A weekly link round-up of sociological work – work by sociologists, referencing sociologists, or just of interest to sociologists. This scatterplot feature is co-produced with Mike Bader.
Continue reading “sunday morning sociology, millennial employment edition”
NBC News just published a self-identified “Hot Take” on why working from home is a bad idea. The piece, by public relations CEO Richard Laermer, is titled “I Let My Staff Work From Home, Then Realized It Wasn’t Working” and recounts a litany of problems that the author faced when he let his employees work from home one day per week. Laermer found that employees treated their Friday work-from-home day as paid time off, even leaving home to go on vacation without notifying their bosses. And the empty office was demotivating, apparently:
One of the many reasons we stopped the one-day-at-home was a startling comment made by our chief financial officer on an empty Friday: “Why do we have this beautiful office when nobody’s here to enjoy it?” The change was palpable, as our usually humming work space suddenly felt drained of the collaborative energy that had previously been a hallmark of it.
The actual research on working from home suggests that Laermer’s experience may not generalize. As economist (and tech CEO) Joe Golden describes, recent research suggests that all-remote work can increase productivity when done correctly. But I’m not writing this post to talk about the substance of Laermer’s argument. Instead, I want to talk about the sexism of the stock photography used to illustrate the piece. The top photo associated with the story is this one:
Continue reading “sexism in stock photography, working from home edition”
I heard Ken Stern on Morning Joe this morning, discussing his new book, Republican Like Me. This is not a carefully thought out response, but a quick thought and a question:
First, the title, which is an obvious paean to Griffin’s classic Black Like Me, serves at once to show the author’s earnestness and to imply that Republican-ness is like Black-ness: assumed to be unchanging, inborn, and genuine.
Second, the question. This is but the latest in probably at least a half-dozen books seeking earnestly to explain (often in crudely anthropological terms) the virtues of the right to liberals. Stern, in particular, references social division and “bubbles” as problems the book is intended to ameliorate. Are there any examples of the converse genre (books earnestly explaining the virtues of the left to conservatives)? If not, why not? And if not, doesn’t the apparent demand for this genre actually imply that the social division is uneven, with one side more interested in transcending the division than the other is?
A junior faculty correspondent writes to ask: “How do sociologists locate funding to write their first book while on the tenure track? How do they locate stand-alone funding to write and/or funding to be an in-residence scholar at another institution? And is there a central place to look for these opportunities?”
So, scatterbrains, what advice do you have? I know about a few of the high profile, in-residence opportunities (like the Stanford CASBS), but only through informal networks, so I’m excited to hear your thoughts as I start my own search for resources. Are there good databases for finding other opportunities? Strategies for raising grant funds specifically to help supplement a sabbatical for those institutions that offer a one semester sabbatical with an option for an unfunded second? Other thoughts? Thanks!
A weekly link round-up of sociological work – work by sociologists, referencing sociologists, or just of interest to sociologists. This scatterplot feature is co-produced with Mike Bader.
This week’s links include discussions of the replication crisis and new directions in the science war(s), and sexual harassment, along with economic sociology links focused on the intersection of tech and inequality.
Continue reading “sunday morning sociology, technology and inequality edition”
I have recently experienced an example of a persistent and rigorous interview that yielded an unexpected payoff. I somehow contracted a Giardia infection, a parasite usually associated with contaminated water. The first questions anyone knowledgeable asks are “Were you drinking out of streams?” and “Were you drinking well water?” because there is a problem in rural areas with contaminated water and wells can become contaminated, especially when there is a lot of flooding, as there was this summer. But I am a city person and only drink tap water. No, I haven’t been camping, I have not been drinking out of streams. I thought maybe there was a sick food service worker? Maybe contaminated tap water in a rural gas station in our trip to Duluth? Hard to know.
It turns out that Giardia is a reportable public health infection, so I got a call this week from a public health student. Continue reading “an object lesson in good interviewing and public health”
A weekly link round-up of sociological work – work by sociologists, referencing sociologists, or just of interest to sociologists. This scatterplot feature is co-produced with Mike Bader.
Between wildfires in California, violence in Myanmar and the refugee crisis in Bangladesh, the humanitarian crisis in Puerto Rico, and everything else in the news, things feel a little grim. The following links will probably not make you feel better, but perhaps they will distract you for a spell?
Continue reading “sunday morning sociology, apocalypse not canceled edition”
The so-called “demarcation question” – separating science from not-science – is an old and thorny one. Fields (often) want to be labeled as scientific because science is afforded a certain kind of cultural authority along with material resources (read: big grant money). Sometimes this question is about creating boundaries between science and pseudo-science (debating say ESP or homeopathy). Other times, it’s about sectioning off science from the humanities, into “two cultures” that are understood as distinct and even oppositional. In the classic “two cultures” division of academia though, the social sciences are a bit of an outlier. Are economics, psychology, sociology, anthropology, geography, anthropology, and history sciences? Are some of them sciences and not others? What criteria would we use to demarcate the scientific ones from the not-science, whatever we decide to call it?
Well, apparently the answer is that a field counts as science if men do it.
Continue reading “apparently, economics is a science because men do it”
The following is a guest post by Arielle Kuperberg.
In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, Mark Regnerus argues that men aren’t getting married because “sex has become rather cheap” (the op-ed is behind a paywall, but you can read excerpts here), and he elaborates the argument in a book he recently published (full disclosure: I haven’t read the book and don’t plan to). You may remember Regnerus from his article “Gay parents are bad, mmmkay?” the now-infamous study in which he used seriously flawed methods to conclude gay parenting has negative effects, by comparing the kids of gay people (many of whom had gotten divorced from the child’s other-sex parent, had never parented with a same-sex partner, or had never even lived with their child), to kids of people in intact heterosexual marriages. Turns out when comparisons are instead made between kids of people in intact heterosexual marriages and kids of those in intact same-sex couples, the kids turn out pretty much the same.
Continue reading “guest post: why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?”
A weekly link round-up of sociological work – work by sociologists, referencing sociologists, or just of interest to sociologists. This scatterplot feature is co-produced with Mike Bader.
What a week.
Continue reading “sunday morning sociology, american violence edition”
Racial politics for the past couple decades have been characterized by “colorblind racism”, defined by Bonilla-Silva as an ideology that rationalizes the subordinated positions of people of color as the outcome of market forces, cultures of poverty, or natural tendencies. As Bonilla-Silva notes, this “new racism” is not the only form of racism that has maintained America’s racial hierarchy since the 1960s, but it has arguably been dominant. Colorblind racism involves ignoring or downplaying structural racism, employing dog whistles in place of explicit racist imagery, and alleging reverse racism whenever a program or policy makes race explicit in order to combat the effects of structural racism.
The 2016 election, the Trump presidency, and a few sets of new survey results make me question if we’re seeing the beginning of another transformation in American racial discourse. This transformation involves the return of explicit racism in right political discourse, the rise of a more explicit White racial identity politics, the rising acceptance of explicit racist discourse in place of dog whistles, and the increasing (albeit still partial) rejection of colorblindness by Democrats/the left (driven perhaps by negative partisanship and the GOP’s embrace of explicit racism). So, what’s the evidence?
A weekly link round-up of sociological work – work by sociologists, referencing sociologists, or just of interest to sociologists. This scatterplot feature is co-produced with Mike Bader.
Apologies for the late posting!
scatterplot 
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