This Month in Sociological Images (March 2013)

Lisa Wade, PhD on April 1, 2013

TODAY WE HAVE THE BEST NEWS EVER!

Sociological Images founder and author and, more importantly, my Best Friend is now tenured!  Congratulations Gwen Sharp!  You are a genius, a damn good person, and you make people laugh.  Nevada State College is incredibly to have you.  Everyone else should follow you on Twitter!

SocImages News:

Tomorrow we’re launching a competition for a new logo.  The top five sketches will receive $50 each and the winner will be invited to work with us to design a polished logo for $500. We hope you can help us spread the invitation far and wide!

Someone liked our post on high heels as a marker of distinction among women enough to cross-post it at Alternet.  Us?  We’re just happy to spread the word of good ol’ Pierre Bourdieu.  In any case, we hope it’s the first of many!

I’m quoted, starting with the phrase “Let’s be frank,” in an article at Bitch about an administrative reluctance to take steps to improve the sexual assault policy at Occidental College and the ongoing efforts to make us a leader in this regard.

Speaking of sex at Oxy, a video recording of my talk on hook up culture at Occidental College is available here.  The sheer enthusiasm of our wonderful students makes up for the bad lighting.  You’re the greatest y’all!

Thanks to PolicyMic, the Huffington Post, and Jezebel for featuring our posts on everything from data on porn stars to vintage baby cages and our fight at Oxy.

Updates on Image Guides:

Sociology doctoral student Calvin Ho put together a set of his favorite SocImages posts about Asian and Asian America.  It’s a great collection and we’re hoping he’ll revise it into an Image Guide.

I organized our a selection of our vintage stuff for Women’s History month and have published it here.

If you are a graduate student or professor who would like to make an Image Guide, we would love to hear from you!  It requires picking a topic, browsing our archives, pulling out the most compelling posts, and arranging them in ways other instructors would find familiar and convenient.  The guides can cover entire courses or be designed to help illustrate a theory, article, or book.  Only the most fabulous sociologists do it.

Upcoming Lectures and Appearances:

The semester is starting to wind down and I enjoyed giving campus-wide talks at Harvard, Queen’s University, Pomona College, and my own lovely Occidental.  Just two more before the semester is up:

  • Apr. 2 — Citrus College — “The Promise and Peril of Hook Up ‘Culture’” (11:30am Handy Campus Center East Wing)
  • Apr. 19 — University of Akron — “Anatomy of an Outrage: Female Genital Cutting and the Politics of Acculturation”; AKD Induction Ceremony Speech

I go on sabbatical next year to write in earnest, but I’d love to use my flexible schedule to do lots of public speaking as well.  Visit my website if you’d be interested in having me.  I have great talks on the value of friendship, the biology of sex differences, the politics of genital cutting and, of course, hook up culture.  For Akron this year I’m doing an AKD Induction Ceremony Speech.  Who can think of something nice to say about sociology? I can!!!

Tweets that Make Us Blush: 3Thanks Cassie!

Also, may we take a minute to have a giant nerd crush on Shankar Vedantam? He tweeted us twice this month!  TWICE!

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Social Media ‘n’ Stuff:

This is your monthly reminder that SocImages is on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and Pinterest.  Lisa is on Facebook and, sigh, Google+.  Most of the team is on Twitter: @lisawade, @gwensharpnv, @familyunequal, @carolineheldman, and @jaylivingston.

In Other News…

Gwen Sharp has decided to use the new protection of tenure to start the Cockroach Liberation Front (CLF), dedicating to refurbishing the invertebrate’s image and fighting for their equal rights (recognition and redistribution).

The CLF’s first mission is to oppose the use of the cockroach in scientific experimentation. To that end, they staged a protest at the laboratory of a biologist at a local college, publicly exposing the senseless torture of these sensitive and complicated creatures.

CLF (1)

Sociological Images stands with the CLF. Anyone who likes TV shows and cake is a friend of ours… and they should be a friend of yours too.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

From Our Archives: Women’s History Month

Lisa Wade, PhD on March 31, 2013

To mark the end of Women’s History Month, we offer this compilation of our posts on women and history.

Sports:3

Health:1

Fashion and Norms of Attractiveness:4

Work:5

Education:

Marriage and Motherhood:6

Suffrage:

Marketing:
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Children and Toys:1

War and Military:

Activism:

Color, Sound,and Language:

Just for Fun:

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

From Our Archives: Easter

Lisa Wade, PhD on March 31, 2013

Posts from Easters past:

Is Steubenville Unique?

Lisa Wade, PhD on March 30, 2013

Philip Cohen, at Family Unequal, used FBI crime reports to put together this telling graph:

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We need to remember that Steubenville is us and we are Steubenville.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

The Austerity Agenda and Public Employment

Martin Hart-Landsberg, PhD on March 30, 2013

While some austerity advocates really fear (although incorrectly) the consequences of deficit spending, the strongest proponents are actually only concerned with slashing government programs or the use of public employees to provide them.  In other words their aim is to weaken public programs and/or convert them into opportunities for private profit. One measure of their success has been the steady decline in public employment.  Floyd Norris, writing in the New York Times notes:

For jobs, the past four years have been a wash.

The December jobs figures out today indicate that there were 725,000 more jobs in the private sector than at the end of 2008 — and 697,000 fewer government jobs. That works into a private-sector gain of 0.6 percent, and a government sector decline of 3.1 percent.

In total, the number of people with jobs is up by 28,000, or 0.02 percent.

How does that compare? It is by far the largest four-year decline in government employment since the 1944-48 term. That decline was caused by the end of World War II; this one was caused largely by budget limitations.

The chart below, taken from the same post, also reveals just how weak private sector job creation has been over the past 12 years (compare the top three rows — the presidencies of Obama and Bush — w job changes This graphic from the New York Times highlights just how significant the decline in public employment has been in this business cycle compared with past ones.  Each line shows the percentage change in public sector employment for specified months after the start of a recession.  Our recent recession began December 2007 and ended June 2009.   As you can see, what is happening now is far from usual.

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It is also worth noting that despite claims that most Americans want to see cuts in major federal government programs, the survey data show the opposite.  For example, see the following graphic from Catherine Rampell’s blog post. economix-22pewwhattocut-blog480 As Rampell explains:

In every category except for “aid to world’s needy,” more than half of the respondents wanted either to keep spending levels the same or to increase them. In the “aid to world’s needy” category, less than half wanted to cut spending.

Not surprisingly, this assault on government spending and employment will have real consequences for the economy and job creation. All of this takes us back to the starting point — we are talking policy here.  Whose interests are served by these trends?

Martin Hart-Landsberg is a professor of economics at Lewis and Clark College. You can follow him at Reports from the Economic Front.

How Many PhDs are Professors?

Lisa Wade, PhD on March 29, 2013

When I approached my undergraduate mentors about graduate school in 1996, they warned me that many people who earn PhDs never get jobs in academia.  This is sometimes deliberate, as their are jobs outside of academia for some degree-holders to get, but it’s also sometimes a grave disappointment.  My mentors emphasized the extent of the risk (and frankly scared me quite a lot), but how bad was it?  And is it worse today?

The Atlantic‘s Jordan Weissmann put together the data.  The leftmost bars on his figure show that, on average, under a quarter of PhDs landed a full-time job at a college or university in 1991.  That number had dropped to less than 20% by 2011.  The numbers, however, vary significantly by field:

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See here for more details.

The looming question, of course, is what percentage of PhDs want a full-time academic job, something that certainly varies by field.  In other words, there aren’t a boatload of bitter engineers bad-mouthing the academy while slinging lattes at Starbucks.  Here’s a hint at an answer: A study published in 1999 found that 53% of all new PhDs said they wanted to become professors.  Ten years later, just over half were tenured (54%) and a handful more were tenure-track (7%); a third weren’t in academia at all.

On the one hand, I think these numbers are really depressing. Five to ten years is a long time to train for a career only to discover that, for whatever reason, you won’t be employed in the area of your expertise.  But I have two “on the other hands.”

On one other hand, I wonder how these numbers compare to other occupations?  We accept that certain occupations are highly competitive and include a lot of dumb luck and failure.  Modeling and acting are obvious examples, there are certainly others.  I know someone who’s spent their lifetime trying to become an astronaut.  Where does academia fall in the spectrum of risky job endeavors?

On a second other hand, I’d love to see some research on what happens to academics — especially in the humanities and social sciences — when they don’t get a job in academia or are denied tenure after getting there.  Within academia, this is often framed as THE END OF YOUR LIFE.  But maybe it’s often okay or pretty good.  Honestly, I don’t know.

Interesting and useful data, to be sure, but far from the whole story.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Health Care Costs, Greed, and “Socialism”

Jay Livingston, PhD on March 29, 2013

Cross-posted at Montclair SocioBlog.

The Washington Post has provided some data on medical costs across a selection of countries (Argentina, Canada, Chile, and India in grey; France, Germany, Switzerland, and Spain in blue; and the U.S. in red). The data reveal that American health care is very expensive compared to other countries.

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No wonder the US spends twice as much as France on health care.  In 2009, the U.S. average was $8000 per person; in France, $4000.  (Canada came in at $4800).  Why do we spend so much?  Ezra Klein quotes the title of a 2003 paper by four health-care economists:  “it’s the prices, stupid.”

And why are US prices higher?  Prices in the other OECD countries are lower partly because of what U.S. conservatives would call socialism – the active participation of the government.  In the U.K. and Canada, the government sets prices.  In other countries, the government uses its Wal-Mart-like power as a huge buyer to negotiate lower prices from providers.  (If it’s a good thing for Wal-Mart to bring lower prices for people who need to buy clothes, why is it a bad thing for the government to bring lower prices to people who need to buy, say, an appendectomy? I could never figure that out.)

There may also be cultural differences between the U.S. and other wealthy countries, differences about whether greed, for lack of a better word, is good.  How much greed is good, and in what realms is it good?  Klein quotes a man who served in the Thatcher government:

Health is a business in the United States in quite a different way than it is elsewhere.  It’s very much something people make money out of. There isn’t too much embarrassment about that compared to Europe and elsewhere.

So we Americans roll along, paying several times what others pay for medical procedures, doctor visits, and drugs.

Jay Livingston is the chair of the Sociology Department at Montclair State University. You can follow him at Montclair SocioBlog or on Twitter.

Upwardly Mobile Beer: The Class Status of Rolling Rock

Jay Livingston, PhD on March 28, 2013

Cross-posted at Montclair SocioBlog.

In the Pittsburgh of my youth many decades ago, Rolling Rock was an ordinary, low-priced local beer – like Duquesne (“Duke”) or Iron City. (“Gimme a bottle of Iron,” was what you’d say to the bartender.  And if you were a true Pittsburgher, you pronounced it “Ahrn.”).  The Rolling Rock brewery was in Latrobe, PA, a town about forty miles east whose other claim to fame was Arnold Palmer. The print ads showed the pure sparking mountain stream flowing over rocks.

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That was then.  In the late 1980s, Rolling Rock started expanding – geographically outward and socially upward.  Typically, when ideas and fashions diffuse through the social class structure they flow downward. Less frequently, the educated classes embrace an artifact of working-class culture. But why?  Their conspicuous consumption (or “signalling,” as we now say) is saying something, but what ideas about themselves and the social landscape are they expressing with their choice of beer?

I had an e-mail exchange about that question with Keith Humphreys, who blogs at The Reality-Based Community.  He too grew up in western Pennsylvania, and we both recalled being surprised years later to see Rolling Rock as a beer of choice among young stock traders and other decidedly non-working-class people.  But we had different ideas as to what these cosmopolitans thought they were doing.  Keith saw it as their way of identifying with the working class.

Those of us who grew up near Latrobe, Pennsylvania are agog when upscale hipsters who could afford something better drink Rolling Rock beer as a sign of their solidarity with us.*

I was more skeptical.  I saw it as the hipsters (or before them, the yuppies) trying to be even more hip – so discerning that they could discover an excellent product in places everyone else had overlooked.  Rolling Rock was a diamond in the rough, a Jackson Pollock for $5 at a yard sale.  The cognoscenti were not identifying with the working-class. They were magnifying the distance.  They were saying in effect, “Those people don’t know what a prize they have.  But I do.”

I had no real data to support that idea, so I asked Gerry Khermouch, who knows more about beverage marketing than do most people.  His Beverage Business Insights puts out industry newsletters, and he writes for Adweek and Brandweek.  He’s also beverage buddies with the guys who changed Rolling Rock marketing.  Here’s what he said,

[F]ar from expressing solidarity with the working class, urban drinkers far afield regarded it as an upscale icon in much the way that Stella Artois has claimed today — a triumph of pure marketing.

One ad campaign in the 90s, “Subtle Differences,” aimed directly at the drinker’s connoisseur fantasies.  Here are two examples:

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It’s the little nuances that make life more interesting. Rolling Rock uses slightly more malt than other domestic golden lagers for a refreshing taste that’s got a little more body, a little more bite. If you’ve noticed, we salute you.

Words like nuance were hardly an appeal to solidarity with the working-class.  Neither was the strategy of raising the price rather than lowering it.

To the marketers, the nuance, the malt, bite, and body didn’t count for much.  Their big investment was in packaging.  Instead of stubby bottles with paper labels, they returned to the long-necked, painted-label bottles with the mysterious “33” on the back. Apparently, the original packaging, the  “Old Latrobe” reference, and the rest added notes of working-class authenticity.

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As for the actual beer inside those bottles, it may have once been what the ad copy said.  The brewers had tried to overcome the “watery” image from the beer’s early water-over-the-rocks imagery.  But when Anheuser-Busch bought the company in 2006, they closed the Latrobe brewery, and Rolling Rock became a watery, biteless product indistinguishable from the other innocuous lagers that dominate the US market.

* This was an aside in a post about the future of the marijuana market.  See also our post about the resurgence of Pabst Blue Ribbon.

Jay Livingston is the chair of the Sociology Department at Montclair State University. You can follow him at Montclair SocioBlog or on Twitter.

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