work

Draining-board Kerplunk USA Today ran a story yesterday about how we are starting to see a shift in conflict in the work-life balance associated with gender roles.

Sharon Jayson of USA Today reports on new data from a telephone interview survey by the nonprofit Families and Work Institute, suggesting that we have reached a ‘tipping point’ in attitudes toward gender roles and the balance of work responsibilities and family life.

Women in two-earner couples are contributing more to family income, but it’s the men who are feeling more conflicted over the work-life balance, according to a survey of 3,500 workers released today.

Asked how much jobs and family life interfere with each other, 59% of fathers in dual-income families reported conflict in 2008, while just 35% did in 1977. For mothers, reported conflict increased from 40% to 45%.

The sociological interpretation…

“It does signal more equality of expectations — that men are no longer let off the hook,” says Scott Coltrane, a sociologist at the University of Oregon. Up until the past decade, “men weren’t doing enough to add stress to their lives,” he says.

Since then, men have been spending more time with their children and more time caretaking, which the survey finds has elevated the inner strife.

“What we see here is that the conflict for women hasn’t increased as fast because it was already so high,” says sociologist Kathleen Gerson of New York University. Other findings show:

•Annual income contributed by women in dual-income couples rose to 44% in 2008; 26% of such women earned at least 10% more than their partners.

•Traditional gender roles have lost favor among both sexes. About 60% of men and women say they disagree with the idea that men should earn the money and women should take care of the children.

•Women under age 29 are just as likely as men to want greater work responsibility, regardless of whether they have children.

“When you get men and women feeling the same, maybe it is a sea change,” says Ellen Galinsky, the institute’s president.

Sociologist Brian Powell of Indiana University, however, says even though “there probably has been real change, I have the sense there’s been more of a change in terms of people’s view that there should be equal division. That’s probably farther ahead of the actual behavior.”

Read more.

Free rural farm landscape Nebraska windmill creative commonsForbes Magazine reports on a new study by a sociologist out of the University of Nebraska, which suggests that in a shifting economy and a waning rural population, people are changing the way they do business. Forbes reports, “Randy Cantrell, with the university’s Rural Initiative, says in most rural counties, between 18 percent and 30 percent or more of jobs are now due to self-employment. And, that accounts for virtually all job growth in rural areas.”

Cantrell believes the popularity of self-employment is on the rise.

As rural areas continue to see their population numbers fall, Cantrell says he expects that to put pressure on employers to shift away from the traditional way of doing business and rely on private contractors.

Cantrell details the phenomenon in a new report based on 2007 census data and other federal statistics.

Read more…

path-station-escalators-at-rush-hourThe New York Times blog ‘Room for Debate: A Running Commentary on the News’ ran an exchange devoted to ‘What to Do When You Lose Your Job,’ particularly appropriate given the latest news from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that “the national unemployment rate surged to 8.1 percent in February, its highest in 25 years, with 651,000 jobs lost last month.”

Luckily, the Times solicited comments from a sociologist, Princeton University’s Katherine S. Newman, to be precise…

Newman writes:

In today’s economic landscape, the skills and experience the newly unemployed bring to the table still matter, but will not command the wages needed to preserve the standard of living they know. Stability at a lower plane is weathered most successfully by families that pull together rather than pull apart, especially husbands and wives who avoid corrosive conflict and learn to adjust with as much grace as they can muster, to new roles as earners and house husbands.

Teenage kids who learn how to pitch in to the family coffers and help with the care of their younger siblings make a difference. Neighbors, fellow parishioners and P.T.A. contacts who are still working should remember that anything they can do to help their unemployed friends get back into the game is a blessing. Most of all, the newly jobless need to remember this maelstrom was not of their making and whatever they have to do to survive will be honorable.

Read Newman’s full commentary.

Read more from the exchange. 

This past weekend, the New York Times Book Review highlighted a compelling new book from sociologist William Julius Wilson entitled, ‘More Than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City.’ 

The Times writes:

In “More Than Just Race,” the Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson recaps his own important research over the past 20 years as well as some of the best urban sociology of his peers to make a convincing case that both institutional and systemic impediments and cultural deficiencies keep poor blacks from escaping poverty and the ghetto.

The systemic impediments include both the legacy of racism and dramatic economic changes that have fallen with disproportionate severity on poor blacks. State-enforced racial discrimination created the ghetto: in the early 20th century local governments separated the races into segregated neighborhoods by force of law, and later, whites used private agreements and violent intimidation to keep blacks out of white neighborhoods. Worst, and most surprising of all, the federal government played a major role in encouraging the racism of private actors and state governments. Until the 1960s, federal housing agencies engaged in racial red lining, refusing to guarantee mortgages in inner-city neighborhoods; private lenders quickly followed suit.

Meanwhile, economic and demographic changes that had nothing to do with race aggravated the problems of the ghetto. Encouraged by recently built highways and inexpensive real estate, middle-class residents and industry left the inner city to relocate to roomier and less costly digs in the suburbs during the ’60s and ’70s. Those jobs that remained available to urban blacks further dwindled as companies replaced well-paid and unionized American workers with automation and cheaper overseas labor. The new economy produced most of its jobs at the two poles of the wage scale: high-paying jobs for the well educated and acculturated (lawyers, bankers, management consultants) and low-paying jobs for those with little education or skills (fast food, telemarketing, janitorial services).

And today…

Today many ghetto residents have almost no contact with mainstream American society or the normal job market. As a result, they have developed distinctive and often dysfunctional social norms. The work ethic, investment in the future and deferred gratification make no sense in an environment in which legitimate employment at a living wage is impossible to find and crime is an everyday hazard (and temptation). Men, unable to support their families, abandon them; women become resigned to single motherhood; children suffer from broken homes and from the bad examples set by both peers and adults. And this dysfunctional behavior reinforces negative racial stereotypes, making it all the harder for poor blacks to find decent jobs.

Read more.

This past weekend, the New York Times ran a story about how humanities and social science PhD students are experiencing high levels of anxiety in the midst of a shrinking academic job market and grim prospects for the future.

The article opened with the story of Chris Pieper.

Chris Pieper began looking for an academic job in sociology about six months ago, sending off about two dozen application packets. The results so far? Two telephone interviews, and no employment offers.

“About half of all the rejection letters I’ve received mentioned the poor economy as contributing to their decision,” said Mr. Pieper, 34, who is getting his doctorate from the University of Texas, Austin. “Some simply canceled the search because they found the funding for the position didn’t come through. Others changed their tenure-track jobs to adjunct or instructor positions.”

“Many of the universities I applied to received more than 300 applications,” he added.

Mr. Pieper is not alone. Fulltime faculty jobs have not been easy to come by in recent decades, but this year the new crop of Ph.D. candidates is finding the prospects worse than ever. Public universities are bracing for severe cuts as state legislatures grapple with yawning deficits. At the same time, even the wealthiest private colleges have seen their endowments sink and donations slacken since the financial crisis. So a chill has set in at many higher education institutions, where partial or full-fledge hiring freezes have been imposed.

 

Read more about Pieper and other struggling PhDs…

Share your own stories of the difficult academic job market, comment below:

NYU sociologist Dalton Conley was featured on ‘Marketplace’ this past Tuesday. Host Kai Ryssdal talks with Conley about the blurring line between work and family now that more Americans are taking fewer vacations and clocking in more hours at the office.

An excerpt from the interview:

RYSSDAL: This [Conley’s book, Elsewhere, USA]  is fundamentally, I guess, a book about work-life balance, but really what you do is you tell us how we’re not getting any of it right.

CONLEY: Yeah, it’s really about work-life imbalance and the underlying forces — some of them very visible but some of them more invisible — that have created this new social and economic landscape that we work in.

RYSSDAL: And the visible ones we know about, right? I mean everybody’s got their Blackberry, they’re on the computer all the time, the kids have 14 different things to do after school. What are the ones though that maybe we’re not entirely aware of?

CONLEY: Well, a couple of big socio-demographic changes have occurred since the 60s. First is rising economic inequality. Every year since 1969 economic inequality has risen in the United States and has particularly been concentrated in the top half. In fact, the higher up you go, the more inequality has risen and the gaps get bigger. And I think this causes what I call an economic redshift, no matter where you are on the top half, it looks like everybody is rushing away from you.

RYSSDAL: That’s insane. I mean, on the face of it, that’s nuts, right?

CONLEY: It’s a brave new world. For the first time, it was people with incomes over $200,000, in a New York Times poll, that said that they feel poorer when they’re around rich people as compared to people who are actually poor. That’s stunning to me. And for the first time in labor history, the further up the income ladder you go, the more hours you work.

Listen to the show.

Week 28 (42)The Christian Science Monitor reported on a new trend in Iowa where women are poised to ‘lead a farming revolution.’ Reports indicate that as wives inherit their husbands’ farmland, they emphasize conservation above maximizing yield and profits. Today in Iowa women own nearly half of the state’s farmland, but suffer from recurring problems when, “The men they hire to farm their land often don’t treat it with the tender care they expect – and often won’t listen when they complain about it.”

The Christian Science monitor provides a sociological perspective on the issue:

Jean Eells, a sociologist who focuses on environmental education, has studied how Iowa’s large share of older women who own farmland are faring in getting their land-conservation views heard.

“As a whole,” says Ms. Eells, “these women have a strong view of land as community – as a source of food and water for animals, birds, as well as people – rather than just producing a commodity. But while that conservation ethic makes them natural allies for agricultural conservation programs, women often feel their views are out of sync [with state or federal programs].”

Partly it’s because women don’t know or use standard terminology to talk about land conservation, Eells says. Partly it’s that agricultural system representatives tend to think and talk production – even when discussing conservation, she adds.

“If a woman brings up something about farming, and a man blusters authoritatively about it, women are socialized to just clam up,” Eells says. “So to the extent that a woman landowner starts discussing conservation, there are a lot of reasons why this might not go well.”

Read more.

Day 13United Press International reports this morning on new work published in Research in the Sociology of Work, from Ithaca College sociologist Stephen Sweet, about how in our current dual-income economy, the loss of one person’s job can put a family at significant financial risk. The result is significant anxiety for some families trying to make it in a floundering economy.

“Nine in 10 dual-income couples in New York state feel there is some risk that one or both of their jobs might not exist in the next couple of years,” lead author sociologist Stephen Sweet of Ithaca College said in a statement.

“In the old economy, we largely depended on the male bread winner. The wife was a homemaker and the men were much more likely to have jobs that were secure; this is especially true for white middle-class families where job security increased with seniority.”

In the old economy, if the husband lost a job the wife was reserve labor and she could go out into the labor force and make ends meet, whereas to maintain a middle-class lifestyle in today’s economy, dual-income couples are the norm to make ends meet, Sweet added.

The study, published in Research in the Sociology of Work, described how the new economy dismantled the systems that made workers more confident they would hold their jobs as they aged and their family investments increased.

“Most working middle class families have next to no savings and the savings they do have are often in things they can’t touch, like their 401(k). They are often in debt so they are living paycheck to paycheck,” Sweet said.

Read more.

money -The New York Times business section blog Economix, ran a story yesterday including commentary from sociologist Viviana Zelizer about the history of holiday bonuses – an especially interesting topic given the recent outrage surrounding bonuses for failing companies’ executives.

Over at The Huffington Post, the Princeton sociologist Viviana A. Zelizer recounts some interesting milestones in the history of the bonus, and traces its evolution from gift to entitlement:

At the turn of the 20th century, U.S. employers began substituting the traditional 19th century Christmas offerings to employees — turkeys, watches, candy or gold coins — with a cash bonus. As early as 1902, J. P. Morgan & Company had apparently broken the record by giving each of their employees a full-year’s salary as a Christmas present. Gifts of cash were increasingly standardized, calculated as a percentage of the wage. By 1911, 10 percent was considered “liberal.” Some banks went as far as substituting the Christmas present for a first of the year merit increase in salary.

Most employers, however, continued to want to treat the bonus as a discretionary gift; after all, this custom of “remembering the workers” served them well to oversee and regulate workers’ productivity as well as assuring their loyalty. Indeed, it is reported that Woolworth’s first Christmas cash bonus to employees in 1899 ($5 for each year of service, with a limit of $25) was meant to match competitors’ higher wages and avoid a salesgirls’ strike. It was probably also a cheaper way to pay overtime. Around 1910, a 25-year-old saleswoman working in a New York department store told a National Consumers’ League investigator that in the week before Christmas “she worked standing over fourteen hours every day… so painful to the feet becomes the act of standing for these long periods that some of the girls forgo eating at noon in order to give themselves ..a foot-bath.” For this overtime the store gave her $20 “presented to her, not as payment, but as a Christmas gift.”

Significantly, while some companies offered a bonus to every employee, others made the Christmas present contingent on length of service or a worker’s efficiency record. Or on a worker’s proper disposition of the bonus; in Christmas 1914, a large Minneapolis flour-milling company reportedly gave each of their employees a $25 check to be deposited at a savings bank, the gift-check being valueless otherwise.

But the similarity to other forms of compensation invited recipients to treat the bonus as an entitlement, pressing for a definition of the additional income as a right. The personalization of a business gift from employer to employee was hard to sustain when the bestowal was standardized and expected. By the 1950s, the Christmas bonus officially lost its status as a gift: when a firm announced a reduction in its annual Christmas bonus as a way to make up for the expense of introducing a costly new retirement plan, the union tried to negotiate the employees’ holiday bonus. After the company refused any bargaining, the union appealed to the National Labor Relations Board. The Board ruled that the Christmas bonus could no longer be considered an employer’s discretionary gift but an expected and negotiable component of a worker’s wage. While a dissenting board member protested that a “genuine Christmas gift has no place at the bargaining table” (Niles-Bement-Pond Company and Amalgamated Local No. 405, International Union, United Automobile, Aircract & Agricultural Implement Workers of America, C.I.O., 1952), it was generally agreed that the bonus was no longer a present but a separate category of payment from the regular paycheck. The benefactor-beneficiary component of the employer-employee relationship, it follows, was vanishing…

Read more.

WorriedThe New York Times recently ran a piece entitled “Why the Sting of Layoffs Can Be Sharper for Men,” in which they look into how job loss may affect men differently – with a greater negative impact – than women.

Psychiatrists and family therapists establish the claim that men are more adversely affected by job loss…

Dr. Louann Brizendine, author of “The Female Brain” and a psychiatrist at the University of California, San Francisco, says that women who lose their jobs “aren’t going to take as much of a self-esteem hit” as men. That is because the most potent form of positive social feedback for many men comes from within the hierarchy of the workplace. By contrast, she said, women may have “many sources of self-esteem — such as their relationships with other people — that are not exclusively embedded within their jobs.”

She said that over the past six months, her clinic has had an increase in the number of men seeking help for difficulties related to job loss.

Terrence Real, a family therapist and the founder of Real Relational Solutions in Arlington, Mass., said the difference in reactions could be explained by the idea of performance esteem.

“Everyone who has written about male psychology has acknowledged that men base their sense of self on the maxim that ‘I have worth because of what I do,’ ” Mr. Real said. The feeling is that “you are only as good as your last game or your last job,” he said.

But research by two sociologists suggests an interesting nuance in this observed trend…

YET while men may appear to reel more socially and psychologically from job loss, they fare far better when it comes to re-employment.

In a 2002 study, two sociology professors at Wichita State University, Charles S. Koeber and David W. Wright, found that women who were laid off and went on to look for another job were re-employed less often than men in the same position. This was especially the case if the women were married, had previously held a part-time job or had worked in something other than a highly skilled, white-collar job.

The implication, Professor Koeber says, is that women have more of a burden than men to show their commitment to a job after a layoff.

“It looks like employers systematically apply some criteria to women that they don’t to men who are looking for jobs after being laid off,” Professor Koeber said.

Read more.