Like cheerleaders, our public outreach mission involves engaging an amorphous crowd of spectators in the play of the field. Like cheerleaders, we also find ourselves celebrating the “players” who produce sociological knowledge and understanding for the rest of us.

One area where sociology is underrated—by both fans and players alike—is in our clear and powerful presentation of basic social facts. Good training in sociology offers both the research skills to go get the evidence and the critical eye and trusted techniques to extract reliable and valid information from mountains of data. Better than any other discipline, sociology and sociologists systematically gather, analyze, and interpret trend data on social issues.

Where are fertility rates rising or plummeting? How have environmental policies affected energy consumption? Are more U.S. women finally being elected to public office? How has the connection between religion and politics changed in the past generation? Are we really overscheduling our kids? You might recognize these as some of the questions we’ve taken up in our Trends section, edited by Deborah Carr since 2004.

A first-rate family demographer, Deborah sets a high bar for data quality. As a skilled writer with a commercial publishing background, she insists on lively prose and cogent interpretation. This wins her fans among hardcore quantoids as well as readers whose eyes glaze over at charts and graphs. As just one marker of her broad appeal, the Utne Reader highlighted Deborah’s article on China’s one-child policy in its March-April issue.

While Deborah has written many of our Trends articles of late, we invite other sociologists to send us short pieces examining social patterns from a sociological perspective. Submissions should use high-quality, publicly available data sources to document the trends. And like all of Contexts, a Trends piece should be written without professional jargon and in a style that grabs and engages a non-sociologist reader with a compelling story from start to finish. (For more information on our submission and review process for other sections, see contexts.org/submissions).

We’d especially encourage Trends pieces that summarize and visually highlight new findings in the field or basic knowledge that challenges (or confirms) conventional wisdoms. Sometimes media and political figures know about our work but choose to ignore it. Often, however, they have no idea we have high quality trend data on the issues they’re debating—just sitting there in our major journals. That’s where Contexts can help spread the word. Although we won’t order any uniforms from that cheerleading catalog, we did send away for a couple megaphones.

Purchase this article from UC Press

Love may never go out of style, but the added benefits of healthy married life may be a thing of the past, a new study in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior (September 2008) suggests.

Getting married has long been thought to improve couples’ health because pooling resources and support systems often sustains healthier lifestyles. Some of us also tend to ditch the bachelorhood fare of instant noodles and eat better when we couple up.

According to Hui Liu and Debra J. Umberson, however, these marriage benefits have become less significant over time. Examining self-reported health surveys from 1972 to 2003, they found the health gaps between married and never-married groups have shrunk considerably. Particularly for men, marriage today may provide little advantage over bachelorhood.

A partial explanation is the simple fact that single people are living healthier lives with better diets and regular exercise than did their elder counterparts. Although getting married may still be a healthy thing to do, the benefits of doing so may not go above and beyond being single and active.

Moreover, the study found divorces have not only become more common today, but the ill-effects of dissolving a marriage have become much more severe.

Of all the reasons to fall in love, it seems improving your health may not be one of them. For that, joining a gym might suffice. A.B.

thinking thrice about marriage

Americans have experienced significant gains in income and material wealth over the last several decades, yet many report being less happy today than ­previous generations.

Theories about the diminishing returns of our fast-paced, consumer-based lifestyles abound, but Jason Schnittker (Social Psychology Quarterly, September 2008) says money alone­hasn’t been responsible for our emotional undoing. Our feelings about marriage have changed, too, and may account for the apparent happiness downturn.

Using data from the General Social Survey over 30 years, Schnittker illustrated that married people are less happy now than 30 years ago. Curiously, this pattern held true for both unhappily married individuals as well as those reporting overall satisfaction with their relationships.

Controlling for this peculiar “marriage effect,” Schnittker argues relative happiness may not have declined at all since the 1970s, and may have actually increased since the 1990s.

That is, growing wealth likely increased general feelings of happiness but changes in the institution of marriage and its significance for our lives have had the opposite effect. A.B.

to :–) or not to :–)?

E-mail is supposed to make communication easier, but it backfires when our sarcasm gets misinterpreted as earnestness, our witty jokes as personal insults, and our matter-of-factness as indifference.

After studying the e-mail interactions of a tech-savvy research panel for 18 months, Daniel Menchilik and Xialio Tian (American Journal of Sociology, September 2008) found that miscommunications arise largely because the reader lacks the proper context.

In face-to-face interactions, we can easily pick up on cues that help us communicate effectively—the tone of a conversation, the moods of participants, and their immediate personal reactions to our statements. But in the faceless, silent world of e-mail, such information is missing, leading to misinterpretations of meanings and intentions.

To avoid these problems, the authors found e-mail users employ techniques for creating context where none exists. That includes, for example, the use of emoticons and CAPS versus lowercase letters, and adding personal information about themselves.

So, smiley faces and exclamation points aren’t just cutesy ways to personalize our online communications, they’re essential techniques for communicating effectively over e-mail. D.W.

portuguese prisons a neighborhood affair

When anthropologist Manuela Ivone P. da Cunha (Ethnography, September 2008) returned to a Portuguese women’s penitentiary for a follow-up study, she found life behind bars looked radically different than it had only a decade earlier.

Instead of individual women being randomly placed, she observed as many as four generations of family members—as well as next-door neighbors and close friends—often imprisoned together.

After a year exploring this shift, da Cunha found that over the previous few years law enforcement had focused more heavily on retail drug trafficking in poor neighborhoods. As well, in Portugal, the risky business of street-level drug sales had developed along close-knit, trustworthy kinship, and neighborhood ties. These two factors came together to make imprisonment in Portugal a distinctively neighborhood affair. 

This shift fundamentally altered the experience of incarceration for many inmates. While time in prison used to be experienced as a “time apart” in which inmates developed new relationships, identities, and lives, many now find that family and friends have been imprisoned along with them, for better or for worse.

da Cunha’s findings help us understand the local effects of mass incarceration and ponder the wider conse­quences of stepping up the global war on drugs. In the effort to get drugs out of neighborhoods, it seems, we may be putting entire neighborhoods in prison. D.W.

stripping bad for women after all

Some feminists have argued that stripping actually empowers women because it defies social conventions by putting sex on display, and then women pocket the cash. But Sheila Jeffreys (Signs, Autumn 2008) argues this is a romantic portrayal of a demeaning and dangerous job.

Most strippers work as independent contractors—which means they pay a stage fee to club owners for the privilege of dancing—and many struggle to make more than $100 a night. Despite their “independent” status, club managers set the price for private dances, determine when women can use the restroom, and often fine dancers for calling in sick or talking back to patrons. 


The pressure to make money in the face of all these regulations and fees can lead dancers to engage in practices such as lap dancing, prostitution, and private dances, where they have a more difficult time protecting themselves from sexual abuse, Jeffreys found. And none of this, the author says, is improved by the fact that much of the industry is controlled by organized crime.

So tell us again what was empowering about all that? M.K.

the economics of the attitude gap

If you’ve ever thought the economy influences attitudes toward gays and lesbians, you may be on to something. Robert Andersen and Tina Fetner (American Journal of Political Science, October 2008) have found that rich countries tend to be more accepting of sexual minorities.

Economic development alone, however, doesn’t lead to less negative attitudes toward lesbians and gay men. It has little impact on working class people’s attitudes, although it engenders more positive attitudes among middle and professional classes. Economic inequality, in other words, exacerbates this attitude gap.

The authors suggest high levels of inequality undermine social trust overall, leading to negative attitudes toward a variety of minority groups, including sexual minorities. 

Anderson and Fetner suggest economic policies such as progressive taxation, like those in more liberal social democratic states, may encourage more tolerance among all classes. T.O.

moving has drawbacks

Americans move pretty often. In fact, 14 percent of us change residences yearly. While previous research has examined how rates of moving affect crime rates in communities, few scholars have looked at the impact of the movement of individual households.

Min Xie and David McDowall (Criminology, August 2008) use data from the annual National Crime Survey to examine how the odds of victimization increase both as people move from one dwelling to another and as dwellings change occupants.

In an individual residence, a household with newer occupants is more likely to be victimized than one with longer-term residents, they found. Within the same neighborhood, houses with more residential turnover are more likely to be victimized than those with stable residents. Finally, their work revealed, neighborhoods with higher levels of residential turnover have higher overall risks of victimization.

Xie and McDowall argue their findings support the “crime opportunity” theory, which holds that crime requires not only a motivated offender but a suitable target that isn’t properly monitored. By understanding how residential turnover leads to greater opportunities for crime, they suggest, neighborhood crime prevention can be improved by better integrating a community’s newest residents. J.S.G.W.

ladies night at the county lock-up

Drunken driving rates in the United States overall have fallen steadily in the past 25 years, but the gap between men’s and women’s arrest rates is narrowing as more women are arrested for driving under the influence.

Sociologists argue this must be due to one of two factors—either more women are driving drunk or the criminal justice system is paying more attention to female drunken drivers. Jennifer Schwartz and Bryan D. Rookey (Criminology, August 2008) use self-reported, traffic, and arrest data to test these competing hypotheses.

They found the criminal justice system is indeed paying more attention to women’s drinking and driving habits. While both self-report and non-arrest traffic data indicate men and women are driving drunk far less than in the past, the arrest rate for men is decreasing much faster than it is for women.

Changing definitions of what constitutes drunken driving seem to be responsible for the narrowing gender gap. As many states have lowered the blood-alcohol content threshold required for arrest, an unintended consequence has been sanctioning more women, who tend to commit less serious DUI offenses. J.S.G.W.

hooligans not just drunken idiots

Although rioting and fighting among spectators may appear to be alcohol-induced male aggression, deeper social forces underlie this raucous fanaticism.

In a study of violence at Dutch soccer matches, Robert Braun and Rens Vliegenthart (International Sociology, November 2008) move away from previous conceptions of fan violence as irrational and disorganized. Instead, they see hooliganism as a form of collective action akin to political protests and revolutions.

The authors measured the social climate within which violent incidents occurred, accounting for variables that extend beyond the sports arena. They found media coverage of recent bouts between fans increased violence, as did aggressive play on the field and unemployment among males ages 18 to 24, the core hooligan demographic. The soccer hooligan’s seemingly disorderly behavior actually fluctuates in relation to social factors, just like other social protestors.

For soccer hooligans, it appears, collective rowdiness functions to humiliate rivals, draw attention to economic and regional backgrounds, and express frustration with social conditions. J.S.

the times, they are a changin’

A surprising new study by Val Burris (Social Problems, November 2008) reveals that in at least one area of political engagement—war—young people today are more active than their Vietnam-era counterparts. 

Burris uses data from the American National Elections Study, CBS News/New York Times polls, and ABC News/Washington Post polls to examine public opinion on war from 1964 until 2006. He found that women and people of color have always resisted sending troops to foreign nations in an offensive strike, wealthy people persist in their support of tough military action, and people with more education continue to be less likely to support war.

However, it’s young people whose opinions have altered over the last four decades—they’ve become more critical of military action. According to Burris, movies have made today’s youth more aware of the horrors of war and teens today face less pro-war propaganda in schools and on television. Encouraged by the anti-war student demonstrations of the 1960s, they now think it’s “normal” for young people to protest military action. Together these factors have added up to an increasingly critical younger population, Burris found.

Apparently, today’s young people, far from apathetic, are learning from the past, while other groups continue to rally around the flag in the same way they always have. K.H.

the great migration … south

U.S. history classes teach about “The Great Migration” of African Americans north following the Civil War. But recent scholarship now points to an exodus from the north back to the south.

A new article by Larry L. Hunt, Matthew O. Hunt, and William W. Falk (Social Forces, September 2008) confirms this reverse migration, which qualitative researchers began to notice in the 1990s.

The authors examined census data from 1970 to 2000 and compared white and black migration. They found that, in spite of its reputation for intolerance, the south is a magnet for a diverse group of people.

Young single people of all races are moving to Dixie to reconnect with extended kin, find employment, and seek potential spouses. And, as of late, increasing numbers of blacks have followed this pattern.

The authors suggest these migrants may also be in on a well-kept secret: the south has the highest numbers of black political office holders and has seen recent increases in black wealth. 

While the south may not be the promised land the north was once thought to be, it does appear young people of color perceive greater opportunities there than ever before. K.H.

i pledge allegiance to the flags

Citizenship has been a way for states to mark who “belongs” and who “doesn’t,” but dual citizenship changes the rules of the game, blowing open the idea of a state as a closed territory with a clearly defined homogenous citizenry. 

In her analysis of dual citizenship legislation in 115 countries, Tanja Brøndsted Sejersen (International Migration Review, Autumn 2008) found only a handful of countries allowed dual citizenship in the 1950s, while today nearly half the analyzed countries do. And, these changes in legal status are a contemporary phenomenon—most of the increase has been since the 1990s.

Asia and the Middle East are much less open to dual citizenship (just 23 percent of countries allow it) than Europe or the Americas (where more than 60 percent of countries do), but Sejersen thinks the dual citizenship wave may be spreading just as the idea of citizenship radiated from Europe in earlier centuries. 

Globalization is part of the story—global migration, the increase of strong transnational communities, international trade, and the decrease in interstate violence all help explain the legal recognition of multiple national identities. Individual states increasingly want to create or maintain stronger ties to those who emigrated and now live abroad, and some states also want to increase political participation of immigrants living within their borders. Territorial boundaries, it seems, may matter less in the 21st century. 

Dual citizenship raises questions of both personal identity and public policy; even so, pledging allegiance to more than one flag just may become the norm. S.G.

africa’s brain gain

Having lived outside their home countries helps well-educated African workers land a job, according to Kevin J.A. Thomas (International Migration Review, Autumn 2008).

Using Ugandan census data, Thomas found that Africans educated at foreign colleges and universities were twice as likely to be employed than equally educated Ugandans who never left their homeland. Foreign-educated Ugandans were also three times more likely to be employed than foreign-born immigrants in Uganda. Even returning migrants with vocational training are more likely to be employed than Ugandans who’ve stayed put or foreign-born immigrants. 

And, it’s not just having migrated that matters. Staying overseas for a longer period of time also helps improve the chances of finding employment. 

This job market advantage may contribute to return-migration patterns, leading to a “brain gain” that could enhance economic development of African nations like Uganda. A warm welcome home, indeed. S.G.

way too cool for school

Homework is just so passé for some teenage boys, especially those in poorer neighborhoods and schools. Understanding why this is the case, according to Edward W. Morris (Gender & Society, December 2008), helps better explain the well-known gender gap in education whereby girls tend to get higher grades, go to college more often, and aspire to higher status jobs than boys.

In interviews, Morris found that boys in rural Appalachian Ohio took pride in their lack of academic effort, instead valuing “common sense” and “working with your hands.” They also reveled in demonstrations of physical power and risk, and considered the term “redneck” a positive identity embodying these traits. Booksmarts was considered feminine, and Morris observed that boys who studied and worked hard in school were on the receiving end of insults intended to strip them of their masculinity. 

Morris contends the gender gap in education may emerge in underprivileged communities—whether rural or urban—because boys are seeking the means to prove their manhood when perceived opportunities for upward mobility and economic security are limited. T.O.

multiculturalism in south america

In the United States “multiculturalism” can mean anything from ethnic dances and identity politics to affirmative action and redistributive economics. And debates over the application of these meanings are often contested and consequential. So what happens when this term is exported?

Over the last few decades, pressure from international organizations and grassroots activists has pushed governments in Brazil, Bolivia, and Peru to address historic racial and ethnic challenges under the guise of multiculturalism. Specific policies include recognizing ethnic and lingual diversity, affirming indigenous groups’ autonomy, and redefining “citizen” from an economic standpoint (campesino or poor farmer) to a cultural one (indigenous).

Felipe Arocena (Race and Class, October 2008) compared each government’s evolving efforts. He found that these new policies have not only employed minorities, they have, in combination with legacies of discrimination, given afro-movements in Brazil and indigenous movements in Bolivia and Peru the opportunity to re-evaluate their national identity. In some cases indigenous movements have even called for the creation of a new and separate state for themselves.

To Brazilian, Bolivian, and Peruvian administrations, the difficulty of multiculturalist policies lies in giving rights and opportunities to historically marginalized groups while maintaining a unified nation. How political leaders deal with the diverse and changing power dynamics will determine whether their countries stay unified or balkanize along racial lines. R.A.

by susan j. ferguson

Jay MacLeod’s Ain’t No Makin’ It has been taught in college classrooms for more than 20 years—and for good reason. For students, it makes sociology come alive, and professors like that their students like it. Now in its 3rd edition, the book’s continuing appeal and importance goes well beyond sociology classrooms. It is, in many ways, a perfect introduction for any reader to the limited opportunities for mobility and success faced by many Americans, and the consequences of our continuing inability or unwillingness to see and understand these constraints.

Separation Anxiety

by peter hennen

While seemingly aimed at boys and girls, The Dangerous Book for Boys and The Daring Book for Girls may appeal less to kids and more to their parents’ anxieties about recent upheavals in traditional gender roles and the threat these pose to male power. Such anxieties are also at the heart of Guy Garcia’s more adult-oriented The Decline of Men.

by jennifer c. lena and peter levin

In September 2008, Damien Hirst became the first famous, living artist to sell his work directly through an auction house, bypassing the gallery system. This direct-to-auction approach demonstrates that the boundary between auction houses and dealers is being breached and suggests that the value of art may become more defined by the market than the experts.

Purchase this article from UC Press

new fish on the block

by lisa mccormick

For many young adults, art performances simply aren’t fun. (Le) Poisson Rouge, a multimedia art cabaret in New York’s Greenwich Village, is trying to combat such alienation by masking an arts institution as a nightclub, mixing art and alcohol, and making classical performances fun without dumbing them down.

For more about (Le) Poisson Rouge and the music McCormick discusses, take a video tour of the (Le) Poisson Rouge and watch a video of The Knights, one of the groups discussed in the article.

Purchase this article from UC Press

a raw export

by r. tyson smith

Pro wrestling is often derided for its fake drama, and pageantry, as well as its violence, lack of subtlety, and over-the-top, macho characters. However, pro wrestling continues its sleeper hold on our culture precisely because of its compelling combination of masculinity, violence, and drama.

Update: Due to a few editing errors in the print version of this article, we’re making an updated PDF version of this Culture Review available for download here.

Purchase this article from UC Press

post 9/11, but not post-racial

by nancy wang yuen and cassidy j. ray

In the popular television shows Heroes and Lost, people of color are well represented among the casts. Although sci-fi television has been a haven for a multicultural approach to entertainment, however, there’s still a ways to go. White male characters are given greater depth than females or characters of colors.

Purchase this article from UC Press

Purchase this article from UC Press

Purchase this article from UC Press

online resources

For a deeper look at life with autism, Stephen Poulson recommends the book and documentary, The Horse Boy, about a young autistic boy who responded well to therapeutic horse-riding. Poulson says:

“Sam,” about whom I wrote in the Contexts article, is weirdly at home on horses, too. So, the family took a trip to Mongolia and the father (a travel writer) wrote a book about the experience (it was filmed, too). The pictures of the trip (the meltdowns, the “special” toys brought along etc.) reminded me of the stress/satisfaction that occurs when Sam takes trips, too.

You can read a review of The Horse Boy in The New York Times here.

However, it received international publicity when Disney chose, because of its unspoiled beauty, to film the blockbuster movie The Pirates of the Caribbean there in 2003.

Purchase this article from UC Press

While the movie perpetuates the image of paradise, the realities play out quite differently in the lives of Vincentians, who are fighting for economic survival against international trade policies and multi-national corporations. This is particularly true for those in the banana industry, which has long been the economic mainstay of the country.

Because of the nation’s colonial ties to Europe and its inability to compete in the global market, the European Union offered the banana trade a fair degree of protection. But with the emergence of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and its emphasis on free trade, the United States, led by Chiquita Brands International, called into question the protections afforded to the industry here and on other Caribbean islands.

This was the subject of a contentious dispute between the United States and the European Union. The WTO ruled in favor of the United States, thus removing or minimizing the protection extended to the industry in St. Vincent and the Grenadines and other Eastern Caribbean islands.

This decision seriously threatens an already vulnerable banana industry in St. Vincent and the Grenadines, which can’t compete on any level with banana production in Latin America. This island nation is small. Its geographic location makes it vulnerable to hurricanes and prolonged droughts. Further, the industry here is largely made up of small-scale farmers who work roughly two acres of often hilly terrain, which makes it impossible to use machines to aid in harvesting. This means banana production is labor intensive and more expensive than in Latin America.

As the banana industry declines, St. Vincent and the Grenadines is turning to tourism as a means of economic development, and the U.S. market is a main target. By capitalizing on the popularity of The Pirates of the Caribbean, they capitalize on typical Western stereotypes about how paradise should look. For tourists, that is. Life for the banana farmers is anything but, as illustrated in these images.

Purchase this article from UC Press

online resources

To learn more about state-by-state legislation against racial profiling, visit the Racial Profiling Data Collection Resource Center. Currently, 19 states have not taken any action to pass anti-profiling legislation and 5 states have legislation pending. Find out if your state is among these, and then contact your representatives to help get legislation passed.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has been and continues to be active in the struggle against racial profiling. Watch this video about a 1997 ACLU law suit on behalf of 12 drivers who experienced racial profiling:

Check out the Missouri Attorney General’s annual Racial Profiling Reports. The reports include statewide data on stops, searches, contraband hit rates, and arrest rates broken down for whites, blacks, Hispanics, Asians, American Indian, and other racial groups. In 2007, for example, blacks were 58% more likely to be stopped in Missouri than would be expected given their proportion of the population.

The Impact Fund is bringing a lawsuit against Antioch, a city near San Francisco, claiming the City and its Police Department harass African American Section 8 tenants because of their race. The lawsuit alleges unlawful searches of homes, “heavy-handed” police investigations, actions to negatively influence landlords, and solicitation of complaints from neighbors. This San Francisco Chronicle article covers the story.

Finally, a video of the 1991 Rodney King beating, referenced in the article, provides a widely-publicized example of excessive use of police force:

Purchase this article from UC Press

The latest findings from sociologists who study employment discrimination help explain why workplace inequalities persist despite the civil rights reforms of the U.S. Civil Rights Act and other subsequent laws. This profile of a research group working in the area further explicates both the serious limitations and potential payoffs of using the law as a strategy for promoting equality.

Purchase this article from UC Press

Purchase this article from UC Press

online resources

A waste of money?

Beaver writes that it’s hard to know the actual value of a college degree these days. Author and career counselor Marty Nemko has an even stronger opinion, arguing that most college students pursuing 4 year degrees or simply wasting their money. See his article in the Chronicle of Higher Education here and listen to his interview with npr here.

Joe the blue-collar career counselor

With degree inflation seemingly on the rise, one working Joe is encouraging people to forgo college in favor of a blue-collar career.

stay tuned…

Watch for an interview with Beaver about this article on the Contexts Podcast in early June!

Purchase this article from UC Press

Purchase this article from UC Press

In August it’s the colleges, in April the graduate schools.

The annual rankings of universities and their programs result in copies of U.S. News & World Report flying off the shelves, and great fanfare follows.

Local news outlets report the lists and the Internet goes all abuzz with discussions about the year’s gains and losses in standing.

Reactions within schools are also significant, ranging from champagne and bonuses to emergency meetings and fears of pink slips.

Despite the fact that most educators are critical of the methods used to create these measures and very much resent their influence, they can’t afford to ignore the impact of changes in rank on application numbers, alumni perceptions, and employers’ interest in their graduates.

“For your own survival, you have to respond to the rankings,” one administrator said.

In publishing clear evaluations for prospective students, rankings have transformed the landscape of higher education in the United States and, increasingly, around the world. They’ve created an authoritative, public definition of school status and produced tremendous pressure for schools to conform to it.

And in the process, these measures have caused a wide variety of unintended consequences that most view as detrimental to the quality of the education these institutions strive to deliver.

The relative nature of rankings creates intense competition for each ordinal position as one school’s rise necessarily leads to another’s fall. This dynamic encourages schools to devote substantial resources to improving their numbers regardless of the educational merit of their actions.

Our research on law schools examines the unintended consequences of rankings to gain a better understanding of the effects—both obvious and subtle—that these public evaluations have had on higher education. This research is supplemented by studies of business schools and undergraduate education as well as a growing body of sociology research on a whole variety of rankings. Not only does our work help identify the processes by which rankings have come to exert so much influence on higher education, it also explains how these measures, designed only to reflect educational quality, actually create and reinforce distinctions among schools, shaping the whole landscape of higher education in the process.

A better understanding of these effects will help us respond more productively to rankings and draw attention to the often-overlooked potential hazards of quantitative assessment.

History and Debate

While a variety of organizations and individuals produced rankings of U.S. universities sporadically throughout the 20th century, they typically designed them for academic insiders. Only in the 1980s did popular media regularly begin producing rankings of colleges and graduate programs intended for consumers.

U.S. News & World Report, the most significant force in this arena, helped pioneer media involvement when, in 1983, it published its first college rankings. These surveys and those that followed after 1985 were relatively simple measures focusing on reputations. Then, in 1988, the magazine started publishing annual rankings that incorporated statistics submitted by colleges and other public sources. In 1990 it followed up with an annual issue dedicated to rankings of graduate and professional schools.

These rankings have proven popular and powerful, and although they’ve spawned many imitators both within the United States (Forbes, The Princeton Review, and Washington Monthly) and internationally (Times Higher Education and Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s rankings), U.S. News & World Report still dominates the rankings market in most fields.

The appeal of rankings seems straightforward—they provide useful information about complicated organizations to busy people. But their effects aren’t simple and their appeal changes as different groups find uses for them. As those who produce the rankings are quick to point out, they offer valuable, and otherwise unavailable, comparative information about colleges and universities.

Choosing where to attend school is an expensive decision, and most prospective students and their families lack first-hand knowledge about their choices. They face the difficult task of choosing among options that may look alike or deciding whether an expensive school is actually better than one with lower tuition. These families are bombarded with messages from teachers, counselors, the media, and college marketing materials that school selectivity matters, schools really are different, and the perfect “fit” between child and college is hugely significant.

One professor we interviewed who routinely asks his students about how they use rankings told us, “they approach them like they were consumers … just like they were going to buy a car. [They] look at education as an investment and they are going to see what you get in return.”

Most students believe the reputation of the school is an important determinant of career trajectories. “The prestige of your law school really does give you some capital later in your career. At every stage of your career, where you went to law school might help you in some way,” a second-year law student explained. Asked how he defined “prestigious,” the student quickly replied: “U.S. News & World Report. It’s the only way to go.”

U.S. News & World Report and its supporters say rankings make (relative) school quality more clear to outside audiences. Although school quality is notoriously difficult to measure, the magazine’s very public reports on how schools fare on particular indicators creates a type of accountability for higher education. External audiences, such as alumni, employers who hire graduates, trustees, and state legislators, are now able to see how a particular school measures up on a wide variety of criteria (for instance, the quality of incoming students, faculty resources, and graduates’ employment successes) compared to its competitors. According to this view, comparative information should also help schools identify their own relative strengths and weaknesses, thus motivating them to address areas in need of improvement.

Critics of rankings, though, question the methods used to evaluate schools, charging that bad information isn’t necessarily better than less information. Some argue the rankings place too much emphasis on standardized tests, while others point to important qualities absent from rankings, like evaluations of teaching, scholarship, or students’ first-hand experiences at schools. Journalist Peter Sacks has described the dangers of using standardized or even universal metrics to evaluate schools doing fundamentally different jobs of offering specialized forms of education. Judging schools according to a single set of criteria, he writes, ignores the fact that schools have different aspirations and punishes those with distinctive or non-elite missions.

While these methodological issues are important, a less readily apparent set of problems surfaces because of these rankings—the unintended consequences that precise quantitative evaluations produce.

Rankings are designed to be reflections of existing school characteristics and quality, to report—in a disinterested and objective fashion—how schools compare to each other on selected criteria. However, we’ve found that rankings actually shape the hierarchy of the institutions they’re trying to assess. Over time, schools change their activities and policies to optimize their standings on the criteria laid out by U.S. News & World Report and other rankers.

Reactions to Rankings

As we know, people react to being measured. Those who run colleges and universities do so with concerted efforts to improve on the criteria that determine their relative position. Consequently, rankings stop being neutral measures of school quality and start transforming the characteristics of the schools they evaluate.

“Almost everything we do now is prefaced by, ‘How will this affect our ranking?’” one law school dean told us. Many administrators characterize rankings as an omnipresent concern, saying they feel compelled to change how they manage in order to maintain or improve their rank.

This pressure to scrutinize and improve one’s rank has produced significant effects on higher education. Rankings influence who is admitted to which schools, how scholarship money is allocated, which programs are well-funded and which aren’t, as well as other serious forms of redistribution of both resources and opportunities. Rankings are also used to fire and reward administrators, allocate budgets across universities, and may even challenge the mission of schools whose goals aren’t captured in rankings factors.

Our research on law schools provides clear examples of how rankings can change educational practice. Law schools, for instance, have dramatically increased spending on advertising themselves to those who may fill out reputational surveys for U.S. News & World Report. This means many schools spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on glossy brochures and publications that are mass-mailed only to administrators and faculty at other schools.

In interviews, administrators bemoaned the fact that this money would be better spent on the development of new programs, faculty salaries, student scholarships, or tuition reductions, but most felt they couldn’t risk the drop in rankings that might result from less marketing. Paradoxically, most also acknowledge that they rarely read the materials others send to them.

“Every time I go to my mailbox I get another mailing from a law school telling me how great they are. I don’t even open them. I just throw them right in the recycling pile,” one dean said.

Many law schools have also increased money spent on scholarships for students with high test scores and decreased spending on scholarships based on need. The driving force behind this change is the increased emphasis on the average LSAT score of their incoming classes, a prominent ranking criterion. This criterion in particular has analogous effects at colleges and other professional schools.

The work performed in schools has also changed in relation to rankings. Those in admissions, career services, and other administrative offices report they must now focus on the “bottom line” numbers more so than in the past. This changes job requirements, reduces professional autonomy, and often shifts the content of job routines.

For example, according to career services personnel, they now spend much more time and energy tracking down the job status of every last graduate so as to optimize their job placement numbers. This work comes at the expense of career counseling, contacting employers, or other forms of mentoring that were once central to their work.

These administrators also report occasional conflicts of interest as they decide between advising students to take the first job offered to them, rather than waiting for a better one, in order to ensure a student counts as “employed” when the program’s statistics are due. This shift in the focus of their work is also stressful because those who fail to improve placement figures risk losing their jobs.

The most controversial tactic adopted by schools is to “game” rankings. Gaming strategies, the topic of gossip and occasional exposés, manipulate the numbers used to construct rankings in ways that serve little or no educational purpose.

New graduates of one college, for example, were offered $5 sandwich vouchers in exchange for $1 donations to their school as a means of boosting their average alumni giving rate. Some schools encourage, or even require, faculty members to take spring leaves to optimize student-faculty ratios, which are calculated in the fall. Still others temporarily move admitted students with lower test scores to part-time or night programs to improve selectivity scores.

Rankings make extremely precise distinctions among the schools they judge. Just one-tenth of a point difference in a school’s score on one criterion can generate changes in overall rank or determine in which “tier” a school falls. Schools understand this phenomenon is an artifact of measurement, but they also know these apparent differences are real in their consequences because important constituents like students or legislators will make decisions based on these outcomes.

So it’s not surprising schools feel strong pressure to maximize their rankings. Their fears that rankings will become self-fulfilling prophecies are hardly paranoid, thus, attempting to boost rankings may not be as unprincipled or self-serving as critics might charge.

A Rankings Evolution?

Educators are taking steps to reign in the power of the rankings. In 2007, 12 colleges boycotted U.S. News & World Report by refusing to complete the magazine’s reputational survey and 19 elite liberal arts schools pledged not to use the magazine’s rankings in promotional materials.

While these actions focus attention on the fact that these rankings are limited in what they measure and may encourage improvements in methodology, administrators see little chance U.S. News & World Report or other media will stop producing what’s clearly a popular and lucrative enterprise. “I think they are a reality,” one dean said. “I can’t imagine life without them now.”

This leaves the question of what can be done to limit the harmful effects of rankings while still providing useful information about schools to broad audiences.

Many educators lobby for improved methods, but such a strategy faces political challenges that will be hard to meet. There are many viable, if competing, definitions of educational quality. As well, any changes in methods will be controversial because—given the zero-sum nature of rankings—they will always hurt some schools as they benefit others. Thus, broad agreement about changes will be hard to come by.

More importantly, methodological changes won’t address the unintended consequences that result from such a public and relative evaluation. Effective changes will require more than methodological tinkering.

Creating alternative rankings might be a place to start. Business schools are ranked by a half-dozen or so prominent media and enjoy greater autonomy than colleges and law schools, over which U.S. News & World Report retains almost monopolistic power. Multiple rankings create more ambiguity about standing, make random oscillations in a single ranking less meaningful, and allow business schools to craft their reputations around the ranking source they feel best suits their school’s philosophy. Although worrisome to advocate for more quantification as a means for redressing the problems rankings have created, these outcomes suggest law schools and undergraduate institutions would benefit from it.

One challenge in implementing this approach is that U.S. News & World Report enjoys huge advantages from having captured the rankings market, so it would be difficult for accrediting organizations or schools themselves to create consensual rankings with broad legitimacy. However, professional organizations can encourage other magazines or news sources to create alternative rankings, they can fund research and initiatives directed at developing new models for evaluating schools, and they can consider developing new systems of classifying and accrediting schools with different missions and interests.

Another useful response would be to develop a cheap and accessible source by which prospective students or employers could manipulate the criteria and weights of ranking components to allow individualized assessments of schools. As many critics of the rankings have pointed out, the weights assigned to the criteria play a significant role in determining overall rank and are assigned arbitrarily: there’s no good reason, for instance, to make reputation scores twice as influential as school selectivity. However, Jeffrey Stake, a law professor at Indiana University, has developed The Law School Ranking Game, which allows users to assign weights to criteria according to their own preferences, resulting in a list of schools that will best suit them as individuals.

Decision guides like this would be even more effective if sponsored by accrediting bodies, foundations, or other professional organizations. This institutional backing would remove any doubts about the objectivity of the guide while also helping it reach a wider audience. Encouraging students to provide their own weights would personalize the information to fit their interests and might help them see how vulnerable rankings are to small changes in criteria. Moreover, such a tool could be an advertising boon—one that provides prospective students with an algorithm that best approximates that school’s own particular strengths and missions. This would allow schools an opportunity to define themselves and their missions while still providing students with comparative information.

A final strategy for mitigating the negative effects of rankings would simply involve doing more to educate consumers about the limitations. One way to get prospective students to take small differences less seriously is use a public format to explain more clearly just what these differences mean.

Understanding the broad impact of different modes of evaluation is a pressing problem. Pressures for accountability, transparency, and productivity have increased dramatically in many institutional fields around the world. However, the transparency that quantification promises is only apparent. Numbers powerfully direct attention in ways that obscure as well as illuminate. The biases and assumptions embedded in measurement regimes are hard to disclose and we often take their authority at face value.

recommended resources

Wendy Nelson Espeland and Michael Sauder. “Rankings and Reactivity: How Public Measures Recreate Social Worlds,” American Journal of Sociology (2007) 113 (1): 1–40. Discusses the process by which rankings alter the behavior of schools and their administrators.

Michèle Lamont. How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment (Harvard, 2009). An in-depth study of how experts in the social sciences and humanities define excellence in their evaluations of fellowships and grants.

Theodore M. Porter. Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (Princeton, 1995). A compelling history of the development of quantification and objectivity during the 19th and 20th centuries.

Mitchell L. Stevens. Creating a Class: College Admissions and the Education of Elites (Harvard, 2007). A description and analysis of the admissions process at an elite college, including a discussion of how the U.S. News & World Report rankings influence the decisions of both administrators and students.

Marilyn Strathern. Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics and the Academy (Routledge, 2000). Twelve contributions address the causes and consequences of the rise of accountability measures in higher education.

When I talk about my recent book The Future of Liberalism, and especially when I talk to more conservative audiences, I’m frequently asked which liberalism I favor: “classical liberalism” with its preference for the market and its belief in individual freedom, or “modern liberalism” and its reliance on the state and commitment to equality. One thing I know is this tendency to see two different kinds of liberalism is wrong.

Listen to Alan Wolfe discuss The Future of Liberalism on the Contexts Podcast.

It’s true that Adam Smith argued in favor of the market, just as John Maynard Keynes made the case for state intervention. But liberalism, as I define it, means as many people as possible should have as much say as feasible over the direction their lives will take. Autonomy and equality are goals that transcend the classical/modern divide.

In the 18th century, legacies of feudalism and the rules of mercantilism created a situation in which free markets could both allow people greater control over their lives and at the same time spread that capacity to others. Smith, although claimed today by libertarians, was a liberal, indeed one of the great liberal thinkers, not because he made such a lasting contribution to economic theory but because he developed a moral philosophy respecting both freedom and equality.

Under conditions of contemporary capitalism, by contrast, individual autonomy is threatened by poverty, economic instability, and concentrated corporate power. Using government to control economic fluctuations, as Keynes argued, gave society the capacity both to improve the ability of any one person to become more autonomous as well as to extend the same notion more broadly. Keynes, a member of the British Liberal Party, was never a socialist. He, like Smith, was a liberal because he too respected both freedom and equality.

But autonomy as well as equality is always constituted in a social context. Liberalism is as much a philosophy of how society ought to be organized as it is a defense of individual autonomy. Indeed one of the tasks in which so many liberal thinkers engaged was to defend and protect the idea of society against its rivals. For Immanuel Kant, this meant defending society against a Rousseauian preference for “nature.” For Thomas Jefferson it meant protecting the capacity for self-government against those who argued that law was God’s province, not that of human beings. Liberalism emerged as a theory of human purpose. We have the power to shape our lives according to purposes we fashion together with others. The concept of society protects us from the anarchy of individualism on the one hand and the designs of all-powerful states on the other.

Society is made possible because human beings have culture at their disposal. In writing my book I was struck by the overlap between the ideas for which liberalism stands and how theorists from Emile Durkheim to Clifford Geertz understand and emphasize culture. Culture offers the means by which human beings establish and realize their collective goals. Culture both expands individual freedom (because it multiplies so enormously the range of possibilities open to us) and promotes equality (because it ties the fates of individuals together through language and symbols). Cultureless creatures would live with neither.

This is why it’s important to recognize that in today’s intellectual climate, the great threat to liberalism comes not from those who assert the priority of God over human creativity but from those who claim culture is merely a byproduct of evolution, something that happens in spite of what individuals want and reflects processes of transmission driven by something like our genes. (Richard Dawkins calls these means of transition “memes”). Evolutionary psychology, sociobiology, and their offshoots such as behavioral economics are anything but breakthrough sciences. They are, in fact, a throw-back to the ideas of such thinkers as Bernard de Mandeville and Thomas Malthus, who questioned liberalism’s understanding of human intentionality from the start and opted instead for one form of determinism or another.

Liberals shouldn’t be afraid to call themselves liberal. Their tradition is a long, honorable, and consistent one. It includes many different thinkers with many different ideas and approaches. But so long as they’re committed to the notion that freedom can’t exist without equality and vice versa, they are liberals. I am proud to call myself one of them.

After World War II, 600,000 of Japan’s former Korean colonial subjects remained there and have never been granted automatic citizenship. Nor have their descendants.

Kiyoteru Tsutsui and Hwa Ji Shin (Social Problems, August 2008) suggest that the ongoing struggle of these resident Koreans provides a good test of theories about how local activism and international human rights movements contribute to political change inside a country. The authors examined four different campaigns to decipher the conditions under which resident Koreans won better conditions for themselves.

In the fight over mandatory fingerprinting of resident Koreans and other aliens, for example, a combination of activism at home and international consensus on rights helped finally abolish the law in 1992. In contrast, attempts to achieve the right to Korean ethnic education haven’t made much headway. Infighting among North and South Koreans on the ground over what kind of education they want has stalled the impact of the international pressure in their favor.

Ultimately, this analysis suggests that while international human rights standards is indispensable to the success of local movements, the opposite is also true: without a strong local movement, international standards alone may not be enough to improve the situation on the ground. M.K.

fruit of the non-kosher vine

The Israeli wine industry is booming, yet most new wineries aren’t following the strict laws of kosher vinting. Tal Simons and Peter Roberts (Administrative Science Quarterly, June 2008) argue this is due to the prior “non-local” winemaking experiences of Israeli vinters. Even when the kosher rules of the local industry were well established, winemakers educated or employed in Napa Valley and elsewhere were able to introduce non-kosher wine practices to the region. Kosher winemaking may have been more common, but exposure to new ideas abroad uncorked a new vintage. W.L.

much ado…for nothing

Many Americans were angry about the events of 9/11, but a study by Kraig Beyerlein and David Sikkink (Social Problems, May 2008) finds those with the most anger often fail to put their time, resources, and money where their mouths are.

Past research on civic engagement has revealed that anger is a motivating factor in joining a social movement, while sorrow and empathy drive people to volunteer time and resources to assist in natural disaster relief.

Using data from the 2002 Religion and Public Activism Survey, the authors found that people with personal connections to the events and those who strongly identify with patriotic values were among the most likely to volunteer in 9/11 relief efforts.

People who felt enraged did little to assist in relief efforts, yet those who felt empathy for victims were more likely to help, the authors learned. Those who offered the greatest amount of assistance often developed personal connections to victims through participation in community or religious vigils. Because of their higher levels of religiosity, women and African Americans were more likely to volunteer their time to assist victims, the study showed, and New Yorkers who lived close to the site of the attack were empathetic and drawn to volunteer, regardless of their religious ties. K.H.

muchachas on the move

The last two decades have seen a dramatic increase in the flow of undocumented female migrants from Mexico. Although men and women crossing the border have increasingly similar demographic profiles, there’s significant variation in how they cross and the likelihood they’ll be caught.

Using data from household surveys in 107 communities in Mexico between 1987 and 2004, Katharine Donato, Brandon Wagner, and Evelyn Patterson (International Migration Review, 2008) find women are more likely to attempt clandestine crossings with a paid smuggler, while men are more likely to cross alone.

Crossing with smugglers in high profile areas increases the chances of being apprehended. A woman making her first trip was more likely to be caught than a man, and even seasoned women face a greater likelihood of being caught than men, the study shows.

The estimated 2 million undocumented Mexican women living in the United States represent the changing face of a migrant stream once overwhelmingly composed of men. The task now is to better understand how their gender helps or hinders the journey. S.G.

are you there god? it’s me, a poor teen

Poverty not only affects American teenagers’ self-esteem, educational achievements, and life chances, but it also influences their faith, according to Philip Schwadel (Sociology of Religion, Summer 2008). Poor adolescents differ from their non-poor counterparts in religious beliefs and practices.

Using data from the National Study of Youth and Religion, Schwadel finds poor teens are more likely to have active, but private, religious lives and they’re much less likely to participate in institutional religion. Moreover, poor teens are more likely to see their faith as important to their daily lives, but its salience comes from personal prayer and scripture reading, rather than attending services, Sunday school, or youth group activities. Finally, poor teens are less likely than non-poor teens to believe in life after death, but are significantly more likely to believe there will be a judgment day for God to reward and punish.

Religious faith can help teens through their confusing adolescent years, and whether or not they live in poverty seems to help explain what that religious experience will look like. S.G.

it’s raining demography, hallelujah

Few social science surveys include questions about sexual orientation, making it difficult to track trends about lesbian, gay, and bisexual populations. And because the Census only captures a subset of the sexual minority population who “out” themselves by indicating they cohabit with a partner of the same sex, single and non-cohabiting sexual minorities aren’t included in such analyses.

Christopher Carpenter and Gary J. Gates (Demography, August 2008) recently made a breakthrough on this front, completing the first systematic analysis of same-sex partnership trends in the United States. They use two representative California public health surveys to compare trends among sexual minorities with regard to who couples up, who cohabits, and who seeks relationship recognition from the state.

They find partnership rates for lesbians are nearly the same as those for straight women, but gay men partner at a much lower rate than comparable heterosexual men. Furthermore, partnered gay men and lesbians tend to be older, are more likely to be white, and more highly educated on average than non-partnered gay men and lesbians.

These demographic differences hold even when comparing same-sex couples who choose to have their relationships recognized by the state to those who don’t. 

These results suggest generalizations drawn about sexual minority populations from the 2000 Census paint a rosier picture of the socioeconomic well-being of all sexual minorities than is actually the case. T.O.

jesus and the gang

Pentecostal Christians in Honduras have a little extra security from gang violence, and his name is Jesus.

Based on ethnography and interviews with youth there, Jon Wolseth (Latin American Perspectives, July 2008) found young men have converted in order to deal with the violence that surrounds them.

Pentecostalism offers Honduran men an alternative way of living that gangs respect. Converted men are seen as “domesticated” because their new ethics prohibit drinking, drugs, and dancing. Also, gangs respect “cristianos” because they’re seen as close to God—which means messing with one may result in divine retribution.

Following the path of Christ, then, becomes an opportunity for some men to avoid getting involved in a gang or a valid reason to leave a criminal past behind. It also gives converts newly meaningful lives. By internalizing a new set of values, including a belief in “sanctuary,” they create a protective social space apart from everyday violence.

As long as the adherent continues to demonstrate his religious commitment through action, God will protect him. This belief gives young men a narrative to explain experiences with gang aggression—from narrow escapes to heavenly justice being leveled against perpetrators. R.A.

i do give a damn about my bad reputation

If you’ve ever wondered how high-powered talent agents get their stars to show them the money, Stephen Zafirau has an answer in his recent article on “reputation work” in the Hollywood talent industry (Qualitative Sociology, June 2008).

After spending seven months at a Hollywood talent management company, Zafirau discovered that creating and maintaining a good reputation is a fundamental part of the everyday work of Hollywood agents and managers.

From fine-tuning the layout of their office furniture to practicing a confident and aggressive form of self-presentation, agents spend a great deal of time and energy on seemingly mundane tasks simply in order to meet industry-wide expectations for a “good agent.” How well an agent does these many “little” things, Zafirau’s subjects told him, makes the difference between a successful or mediocre career.

Reputation is important in many industries, of course, but the author argues it’s especially important in fickle and rapidly-changing culture industries, which offer few sure markers of agents’ competency and even fewer guaranteed pathways for client success. Amid this uncertainty, the perception that an agent is competent becomes the surest sign of competency itself and a stabilizing feature in an otherwise volatile business. D.W.

betting on addiction

Millions of dollars have been wagered on whether or not excessive gambling is a problem of neurological proportions. Indeed, drugs like naltrexone—originally used to fight heroin addiction in the 1960s—have become silver bullets for curbing urges to gamble deep inside the brain.

But like any good casino game, things aren’t what they seem. According to Scott Vrecko (Economy and Society, February 2008), irresponsible gambling didn’t become a medical problem until the gaming industry itself stepped up to the table.

With start-up money from the gambling industry, the National Center for Responsible Gambling (NCRG) was established in 1996 to sponsor research on pathological gambling addictions. Since then, researchers funded by the center have churned out hundreds of articles on the subject; at Harvard, NCRG even financed an institute on pathological betting and related disorders.

As more research is conducted on pathological gambling, thinking about gambling in non-medical terms becomes harder. Too many casinos, the lack of will power, and more sociological factors aren’t the problem—it’s the brain. This study reminds us that moral problems can become medical ones when vested interests step in. W.L.

old churches never die

The national mortality rate for U.S. religious congregations—just 1 percent since 1988—is among the lowest ever observed for any type of organization, according to Shawna Anderson and colleagues (Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, June 2008).

Sociologists have long been interested in when and why organizations decline, dissolve, and die. They’ve looked at the demise of everything from volunteer service organizations (which close at a rate of 2.3 percent) and California wineries (5 percent) to peace movements (9 percent) and chapters of Mothers Against Drunk Driving (7 percent). But few studies examine the rate at which congregations close their doors.

Based on data from the 1998 National Congregations Study, Anderson and her colleagues argue religious groups are so resilient because these “minimalist organizations” cost very little to start and maintain, and they remain flexible in the face of obstacles. A congregation doesn’t have to be a thriving, suburban mega-church with a large membership and huge budget to survive. In fact, a small, rural congregation with six members and a volunteer rabbi can also stay alive—and be well—in the American religious landscape. D.W.

good corruption, bad corruption

The bribes and payouts orchestrated by convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff and his cronies were extraordinary, even for Washington.

But while Abramoff’s exploits hinted at a government in disarray, plenty of governments function just fine with high levels of bribery and embezzlement. According to Keith Darden (Politics and Society, March 2008), corruption in the right context can actually build loyalty among officials and uphold public order.

Darden analyzed publicly available (secretly) taped conversations between former Ukrainian president Leonid Kuchma and his underlings to understand how one of the most corrupt states in the world was still effective at collecting taxes and fighting crime.

When officials used graft to buy compliance from subordinates, it reinforced the established state hierarchy, thus ensuring a high level of performance. Kuchma encouraged officials to take a “second salary” from their own departments, and they complied, recognizing that keeping their job (and avoiding prison) meant obeying Kuchma and keeping his accountants happy.

To some, this was corruption of the worst kind. However, it clearly facilitated governance when the rule of law was weak. Of course, widespread corruption only lasts as long as the general public will take it. As Darden points out, the Orange Revolution in 2004 led to the overthrow of the decade-long Kuchma regime. Perhaps it was too much corruption—even for Ukraine. W.L.

psst, you taking calculus next year?

Even as the differences in math proficiency between the sexes seem to be disappearing, differences between the math courses taken by girls and boys in American high schools remain.

According to Kenneth Frank and his co-authors (American Journal of Sociology, May 2008), we can look to girls’ classmates for clues about why they sign up for more advanced math courses.

Previous research has shown that teenagers are pretty secure in their friendships and therefore peer pressure from friends holds little sway. The authors argue the more relevant group for peer pressure is the kids with whom a teen takes many courses in common.

Because these classmates are a teen’s most likely potential pool of friends, the researchers theorized that their choice of math courses would be influenced by an attempt to fit in with the kids they wanted to be friends with, rather than those who are already their friends.

The results of the study show this peer influence had an effect on girls, but not boys. Although the research couldn’t necessarily explain why this would be so, the result is troublesome for those hoping the gap between girls and boys will continue to narrow. M.K.

foster care not as bad as we thought

Deciphering whether something is the cause of a social problem or its effect is the stuff of good sociology, and despite the prevailing assumption that foster care sets kids up to fare worse during adulthood, a new study challenges whether it’s actually true.

Stephanie Cosner Berzin (Social Service Review, August 2008) argues the social and family environments many foster kids come from, and not foster care itself, are to blame for the poverty, low educational attainment, and high rates of incarceration many foster kids face as adults.

To test this for the first time, Berzin used a sophisticated statistical technique known as propensity score matching to simulate an experiment on a nationally representative sample of young adults. Comparing the transitions of 120 foster kids to a “matched” sample of comparable kids who were never in foster care, Brezin found few differences.

According to the analysis, kids from comparable social backgrounds (in terms of neighborhoods, socioeconomic status, and other factors) fare no better during their transition to adulthood than their counterparts in foster care. Though foster care certainly didn’t improve the outcome, it also didn’t hurt foster kids’ futures, Berzin found. A.B.

risks of the rich and pregnant

Being wealthy and with-child has its own unique dangers, according to a new study in the Journal of Epidemiology (August 2008).

Mélissa Généreux and colleagues took the novel approach of analyzing how indirect exposure to traffic-related pollution may lead to preterm births and/or low birth weight in newborns. They claim that soon-to-be-mothers are impacted differently depending on their socioeconomic status (SES) and the neighborhoods they live in, but not in the expected ways.

In poorer neighborhoods there are no significant birth risks of living within 200 meters of a highway. But in wealthy neighborhoods, this same distance increases the odds of a preterm birth by 58 percent and low birth weight by 81 percent.

Researchers speculate that low SES mothers are exposed to so many other hazards in their environments that living near a highway is mostly irrelevant. Conversely, high SES women significantly undo the health benefits of living a high-SES lifestyle if they live near a highway. A.B.

rolling the dice with capitalist market reform

In a capitalist market, the winners and losers are clearly marked by their financial status, but they may be separated by their stress levels as well. Wei-Hsin Yu (Social Problems, August 2008) uses a nationally representative survey of urban Chinese residents to find out how the transition from a state-organized to a market economy is affecting their mental health.

Yu finds the transition has a positive impact on the psychological well-being of those in provinces that have the highest levels of private employment. However, since this holds true for individuals across a variety of income levels, positive mental health may result not from improvements brought about by a market economy, but rather by a belief in the possibilities such a change brings.

This points to the idea that the higher wages (or possibility thereof) in the private sector offsets the stress brought on by job insecurity. However, those in the formerly collectivized sector, now open to the whims of the market, had significant decreases in their psychological well-being.

It turns out in the craps game of free-market capitalism, winning or losing affects more than just your pocketbook. J.W.

Some can be a bit edgy, others are insightful and often amusing. But all are passionate and reaffirm our belief that we have as dedicated a following as any academic publication out there.

One of our current favorites is from a loyal reader who told us about how, instead of stacking back issues on a shelf in his office, he leaves them in choice locations—the coffee shop magazine rack, the gym, the waiting room at the doctor’s office—for others to pick up and peruse.

This small act of guerilla marketing is a wonderful reminder of Contexts’ overarching mission and goal: to bring sociology to broader, previously untapped audiences and public attention. With the help of the American Sociological Association’s media folks, in fact, we’ve had some successes recently on this front.

Robin Simon, for example, was featured in Newsweek, among other media outlets, after her piece on the stresses of parenting—also excerpted in the Utne Reader—appeared in these pages last spring. We were similarly gratified to see media using Jen’an Read’s contribution to our fall issue to help inform public understandings of Muslims in America. And we don’t think it was coincidental that David Brooks used the phrase “self-immolation express” in his syndicated New York Times column not long after our article on the topic (by Michael Biggs) appeared in the same issue in which Brooks himself was interviewed by Jerry Jacobs.

We like to think our new website, contexts.org, has played a role here as well. Our various blogs now get thousands of hits each day. And these online readers also practice guerilla marketing, linking to Contexts sites to spread the sociological word. If you haven’t had a chance yet, visit contexts.org to check out the Contexts Crawler, which tracks sociology in the national and inter national media, the popular Sociological Images blog, or one of our new podcasts.

Of course, there’s still a good deal of work left to do before we achieve total media saturation. But now that we have our feet under us, we will continue to spread the Contexts gospel, one strategically placed piece of sociology at a time.

Listen to the podcast interview with Jose!

Purchase this article from UC Press

by ron anderson

In the last decade, the number of super-wealthy Americans has doubled. The extremely rich own 73 percent of the wealth in America and are using it to form residential enclaves, creating a nation within a nation—a subnation author Robert Frank calls “Richistan.” They are unlikely to disappear if free- market capitalism continues to allow the lucky-rich to grow exponentially during the next few years.

Purchase this article from UC Press

holding a mirror to americans

by claude s. fischer

Americans of the 1950s were both fascinated and repelled by what they saw in and through the new science of public opinion polling. This complex reaction is the subject of a rich and engaging book, The Averaged American. The study raises key questions about surveys—now so ubiquitous in the American media—and about how they may have changed the Americans they sought to measure.

Purchase this article from UC Press

by shyon baumann and josée johnston

Food magazines are designed to appeal to the senses, but they provide guidance about culture, status, and the good life, as well as food. Rather than telling readers what to do, these magazines tell them how to be.

Purchase this article from UC Press

why we go home again

by kevin fox gotham

Still Waiting: Life After Katrina follows the families of three African American women as they rebuild their lives and community in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. It is a distinctively sociological portrait of human resilience in the face of disaster and recovery.

Purchase this article from UC Press

who’s counting?

by jeffrey j. sallaz

In 21, a group of smart, nerdy MIT students travel to Las Vegas to count cards and score big at some of the biggest casinos in the world. Large sums of money are won, lost, and then won again, the main character “gets the girl,” rediscovers his moral compass, and the bad guy gets what’s coming to him. But despite its critical vernier, 21 is ultimately a casino advertisement, one paid for, curiously, by moviegoers like ourselves.

Purchase this article from UC Press

bottoms up

by matthew desmond

America is witnessing a kind of renaissance of working-class culture, but it’s being ushered in by people distinctively not working-class. To understand why middle-class Americans seem so eager to embrace and consume the accoutrements of a working-class lifestyle, Matthew Desmond joins a group of tourists at Milwaukee’s Miller Brewery. Inside he finds plenty of beer as well as nostalgia for blue-collar America, but very few actual workers.

Purchase this article from UC Press