This review discusses research on the urban street gang after the 1960s, the period in which social scientists began to conceptualize the gang outside of the social-problems framework. Street-gang research has changed dramatically in the past three decades in accordance with general shifts in sociological research, including developments in gender studies, economic sociology, and race and ethnic relations. This review addresses these major trends and debates and highlights suggestions for areas of future inquiry that build on innovations of contemporary scholars. 42 COUGHLIN VENKATESH American cities drew the country's attention to the status of its most disenfranchised youth. The inner-city, minority youth gang became the principal empirical object, and the gang was viewed primarily as a social problem, one involving the challenges to social integration faced by disenfranchised inner-city minorities. In effect, the fields of criminology and social work laid claim to gang research, to the diminution of those working in sociology departments. This review discusses street-gang research after the 1960s, the most recent significant period of change in this field. In this time, movements in cultural and gender studies, economics, and social history radically altered sociology. The reliance on human ecology theory and the social-problems approach to street gangs have both been called into question, and new perspectives have emerged. This review addresses some of the most important directions taken by social scientists in response to both shifts in the organization of sociological research and changes to the street gang. Two caveats are in order: First, although it is instructive to compare the intellectual historical development of street-gang research in America with other cities and countries (Hazlehurst & Hazlehurst 1998b), any such comparison would exceed the boundaries of this review. Comparative, cross-cultural, and global investigations of gang activity are beginning to emerge (see Hazlehurst & Hazelhurst 1998a and Klein et al. 2001 for two recent edited volumes), but they are not directly reviewed here. 1 Second, there are many studies of delinquency, psychology of deviance, youth violence, and so forth that touch on gangs indirectly or loosely consider gang activity as either a determining variable or an outcome. Because this review is directed primarily at identifying critical trends in gang research, i.e., those studies that take gang activity as a direct object of analysis, these tangential studies are not considered. We organize this review by outlining several of the most interesting debates in research and substantial bodies of work in emergent subfields that are dramatically altering our understanding of urban street gangs. We begin by reviewing the debate on the gang's involvement in entrepreneurial activity. We then turn to studies on female gangs and gang members and on broader issues related to gender. This subfield has not only produced one of the more substantial sets of studies on gangs in a vari...

than a primary guide to the modern field. As an exploration of economic sociology's classical roots, on the other hand, Trigilia provides a cogent guide.Eight years after publishing The Handbook ofEconomic Sociology, the Russell Sage Foundation has again brought together leading scholars in the field and produced this new edited volume. The two volumes share four contributors (Paul DiMaggio, Mark Granovetter, Alejandro Portes, Harrison White) and Marshall Meyer, a contributor to the first volume and an editor of the second. Other than this overlap, these collections differ in purpose and scope. The new volume is thus a welcome addition, useful not only to seasoned students of economic sociology but also to newcomers wanting to survey the theoretical land and sample recent empirical studies.Where the Handbook cut a broad swathe -over 30 essays, 830 pages, and topics including the welfare state, leisure, ethnic enclaves, and banking-The New Economic Sociology is more precise, aiming to capture "developments" in a field that the editors argue is in its "second phase" and still "emerging." These developments include new attention to relational dynamics, especially through social network analysis; expansion of disciplinary boundaries to include research on household labor, remittances, "intimate transactions," and other kinds of economic exchange outside formal markets and firms; and a reworking of trust, risk, uncertainty, and social capital as categories integral to economic life. Loyal to their field, the editors argue that with an "integrated and sophisticated theoretical approach" economic sociology can guide the entire discipline and provide "an opportunity to reaffirm sociology's historical roots as a social science." The quality of many essays in this volume lends support to the editors' grand vision for economic sociology.In a thoughtful introductory essay -itself a highlight of the volume -Guillen and his colleagues identify four subfields of sociology that have fruitfully examined economic processes: organizations, social stratification, development, and culture. They chart the distancing of organizational theory from the sociological fold -noting recent moves of sociologists to business schoolsbut suggest that efforts at reintegration are taking hold. They argue that economic sociology since the 1990s has marginalized race-and gender-based stratification (and attempt a partial remedy in their own collection with four essays devoted to "gender inequality"). The editors have less to say about the sociology of economic development, except that the apparently new "global at