I ended up calling the police. Within minutes an officer responded to the scene and issued a citation to the couple that had left their dog in the car. Having two older sisters that are veterinarians, I realized that the animal, while not locked in the automobile for too long, may have suffered from minor heat stroke and should probably have been taken to the vet as a precautionary measure. The dog’s owners, however, merely cracked open the window and went back into the gym to resume their exercise routines.

Such treatment of pets, and animals more generally, seems far too common; and most likely, this dog’s owners probably did not think their actions equated to animal abuse any more than Archie Bunker thought that his routine slurs were racist. In many ways, this entire situation speaks to the larger question of whether animals actually have rights. Lyle Munro’s recent examination of the animal rights movement “in theory and practice” speaks to the fact that our understanding of the issue is empirically poor. In the article, he recommends a greater working partnership between research scholars and animal activists.

As social scientists, we would undoubtedly benefit from a greater empirical understanding of the animal rights movement, although the underlying theoretical conundrum will persist: Do animals actually have rights? Perhaps Joel Best put it best when he once told me that the animal rights movement will never truly succeed because too many people like hamburgers. We do, after all, slaughter a wide variety of animals for a whole host of reasons: consumption, material goods, overpopulation, and the list could go on. Presumably if given their choice, these animals would have passed on their contributions to human survival and happiness. On a smaller scale, many pet owners like myself effectively keep their animals as captives of sorts, even if mine seem content with their full bellies and excessive sleeping. In my own research on zoophilia online communities (see Maratea and Kavanaugh for how this relates to new directives in deviance research), I found that many zoophiles posted statements that mainstream animal lovers like myself actually violate animals’ rights if we support the “Bob Barker approach” to spaying and neutering, and, more importantly, if we refuse to satisfy the sexual needs of our beloved animal partners. Like you (presumably), I scoff at such a ridiculous notion. Yet, this example, however distasteful, speaks to the difficulty in uniformly defining whether animals have rights (which they cannot possibly comprehend).

Most animal lovers will probably agree – to varying degrees – that we should protect animal welfare. Rights, however, are a tricky concept; they are purely human constructs that are applied in an entirely subjective manner. For example, the idea of universal human rights might exist on paper, but has certainly never been achieved in practice. How then, does a species that cannot objectively respect the rights of other human beings reconcile whether life forms that are largely considered inferior are endowed with similar innate rights?

Additional Readings:

The Animal Rights Movement in Theory and Practice: A Review of the Sociological Literature by Lyle Munro

Screwing the Pooch: Legitimizing Accounts in a Zoophilia Online Community by R.J .Maratea

Deviant Identity in Online Contexts: New Directives in the Study of a Classic Concept by R.J. Maratea and Philip R. Kavanaugh

Photo courtesy The Fairfield Bay Animal Protection League (www.ffbanimalshelter.org)

found at http://www.impactlab.net/2011/09/08/many-americans-falling-out-of-the-middle-class/

“Somebody who’s fallen from the middle class to poverty, in my opinion is still middle class.”  Mitt Romney, Republican presidential candidate, made this statement on a talk show a few weeks ago.   Bloggers ridiculed the comment as nonsensical.  I admit I too was tempted to just call Romney an idiot (again) and move on.  But, as I’ve been watching politicians in a society of growing inequality and high unemployment struggle with the concept of class while desperately trying not to alienate any potential voters, I’ve begun to see these comments as teachable moments regarding class.  Here I will offer some possibilities of Romney’s meaning and more importantly employ this statement to discuss the concept of class.

A generous reading of Romney’s quote is that people whose incomes recently fell below the poverty line, still retained middle-class knowledge and credentials (i.e. cultural capital) and social connections (i.e. social capital) even though their economic capital likely declined.  The durability of class status remains an important feature of America’s class structure.  Capital (or resources we can employ to cushion hard times and gain advantages and opportunities) often goes unmentioned when poverty is calculated solely by income.  Long ago, Max Weber highlighted these aspects of social class to broaden the concept beyond what he viewed as a limited materialist perspective.

Of course, anyone watching the Republican primary might view the above reading as absurdly generous.  Instead, the more likely underlying concept is the time-honored tradition of separating the deserving poor from the undeserving poor.  Casting “the poor” as deviant serves to legitimize a system of inequality wherein most politicians find themselves concentrated at the top.  As Karl Marx once noted, every economic order produces legitimizing ideologies.  Meritocracy, a key aspect of capitalist ideology, equates a structural position, like class, with individual morality.  In this way, Romney’s statement posits that middle-class is an individual moral attribute and not a feature of a social system.

As the Republican debates demonstrate, politicians struggle when addressing class beyond vague allusions to the great middle-class.  However, casting the poor as undeserving is an increasingly risk-free strategy for politicians as few self-identified poor people vote and the poor are by no means organized.  On the other hand, the possibility of offending people – some of who are poor or were poor or know someone who is poor or liked a fictional movie character whom was poor and/or could imagine a poor person they might not despise – provokes caution among politicians.  As a result, politicians are careful to point to a category of deserving poor.  Providing a loop hole for some people in poverty adds to the durability of the “undeserving poor.”

Class analysis is crucial to understanding the economy and the role of politics in conditioning economic outcomes from differently situated persons.  Politicians do our nation a service when they remind Americans that income is not the sole measure of social class and may do a poor job of predicting the relative benefit/cost of a specific tax measure, spending proposal, or shift in regulations.  At the same time, class is not an individual attribute, it is not freely chosen by sheer will power and cannot be altered by an improved attitude.

In a recent article, Archer and Orr (2011) note, “…class and collective identification should be treated as separate theoretical concepts.”  Such a theoretical separation allows us to understand how subjective class identification and an academic analysis of class (i.e. one based on empirical data and tested causal models) may explain different kinds of outcomes – like the effect of a political campaign message on the one hand, and the effect of a tax cut on the other.  Furthermore, this separation allows us to consider how different correlations between the two lead to different political environments.  For example, if anyone can claim middle-class status is the society more likely to expect and demand a middle-class lifestyle?  Would our politics benefit from an acknowledgement that the formerly middle-class or those with middle-class cultural and social capital have different interests than the poor?  For example, debt forgiveness of student loans might benefit large portions of the recently “fallen into poverty” class while having little effect on those who have lived in poverty their entire lives.  Finally, we might consider how changing the importance of family wealth, by eliminated college tuition for example, might not simply alter the class structure and class interests but change the importance of social class and self-identifications.

Class Identification in Review: Past Perspectives and Future Directions by Patrick Archer and Ryan Orr

Survey Finds Rising Perception of Class Tension

The course was an introduction to Public Health. Public Health is the work of protecting and improving the health of communities through education, research, and communication. Sociologists, demographers, and legal scholars, as well as public health scholars and clinical care providers, have documented myriad ways in which race and ethnicity shape communities and their health – influencing at the very least where people live and thus the schools and jobs they have access to, the distances they have to travel to get to their jobs and schools, and the means by which they travel there. Race and ethnicity are fundamental to the study of the health of communities. But somehow Allie didn’t see the connection.

Allie had the transcript of a superstar. She’d aced every course she’d taken in college and most every course prior to it. And many of those courses explicitly stated as a primary course objective that students would improve their critical thinking capacities. Allie’s grades would suggest that she’d unequivocally excelled at this; her comments indicate something more ambiguous about her success. They indicate to me that the “critical thinking” valued by the institutions in which a White, privileged student like Allie had excelled might be leaving students to flounder when it comes to thinking critically about race, ethnicity, and the ways in which privileges and oppressions have been – and continue to be – systematically linked to race and ethnicity. For Allie, this lack of support led to a vicious loop: she saw race and ethnicity as having nothing to do with her (Whiteness apparently did not count as race or ethnicity); as mattering only when fulfilling some institutional requirement; and as unworthy of her learning energies unless she was fulfilling such requirements, upon completion of which, she could return to not thinking of race and ethnicity at all.

Sociologists like Eduardo Bonilla Silva see students like Allie the norm among college students who are White and economically well-off: they’ve learned, even been encouraged, to minimize – and deny – the ways in which race shapes social relationships, and the ways in which the blatant racism of the past relates to deeply embedded and ongoing injustices in the present. Such dangerous misunderstandings are evident now in Tucson, Arizona, where the Tucson Unified School District has moved to eliminate its Mexican American studies curriculum and to ban books the discuss the history of the Americas from the perspective of the peoples who have lived on the land prior to European and European-American conquests. Arizona School Superintendent John Huppenthal argues that this ban was a necessary move because the program “promotes resentment.” But what about the resentment of White, privileged students like Allie – the resentment of having to think about, talk about, reflect on systemic inequities by which they have benefited? Allie’s “mainstream” course of study promoted her resentment of her public health course. So do we ban Allie’s honors program, then? Do we ban the high-level honors curricula she followed in high school?

Education scholar and educator Ernest Morrell has described critical thinking as thought and/or inquiry that fosters individual or social transformation (2009:29). A ban transforms nothing, relying instead on binary oppositional terms and explanations. Dangerous and unjust as a ban may be, however, it makes the binary oppositional logic on which it operates apparent. In Allie’s case, her mainstream curriculum allowed that thinking to operate silently. So if institutions like Allie’s really want to “honor” students, shouldn’t they support – actively and explicitly and thoroughly – the voices and perspectives that students need to engage them in the conversations that foster critical thinking?

In 2010, MSNBC published an article written by Alex Johnson entitled “Some schools rethink bans on cell phones: Bans don’t work, so administrators explore using mobile devices”. In the report, Johnson notes that 100 plus students were suspended – not for cheating, smoking, or bullying – but for having cell phones. While presented here as merely an anecdote, there can little doubt that the use of cell phones, and mobile technology more generally, is an issue that has caught the attention of school administrators across the nation. Within the article, Brian Begley, principal of Millard North High School, illustratively notes: “Cell phones aren’t going away.” As mobile devices become increasingly marketed to today’s youth and as their functionality blurs with that of computers, the issue of wireless, new media technology within high schools will reshape school operations.

The article cites that although 69 percent of American high schools have placed a ban on cell phones, 63% of student respondents nonetheless reported using them on campus. Recognizing that simply banning the devices does little to discourage their usage, Johnson notes that “a growing number of school districts are exploring other ways to shut them down.” Rather than employing suspension as a punishment, certain schools have resulted to more invasive forms of social control,  including “confiscating phones…keeping them for 30 days and searching them for evidence of cheating, pornography or other ‘illicit activities.’ If such evidence is found, it’s turned over to the sheriff’s office”.

Whilst illustrating both the complications for banning cell phones and their potential applicability within schools, the issue of cell phones points to a larger development.  Scholars have recently begun to document how two large-scale trends are transforming the socialization of youth within school settings. The first stems from a late-modern preoccupation with safety and security (see Garland, 1996, 2000; Simon, 2007; Foucault, 1977). Whether accelerated by internal events such as school shootings, or external factors like reported rates of youth violence, it is clear that crime has now become a chief organizing principle shaping school discipline. Consequently, issues such as cell phone use are caught in the proverbial cross-hairs and mobilized against in the name of promoting school safety.

Today, the distinction between school discipline and criminal punishment has become less clear given the influx of criminal justice practices within schools (Kupchik, 2010). This is evidenced, within this article, by schools incorporating more invasive forms of monitoring that sometimes include the use of law enforcement. Although zero tolerance policies, metal detectors, police officers, surveillance cameras, drug dogs, and high-tech security systems signify measures of formal social control generally associated with the criminal justice system, they have increasingly become part of the school’s natural environment. The widespread adoption of rigid crime control practices and policies illustrates the growing legitimacy of criminal justice to manage and control youth in school settings.

The other trend highlights the celebratory nature of late-capitalism. A growing number of scholars have argued that the power of the commercial market to reconfigure the social world can no longer be ignored (see Hayward, 2004; Baudrillard, 1998; Campbell; 2005; Featherstone, 2007). Hayward (2004) for instance, notes that it is crucial to realize the role of consumer culture to fully understand contemporary society (see also Lury, 1996; Slater, 1997; Miles, 1998). Given the markets increased societal prominence within late-modern society, its capacity to influence youth behavior has become too great to dismiss.

While safety and security lie at the heart of societal needs, there are also transgressive behaviors backed by the expanding marketplace – including cell phones and their continued use. Those actions deemed transgressive by school policies are now commodified and marketed within the consumer culture to grip the subjective and emotional widespread appeal of youth (see Ferrell, Hayward, & Young, 2008; Presdee, 2000). Marginal behavior – now a commodity – is tirelessly marketed to school youth as they engage those behaviors that are often barred by school/state control.

While the tendency of punishment and control seem to contradict the leanings of the late-capital market (as noted above), perhaps it is worth exploring the nexus between the two. Specifically, begging an examination of how the goals of the state and the market – while apparently contradictory – combine to reproduce behaviors which conform to the social conditions of late-modernity.

Read: “Beyond Fear: Sociological Perspectives on the Criminalization of School Discipline“, in The Sociological Forum.

Read: “Homeroom Security: School Discipline in an Age of Fear“. By Aaron Kupchik, published by NYU Press (2010).

In my last post I reviewed some of these types of images of anarchism, and suggested that anarchism actually provides an interesting opportunity for analysis in terms of its history as a social movement, its trajectory as a political philosophy, and its alternative approach to social order. I use social order to mean the system that governs relations between people and their actions in groups, including how economic exchange takes place, how norms develop, and how conflicts are resolved. The elements of the system may be formal—for example, specific organizations or law— or informal—like patterns of interaction and expectation for interaction. For many anarchists (though again, there is enormous diversity in the philosophy and tactics behind protests labeled as anarchist), anarchism is not about the absence of social order, but about establishing social order that is not founded on coercion and hierarchy; anarchists’ opposition to an authoritative state derives from this principle. An alternative is a social order based on “customs, habits and usages” among all members.

Anarchist protesters have been a part of many of the major social movements in modern European history, from the 1848 French Revolution to the Russian Revolution to the Spanish Civil War. Organizations based on anarcho-syndicalism, which proposes an economic and social system democratically governed by workers, proved influential in Central and South America in the early 20th century. The history of anarchist thought, as distinguished from social movements based on anarchist principles and tactics, is also rich and varied. For example, some have argued that the ancient Chinese school of thought of Taoism is anarchist in nature, in that it argues that there should be no lords or subjects; others saw Greek philosopher Zeno’s work to be anarchist, as he argued that there was no need for states.

In The Sociology of Philosophies (a shorter version of the tome is here), which surveys the social conditions around many of the worlds’ great philosophical traditions, Randall Collins makes a number of points about the when and where schools of philosophy emerge, and the form in which philosophical thought takes. Far from being the product of brilliant, isolated, individual efforts, major philosophical works were clustered in the same time period, within a small number of physical spaces, and around social ties, often arranged as chains of teachers and students. Indeed, Collins argues, the social relations between schools of thought—how contentious or harmonious relations were—influenced the degree to which the philosophy produced was abstract or concrete. Schools of thought relied on the organizational structure—for example, the strength of patronage ties—supporting the people carrying out philosophical work. The history of anarchist thought might be read in light of Collins’ observations as well; a cursory review suggests a great degree of temporal and spatial clustering; from the emergence of Christian anarchism through Europe during the Middle Ages to Enlightenment versions of anarchism as proposed by William Godwin to French anarchist thinkers such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, and others who were involved in the revolutions of 1848 and the Paris Commune. (Of course, actually examining whether the schools and strands of anarchist thought developed as Collins’ describes philosophies in general would require a much more in-depth knowledge of the history of anarchism than I have, but Collins’ provides an entry point for thinking about anarchist thought.)

A major criticism of anarchism is that it seems totally unserviceable in light of what we know about how humans create groups and maintain order. Rosabeth Moss Kanter describes one possible result that “Though communes may remove the repressive control of distant, impersonal institutions, they replace it with the control of the intimate, face-to-face group of peers, which is perhaps a more benign kind of coercion, but coercion nonetheless.” However, she argues, though some social order is required, these types of groups attempt to carry out creating and enforcing order in as equitable way as possible.

A number of researchers have pursued studies of social order within anarchists communities—how social order actually occurs. Randall Amster uses examples from utopian experiments, indigenous cultures, and the group, Rainbow Family of the Living Light, and finds evidence that anarchist communities punish members, but are more likely to do so using restorative or restitutive justice. The bottom line seems to be that doing anarchism right is very difficult, and requires a lot of effort and energy from all participants, but there are historical and current examples where it succeeded, including the community in Madagascar that David Graeber, who has been closely involved in the Occupy Wall Street protests, studied for his doctoral dissertation.

For more resources on the history of anarchist social movements and philosophical thought, see Anarchy Archives, which also includes a number of critiques of anarchism, and comparisons between anarchism with socialism.

Photo by Joseph Morris

Congratulations! You did it. You got into college! Maybe you’re going to Princeton, Michigan, Duke, Berkeley, Stanford, or another of the best research universities in the world. Or perhaps you’re bound for a great liberal arts college like Swarthmore, Davidson, Pomona, or Kenyon Maybe it’s a private college in New England or the flagship campus of your state university system. That is wonderful, and I’m sure, well deserved. You’ve worked hard the past few years, building an amazing record of academic achievements, community service, and activities that have kept you busy and challenged. You sweated through exams like the SAT, filled out countless applications and forms, and waited in agony to get word from your dream schools. And now you’re in. (p. 1)

Indeed these lines indicate how Bader envisions his readers: traditional college-aged students who will be residing on campus, and who have the resources to ensure that no matter what happens, “[they] will be fine” (p.137).
Bader breaks down the eleven habits he recommends, devoting a chapter for each. Six of the eleven habits –1, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 9—deal with courses of study and careers, generally encouraging students to decouple the former from the latter. Habit One, “Focus on Learning, Not on Grades,” urges students to place their GPA concerns on the backburner and strive instead to become a “learned person.” Bader cautions students that although their colleges have already taken steps to define what it means to be a “learned person” for them through core requirements, students must work to craft their own definitions (p. 26) and that in doing so, grades will become the “byproduct of their passion for learning” (p. 30). Habit Four, “Approach the Curriculum Like a Great Feast,” advises students to “sampl[e] [their] way to success” (p. 79), but pays little attention to dissonance this suggestion may bring to the many students who feel pressure to preserve tuition dollars for courses that will cultivate skills that translate into incomes for themselves and their families. In place of such discussion, Bader offers Habit Five, “Understand that Majors and Careers are not the Same Thing.” College students and their parents are prone to “invent the connection to better justify the expense and effort of going to college at all” (p. 97).
Habit Six proposes a distinction between working hard and working smart. Working smart, Bader suggests, entails understanding how teaching and learning are structured in college: lectures provide efficient delivery of material, and if students are to avoid being “court reporters” then they will need to take an active role in the lecture, putting the lecturer’s content into a conversation with their own thoughts (p. 125). Such private conversations will serve students well when they apply for admission to graduate or professional schools, as laid out in Habit Seven. Honesty and individuality, Bader argues, are the traits that facilitate the subject mastery and sense of self that graduate schools desire in their students (p. 140). Bader sticks to this idea of individualism in Habit Nine, “When You Are Failing, Understand Why.” He examines “four broad reasons for academic struggles”: lack of motivation, poor time management, weak study skills and talent, poor mental and physical health (p. 177). What Bader does not examine is a key commonality among these four reasons – that they are all problems attributable to individuals rather than issues stemming from systemic problems that students might experience as members of social groups (e.g. as first-generation college students, as children of working class parents, as students of color, etc.).
Habit Two, “Build an Adult Relationship with Your Parents,” makes evident many of the assumptions that are just as present, but perhaps not as explicit, through the rest of the book. Bader recounts difficulties students with “helicopter parents” – for instance, the parents who flew in from Hawaii to speak with him about their son’s progress twice in two weeks – but he does not recognize that many parents do not feel entitled to make such demands on faculty and administration, and that consequently their students might be less likely to have close contact with faculty and administrators. Furthermore, Bader does not consider the possibility that many students may already have “adult” relationships with their parents, having contributed to the family income and household management throughout their middle and high school years.
Much of Dean’s List presents college success from the perspective of privilege-as-norm. As few as one in four college students live on campus and study full time (Abramson 2011). When Bader advises students to “learn from diversity at home and abroad” (Habit 8), he does not consider the difficulties of studying abroad for students who have jobs outside of school. Indeed study abroad programs struggle to engage students of color, first generation college students, and students who have to work to pay their own tuition (e.g. Stuber 2011).While Bader and his colleagues offer important and helpful recommendations to students, they put the onus on students to conform to norms of privilege rather than opening up a conversation about success that really recognizes and appreciates where students are coming from.

References
Abramson, Larry. (2011). “In Tenn., A Possible Model for Higher Education.” National Public Radio. Retrieved from http://www.npr.org/2011/11/27/142759691/in-tenn-a-possible-model-for-higher-education
Moffatt, Michael. (1989). Coming of Age in New Jersey. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Nathan, Rebekah. (2005). My Freshman Year. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Stuber, Jenny. (2011). Inside the College Gates. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

This intersection is rather bleak and run-down. The building on the lot is abandoned; it seems to have been a major fueling station, but now, all that remains is the building’s structure and gas lines protruding from the ground. It resembles a quilt with different shades of white – some patches are more faded, some soiled from the dirt of the lot, and some brightly white. Having driven by this lot a few times in the past, graffiti artists oftentimes ‘tag’ and ‘piece’ this building for recognition but their artwork is quickly covered by a fresh coat of white paint.

As the light turns green, I find myself looking toward the gathering instead of the road. Three cars have been parked so that their trunk opens toward the road. From a distance I can see NFL jerseys, shoe boxes, clothing accessories, and a set of 22s (rims/wheals). Looking for a Bears jersey for the upcoming season, I pull in. Packed in the trunk of a ‘murdered out’ Dodge Charger, I notice “NFL Authentic” jerseys being sold for $40 instead of the sport store’s $120. Also, there are new air force ones, hand bags, new car parts, and even fresh sea catches being sold for a fraction of what major stores charge. During the roughly five to ten minutes on the lot, the three different ‘retailers’ had cycled through nine ‘customers’ making approximately $340. It seems that the deal was always on the turn; that the street-level sale had garnered attention from both ‘entrepreneurs’ and prospective ‘consumers’.

The anecdote above, while only a single instance, can be seen in other forms around the nation given the current economic conditions. Forming a gauntlet on city sidewalks are men and women selling roses made of paper, bootleggers selling ‘foakleys’ (fake Oakleys), and strapped individuals turning trashed paint cans and tin canisters into extravagant drum-sets. They find discards and transform them into means and tools for survival. Oftentimes, these individuals – if able to skirt law enforcement efforts – alter spaces of marginalization into their own commercial site. The posh city corner that shuns marginal existence becomes a main outlet for those trying to make ends meet. Here, the homeless man collecting trash, paint canisters, scrapped metal awnings, and wooden dowels during the day becomes a drummer – a show artist by night.

Perhaps it is time to rethink and understand the cultural dynamics of the street level market – to pursue the task Duneier or Venkatesh once took in their work ‘Sidewalks’ or ‘Off the Books’ (respectively). Given contemporary conditions, individuals ushered out of the formal market may be taking to places of abandonment and opportunity. Here, space itself can be interpreted as offering a dualism. Spaces and cityscapes which marginalize economic immobility may be offering a major outlet for survival and growth.

While the street, block, and intersection may present opportunity for those looking to ‘better’ their conditions, these are also spaces of intense scrutiny.  In efforts to maintain a certain aesthetic and a sense of safety, those taking to the street find themselves under constant examination and surveillance – perhaps even being forced to take their dealings somewhere else. Once turned out by declines in the economy, they may also undergo further marginalization as a result of their taking to the street.

* Read: John Michael Roberts. (2008). Public Spaces of Dissent.Sociology Compass.

* Read: James Martin. (2007). Space and the State. Sociology Compass.

* Read: Sam Binkly. (2007). Governmentality and Lifestyle Studies. Sociology Compass.

By Dr. Jessica Hodge

Even though I am aware of the flaws with the FBI’s Hate Crime Statistics report, I still look forward to seeing the report every year as this is the closest thing we have to official national statistics. As someone who studies the subject, I am always interested to see how the numbers have changed in comparison to previous years’ reports. For example, I can see what types of bias crimes are most common across the country, and whether the type of crime (e.g., property crime vs. violent crime) differs depending upon the type of bias motivation (i.e., whether the crimes were motivated by the victims’ race, religion, sexual orientation, etc.). However, this year, I am particularly anxious to see the report, so much so, that I have been checking the FBI’s website almost daily. Why do you ask? Well, good question!

Part of the misunderstanding of anarchism may stem from the great diversity of both thought and practice that falls into the category of anarchism. Anarchist thought spans a continuum from extreme individualist versions, which stem from a philosophy of the complete sovereignty of the individual and her property over the state or groups and communities, and resembles what we think of as libertarianism, to social variants. (Individualist anarchism is mainly theoretical in the sense that it has rarely been part of anarchist social movements.) In social versions of anarchy, individual freedom depends on equality, community and mutual aid. Private property, as the source of inequality, is undesirable, and decisions should be made democratically. Versions of (and nomenclature for) anarchism have proliferated: anarcho-syndicalism, anarcho-capitalism, anarcho-communism, anarcha-feminism, anarcho-naturism, Christian anarchism, post-left anarchism. (For explanations of each of these, try here.)

The main principle, however, is an opposition to centrally governed, state-based societies in favor of non-hierarchical voluntary association. In one of its most utopian formulations, Emma Goldman argued in Anarchism and Other Essays that “Anarchism stands for a social order based on the free grouping of individuals for the purpose of producing real social wealth; an order that will guarantee to every human being free access to the earth and full enjoyment of the necessities of life, according to individual desires, tastes, and inclinations.” Different types of anarchists have historically disagree on the tactics that should be employed toward social change: many advocate non-violent forms of resistance, while others support coercion through violence or propaganda. As Drake Bennett writes, a central tenet of modern anarchism is that “revolutionary movements relying on coercion of any kind only result in repressive societies.”

Reporters covering Occupy Wall Street have observed anarchist thought and principles in the protest. In a recent essay in The New York Review of Books, Michael Greenberg related his interactions with some of the organizers he met at Zuccotti Park. Some of the these organizers, he observed, seemed guided toward a kind of faith and optimism, part of which “seemed to derive from the fact that anarchism, as they loosely conceived of it, had hardly been tried. It offered a process of mutual cooperation, not ideologies or even fixed goals.” Occupy Wall Street’s General Assembly structure, which lacks hierarchy among participants and is based on consensus decision making, draws on principles of anarchism.

And media attention to the role of David Graeber, an academic anthropologist and anarchist activist who recently published a expansive history of debt, in the organization of the protests, and in discussions of Occupy Wall Street, have highlighted anarchist thought as well. (For his dissertation, Graeber studied a rural community in Madagascar that the central government abandoned in the aftermath of IMF-imposed spending cuts. Graeber found that the community of 10,000 created an egalitarian social system governed by consensus.)

Regardless of whether you think the philosophical basis of anarchism is valuable, for many people, anarchism necessarily fails in the execution. As Bennett reports in his article on Graeber, economist Tyler Cowen found Graeber’s recent work on the history of debt persuasive. Anarchism however, makes less sense to Cowen, who “sees little alternative to the modern state. ‘Look at Somalia. If there’s a vacuum, something has to fill it.’” Graeber acknowledges such a sentiment: “’Most people don’t think anarchism is a bad idea. They think it’s insane’…Yeah, sure it would be great not to have prisons and police and hierarchical structures of authority, but everybody would just start killing each other. That wouldn’t work, right?’ Graeber’s father, however, had seen it work. ‘So it wasn’t insane. I was never brought up to think it was insane.’”

When I first visited Occupy Wall Street in September, I was struck by how much energy went into sustaining the community itself as opposed to developing strategic plans, or formulating policy recommendations. But understanding the threads of anarchism present in the OWS protests (though, of course, not everyone in the core of the protests are anarchists), helped me understand that at least for some participants in OWS, the entire goal was to create an egalitarian community governed by consensus in part as a demonstration that such a thing was possible and preferable. Formulating policy recommendations for the state to act on does not make sense in an anarchist framework: policies are state tools for action. If you do not believe the state should organize social life, then proposing tools for the state are not even in the realm of consideration.

In my next post, I’ll discuss more of the history of anarchism in social movements, the forms of social organization advocated by anarchism as a replacement for the state, and what a sociological account of ideas can tell us about the philosophy behind anarchism.

More about anarchism and individualist anarchism.

Image by arimoore.

President Obama receives the script from his recent Mic Checking

Author’s Note: This piece was originally posted to Sociology Lens on December 10th. On December 13th, the piece was temporarily removed and I was asked to make revisions to make more explicit the conventional sociological themes in this piece. This request was made as the result of pressure from a senior professor who deemed this piece too “polemical” and not “sociological.” While I and many others in the discipline have epistemological objections to very concept of value-free social science, and thus view with suspicion any implication that sociology can be separated from politics, I agreed to make revisions, because I think that argument in this piece important and can only be strengthened by further reference to the social theory canon. The downside is that the post is now less accessible to a popular audience than it was originally intended to be, so I have archived a copy of the original here. Finally, I must note that, while examining power is, perhaps, the oldest and most important task of sociology, it is (and has always been) political by nature.

A recent news piece for Inside Higher Ed reports on several instances where students have disrupted public presentations by conservative academics, activists, or politicians. The students used “the human microphone”—i.e., a practice of amplifying a speaker’s voice by having many people repeat the speaker’s words in unison—to offer counterpoints to the arguments being made by the presenter. The article’s author, Allie Grasgreen, asserts that the mic checking the conservative presenters is tantamount to “censorship.” This assertion shares the logic of what Karl Rove demanded when he was mic checked at John Hopkins:

If you believe in free speech and you have a chance to show it… if you believe in the right of the First Amendment to free speech… then you demonstrate it by shutting up and waiting until the Q&A session… line up behind the mic…

Click here to view the embedded video.

But Grasgreen and Rove both miss the point. Occupiers are trying to demonstrate—through the very performance of this act—that “free speech” is not evenly distributed. The point is that only the 1% ever find themselves at the podium. The 99% are left to fill the seats in the audience, and, if they are lucky, they may have the chance to do as Rove commands and line up behind the mic for a few brief seconds in the spotlight. This is, of course, because the opportunity to speak and to be heard is inextricable from issues of wealth and power. The few who hold these assets in abundance have more purchasing power in the attention economy. K Street is nothing if not an industrialized machine for converting money and power into speech that will be heard. Sure, we all may have “free speech,” but as George Orwell quipped in Animal Farm “some animals are more equal than others.”

The problem with the current discourse surrounding “free speech,” as it pertains to the Occupy movement, is that it has been cast in a radically conservative tone—it is backward looking, towards the white, male, and aristocratic thinkers of the Enlightenment who did not have to worry about power because they already had it. The tendency is to assume that, despite all the evidence to the contrary, we all somehow have equal access to the public sphere. Sociology has long been antagonistic to this concept of free speech, instead, viewing speech (an the knowledge embedded within it) as intimately tied to power. As C.W. Mills famously noted in his (1956) The Power Elite:

American men of power tend, by convention, to deny that they are powerful [...] So firm a part of the style of power-wielding have they become that conservative writers readily misinterpret them as indicating a trend toward an ‘amorphous power situation.” [...] But the “power situation” of America to is less amorphous than is the perspective of those who see it as a romantic confusion. It is less a flat, momentary ‘situation’ than a graded, durable structure. [...] It is the form and the height of the gradation of power that we must examine if we would understand the degree of power held and exercised by the elites.

In short, Mills is saying we are a society comprised of institutions (most importantly, military, political, and financial institutions) and our positions within these institutions determine the levels of power and influence we have. These institutions perpetuate historical inequalities, transmitting unequal power relations across generations. Mills goes on to connect link power and freedom, saying, “[m]oney provides power and power provides freedom.” Mills highlights the mistake of talking about freedom in binary “free or unfree” terms. Freedom of speech, like all freedom, has many dimensions and gradations. When we say “free speech” we really mean “free political speech.” For political speech to be meaningful, it requires attention, which is a finite resource—and, a resource that has been marketized. Attention goes to the highest bidder—the person with most economic, social,  cultural, or symbolic capital to trade  (as Pierre Boudieu would say). More recent theorists have termed these conditions “the attention economy.” This economy is an ever-shifting field where those already in power seek to consolidate their position by establishing exclusionary practices (i.e., a habitus) that distinguish them from others and continue to draw attention their way. Those who control institutions get to write the rules and the rules will always ensure that they are heard at the expense of others.

Michel Foucault made a similar argument from a historical perspective. In his (post-)structuralist interpretation of history, various chronological epochs—discursive regimes as he sometimes called them—are define by the relationship between power and the articulation of certain situated knowledges. Foucault obseved that certain ideas, speakers, and media had more traction than others at any given point in history.  For example, the pronouncement of the  priest may hold sway in one era, but be almost insignificant compared to the written records of the clinic in another era. When we speak, we are always implicitly invoking our institutional position. As I write this piece, I am ever-conscious of the fact professors will read it as the work of a grad student. In some countries, it is even customary to ask the age of a speaker before listening to his/her argument. We might also consider observations in intersectional works like Black Feminist Thought, where Patricia Hill Collins demonstrates that being black and being women makes one’s voice less likely be heard, regardless of content. Only those at the very top have the luxury of (naïvely) assuming their speech is interpreted on its own intrinsic merits. The world is not flat (Thomas Friedman not withstanding); those at the top of the hill have an easier time projecting their voices.

We must ask ourselves: Who benefits from the belief that we have equal access to political speech? The obvious answer: Those who already control it. Marx recognized long ago that those in power benefit when they can convince others to adopt an ideology that reinforces their own position. When it comes to free speech, America appears to have fallen into a state of “false consciousness,” where we blissfully deny that the obvious lack of representation that most of us experience. How can we, in good faith, claim equal access to political speech in light of the Supreme Court’s recent Citizens United decision, which makes the linkage between access to money and access to speech de jure and not merely de facto? American politics is explicitly and affirmatively runs on a pay to play model. Were this not true, the lack of competitive elections and the sham that is modern broadcast media would render most political speech irrelevant anyway. Occupy’s mic check tactic is controversial because it challenges the prevailing ideology that political speech is uniformly accessible. It is performative critique: The voiceless demand a voice and are immediate silenced via institution mechanisms of force and coercion. It is for us academics to articulate the argument, the Occupiers have done their part in demonstrating it.

Importantly, this criticism of contemporary discourse surrounding free speech is not new. There are many detractors to those who believe that the de jure existence of the First Amendment (or its analogs in other countries) as well as some basic democratic institutions somehow guarantee de facto equal representation in public discourse. Thinkers such as Jürgen Habermas who cling to idealistic Enlightenment conceptions of radically free, rational, and (as Charles Taylor describes) “atomistic” individuals have been criticized by commentators with communitarian, neo-Marxist, feminist, post-Modern, and many other backgrounds. Many of these critics have argued that the only way to challenge system characterized by systematic exclusion is from without. Habermas’s mentor, Herbert Marcuse, for example, called for a “Great Refusal” by those on the margins. Similarly, Audre Lourde argued that “[t]he master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” Occupy’s mic check strategy embodies this sort of theoretical perspective, seeking to rupture the norms of public discourse to which they have been systematically denied inclusion.

What we need is an updated notion of free speech that accounts not only for negative freedom (i.e., freedom from constraints) but also for positive freedom (i.e., freedom to be recognized) as well. That is to say, for the right to free (political) speech to have a practical significance, it must also imply a right of equal access to the public sphere. Of course, there are practical limits to equal access. Attention given to one individual or group comes at the expense of attention to others. But what the Occupy movement seems to be rejecting is the current (arguably anti-democratic) reality where distribution of access is left to be determined by market forces. Occupiers are struggling for the democratization of political speech. The primary purpose of Occupy’s use of the human microphone at public speaking events is not to disrupt, but to be heard. It is not an assault on free speech but a tactic for obtaining it.

To fully understand extent of and limits to free speech, we must also examine the justifications used when suppressing the activists’ attempts at having their voices heard. The police who interrupt these mic checks are often publicly valorized as protecting free speech. Such claims are naïve, if not outright deceptive. The real reason why universities break up these actions is because they want to preserve and protect the routine operation of the bureaucracy; it has little to do with freedom and is, instead, about rationalization (what sociologist Max Weber described as the tendency of Modern bureaucratic institutions to value efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control above all else). We should not conflate the maintenance of order and the protection of institutional reputation (zwecktrational action) with struggles motivated by the pursuit of an abstract ideal of freedom (wertrational action).

It is also important to recognize that the logic of this debate over access and control extends beyond issues of free speech and the human microphone. Political opponents have made similar criticisms of the Occupy movement’s tactic of indefinite encampment on (often privately-owned) public spaces. These detractors have argued that by camping in a public space, Occupiers are, simultaneously, denying others the freedom to use that space. Again, this concept of freedom is blind to power. Like speech, space is not evenly distributed. If the mic check tactic aims at the democratization of speech, encampments aim at the democratization of space. Occupiers are protesting a society in which the town square has given way to the shopping mall.  The encampments are, in part, a statement about the forfeiture of public space to the private sector—that is, out of the hands of the 99% and into the hands of the 1%. Absence of public space precludes public assembly. The thought of protests on Las Vegas’ sidewalk-less strips is difficult to entertain. Systematic denial of space is also systematic denial of speech. For this reason, claims that the encampments constitute a denial of their freedom to assemble (especially when articulated by those who already control the vast majority of the space) ring hollow.

Both critics and journalists will sound hopelessly out of touch so long as they continue to apply to Occupy the very concept of freedom that the movement is criticizing. Occupy affirms what Cicero observed long ago: “Freedom is participation in power.” While this aphorism may be a bit simplistic, it is certainly true that a concept of freedom that is blind to power merely serves to reinforce it.

Follow PJ on Twitter: @pjrey

At the time, I was 24 years old. And I was then, and am still, White, middle class, and privileged with access to credentials, to a career I loved and identified with, and to a car to get me to and from it all. I stood in front of students, many of whom were decades my senior, many of whom worked multiple jobs, many of whom rode multiple buses to get to those jobs and even more buses to get to our class. Many of them communicated in multiple languages, including English, which they learned by listening to and engaging with people. What they needed from our class was support in, and practice with, the codes of the written English language.
As semesters went on, I cavalierly kept on asking the question that elicited the my-from-is answer – a question that was all too simple for me: Where are you from? And with the unwitting ease that comes from privilege, I would model the grammatical response: “I am from North Carolina.” But in the rest of my everyday life as a professional, credentialed native speaker, I could be from North Carolina, and all that that entails in terms of accent, word choice, rhythm. Many of my students had lived in the vicinity of our DC metro area school far longer than I had. They had families here—children, grandchildren – friends, co-workers, religious communities. They were of this place and of the places they had been before. And to say “my country is…” necessitated a choice between country of origin and country of residence – a choice that may have felt like a false one. Their “from” was something multiple and hybrid and complex – too personal to fit into a prepositional phrase. Grammar bends for identity.

I’m thinking about this now because this is the time of year when there never seems to be a shortage of declarations about what exactly has defined the past twelve months. For example, news blogs declare whose words count as the year’s “best essays“; linguists and other “assembled experts” hunt for a “word of the year.”

But whose words make it to these lists? And whose ideas and experiences represented within them? Whose creativity do they recognize, and whose do they pass over? I write these as real questions – questions that I hope  others might want to launch a conversation from…

I visited the movement in Chicago, IL, Atlanta, GA, Lansing, MI and Washington, D.C., all in late October and early November when the police intervention was only beginning. In Chicago, the movement “headquarters” was located at the Federal Reserve building. Camping was not allowed in Chicago, so people hanged out all day then went home. Many got back up and returned again the next day. This differentiates this portion of the movement from others I personally witnessed, and those I viewed through the media. It seems that there has been a focus in the press on the tent cities that have popped up all over the U.S. as a main source of “the problem,”  which has shifted the issue surrounding free speech to one of public health concerns. As these “tent cities” are now being dismantled in many cities, we may wonder whether the movement will be able to sustain itself without such a visible and widespread physical presence. Consider that Joel Best (1999) notes that activists are most likely to succeed when they take ownership of a prospective social problem; this occurs only if they succeed at attracting and maintaining mainstream media attention on the issue in hopes of pressuring policy-makers to take action. Lacking the visible spectacle of the tent cities, the question emerges whether an otherwise unstructured collective of Occupy movements can maintain the requisite amounts of public visibility to remain in the larger social consciousness.

Given these long-term viability concerns, I spoke with quite a few people at Chicago movement regarding why they kept returning day after day. Overall, they continued to return because of the passion and energy of the movement. When I inquired as to what was their personal purpose in joining the movement, I received, of course, a multitude of responses. Many truly believed that something/anything needed to be done; some folks were interested in anarchy; others wanted fair trade or labor practices to be required of businesses; still others wanted “the imprisonment of the top people at corporations, who exploit the worker and rob the tax payer.” This particular movement marched to the Congress Hotel from the Federal Reserve building in order to join America’s longest union strike (since 2003). After that, they marched down to Trader Joe’s to protest unfair labor practices and then returned to the reserve building, where many went home only to return the next day.

What I also found interesting was the diversity of the movement in Chicago. I met professors, students, working class folk, homeless veterans, people of different colors, and people of different sizes. I also watched the media beeline it to the shortest person who sported some blue hair. Indeed, the sensationalism in the story results from the extreme pictures and opinions, which is what I see when I watch the news, and is not unlike the popular reduction of the Tea Party Movement into a cascade of racist imagery and overtures. Still, what I saw in this sea of faces was a diverse group of people that, while participating for different reasons, all shared an underlying cause. Yet, as I seek to discuss the emergent social makeup of the entire movement and not just a sum of its parts, we are all left to consider whether social movements themselves, and the very viability of grassroots protest more generally, are as fundamentally tied to sympathetic mass media presentations as they were in the days before Twitter, Facebook, smart phones, and the Internet itself.

Further Reading:

Best, Joel. (1999). Random Violence: How We Talk About New Crimes and New Victims. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Gitlin, Todd. (1980) The Whole World is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Reiman, Jeffrey and Paul Leighton. (2010). The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison: Ideology, Class, and Criminal Justice (9th ed.) Boston: Allyn & Bacon.

Photo courtesy: David Shankbone (http://blog.shankbone.org/2011/10/18/the-littlest-occupy-wall-street-protester/)

Rebecca Hayes is an assistant professor of Social and Criminal Justice at Central Michigan University. Her recent work includes researching media representations of gender and race, and research on student disclosures of sexual/dating violence to professors. Her passion is firmly ensconced in the realm of public criminology and the majority of her spare time is spent assisting in the fight against violence against women.

Like every scandal or tragedy, news reporters have called this a teachable moment.  Here I want to consider how such a case is teachable for sociologists.  I am somewhat hesitant about these kinds of events.  After all, one case does not make a social trend or constitute the kind of empirical evidence from which sociologists make claims about society.  In addition, social claims do not automatically predict or explain single incidents.  Indeed, I consistently remind students that to make such assumptions is a misuse of sociology.  So, after spending the semester explaining the sociological imagination how can I use a single case as a teachable moment?

I won’t review all the grim details here but instead focus on two oft-mentioned concerns.  The first is why no one reported these incidents to the police and the second, why Penn State students protested and rioted, not over the possible cover up of child rape, but over the firing of their football coach.

Much of the debate in the media over the first issue has involved individual moral evaluations – of Coach Paterno, the grad assistant who said he witnessed the rape, and the individuals whose legal duty it was to report the accusations to the police.  Without delving into a psychological profile of the individuals involved and weighing in on attempts by many to antiseptically quarantine certain individuals from the “true villains,” I believe that I can point to some features of our society that make these events more likely.

If we move away from the speculative noise surrounding this specific incident, we should note that rape is one of the most under-reported crimes in our society.  This under-reporting is, in large part, due to the widespread assumption that rape victims, even children, are not blameless.  Victim-blaming is a well-documented piece of what scholars refer to as “rape culture.” Victim-blaming contributes to rape because it allows rapists to partially legitimize their own behavior, but also because it contributes to the silence around rape as victims internalize the idea that they bear some responsibility.  A conscious cover up complete with damning emails documenting threats and payments of hush money may emerge in this one case, but such cover ups are not the reason that so many sexual assaults go unreported.  When others know or suspect rape or sexual assault a conspiracy of silence is more likely.

Similarly, the response of Penn State students who appeared to care more about their football team than innocent children is likely less a case of misplaced priorities of an immoral group of people and more about collective identity under siege.  The Penn State football program and the icon of Coach Joe Paterno were symbols of the community of Penn Staters.  Paterno, and the team, served a similar function as the totem in Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life by symbolizing the community and its values.  While not condoning or excusing such behavior we should seek to understand how collective identity forms and the risks associated with the kind of mini-nationalism that sometimes develop around college football.

By looking at these larger cultural features as potential explanations not just for the single case at Penn State but for cases like Penn State, we can better understand how the culture and structure of our society conditions outcomes like the Penn State case.  My training as a sociologist provides me no more insight into what exactly happened in this particular case then any random poster on an internet blog.  However, looking to the larger social forces that condition social problems allows us all to move beyond individual moral blame, which while certainly warranted in this case, is far too limited in its ability to understand social problems.  Ameliorating rape and the silence around it is a social problem that calls for social solutions not simply individual moral judgments.

Further Reading:

“Rethinking Gender and Violence: Agency, Heterogeneity, and Intersectionality” by S.J. Creek and Jennifer L. Dunn Sociology Compass

“Accounting for Victimization: Social Constructionist Perspectives” by Jennifer L. Dunn Sociology Compass

Sociologists Will Kalkhoff, Joseph Dippong, and Stanford Gregory, Jr. in their Sociology Compass article “The Biosociology of Solidarity,” make two interventions regarding the role of neuroscience in the social sciences: first, social scientists should take findings from neuroscience seriously (as others including Freese et al. 2003 and Massey 2002, have argued about biological evidence in general) in order to understand the mechanisms underpinning large social processes such as social solidarity. Second, the brain should be seen as a “dependent variable whose structure and function is strongly influenced by sociocultural factors throughout adulthood” (942); the goal of “biosociology” (not to be confused with sociobiology) is to understand how the interaction of biological factors and other types of factors produces behavior.

In order to understand solidarity—feelings of interpersonal connectedness or membership—we need to understand what happens physically when individuals interact with one another, the authors argue. Small-scale processes involving the brain within interactions affect the feelings we have about the interaction, and the other person or people involved. The authors take Simmel’s proposition that “society is the result of ‘countless minor syntheses’”(945) as a starting point, and marshal evidence, for example, that we adjust the rhythm and tone of our voice in conversation to match the other person. When these nonverbal vocal cues are eliminated, the quality of the interaction declines (Gregory 1983; Gregory et al. 1997). Electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings indicate that during interactions, skeletal muscular electrical activity between individuals becomes synchronized (Condon and Ogston 1967). (Recent work using fMRI by neuroscientist Uri Hasson suggests a parallel finding: the pattern of neural response of an individual listening to another person tell a story becomes similar to that of the storyteller. The more neural coupling there is between the listener and the storyteller, the greater the reported comprehension of the story.) I would also throw in the large literature on the role of mimicry in interactions, an excellent of review of which is here.

Importantly, when we treat synchronized brain activity as a mechanism by which interactions might improve or deteriorate, the role of the brain becomes non-deterministic. The question becomes whether or not synchronicity is achieved, and if so, how it changes the interaction. The implication is that when quality of the interaction is improved, the possibility of feelings of solidarity increases. (This line of inquiry parallels that of Randall Collins, who calls the feelings and motivation generated in interaction “emotional energy,” and theorizes that the affect and emotional energy produced in interactions scales to larger phenomena because social life is a concatenation of “interaction ritual chains.”)

The authors discuss three areas of brain research they find particularly intriguing for sociologists in general, but especially for sociologists interested in coordination and cohesion, or failures thereof: mirror neurons, nonconscious cognitive processes, and neural plasticity. Mirror neurons fire both when an individual performs an action, and when the individual sees others perform that action. As such, they facilitate understanding of joint action as occurs in interactions, and may be implicated in what we call empathy. Cognitive processes that proceed below our conscious awareness, often referred to as automatic processes, are a much larger part of our psychological life than we may realize. These nonconscious processes may be particularly relevant to how we perceive and adapt to others in interactions. And finally, scientists have known that the brain adapts to its environment at many levels, from neurons and synapses to entire cortical regions, but recent findings have demonstrated neural change and growth well into adulthood.

At least part of the “biophobia” around incorporating biology into social science is due to the lingering scars from historical claims with political implications: social Darwinism, eugenics, intelligence testing. New evidence regarding the plasticity of the brain in adulthood provides fertile ground for exploring the feedback mechanisms between the brain and social context that avoids these older, deterministic approaches.

Will Kalkhoff, Joseph Dippong, and Stanford Gregory, Jr. 2011. “The Biosociology of Solidarity.” Sociology Compass 5: 936-948.

(Image from Art off the grid)

Later, Jeremy Bentham (1789), in effort to progress this thinking, formalized deterrence theory. He, similar to Beccaria, proposed that as the (1) celerity, (2) certainty, and (3) severity of punishment increase, crime would decrease. While each were thought to enhance the deterrence aspect of punishment, all three were considered necessary so long as they were employed fairly. By viewing individuals as rational actors, Beccaria and Bentham posit that criminality would occur less once individuals calculate in these principles of deterrence and punishment.

More recently, scholars have noticed that the perception of certain punishment is most influential for reducing crime (Paternoster, 1989). While improving due process and intensifying criminal sanctions may enhance swiftness and severity, increasing certainty is a bit more problematic. So, the question then becomes: How does the criminal justice system enhance the perception of certain detection and punishment of criminal activity. Traditionally, this has translated into tightening criminal statutes, intensify crime control efforts, and building more prisons. However, this has been less than effective and scholars are starting to take note of conditions that may be altering the very principles of deterrence and how it is carried out.

Beck (1992) and Giddens (1990, 1991), for example, argue that “risk has become a central, generalized preoccupation, to the extent that it is configuring contemporary institutions and contemporary consciousness” (Hudson, 2003: 43). As a result, crime control efforts have made predicting, identifying, and managing irrational risks a central objective (Erikson, 2007; Simon, 2007). However, as the state intensifies its energies to control risk and ensure safety, it, in turn, exposes its own limits to do so. As a result, the state now relies on more excessive forms of social control that lie beyond its reach. Individuals now face an unprecedented “culture of control” (Garland, 2000); including a growing hybrid between state authority and social regulation. Deterrence, now, no longer rests within the responsibilities of the state – it has become a task of and for the individual to carry out.

May we be seeing a new wave or perhaps a new form of deterrence? As individuals become more aware of risk and pursue safeguards against harm, do they play a more active role in the operation of deterrence? Today, we can buy extravagant surveillance\ systems which now monitor sidewalks, houses, and schools. Crime control has become an industry that people can buy into to secure their lives in ways that the state cannot.

Perhaps more fitting – are we seeing the internalization of deterrence/control? Similar to Cooley’s ‘looking glass self’ and Mead’s ‘generalized other’, individuals are being increasingly tasked with self-monitoring – a practice which places the responsibility of ensuring safety and security on the individual rather than the state. That is, are individuals internalizing what was once the goal of the state; to reduce harmful activity in attempts to keep its citizens safe in their daily lives? This begs the question, has the notion of deterrence changed given current social conditions?

Read: Anderson, B. & Brown, M. (2010). Expanding Horizons of Risk in Criminology. Sociology Compass, 4(8):  544-554.

Read: Garland, D. (1996). The Limits of the Sovereign State: Stratagies of Crime Control in Contemporary Society. British Journal of Criminology, 36(4): 445-471.

Hazare is the most public face of an active social movement regarding government corruption in India that has included conferences, investigations and judicial action, formal complaints, and protests. Many middle class Indians, who are often considered politically apathetic (I don’t know whether or not this actually the case), have participated in the protests; their participation is seen as representing serious public will behind anti-corruption measures. (The organization behind many of the events over the last couple of years, India Against Corruption, has U.S. branches in many states, including New Jersey and New York.)

But, despite the ostensibly pro-social goal of reducing and eventually eliminating corruption, there is skepticism regarding both the bill and the movement around it. Novelist and activist Arundhati Roy has argued that because the anti-corruption movement is funded by the World Bank and private foundations (e.g. the Ford Foundation) presumably in the interest of promoting international commerce, the motivations behind the movement are suspect. (Hazare has also received money from right-wing Hindu nationalist groups.) Additionally, she argues, the bill creates a “panel oligarchy” of ten non-democratically chosen elites. Others have questioned the exact nature of the body created by the legislation, to whom it is accountable, the extent of its judicial powers and its relationship with the courts, and whether it is extra-constitutional.

Both the public demonstrations in support of anti-corruption measures and the criticism of the Jan Lokpal bill illustrate just how serious, and how slippery, a problem corruption is. It is slippery on many fronts: hard to define, hard to measure, hard to change.

Take the recent example of ticket fixing in the New York Police Department. Police officers routinely changed the parking tickets of their friends and family members so that they did not have to pay the fines. In the aftermath of the charges, several former police officers have discussed how widespread, common, and accepted this practice was for several decades. They discussed how their superior officers demanded that they fix tickets for individuals from powerful constituencies, or the City Council staff members. Not only were police officers not charged for doing this, but they were occasionally punished if they did not participate. Of course, what the officers were doing was explicitly illegal; some might see their actions as violating moral codes of conduct, while others might argue that it was a simple perk of the job to which they were entitled. (One might debate why these officers are being prosecuted for ticket fixing at this point in time, given that ticket fixing was a common practice for so long; perhaps because so many officers were involved and the evidence was particularly strong, perhaps because some officers were involved in other criminal activities (the initial investigation was launched in response to a report that an officer was protecting a drug dealer), or perhaps because the revenue source provided by parking tickets is now more important to the city than previously because of the recession.)

The ambiguity around the example of ticket fixing (if indeed you see any ambiguity) illustrates sociologist Mark Granovetter’s argument in his paper, “The Social Construction of Corruption,” that the local meanings and norms attached to transactions are very important in understanding and defining corruption. A good deal of social scientific writing on corruption focuses on how individual incentives make corruption more or less likely, Granovetter notes. In these accounts, the creation of such incentives and the social and cultural apparatus supporting such incentives is often neglected. Plenty of types of transactions can be codified as illegal, but if the individuals involved in the transactions see them as legitimate, as part of the rights and rewards of an organizational position or role, then they will be very difficult to change.

For example, few people would consider bringing sweets and other gifts to employees of an archive in Egypt in order to facilitate access to documents to be bribery. Instead, they understand these behaviors as part of the local context in which gifts to officials are basic norms. Local context, and individuals’ perceptions of the prevalence and social acceptability of transactions, are essential to both understanding what is locally considered corruption, what effect certain forms of corruption may have, and how to change corrupt practices. We call transactions we consider illegitimate corruption; but determinations of legitimacy and illegitimacy depend on a good deal more than general moral standards. This is not to argue for extreme relativism regarding corruption, but to point out that there is a lot of ambiguity in practice in the transactions that take place between officials and non-officials. (See Granovetter’s paper for a number of great examples and a nuanced discussion of how the relationship between transaction partners (the status differences between the individuals involved) and the social context of transactions (market vs. network-based), in addition to different standards for embezzlement and bribery, contribute to the sense of transactions as legitimate or illegitimate.)

Each year, Transparency International puts together a “Corruption Perceptions Index,” a country-level measure of perceptions of the “misuse of public power for private benefit” using a variety of surveys of the opinions of individuals involved in business or performance assessments from analysts. In 2010, India received a score of 3.3 on a scale of 10, similar to China, Greece, and Peru (all with scores of 3.5), above countries like Iraq (1.5), Sudan (1.6), Russian (2.1) and Paraguay (2.2), and below countries like Turkey (4.4), Malaysia (4.4), Poland (5.3), and South Korea (5.4). But the measure is subject to a good deal of criticism for a lack of standardization, incomplete data collection across countries, and changing methodology between years which makes it hard to compare across years. Two critiques are more fundamentally damaging, however. One argues that by virtue of whose opinions and analyses are included in the index, the perceptions index captures mainly the perceptions of (often Western European and American) business elites. Not only might these individuals use particular definitions of corruption, but presumably they are focused on corruption in areas related to conducting business; they are likely unaware of corruption in other areas of life. Another critique points out that there is evidence that perceptions of corruption and the actual experience of corruption are very different—this measure does not take into account the impact of corruption on everyday lives and without that, it is difficult to understand exactly what consequences corruption has. The experience of corruption of the type where telephone company workers demanding additional payment for installing a telephone line might be very different, and have different political consequences, than governors offering senate seats for a fee, to take a not-so-hypothetical example, or when local officials require international corporations to use a particular local construction company.

In addition to these problems of definition and measurement, there the additional issue of the political use of corruption charges. As historian William Gould reminds us, charges of corruption have been utilized strategically for political purposes in India, in particular during periods of rapid political transition as during the first General Election of 1951-52. Corruption charges have been wielded in the service of questioning the role of government and current leaders. (Gould also has an interesting discussion of the legacy of the British colonial bureaucracy in shaping corrupt transactions in India. Gould writes, “conditions of colonial rule by a western power in India largely exacerbated certain forms of corruption, by basing power on particular kinds of authoritarian administrative structures. These structures allowed a whole range of public servants to effectively allow corrupt transactions to continue, since government was not accountable.”)

These issues drastically complicate understanding corruption as people experience it, and tackling those transactions between officials and citizens that are most harmful to individuals’ lives.

For more corruption-related readings, see:

“Globalization and Corruption.” WARNER, CAROLYN. The Blackwell Companion to Globalization. Ritzer, George (ed). Blackwell Publishing, 2007  OR Corrupt Exchanges: Empirical Themes in the Politics and Political Economy of Corruption. Della Porta, D. and Rose-Ackerman, S. (eds), 2002.

(Photo by Pushkar V)

Following Foucault, there can be little doubt that the medical field has garnered power and authority in today’s society. Its utility and influence can be found in school immunizations, sports-related physicals, annual check-ups, seasonal vaccinations, yearly shots, and the like. However, as Conrad (2007) notes, this is only part of the picture. He, among others, proposes that the medical field has grown beyond shots and treatment; those in the medical profession now have the authority to define and/or redefine once thought non-medical issues as medical conditions.

Conrad (2007) defines this as the process of  ‘medicalization,’ wherein non-medical issues are defined and treated medically as an illness or disorder. He highlights that the range of behaviours constructed as an illness warranting both the pervasive gaze of medical personnel and prescribed treatment has increased since the 1950s. Phelan (2005) and Courtwright (2010) add to this by discussing “geneticization” and, more specifically, how this process is re-shaping social problems. As the medical framework expands and gains authority over social problems, definitions change, different prescriptions are written, and alternative practices are adopted to abate social ills.

This process of ‘medicalization’ can be seen in the historical development of homosexuality, attention deficit disorder (ADD and ADHD), and even depression (Conrad, 2007). For the authors, the growing interest in medicine to explain behaviour was unavoidable given the rise of (1) improved medical instrumentation, (2) new laboratory techniques, (3) substantial monetary grants, and (4) improvements in research. Interestingly, behaviors once considered criminal or deviant are now being examined using medical lenses, defined employing medical definitions, and treated medicinally. Armed with growing support, medical authority, and political backing, the medical paradigm has become a major voice within the crime and deviance debate.

While medicalization has been interpreted as another form of control over the social and physical body, the gaining influence of the medical field has produced an intriguing dynamic. Conrad and Schneider (1980) discuss the importance of securing authority over defining behaviors and persons. Now, the criminal justice system and medical profession compete for this authority – contending that their own definition over actions is the more proper. Behaviors once thought criminal can now be medicalized, ushered into the realm of medicine, and removed from their criminal implication by being redefined as a medical pathology. As the medical field grows and the criminal justice system defends its legitimacy – a contested space is created; actions can now become medicalized or criminalized.

Read: Anderson, Swan, & Lane. (2010). Insititutional Fads and the Medicalization of Drug Addiction. Sociology Compass, 4(7): 476-494.

In the end, the Chronicle headlined the outage as more of a “brownout” than a “blackout,” and NPR corroborated that conclusion with sound bites from students describing increased text messaging and some tenacious hacking. Even Jimmy Fallon jumped in on the analysis in his late-night comedy show, quipping: “Check this out: A college in Pennsylvania is blocking computer access to social-networking sites for an entire week, and then requiring the students to write an essay about the experience. Yep. The essay will be called, ‘We all have smart phones, dumb-ass.’” Nevertheless, campus officials declared the experiment a success with in-house surveys revealing that 33% of the private university’s 822 students reported feeling less stressed during the week of the outage and 21% stating they’d spent more time doing homework. These were happy fringe benefits, however, as the primary objective of the project had been somewhat more metaphysical—encouraging students to “push, prod, question and generally explore social media.” Or, as one speaker invited to campus during the week of the ban put it, to encourage dialogue around the question of:

“Why are we posting on Facebook? Why are we sharing, why are we disclosing in this way and for what purpose? Many people are already in the habit of, ‘I have to go post on Facebook, I have to go see what’s happening, I have to update my status.’ Why? You don’t have to…”

Last year I asked my Introductory Sociology students to approach this discussion from a different starting point—starting with how they actually used social media—and how they were using it to make and share meaning in their daily lives. For 24-hours, students recorded their social media interactions in written logs, describing what they did (texting, updating a status, sending a message, posting a photo, commenting on a photo, “liking” a comment, replying to a comment, tweeting, re-tweeting, and so on) and the context in which the action took place (home, dorm room, living room, classroom [alas!]), and reflecting briefly on what they felt about the interaction at the time (for example: “I hate that picture of me, so I untagged it”). I compiled the logs into a “data package” that they could read and reflect on before coming together in groups to discuss what they saw as emerging themes—meanings that they seemed to share about how they and their classmates were using social media in their daily lives.

What follows—with many thanks to my students!—is one approach to that oft-repeated wail of “WHY! Why are students posting/ tweeting/ texting status updating?” But social media use doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It happens in a social context. Structures, disciplinary practices, cultural understandings, and interpersonal relationships shape interactions in any context. For these students, the classroom stood out as one particular context that created a need for social media use. In my own research, I argue that this is because power relationships shaping the classroom have informed students’ understandings of the classroom as a private place, a place where individuals need to “take in” information, but don’t necessarily get to connect to their own experiences, interests, and concerns while they are there. This social environment facilitates a sense of boredom among students.

Social media use during class was one of the most commonly observed themes from the data I collected (over 20,000 words of logs—and approximately 30 groups of students over the course of 3 semesters!). In the examples cited below, this theme is presented and described by students Christi G., Ellen N., Clare B., and Robby B. Particularly, these students point to the connection between their use of social media and boredom in the classroom.

Boredom During Class
(by Christi G., Clare B., Ellen N., and Robby B.; SOCY100 Spring 2011)

Often times, people get bored during class, but there are many different reasons for this. One of the more common reasons is because the professor lectures in a very quiet and monotone voice, which puts people to sleep. Another cause of boredom is general lack of interest in the class, such as someone taking a core elective that they aren’t actually interested in. Social media is sometimes seen as the answer to boredom in class, but could also be the problem. Social media is seen as a good answer to boredom, because it can be a small time commitment or an activity for the whole class period. People can talk with their friends rather than listening to lectures. Lectures are isolating because you sit and try to write everything down, and social media lets people connect with other people. Also, in large lecture halls, there is probably someone nearby on Facebook doing something potentially distracting. The person on Facebook is probably using it because they are bored with the class and looking for something to do. Another reason for being on Facebook during class would be that there’s some kind of very exciting event or conversation taking place that you want to take part in.

Example 1:
11:42am – Trying to focus in Econ but I can’t. Text other roommate telling her how boring econ is

Example 2:
12:15pm – Hopped on Facebook because I was bored in class.

Example 3:
12:00pm – I was in biology class. This class just gets boring almost every day, so I pulled out my cell phone to check if someone texted me. No text message, so I initiated a text conversation with a guy friend.

Example 4:
BBMing [Blackberry Messaging] my friend “Chris” because I am bored in [the library].

Example 5:
10:00 AM- playing wordmole on my blackberry during a very boring STAT [statistics] class.

Example 6:
12:15 am: Hopped on Facebook because I was bored in class.

12:30 am: Checked my Twitter for any mentions and @ replies from the Party tweets I put up earlier on the weekend.

12:43 am: Mentioned my roommate in a tweet that fried him up for putting up so many tweets in like 5 min. when u needs to be studying. I put it up on twitter and facebook so that everyone else would notice and fry up my roommate also.

12:45 am: My roommate replied back to be asking where am I at because Twitter can be used as a person to person communication medium.

12:48 am: I reply back with a [Tweet] “at class bored” because no one uses direct messages in college.

Example 7:
10:00 am class starts and I wish I had my laptop to keep me entertained

Example 8:
2:24 pm I hear my phone buzz but am doing a group project and don’t want to be rude so I ignore it

2:40 pm class is almost over and another member of the group checked his phone so I check mine. My cousin, A, texted me about her college visit to Ohio State and how she is jealous of our warm weather since it’s not as nice there. I have another text from C saying she fell asleep outside where I left her but is feeling better

Example 9:
8:01 PM- Bored in Physics class so I end up playing games on my phone

Example 10:
1:02pm: I texted my boyfriend during class because it was extremely boring and I needed something to occupy my brain. (Don’t worry…it wasn’t SOCY!) We texted for the rest of class and I don’t remember anything from lecture.

***
In short, when students examine their uses of social media sociologically, they reflect on their own identities, the social contexts in which those identities have developed, and the interactions that take place in those contexts. Through their reflections and dialogues via social media, they construct, share, and evaluate knowledge. These processes become particularly visible via social media. But when students reflect on their lived realities in their school work, sometimes they can become visible in the classroom too.

While such students might seem withdrawn from the class, this familiar scene holds a potential goldmine of sociological exploration and examples.

If these students are already intently interested in, or “studying” the profiles and usage of their friends and themselves, why not engage them to do so via in-class assignments and beyond? The setting seems ripe for investigation on topics like presentation of self, production of identities, symbolic boundaries, and social interaction of all sorts.

Some sociology departments anchor courses in such investigations. According the article “College Offers Facebook Sociology Course,” Nell Vidyarthi explains,

As a student, I was always amazed by the abilities of students to simultaneously “pay attention” and browse Facebook, but a new course from Bowdoin College in Maine brings Facebook into the course load.  Entitled “In the Facebook Age”, the course analyzes sociological concepts and applies them to the emerging phenomena of Facebook and other social networks.  The course itself is fluid, and its material responds to the changes that occur every day in the social sphere.

Other sociology courses could find ways to weave their themes and concepts into things that could be analyzed by using Facebook (as long as bias and investigation are incorporated into such assignments or discussions). With the many facets and pieces of information we all provide for each other via Facebook and the time our students already spend interacting through it, it seems absurd not to engage them to sociologically utilize the time they spend there.

In what ways do you or others engage sociologically with students’ Facebook usage?

Crime & Deviance

Culture

Organisations & Work

Political & Sociology

Science & Medicine

Teaching & Learning Guide

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He spoke, of course. And as usual, his teacher and his classmates seemed engaged in what he said. They nodded; they looked at him when he was speaking. Some responded to his comments directly. At least one made reference to “what AJ was saying” when making a contribution later in the discussion.

AJ’s panel centered on experiences shaping Black male identities and the development of supportive relationships around those identities. The class discussion that day and the assigned readings for it were billed under the heading of Men and Masculinities. The instructor was White and female. Over half the students in the class appeared to be White. As in many of his college classrooms, AJ was the only African American male. And now, here he was, leaving class with me, a White, female graduate student and researcher with whom he’d consented to spend an inconveniently large number of hours. Here he was shrugging his shoulders as he searched for a verbal answer that might skirt any sensitivities I might have and still answer my question about why he had not discussed his own work where it seemed so relevant and so important to furthering the discussion at hand. Softly he critiqued that powerful discussion I (and perhaps also his professor, the college deans, and the University Viewbook for prospective students) were imagining as he shrugged his shoulders and said: “It’s not going to go as far as you want it to.”

I thought about this experience with AJ when I was reading through The Educational Experience of Young Men of Color, a report released Monday (20 June 2011) by the College Board’s Advocacy and Policy Center. The College Board report makes “six clear recommendations” toward addressing some of the issues that young men of color face, including teacher education for culturally responsive pedagogy in the college classroom and the strengthening of campus multicultural centers. Sounds great to me, but what about AJ’s classroom and countless other classrooms quite like it? What about those class discussions that hold so much potential, but that “don’t go as far as you want [them] to” because one student feels looked to, again and again, to represent a  provide a neat and tidy synopsis of the myriad perspectives and experiences of  myriad others who share his race and gender? What about those deliberations and disagreements and questions and shared experiences that students like AJ want to participate in but have learned not to look for in the classroom? What about the cultural and disciplinary messages students receive day after day, semester after semester, to channel their classroom energies and efforts have to go into preparing for tests of discrete skills rather than into dialogue and collaborative knowledge construction?

The College Board study finds that campuses with strong multicultural centers that reach out to students and families tend to have higher retention rates. Indeed many of the students in my study have indicated that the campus multicultural center at our University has been a key resource for academic advising, extracurricular activities, peer mentoring programs, and summer opportunities. I can’t help but think, though, about a comment from Chloe, another student in my study, a rising senior, who transferred last year from an HBCU (Historically Black College/University):

There’s just a lack of diversity [on this campus]. This is a predominantly white university. I think you can call it a PWI. I looked that up. And I don’t care any type of way, but the fact that there’s even a multicultural center, this one separate place, that says a lot about the lack of diversity.

The College Board’s six recommendations are indeed clear and worthwhile. But recommendations that suggest changes that can be made around the margins without reconstructing the center are, like AJ’s class discussion, “not going to go as far as you want it to.”

Americans seem comfortable with extremes in wealth and accept, to some degree, a high level of inequality.  Neoliberal ideology (not to be confused with the American political label liberal) asserts that free markets, left alone, will efficiently and justly reward individuals for their talent and hard work.  Neoliberalism claims that some are rich because they are talented and work hard while some are poor because they are untalented and lazy.  Some consider neoliberal ideology hegenomic.  But, as Newt Gingrich found out, when Politico revealed his 500,000 credit account at Tiffany’s, American attitudes toward the rich and the poor are more ambivalent than simple categories of an undeserving poor and a deserving rich.

Americans make individualized assessments of the rich and the poor, often without altering their overarching beliefs about the poor or the rich or the economic system in general.  While much has been written about the undeserving poor, especially in regards to so-called “welfare queens” and “deadbeat dads,” similar individualistic evaluations can also be applied to the rich. As Parasad et al. (2009) writes, “The markers of the undeserving rich are an excessive appreciation and display of money…” coupled with a claim of moral superiority evidenced by one’s wealth.  Press coverage and public reaction to what the New York Times categorized as a “rich guy foible” accused Gingrich of these sins.

Gingrich’s defense was that he had no debt and was “very frugal.” Newt Gingrich attempted to paint himself as the deserving rich and simultaneously claim that if the US government was as fiscally responsible as him it would be in great shape.  In doing so, he tried to recast his wealth as a sign of success, stating that “I think I have proven I can manage money.”  His attempt to pivot the story into campaign talking points on overspending and fiscal irresponsibility is subject to the fairly obvious critique that it is not very difficult to manage money when you have enough to spend 500,000 grand on jewelry.  However, beyond Gingrich’s personal political fortunes, the episode reveals both the strength of and a key vulnerability of neoliberal discourse.

On one hand, evaluations of the individual deservingness of wealth (or poverty) crowd out structural evaluations of wealth and poverty and inequality in our economic system.  Amidst all the moral evaluations and the attempts for the super wealthy to claim that they are just like everyone else is the underlying premise that we shouldn’t question wealth.  After “rich-guy foibles,” few ask whether an economic system that produces billionaires and homelessness (regardless of the fairness of “the game” or the morality of individuals) is a morally-defensible (or economically sustainable) reward system.  In other words, the foundations of neoliberal ideology seem to emerge unscathed.

On the other hand, neoliberal discourse remains vulnerable to moral evaluations of the so-called winners of a supposedly fair system.  Perhaps, rather than convincing Americans that all wealth is deserved, neoliberal rhetoric has opened up both wealth and poverty to individual moral evaluations.  Neoliberal rhetoric, because it involves individual-level moral evaluations, may not be equivalent to a just-world belief.  In other words, negative evaluations of the wealthy could serve as a basis for questions about how the economic system functions.

All That Glitters May Redefine Run by Gingrich

Prasad et al. – The Undeserving Rich: “Moral Values” and the White Working Class

Resisting the Neo-Liberal Poverty Discourse: On Constructing Deadbeat Dads and Welfare Queens