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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.

With more troops coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan, this Veterans Day sees a unique push for public awareness about the challenges that accompany a return to civilian life. Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz has a new book and A&E a new reality show, and the social science shows why we want to pay attention to veterans after they return from service. We have a few previous TROT posts on issues within the military, but unique problems arise in a civilian world which can often be less hospitable than the regiment.

Military service provides a number of social benefits upon returning home. The positive image of having served can even overcome negative stereotypes in civilian life and help advance veterans who have a history of delinquency.
After service, however, institutional problems in civilian life mean veterans don’t all face the same challenges when they return home. For example, the G.I. Bill offered a wide range of education and housing benefits, but historic racial inequality in civilian institutions often made it harder for vets of color to collect those benefits. Today, female vets are more likely to face unemployment than males. However, those with only a high school degree often do earn more than non-vets with only a high school degree, and they are more likely to be enrolled in college.
We can still do a lot of work to improve the military, particularly in leadership and adjudication, but it also has a history of positive institutional changes to address issues like racial inequality and reduce the risks of service for certain minority groups.

 

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.

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.

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.

According to a new report making headlines this week, 21 American cities have passed laws designed to stop residents from sharing food with homeless people since 2013. The finding, which comes from the National Coalition for the Homeless, highlights an increasingly popular belief that hunger motivates troubled individuals to make lifestyle changes. Food aid, in this view, keeps the homeless complacent. In an interview with NPR, one consultant argued that “Street feeding is one of the worst things to do… it’s very unproductive, very enabling, and it keeps people out of recovery programs.” Many city officials quoted in the report have extended this line of thinking to community soup kitchens and food pantries as well. They see those offerings as well-intentioned, but ultimately misguided attempts to help. One, a police captain from Cincinnati, remarked “If you want the bears to go away, don’t feed the bears.” Research shows this isn’t the case, and these attitudes may actually harm people experiencing homelessness.

Social scientists have amassed a great deal of knowledge about the connection between homelessness and hunger. Over and over, they’ve shown that people with stable food access tend to fare better in other aspects of life.
More importantly, these people aren’t animals and homelessness is no mere matter of individual laziness or poor choice. A number of well known structural factors cause and sustain homelessness, including social stigma, poor access to affordable housing, limited employment opportunities, mental health factors, and physical disabilities.

For more on homelessness, check out TROT posts on last year’s polar vortex and this year’s VMAs.

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.

American companies have a new trick for an old trend of saving money by going overseas – moving their headquarters to countries with lower taxes.  These recent corporate inversions in which U.S. based companies, such as Medtronic and Burger King, reincorporate abroad in order to avoid taxes is part of an ongoing process in which corporations go global to offshore work and shuffle money through “tax havens” to boost profits. Commentators such as Allen Sloan condemn these tactics as unpatriotic and bad corporate citizenship. This highlights the tension between national interests and the pressures of globalization. We know that firms are not tied to particular national borders—a fundamental aspect of capitalism that classic theorists like Max Weber and Karl Marx observed in the 19th and early 20th century— but why are these publicly unpopular actions so prevalent today?

While nation-states have lost some power in the past 30 years, they created the very policies that contributed to economic globalization. U.S. policy since the 1970s has led to an increased financialization of the economy and the opening of global capital flows. Corporations aren’t just moving overseas due to greedy and unpatriotic CEOs, but the result of decades of change in policy and the global economy. 
Firms also have immediate financial interests in increasing shareholder value and avoiding taxes, even if that means harming national interests or engaging in immoral behaviors. Organizational dynamics, leadership and culture shape business strategies as well as the broader policy and economic context. 

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.

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.