Contexts

Planning to protest a proposed Wal-Mart store? Not so fast—you could be inadvertently aiding its expansion (and saving the retailer some money).

According to Paul Ingram and his coauthors (American Journal of Sociology, July 2010), Wal-Mart filed about 1,600 proposals for new stores between 1998 and 2005. Some 563 of these proposals were met by protests, and 65 percent of those stores never opened. This suggests protests are highly effective, and by extension, detrimental to Wal-Mart’s profit margins.

But why does Wal-Mart file proposals when they have sufficient resources to simply build their stores without the hassle? The authors conclude that proposals give Wal-Mart an inexpensive way to predict the profitability of future stores. A proposal that’s met by protests indicates a lukewarm local reception. By not opening that store, Wal-Mart saves money it can invest in opening outlets in friendlier neighborhoods. Or, if they push ahead with the proposed-but-protested store, they’re able to make targeted concessions that’ll help appease each local community’s concerns.

Some tips for anti-Wal-Mart activists: protests are more likely to succeed in communities that are pro-Democrat, have strong “buy local” values, and are located near other communities that’ve successfully faced down Wal-Mart before. Or so says Wal-Mart’s marketing research.

The dangers of substance use during pregnancy are widely known, but media attention has vilified certain drugs (and certain drug users) more than others. Starting in the mid-1980s, the media focused significant coverage on an array of social problems believed to be associated with pregnant crack users, stoking public outrage over “crack babies.”

Kristen W. Springer (Sociological Forum, September 2010) looked at New York Times articles spanning more than 15 years to explore how media portrayals of crack cocaine use during pregnancy compared with those of alcohol and tobacco use. She also examined how portrayals of poor and minority pregnant women compared with others.

Springer has found that crack-using pregnant women are significantly more likely to be presented as “bad mothers” than those using alcohol or tobacco during pregnancy, and that racial minority and poor women are portrayed negatively more often than others. What makes these media representations problematic is that medical research suggests alcohol and tobacco use are more harmful to fetal development that cocaine use and that far more babies are born to white drug users than to any other race.

Springer’s study suggests that framing and frequency of news stories about pregnant drug users has little to do with protecting the health of children. Instead, she argues, poor and minority mothers are portrayed as unfit moms—easy targets and scapegoats who can shoulder the blame for changes and problems in the family today.

It’s doubtful you considered the prospect of kidney failure when choosing your neighborhood. But new research suggests that your neighborhood’s racial composition and poverty level could affect your likelihood of being placed on a donor kidney waitlist if you happen to ever reach end stage renal disease. That is, where you live can impact how long you live.

Researcher Milda R. Saunders and colleagues (American Journal of Transplantation, 2010) analyzed Census data against statistics on blacks and whites who initiated dialysis over a six-year span in order to determine patients’ neighborhood characteristics.

Not surprisingly they found a consistent black-white gap. Additionally, they discovered that neighborhood poverty disproportionately affected black residents’ transplant chances. Whites from wealthier neighborhoods had a better chance of getting onto a transplant waitlist than their black neighbors and anyone from poorer neighborhoods. Altogether, when neighborhood wealth decreased, the disparity between blacks and whites on the transplant waitlist increased. This results in blacks from primarily black, poor neighborhoods having the lowest likelihood of appearing on transplant waitlist.

So while your neighbors may help you out with a cup of sugar, they may be hindering your chances of getting a kidney.

The link between incarceration and employment is clear: it’s hard to get work after prison. The dominant view is that previously incarcerated offenders are simply stigmatized. Recently, Robert Apel and Gary Sweeten (Social Problems, August 2010), explored the complexities of this link using National Longitudinal Survey of Youth data from 1997.

Consistent with previous research, young adults in this study were less likely to be employed for years after being released, even if their incarceration was short (four months or less). But upon closer scrutiny, Apel and Sweeten found that non-employed ex-inmates hadn’t necessarily experienced difficulty in finding work. Rather, they just hadn’t looked (or gave up quickly). When compared to others who were convicted but not incarcerated for their crimes, the effect weakened; being locked up affected future employment far more than just the label “convicted criminal.”

Removal from society (and the resulting disruption of work history and education), as well as limited job options and better earnings in illegal markets, produce discouraged workers who don’t seek employment after prison. The authors are careful not to dismiss the stigma of incarceration on employment outcomes, but their analysis shows how employer willingness to hire is useless if ex-inmates aren’t applying.

Moms with higher education are more likely to promote and engage in their children’s learning, positively impacting their kids’ overall academic achievement. We also know that moms experiencing de­pres­sion are less likely to engage with their child, and this negatively impacts the child’s learning. Yet, researchers haven’t studied how a depressed woman’s own educational experience affects her child’s.

Jennifer March Augustine and Robert Crosnoe tackle this question in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior (October 2010). They compared maternal depression with children’s academic achievement, testing math and verbal skills in the first, third, and fifth grades and found that a mother’s depression only negatively affected her child’s development when she had a high school education or less. Augustine and Crosnoe speculate that the experience of higher education, valuable in many ways, may also equip mothers with knowledge about and a belief in the value of the educational system that helps buffer their children from some harmful effects of their mother’s depression.

No longer free, but still crucial in the reform era, educating a child now costs most urban Chinese families a third of their income. This puts unprecedented pressure on families and causes new social anxieties. Mary Crabb’s (Economy and Society, August 2010) ethnography examines how market reform has rendered schooling their single child both the top priority and the sole responsibility of middle class Beijing families.

Crabb argues that from early 1980s onwards, China’s market rationality gradually infiltrated its education system. This is reflected, Crabb writes, not only in the diversification and privatization of schools, but also in the proliferation of private tutoring, weekend language clubs, and extracurriculars.

Based on her work as an English teacher in a Beijing middle school, the author describes moments in which anxious parents struggle to manage their child’s well-rounded development. One parent explains, “I want my son to have a quality education… We only have one child, so we pin all our hopes on him.” Another laments, “I knew I had to make the right choice… for his future success, and I was very afraid of making the wrong decision.”

Despite anxieties over education’s move to the market, Crabb believes the Chinese state remains schools’ central actor by defining education as the motor of its ever-growing economy. Privatization of education, then, may deliver both an urban, consumer middle class and quality human capital.

After the Second World War, many countries experienced the benefits of economic growth. Until the late 1970s, workers’ wages kept pace with, and in many instances exceeded, this economic expansion. Since then, average real wages and employment rates have fallen, despite the increasing expansion of total income across countries.

Many sociologists have speculated that this might be due to union activity, but they lacked the data to demonstrate it empirically. Now Tali Kristal (American Sociological Review, October 2010) has filled this gap. Using data from 16 democratic capitalist countries, Kristal constructed models to measure the change of labor’s share of national income, finding that the working class’s prosperity corresponds directly to their levels of union activity.

Surprisingly, while labor activity is initially beneficial to the working class, it appears to contain the seeds of its own destruction, since it can adversely affect overall corporate earnings. But that’s true only to a certain point, after which union activity has a positive effect on capitalist profits. That profit is then invested in labor-saving initiatives to reduce the high labor costs imposed by the unions. It might be time, again, for nations to carefully rethink labor relations.

Environmental justice scholars have examined how community characteristics, like racial composition and average income, influence residents’ exposure to hazardous chemicals. In their new study, Don Grant and his colleagues (American Sociological Review, August 2010) take this research one step further, considering the effects of chemical plants themselves.

Grant and his team examine new Environmental Protection Agency data in order to see the combined effects of facility and community characteristics. Using complex statistical analyses, they find four “recipes” for how community and facility factors intersect to produce high risks. These include: 1. large African American population and low income; 2. large African American population and large Latino population; 3. large African American population, large plant size, and a plant that’s part of a branch; and 4. large Latino population, low income, and a plant that’s part of a branch.

These “recipe” formulations help remind researchers to stop debating which individual community characteristics matter most. Instead, researchers and policy makers should focus on how various factors combine in a variety of ways to produce health-threatening emissions, and maybe even how to put a stop to the danger.

While you can thank trade between nations for the pleasure of eating avocados at any time of the year, trade relations can have another important benefit: deterring conflict.

Aseygul Aydin (Journal of Peace Research, September 2010) examined data from the Correlates of War project and confirmed past findings that trade can deter interstate conflict. That much we knew. However, while past studies have found the volume of trade is key, Aydin found trade also matters because it fosters connectivity.

As Aydin explains, states are likely to intervene in conflicts that threaten economic interests, *especially* if those interests are linked through regional trade organizations. Those groups form dense ties and are directly affected when one of their members falls into conflict. For these reasons, other states might view membership in a regional organization (rather than in a more diffuse international group, like the World Trade Organization) as a signal of long-term economic interest by member states.

Apparently, your mango or banana is more valuable than you realize.