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Tag Archives: Inequality

“Gender Deviance” Revisited: An Interview with Daniel Schneider, Winner of the 2012 OOW Award for Best Paper by a Grad Student

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October 29, 2012
Announcements, Awards, Interviews
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Daniel Schneider received his PhD in Sociology and Social Policy from Princeton University in 2012.  He is currently a Robert Wood Johnson Postdoctoral Scholar in Health Policy Research at UC-Berkeley/UCSF.  Daniel’s paper, “Gender Deviance and Household Work: The Role of Occupation,” won the 2012 James D. Thompson Award from the Organizations, Occupations, and Work section of the American Sociological Association and was recently published in the American Journal of Sociology. The following is the text of an interview recently conducted with Daniel by Kate Kellogg, an Associate Professor of Organization Studies at MIT.  

Kate Kellogg: What are your general research interests, and what led you to explore the specific question of gender deviance?

Daniel Schneider: My research is at the intersection of family and inequality. My work looks at how inequality structures the formation of families and how gender inequalities then play out within those families. So, for instance, some of my work has looked at how differentials in wealth by race and education shape differential entry into marriage. But, other research looks at how families then perpetuate inequality and serve as sites for unequal practices.

This work taps into that second vein, looking at how economic resources and engagement in the market economy matters differently for men and women in the household. More specifically, this project engages with an existing literature on how men’s and women’s relative economic resources shape housework time.

Kate Kellogg: Can you say a little bit about the behind-the-scenes’ trials and tribulations of your research process?

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America’s Newspaper of Record Continues to Ignore Sociologists on Jobs, Inequality

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October 25, 2012
Commentary
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In the lede article in Tuesday’s New York Times, David Leonhardt pointed out that a critical topic has been glaringly absent from the presidential debate: the standard of living of Americans.

Hats off to Leonhardt and the Times for bringing this issue to the front page. Unfortunately, as is typical of the Times and other media outlets, the article was based exclusive on interviews with mainstream economists.

A particularly sharp juxtaposition between economic and sociological analyses of living standards and inequality was posed today with the publication of a symposium of sociologists in the journal Work and Occupations on Arne Kalleberg’s recent book, Good Jobs, Bad Jobs.

Based on his interviews with economists, Leonhard lists the top two causes of “a decade of income stagnation” as automation and globalization. No one to blame here, just impersonal forces we can’t control!

Among a “second group” of forces, he notes rising health care costs and “shrinking” unions.

In contrast, neither Kalleberg nor any of his commenters highlight technology as playing an independent role in wage stagnation and growing inequality, unmediated by the decisions of managers and policymakers. Instead, Kalleberg focuses on the rise of low-wage work, driven by a shifting balance of power between employers and workers as employers, aided by policymakers, engaged in corporate restructuring to achieve flexibility.

Globalization is a key force here, indeed. But rather than viewing it as an impersonal force to which corporations respond, sociologists emphasize how globalization is actively created by American corporations through global outsourcing.

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“Mr. Mom”? Why Not Just, “Dad”?

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September 22, 2012
Commentary, Panel - Men and Childcare
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Like Lata Murti, I, too, have been thinking, teaching, and writing about men and women at work for a long time, and my initial reaction to her story is one of regret for Adam.  Nearly simultaneously, though, I think about my own daughter and what my spouse and I expect of the people who care for her.  When I look back at the history of her baby-sitters, the majority of them (all but one) were women.  And when I’m honest with myself, I’m not sure I can dismiss the possibility that each of those independent decisions was gendered in some way.

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Are you better off than you were forty years ago?

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September 5, 2012
Commentary, Election 2012
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An emerging critique of U.S. President Barak Obama’s record is the idea that Americans are not better off than they were four years ago. A quick caveat – it seems that Republicans are speaking primarily to “average”, i.e. middle class, Americans here. Paul Ryan, the Republican nominee for the Vice Presidency, has forcefully adopted this critique of Obama, suggesting that his record should be judged based on whether  Obama’s policies have improved the lives of Americans. In a campaign stop on September 3rd, Ryan went as far as to suggest that Jimmy Carter’s Presidency, much derided by the right, seems like the “good ‘ole days” compared to Obama’s:


This reference is more than just a slant at President Carter. It is a reference to then candidate Reagan’s campaign against Carter in 1980, when he famously asked Americans whether they were better off or not than they were when Carter began his term.


What these arguments miss, however, are the fundamental changes these so-called “average” Americans have experienced over a much longer period.

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Ginsburg’s Reshaping of Sex Discrimination and What it Means for You

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July 19, 2012
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Did you know that know that employment decisions based on the assumption that men are breadwinners can be just as illegal as those that assume women are caregivers?  That penalties men experience as a caregiver can be illegal under Title VII?  If you’ve ever wondered what gave rise to men’s legal right to provide family caregiving and how was written—and subsequently unwritten—into law , read law professor Stephanie Bornstein’s recent publication.

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Who are the Real “Help”? Reflections on “The Help”, Race, and Domestic Work, Past and Present

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March 19, 2012
Commentary, Panel - The Help
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Few pastimes are perhaps more uniquely American than going to the movies. Though movie prices continue to increase from their already elevated prices, feature films are fairly accessible for most Americans; they reach a diverse and widespread audience, whether viewed in the theater, at home, or, in today’s technology-driven, ask-and-you-shall-receive society, through instant online streaming via iTunes or Netflix.

Inarguably, blockbuster films often serve as powerful theatric representations of both contemporary and historical social problems and injustices. Through fictional yet theatrical and artistically visual means, popular films have captured the imaginations of millions of Americans, establishing a platform upon which conversations about political and social issues—both in the media and amongst citizens—can and have taken root. Don Cheadle’s 2004 performance in Hotel Rwanda, Sean Penn’s portrayal of gay rights activist Harvey Milk in 2008’s Milk, and 1994’s Philadelphia, which tells the story of Andrew Beckett (played by Tom Hanks), an HIV-positive attorney who is fired on the basis of his medical condition, are all movies that have sparked politically charged conversations about race, sexuality, inequality, and civil rights in the United States.

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Rich Reporting and Thin Analysis in Adam Davidson’s Pop Economics

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February 20, 2012
Commentary
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Adam Davidson is a co-founder of NPR’s Planet Money, a team of economics reporters that produces podcasts and segments for various NPR shows and the extraordinary weekly public radio show, This American Life. Davidson and his Planet Money team have produced some of the most penetrating and informative reporting on contemporary finance. Indeed, their reporting on finance is unrivalled, serving to demystify the murky world of derivatives, mortgage backed securities, credit default swaps and the like for a broad public audience – in the process playing a critical role for democratic debate.

And Davidson can really tell a good story. So good that he has recently been given a new platform for a news analysis, his It’s the Economy column for The New York Times Magazine. Unfortunately, since Davidson has turned from reporting on finance to news analysis focusing on the wider economy, he has increasingly traded the rich journalism that made his name – carefully and clearly explaining the esoteric workings of the financial world through first-rate investigative reporting – for commentaries on the broader economy that present embarrassingly thin analyses based on the oversimplified fantasy world of textbook economics and recycled tropes of American exceptionalism.

Davidson’s fascination with mainstream Economics got the better of him again in last weekend’s Magazine column, in which he praises the entrepreneurial efficiency of an alleged craft revival. Based on a couple of interviews with “successful entrepreneurs” making hand-crafted beef jerky or precision manufactured components,  Davidson argues that a new breed is following “what seems like an ancient business model: making things by hand,” rejecting “the high-volume, low-margin commodity business.”

But, we learn, “the craft approach is actually something new — a happy refinement of the excesses of our industrial era plus a return to the vision laid out by capitalism’s godfather, Adam Smith.” The craft revival is a further realization of the Smithean division of labor, a new round of efficiency improvements based on “hyperspecialization.” Indeed, so efficient is the American economy that “the average American leads a shockingly good life by any historical or international standard” and “Huge numbers of middle-class people are now able to make a living specializing in something they enjoy, including creating niche products for other middle-class people who have enough money to indulge in buying things like high-end beef jerky.”

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Seen Combat. Need Work.

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January 12, 2012
Commentary
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Mt. Rainer Park in Washington was recently closed while the FBI investigated the fatal shooting of a park ranger and death of the gunman, probably from exposure.   I could write about an almost two-year old law allowing people to bring loaded weapons into national parks or the untimely death of a young park worker, but I think it is salient to focus on what the media have already called to our attention:  the alleged gunman is a veteran of the Iraqi war.  After serving in Iraq for two years, reports from those who knew him say he was depressed, aggressive, and most likely suffered from PTSD once back in the U.S.  Although I do not know if he was employed at the time of this tragedy, what occurred in Mt. Rainer should remind us of the economic plight of combat veterans.

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Declining public sector jobs, black workers and the racial gap

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December 5, 2011
Commentary, News Analysis
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A recent New York Times article reports on how the long downturn of the US economy has hit the public sector hard, which, in turn, has been devastating for the black middle class. The article notes that black workers are about one third more likely than whites to be employed in the public sector. Blacks have historically been more able to find work in the public sector, as they faced more discrimination in the private sector. Overall, unemployment rates for blacks have consistently been about twice that for whites, with the black unemployment rate peaking at 16.7% last summer.

The article provides important reporting, but it is unfortunate that it only cites economists and does not address sociological contributions to understanding racial discrimination in labor markets. It notes that economists explain the persistent racial gap in terms of lower educational levels for blacks (the standard human capital refrain), along with continuing discrimination.

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