Category Archives: Sociology

An office park that successfully created a “culture of public transit”

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A lot of people would want more Americans to consistently use public transit. But one writer suggests a San Ramon, California office park where “33 percent of the park’s 30,000 workers leave their cars at home” might hold some answers. Here is a look at how this office park’s transportation center tackles logistics, focus on the multiple benefits of using public transit, and has “evangelistic zeal”:

1. Logistics: the office park was built in 1978 and needed to competed with other office parks. The office park purchased a fleet of buses, found ways to subsidize costs, and coordinated bus schedules with other nearby mass transit options. Today: “There are now 13 different bus routes running to the park, and the connections to BART and various local train and express bus services are coordinated. On its website, the Ranch now pitches its transit program as a competitive advantage.”

2. Pitching the multiple benefits of public transit: it’s not just about money but improving health and reducing stress. Today:

Marci says that once riders begin leaving their cars at home they go through a stressful period of two weeks or so where they feel that they’ve lost the control they had in the car. But within three weeks they notice their overall stress levels are lower. “Transit requires that you go at a different pace. You have to wait. If there were roses, we’d smell them,” she says, “There’s not much of that in our lives.” She says HR people have called her saying some of their meaner workers have become pleasant people after switching to transit.

3. The office, particularly its program manager, aggressively push the program and look to engage people in conversations.

Overall, this sounds interesting. But I am a bit skeptical about whether this is a possible solution to energy and transportation issues:

1. Even with all of this work, 67% of the workers still use their cars on a regular basis. (This is based on data the story provides.) Is this the best we can hope for outside of really dense urban areas like New York City? It really is difficult to fight a culture that prizes individuals being able to drive themselves.

2. There is no mention in this article about the cost of this program. It could be cheaper in the long run (if all the possible costs are accounted for) but I imagine some money might need to be spent up front for similar programs with the reduced costs coming down the road. The article suggests this program helped this office park compete – how much did it help?

3. Is this three-pronged strategy viable on a larger scale? Or does it only work under certain conditions?

“Invasion of the Harry Hunters”

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When reading a story today about the upcoming Royal wedding, I was reminded of a Newsweek piece from several weeks ago. While it may not be surprising that some young British women might be trying to catch the attention of Prince Harry, it is more interesting to read about young American women who have become “Harry hunters”:

Fleming is part of a small but resolute group of American “Harry hunters,” aspiring princesses who are crossing the ocean in hopes of capturing the redheaded royal’s heart (and the tiara that comes with it). Some rely on semesters abroad to lend an air of social normalcy to their excursions, while others simply count their pennies—or lean on their parents—to fund extended vacations in Britain. But the goal is always the same: to live happily ever after with a prince of the realm.

These days, their mission has taken on a distinct sense of urgency. Next month Harry’s older brother, Prince William, will wed Kate Middleton—a commoner herself, the Harry hunters note optimistically. But even as these earnest, young crown chasers devour royal-wedding news, the nuptials are a source of serious anxiety. When it comes to available slots on the Windsor family tree, explains author Jerramy Fine, whose 2008 memoir recounts her own unsuccessful efforts to marry into the monarchy, “Harry is now their last chance.”

This reality is not lost on Taylor McKinley, a sweet 21-year-old George Mason student who recently began a semester abroad at the University of Leicester (two hours outside London). McKinley takes her princess prep seriously. She reads magazines with names like Majesty and Royalty. She studies the historical monarchy. And in high school, she even abstained from dating, figuring she would “hold out for royalty.” Now, she spends her weekends dragging classmates to Harry’s favorite restaurants and waiting for fate to strike. Her parents are skeptical, but McKinley is confident she will one day find her prince. “I’m one of those people who only reads books with happy endings,” she says.

McKinley’s tactics are mild for a Harry hunter.

How come the story doesn’t include any reactions from family or friends of these girls? While these girls supposedly take heart that Kate Middleton is a “commoner,” in order to be a “Harry hunter,” it seems like one has to be rather wealthy and have time on her hands. Studying abroad is a clever tactic but the story also discusses a woman who works part-time and takes her summers abroad to try to catch Harry’s eye. I know “commoner” means “non-royal,” but it is not like just any American young woman could fly to Britain and attend the sorts of events that Prince Harry might be at.

I wonder if we will hear more about the story in the next few weeks as we get closer to the wedding date. I’m sure we’ll hear theories or ideas about why a good number of Americans seem to be fascinated by a foreign country’s royalty.

UPDATE 10:09 AM 4/13/11: One more thought came into my mind about this story:

The news story gives us two examples of American women that are doing this and then says little about how many people are actually doing this. We get two small clues. Regarding the American women, we are told these two are  “part of a small but resolute group.” Regarding British women, we are told that “London’s Daily Mail frequently chronicles the exploits of young British socialites who spend weekends trolling the prince’s favorite bars.” While this may be an interesting story that grab’s people attention (like me), if there are only 5 or 15 or 25 people doing this, does it matter?

This is an example of a type of story that bothers me as a social scientist. It is interesting but it seems to be based on two cases with little attempt to ascertain whether this is a broader trend or not.

Continued issues for Walmart in Chicago

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Even with discussions last year suggesting more amity between Walmart and the city of Chicago (and an earlier post here), there are still some issues for the retailer in the city.

1. Over the weekend, activists in Little Village, a neighborhood on Chicago’s west side, said they think Walmart should locate one of their stores in their neighborhood rather than just building on the south side:

At a news conference Sunday afternoon at 26th Street and Kolin, Raul Montes Jr. said people could benefit from having a Wal-Mart more centrally located in the city, vs. the locations on the South Side, which are currently planned.

Montes says Wal-Mart would do well at 26th and Kostner, which has been vacant for years. Montes says he and others in Little Village have sent letters to their alderman over the past few months and have so far, gotten no response.

He says they feel ignored.

2. Last night, Walmart representatives presented plans to residents of Lakeview, a neighborhood on the north side, regarding a proposed smaller version of their store called “Walmart Market.” There was some opposition from the crowd:

About 200 people — many wearing anti-Wal-Mart buttons and stickers — filed into the Wellington Avenue United Church of Christ to hear the proposal.

John Bisio, a Wal-Mart Stores Inc. public affairs senior manager, said that although he recognized the citizens’ concerns, the smaller facility at Broadway and Surf Street would not interfere with the neighborhood’s character…

But many in the audience could be heard snickering at company representatives’ arguments for why the 32,000-square-foot Walmart Market would be good for the North Side neighborhood.

After the presentation, several residents overwhelmingly shouted down the proposal and urged Alderman Tunney to push forth the zoning limitation in City Council.

It is interesting to contrast these two responses to Walmart: one neighborhood wants a store while another is very skeptical and thinks the store is unnecessary and could harm the neighborhood.

But with big box stores wanting to move into cities (Target recently talking about plans to open on State Street as well as recently opening their first store in Manhattan), these discussions will continue to take place.

Pew using word frequencies to describe public’s opinion of budget negotiations

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In the wake of the standoff over a federal government shutdown last week, Pew conducted a poll of Americans regarding their opinions on this event. One of the key pieces of data that Pew is reporting is a one-word opinion of the proceedings:

The public has an overwhelmingly negative reaction to the budget negotiations that narrowly avoided a government shutdown. A weekend survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press and the Washington Post finds that “ridiculous” is the word used most frequently to describe the budget negotiations [29 respondents], followed by “disgusting,” [22 respondents] “frustrating,” [14 respondents] “messy,” [14 respondents] “disappointing” [13 respondents] and “stupid.” [13 respondents]

Overall, 69% of respondents use negative terms to describe the budget talks, while just 3% use positive words; 16% use neutral words to characterize their impressions of the negotiations. Large majorities of independents (74%), Democrats (69%) and Republicans (65%) offer negative terms to describe the negotiations.

The full survey was conducted April 7-10 among 1,004 adults; people were asked their impressions of the budget talks in interviews conducted April 9-10, following the April 8 agreement that averted a government shutdown.

I would be hesitant about leading off an article or headline (“Budget Negotiations in a Word – “Ridiculous”) with these word frequencies since they generally were used by few respondents: the most common response, “ridiculous,” was only given by 2.9% of the survey respondents (based on the figures here of 1,004 total respondents). I think the better figures to use would be the broader ones about negative responses where 69% used negative terms and a majority of all political stripes used a negative descriptor.

You also have to dig into the complete report for some more information. Here is the exact wording of the question:

PEW.2A If you had to use one single word to describe your impression of the budget negotiations in Washington, what would that one word be? [IF “DON’T KNOW” PROBE ONCE: It can be anything, just the first word that comes to mind…] [OPEN END: ENTER VERBATIM RESPONSE]

Additionally, the full report says that this descriptor question was only asked of 427 respondents on April 9-10 (so my above percentage should be altered: it should be 29/427 = 6.8%). So this is a smaller sample answering this particular question; how generalizable are the results? And the most common response to this question is the other category with 202 respondents. Presumably, the “others” are mostly negative since we are told 69% use negative terms. (As a side note, why not separate out the “don’t knows” and “refused”? There are 45 people in this category but these seem like different answers.)

One additional thought I have: at least this wasn’t put into a word cloud in order to display the data.

A narrative about McMansions at the heart of the economic crisis

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With an ongoing economic crisis and housing slump, there are plenty of stories about who has been hit the hardest. But one writer suggests that perhaps we can’t just simply say that those who were excessive in their consumption and purchased McMansions are the only ones affected:

With an ongoing economic crisis and housing slump, one target of blame is McMansion buyers. But one writer suggests the economic crisis affects more people than just those who consumed beyond their means:

The nation’s lingering housing foreclosure mess is too often about folks with McMansion-size aspirations and duplex paychecks, granite counter appetites and laminate budgets.

And when we hear that one of the nation’s hot spots for foreclosures is Prince William County, we nod knowingly, thinking of the vast tracts of huge new homes and the dreamers who drowned in them.

But the other day, I met some of the folks who lost their homes or are fighting with banks to try to keep them. And McMansion isn’t what comes to mind.

The rest of the story goes on to describe the stories of a few people who lived more modest lifestyles and yet have still fallen into housing issues.

I would be interested in seeing some figures about what kinds of homes or types of owners are those who have experienced the most foreclosures or mortgage difficulties. Is it really McMansion owners or others? We hear quite a bit about regional differences, such as high vacancy rates in Florida and high foreclosure rates in certain states or cities, but less about other factors.

In reading this one particular story, I wonder why people might be quick to jump on people like those who live in Prince William County (a wealthy county – this Wikipedia list has it as the 14th highest county in the country in terms of median household income). How much of this is a moral judgment leveled against McMansion owners and houses more broadly? With this housing crisis, it now looks like McMansions are also a bad economic deal, adding to the other issues that critics say McMansions have.

Early signs: higher gas prices lead to less driving

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With gas prices moving upward, there are some signs that this is already changing driving behavior among Americans:

Drivers bought about 2.4 million fewer gallons for the week of April 1, a 3.6 percent drop from last year, according to MasterCard SpendingPulse, which tracks the volume of gas sold at 140,000 service stations nationwide…

Before the decline, demand was increasing for two months. Some analysts had expected the trend to continue because the economic recovery was picking up, adding 216,000 jobs in March…

Instead, about 70 percent of the nation’s major gas-station chains say sales have fallen, according to a March survey by the Oil Price Information Service. More than half reported a drop of 3 percent or more — the sharpest since the summer of 2008, when gas soared past $4 a gallon. Now it’s creeping toward $4 again…

The decline is somewhat puzzling because Americans typically curb their driving only as a last resort, after sacrificing other forms of discretionary spending, like shopping for new clothes, or going to movies, concerts and restaurants.

Economists and others have been talking about this for a while: what exactly is the price point of a gallon of gasoline where Americans might drastically change their transportation patterns? In this earlier post, I briefly discussed the claim that the Obama administration actually wants higher gas prices as this would lead to greener transportation choices such as mass transit or bicycling or car pooling (or other options).

But if gasoline prices stayed relatively high (so they don’t really go down like they have after some of the temporary spikes in recent years – see the weekly average in the US going back to 1990 here or a graph showing prices going back to the mid 1970s here), it might lead to all sorts of changes. This could include everything from buying smaller cars (as the story above suggests is happening) to more Amtrak riders to longer semi trailers to rethinking patterns of sprawl.

2010 Census figures show growing urban population

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In the last 110 years, the United States has become very urbanized: in 1900, 60.4% of the population was rural and 29.6% urban while in 1990, those numbers changed to 24.8% rural and 75.2% urban. New 2010 Census figures show that this trend has continued:

The U.S. population grew by 27 million over the decade, to 308 million. But growth was unevenly distributed. Metropolitan areas, defined as the collection of small cities and suburbs that surround an urban core with at least 50,000 people, accounted for most of the gain, growing 10.8% over the decade to 257.7 million people.

Rural areas, meanwhile, grew just 4.5% to 51 million. Many regions—from the Great Plains to the Mississippi Delta to rural New England—saw population declines. About 46% of rural counties lost population in the decade, including almost 60% of rural counties that aren’t adjacent to a metro area, according to an analysis of Census data by Kenneth Johnson, senior demographer at the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire.

Based on these 2010 figures of 308 million US residents (though the population now is just over 311 million), that means 83.67% of the US lives in metropolitan areas. I still want to see the breakdown of urban areas: how much of the population now lives in suburbs (50.0% of Americans in 2000 compared to 30.3% percent in central cities – page 33 of this report) compared to cities. It is interesting to note that rural areas have still grown in population even as nearly half of rural counties lost population. Where exactly are the rural growth spots and are these exurbs that will soon become part of a metropolitan region or tourist spots?

(The rest of the article talks about how the population continues to grow more in the South and West. Read more about that here.)

Sociologist looks at 80 years of love songs

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Musical styles might change a bit as time passes but an ever-present feature of rock or pop music is the love song. One sociology professor has a new book looking at such songs and they messages they send:

UC Santa Barbara professor of sociology Thomas Scheff’s new book, What’s Love Got to Do With It? Emotions and Relationships in Pop Songs, reveals why love songs may actually be negative representations of love and relationships for romantics both hopeless and otherwise.

“Music informs our ideas about emotions, and love in particular, but most love songs are terrible models. Lyrics maintain the mystery of love, but they reveal next to nothing about the look and feel of actual love,” asserts Scheff in his book.

Scheff, who studied 80 year’s worth of American song lyrics, reprimands the machine of pop love songs for setting unrealistic expectations about love for listeners. He questions the disconnect between real world expectations and actual outcomes in relationships that listeners formulate from growing up with their favorite love songs, from George and Ira Gershwin’s “They Can’t Take That Away From Me” to N’Sync and Backstreet Boy ballads. Scheff also discusses the pitfalls of pop culture influences.

On the one hand, I can imagine people suggesting that Scheff is simply writing about common sense: of course we know that love songs don’t actually reflect reality. On the other hand, I also imagine there could be some rich ground to cover here, particularly in thinking about how people readily consume such things and then go out and live more complicated relationships. How might Scheff’s thoughts about love songs fit with Ann Swidler’s look at the two dominant motifs regarding love in the United States in Talk of Love? (And in the middle, perhaps there are disc jockeys/radio hosts who will comment that this book is validation for playing love songs. This one’s for you Delilah.)

I will be interested to see if Scheff’s book looks at how love songs have changed over this 80 year period. Are the Gershwins and Adele covering the same ground?

Can Google incentivize being social?

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There is no question that Google would like to be more prominent in the social networking (SNS) phenomenon. Apparently, Google has tied an incentive for employees, a yearly bonus, to how well the employees help the company move forward in this area:

“[Your bonus] can range from 0.75 to 1.25 depending on how well we perform against our strategy to integrate relationships, sharing and identity across our products.” Social.

And yes, you read that correctly, the bonus can go up or down based upon Google’s performance in the social realm. The critics are already jumping all over this one, noting that it looks like all Google employees will be losing bonus money this year. And given the decided lack of success from products like Wave, Buzz, and to a broader extent, Orkut, who can blame them?

But on a higher level, it’s the strategy itself that may be the most interesting thing here. Mathew Ingram notes that you can’t threaten people into being social. While Mike Elgan calls this Larry Page’s first blunder (as CEO). I actually have a slightly different take on this. I think that on paper, this is actually a good idea and strategy. But in practice, I think it will ultimately be looked upon as a bad thing and may even directly backfire.

I’m not sure that I really think the headline on this story captures what is going on (“I’m Having A Party. Here’s $50. Bring Cool People — Or You Owe Me $100.”): being social online is different than incentivizing employees to walk up to people they don’t know on the street and push products. In order to be social online, one needs only to make links between people (“friends” in Facebook terms) and then provide some content (which the user gets to pick and choose). Since I would guess that many Google employees are already operating privately in these SNS realms, how hard would it be to transfer some of that activity into a Google product? While this activity is still personal and requires effort from individuals, it doesn’t seem like it would take much to be social online with a new product.

Now it is a more interesting question to ponder whether such a strategy would actually help a fledgling SNS product get off the ground. This writer suggests other SNS launches were “organic” and a push from Google’s employees would only work if the product was really good. This might be the case – but the argument here is that we know for sure how SNS products take off. Could Google do something new with this kind of incentive and with its large number of employees (and their contacts), could they get a new program/app/platform up and running? If Google employees started even a decent online party, wouldn’t some other people want to get involved?

(On a side note, it would be interesting to think more about this incentive. What do Google employees think of this? By virtue of possibly losing some of their bonus, will workers operate as homo economicus and help make something happen?)

Boost home values by leaving out distressed sales

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The Chicago Tribune looks at one way home values might stabilize: simply don’t include distressed home sales in the calculations and in appraisals.

A report from data provider CoreLogic showed that Chicago-area single-family home prices were relatively flat in February, down only 0.37 percent from a year ago. But that figure includes only traditional sales and not the impact of distressed-sales prices. Add in the sales of foreclosed, bank-owned homes and short sales, and Chicago-area home prices fell 10.4 percent in February on a year-over-year basis…

There’s one problem with Ford’s proposal, though. Appraisers are licensed by the state of Illinois but follow uniform federal guidelines that dictate that they analyze available comparable sales.

“It would lead to a misleading report,” said Chip Wagner of A.L. Wagner Appraisal Group Inc. in Naperville. “You can’t overlook any of the factors in the marketplace that are influencing factors. It sounds like a good idea in fairness to homeowners, but the appraisers that follow that would be in (danger) of losing their licenses.”

While this is being considered in a number of locations, it does seem that legislators would need to decide whether the benefits for homeowners outweigh the limitations.

Additionally, this sort of story might be good ammunition for those who are cynical about statistics: can’t you just change around a definition and say something very different (in this case, Chicago home sales have declined versus they have barely declined)? But at the same time, most statistics are dependent on their operationalization: whether home sale values should include the sales of distressed homes is more of a definitional issue and decisions about this would likely come down to vested interests and motivations.