James Mollison, the photographer who brought us Where Children Sleep, has a fantastic series called The Disciples in which he captures die-hard music fans (he calls them “tribes”). The results are a great example of the power of sub-culture. I’ll highlight just four here, but you should go check out them all (and definitely click on these for a larger image).
NPR reports that Beef Products Incorporated, the company that makes “finely textured beef” (a chemically-treated paste made from non-muscle cow parts used as a filler in ground beef), will be closing three of its production plants this month. Dozens of food manufacturers, grocery store chains, restaurants, and school districts have announced they never did or will no longer use the product. This after just two months of media coverage and activism around the product, kicked off by an ABC News report on March 7th.
The swiftness and sureness of this victory against this product is a testament to the value of the right language and one good image. In case you haven’t caught on yet, finely textured beef is better known as ”pink slime.” Between that nifty pejorative and the image below, which you probably saw, finely textured beef never had a chance. This is “mechanically separated chicken” (made with a similar but not identical process); it appears to have become synonymous with pink slime, correctly or no:
This is the power of framing. The product at issue is not “slime,” it’s cow-part paste. Of course, it’s not “beef” either, it’s cow-part paste. Both are discursive frames; it’s a classic “he said, she said” social movement framing battle (along the lines of “life” vs. “choice”). The outcome of the contest depended, in part, on which language captured the public’s imagination. And… well… we saw how that went.
As discussed in Part II, between 1989 and 2003, LEGO had introduced a stream of lines aimed specifically at girls. None were particularly successful and the company was in trouble. So, what next?
Those of us who follow every move TLG makes are well familiar with the company’s near collapse in 2004 and subsequent renaissance. This is a really important moment for our story, because this is the year when TLG stopped being a family run business and brought in a non-Kristiansen CEO, Jorgen Vig Knudstorp. With Knudstorp’s arrival came a change in philosophy. Quoted from the DailyMail article linked above:
Instead of “nurturing the child” – as Knudstorp puts it – [employees'] primary goal now had to be, “I am here to make money for the company.”
I, like many LEGO fans, am very grateful for what Knudstorp did to save and revitalize the company. The post-2004 era has seen a flourishing of LEGOthemesandsetsaimed at advanced builders. The LEGO minifig has been injected with more personality and variety than ever before. However, part of TLG’s new strategy also involved abandoning efforts the girl market and focusing exclusively on boys.
Abandoning schlock like Belville and Clikits is not a bad thing, but the push toward conflict and hyper-masculinity in classicthemes (and a wholehostofnewones) made LEGOLAND inhospitable for femininity. Here are a couple more telling quotes from the Daily Mail article:
As always with Lego, this [action-oriented theme] was developed at every stage… with the help of focus groups, mostly comprising boys aged between six and 12.
In this new world focused on profit, the company sees no shame in admitting that, like it or not, what most excites little boys is conflict.
Notice the substantial hike in the m/f ratio in 2007. This ratio had been gradually approaching 1 throughout the 90s, but jumped back up to 1992 levels in 2007 (male/female ratio = 8).
Girls also disappeared from LEGO commercials and marketing collateral. Take this awesome seriesofcommercials encouraging fathers and sons to build together (the first is embedded below). The utter lack of anything similar for girls sends a clear message about who is expected to play with LEGO, it has entirely entered the masculine domain. With girls being actively excluded from TLG’s marketing efforts it’s no surprise that we see such a low percentage playing with them now.
In the final installment of this series, I’ll offer my perspective on the controversy over the new line aimed at girls, LEGO Friends.
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David Pickett is a social media marketer by day and a LEGO animator by night. He is fanatical about LEGO and proud to be a nerd. Read more from David at Thinking Brickly.
You’ve probably heard someone in media or politics bemoan the ballooning student debt in the U.S. In fact, debt has been rising. It’s more than doubled in the last ten years (that’s a more than 100% increase):
This debt, though, can’t be attributed primarily to the rising cost of education, as Planet Money explains. The average debt load for a student graduating from a public school, for example, has risen by 20%:
The average debt load for a student coming out of a private school has gone up a bit more, but still not enough to account for the leap in overall student debt.
The increase in debt, it turns out, is largely accounted for by an increase in the number of people going to college. In 1970, 8,500 8,500,000 people enrolled in college in the Fall; in 2009, that number exceeded 20,000 20,000,000 (source). A more than 100% increase.
So, the story isn’t quite as dire as we might think. This may be little consolation, though, for my students who walked across the stage yesterday. Congrats, Seniors! :)
This weekend is commencement at my college, Occidental, and I thought it the perfect day to post new data on the job experiences of recent graduates. The data, a survey of 444 people in who graduated between 2007 and 2011, comes from a report out of Rutgers.
Just over half of the sample had a full-time job; 12% were un- or underemployed and looking for full-time work.
The recession appears to have depressed earnings by about $3,000. Pre-recession grads were making, on average, $30,000, while post-recession grads took in $27,000:
A third of students (35%) reported that their first job out of college was “not at all related” or “not very closely related” to their major. Almost half saw their first job as temporary and just “to get you by” (though this would drop to 36% when asked about their current job). Only half thought that their first job required a college degree.
A significant proportion of students felt that they’d had to sacrifice something important to secure their job: 27% reported that they were working below their level of education, 24% took a job that paid less than they expected to earn, and 23% were working outside of their interests and training:
Many graduates would have done things differently. Notably a third said they would have re-thought their choice of major:
And most of them would have been more likely to have chosen a professional major (e.g., education or nursing) or one in a “STEM” field (e.g., science, technology, engineering, or math).
Recession-era grads are much more likely to be getting help from their parents, compared to pre-recession grads:
A crazy character named Andrew Hales, a student at Utah Valley University, has put up a series of You Tube videos in which he — knowingly or not — does a classic Sociology 101 experiment called “norm breaching”: break a simple social rule and see how people react to you. I’ll put my favorite first, but they’re all worth a chuckle:
Holding the door open for people that are (too) far away:
Walk (too) close to people and get in their way:
Staring at people:
Some of his transgressions are more out there than others, but these experiments show how uncomfortable others can be made by even mild norm breaking.
Americans were recently asked whether they believed that President Obama could do much to lower gas prices. The answer was highly correlated with political party affiliation: 65% of Republicans said “yes,” while only33% of Democrats said the same.
In fact, the President has very little control over the price of gas. According to the Washington Post:
Today’s oil prices are the product of years and decades of exploration, automobile design and ingrained consumer habits combined with political events in places such as Sudan and Libya, anxiety about possible conflict with Iran, and the energy aftershocks of last year’s earthquake in Japan.
An expert calls the idea that a President can substantially influence the oil market “preposterous.”
So, does this mean that Democrats are smarter about econo-geo-politics?
Nope. It just means a Democrat is in the White House. The pollsters, WP/ABC News, asked the same question in 2006, during the Bush Administration. That year 73% of Democrats gave President Bush some of the blame for gas prices; only 47% of Republicans did.
(Red = answered “yes” in 2006; Blue = answered “yes” in 2012)
Such switches, argues political scientist Brendan Nyhan, are typical. NPRreports: “On a range of issues, partisans seem partial to their political loyalties over the facts. When those loyalties demand changing their views of the facts, he said, partisans seem willing to throw even consistency overboard.” Nyhan believes that the phenomenon might be related to “cognitive dissonance,” a sense of unease that comes from holding two incompatible beliefs at once. If you like the President, in other words, it might be hard for you to also think that he could do something about gas prices, but isn’t.
Sociological Images encourages people to exercise and develop their sociological imaginations with discussions of compelling visuals that span the breadth of sociological inquiry. Read more...
