work ethic

Clippings – February 5th, 2024 TSP Media Report

Mallory Harrington on February 5, 2024
  • (Via ASA) KPBS ran a story about the transformation of how children play over the last three decades from free, unstructured play to organized and supervised activities. Rebecca London (Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz) commented on the benefits of free play in developing social skills (such as working together and resolving disputes): “It’s not just about the play, it’s about the interaction that happens through the play. That interaction is an incredibly important part of child development.”
  • Susan Brown (Professor of Sociology at Bowling Green State University) was quoted in a USA Today article about the surge of ‘gray divorce.’ Since 1990, the divorce rate has doubled for Americans over 55, and tripled for Americans over 65. Brown explained that “a growing share of aging adults will be aging alone.” Brown noted that women often initiate gray divorces, but tend to be financially worse-off due to childcare costs and time out of the workforce.
  • Phys.org highlighted Martin Schröder’s (Professor of Economic Sociology at the University of Marburg) work revealing a lack of generational differences in work ethic and attitudes toward work. Despite a persistent “generational myth” in the workplace that characterizes millennials as not wanting to work and baby boomers as constantly on the brink of burnout, Schröder found that once “age effects” (younger people are generally less willing to work) and “period effects” (people of all ages generally see work as less important now than they did in the past) are accounted for, “the differences between the generations are not really that great at all.”
  • In Copenhagen, Camilla Bank Friis (Sociology Postdoc at the University of Copenhagen) collaborated with BFA Transport on a new campaign aiming to prevent conflicts between public transport passengers, bus drivers, and ticket inspectors. Friis drew from her research to create videos and comic strips to share tools for avoiding conflict. “You put yourself in play as a researcher and enter into dialogue with those who will ultimately use our work,” Friis explained. “I think the project has become a good example of how a collaboration between university research and external actors can make knowledge useful if you are willing to cut off some of the academic edges.” This story was covered by Mirage News.
  • The Boston Globe featured Ruha Benjamin’s (Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University) new book Imagination: A Manifesto. Benjamin’s work focuses on how science and technology shape the social world. In her new book, she argues that “imagination itself isn’t neutral or objective,” but reflects our hierarchical society. “I want us to question the imagination that says we can go to space, we can colonize Mars — and at the same time say, ‘Housing for all? Healthcare for all? That’s outlandish, that will never happen,’” Benjamin says. “It’s that sort of lopsided, deadly imagination that I want us to grow our critical antennae to hear when it’s coming.”

The Myth of the Self-Made Man

Jack Delehanty on October 7, 2014

Photo by J.L. McVay via Flickr.
Photo by J.L. McVay via Flickr.

During election season, we are treated to story after story about how candidates have made themselves out of nothing. Wisconsin Governer Scott Walker, locked in a tight reelection battle with Mary Burke, his Democratic opponent, has made a career of turning talk about his lack of a college degree into a story about upward mobility rather than academic insufficiency. Much of Joe Biden’s appeal as both a Senator and a Vice President comes from his salt of the earth appeal as the son of father who faced financial ruin, lived with his grandparents, and, through hard work and dedication, made something of his life. Candidates on both sides of the aisle tap into the discourse of upward mobility to demonstrate that they understand the struggles of the people they hope will elect them.

When candidates talk about how they have pulled themselves up by their bootstraps on the campaign trail, they’re doing more than lauding their own humble pasts to gain voters’ trust. They’re also tapping into a social narrative that’s been used throughout American history to determine what counts as economic success and who it’s available to. At the same time as it aligns candidates with desired swaths of the electorate, especially middle-class whites who turn out in numbers, it also implies a subtle distance between candidates and social problems. All of us can do this, if only we try hard enough, goes the implied reasoning, and if you can’t do it, that’s on you. Who can’t do it? As usual in American society, that would be the out-groups: non-whites, immigrants, LGBT people, and the disabled. Advocates of the bootstraps school of social mobility like to counter this critique by linking economic success to cultural values. They point out that immigrant Jews have largely succeeded economically, while African Americans still struggle, and attribute this to a set of American cultural values that Jews share, but blacks don’t.

In an excellent longform Slate article on this topic, John Swansburg cites sociologist Stephen Steinberg’s 1981 book The Ethnic Myth, a critique of what Steinberg calls the “Horatio Alger Theory of Ethnic Success,” or the belief that all social outgroups start with the same set of disadvantages. Most early 20th century Jewish immigrants, Steinberg argues, came from urbanized, industrial European cities, where they gathered “years of industrial experience and concrete occupational skills that would serve them well in America’s expanding industrial economy.” Most American blacks, on the other hand, learned farming and field work—skills that benefited them little as they moved to the industrial North after Reconstruction.

When Scott Walker, Joe Biden, or any other candidate for office talks about his or her humble past, he or she is making a subtle implication that the problems of disadvantaged groups in America are  mostly cultural, rather than economic or structural. I know how to work hard and I know you do too, so elect me and I’ll make sure that our kind of work is rewarded. And those others, whose work is never rewarded? Well, they’re just not working hard enough.

For more on how candidates construct narratives to court voters, read (or listen to!) Jeffrey Alexander’s “Heroes, Presidents, and Politics,” now in podcast form.