Monthly Archives: August 2014

The benefits of institutions over charismatic authority for evangelicals

Posted on by

American evangelicals may often prize celebrity pastors and figures but sociologist and college president Michael Lindsay argues institutions provide more lasting impact:

Weber distinguished between different kinds of authority. Traditional authority is what the Queen of England has. You inherit it from your parents. Rational-legal authority is what President Obama has. You’re on top of a major bureaucracy, and that’s how you get things done. And then there’s charismatic authority. This is the authority that Billy Graham had. It’s the authority that Jesus had. It’s the authority that gathers and collects around an outstanding individual, a persona.

But in order for that person to have lasting impact, Weber says, it has to be routinized; in other words, it has to be channeled into an institutional form. The authority of a charismatic individual has to be transferred into a rational-legal bureaucracy. So, for instance, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association is a great example of the routinization of charisma. After Billy Graham is gone, his ministry will continue. Charles Colson died two years ago. But much of his work is continuing in Prison Fellowship even though the founder is no longer there.

So, while it is true that evangelicalism does prize the personality, and there is a cult of celebrity in the church, what we are witnessing is evangelicals coming to appreciate the importance and the primacy of institutions.

Charismatic leaders are rare and it can often be difficult to take the better things they do and imbue that into institutions. Yet, institutions can have incredible staying power and operate at a broader level of society.

While evangelicals may be showing more interest in institutions, such a viewpoint rubs against the typical evangelical tendency toward individualism. The charismatic leader can fit the American story of working hard and making something of oneself. The attractive leader can pull in individuals through new technologies as evangelicals effectively used the ascending radio and television scenes. (Interestingly, I’ve seen much less about evangelicals effectively harnessing the Internet for their ends. Perhaps such an analysis can come with time.) Appealing to institutions requires both leaders and adherents to turn their focus more to the communal than their own interests. This is a difficult switch, particularly in certain areas like Smith and Emerson demonstrate in Divided By Faithwith the inability for white evangelicals to beyond the individual to the social dimensions of race in America.

Drudge Report gets in on the politicization of tiny houses

Posted on by

The Drudge Report yesterday featured this headline and photo regarding tiny houses:

DrudgeReportTinyHousesAug0514

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

While the headline links to a fairly bland story about the increased popularity of tiny houses in the Daily Mail, the tagline and the picture is intended to make another point: Americans are choosing tiny houses because the economy has pushed them into it. If the economy was doing better, assumed to be the case if there was a different president, they wouldn’t choose a tiny house. Perhaps this is what a future conservative president should run on: McMansions for all!

This isn’t the first time people have made political points with tiny houses. In the number of articles I’ve seen about such homes (and in the Daily Mail summary article), tiny house residents often make clear statements that they want to avoid consumerism and live greener lives. Generally, they seem to be favored by educated liberals. However, there is little reason that they couldn’t be supported by rural conservatives who want cheap and mobile housing on land or who want to build their own homes.

Given the relatively small number of tiny houses, perhaps the public discussion over tiny houses can’t help but be political as both sides try to use it to their advantage. If such homes were to become numerous and widespread across the population, the opposite might be true: neither party could risk alienating voters over their choice of a home.

Americans under 35 have lowest recorded homeownership rate; what does it mean?

Posted on by

The latest Census data shows Americans under 35 now have the lowest recorded homeownership rate for that age group:

In the second quarter of 2014, the rate of homeownership among householders who are under 35 dropped to the lowest number ever reported since the Census Bureau first started recording quarterly homeownership rates 21 years ago.

In a news release published this week, the Census Bureau said that the homeownership rate among householders under 35 was 35.9 percent in the second quarter of 2014. That number was not only lower than any quarterly rate going back to the fourth quarter of 1993 (the first quarterly rate reported) but was also lower than any of the annual homeownership rates for under 35s that the Census Bureau has published since 1982.

However, a Census Bureau official also said that the 35.9 percent homeownership rate for under 35s for the second quarter was not statistically different from the rate for the first quarter of this year (36.2 percent) or the fourth quarter of 2013 (36.8 percent).

These figures on their own could support a number of different arguments about the fate of homeownership in the United States. On one side, those promoting more urban lifestyles could say millennials aren’t buying more homes because they are moving to cities and looking to rent units in order to have more flexibility and take advantage of the urban lifestyle. On the other side, others might note that this data comes 5+ years into the bursting of a housing bubble and that millennials will show more interest in homeownership when the economy picks up. Yet, to make such claims with this data alone would be irresponsible. To be honest, we need a lot more data than this to support any argument and know whether younger Americans do or do not want to own homes in similar numbers to past generations.

See the full Census report regarding 2Q homeownership rates here.

Watching metropolitan sprawl from space

Posted on by

Check out a set of interesting GIFs showing sprawl in metropolitan regions:

A couple things jumped out at him while studying these animations. “It is interesting to see the ‘greening’ of the mid-ring suburbs of the ’70 to the ’90s as the tree canopies matured,” he says. “This is in contrast to the concrete jungles of prewar neighborhoods and the virgin developments of the 21st century.” (Look again at Dallas/Fort Worth for a good example.)

A few other trends he noticed: Some cities, like Chicago and Philadelphia, grow lighter over time, an apparent consequence of newer, white-roofed buildings crowding out older ones with dark roof tiles. And the shrinking of water sources, whether manmade or natural, is a “sad site to behold,” Williams says. “On the other hand, the creation of artificial land in coastal metropolises is increasingly larger in scale (re: Shanghai).”

If one thinks that any sort of sprawl is bad because it takes up more land, leads to deconcentrated regions, necessarily leads to McMansions and more driving, or other reasons, the images of American cities may look bad. But, the animations of American cities show sprawl on a different scale than that of some global cities. The American regions show more filling in between existing settlements, particularly in more established Northaast and Midwest cities. Sunbelt cities may look more like cities in developing countries where cities have simply exploded rather than filled in.

It is also interesting to consider sprawl from this particular vantage point: via satellites. The average suburbanite might consider sprawl at a closer level; the nearby field that disappeared for a housing development, the increase in traffic as new residents add to the local congestion, the notices about cheaper houses on the metropolitan fringe. But, satellite images and maps help remind us of the broader nature of sprawl: if the region is a circle with the city in the middle, expanding sprawl moves out the outer ring of the circle, adding more and more square miles that is only generally bounded by a large body of water (or perhaps another metropolitan region).

Porches on new American homes increase by 21% between 1993 and 2013

Posted on by

More new American homes have porches:

As the Census Bureau reported in June, 63 percent of new single-family homes completed last year had this once-again-trendy feature, up from 42 percent in 1993. So what’s the cause of this major upswing? Well, as Robert Stern, dean of the Yale School of Architecture, revealed to the Wall Street Journal, the return of the porch is reflective of a desire for social connection. And as “a place between the privacy of the house and the public world of the street,” it’s perfect for just that.

See the official Census data here – the porch is up as well as the patio while decks have decreased.

But, the real question is whether this increase in porches is related to an increased use of porches. The quote above from Stern is paraphrased as “reflective of a desire for social connection” but not necessarily an actual uptick in that. This gets at an issue at the heart of some critiques of New Urbanism and other attempts at neo-traditional architecture: does building a porch change social behavior? Indeed, what if having a porch of the front of the house is more related to what is perceived as features that increase a home’s value?

All together, these new porches may be much more aspirational and about financial return than utilized for socializing.  We’ve all heard the story that people in the not-too-distant past used to sit on the porch all the time but, unfortunately, I’m not aware of any data sources that consistently measure this in the American population at large…

Growth sector: catering to the wealthy

Posted on by

Here is one area for economic opportunity: providing goods and services for the wealthy.

Nathan Wilmers, a sociology Ph.D. candidate at Harvard, looked at how the growing impact of wealthy consumers is reshaping the economy and wages. Others have termed this phenomenon “the plutonomy,” or an economy in which earnings and spending are dominated by those at the top.

Consumer spending by the top 5 percent of households has grown 5.2 percent a year since 1989, while spending by the bottom 95 percent has grown at 2.8 percent, Wilmers said. In the past, economists have estimated that the top 5 percent of consumers account for nearly 40 percent of consumption…

Wilmers said that “the increased influence of these consumers sets up big rewards for businesses that create and sell the sorts of products the affluent want.” Specifically, he looks at salaries for butlers, wine producers, Realtors, lawyers and bankers and found that those who are best at their professions and excel at skills valued by the wealthy have the highest wages.

Even within the same industry—say, law or household staff—people hired by wealthy patrons make more than those that serve the middle class or affluent. Companies favored by wealthy consumers also have higher margins (as anyone who’s looked at Hermes profits in Birkin bags can attest).

A few thoughts:

1. At what point does the market become saturated with people and businesses trying to sell to the wealthy?

2. Some historical context would be helpful here. How much does this differ from previous eras? It makes sense that the wealthy consume more but is this significantly different than a few decades ago?

3. Isn’t this a reasonable outcome for a capitalistic system? If you want to make money, you want to find consumers who can pay for your products. Having smaller profit margins may provide for a need or exhibit altruism but a purely profit-motivated firm would seek out the wealthy.

Horror film featuring dissertation writing sociology Ph.D. student does not end well

Posted on by

Sociologists don’t often make it into movies or TV shows but here is a new horror film that features the trials of a sociology Ph.D. student:

Matt Passmore (The Glades) and Huntingdon Valley native Katie Walder (Gilmore Girls) star as Las Vegas couple Josh and Sarah – he’s a croupier at one of the big casinos; she’s a Ph.D. candidate in sociology – whose quiet, cookie-cutter lives in a quiet, cookie-cutter housing development are turned inside out when the ultimate neighbor from hell moves in across the drive.

A scrawny, Norman Bates-ian creature with stringy, greasy hair parted in the middle, Dale (Nathan Keyes) is instantly, and most creepily, besotted with Sarah.

That’s because Sarah is the spitting image of Dale’s mom, who was viciously stabbed to death by Dale’s pop, as we see in a brief prologue…

The creepfest begins one afternoon when Sarah is jotting down some thoughts about the latest chapter in her dissertation, a study of the social effects of Internet porn. She falls asleep, only to wake up later that night dressed in an entirely different outfit.

Doesn’t sound like a good film. Also, it doesn’t sound like the sociology Ph.D. matters much for the plot. Could any graduate program have fit the bill here? Don’t sociologists get to do anything interesting in the media?