With a candidacy that has provoked much deliberation over race relations, social movements, and the nature of political campaigns, prominent sociologists discuss the social significance of Barack Obama and what it might mean, sociologically speaking, were he to win the office.
You can read full coverage for free online at contexts.org/obama.
Welfare critics have argued that reliance on government assistance instead of “legitimate” work has created a class of people so dependent on help that they lack the ability to care for themselves.
These are the people, the party line goes, who failed to evacuate prior to Hurricane Katrina.
To test this “welfare dependency” theory, Timothy Brezina (Social Problems, February 2008) used data from the Survey of Hurricane Katrina Evacuees to examine the characteristics of the New Orleanians hit hardest by the storm.
His findings indicate, contrary to the claims of welfare dependency theorists, that more than half of these New Orleanians were employed full time before Katrina and many showed great initiative after the storm. Upwards of 60 percent, for example, were already seeking new jobs just two weeks after the evacuation.
Brezina found the best predictor of pre-storm evacuation was awareness of the evacuation order, not employment or welfare status, a result consistent with previous research on evacuation. J.W.
Ebonya Washington (American Economic Review, March 2008) found legislators—especially dads—with more daughters voted more liberally than their colleagues with more sons, particularly on reproductive rights issues:
Voting also shifted to the left for issues like the environment, foreign policy, and health. The chart depicts the average voting score given by the National Organization for Women for U.S. Representatives in the 105th Congress with only two children.W.L.
Surrogate pregnancy and egg donation are often viewed as altruistic actions or opportunities for profit.
In interviews with a large number of women in New Zealand who have donated eggs or been surrogates, Rhonda Shaw (Sociology, February 2008) found women also give these reproductive gifts for personal reasons, rather than motivations of either profit or altruism.
New Zealand highly regulates surrogate pregnancy and egg donation, and actually makes it illegal for a woman to profit from them. These restrictions have limited surrogate pregnancies to a few a year and egg donations to just 20 or 30 a year.
The restriction on profit has created a social and institutional structure that reinforces the altruistic nature of reproductive gifts. But according to Shaw, this isn’t why women give.
Some women gave as a way to move past painful memories such as abortions and relationship break-ups. Others gave as a way to mourn the death of loved ones. Still others indicated they wanted to experience something they had yet to experience.
Though on the surface these responses appear quite different, Shaw argues they all represent the idea that women have highly personal reasons for their reproductive gifts. K.C.
With 2008 being an election year, we weren’t surprised to receive a number of wonderful contributions on politics.
Several of those were exceptional, and you’ll read them here, but writing about politics remains a challenge for a publication like Contexts, not to mention for the discipline of sociology in general.
Part of the problem has to do with the constraints of time. As a quarterly, we obviously can’t be as limber as newspapers, magazines, and online media. But even if we published every week, sociological analysis doesn’t always come quickly or easily. By the time we’ve properly formulated our questions, gathered our data, come to our conclusions, and assessed their public significance, the political process has sometimes moved on. There are some exceptions, to be sure: spot commentaries delivered by informed sociological bloggers, expert opinion pieces by sociologists in The New York Times or The Nation, and, we would add, interactive features at contexts.org, such as our roundtable on the social significance of Barack Obama’s candidacy.
Sociological content itself presents other difficulties. What we have to say often doesn’t lend itself to a 10-second soundbite or one-page press release. Our critical perspectives and insights into the complexity of the world can also be tough to translate into action or concrete policy. Sometimes, in other words, politicians, pundits, or ordinary citizens just aren’t ready to deal with the sociological take.
Other issues are also in play, issues that force us to confront some of the deepest fault lines in the discipline. For example, many get into this field because they see profound public and political value in the systematic study of social life. Yet there are many different visions of how sociologists and sociology properly engage and impact the world. On one extreme are those who believe sociologists must actively engage the social world with their research and commentary. On the other are those convinced the most appropriate sociological contributions must be made above the political fray, offering more detached and objective analysis. Suffice it to say, these different orientations—both of which, in our view, have their time and place—yield very different approaches to politics.
And then there’s the political orientation of sociologists themselves. Many people these days (some sociologists foremost among them) assume we’re a uniformly liberal or progressive lot, and that politics and political analyses are, therefore, as biased as they are predictable and uninteresting. We refuse to concede these assumptions. Not only do we know more than a few conservative sociologists (we’ve been trying to get more of them to write for us, by the way), we also believe that in certain respects—its skepticism about radical social change, for example, or its understanding of the limits of human consciousness and comprehension—sociology is profoundly conservative. All of which helps to explain why some of the best sociology can’t be shoehorned into conventional left/right boxes.
You may not agree with us on all these points, of course, and Contexts won’t adopt an editorial stance on any of these debates. We see sociology as a big disciplinary tent marked by its unique ability to both contain and engage these different perspectives. If that lack of a singular perspective makes it difficult for us to comment decisively on politics, so be it. But there is a unifying force that connects disparate sociological approaches to politics: the recognition that all politics is social.
The social dimensions of political life color debates, shape legislation and policy, and call forth the very issues framed as “political.” Our job is to analyze and dissect these aspects of the political process as issues are debated and decisions are made—and to do all we can to inject these analyses into the public agenda.
by monte bute
Race and gender may have been the most visible currents in the 2008 presidential primaries, but what really unsettled the political waters was a riptide of religion, and perhaps we could call Reinhold Niebuhr Barack Obama’s theologian. Parts of The Irony of American History are time-bound, but Neibuhr does sketch an existential drama that is born of the human condition. He appropriates the ideas of tragedy, pathos, and irony to portray three enduring theories of human nature and destiny. With Abraham Lincoln as his exemplar, the preacher casts his lot with irony.
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by john ratliff
Though the sociology is only implicit, Crashing the Gate and Netroots Rising illuminate how the new technologies and practices of netroots face many of the time-honored social challenges of politics, especially when it comes to questioning the relationship between movement and party organization, and trying to balance idealism against political pragmatism.
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by gary alan fine
The argument in Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland is more psychographic than tied to political economy or the stirrings of global markets. In other words, Perlstein is interested in people, more than in forces, and Nixonland focuses on reputations, their entrepreneurs, and how they’re established and preserved.
Since the 1960s, federal, state, and local government agencies have restricted where Americans can smoke. These rules emphasize the health hazards of smoking. In contrast, campaigns to restrict public smoking in Japan, where the government has a direct financial interest in the tobacco industry, have nothing to do with health—rather they are justified by the risks that people, especially children, might be burned by cigarettes or embers.
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The author spent a year in a mountain hideaway in the Roaring Fork Valley of Colorado observing and interviewing the locals. He found Aspen to be a microcosm of the elite’s social world—a telling, compact social environment where society’s powerbrokers wear their lifestyles, customs, habits, behaviors, and attitudes on their sleeves.
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Shelter Island is a resort town on the east end of Long Island, New York, adjacent to The Hamptons and part of a county (Suffolk) known for antagonism toward recent Latino arrivals. However, the mostly white seasonal vacation spot proves to be a unique oasis from anti-immigrant sentiment because Latino workers commute and this don’t live on the island, there’s no day-labor site, and Latinos do the jobs the locals won’t.
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George Carlin should be the perfect comedian for sociologists. He was left- leaning, political, and not especially funny. In fact, his earnest concern for social justice and animus against hypocrisy are probably what kept him from being funny.
One thing I know is that race-neutral alternatives to affirmative action have not diversified college campuses.
The latter half of the 1990s witnessed a spate of court decisions and public referenda outlawing the use of affirmative action in college admissions decisions. In response to a judicial ban on affirmative action imposed by the 5th Circuit Court, for example, the Texas Legislature passed a law guaranteeing admission to any state public university to all seniors who graduate in the top 10 percent of their high school classes.
In force since 1998, the top 10 percent law disregards standardized test scores for students eligible for automatic admission. When the outcome of the 2003 Supreme Court decisions involving the University of Michigan’s affirmative action policies was uncertain, supporters touted the Texas law as a race-neutral strategy to increase campus diversity because it applies a uniform merit criterion to all high schools, whether rich or poor, large or small.
Although diversity of the freshman class plummeted the year affirmative action was banned and diversity rebounded after the uniform admission law was implemented, it doesn’t follow that the percent plan is race-neutral or that it is responsible for the rebound.
The percent plan capitalizes on Texas’s highly segregated high schools to boost minority representation at the state’s public flagships—University of Texas at Austin (UT) and Texas A&M University (TAMU). What’s more, both institutions began an aggressive outreach campaign that targeted poor high schools with low college-going traditions, offering scholarships to rank-eligible students. In Texas, high schools that fit this description tend to be predominantly black or Hispanic. On average, minority students are less likely to qualify for automatic admission if they attend integrated schools, but their chances are much higher if they graduate from predominately minority schools.
The uniform admission law didn’t have uniform impacts at both public flagships. Representation of minority students rose at both premier campuses, but not equally. In fact, African-Americans and Hispanics were better represented at TAMU under affirmative action than the top 10 percent regime. Black and Hispanic enrollment at UT has returned to levels achieved before affirmative action was outlawed, but this is mainly because these minorities represent a much larger percentage of the college-eligible population and not because of the admission guarantee. Today, less than half of Texas high school graduates are white, and despite their elevated high school drop-out rates, Hispanics are currently more than one in three Texas high school graduates.
Although many minority students qualify for admission to selective institutions under the percent plan because standardized test scores aren’t considered for top-ranked graduates, an admission guarantee doesn’t guarantee enrollment. This is particularly important in the quest to diversify campuses because minority students are more likely than their white counterparts to attend resource-poor high schools with low college-going traditions. Simply put, not enough minority students are taking advantage of the plan.
Finally, the top 10 percent law did broaden access to the public flagships, as intended by the legislation’s architects. Today, a larger number of high schools send students to UT and TAMU than before the admission guarantee was in force. In fact, application rates of top-ranked graduates from affluent high schools rose, while application rates from top 10 percent graduates from poor schools remained constant (at UT) or fell (at TAMU). Apparently the playing field is more uneven than advocates of the law admit.
At its 10th anniversary, the top 10 percent law has become as controversial as the race-sensitive admission regime it replaced. Critics from affluent districts claim the uniform admission law gives unfair advantage to highly ranked students from low-performing schools who are presumed less well prepared for high level college work compared with lower ranked students from competitive high schools. Support for the percent plan also has eroded among UT administrators, who complain that diversity in a broad sense is compromised when more than 80 percent of students are admitted using a single metric—top 10 percent high school class rank.
There are many different arguments for (and against) programs designed to foster diversity in our nation’s colleges and universities. The major lesson for the country is that even in a majority minority state like Texas, no viable race-neutral alternatives currently exist. States like Michigan that are considering a percent plan after a decisive ballot initiative outlawed affirmative action should understand that the unintended consequences of a percent plan will likely outweigh the benefits. Fortunately, the 2003 Supreme Court Grutter decision upheld narrowly tailored consideration of race in college admissions, which is the most efficient and effective strategy to diversify college campuses.
People today are well aware that we live in a world in which terrorism is an ever-present threat. But we are less aware that this world didn’t begin on September 11, 2001. The threat of terrorism has been with us for many decades and will continue into the future. Understanding the basic definition of terrorism and its social constructions can help us put the threat in proper perspective.
Despite the female candidates involved in the historic 2008 election, women trail men in all types of elected offices in the United States. The fascinating statistics and cogent analysis presented here show that, although it may take decades until a woman is elected president of the United States, this possibility is becoming increasingly likely.
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The Inter-Parliamentary Union offers data on the number of women in national parliaments around the world. Check out the comparative chart by country. Scroll down–far down–to find out how the United States ranks.
The Worldwide Guide to Women in Leadership provides an overview of the history of women in executive, ministerial, and royal positions around the world. See which countries have and have not elected women as heads of state, and find out about women like Sirivamo Bandaranaike of Sri Lanka, the first elected prime minister in 1960.
According to a story in the Hindustan Times, India has the most female elected representatives in the world.
Politicians have long played on the apparent disconnect between Hollywood celebrities and mainstream “family values.” While Hollywood may provide multiple examples of people who have children outside marriage or seem to be less-than-committed spouses, the real causes of these changes are far less glamorous. Rather than the decline of “family values,” cultural norms have changed to adapt to a host of economic, political, and social changes in American society.
The ranks of those exonerated of crimes they didn’t commit increases every year, raising questions central to society’s ideas about fairness, justice, and responsibility. Sociological research can help us understand exonerees in ways that go beyond basic descriptive and journalistic accounts. If incarceration of an innocent person can be considered a sustained catastrophe, like a flood, earthquake, or other disaster with long-term consequences, we can understand the human suffering experienced by exonerees just as we do other trauma survivors.
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In the article, Westervelt and Cook discuss The Innocence Project. At innocenceproject.org, you can view an interactive map of exonerations by state.
Watch this video about how lawyers at The Innocence Project helped exonerate Herman Atkins after 12 years in prison:
Watch the trailer for the documentary, “After Innocence”:
