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Supplementary Lecture Notes for Week 5

All of the readings over the past two weeks, as well the readings this week, are related to social

disorganization in some way. As you already know, social disorganization theory was originally

developed many decades ago by Shaw and McKay at the University of Chicago. However, its

most important applications in the recent past are based on extensions and expansions of the

theory. Before discussing those extensions, I will provide a brief review of Shaw and McKay’s

original formulation of the theory. Then we will discuss some of the ways in which it has been

extended. Much of the readings from Robert Sampson’s book, Great American City , will

continue to expand on the theory, as will the book Divergent Social Worlds , which we will read

later this semester. By the end of the semester, you will be an expert in social disorganization

theory!

To review, Shaw and McKay argued that crime rates will be higher in neighborhoods with higher

levels of poverty, racial and ethnic heterogeneity, and residential mobility. That is, they expected

crime rates to be highest in neighborhoods that were poor, that had a diverse mix of racial and

ethnic groups, and where people were constantly moving in and out. To understand the basis of

these arguments, it is important to keep in mind that Shaw and McKay were writing at a time

when dramatic social and demographic changes where occurring in the city of Chicago, and in

the United States overall. Largely due to the shift to an industrial economy and the wave of

urbanization that it entailed, Chicago rapidly developed from a small town of about 30,000

people in 1850 to a large, densely populated metropolis of over 3 million people in 1930. During

that time, Chicago also experienced a massive wave of immigration, initially from Western

European countries such as Germany and England, and later from countries in Central, Eastern,

and Southern Europe. Toward the end of this period, Chicago also experienced a very large

influx of African-Americans, which was part of the broader “Great Migration” in the United

States wherein blacks migrated in large numbers from the rural South to manufacturing centers

in the Northeast and Midwest where jobs were most abundant.

These dramatic socioeconomic changes in Chicago were occurring at the same time that

American urban sociology (and eventually its descendant, criminology) was emerging and

developing as a discipline at the University of Chicago. Its scholars were especially dedicated to

identifying and understanding the effects that these rapid changes were having on residents,

neighborhoods, and the city as a whole. Shaw and McKay were among these scholars. They were

specifically interested in explaining why certain neighborhoods in Chicago remained high in

crime despite the fact that the composition of people living in those neighborhoods was

constantly changing. Before this emergence of the Chicago School, most theories of crime were

micro-level ( remember that from above!) . Such theories argued that certain types of individuals

were more likely to engage in crime, so neighborhood crime rates were high simply because

those types of individuals tended to live there. However, Shaw and McKay observed that crime

rates in some neighborhoods remained high despite the fact that they changed from being

predominantly German neighborhoods, to predominantly Italian, to predominantly Black, and so

Page 1 on. Moreover, when a racial/ethnic group moved out of those high crime neighborhoods and into

lower crime neighborhoods, crime in those new neighborhoods tended not to increase. Therefore,

they argued there was something about the neighborhood that caused it to be higher in crime, not

something about the types of individuals that lived there–a macro-level explanation.

Now that we understand a little more about the historical context within which Shaw and McKay

were writing, it is not surprising that they pointed to major socioeconomic trends of that period

as explanations for high crime in neighborhoods. They argued that these processes of

industrialization, urbanization, and mass immigration created neighborhoods with a constant

turnover of residents (people moving in and out), as well as a diverse mix of languages and

cultural backgrounds among the groups that lived there. This impeded the development of strong

social ties, cohesion, and collective norms within these neighborhoods, which in turn made it

more difficult to control neighborhood residents from engaging in crime. Shaw and McKay

found support for their theoretical arguments using extensive and innovative (for that time)

statistical analyses.

Though Shaw and McKay have had a lasting impact on criminology through the development of

their theory, the empirical research that they and others conducted had some important

shortcomings. First, though social disorganization was thought to cause crime in neighborhoods,

some researchers measured social disorganization using crime itself. Thus, they were essentially

arguing that high crime in a neighborhood caused high crime in that neighborhood—not a

particularly fascinating insight! Second, though at times Shaw and McKay were quite clear about

why they thought things like high residential turnover and ethnic heterogeneity caused high

crime rates, they were unable to directly test those hypotheses. For example, the figure below

presents a simple causal model that links residential mobility to high crime rates in

neighborhoods. Specifically, it suggests that a large amount of turnover in neighborhood

residents (residential mobility) causes residents to have fewer social ties (e.g. weaker friendship

networks and less neighboring), which leads to lower levels of informal surveillance by

neighborhood residents (informal social control), which leads to higher crime.

The early research by Shaw and McKay and others was only able to establish the relationship

between residential mobility and crime rates, without testing the “in-between” characteristics

(called “mediating” characteristics) that explain why residential mobility is associated with crime

rates. As you read earlier this semester in the article by Kubrin & Wo (2016), some of those

mediating characteristics are things like social ties, friendship networks, and informal social

control. Earlier this semester we had a lively discussion about the role of neighborhood ties, and

the chapters from Sampson’s book that you read last week and this week provide additional

research evidence showing that neighborhoods with these characteristics tend to have lower

levels of crime.

Page 2residential

mobility weak

social ties less informal

surveillance higher

crime rates The chapter by Kubrin & Wo also introduced the concept of collective efficacy , and Chapter 7 in

Sampson’s book discusses it at much greater length. In fact, most of the chapters in Sampson’s

book address collective efficacy at least to some extent, which is not surprising given that he has

been a very important researcher on this topic. As you will read, the notion of collective efficacy

raises the possibility that strong social ties may not be necessary for reducing crime as long as

neighborhood residents are 1) willing to intervene for the good of the neighborhood (e.g. when

they see people “causing trouble” or “up to no good”), and 2) trust their neighbors to do the

same. Extensive research over the past decade has provided considerable evidence to support this

argument, and you will read about much of that research in this week’s readings.

I want to briefly discuss some interesting research (which we don’t have time to read in this

course, unfortunately) which suggests that sometimes dense social networks in neighborhoods

can actually have the opposite effect—in some cases they may actually lead to higher levels of

crime. In an excellent book called Black Picket Fences by Mary Patillo-McKoy, she explains that

in neighborhoods with a very high degree of familiarity among residents, people may be

reluctant to report crime and delinquency to the authorities. In her study using qualitative

methods of direct observation and in-depth interviews, she describes one example where a

neighborhood resident didn’t want to officially report the criminal behavior of a young man in

the neighborhood because “his mama is such a sweet lady” (p. 763). This serves as an example

of the potential adverse consequences of dense social networks in neighborhoods.

Other researchers have since provided additional support for this argument. A series of studies by

Christopher Browning and his associates (2004, 2009) have labeled this concept “negotiated

coexistence,” hypothesizing that as strong ties and social interaction increase in a neighborhood,

residents (both offenders and others) become increasingly interdependent. As argued by social

disorganization theory and its extensions, this can have a beneficial effect of reducing crime in

the neighborhood because people are more likely to watch out for each other and help control

neighborhood crime. However, these dense networks and interdependence can also have a

harmful effect because neighborhood residents may have social ties with, or at least some

familiarity with, offenders in the neighborhood, and are thus less likely to report their behavior to

authorities. This suggests a very complex interplay between social ties, informal social control,

and neighborhood crime rates. Keep this in mind as you read the chapters this week, as it creates

an interesting alternative to the seemingly straightforward argument that strong social ties in

neighborhoods are always beneficial for reducing crime.

New references

Browning, Christopher R. 2009. “Illuminating the Downside of Social Capital: Negotiated

Coexistence, Property Crime, and Disorder in Urban Neighborhoods.” American

Behavioral Scientist , 52:1556-1578.

Browning, Christopher R., Robert D. Dietz, and Seth L. Feinberg. 2004. “The Paradox of Social

Organization: Networks, Collective Efficacy, and Violent Crime in Urban

Page 3 Neighborhoods.” Social Forces , 83:503-534.

Patillo-McKoy, Mary. 2000. Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril Among the Black Middle

Class . Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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