Tax Haven Mavens

Erik Kojola on October 20, 2014

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. 

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.

Rockefellers Less Loyal to Oil

Erik Kojola on October 6, 2014

The Rockefellers, powerful American industrialists with vast wealth built from the oil industry, are now ditching fossil fuels. According to an announcement from the Rockefeller Brother’s Fund, the organization has pledged to withdraw their investments from fossil fuels and instead invest in clean energy. Corporations and institutions respond to pressure when social norms shift and change, especially when it impacts their public image and the bottom line.

Corporations can be pressured to enact socially responsible behaviors through government policy, nonprofits, civil society groups, social movements, and internal culture and leadership.
Yet, this announcement may also represent a corporate public relations and greenwashing campaign that fails to address the underlying causes of climate change. Either way, the direct impact on energy industries may be less important than the symbolic impact of the gesture.

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.

Falling Poverty Rates Leave Us Hungry For More

Jacqui Frost on September 29, 2014

For the first time since 2006, the Census finds a .5 percentage drop in the poverty rate, with children and Hispanics seeing the biggest declines. Before taking these encouraging statistics at face value, it is important to put them into context. Briefs produced by the Stanford Center on Poverty and Equality and the Center for American Progress outline important factors that often get ignored when focusing on the poverty rate alone, including the consistent struggle for young adults and minorities to find work and the ever-increasing working poor that often get left out of the poverty conversation entirely.

The high poverty rate among young adults is cause for concern. Experiencing poverty in early adulthood has been found to hinder future earnings, especially within minority populations. Young people may stay hungry if our definition of poverty doesn’t grow up with them.
While the poverty rate may have dropped slightly, this is largely due to the increase in the working poor. Millions of families are trapped in the middle, earning just enough to be considered above the poverty line but making far from enough to be considered economically secure. Poverty among working adults is linked to a broader decline in labor unions.
Most of the discussion around the poverty rate centers on what David Cotter calls “person poverty” as opposed to “place poverty.” In his analysis of Census data, Cotter finds that, regardless of any individual characteristic, households in rural America are more likely to experience poverty than their metropolitan counterparts.

Our partner Scholars Strategy Network has tons of great briefs on this issue, including this one on the need for a more comprehensive measure of poverty.

Think Fast: Policing, Race, and Implicit Bias

Richie Lenne on September 26, 2014

Recent shootings in Missouri, Utah, and South Carolina keep us asking how racial bias affects the use of deadly force by the police. How and why does differential treatment by race continue to persist in law enforcement? Part of the answer has to do with the culture and history of policing (see our pervious post Reflecting on Ferguson). Another part involves what psychologists call “implicit biases.” Implicit biases are the unconscious ways in which people treat others differently. Studies of implicit bias have consistently shown that people tend to prefer white to African-American, young to old, and heterosexual to gay. Many social scientists conclude these implicit biases reflect societal biases, because continuous exposure to these assumptions in media and daily interactions leads to biased cognitive associations like “white-innocent” or “black-criminal.”

Implicit biases are most clearly exposed when people are forced to make quick decisions, like when an officer is deciding to shoot or holster their weapon.
Psychologists study the shoot/don’t shoot scenario with video game simulations that require civilians and police to make decisions about a person removing an object (either a weapon or non-weapon) from their pocket. Generally, police make better decisions than civilians, but a racial bias still persists.
Social scientists have several suggestions on how to reduce biases in law enforcement, including increasing the diversity of police forces and management, removing stereotypic images from the workplace, and requiring training to develop counter-stereotypic cognition.

If you are interested in learning about your own implicit biases you can take the Implicit Association Test (IAT) at Project Implicit.

Fast Food Strikes Bring Everyone to the Table

Erik Kojola on September 23, 2014
Image via Annette Burnhardt via Flickr Creative Commons
Image via Annette Burnhardt via Flickr Creative Commons

Flipping burgers at McDonald’s is the iconic dead-end job of the U.S. service economy with low-wages, few benefits and certainly no labor unions. But now a national movement of fast-food and other low-paid workers is growing and organizing to improve working conditions. In the past two years there have been seven national fast-food strikes, which reflect a broader resurgence in the U.S. labor movement and new forms of social mobilization from Occupy Wall Street to the Walmart Black Friday strikes. These recent protests have mobilized often marginalized communities in ways that question the service economy model based on cheap non-unionized labor.

Service work, and fast-food in particular, is a growing sector of employment that is indicative of larger trends in the U.S. economy towards contingent, temporary employment and low wages. Violations of workplace laws like mandatory overtime and minimum wage are part of corporate cost-cutting and common in low-wage industries, and unionization could help give workers power to resist these practices.
This revitalized labor movement is also mobilizing women, people of color and immigrants who were largely left out of the traditional craft and industrial unions.
Broader decline of unionization and decrease in the minimum wage has contributed to rising income inequality, and so attempts to organize low-wage workers could help all U.S. workers and reduce this inequality. Union membership provides a wage boost for workers, especially women, people of color and those with less education.

For more on the inclusive power of unions, check out this Girl w/Pen! post.