AJS Volume 116 Number 2 (September 2010): 643–55 643  2010 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0002-9602/2010/11602-0007$10.00 Commentary and Debate To conserve space for the publication of original contributions to scholarship, the comments in this section must be limited to brief critiques; author replies must be concise as well. Comments are expected to address specific substantive errors or flaws in articles published in AJS. They are subject to editorial board approval and may be subjected to peer review. Only succinct and substantive commentary will be considered; longer or less focused papers should be submitted as articles in their own right. AJS does not publish rebuttals to author replies. VOX REGNI? UNDERESTIMATING THE ROLE OF THE STATE IN RADIO LICENSING DECISIONS: A COMMENT ON GREVE, POZNER, AND RAO 1 In their article “Vox Populi: Resource Partitioning, Organizational Pro- liferation, and the Cultural Impact of the Insurgent Microradio Move- ment” (American Journal of Sociology, vol. 112 [3]: 802–37), Henrich R. Greve, Jo-Ellen Pozner, and Hayagreeva Rao “analyze how low-power FM (LPFM) radio stations arose in response to the domination of radio by corporate chains and investigate the impact of LPFM stations on radio listening” (p. 802). They measure factors associated with the variation in the number of applications for LPFM radio licenses in counties across the United States, the acceptance rate of applications, and the listenership of LPFM stations in an effort to fill “symmetrical gaps . . . in social movement, production of culture, and organizational ecology literatures” (p. 804). They conclude by discussing how discourse and “the distribution of community resources” (p. 830) affect organizational founding attempts, how organizational density and diversity affects the success of founding 1 The author would like to thank John Anderson, Matt Desmond, and Myra Marx Ferree and the members of her writing group at the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Department of Sociology as well as the AJS reviewers for their invaluable assistance and feedback in writing this comment. Direct correspondence to Peter Hart-Brinson, Department of Sociolgy, Grinnell College, 1210 Park Street, Grinnell, Iowa 50112. E- mail: hartbrin@grinnell.edu