Monthly Archives: November 2013

Can Malcolm Gladwell’s writings lead to “the sociology of success”?

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Sociologists might like Malcolm Gladwell but I wonder how many of them would go so far as to endorse a course titled “the sociology of success” based on his writings:

The Idea Lab has completed the first course of an ongoing educational offering called Krypton Community College, a free online/offline project based on a simple idea: We learn better when we do it together. Every four weeks, Krypton Community College presents a different course, based around the work of an acclaimed author / teacher / scholar / speaker – someone with something to say and a track record doing it. The first course, No. 001, was based on the works of acclaimed leadership expert Seth Godin.From noon to 1 p.m. on Nov. 5, The Idea Lab will present the first session of four-week course No. 002 of Krypton Community College. “We are happy to announce that the second course, The Sociology of Success, comes from the works of Malcolm Gladwell,” Ashby said. “This course draws from Malcolm’s writings about how the society we build influences who we become, the heroes that lead us, and the choices we make.”…
Ashby explained how Krypton Community College works. “With every course, we meet each Tuesday for lunch for four weeks,” he said. “Everyone who enrolls in the course gets a PDF document with links to articles and other resources. We come together to discuss and encourage each other to dive deeper into the work.”

On one hand, perhaps this takes advantage of what Gladwell does well: synthesize social science research and create interesting narratives. People who might typically not consider sociological ideas can attend this lunch course and learn something.

On the other hand, perhaps this is “pop sociology” at its worst: quickly scanning the works of Gladwell in a hour and hearing sociology through a journalistic lens. Even more problematic might be the title of the whole class – finding “success,” whatever that means, or talking about leadership. This course isn’t really about sociology but rather than American values of getting ahead with a veneer of academic respectability.

In the end, I would be suspicious that there is much sociology in this one lecture. Granted, this isn’t a full course but it seems like a very limited sociological approach.

Why live in Celebration, Florida when you can live in a Disney gated community within the resort?

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Celebration, Florida gets a lot of attention as a Disney-designed New Urbanist community but there are more exclusive Disney housing options: living in a big house within a gated community inside the resort.

Walt Disney Co.’s gated community known as Golden Oak—named after the company’s California ranch—is the only place in the world where you can own a home within Disney-resort boundaries. Some 980 acres are being carved up for as many as 450 homes on the Lake Buena Vista site, a few within eyesight of the famous Cinderella Castle fireworks.

Homeownership in the development starts at $1.7 million, and homes have sold for more than $7 million. Extras include property taxes and annual fees as high as $12,000 to cover perks, which include park passes, door-to-park transportation, extended hours for visiting attractions such as the Magic Kingdom and Epcot, and a 17,000-square-foot clubhouse with a restaurant and concierge. Residents also will have access to some of the amenities, including the spa and dining rooms at the $370 million, 444-room Four Seasons resort expected to open in Golden Oak next summer…

Many homes include nods to Mickey Mouse and friends. (Disney is willing to overlook trademark violations inside the home.) The ceiling of one of Mr. Bergami’s guest rooms has a tray ceiling in the shape of Mickey’s head. Doors have carvings of the castle, Donald Duck and Goofy.

Homeowners also have the option of adding “hidden Mickeys”—as the features are known—in everything from kitchen backsplashes to stair railings. Builder Chad Cahill included an estimated 75 hidden mouse ears in a showcase home finished earlier this year. Some are tough to spot, so when the furnished $2.7 million home sells, the new owner will receive a map of the locations.

See a 2012 post about the construction of this gated community. Sounds like the gated community is all about giving the wealthiest Disney fans what they want: an immersive Disney home just a short distance away from the Disney gates.

A thought about these wealthy Disney fans: are they easy to spot at the Disney parks? We spent a day at the Magic Kingdom in Florida last year and I was struck that the people around us looked like a broad slice of middle-class America. Granted, it is not cheap: single-day tickets were over $90, the food was moderately expensive (not as bad as I thought it might be), and many people have to travel far and pay for airfare, a hotel, and a rental car. Of course, there are lots of other things to spend big money on (for example, giving your small daughter the full princess experience), but I don’t remember seeing people who were flashing wads of money and really expensive clothes or other goods. Perhaps this says more about Americans trying to downplay their wealth (we’re all middle-class) or the findings that most millionaires don’t act like stereotypical millionaires.

Those who live in Walmart parking lots

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Walmart has thousands of U.S. locations and there are people who live in some of these parking lots:

The company’s policy of allowing overnight stays in their parking lots is intended to boost sales, but has the tangential effect of creating a subculture around its locations (though they’re still at the mercy of local laws).

The two separate Walmart parking lots in Flagstaff, Arizona are specifically known for their long-term residents, and this past summer photographer Nolan Conway spent several days making a series of portraits of both the overnighters and the people who call these asphalt grids a temporary home…

Sometimes managers will say no to campers because space is limited. Conway says he’s unsure what the exact rules were for the Flagstaff Walmart parking lots but there were stories of the police coming and telling all the long-term campers to leave.

Conway says he first tried to make the Walmart portraits in another city during the winter but was routinely turned down. In Flagstaff people seemed more amenable, partly because it was summer and they were outside and more approachable, but also because these parking lots had so many long-term residents that they developed relationships and interacted on a regular basis. Their dogs would play together and residents shared meals and holidays.

Why should we be surprised – lots of other things happen at Walmart. It would also be interesting to hear: (1) what Walmart officially says about people living in the parking lots; (2) whether this actually does help boost sales; (3) is there anything terribly wrong if people live in parking lots that are often criticized for being wasted space much of the day?

Focus less on how all of Manhattan’s 120,000 blocks can be walked and spend more time with the sociological findings

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A sociologist who has walked every block of Manhattan shares what he learned in a new book:

The result is his new book, The New York Nobody Knows: Walking 6,000 Miles in the City. The expansive sociological study relies on Helmreich’s on-the-ground research, culled from thousands of hours of observation and casual conversations with local residents, to help parse hot-button issues like immigration, assimilation, and gentrification. But more than that, the miles and miles clocked – he wore out nine pairs of shoes in his trek across the city – come through as a sort of extensive love letter to the frenetic energy and diversity of New York…

For non-New Yorkers, the time the book spends on the outer boroughs is a fairly obvious corrective for what Helmreich sees as the tourism-generated, Manhattan-centric view of New York. And for all its diversity – the book spends hundreds of pages on the immigrant communities of the city – New York comes off as an inextricably linked web of groups that constantly must interact, change, and adjust. “It’s almost as if you dropped a hundred towns in Nebraska into the middle of the city,” Helmreich says. But what sets New York apart, he adds, is that “there’s this duality to New York that you can be in these places, but you can also be in the city.” Even those who live in more isolated pockets, such as the waterfront community of Edgewater Park in the Bronx, have a sense of connectedness…

By necessity, given the size of the city, Helmreich calls his book no more than a much-needed “introductory work” to the diversity of New York City. His method is, in some ways, a throw back to a much earlier form of social criticism, when walking was curiously in vogue for the self-styled intellectuals and elites of 19th century Europe. Think of Charles Dickens’s night walks through London or the well-dressed flâneurs of Paris. And it’s one that anyone can learn from. “If I accomplish anything besides sociology,” Helmreich says, “it’s to encourage people to walk through what I call the greatest museum in the world.”

Interesting findings that could suggest how disparate communities within a larger community understand their place in the whole. Additionally, there is a lot of potential here to detail the New York that most of its residents know, not the big money Wall Street/hedge fund world or the celebrity/glamorous crowd.

However, this article goes more for the human interest angle than the actual findings of the book. While it may be interesting to detail how a single person was able to walk the whole city, it may not mean much if they weren’t very observant or didn’t find much of interest. Rather then calling this an “epic quest,” how about thinking through what this methodology leads to compared to traditional ethnographic work that calls for spending extended time with a more limited group of people? How does this compare with other studies of American streets, such as the work of Jane Jacobs looking at places like Greenwich Village and Rittenhouse Square (Philadelphia), Elijah Anderson examining street life in poor Philadelphia neighborhoods, or Mitchell Duneier analyzing how black street vendors utilize public sidewalk space in New York City? Even as New York City gets a lot of attention, this seems like a lost opportunity to highlight how a sociologist (versus a journalist or a reality TV show or an academic from another discipline) views the street-level operation of the world’s #1 global city.

Lampooning modern life: “Pottery Barn Catalogue Descriptions Written by an Aspiring Crime Novelist” and 20th Century History in Linkbait Headlines

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Taking some time to laugh at our modern times is a necessary part of survival. So, two recent examples:

1. xkcd rewrites some major moments in the 20th century in the style of today’s Internet headlines. An example from 1912: “6 Titanic Survivors Who Should Have Died.” One of my first thoughts on reading these headlines: how long until we get history textbooks that follow this style?

2. McSweeney’s rewrites descriptions from a Pottery Barn catalog in the style of an aspiring crime novelist. An example:

The door to the Farmhouse Armoire stands slightly ajar, revealing room for a 60-inch television and something more sinister. Look closely at the Morgan Cachepot across the room, and you will see reflected in its gentle curves the silhouette of an escaped maniac hiding inside the wardrobe. Quick thinking and a rustic iron latch will hold the madman until the police arrive. The solid pine doors can withstand the pounding fists of a captive lunatic, but not ammonia-based cleansers.

This would make the Pottery Barn catalog a lot more interesting.

This is one redeeming quality of the Internet: the ability to harness and make accessible lots of examples of wit. If the Internet can’t rally to save Wikipedia or we can’t stop ourselves from obsessively interacting with smartphones and social media, at least we can chuckle a bit along the way. At the same time, it is odd that I came upon this humor through a chain of websites and others who selected it as worthy of their reader’s attention (or clicks). Why bother making light of my own circumstances when I can rely on others to provide a quick laugh?

Persistent homelessness in the Chicago suburbs shouldn’t be a surprise

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Homelessness is an ongoing concern for Chicago suburbs:

Advocates say her story reflects an ongoing dilemma for those working to end homelessness. The problem often is dismissed as an urban one, but thousands of homeless people seek emergency overnight shelter across Chicago’s suburbs each year. In DuPage County, nearly three-quarters of the homeless are from the county, officials said.

Although the number of people served by homeless support agency DuPage Pads has remained steady at about 1,400 people for the past three years, officials counted an additional 29 people who refused shelter this year in favor of sleeping in parks, building entryways and other public areas, said Carol Simler, executive director for the agency.

Many of these homeless people are affected by mental illness, substance abuse or debilitating health conditions. Yet stringent suburban law enforcement — which keeps homeless people from congregating or loitering — coupled with an increase in foreclosed buildings in some areas make the fringe group difficult to reach, advocates say…

In Lake County, 2,000 people receive assistance or shelter from PADS Lake County each year. Officials estimate that an additional 200 choose to sleep outdoors — a group that can be elusive, said Joel Williams, executive director of PADS Lake County.

A few thoughts:

1. Homelessness in the suburbs might be even more pernicious for those without a home because it is harder to access local services or they are less present. As this article notes, there are several organizations in the Chicago suburbs tackling the issue and the PADS organizations in DuPage and Lake County take advantage of the Metra lines or busing, respectively.

2. It shouldn’t be surprising in 2013 to see “urban” issues in suburban areas. For example, the number of people in poverty in the suburbs now exceeds the number in poverty in big cities. Or, see the recent set of articles in the Chicago area about an uptick in heroin usage in the suburbs. Yet, it is still common to see articles like this or reactions from suburbanites that say things like, “isn’t it strange to see urban issues in the suburbs?” It could be that there are still suburbanites who aren’t expecting these issues or who intentionally moved to the suburbs to get away from such concerns. Yet, I also wonder if this isn’t really code for something: this is really more concern in wealthier suburbs who would like to keep these sorts of troubles far from their borders.

Sociologist who studies fear at and collects stats for a haunted house

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Here is one way to put sociological training into practice: working for a haunted house.

Ms. Kerr’s equivalent of a coffee break was the ScareHouse in Etna, which bills itself as “Pittsburgh’s ultimate haunted house” and has earned accolades from national publications, trade magazines, horror movie directors and other outlets to buttress the claim…

A part-time professor at Pitt and Robert Morris University, Ms. Kerr’s appreciation for the macabre also led to a job at ScareHouse, where she’s worked since 2008 as an administrator, statistician and resident sociologist…

Though the ScareHouse, which opened in 1999, had long taken customer surveys, Ms. Kerr added a new dimension, he says, polling not just on what aspects of the haunted house worked but what customers’ fear most deeply…

Ms. Kerr’s book, based on her haunted house experiences, deals with “the real benefits of experiencing thrilling or scary materials.” Those can range from the endorphin and adrenaline rush and confidence boost of surviving a dicey encounter to the stronger bonds formed in social groups that experience a scary situation together. Of course, there’s an important caveat.

“To really enjoy thrilling situations, you have to know that you’re safe,” she added.

“Thanks for experiencing our haunted house – now please take our exit survey.” Yet, it sounds like an interesting place to collect data. It would be interesting to hear how generalizable the findings about fear at a haunted house might be to other situations.

I often tell my statistics and research methods students that all sorts of organizations, from NGOs to corporations to religious groups to governments, are looking to collect and analyze data. Here is another example I can use that might prove more interesting than some other options…