In this essay Nathan Palmer uses gentrification to illustrate how simple individual choices can lead to collective issues.

Gentrification is what happens when the middle-class starts buying houses in poor neighborhoods. The neighborhood quickly flips from being predominately poor to being predominating non-poor and like a snapped towel a wave of change pushes the long-time locals out of their homes (Glass 1964; Hackworth and Smith 2001; Smith 1996). Disproportionately the people losing their long-time homes are people of color and the ones getting their dream homes or turning a profit from flipping the neighborhood are white (Freeman 2006)[1].

The homes in poor neighborhoods are cheap and thus attractive for people with low paying careers (e.g. artists) and for real estate developers trying to buy up land in anticipation of a future booming housing market (Zukin 1989). Over time as middle-class individuals and families move into a historically poor neighborhood, their presence changes the housing market. The values of the properties begins to rise and more people want to move into the area. The shift in the housing market can be dramatic, especially if other social factors are present like tax breaks or financial incentives from the local government to encourage growth or a company moving it’s operations into the area (and with it a lot of new jobs).

Rising property values generate desperately needed money for local services, but it also raises the cost of living in the area. Long-time locals watch their monthly rent climb or they are evicted after their landlord’s sell their property for “redevelopment.”

Highland Park, a neighborhood just outside downtown Los Angeles, is gentrifying at warp speed. “According to RealtyTrac, home values have soared about 200 percent from March 2000 to 2014.” Marketplace, a national public radio program, sent their Wealth & Poverty team to Highland Park to report on the human experience of gentrification and in the piece below, the people who gentrified it.

This is what gentrification in Highland Park looks like. Click the next button on the left hand side of the map below to watch the median income of the area shift from $4,704 in 1980 to $41,121 in 2010[2].

Gentrification is inherently a social issue. Each individual home buyer is doing what they feel is best for them. But when market conditions and social forces combine, lots of people make the same individual choice and a social problem is born.

To understand gentrification you must have a sociological imagination. That is, you must understand a personal trouble in context of the social issue that surrounds it. We can’t understand gentrification at the individual level alone. Each of the gentrifiers who move in and the long-time residents forced out have an individual story, but that story is but a single page in the book of gentrification.

Dig Deeper:

1. How could gentrification be seen as both a good thing and a bad thing?
2. Conflict theorists would ask, “who benefits from this?” How would you answer this question?
3. In the Marketplace clip, the people interviewed resisted being labeled as gentrifiers. Why do you think they responded this way?
4. Think of another social problem that requires a sociological imagination to fully understand. Describe both the social problem and how a sociological imagination can lead to a fuller understanding. For a refresher on the sociological imagination check this out.

References:

• Glass, Ruth. 1964. London: Aspects of Change. London: Centre for Urban Studies and MacGibbon and Kee.
• Hackworth, Jason and Neil Smith. 2001 “The Changing State of Gentrification.” Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie (92) (4): 464–77.
• Smith, Neil. 1996 The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City. New York, NY: Routledge.
• Zukin, Sharon. 1989 Loft Living: Culture and Capital in Urban Change. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
• Freeman, Lance. 2006. There Goes the ’Hood: Views of Gentrification from the Ground Up. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press

Sociology classes are often conversations about the scientific data surrounding controversial subjects. It’s really easy for students to feel challenged or even leave class upset. In this essay Nathan Palmer explains how something called the ecological fallacy can lead students to misinterpret sociological data and get their feelings hurt.

Sociology is great because it challenges us to rethink what we know and learn about things we never knew existed. This is also what makes learning sociology upsetting at times. It can be hard to discover that the things “we know are true” aren’t supported by evidence.

You should expect to occasionally leave class frustrated or maybe even a little angry. This is normal, but getting deeply upset is not. In all my years of teaching, I’ve found that most of my angry students made one simple mistake. They took things personally[1].

I Bet You Think This Stat Is About You

Sociology is about the social. Meaning sociologists focus on what happens between people or what happens when lots of individuals do similar things. Sociology is rarely, if ever, focused on a specific individual.

However, that doesn’t stop students from taking things personally. It’s really easy to listen to the findings of a research study about a group you are a part of and think the study and/or your instructor is saying something about you personally.

For instance, look at the chart above. This shows that African Americans are incarcerated five times more often than whites are, and Hispanics are nearly twice as likely to be incarcerated as whites. Latino or African American students could easily misinterpret this chart and think that it is suggesting that they personally are more criminal or that their entire racial ethnic group was more criminal than whites. Furthermore, white students might read this chart and feel that they are some how less criminal or that whites as a group are superior to people of color. Either interpretation would be inaccurate for at least two reasons.

First, a rate of incarceration for a racial ethnic subgroup cannot tell us anything about every member of that subgroup. For instance, if I told you that my class has an average grade of a B, it would be wrong for you to assume that means your friend in my class has a B. When we use group level data to make individual level conclusions, this is what’s called the ecological fallacy. An average, a rate, a proportion, or any other collective measure of a group cannot tell us anything about specific individuals.

Second, sociologists are quick to point out that there is no evidence to suggest that people of color use or sell narcotics at significantly higher rates than their white counterparts. Which means that all other things being equal, we should anticipate that all racial ethnic groups would be arrested for drug infractions at roughly the same rate.

However, changes to our laws and policing priorities made 30 years ago (which together were called the “War on Drugs”) led to a 500% increase in our prison population with African American men experiencing the steepest increase in incarceration. The War on Drugs laws were written to punish high income drug users less severely and poor neighborhoods (and especially poor neighborhoods of color) saw police patrols increased which subsequently raises the likelihood of any drug offense being caught (Alexander 2010; Reiman and Leighton 2012).

Conclusion

When we personalize sociological findings, we are misinterpreting them. Averages, medians, rates, proportions, etc. are useful statistical tools for measuring the central tendencies of a group, but they do not tell us anything about particular individuals. Furthermore, sociology is all about finding out what social factors influence individual behavior and life experiences. Group averages do not tell us things about individuals, instead they tell us things about how people in similar social circumstances have similar experiences which lead to similar outcomes.

Anger, frustration, confusion, and exhaustion are all common side effects of learning. However, if you find yourself deeply hurt by a class topic, check to see if you are committing the ecological fallacy by personalizing a social statistic.

Dig Deeper:

1. Describe in your own words what the ecological fallacy is and give one example of how it can lead you to misinterpret statistics.
2. Practice your social scientist skills and describe two research questions you would like to answer to better understand the racial disparity in incarceration rates.
3. Students often find it easier to come up with individual based explanations for social phenomena (i.e. individual characteristics caused it) than to come up with social explanations (i.e. changes in society caused it). For instance, students often attribute the divorce rate in the U.S. to individuals no longer caring about romantic love or family. Describe at least two ways that changes in the divorce rate could be explained by changes in society.
4. Why do you think students are quick to personalize social statistics and more likely to use individual explanations rather than social explanations when thinking about what causes social issues?

References:

• Alexander, Michelle 2010. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York, NY: The New Press.
• Reiman, J., & Leighton, P. (2012). The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison (10 edition.). Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.

On January 7th brothers Chérif and Saïd Kouachi murdered 12 writers and cartoonists at the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. In this post Nathan Palmer uses social integration theories to better understand this terrorist attack.

Dressed in body armor and holding fully automatic rifles, brothers Chérif and Saïd Kouachi forced their way through the heavy metal doors of the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a French satirical magazine. They opened fire in the lobby and moved with militaristic precision to the newsroom where an editorial meeting was under way. Survivors reported that they methodically killed nearly everyone in the room firing single shots into their victims execution style. After killing 12 they fled the building reportedly shouting, “We have avenged the Prophet Muhammad. We have killed Charlie Hebdo!”

“What kind of person could do something this awful?” was my initial reaction. In my anger and disbelief, my first questions were about Chérif and Saïd Kouachi as individuals. However, with time my sociological mind produced a different question.

“What social conditions would a person have to be in to be willing to commit such a heinous act?” I am not asking who is responsible for the attack; the Kouachi brothers and their associates are responsible for their actions. Terrorism cannot be justified by sociology, but it can be better understood and perhaps we can discover something about ourselves and our society in the process.[1]

Why Do Most of us Follow The Rules?

To state the obvious, what the Kouachi brothers did was selfish. They wanted Charlie Hebdo to never be published again and they wanted to punish the writers and cartoonists who created it. However, the people of France wanted to live in a society with free speech; even when that speech was offensive, racist, and anti-Islamic as many thought Charlie Hebdo was. From this line of thinking, what the Kouachi brothers did was a selfish attack on the social order of France. And this brings us to one of the central questions sociologists and criminologists have been wrestling with forever: Why do people follow the rules even when it’s in their best interest to break them?

Simply put, when you don’t feel like you are a part of society, it’s easier to do things against society.

According to John Braithwaite (1989) we follow the rules because we are afraid of being shamed. In other words, our desire to be a part of a community and to be respected by that community, keeps us from doing things that are against the communities collective interests. Shame then, is the weapon that society wields to keep individuals in line.

Braithwaite argues that there are two types of shaming and that social integration is what distinguishes one from the other. Social integration is a measure of how connected and bonded a person is with their society. When we are fully integrated into a community (as you probably are with your family) you feel like you are an inseparable part of the group. If you’ve ever been “the new kid” at school, then you know what it feels like to not be well integrated into a community.

Punishments that make it hard or even impossible for offenders to become a part of society again after they have served their sentence are called disintegrative shaming. Furthermore, when ex-offenders receive labels like felon or sex offender that follow them wherever they go, then this is disintegrative because these labels prevent them from returning to society in good standing. However, when ex-offenders are allowed back into the fold of society this is called reintegrative shaming. Braithwaite believes that when a criminal receives disintegrative punishment, they are less likely to feel like part of the community and thus the threat of public shame is reduced. In the absence of a healthy fear of shame, ex-offenders are more likely to commit future crimes and join deviant[2] sub-groups.

Simply put, when you don’t feel like you are a part of society, it’s easier to do things against society.

Social Integration & the Terrorist Attack on Charlie Hebdo

Evidence suggests that the Kouachi brothers were not very integrated into French society. They grew up as orphans, bouncing from foster home to foster home. Being of Algerian decent and being Muslim, they were both an ethnic and religious minority in their community. As Dina Temple-Raston reported for NPR, “People who knew the brothers say that even though they were born in France, they felt the prejudice of the newly-arrived.” Chérif Kouachi had a long history with the police, getting arrested for things like stealing cars and smoking marijuana.

The New York Times reports that in 2002 Chérif Kouachi was sickened by the images of U.S. soldiers humiliating Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. So much so that he decided to travel to Iraq to try and join the insurgency. Reportedly Kouachi had only trained with a hand-drawn picture of an AK–47 before he tried to board a Iraqi bound flight and was arrested by French authorities. He was sentenced to 20 months in prison.

While incarcerated Chérif Kouachi integrated with a radical Muslim prison gang. According to Laila Fathi and NPR this is a “textbook case of radicalization.” Which from a social integration perspective makes sense on two fronts. First, when someone has been shamed and removed from society, it would make sense that they would be more open to anti-society ways of thinking. Or more simply, a disintegrated person is more likely to not conform to societal norms. Second, as NPR mentioned in their piece, joining a prison gang is often about survival. Integrating into prison culture means integrating with a protective sub-group (aka a gang). If espousing radicalized Muslim beliefs is the price of admission, then we can see how social disintegration leads to integration with deviant sub-cultures like violent radical Muslim prison gangs.

Social integration can help us understand criminality and terrorism, but it doesn’t cause them. The overwhelming majority of people who are poorly integrated with society do not commit such heinous acts. Furthermore, criminals like Bernie Madoff[3] show us that people who are strongly integrated are also prone to criminality. In the wake of a terrorist attack it is not surprising that the first questions we often ask are about the men who executed it. But by asking sociological questions we can see commonalities between all criminal acts and better understand the social conditions that make deviance more likely.

Dig Deeper:

1. The author of this essay stated multiple times that sociology can help us better understand terrorism, but it can’t justify such acts. Explain in your own words the difference between understanding and justifying.
2. Similarly, the author of this essay was clear to say that social integration can help us understand terrorist acts, but it doesn’t cause them. Explain in your own words why social integration cannot be said to cause terrorism/criminality.
3. Pick another well publicized crime and do a little research on the criminal(s) who committed it. Is there evidence to suggest that they were well integrated into society or poorly integrated? How might that help us better understand the crime?
4. Think about Braithwaite’s reintegrative shaming for a moment. How could we punish law breakers in such a way that they are not pushed out of mainstream society?

References & Further Reading:

• Braithwaite, John. 1989. Crime, Shame and Reintegration Cambridge University Press
• Uggen, Christopher. 1993. “Reintegrating Braithwaite: Shame and Consensus in Criminological Theory Crime, Shame and Reintegration by John Braithwaite” Law & Social Inquiry 18(3):481–499

Author’s Note: Thanks to Dr. Grant Tietjen and Dr. Ami Stearns for consulting on this essay.

In this post Nathan Palmer discusses how a man isolated in the woods for 27 years lost himself and how the self is socially constructed through interaction.

In 1986 Christopher Knight walked away from society. He turned over the engine in his white Subaru Brat and drove to the forests of central Maine without a plan, a map, or even basic camping gear. He told no one where he was going and did everything he could to cover his tracks. He was 20 years old.

Knight eventually found a concealed spot on the forest floor to set up camp near the shores of North Pond. He slept in a nylon tent and never once lit a fire, fearing it would give away his location. He tried surviving on road kill and what he could forage, but it wasn’t enough. Knight burglarized near by homes, cabins, and businesses for all his food, clothing, and camping gear needs. He estimates that he victimized about 40 properties a year. When the food ran out or when the wet windy brutally cold Maine winters brought him inches from death, he meditated.

It all came to end in 2013 when Knight was captured while burglarizing the Pine Tree summer camp, near the shoreline of North Pond. The man who had been willing to freeze to death to stay outside of society would be forced back into it. In the 27 years he spent in the forest, he had only once come across another human. It was a hiker. He said, “hi.”

When asked by a reporter how living in solitude affected him, Knight said something profoundly sociological.

• “I did examine myself,” he said. “Solitude did increase my perception. But here’s the tricky thing—when I applied my increased perception to myself, I lost my identity. With no audience, no one to perform for, I was just there. There was no need to define myself; I became irrelevant…”[1]

How could Knight lose his identity to solitude? If the self is something that can be lost, then by inference the self is something we have to acquire in the first place. Where do we get our sense of self from?

How Do We Find Our Selves?

Sociologists argue that you only discover yourself by interacting with others (Cooley 1902; Mead 1934; Goffman 1959). Through interaction we first learn that others see us (i.e. I have a name. I am different from others). Then we learn how others see us (i.e. I’m a boy) and what behaviors they expect from a person like us (i.e. I should play with trucks and not dolls).

But you are not a robot programed by social interaction. Each of us has an inner sense of self where we process the messages others give us. We can internalize those messages (i.e. dolls are stupid), we can adapt them (i.e. dolls are cool when they ride in trucks), we can innovate on them (i.e. dolls and trucks are cool), or we can resist them (i.e. trucks suck, dolls rule).

You might be tempted to think that your inner self is the real you, separate from social interaction. I think therefore I am, in other words. However, it is impossible to think without using language, imagery, and other symbols. Where did you learn what words mean? Where did you learn how to feel about an image or color or shape or size or any other visual attribute? You learned what these symbols mean through repeated interactions with others. Even alone in your head, society and culture are present.

What Knight Lost

As a sociologist it makes sense that Knight felt he, “lost his identity.” For nearly three decades he had almost no human interaction. “With no audience, no one to perform for, I was just there. There was no need to define myself; I became irrelevant.”

After decades of disuse, Knight struggled to regain his social interaction skills and he knew it. He told reporter Michael Finkel, that he only agreed to be interviewed, “because he was locked in jail and needed practice interacting with others.” During interviews Knight reportedly avoided eye contact stating, “I’m not used to seeing people’s faces. There’s too much information there… Too much, too fast.”

Finkel reported that during interviews Knight’s speech, “seemed candid and blunt, unfiltered by the safety net of social niceties.” Sociologically this is unsurprising. It is only through interaction that we learn to filter our inner selves. “Social niceties” are nothing more than the social norms for interaction.

Knight never truly left society. He survived only by repeatedly raiding it for resources. The police found stockpiles of pilfered magazines and books around his campsite. He reportedly enjoyed listening to music, the news, and the audio portion of television shows on a radio. Everyone Loves Raymond was a favorite.

Knight’s story is not one of life outside of society, but life without social interaction. In losing his identity, Knight provides evidence that the self is a product of the social world and that when we can’t see our reflection in the eyes of others, we lose a part of our selves.

Dig Deeper:

1. Describe in your own words what the self is according to sociologists.
2. If our sense of self comes from interactions with others, does that mean that we are not individuals?
3. Knight said that there was “too much information” coming from people’s faces. What do you think he means? What kinds of information do we communicate to one another with our faces?
4. Sociologists argue that we do not always internalize (i.e. accept uncritically) the messages others give us during interactions. We can also adapt, innovate, or resist those messages. Give an example (not used in this essay) of a cultural message that someone could receive through social interaction and how it could be adapted, innovated on, or resisted.

References:

• Cooley, C. H. (1902) Human Nature and Conduct. Scribner’s, New York.
• Goffman, E. (1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Doubleday, Garden City, NY.
• Mead, G. H. (1934) Mind, Self and Society. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.


In this essay Nathan Palmer discusses how the The River Rouge high school football team has developed social capital to achieve both on the field and in the classroom.

Just south of Detroit, in a neighborhood struggling with poverty and crime is a shining example of what we can accomplish when we work together. Head coach Corey Parker has The River Rouge Panther high school football team focused on a vision and committed to each another.

How are the Panthers defying the odds? Why are these young men achieving academically when roughly a third of their peers won’t even graduate? How did coach Parker change the culture of the football team? Social capital.

How Social Capital Transforms Lives

Why do some schools do better than others? That was the simple question that sociologist James Coleman wanted to answer. The intuitive answer to this question was, money. It would make sense that schools with fewer resources would have lower educational outcomes (e.g. low grades, graduation rates, and college enrollment rates). However, in 1966 Coleman published a study which suggested that the amount of money a school had to spend on it’s students had only a modest impact on student outcomes (e.g. graduation rates, GPA, etc.)[1]. So if not money, what else could explain school success? Coleman believed that differences in school performance were due to differences in social capital.

Social capital is a resource that people gain from being a part of a community (or what sociologists call a social network). Just like financial capital (i.e. money) social capital makes things possible that otherwise wouldn’t be. Unlike money, social capital cannot be individually owned, but rather it only exists in the connections between people.

Coleman (1988) believed that when people in a social network establish relationships built on trust and reciprocity (i.e. give and take), the network as a whole was better able to achieve it’s collective goals because the community is better able to communicate a collective vision to every member in the network. A “collective vision” might sound fancy in the abstract, but a real world example will show you how ordinary such visions can be.

Listening to coach Parker you can hear the collective vision he instills in his students. Academics above football. Going to college is expected of you. I am committed to you. We are committed to each other. When asked by reporter Dustin Dwyer if football was just a game, coach Parker laid the team’s collective vision out plain.

• 
  “Oh, no way,” he says, laughing. “No way. Football around here is a tool. It’s a vehicle. It’s a backbone, if you’ve never had it. If no man has ever told you that they love you. It’s a good, strong backbone to let you know you are good enough, you are strong enough, you are smart enough to do anything you want in this world. To have vision, to have foresight, to have dreams. … That’s what football is.”
  

It should be clear by now that the power of social capital is not in the collective vision, but in the social norms it creates. If one of the River Rouge players starts slacking off in class, coach Parker and the rest of the Panthers will call them out. Or to put that in sociology-speak, any deviation from the collective social norms will receive sanctions from the rest of members of the social network. But why does the threat of sanction (i.e “getting called out”) inspire River Rouge students to comply with the rules? The simple answer is love.

Coach Parker and his young men have established trust and reciprocal relationships with one another. The Panthers can trust one another to show up every day for practice and to take it seriously. They can trust that if they are struggling, they can go to one another for support. They give their time and heart to one another because they trust that others will do the same for them. When a social network establishes trust and reciprocity, individual members feel committed to the whole and the sting of being called out for breaking the rules. Simply put, we follow the collective norms when we feel committed to the people in the network.

Coleman (1988) argued that if schools can establish trust and reciprocal relationships between students and teachers, between teachers and parents, and between teachers and administrators collective visions would take hold and academic success would be more likely. But we should be careful not to take his ideas too far. Social capital can help a school overcome tough circumstances, but those same circumstances make it harder for trust and reciprocal relationships to be established. Crime, poverty, and other structural factors can shred social bonds and create distrust amongst a community.

Social capital may help communities “do more with less” as the saying goes, but there is no evidence to suggest that social capital can erase educational inequality. If anything, the Panthers success should leave us asking, “how much more could our schools accomplish if they had both the social and financial resources they needed?”

Dig Deeper:

1. Some people read Coleman’s work and say, “school funding doesn’t matter. Poor performing schools just lack social capital and developing that is free.” What would you say to a person who makes that argument?
2. If we take Coleman to be saying that, “money doesn’t matter,” then wouldn’t that be an argument for equalizing the amount of resources each school has in the U.S.? If money doesn’t matter, then wealthy schools should have no problem taking a cut in resources, right? What do you think of this logic and what do you think would happen if a wealthy school was asked to give up some of it’s resources to a poorer school?
3. Imagine that your parent says to you, “I’m not mad at you for breaking the rules. I am just disappointed in you.” How would you feel? Now imagine that a complete stranger says the exact same thing to you. Why would it hurt more if your parent said this to you? Explain your answer using Coleman’s theory of social capital.
4. Think of a time you were in a tight knit social network like a team, a class, or any other social group. What was the collective vision that emerged within that group and what social norms (or rules) did that vision establish?

References:

• Coleman, James S. 1966. Equality of Educational Opportunity Study (EEOS), 1966: Version 3. Retrieved December 27, 2014 (http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/ICPSR/studies/06389).
• Coleman, James S. 1988. “Social Capital in the Creation of Human Capital.” American Journal of Sociology 94:95–120.
• Kozol, Jonathan. 1991. Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools. 1st edition. New York: Crown.
• Kozol, Jonathan. 1995. Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation. 1 edition. New York: Crown.

If Italian immigrants started at the bottom of the American social ladder and made it to the top, why can’t Mexican immigrants do the same today? In this essay Nathan Palmer shows us how thinking sociologically and considering social structure can help us answer this question.

“Italian immigrants made a place for themselves in America and worked like hell to climb to the top of the economic ladder, why can’t we ask the same for immigrants today?” On the face of it this is a reasonable question, but is this a fair comparison?

Mass Italian immigration to the United States started after the Civil War, peaked in the 1910s, and then tapered off. Like most immigrants, these Italian men, women, and children established their first foothold into the country at the bottom of the social ladder living in poor neighborhoods with inferior schools and inferior community resources. Italian immigrants faced open bigotry, discrimination, and even mass lynching’s by the hands of their white counterparts. In the face of all this, Italian immigrants fought their way out of poverty and into the mainstream.

Since the 1960s the majority of immigrants to the United States have come from Central America, South America, and Asia[1]. This can be explained in part by the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act, which removed multiple barriers that systematically limited Latino and Asian immigration. However, recent Latino and Asian immigrants have struggled to escape poverty and integrate into the mainstream. For example, first and second generation Latino immigrants disproportionately live in poor neighborhoods, are exposed to high rates of crime, and drop out of high school (Haller, Portes, and Lynch 2011).

So what gives? Some would argue that recent Latino and Asian immigrants lack grit or are lazy. This is what is known as an individual explanation because it tries to explain a social problem (i.e. less comparative immigrant success) by relying on individual characteristics (i.e. today’s immigrants are lazy). To be a sociologist is to consider how social structures affect individual lives.

Two Different Times, Two Different Economies

The United States economy today is different than it was in the late 1800s – early 1900s. When the bulk of Italian immigrants arrived, the U.S. economy was transitioning from being primarily agricultural to a booming industrial economy. In the late 1960s when the large scale flows of Latino and Asian immigrants started in the U.S. the economy was shifting away from being largely industrial and becoming the largely information/service based economy we have today.

Workers in the U.S. industrial economy of the 1900s could land relative high paying manufacturing jobs without a high school diploma. Compare that to the $21,332 average annual income of workers without a high school education earn. Both Italian immigrants of the past and Mexican immigrants of today struggled to get their children to graduate from high school (Perlmann 2005), but the consequences today are much greater than they were in the past.

The Italian immigrants of the early 1900s also benefited from arriving in the U.S. prior to the post-WWII economic boom. High paying, low skill industrial jobs and FDR’s New Deal polices reduced economic inequality, creating the sizable middle class we have today. This time period, which economists refer to as the “Great Compression” started in the 1940s and ended in the late 1970s (Goldin and Margo 1992; Krugmen 2007; Piketty and Saez 2006). Latino and Asian immigrants, who were largely barred from entering the country prior to the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act, were not present for most of the “Great Compression.”

And Let’s Not Forget Racism

Even if Latino and Asian immigrants had been present for the great compression, there is reason to believe they wouldn’t have enjoyed it like Italian Americans did because of widespread individual and institutional racism. While Italian immigrants and other groups from southern and eastern Europe faced overt bigotry when they arrived in the U.S., these “white ethnics” as they were called at the time were eventually able to fight off the stigma of that ethnic label and become simply “white” (Ignatiev 2009; Jacobson 1999; Roediger 2006). Latinos and Asian Americans have and continue to experience individual and institutional racism, prejudice, and discrimination.

Thinking Like a Sociologist

To think like a sociologist you must consider how an individual’s experiences are influenced by both the social structure and the historical moment they live in (Mills 1959). To compare the experiences of Italians immigrants to that of immigrants today is to compare to starkly different historical moments and two different economic structures.

Dig Deeper:

1. We often hear politicians and pundits say that the poor are to blame for their economic situation. These are individual explanations of poverty. Write down at least 3 individual explanations of why some people are poor.
2. Now come up with at least two structural explanations for why some people are poor. It might be helpful to think about the question, how does the way our society is organized affect who is poor and who is rich?
3. How does the social structure of your society impact your individual choices? Think of at least three examples. (Hint: are you in school? If so, why?)
4. How is your life affected by the historical moment you live in? To answer this question it might be helpful to think about what your life would be like if you lived in a different time period.

References:

• Goldin, Claudia and Robert A. Margo. 1992. “The Great Compression: The Wage Structure in the United States at Mid-Century.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 107(1):1–34.
• Haller, William, Alejandro Portes, and Scott M. Lynch. 2011. “Dreams Fulfilled and Shattered: Determinants of Segmented Assimilation in the Second Generation.” Social Forces 89(3): 733–762.
• Ignatiev, Noel. 2009. How the Irish Became White. Routledge.
• Jacobson, Matthew Frye. 1999. Whiteness of a Different Color. Harvard University Press.
• Krugman, Paul. “Introducing This Blog.” Retrieved February 22, 2015 (http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/09/18/introducing-this-blog/).
• Mills, C. Wright. 1959. The Sociological Imagination. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Oxford University Press.
• Perlmann, Joel. 2005. Italians Then, Mexicans Now: Immigrant Origins and the Second-Generation Progress, 1890–2000. Russell Sage Foundation.
• Piketty, Thomas and Emmanuel Saez. 2006. “The Evolution of Top Incomes: A Historical and International Perspective.” National Bureau of Economic Research.
• Roediger, David R. 2006. Working toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White: The Strange Journey from Ellis Island to the Suburbs. Basic Books.

In this essay, Nathan Palmer shows us how the past influences the present.

Why does your right pinky finger rest on the semicolon key when you type? I’m not sure I even know how to properly use a semicolon and I’m a professional writer. Having the semicolon in the home row[1] of keys is plain stupid, but you wanna know what’s worse? E and J. According to an analysis of the Concise Oxford Dictionary the letter E is by far the most frequently used letter in the English language. So why is E not on the home row? The letter J is the second least used letter in the alphabet and it’s under my right index finger. What gives? Who designed this thing? Believe it or not, the answer to this question can teach you something about sociology.

The Dirty on The QWERTY

The modern QWERTY keyboard layout (named for the first six letters in the top row of keys) first became popular in the late 1800s with the Remington No. 2 Typewriter. There are two competing theories about why this odd keyboard arrangement rose to dominance. First, back in the day when you pushed a key on a typewriter a mechanical arm would slap the letter onto a piece of paper. If you typed quickly it was fairly easy to have one mechanical arm crash into another letter’s mechanical arm and jam the machine. To minimize these jams, the QWERTY was developed to space common letter pairs far apart. However this doesn’t really make sense given that e and r are two of the most common letter pairings in the English language. The second theory is that the QWERTY arrangement was designed to make it easy for telegraph operators to translate messages received in morse code back into English (Yasuoka and Yasuoka 2011).

Either way, the QWERTY wasn’t designed with our modern needs in mind. We should change it, but we probably won’t.

Path Dependence: How The Past Influences The Present

In the 1930s the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard was designed to increase efficiency by placing the most commonly used letters along the home row, but imagine how hard it would be to adopt this technology. If you bought a computer with a Dvorak layout and taught yourself to become proficient with it, you would still have to switch back to a QWERTY every time you used any other computer or any device with an onscreen keyboard. It’s logical to want to increase typing efficiency, but it’s illogical to go against the flow of society.

This is a classic example of how choices made in the past affect the choices we make in the present or what sociologists call path dependence. Jeff Manza (2013: 105) defines path dependence as, “the ways in which outcomes of the past impact actors and organizations in the present, making some choices or outcomes logical and other illogical.”

The QWERTY is just one of many examples of the effects of Path Dependence. For instance, why do many employers in the U.S. pay for their employees health insurance? Why are power lines in the U.S. hanging from telephone polls instead of buried in the ground where they would be safe from falling trees and bad weather? Why do college students today expect to develop job skills instead of learning to be a well rounded person through studying latin or classical literature? The answer, at least partially, to all of three of these questions is, choices people made in the past (for more see here, here, and here).

To be a sociologist is to see how our individual lives are affected by the choices that the people around us make today and the choices that people made in the past (Mills 1959). Because every device and everyone around us uses a QWERTY keyboard it is too hard to do anything else. Or put another way, when everyone around you is going in the same direction, it is hard to go against the flow of society. And often the direction society flows is set by choices made in the past.

Dig Deeper:

1. What are some other examples of path dependent phenomena? That is, what things are only logical today because of decisions made in the past?
2. Are we helpless to fight against path dependency? Can societies make drastic changes in technology or in social arrangements? What are some examples you can think of? Hint: think of some revolutions throughout history.
3. How has your life been shaped by the decisions your ancestors made? For example, how did your family come to live where you were raised? Come up with at least three examples.
4. How has your life today been shaped by the decision you made in the past? That is, what is only logical to you today because of choices you made long ago?

References:

• Manza, Jeff, Richard Arum, and Lynne Haney. 2013. The Sociology Project: Introducing the Sociological Imagination. Boston: Pearson.
• Mills, C. Wright. 1959. The Sociological Imagination. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Oxford University Press.
• Yasuoka, Koichi and Motoko Yasuoka. 2011. “On the Prehistory of QWERTY.” Zinbun 42:161–74.

In this essay Nathan Palmer uses The Walking Dead to illustrate social structure and why the idea of losing it terrifies us.

What is it about The Walking Dead that horrifies us? The zombies are a constant disgusting threat, but they’re also slow and fairly easy to deal with in small numbers. The real horror of The Walking Dead is the other human survivors. “Fight the dead. Fear the living,” the tagline for season 3, says it all.

What is it about The Walking Dead that fills it with grief? In show after show we see our favorite characters mourn the loss of their old lives. Obviously they mourn their lost loved ones, but they also mourn something much bigger. They mourn the loss of the “way things used to be” and who they were before the apocalypse.

The horror and the grief of The Walking Dead have the same root source: the catastrophic loss of social structure.

Social Structure: The Routines That Make Society Possible

There is a routine and order to life. Each day is remarkably similar to the day before it. Almost every situation we face throughout the day is similar to one that we’ve faced before and we know from that experience how to handle it.

When you’re hungry, when someone starts a conversation with you, when you need to get yourself across town, when you want to play basketball, when someone sends you a funny Snapchat, or when any other situation arises in your life, you almost always know what to do. There is a routine for solving these problems or handling these interactions. You likely already know that routine, but if not, you are highly skilled at adapting old routines to new situations or learning new routines altogether.

Social structure, though, includes far more than individual routines used to get through life. Social structure can also be large formal organizations that enact routines to meet the needs of society. It might be easier to think of these organizations as social institutions and the routines they enact as systems. For instance, think of all of the systems that have to be maintained for you to be able to purchase things using a debit card. You know your portion of this routine (i.e. pull out debit card, swipe it, enter passcode, accept total, wait for approval from bank), but outside your perspective our financial institutions are carrying out scores of routines to make your single debit card transaction possible.

In fact, life in modern society wouldn’t be possible if we didn’t routinize so much of it. Each day 7 billion people on this earth are able to have their basic needs met because we have created routines (or systems) for meeting all of their basic needs. Millions of times a day strangers interact with one another and for the most part, things go smoothly. That in and of itself is an amazing feat and it is all facilitated by how we routinize and structure our society.

Social structure then, “are the routines and organizations that shape, constrain, and enable everything that we do” (Manza et al. 2013:88). We call them social structures because no single individual can create or change them and because they only emerge through social interaction.

The Horror of a Catastrophic Simultaneous Loss of Structure

Social structures are typically slow to change and typically that is a good thing. We need to know that our routines and the organizations that we’ve come to rely on will be there when we wake up in the morning. Even when a social institution changes it often only changes partially. For example, every year politicians change our laws, but the Constitution remains the bedrock of legal justice system.

What scares us about The Walking Dead, from a sociological perspective, is the complete and total loss of social structures. The idea of waking up in a world where there is no social order familiar to us and where nearly all our routines for meeting our daily needs are simultaneously made useless is horrifying. The Walking Dead shows us what it would be like to live in a world without our modern governments and the medical, educational, and economic systems that we are nearly completely dependent on. Without structures to guide our interactions with one another, you have to put your guns in every stranger’s face until you know you can trust them.

The characters on the walking dead often reminisce about and mourn for “the way things used to be.” To a sociologist, the way things used to be is another way of talking about social structure.

Dig Deeper:

1. Describe a routine that you use everyday to meet a need.
2. Describe a routine that you use frequently when interacting with others.
3. What is it about social structures that make them social?
4. Describe something that is very easy to do today because of our social structure that would be very hard after an apocalyptic event (e.g. nuclear bombing).

In this essay, Nathan Palmer asks how does a person’s social context affect their behavior and finds that sociologists really don’t have a clear answer.

Who you are and where you are affects your experiences, your behavior, and your understanding of the world around you. This is sociology in a nutshell^[1].

Sociology is built on the idea that your social context affects your individual choices and perceptions of the world. Social context is the term we use to describe both who you are as an individual and how you relate to everyone else around you. For example, being a wealthy business executive in New York City is a social context that is very different compared to that of an undocumented immigrant working in a sweat shop making dresses outside of Los Angeles. The way people interact with you, the opportunities available to you, and the lessons you take away from those experiences all vary based on your social context.

Now I’m going to let you in on one of sociology’s dirty little secrets; we don’t precisely know how or why social context influences individual behavior. We know that social context affects individuals (mountains of scientific research confirms this), but sociologists do not exactly agree on why (Rubinstein 2001).

Sociology’s Two Teams

To understand why sociologists do not agree on why social context affects individuals, we have to discuss sociology’s two teams. Sociology, especially American sociology, can be split up into two teams on this issue; structural and cultural^[2]. Team Structure argues that the way society is organized influences the opportunities an individual has and ultimately what choices appear rational to that individual. Team Culture, on the other hand, argues that our individual behavior is a product of what we think others around us expect of us and more generally how we understand the world around us. This disagreement is nicely summarized by a theorist named Jon Elster (1990 as cited in Rubinstein 2001:7) who suggests that in social science, ”there are really just two basic motivations of human behavior" rationality and social norms.

Walking Calculators of Rationality

The individual according to Team Structure is a rational/instrumental actor. Which is another way of saying, individuals make choices to achieve goals. For instance, it is rational to go to college if you would like to have a high paying career. Similarly, if during a job interview you didn’t mention you had a bachelor’s degree, that would be irrational as it would reduce the likelihood of you achieving your goal of employment. Taking this idea to its logical extreme, the individual becomes a walking calculator constantly looking to make the decisions that maximizes their chances of achieving their goals.

Team Structure’s main point is that what appears rational to an individual is largely based on the social context they live in. For instance, research shows that wealthier parents are more likely to not vaccinate their children (Smith, Chu, and Barker 2004). The fact that these parents have more money and thus could afford medical treatment if their child did contract one of these preventable diseases, could make the decision not to vaccinate more rational than if they were poor. The structure of society (i.e. the unequal distribution of money) creates multiple social contexts (i.e. affluence/poverty) which ultimately affect what decisions appear rational (i.e. to vaccinate or not) in the pursuit of an individual’s goals (i.e. to raise a happy healthy child).

Sociologists, by in large, would hate the accusation that they believe individuals are rational. Most sociologists would argue that individuals make choices for a wide variety of reasons and rationality is but just one. But despite our distaste for rationality, multiple scholars have argued that classical sociological theory (e.g. Marx and Weber) and contemporary theory (e.g. Giddens, Bourdieu, and Collins) is rooted in rationality (Alexander 1984; Knottnerus and Prendergast 1994; Rubinstein 2001).

Norm Driven Role-Players

Individual behavior, according to Team Culture, is primarily driven by the individual’s perception of the world around them. An individual receives messages about what is possible for someone like them (i.e. their opportunities) and also messages about how they are expected to behave (i.e. social norms). From this point of view, the individual is playing a role in society.

For example, let us consider the role of being a college student. Individual college students may choose to abuse alcohol because they perceive that they have ample opportunity to do so and that binge drinking and alcohol abuse is what college students are supposed to do as a sort of rite of passage (Crawford and Novak 2006).

Conclusion

Sociology is great at showing us how our individual experiences and choices are affected by our social context. However, as a discipline we are still debating why social context affects individuals and precisely how it does. Modern sociologists, especially in America, have moved away from answering generic questions of how society influences the individual. Instead the bulk of sociological research today focuses on a how a specific social context affects specific individual behaviors (e.g. what affect does growing up poor have on college graduation). Each of these single context studies could be bringing us closer to finding the general relationship between all social contexts and individual behavior or it could be bringing us closer to discovering that there are no generalizable rules for how social context affects individuals. Only time will tell.

Dig Deeper:

1. What is your social context? First describe at least 5 aspects of who you are (e.g. your race, class, gender, etc.) and then how that relates to the people in your community.
2. How would your life be different if you lived in a different social context? Look at the attributes you listed in question 1 and swap them out for a different status (e.g. swap rich for poor or Christian for Muslim). How do you think you would experience the world differently if this was your social context?
3. Which team’s explanation of how social context affects individual behavior do you find most persuasive? Compare and contrast the strengths and weaknesses of each explanation.
4. If thousands of sociological studies show that social context does affect individual behavior, does it really matter if sociologists aren’t exactly sure how it does or why it dose have an impact? Write out at least one reason why it does matter and one reason why it doesn’t.

References:

• Alexander, Jeffrey C. 1984. “Social-Structural Analysis: Some Notes on Its History and Prospects.” The Sociological Quarterly 25(1):5–26.
• Crawford, Lizabeth A. and Katherine B. Novak. 2006. “Alcohol Abuse as a Rite of Passage: The Effect of Beliefs about Alcohol and the College Experience on Undergraduates’ Drinking Behaviors.” Journal of Drug Education 36(3):193–212.
• Knottnerus, J. David and Christopher Prendergast. 1994. Recent Developments in the Theory of Social Structure: Introduction and Overview. Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press.
• Rubinstein, David. 2001. Culture, Structure and Agency: Toward a Truly Multidimensional Sociology. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage
• Smith, Philip J., Susan Y. Chu, and Lawrence E. Barker. 2004. “Children Who Have Received No Vaccines: Who Are They and Where Do They Live?” Pediatrics 114(1):187–95.

In this essay, Nathan Palmer discusses what sociologists think intro students should be learning.

“What are we supposed to be learning here anyways?” Likely not a day goes by that a student in an intro to sociology class thinks this to themselves. Every class that tries to introduce students to an entire discipline struggles to find a core message, but intro to sociology especially struggles with this. Sociologists from the start of the discipline (Howard 2010) to today still disagree about what sociology is and what it isn’t (D’Antonio 1983). Even for the best intro teachers, sociology 101 can feel like a bunch of loosely connected bits of information that do not add up to anything substantial[1].

What Sociologists Want Intro Students To Learn

Despite our internal disagreements about defining our discipline, multiple studies have shown that your intro teacher and the rest of us generally agree about what you should be learning[2]. For instance, Caroline Persell (2010) gave over a hundred leaders in sociology a list of 30 learning goals and asked them to rank them from the most important to the least[3]. Here’s what she found:

Sociology Leader’s Top 5 Learning Goals for Introductory Sociology:

1. Show the relevance and reality of structural factors in social life
2. Place an issue in a larger context (identify systemic elements; identify stakeholders; list unintended consequences).
3. Identify and offer explanations for social inequality
4. Recognize the difference between empirical and normative statements.
5. Compare and contrast one’s own context with those in other parts of the U.S. and the world.

That list might be hard to unpack for many students, so let me briefly explain what each means. Social structure is a term that describes how the organization of society affects individuals experiences and opportunities. “Placing an issue in a larger context” means zooming out on an individual situation or experience and seeing how the social circumstances surrounding it influence it as well. Social inequality is a term used to describe how opportunities and resources are distributed within society unevenly. Empirical statements are used to explain why something happens or describe an experience that are based on data gathered using scientific methods. Normative statements are similar, but they are not based in scientific evidence and often they are based in personal experiences or common sense. The last goal seems to me to be describing a student’s ability to use the sociological imagination to better understand their own social context, another’s social context and how each social context affects the individual

If you want to know more, check out these essays for more on Social Structure, Social Contexts, Social Inequality, empirical vs. normative statements, and the sociological imagination.

What Your Intro Teacher Wants You To learn

It is easy to find out what your intro teacher wants you to learn. The first place to look is your class syllabus. Today almost every syllabus contains a section with the word “objectives” in the title (e.g. learning objectives, course objectives, etc.). You can read these to get a broad overview of what your teacher wants you to learn. Second, you could simply ask them. Go to their office hours, ask before/after class, or shoot them an email. Trust me your teacher will almost certainly be impressed by the question and think you are a bright and motivated student for asking.

Dig Deeper:

1. From your experiences with sociology, do you find the discipline to be “a bunch of loosely connected bits of information” or do you think the goals of sociology are clearer? Describe your opinion and provide some explanation as to why you feel that way.
2. What is your social context? Take what you’ve learned from your sociology class and apply it to yourself. You might start by discussing your social statuses (e.g. student, son/daughter, etc.) and also your social demographics (e.g. race, gender, economic class, etc.). Then write some about how your experiences are influenced by your social context.
3. Think about a sociology class that you are currently taking. What have you learned about social structure (i.e. goal #1) in your class?
4. In the same class as you discussed in question #3, what are you learning about social inequality?

References:

• D’Antonio, William V. 1983. “Nibbling at the Core.” Teaching Sociology 10: 169–85.
• Grauerholz, Liz and Greg Gibson. 2006. “Articulation of Goals and Means in Sociology Courses: What We Can Learn from Syllabi.” Teaching Sociology 34(1):5–22.
• Howard, Jay R. 2010. “2009 Hans O. Mauksch Address Where Are We and How Did We Get Here? A Brief Examination of the Past, Present, and Future of the Teaching and Learning Movement in Sociology.” Teaching Sociology 38(2):81–92.
• McKinney, Kathleen, Carla B. Howery, Kerry J. Strand, Edward L. Kain, and Catherine White Berheide. 2004. “Liberal Learning and the Sociology Major Updated.” American Sociological Association.
• Persell, Caroline Hodges. 2010. “How Sociological Leaders Rank Learning Goals for Introductory Sociology.” Teaching Sociology 38(4):330–39.
• Persell, Caroline Hodges, Kathryn M. Pfeiffer, and Ali Syed. 2007. “What Should Students Understand After Taking Introduction to Sociology?” Teaching Sociology 35(4):300–314.
• Wagenaar, Theodore C. 2004. “Is There a Core in Sociology? Results from a Survey.” Teaching Sociology 32(1):1–18.

In this post Nathan Palmer uses the recent controversy over the Indiana law to show us how issues are framed by social movements.

For a social movement to change people’s minds, recruit supporters, and secure the resources needed to accomplish their goals, they have to tell a great story. That is, they have to present their ideas in a way that will resonate with people and effectively communicate what they feel must be changed and why. This process within social movements is what sociologists call framing.

If you’ve ever cropped a photo and it looked a lot better, then you understand the basics of framing. Just as you can frame a photo to cut out the people in the background so that you and your friends’ smiling faces are front and center, you can also frame an issue so that some aspects of it are highlighted and other aspects are downplayed or cut out altogether. Framing is easier to understand when you see it in action, so let’s take a look at how supporters and opponents of a recently passed law in Indiana framed the legislation[1].

How Supporters Framed Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

Supporters of Indiana’s RFRA champion it as a protector of religious freedom and people of faith from being forced by the government to provide services that are against their religious beliefs. Indiana Governor Mike Pence said of the law, “this is about protecting the religious liberty of people of faith and families of faith…” Supporters pointed out that many states across the country have similar RFRA laws and that the federal RFRA law was signed into law by President Clinton.

Supporters of Indiana’s RFRA law vehemently deny that it will legalize open discrimination against gays, lesbians, or any other sexual minority. Last week we saw a series of supporters attempt to argue that the law was not discriminatory during multiple live TV interviews and get grilled by their interviewers. For instance, Gov. Pence was asked more than three times by George Stephanopoulos if the law legalized discrimination and each time he dogged the question. Peter Sprigg of the Family Research Council and Ryan McCann of the Indiana Family Institute are two other good examples of supporters making an exasperated defense of the law as non-discriminatory. In all three cases, the supporters seemed shocked by the accusation and reiterated that this law wasn’t about discrimination, but religious liberty.

How Opponents Framed Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act

Opponents of Indiana’s law framed the issue squarely on discrimination; arguing that the bill would make it legal for any individual or any corporation to deny services to non-heterosexual customers. As NPR reported, the law, “caused a firestorm of criticism from those who say the law could lead to discrimination against gays and lesbians, including businesses like Apple and Angie’s List; the NCAA, which is hosting the men’s college basketball Final Four in Indianapolis; and even other states like Connecticut, which banned state-paid travel to Indiana.”

Opponents also point out that while 19 other states have RFRA laws, Indiana’s is unique. The RFRA laws in other states have clear guidelines about when you can use religious expression as a defense, for instance in Texas you can’t use such a defense in a civil rights case. Furthermore, other state RFRA laws require that the state be a party in the lawsuit before the religious expression defense can be invoked. Which means that an individual who is being sued or prosecuted by the government can argue that their religious rights protect them from being sued or prosecuted. However, the Indiana law was worded so that an individual or corporation could invoke the defense if they were sued by another individual.

Finally, the opponents of Indiana’s RFRA law framed the law as being antiquated or from a bygone era. For instance, Hillary Clinton tweeted that it’s, “sad this new Indiana law can happen in America today.” Many opponents including Apple CEO Tim Cook compared Indiana’s RFRA law to the legalized discrimination of the Jim Crow era. This sentiment was succinctly captured in the internet meme image of a sign that read, “Now Entering Indiana. Please Turn Your Clock Back 200 years.”

Competing Frames and Social Change

In the court of public opinion, the supporters frame of the Indiana RFRA law lost. After extreme public pressure, Gov. Pence signed a law to “fix” the RFRA legislation last Thursday (although some argue the amended law still allows for discrimination against sexual minorities). As the Indiana RFRA law demonstrates, from a framing perspective social change happens when a social movement can successfully replace an old frame with a new one.

Dig Deeper:

1. Explain in your own words what it means to frame an issue.
2. Pick a social issue (e.g. marijuana legalization, immigration reform, police brutality, or any other issue) and discuss how it is framed in public discussions and in the media.
3. Why do you think the supporters of Indiana’s RFRA law were unsuccessful in their attempt to frame the law as being non-discriminatory?
4. Imagine that you are one of the leaders for a student-led social movement to make higher education more affordable and to reduce student loan debt (FYI, the total outstanding student loan debt in 2014 was $1.08 trillion). How could you frame the issue of student loan debt in a way that would resonate with the public?

In this essay Nathan Palmer asks us to consider how we perform our gender, even if it doesn’t feel like a performance to us.

Where did you learn to perform your gender? Chances are, this question sounds strange to you. Before I took a sociology class, I would have responded, “I don’t perform my gender, I am just being my true self. This is who I am, I’m not faking this.” I don’t doubt for a second that almost everyone reading this is being their authentic selves, but performing gender has nothing to do with authenticity and after you perform anything long enough, it stops feeling like a performance and starts feeling natural.

Separating The Men From The Boys Masculinity

If you’re still confused, then it might help to disentangle gender from sex. Sex is the term we use to describe biological distinctions between males and females. Gender on the other hand is a term we use to describe the social performances we associate with the terms masculinity and femininity. For instance, femininity in the U.S. is often associated with compassion, emotional sensitivity, submissiveness, and dependence on others. Masculinity is often associated with rugged independence, aggressiveness, a lack of emotions (except anger), leadership, and dominance.

However, these gender associations are not laws of nature. Females can be dominant leaders and males can be emotionally sensitive caretakers. In fact, males and females can exhibit the behaviors associated with masculinity at one moment (e.g. at work) and then a short time later flip and exhibit feminine characteristics (e.g. at home). While in the U.S. we associate males with masculinity and females with femininity, both males and females can perform either masculinity or femininity and most of us do.

The Theater of Gender

Sociologists call gender a performance because gender is often like a theatrical play. Think of the costumes we associate with masculinity (e.g. suits, baggy clothes, short hair) and then think about the costumes we associate with femininity (e.g. dresses, tight/revealing clothing, long hair). Now think about the blocking (i.e. movement on stage) and dialects (i.e. manners of speech) we associate with males and females. A student of mine once told me I was too “swishy with my hands” during my lectures. What he was doing was giving me a cue that my gender performance was inappropriate for a masculine person like myself[1].

Obviously there is nothing about female’s biology that makes them where dresses or have long hair. My male biology (i.e. xy chromosomes) didn’t prevent me from being “too swishy” with my wrists. Therefore if our biology doesn’t produce these behaviors, then it must come from somewhere else.

Gender Performance – A Taught Behavior

Sociologists argue that the social world around you taught you how to perform your gender. Socialization is a term used to describe how individuals are taught by those around them to be fully functioning members of a community or group. Sometimes socialization happens through direct instruction (i.e. “boys don’t play with dolls!”) and sometimes it’s taught indirectly through observation (i.e. gendered messages in Disney movies). Either way, we are socialized on how to perform our gender from those around us and we learn the rules of this performance very early in life.

It’s clear from the video above that by a very young age children already understand the idea that there are only two genders and that each gender has activities, costumes, and ways of behaving that are associated with it. As psychologists Carol Martin and Diane Ruble (2002) put it, “by the age of 5 Children develop an impressive constellation of stereotypes about gender (often amusing and incorrect) that they apply to themselves and others.”

Schools and parents often segregate children by gender and provide highly gendered activities for boys and girls to play and through that play they get to rehearse their gender performances (Messner 2000). When children do not conform to the gender stereotypes they are often cued by their peers and the adults around them to change their behavior, but all forms of gender non-conformity are not treated equally (Kane 2006). For instance, non-conforming young males are often cued by their male peers through name calling and/or violence (Kimmel 2004; Pascoe 2011).

But I’m Not Performing This!

At this point in your life your gender performances almost certainly feel natural to you. You no longer have to think, “what should a person like me be doing in a situation like this?” Many of you reading this are probably thinking, “but I’ve been this way for as long as I can remember.” However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that your performance is natural or that your gender is coming from your internal biology.

At this point in your life, your gender performance is almost certainly something you do automatically and without thought. But you should keep in mind that everyone around you started gendering you before you were even born. Expecting parents tell their friends and families what gender of child they are going to have. Those friends and family members buy gendered clothing, toys, and books (Paoletti 2012). The people around you have always treated you differently because of your gender.

Over time, you learned the rules of your gender performance through rehearsal and lots of trial and error. Eventually what was once an effortful and conscious gender performance becomes automatic and unconscious. Today if I asked the men in the room why they sit with their legs as wide as possible or if I asked the women why they cross their legs, they both would undoubtedly say, “because it’s how I’m comfortable.” But the question remains, is the different ways of sitting comfortable because of differences in biology or is it comfortable because after years of habitual practice, you joints and ligaments have become accustomed to sitting in such a manner? The point is, just because your gender performance is automatic and comfortable to you today doesn’t mean that it is natural. At least to some degree, you and all the rest of us are performing gender.

Dig Deeper:

1. After reading this do you feel that you are in fact performing your gender? Explain your answer. Also, why do you think it can be difficult for individuals to see their gender as a performance?
2. What are some common ways people in your community perform either masculinity or femininity?
3. In this short video clip, Jackson Katz argues that violence is a gender performance that is taught to boys and men. Who and what does Katz believe are socializing men to be violent? Do you agree?
4. Both our socialization and gender performances are things that change over time. Being socialized as a child to stereotypical masculine or feminine performances does not mean that you will perform your gender that way for your whole life. Do you think that how you perform your gender has changed over time? If so, provide an example of this change. If not, why do you think your gender has remained static over time?

References:

• Kane, Emily W. 2006. “‘No Way My Boys Are Going to Be like That!’ Parents’ Responses to Children’s Gender Nonconformity.” Gender & Society 20(2):149–76.
• Kimmel, Michael S. 2004. “Masculinity as Homophobia: Fear, Shame, and Silence in the Construction of Gender Identity.” Race, Class, and Gender in the United States: An Integrated Study. Ed. Paula S. Rothenberg. New York: Worth 81–93.
• Martin, Carol Lynn and Diane Ruble. 2004. “Children’s Search for Gender Cues Cognitive Perspectives on Gender Development.” Current Directions in Psychological Science 13(2):67–70.
• Messner, Michael A. 2000. “Barbie Girls Versus Sea Monsters Children Constructing Gender.” Gender & Society 14(6):765–84.
• Paoletti, Jo B. 2012. Pink and Blue: Telling the Boys from the Girls in America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
• Pascoe, C. J. 2011. Dude, You’re a Fag: Masculinity and Sexuality in High School. Second Edition, With a New Preface edition. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press.

It’s Earth Day again, are you ready to celebrate? In this post Nathan Palmer discusses a few of the unique reasons environmental problems can be so hard to change.

Humans relationship with the environment is a funny thing. Polls show that the majority of people everywhere value the environment and are concerned about the environmental destruction that humans are causing on the earth (Bell 2011). It would seem that everyone is in agreement; the earth is important and we should protect it. But then why are many environmental problems only getting worse?

But First, Let’s Keep Things in Perspective

Before I answer that question, let’s do a reality check. In many ways, the environment is better today than it was just a few decades ago. This is especially true in the United States and Western Europe. For instance, in the U.S. the environmental movement successfully pressured government officials into creating the Environmental Protection Agency and passing laws like the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. While some problems like the loss of biodiversity and global warming continue to worsen, it is important to keep things in perspective and not throw our hands up in defeat. Alright, now let’s get back to it.

Why Environmental Problems are Hard

Humans are remarkable creatures that can use their intelligence and technology to break the laws of nature and live unsustainably forever. The previous sentence is what sociologist call an ideology. An ideology is a set of ideas that people use to make sense of the world. This specific ideology is what sociologists Catton and Dunlap (1978) and scholars from other disciplines call the Human Exemptionalism Paradigm (HEP). Simply put, the HEP asserts that humans are not a part of nature, but above nature.

The idea that humans are beyond the control of nature was instrumental to the formation of modern society, all of the scientific disciplines, and to all of the technological innovations that humans have made in the last two millennia. Until very recently in human history, nature was perceived to either be an unending cornucopia of natural resources or as a god forsaken wild wasteland that needed to be tamed by humans.

Today, we are quickly coming to the realization that humans are not able to break the laws of nature and that technology can only delay the inevitable if we continue to live unsustainably. Dunlap (2008) has argued that sociology (and every other scientific discipline) needs to update the key ideas and theories of the field to root out any inaccurate assumptions based on the HEP. Dunlap and others believe that a New Ecological Paradigm (NEP) is what is needed for humans to live in accordance with the laws of nature.The NEP as an ideology would argue that, “humans are one of a great many species in this ecosystem. They must abide by the laws of nature and live sustainably within the ecological constraints of nature.”

Environmental problems like climate change and biodiversity loss are hard to address because so many of our social systems are built on top of the HEP ideology. For instance, let’s look at the economy. As Marx (1978) argued capitalism is built on a set of contradictions that ultimately cannot be out run. Case in point, capitalist economies have to grow to survive.

In a capitalist system the national economy has to grow. Each year if the national economy fails to grow we call that a recession and if it dramatically fails to grow we call that a depression. Seemingly every successful politician ascends to office by promising that they will, “grow the economy,” and, “create jobs.” However, what is the economy if not a system that extracts natural resources to convert them into goods that people need and want? Economic growth then ultimately requires that we extract ever more resources from the earth, which is obviously unsustainable.

The reason it is hard to address environmental problems is doing so would require us to fundamentally rethink almost all of our social institutions. However, human history is full of stories of societies making fundamental changes that until they happened seemed unthinkable. Over the last few decades we have witnessed the people in countries all over the world successfully pressure their governments to protect the environment. Environmental problems are hard, even intractable some times, but that is no reason to through our hands up in defeat.

After all humans are a remarkable highly intelligent technologically advanced species. Today we are working so hard to live above the laws of nature and outrun the consequences. Imagine what we could do if we worked half as hard to live under the laws of nature.

Dig Deeper:

1. Think of another example of how the HEP ideology has influenced a situation becoming an environmental problem.
2. How could our economy adjust so that we didn’t need it to constantly grow? Or put more simply, what would a sustainable economy look like in your home country?
3. Do you see individuals applying the HEP ideology to their own personal choices? For instance, driving a gas guzzling car, eating a meat heavy diet, or having a lot of children all create negative environmental impacts, but yet people continue to do these things. Can the HEP ideology help us understand these choices?
4. What are some other reasons that environmental problems are hard to address? Explain your answers and select reasons that were not discussed in this essay.

References:

• Bell, Michael Mayerfeld. 2011. An Invitation to Environmental Sociology. Fourth Edition. Thousand Oaks, Calif: SAGE Publications, Inc.
• Catton Jr, William R. and Riley E. Dunlap. 1978. “Environmental Sociology: A New Paradigm.” The American Sociologist 41–49.
• Dunlap, Riley E. 2008. “The New Environmental Paradigm Scale: From Marginality to Worldwide Use.” The Journal of Environmental Education 40(1):3–18.
• Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. 1978. The Marx-Engels Reader. 2nd Revised & enlarged edition. edited by Robert C. Tucker. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

In this essay, Nathan Palmer uses the Bruce Jenner interview to explore social statuses and categorization systems.

On Friday, Olympic gold medalist Bruce Jenner publicly announced that, “for all intents and purposes, I am a woman.” Jenner discussed his transition with Diane Sawyer during a ABC News television special that 16.8 million people watched live. In the wake of Jenner’s announcement, there have been many smart discussions of gender identity, the difference between sexuality and gender, and the on going legal discrimination against gender and sexual minorities.

As I watched on Friday, the sociologist in me was struck by how the television show ended. As a montage of video clips played Sawyer said in a voice over, “It’s time to leave. The transition is ahead, so in a sense as we said, this is a kind of farewell to the Bruce Jenner we though we knew.” Sawyer then asked Jenner if he felt like he was saying goodbye to something. He replied, “I’m saying goodbye to people’s perception of me and who I am. I am not saying goodbye to me, because this has always been me.” I can’t think of a better way to describe a status transition.

Statuses

A status describes a position within a community or group and its corresponding position within a social hierarchy of honor and prestige. Each status affords the individual who possess’s it a set of duties, rights, immunities, privileges, and usually it is also associated with a particular lifestyle or pattern of consumption. Every status has a corresponding set of roles. Roles are the set of behaviors and ways of thinking we expect a person of a given status to display. This is harder to understand in the abstract, so let’s focus our attention on the status at the center of the Jenner announcement, gender.

Gender is commonly understood in the United States as having just two main statuses; you can either be a boy/man or a girl/woman. Each status has a set of roles associated with it and each of us is expected to perform those roles. Not performing our prescribed gender roles or performing the gender roles associated with the opposite status has social consequences (e.g. judgment, ridicule, shame, violence).

We also use gender statuses to place ourselves and those around us onto a hierarchy depending on the situation^[1]. For instance, being a man might lead people to presume you are a naturally better leader, but a naturally inferior parent. If over time, your male status increases the number of leadership opportunities that come your way and decreases the number of care-taking opportunities that others extend to you, then you might become an excellent leader and a crap parent, but that is not solely nature’s fault.

Crossing “Mental Gaps”

What we are really talking about here are social categories and categorization systems. The sociologist Eviatar Zerubavel (1991) has explored how the ways we categorize objects, acts, and events in our world affects how we understand and interact with them. Zerubavel suggests that to create a categorization system we have to do two things: lumping and splitting.

When we come across a new object, act, or event we have to place it somewhere within our existing categories before we can understand it. This categorization work is known as lumping. On the other hand, splitting is the work we do to maintain the boundaries separating things we perceive as categorically different.

These category systems are distinctly social creations. We do not come out of the womb knowing where everything goes. We learn from the people we interact with where they draw the line separating this from that. After enough interactions we come to know how most people in our culture categorize the world.

While every human group has a categorization system, they can vary widely. For instance, humans have always needed to decipher family members from strangers, dangerous from safe, and edible from inedible, but different societies lump and split these categories differently. For instance, in the U.S. dogs are pets and insects are vermin, but both are categorized as food in different parts of the world. It’s tempting to think that the way you categorize things is the correct way, but you’re a little biased.

Part of the splitting work we do is to create gaps or spaces in the real world to reflect the gaps and spaces between categories in our minds. For instance, personal space creates a buffer between ourselves and others. Picket fences create gaps between my yard and my neighbors.

When we can’t create physical barriers between categories, we often create rites of passage (which are events that mark our crossing over a perceived barrier between statuses). Society is filled with these rites of passage, we hold events to celebrate an individual transitioning from child to adult (e.g. Quincineras, Bat Mitvas, ), from single to partnered (weddings), from child to parent (e.g. baby showers), from high school to college student (e.g. graduation parties).

These rite of passage events serve two social functions. First, they communicate to everyone that an individual has changed their status. Second, they reinforce in everyone’s mind that these two statuses are separate distinct categories. In effect rites of passage make the categories real, at least to those in attendance.

Keeping an “Open Mind”

Diane Sawyer’s final question to Jenner was, “So to everyone watching, if you could say to them, when you think of me please be…” Jenner quickly finished her sentence, “open minded.”

Being open minded, in a sociological sense, means realizing that the categories we have created in our minds are flexible. We made them up collectively and they are not a perfect reflection of reality. Our two gender status system isn’t the way to see the world, it’s one way of seeing the world amongst many. When people feel that they have no place in our categorization system or people are oppressed by our categorization system, we should change our minds.

Dig Deeper:

1. How can lumping and splitting help us understand prejudice and discrimination?
2. Jenner told Sawyer that gender identity and sexual attraction are totally separate things; “It’s apples and oranges”. What did he mean and how is this an example of lumping and splitting?
3. Zerubavel argues that rites of passage (where an individual transitions from one status to another) can serve to reinforce the perception that the two statuses are distinctly separate categories. The author of this essay argues that the Jenner TV show was much like a rite of passage. Do you think it’s possible that the TV show reinforced the very status distinctions it was trying to question in the first place?Explain your answer.
4. Think of at least one other example of how people from a culture that is different from yours categorize the world differently. Does this mean that they categorize the world wrong? Explain your answer.

References:

• Zerubavel, Eviatar. 1991. The Fine Line : Making Distinctions in Everyday Life. 1st edition. New York: The Free Press.

In this essay, Nathan Palmer uses the movie Ex Machina to discuss why common sense is so hard to replicate in a computer program.

Ex Machnia is a thrilling science-fiction movie that will leave you asking yourself, “what does it mean to be human?” In the film, we first meet Caleb who is a coder at Bluebook, the world’s most popular internet search company that seems like a fictionalized version of Google and Facebook combined. Caleb has been selected to fly to a secret underground Bluebook research facility to work directly with the company’s billionaire CEO, Nathan. There Caleb learns that Nathan has created a robot with artificial intelligence (A.I.) named Ava.

Caleb soon learns that he will be administering the Turing Test on Ava.

The Turing Test is a Test of Appropriate Social Interaction

The Turing Test is a test of interaction. For the A.I. to pass, it will have to interact appropriately with its human evaluator. Which means that the A.I. would need to be pre-programmed with all of the rules that govern human interaction. In addition, the A.I. would need to be able to adapt its existing rules and learn new ones as things change.

This means that to create an A.I. that could pass the Turing Test, programmers would need to replicate the thing that tells each of us how to behave in social interactions. So where do you and I turn when we want to know how to appropriately interact with others? Common sense.

To Be Human is to Have Common Sense That Doesn’t Make Sense

We use common sense to guess both what others expect of us and what we should expect of others. For instance, common sense tells us that when a passer by says, “how are you?” they don’t really want you to answer the question. It is common sense that tells us how to behave in conversations, what emotions are appropriate to display, how to treat strangers vs. how to treat loved ones, what to keep private vs. what to share publicly, and so on.

Therefore, to design a perfectly human A.I./robot that could pass the Turing Test all you need to do is write a computer algorithm that replicates common sense. While that might sound straight forward, it is an astonishingly complex design problem to solve.

Common sense isn’t really a list of rules that we all follow. Instead it is a set of rules that have lots of exceptions. For instance, if you are sitting in a hospital waiting room while a loved one is having surgery when someone asks you, “how are you?”, that person expects you to give them a more detailed answer. Furthermore, in any particular interaction situation there may be multiple rules that contradict one another. For instance, one rule says you should almost always answer anyone who asks you a question, but another rule says when standing in front of a urinal peeing, never talk. So what’s a fella to do when chatty-Charlie in the urinal next to him starts asking questions?

The point is, when it comes to social interaction, it all depends. It depends on where the interaction is taking place. It depends on the statuses of the people who are interacting (e.g. are you talking to your boss, your friend, your mother, etc.). It depends on the emotional state of everyone involved. It also depends on which part of the world (and thus which culture) each of the participants is from. I could go on and on, but the point is, there may be rules for interaction, but all of them depend on a wide variety of factors. To be human is to know what factors are the most important to determining the appropriate course of interaction.

In Duncan Watts (2011:10) excellent book on common sense, Everything is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer, he summarizes the challenges of creating an A.I. with common sense:

• Attempts to formalize commonsense knowledge have all encountered versions of this problem — That in order to teach a robot to imitate even a limited range of human behavior, you would have to, in a sense, teach it *everything* about the world. Short of that, the endless subtle distinctions between the things that matter, the things that are supposed to matter but don’t, and the things that may or may not matter depending on the other things, would always eventually trip up even the most sophisticated robot. As soon as it encountered a situation that was slightly different from those you had programmed it it handle, it would have no idea how to behave. It would stick out like a sore thumb. It would always be screwing up.

In Ex Machina, Nathan does exactly what Watts suggests; he tries to teach Ava everything about interaction by using the data his Google-like internet company has collected on its billions of users. Internet searchers were used to decipher how people phrase questions and what interests them. Internet communications between people were used to model the rules for interaction[1]. To learn all of the rules for conversation and emotional displays Nathan secretly records billions of calls and video chats by hacking into everyone’s cell phone.

As the film ends we are left still wondering what it means to be human. However, from a sociological point of view, to be human is to use common sense. Despite its simple sounding name, the only way to have common sense is to be able to use the complex and often contradictory rules for interaction. So far, there isn’t technology capable of replicating the vast network of situational contingencies we call common sense.

Dig Deeper:

1. Imagine that you are trying to program a robot to pass the Turing Test. What aspects of a situation would the robot need to pay attention to?
2. Create a list of 3 rules (either formal or unspoken) that govern face-to-face conversations.
3. Create a list of 3 rules (again, either formal or unspoken) that we use to decide what emotions are appropriate to display at a given moment.
4. In addition to common sense not making sense, it is also not that common. We can only learn what is common sense through interacting with other people, but no individual interacts with the exact same set of people. Duncan Watts argues that common sense is only common to people who share sufficiently similar social locations. Explain in your own words what Wattts means and why common sense isn’t common.

References:

• Watts, Duncan J. 2011. Everything Is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer. New York, NY: Crown Business.

In this essay Nathan Palmer discusses the influence significant others have on our thoughts and behaviors.

Right now my legs feel like Jell-O and my head feels like I’ve gone 12 rounds in the ring with Floyd Mayweather. Over the last four days I drove for 20 consecutive hours by myself from my home in Georgia to my hometown in Lincoln, NE. I spent 48 hours there and then again drove 20 hours back home. What was I thinking? Why would I do that to myself? The answer is simple: family.

The drive was hard, but that all melted away when I saw my beautiful niece moments after she came into the world. Being there to hold her, to comfort my sister-in-law, and to hug my brother as he became a father was priceless. In the end, the drive was a tiny price to pay for these life-long memories. I would do almost anything for my family and that, believe it or not, is a key lesson of sociology.

Others’ Influence on You

Others influence our thoughts and behaviors, that simple truth is at the center of sociology. Interacting with others is how we learn what is right/wrong, acceptable/unacceptable, appreciated/unappreciated, nice/mean, and so on. Most everything you know is something you learned from interacting with other people. Others teach us how to behave and influence how we think about the world and ourselves.

At the same time, not all others are created equal. Significant others is the term sociologists use to describe people who have a profound influence on our thoughts and behaviors^[1]. Often an individual is close both emotionally and physically to their significant others. Family members, best friends, and mentors most commonly fall into this group.

Significant others have a strong influence on us because we place a higher value on their opinions and viewpoints. We avoid saying or doing things that might disappoint, hurt, or offend our significant others. Similarly, we try to say and do things that we think our significant others will appreciate.

Within our group of significant others there are a few people whom we give exceptional influence over our thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. Role models are individuals whose movements, ways of thinking, styles of dress, manners of speech, etc. we try to imitate. As the youngest child, my mom, dad, and brother were my role models and I am, in a way, a poor imitation of them.

Who You Are Depends on Who Matters to You

From a sociological point of view, who you are is a product of the people you treat as significant. Our significant others tell us what our name is, which family we are a part of, what role we play in our family, what role we play in the world, and what is expected of us.

This is not to say that each of us does not have any individual control over our selves. Each of us can choose to change who our significant others are or we can choose to go against the wishes of those we consider significant others. However, if we choose to abide by the wishes of our significant others or rebel against them, either of those choices is ultimately a reaction to our significant others.

To this day, when making decisions I often think to myself, “what would my mother/father/brother do in this situation?” Since getting married and becoming a father, when making decisions I often think, “how will this affect my marriage and my daughter?” And also, “what would April (my wife) do in this situation?”

However, most of the influence significant others have on us is automatic and unconscious. For instance, growing up my father always said, “Palmers are never late,” and to this day I arrive ridiculously early to everything. Now that I am a parent I catch myself saying things exactly the same way my mom and dad would when I was a child. Over time through repeated interactions, we become like those close to us whether we intend to or not.

Priorities are Like Arms

One of my favorite sayings is, "priorities are like arms; if you say you have more than two, you are either crazy or lying.” Everyone can’t be a significant other to you. We have to make choices about who we are aligned with, who we will make sacrifices for, and who we will be vulnerable with. Like many people, I was raised to believe that family always comes first. My family is my priority and there isn’t much I wouldn’t do for them and they wouldn’t do for me.

Ultimately driving for 40 hours isn’t really that big of a deal and people have sacrificed far more for their significant others. I don’t want to blow things out of proportion here. However, I made the decision to go precisely because it was for my significant others and I thought my role models would do it if they were in my shoes.

To my newborn niece, welcome to the family. You will forever be one of my significant others. You will be loved, cared for, and supported for the rest of your life.

Dig Deeper:

1. Write a list of at least 3 people who you consider to be your significant others. Write their names, their relationship to you, and how long you have known them.
2. Out of that list of significant others who would you consider a role model of yours? Describe how this role model influenced who you are today.
3. Over the course of our lives our group of significant others changes. Who are some of your significant others today that weren’t significant others when you were a child?
4. Imagine that all of the people you listed as significant others told you that unless you changed your behavior they would cut ties with you forever. Do you think that would influence you into changing that behavior? What does this tell us about the power significant others have over us? Explain your answers.

There are 7 billion people in the world and every day we interact with one another like a giant ant colony. Just imagine how many one-on-one interactions happen every single day. Isn’t it remarkable that, for the most part, these interactions go according to plan. How is it that we can interact with people we’ve never met before? How do we know what these strangers will expect of us? The answer is simple, right? Common sense tells us how to interact with one another.

As we discussed in the first part of this series, despite it’s name, common sense is a fantastically complex system of rules within rules. It is so complex in fact, that currently there isn’t a supercomputer or algorithm that could recreate it. You read that right, common sense, the thing we all take for granted- the thing that even children have developed, is far more complex than all of our fancy modern technology can handle.

The sociological question you should be asking now is, if common sense is so complex, how did each of us develop it in the first place?

Common Sense & The Generalized Other

From the moment you opened your eyes, the humans around you have been interacting with you. As a newborn they made faces at you, spoke words around you, and taught you that certain stimuli (e.g. crying) would be rewarded (e.g. with food). You first learned to mimic these behaviors and then over time, through repeated one-on-one interactions and trial and error, you learned that there is a collection of rules, roles, ways of thinking, beliefs, customs, etc. that those around you were using to interpret your actions and design their responses.

These common sense rules of interaction are what the sociologist George Herbert Mead called the Generalized Other. Mead started developing this theory by observing little children and he discovered what anyone who has been around toddlers knows: they are self-centered and cannot see themselves from the perspective of others. This fact leads to some cute interactions like when my one year old put her hand over her eyes and teased, “you can’t see me Daddy!”

We first learn to consider others by focusing on specific individuals. We think, “what will mom/dad think of me if I do this?” or “will my brother be angry if I do this?” We test these hypotheses through trial and error and eventually develop a robust understanding of what our mother, father, and brother expect of us.

I often joke that we send children to school to learn to get along with people who don’t love them. While I say that in jest, it’s fairly accurate. Kindergartners learn to value the perspectives non-family others have of them. Here too, children can develop their interaction skills by focusing on specific individuals. “What will my best friend Fiona think of me if I do this?"

Eventually, once our brains are developed enough and we’ve had a sufficient amount of practice interacting with others, we expand the rules we’ve learned from interacting with specific individuals and come to understand what others will expect of us in general. And that is why Mead named the term the Generalized Other. With a developed generalized other, an individual can with a fair degree of accuracy predict how their words and actions will be received by those around them and also how those around them will likely respond.

Programming The Human Super Computer

If you’ve ever interacted with a computer trying to pretend to be a human, you know that it’s often an awful experience. Try as they might, engineers and programmers cannot develop a machine or algorithm that feels unmistakably human.

The computational power of the human brain far exceeds that of what we today call super computers. Humans are evolutionarily designed to mimic one another and estimate how likely something is to happen^[1]. However, at birth we are not able to understand fully how others see us or how we look through their eyes. This is a skill that biology cannot provide us. We only become human through interaction. The human super computer is programmed socially.

Dig Deeper:

1. Growing up, who were the specific individuals that were important to you and served as your specific others.
2. The comedian Louis CK observed that you never hear little children ask, “is this a good time for you to talk with me?” What would Mead say explains this? Be sure to use the concept of the generalized other in your answer.
3. How do schools teach little children to interact appropriately with others? Or put more sociologically, how do schools encourage children to develop a generalized other?
4. The generalized other uses a few specific observations to make broad sweeping rules about large groups of people. How is this similar to stereotyping? How can a person use their generalized other without stereotyping other people?

Why do we travel to far off places? We say that we want “to get away” and “leave it all behind,” but do we really? Do our actions match our words?

Think about the last few times you traveled. Did the room(s) you slept in look a lot like the room you left at home? What about the meals you ate? Did you dine on something you’ve never eaten before? Finally, think about what you did for fun while you were away. Did you have a lot of first time experiences?

From my non-scientific anecdotal observations, most of us leave home only to recreate the same daily routines we seemed to so earnestly want to get away from. Instead we stay at the Best Western, drink Starbucks, eat at chain restaurants, and go shopping, swimming, drinking, to the movies, or any of the other things we can do at home. It would seem that, for the most of us, we want to do the same old things , just in new places[1].

That people want to recreate their home routines while away doesn’t really say that much about society, but the fact that they so easily can recreate their routines does. While we may take it for granted, we should be awed by the fact that you can go nearly anywhere in the U.S. (and increasingly anywhere in the world) and have an almost identical experience. The sociologist George Ritzer would suggest that this is all made possible because of the phenomenon he calls The McDonaldization of Society.

The McDonaldization of Society

In the early 1900s Henry Ford revolutionized the automotive industry by adopting the assembly line. Ray Kroc, the founder of McDonald’s, adapted the logics of the Ford assembly line and created the fast food industry. McDonald’s replaced the chef with a team of low payed workers trained to do one single part of the food production process. Wherever possible human judgment was replaced by technology so that every burger would taste exactly the same (e.g. a ketchup squirter that put exactly the right amount on each bun). Croc also required every aspect of the restaurant be standardized so that you could walk into a Mickey D’s anywhere and the food, the workers, the dining room, and every other aspect of the experience would be identical.

Ritzer (2007) argues that the logics of business that revolutionized car manufacturing and later the food service industry have now been adopted, to one degree or another, by almost every aspect of society. He identified four main facets of the McDonaldization of Society process[2].

• Efficiency – The optimum method for completing a task. Find the quickest and cheapest way to produce a thing or to complete a task. Individuality cannot be allowed.
• Calculability – Decisions must be made using criteria that can be objectively measured rather than subjective criteria. In other words, opinions are out and measurements are in. After all they sell the Big Mac not the Good Mac.
• Predictability – The production process and consumer experience must be exactly the same.
• Control – Wherever possible, human workers must be replaced by technology because technology is far better at producing identical results. When technology cannot replace human labor, then work should be reduced to its simplest form so that workers are never allowed to make decisions or deviate from the optimum production method.

The McDonaldization of Society is basically the rationalization of everything[3]. To be rational is to only make decisions that get you closer to achieving your goals. Over the last few decades as large multi-national corporations have ascended to dominance, many one of a kind businesses have been unable to compete and shuttered. Today you can find a McDonald’s, Starbucks, Best Western, Walmart, etc. everywhere and every one of them will be run as close to identical as possible. The reason you can go anywhere and have an experience similar to home, is that anywhere you go, the businesses you will interact with are all reproducing the same optimum method.

The McDonaldization of Travel

The McDonaldization of Society makes it possible for us to travel to distant places and find all of the comforts of home waiting for us, but does that make traveling pointless? Why should we leave home only to do roughly the same things? If our goal is to “get away” and experience “something new”, then the McDonaldization of Society makes this harder.

At the same time, the McDonaldization of Society is not complete and total. Meaning that there are still one of a kind experiences left in the world. If you want to design a trip filled with new experiences, you can, but you’ll have to work to find them. And in closing, I have to admit that after a long day of first experiences, it’s comforting to lay my head down in a hotel room that reminds me of home.

Dig Deeper:

1. When you travel, do you crave new experiences, familiar ones, or a combination of both? Explain your answer.
2. Think about an ATM or self-checkout lane at a grocery store. How are these examples of the McDonaldization of Society? In your answer address the four facets of McDonaldization listed above.
3. If you’ve every driven on the interstate, then you’ve likely noticed that the signs for most exits list gas stations and food options that are roughly the same. How is this an example of The McDonaldization of Society? In your answer address at least two of the four facets of McDonaldization listed above.
4. Is it possible that as our society has become McDonaldized we have come to enjoy predictability so much that we want it all of the time, even when we travel? Explain your answer.

References:

• Ritzer, George F. 2007. The McDonaldization of Society. 2nd edition. Los Angles, Calif: SAGE Publications, Inc.
• Weber, M. 1930. The Protestant Ethic And The Spirit Of Capitalism. First Edition edition. George Allen & Unwin.

In this essay Nathan Palmer uses last week’s landmark supreme court ruling to discuss heteronormativity and what it means to embrace diversity.

Social change is often a painfully slow process until it becomes instantaneous. After decades of activism by marriage equality advocates and the LGBTQ community in general, the U.S. Supreme Court in an instant made the right to marry anyone, regardless of their gender or sexual identity, legal in across the country. For those concerned with social justice, this was a week to party.

Unfortunately, sociologists often make for crummy party guests. We tend to look at everything with a critical eye and I found myself unable to turn that voice in my head off Friday as I read through the Supreme Court’s majority opinion. This decision, which written by Justice Kennedy, provides good examples of something sociologists call heteronormativity and offers us a chance to think about what we mean when we use terms like equality and diversity.

It’s Either Marriage or a Lifetime of Loneliness

Reading through the majority opinion[1], which was written by Justice Kennedy, I was struck by the multiple times marriage was presented as the only way to avoid a “lifetime of loneliness.” Here is a good example inside the final paragraph.

• No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were. As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death. It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right.

Justice Kennedy clearly has an affinity for marriage. However, he also seems to be indirectly slamming non-marital relationships. If no union is more profound than marriage and the unmarried are “condemned to a life of loneliness,” then Justice Kennedy must not think too much about the millions of Americans who are cohabiting with their romantic partners. And while social scientists call it cohabiting, in reality many of these cohabiting couples are raising children, caring for elders, celebrating holidays, carrying on family traditions, and doing everything else every other family in America does.

Furthermore, over the last few decades the number of cohabiting couples has been on the rise. As of 2010 of all couples living together, 1 in 5 was not married. If life without marriage was so lonely and dreadful, we wouldn’t see a growing number of people opting into it.

While you might think we should give Justice Kennedy a little leeway to wax poetic in this landmark decision, you should keep in mind that this is a legal opinion. Every single word has the potential to set a legal precedent that all future courts will have to abide by. These documents are written to be painstakingly scrutinized for their meaning.

“Other people are not failed attempts at you.”

My wife has the quote above framed inside her office[2] and it was the first thing to pop in my head as I read the Supreme Court’s majority opinion and watched the news on Friday. While many same sex couples were indeed waiting for the moment they could get married, many were not. Many gay and lesbian couples were and still are perfectly happy not being married.

It is heteronormative to assume that gay and lesbian couples ultimately want to be just like us. Heteronormativity is a term social scientists use to describe how heterosexual social norms become the standard that all others are judged by. At the heart of this phenomenon is the idea that heterosexuals are the ideal and that any deviation from heterosexual culture is inferior.

Terms like queer, genderqueer, and pansexual have emerged precisely because people within the LGBTQ community do not feel that their identities and lifestyles can fit within the popular narrow social definitions of love, sex, and family. To embrace diversity is not to allow a greater number of people the opportunity to be just like the majority group. Instead, embracing diversity means accepting and appreciating many different ways of living and expressing love.

In truth, the narrow social family ideals of a husband, wife, 2.5 kids, dog, and white picket fence isn’t something that many heterosexuals fit into these days. We are a nation of blended families, cohabiting partners, divorce & remarriage, and life long singletons (Klinenberg 2012). On Sunday I heard a cable news talking head say that after this supreme court ruling, “the family in America is dead.” To which I might add; The family is dead, long live the families.”[^Kath]

Dig Deeper:

1. Does your immediate family fit the social stereotype or does it deviate from it? Be sure to list all of the members of your immediate family in your answer.
2. Describe in your own words another example of something that is heteronormative. Be sure to explain why it is heteronormative.
3. Google the words genderqueer and pansexual. Now describe the terms in your own words.
4. What does the phrase, “other people are not failed attempts at you,” mean to you? How do we treat people differently when we see them as a failed attempt at being us?

References:

• Klinenberg, Eric. 2012. Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone. New York: Penguin Press.
• National Center for Family and Marriage Research. 2010. “Trends in Cohabitation: Twenty Years of Change, 1987–2008.” http://ncfmr.bgsu.edu/pdf/family_profiles/file87411.pdf accessed June, 28, 2015.

Tattoos are quickly become mainstream in the United States, especially for younger people. Until recently a tattoo could disqualify a person from becoming a police officer, joining the military, and many other jobs. In this post Nathan Palmer discusses tattoos as example of how individual actions can change social institutions.

I am too fickle for a tattoo. I can’t commit to an image for my phone’s lock screen, so the idea of committing one image on my body for the rest of my life blows my mind. Recent research suggests that a growing number of people do not share my aesthetic commitment issues.

One in five U.S. adults today has a tattoo. That was the main finding of a Harris Poll survey of 2,016 people published in 2012. As you can see in the chart above, the proportion of tattooed adults has been steadily rising over the last twelve years. Given that people under the age of forty were more likely to report having a tattoo, there is reason to expect this trend to continue to grow over time.

Not too long ago tattoos were associated with gangs, bikers, and prisons (DeMello 2000). However, that stereotype is fading and today tattoos are associated with reality television shows, celebrities, and the art world. As more people get inked and old stereotypes fade, many of our social institutions are being forced to adjust.

Tattoos, until very recently, disqualified an applicant for many jobs, but as the pool of job applicants fills with ink, some employers have adjusted their stance. In April the U.S. Army changed its policy on tattoos, removing previous limits on the size and number of tattoos a soldier was allowed. Around the country in places like Seattle, New Orleans, Manchester, NH, and Tarpon Springs, FL police departments are also relaxing their polices to allow the tattooed to protect and serve. At the same time however, the Army still bans face, neck, and hand tattoos and many police departments still have policies against tattoos (especially for ones that are visible while in uniform).

How Individual Acts Can Change Society

The shifting landscape around tattoos is a good demonstration of how individual acts can change social norms. First a quick refresher on norms. Every society has cultural values that tell us how things ought to be. Cultural values tend to be abstract concepts, but they are refined into specific rules of behavior that are called social norms. Any act that violates a social norm is considered deviant and is likely to receive a sanction (i.e. formal or informal punishments). For example, in many societies honesty is a cultural value and there is a social norm against lying. People caught in a lie often are shamed and punished.

Cultural values and social norms represent what sociologists call a social structure because no single person is able to control them. Social structures organize society by using social institutions to promote some behaviors and discourage others. In the case of tattoos, social institutions like the economy and the government use their hiring policies to limit an individual’s agency (i.e. their ability to do what they please). Social structure, then is how the group controls the individual. But this is only half the story.

Social structures influence individuals, but individuals can also influence them right back. If enough individuals do something despite it going against a current social norm, then their actions may become the new norm. For instance pants used to be viewed as men’s clothing and it was deviant for women to wear them, but over time this norm has faded into obscurity. Individuals have agency; we can go against the flow and if enough of us do so, eventually we change the direction of the flow.

Only time will tell if tattoos become the new norm. However, as more individuals embrace tattoos and our social institutions relax their polices against them, the stage is set for tattoos to lose their deviant status.

Dig Deeper:

1. Do you think people with tattoos should be banned from certain kinds of work? Explain your answer.
2. What are some cultural values and social norms in your community?Write down at least 3 cultural values and the specific social norms that stem from them. Do not use any of the examples discussed in this article.
3. How has the social norms around using laptops, tablets, and phones during class changed over the last few years? Could this be seen as an example of individual acts changing social structures? Explain your answer.
4. Of those surveyed by the Harris Poll, 24% said that they thought a person with a tattoo was more likely to do something deviant than a person without a tattoo. Why do you think this is? Do you anticipate that this number will go down as more people get tattoos? Explain your answer.

References:

• DeMello, Margo. 2000. Bodies of Inscription: A Cultural History of the Modern Tattoo Community. Duke University Press.

Author’s Note: Thanks to Dr. Chris Uggen for the tweets that inspired this article.