Category Archives: Sociology

There goes the neighborhood, vacant suburban lot full of dandelions edition

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As I was walking near campus, I spotted a yard that may just be in many suburbanites’ nightmares: a vacant corner lot full of dandelions.

DandelionLawn

Granted, these dandelions might be temporarily in bloom but this is a potential disaster for many neighboring yards. Even worse, this yard sits at a corner on full display. Interestingly, the lot also contains a “for sale” sign. Does the sight of dandelions discourage anyone from purchasing it? Would it better to have a barren yard than this spectacle?

It can be hard and laborious to fight off the dandelion scourge if others around you don’t keep up. The picture isn’t quite wide enough to show it but there is a very clear line where the yard to the right begins because of the absence of dandelions. How long can that pristine yard to the right hold out? My neighborhood has some similar issues; when dandelions are in full bloom, on windy days the air can be full of white seeds blowing around. I’ve had to act as a dandelion vigilante, digging out the root at first sight of the yellow bloom. Until this point, I’ve been able to keep things under control without herbicide but that would be much more difficult if I lived next to this lot. Is there a proper etiquette or protocol to follow in order to get a nearby homeowner to tackle the dandelions in their own lawn?

And thus continues the battle between suburbanite and nature, man versus weed. When homeowners are not vigilant, all lawns can suffer.

(I think this issue is related to one I raised a few weeks ago: it may not be a pretty sight if everyone lets their dog use the common areas in a neighborhood for a restroom.)

Fewer teenagers and young adults getting their driver’s license

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The Financial Times cite some interesting statistics about the rise in the number of teenagers and young adults who are not getting their driver’s licenses. While a number of explanatory factors are cited such as economic conditions, not needing cars as much because of social media, and young adults rejecting direct advertising from car makers, I’m more interested in another issue: what does this say about driving as a rite of passage as part of the transition from being a teenager to becoming an adult? This is well ingrained in American culture and lore but if fewer young adults see it as worthwhile, it could practically wipe the genre of cliched high school movies by itself. Forget about emerging adults delaying marriage; some don’t even want to be able to drive!

There is no mention of this in the article but I would be interested to know the spatial distribution of 16-34 year olds in the United States. It is much easier to go without a car in a denser, more urban setting. Does this mean that compared to the general population, a higher percentage of this age group lives in such denser settings?

Sociology student thesis on “Live Below the [global] Poverty Line” challenge

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A sociology undergraduate at the University of South Florida put together an interesting Honors College thesis based on living on less than $1.50 a day:

Sagal, a sociology student at the University of South Florida, brought the “Live Below the Poverty Line” challenge to USF via her Honors College thesis.

Sagal put up a Facebook page, visited classes, and posted fliers to enlist students in her journey to spend only $1.50 a day on food.

“Many people thought it was impossible to live off of such a little amount per day,” Sagal said. “Others thought I was crazy for trying to get people to join in, since it would be so difficult.”

Three other students participated in the challenge, which required participants to live off $1.50 a day, the current equivalent of the accepted global figure used to define extreme poverty and set by the World Bank as US$1.25 per day in 2005. The $1.50 figure represents the amount someone living in extreme poverty in the U.S. would have to live on…

Some of the food students ate, which they either bought individually or pooled their money together to purchase, was rice, oyster crackers, eggs, cheap bread, and Ramen noodles.

“I learned how much a lack of food can really impact every aspect of your life,” Sagal said. “I was also constantly thinking about food. It was extremely difficult to concentrate on anything and focus because all I could think about was what I had left for the day and when I can eat next.”

Sounds like a revealing experiential learning experience.

One note: shouldn’t the students also have to factor in other costs besides food such as paying for water, electricity, tuition, etc.?

Sociology article helps lead to getting diversity information on NYC financial firms?

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Earlier this week, two major financial firms said they would release data on the gender and race of their employees:

There is no requirement that Corporate America disclose its diversity data, but Monday two major companies – Goldman Sachs and MetLife — announced they’d be giving up the long-held secret…

The information is available and has been since 1964, because under the Civil Rights Act of that year, companies with 100 workers or more have had to report the data on race and gender annually to the U.S. Department of Labor. The problem has been, they were not under any requirement to release that data to the public, or even to local governments such as New York…

And there’s a lot of inequality, especially in the higher ranks at companies where the lack of diversity is greatest.

When I saw this, I was disappointed we didn’t get any information willing these companies were to start releasing this data or whether they were feeling enough public or government pressure. And then the article had a quote from the author of a recent sociology article on the topic that was published in a top journal and I wondered if this article made any difference…

Liu’s push for disclosure is a good first step on the road to more diversity, said Emilio J. Castilla, professor at MIT Sloan School of Management and author of  an article titled “Bringing Managers Back In: Managerial Influences on Workplace Inequality,” published in the American Sociological Review late last year.

“But this might not be enough,” he stressed. “They’re increasing transparency, showing some percentages, but I’d think about accountability. Are there organizational procedures in place to make sure these efforts result in the outcomes they want?”

I’m probably too hopeful here that an article in a sociology journal was influential but it couldn’t hurt…right?

“More U.S. cities set to enter default danger zone”

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A Reuters story suggests more municipalities are having trouble keeping up with their debt:

Bond defaults were $25.355 billion in 2011, or nearly five times the value of defaults in 2010, according to Lehmann. In 2012’s first quarter, defaults totaled $1.245 billion, or more than double the $522 million of last year’s first quarter.

Municipal bankruptcies, such as last November’s landmark, $4.23 billion Chapter 9 filing by Alabama’s Jefferson County mainly because of its excessively expensive sewer system mocked as a Taj Mahal project, have picked up, too.

Chapter 9 municipal bankruptcy filings doubled to 13 in 2011 from six in 2010, but still remain rare among the more than 60,000 issuers, with only 49 of the 264 cases since 1980 being towns, cities, villages or counties, according to James Spiotto of Chapman and Cutler LLP. States are ineligible for Chapter 9.

Outsized pension-deficit payments and other liabilities, as well as depressed local economies or failing government projects such as Harrisburg’s trash incinerator, often herald crises, according to Ciccarone.

While much of the focus has been on the national debt and national figures (such as unemployment, jobs created, where to set the tax brackets, etc.), all of this is trickling down to the local level. Since many municipalities and local taxing bodies are heavily dependent on property taxes, a decrease in housing values and a continued sluggish housing market suggests many communities will struggle to find revenue. In other circumstances, local bodies might be able to look to states and the federal government for monetary help but they have their own issues during this economic crisis.

I would love to see experts speculate on where this all will end up in five or ten years. Are we legitimately in danger of a lot of municipal governments defaulting? If so, how will this affect local services? How will residents respond to what will be more fees and taxes even as their services might decrease? Could the wealthier people respond with their feet and move to more financially solvent communities?

Increase in retractions of scientific articles tied to problems in scientific process

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Several scientists are calling for changes in how scientific work is conducted and published because of a rise in retracted articles:

Dr. Fang became curious how far the rot extended. To find out, he teamed up with a fellow editor at the journal, Dr. Arturo Casadevall of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. And before long they reached a troubling conclusion: not only that retractions were rising at an alarming rate, but that retractions were just a manifestation of a much more profound problem — “a symptom of a dysfunctional scientific climate,” as Dr. Fang put it.

Dr. Casadevall, now editor in chief of the journal mBio, said he feared that science had turned into a winner-take-all game with perverse incentives that lead scientists to cut corners and, in some cases, commit acts of misconduct…

Last month, in a pair of editorials in Infection and Immunity, the two editors issued a plea for fundamental reforms. They also presented their concerns at the March 27 meeting of the National Academies of Sciences committee on science, technology and the law.

Here is what Fang and Casadevall suggest may help reduce these issues:

To change the system, Dr. Fang and Dr. Casadevall say, start by giving graduate students a better understanding of science’s ground rules — what Dr. Casadevall calls “the science of how you know what you know.”

They would also move away from the winner-take-all system, in which grants are concentrated among a small fraction of scientists. One way to do that may be to put a cap on the grants any one lab can receive.

In other words, give graduate students more training in ethics and the sociology of science while also redistributing scientific research money so that more researchers can be involved. There is a lot to consider here. Of course, there might always be researchers tempted to commit fraud yet these scientists are arguing that the current system and circumstances needs to be tweaked to fight this. Graduate students and young faculty are well aware of what they have to do: publish research in the highest-ranked journals they can. Jobs and livelihoods are on the line. With that pressure, it makes sense that some may resort to unethical measures to get published.

Three other thoughts:

1. How often is social science research retracted? If it is infrequent, should it happen more often?

2. Even if an article or study is retracted, this doesn’t solve the whole issue as that work may have been cited a lot and become well known. Perhaps the bigger problem is “erasing” this study from the collective science memory. This reminds me of newspaper corrections; when you go find the original printing, you don’t know there was a later correction. The same thing can happen here: scientific studies can have long lives.

3. Should disciplines or journals have groups that routinely assess the validity of research studies? This would go beyond peer review and give a group the authority to ask questions about suspicious papers. Alas, this still wouldn’t catch even most of the problematic papers…

Argument: growing income inequality reflected in “unseemly” larger houses

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In his new book, Charles Murray (not a sociologist) apparently makes the case that the “unseemly” big houses in the American suburbs today reflect growing levels of income inequality:

He begins by noting that the distribution of income was far more compressed in 1963 than it is today. Back then, the median family income of professionals and managerial occupations was only about $62,000 p.a. in today’s dollars. Less than 1% of American families in 1963 had incomes higher than $200,000 p.a. and only 8% had household incomes higher than $100,000 p.a. (again, all figures in today’s dollars).

The housing of the time reflected the same degree of compression. Even the elite didn’t usually live in what we think of today as a mansion. He recommends viewing an episode of Mad Men to see the sort of house – remarkably modest by today’s standards – that the Drapers live in. That, he says, is “the kind of house that the creative director of a major New York advertising agency might well have lived in”.

In 1963, great mansions were something most Americans saw in the movies, not in person. Only the richest suburbs of New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles had entire neighborhoods consisting of mansions.

The nature of the change since then can be seen by driving around suburban neighborhoods where the affluent of the 1960s lived, such as Chevy Chase, Maryland; Belmont, Massachusetts; or Shaker Heights, Ohio.

Most of the housing stock remaining from that era looks nothing like the 15,000- and 20,000-square-foot homes built in affluent suburbs over the last few decades. No reproductions of French châteaux. No tennis courts. No three-story cathedral ceilings.

Interesting argument. I wonder if some other factors might also be at play here.

(1) Perhaps people today are more willing to spend their wealth on impressive houses. This could be the case if homes have become more important markers of status since the 1960s.

(2) Perhaps home builders weren’t building these types of homes on a large enough scale for more wealthy Americans to access them. The early 1960s is not that far removed from the under 1,000 square feet Levittown houses and the big builders (as opposed to more local or regional builders) were just taking off. In other words, there was no Toll Brothers yet. Additionally, you need lenders who would be willing to service more mortgages for bigger houses.

(3) Overall, all American homes increased in size over this time period. The average square footage of a new home was 1,660 square feet in 1973 and peaked at 2,521 square feet in 2007. It could be true that the top 10 or 20% of houses have really increased in size but on the whole, all new homes have gotten bigger.

(4) Another factor that might be overlooked here is that the wealthy in the 1960s tended to live with other wealthy people in suburbs or subdivisions and this is likely still the case today. Sure, Don Draper might have had a smaller home but Draper still lived with white-collar professionals. Even if their house sizes have really ballooned, one issue is that the wealthy still live apart from other Americans. Perhaps we should be more concerned with residential segregation than just the size of homes.

British economics writer: economics has failed but are the sociologists ready to step up?

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This is an interesting viewpoint: “Mainstream economic models have been discredited. But why aren’t political scientists and sociologists offering an alternative view?” Here is some of the discussion about how sociology has failed to seize this opportunity:

Perhaps you have more faith in the sociologists. Take a peek at the website for the British Sociological Association. Scroll through thepress-released research, and you will not come across anything that deals with the banking crash. Instead in April 2010, amid the biggest sociological event in decades, the BSA put out a notice titled: “Older bodybuilders can change young people’s view of the over-60s, research says.”

Or why not do the experiment I tried this weekend: go to three of the main academic journals in sociology, where the most noteworthy research is collected, and search the abstracts for the terms “finance” or “economy” or “markets” since the start of the last decade.

Comb through the results for articles dealing with the financial crisis in even the most tangential sense. I found nine in the American Sociological Review, three in Sociology (“the UK’s premier sociology journal”), and one in the British Journal of Sociology. Look at those numbers, and remember that the BSA has 2,500 members – yet this is the best they could do…

It wasn’t always like this. One way of characterising what has happened in America and Britain over the past three decades is that people at the top have skimmed off increasing amounts of the money made by their corporations and societies. That’s a phenomenon well covered by earlier generations of sociologists, whether it’s Marx with his study of primitive accumulation, or the American C Wright Mills and his classic The Power Elite, or France’s Pierre Bourdieu…

Nor is there much encouragement to engage with public life. Because that’s what’s really missing from the other social sciences. When an entire discipline does what the sociologists did at their conference last week and devotes as much time to discussing the holistic massage industry (“using a Foucauldian lens”) as to analysing financiers, they’re never going to challenge the dominance of mainstream economics. And it’s hard to believe they really want to.

Ouch.

I can imagine some sociologists might argue that the world is much bigger than markets and economics. They would not be wrong. At this same time, this critique could be viewed as a call to action: does sociology offer a compelling alternative way to view the world? How can we account for both economic and social life?

I will say that there does appear to be growing interest in economic sociology. This may not be reflected in these particular journals but more sociologists are looking at the social and cultural dimensions of economics. As noted, this was a key concern of a number of foundational sociologists, observers who noticed that industrialization was changing the social world. I wonder how many sociologists would view studying the economic realm as something “dirty” (too many ties to capitalism, too messy, too close to economics, etc.) or “uninteresting” (not what really motivates them to research, teach, and engage in public life).

The Thomas Kincaide housing development in Vallejo, California

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With the recent passing of Thomas Kincaide, one columnist takes a look at a development in Vallejo, California built with Kincaide’s name on it:

Named the Village, a Thomas Kinkade Community, it promised residents a “vision of simpler times” with “cottage style homes that are filled with warmth and personality.” Its slogan: “Calm, not chaos. Peace, not pressure.”…

The homes in the Village look a lot like other tract homes in Hiddenbrooke, but with Kinkadean touches such as steeply gabled roofs covered in faux-slate tile, gingerbread trim, front porches and stone facades.

Residents see their homes and neighborhood as unique and distinctive.

Teri Booth, an original owner, says she bought her home because “it didn’t look like every other McMansion.”

Homes here average 2,400 square feet. The four models were named after Kinkade’s daughters – Merritt, Chandler, Winsor and Everett. The styles might be described as pseudo Victorian, pseudo French provincial, pseudo New England cottage and pseudo arts and crafts.

The streetlights (electric) look like Kinkade’s gaslight logo and the walkways (stamped concrete) resemble cobblestones.

This reminds me of the Disney-built Celebration, Florida and Martha Stewart homes. Some homebuyers are looking for a distinctive house, a world of not “every other McMansion” but rather a Thomas Kincaide McMansion! (Interestingly, this article suggests that the Kincaide homes are a pastiche of styles, a common complaint about McMansions. These homebuyers also seem to like being tied to a famous person or company. Perhaps this is reassuring or perhaps it means that there might be a bigger market for the homes as they are distinctive. (Alas, as the article suggests, home prices in a Kincaide neighborhood can fall as well.) The Village also seems to promote nostalgia and traditional neighborhood life, as do many other developments and builders.

Why have just a painting when you can buy a Thomas Kincaide house?

Sociology grad student taking photos of Chicago’s demolished buildings

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The Chicago Tribune has an interesting profile of a sociology graduate student who photographs buildings that the city of Chicago is about to demolish:

Since January, Schalliol, who is working on a sociology doctorate at the University of Chicago, has been documenting the city’s demolitions with photographs…

But even the worst houses, the ones that aren’t worth the work to keep, give Schalliol pause.

“There isn’t a time,” he said, “when I look at a building that I don’t think, gosh, this is a waste.”

He feels that most acutely in wealthy neighborhoods, such as Lincoln Park and Lakeview, where nice old homes that in a different place or era would be coveted as vintage jewels are routinely torn down merely to make space for mansions and big condo developments.

He photographs them all with equal care, with appreciation and attention to detail, the way you might dress a corpse for burial.

“I want to respect the people who made the building,” he said, “who maintained it, who lived in it. I want to see the building not just how it is, but how it was.”

I wonder what Schalliol will do with all of this, particularly if it is for more academic purposes. I think there is a lot of potential here: buildings are a kind of collective memory. Styles of architecture, the people who live, work, and meet in them, and the collection of buildings in a neighborhood constitute particular social worlds. When the buildings disappear because of old age or disrepair, that social world disappears as well. For example, the demolition of the public housing high-rises in Chicago and many other American cities may be beneficial in reducing concentrated poverty but it also helps remove the concepts of poverty, race, and related issues from the immediate reach. (To be clear, this is likely exactly what some wanted – get rid of the high rises so the problems aren’t so visible. Unfortunately, this doesn’t deal with the root issues.) It can be easy to simply build something new in place of something old but this does help cover up what came before.

At the same time, I also don’t believe that all buildings should simply be preserved because they are old. Should Brutalist buildings be preserved to remind us of a particular architectural moment? Deciding what buildings should stay and go is a complicated process but at the least, I approve of people at least recording by photograph what buildings used to stand in particular locations.