Monthly Archives: June 2011

Explaining our social world to alien visitors

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Sociology has a meme involving aliens: what would someone from Mars observe or conclude if they came to Earth and looked at modern society? Although it doesn’t come from a sociologist, here is an update on this idea that includes McMansions:

Since they haven’t answered, we could assume that the humans in space aren’t sophisticated enough to interpret our radio signals.

But just imagine how we can help them when we do find them. We can teach them everything we know and speed up their evolution into modern man in a flash. We could have them skip over the stone age, the bronze age, the iron age, the industrial revolution, and be flipping microchips and tweeting by sunset. How exhilarating it will be for us to teach them about fire and wheels. We could bypass the telegraph, and give them 3DTV! Imagine their excitement, moving from a cave to a McMansion with granite countertops? Once they learn how to use all the gadgets — iPod, iPad, iPhone — they would only need to learn the basics of reading and math.

The sequence of what we teach would be important. It would be terrible to show them how to accumulate stuff before we taught them how to defend themselves from those who would take their stuff away. Would spears be good enough or would we need to give them guns, guided missiles, or maybe an atomic bomb? And if they come from a tribal background, would every tribe need an atomic bomb?…

Of course, there is a chance that humans, way out there in space, have been receiving our signals. Maybe, they’re a lot smarter than we imagine. Maybe, they know all about us. Maybe, they have decided it’s better not to answer our call.

This may seem like a silly exercise but it has some value: it can be hard to take an outsider’s perspective of our own world. By trying to adopt the viewpoint of someone who might come from a completely different social system (and planet), it helps us take a broader and overhead look at our own actions and social relations.

I sense some satire here about showing our visitors 3DTV, McMansions, and iPads. This sounds like a suggestion that we pay too much attention to technological and physical comforts without remembering the foundation beneath them such as social structures, basic tools, government, and moral values. This seems related to the question of what civilization relies on.

Big cities promote new ideas

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Big cities are generally thought of centers of innovation for both business and culture. This article suggests this effect is particularly pronounced in developing Asian countries:

“Cities are the first to embrace many concepts that are a taboo in towns and villages,” says Sandhya Patnaik, a sociology professor at Delhi University, referring to pre-marital sex, live-in relationships or divorces.

“Anything new or modern touches cities first. Trends percolate to smaller towns at a very slow pace.”

Occasionally in India, the battle between village tradition and liberal city culture can have deadly consequences, such as the “honour killings” seen in Delhi’s migrant areas…

But experts say cities across the world generally serve as a positive melting pot, where different cultures intermingle, encouraging tolerance and the interchange of ideas.

“The freedom in a big city comes from diversity,” Jirapa Worasiangsuk, a sociologist at Thammasat University in Bangkok, told AFP. “It’s the choices and the opportunity to choose that make Bangkok or other big cities a better place.

“People have more choices to choose how to live, to choose their career, to do whatever they want.”…

Sociologists say the freedom of cities often stems from a feeling of anonymity — but this can often tip over into loneliness.

This article seems to suggest that modern, Western ideas are found in the city. I assume most Westerners would look at news like this and think that these changes are long overdue but the article suggests these new ideas are not always met favorably. Such changes are not easy (and some places could argue whether they are desired) as the early sociologists recognized when looking at the changes urbanization was bringing to Western Europe in the 1800s.

It would be interesting to read diffusion studies from these countries that track how new cultural and social ideas leak out of cities and come to dominate social interaction.

Thinking more about this, are there major cities in modern times that have been business centers but also that remained culturally conservative? Or does being open to business tend to correlate with more liberal ideas? This would be interesting as neoliberalism is often thought of as being conservative since it is capitalistic.

Except more communities to challenge 2010 Census counts

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Amidst an economic crisis that has also affected many municipal budgets, expect more communities to appeal the 2010 Census counts:

Cities have two years to contest their counts under the Census Bureau’s appeals process, which began this month…

In recent decades, the peak for challenges was 6,600, or 17 percent of all U.S. jurisdictions, in 1990, when the census missed four million people, including five percent of all blacks and Hispanics.

In 2000, roughly 1,200 jurisdictions, or 3 percent, contested the count. The net change due to census challenges that year was just 2,700 people.

Apart from the challenges, analysts later determined the 2000 census had an overcount of 1.3 million people, due mostly to duplicate counts of more affluent whites with multiple residences. About 4.5 million people were ultimately missed, mostly blacks and Hispanics.

Interestingly, the article suggests that while government dollars are behind these challenges, it is also about the “psychological impact” on civic pride. I wonder who exactly will appeal: St. Louis, Chicago, and a host of other Rust Belt cities lost population and New York City didn’t have the population increase that was expected. Since budgets are tight everywhere, could we even get appeals from places like Houston which experienced sizable growth?

It would also be interesting to hear how exactly the Census Bureau adjusts these figures based on subsequent analyses of overcounts and undercounts. This is a reminder that Census figures are not perfect even as many things, including many social science studies based on population proportions calculated in the Census, are based on these figures. I am not suggesting that the Census figures are wrong but rather that it is a very complicated process that is bound to be tweaked some after the first figures are released.

Chicago beats out competitors: not on list of America’s 10 Dirtiest Cities

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I heard a joke years back: Chicago may be corrupt but at least it’s clean while Philadelphia is both corrupt and dirty. On a new list of America’s dirtiest cities, Chicago isn’t in the top 10:

While such sentiments don’t appear in tourist brochures, that glorious grit has landed Baltimore in the Top 10 dirtiest cities, as chosen by Travel + Leisure readers in the annual America’s Favorite Cities survey. Of course, visitors gauge “dirty” in a variety of ways: litter, air pollution, even the taste of local tap water.

This year’s American State Litter Scorecard, published by advocacy group the American Society for Public Administration, put both Nevada and Louisiana in the bottom five—echoing the assessment of T+L readers who ranked Las Vegas and New Orleans among America’s dirtiest cities.

The top 10 dirtiest cities according to Travel + Leisure readers, starting with the dirtiest: New Orleans, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Memphis, New York City, Baltimore, Las Vegas, Miami, Atlanta, and Houston.

The top 10 dirtiest states according to the “2011 American State Litter Scorecard,” starting with the dirtiest: Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nevada, Alabama, Indiana, Georgia, Illinois, Oklahoma, and Montana. The best states: Washington, California, Iowa, Maine, and Connecticut. I like the conclusion on the slideshow: “Scorecard not definitive: Contributing inquiry into poorly probed matter.” Somebody should study the issue…

Having been to many of these places, I have always thought that Chicago’s tourist area, including the Loop and River North, was quite clean and attractive, as far as cities go.

Aging suburbs might change suburban priorities

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The demographic shift in America due to the aging of the Baby Boomers could also affect American suburbs:

Although the entire United States is graying, the 2010 Census showed how much faster the suburbs are growing older when compared with the cities. Thanks largely to the baby-boom generation, four in 10 suburban residents are 45 or older, up from 34 percent just a decade ago. Thirty-five percent of city residents are in that age group, an increase from 31 percent in the last census…

“When people think of suburban voters, it’s going to be different than it was years ago,” Frey said. “They used to be people worried about schools and kids. Now they’re more concerned about their own well-being.”

The nation’s baby boomers — 76 million people born between 1946 and 1964 — were the first generation to grow up in suburbia, and the suburbs is where many chose to rear their own children. Now, as the oldest boomers turn 65, demographers and local planners predict that most of them will not move to retirement areas such as Florida and Arizona. They will stay put…

Local governments are starting to grapple with the implications.

The article then goes on to detail the changes some suburbs have made, primarily in the areas of public safety and civic services. Frankly, I was expecting some bigger changes.

Here are a few predictions about how this might have play out. Some of this has already started.

1. Aging suburbanites will be less likely to favor new development that bring in a lot of children in the community. This comes up primarily as a property tax issue in many communities. With many seniors on more fixed incomes, how can they adjust to rising taxes? And if they are long past supporting school-age children, why should they have to pay more money to schools? While one could argue that more money leading to better schools helps everyone in the form of higher property values, this is still a high price to pay.

This could lead to a shift in many communities away from new homes or multi-family units to a more diversified tax base (more industrial and commercial properties) and developments friendly to seniors. A community like Naperville pursued some of these goals in the 1990s and 2000s: seeing the dwindling supply of open land, Naperville pursued some senior-living communities and more commercial and industrial uses to reduce the strain on the schools and help provide some housing that would enable seniors to stay in the community.

2. They will aim to keep their suburbs similar to way they were when they moved in. As the first generation who primarily grew up in suburbs, they will want to preserve their idyllic nature. How this works itself out in each community may differ but this could be an era of hyper-NIMBYism or at least hyper-vigilance to make sure such uses benefit from the older citizens.

 

Small Islamic mosque in unincorporated Lombard approved by DuPage County Board

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A small mosque for an unincorporated site near Lombard has been approved by the DuPage County Board:

Proclaim Truth Charitable Trust, which currently holds services in Villa Park, won approval to build a one-story, 5,200-square-foot brick and stone mosque on a 1-acre unincorporated site at 1620 S. Highland Avenue.

The board, by a vote of 13-4, endorsed plans for the group’s mosque at the same time that several other zoning applications to construct mosques elsewhere in unincorporated DuPage County have drawn significant opposition from neighbors. Proclaim Truth’s plans attracted minimal public opposition.

However, unlike the other area proposals, which include a recently approved 47,000-square-foot mosque near Willowbrook and a pending proposal for a 43,000-square-foot mosque on the south side of Roosevelt Road just east of Interstate Highway 355 near Lombard, Proclaim Truth plans to build a relatively small worship facility on its 1-acre property on Highland Avenue…

The mosque will have a full-service worship area that will hold no more than 150, along with a classroom for Saturday school, and a men’s and women’s lobby. In addition to the mosque, the group also will construct a 50-space parking lot.

Based on what I have read about this in the Chicago Tribune, here are several things that seemed to be working in this mosque’s favor:

1. When I wrote about this mosque on January 28, 2011, I noted that it sounded like this mosque had “a stronger welcome from residents in the neighborhood” compared to other proposals. This article seconds that idea.

2. The size of this mosque is pretty modest. I would guess this would affect how residential neighbors would view a proposed church, mosque, or other religious center with larger buildings attracting more negative attention.

3. Does it matter that this proposal was approved by DuPage County, which has control over some unincorporated land uses, as opposed to needing approval from a particular municipality? The article suggests other proposals for unincorporated land have drawn more opposition so it sounds like it is more about the neighbors than it is about who grants final approval.

4. Speaking of neighbors, if you look up the site, 1620 South Highland Avenue, Lombard, IL, Google Maps shows two nearby congregations: Chicago Christadelphian Ecclesia and Congregation Etz Chaim. Did the presence of these two groups drive the positive neighborhood response?

Quick Review: Those Guys Have All the Fun, Part 2

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In Part 1 of my review of Those Guys Have All the Fun, I commented on some of the things I liked and didn’t like. In Part 2, I want to tackle what I saw were two main themes: the business side of ESPN and ESPN personalities.

The authors provide some guidance in pointing out the steps that ESPN took to achieve global dominance. Like all TV networks that want to compete, ESPN had to pay big money for league packages and it took until the late 1980s for ESPN to even acquire a piece of the almighty NFL. I was surprised by the strong relationship between ESPN and NASCAR (perhaps because I am not a big fan): ESPN was willing to take a shot with racing in its early days when other networks were not so the two entities grew in popularity together. And one prominent negative for the network came when they finally acquired Monday Night Football only to find that the NFL and NBC had worked out a better deal for Sunday nights.

But like all businesses, ESPN needs to generate money. The key to this is that from its early years, ESPN charged cable services a per-subscriber fee. As it added content, particularly the NFL, ESPN raised these fees and now the book suggests something like around $4 of every cable bill goes toward ESPN. With advertising and subscriber revenue, ESPN was able to build its company.

Also from the early years, ESPN aimed for a particular corporate culture that valued the company above individual stars. Once ESPN became more popular, this became more difficult as certain individuals, like Keith Olbermann, who is featured a lot in this book, wanted to do things their own way and also wanted to make more money. While some of the executives seem to suggest that this corporate culture was about creating a tight-knit family, it also sounds like this was a business decision as it would help keep salaries down.

Even within this culture, I was surprised by the amount of sniping between personalities. This takes place in all companies, particularly in high-pressure situations, but some of it seemed silly here. Certain personalities, like Bob Ley, were cited as respected team players while others, like Mark Shapiro, were depicted as divisive. But there were a number of stories about yelling and aggressive behavior that made it sound like work life at ESPN could be quite unpleasant at times.

Another point of contention amongst the personalities was the strong emphasis on journalism, primarily attributed in this book to John Walsh. Many of the interviewed on-air personalities suggested they thought of themselves more as journalists in wanting to accurately and quickly report a story. Some personalities had some other thoughts and ended up leaving. Employees generally sounded like they didn’t get wrapped up or emotionally invested in individual stories, which I found a little surprising since the network seems to thrive on covering particular prominent athletes like Michael Jordan or Lebron James.

But this issue of journalism is where ESPN often seems to get into trouble these days: are they a news organization that just happens to only cover sports, or are they an entertainment company? The lines are blurred when ESPN becomes the story rather than reports the story and this seems to happen a lot. I understand why ESPN would want to appear more objective and ethical but I think they also need to acknowledge that they entertain and viewers are drawn to interesting voices and ideas.

(A side note: frankly, I am glad that the 1990s Chicago Bulls won their championships then compared to the over-analyzed and over-covered sports world of today. What might have ESPN done with such a dominant team and stories like Jordan’s gambling if their current form existed then? Back then, it seemed to be more about highlights than analysis – but I suppose they would argue that people can find highlights all over the place and so ESPN has to give them something else.)

These two issues, the business side and personalities, raise some questions:

  1. What would it take for ESPN to begin a decline or lose its prominence in the sports world?
  2. Why hasn’t there been a better competitor to ESPN over the years? (Perhaps they couldn’t access subscriber fees?) Ted Turner is portrayed as a competitor at times for league packages but he ends up fading away.
  3. How is ESPN viewed by other networks? There is some of this in the book but it is limited.
  4. Is ESPN’s corporate culture similar or different compared to other TV networks and other firms in other industries?

On the whole, I found this book to be quite engaging. If you are familiar with some of ESPN’s key shows and personalities, there is a lot of interesting material here. But if you want to better understand how ESPN became the behemoth that it is today, this is a good place to start.

How a pharmacy receipt illustrates identity issues in the EU

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Sociological ideas can come from all sorts of places. Here how a French receipt for toothpaste provides insights into the unity of the European Union:

Harrington had spent her senior year of high school in France and had fallen in love with a specific toothpaste flavored with a lemony-minty herb called “verveine.” So she went to the nearest pharmacy, bought the place out (all two bottles worth), and forked over her euros.

But when Harrington looked at her receipt, she saw something that looked out of place. Below the price of her toothpaste in euros, there was a conversion statement that said 1 euro is equal to 6.5597 francs.

Handy? Well, sure, until one remembers that France has been on the Euro since 1999. That gives people more than a decade to practice converting euros to francs.

Most people would probably forget about this cultural oddity as soon as they crammed the receipt into their back pockets. But Harrington is an economic sociologist at the Copenhagen Business School, and decided to dig deeper. What she found was that this little line on the pharmacy receipt was indicative of larger identity issues in contemporary Europe.

With the advent of the European Union and a common currency, citizens had to reconcile their national identities with a new continental identity. The process has been far from frictionless — not only do many French people still talk about prices in terms of francs, but Germans still speak in terms of deutschmarks (and they don’t even have dual pricing receipts).

Harrington says the current debt crisis has revealed cracks in the spirit of European collectivism “because it was never a seamless whole to begin with.”

This story suggests a kind of intellectual curiosity I would guess a lot of sociologists would want to instill in their students: how might you see the world, including pharmacy receipts, from a sociological perspective? Within the field of sociology, Harrington would have to build upon this single piece of evidence. In order to draw publishable conclusions about “European collectivism,” she would need to draw upon a broader dataset that would have demonstrated patterns of behavior.

Finding sociology in summer camp romances

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One thing I thoroughly enjoy about sociology is that you can find topics to study anywhere people are. Witness this example of a sociologist tackling romances in the laboratory of summer camp:

Faith wasn’t ready to be exclusive with Colyn. There were lots of boys at summer camp, and the seventh-grader wanted the chance to date some of them before the session ended. The thing was, Faith wasn’t so keen on the idea of Colyn going out with any other girls but her, and she protested when her friends told her she was being jealous and unreasonable. As she made her case, those of Faith’s fellow campers who were within earshot stared at her and shook their heads, muttering, “It’s not fair.” Nearby, a sociologist named Sandi Nenga sat with a notebook and wrote down every detail.

Nenga’s notes would eventually form the basis of an academic paper entitled “The Age of Love: Dating and the Developmental Discourse in a Middle School Summer Camp.” In the paper, the Southwestern University sociology professor describes infiltrating the children’s ranks and watching closely as they developed dating rituals and norms. “Simply keeping track of the beginning and ending of relationships constituted a significant portion of each day in the camp,” she found.

Nenga’s study might be a little jarring to those of us who remember going to summer camp as kids, and it’s not because we can’t vouch for her findings from personal experience. Rather, it’s because using summer camp as a place to study children has likely never occurred to most of us. But where we see boys and girls swimming in lakes and singing songs around the campfire, social scientists like Nenga see a research opportunity: an organized group of humans-in-training who have been made to grapple with one another in a strange new place. Where we see kids trying to make friends and getting crushes on each other, they see a controlled environment in which the inhabitants feel very much free—but can be observed and studied the entire time.

Like hot-rod mechanics eyeing an exceptional motor vehicle, in other words, social scientists look at summer camp and see a truly remarkable lab.

The rest of the article contains a fascinating overview of summer camp research which dates back decades. This reminds me of Ann Swidler’s idea of “unsettled times” where humans have to interpret new situations which involve following old strategies of action or developing new solutions.

I tell my students that sociology is valuable wherever people are doing things. I just hope Nenga was able to avoid “jargonized wishful thinking” in this intriguing research setting.

Quick Review: Those Guys Have All the Fun, Part 1

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I recently read Those Guys Have All the Fun,  a best selling non-fiction book. Through interviews with many of the business and on-air personalities of ESPN, this tells the story of the sports network’s first three decades. Here are my thoughts on this large book: in Part 1, I will tackle how the book was carried out and in Part 2 I will address what I saw as the book’s two main themes:  important business decisions and personalities.

1. As someone who fondly remembers ESPN from when my family first had cable in the early 1990s, I knew most of the products and many of the personalities that the book was about. It was funny to remember the programming that ESPN had at that time including fitness shows in the morning.

1a. This book reminded me that ESPN and all of its channels need a lot of content to cover 24 hours a day. In the early days, they struggled for content but even in recent years, I was struck by a comment from a manager that poker was a brilliant find not just because it was popular but because it filled a lot of hours cheaply.

2. I think this book wants to be authoritative but I think it tries to cover too much and talks to too many people to do this. It is an impressive feat to have talked with many of the important people from ESPN’s history and I assume that the authors have a lot more material that they didn’t include.

3. I don’t think I particularly like this format where the authors provide little overarching commentary and let the interviewees tell the story. The authors could have provided a little more summary material and this would have helped connect the chronological periods that each chapter covers. Letting the people involved tell their stories is interesting but ultimately there is an overarching story to tell.

3a. After I finished, I wondered who they didn’t talk to. I assume there were some employees who were not interested in participating and how they might have told a different story. In the end, this tends to be a very positive book about ESPN.

4. Bristol, Connecticut comes up a lot, almost always as a joke. It would have been interesting to hear from community leaders and residents about how they viewed the rise of ESPN as most of the employees don’t think very highly about it.

5. There is an assumption throughout from employees that sports are everything. Occasionally, events like OJ Simpson’s car chase and trial or 9/11 remind them that there are other important things going on in the world. I would be interested in hearing these employees talk more about the relationship between their job in sports and the rest of their lives. Is anyone in the company worried about a sports 24/7 world?

5a. Is ESPN set up to serve the ardent sports fan or does it make a concerted effort to draw new viewers? Certain events or sports, like the full coverage of the World Cup, might attract new viewers.

6. The issue of sexual harassment comes up throughout but the conclusions are unclear: has ESPN sufficiently dealt with this or has this book simply helped sweep it under the rug? And how many readers of this book would care about this issue?

7. I think more attention could have been paid to the Internet, how ESPN’s site compares to others, and how the company has balanced between TV and the Internet. I’m not very fond of all the video on ESPN’s sites and probably read more commentary on SI.com where the emphasis is more on the articles and insights than the overwhelming force of ESPN. Is there sniping within the company between the Internet and TV sides?

8. From a sociological perspective, there is a lot more analysis that could be done with this information. There is a quote toward the end from a Fox Sports executive that struck me: ESPN’s overall ratings are low. Yet, they draw a lot of attention. Perhaps this is because it is a favorite of males. Perhaps it is because they tend to dominate sports coverage in the US. Perhaps it is because their size has led to a number of competitors and websites devoted to their doings. But it sounds like ESPN has cultural influence beyond its ratings and this could be explored further.

Part 2 of this review will follow tomorrow.