The Christian Science Monitor reported this morning on the enduring signs of US power despite the economic crisis. Many people seem panicked about America’s status as a superpower, so the Monitor investigated scholarly opinions as to whether ‘the American century’ is over. 

Sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein brings his take to this coverage…

Still, what seems clear is that the experience of the Bush years, now drawing to a close amid the worst economic calamity in eight decades, have bolstered those who long predicted a clipped American eagle. “What George Bush did was turn a slow decline into a precipitous one,” says the noted Yale University sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein, who has been predicting the end of the American empire since the 1980s.

“We’ve had two standout factors: the Iraq war, which not only demonstrated but actually accelerated this decline in power, and then the way this president put the American government in such deep debt,” Mr. Wallerstein says. “What we see playing out before us is the culmination of these actions.”

The Monitor concludes….

But for the moment, it’s the financial crisis that is providing a gauge of America’s enduring leadership capacity. With many economists citing international coordination as key to righting the global economic ship, one test will come Friday when finance ministers of the world’s seven major economies meet in Washington.

Read more.

Eleanor Clift of Newsweek, has recently written about how vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin is reigniting the culture war as her ‘everywoman’ act plays well with audiences. She suggests that this might indicate that the GOP will try to once again paint Barack Obama as an elitist.

In her article Clift included commentary from sociologist Todd Gitlin, who spoke at a Pew Forum discussion in Washington as to whether the cultural war will have an impact come November…

Todd Gitlin, a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University, speaking from the progressive side, said the culture war always matters, but that it may not be decisive, with economic issues making it harder for Republicans to get traction on lampooning Obama as an elitist, in the way they turned John Kerry into a windsurfing Frenchman. Gitlin described the presidential election as a “quadrennial plebiscite of who we are,” with Americans casting their vote for the candidate that best embodies who we are as a nation.

Newsweek’s commentary on the vice-presidential candidates in this culture war…

Nobody wants to be an elitist. In politics, it’s a deadly label. What we saw in Thursday night’s debate were two competing strains of populism. Biden, the Irish-Catholic kid from Scranton, represents Main Street populism, the people against the powerful, anti-corporatism, little guy kitchen-table values. Palin is wooing the same working-class constituency that could decide the election in battleground states like Ohio and Pennsylvania with her pro-gun, family and religious down-to-earth values.

Read more here.

Yesterday the Virginian-Pilot ran a story about the potentially negative consequences of workplace diversity training. A 2005 study from the Society for Human Resource Management concluded that about two-thirds of companies engage in diversity training, but that most of these efforts backfire, resulting in a more homogeneous workforce. The source of the trouble appears to be that most sessions are mandatory rather than voluntary, and focus solely on the legal dangers and not on the benefits of diversity in business settings. 

Call in the sociologists to break down the problem…

“They force their workers and managers to sit through this training, and they hit them in the head with the possible legal sanctions,” said one of the researchers, Alexandra Kalev, an assistant sociology professor at the University of Arizona.

Kalev and Frank Dobbin, a sociology professor at Harvard University, reviewed the types of diversity training programs and the composition of the work force at the companies. They found that optional sessions are more likely to lead to increased numbers of women and minorities in the workplace.

That’s because mandatory sessions might trigger resentment and unintentionally “activate biases,” Kalev said. When they’re voluntary, she said, employees are more likely to search for the positives to justify the use of their time.

A better idea….

Too many diversity training programs, [Kalev] said, are designed as “a ticket out of jail” – a way to bolster a company’s defense if it faces discrimination suits. Too often, [she] said, the sessions concentrate on legal minefields. “You have to behave this way,” she said, “otherwise we will get sued and we’ll have bad publicity.” That also turns off employees. “The legal content is so boring and so intimidating,” she said, “and it’s usually exaggerated.”

Better, she said, to focus on how diversity helps them achieve their strategic goals.

Read more.

This morning MSNBC ran a story on new research from San Francisco State sociologists, which suggests that when women receive a breast cancer diagnosis, they often assume a caretaking role in their own treatment and recovery. 

MSNBC reports:

 After conducting a series of interviews with 164 breast cancer survivors over two years, researchers from San Francisco State University found that women with cancer not only shoulder the emotional burden of disclosing their diagnosis to loved ones, they often end up being supportive of others at a time when they actually need support themselves.

“There’s been a lot of research on how women are emotional managers, how they take care of others,” says medical sociologist and lead researcher Dr. Grace Yoo, who recently presented the findings at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association. “And when they’re diagnosed with breast cancer they’re still doing that. They’re worried about how others might react.”

Read the full story. 

Today the New Republic published a review of the new book, “The Politics of Truth: Selected Writings from C. Wright Mills,” edited by John Summers. 

An exerpt from the New Republic article:

C.Wright Mills published his sociological trilogy during the 1950s: White Collar in 1951,The Power Elite in 1956, The Sociological Imagination in 1959. Those were years of Republican ascendancy, and while the president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, was a moderate, the vice president, Richard Nixon, and a number of key senators, including Joe McCarthy, belonged to the conservative wing of the party. By decade’s end, the country was tiring of Republican rule and its accompanying scandals and foreign policy failures, and was harkening to the appeals of a young, ambitious, brash, Catholic politician who called for change. The times were perfect for a radical such as Mills to make his mark.

Almost a half-century later, the United States once again faces a choice between an incumbent conservative party with little public appeal and a young, dynamic politician whose race, rather than his religion, sets him apart from the usual run of presidential contenders. This time, though, there is no single social critic publishing books documenting the hold that powerful military and economic forces have over the country’s destiny, and lamenting the decline of a vibrant public sphere, and urging intellectuals to dissent as loudly as they can from the prevailing complacency. Lacking a Mills of our own, we may turn back to the original. Oxford University Press has recently re-published Mills’s trilogy, and The New Men of Power, Mills’s book on labor leaders, which appeared in 1948, has been reissued by the University of Illinois Press. And now John Summers, an intellectual historian who has written widely on Mills–including a devastating essay in theMinnesota Review documenting the extent to which another sociologist, Irving Louis Horowitz, now something of a neoconservative but then more radical, mistakenly recounted the facts of Mills’s life and prevented others from gaining access to the Mills papers that Horowitz kept over the objections of Mills’s widow–has brought together a collection of Mills’s essays, which he calls The Politics of Truth.

Fascinating… Read the full review here.

Science Daily reports today on a new study from sociologists Mark Levels, Jaap Dronkers and Gerbert Kraaykamp, which suggests that factors like country of origin, destination country, and qualities of immigrant communities play a significant role in educational outcomes for immigrant children.  

The research, which looked at the mathematical literacy scores of thousands of 15-year-old immigrants to 13 Western nations from 35 different native countries, indicates that economic development and political conditions in an immigrant’s home country impact the child’s academic success in his or her destination country. Counter-intuitively, immigrant children from countries with lower levels of economic development have better scholastic performance than comparable children who emigrate from countries with higher levels of economic development.

Children of immigrants from politically unstable countries have poorer scholastic performance compared to other immigrant children. “Adult political immigrants are known to face serious negative consequences that can be related to the political situations in their origin countries,” said sociologist Mark Levels, junior researcher in the Department of Sociology at Radboud University, Nijmegen, in the Netherlands. “We found that these consequences carry across generations to affect their children’s educational chances as well. Our findings therefore have urgent implications in countries that receive a large number of these immigrants.”

Mark Levels, one of the primary investigators told Science Daily, “Specific educational programs designed to counter the negative effects of political migration may be essential to ensure that the children of politically motivated immigrants achieve their full potential.”

Read more here.

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports this morning on an ongoing debate as to the validity of a 2006 study which concluded that Americans have become significantly more socially isolated over the last 25 years. 

David Glenn reports, “In the summer of 2006, several major news outletsgave prominent coverage to a sociological study with a grim message: Americans’ social isolation had increased radically since the 1980s. Whereas in 1985 Americans reported that, on average, they had 2.94 friends or family members with whom they could discuss important matters, by 2004 that number had dropped to 2.08. A quarter of Americans had no close confidants at all. Those findings were …[even] startling to the study’s authors, who are sociologists at Cornell University, Duke University, and the University of Arizona, [J. Miller McPherson, Lynn Smith-Lovin, and Matthew E. Brashears].”

UC Berkeley sociologist and social networks scholar Claude Fisher has some concerns:

The [previous] study’s portrait of collapsing social networks, Mr. Fischer writes, is at odds with other recent findings by social scientists. What’s more, he says, some of the 2006 paper’s data seem internally inconsistent or simply implausible. For example, among people who reported belonging to four or more organizations—presumably a highly sociable bunch—14.9 percent reported having no confidants. And what about married people? Surely they discuss important matters with their spouses, if no one else. In 1985 only 6.6 percent of married respondents reported having no confidants, but in 2004, 22.2 percent did so.

Fisher claims that such errors could be due to errors during data collection or coding. Now the original study’s authors have responded…

The Times (UK) reports this morning on the potential health risks associated with energy drinks and the dangers they pose to young people. Pete Bee reports, “Energy drinks have become the elixir of a generation that considers itself in need of more of a jolt than can be obtained from a mere cup of coffee. Around 330 million litres of products such as Red Bull, the UK’s bestseller, are consumed every year in Britain and the super-caffeinated drinks market is worth £1billion annually.”

A sociologist contributes to these concerns over the consumption of highly-caffeinated energy drinks, some with more caffeine than seven cups of black coffee. 

… [Researchers] have suggested that the caffeine in energy drinks means that the regular use of such products should be considered an accurate predictor of bad behaviour in young people. Reporting in The Journal of American College Health, Kathleen Miller, a sociologist and addiction researcher at the University of Buffalo, showed a link between caffeinated drinks and risky or aggressive behaviour patterns, including substance abuse, violence and unprotected sex. She says that her findings did not mean that caffeinated drinks cause bad behaviour, but that their regular consumption might be a warning sign for parents that “kids who are heavily into drinking them are more likely to be the ones who are inclined toward taking risks”.

And be sure to lay off the Red Bull…

A growing number of researchers are looking not just at the effects of caffeine, but at the consequences of high doses contained in energy products. Scott Willoughby, of the Cardiovascular Research Centre in Adelaide, Australia, recently showed how the sugar-free version of Red Bull can cause the blood to thicken, raising the risk of heart attacks and strokes.

The full story.

This morning USA Today covered a new study by the Pew Research Center that surveyed 1,260 individuals about decision-making in the ‘typical American home.’ The study found that women had the final say in decisions at home in 43% of the couples.

USA Today called in a sociologist…

Sociologist and gender studies expert Michael Kimmel of Stony Brook University-New York says the responses suggest the path for couples is “far grayer” these days as couples weave in more equality.

“There’s far more fluidity in family decision-making around these topics than ever before, and that’s the real news,” he says. “Sometimes she makes the plans, sometimes he does. It’s who has the spare time.”

Kimmel offers three ways to interpret the findings: “One is ‘Only 43% of women make most of the decisions.’ Another way is ‘Couples are in their homes navigating and negotiating equality far more than ever before.’ A third way to read it is ‘In both very traditional couples and in very egalitarian couples, women’s sphere of influence has always been the family purse. She pays the bills, decides which dinner parties they go to. He goes along with family projects.’ “

Read the full story.

The Washington Post reports this morning on findings from sociologist Emilio J. Castilla, of MIT. Castilla’s study, published in the most recent issue of the American Journal of Sociology, examines merit-based pay plans that aim to distribute rewards without racial or gender bias. He concludes that they still favor white men.

The Post reports:

The biases [in pay] were introduced when a supervisor recommended raises or when the human resources department approved them, [Castilla] said. His research, published in the latest issue of the American Journal of Sociology, found that minorities and women had starting salaries similar to those of white men. Biases crept in over time, creating a pay gap. Even though merit-based systems create the appearance of meritocracy, he said, they need more transparency and accountability to live up to it.

Read more.