Author Archives: legallysociable

Sociology: helping us move beyond common sense (and individualistic) understandings of the world

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This overview of the recent book Everything is Obvious Once You Know the Answer: How Common Sense Fails Us does a decent job in explaining why sociology helps us move beyond common sense understandings of the world:

This thought-provoking book challenges the universal belief that management decisions based on common sense – rooted in best practices, hunches and experiences – often lead to the best outcomes.  According to the book, the reality ends up being quite different.  Relying too much on common sense often leads well-intentioned and intelligent people to make poor strategic and tactical decisions in areas such as capital investments, product introductions, new market entry and advertising decisions.

Watt’s supposition is that people give too much credence to their prior and accumulated experiences, history in general and what they perceive as best practices when making decisions.  According to the research, a person’s common sense is faulty for a number of reasons:  it contains intrinsic bias; it is based on unproven or wrong assumptions and; it is too difficult to deduce clear-cut conclusions and action steps from an environment that is overly complex or unclear…

Relying on common sense for decisions or to make predictions has dangerous implications.  For one thing, reality is usually very different from what was first imagined.  The future is quite complex and rarely reflects the same conditions that earlier decisions were based on.  As a result, it is highly unlikely positive outcomes will repeat themselves if the individual relies solely on history.  In my consulting experience,  the higher degree of uncertainty around a decision or potential outcome, the more likely senior executives will rely on subjective criteria like common sense or best practices as a basis for decision making.

I’ve made a similar argument to students: we tend to operate on a day-to-day basis by seeing things in terms of how we have seen or experienced them before. We make patterns out of things (we are pattern-making creatures) that have happened to us regardless of the amount of information to back up our conclusions. New information is then filtered through these older constructs. When confronted with new information that doesn’t “fit,” we have to ignore it, fit it into our old constructs, or develop new constructs.

Thinking sociologically means that we move beyond this individualistic level in a couple of ways:

1. We try to take a broad overview, recognizing that the world is complicated and many things are related. Instead of just thinking about how something affects us, we look at how systems are connected and social processes take place. The question is more “how does the whole affect the individual” rather than “how does the individual fit within the whole.”

2. Conclusions should be based on data that is collected and analyzed in ways that minimize individual level bias. Though we often are unable to create perfect models or understanding, we can make good estimates.

I may have to try out this description with my students to see what they think.

C. Wright Mills influences movie about white-collar cubicles

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A new movie about white-collar cubicle workers is influenced by the work of sociologist C. Wright Mills:

In his 1951 book “White Collar,” the sociologist C. Wright Mills acknowledged the powerlessness of the white-collar worker while also understanding his importance within a larger context: “Yet it is to this white-collar world that one must look for much that is characteristic of twentieth-century existence … They carry, in a most revealing way, many of those psychological themes that characterize our epoch, and, in one way or another, every general theory of the main drift has had to take account of them.”…

Mills’s thinking was a major inspiration for the filmmaker Zaheed Mawani, who documents the resigned reality of the cubicle-coralled white-collar worker in his new film “Three Walls” (you can watch a clip here). Mawani’s film brings to the screen what numerous long-term studies have shown: that a lack of autonomy over one’s daily tasks leads to boredom (at best), utter despair and even increased mortality rates. Yet, time and again, proposed solutions ignore these deeper issues and focus instead (see last month’s column) on the furniture.

Mawani has used the cubicle to explore larger issues in the world of work. As he and I both discovered, passions run high around the most seemingly banal piece of furniture: it has its arch defenders, its resigned occupiers and its rigorously vocal critics. Mawani was interested in examining what the cubicle has come to represent, as he explained in an e-mail to me, “in terms of the shifting nature of white collar work: the lack of job security, increase in temporary workers, our detachment to work (the fact that we no longer stay in the same job for more than a few years and the ramifications of no longer having that employee-employer bond). It’s also about our relationship to technology, the lack of physicality in work.”

Is there really much more to say about the cubicle, a piece of office furniture that has received much criticism over the years? For many, the cubicle has come to represent a temporary space where workers are simply replaceable cogs in corporate machines that tend to benefit some wealthy owner somewhere else.

This discussion reminds me of the design firm IDEO which has been featured in a number of places for creating a different type of workplace: no walls, open desks, lots of toys, lots of collaborative space, and a lot of interaction between workers of different backgrounds in order to take advantage of everyone’s ideas. For an example of how they operate, I’ve had students watch this old ABC Nightline clip about how the company went about designing a new grocery cart. This sort of office seems to appeal to a younger generation and IDEO argues that it is much more effective. (Humorously, here is IDEO’s attempt to build “Dilbert’s Ultimate Cubicle.”)

The idea that office furniture can reveal deep-seated cultural themes is intriguing. I’m afraid to ask what someone might be able to see if they had time to observe my office…

Too many farmer’s markets in the US?

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This piece in the New York Times suggests that there may now be too many farmer’s markets. I wonder if this is the case because too many communities want them to boost economic development:

Farmers in pockets of the country say the number of farmers’ markets has outstripped demand, a consequence of a clamor for markets that are closer to customers and communities that want multiple markets.

Some farmers say small new markets have lured away loyal customers and cut into profits. Other farmers say they must add markets to their weekly rotation to earn the same money they did a few years ago, reducing their time in the field and adding employee hours…

Nationwide, the number of farmers’ markets has jumped to 7,175 as of Aug. 5; of those, 1,043 were established this year, according to the federal Agriculture Department. In 2005, there were 4,093 markets across the country.

While the main argument here seems to involve supply and demand, I’ll throw out another possible factor. More and more communities (or city neighborhoods) desire farmer’s markets because they are relatively easy ways to attract residents and visitors to a community. Because they usually don’t require buildings (with good weather being a helpful feature), can easily be moved around, can make use of unused or underutilized parking lots (a common suburban issue), and can offer some goods that are more difficult to find elsewhere, farmer’s markets can be a “quick fix.” This has developed as a popular strategy in nearby suburbs where such markets bring in people to an older downtown that might not typically come otherwise. Before such markets became popular, these could help a certain community apart from others. If we think about it in reverse, perhaps it is not only communities or neighborhoods that drive this trend: residents could desire a farmer’s market not only for convenience but for status.

It is not uncommon for communities to adopt similar economic strategies but this sounds like one where not everyone may be able to win. Any chance that some national regulatory board or group might develop to help space out farmer’s markets?

h/t Instapundit

The problem with using averages as illustrated by the average salaries of NBA players

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In negotiations between NBA owners and players, the topic of the “average player salary” has come up. This discussion illustrates some of the issues involved with  using averages and medians:

Here is the “average player salary” for each of the major U.S. professional team sports, based on a variety of sources using the most recent data available:

NBA: $5.15 million (2010-11)

MLB: $3.34 million (2010)

NHL: $2.4 million (2010-11)

NFL: $1.9 million (2010)

From the public’s view, these numbers are high in all four sports. But players and agents argue that these averages obscure important distinctions including the value of certain positions over others (the quarterback in the NFL versus the punter) and the size of the roster (fewer NBA players, more NFL players).

One common solution to problems with averages is to instead use a median. Here is how this might change the discussion in the NBA:

“It’s the median salary that’s more important,” NBA agent Bill Duffy said. “Look at the Miami Heat as an analogy here: You’ve got three guys making $17 million and probably six guys making $1.2 [million]. So that’s a little misguided, that average salary.”…

It is not unlike, Duffy said, news stories that cite the “average” U.S. household income as opposed to the median. The latter figure, according to the most recent U.S. census, was $50,233. If you were to average in the dollar amounts pulled down by Wall Street bankers, Ivy League lawyers, certain public-union employees and yes, professional athletes, that number would jump considerably.

Curiously, neither the NBA nor the NBPA seems to make much use of a median player salary.

“We use [average] because it’s the most commonly used measure and best reflects the amount of compensation that the NBA provides to players across the league,” an NBA spokesman said this week. “In addition, it’s the measure that both we and the union agreed upon in the CBA.”

In the NFL, the median salary is approximately $770,000 — about 40 percent of the average.

In the NBA, using USA Today salary figures for the 2009-10 season, the estimated median salary was about $2.33 million. That’s still about 46 times what the median U.S. household earns, but it is less than half what the max-salary-bloated “average” is.

What happens in these sports is this: a small number of star athletes make huge amounts of money, pulling the average for all athletes up. If you use the median instead, where 50% of the players make more and 50% more make less, it suggests that more of the athletes in each sport make less. Particularly in the NFL which has bigger rosters, the difference between the average and the median shows that many players make very little.

It is interesting that the NBA spokesman said the two sides had agreed in their Collective Bargaining Agreement that they would use the average salary figure. Was this really a point of contention negotiations or did no one really think about the consequences? What was the thinking behind this for the players? If the union was focused on helping all of their members, perhaps they would focus on the median, suggesting that they are strongest when all of their members are well taken care of. This lower figure might also look more palatable to the public though it is unclear whether public perceptions have any influence on such negotiations. However, if the union was more interested in making sure that individual athletes could receive the biggest possible payouts because of their athletic exploits, then perhaps the average is better.

Two takeaway points:

1. Averages and medians are both measures of central tendency but they are open to different interpretations. People need to be clear about which they are using and which interpretation their number interprets.

2. It will be interesting to see if the new CBA is based on average or median salaries.

American politicians push small town values in a suburban country

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America is a suburban nation: more than 50% live in the suburbs, roughly 30% live in cities, and about 20% live in small towns or rural communities. Despite these demographics, this article suggests that politicians still frequently draw on the idea of small town values:

American politics may live in the cities and suburbs — but it dreams in small towns.

More than a century after the American people migrated from the farms to the cities and then to the suburbs, the image of small-town America endures as the birthplace of solid character and sound values. In the gauzy image of politics, as in popular culture dating back more than a century, small-town America is a place where the people go to church, work hard and help one another in ways unknown in the cities and suburbs of America…

Still, politicians love to wrap themselves in the sentimental image.

“The people still have the same spirit in Waterloo that Iowans have always come to exemplify. We work hard. We don’t spend more money than what we take in,” Bachmann said in Waterloo, where she was born.

Perry wears his childhood in Paint Creek, Texas, as a badge of honor. “Doesn’t have a zip code. It’s too small to be called a town,” he said during a recent visit to Waterloo. “What I learned growing up on the farm was a way of life that was centered on hard work, and on faith and on thrift.”

Obama can’t claim a childhood in a small town — he was born in Honolulu. But he, too, reveled in small-town values during his recent Midwest bus tour.

So while Americans may no longer live in small towns, they want to hold on to particular characteristics such as hard work, community, and religious values. These are symbolic values, perhaps even more so than actual actions that people carry out. (There is often a disconnect between what people say they believe and what they actually do.) And, of course, people may want to hold on to these values but they don’t necessarily want to live in the places where these values arose.

This reminds me of a theory I have had about the popularity of American suburbs: they are a uniquely American adaptation that combines some of city and rural life. This is about perceptions. On the rural side, suburbs still offer lawns, single-family homes, good schools, safety, and community life. On the city side, suburbs have easier access to the city, more cultural amenities, more jobs, are more open-minded, and more opportunities over all. Suburbs don’t really offer the best of either of these worlds but offer some of both, allowing Americans to straddle these two worlds.

A question: how difficult is it for Americans to elect urban politicians to higher office (particularly compared to more rural candidates), candidates who would portray themselves solely as a city dweller and act like city dwellers? Perhaps Barack Obama is the closest we have come to this but because of political realities has primarily tried to appeal to working and middle-class suburbanites who may just swing the election.

More educated people attend church more

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One common idea is that people (or societies) that are more educated will move away from religious beliefs. However, several recent sociology studies suggest that more educated people are more likely to attend church:

While overall church attendance has declined slightly in the United States in recent decades, a new study says attendance at religious services among white Americans who did not go to college has fallen more than twice as quickly as it has among more highly educated whites.

The study, released Sunday by the American Sociological Association, draws on decades of data from the General Social Survey and the National Survey of Family Growth to conclude that “moderately educated whites,” defined as people with high school degrees, attended religious services in the 1970s at about the same rate as whites with degrees from four-year colleges. In the last decade, however, they attended much less frequently…

The research shares some conclusions with a recent study by a University of Nebraska-Lincoln professor whose findings contradicted the common myth that less-educated people are more religious. That study, released in early August, concluded that a college degree does not make a person less religious, but that more education does make people more accepting of the validity of religions other than their own. Both studies used data from the General Social Survey, which is an ongoing survey of American’ attitudes and behaviors that began in 1972.

This is a reminder that social class, made up of influential factors like education, impacts religious life, an area that some believe should be more of a private matter.

This fits with some thoughts I heard at the ASA meetings in Las Vegas that there seems to be two trajectories in American life: a middle/upper class life built upon education and a working/lower class life built upon traditional values.

I wonder how this would look from the religious congregation side: have more congregations been deliberately seeking more educated members who have more resources and are more open-minded? This makes pragmatic sense but not religious sense.

A final thought: how much of this is driven by increasing education levels of conservative religious group that in the past were less educated (evangelicals, fundamentalists, etc.)?

Quick Review: ASA 2011 Las Vegas

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The 2011 American Sociological Association meetings are still going on in Las Vegas. While I was only out there for the first half of the meetings, here are a few thoughts on the annual convention:

1. Las Vegas presents a series of contradictions and this irony should not be lost on sociologists.

1a. When you fly in and out, you really see how the city rises right out of the desert.

1b. I stayed a little bit off of The Strip and this daily walk was interesting in that the landscape several blocks away was really empty, desert lots and more rundown facilities. The airport backs right up to the south end of The Strip.

1c. The opening plenary session on Friday night included discussions of different sociological traditions including feminism and Marxism. The reception afterwards included a greeting from a Las Vegas girl in a feathery costume and a Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis, Jr. impersonator providing entertainment. Can one easily go from discussing inequality and oppression to enjoying the fruits of capitalistic success? The answer appeared to be yes.

2. Some of the main themes I heard at the sessions I attended: an interest in explaining the Tea Party; some nervousness (?) about the reelection prospects of President Obama; explanations that Democrats won the recent recall elections in Wisconsin (despite media reports to the contrary).

3. The conference is being held at Caesar’s Palace, just a gargantuan facility. The main conference hall must have been at least 1,500 feet long. Two downsides to the conference setting: a lack of nearby coffee shops (the closest one had ridiculous lines on both Saturday and Sunday mornings) and it was difficult to walk to other nearby attractions. One thing I noticed: while typical ASA meetings tend to tie up the facilities in one or perhaps even two big city hotels, we were just a drop in the bucket of Caesar’s Palace.

4. The Strip has to be one of the most fascinating streetscapes in the world. The combination of heat, casinos, people drinking while walking, families, the homeless, and more is a sight to behold. Of course, it is more interesting because it is all inauthentic: this isn’t a neighborhood where people live but it is an endless stream of visitors.

5. I know the country is experiencing economic difficulties but I don’t think you could tell this by simply looking at The Strip. There were plenty of people of all ages and backgrounds walking around and spending money. If you wanted to find a place to study consumption and/or tourism, this would be it.

6. One thing I just cannot understand: why is there not public transportation from the airport to The Strip? While there is a monorail that runs behind the hotels on the northern end of The Strip, one has to take a shuttle or a taxi from the airport. I don’t know if these private firms have a lot of political clout but it seems like the city would want to help people get from the airport to The Strip as quickly and cheaply as possible.

7. People say the heat is a “dry heat” – I do think it makes a difference. While it was roughly 103 degrees during the days I was there and it was still 94 degrees at 10 PM one night when I was out walking, I definitely felt the humidity in Chicago on Sunday night.

A disconnect: having electric car chargers at Costco

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The story that Costco is getting rid of electric car chargers in their parking lots because of a lack of use could be taken in several directions. One could ask: doesn’t there need to be an infrastructure in place before electric car owners would go to Costco? But I think there is a more interesting question: are electric car users really the sort of people who would shop at Costco?

Costco is a big box store, plain and simple. They offer bulk goods at cheap prices. Their buildings are bland and surrounded by parking lots. Is this the sort of place that electric car users would go? Are there people who would shop at Costco but wouldn’t shop at Wal-Mart (and I assume there are quite a few)? From a broader perspective, the picking and choosing between the “righteousness” of certain big box stores (Wal-Mart versus Target versus Costco versus Sam’s Club versus Home Depot…) is odd: they all operate on similar principles though their particular implementation varies some. To shop at any of them is to encourage standardization and sprawl. This doesn’t really go with the electric car culture/vibe.

So where should electric car chargers be installed? A few retail options: Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s. I suspect these would get a lot more use.

Balancing libertarian and humanitarian instincts when using the word “NIMBY”

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Megan McArdle discusses how the word NIMBY is a prejorative term that tends to be used in instances when the user doesn’t approve of particular uses (opposed to uses that they would approve):

I think this is a little bit too cute.  I read DePillis pretty regularly, and I don’t usually see her calling out, say, people opposing a local Wal-Mart as “NIMBYs”; they’re “opposition groups”.  The term NIMBY seems to be reserved for people who oppose locating things in their back yards that DePillis herself thinks are laudable.  Small wonder that when she uses the word, people take it as a perjorative.

Nonetheless, she has a point: many people oppose having necessary but potentially disruptive things located near them, even if you think those things are a good idea; if you do, you should own it, not make up ridiculously implausible stories about how those inner-city kids wouldn’t really enjoy a halfway house in a nice, suburban neighborhood; they’d be much happier in a crack-infested ghetto like the one where they came from.  Don’t you know you shouldn’t remove creatures from their natural habitat?
 
In the case of people in some DC neighborhoods, they may even be justified.  Anacostia–and my own neighborhood–house an unusually large number of social service organizations, because land has been cheap, and the communities have lacked the socioeconomic power to block new projects the way that, say, Dupont and Friendship Heights have.  I don’t know the statistics on Anacostia, but Eckington/Truxton Circle house thirteen social service groups, from women’s shelters to So Others Might Eat, a wonderful organization that serves thousands of meals to homeless people every day.  Frankly, I haven’t found them disruptive–and indeed, didn’t really know they were there until controversy erupted over a plan to build a fourteenth service facilities.  But the fact remains that a lot of the homeless people hang out in what passes for the area’s park space between meals, and more than a few spend the day drinking single-serving beers from the area’s many liquor stores…
 
In this case, my libertarian instinct squares with my humanitarian instinct: at least in the case of private charities, I cannot, in good conscience, oppose letting them do whatever they want with the property they buy (within reasonable limits on things like toxic fumes and all-night jackhammer parties.)  But I don’t think it’s helpful to brand my neighbors who do as NIMBYs.  Oversaturation of neighborhoods with social services is a genuine problem for those neighborhoods.  We should treat it with at least as much respect as we give to those who don’t want to live near a big-box store.

McArdle seems to be suggesting that the use of the term NIMBY escalates a discussion about land use to an unhelpful level. As soon as the word is brought out, the terms of the discussion changes as the user implies that people are being selfish and those being called NIMBY then have to go on the defensive. Additionally, NIMBY is in the eyes of the beholder: what one person would see as desirable is an abomination to another.

The term McMansion, something I have spent a lot of time studying, is used in a similar manner. Just like NIMBY, the term evokes larger issues such as excessive consumption, sprawl, the disruption of a neighborhood, etc. McMansion and NIMBY are not simple descriptive terms that just refer to a big house or opposition to a particular land use. Both are politicized terms. NIMBY often refers to wealthier, white, more educated homeowners who want to protect their private utopias that many see as exclusionary and government subsidized.

Are there helpful alternatives to the term NIMBY?

Wired’s “seven creepy experiments” short on social science options

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When I first saw the headline for this article in my copy of Wired, I was excited to see what they had dreamed up. Alas, the article “Seven Creepy Experiments That Could Teach Us So Much (If They Weren’t So Wrong)” is mainly about biological experiments. One experiment, splitting up twins and fixing their environments, could be interesting: it would provide insights into the ongoing nature vs. nurture debate.

I would be interested to see how social scientists would respond to a question about what “creepy” or unethical experiments they would like to see happen. In research methods class, we have the classic examples of experiments that should not be replicated. Milgram’s experiment about obedience to authority, Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment, and Humphrey’s Tearoom Trade Study tend to come up. From more popular sources, we could talk about a setup like the one depicted in The Truman Show or intentionally creating settings like those found in Lord of the Flies or The Hunger Games.

What sociological experiments would produce invaluable information but would never pass an IRB?