Rural communities make up much of America's heartland, yet we know little about their social organization, and how elements of their social organization relate to crime rates. The current study sought to remedy this gap by examining the associations between two measures of social organization - collective efficacy and social trust - with a number of structural community characteristics, local c...

This article elaborates and extends Sutherland’s [Principles of criminology (4th ed.), Lippincott, Philadelphia, Sutherland (1947)] concept of differential social organization, the sociological counterpart to his social psychological theory of differential association. Differential social organization contains a static structural component, which explains crime rates across groups, as well as a...

Until a few decades ago, the police were mainly a reactive bureaucratic organization that moved from one criminal event to the next, according to the degree to which the outside world required its services. Since then the police have abandoned the emphasis on law enforcement with regards to petty crime and public order. More recently the police have developed community policing as an important ...

Although numerous theories suggest that voluntary organizations contribute to lower crime rates in neighborhoods, the evidence for this proposition is weak. Consequently, we propose a dynamic perspective for understanding the relationship between voluntary organizations and neighborhood crime that involves longitudinal analyses and the measurement of the age of organizations. By using longitudi...

Using a proprietary dataset of 667 companies around the world that experienced whitecollar crime we investigate what drives punishment of perpetrators of crime. We find a significantly lower propensity to punish crime in our sample, where most crimes are not reported to the regulator, relative to samples in studies investigating punishment of perpetrators in cases investigated by U.S. regulator...

The explanation of crime has been preoccupied with individuals and communities as units of analysis. Recent work on offender decision making (Cornish and Clarke, 1986), situations (Clarke, 1983, 1992), environments (Brantingham and Brantingham 1981, 1993), routine activities (Cohen and Felson, 1979; Felson, 1994), and the spatial organization of drug dealing in the U.S. suggest a new unit of an...

Municipalities worldwide are under increasing pressure to reduce the amount of solid waste ending up in landfills. One way of doing so is to increase household participation in recycling. Although existing research identifies several factors affecting household recycling behaviour, South Africa poses a unique situation with regard to attitudinal and spatial factors. Socio-political transformati...