The Global Sociology Blog

Here is a great source of global maps for sociology instructors. Lots of variables to pick from and neat maps as a result:

The Work, Family, and Equity Index (WFEI): Measuring governmental performance around the world in meeting the needs of working families. via kwout

This complements the following from Sociological Images:

Paid Holidays/Vacation Days in the U.S. [...]

Apparently, apart from Green Day, there is no more rock music made in the US.
Only commercial hip hop and country matter.
Whatever passes for pop is so bad that it has to be surrounded by ridiculous, over the top, gimmicks (SWAT teams, robots, etc.).
Obviously, one has to turn to the European musical scene to find some [...]

One of Neil Fliegstein’s central concept, in his whole view of markets as fields, is that of conception of control. For Fliegstein, there are four types of rules and understandings necessary for structured exchange (market as field) to emerge: (1) property rights, (2) governance structure, (3) rules of exchange, and (4) conceptions of control. To [...]

Via Arthur Goldhammer, enlightening…

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Dirty Harry…

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Among the sociological topics I like reading about, I particularly enjoy sociology of labor, especially those based on deep ethnographic work combining micro-analysis of social relationships in the workplace with macro-analysis of structural inequalities.
So, this is why when my colleague Mike recommended Christine L. Williams’s Inside Toyland: Working, Shopping, and Social Inequality, it was a [...]

Over at The Sociological Imagination, Josh McCabe has a truly great post where he dispatches common misconceptions about sociology especially compared to economics. The whole thing is a must-read. The misconceptions he debunks?

Sociology is all mushy methods (often proclaimed by people who swear only by statistical models with only remote connection to reality)

Sociology is ideological [...]

From a student’s email: “I wasn’t at the school on Monday because I had a really bad diarrhea.”
Well, thank you so much for letting me know! Next time, a simple “I was sick” will suffice.

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So, this has made the rounds already:

New Economics of Marriage: The Rise of Wives – Pew Research Center via kwout

Full report here.
Based on this report, the New York Times has a series of contributions on the topic from several women from academic experts (Stephanie Coontz) to useless hack (Barbara Dafoe Whitehead)
As always, Stephanie Coontz identifies [...]

Thanks to VeganProf for pointing this out to me. It is hilarious and makes a good point about gender roles on both levels:

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Via Chad Gesser,
So much to click through… Really cool

Patchwork Nation: American communities in a time of change. > Patchwork Nation Blog | The Christian Science Monitor via kwout

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Hey kids, remember how the social media platforms were going to be the great equalizers? (providing we conveniently ignore the pesky digital divide)… well, not so much…

India caste | Facebook | Orkut via kwout

And the top of the caste distribution is represented as well:

India caste | Facebook | Orkut via kwout

Conclusion: social media platforms make [...]

At least more effective than the US government, according to Tony Karon.

The man Obama needs to fix America is … Karl Marx – The National Newspaper via kwout

Seems ironic, isn’t it?
Actually, I would argue, following Neil Fligstein’s typology (The Architecture of Markets, p.46), and considering the financial crisis and latest US Supreme Court decision that [...]

Joseph Stiglitz on ‘Ersatz Capitalism’ and Moral Bankruptcy » New Deal 2.0 via kwout

I would argue that this is a feature, not a bug or some monstrous abnormal development but the logical end point of 30 years of neoliberalism that started with Reagan and Thatcher and culminated with the 2008 crisis and the recent Supreme [...]

Contribute to torture (psychologists):

The Psychologists and Gitmo—By Scott Horton (Harper’s Magazine) via kwout

Or help pacify the native for military purposes (anthropologists):

David Price: Hollywood’s Human Terrain Avatars via kwout

And should I mention economists? (Ian Welsh can probably answer that one better in terms doing social damage… just read his blog)
So, if doing no harm is a [...]