Commentary

For the past eight years, we have been working to address an important question: Why has the gender revolution seemed to stall? Our review of data from a range of sources suggests that during the 1990s, our society’s substantial progress toward general gender equality was indeed slowed, stopped, or even reversed on any number of fronts, including employment, earnings, occupational and educational segregation, gender attitudes, housework, and political office holding.

We, along with others, have documented and commented on these trends in several places (see links below). One issue we have addressed is the complexity of these trends: While some of the indicators show signs of a “rebound” in the 2000s, other indicators do not. But what we have struggled with most may well be the timing of these trends. Why did the equalizing trend of the 1970s and 1980s give way to stalled progress beginning in the 1990s? The pattern is all the more puzzling, in that one might have expected the slowing to have occurred during the Backlash/Reagan-era 1980s rather than the 1990s.

Shrinking Numbers of Black Workers in Science, Technology Jobs

By Adia Harvey Wingfield

November 2, 2011

Commentary, News Analysis

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The Huffington Post recently reported a story about the declining numbers of blacks working in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields. Overall, the numbers of workers in STEM fields is declining, but black Americans’ numbers are shrinking to very low percentages. The article cites a number of factors that may explain this, including but not limited to a lack of role confidence (a factor that sociologist Erin Cech and her colleagues also note affects women in STEM fields as well), economic and financial considerations, and a lack of role models and social support in the field.

The Mythology of Steve Jobs

By matt vidal

November 2, 2011

Commentary, News Analysis

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The deification of Steve Jobs is a truly remarkable sociological phenomenon. There has been good sociological commentary on this already, including a post by Kieran Healy applying a Weberian analysis of charismatic authority to Jobs and a post by Teppo Felin on the social construction of Steve Jobs (also see a post by Shamus Khan on the Foxconn sweatshops that make Apple products).

What I want to add here is an argument that not only is the exaltation of Jobs explicable as a reaffirmation of the American mythology of individualism and free markets, but, more provocatively, the Jobs-as-Great-Man narrative is wrong in assigning so much responsibly for Apple’s ostensibly-trailblazing products to a single individual. Against both the American mythology and mainstream economics, technological innovation is better conceived as a collective endeavor.

New CBO report: Trends in the Distribution of Household Income Between 1979 and 2007

By matt vidal

November 1, 2011

Commentary, News Analysis

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The Congressional Budget Office recently released a report on “Trends in the Distribution of Household Income Between 1979 and 2007.”

Among the highlights:

The top fifth of the population saw a 10-percentage-point increase in their share of after-tax income, with most of that growth going to the top 1 percent of the population.

The bottom 80% saw their shares decline by 2 to 3 percentage points.

Thanks to Kay Christensen for sending me this.

The Labor of Protest: A Comment on Walker and the Occupy Movement

By Steven Vallas

October 31, 2011

Commentary, News Analysis

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Many of us are watching with rapt attention as events in Oakland, Atlanta, and many other cities unfold. The police actions in NYC at the outset of the movement, and now the use of tear gas by police (and the serious injury inflicted on a Marine veteran) all play into the movement dynamics in very interesting ways. Readers will want to visit our sister blog, Sociological Images, for a very interesting story by Gwen Sharp, who presents a provocative graph charting what seems to be a dialectical relation between police repression and media coverage, in keeping with social movement theory. And yesterday, many national newspapers were reporting that many cities (New York, Oakland) were beginning to back off, perhaps sensing the tactical disadvantages that repression involves.

Undoing Gender …?

By Julie Kmec

October 27, 2011

Commentary

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I recently read an article that I’m recommending to all of my colleagues and will adopt for my graduate seminar next year. It’s Robin Ely and Debra E. Meyerson’s “An Organizational Approach to Undoing Gender: The Unlikely Case of Offshore Oil Platforms.” It is methodologically exciting—they performed a case study of two offshore oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico (before the Deepwater Horizon oil spill) and analyzed case data of published work on men doing “dangerous” work (e.g., miners, wild land firefighters, military service). It is also theoretically provocative—they theorize that organizations can “disrupt conventional masculinity’s masculine elements” (page 5). Organizations, they conclude, have the capacity to change deeply rooted work cultures; namely, organizations can both “do” and “undo” gender at work. In their case, an organization initiative on one of the oil rigs designed to increase safety, had the unexpected effect of allowing men to “de-masculinize” their behaviors—to openly admit and share responsibility for mistakes, to work for the collective, to express their feelings, and reduce the typical need to express “toughness” common among men doing dangerous work. They actually found that the new organizational initiative reduced men’s need to compete or otherwise affirm their masculine credentials.

Social Media and the Labor Market

By osharone

October 26, 2011

Commentary

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These are tough times to be an unemployed job seeker. During in-depth interviews job seekers frequently tell me that applying for jobs “feels like you’re applying to a black hole.” Understandably so: Job seekers may submit hundreds of applications electronically without receiving a single acknowledgement. They often suspect that nobody even looks at their resumes.

In these dark times, job seekers who turn to support organizations or advice books often learn of a new “solution,” a technology that (in the words of one employment counselor) “has revolutionized job searching.” The technology is social media, and specifically social networking sites (SNS), such as LinkedIn. Support organizations across the U.S., including state-run “One Stop” centers, are now offering trainings to job seekers on how to use SNS platforms like LinkedIn. The mantra I hear at these trainings is that “if you are not on LinkedIn you are invisible.” The message resonates with job seekers.

Occupy Wall Street, Inequality, and Organizational Democracy

By walkeret

October 25, 2011

Commentary, News Analysis

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by Edward Walker, University of California-Los Angeles

The Occupy Wall Street (OWS) demonstrations have caused, to say the least, quite a stir in the weeks since the first events in the New York financial district on September 17. Organized with explicit reference to the Arab Spring uprisings, activists responded to a February call by the Canadian magazine Adbusters for a “Tahrir square moment” targeted against Wall Street financial firms, which they called “the greatest corruptor of our democracy.” Although the first events included only a small number of activists and looked like to many like a bust, fortuitous events facilitated broader mobilization: mass arrests of over 700 demonstrators who thought they were following the officially sanctioned march route over the Brooklyn Bridge, a YouTube video of an officer pepper-spraying a seemingly defenseless group of activists, and the early support of the Airline Pilots Association (followed by significant additional union support in the following weeks). The campaign’s reach has become astoundingly broad; as of October 15, the movement claims to have a presence in over 100 U.S. cities and over 1,500 global cities. Even if these figures can be discounted to some extent as self-serving overestimates, the ability of the campaign to capture public attention has been remarkable. For instance, Nate Silver notes that the movement received a cumulative 3,000 print stories over the first three weeks of its existence, and my own October 16 search of NewsLibrary shows that an additional 4,500 stories have been published in the week since Silver’s October 7 accounting. Media coverage of the movement seems to be following an accelerating production function, to use Oliver and colleagues’ (1985) terms. By this metric, OWS is on pace to receive more cumulative early coverage than the first Tax Day Tea Party events in April 2009, despite OWS’s minimal initial coverage and associated questions about the its legitimacy early on. Further, the movement is gaining major traction in public opinion, as 54% now hold a favorable view of these demonstrations (this compares to the 27% favorable view held about the Tea Party movement). Read More

Blood money, inefficiency in “free market” supply chains

By matt vidal

October 25, 2011

Commentary, News Analysis

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A recent article in The Guardian by Lucy Siegle presents some uncomfortable facts about the conditions of production or of many middle-class home comforts. She reports on the human or environmental impacts involved in the production of nine items, from toy packaging to jeans to laptops.

The article presents an informative look into the complex global supply chains that are generally hidden from view when we purchase our products at the Big Box store or on the internet. When reading the article, I was struck by how the reality of global supply chains is often so far from the beneficent free markets found in economics textbooks. The article largely speaks for itself, but let me highlight two disconnections I found particularly egregious with regard to the so-called free market supply chains for mobile phones and coffee.

Nurses with doctorates, professional autonomy and the social construction of skill

By matt vidal

October 17, 2011

Commentary, News Analysis

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A recent article in the Sunday New York Times reported on the growth of health professionals earning doctorate degrees and how this has generated “a quiet battle over not only the title ‘doctor,’ but also the money, power and prestige that often comes with it.” The article reports that, as would be expected, physicians are none too happy with this development. Laws already exist in Arizona and Delaware that limit the right of nurses to use the title of ‘doctor’. And a bill proposed in the New York State Senate would bar nurses outright from using the title, whether or not they hold a doctorate.