Monthly Archives: May 2012

Sociologist Dalton Conley to spend sabbatical working for the online University for the People

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Sociologist Dalton Conley has an interesting sabbatical project: working to help the online University for the People up and going.

The international, tuition-free, nonprofit institution, founded in 2009, is a pioneering effort in e-learning and peer-to-peer learning. Using open-source technology and coursework provided gratis by well-regarded institutions, it offers two- and four-year degree programs in business administration and computer science. It has formed partnerships with Yale University, New York University, and Hewlett-Packard, and to date has enrolled 1,400 students from 130 countries.”Higher education is our best cultural product, as far as I’m concerned,” says Mr. Conley. “We also export our less-impressive cultural products, McDonald’s and Hollywood and so forth, so I think it’s a great idea to help folks who want to help themselves to increase their skill sets and help their own countries.”…

As University of the People’s dean of arts and sciences, Mr. Conley will work to expand course offerings. “We need to focus on pragmatic degrees that are going to help individuals in their societies, in developing countries,” he says. He hopes the next two majors will be in health, to train nurses and community-health workers, and education, to train teachers.

This sounds like it could be a very interesting project. However, isn’t access to this free online school still dependent on who has regular Internet access? Without that kind of infrastructure, will this school be best able to help those who most need the help?

Greenwashing Cadillacs and McMansions

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A review of the 2012 Cadillac Escalade compares the greenwashing of the Escalade and McMansions:

And of course, the Escalade is not a paragon of fuel efficiency, but you knew that. Still, 13 mpg city and 20 mpg highway is pretty grim. Much better mileage is available, however, in the form of the Escalade Hybrid. It’s easy to view that car as a cynical bit of greenwashing (sort of like putting bamboo floors in your McMansion), but the Hybrid’s EPA ratings of 20/23 mpg put it on a par with much smaller vehicles — the city rating particularly.

Two thoughts:

1. I’ve asked repeatedly whether McMansions could be considered green. SUVs have similar issues: how many MPG would they need to no longer be considered with derision by critics?

2. The comparison between McMansions and SUVs is not unusual. Here is a finding from my recently published paper on the meaning of the term McMansion: out of the 637 articles that mentioned McMansions in the New York Times between 1/1/00 and 12/31/09, at least 33 compared McMansions and SUVs. Both are often cited as exemplars of excessive consumption (using resources, debt, sprawl, etc.) and many critics would love to leave the two objects to a foregone past.

Building houses designed for blended families

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Architects, real estate agents, and builders are adjusting to selling more homes to blended families:

“More and more people are getting divorced, especially in Paris and its suburbs. We have many customers in this situation. We try to interest them in a certain type of home,” admits Alexandre Colleu, a real estate agent working in suburbia. In France, one out of five children live in a blended family. In Switzerland, more than 22,000 divorces were granted in 2010; the figure has been increasing steadily for the past few years. “Separations are increasing, but so is the speed at which couples find new partners. They are not a market yet, but they’re a target population,” confirms Yankel Fijalkow, author of The Sociology of Housing. “Real estate agents have now found a way of selling homes that would be too expensive for a single family,” he notes. At the National Architecture School in Paris, where Fijalkow teaches, masters-builders and architects are working on the issue: “They are studying the housing models of countries from countries where people live with their extended family rather than within nuclear families,” Professor Fijalkow explains.

Each blended family is different. Some homes are organized so that each generation has their own space– whereas in other houses, people are separated according to family groups. Let’s go back to the aforementioned “nine-room house”. The estate agent describes it: “It is made of two detached houses linked by a footbridge. The couple who wants to preserve their newly-found intimacy can live in one house, and the children in the other. Also, children of blended families are often teenagers who appreciate the idea of having their own private space,” he adds.

Sibrine Durnez, an architect in the Belgian city of Liège, has designed a house with two very separate levels. “The parents did not want to live in a sad, empty house on the weeks when they don’t have custody of their children. So from their floor, they can’t see the kids’ rooms. They also wanted all the children’s bedrooms to be exactly the same size, to avoid jealousy,” she explains, adding that her firm mostly designs small houses for single-parent families.

Other families chose to allocate a part of the house to each “clan,” where they share some rooms but sometimes have two different front doors. The most radical version of this is a perfectly symmetrical house, with a double kitchen and a double living room, which can be separated or joined according to the mood of the day. “It’s important to be able to spend time with each other, but it’s also important to be able to ‘avoid’ each other,” Yankel Fijalkow explains.

This sounds like an interesting adaptation to the Going Solo world: even in families where adults have decided to live together, the emphasis in these homes is on private space where each individual can adjust to the changing family circumstances.

It would be really interesting to hear from families that live in these homes. Does the design help promote family togetherness? In other words, is it more important to simply have the different family members living in the same dwelling than interacting on a regular basis within the dwelling? What happens if families grow closer together and want more common space – do they have to move?

Sociologist argues that there aren’t as many high-paying high-tech jobs as people think

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While commentators suggest that college students should pursue high-tech careers, a sociologist argues that there aren’t as many jobs in this sector as people think:

Finally, it is a big mistake to think that the tech sector is a panacea for the jobs crisis. University of Michigan professor of business and sociology Gerald Davis has examined the data and found that the job-producing high-tech’s potential is consistently overplayed.

“Although the handful of teen billionaires who manage to cash in on the latest app may suggest otherwise, surprisingly few people actually work in the high-visibility success stories of the tech economy,” Davis writes in an article to be presented at the American Sociological Association meeting. “The combined global workforces of Google (32,467), Apple (63,300), Facebook (3000), Microsoft (90,000), Cisco (71,825), and Amazon.com (56,200) — 316,792 as of the end of 2011 — are smaller than the U.S. workforce of [grocery chain] Kroger (339,000). Notably, a recent survey of college graduates under 40 found than one in five listed Google as their most preferred employer, followed by Apple and Facebook. They might as well have chosen the NBA as Facebook, given the firm’s minuscule employment, and Apple’s recent surge in net jobs is almost entirely attributable to the roll-out of its retail stores, where most of its current employees work. The Computer and Electronic Products industry has seen a loss of 750,000 jobs since 2000 as production has been almost universally offshored. But even the Information Services sector, which includes telecommunications, broadcasting, publishing and data processing, shed over one million jobs during the same period.”

It sounds like aspirations and the number of available jobs don’t line up. Some could argue that there are plenty of smaller high-tech firms and start-ups along with plenty of opportunities for entrepreneurship but I’m guessing plenty of young adults would want to work for established (and cool!) companies.

Others have argued that people in or going to college should look at what jobs are going to popular in the future, presumably to avoid industries that are losing jobs. But what commentator would discourage young people from going into the high-tech sector even though they would quickly recommend steering clear of liberal arts degrees?

Sociologist: some people working more hours in order to consume more

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Sociologist Juliet Schor has over the years written about the consumer habits of Americans, notably in The Overspent American. She argues that part of the reason some Americans are working more is they need the money to consume more:

But it seems the enemy we have met is also us, as Pogo long ago predicted. Juliet Schor, author of “The Overworked American” and “The Overspent American,” finds we’ve radically increased our work hours over three decades. Part of that is due to the weakening of unions, which historically reduced excessive workweeks, Schor says.

But it’s also due to a “dramatic upscaling of the American dream” to include ever pricier McMansions, cooler cars and all manner of material want, she argues.

“Comfort is no longer enough,” Schor says in an interview by the Media Education Foundation. “People want luxury.”

Fair enough, although in Michigan’s economy just pizza and Netflix is a luxury for many. Schor’s point is people are overworking themselves while their employers expect the same. Either way, it’s a mechanistic life, always producing, always plugged in — more like a machine than a mind.

Schor discusses the idea of “reference groups,” people that we compare ourselves to. With new kinds of technology, such as television, more Americans were exposed to upper-scale standards of living beyond what they saw around their immediate vicinity. For example, when Americans watched shows with middle-class values like The Cosby Show, they saw a family with a doctor and lawyer as parents (meaning there is a high household income as well as high status) that rarely had to deal with money issues. Over the long run, Schor argues that Americans came to see that sort of lifestyle as normal, something to aspire to in order to be middle-class.

It seems like it wouldn’t be too hard to get some data to test this question: do people who work longer hours consume more (as a percentage of their income)? Could you control for occupation (some might require more work than others), location, whether there is more than one wage earner in the household, and adjust that once you get certain subsistence levels of income you can “afford” to consume more?

A second question: if Schor is correct that television gave people wider reference groups which contributed to consuming to maintain or raise their status, what effect has the Internet had?

Another famous sociology major: Arne Duncan

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Occasionally I highlight famous sociology degree holders such as Ronald Reagan or the current President of Ireland or Martin Luther King, Jr. Add the current Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, to the list:

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan leads this year’s class of inductees for the Academic All-America Hall of Fame that was announced Tuesday by the College Sports Information Directors of America.

Duncan was a basketball co-captain at Harvard and the Crimson’s leading scorer at 16.9 points a game as a senior in 1986-87. He was first-team Academic All-American that year, graduating magna cum laude with a degree in sociology.

He tried his hand at pro basketball from 1987-91, including a stint in Australia.

Some students want to know that sociology majors can make a difference in the US government or in large organizations. This is a good example: Duncan built upon his degree and parlayed into a career in education.

The title of Duncan’s senior thesis at Harvard sounds like something that might come out of a William Julius Wilson text:

Duncan attended the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools[2] and later Harvard University, where he graduated magna cum laude in 1987 with a bachelor’s degree in sociology. His senior thesis, for which he took a year’s leave to do research in the Kenwood neighborhood, was entitled The values, aspirations and opportunities of the urban underclass.

It would be interesting to hear Duncan talk more specifically about how a sociology degree has helped him see the world differently and get involved in and move up within government organizations.

Can you imagine what might happen if Duncan, working out of personal experience as well as an administrator, led a charge to include sociology in curriculum?

Can you get a “whiff of McMansion” from a 1929 house?

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Occasionally, the term McMansion is applied anachronistically to older homes. See this example of a 1929 home in Oregon:

On Sunday, the Wayne Morse Historical Park Corp. invited the public to come out to the ranch and enjoy its annual open house, throwing open the doors of the home that Morse and his wife built shortly after moving to Oregon from Wisconsin in 1929 so he could take a job at the University of Oregon School of Law…

Designed by UO architecture professor Wallace Hayden, the colonial revival house, listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 1999, is modest beyond imagination for a man known as the Tiger of the Senate.

The living room is scaled to fit a family, not to hold a state reception. There is no “McMansion” whiff here; instead, the house looks as if it was comfortable for Morse, his wife, Mildred, and their three daughters.

I think I know what the journalist is getting at: the home is not pretentious or does not betray who lived there. Indeed, the long-term owner of the house was a 24-year member of the US Senate who was elected as a Republican, Independent, and Democrat and also “set a record for performing the longest one-person filibuster in the history of the Senate” at 22 hours and 26 minutes (later broken by Strom Thurmond). At the same time, the home, can’t really be considered a McMansion because of when it was built. The term McMansion didn’t arise until the late 1980s and retroactive applications of the term don’t account for the context in which it arose of sprawl, larger homes, and new ways of displaying wealth. Additionally, this article suggests the home is a colonial revival home, a style that may indeed be found in McMansions of today but it also a coherent style that doesn’t fit with the mish-mash style of some McMansions. Finally, the house is on the National Register of Historic Places, an honor that I suspect will not be applied to many McMansions.

Also, I amused by this idea: “whiff of McMansion.” Perhaps it could apply to a garish perfume or wine?

A story of teaching sociology to a young child

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At a few points, I’ve thought about how sociology could be taught to young children. One way would be to include it the social studies curriculum but another would be to have kids accompany their parents to college classes in sociology:

Fourteen years ago, Karen Bilodeau was an unusual student at Bates College. She was 33 years old and often took her preschooler, Emma, with her to classes or to meetings with professors…

All that made an impression on Emma, a senior at Edward Little High School. With a goal of becoming a doctor helping underprivileged children, this fall she’ll go to college on the campus she walked as a child…

Between the ages of 3 and 6, Emma remembers going to professor Emily Kane’s sociology classes. “I remember her doing a lot of projects. Kane examined gender equality in ‘The Little House on the Prairie.’ I remember that being fascinating,” Emma said…

When it was time for Emma’s college search, she longed to go out of state. During an overnight visit to Oberlin in Ohio, she said she changed her mind, preferring to be near her younger siblings and longing for Bates.

At age 17, like she did at age 4, Emma sat in on Professor Kane’s sociology class. “It was very much like, ‘This is what I want to be doing the next four years,'” she said.

Emma plans to study sociology and African-American studies. Her adopted siblings are African-American. She also plans to take science classes to help her continue to medical school.

“I really want to help underprivileged kids as a pediatrician or surgeon” in Haiti or Africa, she said.

A nice story. I’ve wondered how much introducing younger kids to sociology might help boost the discipline’s profile before students enter college as sociology is one of few disciplines that new college students don’t know much about. Or, perhaps this would help imprint sociology on the nation’s consciousness in a way that it isn’t now. This reminds me of Jane Elliot’s famous “blue eyes, brown eyes” experiment in a third-grade classroom. As Elliot has showed, this experience was formative in the lives of her small-town Iowa students. Perhaps the route to public sociology should begin with children rather than adults?

 

Our world: the Beatles can get $250k for the use of an original recording on a TV show

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I’ve seen/heard several discussions of the use of the Beatles song “Tomorrow Never Knows” to close the most recent episode of Mad Men. Here is some of the story behind how the show was able to get permission to use the song – for $250,000:

 “It was always my feeling that the show lacked a certain authenticity because we never could have an actual master recording of the Beatles performing,” Matthew Weiner, the creator and show runner of “Mad Men,” said in a telephone interview on Monday. “Not just someone singing their song or a version of their song, but them, doing a song in the show. It always felt to me like a flaw. Because they are the band, probably, of the 20th century.”…

Near the end of the “Mad Men” episode, titled “Lady Lazarus” and written by Mr. Weiner, the advertising executive Don Draper (played by Jon Hamm) finds himself struggling to understand youth culture and is given a copy of the Beatles album “Revolver,” a new release in the summer of 1966.

But instead of starting his listening experience with the album’s acerbic lead-off track, “Taxman,” Draper instead skips to its final — and, shall we say, more experimental — song, “Tomorrow Never Knows,” contemplating it for a few puzzled moments before he shuts it off. (That psychedelic song, with its signature percussion loops and distorted John Lennon vocals, also plays over the closing credits of the episode.)…

To win the company’s approval in this case, Mr. Weiner said, “I had to do a couple things that I don’t like doing, which is share my story line and share my pages.” He added that he received the approval from Apple Corps last fall, about a month before filming started on the episode.

Several thoughts:

1. Does this show that the Beatles still matter? On one hand, yes: the creator said he wanted to have an authentic Beatles song on his show. On the other hand, this is a show about the 1960s – it is a period piece, a “retro cool” show, not a show about the modern day that would show the current relevance of the Beatles. The creator suggests they are the band of the 20th century, inviting questions about who might be the artist of the 21st century.

2. Contra #1 above, the Beatles can still get $250k for the use of their song. Is this about the greatness of their work or because they have been so tight in who is able to license their music? Are the copyright holders of the Beatles music (some combo of Michael Jackson’s estate and Sony?) simply waiting for McCartney and Starr to die so they can reap a windfall from licensing?

3. The article doesn’t discuss this but the selection of “Tomorrow Never Knows” is particularly interesting. This song would never make it on a Beatles “greatest hits” album (it is not on the 1 album or the Red or Blue albums of the 1970s). It is buried at the end of the Revolver album. At the same time, many books and critics acknowledge that this song is a turning point in the group’s career. It was actually the first recorded song for Revolver, an album noted by many critics as the greatest album (or one of the top 3) of all time. It was a sharp departure from earlier Beatles music: in a few short years, the group had moved from “I Want To Hold Your Hand” to Lennon singing about ideas from The Tibetan Book of the Dead with all sorts of studio effects like backward guitar around him. My guess is that the playing of song means that Don Draper’s is about to take an interesting turn (along with the rest of the 1960s).

4. A question about copyright: will the Beatles music ever become part of the public domain? It would be a shame if it does not.

5. How long until we live in a world when nobody knows about or cares about the Beatles? I’m particularly interested in the changes that will happen when the Baby Boomer generation fades away…

Comparing the mass-produced ranch to the mass-produced McMansion

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I’ve recently seen several articles about the ranch house (I discussed Atomic Ranch magazine a few weeks ago) but this one, “Ranch housing style makes a comeback,” led me to thinking why the mass-produced ranch may be popular and the mass-produced McMansion is not. Here is a brief explanation from the article:

Cicaloni is not alone in her appreciation for the ranch. Though it will never be as popular as the ubiquitous Colonial here in New England, the ranch is making a return. The simple home is being embraced by young people attracted to the mid-century modern vibe; by aging boomers who no longer want to deal with stairs; and, as always, by those looking for an affordable home…

“Popular publications portrayed a confident and easygoing way of life that could be accessible to one and all; of particular interest was the casual California lifestyle, implying prosperity, glamour and optimism as embodied in a sunlit and breezy ranch house where indoors and outdoors blended effortlessly,” Betsy Friedberg of the Massachusetts Historical Commission wrote in a 2003 issue of Preservation Advocate. “In the 1950s, I think, [ranches] were considered fresh,” says Zimmerman. “They were built at the same time as Capes, which looked very traditional. If you were a person who was up to date and interested in the latest thing, then, yes, a ranch is the thing you would have chosen in 1952.”…

BUT EVENTUALLY, thanks to tract housing like in the infamous Levittowns, people didn’t see the charm anymore. The 1962 song “Little Boxes,” inspired by a drive through a postwar development in California, ridiculed the conformity: Little boxes on the hillside, little boxes all the same. There’s a green one and a pink one, and a blue one and a yellow one. And they’re all made out of ticky tacky, and they all look just the same…

But the other thing is that taste in homes, like fashion, is cyclical. “All building styles go through a period when they are unpopular,” says Zimmerman. “At one point, Victorian houses were thought of as white elephants and hard to heat and not set up for modern living and not in tune with the landscape. So, in the ’60s, we lost a lot of Victorians.” And so, the ranches often derided as “ranch burgers”?—?as in mass-produced by a fast-food chain?—?were replaced with homes that came to be known as “McMansions.’’

So it’s simply a matter that ranch houses are on an up-cycle? It is somewhat amusing to think that these simple houses could be an antidote to an era of supersizing house size and debt.

I’m sure some critics of suburban houses would argue that ranch homes and McMansions share several important characteristics. To start, they are associated with sprawl and tract subdivisions. McMansions may be an easy target today but there were plenty of critics of the Levittowns and similar subdivisions built after World War II. In this sense, the problem may not be with the homes themselves per se but rather with the way of life that promotes building mass-produced houses. Second, both ranches and McMansions are not prized for their design or architecture due to their mass-produced nature as well as their unpleasing aesthetics (though these differ: ranches are meant to be more simple while McMansions are meant to impress or be flashy).

It would be interesting to see figures about how quickly housing stock is replaced in the United States. For example, how many ranch houses were built and how quickly were they replaced? What can this tell us about how quickly McMansions might be replaced?