culture

The Chicago Tribune noted that the summer concert season is overwhelmingly dominated by 60-somethings. They cite the upcoming concerts in Chicago by Elton John (age 62), Billy Joel (age 60), and Crosby (67),  Stills (64), Nash (67) and Young (63). The Tribune also noted that Bob Dylan (age 68) celebrated a No. 1 album last week, and is about to embark on a tour with Willie Nelson (76) and John Mellencamp (57).

The paper reports,

This cataloging of rock’s geriatric movement is meant simply to point out what’s both obvious and startling: Rock’s biggest names have gotten old.

“I think all of us are pretty amazed at the lengths of the careers of the acts that pretty much defined rock ‘n’ roll,” said Gary Bongiovanni, editor in chief of the concert-industry trade publication Pollstar. “If you look at the ones that demand the highest prices, it’s all acts that date back to the ’60s and ’70s.”

A sociologist explains how these aging musicians are still able to rock…

How sustainable can this business be when so many key players could be cashing retirement checks?

Celia Berdes, a sociologist at Northwestern Memorial Hospital’s Buehler Center on Aging, Health & Society, thinks rockers who maintain a healthy lifestyle and diet can keep going for a while.

“In gerontology, we think that people can continue their level of activity and productivity well into their 70s,” she said, noting that guitarists probably maintain excellent dexterity thanks to the continual finger exercise. “The worry I would have for the rock musicians is they’ve burnt the candle. It’s possible they may be aging at a faster rate, particularly with regard to hearing.”

Singers go through other types of changes as well. Elton John’s voice is much deeper than it was in his ’70s heyday, and many older singers typically key down their songs to compensate for their range loss on the high end.

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…

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.

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.

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.

The Wall Street Journal ran a story earlier this week about a new book from Johns Hopkins University sociologist Andrew Cherlin. This new book, entitled The Marriage-Go-Round,  focuses on the culture surrounding marriage in the United States.

University of Virginia sociologist Bradford Wilcox writes (for WSJ):

Last week, Vermont became the fourth state to legalize same-sex marriage, setting off yet another round of celebration and hand-wringing in different quarters of American life. The debate over same-sex marriage — showing so much intensity on both sides — is but one sign that Americans take marriage very seriously indeed. From television specials featuring over-the-top Bridezilla weddings to the federal Healthy Marriage Initiative, which spends $150 million annually marriage-related programs, no other Western nation devotes as much cultural energy, public policy or religious attention to matrimony as the U.S. And with approximately 90% of Americans marrying over the course of their lifetimes, the U.S. has the highest marriage rate of any Western country.

On Cherlin’s new book…

But there is a darker side to this exceptionalism, as Andrew J. Cherlin notes in “The Marriage-Go-Round,” his incisive portrait of marriage in America. Virtually no other nation in the West compares with the U.S. when it comes to divorce, short-term co-habitation and single parenthood. As Mr. Cherlin documents, Americans marry and co-habit at younger ages, divorce more quickly and enter into second marriages or co-habiting unions faster than their counterparts elsewhere. In other words, Americans “step on and off the carousel of intimate relationships.”

The biggest problem with this aspect of American family life is that children often do not do well when parents and partners are whirling in and out of their lives. Children have difficulty adapting to changes in their routines or to step- parents who are not comfortable acting as authority figures or to nonresidential parents who see children only intermittently. The live-in boyfriend, who may well not have a child’s best interests at heart, is an even greater problem. Such a mix of hybrid forms, according to Mr. Cherlin, is part of the reason that family instability is linked to higher rates of teen sex, teen pregnancy, teen drunkenness, truancy and behavioral problems in school.

By contrast, Mr. Cherlin writes, “stable, low-conflict families with two biological or adoptive parents provide better environments for children, on average, than do other living arrangements.” Unfortunately, the family changes of the past half-century have left millions of American children vulnerable to one or more dizzying spins on the family merry-go-round.

What is so bad about the marriage-go-round?

Family instability, Mr. Cherlin shows, has been increasingly concentrated in poor and working-class households in recent years. Divorce is much more common in less-educated circles: 23% of women with only a high-school degree will divorce or separate within five years of marriage, compared with 13% of women who hold a college degree. Thus children at the lower end of the socioeconomic ladder are now much more likely to be doubly disadvantaged by poverty and family instability.

And Cherlin’s advice…

Because Mr. Cherlin is reluctant to challenge the individualistic ethos of our day, the strongest advice he can muster — when he steps back to consider the marriage portrait he has drawn so brilliantly — is that Americans who aspire to be parents should “slow down” when they are entering or exiting a marriage or a co-habiting relationship, bearing in mind that children do best in a stable home. It is not bad advice, certainly. But some of us may wish to do more than put a yellow light in the path of parents who are tempted to hop onto (and off of) America’s family merry-go-round. For the sake of the children, a red light may be better.

Read more.

The Houston Chronicle ran a book review with a rigorous critique of Dalton Conley’s Elsewhere, USA this weekend, highlighting some of the aspects of the book that were confusing to Chronicle reviewer Steven Alford, but raises some interesting concerns about how applicable Conley’s arguments are to a lay-reader, or any middle-class American. 

Alford writes: 

Conley claims, “changes in three areas of our lives—the economy, the family, and technology—have combined to alter the social world and give birth to a new type of American professional … the intravidual [who] has multiple selves competing for attention within his/her own mind, just as, externally, she or he is bombarded by multiple stimuli simultaneously.” (Isn’t he describing a mother of twins?)

This raises the question of exactly what and whom he is describing in the Elsewhere society—the wealthy or a much broader group. If the latter—and it seems he’s going for a larger reader demographic—then the terms of the argument he sets up at the beginning just don’t work, shuttling as it does between descriptions of the hard-working, high-flying Elsewhere class and “us,” constantly conflating the author/reader “us” with Mr. and Mrs. Elsewhere.

This intravidual is a member of the Elsewhere class, the top third of earners, “lawyers with young kids at home, and investment bankers, and public relations consultants, and advertising executives, and yes, overpaid CEOs.” Apparently, the more these people earn, the more they work, upsetting the traditional idea of leisure-class elites. Also, they “change partners more than they change locations.”

They live in the Elsewhere society, “where not only have physical boundaries become less important, where not only do many of us function with split-screen attentions (becoming, in essence, a collection of intraviduals), but where social boundaries dissolve, leaving us in a new cultural landscape without a map or guidebook.”

Do you live here? Do I? I have no idea (lacking, I guess, the relevant map/guidebook). The reason I’m confused is that there is a fundamental problem with Elsewhere’s argument. After identifying the Elsewhere class in the introduction, in the first chapter he switches to “we,” “us,” and “Mr. and Mrs.” [!] Elsewhere, suggesting that he’s speaking to a broad swath of readers, not just those he earlier identified as earning more than $200K a year.

But has Conley’s written an ‘Encyclopedia of Sociology’ in this volume? 

To call the book’s prose “breezy” would be akin to calling a hurricane windy. On any given page, it seems that an Encyclopedia of Sociology has exploded and we are sifting through the remains. All the usual suspects appear — C. Wright Mills, Weber, Milgram, Goffman, Shills — but they are presented adrift from their important historical and social context, applied at will to the present moment, picked up and put down like so many discarded Legos.

For example, Conley explains Marx’s four types of alienation — no doubt helpful to many readers — and claims that intraviduals are alienated. But then it’s on to the next topic. Wait: If a postmodern person is alienated, how does that compare to the modernist figure who was the object of Marx’s analysis? And apparently one of the marks of an intravidual is his/her internationalism: Identity is no longer a function of place and space. But what of Marx’s proletariat, which was international by definition? What’s the difference in the two types of internationalism? Apparently “nowhere men” are “the necessary, dialectic complement to the Elsewhere class,” an observation not made until page 131, and dropped again without elaboration. The author then talks about rational taxation schemes, the monetization of the Internet and other bubbly topics only peripherally, if at all, related to his subject.

Read more.

A New York Times Style-section column by Michelle Slatalla caught my eye this morning, declaring that I should be a patriot and hire a housekeeper(???) I decided to peruse the column and saw that it was mostly devoted to Slatalla’s musings on ‘spring cleaning’ with her family. But I read on, and was pleased to learn that Slatalla had consulted a sociologist when she became exasperated trying to get herself and her family in gear for cleaning the house. She writes:

And that [cleaning grease from the stove and noticing the filthy baseboards] was when I finally gave up. I couldn’t do this on my own anymore. I needed the help of an expert to motivate my family.

“How am I going to get the rest of them to help me keep the house clean?” I asked Pamela J. Smock, a sociologist at the University of Michigan who studies how housework affects family relationships.

“Let me ask you a question,” she said. “Are you still able to afford to hire someone to clean your house?”

“ ‘Afford’ is a state of mind,” I said. “My household hasn’t lost income — yet — but my husband and I are journalists, the most endangered species there is outside of Detroit.”

I’m superstitious: Maybe if I appease the God of the Bad Economy with this offering — cutting my discretionary spending — I can ward off a worse fate.

That’s the wrong way to think, Professor Smock said.

“Right now, the bad economy is hurting people who clean houses for a living much more than it’s hurting the middle class,” she said. “So anybody who is solidly in the middle class or above should hire the cleaners back. Absolutely. Immediately. You’ll be serving your country.”

I stopped to consider this argument, which sounded, frankly, like the exact opposite of the old conventional wisdom.

“I used to feel guilty about hiring housecleaners,” I said. “Like I was selfishly relying on the hard labor of poorly paid workers to make it easier to pursue my own career without sacrificing my comfort.”

Forget that claptrap, said Professor Smock, who pays $110 for housecleaning twice a month.

“If I got a raise, I’d do it every week, and also hire the cleaning lady’s husband to install the underground sprinklers,” she said. “Right now, people need jobs. It’s a bad idea to cut back on things you used to do normally. Don’t do your own hedging. Don’t start mowing, either.”

Put that way, I saw she had a point. How could I have been so selfish? I called the cleaners right away, of course, and that made me feel so patriotic that I decided to do more.

Read more.

The Houston Chronicle reports today on new naturalization statistics indicating that Latinos are driving the recent record-level surge in United States, comprising nearly half of the one million new Americans in 2008.  The numbers:

Nearly half of the record-setting 1 million new U.S. citizens sworn in last year were Latino immigrants — a 95 percent increase among that ethnic group from the previous year, according to an analysis by an Hispanic advocacy organization.

Department of Homeland Security data shows the number of immigrants naturalized in the U.S. grew from about 660,000 in 2007 to more than 1 million in 2008 — an increase of roughly 58 percent. The Houston metropolitan area saw more than 28,000 naturalizations last year, an increase of roughly 54 percent from 2007.

Nationally, Latino naturalizations jumped 95 percent from about 237,000 in 2007 to 461,000 in 2008, according to the analysis released Tuesday by the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials. NALEO used data from the DHS’ Office of Immigration Statistics, counting immigrants who hailed from predominantly Spanish-speaking countries as Latinos.

And the sociologist weighs in…

Nestor Rodriguez, a sociology professor at the University of Texas, said the growth in naturalization applicants was expected based on the level of legal immigration to the U.S. in the 1990s. More than 9.7 million people were admitted as legal permanent residents during that decade, he said, roughly 80 percent of them from Latin America and Asia. Although it takes only five years for a green-card holder to be eligible for citizenship, many historically have waited to take the oath.

“This is like a boa constrictor that eats something, and it makes its way through the body,” Rodriguez said. “This is the bump that’s going down the body.”

Rodriguez added that some new citizens may have been spurred to action by the fee increase that took effect in July 2007 and raised the cost of a citizenship application from $330 to $595.

And another sociologist…

Tom Janoski, an associate professor of sociology from the University of Kentucky who has researched international naturalization trends, said some new citizens may have been driven to apply because of a fear of deportation in many immigrant communities.

“One factor that causes people to naturalize is that they’re scared,” Janoski said.

Immigration officials conducted a series of high-profile work-site enforcement raids and targeted home raids in 2007 and 2008 that prompted protests. Unlike citizens, legal permanent residents convicted of crimes can be stripped of their legal status and put into deportation proceedings.

Read more.

The Vancouver Sun (Canada) reports this morning on new work from University of Lethbridge sociologist Reginald Bibby about The Emerging Millenials. The Sun suggests, “The kids are all right. Better than all right — in fact, they just keep getting more and more virtuous in their behavior and optimistic in their expectations. Maybe too optimistic. When teens see their futures, they see large, happy families, stable marriages and the jobs they want — not just merely ‘good jobs’ — according to a major survey of 4,500 teens.”

In a forthcoming book based on the survey, called The Emerging Millennials, University of Lethbridge sociologist Reginald Bibby notes that today’s teens expect a very bright future — 95 per cent say they will get to where they want to be in life. They expect things will just keep on getting better, said Bibby, who has tracked adolescent trends since 1984.

“In large part, it’s because they are showing signs of having learned much from us about the good things they want to pursue and the not-so-good things they don’t want to repeat.”

Overall, teens reported to being very close to their parents, with almost eight in 10 teens saying they received a high level of enjoyment from their mothers and more than seven in 10 saying the same about their fathers (although a quarter are concerned their parents are too busy.) Teens are rewarding their vigilant parents with good behavior, said Bibby. They are less likely to smoke, drink or take drugs than they were eight years ago. And 56 per cent of teens have never had sex, up from 51 per cent in 2000.

“Given the resources we’ve been directing toward teens, I think we should be shocked if things have not been improving over time,” he notes. “I’d like to think after all these decades and the money we’ve been spending that some of the message finally is taking.”

But it’s not all good news…

Sometimes their expectations don’t match up with reality, and Bibby says their expectations “seem to be nothing short of naive in thinking that little is needed by way of job adjustments in order to make optimum family life possible.”

For example, though about 70 per cent thought good benefits were “very important” in a job, only half thought flexible hours were important.

And Bibby was disappointed to find that only about half of the girls and slightly less of the boys identified a “good job” as one that would let them take family responsibilities into account, well below the work being interesting or the job itself paying well.

Bibby suggests ‘millennials’ need to have a chat with their Baby Boomer parents about having it all.

Read more.