Abstract
Drug markets, rural evictions, and millennium goals: A snapshot of new research.
Making Merit
Elites often strive to justify their success by invoking the concept of merit. But how do they define merit? According to a new article by Sam Friedman and colleagues, the answer varies across countries.
Published in Social Forces, the study draws from 71 interviews with elites in the United Kingdom and Denmark to identify national differences in success narratives. Elites in the United Kingdom defined merit as innate talent, attributing their success to qualities such as intelligence, creativity, or good judgment. In contrast, Danish elites defined merit as hard work, emphasizing their dedication, accumulated expertise, and contributions to civic society. Despite these differences, their success narratives shared a key quality: both groups portrayed themselves as unstrategic, downplaying calculated planning and self-promotion and instead insisting that others had spontaneously recognized and rewarded their positive qualities.
Elites’ definitions of merit matter for the ways they explain their successes.
iStockPhoto.com // Nuthawut Somsuk
How we define merit has implications for understanding and addressing inequality. When merit is perceived as innate, inequality may appear inevitable—the implication is that some people are simply born with less creativity or good judgment. Defining merit as hard work offers a more hopeful narrative, yet this perspective can lay blame on those perceived as unsuccessful, implying that they did not work hard enough. Ultimately, the study shows how the idea of merit is interpreted differently based on national cultures, yet similarly justifies inequality.
A Broader Look at the Housing Crisis
As the housing crisis continues to affect millions of renters around the world, scholars tend to focus on urban areas. But people rent in rural places, too. That’s why a recent study by sociologists Carl Gershenson and Matthew Desmond focuses directly on the ways the rental housing crisis is affecting rural Americans.
Published in Rural Sociology, this study offers the first comprehensive analysis of evictions in rural America, where the number of renters has steadily risen in recent decades. Using data from Princeton’s Eviction Lab, the authors analyze 11 years of eviction data in rural counties (totaling more than 220,000 evictions per year). Their findings reveal important trends that fall along racial and class lines. For instance, while the majority of evictions affect White families, the rural eviction rate is four times higher among Black rural renters, and eviction filing rates are highest in heavily Black counties. In majority-Hispanic counties, lower eviction rates are offset by higher rates of poor-quality informal housing options like RVs and off-grid shelters.
Rural evictions data reveal trends along racial and class lines.
iStockPhoto.com // Andrii Zorii
This study reveals, for the first time, the extent to which the housing crisis has infiltrated rural communities. It also showcases how many of the racial and class patterns documented in urban areas are playing out in rural regions. Not only does this demonstrate the need for housing policy actors to better take regions into account, but it also drives home the need for more sociological inquiry into rural life.
Saving Money, Saving Relationships
When a friend or family member asks for money and you are unable or unwilling to help, how do you say no without damaging the relationship? A new study by Kristen McNeill and Rachael Pierotti in Socio-Economic Review investigates this universal dilemma through interviews and focus groups with factory workers in Cote d’lvoire. The findings suggest that the practice of earmarking, or explaining that one’s money is already set aside for another purpose, can resolve this dilemma, leaving one’s savings—and the relationship—intact after a monetary ask.
In some cases, the rhetorical strategy of earmarking is deployed with all sincerity: a potential giver wants to help but genuinely feels they cannot. In other cases, when the asker is perceived as undeserving or the expense frivolous, a potential giver may fabricate an earmark as an excuse for not choosing to help. In both cases, earmarking provides a socially acceptable reason for refusal that helps maintain the relationship. Additionally, the authors demonstrate that an individual’s perception of being able to give is itself subjective. When the asker’s need is deemed sufficiently urgent and socially valued, like a medical expense, the potential giver generally feels able to give even if it means overriding an earmark.
Deciding—and explaining—whether to give money to friends and family can be tricky for relationships.
iStockPhoto.com // Marina Demeshko
The authors’ discovery that some earmarks are (or can be) overridden while others remain intact suggests the distinction between can’t help and won’t help is—at least when it comes to money—more complicated than it may initially appear. It also demonstrates that earmarking isn’t only a strategy for saving money, it’s a strategy for saving relationships.
Are You Holding?
Say you want to buy or sell some secondhand fashion online. To determine whether the platform you intend to use is legitimate, you might look to its payment system. How does the app ensure secure transactions? Both buyers and sellers are likely to be relieved when an app provides an escrow service—that is, when a buyer purchases an item, the app steps in to process the payment and safeguard both parties by securely holding the buyer’s payment. But things seem to work differently in cryptomarkets used by people trading in illegal drugs. A new paper by Filippo Andrei and colleagues in the European Sociological Review indicates that, when it comes to drug markets, escrow systems undermine rather than enhance trust.
With a dataset of auction listings and transactions from a cryptomarket between March 2015 and January 2017, the authors find that escrow is associated with reduced sales of drugs, quantified by the volume of sales per auction listing. The authors propose two possible mechanisms for this inversion. First, escrow is associated with increased prices, which may disincentivize buyers and lead to a preference for advance payment transactions. Second, escrow may backfire by crowding out trust between traders; analyzing user reviews, the authors found that feedback posted after advance payment transactions was more positive than feedback posted after escrow transactions.
Escrow, a system of holding payments to protect buyers and sellers, appears to lower trust in online drug trades.
iStockPhoto.com // InfinitumProdux
Despite the cryptomarket’s technological advances, these findings suggest that drug users’ communities rely on informal social control online as well as off. Escrow, as a potentially incompatible control mechanism, ends up crowding out trusting and reciprocal behaviors between traders—a fact that may aid law enforcement agencies hoping to tackle the dark web’s illicit drug trade.
Travel and The Times
How do you choose where to go on vacation? Maybe you consult friends or family or follow the advice of a travel influences Or maybe you plan your trips by flipping through The New York Times Travel section. While the latter might feel like an antiquated approach for the more online among us, sociologists Hesu Yoon and Andrew McCumber argue in their new Poetics paper that elite media institutions like the NYT still play an important role in shaping our cultural imagination about faraway places.
Combining computational text and qualitative discourse techniques, Yoon and McCumber analyze over 10,000 articles published in the NYT Travel section between 2000-2019 to show how elite travel writers symbolically construct places as particular types of destinations. European destinations are widely valorized for their culture—museums, cafes, and cultural venues—while non-European countries, particularly places that experience colonization, are primarily heralded for their scenic and recreational beauty. This geographic hierarchy between cultural and natural destinations is further compounded by the tendency of writers to afford a broad definition of culture to European contexts (e.g., celebrating France’s entire cultural history) but a much narrower discussion of culture in non-European places (e.g., focusing on the food of East Asia).
Elite media and the “western gaze” shape how we imagine potential tourist destinations.
iStockPhoto.com // Tatsiana Kuryanovich
While scholars have long documented how the global north and south are stratified by material outcomes like economic growth, this study demonstrates how the selective attribution of symbolic value can also retrench global hierarchies through the construction of countries as particular types of “destinations.” The patterns identified here show that global tourism is still largely experienced through a “western gaze” in which non-European nations, and nations with histories of colonialism in particular, are further marginalized based on the attractiveness of their culture as a tourism experience for the readers of the NYT.
Paying Attention. Period.
Menstrual health and hygiene (MHH) are absent from both the Millennium Development Goals and the Sustainable Development Goals, which have shaped global and national-level policies for several decades. Why? In Sociology of Development, sociologist Rita Jalali examines MHH in the global health agenda, shedding light on the reasons why certain social causes receive less attention than others.
Jalali’s data come from organizational documents from the World Bank, UNICEF, UNDP, and WHO, spanning a 38-year period (1978 to 2015). Results show that none of the 114 flagship annual reports published by these organizations focused on MHH. The reason MHH was excluded from the global health agenda is its measurability—it’s hard to find measurable evidence about MHH and potential solutions for its related problems. Indeed, both academia and the public sector lack reliable measurement indicators for MHH, which obfuscates the issue and impedes advocacy work. Additionally, menstrual advocacy challenges traditional gender norms that shame menstruating bodies, resulting in some groups’ reluctance to discuss the issue in policy forums and strategic meetings.
Why are menstrual health and hygiene excluded from so much of the global health agenda?
iStockPhoto.com // Dmytro Skrypnykov
The global silence surrounding MHH underscores the unintended consequences of inequality within social movements. The global women’s health movement, primarily led by middle-class actors, has tended to prioritize issues such as reproductive self-determination, affordable medical care, workplace safety, and freedom from violence. However, MHH concerns, which disproportionately affect women and girls from economically disadvantaged backgrounds across both high- and low-income countries, have been marginalized. Thus, beyond emphasizing the “entrenched role of unequal gender norms” and “power structures that perpetuate gender inequalities,” the neglect of MHH also highlights how poverty plays a significant role in determining access to menstrual health resources and services.
Our Forests, Ourselves
Environmental dilemmas require social solutions. In North America, urbanites frequently lead the charge on environmental activism, often implicitly constructing rural people as oppositional to their goals. However, along the Aegean Coast of Turkey—a region governed by men in the mining and forestry industries—rural women have inspired positive environmental outcomes. A new study published by Nihan Bozok in Gender & Society investigates what prompted these rural women to protest deforestation.
The data for this paper comes from a decade of ethnographic research and 110 interviews with rural Turkish women. Bozok argues that women’s lives are structured by forests along the Agean Coast for three reasons: childhood memories, foraging and managing the forests, and social connections. The forests provide women with traditional lands of socialization, giving generations shared memories of foraging and learning to become stewards of nature. Deforestation risks erasing these central aspects of rural Turkish women’s lives and culture. Nature is also the epicenter of belongingness for these women, who nurtured relationships in nature while managing the land. Therefore, to lose woodlands also meant losing the ecology of their lives, the place where they felt they belonged. Collectively, for the study’s participants, defending the forests of Turkey was inseparable from fighting for themselves.
The Duden waterfalls near Antalya, Turkey.
iStockPhoto.com // :saiko3p
Maybe, just maybe, our world’s most key resources include the people tied to our forests, such as these rural women in Turkey. Bozok’s work underscores how the capacity for environmental activism can come from populations that by all other indications lack power. By learning how to work with instead of against rural peoples, we may find new ways to sustain our planet—and our ways of life.
Same Behavior, Different Meaning
What does it mean to drive an electric vehicle? For some, it may be a bold act of climate action while for others it may simply be a pragmatic cost-saving practice. In a cultural context in which these different meanings can signal divergent political outlooks, it’s incumbent upon sociologists to consider how meaning-making processes are shaping social responses to the climate crisis. That’s where a new paper in Social Forces comes in.
By tracing the material flow and meaning-making practices associated with electric vehicles from production through to consumption, Terence McDonnell, Anna Gabur, and Rachel Keynton argue that U.S. conservatives are purchasing EVs at an accelerating rate not because they’ve grown more concerned about climate change, but because they have been able to strategically redefine what an electric vehicle is. Conservative consumers focus, the authors find, on the money saved and freedom offered by driving an electric vehicle, rather than on climate change mitigation. This strategic redefinition enables conservative consumers to reaffirm their cultural identities while still engaging in a cultural practice typically associated with the “other side.”
An electric pickup truck makes use of a Texas charging station.
iStockPhoto.com // RoschetzkyIstockPhoto
What does this tell us about the cultural politics of climate change? Most importantly, it suggests that people traditionally opposed to climate action may be very willing to engage in climate-friendly practices if they are offered up in culturally resonant ways. Making pitches to shift climate-related behaviors in a politically and culturally polarized country may mean adopting more than one framing.