Tag Archives: sociology

The sun never sets on legal un(der)employment

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John Flood, a U.K. legal scholar and sociologist, comments on the well-documented travails of recent U.S. law graduates, noting that their U.K. counterparts are facing similar difficulties as globalization changes the practice of law the world over:

What we’ve seen in the UK is a disjunct between the numbers of law students coming into the academy and the numbers of jobs available. For many the problem is that the academy is producing too many law graduates and should be more sensitive to job availibility rates….[T]here is also a big rise in the use of paralegals and I don’t mean those trained to be paralegals. Rather the unemployed would-be lawyers are turning to paralegaling in the hope that a training contract might open up while they are there.

What will entrench the stratification of the market is the opening up (de- and re-regulation) of the legal services market that’s now taking place. Fewer jobs will need to be done by fully-qualified lawyers. They can instead be carried out by a range of people qualified for certain legal and quasi-legal tasks. This is where corporatized law meets Tesco Law. [Tesco is a U.K.-based retailer similar to Wal-Mart.]

The US legal profession still thinks it can maintain a headlock on the control of the profession. How long for? At the expense of a cheap shot, [Egyptian President] Mubarek is finding a 30-year rule coming to end; [former British Prime Minister] Tony Blair only lasted for 10 years before he was ejected. Permanent monopoly becomes increasingly hard to justifiy, especially in a global market.

Flood also references a recent Above the Law article, which noted that Thomson Reuters recently

announced that it was exploring the sale of BAR/BRI, its bar exam prep business, and purchasing Pangea3, a legal process outsourcing company. That’s a strong message that they think there’s more of a future in hiring people to do low-end legal work, work that technically doesn’t constitute “practicing law” under legal ethics rules, than in training the practitioners of the future.

I’d like to see a quantitative analysis backing up some of Flood’s assertions, but his general points are well taken:

  • There are more lawyers than jobs.
  • Many law jobs do not, objectively speaking, require lawyers.
  • Much legal work can be done at a distance–even across international borders–as a back-office service.
  • In the long- (and maybe even the short-) run, the established legal cartels are no match for these forces of globalization.

David Brooks makes a pitch for sociology?

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David Brooks jumped into the recent debate over Amy Chua’s “tiger mother” theory with a piece suggesting that Chua is ignoring what is really cognitively difficult. In describing this, Brooks makes a pretty good pitch for sociology as a discipline:

I have the opposite problem with Chua. I believe she’s coddling her children. She’s protecting them from the most intellectually demanding activities because she doesn’t understand what’s cognitively difficult and what isn’t.

Practicing a piece of music for four hours requires focused attention, but it is nowhere near as cognitively demanding as a sleepover with 14-year-old girls. Managing status rivalries, negotiating group dynamics, understanding social norms, navigating the distinction between self and group — these and other social tests impose cognitive demands that blow away any intense tutoring session or a class at Yale.

Yet mastering these arduous skills is at the very essence of achievement. Most people work in groups. We do this because groups are much more efficient at solving problems than individuals (swimmers are often motivated to have their best times as part of relay teams, not in individual events). Moreover, the performance of a group does not correlate well with the average I.Q. of the group or even with the I.Q.’s of the smartest members…

Participating in a well-functioning group is really hard. It requires the ability to trust people outside your kinship circle, read intonations and moods, understand how the psychological pieces each person brings to the room can and cannot fit together.

This skill set is not taught formally, but it is imparted through arduous experiences. These are exactly the kinds of difficult experiences Chua shelters her children from by making them rush home to hit the homework table.

Sounds like a good reason to take a sociology course. Interacting with other human beings can indeed be difficult and sociology both teaches particular ways of thinking about interaction that would be helpful.

These sorts of skills, such as working within a group, often get labeled something like “soft skills.” Brooks seems to be suggesting that perhaps these really are the “hard skills” that people need to be productive employees, neighbors, and citizens. Employers seem to want these skills and yet we have relatively few college courses that explicitly teach them.

I wonder if there is available data or studies that show that sociology students are better prepared to work in group settings than those of other majors.

And would people in other disciplines read this pitch of Brooks?

The counterpart to women’s studies: men’s or male studies?

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Women’s studies programs are common at American colleges and universities. And in recent years, courses about men and masculinity have increased in numbers. An article in the New York Times explores this phenomenon and the split between proponents of men’s and male studies:

Male studies, largely the brainchild of Dr. Edward M. Stephens, a New York City psychiatrist, doesn’t actually exist anywhere yet. Last spring, there was a scholarly symposium at Wagner College on Staten Island, intended to raise the movement’s profile and attract funds for a department with a tenured chair on some campus. A number of prominent scholars attended, including Lionel Tiger, an emeritus anthropology professor at Rutgers, who invented the term “male bonding,” and Paul Nathanson, a religious studies scholar at McGill University, who specializes in the study of misandry, the flip side of misogyny. Both are on the advisory board of the Foundation for Male Studies, which Dr. Stephens founded last year…

The people in men’s studies, like those in women’s studies, take a mostly sociological perspective and believe that masculinity is essentially a cultural construct and that gender differences in general are fluid and variable. To Professor Kimmel, we live in a world that is increasingly gender-neutral and gender integrated and that this is a good thing for men and women both. “That ship has sailed — it’s a done deal,” he said recently, dismissing the idea that men and women are as different as Martians and Venutians.

The male studies people, on the other had, are what their critics call “essentialists” and believe that male behavior is in large part biologically determined. Men think and act differently from how women think and act because that’s how evolution shaped them. In the most extreme formulations of essentialism, men are basically still Neanderthals: violent, clannish, sexually voracious and in need of female domestication.

The article points this out but this sounds like another episode in the nature vs. nurture debate.

But the study of masculinity does seem to be a growing field of study. I don’t know much about this particular field  but it seems to me that there has been a growing recognition that there is a wide range of male experiences. And more men seem to be interested in at least thinking about this and how their lives have been shaped by cultural expectations.

What is the “typical” role for males today? Take a sector of the media like video games. These are popular among males, particularly the younger generations, and many of these games present particular views of masculinity and the world. Should one be an soldier shooting others in Black Ops? Should one be a 13th century assassin? Should one be a puzzle solver or an athlete? There are a number of roles, realistic and otherwise, that are presented. And all of this has real consequences: with terms like “man-cession” or “he-pression” being in the news recently due to the loss of certain jobs, what happens to males matters for society.

Sadly, Emile Durkheim didn’t make into a video game

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All sociology majors learn about the Big Three sociological theorists from the 1800s/early 1900s: Émile Durkheim, Karl Marx, and Max Weber. But while Marx and Weber still get discussed and brought up in public conversations, Durkheim doesn’t seem to get as much attention.

However, some curious gamers thought that they had discovered that Durkheim made it into the video game “Deus Ex: Human Revolution:”

In our first teaser ever released, the cyber-fetus had the name “Emile” written on his skin. The fans thought it had to be directly connected to the story, so they started digging for info and researching the name. They came up with all sorts of very cool theories and possible in-game conspiracies related to it. For example, they found a 19th century French sociologist named Émile Durkheim and came up with some pretty nifty concepts based on their find. The funny thing is though, that the name Emile is nothing more than an inside joke created by the Digital Dimension guys, the studio who produced the teaser for us. During the long nights of overtime working on the teaser, they simply decided to name the cyber-baby and went ahead with Emile. One afternoon, when I walked into their studio for a review session, they asked me if they could leave the name on him. I said yes.

Alas, the Emile in the game is not the intrepid sociologist. And how exactly did these curious gamers link the Emile in the game to Durkheim? If one Googles “Emile,” Durkheim only comes up as a related search in the first few pages of search results.

I wonder if any sociological theorists have ever made it into a video game…

Sociology, among other disciplines, under review in Iran

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When I first saw the story a few days ago that the Iranian government wanted to review certain disciplines in Iranian universities, I wondered if sociology made the list. Indeed it did, among other academic fields of study:

Iranian Ministry of Science and Technology announced that 12 disciplines in the humanities will have to be revised before any further developments are approved in those fields.

Abolfazl Hassani, head of Education Development at the Ministry of Education, told reporters today that the fields of “law, human rights, women’s studies, economics, sociology, media, political science, philosophy, psychology, education, administration as well as cultural and artistic administration” are under review…

He added that the contents of these sciences as taught at present are not consistent with religious principles and are based on “Western culture.”

Hassani went on to say: “It is imperative that we revise the contents of these disciplines in view of our religious and indigenous ideology and principles.”

Why exactly are these disciplines under review? One guess is that these disciplines may be considered subversive in that they suggest ideas and values that don’t line up with the ideas and values of the Iranian government. This does seem to be the general nature of a lot of sociology: an interest in questioning why things are the way they are when they might be otherwise.

Different definitions for welfare

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Apparently the gubernatorial race in Maine has included discussions about how welfare provided by the government might be defined differently:

“Essentially, we all get welfare in some fundamental form or another,” said Luisa Deprez, a sociology professor at the University of Maine.

Unemployment, Social Security, school lunches, subsidized college loans and even federal tax refunds can be considered forms of public assistance, according to those who favor a broader definition.

In the context of the gubernatorial campaign, however, welfare has been discussed in its more common, narrow definition: public anti-poverty programs that help provide basic needs, such as food and shelter.

I’ve other studies that suggest the public favors government intervention more when it is called something like “government assistance” as opposed to “welfare.”

This is a reminder that there are very few people who really want no government involvement in the lives of individuals. In reality, people who are supposedly at different ends of the political spectrum are debating how much government should be involved. How many people, of any political persuasion, are willing to completely give up unemployment benefits, Social Security, or Medicare?

An academic conference to study elites

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“Elites” have been in the news lately and recently, Columbia University hosted a conference about elites. This is not as normal as one might think:

In the academic world, this was remarkable. As several of the scholars acknowledged, there has traditionally been some unease in talking about the elite, let alone researching them.

“When we study the poor, it’s relatively easy,” said Sudhir Venkatesh, a professor of sociology at Columbia and the author of “Gang Leader for a Day” (Penguin Press, 2008). “The poor don’t have the power to say no. Elites don’t grant us interviews. They don’t let us hang out at their country clubs.”

But Dorian Warren, an assistant professor of political science at Columbia, said the increasing concentration of wealth, moving from the top 10 percent of Americans to the top 1 percent, has made this the right time to look more closely at the group. “We have to understand what’s going on at the top,” Mr. Warren said.

This is an interesting topic: so why don’t academics study elites more? A few reasons (from what I know about sociology):

1. As noted above, elites can be hard to access.

2. Sociologists have often focused on deviants and the poor are often considered more outside society’s norms.

3. Could it be that many sociologists, with higher levels of education and decent incomes, might themselves be part of or are closer to the elite? If so, then there might be less interest in studying themselves or drawing attention to the class they participate in.

Sociologists less susceptible to offshoring

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According to ResumeBear, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has compiled a list of the occupations that are likely to be sent offshore. Sociologists are not very likely to be offshored, with a score of 7 on a susceptibility score (which ranges from 16 on the high end to 4 on the low end).

Making the case for reputational rankings

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A statistician argues that the National Research Council’s study of doctoral programs released earlier this week should have included reputational rankings:

Mr. Stigler says that it was a mistake for the NRC to so thoroughly abandon the reputational measures it used in its previous doctoral studies, in 1982 and 1995. Reputational surveys are widely criticized, he says, but they do provide a check on certain kinds of qualitative measures. When the new NRC counts faculty publication rates, it does not offer any information about whether scholars in the field believe those publications are any good. (That’s especially true in humanities fields, where the NRC report does not include citation counts.)

“Everybody involved in this was trying hard, and with good intentions and high integrity,” Mr. Stigler says. “But once they decided to rule out reputation, they cut off what I consider to be the most useful measure from all past surveys.”

In an e-mail message to The Chronicle this week, Mr. Ostriker declined to reply to Mr. Stigler’s specific statistical criticisms. But he pointed out that the National Academies explicitly instructed his committee not to use reputational measures.

I was curious about this when I looked at the list of sociology doctoral programs. Perhaps several of the schools that were lower than I expected, such as the University of California – Berkeley, were lower because of this.

Stigler defends reputational measures but I’ve seen others argue that they prohibit “true” rankings within fields because certain schools retain a reputation even without the necessary output (research, good grad students, etc.). This particular discussion is part of a larger one where it will need to be decided whether reputational rankings should be used or not.