sociology

Lest you think that sociologists are not discovering things relevant to your day-to-day life, rest assured. Sociologist Dan Myers of Notre Dame, along with his son, claims to have discovered the shortest possible Monopoly game.  As reported on NPR:

The shortest possible game of Monopoly requires only four turns, nine rolls of the dice, and twenty-one seconds, Daniel J. Myers, a professor of sociology at Notre Dame University, told NPR’s Robert Siegel…

In short, here’s what has to happen:

“One player moves around the board very quickly, to buy Boardwalk and Park Place, and places houses on them,” Myers explained. “And the other one ends up drawing a Chance card that sends them to Boardwalk, and they don’t have enough money to pay the rent with three houses, and the game is over.”

So, what is the statistical probability of that particular game happening?

The odds are very, very, very slim.

Statistically speaking, it would happen “once every 253,899,891,671,040 games,” Josh Whitford, an assistant professor of sociology at Columbia University, says.

Not only is this discovery fun, it’s also not without its sociological parallels. From Myers’ interview with NPR’s Robert Siegel:

SIEGEL: Monopoly, famously, was popular in the Great Depression, when people were going broke. And now, you’ve come back during the Great Recession of the 21st century, with this theory.

Mr. MYERS: Yeah, well, there have been some comments out on the blogosphere about how it’s representative of what’s going on in our economy, that people could go bankrupt so quickly. We didn’t intend to parallel but certainly, it’s been drawn by a number of people out there.

Myers’ next project will be the shortest possible game of Risk.

SIEGEL: Well, what will fill the void, now, that’s occupied you for the past few weeks?

Mr. MYERS: Well, we’ve been getting suggestions from those out in the blog world. So the next one is to try to play the shortest possible game of Risk.

SIEGEL: Which you think might be more complicated or…

Mr. MYERS: I think it will because making someone go bankrupt isn’t quite as complicated as world domination.

What could decorative rocks and park benches have to do with sociology? The San Francisco Chronicle suggests one possibility:

For Jeffrey Miller, landscape architecture is more than just plants, waterfalls and decorative rocks. For Miller, the founder of San Francisco’s Miller Company Landscape Architects, it’s about uniting living spaces and bringing people together.

“My impetus to be a landscape architect came out of a question – how to design social and public space so that there were better relationships between people,” he said. “It wasn’t a nature-based beginning, it came from more of a sociological perspective.”

Since forming Miller Company in 1980, the former sociology student and filmmaker has been involved with some of the more dramatically landscaped residential communities in the Bay Area.

Miller applies his sociological imagination to landscaping by envisioning public spaces as opportunities for social interaction and connection, especially in big cities.

Ultimately, Miller realizes that the outdoor space of a development is almost always larger than the interior space, and what you do with that is as important as creating comfortable living rooms and spacious kitchens.

“The largest space that we have with these projects is everything that’s outside of the buildings,” he said. “So the care and design of the world outside of buildings is tremendously important to the way we live, especially in urban places. This is kind of our public living room – what we have outside – and the more we can create sociable environments for communities coming together, the better social environment we’re going to have.”

Immigration researcher, Marta Tienda, was recently profiled on NJ.com:

She is one of the world’s foremost sociologists, an achievement she insists has little to do with genius and everything to do with “trying harder than everybody else.”

“What I bring to the table is proof that anybody can make it if they do the work,” says Tienda, 59. “I want what I am and where I came from to resonate with people, particularly young Hispanic women.” …

Tienda’s road to excellence began as a child migrant worker in the farm fields of the Midwest, where she picked vegetables alongside her three sisters, brother and her father, an illegal immigrant from Mexico.

It is a journey that involved loss, sacrifice and decades of 18-hour workdays.

At college, she developed a passion for social change:

Tienda studied Spanish literature on a full scholarship at the University of Michigan. Her plan to become a teacher was derailed by a summer job working with immigrants. Tienda discovered she could mediate change, for instance, when she convinced growers it was in their best interest to provide day care for workers. She vowed to become “a problem solver.”

She recognized that sociological research could be a tool to help improve the lives of Hispanic people in the U.S.:

For more than 20 years, Tienda has done just that, although her research has expanded to cover other minorities.

Her seminal work, “The Hispanic Population of the United States,” was published in 1987 and is still used in college classrooms. Analyzing demographic patterns over a 20-year period, it was the first authoritative description of this country’s diverse Hispanic population. It led to a professorship for Tienda at the University of Chicago.

There, she helped rebuild the population studies office into a world-renowned research center and eventually became chairwoman of the sociology department. She collaborated with Israeli sociologist Haya Stier on another benchmark study — “The Color of Opportunity: Pathways to Family, Welfare and Work,” published in 2001. Based on a survey of Chicago’s racially diverse, inner city poor, it documented ways in which race limited economic opportunity.

Her strengths, colleagues say, lie in the breadth of her knowledge, her grasp of the mathematics that drive quantitative demographic research and, of course, that prodigious energy.

HBO’s “The Wire” continues to inspire sociological inquiry. According to the Times Higher Education,

Drugs, guns and institutional corruption may be standard fare on the streets of Baltimore, the setting of the cult television show The Wire, but they are surely far removed from most academics’ working lives.

This week, however, scholars are convening at Leeds Town Hall to analyse the HBO show, broadcast in the UK on FX and BBC Two, as an example of “social science fiction”.

The conference has attracted almost 50 papers and an international audience of more than 100, with sessions such as “It ain’t about right, it’s about money” by Peter Moskos, assistant professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York, and “A man must have a code: the masculine ethics of snitching and not-snitching”, by Thomas Ugelvik, from the University of Oslo’s department of criminology and sociology of law.

Why does the show garner so much interest among social scientists?

The conference was organised, Professor Burrows said, to take advantage of this interest at a time when academics in the field were being urged to do more to develop “public sociology”.

“We were spending more time talking about the show than we were about work, so we thought we’d try to combine the two,” he said.

“We spend hours and hours (as academic sociologists) writing papers that not many people read, but actually many of the issues that we try to write about – particularly people who work in urban or political studies – can be dealt with more analytically in entertainment.”

The show’s broad public appeal does seem to get people outside of academia excited about social science:

“The show appeals to academics, people in the media and politicians because it talks to many of their concerns, but actually it’s far more ubiquitous than that,” he explained.

“I’ve been struck by how many young kids have got into it, usually because they think it’s about bad language, drugs and violence, but actually – and I’ve spoken to my own teenage children and their friends about this – it gets them thinking seriously about politics, culture, race. Then, suddenly, sociology, economics and political science are a little bit more sexy than perhaps they thought they were.”

Paste Magazine reports that students at Harvard will soon be able to register for a class based on the HBO series, “The Wire”.

The class will be taught by sociology professor William J. Wilson, an outspoken, long-time fan of the show. “It has done more to enhance our understanding of the challenges of urban life and the problems of urban inequality, more than any other media event or scholarly publication,” Wilson told the audience at a panel discussion on campus.

That’s high praise from a renowned sociologist, who is not alone in his enthusiasm for the show as a vehicle for teaching.

Harvard is not the only university to offer a course about The Wire. UC-Berkeley teaches a film studies course about it, and so does Middlebury College. Duke offers a literature course that uses it to examine phenomenology and 21st century visual media.

The New Mexico Business Weekly ran a story about a new study from the National Association of Colleges and employers about new employment statistics for college graduates. The bottom line… sociology majors aren’t doing so hot.

The paper reports:

College graduates from the class of 2009 who have been able to find jobs are landing starting salaries comparable to those offered a year ago, a new report has found.

This year’s graduating class held its ground with average starting salary offers, demonstrating that employers are reluctant to significantly tinker with starting pay despite the recession, a report by the National Association of Colleges and Employers found.

The average starting salary offer for new college graduates is $49,307, which is less than 1 percent lower than the average of $49,693 that 2008 graduates posted last year at this time, according to a news release Wednesday.

Although engineering majors seem to be doing quite well, liberal arts majors appear to fall slightly behind.

Liberal arts grads experienced a decline of less than 1 percent from $36,419 last year to $36,175, the study found.

Among the liberal arts disciplines, English majors posted a 1.1 percent increase in their average salary offer to $34,704. The salary offers for history majors rose 1.7 percent to $37,861. Psychology majors’ average salary offers grew 2.1 percent to $34,284. Sociology majors, on the other hand, saw their average offers fall 4.4 percent to $33,280.

Read more.

Inside Higher Education reports this week on the rapidly disappearing rural sociology programs at universities around the country. They report that rural sociologists are now combined with other social science departments in many land grant universities. Inside Higher Education notes, “many professors in the field say that they have seen a slow erosion in support and expertise as retiring professors in these departments are replaced with sociologists who focus on other areas.”

Sociologists have been up in arms about the disappearing field in recent weeks…

These concerns [about putting rural sociology programs in other departments] are nothing compared to the anger that has spread through the rural sociology world in the last few weeks, however, as word spread that Washington State University wasn’t planning to merge its rural sociology program with another unit, but to simply eliminate it.

That a land grant university would simply abolish the discipline — and in particular a rare freestanding program that is well respected nationally — stunned rural sociologists. Many have come to expect that sociology departments (general ones) will be more occupied with issues of criminology and sexuality and suburban youth than with aging populations in rural towns or the new immigration that is changing those communities.

The Rural Sociological Society issued a statement on Washington State’s plan:

“We are deeply concerned for the personal welfare of the department’s faculty members and staff, but we also believe that this action sends a powerful negative message to the land grant university system that applied research and outreach focused on problems and opportunities experienced by rural people and communities is expendable,” says an advertisement published in two newspapers in Washington State Friday and signed by the president, president-elect and 19 past presidents of the Rural Sociological Society.

Rural sociologist Kenneth Pigg comments:

“There aren’t very many rural sociology programs around. There’s a general perception that rural doesn’t matter anymore. Whenever financial problems arise and administrators get a little touchy about how they are going to manage budgets, this is the sort of thing that happens,” said Kenneth Pigg, a rural sociologist at the University of Missouri at Columbia, one institution that still has a freestanding program.

Pigg said that social sciences were once viewed as central to the land grant mission — that departments of rural sociology (or agriculture economics) were applying research to help rural communities. “Now, with the emphasis on life sciences generally, you don’t see that at a lot of universities,” he said. Pigg’s work currently focuses on the impact of technological change in rural areas. While many have said that the Internet is “a savior” for rural life, Pigg said that there’s not nearly enough attention paid to the impact it has and the lack of real access to technology of many people outside of urban areas.

He said that there is nothing theoretically wrong with having rural sociology as part of other departments, but that the discipline in its entirety doesn’t pay much attention. A list of sections of the American Sociological Association includes on on urban sociology, but nothing specifically on rural areas. And while there is a section on animals and society, paper and book topics there appear more focused on pets than on farms.

Read more from Inside Higher Ed.

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…

This past weekend, the New York Times ran a story about how humanities and social science PhD students are experiencing high levels of anxiety in the midst of a shrinking academic job market and grim prospects for the future.

The article opened with the story of Chris Pieper.

Chris Pieper began looking for an academic job in sociology about six months ago, sending off about two dozen application packets. The results so far? Two telephone interviews, and no employment offers.

“About half of all the rejection letters I’ve received mentioned the poor economy as contributing to their decision,” said Mr. Pieper, 34, who is getting his doctorate from the University of Texas, Austin. “Some simply canceled the search because they found the funding for the position didn’t come through. Others changed their tenure-track jobs to adjunct or instructor positions.”

“Many of the universities I applied to received more than 300 applications,” he added.

Mr. Pieper is not alone. Fulltime faculty jobs have not been easy to come by in recent decades, but this year the new crop of Ph.D. candidates is finding the prospects worse than ever. Public universities are bracing for severe cuts as state legislatures grapple with yawning deficits. At the same time, even the wealthiest private colleges have seen their endowments sink and donations slacken since the financial crisis. So a chill has set in at many higher education institutions, where partial or full-fledge hiring freezes have been imposed.

 

Read more about Pieper and other struggling PhDs…

Share your own stories of the difficult academic job market, comment below:

According to the Wall Street Journal, a new report based on the study of more than 200 professions puts sociologists firmly in the #8 position of the ‘best jobs’ list.

About the study:

The study, to be released Tuesday from CareerCast.com, a new job site, evaluates 200 professions to determine the best and worst according to five criteria inherent to every job: environment, income, employment outlook, physical demands and stress.

The findings were compiled by Les Krantz, author of “Jobs Rated Almanac,” and are based on data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau, as well as studies from trade associations and Mr. Krantz’s own expertise.

And the article devotes significant time to how well sociologists are doing…

Mark Nord is a sociologist working for the Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service in Washington, D.C. He studies hunger in American households and writes research reports about his findings. “The best part of the job is the sense that I’m making some contribution to good policy making,” he says. “The kind of stuff that I crank out gets picked up by advocacy organizations, media and policy officials.”

The study estimates sociologists earn $63,195, though Mr. Nord, 62, says his income is about double that amount. He says he isn’t surprised by the findings because his job generates little stress and he works a steady 7:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. schedule. “It’s all done at the computer at my desk,” he says. “The main occupational hazard is carpal tunnel syndrome.”

Others who made the list…

Read the full story.