This analysis of community opposition to group homes for the mentally handicapped uses data from a survey of New Jersey group home providers. It indicates that deteriorating neighborhoods are most likely to organize in opposition, but that upper‐middle class neighborhoods are most likely to enjoy private access to local officials and can, therefore, lobby effectively in opposition to group homes in their neighborhoods. Generally, lower and lower‐middle class neighborhoods do not have lobbying privileges and must rely on mass‐mobilization, petition campaigns, and other public political tactics that are less effective in influencing local officials. If, however, they gain access to local officials and secure lobbying privileges, they are no less successful than their upper‐middle class counterparts in influencing them.

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Data from the New Beneficiary Study for currently married men who began receiving social security benefits in 1980-1981 indicate that the racial earnings gap is greater in retirement than it was in employment. Racial differences in employment and pension earnings are specified by education and employment status. There is, however, a significant net racial effect in predicting social security earnings. Furthermore, education interacts with race in predicting asset earnings, which constitute the major source of racial inequality in retirement. This analysis highlights not only the enduring problem of poverty for African Americans and Latinos who are "working off the books," without social security benefits, but also the possibility of a "glass ceiling" that limits access to assets for highly educated nonwhites.As policy makers debate the future of the Great Society programs that were intended to reduce racial inequality, sociologists debate the extent to which the black-white earnings gap has narrowed. A. Silvia Cancio, T. David Evans, and David J. Maume Jr. (1996) argue that employment discrimination increased with deregulation in the 1980s. George Farkas and Keven Vicknair (1996, p. 559) suggest that the apparent increase is due to the failure of Title I compensatory education programs. Above and beyond the problems of education and employment discrimination, however, African Americans and Latinos continue to suffer from the burden of inherited poverty. While not denying the effects of education and employment discrimination, we suggest that the racial earnings gap might have increased in the 1980s, in part, because of increased racial inequality among retirees-the parents and grandparents of the new employment earnings cohort.Much recent research has focused on increased gender inequality in retirement, using a lifecourse perspective (

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The frontier experience, according to Turner, cast the mold for all that is distinctively American. The bounty of open land and the experience of forging local democratic institutions shaped the character of a new nation, built on the pillars of rugged individualism and democratic governance. The closing of the American frontier was a national tragedy, eulogized by Turner and recited by his followers. ~ From them, Americans have inherited a moral and intellectual dilemma. They can neither deny its significance nor accept its implications, so they continue to search for new frontiers.Despite a romantic attachment to the dime novel caricature of the American frontier, there have been few efforts to distinguish the frontier experience as a social rather than demographic phenomenon. 2 Turner's critics have argued that open land was not a sufficient basis for economic autonomy and political participation, even in the nineteenth century. Homesteading farmers merely established the basis for their dependence on industrial capital (which was apparent, at least to those farmers involved in the late nineteenth-century agrarian struggles)) The nineteenth-century American frontier was not a social or political vacuum. It was granted autonomy as part of a strategy for controlling the perimeter of the governed territory. The state facilitated entrepreneurial economic and political development and coopted frontier elites who succeeded in establishing effective social control. This process fostered economic and political expansion through the penetration of capital and the annexation of new territory. The Frontier As Perimeter Social ControlOne might view the frontier as Turner's solution to Mizruchi's problem. Mizruchi asks how society absorbs the surplus population that might otherwise challenge the status quo. 4 Turner replies that, in America, the frontier did the trick. Thus stated, the "safety valve" thesis is elegant but inadequate. The American frontier matched entrepreneurial labor and capital with the