The opening ceremony of the Olympics is not short on inspiring imagery for the many millions who tune in around the globe. As the host country provides the spectacle and entertainment, athletes representing their respective countries march one after the other to cheers of the crowd. With such cooperation in the name of athletic competition, the Olympics can’t help but be a large step towards worldwide transparency, peace and equality. Right?

In a recent New York Times editorial, David Clay Large, a professor of history at Montana State University, suggests otherwise. Drawing on analysis of the 1936 Berlin Games, Large explains that there is little evidence that the Olympics works to open up repressive regimes. In fact, the inspiring tales of the Olympics taming Hitler’s Nazi regime are mostly myth.

The Olympics gave the Nazis a lesson in how to hide their vicious racism and anti-Semitism, and should offer today’s International Olympic Committee a cautionary tale when considering the location of future events.

While few would argue that the Berlin Olympics transformed Nazi Germany into the ideal international partner, it is commonly said that Hitler did reduce persecution of Jewish people during that time.

But the truth is more nuanced. Although the regime did discourage open anti-Semitism, this directive pertained only to Berlin. Outside the capital, the Nuremberg Laws remained in full effect.

Large explains that through employing deceitful tactics throughout the Olympics the Nazis learned how was easy it was to mislead the global public through superficial changes.

The article continues with Large deconstructing other pervasive myths about the value of the Berlin Games, including the well-told stories about the impact of Jesse Owens’ dominance. According to Large, the black American track-and-field athlete, did not simply force the Germans and people everywhere to rethink negative views towards black people; rather, the victory simply led to the group in power using the success to enforce negative views.

[T]he publicity surrounding black athletes’ success simply taught the Nazis how to refine existing stereotypes. Instead of arguing that those athletes were physically inferior, they disparaged them as freaks who, because of their “jungle inheritance,” were able to jump high and run fast.

Large’s presentation of “the truth behind the 1936 Games” effectively calls into question many of the underlying assumptions about the positive impacts of holding the Olympics and other large international sporting events in countries with questionable governance and a history of mistreating citizens. And, as Large points out,

there is little evidence so far that the 2008 Beijing Olympics did anything but show the Chinese government how to maintain its clamp on freedom while supposedly opening its doors to the world.

Large concludes with a critical but potentially positive suggestion:

This is not to say that the Games should be held only in politically “clean” countries. But instead of blindly celebrating the alleged openness of repressive regimes that host the event, the international community should use it as an opportunity to hold them to the values that the Olympics claim to represent.

In an upcoming article in The Nation (available online), Mary Jo Kane, Professor of Kinesiology and Director of the Tucker Center for Research on Girls & Women in Sport at the University of Minnesota, takes on the argument that sex sells women’s sports.

Kane explains that too often the little attention devoted to women athletes is sexual in nature. She turns to the much discussed coverage of Olympic gold medal winning skier Lindsey Vonn as example.

Even Sports Illustrated—notorious for its lack of coverage of women’s sports—couldn’t ignore this historic moment and devoted its cover to Vonn. SI’s cover, however, blatantly portrayed Vonn as a sex object and spoke volumes about the rampant sexual depictions of women athletes.

The portrayal of Vonn comes as no surprise to people like Kane who have seen study after study confirm that sports coverage offers hypersexual images of female athletes while focusing on the athletic prowess of their male counterparts. However, many of those who cover and market sports believe that this is not a bad thing. They argue that the images of scantily clad women athletes actually helps bolster the popularity of the sport. Being skeptical of the claim that sex sells women’s sports, Kane decided to conduct a series of focus groups to gather empirical evidence.

Study participants were shown photographs of female athletes ranging from on-court athletic competence to wholesome “girls next door” to soft pornography and asked to indicate which images increased their interest in reading about, watching on TV and attending a women’s sporting event.

It turns out that the sex sells approach did little but alienate the core fan base of women’s sports—women and older men. For young women it was the images of women athletes actually playing sports that caught their eye. And for women of all ages and older men, the sexual images did little but offend.

Even when younger males, a prime target audience, indicated that sexually provocative images were “hot,” they also stated that such images did not fundamentally increase their interest in women’s sports, particularly when it came to attending a sporting event. The key takeaway? Sex sells sex, not women’s sports.

Kane concludes the article with a rather novel suggestion: maybe women’s sports should be sold through focusing on the excitement of the sport itself – the athletes’ skill and determination, the drama of the competition, and the heated rivalries.

Millions of fans around the globe just witnessed such media images and narratives during coverage of the Women’s World Cup in Germany. Perhaps such coverage will start a trend whereby those who cover women’s sports will simply turn on the camera and let us see the reality—not the sexualized caricature—of today’s female athletes. If and when that happens, sportswomen will receive the respect and admiration they so richly deserve.

Many people put off talking about immigration reform until “America regains control of its borders.”  But, according to Douglas Massey’s recent CNN article, that moment has arrived. He says:

According to estimates from the Mexican Migration Project, which I co-direct, the rate of new undocumented migration from Mexico dropped to zero in 2008 for the first time in 50 years. This remarkable event partly reflects the drop in labor demand in the context of a deep economic recession, but it also stems from a massive increase in border enforcement.  Since 1990, the size of the Border Patrol has increased by a factor of five and its budget by a factor of 13.

While this increased enforcement surely contributed to decreased immigration, it also likely decreased the outflow of immigrants who were already here.

At present, therefore, new undocumented migrants are not heading northward; former undocumented migrants are coming back in very small numbers; and settled undocumented residents are staying put.  As a result of these trends, the population of undocumented U.S. residents peaked at 12.6 million persons in 2008 and fell to 10.8 million in 2009, according to the latest estimates from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.  Net undocumented migration is now slightly negative.

Many immigrants are also employed as guest workers; in fact, from 1990 to 2008, the number of Mexicans admitted with temporary work visas grew from 17,000 to 361,000 per year.  Many other migrants are becoming citizens.  For example, the number of legal Mexican immigrants attaining U.S. citizenship went from 18,000 in 1990 to 232,000 in 2008.

In sum, of the four principal components of comprehensive immigration reform, three have already been substantially achieved.   The border is now under control and net-undocumented migration has fallen below zero; a guest worker program has been created to bring in more than 360,000 temporary Mexican migrants per year; and legal immigrants have increasingly taken it upon themselves to “expand” the quotas by naturalizing and sponsoring the entry of immediate relatives outside of the numerical quotas.

According to Massey, one main accomplishment remains: the creation of a pathway to legalization for long-term, undocumented residents of the United States.

Somewhere around three million of these people entered the country as minors.  They did not make the decision to violate U.S. immigration law and should not be held responsibilities for choices made by their parents.  In the absence of a criminal record or other disqualifying circumstances, those who entered as minors should be given an immediate and unconditional amnesty and be allowed to proceed with their lives in the only country that most of them know.

For their part, undocumented migrants who entered as adults should be offered a temporary legalization that confers the right to live and work in the United States for some extended period, during which they would be able to accumulate points ultimately to qualify them for legal permanent residence.  Points would be awarded for socially desirable behaviors such as paying taxes, learning English, studying civics, holding a steady job, owning a home, parenting U.S. citizen children and generally staying out of trouble.  Once a certain minimum threshold of points is achieved, migrants would be allowed to pay a fine as restitution for violating the law and then, having paid their debt to society, get on with their lives as legal permanent residents of the United States.  We are much closer to the ultimate goals of immigration reform than most people realize.

Sarah K. Cowan, a sociology and demography  grad student at UC Berkeley, recently asked CNN readers, “What if a President served 42 years?”   That’s how long Moammar Gadhafi has been the leader in Libya, which could be equated to Richard Nixon still serving as President of the United States today rather than leaving office in 1974.

In a healthy democracy, citizens see multiple leaders of government in their lifetime. Doing so allows them to compare leaders, form political preferences and to participate meaningfully in the political process by voting in truly competitive elections.

But, in many countries, a large portion of the population has only experienced one leader.

…Seventy-nine percent of Libyans have lived their entire lives under Gadhafi’s rule. Before the revolution in Egypt, 60 percent of Egyptians had lived their lives under President Hosni Mubarak exclusively. Sixty-one percent of Zimbabweans have only known Robert Mugabe’s rule. By contrast, the longest American presidency was Franklin D. Roosevelt’s; he was elected four times, to serve for a total of 16 years, of which he served 12 before his death…

According to Cowan, two main factors have led to situations where much of the population knows only one leader.  First, that leader remained in power and disregarded or never established term limits.  Second, the populations in these countries are comparatively young.

Twenty percent of people in Mozambique have lived their entire lives under Armando Guebuza, and they are all under age 7. The population is so young because women in Mozambique have a lot of children — more than five on average — and people die young — at age 48 on average. (The age of the population can have a powerful effect on these calculations: If Libya had the same age profile as the much older population of the U.S., 57% of the population would have known Gadhafi as the only leader during their lifetime, compared with the 79% who actually did.)

Opinions on the benefits of long-standing rulers vary.  Some scholars argue that they create political and social vacuums and stunt economic growth, while others argue that, under the right conditions, long tenures may lead to economic growth.  Either way, Cowan says:

Leaving aside whether lengthy tenures are beneficial for economies, they violate democratic principles. It is a characteristic that distinguishes democracies from authoritarian regimes; in a democracy, the leader changes in a reasonable time frame. Term limits, confidence votes for parliamentary systems of government and regular and fair elections are all means by which to prevent “presidents for life.”

As California grapples with a recent Supreme Court decision that mandates the state to reduce its prison population, sociologist Joshua Page examines an alliance that speaks out against prison reform.

This alliance, between Crime Victims United and the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, has existed for over two decades, as both organizations have lobbied for harsher sentences and other “tough on crime” policies.

The union had a strong personal interest in developing the victims group, which it realized could be an effective ally in achieving the guards’ policy objectives: enhancing members’ pay and benefits, keeping private prisons out of California and promoting “tough on crime” sentencing laws. Crime Victims United shares the union’s commitment to lengthy, harsh mandatory sentencing laws such as “three strikes.” The alliance has been good for both partners.

And the two groups have become a powerful force.

But their success has had a downside. When Crime Victims United turns complicated criminal justice matters into simple choices between helping and hurting victims, reasoned debate and thoughtful policymaking are necessarily constricted. Lawmakers are reluctant to oppose advocates. . .for fear that they will be tarred in the media and targeted in future elections. No politician wants to stand against a woman whose daughter was murdered and be deemed soft on crime. With financing from the guards, the victims group has the resources to seriously help or damage a politician’s image and career.

So while Crime Victims United provides support to people who suffer crimes, their actions may also cause harm.

By claiming pride of place as “the voice of victims,” the group marginalizes alternative victims’ voices. Some victims’ rights groups in the state maintain that vengeful, ultra-tough penal policies do not help victims of crime but simply create more suffering and resentment. These groups say that challenging offenders to take responsibility for the harm their crimes cause through restorative justice practices and helping prisoners develop the tools necessary to live crime-free lives help prevent future victims. These alternative voices reject zero-sum logic; they do not reflexively pit offenders against victims — or, in Nina Salarno Ashford’s words, the “bad people” against the “good citizens.”

According to Page, both groups will likely ensure their voices continue to be heard.  “If policymakers continue to follow the voices of expressly punitive victims rights advocates and ignore the opinions of those who promote alternative, less punitive conceptions of justice, California will not shrink its $9-billion prison system or alleviate its correctional crisis. The status quo will prevail.”

Check out the entire Op-Ed in the Los Angeles Times.

In a recent editorial in the Huffington Post, Abby Ferber, Professor of Sociology and Women’s and Ethnic Studies, uses the recent coverage of  Arnold Schwarzenegger’s child from an affair and Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s alleged rape of a woman in NYC as an opportunity to examine often ignored elements of heterosexual privilege.

As Ferber reminds us, this is not the first time men in positions of power have been accused of sexual activity not befitting a married (or unmarried) man.

Another news cycle focused on powerful men’s inappropriate and abusive sexual behavior…Before Arnold, it was Tiger Woods, and John Edwards, and ______ (fill in the blank with one of the many other names that might pop into your mind at this point).
We have heard it all before. The flurry of newspaper and tabloid articles rehash the same old issues.

However, one accusation that is absent in the glut of sensationalist coverage, is that these men are destroying marriage itself. Instead, Ferber explains, we reserve that accusation for gay and lesbian couples seeking the right to marry.

The actions of individual heterosexual men are never used against all heterosexuals. One of the central benefits of being part of a privileged social identity group is that your own behavior is never taken as representing that of your entire group. No matter how many stories we hear about heterosexual men committing adultery and destroying their marriages, why is it that we continue to hear that it is LGBT people that are the greatest threat to the institution of marriage?

The privilege extends beyond the marital walls to negative stereotypes about deviant sexual desires and lack of self-control.

And what about the stereotypes of gay men as promiscuous, or as pedophiles? Here heterosexual men have gay men beat as well, and there is no dearth of public examples…And yet again it is gay men that our society stereotypes as pedophiles.

Ferber’s brief, but powerful, op-ed shows the importance of not only looking at what is said, but also what is not said. Sometimes it is the questions not asked, and generalizations not made, that reveal the benefits of positions of power.

That is what heterosexual privilege does, it allows individual heterosexual men to behave badly without anyone assuming it says something about all heterosexuals. And the point is not to assume that it does, but to ask why so many are willing to quickly make these assumptions about those who do not share the benefits of heterosexual privilege.

In a recent op-ed in the New York Times, sociologist Jaye Cee Whitehead shared her thoughts on economic arguments for gay marriage.

In a letter to the New York State Legislature last month, top business executives endorsed same-sex marriage on the ground that “attracting talent is key to our state’s economic future.” The signers — among them the banker Lloyd C. Blankfein, the financier Ronald O. Perelman, the real estate developer Jerry I. Speyer and the publisher Mortimer B. Zuckerman — declared that legalizing gay unions would “help maintain our competitive advantage in attracting the best and brightest people the world has to offer.”

This letter is one of many examples of promoting marriage equality as good for business.

States and cities are, as the New York executives pointed out, competing to attract talent in a globally competitive labor market. The wedding industry benefits, of course, when more couples are allowed to marry. And marriage equality is associated with revenue gains from sales taxes and license fees. Backers of gay marriage speak openly of the gains from “marriage tourism” in states that have legalized same-sex marriage.

So why shouldn’t gays and lesbians have equality and bolster the economy at the same time?  In Whitehead’s eyes,

. . . supporting marriage on economic grounds dehumanizes same-sex couples by conflating civil rights with economic perks. Americans should be offended when the value of gays and lesbians is reduced to their buying power as consumers or their human and creative capital as workers. . .Worse yet, this narrative neglects the most economically vulnerable gay and lesbian couples and plays into the inaccurate stereotype of same-sex couples (particularly male couples) as being mostly well-educated and affluent.

Indeed, many proponents of same-sex marriage often point out that legalizing same-sex marriage may reduce spending on welfare programs.  But, Whitehead explains why these and other economic arguments are problematic.

Supporters of same-sex marriage ought to acknowledge that marriage is not just a natural expression of human intimacy or a declaration of personal commitment; it is a form of governance. The vast expansion of the government over the past century has embedded marriage into all areas where the state and the individual intersect, from tax obligations to disability benefits to health care decisions to family law. As with any other structure of governance in a democratic society, we ought to think about its participants as citizens rather than consumers.

So if you support same-sex marriage, do so not because it brings in tax revenue and tourism dollars and prevents people from becoming a burden on the state, but because you value gay men and lesbians as citizens who deserve equal access to the rights and responsibilities of marriage.

On April 21st, 2011, Harold Garfinkel, one of the important figures of the sociological canon and the man responsible for countless ‘face the wrong way in an elevator’ or ‘eat like a dog in a crowded cafateria’ introduction to sociology labs, passed away. He was 93.

The New York Times honored his passing with an account of his importance to the discipline and to broader understandings of the social world. In the article Garfinkel is attributed with the ability to draw out the complexity of even the simplest social interaction. His tendency to match the complexity of the social world with the complexity of his writing is also noted when he is characterized as:

an innovative sociologist who turned the study of common sense into a dense and arcane discipline.

Through development of the sociological approach known as ethnomethodology, Garfinkel went against the grain of the discipline by focusing on how members of society worked together to create social order rather than focusing on how the social rules determined the behaviors of individual members of society.

Mr. Garfinkel was sometimes likened to a quantum physicist because, in effect, he suggested that the fundamental building blocks of a social order were much smaller and much harder to observe than had been previously believed. Rules were not the smallest particles of social order, he found; rather, the rules themselves would be impossible without the bits of knowledge, the gestures and the methods of reasoning that allow people to communicate.

John Heritage, a professor of sociology at U.C.L.A., explains,

“His point of view wasn’t that rules aren’t important, but that how they get interpreted and applied is a matter of mutual negotiation. We have to have common resources for any form of coordinated action of human beings, and we use these common resources just to exist in a shared world. It’s a fundamental part of the human condition.”

In Garfinkel’s seminal work, Studies in Ethnomethodology, published in 1967, he introduced sociologists to so-called “breaching” experiments:

in which the subjects’ expectations of social behavior were violated; for example, a subject playing tic tac toe was confronted with an opponent who made his marks on the lines dividing the spaces on the game board instead of in the spaces themselves. Their reactions — outrage, anger, puzzlement, etc. — helped demonstrate the existence of underlying presumptions that constitute social life.

As Professor Heritage explains, the book had influence beyond disciplinary walls.

“Not only did it deal with rules and language, which are fundamental elements of sociological study, but it reached across many fields: cognitive science, artificial intelligence, philosophy. You wouldn’t get any argument if you said it was among the 10 most important books in sociology in the 20th century.”

After Sunday’s announcement that bin Laden had been killed, people gathered in front of the White House and Ground Zero in what many social scientists say was a rare moment of American unity. The Christian Science Monitor turned to social scientists to reflect upon these celebrations.

“It’s one of those things that is as close to what passes for a day of national unity in the U.S. as we can get these days,” said Peter Ditto, a psychologist at the University of California, Irvine who studies politics and judgment.

But, debates are already in full swing, as people consider whether flag-waving and chanting were appropriate ways to respond to a death.

At times, the scene seemed like that of a sporting event, with people climbing lamp posts and singing “Na Na Hey Hey (Kiss Him Goodbye),” a song more associated with losing basketball teams than the war on terror. That’s not a surprising dynamic, according to Francesco Duina, a sociologist at Bates College in Maine and author of “Winning: Reflections on an American Obsession” (Princeton University Press, 2011). American culture is particularly competitive, Duina said.

“The percentage of Americans who embrace competition is higher than the percentage in any other industrialized country in the world,” Duina told LiveScience.

Duina also shared that to many people, bin Laden’s death is a confirmation that our approach to life is superior to his.  “That’s what’s being celebrated, and that’s why you see the flags.”

Political differences likely explain some differences in opinion regarding the appropriate way to respond to this death.  But, sociologists point out another—generational differences.  Many people in the crowds were college students, who often don’t have to work early in the morning.

But young people also experienced 9/11 differently than those in older age cohorts, said Andrew Perrin, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who has studied the cultural aftereffects of 9/11.

“If you were 8 or 9 at the time, by the time you began thinking about world politics, 9/11 was a thoroughly interpreted, thoroughly understood, if you will, cultural event,” Perrin told LiveScience. “So you didn’t go through the same level of experiencing this unsettled time and doing the work of interpreting it. You experienced it as something that was thoroughly understood before it was presented to you.”

In a recent opinion column in the Star Tribune, John Rash points to the absence of religion as a major theme in shows on the national television networks.

The absence is all the more surprising considering that 80% of Americans reported to Gallup that religion plays a ‘very’ or ‘fairly’ important role in their lives.

And as Rash reminds readers, religion continues to maintain a very visible presence in other popular culture:

Topping the bestseller list is “Heaven is for Real,” about a boy witnessing the afterlife following a near-death experience.
The hottest Broadway show is “The Book of Mormon,” a satire (and grudging admiration) of the faith from the creators of “South Park.”
The highest-grossing R-rated film ever isn’t a gross-out comedy, Quentin Tarantino-style nihilistic violence, or even a sexual coming-of-age story, but “The Passion of the Christ.”

To help understand the absence, Rash turns to academia. Professor Jeanne Halgren Kilde, director of religious studies at the University of Minnesota, explains that even though network television rarely features explicitly religious themes, it is engaging in many of the same debates.

“Questions about good and evil, justice, personal destiny, love, about relationships — these are the narratives we see on TV that are the same questions religion has been asking, and answering, forever. So TV becomes in some senses a kind of superseding of what had been the religious context of discussing, to a more secular context of answering these questions.”

And, while the major religions are rarely a central theme in popular television, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of shows with spiritual and paranormal themes.

Hitting its peak around 2006, this trend inverted media maven Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum: This time, the message was the mediums — as well as the psychics, ghost hunters and clairvoyant crimefighters who populated prime-time in shows like “Medium,” “Supernatural” and “Ghost Whisperer.”

Penny Edgell, professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota provides context to the rise.

“Network prime time is responding to a trend,” said Penny Edgell “And thus it’s perpetuating and popularizing that trend of people thinking about spiritual things, but drawing on a different kind of repertoire that’s more about relationships and flexible personal contacts that might shape your own life that don’t have anything to do with a doctrine or a church. There’s a lot of the supernatural on TV, but not a lot of organized religion. And that mirrors trends in how people are thinking about their spirituality; it mirrors a rise of a discourse that emphasized spirituality of something that’s distinct from, but not always in opposition to, organized religion.”

Rash does make note of one of the few shows where religion is discussed – America’s longest running cartoon, The Simpsons.

Even the Catholic Church’s official newspaper, Osservatore Ramono, honed in on Homer, saying he “finds in God his last refuge, even though he sometimes gets His name sensationally wrong.”

Whether or not the misadventures of America’s favorite animated family is the appropriate venue for a national discussion of religion remains up for debate.