This study investigates the relationship between social connections and collective civic action. ... more This study investigates the relationship between social connections and collective civic action. Measuring social capital in eight Phoenix, Arizona, neighborhoods allowed the authors to determine that individuals with strong social bonding (i.e., association and trust among neighbors) are more likely to take civic action. However, while social capital lessens the relationship between an individual’s social status and the likelihood of taking action, it does not eliminate the positive relationship. The analysis also suggests that bonding and bridging are distinct forms of social capital that have some different antecedents
This study grows out of work that each of the authors have previously done on the dynamics, in va... more This study grows out of work that each of the authors have previously done on the dynamics, in various social contexts, of family recovery from disasters. In those earlier studies, the importance of ethnicity and race was left largely unexplored. Our previous research did note the importance of culture, age, and social class as determinants of patterns of aid utilization. To that mix of social variables we now add race and ethnicity (and/or religious affiliation) as additional pieces in the puzzle of family recovery. Four sites are discussed, each with its own mix of disaster agents, ethnic groups, patterns of destruction, aid utilization, and victim recovery. We examined a tornado in Texas, a flood in Utah, an earthquake in California, and a hurricane in Hawaii. Groups affected by the disasters were, among others, bl acks, Hi spani cs, Japanese-Ameri cans, Fi 1 ipinos, and Mormons. This study looks at various factors-particularly aid from official and "unofficial" sources-that affected the recovery of those disaster victims. The United States has an institutionalized structure of public and private organizations that aid the victims of natural disasters. Our study examines some of the patterns of aid utilization across the various groups of victims and the effects of such programs on victim recovery. Understanding the complexities of a dynamic social process like family recovery requires consideration of a large number of influences. While we have attempted to focus on those judged to be most relevant, there always remains the possibility that others not examined here may prove to have greater explanatory power. This work should be read as part of the continuing effort of several researchers to understand and conceptualize the process of long-term family recovery from disasters.
This article presents an exploratory analysis of factors affecting belief in an afterlife. Data a... more This article presents an exploratory analysis of factors affecting belief in an afterlife. Data are taken from the 1978 subfile on the National Opinion Research Center's General Social Survey. With belief in life after death serving as the dependent variable, a number of variables are introduced in a tabular analysis. Among factors found to be statistically significant are sex, race, age, marital status, and several religious and residential variables. Controlling on frequency of church attendance and religious intensity, it is shown that Protestants have the highest incidence of belief in life after death, followed closely by Catholics, with Jews exhibiting the lowest level. A discriminant analysis was run in order to select a group of independent variables that were good predictors of belief in an afterlife. Race, religion, and church attendance were found to be significant discriminating variables of such belief.
Abstract The Phoenix, Arizona, metropolitan area's relentless pursuit of urb... more Abstract The Phoenix, Arizona, metropolitan area's relentless pursuit of urban growth for more than a century has produced a durable racialized landscape, with minorities concentrated in an environmentally degraded urban core and a largely white and relatively privileged population in the expanding zone of peripheral suburbs. As suburbanization has marched outward, new and different forms of environmental insecurity are appearing. While vulnerable people in the central city are exposed to a concentration of industrial hazards ...
Healthseekers [i.e., people seeking climactic cures from diseases, such as tuberculosis (TB)] mig... more Healthseekers [i.e., people seeking climactic cures from diseases, such as tuberculosis (TB)] migrated to the American West starting in the 19th century. Local officials, interested in promoting urban growth, capitalized on this phenomenon by aggressively advertising for healthseekers. This paper analyzes the case of TB in Phoenix, Arizona, USA during its period of early growth to demonstrate how social constructions of disease intersected with political constructions of race and class to produce pathologized bodies and stigmatized places. Contradictions in Phoenix's progrowth strategy are discussed in this paper, along with strategies employed by city leaders to 'solve' them. These strategies included an emergent discourse by those in power that served to construct race, class and place-based inequities. Further, ideological and spatial strategies were instantiated to ensure that other Phoenix residents did not 'see' the injustices being produced. The material results of these discursive strategies included dilapidated housing, a lack of urban infrastructure, and lack of health-care services for minorities and the poor in Phoenix. Those in power, in the name of private accumulation and urban growth, had constructed a context in which poor persons with TB were spatially isolated and socially stigmatized while wealthy whites with TB were socially, culturally and environmentally advantaged. r
Objectives. Our objective is to examine spatial relationships between modeled criteria air pollut... more Objectives. Our objective is to examine spatial relationships between modeled criteria air pollutants (i.e., nitrous oxides, carbon monoxide, and ozone) and sociodemographics in metropolitan Phoenix, Arizona. Modeled air pollution offers environmental justice researchers a new and robust data source for representing chronic environmental hazards. Methods. We used multiple regression equations to predict criteria pollution levels using sociodemographic variables at the Census block group level. Results. We find that Census block groups with lower neighborhood socioeconomic status, higher proportions of Latino immigrants, and higher proportions of renters are exposed to higher levels of criteria air pollutants. Proportion African American, however, is not a significant predictor of criteria air pollution in the Phoenix metro area. Conclusions. These findings demonstrate clear social-class and ethnic-based environmental injustices in the distribution of air pollution. We attribute these patterns to the role of white privilege in the historical and contemporary development of industrial and transportation corridors in Phoenix in relation to racially segregated neighborhoods. Although all people are implicated in the production of criteria pollutants, lower-income and ethnic-minority residents are disproportionately exposed in metropolitan Phoenix. This article examines the environmental justice implications of spatial relationships between modeled criteria air pollutants (nitrous oxides, carbon monoxide, and ozone) and sociodemographics in metropolitan Phoenix (Maricopa County). The use of modeled air pollution data offers environn Direct correspondence to Sara Grineski, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Texas at El Paso, El Paso, TX 79968 hsegrineski@utep.edui. Sara Grineski will share all coding information and data with those wishing to replicate the study. We acknowledge the contributions of Dr. Yu-Jin Choi, an environmental engineer at Arizona State University. Dr. Choi shared her pollution models with us and patiently answered our questions about them. We also acknowledge the assistance of Carol Atkinson-Palombo and
This article is based on a multimethod study designed to clarify influences on wildfire hazard vu... more This article is based on a multimethod study designed to clarify influences on wildfire hazard vulnerability in Arizona’s White Mountains, USA. Findings reveal that multiple factors operating across scales generate socially unequal wildfire risks. At the household scale, conflicting environmental values, reliance on fire insurance and firefighting institutions, a lack of place dependency, and social vulnerability (e.g., a lack of financial, physical, and/or legal capacity to reduce risks) were found to be important influences on wildfire risk. At the regional-scale, the shift from a resource extraction to environmental amenity-based economy has transformed ecological communities, produced unequal social distributions of risks and resources, and shaped people’s social and environmental interactions in everyday life. While working-class locals are more socially vulnerable than amenity migrants to wildfire hazards, they have also been more active in attempting to reduce risks in the aftermath of the disastrous 2002 Rodeo-Chediski fire. Social tensions between locals and amenity migrants temporarily dissolved immediately following the disaster, only to be exacerbated by the heightened perception of risk and the differential commitment to hazard mitigation displayed by these groups over a 2-year study period. Findings suggest that to enhance wildfire safety, environmental managers should acknowledge the environmental benefits associated with hazardous landscapes, the incentives created by risk management programs, and the specific constraints to action for relevant social groups in changing human-environmental context.
Groundwater overdraft is a resource management issue that poses a threat for the security of comm... more Groundwater overdraft is a resource management issue that poses a threat for the security of communities. Impacts of groundwater overdraft are influenced by the biophysical and social contexts of water management. This paper presents a method for assessing vulnerability to water scarcity in spatial terms using biophysical and social indicators. A geographic information system was used to establish areas of vulnerability based upon hydrologic variability in water resource availability within a groundwater basin, three types of water management systems, and 10 sociodemographic characteristics. Our study area is in the rapidly urbanizing Arizona Central Highlands, located $150 km north of the Phoenix metropolitan region, USA. Results indicate that the most biophysically vulnerable places do not necessarily intersect with the most vulnerable populations and that local differences in vulnerability are interrelated, rather than independent, outcomes in a process of socioenvironmental transformation. Vulnerability is influenced by laws that deny access to local surface waters and lead to dependence on fossil groundwater, and by economic reliance on urbanization. Localities attempt to reduce vulnerability through the development of community water systems and the expansion of water frontiers. While such strategies may reduce local vulnerability, they are not sustainable solutions because they transfer risks to other places, and thus contribute to vulnerability elsewhere. r
A need for successful collaborative strategies is an enduring problem in natural resource managem... more A need for successful collaborative strategies is an enduring problem in natural resource management. Several qualities of "successful" partnerships have been identified but few empirical studies have tested these claims against the information sharing structure of "unsuccessful" partnerships. This paper examines the ego networks of members in a partnership that has not successfully reached its goals as an illustration of the ways in which external ties relate to attitudes and relationships within a partnership. By focusing on information sharing frequencies, member ideologies, and power structure among organizations involved in a groundwater controversy, we test the extent to which the process and outcomes of participation align with conditions often used to indicate "success". Results show that individuals who think that science is objective maintain information sharing ego networks that include a larger proportion of ties outside of the partnership than those who consider science to be less certain. Individuals who consider themselves a member of the partnership are more central to the network of organizations invited to join the partnership and maintain a greater proportions of unique ties relative to ties common across multiple actors. This case study challenges widely held assumptions about the properties of successful collaborations and supports claims that scientific discourse can be used to obscure debates over values.
This paper engages recent discussions about the politics of scale to examine emerging place-based... more This paper engages recent discussions about the politics of scale to examine emerging place-based conflicts over water resources in Arizona. Our focus is on the 14,247 sq km Verde River watershed in Arizona's Central Highlands, a region that contains the Prescott Active Management Area (PrAMA), one of five zones in the state in which groundwater is regulated by state law. Residents in the watershed depend almost exclusively on groundwater, a resource now being mined at rates in excess of recharge. A host of environmental issues -including threats to local water security and to the baseflow of one of the few remaining perennial streams in Arizona -have catalyzed a variety of civil society groups across the region in seeking to stop, control, or mitigate scaled impacts of rapid exurbanization and groundwater exploitation in the PrAMA. Based on in-depth interviews, public fora transcripts, government and civil society group documents, media accounts, and scientific reports, we examine competing discourses about water and scalar politics of key citizen groups, government actors, and development interests. Through this analysis, we examine the socio-spatial construction of claims and counter-claims of environmental harms of groundwater development. The paper contributes to recent discussions of scalar politics in geography by highlighting the importance of environmental governance disputes over water resources using a First World case study.
A significant number of Americans now live in housing that is marked by walls and in many instanc... more A significant number of Americans now live in housing that is marked by walls and in many instances by gates. While an increasing amount is written on these enclaves, relatively little research has been done on the developments themselves, the Home Owner Associations (HOAs) that run them, or their residents. This paper draws on the American Housing Survey and the Phoenix Area Social Survey to present demographic information on the housing and to indicate some of the attitudes of these homeowners. The data are used to question ...
This study investigates the relationship between social connections and collective civic action. ... more This study investigates the relationship between social connections and collective civic action. Measuring social capital in eight Phoenix, Arizona, neighborhoods allowed the authors to determine that individuals with strong social bonding (i.e., association and trust among neighbors) are more likely to take civic action. However, while social capital lessens the relationship between an individual’s social status and the likelihood of taking action, it does not eliminate the positive relationship. The analysis also suggests that bonding and bridging are distinct forms of social capital that have some different antecedents
This study grows out of work that each of the authors have previously done on the dynamics, in va... more This study grows out of work that each of the authors have previously done on the dynamics, in various social contexts, of family recovery from disasters. In those earlier studies, the importance of ethnicity and race was left largely unexplored. Our previous research did note the importance of culture, age, and social class as determinants of patterns of aid utilization. To that mix of social variables we now add race and ethnicity (and/or religious affiliation) as additional pieces in the puzzle of family recovery. Four sites are discussed, each with its own mix of disaster agents, ethnic groups, patterns of destruction, aid utilization, and victim recovery. We examined a tornado in Texas, a flood in Utah, an earthquake in California, and a hurricane in Hawaii. Groups affected by the disasters were, among others, bl acks, Hi spani cs, Japanese-Ameri cans, Fi 1 ipinos, and Mormons. This study looks at various factors-particularly aid from official and "unofficial" sources-that affected the recovery of those disaster victims. The United States has an institutionalized structure of public and private organizations that aid the victims of natural disasters. Our study examines some of the patterns of aid utilization across the various groups of victims and the effects of such programs on victim recovery. Understanding the complexities of a dynamic social process like family recovery requires consideration of a large number of influences. While we have attempted to focus on those judged to be most relevant, there always remains the possibility that others not examined here may prove to have greater explanatory power. This work should be read as part of the continuing effort of several researchers to understand and conceptualize the process of long-term family recovery from disasters.
This article presents an exploratory analysis of factors affecting belief in an afterlife. Data a... more This article presents an exploratory analysis of factors affecting belief in an afterlife. Data are taken from the 1978 subfile on the National Opinion Research Center's General Social Survey. With belief in life after death serving as the dependent variable, a number of variables are introduced in a tabular analysis. Among factors found to be statistically significant are sex, race, age, marital status, and several religious and residential variables. Controlling on frequency of church attendance and religious intensity, it is shown that Protestants have the highest incidence of belief in life after death, followed closely by Catholics, with Jews exhibiting the lowest level. A discriminant analysis was run in order to select a group of independent variables that were good predictors of belief in an afterlife. Race, religion, and church attendance were found to be significant discriminating variables of such belief.
Abstract The Phoenix, Arizona, metropolitan area's relentless pursuit of urb... more Abstract The Phoenix, Arizona, metropolitan area's relentless pursuit of urban growth for more than a century has produced a durable racialized landscape, with minorities concentrated in an environmentally degraded urban core and a largely white and relatively privileged population in the expanding zone of peripheral suburbs. As suburbanization has marched outward, new and different forms of environmental insecurity are appearing. While vulnerable people in the central city are exposed to a concentration of industrial hazards ...
Healthseekers [i.e., people seeking climactic cures from diseases, such as tuberculosis (TB)] mig... more Healthseekers [i.e., people seeking climactic cures from diseases, such as tuberculosis (TB)] migrated to the American West starting in the 19th century. Local officials, interested in promoting urban growth, capitalized on this phenomenon by aggressively advertising for healthseekers. This paper analyzes the case of TB in Phoenix, Arizona, USA during its period of early growth to demonstrate how social constructions of disease intersected with political constructions of race and class to produce pathologized bodies and stigmatized places. Contradictions in Phoenix's progrowth strategy are discussed in this paper, along with strategies employed by city leaders to 'solve' them. These strategies included an emergent discourse by those in power that served to construct race, class and place-based inequities. Further, ideological and spatial strategies were instantiated to ensure that other Phoenix residents did not 'see' the injustices being produced. The material results of these discursive strategies included dilapidated housing, a lack of urban infrastructure, and lack of health-care services for minorities and the poor in Phoenix. Those in power, in the name of private accumulation and urban growth, had constructed a context in which poor persons with TB were spatially isolated and socially stigmatized while wealthy whites with TB were socially, culturally and environmentally advantaged. r
Objectives. Our objective is to examine spatial relationships between modeled criteria air pollut... more Objectives. Our objective is to examine spatial relationships between modeled criteria air pollutants (i.e., nitrous oxides, carbon monoxide, and ozone) and sociodemographics in metropolitan Phoenix, Arizona. Modeled air pollution offers environmental justice researchers a new and robust data source for representing chronic environmental hazards. Methods. We used multiple regression equations to predict criteria pollution levels using sociodemographic variables at the Census block group level. Results. We find that Census block groups with lower neighborhood socioeconomic status, higher proportions of Latino immigrants, and higher proportions of renters are exposed to higher levels of criteria air pollutants. Proportion African American, however, is not a significant predictor of criteria air pollution in the Phoenix metro area. Conclusions. These findings demonstrate clear social-class and ethnic-based environmental injustices in the distribution of air pollution. We attribute these patterns to the role of white privilege in the historical and contemporary development of industrial and transportation corridors in Phoenix in relation to racially segregated neighborhoods. Although all people are implicated in the production of criteria pollutants, lower-income and ethnic-minority residents are disproportionately exposed in metropolitan Phoenix. This article examines the environmental justice implications of spatial relationships between modeled criteria air pollutants (nitrous oxides, carbon monoxide, and ozone) and sociodemographics in metropolitan Phoenix (Maricopa County). The use of modeled air pollution data offers environn Direct correspondence to Sara Grineski, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Texas at El Paso, El Paso, TX 79968 hsegrineski@utep.edui. Sara Grineski will share all coding information and data with those wishing to replicate the study. We acknowledge the contributions of Dr. Yu-Jin Choi, an environmental engineer at Arizona State University. Dr. Choi shared her pollution models with us and patiently answered our questions about them. We also acknowledge the assistance of Carol Atkinson-Palombo and
This article is based on a multimethod study designed to clarify influences on wildfire hazard vu... more This article is based on a multimethod study designed to clarify influences on wildfire hazard vulnerability in Arizona’s White Mountains, USA. Findings reveal that multiple factors operating across scales generate socially unequal wildfire risks. At the household scale, conflicting environmental values, reliance on fire insurance and firefighting institutions, a lack of place dependency, and social vulnerability (e.g., a lack of financial, physical, and/or legal capacity to reduce risks) were found to be important influences on wildfire risk. At the regional-scale, the shift from a resource extraction to environmental amenity-based economy has transformed ecological communities, produced unequal social distributions of risks and resources, and shaped people’s social and environmental interactions in everyday life. While working-class locals are more socially vulnerable than amenity migrants to wildfire hazards, they have also been more active in attempting to reduce risks in the aftermath of the disastrous 2002 Rodeo-Chediski fire. Social tensions between locals and amenity migrants temporarily dissolved immediately following the disaster, only to be exacerbated by the heightened perception of risk and the differential commitment to hazard mitigation displayed by these groups over a 2-year study period. Findings suggest that to enhance wildfire safety, environmental managers should acknowledge the environmental benefits associated with hazardous landscapes, the incentives created by risk management programs, and the specific constraints to action for relevant social groups in changing human-environmental context.
Groundwater overdraft is a resource management issue that poses a threat for the security of comm... more Groundwater overdraft is a resource management issue that poses a threat for the security of communities. Impacts of groundwater overdraft are influenced by the biophysical and social contexts of water management. This paper presents a method for assessing vulnerability to water scarcity in spatial terms using biophysical and social indicators. A geographic information system was used to establish areas of vulnerability based upon hydrologic variability in water resource availability within a groundwater basin, three types of water management systems, and 10 sociodemographic characteristics. Our study area is in the rapidly urbanizing Arizona Central Highlands, located $150 km north of the Phoenix metropolitan region, USA. Results indicate that the most biophysically vulnerable places do not necessarily intersect with the most vulnerable populations and that local differences in vulnerability are interrelated, rather than independent, outcomes in a process of socioenvironmental transformation. Vulnerability is influenced by laws that deny access to local surface waters and lead to dependence on fossil groundwater, and by economic reliance on urbanization. Localities attempt to reduce vulnerability through the development of community water systems and the expansion of water frontiers. While such strategies may reduce local vulnerability, they are not sustainable solutions because they transfer risks to other places, and thus contribute to vulnerability elsewhere. r
A need for successful collaborative strategies is an enduring problem in natural resource managem... more A need for successful collaborative strategies is an enduring problem in natural resource management. Several qualities of "successful" partnerships have been identified but few empirical studies have tested these claims against the information sharing structure of "unsuccessful" partnerships. This paper examines the ego networks of members in a partnership that has not successfully reached its goals as an illustration of the ways in which external ties relate to attitudes and relationships within a partnership. By focusing on information sharing frequencies, member ideologies, and power structure among organizations involved in a groundwater controversy, we test the extent to which the process and outcomes of participation align with conditions often used to indicate "success". Results show that individuals who think that science is objective maintain information sharing ego networks that include a larger proportion of ties outside of the partnership than those who consider science to be less certain. Individuals who consider themselves a member of the partnership are more central to the network of organizations invited to join the partnership and maintain a greater proportions of unique ties relative to ties common across multiple actors. This case study challenges widely held assumptions about the properties of successful collaborations and supports claims that scientific discourse can be used to obscure debates over values.
This paper engages recent discussions about the politics of scale to examine emerging place-based... more This paper engages recent discussions about the politics of scale to examine emerging place-based conflicts over water resources in Arizona. Our focus is on the 14,247 sq km Verde River watershed in Arizona's Central Highlands, a region that contains the Prescott Active Management Area (PrAMA), one of five zones in the state in which groundwater is regulated by state law. Residents in the watershed depend almost exclusively on groundwater, a resource now being mined at rates in excess of recharge. A host of environmental issues -including threats to local water security and to the baseflow of one of the few remaining perennial streams in Arizona -have catalyzed a variety of civil society groups across the region in seeking to stop, control, or mitigate scaled impacts of rapid exurbanization and groundwater exploitation in the PrAMA. Based on in-depth interviews, public fora transcripts, government and civil society group documents, media accounts, and scientific reports, we examine competing discourses about water and scalar politics of key citizen groups, government actors, and development interests. Through this analysis, we examine the socio-spatial construction of claims and counter-claims of environmental harms of groundwater development. The paper contributes to recent discussions of scalar politics in geography by highlighting the importance of environmental governance disputes over water resources using a First World case study.
A significant number of Americans now live in housing that is marked by walls and in many instanc... more A significant number of Americans now live in housing that is marked by walls and in many instances by gates. While an increasing amount is written on these enclaves, relatively little research has been done on the developments themselves, the Home Owner Associations (HOAs) that run them, or their residents. This paper draws on the American Housing Survey and the Phoenix Area Social Survey to present demographic information on the housing and to indicate some of the attitudes of these homeowners. The data are used to question ...
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Papers by Bob Bolin