more detailed picture of where rap is situated in the consumption patterns of groups of students differentiated by, among other factors, their racial identity.

Our goals are to: (1. distinguish students with a serious, exclusive taste for rap from more casual fans; (2. to calculate the

Listening to rap

701 size and racial makeup of rap music’s prime audience; and (3. to map relationships between that core audience and resistant and delinquent repertoires. Few surveys of general populations of young people have established any kind of connection between rap and deviancy, net of other factors. We contend that rap’s reputation as a corrosive force is validated by that linkage, and that without it that representation becomes more ontestable. A similar logic applies to the relationship between rap and social protest. The claim that the music carries a serious message-that it is an expression of resistant values and perceptions-is substantiated with evidence of a link between the music and a collective sense of inequity, and weakened by its absence. Data The data for this research are drawn from the Toronto Youth Crime and Victimization Study, a stratified cross-sectional survey of Toronto adolescents carried out from 1998 through 2000 (Tanner and Wordey 2002).

Self-administered questionnaires were completed by 3,393 Toronto students ages 13-18, from 30 Metropolitan Toronto high schools in both die Cadiolic (10 schools) and larger (20 schools) systems. Within each school, one class from each grade, 9 (ages 13 and 14) through 13 (ages 18 and 19), was randomly selected. The overall response rate was 83 percent (83. 4% for Catholic vs. 83. 1% for ), and is a conservative estimate as it was based on the number of students enrolled in each class rather than those present the day of the study.

Informed consent was given for participation in the study. Surveys were completed during class under the supervision of a member of the research team (and without a teacher present) and took approximately 45 minutes to complete. The survey asked young people about a broad range of topics, including family life, educational experiences, leisure activities, delinquent involvement, victimization experiences and so forth. The survey instrument was designed by members of the research team and evolved out of a series of 11 focus groups with adolescents in Toronto schools.

The completed survey was reviewed by a series of institutional ethics boards, including those at the University of Toronto, the Toronto Public School Board and the Catholic School Board. As the survey does not include high school dropouts, institutionalized youth and street youth, it is a school sample and thus any generalizations speak only to the experiences of school-based adolescents. Our sample is ethnically and racially diverse and is representative of the Metropolitan Toronto high school population. Measures

Musical Preferences Guided by Bourdieu’s work (1984) and Peterson’s recasting of musical taste in terms of omnivorous and univorous patterns (1992), we focus our attention on 702 • Social Forces 88(2] how musical choices are combined: if young people liked (or disliked) one style or genre, what other styles or genres did they like or dislike (what Van Eijck 2001 has referred to as “combinatorial logic”). Indicators of musical taste were derived from the question: “How much do you like each of the following types of music? Respondents were then asked to evaluate each of 11 contempotary musical genres: Soul, Rhythm and , Jazz, Hip/Hop and Rap, Reggae and Dance Hall, Classical and Opera, Country and New Country, Pop, Alternative (including Punk, Grunge), Heavy Metal (Hard Rock), Ethnic Music (traditional/ cultural), and Techno (Dance). Musical tastes were assessed on a five-point Likert scale that addresses whether respondents liked the musical genre very much, quite a lot, a little bit, not very much or not at all.

Unlike previous research that dichotomized musical tastes, focusing exclusively on the musical genres most liked (Peterson and Kern 1996) or disliked (Bryson 1996), we target the level of appreciation (or lack of appreciation) each respondent has for a particular musical genre. For space considerations a detailed overview of the clustering procedure has been omitted but is available upon request. We employed a two-stage cluster analysis (hierarchical agglomerative and ^-means) procedure to derive groupings of adolescent musical tastes.

Cluster analysis assembles respondents based on their common responses to questions/ measures, and is useful for identifying relatively homogenous groups, groups that are highly intetnally homogenous (members are similar to one another) and highly externally heterogeneous (members are not like members of other clusters) (Aldenderfer and Blashfield 1984). Employing cluster analysis techniques, we uncovered seven musical taste clustets.

The largest group (n = 616) was the Club Kids, composed of those who report an above average enjoyment of techno and dance, mainstream pop, and hip-hop and rap. Next were the Urban Music Enthusiasts (n = 605). Members of this group combined a strong appreciation of Rap and Hip Hop with considerable disinterest in most other musical styles. These adolescents are the primary focus ofthe current study. Then there was a fairly large (n = 482) group of youth, the New Traditionalists, who have an above average liking of and opera, jazz, soul, R&B, country music and mainstream pop.

The fourth largest (n = 425) group, the Hard Rockers, comprised a sizeable number of heavy metal and hard rock, alternative, punk and grunge fans. Then there was a surprisingly large (n = 384) group of adolescents, the Musical Abstainers, who are only marginally interested in any kind of music. The group we call the Ethnic Culturalists (n = 380) were so described because of a dominant preference for a quite wide range of ethnic music, as well as a greater than average liking for soul and R&B, jazz, classical music and opera, country music techno and dance, and mainstream pop.

Social Forces 8H2) likes and dislikes, but also with respect to sociodemographic, socioeconomic class indicators, and measures of , cultural capital, leisure patterns and subcultural delinquency (Tanner, Asbridge and Wortley 2008). Social Injustice, Property Crime and Violent Crime The sense of injustice that rap is said to speak to often involves the dealings that young people have with the police and courts.

Six items in our questionnaire invited respondents to evaluate their perceptions of the equity of the , fairness in the educational system, and more general perceptions of the equality of opportunity in Canada. Some of the questions addressed racebased inequality, while others invoked age, class- and gender-based discrimination. These six items were condensed into a scale and standardized (alpha = . 65) with higher values indicating greater feelings of social injustice. Respondents were also invited to report their participation in illegal activities.

Our measures of crime and delinquency covered a spectrum of activities, varied by type and seriousness. Two scales items are constructed based on the following question: “How many times in the past year have you done any of the following things? Would you say never, once or twice, several times, or many times? ” The first scale captures involvement in property crime, including self-reported property damage, theft under $50, breaking into a car, stealing a car, stealing a bike, breaking and entering a home, drug dealing and theft over $50 ..

The second scale measures violent offending and includes carrying a hidden weapon such as a gun or knife in public, using physical force on another person to get money or other things, attacking someone with the idea of seriously hurting him or her, hitting or threatening to hit a parent or teacher, getting into a physical fight with someone, and taking part in a fight where a group of friends were up against another group (alpha = . 81). SES, School Measures and Cultural Capital

The impact of students’ sociodemographic backgrounds is initially examined in terms of demographic variables-age, gender, Canadian identity (“Do you think of yourself as Canadian? “-a measure of perceived inclusion in Canadian society), and race. Socioeconomic status is captured through indicators of parents and family situation, and includes measures of parental educational attainment (whether or not they had attended postsecondary education), family intactness (whether or not respondents grew up in a two-parent household), a measure of subjective social class based on perceptions of family income.

Next we include a set of measures related to educational attainment, experiences and expectations: self-reported grades (proportion receiving mostly As), skipping school, suspension from school, educational stream (general or academic stream) and a more evaluative question about the degree of importance that young people attached to education. Listening to Rap • 705 Finally, we include a measure of respondents’ own cultural capital activities.

While mainly used as an explanation of educational and occupational attainment (DiMaggio 1982; DiMaggio and Mohr 1995; Aschaffenburg and Maas 1997), measures of cultural capital have also been deployed to uncover dispositions, or orientations, towards the arts (Bourdieu 1984; Swartz 1997). We use it here as a further measure ofthe characteristics and lifestyles ofthe audience for rap-its possession bestowing status upon individuals and the music that they listen to, its absence denoting the opposite.

Our seven-item cultural capital index comprises both traditional highbrow pursuits-going to the symphony, visiting museums-and the sorts of respectable leisure activities (playing a musical instrument, attending cultural events, going to the library, reading a book for pleasure and ) that contribute to the cultural resources available to young people. The sum of these seven items is standardized and has an alpha of . 65. Descriptive statistics and other details on all measures can be found in Appendix A. Analytic Procedure Multivariate logistic regression is employed in four separate analyses.

First, a strong preference for Rap and Hip/Hop-being an Urban Music Enthusiast-is regressed on sociodemographic, socioeconomic status and school measures. Next, we regress being an Urban Music Enthusiast on sociodemographic, socioeconomic status and school measures for three racial groups-white, black and Asian/South Asian youth. For each racial group we run four separate models that include baseline measures only, followed by models that add social injustice, property crime and violent crime. All analyses were conducted with the Stata 8. computer program (StataCorp 2001) using the survey commands that account for intra-cluster correlation due to the complex sampling strategy. Results We can quickly confirm the enormous popularity of rap with our respondents. It has the highest average approval rating of any musical genre, with some 33 percent of students saying that they liked it “very much,” and 21 percent saying that they liked it “quite a lot. ” Rap clearly appeals to a broad range of young listeners and is, therefore very much part of a common music culture among .

But our cluster analysis also isolates a group of students who enjoy rap music and little else. Examining the approval radng for each music genre relative to the cluster means, where scores approaching 1 indicate a strong approval ofthe genre, and scores approaching 5 indicate a strong dislike, demonstrates that Urban Music Enthusiasts have a strong preference for rap and hip-hop, reggae and dance hall; a more moderate liking for soul and R&B, and a below average liking for all other musical genres.

We think that our Urban Music Enthusiasts fit the profile of music univores-individuals who appreciate a few musical styles while disliking everything 706

Social Forces mi) else-as described in the research of Peterson (1992) and Bryson (1997). Bryson links univorous taste among American adults to low status, particular racial and ethnic groups, and regional differences. She also notes that univorous taste, when compared to omnivorous taste, is more likely to be related to what she calls “subcultural spheres. ” (Bryson 1997:147) Our Urban Music Enthusiasts appear to be rap univores who may also be adhering to “sub-cultural spheres. Of the 605 Urban Music Enthusiasts in our sample, 275 {A6%) are black, 117 (19%) are white, 115 (19%) are Asian or South Asian, and 98 (16%) are from other racial groups. These figures tell us that young black people still comprise the central component of the rap audience; moreover, roughly 57 percent of black youth is Urban Music Enthusiasts). At the same time, we observe evidence of a significant racial crossover. White Urban Music Enthusiasts constitute 8. 6 percent of the white students in our sample, while Asian Urban Music Enthusiasts make up 9. 5 percent of all Asian students.

The racial composition of the Urban Music Enthusiast taste culture prompts two further questions: Eirst, of the black students surveyed, what factors in addition to race predict their univorous interest in rap? Second, of white and Asian students, what factors encourage their involvement in an essentially black music culture, an involvement that clearly sets them apart from other white and Asian students? Table 2 provides results for Urban Music Enthusiasts membership regressed on sociodemographic, socioeconomic status and school measures, with separate analyses for white, black and Asian/South Asian young people.

Paying particular attention to the findings for each racial group, what is common to all three groups of Urban Music Enthusiasts is that, compared to other students in our sample, they are poorly endowed with cultural capital and are not especially good students. Few other background factors have any significant or consistent impact upon a disposition towards Urban Music. For white students, parental SES, family structure and subjective social class, have no bearing upon their musical preferences, whereas school suspension and poor grades are strong predictors.

For black students. Urban Music enthusiasm is more common among younger students and those less likely to identify as Canadian. Being a black youth identified as an Urban Music Enthusiast is also strongly related to growing up in a single-parent family and skipping school. For their part, Asian/South Asian youth are something of an anomaly-among them. Urban Music Enthusiasm is positively associated with social class and having well-educated mothers-but like other Urban Music Enthusiasts it is also strongly related to school suspension and skipping school.

We are less interested, however, in the sociodemographic and socioeconomic factors that may lead to being an Urban Music Enthusiast than in the relationship between being a Urban Music Enthusiast and representations of rap-either as part of a culture of resistance and/or as a basis for subcultural delinquency. Tables 3 through 5 describe the distribution of being an Urban Music Enthusiast across three racial groups (white, black, Asian/South Asian) as shaped by perceptions Listening to Rap

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Dependent Measures Yes ~ Urban Music Enthusiasts No Social Injustice (index of amount of agreement or Z-score disagreement regarding the following statements: people from my racial group are more likely to be unfairly stopped and questioned by the police than people from other racial groups; discrimination makes it hard for people from my racial group to find a good job; discrimination makes it difficult for people from my racial group to get good marks in school; students from rich families have an easier time getting ahead than students from poor families; everyone has an equal chance of getting ahead in Canada; it is rare for an innocent person to be wrongly sent to jail, with an a=. 65). continued on the following page 722  Social Forces 88 Appendix A. ontinued Coding Variables Independent Measures Property Crime (index of frequency of involvement Z-score in breaking into cars, minor theft under $50, property damage, stealing bikes, breaking and entering into homes, stealing cars, major theft over $50, and drug dealing, with an pi=. 86), _ . ^ Violent Crime (index of frequency of carrying a hidden Z-score weapon like a gun or knife in public, using physical force on another person to get money or other things; attacked someone with the idea of seriously hurting that person, hit or threatened to hit a parent or teacher, getting into a physical fight with someone, and taken part in a fight where a group of friends were up against another arouD. with an a=. 81). Mean/ Cases Percent 3344 3288 Copyright of Social Forces is the property of University of North Carolina Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or

Environment and undermining local cultures. To what extent Is this true in Hong Kong? You should give both the advantages and disadvantages of Hong Kong’s tourist industry but your essay should support one side only.

Tourism is travel for recreational, leisure or business purposes. It has become a popular global leisure activity, which is of vital importance for many countries, due to large intake of money for businesses with their goods and services and the opportunities for employment in the service industries. This rapid expanding industry shows both positive and negative effects.

Hong Kong is an attractive and vibrant city that worth tourists’ travelling as we can see many tourists in some tourist spots every day, for instance, Central, Causeway Bay, Tsim Sha Tsui, Mong Kok and so on. However, tourism in Hong Kong has long been criticised for damaging the environment and undermining local cultures.

First and foremost, tourism can promote job opportunities. A good example is the operation of the Hong Kong Disneyland. It attracts more fresh graduates and young adults to find jobs and work there, and hence increase employment rate of Hong Kong.

Undeniably, under the background of rising job opportunities, tourism can stimulate economic growth. As more and more tourists around the globe visit Hong Kong, this increases foreign exchange earnings and boost sales of shops. To cater for tourists’ needs, there will be improvement of facilities or infrastructure such as roads, buildings, airports and communication systems, which may be improved to meet growing demands.

Although tourism can bring us benefits, its drawbacks cannot be disregarded.

Tourism may damage traditional culture. Tourists visit to Hong Kong will focus more their attention on shopping than seeing some popular tourist spots related to traditional cultures. Although economic growth is stimulated, Hong Kong will soon become a consumer society.

Tourism could cause pollution. The non-biodegradable rubbish left behind by many tourists often ends up being dumped into landfills, rivers and the sea.

Furthermore, young people will grow up in a deteriorating environment and be affected by what they see tourists do and then follow their behaviours such as drunkenness, drug abuse and gambling. In some serious cases of crimes, the relationship between two countries may be worsen because of the records of criminals.

In my view, tourism has often been criticised for damaging the environment and undermining local cultures. When you walk on the streets and beaches, you can see a lot of waste and litter on the ground, even though local citizens throw some of them on the floor.

Moreover, the reason why tourism undermines local cultures is tourists enjoy material comfort more than spiritual satisfaction. They realize that there are lots of cheap goods in Hong Kong and then rush into the shops and buy whatever they can without consideration. This forms a consumer culture. When they find something they have bought is useless, they will throw them away immediately. This definitely damages the environment and becomes a vicious cycle as time goes by.

To remedy the problem, the local government should implement some effective measures to make tourist industry more traditional and environmentally-friendly, for example, holding more traditional activities so as to attract tourists and let them know more about local culture. Education of tourists to be a responsible person in their home countries is extremely important. Although different countries have different rules and laws, ‘When in Rome, do as Roman do’, tourists should strictly follow the rules when they are traveling to Hong Kong or even other places. If they do not obey the law, they would receive heavy penalty and even imprisonment, no matter they are tourists who visit Hong Kong.

In this report, we will focus on the relationship between crime rates and economic conditions. When we experience an economic downturn, what effect will it have on us? We asked this question in the interviews which we conducted, and we concluded that the unemployment rate is an important factor for people to feel that the economy is becoming worse, as I will discuss later. Second, if we lose our jobs, see our salaries decrease, and see depreciation in purchasing power, we may struggle to make a living and look for other sources of money to survive. This situation might lead some people to commit robbery. The strain of grief from making a living during bad conditions might lead some people to become desperate or irritated. The more people who become desperate or irritated, the more crimes there would be. For example, a conflict over debt might escalate to assault or murder.

Third, with a decreased salary, some people might start to feel inequality in that they are not receiving adequate compensation for the work that they are doing. Given this situation, their ethical level might fall to the point that they commit white color crimes. Thus, logically thinking, crime rates would increase as economic conditions worsen. Our hypothesis is that crime rates increase as economic conditions worsen. The crime rate which we use for our project consists of crimes of murder and non-negligent manslaughter, forcible rape, aggravated assault, property crime, robbery, burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft.

To break it down, prominently money related crimes would include property crime, robbery, burglary, larceny and motor vehicle theft. Murder and non-negligent manslaughter, forcible rape and aggravated assault are not crimes motivated by money directly, and those seem to have nothing to do with economic conditions. However, rates of murder and non-negligent manslaughter, forcible rape and aggravated assault would also increase if economic conditions got worse. In my thinking, people might commit those violent crimes because of stress, depression or desperation caused by poverty.

Therefore, we look at crime rate as a whole, not segmented. For qualitative analysis section For qualitative analysis, we interviewed three people concerning crime and economic conditions. To know how citizens feel about crime and economic conditions, I chose two people who work in private companies and one person who works in a public organization. Two of them are not married, and one has a family. Their ages are in the range of 30-50 years old.

I asked the following four questions. 1. Under what kind of economic conditions would you think that the economy had gotten worse? 2. Do you think it’s true that crime rates would increase as economic conditions worsen? Why? 3. If you lose your job and have no way to earn money, do you think you would commit a crime to make a living? 4. Do you have any friends or acquaintances who committed a crime because he or she didn’t have another way to earn money due to worsened economic conditions?

For quantitative analysis section

According to Rosentfeld & Fornango (2007), disagreement exists over how best to measure the economic conditions that are most relevant to criminal activity. And the unemployment rate is by far the economic indicator of choice in research on the impact of economic conditions on crime rates (p.736). Arvanites & Defina argued persuasively for the use of a broader indicator than the unemployment rate to measure crime-relevant economic conditions (as cited in Rosentfeld & Fornango, 2007, p.738).

And they use real Gross State Product (GSP) per capita, which is a state-level analog for Gross Domestic Product (GDP), to represent the totality of economic conditions with a potential influence on crime (as cited in Rosentfeld & Fornango, 2007, p.738). On the other hand, Rosentfeld & Fornango (2007) argued that no indicator measures the impact of unemployment, income, or other conditions on collective perceptions of economic hardship (p.739).

Taking their arguments into consideration, to examine how economic conditions affect crime rates, we still use the unemployment rate as an economic indicator in my research. The unemployment rate indicates the rate of people who currently do not have a way of making a living or earning money. And based on the interviews, even if people would never commit a crime in a normal situation, if they could not feed or house themselves or their families, they may resort to stealing or other crimes to survive if they were desperate.

This suggests that the unemployment rate is one of the contributing factors for a higher crime rate. Based on the interviews, the unemployment rate is an important factor for people to feel that the economy is becoming worse. Therefore, the unemployment rate indicates the economic conditions in light of crime rates. With this indicator, we examine the crime rate which includes murder and non-negligent manslaughter, forcible rape, aggravated assault, property crime, robbery, burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft rates of Pakistan between the period 1999-2008.

There is a lot of research concerning the relationship between unemployment and crime rates. However, as Kleck and Chiricos (2002) pointed out, employment in low pay, part-time, and contingent jobs could have substantial motivational consequence for crime apart from any effects of unemployment. And undoubtedly, such”underemployment” is a major contributor to poverty. The reason that I use unemployment rate instead of discouraged workers rate is that regardless of the motivation for looking for a job, people under unemployment do not have a stable income. And that means that there is still a comparatively high possibility for them to commit a crime for money.

I have taken the Pakistan’s 10 years unemployment rate and crime rate to examine the relationship between crime rate and economic conditions. As Long ; Witte argued, the relationship between specific societal economic conditions and crime rates remains ambiguous, though the search for links between specific societal economic conditions and crime rates has an extensive history in the sociological literature (as cited in Devine, Sheley ; Smith, 1988, p.407

International Business Law

Case brief

Title:    Camel Manufacturing Co. v. United States

686 F. Supp 912 (1988)

Court of International Trade

Facts:

The plaintiff imported nylon tents weighing over thirty pounds into the United States. These tents were designed to hold up to nine people and were used by people who camped outdoors solely or who camped outdoors while engaging in other activities like fishing, hunting and canoeing.
The plaintiff entered the tents as “sports equipment”.

In the case of The Newman Importing Co. Inc v. United States 415 F. Supp 375 (1976), the court had ruled that certain light tents used in backpacking were sports equipment because the activity of backpacking was found to be a sport.

Issue:

The plaintiff questioned the classification of its goods as “Textile articles not specially provided for”. Such goods bore a duty of 25 cents per pound plus 15 percent ad valorem.

The plaintiff believed its goods should have been classified as “sports equipment” which bore only 10 percent ad valorem import duty. The plaintiff argued that “camping out” should be regarded as a sport so that these tents could be considered sporting equipment.

Decision:

The court found that since the tents were too heavy to be considered sporting equipment, and could not expand the term ”sports” to include camping out, the plaintiff’s claim for classification was denied. Judgment was issued dismissing the claim.

Opinion:

I agree with decision of the court based on the reasons given. Also, I believe that the plaintiff only found it necessary to file for re-classification because it was undergoing liquidation.

English law is made up primarily of Civil and Criminal Law. Civil Law is concerned with the the Laws of Tort and Contract. Civil law can be defined as that area of law which is concerned with private disputes that occur between individuals or between individuals and organisations and where a proceedings in court is initiated by the aforementioned. In contrast, criminal law seeks to punish those that has done wrongs against the community. For example, a person who decides to take the life of someone else commits murder. The community by way of its government has a duty to protect itself from being murdered.

The result is Criminal Law which is enforceable by the State and initiated by the Police. Therefore criminal law is said to protect the community and punishes those that breaks the law with a fine, imprisonment or community sentences. Whereas, civil law seeks to compensate party who has suffered wrong. Civil law covers many areas of everyday daily life, most notable are domestic relations law like divorces and child custody law, probate like wills and estates, employment like agency and working hours laws, and personal injury law. Under pining those laws are Tort and Contract Law.

A high level definition of tort law is that it deals with wrongs or injuries inflicted on one party by another and usually the parties involved are unknown to each other until something occurs which results in the tort action. Contracts on the other hand deals with the roles, relationships and obligations of parties that are engaged in a formal agreement. Under civil law an example of tort is acts of carelessness, or failure to act which result in injury or loss to another person. An example is a driver who fails to drive properly and as a result of that failure injures a pedestrian.

This incident can give rise to negligence which is the failure to take reasonable care to avoid injury or loss to another person. However in order to prove a negligent claim, it must be proved that there existed a duty of care on the driver to not cause harm to others. The test of this duty of care is that the court will need to determine that a reasonable person would expect that a certain result might follow from an action. Therefore, by not driving properly the driver mounts the pavement and hits the pedestrian, if the result is foreseeable for a reasonable person, then liability may be imposed for the action.

In comparison, contract law is an agreement between two persons where one binds himself, with respect to the other, to give something or to render some service. As such, a contract is said to be binding with obligations, and if not met, may lead to an action in civil court. For example a plumber hired to undertake the repair of a leaky facet has entered into a contract to repair the leaking facet in exchange for payment, if he fails to repair the facet within the terms of the agreement, there might not be any obligation to pay him as the terms of the contract has not met.

To conclude, civil law covers several area of laws and is primarily concerned with private individuals or companies. The use of the term civil law as a blanket term to cover tort and contract is not confusing as the actions undertaken by the individuals will be indicative of the area of the law that is applicable. The principles are distinguishable, tort usually involves persons who have not entered into a contract or a formal relationship whereas contracts are legally binding agreements established by two or more persons.

Where there might be a blurring of the distinctions is where there arises a case of tort while undertaking a contract. Such as an accident in the workplace where there exist a contract of employment. Bibliographies “Civil Law” Directgov http://www. direct. gov. uk/en/CrimeJusticeAndTheLaw/Thejudicialsystem/DG_4003097 “Criminal Law” Directgov http://www. direct. gov. uk/en/CrimeJusticeAndTheLaw/Thejudicialsystem/DG_4003097 “Tort” Stanford University http://plato. stanford. edu/entries/tort-theories/

Hand’s wife gave birth to a baby eight months after their marriage. Han was under the Impression that the baby belonged to his wife’s cousin. Han told everyone that It was a premature birth. This explained why the baby died so soon; nevertheless, It was actually the wife who killed the baby by smothering It with her breasts. For the rest of Mr.. And Mrs.. Hand’s marriage, Han did not approach his wife and ask her if the baby was his. It seems to me that Han does not face his problems, but runs away from them or take the easy way out. For example, Han did not want to ivories his wife because he did not want there to be any wrong on him.

If Han had confronted her about the possible affair as well as the death of their baby, their marriage would have gone in a completely different direction that did not end in one of them killing the other. I do not mean to say that they would have lived happily ever after or anything, but it definitely would have helped their relationship with each other. The birth and death of the baby symbolizes a new beginning for Han. “The child’s death seemed Like retribution for everything and I decided that I should be as ignoramus as possible”.

Han replaced the love for his wife with a tremendous hatred towards her. He thought of divorcing her, but having recently converted to Christianity he did not want there to be any wrong by his doing. Hand’s actions cause me to think of him as the kind of person who works hard to please everybody. I mean, his Job is to entertain people. Becoming a Christian definitely made him an even greater person in his audience’s eyes. When he was in the courtroom he told the judge that he did not know if he was guilty or not, he decided to tell the truth.

I decided that the best way of being acquitted would be to make a clean breast of everything”, “Why not be completely honest”. That that is the kind of thing someone who wants to please people would say in his situation. In my opinion Han did not mean to kill his wife; on the contrary, subconsciously he did kill her on purpose. Han would never hit his wife. Yes he was harsh, but never did he physically harm her. Of course that was Just because his conscious told him that that was wrong. Deep down Han wanted to hurt her and rid of her. Even though the