Forbes Magazine is running a story this week about peripheral effects of the economic meltdown, and for this they turn to the work of famous sociologist and criminologist Sudhir Venkatesh.

Elizabeth Eaves, for Forbes.com writes,

You may think the economic meltdown is hitting bankers and Realtors hard, but spare a thought for members of the underground economy–prostitutes, drug dealers and purveyors of stolen goods, to name just a few participants. That’s what sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh does, having spent much of the last 15 years studying, and sometimes living within, the underground economies of New York and Chicago.

“The recession is engendering more violence,” says Venkatesh, a professor at Columbia University. “There’s far greater competition for whatever meager resources there are. The folks down on Wall Street peddling drugs, they’re fighting. The sex workers are trying as hard as they can to retain their clients,” he says, sitting in a Mediterranean restaurant a short walk from the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse, where he’s on jury duty. Considering his well-documented friendship with a gang leader–the subject of his bestseller, Gang Leader for a Day–one might have expected the court to disqualify Venkatesh, but no such luck.

About today’s economic situation…

Today Venkatesh is watching black market workers slip into despair along with the rest of the population affected by the economy. Lest legal workers consider this a distant problem, one conclusion of Venkatesh’s work is that the underground and mainstream economies are intimately entwined. “The boundaries are fluid, particularly in the global city where the black market has become instrumental–one might even say vital–to the overall economy,” he says. In New York City illegal workers serve sex, drugs and takeout to the wealthiest members of society–or at least they did until financial sector layoffs began in 2008.

The underground economy includes a vast array of people providing services that are off the books but otherwise legal. Venkatesh enumerates those having a harder time in the face of the recession: office cleaners, squeegee men, informal security guards, “canners” who scavenge for recyclables (there’s less consumption now, so less to recycle) and nannies whose employers have been laid off. And as business contracts, underground workers face certain problems unique to their status. They have no unemployment insurance or other benefits, and, with little protection from law enforcement, they tend to resolve disputes by physical means.

Venkatesh prefers to leave detailed prescriptions to policymakers but nevertheless ventures a few. Microcredit loans, as well as education on risk management and planning, could help shift some black market entrepreneurial zeal above ground. He heartily approves of the proposal by Barack Obama–a fellow pickup basketball player at the University of Chicago when Venkatesh studied there–to expand the Earned Income Tax Credit to give a bigger break to low-income parents. Sales taxes also hit the poor hard, he says; one way to help would be to let them use prepaid cards to buy goods tax free.

Venkatesh is struck by how much the black market resembles the wider society in which it is enmeshed. In the same Parisian banlieues that erupted in riots in 2005, he observed an “almost aristocratic,” highly centralized criminal operation. In the ghettos of Chicago, by contrast, he observed underground workers convene an ad hoc court to solve a dispute. His dismisses the “culture of poverty” theory, which suggests that poor blacks in America don’t work because they don’t value employment. “People in America want to work,” he says. They do so ever so industriously, even when they’re breaking the law.

Read more.

United Press International issued a release this morning about new findings on the spread of AIDS across sub-Saharan Africa, out of Penn State University.

A U.S. sociologist says increased schooling across sub-Saharan Africa might be lowering the number of new HIV infections among younger adults.

If that is true, Penn State University Professor David Baker says it would suggest a shift in a decades-long trend in which a formal education was considered an AIDS risk factor.

“Before the 1990s, in the impoverished regions of sub-Saharan Africa, even modest amounts of education afforded males higher income, more leisure time and, for some males, greater access to commercial sex workers,” said Baker. “HIV-infected higher-status males then spread the infection to both educated and uneducated women, which moved the disease into the general population.”

Baker and graduate students John Collins and Juan Leon report their research findings in the U.N. journal Prospects.

Read more.

Forbes Magazine reports on a new study by a sociologist out of the University of Nebraska, which suggests that in a shifting economy and a waning rural population, people are changing the way they do business. Forbes reports, “Randy Cantrell, with the university’s Rural Initiative, says in most rural counties, between 18 percent and 30 percent or more of jobs are now due to self-employment. And, that accounts for virtually all job growth in rural areas.”

Cantrell believes the popularity of self-employment is on the rise.

As rural areas continue to see their population numbers fall, Cantrell says he expects that to put pressure on employers to shift away from the traditional way of doing business and rely on private contractors.

Cantrell details the phenomenon in a new report based on 2007 census data and other federal statistics.

Read more…

Inside Higher Education reports on new work from Neil Gross, a sociologist at the University of British Columbia, whose research explores today’s faculty politics. This new study engages the contentious and ongoing debate over professors politics. Inside Higher Ed notes, “Right-wing critics make much of the fact that many surveys have found professors — especially in the humanities — to be well to the left of the American public. This political incongruence is frequently used as a jumping off point to suggest that professors are indoctrinating students with leftist ideas.” 

The analysis, Neil Gross explains, indicates that “conservative critics are correct about humanities professors’ leanings, but incorrect about their views of what classroom responsibility entails.”

In fact, Gross finds — in a study based on detailed interviews of professors’ in various disciplines — that faculty members take seriously the idea that they should not try to force their views upon students, or to in any way reward or punish students based on their opinions. And this view is shared by professors who see their politics playing a legitimate role in their research agendas, not just those who view their research agendas as neutral.

The aim of this new research is, in part, Gross writes, to shift the discussion of professorial politics away from the unsurprising (many professors are liberal) to “a more systematic” study of how “academicians in various fields and at various points in time understand the relationship between their political views, values, and engagements and their activities of knowledge creation and dissemination, and to how such understandings inform and shape academic work and political practice.” It’s not enough to simply document professors’ politics, Gross writes. What is needed is more attention to how professors handle the “knowledge-politics problem” in their work.

Specifically, the findings in the interviews Gross conducted raise questions about the assumptions of some critics of academe that one can draw conclusions about what goes on in classrooms based on the political and research writings of professors.

Read more…

Newswise (a press release service) highlighted a recent study out of the University of Chicago, which suggests that “not having many close friends contributes to poorer health for older adults, those who also feel lonely face even greater health risks and that older people who are able to adjust to being alone don’t have the same health problems.”

The study is the first to examine the relationships between health and two different types of isolation. Researchers measured the degree to which older adults are socially connected and socially active. They also assessed whether older adults feel lonely and whether they expect that friends and family would help them in times of need.

“Social disconnectedness is associated with worse physical health, regardless of whether it prompts feelings of loneliness or a perceived lack of social support,” said study co-author Linda Waite, the Lucy Flower Professor in Sociology at the University of Chicago and a leading expert on aging.

However, the researchers found a different relationship between social isolation and mental health. “The relationship between social disconnectedness and mental health appears to operate through feelings of loneliness and a perceived lack of social support,” Waite explained.

Older adults who feel most isolated report 65 percent more depressive symptoms than those who feel least isolated, regardless of their actual levels of connectedness. The consequences of poor mental health can be substantial, as deteriorating mental health also reduces people’s willingness to exercise and may increase health-risk behaviors such as cigarette smoking and alcohol use, Waite explained.

Read more.

USA Today reports on new numbers released from the National Center for Health Statistics, indicating that 2007 set an all-time record for births in the United States, with some interesting changes in the motherhood landscape.

The USA’s banner year for babies in 2007 set a record of 4.31 million — and was driven in large part by growing numbers of unmarried adult women giving birth, new government data show. Childbearing by unmarried women reached “historic levels,” the report says, to an estimated 1.7 million, or 40% of all births. There were increases in the birth rate and the proportion of births as well as an increase in the number. Teen moms accounted for 23%. The report, based on preliminary data, was released Wednesday by the National Center for Health Statistics.

Since 2002, all measures of childbearing by unmarried women have been “climbing steeply,” says Stephanie Ventura, a demographer who worked on the government report, which is based on birth certificates. The report found 60% of women 20-24 who had babies in 2007 were unmarried, up from 51.6% in 2002. Among ages 25-29, 32.2% of births were to unmarried women, vs. 25% in 2002. For ages 15-19, almost 86% were unmarried, compared with 80% in ’02.

But what about the number of births we can expect during the recession? Call in the sociologist!

Evidence from the Depression and past recessions has shown that numbers of births fall in hard economic times.

But University of Chicago economist and sociologist Gary Becker says that may not hold true anymore, with greater numbers of women in the labor force. Women laid off from their jobs might see unemployment as the time to have a child, he says: “Births might go up during recession.”

Read more.

The Irish Times reports today on a new study from Dublin University sociologist Majella McSharry about the potential influence of friends and siblings on body image.

The Irish Times reports:

FRIENDS AND siblings have a far greater influence on how teenagers perceive their body shape than celebrity magazines, according to new research to be published later this week. It also highlights the prevalence of undiagnosed eating disorders.

Sociologist Dr Majella McSharry said the popular press validated the “aesthetic-athletic” body, but it was peers who really determined how teens saw themselves.

About the methods:

She polled 242 students across five second-level schools around Dublin, then conducted in-depth interviews with 30 of them about body image.

“I went out like everybody else thinking that they are going to talk about the media and they did, ultimately that was where they got these ideal images from,” she said. “But where they were actually validated and played out was in the real bodies that they met in day-to-day life, the ones that sat beside them in school, the brothers and sisters they came home to, the parents who fed them. They had much more of an influence on them than just the celebrity bodies.”

Teens were aware of tricks like airbrushing and the kinds of body images used to sell products, said Dr McSharry, who did the research for a doctorate at NUI Maynooth.

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The Los Angeles Times ran a story about recent work from Trinity College sociologist Barry A. Kosmin (the study’s principal investigator) that suggests that Americans are turning away from many denominations with greater frequency. Moreover, Kosmin finds that the percentage of people who do not identify themselves as having a particular religious affiliation has almost doubled since 1990 – to 15%.

The LA Times writes:

Mainline Christian denominations, once bulwarks of the religious landscape, have suffered most from the drift. Methodists, Lutherans and Episcopalians are among the denominations that have seen their ranks decline. Although 86% of Americans identified as Christians in 1990, just 76% said the same last year, the result of onetime adherents rejecting organized religion, the survey concluded. The broad falloff has occurred as some groups, including Catholics, have seen their overall numbers rise. But despite growing by 11 million new members since 1990, Catholics now account for a smaller percentage of the U.S. population than they did then — 25% compared with 26%.

Kosmin’s commentary:

The survey’s principal investigator, sociologist Barry A. Kosmin of Trinity College in Connecticut, described the overall trend as an erosion of the “religious middle ground.” He said many people appeared to be rebuffing denominations altogether or favoring more conservative evangelical groups that have boosted their relatively small memberships by offering emotional and personalized religious experiences.

Kosmin said the changing religious outlook also reflected an increasingly diverse and complex culture that emphasized greater tolerance for diversity while eschewing respect for authority.He pointed to one sign of religious detachment — the fact that 27% of Americans do not expect to have a religious funeral.

“Even the people in the pews are more rebellious than they used to be,” said Kosmin, founding director of the Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture. “Those you would call ‘the religious’ don’t look like what their grandparents did in terms of their worship style, their ritual behaviors.”

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The New York Times blog ‘Room for Debate: A Running Commentary on the News’ ran an exchange devoted to ‘What to Do When You Lose Your Job,’ particularly appropriate given the latest news from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that “the national unemployment rate surged to 8.1 percent in February, its highest in 25 years, with 651,000 jobs lost last month.”

Luckily, the Times solicited comments from a sociologist, Princeton University’s Katherine S. Newman, to be precise…

Newman writes:

In today’s economic landscape, the skills and experience the newly unemployed bring to the table still matter, but will not command the wages needed to preserve the standard of living they know. Stability at a lower plane is weathered most successfully by families that pull together rather than pull apart, especially husbands and wives who avoid corrosive conflict and learn to adjust with as much grace as they can muster, to new roles as earners and house husbands.

Teenage kids who learn how to pitch in to the family coffers and help with the care of their younger siblings make a difference. Neighbors, fellow parishioners and P.T.A. contacts who are still working should remember that anything they can do to help their unemployed friends get back into the game is a blessing. Most of all, the newly jobless need to remember this maelstrom was not of their making and whatever they have to do to survive will be honorable.

Read Newman’s full commentary.

Read more from the exchange. 

This past weekend, the New York Times Book Review highlighted a compelling new book from sociologist William Julius Wilson entitled, ‘More Than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City.’ 

The Times writes:

In “More Than Just Race,” the Harvard sociologist William Julius Wilson recaps his own important research over the past 20 years as well as some of the best urban sociology of his peers to make a convincing case that both institutional and systemic impediments and cultural deficiencies keep poor blacks from escaping poverty and the ghetto.

The systemic impediments include both the legacy of racism and dramatic economic changes that have fallen with disproportionate severity on poor blacks. State-enforced racial discrimination created the ghetto: in the early 20th century local governments separated the races into segregated neighborhoods by force of law, and later, whites used private agreements and violent intimidation to keep blacks out of white neighborhoods. Worst, and most surprising of all, the federal government played a major role in encouraging the racism of private actors and state governments. Until the 1960s, federal housing agencies engaged in racial red lining, refusing to guarantee mortgages in inner-city neighborhoods; private lenders quickly followed suit.

Meanwhile, economic and demographic changes that had nothing to do with race aggravated the problems of the ghetto. Encouraged by recently built highways and inexpensive real estate, middle-class residents and industry left the inner city to relocate to roomier and less costly digs in the suburbs during the ’60s and ’70s. Those jobs that remained available to urban blacks further dwindled as companies replaced well-paid and unionized American workers with automation and cheaper overseas labor. The new economy produced most of its jobs at the two poles of the wage scale: high-paying jobs for the well educated and acculturated (lawyers, bankers, management consultants) and low-paying jobs for those with little education or skills (fast food, telemarketing, janitorial services).

And today…

Today many ghetto residents have almost no contact with mainstream American society or the normal job market. As a result, they have developed distinctive and often dysfunctional social norms. The work ethic, investment in the future and deferred gratification make no sense in an environment in which legitimate employment at a living wage is impossible to find and crime is an everyday hazard (and temptation). Men, unable to support their families, abandon them; women become resigned to single motherhood; children suffer from broken homes and from the bad examples set by both peers and adults. And this dysfunctional behavior reinforces negative racial stereotypes, making it all the harder for poor blacks to find decent jobs.

Read more.