culture

Volunteer Work: Getting the Gift to Keep on Giving

Jacqui Frost on November 30, 2014

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As the holiday season draws near, Americans are gearing up for one of their favorite holiday traditions – volunteering. A time when one is supposed to “spread good cheer,” the season consistently brings a spike in volunteer activity. News outlets all over the country are urging us to “show your gratefulness this holiday in a truly meaningful way” and “take stock of those in need of a hot meal or a warm coat” before we turn to our own celebrations. While it’s not surprising to see such spikes around this time, as American culture encourages such behavior and you can’t swing a turkey without hitting a flyer or advertisement seeking volunteers, what about the rest of the year? What motivates volunteers when spreading good cheer gives way to a busy new year full of work deadlines, weight loss goals, and taxes?

Psychologists point to individual-level motivations such as a desire to express one’s humanitarian values and gain a better understanding of an issue or a community as strong motivators for volunteerism. However, these motivations don’t lead people to volunteer for just any cause. Persuasive messages and feedback from leaders of volunteer groups, as well as how well the group and its goals fit with the volunteer’s goals, are also major factors.
Sociologists show how social factors such as the racial heterogeneity of a region and the availability of organizations to volunteer for are also important when considering why people volunteer. They find that people who don’t volunteer in one place may be more likely to volunteer when they move somewhere else, pointing to factors like the amount of racial segregation, income inequality, and religious diversity in an area. These findings show how simply valuing volunteering as an individual is usually not enough, but that larger social and structural factors are at work.

For a great piece on who volunteers after environmental disasters, see this Reading List post.

#pointergate, Moral Panic, and Online Protest

Jack Delehanty on November 7, 2014

On Thursday, November 6, Minneapolis-Saint Paul ABC affiliate KSTP ran a story claiming Minneapolis Mayor Betsy Hodges had “flashed a gang sign” with a “known felon” during a get out the vote drive in North Minneapolis. The photo shows Hodges embracing and pointing at a young black man, and him pointing back. To support the headline that law enforcement officials were “outraged” by Hodges’s interactions with this man, KSTP reporter Jay Kolls quoted retired Minneapolis police officer Michael Quinn, who accused Hodges of “legitimizing gangs who are killing our children.” The story drew an immediate backlash in other press outlets and on social media. Writing in the Star Tribune, University of St. Thomas law professor Nekima Levy-Pounds criticized the media’s routine portrayal of black men as dangerous criminals and argued that such stories desensitize people to institutional racism. Twitter users deployed the hashtag #pointergate to criticize KSTP and Kolls for their inflammatory reporting, and by mid-day Friday, #pointergate was the top non-sponsored hashtag in the U.S. What might KSTP have expected to gain from running a story like this? Should it have anticipated the furious backlash? And should we be surprised that the reaction on Twitter is as big a story as the original report? Playing on fear has long been a media tactic for drawing attention to stories, but the fear of crime and gangs is a special case.

News media organizations construct their stories as secular morality plays that deploy a “discourse of fear,” which transforms news consumers into victims of the problems that the stories construct. The use of these “problem frames” has increased during the 2000s, and the media applies them much more frequently to stories about race, drugs and gangs.
Social media allows marginalized groups to share frustration much more quickly and publicly. In these symbolic conflicts, both sides escalate their positions through the same venues, like Twitter, and the side that escalates fastest usually prevails. KSTP’s silence on Twitter has given their critics full, uncontested voice, and allowed them to make their protest itself a news item.

Harassment Online and On the Street

Evan Stewart on November 5, 2014

A new survey from the Pew forum sheds light on widespread online harassment. Young adults in the study reported experiencing more bullying overall, and women were more likely to have been stalked or sexually harassed. These are serious crimes, but routine harassment also isn’t harmless. A new viral video and recent piece from The Daily Show capture women’s everyday experiences with street harassment and catcalling in public. These accounts bring bullying back to light, and social science research shows how and why harassment emerges. 

Bullying isn’t just meaningless cruelty; it is one way groups enforce social norms (especially around gender and race). Challenging harassment often means criticizing society’s deeply held beliefs.
Bullying and harassment are also advanced through social organization. Bullying can emerge when an organization is in chaos and can’t moderate unequal relationships around race and gender, and our legal protection of free speech often makes anti-harassment efforts hard to enforce.

Studying Whiteness: Not Beyond the Pale

Stephen Suh on October 30, 2014

Along with the national release of Dear White People earlier this month, PBS recently debuted a series with a unique take on US race relations called The Whiteness Project. Citing a lack of critical examination of whiteness and white identity as its motivation, the program conducts one-on-one interviews with white Americans “from all walks of life and localities.” In part one of the series, participants from Buffalo, NY are shown responding openly, sometimes jarringly, to questions about race, whiteness, and white privilege. Whitney Dow, the producer/director of The Whiteness Project, claims that through these interviews, the project hopes to examine “both the concept of whiteness itself and how those who identify as ‘white’ process their ethnic identity.”

Scholars from numerous disciplines have written thoughtfully and critically about Whiteness and how it pertains to U.S. race relations. Matthew M. Hughey and Matt Wray, both TSP contributors, have also written on the subject.

Gender Pay Gaps: The Silicon Ceiling?

Anne Kaduk on October 24, 2014

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has been harshly criticized for his remarks that women should trust in the system to give them the right raises as they go along, rather than asking for raises they feel they deserve.  While he later “clarified” his statement on Twitter saying that he meant to say that the tech industry must close the gender pay gap so asking for a raise is not needed, research shows why sociologists are skeptical of his arguments.

The gender pay gap is well documented, and it exists even when controlling for a variety of factors related to wages, such as occupation, work hours, and educational attainment.
Occupations with lots of female employees also tend to be paid less favorably than those requiring similar skills but largely done by men.
Mothers tend to be particularly disadvantaged in terms of salary compared to childless women or to men.
Women can also face penalties for asking for a raise, even if they deserve it, if they don’t frame their request in a way that still conforms to gender norms.

For more on women in the workforce, check out these previous TROT posts and briefs from SSN.

Tactical Textbooks: The Politics of Teaching History

Jack Delehanty on October 17, 2014

The past few weeks have seen furious debate about the College Board’s new framework for AP U.S. History. At issue is the framework’s emphasis on topics like racial conflict and social inequality. To the Board and its advocates, like James R. Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association, these topics encourage “learning how to ask historical questions, interpret documents and reflect both appreciatively and critically on history.” To the new framework’s detractors, however, this curriculum neglects core American values and demonizes the U.S. from a global perspective. This debate about education and curriculum became a political flashpoint in August, when the Republican National Committee passed a resolution condemning the new framework as “radically revisionist.” What kind of history does the College Board want students to learn, and what kind of history are Republicans accusing the Board of revising? The debate over AP U.S. History is more than a skirmish over education policy—it reflects an ongoing struggle over cultural authority.

Sociologist James Loewen, in a now classic book published in 1995, argued that most standard U.S. history textbooks supplied “irrelevant and even erroneous details, while omitting pivotal questions … textbooks rarely present the various sides of historical controversies and almost never reveal to students the evidence on which each side bases its position.”
What conservatives are calling revisionist, then, is a way of thinking and learning that challenges common assumptions about how, why, and for whom social change has taken place throughout American history. Banks shows that education, far from a neutral dissemination of facts, reflects the political and social interests of those doing the teaching. History is written by the conquerors.
The debate over education also plays out in a context where conservatives’ trust in science and academic knowledge is declining. Sociologist Gordon Gauchat shows that in the period from 1974-2010, conservatives’ trust in science as a source of cultural authority declined precipitously, and suggests that academic and scientific forms of knowledge have become strongly politicized as a result.

Linking Up With New Social Networks

Evan Stewart on October 15, 2014

Recent media buzz over two new social networks, each challenging part of Facebook and Twitter’s model, raises questions about how people cultivate connections. Ello launched with a manifesto against corporate social media and drew a number of new users unhappy with Facebook’s “real name” policy. While their stance on selling data is still in question, another new network is proud to cash in. Netropolitan.club, billing itself as the next new elite social network, charges $9,000 for exclusive access to connect with everyone else who paid the admission fee. Their success hinges on a chicken and egg question: do we join new groups that give us what we want, or do our current networks shape what we want in the first place?

Classic network research argues that your ties shape what you want, and recent studies of political activism show how this works. People often join activist groups with personal motives and later learn their political stances through the group’s social ties.
On the other hand, tastes also shape the kinds of networks we form. Joining up can be a form of “conspicuous consumption” where members buy in to show insider status. “Highbrow” taste in culture also tends to form stronger, more exclusive ties with other members in the network, while “lowbrow” or popular tastes are associated with weaker, but broader ties.

Back In Living Color? Diversity on TV

Stephen Suh on October 14, 2014

The new season of TV programing is sporting a decidedly more ‘colorful’ look, with non-white creators, producers, and/or lead characters being featured on a number of recently launched series. Among all the major networks, ABC appears to be contributing the most to this trend toward diversity. Not only are they signed on for another new series by famed African American producer/director/writer Shonda Rhimes, titled How to Get Away With Murder, they are also credited with reviving the TV presence of the non-white middle-class family, with new shows about African (Black-ish), Latino- (Cristela), and Asian- (Fresh off the Boat) American families. Most critics, though welcoming of this change, are hesitant to mark this as “progress.” What might social scientists think about this?

Though it’s been a few years, shows like Black-ish, Cristela, and Fresh off the Boat aren’t the first we’re seeing of non-white middle class families on TV. Herman Gray has written extensively, and critically, about television’s discourse on “diversity” and “blackness” and the role played by artists of color in the production process.
Looking more broadly, scholars like Catherine R. Squires write critically about the ways we as a supposedly “post-racial” society now consume those discourses about “diversity” and “multiculturalism” on TV:

Atheist Church: A Predictable Paradox

Jacqui Frost on October 8, 2014

The Sunday Assembly, an organization dubbed by the media as the first “atheist church,” more than doubled its number of “congregations” over one weekend. This group almost replicates the church model in that they meet on Sundays, they sing songs and listen to speakers, they bring snacks and coffee, and they focus their “assemblies” on building community and living a good life—they just simply do all of this with no reference to a deity or the supernatural. At first glance this seems paradoxical. Why do nonbelievers want to create something so much like the church that believers frequent? Sociologists point to one major reason – community.

The drive to come together and share space and ideas with others is a fundamental way humans build identity and community. As far back as Emile Durkheim, sociologists have shown how sharing beliefs and rituals both create and sustain identities, communities, and society. Today, sociologists are finding the same thing happening among nonbelievers who are riffing on the structure and rituals of religious institutions in order to build their own community.
Community building has historically centered around religious institutions. As Americans leave churches at an increasingly higher rate, they are left at a loss with how to form communities without the church model. In many ways, the atheist church phenomenon is due to what sociologists call “institutional isomorphism,” which shapes the available models for building community.
The church model is not the only thing that nonbelievers are borrowing either. Groups of nonbelievers have used social movement rhetoric from civil rights groups, especially LGBTQ rights, to build a movement around non-believing identities. This kind of appropriation is common, however, and sociologists argue that all movements do some version of this, looking to past movement successes to build from when creating their own strategies.

Growing and Granting Genius

Evan Stewart on October 2, 2014

Every year, the MacArthur Foundation releases a list of fellows recognized for “originality and dedication” in their respective fields. 2014’s list honors social psychologist Jennifer Eberhardt, whose work on implicit biases showed up on TROT last week. Known informally as the “genius grant,” the MacArthur fellowship offers funds for a wide range of scholars, artists, and entrepreneurs to pursue new directions in their work. But what exactly is a genius? How do we decide who has that special something? Social science suggests we should not only look at geniuses themselves, but also at how socialization and networks among people craft innovation.

Biographical studies show that genius and other talents are not born, but rather cultivated through an extraordinary amount of practice, habit-forming, and parenting.
Institutions and social networks also play a big role. “Genius” level work in the arts and sciences must be recognized by peers and labeled as such.