Tag Archives: clubs

Clubs and organizations: “Join or Die”

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A new documentary follows up on the argument of Bowling Alone and why it is worthwhile to join a club:

Photo by Pavel Danilyuk on Pexels.com

If you’ve been feeling depleted and disconnected from a world of diminished meaningful in-person interactions, “Join or Die” explores one reason why, as laid out by social scientist Robert Putnam. Collectively, we’re less involved in organized gatherings. There are all kinds of reasons for that, but it’s a fundamental shift that’s affected our quality of life, because the social bonds that result when you join a club or organization are not just a matter of “warm, cuddly feelings,” Putnam says in the film. “In area after area of our community life, our communities don’t work as well when we’re not connected.” And that, he says, has far-reaching effects not only on us as individuals, but on democracy itself…

Putnam’s thesis is that communal activities build social ties, which have value beyond the immediate satisfaction of just doing things together. It creates a sense of mutual obligation.

I was thinking about some of these ideas as I was reading an article in the Chicago Reader about dog owners letting their pets run off-leash in city parks. Technically it’s not allowed and the practice can be controversial, but the story focused on an aspect I hadn’t considered: “While proximity and green space may have motivated people to start utilizing unofficial areas, the community that forms within is what keeps them coming back.”

This is more or less Putnam’s theory come to life. According to the story, because of the “community-oriented and unregulated nature of the unofficial dog parks, their patrons feel that they look out for each other’s dogs more than people do when at an official (dog-friendly area). The sentiment that ‘we all look out for one another’ was repeated more times than I could count, whether in the context of cleaning up after dogs, calling dogs that run outside the gates and/or begin to wander off and explore new scents, or maintaining space for other park patrons.”…

Putnam says TV is one of the reasons we’re fractured. He calls it “lethal for social connectedness — basically we’re now watching ‘Friends’ instead of having friends.” But I think it goes even deeper. The kind of stories we see on TV reinforce many of the factors he’s citing. Instead of stories rooted in the idea that life is a group project, we’re fed the message that fixing or changing anything is, as Putnam put it, “the business of somebody else” — and on screen that’s usually the police or superheroes, rather than regular people working together to solve problems.

Another way to think about it is that there are collective and individual benefits to joining a club: it can help one’s well-being and improve social connections. At the same time, the social relationships and social networks formed can help tighten bonds and communities.

In contrast, other common activities may not do the same things. Online or social media activity can bring people together – but it can also lead to atomization and relationships that work differently when not regularly conducted in-person. Television tends to be a more solo activity or occurs with a small group, even as mass media has the potential to bring people together to some degree (common experiences, etc.).

I am curious to hear more about the actual in-person component of joining a club and how much this matters for building social capital. As Randall Collins explains in Interaction Ritual Chains, unique things happen when humans are in physical proximity.

The “sonic sociologist”

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It can often to be interesting to see how people describe sociology in the non-academic realm. How about a “sonic sociologist“?

DJ Ms Thang is a relative “novelty’’ (her word) in the nightlife business: a sought-after female DJ who can get a room pumping whether she’s spinning for 20-something club kids or a ballroom full of gala-goers. Those skills, as well as her runway-model good looks (she’s sometimes been booked on those alone, she acknowledges), make it clear that “I can hold my own with the boys,’’ she added slyly.

To those who groove or merely toe-tap to the selected beats she puts out, the allure is in her perceptive crowd-reading, and her soulful style, a melange of genres…

“You’re like a sociologist,’’ she said, in her case, one in stilettos, jeans, and lace fingerless gloves. On a Tuesday night at Minibar, the sonic sociologist spins some mellow tracks for a reserved sampling of clubgoers. She starts with the Revenge Rework of Marvin Gaye’s “Heavy Love Affair.’’

It would be interesting to read a study as to how DJs develop these people-watching and perception skills. Similar to some other culture industry insiders, would DJs describe their abilities as “intuition” or “innate abilities”? If so, I suspect a sociologist might find that DJs acquire and develop these skills as they get more opportunities and hone their craft.

How to get into clubs (the key: status)

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Status is a topic that fascinate sociologists – who is labeled high status, why do they develop this, and how do they use it? A new study in Qualitative Sociology looks at what people are more likely to get into clubs:

Bring a woman — preferably many — if you want to get past the velvet rope.

That’s the advice of professor Lauren Rivera, who spent six months as a coat-check girl and in other low-level positions at an uber-exclusive club in Manhattan. The jobs were a cover for her academic work, on the bouncers of the club and the decisions they make. That account was just published in the journal Qualitative Sociology. It’s pretty much a how-to for making it beyond the velvet rope.

“I study status,” Rivera, an assistant professor at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, tells AOL News, “and I had a question. And the question I had was, How do people evaluate the worth of others in these unconstrained situations?'”…

Rivera began by flitting around the club, trying to steal looks at the bouncers in action. But a few shifts into her stay, she set up as a coat-check girl, which gave her an almost unencumbered look at the bouncers and who they were admitting. Later, she interviewed them all, delving deeper for the why of their judgments. “The interviews were actually more fruitful than the process itself,” Rivera tells AOL News.

Here’s what she found. Bouncers, first and foremost, let in the people they’ve let in before. “Generally, the most important thing is to be recognized,” she says, i.e. a star. If you’re not a star, it’s important to be a regular — maybe a friend of the star who goes to the club often, even when the star is, say, filming a movie in Antigua.

That still leaves the rest of us. How do we get in?

“Bring women,” Rivera says. “Women get in because the more women there are, the more men will spend money on them.” So if you’re a man, it matters less what you wear than who’s on your arm — or, preferably, arms. And if you’re a woman, never come alone. Always come during a massive girls night out.

After that, pinning down who’s admitted gets tricky and idiosyncratic.

Very interesting work. The bouncers had to develop methods for letting people in or keeping them out. The bouncers may appear to have an “instinct” about this but in reality, they develop and follow rules that they believe lead to a more successful club. While the above factors would increase the likelihood of getting into the club (being a regular, bringing women, being famous), there were also factors that would decrease your status in the eyes of bouncers: being an American black or Hispanic man.

Also, this research method of participant observation allowed Rivera to dig deep into the workings of the club. Without the initial observations from the inside of the club as an employee plus the interviews at the end where she could then ask the bouncers about their decision-making, the study would not have been so complete.