Katie Hyde likes taking pictures but is more inspired by what kids can do with cameras. For over ten years she’s been teaching college students, children, and classroom teachers in the Literacy Through Photography program at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies. She spends part of each year working in Tanzania and, whenever possible, escapes to southern Spain to take dance classes and behold the amazing art of flamenco. A sociologist by training, she also teaches Duke undergraduate courses that combine sociology, documentary studies, and photography.

Mediations

Kari Lerum has long been interested in why, how, and when people become central or marginalized within social groups; she is also fascinated by the ways that ideas about sexuality and the body are translated into political and cultural truths. While trained in sociology, she also teaches courses in Cultural Studies and Women, Gender, and Sexuality studies at the University of Washington (Bothell and Seattle). Her sociological imagination is enhanced by conversations with a variety of people, including policy makers, health care workers, grocery store clerks, and her 11-year-old daughter. She also blogs for Ms. Magazine, Rh Reality Check, and Sexuality & Society.

Trends

Tom Linneman is enamored with all types of trends. He owned a pet rock in the 1970s, pegged his jeans in the 1980s, danced the Macarena in the 1990s, and went crazy for cupcakes in the 2000s. Less faddishly and more sociologically, he keeps a close eye on trends in public opinion, the changing methodological landscape, and innovative attempts at social change, all of which he hopes to feature regularly in the Trends section. Most recently, he is the author of Social Statistics: The Basics and Beyond. Having just finished a five-year stint as chair of the sociology department at The College of William and Mary, he is quite happy to return to teaching and researching full time—and to join the crew of Contexts. He lives in Richmond, Virginia.

Books

Arvind Rajagopal is a professor in the department of Media, Culture, and Communication and affiliate faculty in the departments of Sociology, and Social and Cultural Analysis, at New York University. He’s the author of five books, including The Indian Public Sphere and Politics After Television. He is currently completing After Decolonization: The Cultural Politics of Globalization in India.

Pedagogies

Gary Kinté Perry distinguished himself in his first year of university teaching by having his students write and perform a play featuring classical sociological theorists. This same spirit of creativity and community animates his work on white racism in higher education, pro-feminist masculinity, perceptions of labor market inequality, and urban sociology. He has received recognition from the Seattle mayor’s office for his courses on community action research and gentrification in local neighborhoods. His passion for critical pedagogy is evident in the “domestic study abroad” course he teaches on post-Hurricane Katrina for his home department at Seattle University. He serves on the board of Washington Educators for Social Justice and is currently working on a book on the erosion of black space in an era of hyper globalization.

Five years earlier, Dr. Muhammad Yunus, an economics professor at nearby Chittagong University, had supported Bangladesh’s struggle for independence, only to see his new nation fall victim to apocalyptic famines soon thereafter.

Compelled to act, the Vanderbilt-trained economist turned to the market. In what he calls “a very modest local initiative,” Yunus befriended a handful of impoverished women entrepreneurs. Shunned by commercial banks, these women relied on village loan sharks to get the money they needed to buy the supplies to make and sell their hand-made crafts, such as bamboo stools.

The loan sharks charged exorbitant rates of interest, so—out of his own pocket—Yunus offered to help the women with very small loans at reasonable rates of interest.
The first few loans were repaid successfully, but Yunus says, “I realized very soon that the problem was not at all a local one. In order to solve the problem, the entire banking system would have to be turned upside down and fully reorganized.” And so, Yunus founded his own bank, the Grameen (“Village”) Bank—which would operate with different values and principles than typical commercial banks.

This article tells the story of how one man’s effort to help his village neighbors in need flourished into a $10 trillion global industry—albeit not necessarily the kind of industry he wanted it to be. It is a story about money and power; it is the story of microfinance. Only 35 years after its inception, nearly 4,000 microfinance organizations operate in over 100 countries around the world (even in the U.S.), providing very small business loans (typically under $1,000) and other financial services to over 150 million disadvantaged entrepreneurs who aspire to work their way out of poverty.

It was 1978 when Grameen officially began lending, and the bank’s business grew steadily. In 2010 it lent out nearly $10 billion to over 8 million people—over 90 percent of whom were women. Those 8.4 million people are not only the Bank’s beneficiaries, they are its owners; over 95 percent of Grameen’s equity belongs to them (the remainder is with the government), and each year Grameen’s net income is distributed to these owners in the form of dividends or deposited into an emergency relief fund borrowers can draw upon if they are affected by flooding or bad weather. In addition to sharing in Grameen’s profits, the borrowers share in its governance. Nine of the 13 members of Grameen’s board of directors are borrowers who have been elected to the board by their peers.

This was not the first institutionalized attempt to employ finance as a means of poverty alleviation and empowerment, but, arguably, Grameen has been the most successful. As the figurehead of the burgeoning microfinance movement, Yunus has garnered praise from world leaders, and he even won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. Despite these successes, Grameen has faced challenges. Researchers have noted that the bank’s claims to alleviate poverty are difficult to verify—and are frequently exaggerated—because Grameen tends to lend to people who already had favorable prospects for upward mobility before they began borrowing. Women who borrow with Grameen tend to have been more empowered before borrowing—not because of it. Further, many women turn over at least some of their loan to their husband; those who don’t may find themselves overburdened with both entrepreneurship and household chores. Economist Robin Isserles has questioned the logic of drawing the poor directly into an economic system that exploits them. He challenges the notion that microfinance could empower women without first changing broader structures of oppression in society.

But these quarrels are not to say Grameen is a failure. As the organization has grown, it has evolved in ways meant to try to address these criticisms. Today Grameen not only lends money, but also offers scholarships, low cost health care, solar power, and a variety of other services to Bangladesh’s rural poor. And while it may not live up to all expectations, most researchers who have studied the bank closely have found at least some benefit to its presence in Bangladesh. Worldwide research shows that it is possible for some poor persons to benefit from microcredit when conditions are conducive to entrepreneurship and when the credit is offered with low interest rates. This has made Grameen and microfinance appealing to activists and politicians alike.

The pace at which the microfinance movement has grown is astounding. No longer a village experiment, today’s microfinance is big business. A new generation of international lending agencies work for profits, even enlisting Wall Street investors. But such growth has come at a cost. The rhetoric of financial revolution that epitomized the early years of the movement has been supplanted by a free market discourse that has undermined local support for microfinance. This article offers a sociological perspective on how microfinance has grown and gone astray. The commercialization of microfinance is the result of co-optation by government-backed agencies. Through the provision of resources and information dissemination, they’ve turned a movement into a high-finance industry.

Change from the Bottom

In the early 1990s development practitioners and humanitarian activists seeking an alternative to the usual bureaucratic, big government approaches to poverty alleviation began arriving in Bangladesh to see for themselves how Grameen worked. Visitors from Vietnam, Columbia, Botswana, and myriad other nations would spend two weeks in the villages of Bangladesh, then convene in Grameen’s head office for semi-annual “Grameen International Dialogue” sessions. Participants exchanged ideas about how to implement microfinance projects in their own countries. The atmosphere was kinetic and hopeful; this was truly a global movement.

For microfinance to spread beyond Bangladesh’s borders, though, required more than just attention: it needed money. The untold story of the microfinance revolution is the persistent lobbying efforts of a small, but highly dedicated group of activists in the United States. The leader of this group, Sam Daley-Harris, founded a citizens’ lobbying organization called Results in 1980. The group is dedicated to passing legislation that will end hunger and poverty worldwide. “The change that is needed will have to come from the bottom,” asserts Daley-Harris. In his book, Reclaiming Our Democracy, Daley-Harris recounts the efforts of Results’ activists and offers some insight into Results’ strategy. One notable strategy was to creatively frame his group’s message in ways that would resonate with the Reagan-era conservatism that pervaded Washington, D.C. at the time. To the extent that Results was effective in this tactic, it also changed the trajectory of microfinance.

For example, Steve Valk, an activist in Atlanta, worked tirelessly to gain the attention of his staunchly conservative representative in Congress, Pat Swindall. Valk was not conservative, but he and other activists met with Rep. Swindall repeatedly, showing up at various town hall meetings specifically to press the issue of microfinance. In spite of ideological differences, the group developed a relationship with Rep. Swindall. They appealed to his conservative nature by likening microfinance to free market economics and presenting microfinance as a hand-up rather than a hand out. And, although the idea for microfinance originated in Bangladesh, they sold it as a profoundly American concept. Rep. Swindall eventually signed on to a bill to fund microfinance loans to hundreds of thousands of Latin America’s poorest families.

Due in large part to Valk and other Results volunteers around the country, the bill gained broad bipartisan support in both houses of Congress. One Congressman remarked, “I have never encountered an issue that had as many members [of Congress] massaged into place by constituents in such a timely fashion.” Although strongly supported, the bill did have its detractors. Most notably, administrators of the federal government’s agency for foreign aid, the U.S. Agency for Development (USAID), were immediately opposed to the bill. One senior USAID official flatly told Daley-Harris, “[US]AID doesn’t work with the poorest of the poor.” Instead, the agency preferred a trickle-down approach through economic growth. USAID sent letters to every member of the Senate to try to dissuade them from voting for the bill—or at least to soften
the bill’s mandate to lend to the poorest of the poor.

In spite of such high-level resistance, the bill passed in 1987, thus inaugurating a new era for the microfinance movement. Daley-Harris unabashedly claimed that Results “blew things wide open” with that bill. Now the Grameen idea would be known throughout Latin America—and soon the rest of the world. But hard fought victories often come at a cost: these newly funded microfinance programs would be administered by the same powerful and well-established agency that had opposed the microfinance bill, USAID.

Control from the Top

Daley-Harris soon found himself locking horns with USAID over the implementation of microfinance funding in Latin America. USAID remained reluctant to implement the Grameen model. One might have taken this power struggle as an omen that growing the movement too quickly could mean relinquishing control to powerful governmental agencies with conflicting ideals and motives. However, Daley-Harris remained committed to globalized microfinance, which he intended to advance by organizing the Microcredit Summit in Washington, D.C. in 1997. The event was attended by 2,900 delegates, including government officials and celebrities from 127 nations who agreed to a goal to reach 100 million of the world’s poorest families with microfinance loans.

This goal was met by 2007.

It could not have been done without the financial support of large government-backed agencies. In the 1990s, USAID was joined in the microfinance movement by the most influential of all such agencies: the World Bank. Originally created in the aftermath of World War II to rebuild Europe, the World Bank now manages a $112 billion portfolio intended to foster economic development around the world. Typically, the World Bank approach has been predicated on mainstream economic principles, which have often translated into policies that favor economic growth over social justice and free markets over social spending. Such policies have been met with anger and local resistance around the world, especially in poorer nations. Throughout the 1980s and ‘90s, the World Bank was bedeviled with riots, protests, and criticism in cities and villages around the world. As Grameen’s popularity grew, World Bank officials saw a foray into microfinance as an opportunity to improve their public image while still adhering to core, free market values. The willingness of private foundations to collaborate in this endeavor also made microfinance appealing. Unlike USAID a decade before, the World Bank expressed keen interest in microfinance and, true to form, did so in a grand manner.

In 1995 the World Bank established a consortium of 33 high-level public and private funding organizations and invited Muhammad Yunus to join its board of directors. The consortium was named the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP), and its purpose was to support the growth of microfinance. In her book, Poverty Capital, Ananya Roy, a scholar of city and regional planning, shows how CGAP was able to assume control over the agenda of microfinance. With over 1,000 publications posted online, CGAP now sets the standard for everyone to follow. It establishes norms, metrics, and best practices for the industry, and these look remarkably similar to the norms, metrics, and best practices of Wall Street. CGAP also offers real time credit ratings and ranks the top microfinance providers based on financial and outreach criteria, but notably not on social impact. CGAP has even helped to develop global risk scoring models similar to the consumer credit systems used in the U.S. According to one senior CGAP staff member, “What is measured is what is managed. We script. We manage. We control.” Thus, the task of fighting poverty becomes akin to any other business venture, based on financial benchmarks and procedures that cater to the interests of investors rather than the needs of the borrowers. The intent is to bring microfinance into the fold of the World Bank’s paradigm of economic growth, which necessitates corporate capital.

To this end, CGAP has teamed up with the Gates Foundation to establish an elite annual conference in scenic Turin, Italy. The annual conference now garners far more attention and holds far more political sway than the much humbler Grameen International Dialogue. The cost of attendence, nearly $10,000 per person, is steep; but participation conveys a mark of validation and authority within the microfinance industry. There is little talk of poverty alleviation at this conference and much more talk of “going to scale.” As a result, high interest rates—often exceeding 30 percent and frowned upon at the Grameen International Dialogue—have become a “best practice.” Presumably, these higher interest rates generate more income and, in turn, allow lenders to reach more people. Theoretically, high interest rates also allow lenders to allocate loans more efficiently, since only the most lucrative businesses could afford to take such costly loans. To an economist, this makes perfect sense. But to a poor entrepreneur on the margins of subsistence, high interest rates are simply immoral.

The Microfinance Machine

Muhammad Yunus resigned from CGAP’s board of directors after only two years. He may have turned banking upside-down, but the World Bank flipped it back over again. The focus had shifted from poverty-alleviation and empowerment to organizational efficiency and profitability. That meant high interest rates and unforgiving terms and conditions—not unlike the loan shark market Yunus had hoped to subvert. In statements to the press, Yunus has decried what he calls the “commercialization” of microfinance—the corporate ownership of microfinance institutions. But his pronouncements have not deterred media criticism and political backlash in his home country. Bangladeshi politicians now associate Grameen with the new breed of microfinance and accuse Yunus of usury. Actually, Grameen’s interest rates remain comparable to commercial bank rates for small loans, but facts like these don’t seem to matter in moments of public outrage, and the Prime Minister of Bangladesh accused Yunus of “sucking money out of the people” before she forced

him to resign from the bank he started. Meanwhile, in neighboring India, angry protestors filled the streets of Hyderabad in the fall of 2010 demanding tighter regulation and lower interest rates for microfinance after the suicides of several desperately indebted farmers. Borrowers throughout the region refused to repay their loans, leading to a crisis akin to Wall Street’s mortgage meltdown. It was what Daley-Harris called “a near death experience for microfinance.” This is significant because the region surrounding Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh, had been recognized worldwide as a pioneer market for the new form of commercialized microfinance, fed on investments from international corporations for rapid growth.

In their study of Andhra Pradesh published just before the 2010 crisis, political scientists Britta Augsberg and Cyrill Fouillet presciently opine: “One needs to ask whether… the ‘microfinance machine’ has gone berserk. Whatever the answer, we see it as an occasion to trigger a collective and widespread reflection on the dysfunction of microfinance, not only in India but the worldwide sector as a whole.”

While Yunus implies that corporate investors are to blame for this situation, evidence shows that the private sector did not force itself upon microfinance. Rather, powerful agents like the World Bank strategically redesigned microfinance to induce corporate participation. While we might be tempted to blame organizations like the World Bank for fostering the current situation, it is important to note that it was the proponents of microfinance themselves who solicited the support of these organizations and at times willingly collaborated with them. Advocates, like the Results volunteers, employed free market rhetoric to garner political favor and access the resources necessary to grow their movement exponentially. But this meant that the movement became beholden to the values and principles of its donors, not its constituents.

It is not too late to apply the lessons learned to the microfinance movement itself. CGAP recently responded to criticism by toning down its free market rhetoric, and, in addition to traditional financial indicators, it is now utilizing some social performance indicators to monitor microfinance. CGAP’s responsiveness suggests there is an opportunity for the kind of civic engagement that Sam Daley-Harris and his volunteers exhibited in the 1980s; advocates could lobby donor agencies and policymakers to ensure the people’s interests are protected. But this time it could happen not only in the U.S., but around the world. Modern technology affords the opportunity for the people of Andhra Pradesh to join forces with advocates in the U.S. or anywhere else to demand appropriate financial services and other forms of community support. At the same time, advocates could draw upon the lessons learned from Andhra Pradesh and Wall Street to foster a sincere discussion about the proper role of finance in our daily lives—not solely as a tool for economic growth, but also as a way to empower people to lead better, more fulfilling lives.

Rather than depending on investors, microfinance providers could also return ownership to their borrowers—a fundamental innovation of the Grameen Bank that was forgotten as the movement went global. Though this strategy would entail slower growth, it may be preferable to the rise of another meltdown of the sort that occurred in Andhra Pradesh. Borrower-owned microfinance would return control to the people microfinance seeks to empower, enabling them to decide for themselves what the appropriate means of economic development might be.

Recommended Readings

Augsberg, Britta and Cyril Fouillet. “Profit Empowerment: The Microfinance Institution’s Mission Drift.” Perspectives on Global Development and Technology (2010), 327-355. Recounts how market-based microfinance went awry in Andhra Pradesh.

Daley-Harris, Sam. Reclaiming Our Democracy: Healing the Break between People and Government (Camino Books, 2004, 10th anniversary ed.). Offers a detailed, first-hand account of the creation and growth of an organization and offers lessons for would-be activists and lobbyists.

Isserles, Robin. “The Rhetoric of Empowerment, the Reality of ‘Development as Usual’,” Women’s Studies Quarterly (2003) 31(3/4): 38-57. Critiques microfinance’s flaws and shortcomings.

Roy, Ananya. Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development (Routledge, 2010). Looks inside the World Bank to see how it controls the development agenda.

Yunus, Muhammad. Banker to the Poor: Micro-lending and the Battle against World Poverty (PublicAffairs, 1999). Provides a philosophy of development and a first-hand account of the Grameen Bank.

It’s an exciting moment to be taking the helm of a magazine dedicated to translating sociological ideas to a broad audience. A few months ago, when a rag-tag band of young people decided to occupy a public park in lower Manhattan, few could have predicted how successful they would be in focusing attention on growing social inequality in this country—and the failure of government to address it.

The protesters have registered a diffuse array of complaints: against the banking industry, environmental degradation, the corporate stranglehold on Washington, and countless others. Scrambling to make sense of what it all means, the press has suggested that the protesters are all over the place, disorganized. But as our cover photo suggests, it’s not that the protests are disorganized—“America just has too many issues.”

We agree. Our goal is to provide rich description and deep analysis of those issues. That analysis will go beyond simplistic explanations and partisan politics, to uncover underlying patterns, tensions, and contradictions.

We’ll also turn our sights to the production of knowledge itself, asking: how do we know what we know? What are we learning—and how are we learning it?

These questions are especially important at a time of retrenchment and shifting intellectual priorities. Higher education budgets are being slashed, and public education, in particular, is threatened. How are we, as laborers in the groves of Academe, coping with these changes? Can we become global citizens and educate our students to grapple with the challenges confronting them?

Toward that end, with this issue, we introduce a regular department called “Pedagogies” under the editorial stewardship of Gary K. Perry. “Mediations” (formerly known as Culture Reviews), now headed by Kari Lerum, will explore how we can engage critically with the forms and sources of information that tell us how to live in the world. Katie Hyde is editing photo essays—now called “In Pictures.” Tom Linneman and Arvind Rajagopal have also joined our team as Trends and Books editors, respectively.

We’re welcoming new editorial board members, too: Wendy Chapkis, Patricia Clough, Ted Conover, Gary Alan Fine, Ilene Kalish, Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, Victor Rios, Sharmila Rudrappa, Zakia Salime, Rita Stephan, and John Torpey.

Day-to-day operations are in the capable hands of Carly Chillmon, our Seattle-based managing editor, and Jennifer Hemler, our associate managing editor at Rutgers. Jon Smajda is continuing on as our webmaster. Big thanks to former editors Doug Hartmann and Chris Uggen, and also Letta Page, former managing editor, for their generous assistance in guiding us through the editorial transition. You’ll note some design changes in this issue, with more to come, thanks to the creative team at Minnesota-based ThinkDesign Group.

We’ll continue to work to make Contexts a leading forum for the broad dissemination of sociological perspectives among educators, policy makers, activists, and students. We look forward to hearing from you.

Initially, the FDA had approved Gardasil amid few objections. According to Three Shots of Prevention: The HPV Vaccine and the Politics of Medicine’s Simple Solutions, a 2010 volume edited by Keith Wailoo, Julie Livingston, Steven Epstein, and Robert Aronowitz, Merck, the drug-maker that developed the vaccine, framed Gardasil© as a vaccine against cancer rather than a sexually transmitted virus (HPV). This frame insulated Merck’s product from a politics of sexuality that Epstein and co-author April Huff say has “privileged a Christian Right moral agenda over the mainstream scientific consensus.”

To overcome the image problem associated with giving “innocent little girls” a vaccine to prevent an STI, Merck cast the drug as a tool of female empowerment. “I chose to get my daughter vaccinated,” said a mother pictured in a 2008 advertisement. In another ad, a young woman boldly proclaimed, “I chose to get vaccinated.” The spots concluded with the feminist tagline: “You have the power to choose.” Merck presented young girls as “health consumers who, by making the ‘right choices,’ can realize their imagined disease-free adult bodies,” according to Three Shots’ contributors Laura Mamo, Amber Nelson, and Aleia Clark.

But while Merck’s desexualization of HPV may have been successful in insulating Gardasil from controversy, it obscured questions of risk for women and men. Merck’s ads never mention, according to Epstein and Huff, that “lack of access to routine health care services, exposure to misinformation or a lack of sexual health education, and structural and cultural obstacles to condom use” place girls at increased risk for contracting the virus.

Epstein further notes that desexualizing HPV has caused the public debate to largely ignore gay men and their risk of anal cancer from HPV. Even though the vaccine was approved for boys in 2009, it took nearly two years for the Center for Disease Control to recommend that boys receive it. HPV has, in the meantime, become one of the leading causes of throat cancers, in addition to causing mouth, anal, penile, and cervical cancers and genital warts.

Perhaps it’s too much to expect that a major drug company would highlight health inequities and challenge homophobia in an ad campaign. Still, the case of Gardasil exposes the inadequacy of a health system where pharmaceutical companies dominate the flow of information about diseases. As Three Shots reminds us, “The U.S. public health infrastructure needs to be wrestled away from capital (pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies) and returned to a multidisciplinary set of social thinkers and actors who weigh global and local STI risks, preventions, and treatments, including but not limited to the HPV-cancer link,in the interests of public good.” While Bachmann’s adoption of unscientific anti-vaccine rhetoric dominated media attention, issues of public health and equity went largely unaddressed.

While the 50-64 age group comments on photos and “likes” things on Facebook less frequently than “power users” like younger women, Keith Hampton and colleagues at the Pew Research Center find that they post status updates even less frequently than other users (“Social networking sites and our lives,” Pew Internet and American Life Project 2011). As such, older users may reap the benefits of use while avoiding some of the social costs. Power users need to manage their complex social worlds (so that mom, boss, and best friend don’t all see the same material), but older users are able to side-step many of the same conflicts. Retirees may be less likely to fear “friending” past co-workers and higher-ups, for instance. And, as part of the draw of Facebook is reconnecting with old friends, older users may be less concerned about interactions between “high school” and “adulthood” friends. They may seek out diverse opinions and attitudes in their social networks.

Alice Marwick, a social media researcher at Microsoft, predicts the waning of “generational schisms” in attitudes about social networking site use as more and more older people join. Partially, this is because, as Facebook becomes more pervasive among all ages, not joining can entail higher social costs for everyone. Not belonging to Facebook limits or blocks access to certain organizations and information and may prevent full engagement with friends and family who post frequently. So, just as some younger people report feeling pressured into participating in Facebook, older people may also feel a push into social membership. According to Marwick, not belonging may “require everyone around you to accommodate something that’s slightly socially unusual.”

Paradoxically, as more and more older Americans are pulled into the orbit of Facebook, opting out may lead to greater social isolation.

While plans for the prison were eventually dashed, Italy’s policies governing the custody and care of transgender inmates remain innovative. Male-to-female transgender prisoners, disproportionately immigrants, are mainly housed separately in male facilities. They are permitted to wear individualized personal clothing, including feminine attire and accoutrements—consistent with a decades-old policy supporting self-expression in Italian carceral settings.

Germany and Great Britain also recently announced plans to permit prisoners to wear the clothing of their choice and even specify which gendered pronouns they prefer to use. Together, these European penal systems stand in stark contrast to American prisons, in which sex (and presumably gender) segregation and standardized uniforms are generally the rule.

Sociologists Jennifer Sumner and Valerie Jenness’s recent research on transgender correctional policy in the United States reveals that while the special medical needs of transgender prisoners are receiving some attention, housing policy remains firmly rooted in binary, anatomy-based distinctions. Sumner is now studying Italy’s experience to explore alternative ways of managing the custody and care of this vulnerable population.

Emily Chamlee-Wright and Virgil Henry Storr, writing in Public Choice in 2010, suggest that victims of Katrina had very specific expectations of how government should respond to their plight. While residents of New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward didn’t expect the government to make victims whole again, they saw state aid as a contractual obligation; government’s failure to provide sufficient help was a breach of that contract. And contrary to media claims, most requests for assistance were modest.

It turns out that racial minorities received less state aid in Katrina’s aftermath than whites did—and far less than they needed to rebuild their homes. Daniel Aldrich’s 2010 Social Science Quarterly article demonstrates much the same in the aftermath of the Indian Ocean tsunami. Caste, location, wealth, and family status all influenced who did or did not receive aid. Disasters didn’t discriminate, but disaster responders did.

How blame is attributed also shapes aid and recovery efforts, according to a 2011 article in Race and Social Problems. Euro-Americans were likely to blame poor government response post-Katrina on incompetent or corrupt bureaucrats and politicians, according to Amy Ai and her coauthors. Blacks, on other hand, were likely to see the problem as situational, varying by victims’ race.

Those who attributed the destruction of New Orleans to natural forces were less likely to offer aid or volunteer to help those in need. Zdravko Marjanovic, C. Ward Struthers, and Esther Greenglass say that if participants believed that the disaster was human-made, they were more likely to believe that humans should play a role in prevention or mitigation (Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy, 2012).

Taken together this new research shows that the social and governmental response to disaster is more nuanced than scholars and policy makers believe. Since global warming is likely to increase the severity and frequency of future disasters, figuring out how best to facilitate the process of recovery is a pressing issue.

Fetner and King told conference attendees that the facts reveal the opposite: lower-taxed counties have a greater propensity to give rise to Tea Party organizations. These communities are more likely to be experiencing economic decline, as evidenced by higher rates of mortgage foreclosure and real estate bankruptcies. Still, Tea Party supporters are not economically worse off than average Americans, according to Fetner and King. Their findings are straight forward: ideology is key. Communities with a history of support for the Republican Party are more likely to produce Tea Party groups.

So much for the Tea Partiers’ claims of disdain for party politics.

1. Sex Work in Sin City, by Barbara G. Brents
2. Las Vegas Syndrome, by Michael Ian Borer
3. My Radical Vegas, by Annelise Orleck
4. Landscape of Arrogance, by Sharon Zukin
5. Surviving the Odds, by Matt Wray

Sex Work in Sin City

by Barbara G. Brents

For progressive, feminist intellectuals, Las Vegas—“sin city”—is a city we can sink our teeth into. It is capitalist patriarchy run amok: the perfect place to analyze sexism, exploitation, and consumerism.

At least that’s what I thought when I first moved here in the late 1980s. At the time, I watched my neighbor drive to work every day in too much makeup and showing too much skin for her job as an “exploited” casino cocktail waitress. Then I noticed she owned her house. Today, she lives reasonably well on a union pension and, like 60,000 other Culinary Union Local 226 members in the city, she has free health insurance. In retrospect, her only complaint about the job was all the cigarette smoke.

Living in Las Vegas has challenged every stereotype and assumption I’ve ever held about sex, gender, and economics. Vegas sells sex, to be sure—and there is no better place to examine all of the complexities of sexual political economy then here.

The leisure industry was central to the “Old West” mining economy at the turn of the 20th century. Women played key roles working in and marketing this industry, providing men with intimacy and companionship. Women were both proprietors and prostitutes in restaurants, saloons, hotels, and brothels. Non-European women often worked in the poorest parts of town, facing the worst working conditions, while others labored independently, sometimes in lavishly furnished houses.

In the 1930s Nevada officials, capitalizing on the growing market for sex, legalized gambling, quickie marriages (and quickie divorces), and permitted red light districts to bloom. During the Depression era, women could still find opportunities in Nevada’s tourist economy.

Things changed in the 1950s, when the city’s Chamber of Commerce began to market a new, upscale Las Vegas, featuring images of chic, scantily clad women lounging around pools. These young, white, “classy” women marketed fantasy, but not, strictly speaking, sex. At the same time, city officials launched an effort to “clean up” Las Vegas to attract Cold War military projects. They declared prostitution illegal, and sex work went underground. A few years later, women were even banned from working as dealers in casinos.

The Sin City image is still based, to a large extent, on the fact that Nevada is the only state in the U.S. in which prostitution is legal. Yet today, prostitution remains illegal in the city. Cards circulating on the Strip show nearly nude women hawking legal referral services that connect escorts with tourists for “dancing.” Women and some men also work independently as prostitutes, but both groups are regularly targeted by vice police in their periodic “sweeps.”

Outside Vegas, about 500 women work as legal independent contractors in 30 brothels in rural Nevada counties. My research suggests that these women are in search of work opportunities they can’t find elsewhere—much as in the past. They’re escaping low paying service jobs and the hustle of illegal sex work, or they’re looking for ways to enhance their erotic dancing or film careers. While there is certainly room for improvement in this industry, there is little evidence that women are trafficked. In legal brothels, employees generally report that they feel safe, are free to come and go, and are bound only by their contract.

Like any city, Las Vegas has problems—they just can’t all be pinned on the “sin” reputation. Because of its strong unions, especially the Culinary Union, many of the city’s workers have fared better than service workers elsewhere. But like other American cities, Las Vegas has suffered a loss of full time, permanent jobs, a declining public sector, and a regressive tax structure—the same dynamics that fuel inequality in other U.S. cities and have been exacerbated in the current recession. As a supposedly one-horse town, the Las Vegas growth machine hasn’t paid much attention to quality of life.

Sociologist Viviana Zelizer noted in 2005 that the intimacy-market divide was dead long ago. “People often mingle economic activity with intimacy,” she wrote. “The two often sustain each other.” Selling sex is, for many Las Vegans, just another job.

More pointedly, the city works hard to maintain its transgressive edge. “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” is one of the most successful campaigns in advertising history, fostering the impression that a weekend here is still a walk on the wild side—but in a safe, acceptable kind of way. The city thrives on the righteousness of its critics: moral resistance feeds the market for hedonistic freedom, and it helps keep our economy alive.

Las Vegas Syndrome

by Michael Ian Borer

Upon visiting some cities, it is said, individuals can easily become psychologically and emotionally overwhelmed, developing symptoms ranging from anxiety and panic attacks to visual and aural hallucinations. Sufferers of “Jerusalem Syndrome” are seduced by the historical religious intensity of the Holy City, transformed into messiahs who shout psalms and sermons at seen and unseen others. In Paris, romantic images of accordions, flowers, and cobblestone streets collide with the presence of street hustlers and short-tempered waiters, leaving some visitors in a state of shock and disappointment. Art-lovers making pilgrimages to Florence can contract “Stendhal Syndrome,” named for the nineteenth century French author who suffered deep pangs of anxiety when confronting the cultural and aesthetic richness of the city.

In much the same way, visitors to Las Vegas often experience neural intoxication. The caricatures of tourists with an overblown degree of entitlement, loosened moral boundaries, and a proclivity toward drunken debauchery and overzealous fedora-wearing are not all that far from the truth. For local residents, many of whom moved to Las Vegas from somewhere else, the syndrome persists in a “hit the jackpot” mentality that once fueled meteoric urban sprawl but has led to empty homes, empty wallets, and a tax base that can’t adequately fund basic social services.

While place-based mental “disorders” such as these don’t appear in the DSM, they are nonetheless real. In his classic writings on the urban environment’s influence on the mental life of individuals, Georg Simmel described the experience of massive numbers of people who were transitioning from traditional rural settings to modern cities. In rural environments, Simmel wrote, the pace of life is slower and interactions are rhythmic and habitual. The city, in contrast, assaults people with its “swift and continuous shift of external and internal stimuli,” requiring individuals to adapt to its tall buildings and unknown others. Only a “metropolitan type”—rational, calculating, blasé—could withstand the city’s stimulation overload. Simmel, writing in the early twentieth century, could hardly have predicted how over-stimulating cities could, and would, become. If he had landed in Las Vegas and seen its neon Strip, Simmel’s central nervous system would have exploded! The bright lights and capricious crowds would challenge his capacity to reason and would unhinge his adaptive “protective organ,” thrusting him into a psychosomatic or emotionally-induced distressed mental state.

Indeed, the hyper-stimulation of “postmodern” cities such as Las Vegas—accentuated by the places themselves and pop culture imaginings of them—heads straight for the senses. The bright lights, the haphazard pastiche of architectural styles and historical references, and the sheer number of entertainment and lifestyle options, can be overwhelming. The Strip’s neon lights are as alluring as they are disorienting. If you stare too long, they will blind you, leaving a distorted vision of the city and the people who live, work, and play in it. Though the Strip is about four miles long, it feels condensed and “in your face.” It’s impossible to avoid its glare. The Strip is the eight billion pound gorilla living outside everyone’s backyard. And as it grows, it demands more from everyone around it.

The unstable built environment and symbolic economy of Las Vegas contributes to the persistence of the syndrome. Las Vegas’s “tradition of re-invention” implodes rather than preserves or reuses buildings, following the whim of the market. Its latest iteration—after the failure of the “family friendly” era—caters to the “cultural omnivore” who can revel in the sustained kitsch of “vintage Vegas” and enjoy the “foodie” delights prepared by celebrity chefs. But the burden of choice can leave some feeling lost and anxious. Though a lack of choices might be constraining, too many can be debilitating.

Cultural analysts are not immune to the Las Vegas Syndrome. Their claims tend to waver between two extremes: an uncritical, obsessively populist boosterism that depicts Las Vegas as a pioneer of new urban forms and sustainability, and a nostalgia-driven, elitist ethnocentrism that conflates moral judgments and aesthetic tastes, proclaiming Vegas to be the pinnacle of postmodern simulation—the city that is not a city, where style trumps substance. Both stances fail to see Las Vegas in all of its maddening complexity.

Instead of being blinded by all the neon, we need balanced analyses and “thick descriptions” that dig deep into the depths of the city’s supposedly superficial culture. In Las Vegas, one can find the best and worst of human ingenuity and creativity. There’s the historically progressive Hoover Dam, the environmentally-minded Springs Preserve and Tonopah Community Garden, and the eclectic downtown Arts District. There are also abandoned foreclosed houses, protected by gates and security guards, next to crime-ridden streets that police refuse to patrol. These paradoxes define the everyday reality of Las Vegas as much as (if not more than) the hyperreal Strip. A distorted vision of the city—the consequence of Las Vegas Syndrome—will persist if we allow the Strip to define and dictate “what happens in Vegas.” To uncover the realities and possibilities that exist in the world’s most impossible city, we need to look beyond the glimmering lights.

My Radical Vegas

by Annelise Orleck

I always look for the Luxor when my plane is landing in Vegas. McCarran Airport is so close to the Strip that the lavish jumble looks like little more than an extravagantly decorated runway. If it’s daytime I set my sights on the brightly painted faux-Sphinx whose face and paws front the sun-swept black glass pyramid. At night, like so many people, I orient by searching for the blue Luxor beam streaming up from the peak of the pyramid into a black desert sky cast orange by the city lights. At 42.3 billion candle-power, this column is the strongest light fixture in the world (astronauts can see it from space). It feels like the right entryway into Las Vegas—a plaster replica of the one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, backlit by one of the curiosities of the modern world, its beam shining up for no apparent reason, pointing at nothing. What can I say? I love Las Vegas.

My feelings about Las Vegas are rooted in my unique experience of the city so many love to hate. Over the past 19 years, I have visited often, first to research the anti-poverty movement that was the subject of my last book and then to remain in touch with the remarkable community of activists I came to know through that work. For me, Las Vegas will always be defined not simply by its mindless expressions of excess and conspicuous consumption, but by the Southern migrant warmth, the fierce militant political spirit, and the humor of the poor Westside mothers and former hotel maids who helped integrate the Strip in the mid-1960s. These same women then stormed Caesars Palace, the Flamingo, and the Stardust in the 1970s—staging sit-ins, eat-ins, and read-ins. Ruby Duncan and the women of Operation Life, with their allies from the Las Vegas League of Women Voters, brought free medical screenings, books, and in-school meals to the poor children of Clark County. They also brought Food Stamps, the Women and Infant Children nutrition program, and millions in federal community development dollars to Nevada. When I travel back for reunions with this still-vibrant coalition, I shake my head in amazement—nearly half a century since the Freedom Summer, a beloved inter-racial community is alive and well in Las Vegas.

I’m not hopelessly starry-eyed. I understand what puts people off about this town. I’ve been squeezed by tangled traffic and massing tourist crowds and gotten headaches from the flashing electronic billboards advertising Cirque de Soleil and power-couple-tiger-trainers Siegfried and Roy. I’ve grimaced at the taxi dashboards plastered with photos of prostitutes, squinted in the smoke of the casinos, and been mesmerized by the incessant chiming of slot machines. But I’ve also noticed the relative contentment of hotel workers, who are members of the largest and most robust private union local in the country and beneficiaries of excellent healthcare and education benefits. I think of their long-time president—Hattie Canty, an African American migrant and mother of ten—who boasted some years back that Las Vegas was the only city in the country where a hotel maid could buy a house, give her children top-notch healthcare, and then send healthy young adults off to college.

Sadly, since 2008, the city that was the fastest-growing in the country for half a century, where for decades migrants could reasonably hope to find work the very day they arrived, has crashed hard. In August 2011, a staggering 14.2 percent of the city’s residents were unemployed. Through the 1990s, developers overbuilt insanely, crushing the Strip with condo towers (now mostly empty) and dotting the desert with gated communities that spread to the gorgeous red rock mountains that ring the city. Nearly half the city’s homeowners owe more than their houses are worth. So many simply walked away that city authorities had to drain hundreds of swimming pools to prevent West Nile virus, and animal rescue groups struggled to find homes for abandoned pets left to run wild in the desert.

Those who see the city as built on the worst of American instincts and appetites take grim satisfaction in its dizzying fall. But I’ll say now what I have always thought: Las Vegas has never been anomalous, even when it was at its most pumped up. With its strip-mall layout and ersatz everything, its fake Paris and Venice and New York all within walking distance, its blatant sale of gambling and sex, its promises of endless water n the middle of the desert, its aging but eternally young singers and dancers, and its striving immigrant population from around the world, Las Vegas is post-World War II American culture writ large. It is American culture on psychedelic drugs, without the self-importance, and with a sense of humor and a libertine streak. And now it has fallen spectacularly: it’s America collapsed and rubble-strewn, but still outlined in bright lights.

The Las Vegas that stays with me is captured in an image from my last visit there. In April 2011, I attended the opening of a new elementary school in one of the poorest areas of North Las Vegas. I walked into the bright, solar-powered Ruby Duncan Elementary School, named for the poor black migrant mother who led a movement that changed the lives of poor Nevadans and helped bring food aid and better medical care to poor families across the U.S. The halls were lined with exhibits capturing the spirit of that movement. Around me sat the movement veterans—black and white women and men, now in their seventies and eighties. In front of us were the students of the Ruby Duncan Chorus representing a school that is thoroughly integrated—with one third African American, one third Hispanic, one third white, and a few Asian and Native American children. Though half of the school’s students qualify for free lunch, each proudly bears the title “Dreamkeeper.” As this rainbow chorus of kids belted out the school anthem, “Everyone Can be A Star,” the elderly War on Poverty activists behind me joined in, laughing a little raucously and thoroughly enjoying themselves. For me, at least, this is Las Vegas.

Landscape of Arrogance

by Sharon Zukin

For me, Las Vegas is not a pleasant place. Megalith hotels looming over the desert look less like resorts and more like fortresses—a Blade Runner image of big business masked by a façade of fun. Behind the bright lights and sparkling fountains of the Strip, dusty back roads sprout strip malls, pawn shops, and giant parking garages. Vegas is a Darwinian landscape of modern capitalism and human arrogance.

I know this isn’t all there is to Vegas. Alongside the city’s founding myth of leisure, vice, and luxury, land companies and residents have built all-American communities. Using water collected by the Hoover Dam, men and women live in single-family homes, drive to suburban shopping centers, and support a variety of religious institutions. Years ago, the region’s explosive postwar growth drew East Coast migrants eager to escape their working class and immigrant origins. The rise of Las Vegas is, in effect, a mirror image of industrial cities’ long decline.

Dependent on gambling and the tourist trade and stricken by a high rate of mortgage foreclosures, Las Vegas is also speculative capitalism writ large. As a tourist, one experiences this in a mildly exploitive way: you can only sit down if you’re eating a meal, buying a drink, or placing a bet.

The dominant gaming and tourism industry has a complicated relationship with the city. The casino complexes are located in Clark County, outside Las Vegas’s borders, so, though they dominate local politics, these economic powerhouses aren’t under the city government’s control. By being separate from the city, yet clustered together, the hotels gain leverage in the regional economy. They enable visitors to escape normal obligations, while they reap profit and influence from buying up large tracts of relatively inexpensive, undeveloped land in unincorporated areas where they evade public control.

The hotels’ autonomy extends to their control of Las Vegas Boulevard, the famous Strip. For many years, the Strip had no sidewalks linking the hotels, and people could not walk from one casino to another. In recent years, the hotels built both sidewalks and footbridges, yet the street is their private space; they offer no benches or lawns for sitting.

On a Sunday morning the Strip is mostly empty, but on Saturday nights, thousands of people are walking, talking, and gawking, an endless, formless, milling crowd dwarfed by the Bellagio’s fountains, a fake Eiffel Tower, and the replica Coney Island roller coaster and Statue of Liberty. Since nearly a quarter of all visitors to Las Vegas come from southern California, the Strip functions as Los Angeles’s Times Square, offering the thrill of a street carnival with all its strangers, tricksters, and costumed street performers.

But the privatization of the sidewalks on the Strip relegates peddlers, “card slappers,” homeless people, and folks selling trinkets to the footbridges, which are controlled by Clark County. Fearing there is too much disorder for tourists to feel safe, the authorities are moving closer to the model of the actual Times Square, which is managed by a business improvement district and bounded by theaters and offices. Outside, the neon fantasy of the Strip anchors the money-making machine of the casinos. Indoors, perpetual night transforms spectacle into speculation: who will “score” tonight?

Synecdoche, however, is not destiny. Las Vegans might only think of the Strip if they’re headed to work, but it’s the unifying landmark for anyone else thinking of this desert town. Behind the play of lights is a city whose economy and image are built on tourism, gambling, and sex—a money machine in the desert.

Surviving the Odds

by Matt Wray

On a hot Tuesday afternoon in June of 1993, Linda Flatt, a 50-year-old dental receptionist, returned home from her job to find her parents and daughter pulling into the driveway. Her ex-husband was waiting with the news that their son Paul was dead. Paul had gambling debts, and Linda’s first thought was that he had been murdered. But then her husband revealed that Paul had killed himself. He was just 25 years old.

As she recounts the story of her son’s brief life and sudden death, Flatt’s voice is steady and calm. But when asked how Paul’s suicide affected her, she whispered, “I was shattered. I never saw it coming.” For several long years after Paul’s death, Flatt relied on the support networks she had developed in the wake of a difficult divorce years earlier. “I felt like a total failure as a mom, but I decided pretty early on that I would survive,” she says.

Flatt now works for the Nevada Office of Suicide Prevention (NOSP), an entity created by the state legislature in 2005 in response to the petitioning of citizen activists like, well, Linda Flatt. She oversees the operation of the Las Vegas office of the NOSP, promoting community-based suicide prevention efforts primarily in Southern Nevada, but Flatt is the first to admit that she’s an unlikely activist. Raised in a military family, she has the kind of serious, disciplined demeanor that reflects a well-behaved childhood. A Republican and a regular church-goer, she was, until the death of her son, not one to question the status quo—much less challenge it.

Trying to prevent suicides anywhere is a very tricky business, and Flatt’s job is especially daunting: for five decades, Nevada has had one of the highest suicide rates in the nation. The state’s high rate is driven in large part by the extremely high rate of suicide in Las Vegas, where more than 70 percent of Nevadans reside. Vegas has by far the highest suicide rate of any large city in the nation (18.4 per 100,000 residents, about double the national average and fully 16 percent higher than the next highest city). Though the city is known as a travel destination, more than 90 percent of the Las Vegas suicides each year are by residents.

Frankly, the odds are heavily stacked against NOSP. The recession that began in 2007 has hit Nevada harder than any other state. The twin engines of its economy—tourism and homebuilding—have sputtered, producing extremely high rates of unemployment, home foreclosure, and personal bankruptcy, all within the context of massive cuts to state spending on services people need most in times of economic trouble.

Such forces conspire to push people to leave the state, resulting in even further declines in tax revenues. No longer one of the fastest growing states in the country, Nevada appears to be losing residents to states with more robust labor markets, such as Texas. Hundreds of thousands of residents want to leave to find better opportunities, but because an estimated 80 percent of homeowners owe more on their homes than they are worth, they’re stuck. Being trapped can be a strong motivator, spurring individuals to work harder to change their circumstances, but it can also lead to feelings of insecurity, hopelessness, and despair. These are precisely the feelings that could place Las Vegans at an even higher risk for suicide than in the past.

Three years after her son’s death, Flatt founded a support group devoted to helping others who had lost someone to suicide. “I was scared to death,” she recalls. “Some who were grieving were now suicidal themselves and I had no idea how to help them.” After finding that local resources for suicide prevention education were limited, she joined forces with Jerry and Elsie Weyrauch, founders of Suicide Prevention Advocacy Network ( SPANUSA), in an effort to unite local grassroots advocates for suicide prevention. “At some point,” she says, “I asked Elsie what it meant to be a ‘community organizer.’” Weyrauch’s reply still makes Flatt laugh: “Well, it means whatever you want it to mean, dearie!” Flatt signed on as a volunteer local organizer and found, somewhat to her surprise, that she was good at it. In short order, she reached out to a local Republican state senator from her church for help. It was that senator who successfully pushed for the legislation that, ten years later, launched the NOSP.

Among its more impressive achievements are the creation of a school-based text messaging support system that provides live crisis intervention for students; annual fundraising walks in eight communities; a statewide epidemiological working group to establish a server-based, comprehensive dataset on completed suicides; training of over 8000 Nevadans in suicide risk assessment; and screening programs that have served over 2,500 youth. NOSP has also helped tribal governments secure funds to reduce methamphetamine-related suicides and successfully developed dozens of private/public partnerships between the state and non-profit agencies and organizations devoted to social services for the young and the elderly. To accomplish all this, the NOSP raised millions of dollars in grants from federal agencies and private foundations. All this with a staff of just four people and state funding of less than $150,000 per year.

It is too early to say exactly how the recession will impact Nevada’s suicide rate. But there are some indications that it will climb as the recession grinds on. Preliminary mortality data from the National Center for Health Statistics reveal a sharp, 10 percent spike in the rate in 2008 and another (this one 17 percent) in 2010. Historically speaking, these are massive increases (suicide rates typically fluctuate only 2 to 4 percent each year). If this trend continues for another few years, it will effectively reverse the long decline in the suicide rate that has been ongoing since the 1970s. There are good reasons to believe that this could occur, since the impact of the economic recession is likely to reverberate for years even after economic growth returns to the state. For some of Nevada’s most vulnerable citizens, the damage will already have been done. However, suicide rates are complex phenomena and notoriously difficult to predict. How it will all turn out is anyone’s guess.

To sociologists accustomed to viewing suicide through a Durkheimian lens, the meaning of the statistical trends is clear and unsurprising: compared to other large cities, we say, Las Vegas must be suffering from low levels of social capital and weak social integration and regulation. We’re partially correct: the suicide rate is not likely to come down unless fundamental features of community cohesion are addressed.

After years of observing the heroic efforts of Flatt and her colleagues, though, I’m not so sure we’re right. While some of us might find the statistics depressing and adopt a fatalistic tone, Flatt sees them as a call to arms. Numbers aren’t everything—the human spirit does its own kind of math. This is what is unexpected about Las Vegas, something that nearly all outside observers fail to grasp. Residents are not hapless victims of social forces beyond their control: led by people like Flatt, they organize themselves to resist those very forces.

When I spoke with Flatt in early October of 2011, she was exceptionally busy: just a week earlier, the coroner confirmed that there had been six teen suicides in the past month, a shocking number given that there were only seven in all of 2010. How was she managing this latest crisis? “I’m persevering,” Flatt said, the resolve edging through her voice. “Things keep getting worse and worse. It’s generally such a scary time. We need to be more creative in how we think. And we need to persevere.” Spoken like a true survivor.

Mostly, I remember it was a beautiful day, and I won a gift card for a local coffee shop—which more than offset the $10 “donation” I made to Students for a Free Tibet. But it was kind of sad because so few people showed up that everybody won something in the raffle. Even if those raffle prizes had been donated, and even if the organization made money, I still felt like I cheated the system. I don’t think many Tibetans would be inspired by my self-sacrifice.

The charity bike ride to fight AIDS was different. At least it felt different. Four days into the 400-mile bicycle ride, I noticed that one of the riders had affixed two large bandages to the backs of her calves. Written on them in black marker was the phrase, “THESE LEGS FIGHT AIDS.” Suddenly, everything made sense. Those words summed it up: the desire that those 400 miles of sore butts, burning legs, and sweat (if not blood and tears) would mean something. They meant determination. They meant struggle. They meant caring.

Photo © Kelly Doering, Stick People Productions (stickpeopleproductions.com).

To sociologists, this phenomenon presents a variety of puzzles. Do people participate because of an altruistic concern for others or merely a selfish desire to have fun? Is this kind of civic engagement old or new? What does it say about our society if civic recreation is replacing Lions Clubs and PTAs as an ideal way of getting involved in public life? There are no simple answers to these questions, but new evidence shows that the “fitness boom” breathed new life into an old civic form—not because it is an efficient way to raise money, but because it resonates with the cultural value of hard, bodily labor and with narratives of suffering for a noble cause.

the changing civic repertoire

Research on civic engagement is never just about civic engagement; it is also about the promise of democracy and the everyday meanings of citizenship. So the stakes were high when Robert Putnam, in his influential book Bowling Alone, showed that a variety of forms of civic engagement—from voting to membership in voluntary associations—were on the decline in the U.S. To read his book is to feel a mountain of data weighing upon you, creating an unpleasant fear that individualism is usurping our capacity to make democracy work. Many scholars confirmed Putnam’s thesis with evidence of their own, but his critics pointed out that some forms of civic engagement, such as volunteering and political advocacy, were actually on the rise.

As scholars weighed evidence on both sides, it became clear that American civic life was changing, if not necessarily declining. Putnam’s image of the lone bowler symbolizing an anemic democracy wasn’t quite right, but the political significance of bowling is less absurd than his critics realized. There may be fewer people in bowling leagues today, but bowlers might be raising more money for charity than ever before. Recreational opportunities feature prominently in the contemporary civic repertoire.

Civic recreation illustrates both what is old and what is new about contemporary civic engagement. On one hand, there is nothing new about using a leisure activity to raise money for charity. Benefit dinners, charity auctions, and dance marathons have existed for decades, and they all promise a good time in exchange for supporting a good cause. On the other hand, fitness fundraisers—running, walking, or performing some other athletic feat to raise money for some cause—are relatively new. Fitness fundraisers represent a recent innovation on an old civic form, and the story of civic recreation’s transformation is also the story of some significant economic, cultural, and political changes in American society.

the transformation of civic recreation

Fitness fundraisers emerged in the late 1960s as walkathons to combat hunger. The first walkathon in the U.S., the Walk for Development, was held in 1968 by the American Freedom from Hunger Foundation. Hundreds of similar walks followed suit: Project Bread organized its first Walk for Hunger in 1969, the same year that the Church World Service began the CROP Hunger Walks. The March of Dimes organized the first Walk America in 1970. It is striking that this tactical innovation occurred during a period of social upheaval: sociologist Michael Schudson argues that it was around this time that a new ideal of “rights-bearing” citizenship emerged. The citizen who came out of the 1960s was keenly aware of how “the personal is political,” and as a result, developed a number of new techniques of political activism—at about the same time that other techniques began the decline documented by Putnam.

In the 1970s and ’80s, fitness fundraisers spread across the nonprofit sector. People weren’t just walking, and it wasn’t just to fight hunger. Nonprofit professionals coupled myriad causes with myriad fitness activities. For example, in 1978 the American Heart Association launched a fundraiser based in schools and called it Jump Rope for Heart; in it, elementary students ask for donations for heart and stroke research. The event promises to promote physical fitness and combat obesity among students, who receive “thank-you incentives” (that is, toys) in return for meeting pledge goals. Biking and running events became common in the 1980s, as the number of health charities organizing them expanded. In 1980, the National Multiple Sclerosis Society organized its first bike ride to raise money for MS research. The two most popular fitness fundraisers today also started during this time: the Susan G. Komen Foundation’s Race for the Cure (1983) and the American Cancer Society’s Relay for Life (1985).

The timing of this tactic’s diffusion is significant for economic, cultural, and political reasons. Civic recreation provides nonprofit organizations with a financial buffer against fluctuations in government funding, which is often their single largest source of revenue. The Reagan administration brought about a sharp contraction in government funding for nonprofit social services, even as the sheer number of nonprofit organizations in the U.S. grew to record highs. Thus, civic recreation helps nonprofit organizations maintain steady revenue streams in uncertain financial times, and successful fundraisers provide them with a competitive advantage in securing donors in an increasingly crowded nonprofit sector.

Culturally, the emergence of fitness fundraisers coincided with the “fitness boom” in the U.S., a period marked by the growth of the health and fitness industry and the increasing popularity of hobbies like jogging and cycling. Not simply a healthy lifestyle choice, individual fitness became an important cultural value and a marker of middle-class status, thanks to its promotion by apparel companies, the fitness publishing industry, and mass media. Having a physically fit body, and the accessories to match, became a symbol of one’s social and moral fitness as well. Owning the newest pair of Nike Air Jordans might not improve your game, but it could work wonders for your style and social status.

Scholar and critic Samantha King argues in her book Pink Ribbons, Inc. that these economic and cultural changes are also political. The rise of fitness fundraisers and cause-related marketing is part of a broader conservative shift in American politics and the dismantling of the welfare state. In the 1980s, President Reagan and other conservatives abdicated social responsibility while advocating personal responsibility for addressing social problems. Individuals who lacked social fitness had only themselves to blame, and nonprofit organizations turned to for-profit activities to make up for the decline in public funding.

As for what has happened to civic recreation since the ‘80s, quite frankly, we don’t know for sure. Detailed, representative data on nonprofit fundraising is hard to come by. Most information comes from the Internal Revenue Service, since every 501(c)(3) organization must report its revenues and expenses each year on IRS Form 990 in order to maintain tax-exempt status. The IRS requires organizations to report “special events” revenue, but the groups don’t have to provide many details about the nature of those events. Moreover, revenue from fitness fundraisers are sometimes lumped in with “direct public support,” making it indistinguishable from direct financial donations.

Imperfect though the data may be, the number of organizations reporting any special events revenue whatsoever is an indicator of the prevalence of civic recreation. As the graphic on p. 30 shows, the number of organizations reporting special events revenue has risen, in both relative and absolute terms. Between 1991 and 2007, the percentage of organizations reporting net revenue from special events increased from 24.1 to 32.4 percent. In absolute terms, the number reporting special events revenue tripled during this time. So, we know the sheer number of civic recreation opportunities to which Americans have been exposed has increased significantly.

Ironically, this growth may have occurred in spite of, rather than because of, any financial benefits. While these events hold the promise of stabilizing revenues, they frequently lose money for the sponsoring organization. Charity Navigator, an “independent charity evaluator,” found in a 2007 study that organizations spent $1.33 for every $1.00 raised by a special event, compared with $0.13 spent for each $1.00 raised in total. Here again, though, we do not know the true financial impact of civic recreation, because many special events are not reported as such.

Further, whether or not an event is financially successful may be unrelated to the overall presence of civic recreation in the American civic repertoire. Even if individual events fail, the sheer amount of civic recreation taking place will still rise. Take, for example, Pallotta Teamworks, a for-profit event planner with a checkered past. Best known as the sponsor of the California AIDS Ride, this organization was a pioneer of the multi-day, multi-thousand-dollar-pledge fundraiser (the template for the AIDS bike ride described here). The organization closed its doors in 2002 amid declining participation and controversy about the inefficiency of its events. As the graphic (above left) shows, Pallotta’s events seem anything but successful.

However, even as individual events were failing, the sheer number of participants was booming, tracking a similar increase in the overall number of events. If, as the graphic on the right suggests, the prominence of civic recreation in the American civic repertoire does not depend on its economic success, the source of its apparent popularity must be located elsewhere.

suffering bodies and fit citizens

All actions are laden with meaning. For instance, we buy Girl Scout cookies because they’re delicious, but each purchase carries an additional value: it teaches a young girl that success comes from hard work. There is no such thing as a free lunch. Similarly, our hearts—and our money—go out to the Salvation Army bell-ringers at Christmas time as they devote their time and labor to the singular task of ringing bells for pocket change. They suffer bodily in the freezing cold, like the poor and homeless they want to help.

Civic recreation, too, is popular in part because it resonates with a deeply held cultural value of hard work through bodily labor. Rather than simply writing a check, it feels good to actually do something for the cause you believe in. Civic recreation tries to unite the value of individual fitness with judgments of social and moral fitness in a healing way. In the face of physical and social ills—for we cannot deny their existence—conscientious citizens try to heal the individual and the social body in whatever ways they can. As an ordinary citizen, if I cannot enact complex, structural solutions, then what can I do?

I can ride a bicycle. When I signed up for ACT II (AIDS Network Cycles Together, II), I learned that the $1500 in donations that I would have to raise to participate in this bike ride would go toward HIV prevention services and a variety of legal, medical, and social services for people with AIDS (PWAs). Some people might prefer to simply write a check and skip the 400 miles of bike riding, but not I. As a practical matter, I couldn’t write such a large check myself, but together with friends and family we could. Plus, let’s be honest: I love cycling and this ride would be a great way to see the rolling hills of southwestern Wisconsin.

But that is not why I was standing hand-in-hand with strangers, people I had just met, listening to the sounds of a lone bagpiper, watching a solemn procession of people and objects that symbolized AIDS as they moved down an aisle of weeping humanity. By the time of those Closing Ceremonies—after six days of riding, eating, and sleeping together—I knew there was a deeper reason I had chosen to ride my bike. It was expressed in the narrative of suffering, fitness, and determination that we constructed collectively.

The event organizers worked meticulously to immerse us participants in HIV/AIDS symbolism, from the mundane to the prophetic. Little red ribbons were everywhere. There was a rider-less bicycle, “Rider Zero,” that accompanied our caravan to represent all of the PWAs who had died or were too sick to ride. Organizers used these symbols and other practices to tell a story of bodily suffering and determination to overcome it—the suffering that you feel trying to ride a bicycle up a hill is indicative of the suffering that PWAs experience every day. It is only through persistence and determination that you get to the top, just as only persistence and determination will win the fight against HIV/AIDS, whether in the individual or the social body.

Participants and other volunteers reinforced the organizers’ narrative. One rider, Brett, a veteran of six AIDS rides, told me a story of physically and emotionally living this metaphor: On a previous ride, after riding 300 miles in three days, he came upon a cemetery with red ribbons tied to the fence, and he broke down crying. The combination of physical exhaustion and the symbolic reminders of his friends who had died simply overwhelmed him. Even HIV-positive participants reinforced the metaphor connecting physical exertion with the fight against AIDS. On the fifth day after dinner, Josh stood up and announced to everyone present: “As an 11-year survivor of being HIV positive, I am alive today because of you. So thank you, thank you all for riding.” In response, everyone cheered and applauded like crazy. Who wouldn’t feel their efforts validated by such testimony?

In addition to these symbols and metaphors, we strove to enact the kind of caring, compassionate community needed to combat HIV/AIDS. Ordinary bike rides are frequently quiet and solitary, but organizers and volunteers worked assiduously to create a norm of boisterous cheering and mutual encouragement. Some volunteers acted as cheerleaders each day, parking their cars at the top of steep hills and yelling words of encouragement: “Looking good rider!” “You can do it!” Cyclists were socialized to do the same for one another, offering words of encouragement and sometimes getting off their own bikes to run alongside slower riders, cheering them on as they struggled to climb steep hills.

Notably, it wasn’t just the fast riders cheering on the slow riders; the slow riders reciprocated. Through this near-constant cheering and mutual support, organizers and participants enacted a culture of caring that reflected, in the words of one organizer, “the way the world should be.” At the Closing Ceremonies, one speaker urged: “Don’t just remember what you’ve experienced these six days and leave the spirit of caring and love behind you. Bring that caring spirit to the rest of the world. Help make the rest of the world more like ACT II.”

What did all of this accomplish? ACT II ultimately achieved the three main goals of all fundraisers: it raised money, generated positive publicity, and recruited volunteers for the organization and its cause. Because ACT II provided participants with an experience more meaningful and rewarding than putting a stamp on an envelope, more than a few ACT II participants remained dedicated volunteers, participating in ACT rides year after year. Of course, our ride didn’t win the fight against HIV/AIDS, but it did teach us a lesson: each of us can make a difference through hard work and determination. Horatio Alger would be proud.

the politics of fun

The emergence of fitness fundraisers and the broad appeal of civic recreation are inextricably bound with the economic, cultural, and political forces that have shaped our society over the past 50 years. This channeling of physical energy into civic purposes—this uniting of individual and social fitness—feels positive, proactive, and liberatory. It empowers people to take action, and it is more rewarding than writing a check. Civic recreation shows the tremendous creativity of nonprofit organizers and entrepreneurs working to create a better society any way they can. And it is liberating to know that civic action doesn’t have to be separated from ordinary life; it doesn’t have to be boring or overly serious. It doesn’t have to be anything. As our society changes, and as we seek new ways to improve it, we will adapt, innovate, and meet new challenges. That, at least, is the promise.

But then I think about playing kickball for Tibet, and it all seems ludicrous. Civic recreation can make politics seem a little too easy, a little too fun—just another commodity to be consumed and enjoyed without any deeper investment or risk. Even worse, cloaking politics in a mantle of sports and recreation could simply be “producing apathy,” as political ethnographer Nina Eliasoph might put it. It may be comforting to think that one form of civic engagement is just as good as another, but succumbing to the politics of fun risks making us unable or unwilling to do the important work when it’s not fun. Critics are right to worry whether we will work as good citizens for the common good, if it does not benefit—or entertain—us directly. Politics can be a matter of life and death—maybe not for you today, but for someone somewhere.

In the end, I think of civic recreation as the knife-edge of democracy. On one hand, civic recreation amplifies the self-interested individualism generated by the fitness boom and the conservative shift in U.S. politics. On the other hand, it is a product of the “rights revolution” of the 1960s, and it shows—directly and experientially—some of the important ways that the personal is political. Just as civic recreation can lead us into mindless consumption or political apathy, it can empower us to take action of the most communal and political sort. The promise of democracy stretches deep, deep down into the minutiae of everyday life; the means and ends to which we devote our civic energies are up to us. So, too, for civic recreation: its social benefits are there to be claimed, but are not guaranteed.

recommended readings

Eliasoph, Nina. Avoiding Politics: How Americans Produce Apathy in Everyday Life (Cambridge University Press, 1998). An innovative ethnography of the ways people use informal talk and recreation to empty the public sphere of political discourse.

King, Samantha. Pink Ribbons, Inc.: Breast Cancer and the Politics of Philanthropy (University of Minnesota Press, 2006). A strong critique of corporate philanthropy, cause marketing, and other ways the line between charity and profit is being blurred.

National Center for Charitable Statistics. One of the best online sources of data on the nonprofit sector, with integrated tools for conducting analyses.

Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (Simon & Schuster, 2000). A powerful description and explanation of trends in civic participation and social capital in the U.S. in the late 20th century.

Schudson, Michael. The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life (Martin Kessler Books, 1998). An insightful historical analysis of how the meanings of citizenship have changed in the U.S. since the colonial era.

In this, our final issue at the editor’s desk, we turn our attention to the work of a Minnesota-based photographer, Wing Young Huie. We think you’ll see it’s no accident that Huie found himself at the release party for our very first issue, back in Winter 2008.

Born and raised in a predominantly white neighborhood of the port city of Duluth, MN, Huie is perhaps best known for a series of projects based in the diverse neighborhoods and communities of the Twin Cities metropolitan area. These photographic explorations (from which a number of the images shown here are drawn) are created and then displayed in neighborhoods like St. Paul’s Frogtown and along Minneapolis’s Lake Street. They are installed in public places and often run for miles, including intimate portraits in the windows of local businesses as well as larger-than-life prints mounted on the sides of buildings. Some are so big that they’re mistaken for athletic apparel advertising or community promotions from the Chamber of Commerce. And these images read, at least to the sociological eye, as striking insights into social life, capturing the community as an aggregrate of its individual members.

Huie rarely uses technical terms or flowery language as he discusses his art and how he’s using it to engage with people near and far. Instead, he carries himself as a thoughtful observer, a humble Midwesterner who generally asks more questions than he answers and listens more than he talks. Despite this quiet approach, Huie’s thinking, motivations, and work are peppered with ideas eminently recognizable to the sociologist: diversity and difference, complexity and ambiguity, connection and (perhaps most of all) context. One recent critic, Patricia Briggs, highlighted context’s importance in Huie’s portfolio, writing, “[Huie] embraces the idea that art exists at the intersection of image, context, and viewer. Its power lies in conversation and connection… beyond the usual goals or logic of documentary photography… to stress the power of photographic images to build connections, to create and reflect relationships.”

Huie says it more simply, stating only that he photographs people in everyday life in “very subjective ways,” looking for images that appeal to him aesthetically. For him, this isn’t about objective, documentary photography that will accurately represent “just the facts.” Instead, it’s his engagement with his subjects that sets him apart. His portraits are meant to create intrigue and conversation, a sense of place that doesn’t require a sociology degree to recognize.

Huie’s latest and perhaps most ambitious effort is the monumental University Avenue Project. The portfolio includes hundreds of photographs taken along what locals just call “The Avenue,” the street connecting the Twin Cities from the State Capitol in St. Paul all the way to the campus of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. And while the road runs East-West, the project took Huie in several new directions. For instance, in addition to creating prints to hang along the thoroughfare, Huie chose to digitally project the images at night, using large screens in an abandoned lot in the middle of the metro. All summer long, the community looked back at itself. Another new theme was his use of hand-held chalkboards that allowed his subjects to “speak” to the viewers.

This technique grew out of Huie’s frustrations with the conventions and limitations of documentary photography. Though it’s his medium of choice, Huie says “A lot of black and white photography portrays its subjects as victims.” Huie counts himself and his work as part of the problem. So, in an effort to “expand meanings rather than contain them” and “to connect the viewer to what is being viewed… reflect what I didn’t see,” Huie began to experiment in seminars and workshops. Eventually, he settled on a reflection and discussion exercise that involved participants writing down their answers to one of these six questions: What are you? How do others see you? What don’t others see about you? What is your favorite word? What is an incident that changed your life? How have you been affected by race? Then, he photographed his subjects, allowing the transitory connections he always makes with these people to continue with his viewers.

Huie understands these questions as the beginning of conversations—often tough conversations—between himself and his subjects, his subjects and their viewers, and viewers and their communities. “These questions are difficult to answer. They require someone to reveal a lot about themselves and their own vulnerabilities.” Huie recalls one particular exchange with a young girl who asked him not to share her comments with classmates, but then begged him to include her picture in his show. “But you understand,” he told her, “that then this will get seen by thousands of people, everyone.” The public nature of the show didn’t dissuade her, Huie recalls—in fact, it was exactly what the girl wanted. Huie puzzles on this moment, perhaps a signal of our unique age, in which privacy is guarded, but publicity is paramount. Everyone, Huie muses, wants to be recognized and connect in some meaningful way.

Huie has recently opened a new gallery and community space in a long-dormant commercial building (it had been vacant for decades) in a slowly-but-steadily rejuvenating part of South Minneapolis. He lives in an apartment above ”The Third Place,” which includes not only large walls to house his photographs, but also ping pong tables and a karaoke lounge (“Ping and Sing with Wing,” as one recent event was described). Huie believes The Third Place will be both a venue to sustain and support his work, and an artistic venture in and of itself, a way to embed himself more deeply within the social worlds in which he works. Indeed, when we sat down to talk about this feature, a gang-related slaying that had taken place at his doorstep the night before dominated our conversation, but seemed in no danger of driving Huie away: “This gallery is an extension of all my projects. It is not just where I work, it is where I live. They are all connected and part of being connected.” And so it is that Huie opens himself up to the experience of the community he captures, “Now is the time to reflect back, take a look at how to sustain and build a base for what I do. Now I’m a communal artist.”

Popular as a speaker for fifth graders, corporate titans, and community activists alike, Huie, like his work, is multifaceted. His body of work includes the cultural lives of adoptive families, black memorabilia in Minnesota, an exploration of race and place titled Looking for Asian America: An Ethnocentric Tour, and, in a foray into our “reality TV” culture, a personal profile not of a starlet, but of a young Native American girl named Schalemar Flying Horse. The images featured here are not a retrospective, but a collection of key moments in Huie’s life and work. They’re Huie’s landmark images.

For more information about Wing Young Huie’s work and The Third Place Gallery, visit wingyounghuie.com.

One thing organizational sociologists know—at least, those of us who study workplace inequality—is that the answer is “Yes, and in circumstances that have been found in many large organizations.” Policies on the books don’t guarantee anything.

Here’s the back-story and why I think this basic sociological point is worth thinking over. Eleven years ago, Betty Dukes and five other women went to Federal Court. They sought class action status for their lawsuit alleging that Wal-Mart, where they’d all worked, discriminated against women in pay and promotion. At Wal-Mart, the plaintiffs argued, women made up about two-thirds of the hourly workforce, but less than a third of salaried managers. In this highly sex-segregated work setting, a “tap on the shoulder” system of promotion permitted local managers to make staffing decisions with hardly any company oversight. The subjective system created pay bias and severely constrained women’s opportunities at Wal-Mart.

It took four years, but a federal judge in San Francisco agreed to let these six named plaintiffs represent the claims of up to 1.6 million other women, and his decision was upheld in two rounds of appeals. But when the case got to the U.S. Supreme Court, conservative judges like Roberts were skeptical about the group’s claims.

I have served as an expert witness in this case testifying on behalf of the plaintiffs, and the experience has reminded me once again of how difficult it can be for lawyers, judges, and the media to understand and accept sociological knowledge.

In the media, this issue has typically been framed as one of “unconscious” or “hidden” bias. In fact, a few years ago, Fortune described Dukes v. Wal-Mart as “the war over unconscious bias,” and Business Week summed up expert testimony with the glib line “white men can’t help it.” Days before oral arguments were to begin, in fact, my hometown newspaper referenced my participation as an expert witness in the trial, writing “a University of Illinois professor’s theory that white men have unconscious bias against women and minorities is likely to be center stage.” But I have no such theory, and the answer to Justice Roberts’s question has little to do with what’s in people’s heads. Instead, it’s about whether a company adopts practices that have been shown to create and sustain bias or whether they implement those that have been shown to minimize bias.

Almost all large companies have written policies mandating equal treatment of men and women. Some even hold their managers accountable for following guidelines that minimize how gender (and race) stereotypes can influence decisions about hiring, assignments, and promotion, and they systematically monitor those guidelines’ effectiveness. Others, though, have written policies that end up disconnected from actual practices, let alone the organizational units charged with addressing diversity and equal opportunity. When sociologists like myself are asked to testify in class action Title VII discrimination cases like Dukes v. Wal-Mart, this is often what we’re being asked to do: determine whether policy and practice amount to nothing more than symbolic management.

While I faced some harsh (or worse: dismissive) responses to my testimony, I’m confident that sociologists must continue to present our data and analysis in cases like these. Without our evidence, gathered with the conceptual and methodological tools of organizational sociology, courts can conclude that the existence of well-intentioned anti-discrimination policies is equivalent to the practice of workplace parity. Workers and managers understand that management handbooks are just paper; the policies that employers enforce are the ones that they take seriously.

One thing I know is that organizational policies are not the same as organizational practices. Another thing I know is that ending discrimination requires conscious effort, not empty promises.