Author Archives: legallysociable

Determining which cities have a future

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SmartPlanet looks into an infographic that supposedly says whether “if your city has a future or it’s destined to turn into the U.S. version of a favela”:

Meanwhile, according to the chart from PPS (click on it for a larger version), Atlanta is easily the most massively dysfunctional metropolis ever to be un-designed by a conspiracy of developers and compliant local government. From comedian David Cross (”David Cross Doesn’t Like Atlanta” – NSFW) to peak oil theorist James Howard Kunstler (”The Horror of Downtown Atlanta“), everyone who has ever been forced to live in or visit Atlanta knows that it is a city as ill-equipped for walkability and sustainable transit as any in the U.S., with the possible exceptions of Dallas, Houston, San Antonio and pretty much every other city in Texas.

Many cities are teetering right on the edge of acceptability, by PPS’s measures. Austin, Texas may sound cool in theory, but in the past 20 or so years it has become a suppurating pustule of sprawl and the bane of commuters throughout its metro area. Similarly, university town Gainesville, Florida has a marvelously walkable historic core surrounded by a not-so-tasty shell of tract homes, McMansions and cul-de-sacs…

Ultimately, though, all these efforts are piddling when compared to what our resource and finance-starved future is going to require: shorter commutes, more walkability, and a relocalization of just about all the essentials of everyday life. Everything, in other words, that was present in Brooklyn about the time that the Brooklyn Bridge went up. And despite that city’s incorporation into New York City as a borough, it retains, to this day, the local character that made it such a high-functioning metropolis a century ago. I may be be biased, but when I think of cities that work, Brooklyn will always be at the top of my list.

The infographic seems to be based on New Urbanist-type principles: walkable cities with vibrant street life where the infrastructure serves people and not cars. More broadly, the infographic presents either a sprawl or anti-sprawl perspective.

The discussion hints that cities can change from being on one side of the ledger to the other. But large-scale changes (across an entire city or region) take time compared to neighborhood-by-neighborhood approaches. Particularly in this time of economic crisis and budget shortfalls, how many cities can even have a discussion about big New Urbanist-type changes?

Will anyone bother looking at this infographic in ten or twenty years to see if the predictions were correct?

Helping PhDs find “alternative careers” outside of academia

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The academic job market is tough. Therefore, it’s not surprising to read about programs and seminars being held to help PhDs pursue job opportunities outside of academia:

“Ph.D.’s often don’t know how to leverage and sell themselves to a nonacademic world,” says Steinfeld. “We can do that for them.” Steinfeld and other career counselors at Wasserman stress that the discipline that is needed to earn a doctorate degree makes Ph.D. candidates attractive to financial firms like Morgan Stanley and service firms like McKinsey and Boston Consulting.

One recent Wasserman workshop on alternative careers, “What You Can Do With a Ph.D. in the Humanities,” featured Michael Shae, who earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Yale in 1992, and two years later began work at the New York Review of Books as an editorial assistant; he is now a senior editor. Another annual workshop, “Careers Outside the Academy: Sociology and Social Science Options,” featured a panel of career switchers with Ph.D.’s, including Preston Beckman, the executive vice president of scheduling for Fox Network. Beckman holds a Ph.D. in sociology from NYU.

Emi Lesure, a Ph.D. candidate in sociology at NYU, says she attended the workshops every year for the past few years and found them heartening. The panelists, she says, noted the perks of their jobs over academic careers: intellectual stimulation, reduced hours, better pay. “I’ve lived the life of a poor, stressed-out, overworked grad student for seven years now,” says Lesure. “I can’t keep that up for another decade.”

The good news, says Steinfeld, is that considering non-academic jobs is no longer career suicide. “Years ago, if you were a Ph.D. student at NYU and you talked in public about looking outside of academia for a job, you were put aside as not a serious candidate,” she says. “Faculty today have a much more realistic understanding of the pressures of job hunting.”

A few thoughts about this:

1. How many big-name graduate programs in different disciplines present jobs outside of academia as viable options?

2. Do graduate programs advertise the fact that some of their students now work outside academia? Since most programs list their recent graduates and their jobs somewhere, someone could look into this.

3. It sounds like hearing from PhDs who have successfully worked outside of academia could make a big difference. It would be nice to have some sort of database of “career switchers” who have sociology PhDs.

4. With the growing prevalence of master’s degrees within certain fields, will the PhD become the next step for non-academic employees who want to get a leg up on their coworkers and competition? If so, will graduate programs be willing to accept more students who they know have no interest in careers in academia?

Not just single-family homes: McMansions can be townhouses

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McMansions typically refer to single-family homes. I had not seen this before but here is a reference to “McMansion townhouses” in a letter to the editor:

The proposal also appears to be extremely bad financially for the county. EYA proposes to build 30 McMansion townhouses on River Road at the Kenwood doorstep. Each household will have two to three automobiles, not counting transient maids, maintenance, deliveries and other service vehicles, adding to present traffic. Presently, this dangerously narrow bottleneck pours excessive traffic onto River Road at the Kenwood doorway. Furthermore, the proposal to allow an outlet onto Little Falls Parkway is bad precedent and the proposed inadequate land swap and will do nothing to solve the traffic impact. It will diminish the amount of “real” park land. Little Falls Parkway is already overly and dangerously congested — it is an extremely narrow road at the proposed outlet.

An earlier piece on the proposed development says the townhomes would be built on a former industrial site. More details from a report suggests there will be “25 market-rate townhomes and four Moderately Priced Dwelling Units.”

Even though I found several documents regarding this proposal, I don’t know exactly what the townhomes will look like. If I had to guess at what a McMansion townhouse might look like, here are some ideas:

1. The structure incorporating several townhouses would look cartoonish with large rooflines, bloated details (two-story pillars, three-car garages that stick out, etc.), and a disregard for nearby architecture.

2. The homes would take up a large percentage of the lots, prominently backing up to other developments who won’t be able to avoid the new construction.

3. These will be large homes, perhaps greater than 3,000 square feet.

But perhaps the usage of McMansion in this case is a little different. It could refer to:

1. The homes are newer construction. By virtue of being new, the townhomes get this moniker.

2. Larger processes of sprawl. Residents who already live in the area want to defend what they bought into, preserve open space (even if it is fairly ugly industrial land), and limit the density of development.

3. The term is simply meant to paint the townhomes in a negative light, regardless of their actual design.

I will have to keep my eyes open to see if others refer to McMansion townhouses.

As a side note, this letter contains a classic NIMBY argument: the new development will add too much traffic to the area and the development will not bring in the money needed to offset the services that will be required.

Leaving bookstores alone in the London riots

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Some people have noticed that the rioters/looters in London have ignored the bookstores:

While the rioters in England this week have looted shops selling shoes, clothes, computers, and plasma televisions, they’ve curiously bypassed one particular piece of merchandise: books. The Economist observes that while rioters have a centuries-old history of book burning, “books are losing out to high-end jeans and Apple-made gadgets” in London, with the Waterstone’s bookstore chain emerging unscathed and the WH Smith chain reporting only one incident (some stores closed as a precaution). In explaining that the store would probably stay open during the unrest, one Waterstone’s employee even felt comfortable enough to issue a dare to the rioters: “If they steal some books, they might actually learn something.” The exception to the rule is the gay bookstore Gay’s the Word, which had its front window smashed and its shopfront splattered with eggs (notably, no goods were stolen). “Our impression is that there are certain people who have an issue with a visible gay business and are using the excuse of chaos to cause anti-gay damage,” an assistant manager told PinkPaper…

So where does that leave us on the question of why the rioters refrained from looting and burning bookstores? The most likely explanation appears to be that the rioters were more interested in high-end clothing and electronics than books, for economic and personal reasons. But a Guardian article yesterday suggests the rioters may have been more principled about what they stole and what they didn’t than one might think.

Interesting. The image many people might have is that the rioters act indiscriminately, breaking and smashing things at will out of anger. But these different possible explanations suggest rioters follow some sort of logic. Yes, their actions fall outside the normal bounds of civil behavior but they are acting upon not-too-unreasonable logic (go for the high-end electronic goods). This reminds me of the work of Sudhir Venkatesh who suggests that gangs follow logical paths even though their actions may seem chaotic or unclear.

Perhaps I only think this as a sociologist or as someone who teaches research methods but it seems like these ideas about bookstores could be tested. Researchers could take different groups of people, perhaps split by socioeconomic status, and then give them a variety of free items that they could take including electronics, clothing, and books. Then, researchers could see what people would take and then could question them about their choices afterward. Of course, some of the same information could be obtained by asking this is a question or series of questions on a large-scale survey. These sorts of options could help provide some insights into where books fall among other desirable consumer goods. If I had to hazard a guess, I imagine American teenagers or emerging adults (18-29 years old) would also put books toward the bottom of the list of things they would desire.

From luxury item to throwaway good: cable TV

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Following up on Joel’s post from Wednesday, Figures from the last quarter suggest the cable TV industry continues to lose customers:

The phone companies kept adding subscribers in the second quarter, but Dish lost 135,000. DirecTV gained a small number, so combined, the U.S. satellite broadcasters lost subscribers in the quarter — a first for the industry…

Sanford Bernstein analyst Craig Moffett estimates that the subscription-TV industry, including the untallied cable companies, lost 380,000 subscribers in the quarter. That’s about one out of every 300 U.S. households, and more than twice the losses in the second quarter of last year. Ian Olgeirson at SNL Kagan puts the number even higher, at 425,000 to 450,000 lost subscribers.

The second quarter is always the year’s worst for cable and satellite companies, as students cancel service at the end of the spring semester. Last year, growth came back in the fourth quarter. But looking back over the past 12 months, the industry is still down, by Moffett’s estimate. That’s also a first.

The article goes on to mention a number of reasons for this: a bad economy so consumers are cutting back, younger people don’t see the necessity of cable, and there is a lot of content available through the Internet.

More interesting to me is the idea that cable TV is no longer the luxury good that it once was. Once the industry began in the 1970s and later consolidated, cable moved from being a rarity to being a necessity. As late as mid 2009, “11% of U.S. TV homes only have the capability to receive TV reception “over the air”.” Having cable simply became part of how Americans spend their disposable income. Cable became prism through which many Americans viewed the world. Certain channels arose, such as MTV which has been getting a lot of attention recently because of its 30th anniversary or ESPN which was the subject of an interesting book, and became part of the national consciousness. These channels, for better or worse, came to represent American culture and were exported around the world. I wonder if having cable at home signaled a middle-class lifestyle even if other traits don’t match this standing.

But now the world may have moved on. (At the same time, despite all the articles suggesting people stop paying for cable, bad economic times, and more competition, the drop in subscribers was only 0.2-0.3%.) How exactly will cable companies convince people that their product is a necessity, particularly among the younger generations? What will be the new narrative regarding cable that will push people to include this in their lives?

“The Marginalization of Marriage” report says marriage is helpful in achieving the American Dream

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A new report from the Brookings Institute, written by one conservative sociologist and one liberal sociologist, suggests that marriage is helpful for achieving the American Dream:

To be sure, not every married family is a healthy one that benefits children. Yet, on average, the institution of marriage conveys important benefits to adults and children. This advantage may be due to the greater stability of the marriage bond, or to the kinds of people who choose to marry and to stay married, or to qualities associated with the institution of marriage (such as a greater degree of commitment and investment in family life). Let us assume that all of these factors play a role. The fact is that children born and raised in intact, married homes typically enjoy higher quality relationships with their parents, are more likely to steer clear of trouble with the law, to graduate from high school and college, to be gainfully employed as adults, and to enjoy stable marriages of their own in adulthood. Women and men who get and stay married are more likely to accrue substantial financial assets and to enjoy good physical and mental health. In fact, married men enjoy a wage premium compared to their single peers that may exceed 10 percent. At the collective level, the retreat from marriage has played a noteworthy role in fueling the growth in family income inequality and child poverty that has beset the nation since the 1970s. For all these reasons, then, the institution of marriage has been an important pillar of the American Dream, and the erosion of marriage in Middle America is one reason the dream is increasingly out of reach for men, women, and children from moderately-educated homes.

This strikes me as an odd defense of marriage. This reasoning is very pragmatic: because marriage is successful in helping people reach the American Dream, therefore, people should look for such relationships. I could imagine several objections to this argument:

1. There are better reasons for defending marriage as an institution. Tying marriage to a particular successful life sequence could take the emphasis away from the relationship and move it to acquiring particular material possessions, life chances, and statuses. Ultimately, it seems to me that the current debate around marital practices in the United States comes down to moral beliefs.

2. Perhaps the notion of the American Dream is changing. Just because this has worked in the past doesn’t mean that this is what Americans want to pursue in the future.

3. There are other notable reasons for the growing inequality and rise in child poverty in the United States over the last few decades.

All in all, I imagine this report could generate a significant amount of debate.

Evidence of sociology being viewed as an easy major for athletes

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It is about that time of year when broadcasters and fans start poring football media guides. One enterprising fan of the University of Arkansas posted some tidbits from this year’s guide and one involved sociology:

Do you know what Greg Childs, Knile Davis, Cobi Hamilton, and Joe Adams all have in common? Well, besides being stars on the offense. They are all majoring in sociology. Arkansas actually has twenty players who are majoring in sociology with sports and recreation management being the second most popular choice. I can assure you that all those players didn’t come to the UofA with a desire to learn more about sociology. No doubt, someone in the athletic department has told them that sociology is a “football friendly” major.

I wonder how the sociology department at the University of Arkansas might respond.

On the whole, I don’t think having the reputation as an “easy major” helps the broader discipline of sociology.

US government thinking of renting foreclosed homes

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Different people have different opinions about what to do with the glut of foreclosures: perhaps convert them into multi-family units, bulldoze them, or donate them. It appears the federal government might try another route: renting them.

The Federal Housing Finance Agency said Wednesday it is seeking input from investors on how to rent roughly 250,000 homes owned by government-controlled mortgage companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the Federal Housing Administration. All of the homes are foreclosures…

Converting the homes into rentals may reduce “credit losses and help stabilize neighborhoods and home values,” said Edward DeMarco, acting director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which oversees Fannie and Freddie.

Homes in foreclosure sell at a 20 percent discount on average, which can hurt prices of surrounding homes.

It also might meet the growing demand for rentals. Since the housing meltdown, nearly 3 million households have become renters. At least 3 million more are expected by 2015, according to census data analyzed by Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies and The Associated Press.

This sounds like it could turn into a large program with a lot of moving pieces. Would these homes essentially be converted into temporary public housing?

If done well, this could help deal with a rental problem. Even before the economic crisis, a number of metropolitan areas suffered from issues of affordable housing: there simply were not enough cheaper and good units available. Additionally, there was often a mismatch between where these homes were located and where jobs were located. Could renting these foreclosures be a viable solution?

How many communities would be interested in supporting a program like this? I could imagine some interesting battles within better-off suburbs. On one hand, as the article mentions, foreclosures tend to drag down home values. On the other hand, having the federal government actively involved as a landlord in more neighborhoods would make a lot of people nervous.

Seeing sociology in the US men’s national soccer team coaching change

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A number of articles have noted the new approach of the new coach of the US men’s national soccer team, Jurgen Klinsman. But this is the first one I’ve seen that suggests Klinsman’s outlook is sociological in nature:

What Klinsmann’s hiring is really about is the big picture, about where soccer is going in the United States, how it will be played and by whom?

It is a grand experiment that is as much about sociology and psychology as it is soccer, and one that promises to be — even to Klinsmann — at least as interesting as whatever happens on the field.

“I deeply believe that soccer, in a certain way, reflects the culture of a country,” Klinsmann, who since 1988 has lived in Huntington Beach, Calif., said at his introductory news conference. “You have such a melting pot in this country with so many different opinions and ideas floating around there. One of my challenges will be to find a way to define how a U.S. team should represent its country. What should be the style of play? It is important over the next three years, especially in the beginning, that I have a lot of conversations with people engulfed in the game here to find a way to define style. What suits us best?”

The question of style posed by Klinsmann — one of the few people with the gravitas and wherewithal to carry such a debate from his perch — isn’t simply about aesthetics. It is about empowerment.

Some Americans might think that having a “national soccer style” might seem odd (is there a “national football style”?) but other countries have such approaches. How exactly cultural values match up with soccer play would be interesting to look at in more depth. Are the explanations that the team fits the values simply post-hoc explanations? (A similar argument: the Chicago Bears and Pittsburgh Steelers play a particular style of football – tough, good defense, hard running, etc. – because of the industrial cities in which they started.) I suspect a “national style” works because it is meaningful and traditional (and perhaps successful), rather than necessarily more true than other possible styles.

Part of the issue raised by Klinsman (and hinted at in this article) is the culture of US soccer that seems to privilege a particular path related to race and social class: going to expensive sports academies as teenagers and then going to college. Few, if any, other countries follow this route. This is a structural issue: how could the path to playing for the USMNT be altered to open it up to more players, particularly those who can’t afford or don’t want to pursue the “typical” route? As Malcolm Gladwell suggests in Outliers, these certain structural advantages help some and not others.

A lot is being asked of Klinsman and cultural changes are difficult to make. But it sounds like Klinsman has some ideas about what to do and US soccer seems to be at a point where people realize it needs to take “the next step.” It will be interesting to watch how the Klinsman sociological experiment goes.

The first Apple sociology app?

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I didn’t see this coming:

Wiley-Blackwell, the scientific, medical and scholarly publishing business of John Wiley & Sons, Inc., is launching its first mobile application in Sociology, accessible via iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.

Wiley-Blackwell Sociology Spotlight is a must-have app for all Sociologists. It shines a powerful spotlight on Sociology, enabling you to instantly read all of the latest news and developments in the field. Whether you want to keep track of broad trends across the discipline or focus in on a subfield, Sociology Spotlight is an essential tool for your research and teaching.

A few questions:

1. Is there a market for this? It does appear to be free…

2. Might this set off an arms race among publishers to make their content available through apps?

3. The iTunes preview app page suggests certain articles have “video abstracts.” Is this the new wave of the future?