Author Archives: legallysociable

One problem area in Sociology PhD job market: a mismatch between advertised fields and PhD student’s interests

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MacLeans points out one of the issues raised by a recent ASA publication titled Moving Toward Recovery: Findings from the 2010 Job Bank Survey:

It’s not all good news, however. The report also surveyed PhD candidates and found some major mismatches between their “areas of special interest” and the jobs that were available in 2010.

One of the widest gaps is in criminology (a.k.a. social control, crime, law and deviance), which made up 31 per cent of all postings on the ASA’s job site in 2010, but was only listed as an area of special interest for 18 per cent of PhD candidates whom were surveyed by the ASA.

The opposite problem exists too. More people are interested in “inequities and stratification” than any other field — 35 per cent of candidates chose it as one of their special interests — but only 19 per cent of jobs advertised were in that area.

There’s also a shortage of jobs for those interested in teaching gender and sexuality. One fifth of students are interested in the subject, but only one tenth of advertised jobs were in that field.

The article misses one other subfield with a large difference: 8.4% of advertised jobs were looking for someone in the sociology of culture while 24.3% of students had an interest in this area.

Will the free market work this out? Who needs to change in this area: should students start pursuing these in-demand sub-fields or do graduate programs hold any responsibility, perhaps for encouraging students in subfields that reflect their faculty more than the jobs available in the field?

McMansion defender claims to be fighting against “green jihadists”

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McMansion is a term that can be used pejoratively. And in response to a proposed “mandatory energy star ratings” for Australian houses, McMansion defenders can use their own pejorative terms like “green jihadists”:

It seems rarely a month passes without some new assault on the lifestyle and housing choice preferred by the overwhelming majority of Australians – the detached suburban home.

Denigrated by a careless media as ‘McMansions’ or attacked as some archaic form of reckless housing choice which is ‘no longer appropriate’ (according to some planning or environmental fatwa), the detached home is under a constant assault of falsely laid allegation and intellectual derision…

But you get the strong impression, reading the constant digest of anti-suburban living which parades through mainstream media, that mainstream Australians are a reckless bunch of self-interested misfits whose behaviour and choices need to be controlled by people wiser than them.

And there’s one of the great ironies in all this: those who advocate denying housing choice and enforcing apartments over detached homes, public transport over private, inner city density over suburban expansion, invariably seem to do the opposite of what they preach. Next time you come across one of these green jihadists waging war on the suburban home (and the people who live in them), ask them if they live in a house or a unit, how many children they have, ask how many cars they own, and ask what their power bill is like.

Perhaps those using these terms might consider it fair after the way “McMansion” has been used over the years. Or perhaps some feel that this imposition on their preferred homes is simply crossing such a line that it should be equated with one of the most negative images one can throw around.

While I’ve written before on the meaning of the word McMansion, this might indicate another possible area of research: what sort of discourse McMansion defenders use. I would guess that a common argument, expressed in this piece, is that people are simply buying homes that they want and they shouldn’t be restricted from pursuing their tastes. Additionally, just like this piece, defenders will point at the hypocrisy of the other side.

Two versions of the ASA 2011 bingo card

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Sociologists at orgtheory put out the annual ASA bingo card several days before this year’s meetings. Interestingly, two other sociologists developed their own bingo card after the meetings, one they argue is “more positive”:

There was a popular “bingo card” for the annual meetings of the American Sociological Association held last week in Las Vegas. It poked a bit of fun at sociologists and the meeting itself. Nathan Jurgenson’s reaction was that the card itself revealed much about the sociological discipline and the problems with the annual meetings. He wrote a posthere on Cyborgology calling for a more positive bingo card that might be helpful to improve the conference experience rather than just complaining about what is wrong. It is easy to be annoyed, much harder to be constructive.

CUNY sociologist Jessie Daniels responded to this call, and, together, we have created a more constructive and useful Bingo card that looks specifically at how to improve a conference by augmenting one’s experience with Twitter.

The card describes how conferences in general benefit from engagement on both the physical and digital levels. Conversations taking place move onto the web, and discussions in the “backchannel” flow back into physical space. In fact, we noted this trend during the Theorizing the Web conference this past spring, calling it an “augmented conference.”

And just as I was wondering how much Twitter was actually used during the conference, the same sociologists have a summary. My quick thought: the Twitter use was pretty limited and I imagine it will be some time before Twitter is fully integrated into the conference.

I wonder if someone has a blogging summary about the conference.

On the whole, are sociologists ahead or behind the curve in adopting newer social technologies, like Twitter? Are the patterns tied more to age or education or some other factors?

The problems with white stereotypes in movies like The Help and To Kill a Mockingbird

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Here is an interesting take on how the presentation of white people in The Help (and To Kill a Mockingbird) obscures the existence of racial systems in the Jim Crow South:

This movie deploys the standard formula. With one possible exception, the white women are remarkably unlikable, and not just because of their racism. Like the housewives portrayed in reality television shows, the housewives of Jackson treat each other, their parents and their husbands with total callousness. In short, they are bad people, therefore they are racists…

To suggest that bad people were racist implies that good people were not.

Jim Crow segregation survived long into the 20th century because it was kept alive by white Southerners with value systems and personalities we would applaud. It’s the fallacy of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” a movie that never fails to move me but that advances a troubling falsehood: the notion that well-educated Christian whites were somehow victimized by white trash and forced to live within a social system that exploited and denigrated its black citizens, and that the privileged white upper class was somehow held hostage to these struggling individuals.

But that wasn’t the case. The White Citizens Councils, the thinking man’s Ku Klux Klan, were made up of white middle-class people, people whose company you would enjoy. An analogue can be seen in the way popular culture treats Germans up to and during World War II. Good people were never anti-Semites; only detestable people participated in Hitler’s cause.

Turner is arguing that the Jim Crow South was a system supported by much of Southern society of all social classes. In contrast, movies can portray racism as being the opinion of particular individuals or of people of smaller social groups. This “whitewash” perhaps helps us feel better today – only bad people were racists – and also reflects our own moral calculus where racists can’t be good people.

But we know from American history that this was not exactly the case. Many “virtuous” and celebrated Southerners supposed slavery and Jim Crow laws. And the North is also complicit: “sundown towns” were the norm and segregation were quite high (and still are). Overall, racism and discrimination still takes place within systems that require beginnings and maintenance provided by people living within the systems and also those in charge.

Schaumburg’s rise due to relocation of Pure Oil headquarters in 1958

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Schaumburg may be well-known for Woodfield Mall but the Chicago suburb was helped on the path to becoming an edge city (see Joel Garreau’s 1991 book) when Pure Oil relocated from downtown Chicago to fields near Schaumburg in the late 1950s:

Frandsen knows it all started nearly 15 years earlier with the construction of the Pure Oil building on the opposite side of Golf Road — the same building that’s now Roosevelt University’s Schaumburg campus…

Though a corporation’s move from the city to the suburbs is a scenario that’s been repeated many times since, one difficulty at the time was establishing a fair and true price for land that had previously been purely agricultural, Frandsen said.

Along with the company’s move came its employees’ relocation to the suburbs as well. Frandsen and his growing family moved to Arlington Heights, one of the nearest residential areas to the office site which was then in unincorporated Palatine Township.

Unlike today, when the one-story building crouches behind a taller strip mall to the south and IKEA to the north, Pure Oil’s headquarters sat like an island among the fields that continued to be leased to farmers.

It is critical to remember that the post-World War II suburbanization boom in the United States wasn’t just about people moving to the suburbs: many businesses relocated as well. Businesses moved for a variety of reasons including being closer to employees, finding cheaper land and lower taxes, wanting to have more “campus-like” developments, and being closer to the homes of executives.

If Pure Oil really did help kickstart the corporate boom in Schaumburg, this story doesn’t sound too different than that of Naperville where the opening of a Bell Labs facility in the mid 1960s along the relatively new East-West Tollway led to a number of other firms also locating nearby. Both Pure Oil and Bell Labs were originally outside of municipal boundaries and were eventually brought into city limits through annexation. Both Schaumburg and Naperville were already communities prior to the coming of these firms and the arrival of new kinds of businesses pushed community leaders to pursue new opportunities. This shift toward office space and white-collar jobs transformed both suburbs.

Looking for Chicago in movies and television

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This Chicago Tribune piece reviews some movies and TV shows that have used Chicago as a setting.

Here are a few takeaway points:

1. Movies and TV shows like to draw upon Chicago’s colorful police and politics.

2. Many film elsewhere. Interestingly, the creator of Against the Wall says, “you can’t fake Chicago as well as you can fake other cities.”

3. Many focus on known quantities, like the Chicago River or the El. The writer suggests this ignores Chicago’s real side.

And a few questions:

1. Compared to other American cities, is Chicago over or under represented? If so, why?

2. What are the best movies and TV shows for making use of their setting? It is one thing to have a backdrop (think of the credits of Family Matters which clearly shows Chicago) and another to really anchor the action within a particular place.

Housing, IP, and Disney

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A New York Times article from last week reports on the convergence of housing, intellectual property, and the Walt Disney Corporation in a recently built suburban home near Salt Lake City:

The sherbet-colored structure sits at the intersection of Meadowside Drive and Herriman Rose Boulevard here, but you don’t need directions to find it. Just look for the swarm of helium-filled balloons that the developer tied to the chimney of a house that has a gabled roof, scalloped siding and a garden hose neatly coiled next to the porch — all details taken from “Up,” the 2009 hit about an old man and his flying abode.

Developer Blair Bangerter duplicated Pixar’s Up house with as much fidelity as physical reality would allow.  And he got permission to do this from Disney!  As the article notes, getting such permission from Disney is highly unusual:

This is a company that once forced a Florida day care center to remove an unauthorized Minnie Mouse mural. More recently, Disney told a stonemason that carving Winnie the Pooh into a child’s gravestone would violate its copyright [though it later “reversed its ruling on that Winnie the Pooh tombstone after the news media reported the rejection”].

So how is a homebuilder in this Salt Lake City suburb getting away with selling a near-identical copy of the floating house in the Disney-Pixar film “Up”?

Although Disney declined to comment for the story, the article suggests several reasons:

  • The developer is the son of a former Utah governor.
  • The developer was able to convince Up‘s director, Pete Docter, to “personally intervened on behalf of the project.”
  • Disney “is trying to evaluate with more care the hundreds of requests it receives a month from people wanting to use its characters and imagery.”

Taking these suggested reasons at face value, it sounds like Mr. Bangerter obtained permission primarily because (a) he was well-connected and (b) Disney sensed a PR opportunity.  There are at least two ways of interpreting this:

  1. Bangerter and Disney saw a market opportunity and bargained to create value.  Most homes in the subdivision are priced around $300,000; the Up home is listed at $400,000.  Disney is often seen as an IP bully; it now looks a bit nicer.  Thus, a deal between Bangerter and Disney created almost $100k in new economic value for the developer and (possible) new goodwill towards Disney.
  2. IP is being used here to create an unnecessary monopoly rent to benefit the already well-connected.  It’s hard to see how Disney would suffer any economic loss if everyone were free to build Up houses–Disney is in the business of selling media and related merchandise, but generally not houses.  However, since everyone is presumably not free to build Up houses, Bangerter and Disney had to spend time and money hammering out an agreement.  As a result of their agreement, Bangerter (apparently) gets ~$100k more for the Up house than he gets for comparable houses in the subdivision, and Disney successfully pacifies a politically powerful developer.

Especially insofar as Disney only considers such deals with well-connected developers like Bangerter, the IP issues quickly blur into fairness issues.

New Illinois law gives many communities the ability to develop their own rules for public hearings

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Public hearings can often be contentious and go on for hours. A new Illinois law gives communities under 500,000 the ability to develop their own rules for public hearings:

Those procedures could deal with the rights of participants to cross-examine witnesses and present evidence during a public hearing.

“It really boils down to efficiency,” said Annie Thompson, the governor’s spokeswoman. “The governor believes in getting the people’s business done in a manner that’s open and transparent but also in a manner that’s efficient. This bill will help (local) governments do that.”

State Rep. Darlene Senger of Naperville said she proposed the legislation in response to the marathon public hearings that happened when Navistar submitted plans to move its headquarters to Lisle…

“This bill allows municipalities that are interested in severely restricting who can participate in the process — under the guise of efficiency — to institute undemocratic and unfair rules,” said Terry Pastika, the center’s executive director. “When you think about the anti-democratic rules it could justify, it’s a big problem.”

I can see both sides. On one hand, a public hearing can go on for hours if a large or vociferous enough crowd wants to talk. These meetings can drag into the wee hours of the morning, making it difficult for public officials in smaller communities who work part-time as public servants. Additionally, one could argue that at some point there may be diminishing returns: jut how much does a group have to say to convince public officials that they don’t like a proposal? On the other hand, there are few official settings where citizens can interact with public officials. Public hearings allow citizens to express their opinions and make their voice heard. Citizens can feel that if they make a convincing or large enough argument, they can sway the outcome.

I would guess that this new law will have this effect: communities and citizens will now have spend some time figuring out what are appropriate rules where both sides feel like they can do what they want to do.

Author explains writing “If Michael Vick were white”

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An ESPN piece (and picture) that considered what might have happened if Michael Vick was white has received a lot of attention. The author explains his thought process here:

Tonight somewhere in America two men will be arrested for DUI. Many people get arrested for this every day. Surely some will be black and some will be white. Does the fact that people of both races will be arrested for this prove that it’s not a racial situation? No. Does the ratio of those arrests as compared to the population perhaps prove that it is in fact a racial situation? Sure, but almost every situation is racialized.

One black driver may be arrested because the police who notice him are hypersensitive to black drivers in BMWs, so he’s the victim of Driving While Black even though it turns out that he also had a little too much to drink. Meanwhile maybe another black driver is swerving and it’s obvious he’s a problem before the officers can clearly see his face. The point is race is too nuanced to be looked at in a simplistic way. And this “switch test” should be discredited and thrown out…

Am I saying that we’re in a post-racial society and race no longer matters? Absolutely not. “Post-racial” is a meaningless term that people who have a sophisticated understanding of race do not use without an ironic smirk. I hate that dumb term and am dismayed at the number of people who think it’s indicative of modern America. It is not. Race still matters. But I think nowadays it often matters, or comes into play, in ways that are more subtle or nuanced than we care to admit.

The key points here:

1. Race still matters.

2. Race is complicated.

Both of these points should be remembered when talking about this article or about other matters that involve race.

This reminds of one reason that I am a sociologist: we don’t rely on singular situations like this. Thinking about Michael Vick can be a helpful exercise but ultimately, it is just one case. Had a number of factors been different, Vick’s skin color, background, football performance, etc., the outcome would likely be very different. But if we look at the more complete picture, whether it is all NFL players or all of American society, we can see how race still matters. Take NFL players: there has been some interesting research about the quarterback position and how race plays into conceptions of who is able to take on that role. Take American society: there is plenty of evidence that the criminal justice system heavily penalizes certain kinds of crimes more than others, certain groups have much higher incarceration rates, and certain groups are treated differently by the authorities.

Another question we could ask: how does the Michael Vick situation illustrate different approaches of justice? I’ve suggested before that it seems like some will never be happy that Vick has tasted success again and this raises questions about whether Americans should pursue retribution or rehabilitation through the criminal justice system.

How technology may lessen a team’s chemistry

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Technology receives a lot of attention but I haven’t seen this brought up before: technology may be making it more difficult to athletic teams to bond.

Ask many coaches, general managers and older players and you’ll hear a common gripe: chemistry on teams has been altered because of modern technology, and not for the better. The rise of smartphones, with all their instant-communication and entertainment options, have created insular worlds into which distracted players too often retreat instead of bonding with teammates.

Coaches and managers are particularly frustrated at the paradox of players fraternizing less with their own teammates, and more with the “enemy.” Players from opposing teams, they say, too often get each other’s cellphone numbers and start calling or texting back and forth, often griping about playing time and occassionally giving up little secrets about their teams…

Major League Baseball is one sport where the chemistry effects of smartphones, iPads, iPods and other handheld devices might be thought to be minimal, because of the longer workdays and more enclosed environs (dugouts, bullpens, clubhouses). Not necessarily so, according to Colorado Rockies manager Jim Tracy. When the game is over, he says, players quickly rejoin their private, smartphone worlds…

Some NFL teams are said to be contemplating outright bans on smartphones during any “team time” activities, and some coaches have spoken with exasperation at competing with phones for players’ attention. Redskins defensive coordinator Jim Haslett, for instance, told ESPN 101 radio in St. Louis the difficulties of dealing with phone-obsessed players such as former Washington tackle Albert Haynesworth.

I’m tempted to argue that this is simply the outcome of having multiple generations in the clubhouse or locker room: an older generation, particularly coaches and managers, had a particular experience in the past and younger players have a different way of going about things. Perhaps it would be more interesting to talk to younger coaches who are more into technology themselves and ask how they try to build team chemistry. Of course, the topic of team chemistry is open for debate. To me, it seems like it is only really an issue when a team is losing and people are looking for reasons why.

The article does suggest that at least a few veteran athletes have adopted informal/player-directed guidelines for technology use in the clubhouse. I wonder if they have encountered some resistance or whether the spirit of such actions, to “help the team,” is reason enough for other players to comply.

Two other quick thoughts:

1. This could also be interpreted as an indicator of the professionalization of athletes. While athletes in the past might have enjoyed the camaraderie of interacting before and after games, today’s athletes have more personal leeway as most work all-year round and make big money. What matters most (or at all) is their performance on the field/court/ice.

2. The article also hints at how technology has changed how players prepare for games. It is now easy and common for athletes to be able to watch lots of video on their own, theoretically giving them some advantages.