Business Week ran a story over the weekend about how the economic meltdown is hitting male-dominated jobs, such as those in car manufacturing and finance, much harder than the service sector, where jobs are more often held by women. 

Good thing they call upon a sociologist to sort this out for their readers…

“In a society where services are becoming increasingly important, women quite simply have the better jobs,” says Hans Bertram, a sociologist at the Humboldt University in Berlin.

Bertram is not at all surprised by the fact that it is men who are worst affected by the crisis. “That was historically always the case, for example when you look at the collapse of the steel and coal industries in the Ruhr industrial region,” he says. Unemployment has always been a part of life in an industrialized country, and belongs to the rhythm of industrial society. “As long as someone is young and strong, he can make good money as a construction worker. But once you are 35 and your body won’t cooperate any more, there are fewer prospects,” Bertram explains.

He thinks it unlikely that, for example, former Opel workers will simply retrain to work in the service sector. “You can’t turn a steel worker into a call center agent,” he says. The service industry usually requires higher qualifications and these are not easily acquired later on in life, he explains.

“The change will only come with the generations,” Bertram says. “Perhaps young men will now more often decide against becoming a mechanic or a construction worker and instead opt to train as a nurse.”

Read more. 

Sociologists have been up in arms over a recent article in the Washington Post by sociologist Mark Regnerus, of the University of Texas at Austin, who claims that women should not delay in getting married.

Regnerus writes,

“Today, as ever, marriage wisely entered into remains good for the economy and the community, good for one’s personal well-being, good for wealth creation and, yes, good for the environment, too;” but that parents do teens a disservice when they “advise our children to complete their education before even contemplating marriage, to launch their careers and become financially independent.”

He also notes that,

“The average age of American men marrying for the first time is now 28. That’s up five full years since 1970 and the oldest average since the Census Bureau started keeping track. If men weren’t pulling women along with them on this upward swing, I wouldn’t be complaining. But women are now taking that first plunge into matrimony at an older age as well.”

Well, this erupted in the sociological blogosphere, specifically on Scatterplot. Shakha writes on Scatterplot,

What have we learned? That women are emotional beings bound by biology and objects of desirability of men. Men, by contrast, need to get good jobs. That may take a while. So men can and should be older than women (they work; women provide childen). “Society” does a disservice to men and women by encouraging them to marry older. You see, people should be married at younger ages because, “Marriage actually works best as a formative institution, not an institution you enter once you think you’re fully formed.”

This has all become very confusing. Apparently women can enter marriage earlier because they’re formed earlier; men are formed later. But marriage itself is not for people how are already formed. I’m lost.

Sociologist Andrew Cherlin published a rebuttal in the Washington Post the following day, entitled “Real Wedding Bell Woes.” He counters many of Regnerus’ claims, and offers additional commentary on the state of marriage in the United States.  Read here.

It seems that the debate about marriage rages on, even amongst sociologists…

The New York Times City Room ran a story about whether or not street vending could help alleviate New York City’s soaring unemployment rate. The article suggests that some members of the City Council as well as advocacy groups think that raising the cap on permits for street vendors might ease joblessness…

Michael Wells, co-director of the Street Vendor Project, said that the city needs to raise the number of permits to handle the surge of people who are looking to make a living. “People call because they have lost their jobs; people call because their husbands have lost their jobs; people call in anticipation of being laid off,” he said at a rally Tuesday morning on the steps of City Hall.

But he said he almost always told them that the chances of securing a legal vending permit was almost next to none. The number of New York street vending licenses for food and merchandise has been capped at fewer than 4,000 for decades — 853 general vending permits and 3,000 food permits citywide — though the Bloomberg administration introduced 1,000 new permits for fruit and vegetable vendors last year.

One sociologist weighs in…

The current set of caps was more or less put into place during the administration of Mayor Edward I. Koch, as part of an effort to clean up the streets, according to Prof. John Garber, a sociologist who has studied New York City street vending.

“They cut the number of vendors permits in half,” said Professor Garber, a who will soon be teaching at the University of Arkansas. “The number of vendors never decreased. The number of illegal vendors increased. It just forced the business of street vending to be illegal.”

“There is an erroneous theory that if you increase the number of street vendors’ permits you increase the number of vendors on the street,” Professor Garber said. “Street vending is bare-bones economics, supply and demand.” He added, “If there is no profit incentive, it doesn’t matter if they have a license or not, they are not going into street peddling.”

His research also found that vendors are often looking for other jobs while they are doing their selling on the street.

Sociologist Mitch Dunier comments on the opposition to street vending…

Opposition to broadening street vending permits comes from a number of directions, said Prof. Mitchell Duneier, a sociologist at Princeton who has also studied street vendors. Many people argue that street vending causes congestion on sidewalks and streets. In fact, the arrival of trucks as a means for delivery prompted a movement against street peddlers and their pushcarts because they “cluttered” the streets. “How much pedestrian congestion is a reasonable amount is frequently a cultural phenomenon of different neighborhoods,” he said. (Chinatown, for example, has a higher tolerance.)

Prof. Duneier added: “There has historically always been a give and take between the business community that is part of the formal economy and the informal economy. Businesspeople who pay rent and taxes are very, very skeptical.”

Garber suggests that this opposition is overstated…

Prof. Garber added that competition is overstated and that in fact, he saw many instances in which street vendor and store were more synergistic. Street vendors generally sell smaller-ticket items, while stores, because of their high-fixed costs for rent, generally try to sell higher-priced items.

“It’s fairly rare for street vendors to compete with store owners,” Professor Garber said. “The direct competition between the two is not really there realistically.” In fact, he noted that street vendors can be good for the city because they provide a sense of safety with vendors and create a urban feel and draw more foot traffic.

Read more.

An article in the Washington Post a few days ago discusses why Americans are leaving their churches. The answer is because of ‘gradual spiritual drift’ rather than disillusionment over church policy. The study offering these new insights illustrates how “spiritual attitudes are taking precedence over denominational traditions.”

About this new research:

The survey, by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, is the first large-scale study of the reasons Americans switch religious affiliations. Researchers found that more than half of people have done so at least once…

Almost three-quarters of Catholics and Protestants who are now unaffiliated with a religion said they had “just gradually drifted away” from their faith. And more than three-quarters of Catholics and half of Protestants currently unassociated with a faith said that over time, they stopped believing in their religion’s teachings.

Pew Forum senior fellow John C. Green said that result surprised researchers, who had expected policy disputes or disillusionment over internal scandals — such as the clergy sex-abuse crisis in the Catholic Church — to play more of a role in people’s decision to leave a faith. Among former Catholics who became Protestants, one in five cited the sex-abuse scandal as one of several reasons why they had left the church. But only a small percentage — 2 to 3 percent — cited it as the lone reason.

The sociological slant…

The results are a “big indictment” of organized religion, said Michael Lindsay, assistant professor of sociology at Rice University and author of a book on evangelical leaders. “There is a huge, wide-open back door at most churches. Churches around the country may be able to attract people, but they can’t keep them.”

At the same time, the large and growing number of people who report having no religious affiliation are surprisingly open to religion, researchers said. Unlike the popular perception that many have embraced secularism, a significant percentage appeared simply to have put their religiosity on pause — having worshiped as part of at least one faith already, about three in 10 said they have just not yet found the right religion.

Read more.

Fox News reports, “Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez wasn’t the first to discover the book he gave to President Obama last week in an attempt to ease diplomatic tensions — college students in the U.S. have been turning its pages for years.” The book the story refers to is the 317-page Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent by Eduardo Galeano.

In the article, academics were called upon to explain the fervor surrounding the book, and how its use among college professors in numerous undergraduate courses highlights its importance. Including historian Paul Ortiz…

Associate Professor Paul Ortiz at the University of Florida said he most recently used Galeano’s book while teaching a class on African and Latin American history last fall.

“The way I present him is that he himself was an oppositional scholar,” Ortiz said. “He was writing against the mainstream economic viewpoint of the development of the Americas.”

University of Minnesota sociology graduate student Ryan Alaniz was also asked to comment on the book…

Ryan Alaniz, a graduate student at the University of Minnesota, said he requires students to read portions of the book’s introduction for a sociology class he teaches called “Sociological Perspectives of Race, Class, and Gender.”

“The story of global capitalism is often told from a U.S. viewpoint often without the recognition that people in other parts of the world may have a very different explanation,” Alaniz wrote in an e-mail. “To gain a more holistic understanding of the consequences of capitalism, a critical student must be exposed to different interpretations of those consequences. Galeano’s book offers a critical Latin American perspective.”

Read more.

Yesterday USA Today reported on how executives who carry out layoffs are suffering too. They now report numerous symptoms including stress, poor sleep, and other problems with their physical health. The paper reports, “About 3 million Americans have been laid off since the recession began 16 months ago, the government says. In every instance, someone decided the worker had to go, and someone delivered the bad news.”

Of course these people can’t expect much sympathy from the laid off employees, but at least we can call upon a sociologist to explain the trend…

Managers involved with layoffs at one large company were more prone than other executives to have sleep problems, ulcers, headaches and even heart trouble up to three years after the layoffs, says Leon Grunberg, a sociologist at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Wash. They also had more job stress and depression. Grunberg led the only long-term study of how such bosses fare, following 410 managers over 10 years, until 2006.

In interviews, managers called the layoffs “gut-wrenching” and “devastating,” Grunberg says.

Something changes

In his study, the managers had mostly regained emotional health up to six years after the layoffs. But they still were more likely than other bosses to have stress-related health problems, such as ulcers and heart trouble, he says. “It seemed to change their image of the company dramatically. One said, ‘It’s almost a falling-out-of-love feeling.’ “

Read more.

In honor of Earth Day yesterday, Fox News ran a story about successful efforts to clean up our planet. They write, “Cleaner air, cleaner water and cleaner-burning gasoline — which means less brain-toxic lead in our blood — are the major achievements of the modern environmental movement, but global climate change looms as the elephant in the living room, experts say.”

The experts say…

“Of course, you can see the glass as half full and half empty, because there are many significant challenges that remain,” [Eric Goldstein, a lawyer with the National Resources Defense Council] told LiveScience. “And of course global warming is first and foremost, and the most critical. And despite the progress, there has also been increasing loss of species around the world, threats to the health of our oceans; there is water scarcity in many parts of the world and haphazard development patterns.”

Call in the sociologist…

A little-discussed downside: U.S. gains in clear air and water often come at the expense of other nations, Drexel University sociologist and environmental scientist Robert Brulle said. We export our toxin-producing manufacturing to places such as Canada, Mexico and China where there are looser environmental policies. We clean up our act, their air and water gets dirtier.

And lately?

Most of the above landmarks were primarily achieved starting in the 1970s, leaving some to ask, “What have you done for me lately?”

The hold-up in progress these days is that early tree huggers tackled the low-hanging fruit first, Brulle says. Now the harder stuff — global issues like global warming, biodiversity loss, deforestation — remains to be solved. Also, the grass-roots movement is less powerful and less empowering. It’s hard to get on the board of a lot of these organizations, other than say the Sierra Club, National Audubon Society or the Center for Health, Environment & Justice.

Nowadays, a lot of organizations — there were 1,339 that operated nationally and reported to the IRS in 2003, according to Brulle — give citizens a “free ride.” Just give money. No need to write a letter, attend a rally or lecture, or change one’s lifestyle.

Meanwhile, the environmental movement has a total annual income of $2.7 billion, Brulle said. And some of the organizations do good work by focusing on buying and preserving land to protect ecological habitats, but this does nothing today for the more pressing issue of global climate change, he says.

“You can buy an ecosystem, but shifts in climate change will destroy the ecosystem as it exists,” Brulle said.

As an example, Brulle points the finger at the Nature Conservancy, which commanded about 19 percent of all environmental income dollars in 2003 by his calculation.

“Do we want to be putting 19 percent of [donations] income on a strategy that is really about buying land?” Brulle said. “That is not going to address global climate change and biodiversity losses … the strategy has failed.”

Brulle’s picks for where to put your environmental dollars — the Sierra Club (for which he is an unpaid advisor; he likes how they effectively connect individuals with national concerns), Center for Health, Environment & Justice (he likes their highly local work) and 350.org.

And another sociologist…

Ohio State University sociologist J. Craig Jenkins also is guardedly optimistic for our environmental future.

“Trying to run a transportation system based on ‘Hummers” took a long time to develop and will take equally long to restructure,” he said.

He predicts significant changes in our energy use and patterns in the areas of transportation, home heating and industrial energy use, if only due to rising energy costs. The United States currently ranges from non-competitive to among the worst in the world in these areas (especially in transportation and domestic energy use).

New housing designs, new methods of generating electricity and new transportation methods are on the horizon, he said, also due to rising costs.

“These will also have global warming benefits,” he said. “The big unknown is whether the latter benefits will be enough to matter.”

Read more.

This week, Newsday ran a story about what might lead certain people to commit murder-suicide, drawing upon scholars’ expertise on identifying key traits of perpetrators. The article was specifically concerned with the practice of familicide, also referred to as ‘family annihilation,’ which is committed by men nearly 95% of the time according to the Violence Policy Center.

The psychological perspective…

Louis Schlesinger, forensic psychology professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City, said there were two different types of familicidal offenders.

One takes a proprietorial view of his wife, gets angry, and attacks her and everyone around her. The second type is “the despondent male,” who feels he must kill his family and himself to spare them the humiliation or pain of what life will bring, Schlesinger said.

“It’s not rational, it’s not reasonable,” he said. “If he tries to kill himself and survives, he views the [slain] family with sympathy. . . . He feels tremendous regret.”

The sociological perspective…

But Jack Levin, a sociologist and criminologist at Northeastern University in Boston, said there is almost always a “catastrophic loss that precedes a family annihilation.”

Triggers can be a loss of a job, money, a relationship or a loved one. Often, he said, there is a feeling of isolation.

“Most family annihilators, and typically it’s the husband and father, have been frustrated and depressed over a long period of time,” he said. “But they, unlike other depressed individuals, blame everybody else for their miseries.”

Or, he said, in cases when the man may be described as a dedicated husband and devoted father, the motive may be “a perverted sense of altruism that they’d be better off dead than live in this miserable existence.”

In general, he said, most familicides are suicidal rampages, “but first the killer will take care of his loved ones.”

If the person is religious, “He may feel he can reunite with loved ones in the hereafter, or wants to spare his loved ones the humiliation of his suicide.”

Read more.

Early this week USA Today ran a story about last weekend’s Council on Contemporary Families conference in Chicago, during which experts discussed how topics such as sexual orientation, sexual labeling, and gender-bending were no longer “x-rated or adults-only topics, but rather subjects that young people talk about as they figure out how they fit in.” Psychologist Braden Berkey told conference attendees, “Youth are saying they don’t want to be defined by gender or orientation.” 

USA Today reports:

Berkey is founding director of the Sexual Orientation and Gender Institute at the Center on Halsted, which opened in 2007 to offer support services and programming for the area’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community. He talked about the evolution of sexual and gender labels and how young people today are trying to dissolve them. He says the terms created in the early days, such as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender, are giving way to other descriptions, such as polygender or multisex. Young people, he says, reject narrow gender definitions and say they don’t want to be defined by their sexuality.

However, a presentation by sociologist Barbara Risman of the University of Illinois at Chicago suggested that for the middle-schoolers she’s studied, attitudes about sexual orientation are less open-minded, especially for boys. She says these boys fear the label “gay.”

More from Barbara Risman…

Among boys, “homophobia in middle school is used to police gender,” she says. In-depth interviews with 43 students at an urban middle school in the Southeast found vast differences between the sexes.

“Today, girls are free to do sports and be competitive. No one thought they had to play dumb to get a boyfriend. The women’s movement has done great things for middle school girls,” she says.

“It’s another story with boys. I feel like we’re in a time warp. We have not dealt with men and masculinity in a serious enough way,” she says.”Boys police each other. There’s no room not to do anything not traditionally masculine.”

Risman says it’s important not to generalize the findings to most American children, but she says the fact that boys are labeled quickly suggests that this is a developmental stage. The study, she adds, was limited by many rules requiring parental permission for contact with minors.

Risman says it’s the stigma of homosexuality that looms among young boys. Being emotional or caring too much about clothes or liking to dance are reasons that boys give for describing someone as “girlish,” she says.

Read more.

This past weekend Pink News, a UK-based media outlet, ran a story on a new study out of the University of Derby suggesting that lesbian women in abusive relationships may resist seeking assistance for fear of being outed. Findings from the study were presented at the British Sociological Association’s annul meetings last weekend in Cardiff and indicate that abusive relationships between gay women “can can include physical assaults, sexual coercion and emotional cruelty but victims are put off seeking help because of fear of being outed to friends, colleagues and family.”

The scale of the problem:

Forty women between the ages of 21 and 70 were chosen for the study, believed to the most detailed research into abusive lesbian relationships to date. All of those who took part had experienced abuse in some capacity.

Around 88 per cent of those questioned had suffered physical abuse such as punching, kicking and slapping. Forty five per cent reported had been bullied into performing unwanted sexual activities and ten per cent admitted to having been forced into having sex.

Thirteen per cent had been threatened with being outed by their partner to friends, family and colleagues or outed altogether by the abusive partner, while 18 per cent had felt suicidal or had attempted suicide during the abusive relationship.

The author’s comments:

Dr Rebecca Barnes, who led the study, said: “Only women who had been abused by a previous female partner were invited to participate in the study, with the aim being to examine these relationships in detail rather than trying to establish what proportion of lesbian relationships as a whole is abusive.

“The findings show that women in abusive same-sex relationships experience very similar challenges to women in abusive heterosexual relationships.

“However, being in a same-sex relationship poses additional barriers to seeking and receiving effective support. My findings also showed that abuse in lesbian relationships can involve wide-ranging forms of emotional, physical, financial and sexual abuse, as it can in heterosexual abusive relationships.”

“One of the key differences with same-sex abuse is the secrecy which surrounds many same-sex relationships – a few of my participants had had relationships lasting years which their family or colleagues knew nothing about or which only a few close friends were aware of. This particularly applied to women who were in their first same-sex relationship.”

Read more.