Category Archives: Sociology

Stephen Slater and emotional work

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Stephen Slater has become a lightning rod for opinions, particularly in the online realm. The flight attendant for JetBlue has drawn attention for his actions on Monday after dealing with a difficult passenger: he told off the passengers over the intercom and then grabbed several beers and slid down the emergency chute right after the plane had landed on a runway at JFK Airport in New York City.

The firestorm over his actions reminds me of the book The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. In this book, sociologist Arlie Hochschild examined several professions, including flight attendants, where the job involved “emotional work.” Regardless of what a customer might do, flight attendants are required to be cheery and helpful. This can take a lot of work and effort as employees are always “on stage.” Occasionally, as Slater demonstrated, the employees can no longer maintain the emotional facade. These sorts of service jobs are often paid relatively less and are viewed by many people as jobs with less prestige and status.

Indeed, opinions about Slater’s action seem to break down along these lines regarding “emotional work.” Is he as a flight attendant justified in responding in the way he did because of a difficult passenger? Or, since he is being paid to be cheerful and diplomatic, shouldn’t he just have done his job and moved on? According to the New York Times, Slater’s actions have resonated with a number of people who felt similarly at their job.

I’d love to hear the side of the passenger who apparently provoked Slater.

Evangelicals and Mainline Protestants

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Joe Carter at First Things discusses some comments made by sociologist Rodney Stark in a recent interview. Stark suggested that the Mainline denominations, Episcopalians, Congregationalists, Methodists, Presbyterians, and a few others, are now the periphery while Evangelicals are the core.

Carter argues:

No offense to my mainline friends, but I’ve never understood why they continue to be considered mainstream by the the mainstream media. The Southern Baptist Convention has as many members as all mainline denominations combined. Yet the dying denominations get all the attention.

I suspect that within my lifetime the only mainline denominations that will continue to exist will be those that, as Stark notes, are led by clergy who are “generally evangelical in their convictions.”

While Carter may have a point about Mainline denominations receiving an inordinate amount of attention compared to their size, there are still some reasons to consider and track the Mainline:

1. They represent an important historical era of Christianity in the United States and their slow decline is of interest. Once the dominant denominations, they are now in a different position. How their theological beliefs have changed over time is fascinating. Tracing these changes is useful just as tracking how Evangelicalism has changed and will change over time is also useful.

2. Mainline denominations have historically had middle-class and upper-class adherents as opposed to more conservative denominations which had less education and lower incomes. While this gap has narrowed today, these denominations still often represent money, tradition, and influence. These are interesting qualities that are attractive to journalists and others.

Pastors as entertainers vs. helping people grow spiritually

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In an op-ed in the New York Times, G. Jeffrey MacDonald argues that part of the reason clergy are so burned out is that expectations from parishioners have changed:

The pastoral vocation is to help people grow spiritually, resist their lowest impulses and adopt higher, more compassionate ways. But churchgoers increasingly want pastors to soothe and entertain them. It’s apparent in the theater-style seating and giant projection screens in churches and in mission trips that involve more sightseeing than listening to the local people.

As a result, pastors are constantly forced to choose, as they work through congregants’ daily wish lists in their e-mail and voice mail, between paths of personal integrity and those that portend greater job security. As religion becomes a consumer experience, the clergy become more unhappy and unhealthy…

In this transformation, clergy have seen their job descriptions rewritten. They’re no longer expected to offer moral counsel in pastoral care sessions or to deliver sermons that make the comfortable uneasy. Church leaders who continue such ministerial traditions pay dearly.

Even as MacDonald suggests there is a large trend toward more consumerist church experiences, he does not mention how pastors might have fed into this or gone along with this. If he doesn’t think pastors have gone along with this, then perhaps the issue is that congregations have taken more control over local churches and demand things like video screens over protests from clergy. If he does think pastors have gone along with this, why did they do so?

I would be curious to hear how MacDonald would change the situation: should change come from pastors, the congregations, both, somewhere else? Is it a matter of the church giving in to cultural pressures?

The impact of war on veteran’s job prospects

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While time spent in the military can be cast as a good stepping stone to a career or an education, a new study in American Sociological Review argues that veterans who spent time in combat had damaged job prospects for the rest of their lives.

According to Businessweek:

“Veterans who saw combat started their work lives at a relative disadvantage that they were unable to overcome. Soldiers exposed to combat were more likely than non-combat veterans to be disabled and unemployed in their mid-20s and to remain so throughout their worklife,” Alair MacLean, an assistant professor in the sociology department at Washington State University Vancouver, said in an American Sociological Association news release.

MacLean and colleagues analyzed data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, a long-term survey of individuals and families conducted annually since 1968. The researchers focused on veterans and non-veterans who would have been between the ages of 25 and 55 in any year between 1968 and 2003…

Combat veterans had higher rates of employment than the other groups in the initial years included in the study but had significantly higher levels of unemployment in most years after 1975.

All in all, evidence of the toll war can exact from those who fight it.

Matching workers to job slots in the American economy

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In economic times like the United States is in now, it would seem logical that all open jobs would attract workers. But this is not the case, according to an article in the Wall Street Journal. Economic changes have “created a glut of people who can’t qualify for highly skilled jobs but have a hard time adjusting to low-pay, unskilled work.”

One way to think of the job market is a process where workers are matched with job slots. If the workers change or the job slots change, the system can get out of whack. From the article:

Matching people with available jobs is always difficult after a recession as the economy remakes itself. But Labor Department data suggest the disconnect is particularly acute this time around. Since the economy bottomed out in mid-2009, the number of job openings has risen more than twice as fast as actual hires, a gap that didn’t appear until much later in the last recovery. The disparity is most notable in manufacturing, which has had among the biggest increases in openings. But it is also appearing in other areas, such as business services, education and health care.

If the job market were working normally—that is, if openings were getting filled as they usually do—the U.S. should have about five million more gainfully employed people than it does, estimates David Altig, research director at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. That would correspond to an unemployment rate of 6.8%, instead of 9.5%.

So it is not as easy turning around the economy by simply creating jobs – there also have to be workers to fill these slots. This is a process that involves workers acquiring particular educations and skills and employers shifting their expectations for employees to take advantage of who may be available to work at that time.

Thinking about economics: science or ideology?

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Barbara Kiviat discusses whether economics is a science or an ideology. Part of her conclusion:

And when you think about it, it is a little odd that we think economics would be able to do these things. After all, the economy is as much a product of sociology and policy as it is pure-form economics. Yet we’d not expect a sociologist or a political scientist to be able to write a computer model to accurately capture system-wide decision-making. The conclusion I’ve come to: while economists may have an important perspective on whether it’s time for stimulus or austerity, maybe we should stop looking to them as if they are people who are in the ultimate position to know.

Sociologists have been arguing for some time now that sociology has a lot to say about economics, including about how cultural values and ideology guide economic decision-making and actions.

The rise of “smart growth”

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Reuters reports on “smart growth” initiatives across the United States with Rockville, Maryland as a prime example. With a weakened economy, more buyers seem to prefer locations closer to downtowns where they can walk, more easily access amenities, and avoid some of the pitfalls of suburban sprawl.

From the article:

Rockville’s renaissance over the past four years shows how the shift toward urban-style living has reached the suburbs. And urban planners insist the trend has legs.

Dubbed “smart growth,” the movement favors the development of a mix of housing and businesses in and near existing cities. At the same time, it discourages the Topsy-like growth of peripheral suburbs, known disparagingly as “sprawl.”

“Sprawl” is a term commonly used to describe the suburbs. It implies automobile dependence, spread out houses, strip malls, big box stores, and a lack of open space. In contrast, “smart growth” offers something different: more dense development, mixed-use development, more thought-through development principles, and a lessened reliance on automobiles.

More suburban communities seem to desire “smart growth,” particularly to help revive their downtowns. This translates into certain development goals: building around existing transportation facilities (like railroads), constructing condos and more dense residential units, and seeking to attract dining, retail, and entertainment uses that can expand a downtown from just a place to errands in during the day.

h/t The Infrastructurist

Summer heat and society

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The heat of the summer is often equated with positive things: sun, outdoor activities, the beach, and driving with the windows open or convertible top down.

But the heat can also cause and expose issues in a society. In Russia, there has been record heat and a staggering number of deaths:

On Monday, Moscow health authorities announced that the number of deaths each day in the capital had nearly doubled to 700 as most of central Russia entered the seventh week of a heat wave. The high temperatures, hovering around 100 degrees, have destroyed 30% of the nation’s grain crops and triggered massive peat bog and forest fires that alone have killed more than 50 people and devastated dozens of villages.

Andrei Seltsovsky, chief of Moscow’s health department, said the city’s morgues were filled almost to capacity, with 1,300 of the 1,500 slots taken. He suggested that residents, instead of following Russian Orthodox tradition of holding burials on the third day after death, bury loved ones sooner.

This sort of event is not isolated to Moscow. Something similar happened in Chicago in 1995. Sociologist Eric Klinenberg wrote about the summer in the book Heat Wave: Social Autopsy of a Disaster in Chicago. In an interview, Klinenberg discussed the book. There were some controversy over the “official death count.” Cook County’s chief medical examiner reported 465 deaths related to the heat for the hottest week but the numbers were disputed by Mayor Daley.

Additionally, the death rates differed by race:

The actual death tolls for African Americans and whites were almost identical, but those numbers are misleading. There are far more elderly whites than elderly African Americans in Chicago, and when the Chicago Public Health Department considered the age differences, they found that the black/white mortality ratio was 1.5 to 1. Another surprising fact that emerged is that Latinos, who represent about 25 percent of the city population and are disproportionately poor and sick, accounted for only 2 percent of the heat-related deaths.

So heat can help expose the disadvantaged in society, those who have no or little access to air conditioning, are often alone, and have no one to check in on them. Since that summer in Chicago, the city has opened “cooling centers” (which are available now all over the state of Illinois) to provide a place for those who don’t have other options. Measures like these have cut down on heat-related deaths in Chicago – it remains to be seen what Moscow will do to help with this current and future heat waves.

The links between money and happiness

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There is a lot of research exploring the links between income/having money and happiness. The New York Times discusses some of this research and how the recession might be pushing people to find satisfaction in things other than money.

With those who have cut back in spending or are legitimately downsizing (moving into a smaller home or giving up a car vs. giving up cable for a while), it remains to be seen whether such behavior will continue when economic times are better.

Age drops for master of divinity degree recipients

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USA Today reports that the median age for those obtaining a master of divinity degree has dropped in the last decade:

For the past 10 years, the estimated median age of candidates for master of divinity degrees has fallen steadily, from 34.14 in 1999 to 32.19 in 2009, according to an analysis by the Center for the Study of Theological Education (CSTE) at Auburn Seminary. That marks a reversal: From 1989 to 1999, the estimated median age had climbed steadily from 31.4 to 34.14.

Perhaps this is part of a larger trend of a younger generation seeking more meaning in their career.

I would be curious to know whether those entering the ministry today do so for similar reasons as those who entered the ministry 50 or 100 years ago.