Citings and Sightings

Just like April’s TSP Media Award for Measured Social Science winner Barbara Risman, there have been quite a few examples lately of sociologists contributing their thoughts and talents to opinion pieces for major news sources. Last week, the New York Times featured op-eds from Arlie Russell Hochschild and Elizabeth Armstrong.

Bravo TV's Millionaire Matchmaker, Patti Stanger, promises to find love... for a price.

First, Hochschild, a professor emerita of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote about the expanding presence of the capitalistic marketplace in our personal lives. It may seem like second nature to hire a professional to help with a task or develop a skill we lack. But, according to Hochschild’s piece, the sheer extent of services available for purchase is shocking: dating coaches, rental friends, and professional potty trainers. Hochschild goes on to look at some of the more invasive manners in which the market has seeped into our intimate lives, as well as what this says about our society.

Hochschild brings in the work of Michael Sandel, a  professor of government at Harvard, who adds that you can now purchase an upgrade in prison cells in California or buy carpool lane access for solo drivers in Minneapolis (see more, here, with Sandel in recent interview on The Colbert Report about the moral limits of the marketplace).

This increasing tendency to hire professionals to take on personal tasks, Hochschild writes, has some unexpected consequences. She describes our ever-increasing relationship with the free market as a self-perpetuating cycle:

The more anxious, isolated and time-deprived we are, the more likely we are to turn to paid personal services. To finance these extra services, we work longer hours. This leaves less time to spend with family, friends and neighbors; we become less likely to call on them for help, and they on us. And, the more we rely on the market, the more hooked we become on its promises.

In the end, Hochschild sums up, offering a warning about outsourcing our personal lives and emotional attachment:

Focusing attention on the destination, we detach ourselves from the small — potentially meaningful — aspects of experience. Confining our sense of achievement to results, to the moment of purchase, so to speak, we unwittingly lose the pleasure of accomplishment, the joy of connecting to others and possibly, in the process, our faith in ourselves.

Figure from "Breastfeed at Your Own Risk," Julie Artis, Contexts (Fall 2009).

Later in the week, the Times featured Princeton professor Elizabeth Armstrong discussing the harmful effects of  distributing free baby formula samples to new mothers at hospitals. In her op-ed, Armstrong maintains that breast-feeding offers many health benefits to babies, and hospitals should be encouraging women in the practice (she makes no mention of whether “Macho Mothering” like that featured on the controversial cover of TIME will help or hinder such efforts). When hospitals give away formula samples, reports show women are more likely to give up breast-feeding sooner. According to Armstrong, though, it’s easy to see why the hospitals continue to provide the samples:

In exchange for giving out samples, formula manufacturers provide hospitals’ nurseries and neonatal intensive care units with much needed free supplies like bottles, nipples, pacifiers, sterile water and more formula.

Armstong argues that arrangement like these lead to a hypocritical healthcare system. Doctors and medical organizations can preach about the benefits of breast-feeding but when “hospitals send new mothers home with a commercial product that often bears scientific claims on the label about digestion and brain development, it sends a very different message.” For Armstong, the answer is simple:

[H]ospitals should help women get breast-feeding off to a good start by adapting baby-friendly policies like helping mothers initiate breast-feeding after birth, allowing mothers and babies to stay in the same room and, most important, ensuring that infant-feeding decisions are free of commercial influence.

Each of these pieces is a great example of a sociologist putting their own work out into the world in a way that allows everyone to see the benefits of sociological insight and its application to, well, society. Congrats to both professors for so frequently daring to peek out from the pages of journals.

For more on breast-feeding and public service efforts to encourage it, we recommend Julie Artis’ Contexts article “Breastfeed at your own Risk,” available in full online at Contexts.org.

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics; Image: Lam Thuy Vo

Over at NPR’s Planet Money Blog, reporter Lam Thuy Vo takes a quick look at some of the latest statistics from the Bureau of Labor to look at how women’s role in the economy (at least, on the employment side) has changed since 1972—coincidentally, the year the House and Senate both passed the Equal Rights Amendment, which would have mandated equal pay for equal work, but was not ratified by the states within the federal 10-year deadline.

Despite lacking legal backup in the fight against sex discrimination, women have certainly made strides in workforce participation in these forty years. They’ve gone from just 36.1% of the American workforce in 1972 to almost an even split at 49.3% in 2012. Vo further breaks out the gender division in workers across sectors for an interesting look at changing economies. It’s certainly worth a visit to look at not only how women’s roles in certain job categories have changed, but also how the proportion of those jobs in the American economy as a whole have changed in just four decades.

Photo by Satish Krishnamurthy, satishk.tumblr.com

The U.S. social safety net continues to grab headlines, this week in the New York Times. We’ve noted before the play programs like food stamps are getting in the current presidential campaign. The NY Times article notes that, paradoxically, “Some of the fiercest advocates for spending cuts have drawn public benefits.” Why might this be?

An aging population and a recent, deep recession seem to be at the crux of the issue.

The problem by now is familiar to most. Politicians have expanded the safety net without a commensurate increase in revenues, a primary reason for the government’s annual deficits and mushrooming debt. In 2000, federal and state governments spent about 37 cents on the safety net from every dollar they collected in revenue, according to a New York Times analysis. A decade later, after one Medicare expansion, two recessions and three rounds of tax cuts, spending on the safety net consumed nearly 66 cents of every dollar of revenue.

The recent recession increased dependence on government, and stronger economic growth would reduce demand for programs like unemployment benefits. But the long-term trend is clear. Over the next 25 years, as the population ages and medical costs climb, the budget office projects that benefits programs will grow faster than any other part of government, driving the federal debt to dangerous heights.

As a result, many Americans have benefited from government safety net programs.

Almost half of all Americans lived in households that received government benefits in 2010, according to the Census Bureau. The share climbed from 37.7 percent in 1998 to 44.5 percent in 2006, before the recession, to 48.5 percent in 2010.

Yet many do not realize that it is no longer just programs for the “undeserving poor” that dominate the scene. Rather, it’s programs such as an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit and increasing Medicare costs that have stretched safety net resources.

Medicare’s starring role in the nation’s financial problems is not well understood. Only 22 percent of respondents to the New York Times poll correctly identified Medicare as the fastest-growing benefits program. A greater number of respondents, 27 percent, chose programs for the poor.

Why the misperception? Perhaps it’s because, as political scientist Suzanne Mettler explains in her book, The Submerged State: How Invisible Government Policies Undermine American Democracy, policies in recent decades have turned from more obvious provision of cash benefits to methods such as tax breaks, incentives, and other “hidden” forms of support. As a result, most citizens  have no idea that they rely on the safety net at all.

No doubt politicians, commentators, and scholars will all continue to debate the form and function of the safety net. But everyday Americans aren’t at all sure what’s best to do.

Americans are divided about the way forward. Seventy percent of respondents to a recent New York Times poll said the government should raise taxes. Fifty-six percent supported cuts in Medicare and Social Security. Forty-four percent favored both.

As one Minnesotan profiled in the NY Times story put it, “I’m glad I’m not a politician…We’re all going to complain no matter what they do. Nobody wants to put a noose around their own neck.”

Photo by gadgetdude via flickr

The concerns of unemployment—especially within the last few years—have even the college-educated uncertain about the value of their diploma. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that a new article shows the type of knowledge and critical thinking skills acquired in college can have a dramatic effect on later employment success. The journal article, by Richard Arum, Josipa Roksa, and a few new additions to their team, is a followup to their influential, yet controversial, 2010 book Academically Adrift.

After spending last spring surveying a large sample of students they’d previously studied for their book, the researchers found stark differences in post-graduation success between those developed top-notch critical thinking skills and those who struggled on that measure. Students who scored in the bottom 20 percent on a critical thinking skills test were three times more likely than those who were in the top 20 percent to be unemployed (9.6 percent compared with 3.1 percent). Additionally, graduates who’d scored low on critical thinking were twice as likely to be living at home with their parents and significantly more likely to have amassed credit card debt (51 percent compared with 37 percent). According to the Chronicle, “The results that [Arum] and his colleagues found were so arresting, he said, that they chose to release them earlier than the follow-up book that they are planning to publish in the next year or two.”

Despite some criticisms about the initial book’s validity and methodology, Arum maintains the sharp differences in post-college achievement are worthy of attention. “That’s a dramatic, stunning finding,” said Mr. Arum, “What it suggests is that the general higher-order skills that the Council for Aid to Education assessment is tracking is something of significance, something real and meaningful.”

Courtesy of _PaulS_ (http://www.flickr.com/photos/kapkap/)

Find out how your income ranks in different parts of the U.S. with this interactive graphic from the New York Times. Needless to say, what earns 1% status in New York is not the same as in Flint, Mich. Data comes from demographic researchers at the Minnesota Population Center at the University of Minnesota.

A breakdown of the jobs of the 1%, featured over on Sociological Images, is part of the same Times package.

Photo by Amanda Tetrault via Creative Commons

Just before the dawn of the New Year, Marketplace Money’s Eve Troeh hoped to find some silver lining, or at least an optimistic take, on one thing so many Americans now share: the job hunt. What she really seemed to find in her American Public Media report, though, was that unemployment remains as alienating an experience as it is a common one. And, as USC sociologist Karen Sternheimer explained, it’s a cruddy thing for anyone to go through, including the so-called highly-educated unemployed.

“One of the biggest measures of class is something called ‘occupational prestige’,” said Sternheimer. “Part of our status is based not just on how much money we have or make, but on kind of what other people think of what we do.” As Troeh went on, “When professionals lose jobs, then, [Sternheimer] says we’re more likely to blame them—even though we all know that layoffs in recent years happened across the board.”

Echoing Joe Soss’s comments in the Star Tribune, as covered in Citings & Sightings a couple of days ago, Sternheimer affirmed, “There’s still a lot of antipathy towards people who don’t have jobs. The myth of the American Dream says that you’ve either succeeded or failed based on your own merit.” More surprisingly, though, Sternheimer tells Marketplace Money that “her research on the Great Depression shows that in tough times, we cling more closely to that dream, that our own hard work determines our fate, rather than blame bigger economic forces.” This can result in a lot of blame for everyone’s “bad times” being placed on the unemployed themselves. And when you are the unemployed, the depression and alienation compound.

Etiquette, in fact, is where the radio story ended: “Etiquette expert Peter Post at the Emily Post Institute says relationships get ruined over a job loss. Even generous offers have to be made carefully.” This is to say, just as talking salary isn’t usually palatable for Americans, talking no salary is touchy, too. For more tips and/or commiseration, be sure to check out the full report, available online at American Public Media.

In some circles the social sciences are criticized for “discovering” what common sense supposedly already tells us. But sometimes, societal trends can cause even the experts to scratch their heads. During the recent recession, for example, unemployment rates in the United States rose sharply and many scholars and politicians expected crime rates to follow suit. According to recently released FBI crime statistics, though, they haven’t.

Violent crimes have fallen 6.4 percent in the last year while property crimes dropped 3.7 percent. Plus, last year’s crime decrease was just a continuation of a downward pattern since 2008; since 1991, the homicide rate has fallen 51 percent and property crimes dropped by 64 percent.

Photo by Cyndy Sims Parr via flickr

When this data went public, news sources like National Public Radio, the LA Times, and MSNBC.com looked to see how experts in criminology reacted to the findings. Richard Rosenfeld, professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis and former president of the American Society of Criminology, was, “surprised by the overall decline in both violent and property crime during and since the recent recession.” He went on, “I’ve studied crime trends in relation to economic conditions for some time, and the 2008-09 recession is the first time since WWII that crime rates have not risen during a substantial downturn in the economy.” Many, including Rosenfeld, attribute some of the decline to smarter policing, but admit that can’t account for all of it, since in many places policing hasn’t changed much in the past ten years or during the recession.

Franklin Zimring, a criminologist and UC Berkeley law professor, was also a puzzled to see a decline in crime during the last three years when incarceration rates have stalled and the economy has soured. “By both the left- and right-wing leading indicators we should be in a lot of trouble—except [we’re] not,” Zimring maintains. “Everything we thought we knew are deeply challenged by events by the last three years.” In an email written to msnbc.com, Zimring does, though, suggest one possible factor affecting this decline: Inflation. “High rates of inflation are connected with high crime rates, so when inflation drops we should expect corresponding declines in crime, in the first instance property crime.”

Although bewilderment in the face of a crime decline is a relatively good problem to have, most scholars and public officials still agree on the importance of getting to the bottom of what’s causing it—particularly if it might be replicable.

Photo by April and Randy via flickr.com

The University of Minnesota’s Joe Soss, recently interviewed for the Office Hours podcast about his new book Discliplining the Poor: Neoliberal Paternalism and the Persistent Power of Race, was featured in the Star Tribune thoughtfully explaining the lessons of his research for the Lori Sturdevant article “It’s Rarely a Luxury to Be in Need of Charity.” As Soss put it, “Our notions about who’s deserving of help and who isn’t are rooted in notions about individual effort and individual success or failure.” But, he told Sturdevant, “It’s become almost a Catch-22… You’re undeserving if you haven’t worked hard enough to lift yourself out of poverty. If you had worked hard, you wouldn’t be poor. So if you’re poor, you must be undeserving.”

And, the columnist relates, maybe, “In frontier Minnesota, hard work could rather reliably produce self-sufficiency. Suspicion of the poor as lazy or profligate arose easily when land was cheap or free, the population was exploding, and harvests of timber, grain and, eventually, iron ore were abundant beyond imagining.” Now that hard times are upon so many, it’s harder to write off the jobless or the poor as deserving of their fate. In this way, the Great Recession may also become something of a Great Equalizer, “opening eyes to to a new reality about work in America,” writes Sturdevant. As Joe Soss said, “Tougher times make people more likely to understand that poverty isn’t just about individual choices.”

In a recent article in the New York Times, economics professor Nancy Folbre helps us understand why men have not only experienced greater job loss during the current recession but have also continued to suffer during the economic recovery.

As Folbre explains, the higher job loss does not come without historical precedence.

The Great Recession has sometimes been dubbed the Mancession because it drove unemployment among men higher than unemployment among women. Because men tend to work in more cyclical industries than women, they have historically lost more jobs on the downturn and gained more on the upturn.

However, the current upturn, has not followed this trend due to the decline in the jobs that men usually fill.

For example, men constitute more than 71 percent of the work force in manufacturing but less than 25 percent of the workers in health and education services…These two employment categories were similar in size in 2000, but manufacturing employment has failed to rise, even in non-recession years. Employment in health and education, in contrast, has risen slowly, but steadily.

The question than becomes, why aren’t more men moving to jobs traditionally occupied by women? Holbre turns to Stanford sociologists Maria Charles and David B. Grusky’s book Occupational Ghettos who illustrate how “gender segregation is a remarkably persistent and complex phenomenon shaped by deep cultural beliefs.” Or to put it more simply, men don’t want the jobs that are thought of as being ‘for women’.

With nursing and home health being projected to grow the most rapidly between now and 2018 and manufacturing jobs continuing to be outsourced to overseas locations, it appears it might be time for men to trade in the work boots for  some tasteful loafers.