The Global Sociology Blog

Welcome to the brave new world of work, where you work more and get paid nothing! Travailler plus pour ne rien gagner (maybe that should be Sarkozy’s slogan for his reelection campaign!). This is the reality experienced by more and more people in the US, and thoroughly explored by Ross Perlin in Intern Nation: How To Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy.

The premise of the book is that internships have exploded in numbers as they have become an almost mandatory of someone’s education in order to gain legitimate entry on the labor market. But Perlin considers them to be “a form of mass exploitation hidden in plain sight” (xiv), with roughly 9.5 million college students, roughly 75% will participate in at least one internship before graduation. He argues that a significant share of those are unethical if not illegal.

In other words, interns are becoming the fastest-growing category of American workers, the largely unpaid ones.

The simple fact of non-payment, for Perlin, also points to the fact that internships have become a site of reproduction of privilege as only those of financially comfortable background can hope for the glamorous internships in Congress, in Hollywood or television and journalism that truly open doors for permanent (and paid) jobs, guaranteeing that the upper-classes will remain the major cultural producers in the mass media. In that sense, internships contribute to both exploitation and reproduction of inequalities in opportunities.

Finally, Perlin argues that internships devalue labor, especially for young people and at entry-level positions at the same time that interns may displace workers.

The book itself is full of a variety of examples in a diversity of settings. The first chapter is dedicated to the Disney internships whose promotion is so present at so many college campuses, as Disney runs one of the largest internship program, with 7,000 to 8,000 interns every year:

“In its scale and daring, the Disney Program is unusual, if not unique – a “total institution” in the spirit of Erving Goffman. Although technically legal, the program has grown up over thirty years with support from all sides with almost zero scrutiny to become an eerie model, a microcosm of an internship explosion gone haywire. An infinitesimally small number of College Program “graduates” are ultimately offered full-time positions at Disney. A harvest of minimum-wage labor masquerades as an academic exercise, with the nodding approval of collegiate functionaries. A temporary, inexperienced workforce gradually replaces well-trained, decently compensated full-timers, flouting unions and hurting the local economy. The word “internship” has many meanings, but at Disney World it signifies cheap, flexible labor for one of the world’s largest and best-known companies – magical, educational burger-flipping in the Happiest Place on Earth.” (3-4)

Needless to say, Perlin is merciless in his investigation of the world of internships, and Disney is not the only entity getting a drubbing, but is presented as somewhat representative of the trend: “a summer job with a thin veneer of education, virtually unleavened by substantive academic content.” (8).

Perlin identifies two major post-War trends that contributed to the internship explosion:

1. The rise of the “new” economy, post-industrialism, service jobs and networked capitalism along with its cohort of contingent labor. This casualization of the workforce is a well-known trait of the post-fordist regime based on flexibility and exploitation and the rise of the ubiquitous “independent contractor”, a catch-all category.

2. The rise of the field of Human Resources and the “Human capital” approach to education.

What this boils down to is what Bauman and Beck have described as individualization in the post-modern era. Students now have to see themselves as having to cultivate individually their own human capital and internships do just that. The student is his/her own entrepreneur, an entrepreneur of one’s self, one’s own independent contractor.

This is also part of the trend of vocationalism in education, that is, seeing education as job training rather than, well, education.

Perlin also notes that internships have also risen on the ashes of traditional apprenticeships that have a medieval connotation and have long been associated with industry and the trades. There are still a few apprenticeships in the US, they are usually paid, with benefits and unionization. There is still an Office of Apprenticeship as part of the government but it seems to be a well-kept secret and the trades are not the hot career when one dreams of working for Google.

I was also surprised to learn that a great deal of internships might actually be illegal (not that anyone is watching). The Fair Labor Standards Act is still the law of the land and, based on a US Supreme Court decision and explained by the Wage and Hour Division of the Department of Labor, one category of people is exempt from the FLSA provisions: trainees. And since the USSC has never ruled on interns, they are considered trainees, therefore exempt. Except that there are six condition that must ALL be met for trainees to be exempt, as listed by Perlin:

1. The training, even though it includes actual operation of the facilities of the employer, is similar to that which would be given in a vocational school.
2. The training is for the benefit of the trainee.
3. The trainees do not displace regular employees, but work under close observation.
4. The employer that provides the training derives no immediate advantage from the activities of the trainees and on occasion the employer’s operations may actually be impeded.
5. The trainees are not necessarily entitled to a job at the completion of the training period; and
6. The employer and the trainee understand that the trainees are not entitled to wage for the time spent in training.

All six criteria have to be met for a position to be considered exempt. If one of these provisions is not met, then, it’s a job and it falls under the provision of the FLSA. How many internships actually meet all six criteria? Who knows. So, employers just looking for cheap labors should not get interns or their internships are illegal. But again, who’s checking? Although Perlin does mention that the Obama administration did increase the number of DOL inspectors.

More than that, because they are not considered workers, unpaid interns receive none of the protection against discrimination or harassment that regular employees get (however inadequate) and they have no legal recourse. On the other hand, corporations receive $124 million annual contribution in the form of free labor.

Perlin is also severe in his critique with regards to what he considers the complicity of colleges and universities in the explosion of exploitative internships. Schools endorse internships without a second thought. Sometimes, they make money off of deal with employers or non-profit organizations. And they provide the academic cover in the form of academic credit for sometimes questionable internships. Often, academic credit is supposed to replace the pay that anyone would normally receive for the same work that interns do. So, not only do students pay for credit, but they don’t get any pay for the internship. They pay to work for free.

“In certain cases, paying college tuition to work for free can be justified – particularly if the school plays a central role in securing the internship and makes it a serious, substantive academic experience. Providing credit certainly can cost the school in terms of supervision time and administrative work, although the costs are unlikely to match those of a classroom experience. And in the most miserable, increasingly common scenario, employers use the credits in an attempt to legitimize illegal internships while universities charge for them and provide little in return, and interns are simply stuck running after them, paying thousands of dollars for the privilege of working for free.” (86)

Instead, of course, colleges and universities actively promote internships  just like they have online education as a low-cost (for them) option to get money from students. The worst offenders, in my view, have the (often for-profit) colleges and universities who offer their credits to highly expensive private internship-abroad organizations (both shall remain nameless, as in, no free publicity, but their practices are truly disgusting) who charge thousands of dollars for unpaid internships outside of the US, but there are also all the non-profit organizations, largely staffed by interns in the name of “service-learning” or the start-ups that wouldn’t even get off the ground if they didn’t use free labor. How many NGOs or such companies would not function without free labor? Or maybe they would need to revise their activities or business plans or pay interns minimum wage.

The other issue that is central, in my view, and that Perlin discusses at length, is this: what about the students who have mandatory internships in their curriculum but cannot afford unpaid work? Or whose parents cannot support them? Well, they get left behind in the race to pad one’s résumé with prestigious internships. In other words, the ability to engage in unpaid internships is yet another privilege that the already-privileged enjoy, at the expense of other students. While privileged students might spend the summer on Capitol Hill, interning for a Congressperson for free (even though there is a big bogus element to these internships, as Perlin shows), others actually have to work to pay for next year’s tuition.

And in addition to the experience and the lengthening of one’s CV, these privileged students get to network and accumulate social capital, something that their less privileged counterparts do not get to do. And finding prestigious internships in the first place is a matter of social connections. For instance, the donor to an NGO can pretty much impose to have a child or relative or friend as intern. Access matters a lot, when it comes to internships.

“Many internships, especially the small but influential sliver of unpaid and glamorous ones, are the preserve of  the upper-middle class and the super rich. These internships provide the already privileged with a significant head start that pays professional and financial dividends over time, as boosters never tire of repeating. The rich get richer or stay rich, in other words, thanks in part to prized internships, while the poor get poorer because they’re barred from the world of white-collar work, where high salaries are increasingly concentrated. For the well-to-do and wealthy families seeking to guarantee their offspring’s future prosperity, internships are a powerful investment vehicle, and an instrument of self-preservation in the same category as private tutoring, exclusive schools, and trust funds. Meanwhile, a vast group of low- and middle-income families stretch their finances thin to afford thankless unpaid positions, which are less and less likely to lead to real work, and a forgotten majority can’t afford to play the game at all.” (162)

And did I mention that women are more likely to get unpaid internships than men?

And you wonder why there is an ideological continuity between politics, news and think tanks and other organizations. It is a Village and they’ve interned there before.

Part of the issue is that there is a high demand for internships (as a result of becoming an academic / graduation requirement), so much so there are now internship auctions where employers auction an internship and potential interns bid on it, and it goes to the highest bidder but not the most qualified candidate.

Of course, other countries are getting on the action as well, exploiting interns. Remember Foxconn, the company that makes your iPad and other Apple goodies, that became famous because its working conditions were so awesome that workers kept killing themselves? So much so that they now have to sign contracts promising not to commit suicide? Yup, that Foxconn… Check this out:

“Foxconn seems to have become the world’s biggest abusers of internships. According to a detailed report recently compiled by university researchers in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, the company uses interns extensively in at least five of its major plants, compensating them at the lowest possible pay grade (under $200 per month) and often forcing them against the law to work nights and overtime. In order to avoid paying for the medical and social welfare owed to regular employees, Foxconn has in some cases reportedly filled more than half of its assembly line jobs with interns – usually with the cooperation of hundreds of schools that stand to receive a fee in return.” (196)

Welcome to the new world of labor casualization, precarization and flexibility. These global workers now have their very own patron saint: San Precario

Also, San Precario is transgender. The five icons represent income, housing, health, communication and transport. That is, there is, hopefully, a rising movement against precarization, that includes interns, as part of the global civil society.

Perlin himself offers a series of recommendations to make internships more meaningful and more fair, based on the six criteria above. But most of all, his book is a wake-up call to a major trend that has gone largely unrecognized and unexamined, and one can see why. It is an important book for anyone interested in labor issues and the future of work.

When I posted a few days ago about the gender-neutral experiment at a Swedish pre-school, one of my friends commented that the whole thing seemed a bit cultish. It seems she is not the only one:

“Many pre-schools have hired “gender pedagogues” to help staff identify language and behaviour that risk reinforcing stereotypes. Some parents, however, worry that things have gone too far. An obsession with obliterating gender roles, they say, could make the children confused and ill-prepared to face the world outside kindergarten.

“Different gender roles aren’t problematic as long as they are equally valued,” says Tanja Bergkvist, a 37-year-old blogger and a leading voice against what she calls “gender madness” in Sweden. Those bent on shattering gender roles “say there’s a hierarchy where everything that boys do is given higher value, but I wonder who decides that it has higher value,” she says. “Why is there higher value in playing with cars?”

At Egalia – it means “equality” – boys and girls play together with a toy kitchen, waving plastic utensils and pretending to cook. One boy hides inside the toy stove, his head popping out through a hole. Lego bricks are placed next to the kitchen, to make sure the children draw no mental barriers between cooking and building.

The school’s director, Lotta Rajalin, says Egalia fosters an environment tolerant of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people. From a bookcase she pulls out a story about two male giraffes who are sad to be childless until they come across an abandoned crocodile egg. Nearly all the children’s books deal with homosexual couples, single parents or adopted children.

Egalia’s methods are controversial; some say they amount to mind control. Ms Rajalin says the staff have received threats from people apparently upset about the pre-school’s use of black dolls. But she says that there is a long waiting list for admission and only one couple has taken their child out of the school.

Sweden has promoted women’s rights for decades, and more recently was a pioneer in Europe in allowing gay and lesbian couples to legalise their partnerships and adopt children. Gender studies permeate academic life in Sweden. Ms Bergkvist noted on her blog that the state-funded Swedish Science Council had granted £50,000 for a post-doctoral fellowship aimed at analysing “the trumpet as a symbol of gender”.

Jay Belsky, a child psychologist at the University of California, said he is unaware of any other school like Egalia and questioned whether it was the right way to go. “The kind of things that boys like to do – run around and turn sticks into swords – will soon be disapproved of,” he said. “So gender neutrality at its worst is emasculating maleness.”"

I think this issue has really touched a nerve, which is reflective of the state of implicit misogyny in Western culture. First, note that there is no evidence of harm done to the children. Nevertheless, let the prophets of doom assemble (a blogger, the always-convincing “some say” and a psychologist *snort*).

Let me state this: it’s only called mind-control when it is not part of the patriarchal norm, just like non-dominant religions are called cults, when they are not fundamentally different from established and institutionalized religions.

How is what is going on in this pre-school more “mind control” than the sexist and gender-polarized socialization that goes on in so many societies? What is the difference? It is teaching children gender relations. All societies do that. Except this one teaches gender equality rather than misogyny and sexism.

So, to the blogger, yes, dominant culture in most societies teaches gender polarization alongside masculine valorization and its feminine opposite (a quick look at what has been happening with the DSK affair is certainly evidence of that). There is an extensive body of research on the internalization by boys and girls of the cultural message that masculine traits are better than feminine traits.

Masculine domination is the cultural norm, implemented through face-to-face and online interaction, a variety of social institutions (from the commanding heights of the business world, to the political sphere, all the way through religious, educational and familial organizations). It’s patriarchy all the way down. And we know the effects of this polarization on men and women in terms of inequalities, mass / structural / symbolic violence. How is this not mind control?

And apparently, the reporter looked for the stupidest psychologist they could find. Of course, not a word on the damage done on generations of girls raised in sexist cultural environments. These things only become a concern if they potentially (since none of the supposed negative effects on boys have been proven) affect boys. Not a single questioning of where activities “that boys like to do” come from (here’s a a hint: socialization that lets boys do that, give them the clothing and tools to do these things and the time / freedom to engage in these activities).

Instead, as usual, there is a ‘naturalization’ of gendered activities: if boys do it, it is because they are “naturally” drawn to these activities whereas girls are “naturally” drawn to playing with dolls. Goodness, this is so profoundly stupid I can’t believe I have to write that. And oh, geez, where do boys get the idea of “turning sticks into swords”… couldn’t possibly be from our common fairy tales and mass media.

And so, “maleness” is taken for granted, rather than the phenomenon to explain, and then assumed to be under threat by de-gendering practices. Never mind that there is a heavy individual and social price to pay for “maleness” (actually, it’s called “masculinity”) in terms of violence, incarceration, mental illness, lower life expectancy. Studies have also shown that more egalitarian people have better sex, better marriages, and egalitarian men have better relationships with their children.

The invocation of a supposed fixed (and yet so fragile so that it must NEVER be challenged or threatened) “maleness” (as in “male nature”) is a way of boxing in boys into a stereotypical idea of masculinity that is in many ways detrimental to them. At the same time, there is never any mention of the fact that girls and women might suffer from the effects of pervasive sexism and misogyny because it is supposed to be their nature as well. The only thing that is seen as detrimental to women is to resist their “natural” (i.e. inferior) femininity by listening to the awful feminists.

If it were about race, we wouldn’t even be having this discussion. Or rather, can you imagine the same argument made about race? With some psychologist explaining that we should keep racial polarization? Of course not. Would anyone argue that teacher racial equality to children would confuse them about their own race? No.

So let me say one thing to the bloggers, the “some say” (an ever-convenient construct reporters use when they want to make an unsupported / indefensible point) and psychologists:

Do check out this series of photo in Der Spiegel on children of the Russian über-wealthy. I know these photos are posed, but boy do they all look stiff:

As the article notes:

“SPIEGEL ONLINE: None of the children in your book are smiling. Is childhood missing from your pictures of children?

Skladmann: I wouldn’t say that. But they live in a secluded world. Some leave that world, to go to a public ballet school, for example. Their parents are attempting to make up for the Soviet times — they only want the best for their children. They receive private language lessons, they go swimming or play tennis. The lives of these children are very planned and regimented. That forces them to grow up quicker.”

Stephane Béaud’s Traîtres À La Nation – Un Autre Regard Sur La Grève Des Bleus en Afrique du Sud (en collaboration avec Philippe Guimard) is perfect and great example of public sociology. It very nicely and powerfully shows what sociological analysis can do, especially with respect to a very high-profile event, such as the “strike” by the French football team during the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.

I really do hope that this book will get an English edition. If that were the case, I would jump on it and make my students use in my undergraduate classes. It is written at the perfect level, uses a lot of concrete examples. There isn’t too much jargon but the sociological analysis is crystal clear and very powerful. And, of course, the topic is guaranteed to get people’s attention. One can point at this book and say “this is what sociology does.”

The starting point of the book, obviously, is the strike by the players of the national French team during the World Cup, followed by their shameful exit from that competition in the early stages (after a very controversial qualification), and the social and political fallout from these events. Considering how discussed these events have already been, what does sociology have to bring to the table? First off, most of the discussion has been tainted by moral, classist and racist considerations. Exit the glorious days of the “black, blanc, beur” winning team of 1998, now, the strike is denounced by politicians as the work of low-class, highly-paid little bosses and the hapless followers. The media and politicians engaged in moral condemnations. Putting oneself in the position of judge, prosecutor and jury is not what sociology does. The job of the sociologist, for Béaud, is the Weberian injunction of Verstehen.

The point of sociological analysis then is to put these events in the proper context (what I call SHiP – structure, history, power) and to retrace the sociological factors that shaped this French national football team (especially in contrast with the 1998 team). What Béaud engages in is what he calls “live sociology” in which moral judgment is suspended and social action is re-situated in is (muli-layered) context, understood as a system of constraints in which individual behavior occurs. That is, the challenge is to treat this event as a social fact (in Durkheim’s sense): the strike is a product of the deregulation of French professional football, structural causes, changes in recruitment, training and socialization of French footballers, the internationalization and precarization of football careers (based on changes in the legal framework). Alongside these structural factors are more institutional and symbolic factors, such as relationships between players and the media, as well as the group dynamics within the French team.

For those of you who don’t remember, the strike of the French team occurred after France’s main sports daily newspaper published the photo to the right, on its front page, after the defeat against Mexico. The comment between quotation marks is supposed to have been said by Anelka against French coach Domenech in the locker rooms. Following the alleged incident, Anelka was expelled from the team by the French Federation.

Arguing the fact that what goes on in the locker rooms is supposed to stay there, and never be divulged to the public, the players went on strike and issues a communiqué (actually drafted by the attorney of one of the players) also blaming the Federation for mismanaging the situation.

For Béaud, this reflects the growing tensions that have been building up between players and the media as well as the changes in these relationships. Whereas these relationships used to be simple and straightforward, if not friendly, they have become more formal, complex and marked by the professionalization of the players. While players used to be approachable, and locker rooms were not closed off to the press, interactions with players are now mediated by the entourage that is characteristic of the main players (attorneys, PR consultants, etc.) and the creation of mixte zones in stadiums is a perfect reflection of that. As a result, it is more difficult to get more than canned talking points out of the players who are already uncomfortable with public speaking.

At the same time, Béaud shows that what happened was not the product of the “little bosses” from the projects pushing the other players into the strike. The French team was indeed divided but not along racial and ethnic lines but rather into group statuses such as established players (incumbent players, those more or less guaranteed to play) versus substitutes. The established group is composed of players who have the most sport legitimacy and credibility, which puts them in positions of leadership.

Compared to other players also from the project, the established players are more sensitive to any feeling of symbolic humiliation and injustice, and they are more likely to experience a relative frustration with the poor game strategy of the French team in recent years, under the leadership of a discredited coach. So, in the 2010 French team, one finds the dominated group, the newcomers, and the recently selected players from African origin. Their lack of either integration in the team or football capital reduced the probability that they would go against the decisions of the established group. And the newspaper frontpage gave the team a unity it had never achieved before.

Add to this the role of the French Football Federation and its incomprehensible to reappoint a discredited coach (which appointing his successor right before the World Cup, thereby undermining him even further), the respective relationships between the players and this coach (certainly, several players from the established group had a grudge against him), the conflict between the FFF and the other major institution involved, the Professional Footballers League. And finally, the infiltration of the political and social tensions from the housing projects into the team all created a bundle of tensions that were bound to explode at some point… and did.

These events are also a reflection of the change in recruitment of players in French football. In the post-War period, one finds most French football players came from the blue-collar working-class (especially the clubs from Northern France). The trajectories of these players are quite different than what they are today. They usually spent their youth years in amateur football, still going to school to obtain technical and vocational qualifications. They become professional relatively late (in their 20s). Therefore, they receive a rather typical working-class socialization. The 1998 team is basically the last fling of that generation of players, with a specific sport and social ethos based on humility, collectivism, respect for the elders and explicit patriotism. This is the working-class before the precarization of the working-class of the deindustrializing years and the defeat of its political power. And the players of the 1998 team who did grow up in the housing projects did so before the ethnic contraction and marginalization of these areas and increased polarization.

There are three major differences between the 1998 team and the 2010 team, sociologically speaking:

(1) There are now more players in the great and economically powerful European teams of England, Italy and Spain. A minority of them now play for French teams.

(2) Players are now recruited by training centers (famous institutions that detect football talents and develop them over several years, with hopes of professionalization right after graduation. These centers have made France the second exporting countries – after Brazil – when it comes to footballers, but they also close off earlier and earlier any real education and occupy a greater part of the players’ socialization) at an earlier and earlier age, and especially from the lower classes. Fewer players now come from the working-class French heartland, and more and more from the housing projects on the outskirts of France’s largest cities.

(3) There are now more players of African origin, especially sub-saharan Africa, as opposed to the Maghreb, and from players from France’s territories (Antilles, Guadeloupe, etc.).

This greater internationalization of football out of France is directly connected to the legal context created by the Bosman Ruling, which allowed players to have greater freedom of movement from one club to the next. This greater freedom has also led to the massive inflation of footballer compensation. All of a sudden, the most powerful European clubs were able to recruit players from all over Europe, and the players were able to demand higher pay for their services. These teams have been accused of pillaging other countries for their own benefit. If French football creates great players, the French teams are not economically strong enough to retain them once these players fully develop their potential. This has led former players to deplore the lack of “fidelity to the jersey”. This also means that teams are less likely to have a trademark style of play, as the recruitment is no longer local and long-term.

Now, a player will typically enter a training center around 15 years old (if not pre-training centers that recruit even younger players) and they may leave for a non-French team even before their training is complete to start playing for the club that has recruited them. And the Bosman Ruling allows these young players to change club more easily (making more money in the process). As a result, their trajectories are much less smooth and their socialization more chaotic as they leave their families at a fairly young age. For the lower-class parents of these players, to sign a professional contract is a way out of the project for their son and club scouts start contacting parents as early as possible (the competition is extreme), making them incredible offers. From the clubs’ perspective, these young players are commodities, and they expect rather rapid returns on investment, so as to re-sell the players at an even higher price than they paid for him.

This means that, at a young age, players have to be surrounded by a whole entourage of agents, attorneys for themselves and their parents, along with the usual trainers, PR people, etc. But in the context of increased precarization for the lower classes, social tensions in the projects, and the ever-more repressive policies put in place by the Sarkozy government, who could resist?

So, Béaud argues that the strike of 2010 in South Africa is an act of civil disobedience and also a reflection of all these structural and cyclical factors: the changes in socialization of the players, transformation of the labor market for French football players, the impact of geographical and sport migration and the corresponding social uprooting, along with the pressures tied to the obligation to perform earlier, faster and better in a very competitive context… on top of the group dynamics and the interpersonal and institutional issues mentioned above.

Béaud wraps up his study with an analysis of the evolution of the players of Maghreb origin in French football, inserting it as well in the social context of immigration and integration. The last two chapters of the book are less directly related to the 2010 fiasco but they additional layers to an understanding of French football in its social context.

As I mentioned above, this book is a great read (something that does not happen enough in sociology!) and a great example of public sociology and live sociology. Highly recommended… if you can read French.

One of the strengths of sociology (among its many, many other strengths) is to take the disparate pieces of the social puzzle – anecdotes and stories of all kinds – and put them together, in the proper context, composed of the social structure, historical processes and power dynamics (something I call SHiP, Structure, History, and Power). In doing so, it shows the inanity of common sense interpretations that often take the form of moral pronouncements.

For instance,

“A Manhattan woman has sued a $19,000-a-year preschool her daughter attended, arguing that the program failed to adequately prepare her daughter for the test required to enter New York City’s hypercompetitive private school system.

The suit, filed by Nicole Imprescia on Friday in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, said the York Avenue Preschool had not fulfilled its stated commitment to prepare her 4-year-old daughter, Lucia, for the intelligence test known as the E.R.B.

“The school proved to be not a school at all, but just one big playroom,” the suit claimed.

Many preschools boast that they can prepare students for the test, helping them score high enough to catch the attention of elite private schools. The preschools have become a component of a mini-industry that also includes costly consultants and test preparation materials.

(…)

The suit charges that preschool education is critical to a child’s success in life, quoting from various news articles. “It is no secret that getting a child into the Ivy League starts in nursery school,” says one. “Studies have shown entry into a good nursery school guarantees more income than entry into an average school,” says another.

Ms. Imprescia enrolled her daughter at York in 2009, when she was 3, but took her out one month into her second year when, rather than preparing for the E.R.B., her daughter was “dumped” into a class with 2-year-old children, talking about shapes and colors, according to the lawsuit. The suit said the school refused Ms. Imprescia’s demand to return that year’s tuition. It did not say whether Lucia had taken the test.”

Claude Fisher puts this in the context of increasing inequalities that goes beyond income and wealth differentials:

“Reardon collected data from 19 nationally representative studies of children’s cognitive achievement for ages ranging from 1 to 18. The studies were conducted from 1960 to 2007. He compared the average scores of children who came from high-income families (those at the 90th percentile, which is about $160,000 in today’s dollars) to those from low-income families (those at the 10th percentile, about $17,500 today). The first group always does a lot better on age-appropriate reading and math tests than the second. But the key finding is that the test gap has been widening for a generation; it is about 35% larger for kids born around 2000 than for kids born about 1975.

Strikingly, over the same period the gap in test scores between black and white children, about which much has been written, shrank. The rich-poor gap is now one-and-a-half times larger than the race gap; 50 years ago it was just about the reverse.”

In other words, the wealth and income gap has turned into a growing cognitive development gap where class matters more than race. Now, the topic of social reproduction in education is a topic that most sociology students encounter with Bourdieu’s work on the subject. Bourdieu emphasizes that cultural capital and differences in habitus (class-based dispositions that shape behavior) partly account for academic achievement differentials. One’s habitus is a product of socialization and contributes to reproduction of class differences.

And Bourdieu’s work showed that an upper-class habitus matches more closely behavioral and academic expectations in schools than a working-class habitus (Fisher mentions Annette Lareau’s now famous study of different socializing modes, where working class parents tend to let their children grow up more “naturally” whereas upper-class parents use a “concerted cultivation” model).

So, by putting toddlers in exclusive prep pre-schools, parents like the one mentioned in the article are trying to lock in their social privileges and pass them on to their children. This is what these exclusive prep pre-schools are selling: the earliest possible socialization into a given habitus that will set children on an elite path of education. This is a perfect example of using one’s economic capital to obtain extra cultural capital.

As Fisher notes,

“In recent decades, the academic expectations for the well-cultivated child have risen. And the things you can buy to cultivate their academic skills have boomed: educational software for infants, early childhood educational programs, pre-school enrichment classes, after-school lessons, tutors, summer camps with intellectual themes, and so on. Reardon cites research suggesting that professional child-rearing advice articles and books more and more stress intellectual cultivation. Also, middle-class parents have been spending more time with their children and spending more money on their children. Even among parents with the same level of education, the ones with more income seem increasingly better able than those with less income to raise their children’s test scores.

While some enrichment activities are free (if a parent has time — which is another thing money can sometimes buy for you), many require purchases – books, software, special classes, coaches, travel, and the like. If these things actually make an intellectual difference, then their proliferation in recent years can explain Reardon’s findings.”

So, it is not just that the children of the upper classes are living behind the physical walls of gated communities, but they also live in a segregated cognitive and social world where their parents carefully cultivate each and every one of their experiences as a way of holding on to their privileges and making sure that no one outside of their class challenge them.

But, as Robert Frank also noted in his book, Richistan, the very wealthy are profoundly afraid of the slightest sign of very subtle downward mobility (from the multimillionaire class to the millionaire class, to be sure) and they feel the strain of intensifying competition between themselves and other members of Richistan (after all, they have the overall social system as they want it, with no more competition from the precarized middle class).

And so, poor Ms Imprescia wasted a whole MONTH of her three-year old daughter’s life and did not get the proper return on investment in terms of cultural capital.

Get Claude Fisher’s book!

One of the things I try to get across when I teach race and ethnicity is how much we live in a racist culture where white is associated with goodness, purity, and other good qualities whereas darkness is associated with evil. Based on this dichotomy, we have an entire symbolic repertoire that we are all socialized into. By default, we are all racist, especially those of us who are white. Being racist, not necessarily consciously, is the basic setting. It is NOT being racist that takes work.

How is this default setting socially and culturally produced? Well, through media products, for one. Take the main Disney animated films. Certainly, for the most part of the 20th century, white characters dominated.

Once Disney got into ethnic heroins, their ethnicity was considerably downplayed, just a little ethnic so the audience “gets” that the heroin is not White Anglo, but not too much so that the majority white audience is not unsettled. So, smooth features are the rule. On the other hand, villains are over-ethnicized (if that is a word) so that evil is associated with strong ethnic traits.

Mulan:

Shanyu, the villain:

Jasmine:

And Jafar:

Tiana, from The Princess and the Frog.

So, yes, the main characters are non-White, but that is settled within the first 20 minutes when they both get turned into frogs. And for the record, in frogs, females are usually larger than males. Not on cartoons:

And who is the villain in that film? He is black, of course (the setting is New Orleans), but look how much more ethnic he is:

It even works with animal characters. Take The Lion King, for instance:

Mufasa and Simba:

Scar:

The point here, of course, is not to accuse the film makers of blatant racism but simply to recognize that when designers think of the traits of different characters, they fall back on cultural scripts we were all socialized into: a villain has overemphasized traits and one way to overemphasize is to push the ethnic button.

Then, we should not be surprised by this:

I have been posting quite a lot on social inequalities lately, So, I thought I could devote one post to the difficulties tied to belonging to the upper class:

Heart-wrenching, I know.

It is, of course, from The Catherine Tate Show, Season one.

Via Nancy Nall Derringer who links to this from her excellent post:

The look on the kid’s face says it all.

For those of you interested in the topic of masculinity, sports and violence, then, you should check out The Grumpy Sociologist’s blog but the picture above shows how this starts.

It is kinda flattering when brilliant people follow you on Twitter (and I’m more than happy to follow back). Case in point, Brandon offers a most effective demonstration of the myth of individualism:

More great stuff over at Theory Drawn.

It is a major source of frustration for sociologists… well, for me at least, to see how much the media swallows the whole evolutionary psychology line on gender, hook, line and sinker because it more or less simply reproduces gender stereotypes and the beliefs that sustain them. So, when, finally, oh, over a hundred years too late, they finally discover the effects of socialization, it is a total shock.

“It is the mainstay of countless magazine and newspaper features. Differences between male and female abilities – from map reading to multi-tasking and from parking to expressing emotion – can be traced to variations in the hard-wiring of their brains at birth, it is claimed.

Men instinctively like the colour blue and are bad at coping with pain, we are told, while women cannot tell jokes but are innately superior at empathising with other people. Key evolutionary differences separate the intellects of men and women and it is all down to our ancient hunter-gatherer genes that program our brains.

The belief has become widespread, particularly in the wake of the publication of international bestsellers such as John Gray’s Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus that stress the innate differences between the minds of men and women. But now a growing number of scientists are challenging the pseudo-science of “neurosexism”, as they call it, and are raising concerns about its implications. These researchers argue that by telling parents that boys have poor chances of acquiring good verbal skills and girls have little prospect of developing mathematical prowess, serious and unjustified obstacles are being placed in the paths of children’s education.”"

Well, any sociologist worth her salt could have told you this was BS a long time ago.

“In fact, there are no major neurological differences between the sexes, says Cordelia Fine in her book Delusions of Gender, which will be published by Icon next month. There may be slight variations in the brains of women and men, added Fine, a researcher at Melbourne University, but the wiring is soft, not hard. “It is flexible, malleable and changeable,” she said.

In short, our intellects are not prisoners of our genders or our genes and those who claim otherwise are merely coating old-fashioned stereotypes with a veneer of scientific credibility. It is a case backed by Lise Eliot, an associate professor based at the Chicago Medical School. “All the mounting evidence indicates these ideas about hard-wired differences between male and female brains are wrong,” she told the Observer.

“Yes, there are basic behavioural differences between the sexes, but we should note that these differences increase with age because our children’s intellectual biases are being exaggerated and intensified by our gendered culture. Children don’t inherit intellectual differences. They learn them. They are a result of what we expect a boy or a girl to be.”"

Hey, welcome to the world of gender socialization. It is a world that has been studied thoroughly and in many dimensions. Sociologists have researched the many ways in which societies are gendered, from the most minute interactions to globalization itself. Here are just two examples on the gendering of society:

• Deborah Tannen, You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation
• Mary Hawkesworth, Globalization and Feminist Activism

So, can we all agree that Larry Summers is full of it now?

By now, you probably have read Jessica Valenti’s piece in the Washington Post, along with the myriad of sexist comments that prove her point: that  gender equality is far from established in the United States:

For women in America, equality is still an illusion – washingtonpost.com via kwout

I argued here before that the patriarchy is a cultural and structural continuum: and that what Valenti writes about is, in essence, no different from this:

IRIN Middle East | YEMEN: “I’d rather die than go back to him” | Middle East | Yemen | Children Gender Issues Human Rights | Feature via kwout

To pretend that there are essential differences between the physical and structural violence depicted by Valenti and the excerpt above is a neat ideological construct that Western patriarchal systems and proponents use to stifle demands for equality whereas to emphasize the continuum nature of the patriarchy emphasizes the “work-in-progress” nature of the struggle for equality, culturally and structurally. And the angry and sexist reactions to pieces such as Valenti’s speaks volume of the strongly internalized nature of patriarchy as ideology.

Similarly, this familiar story is part of the same continuum:

What is a girl worth? | Education | The Guardian via kwout

I should add that I have issues with this instrumental view of girls’ education (“let your girl go to school and the return on investment will be greater!”) or that somehow, once educated, girls have a responsibility for the development of their country. I never see such expectations mentioned when it comes to boys.

In a more humorous fashion, Abstruse Goose captures the same idea:

There has been a lot of discussion already regarding the new edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. By looking at what disorders have been discarded and which new entries are added, one can get a glimpse of the state of deviance and its socially-constructed medicalization, for instance, the brand new “temper dysregulation with dysphoria” (kids who throw tantrums). In this last case, it is not just medicalization but pathologization of social behavior.

As Todd Krohn notes,

The Power Elite: Psychiatry and Social Control via kwout

It is actually the pathologizing of an entire age category in the context of the surveillance society where children and teenagers are turned into a suspicious categories with propensity for deviance, especially, sexual deviance.

Over at Larvatus Prodeo, Robert Merkel adds another layer:

The most influential book you’ll never read at Larvatus Prodeo via kwout

This adds the power layer to labeling of medical / psychiatric disorder for social behavior that violates the norms. Which reminded me of this:

As always, there is too much emphasis on chemistry and psychology but there is some good stuff on the way deviance behavior is defined and processed (which is where psychology should be the object of study rather than the explanatory approach, after all, we have gone from defining behavior from sinful, to criminal, to mental disorders, each corresponding to the power of different groups – moral entrepreneurs – to define deviance on their own terms).

A very good article in the Guardian regarding gender and color stereotyping. Saussure and Levi-Strauss established long ago that signifiers are arbitrary, hence the variability:

The power of pink | From the Guardian | The Guardian via kwout

If I remember correctly, blue used to be the color of the Virgin Mary whereas pink was the color of angels. Bottom line: we divide the world into neat categories of signified supported by arbitrary signifiers that have very real effects. For instance, all this stuff about color and texture shapes gender socialization in ways that have been extensively studied by many scholars.

So now, pink is a girls’ color and blue is a boys’ color. In spite of such obvious arbitrariness, we still get this type of nonsense when evolutionary scientists who are always so keen on proving that everything gendered is encoded in our genes and innate:

The power of pink | From the Guardian | The Guardian via kwout

Oy. Right, because, of course, these women were absolutely not influenced by their socialization, and other socio-cultural factors, so it just HAS to be biology.

We see how strongly we use these arbitrary cultural signifiers and how much they organize our perceptions when they get questioned, as with the Pink Stinks campaign:

pinkstinks – Home via kwout

Cultural standards, especially those pertaining to gender, are not to be messed with. That kind of deviance gets attacked very quickly and nastily:

The power of pink | From the Guardian | The Guardian via kwout

Anyone who has taught gender has encountered that kind of aggressive resistance from students who feel personally attacked when the social and cultural logic of gender (and its oppressive effects) are exposed.

That is how social structures and cultural standards reproduce themselves: by being not only embodied in social actors, but by also shaping perception not just of “what is normal” but of the very self. Hence, any deconstruction is perceived as a personal attack. Social control mechanisms then get into high gear through a variety of (passive-)aggressive behaviors like the nasty emails above, or students providing anecdotal evidence that supposedly invalidates the point being made.

This is the same logic underlying the phenomenon of corrective rape or any type of gender violence whose goal is to force individuals back into the narrow yet socially and culturally-defined boxes of gender roles. They are at the roots of various forms of symbolic violence (which is no less real than interpersonal, physical violence) as ways to make deviance very costly to those tempted to step outside of the box (and encourage others to do so, as the Pink Stinks campaign ladies do).

I take a lot of fitness classes. I work out quite a bit, cardio kickboxing, step aerobics, strength training, pilates, core strength. I have done them all. But of course, it is impossible to switch off the sociologist thing. And of course, in fitness classes like these, gender is the first thing one notices. Instructors are often women and so are the students in attendance. In roughly 25-student classes, you’re lucky if there are two or three men.

So, where are the men? At the college where I work, the student population is roughly equally divided between men and women. Why would mostly women take fitness classes? Because fitness classes are “girly”. How do we know? Because the instructors are women, for one. A woman instructor apparently automatically feminizes what she teaches. Also, it often happens, mostly in cardio kickboxing classes, that our instructor leaves the door open. It is pretty intense, so, a bit more air circulation is nice. Quite often, groups of young men – mostly athletes – will stop at the door and mimic the moves the class is doing, but with a “faggy” twist (if you’ll pardon me the expression), shaking their hips (we don’t do that in cardio kickboxing), dancing to the music (there’s no dancing in cardio kickboxing), punching in a “weak” and girlie fashion. These guys wil do that for a few seconds and then walk away. That’s all they need to demean our workout as not really working out. We’re just doing girl stuff.

Incidentally, one day, two guys from the football team were doing that for longer than usual (turned out one of them was the boyfriend of one of the young women in the class and they were waiting for them to be done, but they probably got bored waiting, so, on they went, mocking us). The instructor probably had enough and made them come into the room and do the routine with us. After a few minutes, they were dying, they could not keep up with the pace, their coordination was bad.

So, what about the few men who do show up. A few come and work out seriously and realize that it is the real deal. From my random observations (see? That’s why I put it in the title), we often get scrawny / geeky guys. Non-athletes. For them, it’s a relatively safe environment. No one makes fun of them for their lack of masculine traits (not big, not muscular), and they get to work out. However, they tend to stay in the back of the room unless they have women friends in the class.

Then, there are a few athletes who show up. And boy do these suffer. Especially in pilates and core strength which often made me wonder what kind of physical conditioning they get. One would think that core strength would be necessary in any sport. So why do athletic guys have such a hard time? For many men, pilates is unfamiliar territory: you take your shoes off, you spend a lot of time with your legs up in the air, you go through movements slowly and with control, with a lot of emphasis on posture, breathing and coordination (and boy, do guys lack coordination). Somehow, men suffer in that department. I blame bodily socialization.

What is interesting is how men react to lousy performance in fitness classes. For instance, in core strength class I am currently taking, there are a few athletes. It is less uncomfortable for men than pilates. It is more athletic and we keep our shoes on. The exercises are tough and mobilize one’s entire core in a sequence of challenging moves. Women go through it with more or less effort (it’s not easy for anyone)…silently. But men go through it with much huffin’ and puffin’ and loud moaning. Somehow, we all HAVE to know how hard it is and how much effort these guys put into it. And they don’t perform all that well. There are several middle-age women like me, these guys are half our age and we do better than them. And we’re much more quiet in our efforts.

Again, I think this goes back to gender socialization. It’s socially ok for men to be loud as they work out. It’s the masculine thing to do to display that you’re putting in the effort. Us women, we have been socialized into being quiet and not complaining. Actually, when it comes to athletes, there is a lot of performance going on. They show off whether it is to show their strength (when we work with weight, they always take the heaviest weights available) or to offset a poor performance by displays of effort (like moaning).

But it still remains amazing to me that work out classes even of a non-gender type, such as cardio kickboxing or various strength classes, are too gender-threatening for many men to take.

Phil Zuckerman‘s Society Without God: What The Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us About Contentment will not surprise any European reader. But I suspect we are not the audience for this book. This book is clearly geared towards an American audience. It is highly readable and would be appropriate for undergraduate students and provides a nice demonstration of debunking of the idea that societies need religion in order for morality to prevail against chaos (something that US students, knee-deep in American culture, are prone to be thinking).

And while being a short and easy read, the book does provide homeopathic doses of theories as well as a methodological appendix. In addition, Zuckerman peppers the text with personal narrative and impressions that lighten the read and add a human element. I found that distracting and useless but I can see why he did it. In other words, it is not a book for an academic for other academics. It is for a general audience.

As a caveat before I go any further into the review, I have to confess (pun intended) that sociology of religion is not my field of expertise and that I have close to zero interest in the subject (in that sense, I am close to many of Zuckerman’s subject). But, as a European living and working in the United States, I found the topic intriguing.

The core of the book revolves around the year (or so) that Zuckerman spent in Denmark where he was surprised by the general lack of religiosity (Denmark has a national church subsidized by the state and people can opt out of the taxes that go to subsidize the church if they so choose). National statistics supports this impression. Scandinavian countries are the least religious in the world. In general, Western European countries all more or less combine low religiosity with high quality of life in a world awash in religion and violence.

As a good American, Zuckerman wonders how it is possible to have low religiosity combined with very high quality of life and morality. This, to me, a faulty premise. Scandinavian countries are not unusual in Europe. They are at the top of the distribution on quality of life and at the bottom of the distribution on religiosity. It is the United States that is the outlier here, the oddity: rich country, unequal quality of life and high religiosity. So, the “how weird is that?” attitude that pervades the book regarding Scandinavian secularism is a bit ethnocentric. But that is the starting point of Zuckerman’s study: a series of interviews with a variety of Danes, from all walks of life regarding religion or lack thereof and related matter. The shaping of the questions also reflect an American attitude: if you are not religious or don’t believe in God, then what is the meaning of life? Or are you afraid of death?

The bottom line is that lack of religion is no hindrance to prosperity, democracy and general quality of life.  For Zuckerman, this also debunks the idea of religion as basic human need, maybe encoded in our genes, something that the sociologists of religion that Zuckerman mentions take for granted with their own version of argument by popularity: if most people are religious, then, that means that religion is part of human nature and fulfills some basic need (and then, they all use that as accepted starting point rather than social fact to be explained). Scandinavia stands as major counterexample to this.

Overall, based on Zuckerman’s interviews, it appears that that the Danes do not concern themselves much with religion and death and exhibit low levels of death anxiety. Zuckerman seems to find this suprising. I do not. I would argue that religion creates death anxiety by turning it into judgment time and potential nasty punishment. As Zuckerman’s interviews show, it is the Christians in Denmark who are afraid of dying, not the non-religious. Similarly, they do not concern themselves with abstract notions of the meaning of life. At the same time, international surveys show that Scandinavians rank among the highest on happiness and satisfaction, combined with strong social engagement. Strong social welfare, equality and security will do that for you. Why should anyone be surprised?

“The notion that religious belief is somehow childish, that earnest prayer is something that only children engage in, and that faith in God is just something that one dabbles with in childhood, but eventually grows out of  as one becomes a mature adult, would strike most Americans as offensive. But for millions of Scandinavians, that’s just the way it is.” (94)

And yet, such immaturity is omnipresent in American society, visible not just through childish religiosity but also through emotional displays that makes Americans recognizable everywhere in the world. Extreme religiosity maintains individuals in a state of permanent immaturity in many respects.

But what interests Zuckerman is what it means to be secular. After all, he argues that secularists are the most understudied of categories. Zuckerman’s research shows that being secular in Scandinavia involves three attitudes towards religious matters:

• Reluctance / reticence
• Benign indifference
• Utter obliviousness

All three attitudes, with different degrees reflect simply a lack of interest in religion and talking about it. In the interviews, subjects are not much interested in religion as a topic. They are either uninterested, have not much to say, or are just plain bored by it.

So why are Scandinavian societies so secular? Zuckerman identifies several potential explanations:

• Lazy monopolies: state religions do not have to struggle for, or advertise to, potential “customers” since there is no competition.

• Secure societies: due to the high quality of life in Scandinavian societies, there is no need for religious comfort (or opium for the people)

• Working women: women used to be the pillars of religious communities, dragging their husbands and children with them (not to mention free labor for the churches). Once invested with the paid workforce, women lose their religious focus and so do their families.

• Lack of need for cultural defense: Scandinavian countries are secure and homogeneous.

• Education: Scandinavian societies have a highly educated populace. High education tends to correlate with lower religiosity.

• Social democracy: social democratic system reflect the values of the population, especially equality and undermine religious tenets and eliminate religion from public life.

(Consider all the opposites to these propositions and you have, according to Zuckerman, a depiction of religion in the United States… although that might explain high American religiosity but not the presence and growth of religious fundamentalism)

Even though they are mostly secular, Zuckerman’s subjects do not reject their Lutheran cultural heritage. But that is just it, Scandinavian societies are more oriented towards cultural religion where religious rituals are perceived as traditions inherited from the past, but devoid of supernatural content but they do see it as part of their history and identity.