culture

National Public Radio (NPR) commentator Dick Meyer reported on the work of sociologist Wayne Baker in his recent piece titled ‘September 11th and The Non-Crisis of Values’ as part of the series ‘Against the Grain.’

Meyer writes:

Baker is a sociologist at the University of Michigan and the author of America’s Crisis of Values: Reality and Perception(2005). I won’t bury the lead for you: The answer is perception, not crisis. It’s a useful big-picture view of American values at a time when it’s easy to be lost in the worm’s-eye view.

Baker is a wise social thinker who studies our values from the perspective of public opinion research, specifically data garnered from large polls conducted regularly all over the world called the World Values Surveys. He rightly notes that the idea that America faces a crisis of values, or “moral values,” is pervasive and is essentially assumed to be true.

But what exactly would a “crisis” of values entail? Would it be that Americans lost their traditional values? Or American values eroding in comparison with other countries? Are Americans deeply divided on fundamental beliefs? He answers no to each question; he found no crisis in America.

From a broad, global perspective, Baker examines human values on two planes. The first is a range of values from traditional to secular-rationalist. Societies with traditional values emphasize the importance of God and religion; of family and parenting; of national identity and pride; of absolute standards of morality, not relative ones. Secular-rationalist values are pretty much the opposite: nonreligious; open to abortion and euthanasia; skeptical of national pride or patriotism; tilted toward individualism over family, duty and authority.

The second axis of value runs from survival values to self-expression ones. In less developed and stable societies, survival values reign: Physical security and meeting basic material needs are paramount; cultural change, foreigners and ethnic diversity are seen as threatening; intolerance is exaggerated and authoritarian regimes tend to flourish. When material needs are well met, self-expression, self-realization, environmentalism, gender equality and creativity become more important.

Read on…

NYU sociologist Dalton Conley published an op-ed piece entitled ‘Rich Man’s Burden,’ in honor of Labor Day. This did not go over well with Slate.com writer Timothy Noah, who wrote a response entitled ‘Stress and Class: An NYU Sociologist Claims, Preposterously, That It’s More Stressful to be Rich than Poor.’

Dalton Conley writes about how many people probably didn’t take the Labor Day holiday to relax with their families but instead remained tied to their Blackberries and connected to their laptops. Conley suggests that Americans working on holidays is not a new thing, and dexterously tied is to Weber’s concept of the ‘Protestant ethic.’ But Conley notes a significant departure from Weber’s notion in current times:

But what’s different from Weber’s era is that it is now the rich who are the most stressed out and the most likely to be working the most. Perhaps for the first time since we’ve kept track of such things, higher-income folks work more hours than lower-wage earners do. Since 1980, the number of men in the bottom fifth of the income ladder who work long hours (over 49 hours per week) has dropped by half, according to a study by the economists Peter Kuhn and Fernando Lozano. But among the top fifth of earners, long weeks have increased by 80 percent.

It was this statement that prompted Slate.com writer Timothy Noah to respond. He writes:

Dalton Conley, chairman of the Sociology Department at New York University, has written extensively about race, poverty, and social classand was himself raised in a housing project on New York’s Lower East Side. This ought to inoculate him against the popular notion, cherished by the professional classes, that the BlackBerry-punching haves experience more stress in their daily lives than the indolent poor. Apparently, it hasn’t….

Now, it may be true that the bottom fifth is working fewer hours while the top fifth is working longer hours. The authors of the study in question claim no insight as to why this should be so and note that because the observed shift took place fully two decades ago, it “is not likely related to advances in communications technology (such as the Internet) that facilitate additional work from home.” Scratch the BlackBerry and the easy availability of wireless Internet off your list of possible culprits. Remember, too, that these findings may be distorted by the survey’s exclusion of women and the self-employed. Still, for simplicity’s sake, let’s assume that the haves are now working longer hours than the have-nots. How does Conley make the leap from saying the haves consume more time on the job to saying, “[I]t is now the rich who are the most stressed out”?

Read the full story from Conley.

Read the full story from Noah.

Is this just about interpretation?

Noah suggests: 

It’s easy to imagine that “It is now the rich who are the most stressed out” is what readers of the Times op-ed page want to hear. But that doesn’t make it true.

This week Newsweek magazine reported on a new book from sociologist Michael Kimmel entitled, ‘Guyland,’ which has been receiving significant media attention since its release. Our fascination with a hard partying lifestyle has at last been systematically studied. 

 Tony Dokoupil of Newsweek writes: 

Once the preserve of whacked-out teens and college slackers, this testosterone-filled landscape is the new normal for American males until what used to be considered creeping middle age, according to the sociologist Michael Kimmel. In his new book, “Guyland,” the State University of New York at Stony Brook professor notes that the traditional markers of manhood—leaving home, getting an education, finding a partner, starting work and becoming a father—have moved downfield as the passage from adolescence to adulthood has evolved from “a transitional moment to a whole new stage of life.” In 1960, almost 70 percent of men had reached these milestones by the age of 30. Today, less than a third of males that age can say the same.

“What used to be regressive weekends are now whole years in the lives of some guys,” Kimmel tells NEWSWEEK. In almost 400 interviews with mainly white, college-educated twentysomethings, he found that the lockstep march to manhood is often interrupted by a debauched and decadelong odyssey, in which youths buddy together in search of new ways to feel like men. Actually, it’s more like all the old ways—drinking, smoking, kidding, carousing—turned up a notch in a world where adolescent demonstrations of manhood have replaced the real thing: responsibility. Kimmel’s testosterone tract adds to a forest of recent research into protracted adolescents (or “thresholders” and “kidults,” as they’ve also been dubbed) and the reluctance of today’s guys to don their fathers’ robes—and commitments. They “see grown-up life as such a loss,” says Kimmel, explaining why so many guys are content to sit out their 20s in duct-taped beanbag chairs. The trouble is that the very thing they’re running from may be the thing they need.

Read the full story. 

The Wall Street Journal reports on a new study about children and housework out of the University of Maryland, and the surprising trend that they are doing very little of it. 

WSJ quips: 

Quiz for the day: How much time each day, on average, does a 6- to 12-year-old child spend on household chores?

If you guessed more than a half-hour, you’re wrong. Children are spending a mere 24 minutes a day doing cleaning, laundry and other housework — a 12% decline since 1997 and a 25% drop from 1981 levels, says Sandra Hofferth, director of the Maryland Population Research Center at the University of Maryland, based on a forthcoming study of 1,343 children. In the glacial realm of sociological change, that amounts to a free fall.

And another sociologist’s findings are considered…

Pitching in at home has become a crucial marriage-preservation skill for young men. Studies show parents still assign more housework to girls than boys. Yet these same young women hope as adults to find men who will help out; 90% of 60 women ages 18 to 32 studied by Kathleen Gerson, a New York University sociology professor, said they hoped to share housework and child care with spouses “in a committed, mutually supportive and egalitarian way.” After controlling for other factors, U.S. marriages tend to be more stable when men participate more in domestic tasks, says a study of 506 U.S. couples published in 2006 in the American Journal of Sociology.

And another’s…

Housework has unique value in instilling a habit of serving others. Analyzing data on more than 3,000 adults, Alice Rossi, a proessor emerita of sociology at University of Massachusetts Amherst, found doing household chores as a child was a major, independent predictor of whether a person chose to do volunteer or other community work as an adult. Thus for parents who value service, housework is an important teaching tool.

Read the full story.

The New York Times health blog, ‘Well,’ reports on a new study out of the University of Toronto which suggests that promotions and increased power at work can lead to an increase in conflict between workers, especially when the new boss is a younger man. The study looks at job authority and personal conflicts at work by using a national survey of more than 1,700 adults in the U.S. 

Tara Parker-Hope reports: 

Lead author Scott Schieman, professor of sociology at the University of Toronto, said younger men may be more competitive, which leads to more friction with others at work. Conflict may also stem from the fact that other workers view younger supervisors as less deserving of their authority because of their young age, which leads to additional workplace tension. Mr. Schieman speculated that younger women also must deal with concerns about their credibility and authority in the workplace. It may be that women respond with more empathy and concern, however, thus avoiding conflict.

“Overall, the conflict associated with authority is worse for younger workers, but there is something about younger women that attenuates that association,” said Mr. Schieman. “As others have shown, they tend to enact these more cooperative orientations when they attain authority.’’

Read the full story.

This past Sunday’s New York Times book review examined ‘Credit and Blame,’ a new book from the late Charles Tilly. Alexander Star of the Times writes:

Two years ago, the sociologist Charles Tilly, who died this spring at the age of 78, published “Why?,” a slim volume examining our compulsive drive to give reasons for what we do. Explaining, he stressed, is a social art; what counts as a good reason always depends on the relationship between who’s giving the reason and who’s taking it. If you spill a glass of wine on a stranger, you might shrug it off with a conventional remark like “I’m a klutz.” If you spill a glass of wine on your wife, you are more apt to tell a story: “I was feeling nervous because of the bills.” It’s one thing to give someone a bad explanation. It’s even worse to give the wrong kind of explanation. If you expect your doctor to give you a technical account of your illness and you receive a cliché instead, you feel you are not being taken seriously.

In “Credit and Blame,” Tilly looks just as closely at our most ethically freighted explanations. When something happens that alters our environment for the better or for the worse, we are rarely content simply to say, “Oh well, those are the breaks,” or “I suppose I got lucky this time.” Instead, we leap at the chance to deem someone — anyone — responsible. We blame our parents when we are unhappy, and credit them for their sacrifices when they die. Thanking friends and family at the Academy Awards ceremony may be, as another sociologist has written, “the ultimate American fantasy” of giving credit, while winning a lawsuit against a local polluter may be the ultimate fantasy of affixing blame.

WARNING: Spoiler Alert

As a sociologist, Tilly was more interested in how we assign credit and blame than when it’s right to do so. Should we care that when a chief executive attributes his company’s success to his own intelligence or decisiveness, he’s probably wrong? Why do we put more blame on someone who drives through a stop sign at night and kills a child than on the countless others who drive through stop signs and kill no one? Tilly does not answer such questions, but his analysis suggests that for all the bad judgments we may make about the supposed malfeasance of terrorism-neglecting bureaucrats or the homeless, our habits are not easily reformed. Blaming, he argues, is not a vice or an aberration but an essential habit that allows us to maintain and repair our relationships with others. Our justice detectors are not fundamentally defective. They are suited to the task of setting things right — approximately.

The full review. 

USA Today reports that new Census data released this week suggest that 6.4 million opposite sex couples live together (as of 2007), up from less than one million thirty years ago. This means that cohabiting couples now make up nearly 10% of all opposite sex couples, including those who are married. 

In comparison, the Census bureau reported 5 million unmarried, opposite-sex households in 2006, but that figure was based on a question that many respondents found to be unclear. In the 2007 supplemental survey sample of 100,000 households, the Census questions asked more directly whether respondents had “a boyfriend/girlfriend or partner in the household” and found 1.1 million more couples.

The USA Today article included comments from two sociologists:

Pamela Smock,. a sociologist at the Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor who studies cohabitation, says the new data gets closer to the truth, but because it’s a point-in-time survey, it still misses the extent of cohabitation in today’s society.

“It’s a snapshot,” she says. “It’s not telling you how many people have ever cohabited, which is much more than that.” …

Sociologist Linda Waite of the University of Chicago, who has done extensive research into marriage and cohabitation, says living together in the USA isn’t very stable or long-term, compared to some Scandinavian countries where it’s more likely to be a long-term committed relationship.

But in the USA, she says, it’s become “part of the life course.” “It’s something people do that leads to somewhere,” she says. “If it doesn’t lead to marriage, it leads to splitsville.”

The full story.

Today’s Washington Post featured an article about how Muslim women in France attempt to resist prevalent stereotypes by attempting to balance the traditions of their faith with the secular society in which they live. The Post article cites the example of a young woman in France who goes out to movies and dinner and dates men (although usually with a chaperone), but wears form-covering clothing and a headscarf, and remains dedicated to her pledge to abstain from sex until marriage.

“The large majority of Muslims tinker,” said Franck Fregosi, a sociologist who has written extensively on Islam in Europe. “The girls will try to go out with boys but hide it from their families. And most of them have a normal life. Some will have sexual relations before marriage. But they will still try to preserve appearances so their families won’t know.”

 

Young women, Fregosi said, also struggle to break free from the cultural traditions of their immigrant parents, including shunning arranged marriages.

“Their priority is to have a pious husband, not a cousin or another man chosen by the family,” he said. “And that is something new.”

 

And additional commentary from an anthropologist…

Religious anthropologist Dounia Bouzar sees two factors at work: a “return to belief” but also a “questioning of the Western model, of the woman who knows what she wants with her body. A lot of young girls are wondering whether that really means more liberty.”

Read the full story.

A posting from Judith Warner on the New York Times blog ‘Domestic Disturbances‘ titled, ‘The Other Home Equity Crisis,’ takes a look at how women are increasingly affected by job loss in times of economic downturn. As further evidence that the opt-out revolution is a myth, beyond Warner’s book, the article cites a report from Congress that was just recently released.

This week, Congress issued a report, titled “Equality in Job Loss: Women are Increasingly Vulnerable to Layoffs During Recessions,” that may — if read in its entirety — finally, officially and definitively sound a death knell for the story of the Opt-Out Revolution. The report, commissioned by Congresswoman Carolyn B. Maloney of New York, states categorically that mothers are not leaving the workforce to stay home with their kids. They’re being forced out.

Women — all women, mothers or not — were hit “especially hard” hard by the recession of 2001 and the recovery-that-never-really-was, the report states. “Unlike in the recessions of the early 1980s and 1990s, during the 2001 recession, the percent of jobs lost by women often exceeded that of men in the industries hardest hit by the downturn. The lackluster recovery of the 2000s made it difficult for women to regain their jobs — women’s employment rates never returned to their pre-recession peak.”

While prior recessions tended to spare women’s jobs relative to men’s, that trend has been reversed in the current downturn, thanks in part to women’s progress in entering formerly male industries and occupations, and in part to the fact that job sectors like service and retail, which still employ disproportionate numbers of women, have suffered disproportionate losses. And this — not a calling to motherhood — accounts for the fall, starting in 2000, of women’s labor force participation rates.

Read the full post. 

The San Francisco Chronicle recently published an article on how presumptive democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama has raised the profile of mixed-race Americans. When the social scientists weigh in, they add a level of complexity to Tyche Hendricks’ report on the issue:

The debate over what to call Obama – and the growing recognition of mixed-race Americans – is also a reminder that there’s no such thing as racial purity and, indeed, that “biologically, race is a fiction,” said sociologist Jorge Chapa, the director of the Center on Democracy in a Multiracial Society at the University of Illinois.

Still, prejudices based on conceptions about race continue, said Michael Omi, a professor of ethnic studies at UC Berkeley. “The prospect of having an African American presidential candidate has led some people to think we’re now in a post-racial society,” Omi said. “What’s disturbing are the ways in which that ignores the persistence of racial inequalities – in health care, home-mortgage loan rates – it shouldn’t make us think we’ve gotten beyond that.”

But the expanding conversation about race that has been prompted by Obama’s candidacy and his complex heritage could advance America’s understanding about race. “I want the history of miscegenation to be part of our discussion, and I think Barack Obama could catapult us there,” said Vest, the iPride co-director. “If these (mixed race) kids are able to normalize their difference by looking at Obama, then my work is done.”