It’d be easy to think that Georg Simmel hasn’t been the talk of the town since he took on Kant, but there he is, resplendent in the New Yorker’s front section in its December 5, 2011 issue.
The topic at hand is actually the naming of personal wireless networks in reporter Lauren Collins’s “Brave New World: The Tao of Wifi.” In the article, readers are introduced to Alexandra Janelli, an environmental consultant with an accidental interest in the names of the wifi networks she encounters as she and her iPhone wander New York City. Janelli’s website, wtfwifi.com, catalogs and considers the names, which Collins says range from “passive aggressive messages to neighbors (Stop Cooking Indian!!!)” to “names [that] are poetry (Dumpling Manor, More Cowbell).”
To get a little more background on this unique form of self-expression, the New Yorker’s author sought out Elihu Rubin, a professor of urbanism at the Yale School of Architecture. It was Rubin who brought Simmel into the discussion:
He wrote [in “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” 1903] about the difficulty in asserting individual personality within the dimensions of metropolitan life. One solution was to adopt “tendentious peculiarities,” mannerisms (of dress, speech, etc.) or other extravagances to attract attention and thus bolster self-esteem.
Rubin muses that “the wireless network name is one such peculiarity,” and comments on how such names give anonymous writers “an open, uncensored forum for personal mantras and other compact philosophies.” It’s nice to see that, nearly a century later, Simmel is still helping everyone ask “What is Society?”
Suzy Maves McElrath and Hollie Nyseth Brehm on December 12, 2011
Photo by Neighborhood Centers, Inc. via flickr.com
Each year, millions of people don their running kicks and spandex and tackle 5ks, marathons, or the occasional holiday-themed trot. But if you’ve ever been a spectator at one of these events, you’ve perhaps wondered what Runner’s World’s Jay Jennings found himself asking: Why is running so white?
That perception has become a truism, and the truism has become a joke. The popular satirical blog “Stuff White People Like,” which spawned a best-selling book, ranked marathons 27th on the original list, just behind farmer’s markets and Wes Anderson movies. More scathing was comedian Daniel Tosh, in a segment on his show, Tosh.0: “The only reason marathons are still around is so 20,000 white people can chase three black guys through the streets of Boston like the good old days.”
But how valid is the idea that running is indeed a predominantly white sport?
Well, pretty darn valid, according to Running USA’s recently released biannual National Runner Survey. Media spokesperson Ryan Lamppa stresses that its methodology is “opt-in” from 60 running organizations and clubs nationwide and “may not be a representative sample” of the actual running population. Still, the numbers, compiled between January and May 2011 from nearly 12,000 respondents, are eye-opening: “Core runners” (who tend to enter running events and train year-round) are 90 percent Caucasian, 5.1 percent Hispanic, 3.9 percent Asian/Pacific Islander, and, in perhaps the most startling figure, only 1.6 percent African-American. (The sample adds up to more than 100 percent because respondents could mark more than one choice.) Those numbers are consistent with ones from other surveys, such as Runner’s World’s, and have remained low even as the number of runners has grown by 56 percent in the past decade, according to the National Sporting Goods Association. (The overall population, from the 2010 U.S. census, is 72 percent white, 16 percent Hispanic or Latino, 13 percent black or African-American, 5 percent Asian, and 1 percent American Indian or Alaska native.)
The next question is, of course, why? In search of an answer, Jennings spoke with new and well-trod runners, heads of national organizations, race directors, coaches, and academics. Through these conversations, he learned that there are economic and cultural roadblocks for minority runners.
Arguably, a potential runner needs only a pair of shoes (barefoot enthusiasts will say not even that!) and a stretch of pavement, but in reality, dedicated running shoes (which RunnersWorld will tell you elsewhere are critical for injury prevention) and race entrance fees can be expensive, especially over time. Moreover, poor neighborhoods may lack safe avenues for running.
In fact, ‘Lacking a safe place to exercise’ was the top barrier to physical activity for African-American women age 40 and older in a 2000 study published in the journal Health Psychology. In another study for the American College of Sports Medicine in 2007, Simon J. Marshall, Ph.D., the lead researcher, commented,
“People in poverty are more likely to live in neighborhoods where public recreation is unavailable or dangerous,” but he added, this does not mean that culture does not play a role.
Martin Beatty, an African-American head track and field coach at Middlebury College in Vermon, cites social pressure to participate in football and basketball as a factor resulting in low participation in cross-country. Another interviewee told Jennings, “Within African-American culture, if your kids don’t play football and basketball, in a lot of communities, it’s not respected.” Low minority participation in the sport means that there are few role models, on the street or in ad-campaigns, to inspire non-white runners. And when African-Americans do participate in running, stereotypes tend to funnel them toward short-distance events.
Why does all of this matter? Health disparities, for one, says Harvard University sociologist, David R. Williams.
[The] professor (and two-time Detroit Marathon finisher) who studies racial differences in health, told Steve Barnes on an Arkansas public-affairs television broadcast, “You cannot take individuals who have been shackled by chains and put them at the start of a line to run a marathon…and expect them, if they haven’t had any training or preparation, to be successful.” He was speaking metaphorically, but a very real fact he cited is that “96,000 African-Americans die every year prematurely from racial disparities in health.”…”All of our institutions,” he said, citing schools, churches, and others, “Need to be encouraging healthy choices.”
Multitasking is taking a bigger toll on working mothers than on working fathers, confirms a new study published in the American Sociological Review. The authors suggest the key to the difference in stress may lie in which tasks each group is juggling. As the Los Angeles Times reported, the parents all spent nearly equal hours doing paid work, but the women were spending about nine more hours each week multitasking. In addition, that maternal multitasking often involved juggling housework and childcare.
The story for dads was a bit different, the Times wrote:
Multitasking by fathers was far less likely to involve child care, the study found, and unlike moms, dads tended to report they were more focused when in charge of their kids. Researchers said this jibes with much research showing that fathers are more likely than mothers to engage with their children in “interactive activities” that are “more pleasurable than routine child care tasks.” When mothers had child care duties, they were more likely to take the kids along on errands, drive them to activities or supervise their homework, the study found.
“This helps explain why women feel more burdened than men,” lead author Shira Offer, an assistant professor of sociology at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, told Time. “It’s related not just to amount but to their experience when they multitask.”
Barbara Schneider, study co-author and a sociologist at Michigan State University in East Lansing, also told the Los Angeles Times article that the families studied were not necessarily “typical American families”:
Participants in the 500 Family Study may not be representative of American families economically, educationally or by ethnicity, Schneider acknowledged. But by focusing on some of the busiest parents, she said, the study underscores the disproportionate emotional toll that multitasking may be taking on women as they shoulder a wider range of responsibilities in the family.
The take-away from the study, according to Time‘s interview with study author Offer:
Dads, pitch in more (without being asked!). Employers and policy-makers, make that possible by understanding that it’s not only mom who should transport the kids to day care and school or stay home with a sick child.
The current political and cultural upheaval focused on the American economy has Wall Street under the microscope. The New York Times DealBook section recently reported on a study by CUNY Graduate Center sociologist Richard D. Alba which dissected some of the income stratification occurring within financial industry. His findings? Not surprisingly, Wall Street remains an old boys’ club. White men are making significantly more than their female or non-white coworkers:
The median compensation for a white man in the financial industry between 2005 and 2009 was $154,500, 55 percent percent more than that for a white woman, according to the study, which used United States Census data. He made 55 percent more than a Latino man, and 72 percent more than a black man. A typical white woman, with a salary of $100,000, made 59 percent more than a Latina woman, and 65 percent more than a black woman.
Historically, white males have dominated the financial sector, and their wage superiority has remained consistent despite growing diversity within the field:
In 2000, more than 67 percent of older workers were white men, the study shows. In the period between 2005 and 2009, that dominance showed signs of eroding, as white men were less than 46 percent of the youngest workers, those just starting out on Wall Street.
While Wall Street has been quick to adapt to complicated new financial instruments and markets, according to Alba, it shows few signs of adapting to an already-changed labor market.
The most recent marital meltdown making headlines involves the rapid “I don’t” of entrepreneur Kim Kardashian and pro basketball player Kris Humphries. While their split’s every detail is dissected everywhere from tabloids to 24 hour news networks, the Des Moines Resister took a different angle on the issue: they talked to some sociologists.
Susan Stewart, associate professor of sociology at Iowa State University, and Tony Paik, associate professor the University of Iowa’s Department of Sociology, helped explain some of the broader societal issues affecting early divorce and how we perceive flame-out marriages. Stewart maintains that although people generally don’t talk about their own divorces, it’s fair game to critique others’. This appears to especially be true for the nearly 1 in 4 U.S. marriages that end within the first 5 years.
“We are fascinated when people crash and burn,” Stewart said. “It’s a way to work through [our own issues]: ‘They are way worse off than I am.’ ”
Stewart believes age is often a determining factor in early divorce, but short engagement periods and contrasting religious or family backgrounds also come into play. And Paik presents data showing that earlier intercourse, surprisingly, may also be a determinant of short-lived marriages: according to Paik’s analysis, of those who remain abstinent until age 18, only 15 percent will divorce within the first 5 years of marriage. Those who have sex before 18 are shown to divorce at at rate of 31 percent.
Paik hasn’t determined why this might be, but he speculates that sex at a young age may lead to other possible divorce determinants, including premarital pregnancy, permissiveness toward non-marital sex, and premarital cohabitation–each of which seems to lose relevance over time, particularly when it comes to the Kardashian-Humphries union, which, so far as the prurient public knows, included none of these factors.
When photographs of Police Lieutenant John Pike pepper-spraying peaceful college students emerged, many people were outraged. But, Atlantic Monthly writer Alexis Madrigral takes a sociological lens by reminding readers that people always act within the confines of structure.
Structures, in the sociological sense, constrain human agency. And for that reason, I see John Pike as a casualty of the system, too. Our police forces have enshrined a paradigm of protest policing that turns local cops into paramilitary forces. Let’s not pretend that Pike is an independent bad actor. Too many incidents around the country attest to the widespread deployment of these tactics. If we vilify Pike, we let the institutions off way too easy.
Many sociologists, such as Patrick Gillham, have documented these changes in our police forces. Looking at the 1960s, Gillham notes that police used “escalated force,” which involved mass arrest and indiscriminate use of force.
But by the 1970s, that version of crowd control had given rise to all sorts of problems and various departments went in “search for an alternative approach.” What they landed on was a paradigm called “negotiated management.” Police forces, by and large, cooperated with protesters who were willing to give major concessions on when and where they’d march or demonstrate. “Police used as little force as necessary to protect people and property and used arrests only symbolically at the request of activists or as a last resort and only against those breaking the law,” Gillham writes.
Yet by the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle, negotiated management was seen as a failure.
9/11 put the final nail in the coffin of the previous protest-control regime. By the time of the Free Trade of the Americas anti-globalization protests in Miami broke out eight years ago this week, an entirely new model of taking on protests had emerged. People called it the Miami model. It was heavily militarized and very forceful.
Looking at these changes, Brooklyn College Sociologist Alex Vitalle explains that the “broken windows” theory has also had a major impact on policing. Broken windows policing doesn’t fight crime directly but rather fights the sense that a street is disorderly.
As Vitale would put it, the theory “created a kind of moral imperative for the police to restore middle class values to the city’s public spaces.” When applied to protesters, the strategy has meant that any break with the NYPD’s behavioral preferences could be grounds for swift arrest and/or physical violence. Vitale described how the theory has been applied to Occupy Wall Street: Consider what has precipitated the vast majority of the disorderly conduct arrests in this movement: using a megaphone, writing on the sidewalk with chalk, marching in the street (and Brooklyn Bridge), standing in line at a bank to close an account (a financial boycott, in essence) and occupying a park after its closing. These are all peaceful forms of political expression. To the police, however, they are all disorderly conduct.
Combine these and other changes, and you have a completely different type of policing than was seen in previous eras. Scholars are already studying it, but in the meantime, Alexis’s article is a reminder that while John Pike was the one spraying the pepper spray, a complex system put him in the position to do it.
More than half of new mothers now get paid leave from work, the U.S. Census Bureau announced last week. At face value the news might seem like cause for celebration, but some have dug deeper to expose exactly which mothers were getting paid leave.
The 22-page census report reported that a super-slim majority of women were getting paid leave: 51 percent of first-time mothers were able to take paid maternity, sick, or vacation time between 2006 and 2008. Hence the divide between which half of moms headlines highlighted:
“Paid-leave benefits lagging for working moms in U.S.” (Chicago Tribune)
“Census shows half of working women don’t get paid maternity benefits; wide gaps by education” (Associated Press)
The lack of access to paid leave among women who haven’t completed college is raising concern. According to the AP article, “Lower-educated mothers are nearly four times more likely than college graduates to be denied paid maternity benefits. That’s the widest gap over the past 50 years.” (The chart above illustrates the comparison.)
University of Minnesota sociologist Erin Kelly echoed Gerson’s sentiment when interviewed by the Star Tribune. “People who are already living paycheck to paycheck, if they don’t have access to paid leave they’re going to have to quit or they’re going to have to do something that is really unhealthy for themselves or their babies,” Kelly told the paper. “The lack of [federal] paid leave policy means in effect we are pushing those women to quit.”
With over 800 million active users, Facebook must be affecting our relationships—some even wonder if acquiring hundreds, even thousands, of online companions is helping or hindering our “real life” connections to others. It’s no surprise that new research on this topic by Cornell sociologist Matthew Brashears is making a splash in media outlets from ABC News to The Times of India and The Telegraph. Brashears work asks, even in this hyper-connected world, do we have as many close friends as we think we do?
In short: no. According to Brashears’ longitudinal research (which looked at over 2,000 adults from 1985 to 2010 and was published in the journal Social Networks), the average number of close friends—people with whom respondents said they’d discussed important matters with during the past six months—most of us report is two. Just 25 years ago, the average was closer to three. Brashears is quick to point out that we’re not becoming asocial. He thinks we’re getting better at being careful in selecting our confidants. Perhaps we now favor a smaller, tighter network for our true support system even while we enjoy more casual, diffuse online networks.
ABC News went a bit further to ask whether Facebook was actually to blame for this culling of comrades. The news outlet turned to a Pew Research Center report written by another sociologist, Keith Hampton of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Hampton took a rosier view in a blog post on the subject:
Internet users in general, but Facebook users even more so, have more close relationships than other people. Facebook users get more overall social support, and in particular they report more emotional support and companionship than other people.
Different networks, we know, fulfill different needs. Facebook reports that its average user has 130 friends—as of this writing, there’s just no separate category for “real friends.”
University of Illinois at Chicago’s Barbara Risman recently told CNN readers that there are two types of sexual harassment. The first is usually easy to spot. “A really detestable (usually) man gives his (usually) female subordinate employee or student an ultimatum: Put out or lose some opportunity, be it a grade, a job or a promotion.” As Risman explains, this type of harassment was commonplace during the era of Don Draper and Roger Sterling, but we’ve come a long way since then.
But then there is the other kind of sexual harassment, the behavior that makes the workplace uncomfortable, that creates an environment that is hostile to women in general, or just to one person because of her (or his) sex, gender, race or ethnicity.Everyone agrees that workplaces ought not to differentiate between actors simply because of their sex, gender, race or ethnicity. But beyond that, when sex and gender are involved, we often get into a “he said/she said” dialogue. For example, he believed the jokes were simply funny and created a more friendly setting; she believed they were offensive and created an us (the boys) versus them (her or her and other women) organizational climate where she was always going to be outside the loop, outside informal conversations and social networks that mattered.
If we look at sexual harassment in terms of he said/she said, though, Riseman argues that there will never be a solution. We can’t deny that many people meet their partners in the workplace. Yet, we also can’t deny that we live in a world where power is not equally shared and where workplaces are not integrated by sex. In fact, integration by sex has stalled; more women are getting degrees, but they are remaining in traditionally female-dominated fields. According to Riseman, this may be because of the workplace cultures that include sexual innuendo and sexual harassment.
I don’t have an easy answer, but I do know we’ll never solve the problem by trying to figure out what he said or she said. Instead, we have to decide what, as a society, we want to be acceptable or not in our workplaces and schools and then enforce the norms with legal penalties. Here’s a first volley: It should be illegal for men (or women) to make sexual overtures to their subordinates. End of story. Power always gets in the way of easily saying no. But more than that, if we want workplaces that do not privilege the men who have previously dominated the social space, we need to change the culture in which sexual banter objectifies women and turns them into the “other,” and take seriously the claims by women that men harass them.
Because, as Riseman eloquently notes, “The more subtle kind of sexual harassment has consequences not only for the individual woman who finally complains, but for all of us, by sustaining a culture where the powerful positions in many occupations, including politics, remain dominated by men.”
Could the President of the United States be a vegetarian? According to Vanderbilt Professor of Philosophy Kelly Oliver, it’s not likely. In her recent New York Times Op-Ed, Oliver explained,
In the United States, we often see our political leaders hunting, particularly bird-hunting, which seems to demonstrate their manly fortitude and bloodlust — qualities intended to persuade us that they can keep us safe. Hunting has become a tool of sorts within the realm of political image making. With few exceptions, President Obama among them, most presidents and presidential hopefuls have been seen hunting. Meat eating, too, is an act used to portray strength. Obama is known to enjoy his burgers, a fact that has helped counter his image as a green-tea drinking elitist. Even Sarah Palin’s so-called new brand of feminism revolves around the image of a tough “mama grizzly,” as she calls herself, shooting and gutting moose to feed and protect her family.
Yet while hunters are often seen as tough providers, animal lovers are infantilized.
In popular culture, celebrities who take on animal causes are seen as a bit crazy — rich versions of the “crazy cat lady,” or dog-crazy Leona Helmsley. Not coincidentally, they are usually women. And, our relationships to the animals with whom (or rather which, to be grammatically correct) we live is given very little status in our society. Despite the proliferation of “cute” pet pictures and anecdotes on the Web, actual displays of affection toward one’s pet or companion animal, or grief expressed over their illness or death, is looked upon with ridicule.
What more, people who are dependent on their animals are seen as unhealthy. In fact, this is reflected in laws surrounding guide dogs, comfort dogs used to provide emotional support to children testifying in court, and other forms of animal service.
The regulations are very clear: these animals are not pets. They are “serving” an essential therapeutic purpose. The fact that these relationships are circumscribed by laws relegate animals to the role of tools or medication, an act that also pathologizes the people who rely on them. Animals, then, can enter our intimate family units only as pets, which is to say property, or as a result of trauma, disease or disability. This cultural attitude suggests that people who are dependent upon their animals for anything other than amusement or entertainment are abnormal or unhealthy. Loving animals as friends and family is seen as quirky at best and at worst, crazy.
To read more about Oliver’s specific reflections on animals and philosophy, click here
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It’d be easy to think that Georg Simmel hasn’t been the talk of the town since he took on Kant, but there he is, resplendent in the New Yorker’s front section in its December 5, 2011 issue.
