Author Archives: legallysociable

Sociologist on how studying an extremist group led to a loss of objectivity

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A retired sociologist who studied the Aryan Nation discusses how his research led to a loss of objectivity and a change of research topics:

Aho began his research in the mid-1980s with a focus on the most notorious group in Idaho, the Aryan Nation Church near Coeur d’Alene and Hayden Lake. Annual conferences were held there with people from all around the world to fight what they called the “race war.” The group, originally formed in California, was forced to relocate to Idaho due to pressure from authorities. Aho was able to interview members of the group face to face, conduct phone interviews and correspond with prison inmates who were part of the organization.

“These individuals were genuinely good, congenial folks,” said Aho. “They were very independent, married, church-going people with deep beliefs. It was only when they gathered in groups and reaffirmed each other’s prejudices that things became dangerous…

In his research, Aho tried to place himself in his subjects’ shoes. He expressed how it is important to see yourself in the other person to find mutual ground and truths that can only be obtained by using this research methodology. However, after nearly a decade of research, he felt that he was losing objectivity and only adding to the problem.

“I spent years trying to understand the people who are attracted to violence, but I began to feel like my fascination with violence made me partly responsible for it,” Aho said. “I think I lost my sociological objectivity, and thought it was time to end my efforts of trying to understanding it, and move on to other scholarly activities.”

Some candor about researching a difficult topic. Given statements by some recently that we should not “commit sociology” and refrain from looking for explanations for violence, we could just ignore such groups. But, looking for explanations is not the same as excusing or condoning behavior and may help limit violence in the future. At the same time, spending lots of time with people, whether they are good or bad, can lead to relationships and a humanizing the research subject. This may provide better data for a while as well as dignity for the research subject but can lead to the “going native” issue that anthropologists sometimes discuss. A sociologist wants to be able to remain an observer and analyst, even as they try to put themselves in the shoes of others.

It would be interesting to hear the opinions of sociologists regarding studying clearly unpopular groups like white supremacists/terrorists. Sociologists are often interested in studying disadvantaged or voiceless groups but what about groups with which they profoundly disagree?

Municipalities and Wall Street argue over using eminent domain to stop foreclosures

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Some municipalities are considering using eminent domain to slow foreclosures – and Wall Street and those in real estate are not happy:

On Saturday, Mayor Wayne Smith of Irvington, N.J., will announce that his mostly working-class city is proceeding with a legal study of the plan. Irvington could try to head off legal action and repercussions through what are called “friendly condemnations,” in which incentives are used to persuade the owner to drop any objections, he said. “We figure if this program works it can help anywhere from 500 to 1,000 homes.”

This summer the similarly working-class city of Richmond, Calif., in a heavily industrial part of the San Francisco Bay Area, became the first to identify homes worth far less than their owners owe, and offer to buy not the houses themselves, but the mortgages. The city intends to reduce the debt on those mortgages, saying that will prevent foreclosure, blight and falling property values. If the owners of the mortgages — mostly banks and investors — balk, the letters said, the city could use eminent domain to condemn and buy them.

Since then, intense pressure from Wall Street and real estate interests, including warnings that mortgages will become difficult or impossible for Richmond residents to get, has whittled away support for the plan. The city has yet to actually use its power of eminent domain, but it is already fighting two lawsuits filed in federal courts…

Opponents of the strategy, including the institutional investors BlackRock and Pimco, Wells Fargo and the Mortgage Bankers Association, say that taking mortgages by eminent domain is a breach of individual rights and that investors will not receive fair market value for the mortgages. In Richmond, Mayor Gayle McLaughlin has asked investors to come to the table to work out a price, but they have so far declined to negotiate.

An interesting convergence of rights. Typically, eminent domain usage tends to raise the ire of citizens but this article makes it sound like this is something residents want. Is this the case? One argument often leveled against eminent domain is that allowing another case gives governments more opportunity to do what they want when they want. However, with this strategy, the municipalities are trying to work for the residents and against larger entities.

I wonder if the only thing that would convince banks and mortgage holders to consider this would be bad publicity, something along the lines: “Those Wall Street banks want to take advantage of distressed communities and are unwilling to work with them to improve their neighborhoods or help their residents.” This would involve less of a legal strategy and more of a public relations strategy.

 

Sociology departments “holding steady” across American colleges

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Inside Higher Ed summarizes a new report from the American Sociological Association on the state of sociology departments across the country. A few highlights:

“We’re doing relatively well,” said Roberta Spalter-Roth, director of research and development for the ASA. “We aren’t doing as well as we would like to be, but we’re doing relatively well compared to other disciplines,” such as physics and foreign languages, which have seen widespread closures in recent years…

One noticeable finding is that bigger sociology departments actually have decreased their employment of adjunct faculty, bucking a long-term, national trend toward hiring more adjuncts across disciplines. That probably accounts for the fact that tenure-line faculty workloads at those kinds of institutions have gone up, Spalter-Roth said. She called the latter trend “problematic.”…

There also was a slight “graying” of the faculty, the survey notes, with the most growth in the associate professor ranks. In 2001-2, departments had, on average: three full professors; two associate professors, and two assistant professors. In 2011-12, they had: 3.7 full professors, three associate professors; and 2.6 assistant professors. The study calls the distribution pattern an “inverted triangle,” with more full professors than assistant professors…

Spalter-Roth said the data was mostly for internal use to report on the data-driven profession, but would also be available to individual departments to report back to their institutions. The association usually surveys departments on different matters every five years, she said.

See the full report here.

It is too bad there aren’t similar figures from other disciplines to compare to. Without good comparisons, the ASA can only compare to ten years ago and not assess the relative movements among disciplines. Isn’t that probably what sociologists really want to know?

It is a little amusing that the ASA collects such data and produces a number of reports on things like mismatches between graduate student subject area interests and jobss and the state of jobs in the discipline. Should we expect much different from a data-driven discipline? At the same time, shouldn’t other disciplines collect similar data to better serve their members? I don’t know what kind of personnel or offices are required to pull off such research but I assume there is some added value to collecting it and distributing the results.

Designing parking garages for life after cars

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Parking garages can be designed in such a way so that they can be converted into other spaces if need be:

There’s a growing belief among architects and designers that all urban parking garages should be built with these “good bones,” which will allow them to be re-purposed in the future. For a variety of reasons, from higher gas prices to greater densification to better transit options, city residents will continue to drive fewer cars. As a result, we’ll eventually require fewer parking lots. The ability to adapt a structure rather than tear it down will save developers time, money, and material waste.

“As the auto culture wanes we’re going to have a lot of demolition to do, which is unfortunate,” says Tom Fisher, dean of the College of Design at the University of Minnesota. “If we’re going to build these [garages] let’s design them in a way that they can have alternative uses in the future. With just a few tweaks that’s really possible.”

Fisher says designing parking structures with an eye toward their afterlife is not only logical but rather simple. His three key elements to an adaptable garage design are flat floors, comfortable floor-to-ceiling heights, and enough loading capacity (in other words, strength) to support another structural use. Those types of changes may cost a tiny bit more up front but will provide enormous savings down the line…

New York isn’t the only place where this re-use is happening. During a recent talk, Fisher pointed out a few other examples from the Twin Cities and elsewhere around the country. In St. Paul, a developer is converting a century-old building from a garage into an apartment complex; in Miami Beach, a parking ramp is being used for retail and housing purposes.

While cars are not going away anytime soon, occasionally converting parking garages can happen. Yet, it would be interesting to see the money that converting requires versus tearing down the garage and building a new structure. I also imagine there are limits to what parking garages can be converted to.

I wonder if the fact that a building was formerly a parking garage is also part of the marketing. That might be a very different ring than saying it was a former factory or theater or church.

What foreign governments say to warn their citizens about Chicago and other big American cities

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Here is a brief look at what some other countries say about American big cities in order to warn travelers:

Well, just as State warns Americans about dangerous places to travel, so too do foreign ministries in other countries — and some countries warn their citizens to avoid heading to certain cities in the U.S. France, in particular, warns travelers to be careful in a large number of specific cities…

Chicago: Stay away from the West Side and anywhere south of 59th Street…

Boston: Avoid walking at night in Dorchester, Mattapan and Roxbury, and be wary of “petty crime” in Chinatown, the North End and Fenway.

New York: Be wary in Times Square and at the Statue of Liberty, and don’t go to Harlem, the Bronx or Central Park at night.

Washington: Northeast and Southeast should be avoided, and Union Station is dangerous at night. “Le quartier Anacostia n’est pas recommandable de jour comme de nuit.” Translation: Don’t go to Anacostia, day or night.

Interesting instructions that seem to be based around avoiding poorer or higher-crime areas of big cities. Perhaps the better question is how many Americans would give the same instructions to family members or friends.

What exactly is the ethnographic line between entertaining stories and academic content?

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One sociologist expresses his dislike of Sudhir Venkatesh’s latest book Floating City and raises an interesting question about the line between entertaining stories and sociological analysis:

 

Early in my career I had a book reviewed by a wise sage of Fleet Street who mocked my sociological language and academic conceits. Some years later, a literary agent explained that if I were to abandon academic conventions but retain the stories of “low life”, untold riches would surely follow. In exchange for academic orthodoxy I should situate myself firmly in the narrative, charting my no doubt dangerous but hilarious adventures through the life-world of the lower orders. Although I rejected this suggestion, I always wondered what an ethnography eviscerated of academic content would look like.

Floating City has answered this question and much more. A self-styled “maverick sociologist” and experienced urban ethnographer who holds a named chair at an Ivy League university, Sudhir Venkatesh drains his study of illegal entrepreneurship in New York of most of the academic conventions that will come naturally to someone with almost a quarter of a century of experience in the dangerous enclaves of US higher education. On arriving in New York from Chicago, Venkatesh finds life in a “World City” unfamiliar (but isn’t Chicago a World City?), with old standbys such as neighbourhood and community apparently made redundant by globalisation…

The populist format of Floating City is insistent that the Homeric author is a pioneer, the first in the field, an ingénue intent on emphasising that the unique demands of researching the global city require a rejection of academic tradition. But his outsider stance and maverick posturing are an irritant; they get in the way of his street-savvy case studies and vignettes of urban life. For at the heart of this book is a conventional ethnography that challenges the author’s ingénue facade by using the full arsenal of ethnographic orthodoxy, and along the way highlighting the enduring importance of community and neighbourhood.

The best of this book is precisely the result of the “traditional sociology” that Venkatesh derides. I will not forget in a hurry the poignancy of his descriptions of Manjun and his family, who run a shop selling pornographic DVDs, or his fine-grained interaction with a group of aspirational prostitute women struggling on streets paved with something less than gold. His interaction with coke-addled socialites I found irritating and somewhat pointless, and his aim to make connections between the so-called upper- and underworlds fizzles out. For while the city may be more fluid, the rich and the poor remain separated, and the dots are not joined.

This gets at some basic issues sociologists face:

1. What audience should they aim for when writing a book? If they write for the public, they may be derided by fellow academics for not having enough academic content. If they write a more academic book, few in the public will touch it. It is rare to find such sociological works that can easily transcend these audience boundaries. Just the other day, I was explaining to someone how the book Bowling Alone was one of these rare texts that contained an academic approach to a problem that caught people’s attention.

2. How exactly should ethnographic research be conveyed? Yes, there are stories to relate but it also needs to contain some sociological analysis. Different ethnographers rely on different mixes of narrative and analysis but the sociological element still has to come through to some degree.

3. If the sociologist is studying “low life,” how can these lives be explored without being exploitative or cheapening? Salaciousness might sell but it does not tend to grant dignity and respect to those being described. Sociologists also often develop personal relationships with those they are studying and these complicates the retelling.

These are common concerns of ethnographers and there are not easy answers. Amongst themselves, sociologists disagree how to do these things better.

Scaffolding makes buildings possible

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Constructing large buildings and repairing them requires a somewhat simple yet crucial element: scaffolds.

Scaffolds, fundamentally and philosophically, allow for newness—but they are, in every other way, very, very old. The caves of Lascaux, home to paleolithic paintings thought to be the first evidence of humanity’s expansion into artistry, feature sockets in their walls—borings that suggest Earth’s earliest expressionists relied on scaffolding to do their work. There’s evidence of scaffolding—wood, secured with knotted ropes—in ancient Greece. And in ancient Egypt.

In more contemporary times, scaffolds have become ubiquitous. In cities, scaffolds are part of the everyday sightscape, so saturated that they become almost invisible. We duck under them on sidewalks. We hang signs on them, taking advantage of their impermanent platform. We sense their message: that building is happening, that things are changing, that progress is marching on. And we sense that, in their way, they are generous. They are with us, in large part, to help something else come into being.

They may be considered ugly by some but they are indispensable. With them, you can reach great heights without machines. Imagine cherry pickers tall enough to reach the top of the Washington Monument or using helicopters for such work.

While they are necessary parts of our infrastructure, I don’t know that I would go so far as to celebrate their presence on the Washington Monument or other great landmarks. Two quick examples where I have seen scaffolding in action:

1. When I was in grad school at the University of Notre Dame, the school undertook a regilding of the golden dome on the Main Building. This isn’t just a gold color; the school uses gold leaf on the exterior. However, this led to an outcry from seniors that they wouldn’t be able to take graduation pictures in front of the dome because of the scaffolding. If I remember correctly, the school removed the scaffolding for graduation weekend and then started up work again.

2. On a couple of Hollywood studio tours, we saw the interiors of the some of the backlot sets. It might look like a New York City street but once you walked inside, you saw that it was a facade with a bunch of scaffolding inside on the backside of the exterior walls.

In both cases, the scaffolding was a necessary part of the process but it is not the main point. The job of scaffolding is to get out of the way to leave a more impressive structure behind. Perhaps scaffolding at the Washington Monument provides a change of pace but it is meant to be temporary. Like a lot of good infrastructure, you shouldn’t have to consider its necessity if it doing its job.

Unintended consequences: when property values decline, seniors with frozen property taxes pay more

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Programs that freeze the property taxes of older homeowners may reduce their taxes for a long time – unless property values decline and seniors end up paying more:

The state’s Senior Citizens’ Assessment Freeze Exemption works by capping participating homeowners’ property assessments. So even if the property’s value rises each year, a participating homeowner is taxed only at the level when the “freeze” was put into effect. In better times for real estate, participating homeowners in some suburban townships averaged as much as $38,000 reductions on their assessments, which would have reduced their property tax bills by hundreds of dollars. But instead of just losing out on the revenue, governments shift the tax burden onto property owners who don’t qualify for the freeze.

The law was intended to prevent fixed-income seniors from being taxed out of their homes since, to qualify, participating homeowners have to earn less than $55,000 a year.

“But nobody thought property values would decline,” said state Rep. David Harris, an Arlington Heights Republican who sits on the House property tax subcommittee. “Now, the issue is huge.”

Here’s why. If property values drop below the frozen level, there is no longer any benefit to the participating homeowner because he or she is taxed at that lower level.

That wouldn’t be a problem if the value dropped for only that homeowner. But when the value drops for everybody and the tax levies for all government bodies stay the same, or more likely increase, tax rates have to increase to meet the levies governments are allowed to collect.

The most important thing to me in this story: nobody assumed property values might drop. In other words, legislators and those receiving the tax help didn’t think about this possibility. So now they are stuck trying to scramble to find a fix.

While there are certainly other reasons contributing to the financial troubles of the last seven years or so, I wonder how much ignoring this simple idea – property values could decline for a while and not bounce back – contributed to the larger issues.

Architecture to improve your health and increase your happiness

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Check out this guide from the American Institute of Architects on how certain designs can improve your health. A few examples:

Serenity Now: The spaces architects create can have a soothing and calming effect that reduces stress through mitigation of excessive noise, allowing visual connections beyond the building or within it, and providing access to natural daylight. Research indicates that short-term exposure to noise may negatively affect mental  well-being; prolonged exposures may exacerbate other issues, including aggression…
Stairs Can Save Lives: Well-integrated and -designed staircases can increase physical activity and cardiovascular health. A Harvard study found that men who climbed at least 20 floors per week had a 20 percent lower risk of stroke or death from all causes. New York City’s Active Design Guidelines recommends stair-design strategies that may increase physical activity.
Toxic Gas: Off-gassing from high VOC (volatile organic compound) materials can trigger respiratory health problems such as asthma or allergies in both users of buildings and the people who build them. A child that sleeps in a bedroom with fumes from water-based paints and solvents is two to four times likely to develop allergies or asthma…
Eyes on the Street: Street-level doors and windows encourage walkability and foster a strong sense of community, which aids people’s sense of environmental safety and broader community health. In a Bronx, N.Y., neighborhood where crime is prevalent, the Betances Community Center, designed by Stephen Yablon, AIA, illuminates a central staircase and gymnasium in natural light, wrapping its ground-level façade in windows as well. These transparencies give the building a welcoming presence and offer views to a public park across the street.

A lot to have to consider when designing and constructing a building. It is interesting that a number of these suggestions cross multiple areas of need. For example, stairs are necessary for safety if elevators stop operating. Toxic gas from VOC materials is a green issue. Eyes on the street is a classic phrase from Jane Jacobs to describe the kind of vibrant street life that helps social control without the need for formal policing. But, to also pitch these as health issues is likely a nice marketing tool. Not only can architects design a well-functioning building, they can improve people’s health outcomes.

In pointing to this story, Curbed provides a quote that architects can even do more: they “are often the architects of our happiness and unhappiness as well.” What can’t architects do?

Height battle between Willis Tower and One World Trade Center reveals each city’s insecurities

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One World Trade Center may have been officially declared the tallest building in the United States but one writer argues the debate is really about Chicago’s and New York City’s insecurities:

What this whole thing really measures isn’t the size of a pair of buildings—it’s the size of each city’s insecurity. New York has its hollow confidence, and Chicago has its inferiority complex. Each is painful, but both can be soothed by the balm of the biggest building. Helpful reminder: The reason that Western Hemisphere asterisk has to be applied to the Willis / World Trade debate is because, among the tallest buildings worldwide, these two barely make the top 10.

The tallest building thing is just a stand-in for the real question: Which is the better city? You’ll need a different kind of Council on Urban Habitat to really get to the bottom of that.

Which is the better city? New York City is consistently ranked as the #1 global city. New York has more glamor, more of the global financial industry, more people than other cities in the United States, and one of the most impressive concentrations of people, buildings, and wealth in Manhattan. Chicago has its place as the quintessential American city (from its explosive growth in the late 1800s, its place as a transportation hub, the birthplace of numerous financial industry and commodity trade inventions, and its contrasts of wealth and poverty) and architecture.

But, all places have imperfections. See an earlier post about Chicago’s insecurities. And, it also depends on which other cities are in the comparisons: New York City is commonly compared to the world’s greatest cities including London, Paris, Berlin, Tokyo, and Hong Kong. Chicago, on the other hand, contends with two larger U.S. cities (including Los Angeles, a city that doesn’t seem to get caught up in these debates) and perhaps the next tier of global cities.

How exactly a building settles these concerns is beyond me. As the article notes, there are other buildings around the world – in some that rank lower on the scale of global cities, places like Dubai, Mecca, and Shenzhen – that are as tall or taller.