Tag Archives: American culture

“How a time-use expert uses her time”

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An interesting look at how sociologists who study time use go about their days:

As a sociologist and director of the University of Maryland’s Time Use Laboratory, Sayer explores the ways that gender and social class guide the ways that people use their time. She looks for patterns and consequences of time use and the ways that these actions influence people’s daily lives.

When she’s not in her office, Sayer lives with her mother, who depends on Sayer’s care, as well as her husband and their three cats. And her recent trip to Texas was not for pleasure but instead to visit her sick older brother and take care of family business…

For many people, this blur of activity is a symptomatic of a condition that Sayer’s colleague, University of Maryland sociologist and time-use researcher John Robinson, calls “hurry sickness.”…

She’ll cram the leftover office work somewhere in between tidying up the house, feeding the cats, making dinner, eating (usually around 8), chatting with her mom and husband, cleaning, reading the newspaper and getting to bed by 11:30.

Don’t forget the impact of the invention of clocks on the modern era. And, for a variety of reasons, Americans seem particularly caught up with the clock – even if they aren’t particularly productive all the time. Workplace productivity has increased but that extra leisure time tends to go to things like television and not necessarily towards civic life. I imagine many sociologists have ideas about what would be best for people to do with their time but it is difficult to do many of these things – such as building and maintaining social relationships – within a social system which has additional aims such as making money or pushing mass media.

 

Is Starbucks really a “third place”?

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Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz likes to claim his stores operate as “third places,” a term coined by sociologist Ray Oldenburg. But, do they really fill this role?

Now that so many street corners seem to have a Starbucks, has the international chain truly become that “place on the corner” where people connect? In fact, Oldenburg dismisses the Starbucks coffee shop as an “imitation”, debilitated by the company’s pursuit of that other quintessentially American obsession, security, and the sterile, predictable environment it produces. “With its overriding concern for safety,” Oldenburg told Bryant Simon, author of Everything But the Coffee: Learning about America from Starbucks, “it can’t achieve the kind of connections I had in mind.”

Walk into a Starbucks today, and you may not notice much connection going on: some customers come in chatty groups, but many others arrive in search of nothing more than a place to open their laptops and get some work done; in effect, using Starbucks not as a third but a second place — their workplace. Most simply grab their coffee and go, never pausing to avail themselves of the chairs and couches provided, while others prefer to keep human interaction to an absolute minimum by using the drive-through window, a resoundingly un-urban feature Starbucks introduced in 1994.

Starbucks’ ongoing retooling and experimentation suggests that Schultz, for all he talks about his company’s resurrection of the “third place”, has yet to hear a sufficient amount of political banter and schoolchildren’s chatter in his stores. Starbucks’ enormous scale and need to service the American demand for frictionless convenience contradicts its mission to replicate the appeal of continental coffee-house culture: how much of a neighbourhood-rooted venue for chance encounter can you provide when you have to run thousands and thousands of them, making sure they all do more-or-less the same thing?

Maybe you could make a case either way. In favor, coffee shops serve as third places in numerous cultures and their presence almost everywhere means Americans have a common place outside their private homes and workplaces to get together. Yet, Starbucks present a common “McDonaldized” experience (it may be coffee but it is still fast food and often dependent on a car-driven society) that is primarily controlled by corporate interests. Perhaps only in a society that is so privatized (emphasis on single-family homes, cars, moving away from urban problems, individualism, etc.) could a chain coffee store even make the case that it is about community.

Percent of American teenagers at its lowest point ever

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The development of the age category teenager has been influential in American society but recent data suggests the percent of Americans who are teenagers has never been lower:

Here’s the total number of 13-to-19 year olds over the past 50 years. (The most recent data from the Census Bureau is an estimate from 2013.)

…

The previous low came in 1953, when the babies of the Baby Boom hadn’t yet hit their teenage years.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out in different social spheres including:

1. Education. Does this mean the closing of schools/colleges and fewer jobs for educators?

2. Marketing. Teenagers wanted to utilize their disposable income and brands wanted to hook them as consumers for life. But, with fewer teenagers, brands will really have to make sure they reach enough teenagers.

3. Suburbs. These areas have been devoted to children for decades while also not knowing what to do with teenagers who often wanted to escape the relatively dull, often private settings.

4. All sorts of occupations. Are there certain industries that won’t attract enough teenagers?

I could go on. But, I would also note that there may be even fewer teenagers if it hadn’t been for higher birth rates among the tens of millions of immigrants who have made their way to the United States in recent decades.

Diversity boom coming to America

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The baby boom after World War II affected American social life and several experts discuss the impact of the coming “diversity boom”:

“This new diversity boom that we’re seeing right now will be every bit as important for our country in the decades ahead as the baby boom [people born between 1946 and 1964] was in the last half of the 20th century,” said demographer William Frey of the Brookings Institution.

“We know that the baby boom has changed the country in lots of ways – popular culture, changing values about all kinds of social issues, families, women’s roles and politics.  And I think this diversity boom is going to have just as big of an impact.  We’ll be a very different country and we’re only just beginning to see the start of it,” said Frey…

“The degree of cultural diversity that this introduces to this country is rather like the cultural diversity we had in the 19th century, and for that matter in the 18th century at the time of founding,” observed American Enterprise Institute political scientist Charles Murray.  In many ways, according to Murray, diversity has been a positive force throughout America history…

A few decades ago, many analysts warned that these demographic trends would lead to a balkanization of America.  However, most experts now agree that U.S. culture and assimilation will reinforce America’s national character, particularly as the rate of interracial marriage grows.

Demographics or geographic mobility may seem fairly dull but sizable changes – here, an increase in immigration and the foreign-born population or a significant increase in birth rates in the postwar era – are influential. It is interesting to see the positive responses from the experts cited here as I’m less confident that such optimism would be shared by a big majority of Americans. Additionally, such booms don’t last forever (or statistically they may just cease to be booms) though it would be hard to predict when this current boom would slow.

In economic terms, 1 baseball team = 1 midsized department store

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Following up on the academic consensus that sports do not economically benefit communities, one economist notes the economic impact of sports teams:

“If every sports team in Chicago were to suddenly disappear, the impact on the Chicago economy would be a fraction of 1 percent,” Leeds says. “A baseball team has about the same impact on a community as a midsize department store.”

The reason?

Economists say the biggest reason sports teams don’t have much impact is that they don’t tend to spur new spending.  Most people have a limited entertainment budget, so the dollars they are spending when they go to a game is money they would have spent elsewhere, maybe even at a restaurant or small businesses where more money would have stayed in the community. Plus, Matheson says, rather than draw people to a neighborhood, games can actually repel them.

Don’t underestimate the money generated by large retail stores. When I worked a short stint at a local Target at the end of high school, I remember seeing the board in our office that listed daily sales. The figure was typically around $100,000. That generates a lot of tax revenue through sales taxes and property taxes.

This is more evidence that the more important feature of sports teams in major cities is their social and cultural value. Teams provide something for a city to rally around and contribute to the city’s collective identify. In major cities with millions of people, it is difficult to find features or events that can bring large numbers of people together. Sports teams also provide opportunities for leisure, whether through enjoying the stadium experience or experiencing the game from afar. Now, if only we could find politicians that would admit the taxpayer money going to stadiums or teams was due to the interest in having a common sports identity and leisure experience rather than some grand economic impact…

McKinsey predicts drop in car ownership (after 2040) due to self-driving cars

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McKinsey suggests one side effect of self-driving cars will be less need for owning one:

But it’s in Phase 3, after 2040, that the fun begins. This is the point where autonomous cars become our primary means of transport, and all the rules are up for debate. Just as car design will fundamentally change once things like forward-facing seats, mirrors, and pedals are no longer necessary, the way we structure physical space could evolve: McKinsey predicts that by 2050, we might need just 75 percent of the space we now reserve for parking our cars. Because this is America, that means we get back 5.7 billion square meters of space—enough to hold the Grand Canyon and then some. That’s because autonomous cars can pack themselves together tightly (no need to allow space for human to exit).

More than that though, our entire idea of car ownership could change. Currently, cars sit unused about 95 percent of the time. That leaves a lot of room for improvement in terms of how we allocate resources.

We won’t stop buying cars altogether—people will still want the option to “independently drive and use the vehicle, and have fun doing so,” says Kaas— but we will buy fewer cars. Without the need for a human at the helm, one autonomous vehicle could take the place of two conventional vehicles: If Joan is going golfing and Joe needs to go shopping, a single car could drop Joan off at the club, swing back to the house to take Joe to the supermarket and back, then return to the club and get Joan. Kaas also predicts you could see the rise of private commuting services, shuttling customers around for a fee.

The recurring theme in the McKinsey report is that the consumer wins. Yes, cars crammed full of high-end technology will likely cost several thousand dollars more than they do today. But “drivers” will save money in the form of regained time (spend your commute working instead of driving!) and many fewer accidents: McKinsey pegs the savings on repair and health care bills alone at $180 billion in the US, predicting a 90 percent drop in crashes.

Cars are expensive so this could theoretically save money (as long as the new autonomous cars have reasonable price tags) and offer more convenience. Yet, it could take a lot to overcome the American love of cars. They aren’t simply about convenience or getting from Point A to Point B (and Americans would always choose mass transit if it were more convenient and effective). It is about other ideas in the American Dream, about freedom and independence and having a status symbol and being mobile. Perhaps by 2040, these things won’t matter as much as we all adjust to autonomous vehicles (and perhaps legislation that makes them the norm for safety’s sake). But, this isn’t just a technological change; this requires some big cultural changes as well.

For Americans, someone else is always a rich person

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Perhaps this is not surprising in a country where almost all claim to be middle class: Americans suggest someone else is the one who is truly rich.

Richard Reeves of the Brookings Institution, who has made this quirk of our class identities into a hobby horse of sorts, recently put together a nice illustration of what he calls our national, “Me? I’m not rich!” problem. In 2011, Gallup asked Americans how much income they needed to be “rich.” In general, they answered some amount that was higher than whatever they made. Most people who earned $30,000 a year or less thought you could be rich making under six figures. A majority of those who earned between $30,000 and $99,000 thought you needed to cross the $100,000 threshold. You get the idea.

reeves_rich

Brookings

None of this is especially surprising. People don’t generally think about living standards in absolute terms. They think about them relatively, and tend to compare themselves with their peer group. And because most of us know at least a few jerks with a bigger house, nicer car, and more interesting-looking vacation photos, it’s easy to conclude that, no, we ourselves are not truly rich. I’m making fun of Americans for it, but my guess is it’s near universal. It just happens to be a problem in the U.S. because, as Reeves writes, those of us who think we should be paying taxes at all tend to believe the rich should be the ones shelling out. That’s a political problem when there are apparently no rich people to be found.

I’ve seen this at work in numerous settings where Americans fall over themselves to claim that they don’t have as many resources as it appears they might. This could involve a discussion of McMansions and how everyone knows someone else who lives in such a garish house while they would never consider such a thing. Or it could be in a discussion of students or staff at a private college where everyone acts like they don’t have any spending money. There are powerful social incentives to not declare oneself rich even when objective measures put people at the higher ends of the social class ladder.

I wonder how much particular actions of the wealthy could mitigate their own admittance at being rich. Take Bill Gates. Fabulously wealthy and well known for this but he has also spent a lot of money on philanthropic ends. Does this take away the negatives of being rich? Warren Buffett is cited in this article as someone who claims to be rich. Does he do anything to offset that image or is it okay if you became rich through building your own financial empire (just American hard work)?

You’ve been warned (again): McMansions are back!

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Newer American homes are bigger than ever:

New American homes were bigger than ever last year, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau. After a few years of shrinkage in the aftermath of the Great Recession, the median square footage of newly-built homes last year tipped the scales at over 2,400 square feet. That’s nearly 1,000 square feet larger than the median home built in 1992. The death of the McMansion has been greatly exaggerated…

There are any number of explanations for this trend. Young first-time buyers, who are less inclined to buy big suburban houses, are largely sitting out of the market. Credit requirements are still much tighter than they were before the housing collapse, so much of the activity in the housing market is from wealthier families looking to trade up — and they’re looking for bigger and better.

Another, possibly overlooked contributor? Politics. A 2012 paper by Stanford political scientist Adam Bonica found that builders and construction firms were among the most politically conservative businesses in America, judged by their owners and employees’ contributions to political parties. And a Pew Research Center study last year found that conservatives overwhelmingly prefer communities where “the houses are larger and farther apart, but schools, stores and restaurants are several miles away.”

I don’t know how much of this is just political. To suggest so means that both sides can claim the other is trying to push a particular agenda: conservatives argue liberals are trying to force everyone into big cities and liberals can argue developers are politically connected people who only want to serve the wealthy. Either cities or McMansions become the big enemy. I would instead privilege two factors. First, an economic situation where many Americans don’t have the money to purchase a home (the homeownership rate is down overall) as well as a housing market that is primarily catering to wealthier buyers (there are more profits to be made in more expensive homes). Second, there is an American ideology that privileges individualism and private space, values that aren’t exclusively conservative or necessarily related to the exurbs. For example, the suburbs are not full of McMansions; suburbs range from inner-ring suburbs to exurbs with a wide range of housing and populations.

“Are Americans falling out of love with the shopping mall?”

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The shopping mall era may be slowly ebbing away:

While high-end malls thrive, many others have been unable to keep up with changing shopping demands of American consumers, leading to obituaries in the US press with headlines such as “A dying breed – the American shopping mall” and “shopping malls in crisis”.

About 80 per cent of the country’s 1,200 malls are considered healthy, which means store vacancy rates of 10 per cent or less, according to CoStar Group data published in The New York Times.

That is down from 94 per cent in 2006, and there is even a website dedicated to documenting what some are calling the death of the shopping centre, deadmalls.com, keeping tabs on the latest closures across the country. Ms Dorsey remembers the old-style mall with nostalgia. “The first time my mum allowed me to go out by myself, it was in a mall,” says Ms Dorsey, a saleswoman at a natural products shop in Fairfax, outside the US capital. “I do have fond memories.”

Most of America’s malls were built in the 1950s and 1960s, as a growing network of highways connected suburban homes to futuristic urban shopping centres…

“It’s not that consumption is going down – consumption is going up, but we’re consuming differently in different places,” says the sociologist George Ritzer, the author of a book on consumption, Enchanting a Disenchanted World. “They are becoming more entertainment complexes.”

There are some competing trends contributing to this:

1. The rise of the suburbs helped lead to this as centralized locations for shopping became more important than communities where needs could be met within walking or mass transit distances (like in cities). But, that decentralization can now be moved increasingly online.

2. Suburbs didn’t have as many public places – and if they did, they were more difficult to access since they often required driving. Malls filled this void, particularly for teenagers who became a prominent social group right around this time (and their collective life was encouraged in the suburbs which was largely centered around child-rearing).

3. Americans still like consuming. See the fate of higher-end shopping experiences. However, shoppers now have more options including big box stores and online retailers. Additionally, the shift in malls toward experiences rather than consumer goods is still consumption. In fact, prioritizing experiences might even increase consumption because people can have a variety of experiences.

While malls won’t disappear anytime soon, perhaps they will be seen at some point as the result of a particular historical and social convergence.

The presence of collective rituals even in modern society

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We all may be individualists in the modern world but rituals such as Valentine’s Day are still crucial:

Why do we celebrate a holiday dedicated to love?

Let’s start with the idea of rituals. We tend to think that only backward or primitive societies have rituals — people running in circles with painted bodies, drums, and fires. The field of cultural sociology has emerged in the last couple of decades, and one of its premises is that there is a strong continuity between early and modern societies. Rituals continue to be central to us, and are perhaps even more important as societies become larger and more heterogeneous.

Valentine’s Day is a ritual. It’s not as if people wake up and think, “Today’s a good day to celebrate love.” It occurs on the same day each year, and it’s a way to liven up a dark winter.

It’s interesting that we think of Valentine’s Day as something for a couple, because it’s also something that the whole society celebrates. Millions of couples are doing this at the same time. It’s a way for society to say that romantic love is good and coupling is important.

Whether you want to celebrate the appointed holiday or not, our society marks them as important events with evidence visible everywhere from television commercials to grocery stores to activities in public schools. They are not just markers in time – we have to have some sort of holiday in the middle of February – but rather days for society to reassert its priorities and modes of celebration.