Tag Archives: sociology of culture

Quick Review: Boomerang

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Michael Lewis’s latest book, Boomerang, gives the current economic crisis some international context. In an entertaining and somewhat breezy manner, Lewis investigates why countries as disparate as Iceland, Greece, Germany, and the United States all fell into the economic mess. Here are a few thoughts about his take:

1. My overwhelming thought about Lewis’s explanations is that he wants to delve into different cultural approaches to the world of finance. Lewis’s argument goes like this: even though these countries have very different histories and cultural mindsets, somehow they all got involved with bad debt in the 2000s. This same topic could spark a fascinating economic sociology or cultural sociology manuscript.

2. Unfortunately, Lewis either doesn’t have much time to spend with each country (he admits the book began as he was working on understanding the US system, which became The Big Short or he doesn’t want to delve deeply into his thin arguments. For example, in Germany he tries to tie their fondness for following rules (which means Germans were the last people to be being disastrous American CDOs) to their fondness for scatalogical humor (which Lewis bases on one anthropological study). While there is a lot of potential here for showing how different cultures can be tied together by a global finance market, Lewis needs a lot more evidence to construct a convincing argument.

3. I found the last chapter to be both exhilarating and depressing. Lewis comes back to the United States in the final chapter and describes how this could all play out. Here is what Lewis suggests: while the centralized governments of Europe struggle, the problem in the US is pushed down the road because the federal government can push off more and more obligations on state and local governments. If this plays out as Lewis suggests (though there is debate over whether it will be as bad as Meredith Whitney suggested), local governments will continue to feel the pain of the economic crisis for years to come and the results may not be pretty.

Summary: I think Lewis is on to something here but I would like to see the topic covered with more depth and include more research.

Considering Steve Jobs and the role of cultural context in innovation

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David Brooks explores the “innovation stagnation thesis” and one of the ideas of this argument is that cultural context matters for innovation:

Third, there is no essential culture clash. Look at the Steve Jobs obituaries. Over the course of his life, he combined three asynchronous idea spaces — the counterculture of the 1960s, the culture of early computer geeks and the culture of corporate America. There was LSD, “The Whole Earth Catalogue” and spiritual exploration in India. There were also nerdy hours devoted to trying to build a box to make free phone calls.

The merger of these three idea networks set off a cascade of innovations, producing not only new products and management styles but also a new ideal personality — the corporate honcho in jeans and the long-sleeve black T-shirt. Formerly marginal people came together, competed fiercely and tried to resolve their own uncomfortable relationships with society.

The roots of great innovation are never just in the technology itself. They are always in the wider historical context. They require new ways of seeing. As Einstein put it, “The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.”

If you want to be the next Steve Jobs and end the innovation stagnation, maybe you should start in hip-hop.

So what exactly is Brooks saying? People who want to be innovators need to embrace or immerse themselves into diverse cultural systems so that they can then synthesize different ideas in new ways? Or is it that innovators like Jobs are only possible in certain cultural contexts and our current cultural context simply doesn’t push people into these different ideas or doesn’t promote this?

Sociologists of culture would have something to say about this. While Jobs clearly had unique individual skills, the production approach would emphasize how his combination of cultural contexts was made possible. He came of age in an era when individuals were encouraged to seek out new ideas and learn how to express themselves. He started a computer company in a field that didn’t have many dominant players and two guys working in a garage could create one of the world’s most enduring brands. He was alive in an era when information technology was a hot area and perhaps ranked higher in people’s interests that things like space exploration and medical cures. (One way to think about this is to wonder if Jobs could have been successful in other fields. Were his skills and context translatable into other fields? Could Jobs have helped find a cure for cancer rather than create personal computing devices? Should he have tackled their other fields – what is the opportunity cost to the world of his choice?) He had the education and training (though no college degree) that helped him to be successful.

In the end, we could ask how as a culture or a society we could encourage more people to become innovators. Is studying hip-hop really the answer? What kind of innovation do we want most in our society – scientific progress or self-expression or dealing with social problems or something else? When we talk about pushing math and science in schools, what innovations do we want our students to produce?

Linking the history of women’s clothing size and the sociology of culture

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This article about women’s clothing sizes reminds me of the production approach within the sociology of culture: sizes were once regulated more closely.

This lack of sizing standards wasn’t always the case.

Until January 20, 1983, the U.S. Department of Commerce and the National Institute of Standards and Technology offered specifics for the sizing of apparel with body measurements for men, women, junior women, young men and children. These standards began in the late 1940s as a byproduct of the necessity for size-standardization in military uniforms during World War Two. Committees that included textile manufacturers, designers and retailers worked with the Department of Agriculture to determine these sizing standards and all adhered to it.

The program was discontinued in 1983. The measurements were not keeping up with the typical American body, which was changing due to better medicine and nutrition, along with an influx of new and varied ethnic groups. Sponsorship of these standards was assumed by private industry. That marked the start of sizing’s new Wild West, a lawless, volatile environment that continues today.

As the production approach would suggest, sizes were once standardized because of particular historical circumstances, namely, World War II. Once the regulation was deemed “unnecessary,” different companies took the sizes in completely different directions. The defense of the change given in the article, new bodies and types, doesn’t make much sense: the existing standards could have simply been altered rather than abandoned.

It would be interesting to see more on how the marketing and design of women’s clothes changed with the regulatory shift. Prior to 1983, companies couldn’t really play around with size and use it as a distinguishing feature. After 1983, different brands could use this as part of their image and sales pitch. Did brands that deviated a lot from the prior standards really help their cause?

The rise of granite countertops from a sociology of culture perspective

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Homebuyers today seem to want certain features in a new home: stainless steel appliances, updated bathrooms, and granite countertops. But how exactly did the granite countertops become so popular?

Granite is relatively new to the kitchen counter; back in 1987, it was pretty much available in only two colours, it was incredibly expensive and was not even considered good counter material because of its lack of resilience. Yet in less than a decade, it went from being luxurious to ubiquitous- it is in every new condo and apartment regardless of price. It became the cherry on top of the McMansion sundae. The price dropped so far and so fast that one can now order it online in Florida for $19.95 per square foot, almost as cheap as a laminate counter. (Although at the time of this writing no doubt there is a significant oversupply in Florida.)

Here is why it became so cheap: “it got globalized…containerized…computerized.” Here are a few details about these:

Granite used to be a very local business- if you lived in the Northeast you got it from Vermont, in the midwest from Minnesota, in eastern Canada from Quebec. It is heavy stuff, and the main market was architectural stone, cut by craftsmen to exacting specifications for the commercial building industry. Taking it out of the ground was dangerous work; granite quarries were often ecological nightmares. However the industry provided a local material, and well-paying skilled jobs…

But granite is found all over the world, and it is cheaper to dig it out in India and Brazil. The environmental standards are not quite as high either…

Unlike architectural stone used on the exterior of buildings, the stone for counters and floors is a uniform 3/4″ thick. By cutting the stone on site the flawed slabs can be separated before they are shipped, and can even be processed further into tiles, so that there is less transport of waste. Once sliced into the new standard, the 3/4 inch thick slab, it can be put into the standard solution for transport, the shipping container. So what if most of the container is full of air, the cost of shipping is more than compensated for by the low cost of the material. Suddenly granite was no longer just available in two colours, but in dozens…

Where cutting granite used to be a skilled craft working in three dimensions, as counters it became a simple matter of cutting the slabs in two dimensions. Often the slabs would be shipped from India or Brazil to shops in China with finishing and edging equipment. Now a kitchen designer in Toronto might send a CAD file to the shop in China where a computerized saw cuts the Indian granite into a countertop, which is then put into a container and shipped to Toronto and installed in a condo.

On one hand, someone could argue that Americans have developed a taste for granite and have made individual choices to have it in their homes. Americans became fed up with their old counter options, like Formica, Corian, or tile. They developed finer tastes and wanted to show off their kitchens.

On the other hand, one could utilize the production approach in the sociology of culture. Granite became an aesthetic choice because of technological change: it has become cheaper and easier to create and install. Through the process of globalization, granite became a better option for American consumers looking for a more durable and flashier surface. Perhaps granite became cheaper because there was some demand for it but Americans didn’t simply choose granite – it was a choice made for them.

It would be interesting to see figures that would show when homebuyers started looking for granite over other surfaces. And who had it first?

The unpredictable nature of Twitter cascades and social marketing

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Tim Harford in the Financial Times discusses mathematical sociologist Duncan Watt’s research on why certain information in social media catches fire among a large group of people (like in a “Twitter cascade”) and other information does not. Watts suggests several factors are important: we tend to see what becomes successful and what is not, popular posts are small and uncommon, and “it’s impossible to predict which tweets will start cascades.”

There are lot of people who would like to take advantage of social media to share information and sell products. This sort of research suggests it is more difficult to do this than some might think. On one hand, having a lot of friends or followers means that more people could see your information. But on the other hand, this does not necessarily mean that people will pass along your information to their own set of friends. If Watts is right, does this mean that companies or organizations should change their strategies or even limit social media marketing?

This is not just a problem in studying social media. It is also difficult within other fields, such as film, music, and books, to predict what will become a success and what will not. A common solution there is to simply produce a lot of material and then wait for a small percentage of products to generate a lot of money and help subsidize the rest of the material. This also seems to be the case with social media: there are a lot of people sharing a lot of information but only a small part of spreads through a larger population. This might also mean that gatekeepers, people who have the ability to sift through and analyze/criticize content, will continue to be important as the average user won’t be able to see the broader view of the social media world.

Could some of this problem be the result of the actual design and user experience of Twitter? If so, might companies and others work toward creating different forms of social media that would increase or enhance the sharing of information across a broader set of users?

James Q. Wilson on the difficulties of studying culture

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In a long opinion piece looking at possible explanations for the reduction in crime in America, James Q. Wilson concludes by suggesting that cultural explanations are difficult to test and develop:

At the deepest level, many of these shifts, taken together, suggest that crime in the United States is falling—even through the greatest economic downturn since the Great Depression—because of a big improvement in the culture. The cultural argument may strike some as vague, but writers have relied on it in the past to explain both the Great Depression’s fall in crime and the explosion of crime during the sixties. In the first period, on this view, people took self-control seriously; in the second, self-expression—at society’s cost—became more prevalent. It is a plausible case.

Culture creates a problem for social scientists like me, however. We do not know how to study it in a way that produces hard numbers and testable theories. Culture is the realm of novelists and biographers, not of data-driven social scientists. But we can take some comfort, perhaps, in reflecting that identifying the likely causes of the crime decline is even more important than precisely measuring it.

I find it a little strange that a social scientist wants to leave culture to the humanities (“novelists and biographers”). This sounds like a traditional social science perspective: culture is a slippery concept that is difficult to quantify and make generalizations about. I can imagine this viewpoint from quantitatively minded social scientists who would ask, “where it the data?”

But there is a lot of good research regarding culture that utilizes data. Some of this data is fuzzier qualitative data that involves ethnographies and long interviews and observations. But other data regarding culture comes from more traditional data sources such as large surveys. And if you put together a lot of these data-driven studies, qualitative and quantitative, I think you could put together some hypotheses and ideas regarding American culture and crime. Perhaps all of this data can’t fit into a regression or this isn’t the way that crime is traditionally studied but that doesn’t mean we have to simply abandon cultural explanations and studies.

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?

Report on how US helped Nazis after World War II

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A recently released report suggests the United States helped a number of Nazis after the end of World War II:

The 600-page report, which the Justice Department has tried to keep secret for four years, provides new evidence about more than two dozen of the most notorious Nazi cases of the last three decades.

It describes the government’s posthumous pursuit of Dr. Josef Mengele, the so-called Angel of Death at Auschwitz, part of whose scalp was kept in a Justice Department official’s drawer; the vigilante killing of a former Waffen SS soldier in New Jersey; and the government’s mistaken identification of the Treblinka concentration camp guard known as Ivan the Terrible…

Perhaps the report’s most damning disclosures come in assessing the Central Intelligence Agency’s involvement with Nazi émigrés. Scholars and previous government reports had acknowledged the C.I.A.’s use of Nazis for postwar intelligence purposes. But this report goes further in documenting the level of American complicity and deception in such operations.

The Justice Department report, describing what it calls “the government’s collaboration with persecutors,” says that O.S.I investigators learned that some of the Nazis “were indeed knowingly granted entry” to the United States, even though government officials were aware of their pasts. “America, which prided itself on being a safe haven for the persecuted, became — in some small measure — a safe haven for persecutors as well,” it said.

Even today, everyone can agree on one group of people who were evil: the Nazis. Yet it appears the relationship between the United States, the supposed moral victors in Europe in 1945, had a much more complicated relationship with Nazis than is typically thought.

This reminds me of a chapter by sociologist Jeffrey Alexander. In this chapter, Alexander detailed how the United States was able to claim the moral high ground after World War II – after all, the US had rid the world of both the evil Nazis and Japanese. But by the mid 1960s, the United States could no longer claim this high ground with questions about whether the two nuclear bombs dropped on Japan had been necessary and Milgram’s experiment suggested lots of ordinary people were capable of evil.

How much more interesting information like this is buried somewhere?