Abstract
Pioneering puppets, burnout and the corporate ladder, and how we teach history: A snapshot of new research.
Making Mom Proud
How do lower-income mothers respond when societal expectations for feeding children demand resources they do not have? Amidst the pressure of intensive parenting norms, lower-income mothers experience the emotional dilemma of how to feel like good mothers when they perceive themselves falling short of their own and society’s expectations, such as preparing home-cooked meals and avoiding fast food. So how do they manage their emotions to achieve a positive maternal identity?
In a recent article published in the Journal of Marriage and Family, Priya Fielding-Singh and Marianne Cooper draw from 33 interviews in the San Francisco Bay Area to examine how socioeconomically disadvantaged mothers respond to the disconnect between their desired and actual feelings of motherhood. They identify a set of emotional “downscaling” strategies, in which mothers reframe their situations to suppress negative emotions and evoke positive ones.
Nothing wrong with raising a good eater.
iStockPhoto.com // kerkez
Mothers’ downscaling strategies included comparing their own current reality to other families who had less and reframing it as an improvement over the challenges they themselves had experienced in the past. Mothers also directed the focus away from the nutritional value of food, an area in which they often felt inadequate, to emphasize other aspects of their caregiving role, such as fostering shared meals and raising children who were not picky eaters, qualities they saw as representative of successful parenting. Through such strategies, mothers suppressed feelings of inadequacy and guilt and amplified feelings of pride and dignity.
These findings provide new insight into the emotional dimensions of social inequality, illuminating how structurally disadvantaged mothers interpret their circumstances in order to feel like good mothers despite dominant cultural narratives portraying them as deficient. In doing so, this study introduces an approach the authors term “attunement,” or the practice of paying attention to what individuals emphasize and omit, to whom they compare themselves, and the emotions contouring their narratives. Through this lens, we can gain valuable insight into the emotional texture of inequality.
From the Corner to the Digital Street
As the distinction between life on the internet and life in the real world blurs, one consequence is that our online behavior can have a tremendous impact on our offline lives—think of someone who gets fired over an insensitive Facebook comment or derogatory Tweet. But as Yun Hsiao and colleagues show in their new study, this relationship goes both ways. Our real world lives also affect our online interactions.
Published in the American Sociological Review, this mixed-methods paper examining on- and offline conflict between Latino gangs in Chicago combines the strengths of computational techniques—like spatial and social network analysis—and in-depth qualitative discourse analysis to contextualize, corroborate, or refute quantitative findings. The authors set out to determine the extent to which online gang behavior, which may include posting about gang activity and membership or making threats toward other gang members, corresponds with real-world violent crime reports and territorial boundaries. They found that rather than acting as a catalyst for violence, online gang activity is heavily influenced by offline interactions and territorial proximity. That is, the more closely gangs are connected in the real world, the more likely they are to engage in conflict online.
As social media becomes central to political and cultural life, studies have tended to focus on either online interactions or the ways online behavior shapes real-world outcomes. The findings of this paper instead demonstrate a more complex process whereby offline proximity and interaction create the necessary conditions for online conflict. This can bring the business of the euphemistic “corner” onto the “digital street,” further exacerbating tensions. Moreover, this paper shows that using qualitative analysis to interrogate quantitative “big data” findings is an important step for capturing the complexity of contemporary social life.
A Sesame Street Feat
When we think about the spread of American culture, we might picture someone eating a Big Mac in Bangladesh, listening to Bruce Springsteen in Singapore, or watching a Disney movie in Denmark. This process, often referred to as Americanization, involves the top-down export of distinctly American products to other countries. But, as Tamara Kay shows in her new Theory and Society article, culture can also spread through more synergistic processes between American distributors and local cultural producers.
The beloved children’s program Sesame Street, which now exists in over 50 countries around the world, is a prime example. Rather than simply air the American version abroad, Sesame Works, the company’s non-profit arm overseeing global diffusion, endeavors to co-produce localized versions of the show that mix its core values of tolerance, nonviolence, and equality with culturally resonant characters and narratives. For example, instead of Big Bird and Elmo, children in Palestine learn cultural pride from Kareem, a seven-year-old green rooster, whose friend Haneen is a vivacious, furry champion of women’s empowerment.
Kay spent nearly a decade observing how representatives from Sesame Works interacted with and exchanged cultural knowledge with partner organizations to develop localized programming. She also conducted 140 interviews with key personnel. From this data, she identified two distinct processes that enable the successful co-production of global Sesame Streets. First, partner organizations and staff from Sesame Works align their interests around mutually supported values by putting forward their non-negotiables and identifying shared goals. Second, both groups deliberately and iteratively exchange complex cultural knowledge—think more abstract values and norms, like fairness, that require nuanced discussion to communicate—to make a hybrid version of Sesame Street that reflects the core values of the original in culturally relevant ways.
Kareem and Haneen star in the Palestinian version of Sesame Street.
Muppet Wiki
The success of Sesame Street’s global adaptations is particularly remarkable considering that its proliferation occurred during an era of heightened cultural polarization. By examining the interactional processes underlying this success, Kay’s study illuminates an alternative—and more equitable—model of globalization in which new cultural products are co-constructed across national boundaries. Once again, Sesame Street has taught us something about how to get along.
Business on Board for the Environment
How has California managed to enact America’s “strongest” climate laws when confronted with a “fragmented system of government with multiple veto points,” a dynamic landscape of interest groups, and a weighty presence of fossil fuel industry? In a paper published in Social Forces, Andrew Jaeger explores the collaboration between Silicon Valley and the state of California, aiming to find answers to questions that transcend state boundaries and environmental constraint.
By examining a multi-faceted dataset that includes archived newsletters, reports, position papers, and field research, Jaeger reveals Silicon Valley’s pivotal role in shaping climate policy. The emergence of the Environmental Entrepreneurs group, advocating that addressing climate change necessitates substantial investments in “cleantech,” has positioned Silicon Valley as a primary producer of such technologies. This burgeoning green industry, in turn, has attracted considerable capital investment and forged a pro-climate business coalition crucial in the passage of California’s climate laws.
A pro-climate business coalition has proven pivotal in forging California’s climate policy regime.
iStockPhoto.com // Krittanut Unsombut
Silicon Valley garnered support, lobbied state officials, and emerged as a fervent advocate for climate initiatives by framing climate policy as a win-win for both the economy and the environment. This scenario not only diffused the economic threats posed by the fossil fuel coalition but simultaneously recast it as a self-interested entity representing a diminishing sector of the economy. Consequently, the emergence of Silicon Valley as a prominent force within the pro-climate movement underscores the author’s suggestion that “a credible plan for spurring growth, supported by significant fractions of capital, is necessary for achieving comprehensive climate policy.”
Courting Eviction
As the cost of living, and housing in particular, skyrockets, more and more people face eviction. Unsurprisingly, U.S. eviction courts—a specific form of civil legal process for adjudicating disputes over tenancy—are experiencing record case numbers. While the legal system seeks fair and just representation, court records show that landlords win eviction cases at an overwhelming—and increasing—rate. Why is this? In a new study published in City and Community, Isaiah Fleming-Kink and colleagues argue that, in an overburdened court system, a series of processes and procedures have emerged that “systematically disadvantage” tenants.
The study combines over a year of ethnographic observations from a Washington, D.C. evictions court with analysis of administrative records to identify four specific forms of disadvantage that tenants experience throughout the eviction court process. First, the unwritten rules of the courtroom—where to stand, who to talk to—are unclear to tenants experiencing the legal system for the first time. This is especially true for tenants with disabilities. Second, tenancy laws are often applied inconsistently, benefitting landlords who have access to more resources to understand and respond appropriately. Third, eviction courts increasingly rely on “shadow procedures,” like consent judgments and settlement agreements, to expedite cases. These almost unanimously favor landlords. Finally, landlords and their lawyers, who are often far more familiar with the court system than are tenants, leverage their relationships with courtroom actors, including judges and administrative clerks, to advance their interests.
iStockPhoto.com // mrdoomits
While evictions are a bureaucratic hassle for landlords, they can be immensely disruptive and traumatic events for tenants. So, too, is the evictions court process, which disadvantages the tenant at every step. The authors are careful to point out that many of these processes are not intentional, but the unintended consequences of an under-resourced and overburdened system. Regardless, for a population already living in precarity, the compounding effects of unequal access to legal representation and due process has potential to reinforce existing inequalities in the rental market and beyond.
History Lessons
How we teach the past can be a contentious issue, especially around sensitive subjects like race, gender, and genocide. But the debates are high-stakes, as history classes play a vital role in the construction of collective memory, and they demonstrate the powerful emotion elicited by what we do—and don’t—teach. In other words, as Chana Teeger argued in a recent article in the American Journal of Sociology, it’s not just the content of history curricula that matters but also the emotions elicited by these lessons.
Drawing from ethnographic observations among students in two racially and socioeconomically diverse South African high schools, Teeger sets out to answer a perplexing question: Why were students captivated by lessons about the Holocaust but bored by lessons about South Africa’s apartheid regime? Supplementing classroom observations with analyses of curricular documents, classroom materials, and interviews with history educators, Teeger found that the Holocaust was framed as a causal narrative in which students were encouraged to ask “why” questions. In contrast, lessons on apartheid primarily comprised lists of repealed laws and past events. The issues of racism, economic exploitation, and settler colonialism, which are crucial for contextualizing apartheid and continue to be relevant for understanding contemporary racial inequality, were conspicuously absent.
The way we teach tough lessons affects what students can learn from them.
iStockPhoto.com // dcdebs
Teeger’s findings reveal “how a past can be remembered but not engaged.” The way apartheid was taught in this context deterred students from exploring why historical racist atrocities were allowed to occur and how they continue to impact the present. Students’ boredom, which arose out of the detached way the apartheid lessons were imparted, enabled them to distance themselves emotionally from histories in which their own families were implicated. This emotional disengagement, then, serves as an “emotional defense of a racist status quo,” avoiding the discomfort of confronting the racist past and its contemporary implications.
Burnout Torches Promotion Possibilities
Employees increasingly encounter workplace conditions that contribute to poor mental health outcomes and, over time, burnout. But what comes after burnout? A recent article by Philippe Sterkens and colleagues helps uncover the ongoing career effects of burnout stigma.
The study, published in European Sociological Review, draws from an online vignette experiment administered to 405 American and British managers. Participants were asked to evaluate a fictitious candidate’s suitability for an internal vacancy. The vignettes included evaluations of a graphic designer, billing and cost clerk, sales manager, and biomass plant technician, and the applicants’ descriptions were varied by gender, employment record, and performance evaluation. Data analysis reveals that, notwithstanding a successful recovery, employees’ history of having a stress leave due to burnout creates a severe obstacle that hampers candidates’ options for promotion. This is especially noteworthy considering that the combined effects of performance evaluation and organizational tenure are eclipsed by the impact of burnout history on promotion propensity.
Even after a successful recovery, a history of professional burnout can stymie promotion possibilities.
iStockPhoto.com // Pavel Muravev
The authors liken the unlikeliness of achieving a promotion after experiencing burnout to “boiling the ocean” and attribute it to stigma attached to burnout. The experiment reveals managers’ assumption that individuals who have experienced burnout may possess lower leadership capacities, a reduced ability to assume an exemplary role within the organization, lower stress tolerance, and a decreased likelihood of securing employment outside of the organization. The results emphasize the need for policymakers and organizations to address burnout syndrome: Overlooking a pool of internal promotion candidates due to discrimination risks losing out on vital institutional knowledge.
Deplatforming Blues
Twitter’s post-January 6th suspension of Donald Trump’s account silenced his digital megaphone in an instant. While the immediate consequences for the former president were evident, the broader impact of account suspension on the everyday user is less understood. To untangle this unknown process, Shangwei Wu and Hui Fang delve into the intricacies of “account bombings,” or the termination of social media accounts in China, in a recent paper in New Media and Society.
The data consist of 115 bloggers’ posts about their account bombing experiences and interviews with 48 social media users whose accounts were suspended. The findings suggest that, beyond erasing extensive periods of one’s life encapsulated in accounts, along with perceived personal property, social media suspensions sever digital ties and evoke a sense of lost dignity, or a sense of worthlessness arising from lost self-respect. By suspending user accounts, then, social media platforms isolate individuals from indispensable bonds in the digitized world. This sets in motion a journey for users as they strive to reclaim their identities and salvage what was taken from them—memories, friendships, and social resources.
Deplatforming can create a deep sense of erasure.
iStockPhoto.com // nadia_bormotova
Social media platforms that transcend national boundaries leverage a power that mimics national governments’ capacities and erases social media users’ sense of self. That is, in a time when more and more of our personal narratives, memories, and lives are etched onto virtual walls, social media conglomerates have become judge, jury, and executioner to those individuals they determine problematic for their platform’s financial success. When media users depend upon online communities for maintaining health and well-being, how might governments curb media platforms’ use of power to support the health of their citizens?