China’s “one-child policy” is hailed as the world’s most effective overpopulation control policy. It has been so effective, in fact, Chinese population officials now fear their country will lack sufficient numbers of adult children to care for aging parents, the nation may lack the resources to provide other services for its burgeoning elderly population, and a skewed sex ratio&where men increasingly outnumber women&will lead to anti-social behavior among unmarried and socially unconnected men.

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Recently we heard a story from an eminent sociologist about a paper she submitted to a leading journal that got us thinking about good writing. The story wasn’t all that complicated or, for that matter, unfamiliar. Its basic punch-line was that one of the reviewers recommended rejecting the paper on the grounds that it was very well written and thus more suited for a publication like the New York Times Magazine than a mainstream sociology journal.

To their credit, the editors didn’t take this advice. However, the anecdote is both telling and disconcerting. Too often in our field the appellation “well written” functions as pejorative rather than as praise. This is particularly troubling to us because the overarching mission of this publication—to bring sociological insight to larger public audiences—requires writing that is engaging and accessible. Contexts is nothing if it is not about the quest for good writing.

We’re not convinced reviewers like the one above really understand what good writing is and why it’s so valuable. Good writing can’t be reduced to proper punctuation or grammar. It isn’t just stringing together words that convey other people’s ideas in a more accessible, poetic, or clever way. Good writing is the actual accomplishment and physical embodiment of clear thinking and strong analysis. Good writing is good thinking. And quality written thought comes in many different forms and serves many purposes. In this issue, for example, we have Sharon Hays and Jess Butler’s rip-roaring and devastating critique of Full Frontal Feminism and a clear-eyed, empirical account of declining social ties in America today by Miller McPherson, Lynn Smith-Lovin, and Matthew Brashears. Very different writing styles. Very different purposes. And both, in our judgment, wonderful pieces of writing.

Writing well, like doing good sociology, is also not easy. Our authors spend a great deal of time honing their insights and findings, and we work with them closely to ensure their prose is as clear and compelling as possible. (If you’re interested, we’ve recently updated and revised the innovative two-stage submission and review process developed by Contexts founding editor Claude Fischer to help achieve these outcomes; see contexts.org/submissions).

What’s at stake in defending and cultivating good writing is much larger than Contexts; it involves the future of sociology itself. The written word, after all, is the primary means by which we confirm core knowledge, generate new ideas, and clarify and debate unresolved questions. Good writing may be, as Monte Bute suggested in commenting on George Orwell in our last issue, the most basic and fundamental method of the sociological enterprise, and the key to realizing the promise of our big, broad, synthetic vision of the world. In an increasingly interdisciplinary and yet specialized academic environment, no discipline is better positioned to play a leading intellectual role than sociology itself—if we can formulate and disseminate our ideas properly.

None of this is to suggest the writing that appears in our leading journals is bankrupt or misguided, or even that it is not often very good. Quite the contrary, we believe journal articles (even very technical or dense, theoretical ones) have an indispensable place and purpose, and we both take pride in the work we publish in these venues. The point, rather, is to insist that good writing—clear, purposeful thinking put into words on a page—is crucial to sociology and the task of rendering social life meaningful and intelligible.

One thing I know is that political bents consist of two distinct elements—the movement and the party—and the relation between them.

The movement consists of amateurs acting on principle by way of passionate action, while the party is made up of professionals making deals and acting by calculation. The movement represents outsiders who aim to change values or policies, or to move the political system in a certain direction; the party represents insiders, aiming to leverage their power into successful careers.

These ideal types are structurally different. A benign interpretation is that there is a division of labor, a difference of type: In this sense, the movement is fuel while the party is a vehicle. But often the difference isn’t static and the two elements doubt their compatibility. The frictions flare into conflict. The movement and the party express divergent human faculties, and tend to engage different character types. Each needs the other but also suspects the other and fears betrayal. The movement tends to think the party is on the verge of selling out, and the party that the movement is reckless, or irrelevant, or counterproductive.

In her remarks earlier this year about the relations between Martin Luther King (the movement inspiration) and Lyndon Johnson (the policy consolidator), Hillary Clinton tried to express the interdependency of the two. The attacks to which she was subjected illustrate the difficulty of sustaining the right balance.

Over the last several decades, the dominant force in American politics has been the combination of the movement conservatives and the Republican Party. Beginning in the late 1950s, accelerating with the Goldwater campaign of 1964 and its sequel, the Reagan ascendancy in California, eventually culminating in Reagan’s presidential victories and the rule of George W. Bush, the conservative movement dynamically combined social conservatives with pro-business, anti-government, anti-tax conservatives. Beginning in the late 1970s, fueled by a wave of evangelical Christianity, these movements succeeded in taking over the party, coalescing under the leadership of men of Western demeanor consolidating Southern strategy aims.

While this movement-party synthesis was developing, the left was decisively weakened by a movement-party antagonism. When, at Johnson’s behest, the Democratic Party committed itself to the Vietnam War, the tenuous and complex relationship between movement and party that had developed with civil rights ruptured. In 1968 the party rejected the movement, and as a result fell out of power. The movement fragmented into movements, and the party withered.

Fast-forwarding toward the present, we can see how teeth-grittingly left-liberal movements have strived to accommodate themselves to the party and vice versa. Eventually, MoveOn.org amalgamated more than 3 million members who could raise money outside the party and enter into elections. In 2004, the campaign of Howard Dean infused movement energies into the Democratic Party. The “netroots” demonstrated that they could raise money and energize the party from its periphery. Though Dean failed in his quest for the presidency, he succeeded in catapulting himself into the leadership of the Democratic National Committee, aiming to rebuild the party’s base. In the congressional elections of 2006, the so-called netroots mobilized with significant effect. They had become, in a sense, the movement on behalf of the party.

Meanwhile, the radical international, economic, and administrative policies of George W. Bush pushed the right’s movement-party synthesis into a corner. Their movement is fatigued, their party embattled. The evangelical glue has weakened. No single individual emerges as self-evident heir in the line of Goldwater-Reagan-Bush. It remains to be seen how convincingly Republican candidate John McCain can position himself as a living synthesis without painting himself into Bush’s electoral corner. Only if persona can make the difference does he stand a chance.

The question for the left side of American politics now is whether it can enfold the disparate energies of movements within the imperfect vehicle of a party.

Democrats battered each other this year because their energies split between two of the 1960s’ successor movements. For Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton represent offshoots of two different movements, though only Obama has the persona and style of the outsider.

Harkening to his experience as a community organizer, invoking “hope” and “change” incessantly, combining “cool” manners and “hot” rhetoric, Obama offers himself as a living translation of movement into party, intimating that he could be a transformational president (though tinctured, he hopes, by a non-partisan tinge). The next test of his transformational powers will be whether he merges the civil rights and feminist streams into a single movement that counts for more than a one-shot campaign.

the environmental costs of global bargain shopping

Why are Olympic athletes in Beijing worried about the air quality in a country on the rise? According to Richard York (Sociological Forum, December 2007), it may be because economic success in Asia is coming at the expense of the natural environment.

Energy production is a huge contributor to global climate change and the depletion of fossil fuels. And countries entering the global marketplace by boosting their own economies require more energy. Yet, prevailing economic and political theories suggest globalization will reduce energy production and consumption with more efficient technologies and better environmental regulations.

York analyzed energy production in 14 Asian economies and found that bargains in the global marketplace run up a big environmental tab. For example, trade with other nations requires much more intensive production of exported goods, which leads to greater energy production. Similarly, countries with lots of debt need more energy to build currency and pay back loans to the international community.

In contrast, he finds little evidence for the popular economic assumption that globalization lifts all boats. Economic growth, too, leads to more energy production and more environmental problems.

The author reminds us that quality of life has little to do with economic development, but it does depend on a clean and safe environment. Just ask the athletes who brought their gas masks to Beijing. W.L.

selling integration in life magazine

Although images of blacks serving whites are no longer common in American magazines, John Grady (Visual Studies, December 2007) shows that contemporary ads rarely depict whites and African Americans interacting, especially in private spaces. Instead, African Americans are often portrayed as overcoming adversity to become exemplars of adult responsibility, typically for other blacks (above). In one case, the different between threatening and “lifesaving” is astonishingly ambiguous (left). W.L.

what we learn from political stink-eye

You can’t stand “that candidate from the other party,” but when you can’t tear your eyes off Sunday morning political talk shows, blame the camera work and lack of civility.

In a series of experimental studies, Diana Mutz (American Political Science Review, November 2007) recorded people’s opinions after viewing staged political debates between two candidates running for a distant congressional seat. The actors hired to play the candidates were either civil or uncivil (rolled their eyes, interrupted the other “politician,” raised their voice), and camera work featured either numerous or no unflattering close-ups of them.

Audiences who watched uncivil debates with frequent close-ups paid closer attention to the conversations and indicated a better understanding of their least favorite candidate’s positions on the issue. However, Mutz points out, this increased understanding was offset by audiences turning more strongly against the candidate they didn’t like in the first place.

Mutz’s study underscores that emotions and social processes are important conduits for making sense of political television. So the coming months should teach us more about the position of the “other candidate,” but we’ll also end up disliking him or her more than we already did. K.C.

birds of a feather take off together, or so it seems

National polls suggest Americans share similar views on most subjects, yet pundits like Bill O’Reilly insist we’re in the midst of a culture war. According to Delia Baldassarri and Peter Bearman (American Sociological Review, October 2007), the presumed culture war has a lot to do with “takeoff issues.”

Takeoff issues are hot-button topics that make the front pages for a short time and appear to divide the public (think abortion, stem cell research, or the Iraq War). The authors use computer simulations to show that takeoff issues dominate the public discussion for a short time and give the illusion of widespread polarization.

These issues determine what we discuss most with others, and people are far less likely to discuss sensitive topics with those whose opinions differ from their own, the authors say. Yet, opinions on more mundane subjects are less polarized, thus most of us rarely experience polarization in our day-to-day lives.

So while Mr. O’Reilly may be correct in pointing out public disagreement over some hot topics, these issues don’t take off very often. J.W.

The winner of the 2008 ASA Award for Excellence in the Reporting of Social Issues is the prolific filmmaker Michael Apted. Within sociology he is best known for his riveting Up films, which vividly chronicle the life histories of 14 English children, originally selected in 1963 and re-interviewed at seven-year intervals ever since. 49 Up, the most recent film in the series, appeared in 2006.

On behalf of Contexts, sociologists Michael Burawoy and Ruth Milkman spoke with Apted about the Up films’ unique, long-term study of class and social mobility in England.

Contexts: The Up films have been a huge hit in the world of sociology, not only because of their insights into class and social mobility, but also because of your interviewing method and your longitudinal analysis. We think of you as a natural sociologist, but do you have any training in this field?

Michael Apted: No, just a kind of nosy interest in the human condition. I had studied history and then I studied law at Cambridge. For me this was a political film. I was very angry about the English class system, the waste of people, the prejudging. Every society has a class system, but the English one is different, in some ways more easy to spot. I have always had this romantic liberal idea of equal opportunity. If people show gifts at an early age, that should be encouraged. And it’s so wasteful when it isn’t or when people just don’t get an opportunity. So that emotion has always propelled the film.

C: It began as a political film, but then over the years it became more of a human drama. What happened?

M.A.: It was organic. As the children got older, we got involved in the drama of their growing up, and we got less interested in the political context. Also by then the political context had less meaning because England was changing. I came to understand that the power of what I had was in the interviews, in the close-up, the people’s faces as they grew up. It’s a snapshot of a generation.

C: C. Wright Mills once characterized sociology as the intersection of biography and history. How did history come in?

M.A.: I have taken some punishment for never putting it in a real historical context. I tried it once or twice, and it was catastrophic. It didn’t really fit. In the end, their lives are the political statements, not their opinions about external political events.

C: The politics may have receded, but the sociology remained central. The epigram for the original film, repeated throughout the series, is the old Jesuit maxim, “Give me a child until he is seven, and I will give you the man.” But there is an ambiguity in that claim: Is it about personality or about class background?

M.A.: It is both. But more importantly about personality. Looking at the films, and looking at my own children, too, you get a feeling that the personality is there from very early on. You never know how people are going to develop, how their muscles are going to develop, but there’s a personality that doesn’t change. If you’re an extrovert you stay extroverted, if you’re introspective you stay that way. It doesn’t tell you much about how they are going to cope with things in life, but that inner personality seems to be there and stay there.

C: You took children from both ends of the class spectrum, but all of them were incredibly reflective and articulate—not to mention funny. How did you find those 7-year-olds back in 1963?

M.A.: We had only three weeks to find all the kids before we started shooting, so it was pretty arbitrary. We went to the cities, to the city of London for example. We went to the educational authorities and we told them what we were looking for. We went to working-class schools and private schools, and I would speak to the teachers and say, “Bring me your finest 7-year-olds.” And they would bring them in and I would look at them. I knew nothing, but I did think that if they wouldn’t talk to me they have no chance of talking to a film crew…In fact, whenever I do documentaries that are character-driven, [I’m] looking for people who can present themselves, who can be articulate, who aren’t kind of stuck for words.

C: What possessed you to do it again, to interview them seven years later? In sociology that would be an ambitious project, first to find them and then to persuade them to be re-interviewed.

M.A.: I wish I could say that it happened immediately. 7 Up, when it came out, was a huge cultural event. The political issues were in the wind, and now they were suddenly dramatized in this incredibly accessible and entertaining way. The response was enormous. I didn’t direct the first film, Paul Almond, a Canadian did it; I just found the kids. It took five years before the guy that was head of Granada Television, Dennis Forman, sat down with me and said, “Why don’t we go back and see how they’re all doing?” You could see that we were on to something, here was a big idea.

C: Now you’ve interviewed them seven times, and you presumably are planning to do another, 56 Up. You’ve only lost two of the original 14 people, and even they may return. How do you persuade them all to subject their lives to such public scrutiny?

M.A.: There’s no formula for it. We keep in touch, we talk to them, and send Christmas cards. It’s like a family. Some you see a lot of, some you never see at all. Some I am close to, some I am not close to. Some I know don’t like me very much, some do—it’s exactly the dynamic of the family. But one of the horrors of the longitudinal documentary is that you are completely at their mercy. Some of them insist on seeing it before I finish it and give me notes on it. They argue the notes like a studio would argue the cut of a film with me. And there is nothing I can do if they don’t let me use stuff.

The discipline of sociology has always depended on the social cartography of identification and rank. Recognizing that sociology continues the work of Veblen, Bourdieu, Goffman and others in their focus on status it is important to examine what we mean by reputation. Reputation operates in several domains. First, with the knowledge of the reputations of others who operate within our social circle. From this starting point, reputational knowledge spreads outward and is a major concern for many people due to the ways in which reputations open and close personal options of identity and self-perception. Reputation also affects the relationships we have with complete strangers as the reputations of celebrities take center-stage in social discourse, shaping our manufactured community. In effect, the media becomes a gatekeeper in the process of defining citizenship and appropriate social behavior.

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low-calorie feminism

by sharon hays and jess butler

In Full Frontal Feminism, author Jessica Valenti presents an updated, white- middle-class-hetero-friendly, do-it-yourself version of feminism for young women. Hays and Butler argue that this version of feminism is ultimately vacuous and reproduces the very problems Valenti is trying to confront.

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harry potter and the wise and powerful life course theorist

by kathleen thiede call and donna d. mcalpine

Part of the Harry Potter series’ sociological and lay appeal is that it is set in the familiar backdrop of life course development. The books bring to life the agents of socialization and social pathways familiar to anyone experiencing, or having already experienced, the transition from adolescence into adulthood.

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the great helmsman’s cultural death

by doug guthrie

Outside of Mao Zedong’s mausoleum in Tiananmen Square, Chinese entrepreneurs sell cigarette lighters, watches, and other trinkets that bear the former leader’s image. Mao’s transformation from cultural revolutionary to kitschy cultural icon is one reflection of a long line of changes in China’s culture and political economy.

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a chinese-led global sexual revolution

by james farrer

Experts at the inaugural meting of the World Association of Chinese Sexologists envision China leading the next wave of a global sexual revolution. A description of that meeting trains a lens on the peculiar power of nationalism in contemporary China.

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it’s sexy. it’s big business. and it’s not just for men.

by lynn comella

Every January the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo transforms the Sands Convention Center in Las Vegas into what is arguably the world’s largest adult playground. The AVN Expo-one of many such trade shows that take place each year-is a microcosm of the sex industry and thus offers a revealing sociological window into the marketing, mainstreaming, and gender dynamics of sex in American society.

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heat wave

tales of the heat

by ross macmillan

At least three sociological accounts attempt to explain why such massive heat-related death took place in Chicago during the second week of July, 1995. An epidemiological investigation, Eric Klinenberg’s book Heat Wave, and now the narrative play Heat Wave staged in Chicago this past spring. All three are sociological, two are interesting and entertaining, and one is accurate.

dramatic calamitas

by e.c. hedberg

As a sociologist and former theater and film student, I was curious to see the relationship between sociology and drama reversed, and I wondered if it was even possible to adapt a piece of research into a dramatic framework set for the stage.

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enlightened teenage masculinity

by robert c. bullman and nicole s. mccants

While Superbad continues the crude and sophomoric story of nerdy, horny, and virginal teenage boys desperately eager to have sex with girls, it also presents a novel, enlightened version of teenage masculinity, one that presents vulnerability and tenderness. While fraught with misogynistic and crass dialog, Superbad tells the story of two male best friends who are afraid to part from each other after high school. It challenges us to ask how adolescent boys can learn to be men without ridiculing and dominating women, and without fearing that close friendships with other men undermine their masculinity or heterosexuality.

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The job of the sports sociologist is to be a professional debunker of accepted truths.

So said Ben Carrington, sociology professor and author-in-residence at the University of Texas at Austin.

One of many of this new breed of debunkers, Carrington looks at sports in a way that challenges the “accepted truths” laid out by the athletic industrial complex and its stenographers in the press.

As a professional sports journalist who tries to do my own kind of debunking, I’ve found many sports sociologists’ research to be indispensable—Grant Farred on how globalization has changed the NBA, anything by C.L. Cole. All do a remarkable job of elucidating the past and present.

There are papers and studies on everything, from the world of Mixed Martial Arts to the politics of hockey fights, that demand a broader hearing. As University of Maryland professor Damion Thomas told me, “Sport sociology brings to bear a number of intellectual tools that allow one to look critically at power relations while connecting sport to large social issues, including race, class, nationalism, and gender.”

And yet there’s this frustration, that a variety of people in the field and I share, that the work needs to be more relevant, more accessible, and more public.

“Many sociologists of sport want to do more than simply make observations or apply esoteric theories. They direct their work to have an impact on sport. They hope to challenge and change sport and society,” said Rich King, president of the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport. “I…use my scholarship against Native American mascots and other forms of racism in sport. I can point to some real impacts on public policy and have heard from some readers that my work has made a difference. Unfortunately, like much academic work, it has reached a very small set of readers—mostly other scholars and students.”

From my perspective as a sports writer interested in promoting social change in and through sports, I see that the sports sociology community has a real opportunity to break out of the academic ghetto, eschew excessively coded and obscure language, and fight to become part of the general discourse of sports conversation, both on campuses and in the broader sports world. It’s time to move beyond Pierre Bourdieu’s self-fulfilling prophesy, laid out in 1990, that “the sociology of sport…is disdained by sociologists, and despised by sportspeople.”

crisis in media coverage

As a humble sports writer, I asked one respected sports sociologist to explain the discipline and received this response

As we know, sport is both a constituent, and a constitutor, of the broader social context in which it is located. It is a vehicle through which the forces and relations of societal power are covertly communicated and, if infrequently, explicitly challenged, to the benefit of some groups within society, yet to the detriment of others. Thus, if we are truly to understand sport, we have to be able to identify the nature of its dialectic (two-way/product and producer) relationship—the manner in which it is articulated to and with—the broader cultural, political, economic, and technological forces which converge to shape the structure and experience of contemporary society.

Let me be clear: I have no idea what that means. I don’t mean to take a cheap shot at the professor, academic writing, or my own intelligence. But the response illustrates the point that sports sociologists need more balance, more attention, and to expend more effort to inject their research into the larger world.

The opportunity for sports sociologists to find a hearing arises from the very crisis currently embedded and emerging in the world of sports. To speak to most sports fans, there is an inchoate fear about what sports has evolved into, and what it continues to become. The media and marketing power of sports, the salaries commanded by top athletes, the public gouging in the construction of stadiums, the rampant use of patriotic symbolism, the overbearing sexism—these all produce a sense of unease that fans are beginning to articulate. A short trip to the sports bar, sports radio, or blogosphere provides plenty of evidence.

In such a climate, establishment sports writers could be having a Menckenesque field day puncturing these unsacred cows. But far from rising to the occasion, the sports writing community has lowered the bar, trading analysis and investigation for commentary.

Witness the crisis in sports analysis. Sports departments at major newspapers have seen their budgets slashed. Chicago Tribune NBA expert Sam Smith, Boston Globe sports staple Jackie MacMullan, and legendary New York Times baseball scribe Murray Chass have all taken buyouts in recent months. As Gus, the craggy newspaper editor on The Wire, reminded us, when it comes to budget cuts, “You don’t do more with less. You do less with less.”

Yet, also witness the paradox. While sports pages are subjected to incredibly shrinking resources, sports writers—by attaching themselves to cable and Internet operations—are compensated beyond the venerable Grantland Rice’s wildest dreams. ESPN’s Pardon the Interruption host Tony Kornheiser—whom The Washington Post just bought out in a cost-cutting move—has said quite aptly that this may not be a golden age of sports writing, but it is a golden age for sports writers. There is more money, more fame, and more reward for those willing to play sports writer on television or radio. But it comes with a measure of privileged isolation that has taken sports writers away from the games, the stories, the players, and most critically, the pulse of the fans.

Michael Rowe wrote a brutal piece on the state of the art for Utne Reader, asking:

Does sports journalism suck? In terms of urgency, the question is less national defense and more spilled milk, but I do feel like weeping whenever I peruse ESPN.com, fending off the bilge and looking for a piece that tackles an actual ethical or social issue. Or just tells a good story. Sportswriters don’t deny me this material outright. It’s simply the case that I have to wade through creeping sludge—predictable opinion, endless stats, finance-obsessed business news, empty profiles, and repetitive analysis—to read the kind of investigative and narrative reportage that appears sometimes in, say, Play, the New York Times’ prestige sports magazine. Never mind that Play is a quarterly—an island in a sea of dead, beaten horses.

Through this “sea of dead, beaten horses,” sports blogs and new media continue to rise in prominence. Bloggers have seized this opportunity—and sports sociologists could be doing the same.

Sports commentary has been almost completely collectivized by the web. The overarching effect has been the flowering of creativity in a grey medium, allowing all kinds of writing—some brilliant, some execrable—into the discussion.

The associations between hip hop and use of the “n word” have been the focus of a great deal of public debate. Drawing on research in Chicago focused especially on Latino performers, this article looks at the controversy from within hip hop culture itself, examining the norms that regulate the use of the “n word.” These rules are dependent upon context as well as one’s position in the racial hierarchy.

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online resources

online video

Sonny Black, “Watch Yo Mouth”: the same song described by Harkness in the article’s opening paragraphs:

Frank Nit, interviewed in Harkness’ article:

Pinqy Ring, also interview in the article:

Bill Cosby and Tim Russert discuss the n-word in hip hop:

online audio

• Michael Eric Dyson on Bill Cosby, Hip Hop and the n-word, July 18, 2007, Democracy Now
• KRS-ONE and Paul Mooney discuss the n-word on NPR
• Latino blog radio show, Capicu!, discuss Latino use of the n-word.

further reading

Who gets to use the N word?, an interview with Jabari Asim, author of The N Word in Salon.