Everyday Sociology Blog

Unemployment and Socioeconomic Status

By Karen Sternheimer

Being unemployed can be an incredibly stressful experience. Difficulty paying bills is the most obvious stressor, but there are others: the threat of losing a home, feeling rejected while looking for a new job, and declining self-esteem are others. How do you now answer the question, “what do you do?”

Yet the challenges of unemployment are not equal opportunity experiences. An individual’s socio-economic status (SES) makes a big difference; two people standing next to each other in line at an unemployment office might have very different realities.

Socio-economic status is a collective measure of status based on education, income, wealth, and occupation, as well as an individual’s family background: parents’ education, income, wealth and occupation. All of these impact how a person will experience unemployment.

For instance, someone with more education is less likely to be unemployed. As you can see from the graph below, people without a high school diploma were three times more likely to be unemployed as those with bachelor’s degrees were in 2008. And because median earnings are higher with more education, people with college degrees might be more likely to have savings to dip into should they become unemployed.

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

And yet for those people who are highly educated and unemployed—note the 2% with doctoral degrees who were unemployed in 2008—the sense of personal failure might be more significant. One possible silver lining to being unemployed during a recession is that a person might know many others in the same situation and therefore take their situation less personally. People with higher levels of education may feel more isolated if they are unemployed.

Another factor defining SES is occupational prestige, which can also shape how someone experiences unemployment. For example, a friend of mine who held an executive-level position lost her job when her company was bought out by a competitor. She was given nine months severance pay of her full salary and decided to start her own business, knowing that she would still collect a significant paycheck for several months. For other people accustomed to not just a high salary, but the power and authority that comes with a high-prestige position, it may be tough to accept that a high-level job might not open up for them.

This is one example of the downward mobility many people are experiencing right now. Aside from having less money to spend and having to alter their lifestyle, finding a job with less prestige also means a shift in one’s social standing and sense of self.

But for some people, who maybe identified too much with their work, unemployment seems to be liberating. In a recent article, the Los Angeles Times described how some people, mostly young and single, experienced “funemployment” by going to the beach, hanging out with friends, and even doing volunteer work. “And at least till the bank account dries up, they’re content living for today.”

Another Times article describes how to have fun in Las Vegas after losing a job by going to the cheaper restaurants in the older, downtown area of Fremont Street. “Vegas is not just the high-priced adult Disneyland I used to revel in. It has spirit and (dare I say it?) soul, and it was totally worth dipping into my severance package.”

The author also described how her newly unemployed status meant she would be mingling with a different crowd that she was used to: “Signs warn patrons not to smoke in line and not to steal the glasses. How enchantingly old school. But the jeans-and-T-shirt-wearing crowd said ‘Midwestern tourist’ more than hip gambler.”

It’s interesting how the author conflates downward mobility with people from a certain region of the country (as a native Midwesterner this rankled me a bit), but it is also a way of trying to distinguish one’s sense of self at others’ expense. A letter to the editor later chided the author for going on vacation at all while she was unemployed.

Clearly having a severance package, previously holding a high paying job, and not having a family to support might make the unemployment experience easier. So too might having a social network with valuable job connections, and family members willing and able to provide financial support and/or a place to live in the meantime. What other factors might make unemployment easier? What might make it more difficult?

Celebrity and Collective Memory

By Karen Sternheimer

What memories have Michael Jackson’s death evoked for you? Listening to gathering mourners talk to reporters, you might have noticed many of them spoke of their own lives and how Jackson’s music intersected with their personal history. Some recalled “growing up with him” via his music, whether they were talking about his work with the Jackson Five or his solo hits of the seventies, eighties or nineties.

The tragedy of his death, along with the death of seventies icon Farrah Fawcett, goes beyond the loss of them as individuals. Certainly their families and friends are feeling a different kind of pain that only their intimates will experience. And yet there are some people who transcend their mortal status—sometimes even in life—and take on a larger role than just individuals, even compared with other famous people.

Certain people and events become embedded in society’s collective memory, which is distinct from although related to our individual memories. Collective memories are typically drawn from people or events that somehow seem to symbolize important social meanings, sometimes meanings so diverse and profound we cannot define them clearly. Instead a person or situation comes to embody what otherwise might be hard to name.

Although the television program Charlie's Angels was central to Farrah Fawcett’s rise to fame in the 1970s, she only appeared in it for a single season. She appeared in a famous poster too, which in itself doesn’t seem like something that would create iconic status. It is what that poster embodied at that specific time that made her not just a famous actress but a symbol of something larger. During a time of change in the status of women, she seemed to personify several contradictions. She possessed both traditional beauty and athleticism; she played a crime-fighting detective on Charlie’s Angels, and yet the show and others like it were called "jiggle TV" because of the skimpy outfits its stars wore.

As a child of the seventies, I rarely watched the show because it was on past my bedtime. Her poster was everywhere, though, and even though I was very young during her heyday my memories of her fame are mixed with my memories of my life at the time. When I see that poster I think of things that seem to be totally unrelated: slumber parties, swimming, and summer camp. The poster becomes a memory shortcut to those years of my childhood. Likewise, Michael Jackson’s music reminds me of my early teen years, when nearly everyone I knew owned the Thriller album.

Collective memories partially emerge from a large group of people having similar memories; Jackson’s career was so long that people from their twenties to their fifties can honestly say they have childhood memories of his music. His career is so loaded with symbolism that volumes might be written about its sociological meaning: the Jackson Five's popularity coincided with desegregation in the 1970s, when fierce debates over busing children to schools in different neighborhoods to promote integration took place, the changes in his appearance and meanings of race, as well as a new era of tabloids where celebrities’ personal lives and legal troubles became big business.

The interesting thing about collective memory is that we don’t even need to have individual memories of a person or event to feel them strongly. For instance, those of us born after the Kennedys or Martin Luther King, Jr. were assassinated still likely feel powerful emotions when seeing footage of those events. I suspect people born after September 11, 2001, will also feel the weight of that day in years to come.

These memories become part of culture for many reasons: they might serve as significant markers that new members need to familiarize themselves with; much like people who study for a citizenship test must know important historical facts. Collective memories are part of the way a group defines themselves, and they are passed along through media images such as video, photographs, and sound bites. These memories can motivate members, much like a reference to Martin Luther King, Jr. might serve as a call for those interested in social justice. The photo of Neda Soltani, the young woman killed during a protest in Iran, could certainly serve as a marker of collective memory for those involved in the movement for change in Iran.

Collective memories can also be passed along through stories and religious texts, and help create shared meanings of events. While people might have different feelings about iconic figures in any society—we certainly don’t all agree on their importance or meaning—their existence helps create a sense of what it means to be a member of a particular social group.

How to Think Like a Sociologist

By Karen Sternheimer

Here’s a shortcut for those of you currently taking a sociology class (or will someday soon). If you can learn to think like a sociologist you can not only earn a higher grade but develop a much more nuanced view of the world around you. You can still be a student of sociology even if you never step foot in a sociology classroom, too.

Step #1: Never assume anything

Assumptions about the way life is might seem to be “common sense”, but if you rely only on this you are not thinking like a sociologist. Sure, even sociologists have our own assumptions, but we find out if they are verified by finding out what actual empirical evidence tells us. This means before we presume our assumptions are true, we test them  (or find results from other studies of the same phenomenon). When I first started graduate school, a professor reminded us that assumptions rely on a sample size of one, hardly sufficient to claim a consistent sociological pattern.

Step #2: Get ready to be wrong

Now that you recognize that your assumptions are just your opinions, you might be surprised to learn that your assumptions are sometimes off, or in some cases, completely wrong! In fact all scientists are supposed to presume we are wrong to begin with, which is the logic behind the concept of the null hypothesis in statistics. When doing statistical tests, we need to disprove the null hypothesis (that there is no relationship between the two variables we are testing) first before drawing any conclusions about our own hypotheses.

It may seem, for instance, that crime keeps getting worse and worse, but as I blogged about a few weeks ago, it’s actually declined a great deal in the last fifteen years. And although women victims are frequently portrayed in the news and in crime dramas, men are most likely to be victims of violence, and elderly people are among the least likely age group to be victimized.

Sociologists think beyond simply right and wrong—we also ask why. For instance, why do we tend to think crime is on the rise? That women are uniquely vulnerable? We ask questions about how misperceptions like these sometimes benefit particular groups, institutions, and the overall balance of power in society. We might consider what purpose “common sense” notions of crime serve for those who have a vested interest in the status quo.

Step #3: Ask even more questions

If at this point you fear we are reading too much into things, you are not thinking like a sociologist. Some tip-offs that you have strayed off the sociological path include responses like:

• “It’s just human nature”
• “It’s always been this way”
• “That’s just the way it is”

I confess that in my student days I occasionally used these well-worn but un-sociological answers myself. Sociologists respond to conclusions like these with more questions:

• “What makes us understand human interactions the way that we do?”
• “How, then, does social change happen”
• “Is this the way things should be?”

You might find yourself resisting these additional questions, as Sally Raskoff recently blogged about . This is completely normal, since it can feel unsettling to find out that many of the “answers” we thought we had about life were not as useful as we might have once thought.

Step #4: Make the everyday strange

Sociologists borrow some of our thinking strategies from anthropologists like Clifford Geertz, who encouraged what he called “thick description” of the cultures we observe. In order to do this, we have to be ready to think about everyday events and patterns critically. This can be very hard, particularly for people who are members of the cultures we study, because it is easy to take things for granted and not even notice them as sociological phenomena.

For some of us, this practice is not just intellectually stimulating, it’s also fun. For others, it may seem like a chore, especially if thinking critically implies that there is something wrong with what we are observing.

Take your favorite television show, for example. If you think like a sociologist, you might observe that the show presents a somewhat skewed impression of crime, or maybe only features whites, or women who are a size 0. If you’re not thinking like a sociologist, you might not even want to be aware of these aspects of your favorite show because you really like it and want to keep watching it.

Thinking like a sociologist, you might understand how this is an outcome of specific entertainment industry practices and want to learn more about how these decisions get made (as sociologists like William Bielby did). Sociologists can both understand something more deeply and still enjoy it.

If you’re not thinking like a sociologist, you might conclude that television just contains dramatic stories people want to watch, and thin women are just nicer to look at, so what’s the big deal? The big deal is everything from our daily lives contains sociological questions, and the answers to those questions help us understand our society in greater depth.

Step #5: Embrace life’s complexities

Life isn’t simple, and neither are sociological findings. Sometimes they may seem contradictory, or you might have personally observed specific situations that appear to challenge a sociological concept. Sociological theories, research, and analysis are not meant as one-size-fits-all proclamations about the way the world works all the time. We might find, for instance, that some forms of crime have declined in one city but not another; that not all explanations for trends in divorce rates make sense in all situations; or that the economic downturn can cause both higher rates of unemployment and savings. The world can be complicated, and so can sociological explanations.

Practice these five steps; challenge your own assumptions, ask questions instead of looking for simple answers, and you just might start thinking like a sociologist.

Pink Flamingos and Social Class

By Karen Sternheimer

On a recent walk through my neighborhood, I noticed an abundance of plastic pink flamingos on several families’ lawns. They immediately stood out as unusual; they hadn’t been there days before, and they appeared on several lawns on different streets.

What was behind this new fad? Are pink flamingos the new must-have for lawn decoration?

I thought this would be unlikely in the neighborhood, an upper-middle class area populated by Los Angeles professionals. Lawn ornaments have symbolic meaning, and pink flamingos—fairly or unfairly—have been linked with a lack of taste and tackiness. Urban professionals, especially in image-conscious Los Angeles, are more likely to try to project an air of sophistication.

Homeowners around here spend a great deal of time and money on their gardens, and very few if any have plastic lawn ornaments. As you can see from the pictures below, many homes have lush landscaping and residents are very devoted to tending them (or paying others to do so). Landscape architects’ signs frequently grace front yards, and those in the know can recommend the “hottest” designer to their friends and neighbors.

You can see just a few examples of neighborhood yards. In fact, beautiful gardens are so valued here that a local club regularly offers tours of some of the community’s best gardens. Being included on this tour is quite an accomplishment. Yards with plastic lawn ornaments are unlikely to garner positive attention, and yet they have appeared on more and more lawns….
I found a clue to this mystery while walking past a local church that had a particularly large flock of plastic flamingos on its well-tended lawn. A pink banner hanging above said “The Flamingos are Coming!” and I figured that the plastic birds must have something to do with a church-sponsored program.

Then I noticed a sign hanging from one of the flamingos on another lawn; as you can see in the picture below, the flamingos were placed there by someone other than the home’s resident to get the homeowner to donate money. In order to have the flamingos removed, the recipient needed to make a donation. The recipient is also encouraged to “flock” a friend’s lawn in order to get them to contribute as well.

After looking online I found that other communities also use pink flamingos for charitable events. A company that sells the flamingos in bulk provides ideas about how to use them to run a fundraiser; one suggestion even includes requesting that those who have been “flocked” pay extra “insurance” to make sure that they don’t get re-flocked by someone else.

The site flockofpinkflamingos.com describes those who get flocked as “victims” of a “hit list”; clearly the pink flamingos are chosen in part to embarrass the recipient. While not explicitly stated, the assumption is that flocked people will be too mortified to keep the flamingos on their front lawn and will make a donation ASAP.

This assumption only works if enough people find the pink flamingos tacky or fear that their neighbors will, drawing on notions of social class. French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu noted that social class is not just about how much money we might have, but it is in part defined by aesthetic distinctions we make about our clothes, food, and yes, our homes.

According to Bourdieu, we derive cultural capital by knowing the unwritten rules of a certain social group. For instance, knowing which fork to use at a formal banquet, what to say and what not to say in certain social contexts, what brands to buy and avoid all are examples of cultural capital. The flamingo fundraiser is based on the presumption that those flocked all know that pink plastic ornaments are not a gift but rather a way to nominate someone for social derision.

In neighborhoods where lawn ornaments like pink flamingos are common, this fundraiser wouldn’t work. It also wouldn’t be effective to flock a stranger’s house: they could just throw the flamingos away. By flocking a friend, the recipient is more likely to feel social pressure to contribute and avoid appearing stingy.

This is an example of informal social control, where our behavior is influenced by those closest to us. We might not have a problem hanging up on a stranger calling for a donation or throw away a letter asking for money, but it’s harder to say no to somebody we know. This is especially the case for people we see regularly, or in the flamingo example, are members of the same church we go to.

We can learn a lot about the intricacies of social class just by taking a walk. What lessons about social class have you found in your neighborhood?

Who is Most Likely to be a Crime Victim?

By Karen Sternheimer

If you watch one of the many television crime dramas that are on now, you might think you know the answer to this question. But looking at the actual statistics might surprise you.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics has conducted the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) each year since 1973, asking a random sample of Americans twelve and older about their experiences with crime during the past year.

This survey is important because many crimes, especially minor crimes like theft, never get reported to police. So if we relied solely on law enforcement agency data, we might never get a good picture of the prevalence of crime. For instance, by comparing the NCVS to the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports, a database of crimes and arrests based on law enforcement data, we can also get an idea of how many rapes get reported to the police and how many don’t.

Here are some things the NCVS teaches us about crime victimization from 1973 to 2006, the most recent year for which data are available:

1. Violent victimization is on the decline

Between 1973 and 1993, violent victimization held somewhat steady, hovering just under 50 per 1,000 (this means that for every thousand Americans, fifty were victims of violence) to around 20 per 1,000 in 2006. This trend mirrors FBI data, which also details a sharp crime decline after the early 1990s. As you can see below, property crime declined significantly too.

2. Teens and young adults are the most likely victims of violent crime

Young people are the most likely victims of violent crime. In 2006, young adults 20-24 were slightly more likely to report victimization than teens after many years of teens being the group most likely to be victims of violence. This isn’t necessarily because teens themselves are more violent—according to then FBI Uniform Crime Reports the vast majority of people arrested for violent crime (more than 80 percent) are adults.

Take a look at the lowest line on the graph above; despite the common perception that the elderly are highly likely to be victims of violence, they are the group least likely to be victimized.

3. Blacks are more likely to be victims of violence than whites

Unfortunately, the NCVS data on race only considers two categories. From the graph above, it is clear that black victimization is higher than the rate for whites. Although the rates for both groups have declined in recent years, we can see that black victimization has increased slightly, while white victimization has remained flat.

4. Males are more likely to be victims of violence than females

With the exception of rape, males are more likely to be the victims of violent crime than females are. As Sally Raskoff blogged about last year, we tend to believe that females are more vulnerable to violence. Boys and men are more likely to be victims of assault, robbery, and homicide than girls or women are.

5. Low-income people are more likely to be victims

The NCVS data reveal that those with household incomes below $7,500 are more than three times more likely to be robbed than those with incomes above $75,000. This might seem counterintuitive; wouldn’t wealthier people have more and better stuff to take? They probably do, but poorer people are more likely to live in higher crime neighborhoods, and criminals typically victimize those around them the most. It’s more convenient.

Poor people are not just more likely to be robbed. Those at the lowest income level are victims of aggravated assault at the rate of 13 per 1,000, compared with 3 per 1,000 in the $75,000 and over category.

 

Okay, now that we have some basic ideas about the age, race, gender, and class of the most likely victims of crime, let’s think about who is most likely to be featured in crime dramas. The victims on these shows tend to be (although are not always) sympathetic figures; after all, if we don’t care about the victim, we might not care if their assailants are caught and brought to justice.

This might lead to highlighting white female victimization, both in crime dramas and in the news to appeal to a specific target audience. Historically the fear for white women and children’s safety motivated the lynching of many black men and the passage of laws allegedly to protect women’s virtue.

In seeking a middle class audience, producers might also tend to focus on middle class victims, people we might imagine are “just like us” and therefore their victimization hits closer to home. We might also feel more emotional connection to stories about elderly victims, which heighten the sense of outrage against a heartless perpetrator.

So crime shows have a lot of compelling reasons for telling slightly different crime stories than the ones that happen in real life. Drama, after all, is heightened reality, not reality.

But it’s important to recognize that the abundance of crime dramas might distort our perception of who are most likely to be victims. Based on NCVS data, those who are young, black, male, and poor are disproportionally likely to be crime victims. Why do you think we have had an easier time viewing this group as the cause of crime, rather than as crime victims?

Baby Booms: As Seen on TV?

By Karen Sternheimer

Babies and children are everywhere in the media world these days. From news coverage of the California octuplets and TLC unscripted television shows like Jon and Kate plus Eight, Table for Twelve, and Eighteen and Counting it seems like there are more people having super-sized families. Oprah recently featured the families of the Yearning for Zion polygamist sect and their multiple children. I started to wonder why there is so much focus on large families on shows like these.

A few questions came to mind:

1. Are we experiencing a new baby boom?
2. Are large families becoming more popular?
3. Are women having more multiple births (three or more babies per pregnancy)?

Let’s look at the data available to see if we can find answers.

1. Are we experiencing a new baby boom?

Thanks to the growth of social institutions, we can be fairly certain that most babies born in the United States will be accounted for. If they are not born in a hospital they are still likely to be given a social security number, so we can get a pretty good count of how many babies are born each year. In 2007, the most recent year for which we have data, the birth rate did rise slightly from 2006-- 1 percent to be exact. This was the largest number of births registered in one year in the United States.

If you take a look at the graph below you can best see this reflected in the top line, which represents the actual number of births, which is now even higher than the number during the postwar baby boom years.

Source: National Vital Statistics Reports, 2009

But before we get too carried away, look at the line below, which represents the birth rate per 1,000 women aged 15-44. A rate is a measure that takes into account the population size; since the population has grown we would expect more babies born simply because there are more people to have them. The birth rate tells us a slightly different story from the raw number above. It is far lower than the birth rate during the mid-twentieth century baby boom years, and is actually somewhat flat by comparison.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the average number of children per American woman decreased from 7.0 to 3.5 between 1800 and 1900. That rate declined until the baby boom after World War II (which you can clearly see in the middle of the graph below) and fell sharply in the years after. Since the mid-1970s that average has hovered below 2.0, down to an all-time low of 1.81 in several years (most recently 2007). In 2008 that number rose slightly to 1.86, but in no way does this change indicate another baby boom, at least not yet.

We can also look to see if women are having more children on average. Below is a graph that highlights the rise during the baby boom, which declined sharply after and has stayed relatively flat since. As you can see, women had an average of more than 3.5 children during the height of the baby boom years (yes, statisticians know there is no such thing as a half a person).

Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1999

2. Are large families becoming more popular?

The data above can also help us answer the second question; the size of families has not grown in recent years, and if anything, households have fewer people now than in the past. Still, in 2006, more than 18,500 women gave birth to their eighth child or beyond. While this might seem like an incredible number of people having such big families, taking the population as a whole into account this means that only 3 in 10,000 births are to these super-sized families. The 2006 data are very similar to the 2005 numbers and the rate of 3 in 10,000 is identical. It might well be that large families get their own reality shows because they are such an anomaly.

3. Are women having more multiple births?

The birth of octuplets to Nadya Suleman sparked controversy about the problems associated with having so many babies at once. Multiple births, particularly carrying three or more babies in a pregnancy, can introduce serious health risks to both the mother and children. Stories about people desperate to bear children using new fertility technologies might suggest that this is a new and growing problem.

The graph below shows the tremendous increase in multiple births between the late 1980s and mid 1990s, as fertility technologies became more available. Also, a growing number of women now have children later in life; such women are more likely to need these fertility technologies and, even if they don’t, the likelihood of having “natural” multiples increases due to changes in an older woman’s cycle.

Source: National Vital Statistics System, 2009

The rate of multiples actually peaked in the late 1990s; the graphs above and below detail how they have actually been declining: by 16 percent since the peak in 1998. While in 1990 there were just 13 quintuplet or higher births, in 2004 there were 86 children in this category, declining to 68 in 2005. This decline is echoed in the graph below, too.

Source: National Vital Statistics System, 2009

So looking at the data we can conclude that there isn’t exactly a new baby boom, but instead a large demographic group, the children of the baby boom generation, are in their childbearing years now. Average family size isn’t growing either. And yes, women are more likely to have triplets or larger pregnancies now than in 1990 and before, but this rate is on the decline.

What other sociological reasons can you think of to explain the baby boom on TV?

Everyday Sociology Talk: What happens at sociology conferences?

Karen Sternheimer and Sally Raskoff discuss what sociology conferences are like. Conferences provide great opportunities for students interested in sociology to learn more about the field and the profession. For more information, check out the regional, national, and international organizations' websites for upcoming conference dates and locations:

American Sociological Association

 

Eastern Sociological Society

Mid-South Sociological Association

Midwest Sociological Society

New England Sociological Association

North Central Sociological Association

Pacific Sociological Association

Southern Sociological Society

Southwestern Social Science Association

 

Canadian Sociological Association

International Sociology Association

Ponzi Schemes and Hegemony

By Karen Sternheimer

I recently blogged about corporate crime and elite deviance, particularly why and how some companies might sell tainted products or swindle investors. Yes, greed and opportunity are major reasons that people try and get away with this kind of behavior. But what is our part in all of this?

The concept of hegemony is useful here. Italian social theorist Antonio Gramsci described how those in power don’t necessarily maintain  their power by force, but by the process of creating consent. For a democracy like ours to continue, a significant number of people must agree that the system is legitimate and agree to keep it that way. This is done in part by encouraging people to think that the system is based on common sense.

Let’s consider the case of Ponzi schemes, like the one Bernard Madoff recently plead guilty to perpetrating and a Texas-based executive, R. Allen Stanford is accused of creating. Each of these schemes involved thousands of clients and over a billion dollars. In Madoff’s case, it is now estimated that he bilked people and charitable foundations out of $65 billion.

In a Ponzi scheme, hucksters promise high returns on investments and initially gain credibility by paying original investors with new investors’ money. The early investors can then vouch for the schemer and believe it is legitimate, encouraging others to invest as well. Like pyramid schemes, which promise a simple business opportunity that can pay big if you can bring new people in the business, a Ponzi scheme’s success depends on getting others to agree to participate.

While both pyramid and Ponzi schemes are illegal in the United States, they are not as uncommon as we might hope. People have attempted to lure me into pyramid schemes twice. When I was just out of college and looking for a job I responded to an ad in the employment section of the newspaper. The ad was vague but promised management opportunities for people with good communications skills, so I went to what I thought was an interview in a very fancy office building in midtown Manhattan.

Instead it was a meeting with others involved in “the company.” I can’t remember what the “product” was, only that the meeting had the feel of a religious service with people testifying how this business changed their life. “I used to drive a cab, now I drive a Porsche!” one man excitedly shared. Others had the same over-the-top enthusiasm that told me this “business” was suspect—that and the fact that I had to pony up a few hundred dollars to get started and find others willing to do the same, who would become my “employees” and I would get a share of their sales revenue.

A few years later, a friend (who was a newly practicing attorney) encouraged me and other friends to come to a meeting about a new business opportunity. I was very skeptical—as a graduate student at the time, I was busy with my research and had no interest in starting a business. But another friend convinced me that we could at least go and see what it was about so as not to offend our pal. Within seconds I had flashbacks of the first meeting: overly excited testimonials about how easy it is to make tons of money selling things I didn’t want to sell, all for a low start-up fee, of course.

I told my attorney friend that this was clearly not a legitimate business; for one, the product was something that anyone could buy at a grocery story for a fraction of their asking price, and the only way to make money seemed to be to lure others into the scheme. He looked dejected as he realized that I was right.

So how does an attorney get lured into a scheme like this? The same way so many investors placed their financial trust in Ponzi schemers like Stanford and Madoff: they wanted to get rich fast. As Los Angeles Times business columnist Michael Hiltzik noted, Americans often see wealth as just around the corner, a magical investment away from being ours (think lottery tickets). This, Hiltzik argues, is why many people identify with the rich and want them to pay lower taxes. We think we might be one of them soon; so, as Joe the Plumber famously did during the 2008 presidential campaign, argue that tax increases for the wealthiest 1% are unfair.

Back to hegemony now. In order for get-rich-quick schemes and investment fraud to work, participants must buy in to not only the scheme, but the legitimacy of the social system itself. One way that Madoff was able to defraud so many people was that he was once chair of NASDAQ, a major American stock exchange. Rather than a fly-by-night con artist, he had many long-term ties to the legitimate financial industry.

He also allegedly didn’t let just anyone participate in his scheme; by concocting an air of exclusivity he created the impression that it was a privilege to be accepted. Wealthy and aspiring wealthy people are used to “special” opportunities--hedge funds, for instance, are typically only open to people with lots of money and promise to beat the market. So the cultural belief that the rules for wealthy people are different might have led some investors to believe that the promise of unusually high returns every year was a realistic expectation.

The people who got ripped off did not consent to losing all of their savings. But they—and most of us—generally consent to the system of beliefs that enabled it to happen. Suppose one of the bilked investors was walking down the street and was robbed at gunpoint. They might give the robber their wallet that one time, but they would not agree that the means was legitimate and probably call the police immediately. Unlike Ponzi scheme victims, they would not encourage their friends to also give the robber their wallet or seek them out again later to give them more money. Only hegemony can enable thieves to take our money and make us, at least initially, happy to give it to them.

Social Networking Sites and Social Theory

By Karen Sternheimer

Are you on Facebook ? Did you respond to the request to post "25 random things" about yourself?

I personally don’t have a Facebook page, a “random thing” about me that increasingly places me in the minority. I’m sure that there are great benefits to having a page on a social networking site, and who knows, maybe someday I will. For now, though, I am okay with old-fashioned socializing.

Facebook, MySpace, and other social networking uses of the internet can dissolve the boundary between our public and private selves. As many posts on this blog reference, sociologist Erving Goffman's "front stage" and "back stage" concepts have been a useful way to understand social life. Goffman wrote in 1959 of how we keep certain information private, part of the process of impression management.

The internet in general and social networking sites in particular have blurred the distinction between front and back stage, something that some social theorists would argue is a feature of postmodernity. In a postmodern society, binaries (like public and private) merge and cannot be clearly separated.

Some people seem completely comfortable divulging extremely personal information on blogs and home pages. Perhaps because of our fascination with the private lives of celebrities, letting others in on personal information may seem very normal. It’s also a way of creating a sense of identity—having lots of online “friends,” announcing one’s relationship status and posting snapshots are ways of making statements about who we are. Descartes, the seventeenth century French philosopher famously said, “I think therefore I am;” we might now amend that to “I’m online therefore I am.”

Not everyone wants all of their information freely circulating. Facebook users created a petition protesting the site’s use of their other online behavior, like shopping, and there has been debate about who actually owns the information posted on the site.

Sometimes people don’t realize that electronic information they might think is private can become public very quickly. As Janis Prince Inniss blogged about last year, former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick’s steamy text messages revealed an affair and led to his resignation. Dean Grose, the mayor of a town in Orange County, California, sent an e-mail to friends depicting the White House surrounded by a watermelon patch. One of the recipients was outraged and made the e-mail public, leading to nationwide scorn and Grose’s resignation.

These cases are great examples of how it’s not just young people who need to think twice about privacy online. In reality there is really no such thing as privacy online. Some of the best advice I got and now give to students is to never post, text, video tape, or e-mail anything that you wouldn’t want to appear as evidence in court. We could also add to that information that you would be embarrassed for your grandmother to find out, your children, or your employer. Yes, they are online too.

Last year I was selected for a campus-wide honor, and I later found out that the selection committee undertook a basic Google search as part of review process. Fortunately for me, the internet was just coming of age as I was developing my professional self and this is the only “version” of me that exists online. As I noted earlier, if posting personal information on the internet is a way to construct our identities, we might run into trouble when we want to change that identity. If I had a blog when I was starting grad school, I’d probably be embarrassed by the content today, now that my ideas have had a chance to develop over time. Once ideas get out there in cyberspace they are hard to reign back in.

Some postmodern theorists might see the collapse of the boundary between our public and private selves as inevitable. But we can still decide how much of who we are will be made public. The framers of the U.S. Constitution valued our right to keep our mouths shut so much they included the right against self incrimination into the Bill of Rights. Ironically, we now tend to hear of someone who “pleads the Fifth” and presume they have done something wrong, or have something to hide. Former Louisiana Governor Edwin Edwards, currently in prison on racketeering charges, was asked if he had anything to hide during his investigation. To paraphrase, he said of course he did, but not related to the charges against him. (He also once said the only way he wouldn’t be reelected would be to be caught with a dead girl or a live boy).

Edwards had a point—we all have something to hide, although hopefully not criminal behavior. It’s up to us whether we choose to share or not, and we all must deal with the consequences accordingly.

I know it’s soooo twentieth century, but I reserve the right to keep the 25 random things about me to myself and to those who know me offline.

Peanut Butter and Deviance

By Karen Sternheimer

Did you hear about the peanut butter recalls? The disgusting conditions at the Peanut Corporation of America? The company’s factory is closed, but only after it shipped peanut butter that had been infiltrated with rats and cockroaches, according to former employees. Workers told journalists that managers insisted that the batches be shipped regardless of quality, because the company would lose too much money otherwise. (Click here to watch a news report about Peanut Corp.)

Hearing about this incident reminded me of Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel, The Jungle, about poor conditions in the meatpacking industry. Like the peanut butter factory, rats were routinely ground into the meat in Sinclair’s book. I read this book in high school and still remember the chapter when a worker got sucked into the equipment and became part of the product.

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This exposé led to the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, which meant that the federal government would inspect food producing plants for safety. Reading The Jungle about eighty years after this landmark legislation, I believed that things had really changed from the old days, and that the food my family bought at the grocery store would never be as dangerous as it was before Congress passed this and other laws.

My high school self would be shocked to read the recall notice that I saw at the bottom of my grocery receipt in early February, warning about a particular product which I had purchased weeks before, and by then had long since eaten. I won’t mention the brand of the product of peanut butter flavored snacks, but it markets its products as healthy and wholesome and uses images from nature in its packaging.

Perhaps after reading The Jungle I needed to believe that the gross things in the book could never happen so I didn’t need to worry about what I ate. Not only did I believe in that food producers would follow the law, but I presumed that basic morality would prevent companies from selling food they knew was tainted.

Why would a company knowingly sell tainted food? Sociologists call this elite deviance, behavior that violates moral, ethical, or legal standards for the benefit of a corporate or government entity. Sociologist David R. Simon argues that elite deviance is committed by those at the highest levels of power, and often causes physical, financial, or moral harm. While we frequently hear of people in power ripping off the public and sometimes even wiping them out financially, elite deviance can be hazardous to public health and safety too.

Power is a central feature of elite deviance; it is what enables people like accused Ponzi schemer Bernard Madoff to have access to billions of dollars in the first place. Simon details how those involved in elite deviance often know and influence people in high places. In Madoff’s case, he was once chair of the National Association of Securities Dealers and therefore knew securities laws well enough to evade them. His reputation seems to have also deterred the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) from following through on the many investigations started into his firm’s dealings.

Elite deviance tends to yield relatively minor penalties, if any. Peanut Corp. has filed for bankruptcy, so it may not end up paying any fines for the salmonella outbreak that resulted. Limited liability laws mean that in some instances individuals cannot be held legally responsible for corporate behavior. Criminal charges for deaths or physical injury that resulted from elite deviance are unusual too.

Simon describes a “cloak of secrecy” that many elites in the highest positions of authority can use to hide their wrongdoing. Corporations can hire public relations firms to try and counter claims against them and revamp their image. Or they can simply change their name. After the many tobacco lawsuits, Phillip Morris became Altria. Blackwater, a military contractor under scrutiny for allegations of improper behavior in Iraq, has changed its name to Xe. Most of us don’t have the benefit of starting anew with a brand new identity, nor do we have spin doctors at our disposal.

Another key reason elite deviance continues, and likely happened at Peanut Corp., is the process of diffusion of responsibility, when no one feels explicitly responsible for an organization’s activities. The cliché of “just following orders” might seem like a cop-out, but consider the role of power in elite deviance. Many of the workers at the peanut plant earned minimum wage and struggled for their basic survival; losing a job could have been financially devastating for them and their families. They might feel like they have little power to change the conditions of the plant and know they could be easily replaced.

Corporations are typically hierarchical; even people higher up in a company might feel pressure to conform to the expectations set by those at the top. Managers who spend much of their waking hours at a company and devote years of their lives to it many not want to risk the possibility of promotion if they become whistle blowers; those that do expose former employers may have trouble finding another job in their industry.

Ideally, individual morality would outweigh these factors; we’d like to think that if we were in the position to blow the whistle we would. But sometimes the realities of power dynamics get in the way. What other sociological reasons do you think explain the spoiled peanut butter and other recent examples of elite deviance?