Everyday Sociology Blog

Authority in 2012: Who’s in Charge?

By Sally Raskoff

Have you seen the movie 2012? It’s an action film in the tradition of The Day After, Waterworld, and Independence Day, yet it has some characters and plot lines that reminded me of Max Weber's concept of authority. Spoiler alert: I will reveal details that may ruin the movie if you haven’t yet seen it.

In 2012, Dr. Helmsley, a geologist, informs White House Chief of Staff, Mr. Anheuser, about the impending doom for the planet. Things happen, including secretly building arks to ensure survival for important or wealthy patrons. Then geologic Armageddon happens, as well as the death of the President, Vice President, Speaker of the House, and most other elected officials.

As the ark boarding commences, Anheuser is in charge and assumes he will continue as leader of the neo-American contingent. There are many people who are barred from boarding as the flood approaches and Helmsley gives an impassioned speech to allow all humanity on board. The other leaders agree and most of the people board the arks with only seconds to spare.

The movie ends with a budding romance between Helmsley and the deceased President’s daughter, Laura Wilson, and the suggestion that Helmsley would be assuming leadership instead of Anheuser.

Weber’s theory of leadership and authority include three types of legitimacy: charismatic, rational-legal, and traditional. All three can be seen in this movie.

The elected officials all held office and had elements of rational-legal authority. Our bureaucratic governmental rules about office holding include how people are elected president, vice president, and to Congress. These are rational and legal processes that are well documented.

The order of succession when high office is vacated is clearly delineated. While the Chief of Staff isn’t on that list, it was assumed in the movie that most elected officials didn’t make it on board the ark. Anheuser assumed that he was next in line and he relished the thought.

Anheuser had a tenuous claim to be president based on tradition, since he was the one remaining member of the last elected administration. He did not have rational-legal legitimacy, since his position was not on the list of succession and he was not elected. While Oliver Platt, the actor playing Anheuser, has some degree of charisma, his character Anheuser does not.

It quickly became clear that Helmsley was a more viable candidate for leadership. As he warned of the geologic meltdown of the earth and tried to save those who remained, his charisma and passion impressed people who gave him more and more to do in higher and higher positions of authority. He also got Laura’s attention after his predictions came true and after his impassioned plea for saving as much of humanity as possible.

While Helmsley gained leadership through charismatic authority, he was assured of the position by his connection to Laura. With their partnership, his claim to traditional leadership was much stronger than Anheuser’s. Marrying the previous president’s daughter connected him with the family who had previously held power – ensuring a traditional base of legitimate authority.

The only type of authority Helmsley lacked was rational-legal, although the viewer could assume their first election would remedy that. If Helmsley and Anheuser ran against each other, one could surmise that Helmsley would win based on his multifaceted claims to legitimate authority.

What other movies or books have characters whose leadership experiences could be assessed with Weber’s ideal type of legitimate bases of authority? Perhaps Harry Potter’s Dumbledore? Gandalf in Lord of the Rings? Margaret Tate in The Proposal? What other examples can you think of?

Understanding Why Crime Rates Fall

By Karen Sternheimer

A New York Times story earlier this year explored a counterintuitive trend: despite the recession, crime rates in New York have fallen. Los Angeles and other large American cities exhibit similar patterns. This challenges a commonly held belief that crime rates rise and fall in large part based on economic changes.

So why do crime rates fall?

Everyone seems to have their pet answer for this question. Besides the economy, some will point to a rise in the number of law enforcement officers, tougher sentencing laws, even the legalization of abortion (according to the authors of Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, anyway). I once had a student who was an ardent supporter of one political party and was convinced that crime rates rose when the other party was in power.

If only solving the crime mystery was so simple. Criminologists have been studying this issue and have come to a startling conclusion: we really don’t conclusively know why crime rates rise and fall.

Between 1990 and 2000, crime rates in the Unites States dropped precipitously. According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report, homicide fell 39 percent, rape rates fell 41 percent, and robbery fell 44 percent. Since that time, crime trends have leveled off for the most part.

But New York’s crime declines put these numbers to shame: 73 percent decline in homicide, 52 percent decline in rape, and 70 percent decline in rape—as well as an astonishing 78 percent drop in auto thefts. Analysts focused specifically on New York to see if any changes there could reveal clues about what causes crime to decline.

I lived in New York in the late 1980s as a college student at New York University, and it doesn’t take a sociologist to notice the drastic changes that have taken place in the city since then. Walking through Washington Square Park (at the center of the university’s main buildings) involved dodging rats and drug dealers at all hours of the day. There were many nearby neighborhoods students were warned not to venture into, especially at night.

I was one of the first to live in a new dorm that was just east of most other university property. Prostitutes regularly walked the streets around the new building, and a group of transients lived across the street in front of an abandoned building. My roommates and I casually watched one afternoon as New York Police officers barricaded our block and raided what we referred to as the crack house across the street. While moving in across the hall, one student had his clothes and other possessions stolen when his parents’ car was broken into. A block or two away stood the porn theater where Robert De Niro’s character Travis Bickle picks up Jodi Foster’s character (a child prostitute) in the classic 1976 movie, Taxi Driver.

New York City in the late 1980s

In one of the movie’s opening lines, Bickle describes New York as “an open sewer.” I wouldn’t have described life there in the late 80s in exactly the same way, but it was a different world when I returned years later. The “crack house” I once lived across the street from now features ground level shops like Ben & Jerry’s and small clothing boutiques. The gritty drug-infested neighborhoods we were warned away from are now upscale, gentrified neighborhoods with young families and sky-high rents. Even The Bowery, which was an open sewer of a street that reeked of urine and despair, has become a Mecca of new development, as seen in the new luxury high-rise building pictured below.

What reduced crime in New York?

Law professor Franklin E. Zimring explores this question in his book, The Great American Crime Decline. He suggests that there are many reasons for declines in New York and elsewhere in America.

It might seem like the most obvious reason for crime to decline in New York is the exploding rents and cost of real estate, pushing out low-income residents who might have more motivation to commit property crimes, for instance. Zimring notes that while this might make sense for Manhattan, New York City is comprised of five boroughs (Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, and the Bronx), yet crime fell throughout the city.

As Bradley Wright blogged about, some attribute the crime decline to the aggressive policing tactics former police chief William J. Bratton employed during his tenure in New York from 1994-1996. Bratton’s strategy mirrored the broken windows theory, the idea that if you eliminate small, quality of life problems like vandalism then you send a message to criminals that larger crimes will also be aggressively prosecuted. And yet crime rates also fell in cities that hadn’t changed policing strategies. Zimring attributes some of the decline to policing (from 25 to 50 percent, in his estimation), but also considers the high population density and strict gun laws as other potential factors. He also suggests that because of the high level of crime in New York before the drop, it had further to fall. Once again, there is no singular explanation of why crime fell in New York or in any other city.

Zimring concludes his analysis with several lessons we can learn from the crime decline, one of which is that we need to do more to compare crime declines in the U.S. with declines in other countries like Canada, where similar drops were observed but even though there were no significant changes in policing or criminal justice. He suggests that crime rates can drop “without major changes in the social fabric” (p. 206). In other words, it doesn’t necessarily take huge social changes to bring down crime rates.

The fact that crime rates have fallen so much is great news. But the fact that there is no simple solution can make it difficult for lawmakers to communicate the importance of some policies to their constituents. We tend to like simple solutions, but in this case there are none.

The Sociological Significance of Pictures

By Janis Prince Inniss

Although I’m not as into it now, I used to love photography…back in the days when we all used film I toted my heavy 35mm camera around. Now everyone—or so it seems—has a digital camera and/or one on their cell phone.

When I was very young my father was a photographer and he taught my brother the trade when he was in his late teens. As my brother developed a photography business I became his assistant—fetching his bag and other such glamorous activities. Along the way, I picked up an interest in photography.

I would take tons and tons of pictures at every event, outing, and holiday trip. After grappling with storing all the pictures, I started to ask myself how many pictures of any one event I really needed. Even 155 pictures of my trip to Yosemite National Park does not change the fact that it is in the past and sometimes enjoying myself rather that shooting pictures has made for better memories.

When I was almost 18, I went to my father’s funeral. It was probably only the second I had attended so I didn’t really know what was done at funerals. Just before leaving our grandmother’s home for the funeral, somehow I got a hold of my brother’s camera. I wasn’t sure what I would do with the camera; what would be an appropriate picture to take given the occasion? I knew that I would not take pictures of my father’s lifeless body. Not only did I consider that that morbid but I refused to even view my father’s body, let alone take a picture of him.

I don’t remember taking any of them, but all these years later I have pictures from my father’s funeral. And I’m glad that I do. They remind me of the early impact of our father’s death on me and my siblings. And the pictures remind me of who attended the funeral. I have forgotten most of the people who were there that day who were not photographed.

Recently I attended an “un-birthday party” in Tampa, an event held to honor the 153 children in this county who did not live to their first birthdays in 2007. Particularly striking was a presentation from a photographer from the Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep organization. The organization exists to take pictures of babies of who have died at birth or who are expected to die soon after. Professional photographers donate their time and the photographs are free for the parents. As the organization’s website points out, taking a picture of such a baby is not necessarily on the minds of grieving parents. (Click here to see a Los Angeles Times story about bereavement photos).

 

 

But as you can imagine, a picture of a baby who only lives for a few hours, days, or months can be of tremendous value to many parents. Not so long ago, many hospitals did not allow or encourage parents to see these babies. Today, parents are encouraged to name their babies, to hold them—acknowledge their lives, however short -–as a way to help cope with their grief. With the professional quality pictures they receive from this organization, parents are granted an important memento that most new parents have or expect—wonderful pictures of their newborn.

Photographs have meanings attached to them. For parents who have lost a baby, a Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep photograph underscores the fact that they did have a baby—for however short a period. The pictures serve as proof that their child existed; it is documentation that this child lived.

Indeed, a photographic image is worth a thousand words. Lately we’ve witnessed dust-ups over news organizations use of the wrong picture to illustrate a story. In an apparent effort to impress us with the size of a “tea party” in Washington protesting President Obama’s health care plan, several websites showed a picture that turned out to be 10 years old. The 10-year-old picture shows an enormous crowd that stretches for blocks, and that was described as being up to 2 million people. It should not surprise you that some conservative blogs reported this high number while mainstream news organizations said that the crowd was in the thousands. At issue here was the ability to say that a particularly high level of discontent exists among “the people”.

We shape pictures—by deciding what pictures we take and how we take them—but pictures also shape our worlds—whether in telling us how big a crowd is, reminding us of a poignant time, or providing tangible proof of a loved one’s life. Societal context and our own personal context shape how we think about these images.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Solidarity: What Brings Us Together

By Sally Raskoff

Are you a member of a club? Have you joined any organizations and spent any time or money with the group and the other members? You might be experiencing something that Emile Durkheim wrote about.

Durkheim’s concepts of organic and mechanical solidarity are fun to think about. Organic solidarity is based on interdependence and is the social glue that keeps society together in complex societies. Mechanical solidarity, based on homogeneity and similarity, is the social glue that keeps society cohesive in less complex societies.

Durkheim saw in growing societies an increasingly complex division of labor, reinforcing differences among people. No longer would most people live in small communities, have the same jobs, and live the same type of lives, e.g., working on a farm. A more complex society consists of many different jobs and people living many different types of lives. If society is to survive as it becomes less homogeneous, new bonds would need to form based on those differences.

Interdependence is one such social bond, since when one specializes in one type of labor, one will depend on others to do the labor required in other areas. For example, if you are a doctor, you depend on nurses, physician’s assistants, and other medical professionals to get your job done, but you also depend on the mechanic to keep your transportation working, the barber or stylist to cut your hair, and the dry cleaners to keep your clothes pressed.

The social bonds created within occupational groups or within other interest groups is a secondary type of social glue connecting people in personal ways. Dense population centers support multiple interest groups, allowing people to join different networks of people and creating many different types of social glue.

When we first learn these concepts, we may assume that mechanical solidarity is replaced completely by organic solidarity. This may not necessarily be the case. In our current times, organic solidarity is likely to characterize the types of social cohesion that are primary while mechanical solidarity is less likely to describe how our societies maintain themselves.

Alexis de Tocqueville was well aware of our American propensity to volunteer. We are a nation of “joiners” as “Americans of all ages, all stations of life, and all types of disposition are forever forming associations” (Tocqueville, Democracy in America). Those student clubs on campus offer but one type of opportunity to join with others to pursue interests. We may, throughout our life span, join interest-based clubs, parent-child groups, neighborhood collectives, and occupational associations.

Some of our understanding of this behavior is captured from surveys on volunteering. Volunteering is usually defined as working for some organization without pay. According to the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics report, just over one quarter of the population volunteer for an organization. The tasks volunteers perform run the gamut from office work to ministering, food distribution, coaching, and artistic performances.

Can this sub-group activity of joining clubs be considered a micro version of mechanical solidarity? It does create groups of like-minded people, as those people come together to perform some common task. Volunteers have things in common that brought them together for a shared goal. The application of the concept doesn’t work entirely, however, since people who belong to the same organization are not held together as tightly as are people in smaller heterogeneous communities.

Durkheim’s concept of the collective conscience helps us understand the difference as it represents the shared beliefs in a society. Those who live in smaller homogenous societies (mechanical solidarity) share a very strong belief and moral structure while those in more complex heterogeneous societies (organic solidarity) may not. Those smaller occupational and interest groups that we join provide a collection of beliefs to which we may belong and between which there may or may not be any cohesiveness.

Take a moment and consider the groups in which you take part. How important to you are they? How strong is the group’s collective consciousness, or shared beliefs? How does interdependence relate to the group? Society is made possible by our bonds with one another; I invite you to consider the number and quality of yours.

Everyday Sociology Talk: Majoring in Sociology

Thinking of majoring in sociology? Members of USC's sociology club talk about why they became sociology majors. Click here to learn more about careers in sociology.

Losing Confidence: Americans and Social Institutions

By Karen Sternheimer

Do you feel less confidence in the government? In corporations? In the press?

If so, your feelings reflect a general trend found in the most recent data from the General Social Survey, a nationally representative household survey taken every other year of American attitudes on a variety of issues. Since 1973 the survey has asked respondents how much confidence they have in a variety of American social institutions. Their 2008 survey results suggest that the public has less confidence in every major social institution (except the military) compared with 2006.

Looking at year-to-year trends might not tell us very much, but if we examine the more than 35 years of data we can see some interesting patterns and think about why Americans might have less faith in various institutions.

Our declining confidence in the news media is rather clear in the graph below. For the past fifteen years, the percentage of people having a great deal of confidence has hovered at or below just ten percent. There are likely many reasons for this, but I suspect that the blending of opinion with reporting—especially on cable news—is partly responsible. If “the news” seems to just be someone’s opinion, especially if it is constructed to influence our political views in one direction or other, we might be less likely to see the press as a reliable source of information. As I blogged about last year, journalism as an industry is in danger, and this loss of confidence is likely a big part of the reason.

By contrast, far more people reported a great deal of confidence in the press in the mid-1970s, in the years following the Watergate scandal and the subsequent resignation of President Richard Nixon. Investigative journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein broke the story of what seemed like a minor burglary of the Democratic National Committee headquarters and continued to pursue the story, revealing a major cover-up.

Not surprisingly, these revelations led to a sharp decline in those who felt a great deal of confidence in the executive branch of the federal government, from 29 percent in 1973 to 14 percent in 1974, as you can see in the graph below. Unlike confidence in the press, confidence in the executive branch of government—which mostly refers to the president—has had many peaks and valleys in the last few decades. Confidence can rise and fall rather quickly.

Most recently, we can see that close to 28 percent felt a great deal of confidence in 2002, just following the terrorist attacks in 2001. But that number fell to 11 percent in 2008, as President George W. Bush’s approval ratings sunk and the economy fell into recession.

Not surprisingly, with news of the collapse of the financial and automotive industries, confidence in major companies fell to the lowest point in General Social Survey history: from a high of 32 percent in 1974, 1984, and 1987 to 16 percent in 2008.

This is a meaningful decline. President Calvin Coolidge famously said that “the business of America is business”. For the past several decades American confidence in business largely reflected this sentiment, that major companies would lead us towards prosperity and opportunity. Scandals in recent years, such as Enron’s massive fraud in the energy market, led to declines in confidence after the financial boom of the 1990s.

These are just a few institutions with declining American confidence, according to the General Social Survey. Medicine, science, and religion are some of the many other institutions that Americans feel less confident about. What does this loss of confidence mean in the grand scheme of things?

It’s possible that mistrust of several major institutions can impact the way we view other institutions, even if there has been no significant reason to doubt them. For instance, despite the advice of public health officials, a large proportion of the population reports that they don't want to be vaccinated for the H1N1 virus. Some just aren’t interested, but others don't trust government officials; some even view calls to get vaccinated as a government conspiracy for control or profit.

When major institutions lose their legitimacy with a large proportion of the public, people are likely to disengage from these institutions, and maybe even ignore important information they provide. What sociological theories do you think might explain why Americans seem to trust social institutions less?

False Alarms and Copy Cats

By Janis Prince Inniss

MoBull Messenger is the University of South Florida (USF) emergency text messaging system that faculty, staff, and students can register for, in order to receive emergency notices. As I mentioned in a previous post, on the principle of not wishing to further enrich my cell phone provider, I do not have a texting plan. Yet, on October 5 I received 7 MoBull texts on my cell phone.

I received the following text at 1:47 pm: “Alert Tampa Campus- EMERGENCY: Armed intruder on campus. Stay inside. Lock doors. Emergency personnel responding.” About 20 minutes later, the alert gave the location of the armed person as the library and warned to “avoid the area”.

Click here to see video about the USF lockdowns

Almost exactly an hour after the first alert, I got this message: “Tampa Campus—A separate report of a suspect on a Bullrunner (campus shuttle) in the Parking and Transportation Services possibly armed. Avoid area and entire campus on alert. “ At 3:19, I received a fourth text message and began to wonder whether this was a joke—of poor taste to be sure—because the description grew stranger : “Tampa campus—white male subject seen in the Cooper Hall area in black tank top, cowboy hat carrying black puppy and a large hunting knife. Officers en route.”

Four minutes later I received the fifth text message as “clarification regarding multiple alerts”. The last two messages said “all clear” and that the “emergency is over”. Had I been on campus I would have heard sirens wail and possibly glimpsed SWAT team members with assault rifles! The campus was shut down for almost three hours.

This was the third time this year that USF has locked down its campus as a precaution against widespread campus violence.

The time before this—in July—I received a MoBull Messenger text as I dropped off a colleague at his office after lunch; the text said that there was a gunman on campus! Although I was right across the road from USF, I drove away from the campus after reading that text. I completed some errands while receiving additional texts warning us to stay away from the campus. I called my mother to let her know that I was not there, as I knew that she was at home and probably seeing a news ticker on her television and that news of a gunman on the campus would cause her some panic.

When I had no other errands and the campus was still on lockdown I headed home and continued my work there. In this case, a “gunman” called a crisis center, reporting that he was in a parking lot on the USF campus with a gun that he was willing to use. The man may never have been on the campus, but was apparently suicidal and was taken for a mental evaluation under the Baker Act.

The first incident of this nature occurred in June when there was a report of a man with a gun in the USF Greek Village which houses 13 sororities and fraternities. This one turned out to be a uniformed ROTC student with his practice rifle. MoBull messages were sent out; the all clear was issued only 16 minutes after the initial message.

In his book The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell describes a “contagious epidemic” of teen suicides in Micronesia. These suicides began with a high-profile one that received lots of attention and was widely copied. Indeed, sociologist David Phillips has found that national suicide rates increase significantly after one is highly publicized. In the Afterword of the book, Gladwell notes that after the Columbine High school shootings in 1999, there were several copy-cat incidents—Gladwell argues these teens were “infected” by the Columbine shootings.

Might the USF false alarms lockdowns be due to copy-cats as well? The first case with the ROTC cadet may have set the stage: a mistake garnered a big response from the campus police and local media. The second episode—that of a gunman saying he was willing to use a gun on the campus was met with an even bigger response—a campus lockdown. Although this person may not have even been on the campus, again there was a big news story about the university responding to what was thought to be an emergency.

The first perpetrator of the most recent USF case was very familiar with the previous reports of armed subjects on the camps as well as with the results. Markenson Innocent not only updated his Facebook page throughout the incident, but also mentioned the bomb threat before it was made saying: "I hope they get my good side!” According to police, using another name, Innocent called police and said that Markenson Innocent had a gun and bomb at the university library. I guess Innocent did not want to take the chance that he would not be discovered or that the wrong person would be arrested. On the same day, there was an alert about a man on the school shuttle; it turns out that Vincent Thomas-Perry McCoy was “joking”.

Since one student at Virginia Tech shot and killed 32 people in 2007 before turning the gun on himself, U.S. universities have implemented plans aimed at minimizing the likelihood that this mass murder would be copied. Perhaps we at USF are fortunate that the act being copied here is nothing more serious than a false alarm. Do you have a different theory to explain what has happened? What do you predict will happen regarding USF campus alarms based on my theory, or yours, if it differs?