The United States slaughters approximately 34 million beef cattle annually, yet consumers know very little about beef production. This is largely by design. In a recent article (and podcast), sociologist Colter Ellis exposes the incredible role of emotional boundaries and boundary labor in beef production. Previous research has focused on the detachments necessary between consumers and the exploitation of commodities, ignoring the producers.

For most consumers, our feelings about cows, pigs, chickens, and other animals that we eat are very different from the feelings about our dogs, cats, and other animals that we keep as pets. Ellis demonstrates how this is not the case for cattle ranchers, who often see cattle as sentient, social beings with individual personalities (as illustrated by Pete the social beast and Cupcake the “teaser” steer). Through daily interactions with their cattle, ranchers develop emotional relationships, yet they have also developed narratives and emotional boundaries that allow them to treat these animals as economic assets and, eventually, as commodities.

The labor of cattle ranchers produces more than just beef. Their boundary labor creates a separation between animal-based commodities and the physical bodies these products come from. It creates a separation between consumers and the industrial practices that transforms sentient beings into emotionless commodities. Ultimately, Ellis finds, it allows consumers the privilege to disengage animal from meal.

Living under the vigilant gaze of creditors is no fun—the nerve of these creditors, expecting us to pay back money loaned to us! Fortunately, not everyone feels guiltless toward credit. In fact, contrition over debt is fairly typical, and our relationships with money are rarely emotion-neutral: money is always moralized.

In fact, in new work, researchers find debt weighs as heavily on our consciences as our wallets. In the most recent issue of Sociological Forum, Franceca Polletta and Zaibu Tufail study the moral relationships between creditors and debtors by accounting for the intervening influence of debt settlement agencies.  Through field observations at two debt settlement agencies and interviews with 17 agents, the researchers aimed to understand whether and why clients are willing to settle certain forms of debt.

Their observations showed that debt settlement agencies were instrumental in shaping what the authors call “equality matching relationships” between creditors and debtors.  Within such relationships, debtors see their relationship with creditors as “reciprocal and ongoing.” Therefore, the receipt of adequate service from a creditor obligated debtors to respond in kind by paying off their debt. Thus decisions about whether debt must be paid back in full or could be settled were made based on perceptions of the moral character of the creditor. Since debtors were most willing to settle credit card debt and least willing to settle medical debt, Polletta and Tufail’s findings suggest that debtors see little integrity in credit card companies, but hold greater trust in the moral worth of medical providers and feel they must pay the entirety of what they are billed by doctors.

All debts being equal—in dollars—does nothing to equalize our perceptions of moral obligation. In other words, when we choose whether to pay off or settle outstanding debt, we are not only making good with creditors, but with our consciences.

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According to a popular real estate saying, “Three things matter for property: location, location, location.” Turns out, location can be as important to mental health as it is to property value. In a recent study, Kristin Turney, Rebecca Kissane, and Kathryn Edin demonstrate that mental health benefits abound for African American women who move into low-poverty neighborhoods as compared to others who remain living in disadvantaged neighborhoods.

The authors analyze data from interviews with 67 Baltimore adults participating in the Moving-to-Opportunity social experiment, a project that randomly gave 4,608 families living in public housing developments the chance to move into low-poverty neighborhoods. Of those interviewed, 33 received MTO’s move to low-poverty neighborhoods, while 34 had not been selected. All interviewed were female and the head of their household; 66 were African American and one was multiracial.

The authors found that both groups reported experiencing traumatic and stressful life experiences and mental health challenges. Many who moved endured additional challenges in transitioning from public to private housing, managing utility bills, securing transportation, and living farther from friends and family. However, the stresses of relocation were counteracted by improvements in neighborhood and home aesthetics, neighborhood collective efficacy and pride, lower violence and criminal activity, and better environments for raising children. On the whole, the improvements in physical and social environments positively impacted mental health of those who moved. The link between location and opportunity remains tenuous, but the link with quality of mental health is now better understood.

If money can’t buy happiness, can redistributive social policies do the trick? In their research on state intervention in various socially democratic welfare states, Hiroshi Ono and Kristen Schultz Lee examine how welfare expenditures and taxes affect the happiness of citizens. Writing in Social Forces, Ono and Schultz not only report that money does buy happiness, but also that using public social expenditures to protect populations from social risk is a wise investment.

Using data from the 2002 International Social Survey Program’s (ISSP) “Family and Changing Gender Roles” module, the authors use individual-level factors including gender, marital status, and income to predict reports of happiness in Eastern European countries.  Countries are classified as either low- or high-PSE (Public Social Expenditure) depending on levels of social welfare funding.

Among their findings, women and men are equally happy regardless of the size of the welfare state. The happiness gap between married couples and non-married persons is greater in high-PSE countries, suggesting that countries with higher social expenditures are home to happier marriages. Cohabiters, too, are also nearly three times happier than non-married, non-cohabiting individuals in high-PSE countries. And even low-income people are happier in high-PSE countries compared to their counterparts in low-PSE countries.  Social welfare programs seem to help both the economic security and the subjective wellbeing of the poor. Still, the authors emphasize that public social expenditures do not invoke happiness among all citizens.

The redistribution of income reduces the happiness gap between the rich and the poor:  The happiness of the poor is lifted, and the happiness of the rich is lowered.

Countries attempting to mitigate various forms of “happiness inequality” through investments in safety nets may learn that achieving a state of happiness may not be as expensive as they thought. It just might lead to a few grumpy 1%’ers.

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Cultural assimilation has long been understood as a one-way process: immigrants and their kin gradually adopt the cultural values of their host society and shed their own. In countries such as the U.S., where white people are the demographic majority, scholars see assimilation as valuing whiteness and the norms and practices associated with it.

Tomás R. Jiménez and Adam L. Horowitz critique this framing in their recently published qualitative study. Their research examines how immigrant origin populations (immigrants and their kin) impact traditional understandings of ethnoracial hierarchy in the U.S. Based off of fieldwork and interviews conducted in affluent city of Cupertino, CA, Jiménez and Horowitz’s research explores how the traditional bond between ethnicity/race and achievement is contested by the Asian American immigrant community in the Silicon Valley. Where highly educated Asian American and immigrant families are the clear majority, the authors maintain that whiteness does not have the social cache it does in other parts of the country. Rather, in this community, whiteness widely embodies “lower-achievement, laziness, and academic mediocrity.”

Jiménez and Horowitz believe their study provides support for the notion that assimilation is a multidirectional process. Immigrant groups in the U.S. can restructure social norms not only for themselves, but also for third-plus generation Americans. In short, immigrants are influencers of the society as much as they are the influenced. Though the findings in this rather unique case study raise additional questions about the future of race relations across a diverse American landscape, they do provide an example of how even long-established norms are constantly challenged.

In today’s life course, living together is often an obvious prerequisite before tying the knot. Until now, there’s been little research on long-term cohabiters’ perceptions of marriage. In his recent research, the late Timothy Ortyl complicates conventional notions of intimacy in American society by exploring the meanings long-term heterosexual cohabiters (hereafter, “LTHCs”) offer when discussing decisions to postpone or forgo marriage.

Among the many transformations of the meaning of marriage and intimacy is the de-romanticization of heterosexual marriage. Recognizing that heterosexual marriage is no longer compulsory, Ortyl sought to explore the rationales given by LTHCs about decisions to say “We do” or “We don’t.” In conducting 48 in-depth interviews with different-sex couples who lived together (unmarried) for at least 4 years, Ortyl reveals how marital attitudes are rooted in life experiences and social location. Ortyl classifies different groups of LTHCs under 6 themes, including “Risk Aversion” and “American Dreamer.” Results show that attitudinal differences vary mostly by social class and less by race and gender differences. For example, the only group that endorsed marital aspirations was the American Dreamers. Members of this category viewed marriage as a financial investment toward membership in the middle class.

Given that the five other categories of LTHCs expressed reservations about conventional notions of marriage, Ortyl sheds light on why some consider “marriagefree” the way to be. More importantly, Ortyl challenges us to think more critically about the application of concepts that privilege heterosexuality as the norm, rather than understanding the rationales behind alternative relationship decisions. While love and marriage are still pretty compatible, the findings of this innovative research suggest you certainly can—and many do—have one without the other.

Twenty years ago, Christine Williams wrote “The Glass Escalator: Hidden Advantages for Men in the ‘Female’ Professions,” examining how gender inequality operates in traditionally sex segregated, predominantly female occupations such as nursing, teaching, librarianship, and social work. She found that men in these occupations were often “fast-tracked” to higher administrative and management positions, and she called this process the “glass escalator.” Williams’s study provided an important complement to analyses of the “glass ceiling”—the invisible threshold in the organizational hierarchy above which women would rarely be promoted.

In the most recent issue of Gender & Society, Williams returns to her earlier work to see what’s changed. She finds that the glass escalator remains for men in female-dominated professions, although it operates differently based on identity and on the current economic climate.

Williams concedes that the glass escalator operates most clearly in relation to white men in stable middle-class jobs. Further, the glass escalator only operates in organizations with stable employment, job hierarchies, and career ladders—all aspects of work that have changed drastically over the past decade. She argues, “We need new metaphors to understand the persistence of male privilege in the flexible, project-based, and flatter neoliberal organization.”

The zoo: a chance to leave the over-regulated world of concrete and bureaucracy behind and reinvigorate the spirit through witnessing exotic animals in their natural splendor. However, as David Grazian reminds us in The Sociological Quarterly, it takes a lot of planning to produce the “natural”.

Drawing on three years and over 500 hours of volunteering at two metropolitan zoos, Grazian provides detailed insights into the tensions that are negotiated on a daily basis by the “nature makers” charged with designing displays that fit how visitors imagine jungles, grasslands, and other untamed settings. This involves creating landscapes that imitate the fauna from far-away lands, while simultaneously enclosing the animals and separating them from human visitors… all without making the zoo look too much like a prison. Audiences must also be convinced that the animals’ activities are unaltered by captivity even as the taboo—sex, killing, and defecating—is censored. Because, hey, even being a wild animal is no excuse for poor manners.

So next time you are strolling your local big cat house, take some time to think about the constant planning and negotiation necessary to create an experience that is wild but not too wild, dangerous but not too dangerous, cute but not too cute, educational but not too educational, civilized but not too civilized, and most important of all, “natural”.

Even alternative media reporting on the housing crisis are using mainstream ways of talking about the problem. While you’d expect publications like BE, The Root, and Colorlines to be more radical (alternatives to, say, Forbes), instead they stick with “neoliberal” and “postracial” themes. That is, these publications believe housing problems are individual problems and have little to do with race, even when banks have admitted in court that race was part of their mortgage decision process. In Catherine Squires’ new study on the disproportionate impact of the subprime mortgage crisis on African Americans, she shows how mainstream rhetoric is rearticulated by even alternative media.

In her content analysis, Squires reveals that both BE and The Root presented stories in which responsibility for the mortgage crisis was shifted from the banks and lenders to the individual borrower. Colorlines was the only publication to address the unequal access of whites and people of color to the American Dream and home ownership, demonstrating greater resistance to the specious appeal of neoliberal rhetoric by placing greater onus on the government and the beneficiaries of its bailout (that is, the banks).

The expectation instilled in alternative media to present a different perspective endures. However, when even the stories they publish look like recycled versions of the mainstream, readers’ trust is sure to wane.

For those who don’t enjoy dramatic irony, too many books and movies provoke that frustrated question: “Why didn’t they just talk to each other?” Entire plot lines that hinge on only a few words of missed dialogue have been the backbone of classic comedies and dramas for centuries, but now modern technology may be making this literary device just too… unbelievable.

Wellman and Rainie, writing in the first issue of the new journal Mobile Media & Communication, illustrate this shift with a creative new twist on an old classic. What if Romeo and Juliet, those unfortunate teens who just missed each other in the end, had cell phones? Instead of talking through their feuding families, they could have just texted, maybe avoiding (spoiler alert!) the whole suicide mess.

Using research from their book Networked: The New Social Operating System, the authors argue that mobile phones and other portable communication devices have ushered in an era of “networked individualism.” We connect as individuals and share everything, down to our geographical location. The star-crossed lovers couldn’t even dream of satellite technology, but they were still pioneering individual networking by meeting alone, in secret, instead of involving their families to court each other formally. Even a decade ago, you’d have to call your paramour’s “home phone,” and maybe even talk to their parents.

Today a quick text makes individual socializing that much easier and more efficient, but it may also radically shift communication through our closest social groups. In our social lives and our dramatic writing, how much longer will we be able to believe people just didn’t get the message?