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Consumer behavior is driven, in part, by the degree to which goods and services appeal to underlying motives for agency and communion. The purpose of this research was to develop a brief individual differences measure of these motivations for use in behavioral research and theoretical and applied consumer psychology and marketing studies. We employed a bi-lingual scale development procedure to create the 10-item Agentic and Communal Consumer Motivation Inventory (ACCMI) in English and French. Two studies show that the ACCMI is language invariant, demonstrates convergent and discriminant validity with consumer, motivational, and interpersonal constructs, and predicts evaluations of products described in agentic and communal terms, respectively, in both languages. The general conclusion of this research is that agency and communion provide a useful framework for understanding and studying consumer buying motivations. Discussion focuses on the relevance of motivational factors for studying human behavior and the applied utility of the ACCMI.

High-profile shootings by police officers and the mass protests that followed have highlighted the necessity of social work scholars to address new perspectives in community safety. Collective efficacy is a theoretical framework that explores how individual-level interactions impact community-level outcomes. Despite evidence that indicates collective efficacy is an effective mediator to community-level crime and violence, criticisms of the model question the influence of informal social control and whether or not it represents policing in another form. This paper seeks to understand the relationship between informal social control and police legitimacy to understand how residents’ inclination to intervene reflects a replication of the worst aspects of formal institutions of social control. I performed a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) across 15 endogenous variables and two latent exogenous variables to create two pathways that assessed the relationship between informal social control and police legitimacy. Results from the CFA pathways indicate that increased levels of informal social control among neighborhood residents was related to decreased levels of police legitimacy. Implications of these findings for abolitionist social work scholars are discussed along with the study’s limitations and future directions for research.

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