government

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.

• Barrett A. Lee and Meredith J. Greif. “Homelessness and Hunger”. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Vol. 49, No. 1 (March, 2008), pp. 3-19
• Don Mitchell and Nik Heynen. “The Geography of Survival and the Right to the City: Speculations on Surveillance, Legal Innovation, and the Criminalization of Intervention”. Urban Geography. Vol. 30, No. 6 (2009), pp. 611-632
• Naomi Dachner and Valerie Tarasuk. “Homeless ‘squeegee kids’: Food insecurity and daily survival”. Social Science & Medicine. Vol. 54, No. 7 (2002), pp. 1039-1049

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.

• Emily Meanwell. “Experiencing homelessness: A review of recent literature.” Sociology Compass, Vol. 6, No. 1 (January 2012), 72-85.
• Jo Phelan, Bruce G. Link, Robert E. Moore and Ann Stueve. “The Stigma of Homelessness: The Impact of the Label “Homeless” on Attitudes Toward Poor Persons”. Social Psychology Quarterly, Vol. 60, No. 4 (Dec., 1997), pp. 323-337

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

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 19^th and early 20^th 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. 

• Saskia Sassen. 1996. Losing Control?: Sovereignty in the Age of Globalization. New York: Columbia University Press.
• Greta Krippner. 2011. Capitalizing on Crisis. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

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. 

• Frank Dobbin and Dirk Zorn. 2005. “Corporate Malfeasance and the Myth of Shareholder Value.” Political Power and Social Theory 17:179-198
• Harland Prechel and Theresa Morris. “The Effects of Organizational and Political Embeddedness on Financial Malfeasance in the Largest U.S. Corporations: Dependence, Incentives, and Opportunities.” American Sociological Review, June 2010; vol. 75: pp. 331-354
• Neil Fligstein and Peter Brantley. 1992. “Bank Control, Owner Control, or Organizational Dynamics: Who Controls the Large Modern Corporation?” American Journal of Sociology 98(2): 280-307
• Nikos Passas. 2005. “Lawful but Awful: ‘Legal Corporate Crimes’.” The Journal of Socio-Economics 34(6):771-786

This week Scotland goes to the polls for a fundamental decision: should it declare independence from the United Kingdom? Discover Society has an excellent summary of the issue, and everyone from The Economist, to Jacobin (on both sides), to The Simpsons’ Groundskeeper Willie has weighed in on the debate. The “Yes” side argues for “embedded independence”—separate nationhood but with strong financial and regulatory ties to the rest of the UK—claiming an independent Scotland can provide better social services to the people. The “No” side thinks the status quo with the UK and the rest of Europe is a good deal, but is willing to compromise with the devolution of some welfare and tax policies back to national control. With a black and white vote, though, social scientists often have to look at the bigger forces behind nuanced policy issues. 

While the meat of the debate is about public policy, accusations of “nationalism” fly in the background. Sociologists can be critical of nationalism; Puri’s work shows how it shapes the desires of society in both progressive and troubling ways. However, authors like Calhoun remind us that national identity also helps create a necessary sense of belonging and social solidarity. Either way, national sentiment is neither unimportant nor just irrationally passionate.

• Jyoti Puri. 2004. Encountering Nationalism. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell.
• Craig Calhoun. 2007. Nations Matter: Culture, History, and the Cosmopolitan Dream. New York: Routledge. 

Scottish public opinion on the yes/no referendum has converged over time and is now closer than ever. With much of the debate centered around social welfare policies, it is important to understand that Great Britain is a strange case; it is much more like the U.S. in terms of market-based social policy, but its public opinion shows a wide range of support for government intervention. This contradiction shows the debate about what the Scottish nation should be is rooted in disagreement about what a nation should do.

• John Mehrtens. 2004. “Three Worlds of Public Opinion? Values, Variation, and the Effect on Social Policy.” International Journal of Public Opinion. 16(2): 115-143.
• Gøsta Esping-Andersen. 1990. The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 

In the latest push against an FCC proposal that would create fee-based “fast lanes” on the Internet, a coalition of tech companies purposely slowed download speeds on their websites. The idea – to demonstrate to users how the new rules might slow traffic on non-paying sites – generated quite a stir: as of September 10th, the FCC received a record-breaking 1.4 million public comments on the proposal.

The coalition of protesting firms includes a roster of sites that rely heavily on user uploads: Mozilla, Etsy, PornHub, Kickstarter, Vimeo, and Reddit all voluntarily slowed traffic. Netflix also joined, displaying a message explaining to users “If there were Internet slow lanes, you’d still be waiting.” Tech giants Google and Twitter added their opposition as well. Protest organizers are asking the FCC to reclassify the Internet as a “Common Carrier” under Title II of the Telecommunications Act, thereby granting the government special regulatory powers designed to protect the web as a kind of public commons.

For most of us, the idea of a “commons” calls to mind a kind of protected natural resource, like the public lands that ecologist Garrett Hardin wrote about in his classic article, “Tragedy of the Commons.” The protesters, though, are asking the FCC to create a “commons” from a service that was built in-part by Internet service providers who now want to charge for speed. So, where might the government stake its claim on a proprietary public service? David Harvey and other social scientists have shown how and why capitalist societies engage in this kind of “commoning.”

• Garrett Hardin. 1968. “The Tragedy of the Commons.” Science 162(3859): 1243-1248
• David Harvey. 2012. Rebel Cities. Chapter 3: The Creation of the Urban Commons. Brooklyn, NY: Verso Books.

The incredible outpouring of individual action in this protest owes a great deal to the organizing efforts of a number of large corporations, each with its own ideological and financial interests in the final ruling. What do you call a campaign that uses grassroots tactics, but takes cues from big business? “Astroturfing”, says Sociologist Edward Walker – and it’s more common than you might think.

• Edward T. Walker. 2010. “Industry-Driven Activism.” Contexts 9(2): 44-49.
• Edward T. Walker. 2014. Grassroots for Hire: Public Affairs Consultants in American Democracy. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Caroline W. Lee. 2010. “The Roots of Astroturfing.” Contexts. 

While President Obama is hosting an economic summit with African leaders this week, the Ebola outbreak is overshadowing major economic news. Experts argue that the epidemic can be curbed, but note rampant distrust toward aid organizations in rural communities makes treatment and prevention difficult. Social scientific research helps explain how media and governments shape the way citizens respond to outbreaks.

We usually think media fans the flames of mass panic, but research on previous Ebola shows media sources actually turn toward a “containment” narrative, emphasizing that it’s hard to catch Ebola and the outbreak is “somewhere else.”

• Sheldon Ungar. 1998. “Hot Crises and Media Reassurance: A Comparison of Emerging Diseases and Ebola Zaire.” The British Journal of Sociology. 49(1): 36-56

It isn’t that local communities “don’t understand” that aid workers are there to help. Epidemics often manufacture misunderstandings and mass panic. Recently, in New York City’s Chinatown, Asians were “stigmatized during the SARS epidemic despite having no SARS cases.”

• Laura Eichelberger. 2007. “SARS and New York’s Chinatown: The Politics of Risk and Blame During an Epidemic of Fear.” Social Science and Medicine. 65(6): 1284–1295

Political context also matters, including the actions of national governments and international NGOs. Comparative work on Uganda and South Africa’s approaches to HIV/AIDS has shown top-down strategies don’t calm the infection rate. Bottom-up approaches, like changing hygiene behaviors, are more effective at the local level. However, this tactic requires an environment of “representation and democratic participation” that governments and international organizations have to build and frame.

• Justin O. Parkhurst and Louisiana Lush. 2004. “The Political Environment of HIV: Lessons from a Comparison of Uganda and South Africa.” Social Science and Medicine. 59(9): 1913–1924
• Yu-Ju Chien. 2013. “How Did International Agencies Perceive the Avian Influenza Problem? The adoption and manufacture of the ‘One World, One Health’ framework.” Sociology of Health and Illness. 35(2): 213–226

Eric Shinseki resigned last Friday as head of the Department of Veterans Affairs, stating that “the VA needs new leadership”. This comes in the wake of scheduling issues at VA medical centers leading to extended delays for veterans’ healthcare—issues he now recognizes as a “systemic lack of integrity” involving a widespread cover-up. According to a new VA audit report prompted by a series of CNN investigations, deadly delays in care were being suppressed by clinics driven to meet performance targets. The VA report concluded that the 14-day wait time performance target was “simply not attainable,” and it called for a “long-term, comprehensive reset” of the broken system. While  Shinseki acknowledges these problems, how reasonable is it to expect his successor to fix them? Research shows that scheduling issues are only one barrier among many to veterans’ accessing care.

When predicting which people will seek care, sociologists take into account patients’ prior experiences with the system such as health outcomes and customer satisfaction. Poor service doesn’t just hurt the veterans who seek care—it may keep them from seeking care in the first place!

• Ronald M. Andersen, 1995.  “Revisiting the behavioral model and access to medical care: does it matter?.” Journal of health and social behavior 36(1): 1-10.

Some veterans are eligible for both Medicaid and VA services. The largest group of these vets relies on Medicaid rather than VA care or a combination of the two.

• Denise M. Hynes, Kristin Koelling, Kevin Stroupe, et al. 2007. Veterans’ access to and use of Medicare and Veterans Affairs health care. Medical care, 45(3): 214-223.

Issues with gender in the military also have an effect. Female veterans have less access to VA healthcare relative to males, with 19% of women reporting delayed health care or unmet needs. Knowledge gaps about VA care, perceptions that providers are not gender-sensitive, and a history of military sexual assault predicted women’s likelihood to delay or forgo treatment.

• Donna L. Washington, Bevanne Bean-Mayberry, Deborah Riopelle, and Elizabeth M. Yano. 2011. “Access to care for women veterans: delayed healthcare and unmet need.”Journal of general internal medicine 26(2): 655-661.

Security breaches can be slippery slopes. Fortunately, Friday’s failed planejacking ended with the containment of a Ukranian passenger who, claiming there was a bomb on board, attempted to reroute a Pegasus Airlines flight to land in Sochi during the Olympic Opening Ceremony. This success corroborates the findings of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism:  given that there have been no consistent changes in number of terror attacks during the past five Games, efforts to reinforce Olympic security have generally been effective. However, with the number of terrorist attacks striking Russia skyrocketing from 50 in 2003 to 250 in 2010, public safety at the Sochi Olympics continues to be a top priority. Safety and surveillance measures taken by Olympic officials have been largely successful at mitigating increased risks, but we’re left wondering why sport mega events are targeted in the first place.

Does the “spectacularization” of the Olympics make the games an ideal arena for terror? A historical look at terrorist attacks on the Olympics sheds some light on potential risks facing host cities.

• Richard Pringle. 2012. “Debunking Olympic sized myths: government investment in Olympism in the context of terror and the risk society.” Educational Review,64(3), 303-316.

Social forces—such as  global economic conditions and professional network structures—shape the security and surveillance strategies at sport mega events. How do these strategies change as both security concerns and expenditure rise?

• Richard Giulianotti and Francisco Klauser. 2011. Special Issue: Security and Surveillance at Sport Mega Events. Urban Studies, 48, 3157-3168.

Why would people experiencing homelessness refuse shelters in some cases? They are often trapped between policies which treat them as criminals for making their own shelter and sick if they seek help.

A recent CNN article reports that relationships between EU officials and the US have been “severely shaken” on account of information leaked by Edward Snowden that the NSA monitored the personal cell phones of 35 world leaders, possibly including Germany’s Angela Merkel. The statement made by Obama’s homeland security and counterterrorism adviser Lisa Monaco raises the important question: Are we collecting information because we need it or just because we can?

While privacy and publicity are often portrayed as a tradeoff, the editors at Cyborgology demonstrate that in many cases, one is a necessary condition for the other.

• Jurgenson, N., and Rey, P.J.  2013. The Fan Dance: How Privacy Thrives in an Age of Hyper-Publicity.  In Unlike Us Reader: Social Media Monopolies and their Alternatives. Lovink, G. and Ratsch, M. (eds.). Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures. 62-75.

Although we typically think privacy is “freedom from” government intrusion, some scholars say society makes it a “freedom to” choose whether or not to disclose personal information. From this perspective,  both social and technological solutions are needed to solve privacy issues.

• Boyd, D. and Marwick, A. September 22, 2011.  Social Privacy in Networked Publics: Teens’ Attitudes, Practices, and Strategies.  A Decade in Internet Time: Symposium on the Dynamics of the Internet and Society.

Leading scholars show how many government practices are invented and learned to manage their populations.

• The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality: With Two Lectures by and an Interview with Michel Foucault. 1991. Burchell, G., Gordon, C.,&  Miller, P. (Eds.) Chicago: University of Chicago Press.