Alice S. Rossi

Sociologist Alice S. Rossi, the 74th president of the American Sociological Association and one of the founders of the National Organization for Women (NOW), has died at age 87. The New York Times has a story highlighting some of her contributions. A brief snippet:

In her scholarship, Professor Rossi explored the status of women in work, family and sexual life. An early public advocate of abortion rights, she was often quoted by the national news media on an array of women’s issues. Her writings are widely credited with helping build the platform on which the women’s movement of the 1960s and afterward was erected.

Professor Rossi was best known for her studies of people’s lives — those of women in particular — as they move from youth to age.

Of her 1964 article, “Equality Between the Sexes: An Immodest Proposal,” she said:

My theme was simple enough. For the first time in known history, I wrote, motherhood had become a full-time occupation for adult women, and motherhood was not enough. For the psychological and physical health of mother and child, for the sake of the trembling family unit, and for the progress of society, equality between men and women was essential and inevitable.

A statement of hers (from The Feminist Papers: From Adams to de Beauvoir, p. 407) that is frequently quoted:

The single most impressive fact about the attempt by American women to obtain the right to vote is how long it took.

Her 1983 ASA presidential address, “Gender and Parenthood,” is available here.

 

Sociology QOTD

From C. Wright Mills:

Caught in the limited milieux of their everyday lives, ordinary men [and women] often cannot reason about the great social structures–rational and irrational–of which their milieux are subordinate parts. Accordingly, they often carry out series of apparently rational actions without any idea of the ends they serve.

From The Sociological Imagination: Fortieth Anniversary Edition, New York: Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 168.

 

Religion, Sex, & Marriage: On Conflicting Values

Sociologist Mark Regnerus explored the topic of conflicting values in an opinion piece for the Washington Post titled, “Say Yes. What Are You Waiting For?” Based on sociological research he had conducted on young evangelical Christians, he discovered a tension between the sub-cultural expectation of no sex before marriage versus the normative practice of delayed marriage. He writes:

Sara, a 19-year-old college student from Dallas, equated thinking about marrying her boyfriend with staging a rebellion. Her parents “want my full attention on grades and school because they want me to get a good job,” she told me. Understandable. But our children now sense that marrying young may be not simply foolish but also wrong and socially harmful. And yet today, as ever, marriage wisely entered into remains good for the economy and the community, good for one’s personal well-being, good for wealth creation and, yes, good for the environment, too. We are sending mixed messages.

According to this article on Regnerus, the argument has generated more than a little controversy. Regnerus is a sociologist at the University of Texas and is the author of Forbidden Fruit: Sex and Religion in the Lives of American Teenagers.

Though this particular conflict is more specific to this group of religious believers, it might make for an interesting class discussion about how values can conflict, especially values that come out of different institutional spheres of our lives. In this case it sounds like there might be tension between basic economic expectations (e.g. get an education, establish yourself in a career, then get married) versus the religious expectations for this group of believers (e.g. abstinence only).

In other words, this conflict might be distantly related to tensions people feel due to the normative expectations between work and home. For example, I feel a constant struggle between my desire to be a good father (e.g. to be involved in my daughter’s lives, to attend school events, to know what’s happening in their classes, to drive them to and fro, simply to talk with them, etc.) and at the same time to be a responsible professor (e.g. to prepare for class, to grade exams, to provide useful feedback on papers, to be on top of committee work, to continue to write and research, to post on my blog, etc.). Part of the beauty of sociology is that it can help us to open our eyes to possible conflicting patterns and practices.

 

Marriage & Divorce Statistics

Pew has a report summarizing data on marriage and divorce from the Census’s American Community Project: The States of Marriage and Divorce. It includes state-level information on things such as median age of first marriage, share of the population currently divorced, percentage of the population that has been married three times or more, etc. It also includes national summary statistics, such as:

On the national level, the Census Bureau survey showed that a shrinking share of Americans are married — 52% of males ages 15 and older and 48% of females ages 15 and older. The proportion of Americans who are currently married has been diminishing for decades and is lower than it has been in at least half a century….Nationally, the median age at first marriage has been climbing for decades: It now stands at 28 for men and 26 for women.

Pew also provides an interactive map the reports data for each state and for both men and women.

The States of Marriage and Divorce

 

Attention Span Deficits

I stumbled across this post by Cory Doctorow on BoingBoing.net that I thought might be of interest: “Notes on an attention economy.” Doctorow cites Herbert Simon from 1971 on the relationship between information and attention:

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients.

Given that attention is a limited resource, it raises questions about what happens when we are faced with so much of it and how we might allocate our attention resources.

Doctorow then points to a recent article by Michael Erard titled “A Short Manifesto on the Future of Attention,” about which Doctorow says, “Apart from some extremely dubious Ronald Reagan worship, the article is a fascinating read.”  One aspect of Erard’s piece that is intentionally provocative is his suggestion that more complex and demanding information ought to be free and easily accessible while the micro-bursts of information candy that we love should command a higher price. Also interesting is the distinction he draws near the end between commodities and gifts.

Part of what makes a piece like this interesting is that it can provoke discussion (something partially demonstrated in the comments in response to his article). For me the interplay between attention and information raises questions about our capacity to process significant information in meaningful ways, not to mention the potential obstacles that might arise to identifying information that is significant which should demand our attention.

There’s a related post at Creating Passionate Users from 2006: The Asymptotic Twitter Curve. According to the author:

For those of you who don’t know about Twitter, it has one purpose in life–to be (in its own words)–A global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: What are you doing? And people answer it. And answer it. And answer it. Over and over and over again, every moment of every hour, people type in a word, fragment, or sentence about what they’re doing right then….Twitter, it seems, is the solution to the one problem we all have: it’s just too damn hard to keep updating our blog every few minutes to tell the world what we’re doing at that very moment.

They offer up this graphic:

The key point in the post isn’t that Twitter is the problem, rather it is symptomatic of the time-pressures we feel in our lives. The author then goes on to cite a number of sources (including Linda Stone on continuous partial attention) that seek to come to terms with this tension in our lives.

 

Perceptions of Crime Rates

Gallup’s annual poll on perceptions of crime finds that, once again, a greater percentage of Americans think that crime rates are rising:

They provide a summary of results here: Americans Perceive Increased Crime in U.S.

 

Segregation: Race & Class

Sociologists Douglas Massey and Jonathan Rothwell have published an article looking at patterns of residential segregation titled “The Effect of Density Zoning on Racial Segregation in U.S. Urban Areas” (Urban Affairs Review, 44: 779-806).  In a presentation at Fordham University, Massey summarized some of their findings. In a story regarding the presentation, Sociologist Warns of New Form of Segregation, he is quoted as saying that, while progress has been made on racial and ethnic integration, segregation on the basis of income and wealth has increased:

The period from 1970 to the present was one of tremendous socioeconomic change. The United States became a vastly more unequal society over this period. . . . By the present time, we are more unequal in terms of income and wealth than any time since 1929. It’s as if all the equalizing policies of the New Deal have been wiped out, and in fact, many of those policies have been wiped out.

In other words, the average person is more likely to live in a neighborhood with others that are also poor than was the case in the past. As the author of the article puts it:

whereas in 1970, the average poor person lived in a neighborhood that was about 13 percent poor, by 1990 the average poor person lived in a neighborhood that was 28 percent poor.

Massey recommends that we need to consider more seriously the intersection of both race and class if we are to understand issues of segregation.

 

Handshakes & Race

Comedian and talk show host Jimmy Kimmel, who is white, visits an African American barber shop to talk about handshakes and race.  The piece suggests that norms we use to greet others vary by race. I wonder what consequences such differences might have for casual interaction across racial boundaries.

Later, Jamie Foxx appears on Kimmel’s show and they continue on the same topic.

If such differences are widespread, to what extent might it help to be more open and up front about their existence and possible consequences?

 

Social Science Jobs

EWeek has a post, “There Will Be Web Jobs for Social Scientists,” that summarizes a report on future prospects for social science majors. The report comes from Gartner, a technology analyst firm, and is titled, “Social Science Meets Technology in Next-Generation Jobs” (a press release from Gartner summarizing the paper is available here). They quote Gartner vice president Kathy Harris as saying:

Many of the needed technical capabilities originate in the social sciences and are aimed at usability and adoption of technology-related business services. . . . These capabilities embody the notion of ‘action at the interface’ between the enterprise and its markets or between business management and technology management.

They identify four key areas of expected need: Web user experience roles, Behavioral analysis roles, Information specialists, and Digital lifestyle experts. They provide more details on each in the press release.

 

Higher Education and Corporate Influence

I would bet most professors have opinions on the influence of corporate culture on colleges and universities. Sociologist Gaye Tuchman has written a book on just that. In the book, Wannabe U: Inside the Corporate University, Tuchman describes what she learned during six years of interviews with faculty members and administrators (in addition to drawing on her own experiences and observations).  The book description puts it this way:

Based on years of observation at a state school, Wannabe U tracks the dispiriting consequences of trading in traditional educational values for loyalty to the market. Aping their boardroom idols, the new corporate administrators wander from job to job and reductively view the students as future workers in need of training. Obsessed with measurable successes, they stress auditing and accountability, which leads, Tuchman reveals, to policies of surveillance and control dubiously cloaked in the guise of scientific administration. Following the big money to be made from the discoveries of Wannabe U’s researchers, Tuchman probes the cozy relationships that the administration forms with industry and the government.

Kathleen Megan reports on the book in a story for the Hartford Courant. Part of the angle she covers relates to the presupposition that the school Tuchman is describing it UConn, a claim that Tuchman refuses to affirm for ethical reasons. Megan also highlights some of Tuchman’s key concerns, including the impact these changes have for teaching. For example, she quotes Tuchman as saying:

Universities are no longer to lead the minds of students to grasp truth; to grapple with intellectual possibilities; to appreciate the best in art, music, and other forms of culture; and to work toward enlightened politics and public services. . . . Rather they are now to prepare students for jobs. They are not to educate, but to train.

It looks like it does raise some basic questions about the purpose of a college education and of colleges and universities. I suspect it also will raise questions about who gets to define success and how success should be assessed.

IndsideHigherEd.com also has an extended summary available here.

Google books has previews from the first couple chapters of the book available here.