for you sociology nerds: bibliographic edition

Quick! Without using a search function or looking at your bookshelf, how many Arlie Hochschild publications can you name that begin with the word THE? I'll start you off with some easy ones...

The Time Bind
The Second Shift

I'm editing a bibliography and just noticed that all six references to Arlie start with THE and then reveal a new concept, to be forever etched into the minds of sociologists.

No links from this post, as that would give it away.

monday sociologist: Nancy Folbre

Nancy Folbre is my new favorite sociologist! For this week anyway, and to clarify, she is actually an economist, but many sociology readers and courses include her writing.

One key concept attached to Folbre is that of the Invisible Heart, an economic analysis of non-market work, the counter to the Invisible Hand, a la Adam Smith. That is, over 50% of work performed in the U.S. is actually non-market work, which must be guided by something. It is not work that is counted into the GDP, nor is it included in most social policy. Yet it is necessary work for either the GDP or social policies to ever make sense. In fact, it should be included as a factor in order for more accurate measuring of our society. The Invisible Heart explains how we organize, heal, educate, and clean up after that percent of work that is considered in the market.

CorporNation
In the meantime, many corporations today are not only ingoring the Invisible Heart, but they are deliberately excluding it, counting this caring work as a burden to the profit motive. Consider Folbre's imaginary island nation, CorporNation:

Imaginary scenario: A multinational corporation, tired of the frustrations of negotiating over taxation and regulation with host governments, buys a small, uninhabited Caribbean island. Perhaps it is a guano island, previouisly used only for collecting bird poop for fertilizer. Its new owners write a constitution and announce the formation of a country called CorporNation. Anyone who is a citizen fo the new country will automatically receive a highly paid job (minimum salary $50,000 per year). The following restrictions apply to citizenship: Individuals must have advanced educational credentials, be physically and emotionally healthy, have no children, and be under the age of fifty. They need not physically emigrate, but can work from the home country over the Internet. However, they will instantly lose CorporNation citizenship and their job hould they requre retraining, become ill, acquire dependents, or reach the age of fifty.

In short, CorporNation takes advantage of the human capabilities of its citzens/workers without paying for their production of their maintenance when they become ill or old. ... In the long run, however, the new corporate states will run into problems similar to those created by slash-and-burn farming or overfishing. They are exploiting a natural resource without replenishing it. Their strategy is not sustainable.

- Folbre, The Invisible Heart

Unrealistic, you say? But what happens when Maquiladoras close in Mexico every time a unionization effort for health care takes place? Or how do we explain the diminishing U.S. manufacturing sector, in the interest of reducing the cost of labor power?

In paying workers less, we are not just reducing a wage. We are extracting labor from people without providing training skills, health care, child/elder care, or sometimes even days off. Yet all of these things have to happen somewhere - I mean we all get sick, old, tired, and need to rest, don't we?

Not according to CorporNation. And, as it turns out, not according to Walmart either. Check this out, from today's Times:

Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest private employer, is pushing to create a cheaper, more flexible work force by capping wages, using more part-time workers and scheduling more workers on nights and weekends...

These moves have been unfolding in the year since Wal-Mart’s top human resources official sent the company’s board a confidential memo stating, with evident concern, that experienced employees were paid considerably more than workers with just one year on the job, while being no more productive. The memo, disclosed by The New York Times in October 2005, also recommended hiring healthier workers and more part-time workers because they were less likely to enroll in Wal-Mart’s health plan.

CorporNation, anyone? Whatever happened to "Give me your tired, your poor," where are the "wretched refuse" now? I guess our nation now is into the business of collecting only the strong and unburdened (read: happy-go-lucky) poor.

More on Walmart: Living Wages in Chicago, Or Maybe Not
monday sociologist series: Dorothy Smith, C. Wright Mills, W.E.B. Du Bois, Raya Dunayevskaya, Eric Schlosser, Barbara Ehrenreich

monday sociologist: Barbara Ehrenreich

Barbara Ehrenreich is my favorite public sociologist, hands down, no competition. My dream college course to teach would be called "sociology according to Barbara Ehrenreich" and we would read either her own writings all semester, or writings that she references or suggests. That means that the course would include at least a peppering of Katha Pollitt and Arlie Hochschild, among others.

Ehrenreich is a feminist, activist, poverty scholar, and so much more. She is at once local and global, and always has been. In my sociology of poverty course I use her 1983 Women of the Global Factory (with Annette Fuentes) as well as her 2002 Global Woman (with Hochschild), both of which document an increasing trend over the decades for women to carry a large portion of immigrant labor - contrary to the popular image of men going overseas for factory jobs.

Of course we all know Ehrenreich today, at least any person who was a college freshman within the last four years knows her, as the author of Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By In America. This has led to a website (I suggest the blog!) which has now become Ehrenreich's homepage, featuring her new book Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream. Of course Nickel and Dimed is the contemporary classic, but Bait and Switch is just as noteworthy. Ethnographically speaking, it reveals the oddball - but evidentally very common - culture of out-of-work middle class America, as they search (in futility) for new jobs. Her book takes us through job coaches, networking opportunities, interviews, pyramid schemes, and in the end suggests that the American middle class isn't all it seems cracked up to be.

While impossible to document all things Barbara in one short post, I do want to refer you to several important Ehrenreich hotspots. First, don't miss her collection of Alternet essays, especially the most recent June 6 article "Can Marriage Fix Poverty?" (note to self: include in fall poverty course). Find her essays also at Znet, Common Dreams, Truthout, and Salon.

Hey, some like Streisand, I prefer Ehrenreich.

the monday sociologist series: Dorothy Smith, C. Wright Mills, W.E.B. Du Bois, Raya Dunayevskaya, Eric Schlosser

monday sociologist: Eric Schlosser

Eric Schlosser is the author of best seller Fast Food Nation and Reefer Madness, both books of which I assign excerpts to students in my courses. Some call Schlosser an investigative journalist; Wiki calls him a contemporary muckracker. I think he's a mighty fine sociologist. Why? Because to me, Schlosser exemplifies the goals of public sociology. Schlosser's style is readable to the general public; he speaks plainly, and brings home a point. And, as a bestseller he's popular, which helps we academic sociologists get the message across to students in a coherent manner.

I'm looking forward to checking out Schlosser and Linklater's movie version of Fast Food Nation*. And if you have kids or find yourself among kid audiences, then check out this even easier-to-read book, Chew On This, targeted at young ones.

Also check out: Schlosser at Forbes, bestfoodnation.com (wow. just. wow.), Chew on This and more at The Guardian, Fast Food Nation full-text introduction, my post about reefer, prison-industrial complex series at the Atlantic Online.

You need a subscription for the Atlantic, but look for Schlosser's upcoming book on the same topic. He's finished with food and drugs for a while and is now looking at America's prison systems.

* I never would have thought my breastfeeding post would link to this, but you must check out the graphic used for the movie!

This post is dedicated to my sister, who recently stated, "I love your blog, but I don't read it on Mondays." Hopefully Eric Schlosser is more captivating than C. Wright Mills.

the monday sociologist series: Dorothy Smith, C. Wright Mills, W.E.B. Du Bois, Raya Dunayevskaya

the monday sociologist: Raya Dunayevskaya

Today I'm paying homage to the founder of Marxist Humanism, Raya Dunayevskaya [Say it with me: RA - ya - DOON - a - yev - SKA - ya]. Once upon a time in the late nineties - ok, my career is a short one thus far - I read a great deal of Dunayevskaya. RD is a true intellectual with her finger on the pulse of the Marxist dialectic, the philosophic moment of revolution, if you will. Her books include such titles as Marxism and Freedom; Rosa Luxumberg, Women's Liberation, and Marx's Philosophy of Revolution; and Philosophy and Revolution.

There is a lot of information available online (read Wiki; visit News and Letters) about Raya, so I will let you pursue biographical and philosophical information on your own. Of note, especially since my discovery of Dorothy Smith, I am no longer a Dunayevskayian. Yet the writings of RD and Marxist Humanism in general are crucial to how I got where I am today.

other monday sociologists: Dorothy Smith, C. Wright Mills, W.E.B. Du Bois

the monday sociologist: W.E.B. Du Bois

William Edward Burghardt DuBois is considered to be the founder of American sociology. I should say that he should be considered the founder of American sociology, because often Du Bois is denied this fact. Du Bois studied history, philosophy, and economics at Harvard University in the late 19th century. One characteristic of early sociologists is that they did not study sociology because it was not offered as a discipline. Yet this combination of disciplines is not unlike other early sociologists. For example, Karl Marx was a philosopher economist who wrote about historical materialism.

Du Bois' dissertation at Harvard was titled The Suppression of the African Slave Trade in America. His interest was race relations in America and he was hired by the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. In Philly, Du Bois conducted the first American ethnographic study (note: according to Wikipedia, ethnography is the "qualitative description of human social phenomena") and soon published his research in 1899, The Philadelphia Negro. Often another sociologist, William Foote Whyte, is charged as the first sociologist to write ethnography, but Foote Waite's Street Corner Society was published in 1943, nearly 50 years later. So let's set the record straight. Finally, W.E.B. Du Bois founded the first sociology department in the United States at Atlanta University.

Du Bois was about 70 years ahead of his time as a sociologist. He made one of the first structure versus agency arguments that I can find, making an argument against blaming the victim before the term was even coined, in The Philadelphia Negro:

It revealed the Negro group as a symptom, not a cause; as a striving, palpitating group, and not an inert, sick body of crime; as a long historic development and not a transient occurrence.

More popularly, Du Bois is known for a concept used in sociology called double consciousness, a term describing the "two-ness" of being both American and black, "two warring ideals in one dark body," as he wrote in the Atlantic Monthly in 1897:

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, -- this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He does not wish to Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa; he does not wish to bleach his Negro blood in a flood of white Americanism, for he believes -- foolishly, perhaps, but fervently -- that Negro blood has yet a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without losing the opportunity of self-development.

The Atlantic Monthly essay along with a collection of other essays on race were compiled into his 1904 book, The Souls of Black Folk, perhaps Du Bois' most popular book, also one of the first sociological treatments of social life in America.

Read a biography of W.E.B. Du Bois; read the Souls of Black Folk in its entirety.

the monday sociologist: C. Wright Mills

C. Wright Mills is this week's monday sociologist, a classic of the field. His most noted work, or my favorite at least, is The Sociological Imagination. Though not always popular during his lifetime, Mills provides a foundation for modern sociology. He writes about personal troubles versus societal issues, where the former might be an indicator of the latter - not an isolated event. Take for example the personal trouble of losing your job. But why did you lose that job? Downsized? Taking care of a loved one (father, mother, child, or family member with a disability)? Then your personal trouble reflects a larger social issue: deindustrialization, outsourcing, or piss-poor family leave policies in the United States. Or maybe none of the above, but these examples happen to enough people for a social problem to be at hand.

Mills talks about a certain creativity - or imagination - necessary in order to think about these issues. Hence, we use our sociological imagination in order to navigate the waters of the discipline. In the Millsian sense, nothing is universal because we surely have not considered all of the possible factors. Using the sociological imagination involves a kind of social thinking that takes us beyond our comfortable boundaries.

Here's a quickie: Mills makes use of biography and history in order to apply the sociological perspective. That is, who are you (biography) and where did you come from (history)? Applying this to our sample social problem, would you have lost your job if you had a different social status? To me the intersection of biography and history is the sociological version of the biological genetic code. How does who you are and where you are from effect your social situation? Max Weber speaks of a person's "life chances," where to some degree people are socially determined, depending on where and to whom you were born. Yes, rich people have different social opportunities than poor people. Not to mention your sex, race, religion, nationality, or geographical location.

So now what do you think about that job?

By the way, kudos to Bitch|Lab for dedicating a post to the man, as we celebrate the 50th anniversary of Mill's foundational work, The Power Elite. Check out her site or the New York Times for a good review of that one. Also sociologist Howard Becker once wrote a nice piece about him a few years back.

Works by C. Wright Mills: From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (with Hans Gerth, 1946); White Collar: The American Middle Classes (1951); The Power Elite (1956); The Causes of World War Three (1958); The Sociological Imagination (1959)

the monday sociologist

Dorothy Smith is the first sociologist of the week. And appropriately so, given the title of this blog: The first book I read by Smith is titled The Everyday World As Problematic: A Feminist Sociology. I was going to find an image cover of her book to place here, but then I thought the following: "You know, why should an author only exist because her book cover does? Dorothy Smith in Texts, Facts, and Femininity wrote that the text of something often becomes more real than the thing itself. I think I'll find an actual picture of Dorothy instead of displaying one of her books." Also, I couldn't find a picture of Everyday World, so I had to think of something else. Anyway, here is a recent photo of Smith, circa 2005.

I am a Smithian: Dorothy Smith writes about how everyday social relations are understood by people under the terms of a ruling aparatus. What does this mean? That we understand (and write about) life according to our standpoint in society. Here is an example used by Smith in several of her essays:

Riding a train not long a ago in Onatario I saw a family of Indians: woman, man, and three children standing together on a spur above a river wathcing the train go by. There was (for me) that moment - the train, those five people seen on the other side of the glass. I saw first that I could tell this incident as it was, but that telling as a description built in my position and my interpretations. I have called them a family; I have said they were watching the train. My understanding has already subsumed theirs. Everything may have been quite other for them. My description is privileged to stand as what actually happened, because thiers is not heard in the contexts in which I may speak. (Everyday World, p. 112)

Dorothy Smith talks about the standpoint of women, or of anyone, as not necessarily being from the position of those in power in society. Yet we are ruled from positions of power that assume from where we come. If I receive a cash assitance check from the U.S. government, who am I? A mom on welfare? An old man in a nursing home? A graduate student on financial aid? And why does a check from the same source for the same amount of money mean drastically different things? Public perception might by that in one case I am bettering myself for a potential career and in another case I am attached to the system, with no hope for the future. Our social interactions - indeed our value systems - are guided by those who are in power. We are smart enough to know better (hopefully), but then why do we still use the phrase "welfare dependent" and "student aid," when we both are just trying to meet the cost of living?

Books by Smith: Everyday World As Problematic: A Feminist Sociology; Texts, Facts, and Femininity; and check out her new Institutional Ethnography: A Sociology for People (2005)