She says her mother was a mentally retarded alcoholic and drug addict who suffered from epilepsy. She was in and out of foster care from age 5 and was molested by her stepfather from age 10. She has been in 16 different psychiatric wards, taken 32 different medications, lived in four different group homes and, at one point, was transferred to a juvenile boot camp for being uncontrollable. While she managed to steer clear of drugs, she did spend time in jail and juvenile homes for assault and theft.

“I never had somewhere to feel comfortable and was always on the run,” Michele says. “I never had the structured family—the actual love, care, and devotion that I’m trying to give my children.”

Michele first met Charlie when they were both children in the foster care system. He had already dropped out of school when they reunited in Columbia, Missouri, and established a relationship. They were married at the Boone County Courthouse on July 25, 2003. Charlie was 17, Michele barely 18.

Not long after they were married, Michele learned she was pregnant. Ka’Mel was born August 11, 2004, with severe neurological problems, including epilepsy marked by intense grand mal seizures.

Doctors said she probably wouldn’t live past 2. Ka’Mel is now 3 but has the brain development level of a 1-year-old. She has trouble communicating, has behavioral problems, and requires frequent hospitalization.

The Silveys had their second child, Derek, on April 7, 2006. Their lives were relatively stable until last spring when the roof of the mobile home they had been living in for more than two years collapsed after a severe storm.

Michele has received help from nearly every social service agency in town, as well as churches and individuals. She and her children receive health care through the Medicaid program, which covers prenatal care and regular checkups. Michele also receives $342 a month through the federal Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, which has a five-year lifetime cap.

The most difficult challenge for the Silveys has been finding safe, clean, affordable housing. Most shelters are reluctant to take in people with serious medical problems, and because Ka’Mel’s epilepsy is so severe and Michele suffers from seizures as well, even temporary housing is difficult to find.

Meanwhile, the Columbia Housing Authority has a long waiting list, and although Michele applied for a subsidized apartment in May 2007 she was told in September she’ll have to wait another nine months.

So many factors have converged—Ka’Mel’s health needs, the couple’s lack of credit and job skills, and Charlie’s criminal record—that finding a stable home at this point is an almost insurmountable task.

“Chronic homelessness is a story with no beginning, middle, and end,” says Colleen Coble, executive director of the Missouri Coalition Against Domestic Violence, “just chapter after chapter of instability.”

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

E.C. Hedberg: dramatic calamitas

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

The story wasn’t all that complicated or, for that matter, unfamiliar. Its basic punch-line was that one of the reviewers recommended rejecting the paper on the grounds that it was very well written and thus more suited for a publication like the New York Times Magazine than a mainstream sociology journal.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

selling integration in life magazine

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

what we learn from political stink-eye

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

don’t worry about old age, be happy

Lighting another candle on the birthday cake each year may not seem like a cheerful occasion, but think again. According to Yang Yang (American Sociological Review, April 2008), growing older may actually make us happier.

Yang draws upon the General Social Survey to show how happiness actually peaks in our late 50s, long after the supposed “glory days” of youth. But not everybody experiences the same levels of joy as they age. Baby boomers, for example, report the lowest levels of happiness, perhaps due to more competition with their peers in school and the workplace.

Inequalities in happiness also decreased over the past 30 years. Whereas women are happier than men in youth, there’s no noticeable difference later in life. Differences between whites and African Americans also decreased with age, though whites remain significantly happier. This may be thanks to shared life experiences that trigger (or dampen) happy thoughts over a lifetime, such as marrying a sweetheart, retiring from the workforce, or losing a loved one.

Yang’s study gives us something to look forward to as our hair grays and our pace slows—the grass does turn greener on the other side of the hill. Carpe diem. R.A.

and that’s why my name is on the annual report

For some companies, the second letter in CEO might as well stand for ego. And according to Arijit Chatterjee and Donald Hambrick (Administrative Science Quarterly, September 2007), having a narcissistic boss could bring big dividends to a company.

Chatterjee and Hambrick measured the narcissism of more than 100 chief executive officers in the software industry and looked at its effect on company performance. Evidence of vanity included lots of headshots in annual reports, the use of first-person pronouns when talking about the company, and relatively high pay for the top executive.

As it turns out, spending a lot of time in front of the mirror could be good for the company, at least some of the time. Companies with a narcissistic boss made bigger and bolder acquisitions, and their strategies were more dynamic. However, big egos correlate with big losses, too. Company performance was more erratic and extreme for the self-absorbed firms, and thus they did no better or worse over the long run than their humbler counterparts.

This study reveals how the personality of a leader can shape the performance of an organization, particularly in an industry as unpredictable as the software sector. And it shows a big payoff every now and then doesn’t necessarily offset the narcissistic boss staring into the pond at the company picnic. W.L.

when is a felon not a felon?

Being convicted of a felony has major impacts long after the prison sentence is up. That is, unless no one ever finds out about the conviction.

Florida law allows judges to “withhold adjudication” for people convicted of felonies, which means individuals keep the right to vote and other civil liberties, and can even lawfully claim they were never convicted of the crime.

Ted Chiricos, Kelle Barrick, William Bales, and Stephanie Bontrager (Criminology, August 2007) studied 96,000 men and women found guilty of a felony, about half of whom had adjudication withheld. They found that being legally labeled a “felon” made people significantly more likely to commit another crime within two years of their release, even when accounting for the type of crime committed and community into which they returned.

The study shows the powerful and long-lasting effects of deviant labels given to people convicted of past crimes. It also points to the promise of policies aiming to reduce future harm rather than simply punish the offender. J.W.

fat in the fire

Judged by current body mass index standards, nearly two-thirds of Americans today are overweight.

Whatever you may think about these standards and figures, Abigail Saguy and Rene Almeling (Sociological Forum, March 2008) argue that news media coverage and reporting exaggerates the extent of the weight problem in the United States—the so-called obesity epidemic—and obscures its underlying systemic and genetic roots.

Saguy and Almeling reach their conclusions by comparing medical science publications on weight and health with those of news media reports. They find that since the mid-1990s the mainstream news media has run more stories on obesity than scientific journals, and tends to characterize the issue in more evocative and extreme terms. They also find the news media are more likely to offer individualist explanations for weight problems, especially when discussing children, minorities, and the poor.

Selective reporting partially explains the news media’s tendencies, the authors say, but the press releases distributed by researchers and medical journals are also partly to blame. The fact that “alarmist studies are more likely to be covered in the media,” they conclude, “may make scientists even more prone to presenting their findings in the most dramatic light possible.” C.S.

becoming white by voting red?

Recent election results show that self-identified Mexican Americans are increasingly voting Republican. Carleen Basler (Ethnic and Racial Studies, January 2008) argues that this trend toward conservatism is influenced by the racial identity of Mexican Americans, their desire to be good Americans, and their conflation of whiteness with American-ness.

Basler’s claims are based on interviews with more than 150 naturalized Mexican Americans in California, and their explanations for voting for President George W. Bush in 2004 are illustrative.

Mexican Americans who supported Bush did so because he made them feel included in his campaign efforts and in his vision for America’s future—a future they believed positioned them as equals. Voting Republican also gave Mexican Americans a hedge against the racialized stigma and deviant images associated with illegal immigration and terrorism. It was especially attractive for upwardly mobile segments of this community, particularly those who had “whiter” skin and were more educated and better off financially.

Especially during divisive times, Basler concludes, Mexican Americans feel compelled to prove their loyalty to the nation and voting offers them a means to do so. One wonders what these Americans will decide is the “most American” vote in November. E.B.

it’s not just florida

When we think of immigrants we often imagine young, able-bodied men and women in search of work and better opportunities for themselves and their families. But many forms of international migration no longer fit this description. Per Gustafson (Ethnic and Racial Studies, March 2008) recently interviewed members of one such group: retirees from Sweden who decided to spend their golden years in Spain.

Gustafson claims that the relocation of retirees from Sweden to Spain is driven largely by tourism, warm weather, and seasonal residency. Basically, these retirees owned vacation homes they could move into when they moved out of the labor force. Despite being retired, migrant retirees shared many traits with other, more traditional migrant groups: They went back and forth between countries frequently, maintained ties with family and friends back home, and forged new hybrid identities and social ties in their new countries.

Differences, however, were also noticeable. Retiree migrants had little interest or need for politics while labor migrants tend to be politically involved. Further, the flow of economic remittances is reversed: labor migrants typically send money back home, but the northern Europeans brought their pensions with them to Spain.

Clearly, the scale, scope, and complexity of migration is increasing dramatically in this new, global era. E.B.

welfare queens, japanese style

In the United States, single moms on welfare are often assumed to be lazy, low-class young women living large on the overly generous resources of the welfare state. So familiar and engrained is this stereotype that even its critics sometimes fail to consider how culturally specific and consequential it may be.

In contrast, the common picture of single mothers in Japan is of middle-class, highly educated workers who don’t really need state support. While these assumptions are obviously quite different from the American welfare queen stereotypes, they’re no less problematic.

According to Chisa Fujiwara (Japan Focus, January 2008), the majority of single moms in Japan do work—and at much higher levels than any other country in the world. For example, 87 percent of Japanese single moms hold full-time jobs, compared with 77 percent in the United States, one of the next-highest national rates.

The problem, according to Fujiwara, is that Japan’s extreme gender gap in wages makes these hard-working moms among the poorest workers in the country. The disjuncture is particularly troubling because the stereotypes—not the facts—have informed Japan’s extensive welfare-to-work reforms over the last decade.

Perhaps welfare stereotypes are as diverse as they are prevalent and problematic—not that this cross-cultural insight makes social policy any easier. C.S.

when to trust someone over 30

Generations of young radicals have found inspiration in Abbie Hoffman’s famous dictum about never trusting adults, but Hava Rachel Gordan (Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, December 2007) found an exception to the rule.

After two years observing two youth activist organizations on the west coast and numerous interviews, Gordon found that young political activists were willing to work with adults when those adults acted as mentors and/or represented the cause to elected officials or others unsympathetic to the cause. Such roles and relationships allowed for sustained adult input and advice that helped the young activists accomplish their goals and shift their energies from one issue and action to another.

In contrast, young political organizers who took pride in their unencumbered radicalism had difficulty sustaining their actions beyond a single issue.

Perhaps Hoffman should have said: “Don’t trust anyone over 30, unless it works to your advantage.” K.C.

what would jesus protest?

Albert Cleage’s Black Messiah may have provoked surprise or even outrage among white Americans when published in the 1970s, but the idea was far from new. The belief that Jesus was black has a long history in the African American community and still resonates with many black Christians today. According to recent polling, in fact, about one-third of African Americans who attend church at least once a year think of Christ as black.

A recent study by Laura A. Reese, Ronald E. Brown, and James David Ivers (Journal of Political Behavior, December 2007) explored the effects of these beliefs on political participation. Analyzing data from the 1993–94 National Black Politics Study, the authors found the belief in a black Christ is a “radicalizing” political force.

African Americans who believe Christ to be black are more likely to engage in radical forms of political participation, such as protests, marches, attending political meetings, and signing petitions. For some, the perception that Jesus was black is also associated with the desire for economic autonomy.

More research will help us fully understand the role of black-Christ beliefs in the African American community, especially in terms of how they interact with the political nature of many contemporary black churches. Still, the authors stress that the political effects of seeing Christ as black is not a function of radical political beliefs but rather the result of envisioning God as part of “one’s spiritual and natural self.” K.C.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you read the PDF version or have read the print version, be sure to skip ahead to some online resources related to this article.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

crisis in media coverage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The reaction from establishment sports writers has been fierce and bizarre. In an episode of Bob Costas’s HBO show Costas Live, Pulitzer-prize winner and Friday Night Lights author Buzz Bissinger indulged in a profane rant against deadspin.com founder Will Leitch, blaming the blogosphere for the downfall of the sports writing medium, instead of identifying its popularity as a reflection of the failure of sports writing. Costas chimed in with Bissinger, likening the blogosphere to being forced to listen to what “a cab driver” thinks about sports. In the past, Costas has called bloggers “pathetic, get-a-life losers.” His contempt is shared by many A-list sports columnists, who are quick to seethe red-faced that “some guy in his basement” gets to have equal voice, or in Leitch’s case, even exceed the popularity of the self-appointed experts. (It’s always “some guy in his basement.” Sports bloggers for some reason don’t live in apartments.)

Besides sour grapes, the most pronounced feature of the bloghaters is their ignorance, demonstrated by the constant polemic that blogs are monolithic. There are sports blogs in every style, for every team, and they have changed both the way we read and the way we understand sports.

“It’s pretty amazing,” Leitch told me. “[Before blogs] when you didn’t like your local sports columnist that was your only choice. Now there are new voices and new options… [Traditional media has] to recognize that they can’t just keep doing the things that they did and try something a little new, that’s kind of what people want.”

What infuriates sports writers are that people on the web—that contemptible cab driver—are calling them on their privilege, their isolation, and the fact that far too many are moonlighting as flacks, writing PR for teams on their BlackBerries as they rush to another TV appearance. Their inability to hold an audience has opened the door to Leitch and his ilk. The audience of bloggers, and the continued decrepitude of celebrity sports writing should signal sports sociologists that fans yearn for new ways of seeing the game.

scholarship that fills the void

If sports sociology wants to affect how we think about our sports world, it has to change how it communicates.

“It would help the business of thinking sports tremendously if sports sociology, as a discipline, would demonstrate less professional anxiety. There is too little insistence upon argument, and too much emphasis upon citation…The refusal to argue is disguised as ‘scientific research’ or just ‘science,’” said Grant Farred, a professor at Cornell University and author of Phantom Calls: Race and the Globalization of the NBA and Long Distance Love: A Passion for Football.

His point is well taken. There is far too little insistence on joining the fray and taking a position about the state of our sports world and too many heads in the academy. Instead, the field might consider the approach of Mary Jo Kane, who excels at using her research to make an argument and then fighting for that argument to be heard.

The sports sociologist from the University of Minnesota, who specializes in gender and sport for women, undertook a far-reaching study of images of female athletes putting their bodies on display for a wide-ranging focus group of both men and women. Kane and her research team found a very basic truth: Sex may sell magazines, but it doesn’t sell women’s sport.

“And it alienates the core of the fan base that’s already there. Women…18 to 34 and 35 to 55 are offended by these images. And older males, fathers with daughters, taking their daughters to sporting events to see their favorite female athletes, are deeply offended by these images,” she said.

As for the young men excited to see race car driver Danica Patrick in leather, spread out on a car, “they want to buy the magazines but they didn’t want to consume the sports,” she said. This should be an earth-shaking revelation for every executive in the Women’s Tennis Association, the WNBA, and the LPGA, who have for decades operated under the assumption that a little leg goes a long way.

But women’s sports, Kane argues, will need more than logic to move away from the abyss of abject objectification.

“This is deeper. This is also about what runs in the bone marrow of women’s sports, namely homophobia. They are very well meaning but they also want to distance themselves from the lesbian label…How do you do that? You reassure the viewing audiences, the corporate sponsors, the TV networks, and the female athletes themselves, that, ‘No, no, no! Sports won’t make your daughter gay.’ Women’s sports will be more acceptable if you believe, even though it is stereotypical and inaccurate, that if you are pretty and feminine in a traditional sense then you are not gay.”

But what about this individual culpability of the female athlete? What about those who say that provocative poses are about celebrating their bodies, and celebration of the body beautiful has been a part of sports since ancient Greece? Kane answers, “What muscle group do bare breasts belong to? You can show off your body without being naked in a passive, sexually provocative pose.”

This question of women’s athletics seeing “breasts as muscle groups” is about more than whether women’s sports is taking itself seriously. It’s whether universities, boosters, and donors take it seriously as well. And it is, Kane believes, about the future of college athletics.

“The end result of this is that when resources are precious, and you dole out those resources, and you don’t take women’s athletics as seriously as men, then there are tangible consequences. Athletic directors get a pass to just not take it seriously,” she said.

Kane revealed her findings not at an academic conference but at the Women’s Sports Foundation. Afterwards representatives from ESPN asked to speak further with her in the weeks to come. Whether she can make a dent in coverage is certainly to be determined. But at least she’s entering the fray and becoming a party to the debate.

Another sports scholar doing something similar is the University of Illinois historian Adrian Burgos, Jr., author of Playing America’s Game: Baseball, Latinos, and the Color Line.

“While those within organized sports at the national, league, or team levels tend to be most focused on and trained to look at the future development of the sport, scholars who study sport look long-range both forward and backwards over time. This produces insights into what has changed that those who look primarily at ‘growing the game’ can overlook,” said Burgos.

With this approach Burgos developed a theory about why the number of African American baseball fans and players continues to dwindle. Major League Baseball’s (MLB) attention to integration on the field came at the expense of those off the field who had shaped generations of black baseball players, he asserts. And the game for African Americans can’t be reinvigorated without a major reinvestment in black baseball.

“Within this private institution,…the process of integration remained strictly in the hands of the very same individuals who had barred blacks (and the majority of Latinos) from participating in MLB for several generations. Through their refusal to incorporate the Negro Leagues and [their] expertise at the management and ownership levels in any meaningful way, these owners basically wiped out the infrastructure of black baseball in the United States, something that would become manifest a couple of generations later,” Burgos explained.

That impact was felt for generations to come, until 1974 when Frank Robinson became the first African American manager of a major league team. But in the meantime, a generation of African American men, devoid of off-the-field opportunities at the highest levels of the game, turned their attention where they could most readily have an impact—local football and basketball.

This perspective, Burgos told me, came about after studying the history of black baseball, integration, and sports today. Together with similar work by fellow scholars Alan Klein and Milton Jamail on Latin American baseball, Major League practices in Latin America, and sport in U.S. society, the policy implications of this research have begun to influence front-office officials at several major league clubs. These new practices have the potential to transform the culture of baseball.

into the fray

Burgos and Kane both demonstrate how research can begin to breach the higher echelons of the athletic industrial complex. But much more humble, grassroots methods can accomplish this as well.

Sports sociologists and sports sociology programs—be they ghettoized on campuses in Cultural Studies or Kinesiology—should fight to have a sports and society column in their college paper. Every sports sociology student should try to intern in his or her school’s athletic department. Professors should actively seek to intervene in local sports radio. Book proposals should be submitted to non-academic, commercial presses. The art of blogs should continue, as it has started, to be integrated into a curriculum.

In fact, sociologists interested in sports should take a cue from Providence College and actively liaison with athletic directors to break down divisions on campus between the jocks and those studying them.

The athletic industrial complex keeps throwing pitch after juicy pitch down the middle of the plate. It’s time for sports sociologists to get the bats off their shoulders and begin to shape debates within the sports world.

Its size and vitality have made it “the second most important country on the planet,” to use Newsweek columnist Fareed Zakaria’s words, on an array of major political, economic, and social issues. Its rich cultural history has had widespread influences throughout the world.

As this issue of Contexts goes to press, I’m leading a group of sociologists on an American Sociological Association-sponsored trip to China. We’re taking advantage of the chance to observe the scale and pace of change there, as well as how political forces are shaping economic and social forces (and vice versa).

China emerged as a global superpower in the 21st century. Its 1.3 billion people make it the most populous country in the world, constituting about 20 percent of the world’s population. Its economic growth rate—increasing at an average of 9 percent annually since the early 1980s—represents the longest period of sustained economic growth in modern times. Its Gross Domestic Product makes up 13 percent of global output, ranking second only to the United States, Thomas Campanella tells us. It’s also the world’s largest consumer of basic food, energy, and industrial commodities.

China’s growth has produced bad news as well as good, however. Some 400 million people have been lifted out of poverty in the past 30 years and new cities, roads, and ports have been built, as Zakaria reported earlier this year. But this progress has come at considerable cost in terms of environmental degradation and growing inequality.

As a consequence of these economic and cultural forces&and because of its historic significance&the World Tourism Organization predicts China will become the largest tourist market in the world by 2020. Interest in China will undoubtedly accelerate due to the 2008 Summer Olympics, which will take place shortly after our trip and center the world’s attention on Beijing.

This focus on China isn’t new for sociologists, of course. China has long been central to American sociology due to both the frequent exchange of students and its significance as a research site for studying the Chinese version of capitalism, according to Michael D. Kennedy and Miguel A. Centeno.

A 10-day visit to a country as vast and complex as China is obviously limited in how much we can see or do to appreciate the diversity of Chinese social life, the country’s economic system, or its political intrigues. Nevertheless, on this trip we will glimpse some of the central challenges and issues facing the country. It will also help us ask better questions about how what’s going on there may impact the United States and the rest of the world.

During our visit we plan to observe the massive urban development taking place in the capital city of Beijing and the port city of Shanghai—the center of China’s unprecedented economic growth and a city that has been transformed from one that had hardly any modern high-rise office towers in 1980 to one that today has more than twice as many as New York City.

We will observe some of the results of the massive rural change and migration of Chinese peasants from poor areas and inland provinces to work in the construction industry in Beijing and Shanghai. In our discussions with sociologists at Peking University and Fudan University, we will also explore the nature and impact of social change in China, political and economic changes, sociology’s institution-building, and the human rights abuses for which the country has often been criticized.

Visit contexts.org/china for photos and reports from the trip. I hope you’re as enthusiastic about reading about these experiences as we are about sharing them. And I look forward to sharing more with you during ASA’s Annual Meeting in Boston next month.

If the Beijing Olympic Games are the coming out party for a Chinese Communist leadership eager to showcase the country’s achievement and aspirations, many zealous party crashers have announced their early arrival.

From the usual suspects like Reporters Without Borders and Human Rights Watch to the unusual alliance of Nobel laureates, U.S. law makers, and Hollywood celebrities, the rallying cry for detractors has been China’s human rights violations at home and abroad.

For the better part of the past year, most of the international media attention and political debate has focused on high-profile, highly charged cases involving Sudan, Tibet, and the torch relay itself. Less visible to international audiences (and, likely, to future Olympic visitors), however, is another kind of rights activism.

Without any national organizations or charismatic public leaders, a quiet “rights revolution” is taking shape among ordinary Chinese people whose everyday lives have been radically, and in many cases adversely, transformed by three decades of market reform. What the Chinese call weiquan, meaning “the protection of lawful rights,” has become a generalized social movement commanding intense passion in many quarters of Chinese society.

Weiquan is invoked constantly in different kinds of public discussions, including newspaper headlines, academic writings, and everyday conversations. Rather than appealing to the purportedly universal notion of human rights, Chinese citizens demand the specific rights—labor rights, property rights, and land rights—enshrined in various Chinese laws.

The rights activism of weiquan is profoundly transforming Chinese society, the Chinese state, and the relationships between them. With the state simultaneously promoting rights and restricting them (if not violating them altogether), and with society itself deeply contentious and in constant change, the outcomes of all this are far from clear. But a better understanding of how rights—and the law itself—are being constructed and struggled over provides a fascinating window into contemporary China.

the challenges of legal revolution

The Chinese leadership has repeatedly insisted that “ruling the country according to the law” (yifazhiguo) is a key principle of government in the reform era. Written into the constitution in 1999, all major party announcements and government reports invoke the “rule of law,” and in the past 25 years, more than 400 pieces of legislation, 1,000 administrative acts, 10,000 local rules and regulations, and 30,000 administrative procedures have been enacted or amended. To appreciate just how phenomenal this legislative explosion has been, consider that during the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976 the government passed only nine laws.

That this legal proliferation has occurred alongside China’s spectacular economic development is not coincidental. But more than just the imperative of the market economy motivates the turn to the law. The legitimation of one-party authoritarianism is another major concern for the Chinese Communist government.

Popular support for the ruling regime was strong in the first two decades of market reform, but in recent years discontent about social injustice, wealth, and power gaps has fueled social unrest. The central government therefore now emphasizes legality and a wide range of “rights” for citizens as a means of ensuring a harmonious and just society. This new configuration has been the basis of rights claims made by aggrieved Chinese citizens. Outside China, globalization of legal norms and practices has also reinforced the practical need for and the legitimating functions of Chinese law reform.

If the central government in Beijing pursues legal reform to bolster its authoritarian rule, however, the implementation of law and protection of actual citizens’ rights face formidable obstacles at the local level.

The top priority of local governments—those at or below the provincial levels—is accumulation of revenue and resources rather than legal reform. Partly this is the result of the central government’s strategy of economic and fiscal decentralization. By allowing revenue retention at the provincial and local levels, the central leadership has prodded entrenched vested interests among provincial officials to promote and sustain the reform drive. But fiscal decentralization has also generated powerful financial incentives for local governments and government officials to collude with employers, investors, and land developers in violation of citizens’ lawful rights. Since the Chinese judiciary is also decentralized, with local governments funding and employing court personnel, local courts are often beholden to the capricious dictates and interventions of local officials.

Filling the gap between laws promulgated by Beijing and lawlessness at the local level is the precarious crucible of rights activism being forged by Chinese citizens. Navigating fluid political spaces, Chinese workers, homeowners, and farmers are using strategies ranging from petitions to government bureaucracies, new civil associations, and public protests to work both within and against emerging systems of law and legality in contemporary Chinese society.

labor rights activism

A series of labor laws have been passed since the early 1990s, and more are expected. The National Labor Law (1994), the Trade Union Law (1992 and 2002), and most recently the Labor Contract Law (2007) and the Law on the Mediation and Arbitration of Employment Disputes (2007) have replaced “policies” and the elusive socialist social contract in regulating employment relations. These laws explicitly define such workers’ rights as hours, compensation, wage rates, and social insurance. At the same time, in an effort to contain labor activism within institutional channels, the law lays down a set of bureaucratic procedures for labor dispute resolution and prohibits independent unionism.

In spite of all this legislation, labor standards in China have remained abysmal over the 30-year period since economic reform began. Chinese labor problems have been so obvious and unsettling that the central government felt compelled to commission a multi-ministry survey in 2006 on the conditions of the country’s 130 million migrant workers. These workers are largely from the countryside and provide the main source of labor for manufacturing, construction, and services in the country. The survey gave an authoritative and shocking portrait: only 12.5 percent of workers have a signed labor contract and only 48 percent are paid regularly. Most work every day of the week and are seldom paid the legal overtime wage.

Lacking the ability to form independent unions, aggrieved workers find the National Labor Law and the legalized labor arbitration systems—flawed as they are—their most important institutional sources of leverage. In their attempt to claim legal rights, workers are also assisted by numerous (their ephemeral and ambiguous legal status makes it almost impossible, not to mention undesirable, to count them) non-governmental organizations focused on labor. Many major cities have non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that specialize in offering legal advice or other assistance to migrant or female workers.

Under the influence and guidance of transnational or international labor advocacy groups, Chinese NGOs adopt standard features resembling those in other countries: legal counseling sessions, hot-lines, and labor law classes. The protocols of internationally funded projects often require an annual quota of labor lawsuits for which these organizations must provide representation. They usually choose cases with “paradigmatic” significance and wide demonstrative effects, either for the court or for workers.

For example, a popular NGO servicing women workers, well-funded by international foundations and visited by prominent female political figures including Hillary Clinton and Cheri Blair, eagerly took up a domestic worker’s complaint about wage arrears and lack of rest days. The goal was to stir public debate about the lack of legal protection for the large number of women working in private middle-class homes in the cities.

Another NGO sued the American fast food giant Kentucky Fried Chicken, which employed mostly dispatched (or subcontracted) workers and allegedly denied them severance payments when workers left the firm. This case became a cause célèbre for Chinese NGOs when the fast food giant stopped hiring subcontracted workers altogether.

The idea of “labor rule of law” is universally embraced, a common denominator among the international labor community, the Chinese government, and Chinese NGOs. Its utility for workers and labor activists in China is apparent in the newly established national network of Working Stations for Migrant Workers Legal Aid, a joint effort between the United Nations Development Programme, the All China Lawyers’ Association, and the China International Center of Economic and Technical Exchange under the Ministry of Commerce. This project aims to train a nationwide network of qualified lawyers dedicated to working full-time for migrant workers in 20 provinces.

The growth of the Chinese bar has also, perhaps inadvertently, contributed. Denounced as “rightists” in the Mao era and numbering only 3,000 at the beginning of reform, there are now some 150,000 attorneys in China and another 100,000 “barefoot lawyers” working without formal certification. Since labor cases aren’t economically attractive, bigger law firms and more established lawyers shun them in favor of lucrative corporate and criminal cases. Yet, younger and newly minted lawyers without established clients, as well as lawyers without official registration, take up labor rights cases out of moral and civic obligation, or simply to fill an emerging market niche. Regardless of their motivation, the growth of the legal profession has channeled labor grievances into the legal system.

With legal assistance, many workers are now filing labor dispute arbitration claims and lawsuits, while others take their grievances to the street by blocking traffic, holding managers hostage, or threatening to commit collective suicide. Labor unrest even prompted Beijing to pass (against very vocal and public opposition from foreign investors) a controversial Labor Contract Law in 2007 that required employers to sign labor contracts with employees and “restricted” the practice of casual employment. However, the institutional dependence of the Chinese judiciary on local governments seriously undermines the legal system’s capacity to resolve the mounting pressures generated by rising legal rights consciousness, labor unrest, and persistent violation of labor laws by employers.

property rights activism

Housing stock in urban China has been almost totally privatized since 1998 when the government overhauled the public housing system previously organized by socialist work-units and local governments. And while private residential neighborhoods have since mushroomed in major cities, violence by thugs has become a serious challenge for urban homeowners.

Thugs are routinely hired by land developers and their subsidiary property management companies to silence and intimate homeowner activists or elected members of the homeowners’ associations who dare challenge their interests. A Renmin University study of 100 residential neighborhoods in Beijing found that from 2001 to 2005, 80 percent experienced serious conflicts between property management companies and homeowners and 37 percent witnessed physical violence and bodily injuries in these disputes. Hence the term “property management terrorism.”

The root cause of property rights violations is the enormous financial interests at stake for both local governments and their allied land developers in China’s housing market. The incentive for local governments to protect the interests of land developers and their subsidiary property management companies can be traced to fiscal decentralization, especially fiscal reform in 1994. At that time, the central government regained budgetary control over a range of taxation revenues from local governments. As a consequence, local administrations become ever more eager to locate or create sources of revenue that could be kept at the local level. Land lease sales and urban redevelopment projects emerged as the two main revenue streams for local governments under this fiscal regime.

This tendency was exacerbated when the former Premier Zhu Rongji targeted the housing market as a way to stimulate domestic consumption after the 1997 Asian financial crisis dampened external growth. Since the late 1990s, in fact, construction and real estate have become the pillars of local state finance, accounting for 50 percent or more of budgetary income in many localities and jurisdictions. Moreover, many land development companies are owned by municipal agencies, state-owned companies, or official acquaintances. In Shanghai, a newspaper report found 60 percent of real estate developers in 2006 were “red-hat merchants,” or private businessmen backed by the government.

As in the case of labor rights, the collusion of local officials and property capital has created major obstacles for property owners seeking to enact and ensure their lawful rights as stipulated in the 2007 Property Rights Law. This landmark piece of legislation, crafted explicitly for the rapidly growing Chinese middle-class, calls for the establishment of homeowners’ associations and stipulates the rights and responsibilities of homeowners’ congresses over a wide range of community affairs, including sanitation, security, and environmental protection.

Thanks to their intricate and intimate ties with the local government (especially the Ministry of Construction) land developers and their affiliated management companies encroach on homeowners’ rights in numerous ways. They have been known to, among other things, convert green areas into additional housing units, overcharge management fees and parking rentals, misappropriate income generated by advertisements on bulletin boards, intimidate homeowners who want to change property management companies, and obstruct the formation of homeowners’ associations.

Aided by their relatively privileged social backgrounds and technical and legal knowledge, homeowners have been able to resist these practices in a wide array of ways. They have filed lawsuits and made extensive use of neighborhood websites. Some homeowners have staged hunger strikes for collective ownership of hot water furnaces, used motorcade protests against property management companies overcharging for parking spaces, and refused to pay management fees. Others collectively petition the Ministry of Construction or the local government when the local authorities refuse to register newly formed homeowners’ associations, or stage mass occupations of property management company offices. Leveraging the media has also helped augment the social impact of homeowner activism.

Property rights activism has a tendency to evolve from concrete issues concerning daily community services to more general demands for power and autonomy in running their communities. Activism sharpens homeowners’ collective awareness of the power imbalance that belies the ideals of equality inscribed in the law. This direct confrontation between local state interests and their agents on the one hand, and homeowners organized as neighborhood communities on the other, is producing an awakening among homeowners as “citizens” in relation to the state and not just as owners of material objects.

Whereas labor NGOs are vulnerable both financially and organizationally, the legality of homeowners’ associations is enshrined in the Property Rights Law. They’re also “organic” in the sense that they’re organized and staffed by homeowners themselves and based in their communities, unlike labor NGOs that are organized by professionals, academics, or transnational advocacy groups. In major cities, including Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Chongqing, Shanghai, and Beijing, federations of homeowners’ associations have formed and pledged support for each others’ work. To date, only a minority of commercial housing neighborhoods have elected a homeowners’ association. The Ministry of Construction announced that 18 percent of Beijing’s commercial residential neighborhoods have homeowners’ associations. The legal right to form their own associations isn’t used widely yet, but the trend is unmistakable.

Finally, as in the case of labor rights activism, lawyers play a central role. Many are attracted to the large and lucrative market property rights lawsuits offer. Others are motivated by political idealism and civic consciousness. The rising volumes of property-related civil lawsuits and administrative litigation lawsuits against the Ministry of Construction, which oversees the governance of commercial residential communities, attests to the intensifying conflicts over property rights.

rural land rights activism

In December 2007, tens of thousands of farmers in 150 villages in three provinces (Tianjin, Heilongjiang, and Shaanxi) made a highly unusual political move: they issued three separate statements to the entire country that they were re-taking their land, which had been illegally requisitioned by local officials. It was an act they characterized as their collective right under rural land use rights regulated by the Land Management Law, most recently revised in 1998, and the Rural Land Contracting Law (2003).

One public announcement asserted that “rural collective land should be owned by all the villagers…Officials and their powerful allies abused the authority of the state and the village collective to usurp our rights as land owners. While they turned themselves into landlords, we villagers become their serfs. We have decided to change this form of land ownership…Land is farmers’ life blood and their most important human right.”

Extraordinarily bold moves like these are part of a rising tide of rural struggles over land use rights. Coercive expropriation, withholding of farmer compensations, and lack of job replacement for those whose land has been taken—each now trigger several thousand land-related conflicts in the Chinese countryside every year. These protests often turn violent and see paramilitary troops, armed police, and hired thugs clashing with villagers who resisted illegal land grabs by local officials. Protesters have been shot dead and villagers have taken local officials hostage.

As in the case of labor and property rights activism, the source of land rights protests is the institutional conflict between decentralized accumulation and legalistic legitimation—in other words, between the interest in revenue and growth of the local government and the central government’s concern for maintaining stability and equity through law.

The Land Administration Law and the Law on Rural Land Contracting stipulates that rural land is owned by “village collectives,” while individual households retain land use rights by contracting plots of land from these village collectives, initially for 15, and later 30, years. But these collectives are vulnerable to the decisions of local governments.

Under the pretext of “urban development,” the establishment of high-tech zones and university cities, or simply “public interests,” local governments can ignore the negotiation procedures and compensations stipulated by law and transfer—for a fee—the farmers’ land to state-owned land. The land-use right can then be sold to private developers. Local governments stand to reap a windfall of profits from such land seizures. Indeed, an estimated 34 million to 40 million farmers have lost some of all of their land since 1987.

Like aggrieved workers and homeowners, villagers vent their discontent by petitioning, filing lawsuits, eliciting media attention, and organizing collective protests. Since land grabs often involve local (township and county) governments or the “high-tech zone committee” under them, the Administrative Litigation Law provides the legal basis for farmers to complain about official abuse of power. Again, since the authority of the judiciary is partial and subordinated to the local government, many of these lawsuits have been dismissed by the court.

Blocked by local judiciary, enraged farmers often resort to petitioning Beijing or the provincial government. These long distance “appeals” are increasingly becoming a hide-and-seek game wherein local police and monitors attempt to intercept, arrest, and detain petitioners heading to the national or provincial capital. Mass petitioning and violent confrontations have increased in tandem with farmers’ use of national laws to fight local infractions of land-use laws.

In these legal mobilizations, farmers implicitly or explicitly assert the right to be treated as equal citizens with access to the protection of the law, in addition to insisting on the right to subsistence. Compared to workers, farmers fighting for their land rights command very little organizational or financial support from either international associations or the domestic NGO sector. Compared to homeowners in cities, farmers are also more financially constrained and have less access to professional legal knowledge and services.

An intriguing development in this arena that could have repercussions in others in coming years is the rise of barefoot lawyers. The Chinese legal system allows citizens the right to enlist the legal representation of other ordinary citizens, so long as no fee is charged. These volunteer lawyers are self-taught legal workers motivated by a sense of justice, righteousness, and local heroism to protect fellow villagers and farmers against all kinds of local official abuses.

beyond beijing

The fact that the fights over everyday rights described here have escaped international headlines is perhaps not surprising given media conventions and conventional biases and assumptions about China and the Olympic Games themselves. But it’s nonetheless disappointing. A real opportunity lost.

This is not only because an understanding of rights activism affords such a rich perspective on Chinese culture and society and all the forces driving the near-total transformation of the most populace nation in the world. It’s also because of the tensions between economic growth and social stability, between authoritarian rule and a more responsive state and involved citizenry; the problematic relationships between state and local government; and the more grounded and specific cultural conceptions of rights and the law itself. And perhaps most importantly, it’s because these are the struggles that will linger and define China long after the spectators and the spectacle of the Olympic Games depart.

recommended resources

Neil J. Diamant, Stanley Lubman, and Kevin J. O’Brien, eds. Engaging the Law in China: State, Society and Possibilities for Justice (Stanford University Press, 2005). This reviews a range of legal rights struggles in China.

Ching Kwan Lee. Against the Law: Labor Protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt (University of California Press, 2007). The author’s work explores the politics of labor rights involving migrant workers and state sector workers.

Elizabeth J. Perry. “The Chinese Conceptions of ‘Rights’: From Mencius to Mao and Now,” Perspectives on Politics (2008) 6(1): 37-50. The author argues that there are fundamental differences between Chinese and American conceptions of rights.