Abstract
Neighborhood partisanship, help-seeking stigma, and coercive debt: A snapshot of new research.
cash and control
“Coercive debt” is a rising and elusive form of financial abuse in which one partner isolates and forces the other to rely on them through economic means—typically a man controlling a woman. Such abuse is difficult to detect, but a new study in the International Journal of Comparative Sociology sheds light on the cultural processes that facilitate coercive debt by investigating cases perpetrated against Arab-Palestinian women in Israel.
Leveraging in-depth interviews with Arab-Palestinian women alongside legal case data, researchers Tal Meler, Raghda Alnabilsy, and Bernstein Miri investigate the economic tactics used in heterosexual partnerships to institute an inequitable relationship based on economic reliance and control. A looming problem forms as men in the Israeli context are socialized to be stewards of money. Because the belief is held at the society level, minority women in Arab enclaves are concurrently socialized to believe they lack basic skills related to money management and to relegate themselves to unpaid domestic and childcare tasks. Furthering the problem, the women in this study are both low-income and low-education, factors that contribute to misunderstandings of their rights and a lack of know-how when it comes to discovering them. With men obtaining and controlling household finances, women reported that they were economically dependent upon their partners and felt unable to leave.
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Although we often think of abuse as physical, sexual, or psychological, this article underscores how economic imbalances can facilitate financial abuse. Those who are the most vulnerable in a patriarchal society, women with limited financial and social resources, pay a steep price.
place-based politics
America may be a pixelated political mosaic of red and blue, but how do we explain divergent partisan attachments among neighboring communities? In a new paper published in the American Journal of Sociology, scholar Stephanie Ternullo argues that place-based organizations—e.g., unions, churches, community groups—play a central role in shaping how adjacent communities identify with different political parties.
Through comparative and longitudinal qualitative research, the study draws on four rounds of interviews with 54 residents in neighboring towns in the heartland of the American Midwest. Pseudonymous Motorville and Lutherton share comparable post-industrial economies and socio-demographic characteristics, yet 54% of Motorville residents identify as Democrat and 63% of Lutherton residents identify as Republican. In parsing this difference, Ternullo adds nuance to a wealth of structuraland individual-level sociological explanations by offering a middle-range account in which place-based organizational arrangements shape local residents’ interpretations of local and national political issues. Organizations provide both diagnostic frames for rendering particular social problems meaningful and narratives of community identity that help residents cohere around a shared sense of who they are as a community.
Economic structures, political elites, and national media all contour the U.S. political landscape, but so too, Ternullo argues, do the community-level organizations with which we interact in sometimes small, but ultimately meaningful ways.
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When side-by-side communities have different politics, this study suggests we look to community-level organizations to help explain the partisan divide.
new labor model, same old problems
Where, when, and how people work is changing. Traditional corporate offices are emptying out and more and more workers report to apps rather than bosses. One of the main forces motivating this shift is the desire, held by both companies and workers, for flexibility. However, as a new study by sociologists Reilly Kincaid and Jeremy Reynolds shows, the benefits of this newfound flexibility are elusive and frequently reproduce many of the same inequalities found in the traditional labor market.
Published in The Sociological Quarterly, authors Reilly Kincaid and Jeremy Reynolds leverage survey data to show that “formally flexible” jobs—in this case, microtask gig work enabled through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform—do not afford laborers a better work-life balance than traditional employment structures. Through detailed analysis, the team finds these novel flexible work models appear to offer little change for groups already facing systemic barriers in the traditional labor market, as both women and low-income laborers experience higher levels of work-life conflict in both arrangements.
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The work may be flexible, but work-life balance remains a challenge.
Despite claims that flexible work in the gig economy is democratizing labor and creating new opportunities for worker empowerment, Kincaid and Reynolds show that neither promise really delivers. While financially stable men may be well positioned to benefit from the freedom of flexible work, for most workers that freedom and flexibility is an elusive promotional “mystique.”
all fun and games?
Social media platforms such as Facebook and X have faced intensive scrutiny for encouraging toxic online discourse and spreading misinformation. Meanwhile, virtual gaming spaces have largely evaded public attention.
iStockPhoto // gorodenkoff
Online maltreatment can harm gamers’ mental health.
With nearly 180 million players monthly, League of Legends (LoL) boasts the title of the world’s largest esport. The concept is simple: two teams face off, valiantly attempting to destroy their opponent’s base. But while the play is seemingly innocuous, a new study by Friedrich Donner in New Media and Society reveals the real-world consequences of some players’ attacks.
Using 25 in-depth interviews with LoL players, Donner outlines how gameplay, context, and emotion combine to foster toxic environments. As online games lack common universal norms and guidelines to promote shared game culture, the author notes frustration, anger, and acute grief make up the affective landscape of online environments. While social media accounts, such as Discord, offer spaces of knowledge development, not everyone takes part and may suffer attacks from those who are part of these networks. This potent mix is especially influential in inspiring maltreatment, as the high intensity and ever-changing nature of the online world exacerbates the root feelings. Additionally, Donner found the gaming platform suffered from a lack of conviviality as well as good pathways of communication. When teams of players were expected to collaborate, but had different levels of gameplay knowledge, it frequently resulted in ineffective team play. That, in turn, led to disappointment and player-on-player aggression. The result was a toxic space for all.
So what? Well, almost five times the population of Canada plays LoL, itself just one game among hundreds that may be cultivating virtual attacks with real-world personal consequences, such as poor mental health, which disproportionally affect younger players. When online and offline worlds increasingly overlap, nurturing collaborative, communicative, and positive online arenas, even competitive ones, may make living in both a better experience.
emirati women’s hidden paychecks
Around the world, patriarchal gender norms have been disrupted by women entering the workforce. While traditional accounts often focus on the market side of these shifts, less is known about how families respond to the new economic reality. This is particularly true in regions outside of the United States and Europe, like the United Arab Emirates, where women’s employment rate rapidly increased from less than 3% in 1975 to 33% in 2019. In a new study published in Social Forces, sociologist Lauren Clingan reveals that this acceleration has not expanded women’s social privileges in ways one might expect, like a reduction in domestic responsibilities, greater decision-making power, or even credit for contributing to essential household expenses. How is this the case?
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In patriarchal societies, families may reframe women’s earnings to protect men’s primacy.
Drawing from 64 interviews with Emirati women and men, Clingan shows how families strategically define and disguise women’s contributions to minimize tensions between the persistent cultural ideal of men’s breadwinning and the practical reality of women’s employment. She finds that Emirati families reconcile the disconnect in two ways. First, they celebrate women’s spending on their families while stigmatizing women’s spending on themselves, effectively converting women’s income into shared rather than individual resources. Second, families downplay women’s economic contributions by framing them as unnecessary, allowing for the preservation of the husband’s primacy in financial provision and power. For example, men rhetorically frame their wives’ contributions as nonessential gifts and continue to manage family finances even when their wives outearn them. Women play an active role in this gendered theater, too. In an extreme illustration, women in Clingan’s study sometimes made secret payments to third parties to help their husbands save face. Ultimately, and despite significant changes to these families’ economic realities, ingrained gender norms persist and men maintain household authority.
between a rock and a landlord
In the United States, housing is inextricable from inequality. While sociologists have long understood that displacement reproduces inequality, Steven Schmidt argues in a recent article that the neglect and trade-offs renters tolerate to remain in substandard housing is equally disadvantageous.
Published in the journal City & Community, Schmidt’s study leverages insights from 131 interviews with non-Hispanic White and Latino/a, low- and middle-income renters in Los Angeles, one the world’s most expensive housing markets. In unaffordable housing markets like Los Angeles, renters commonly get trapped in a process that Schmidt calls negotiating neglect: fearing eviction, renters may avoid contacting landlords to request or follow up on necessary housing repairs, sometimes even opting to pay for the repairs out of pocket.
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Research suggests tenants, fearing eviction, may try to negotiate neglect rather than confront landlords.
Eviction is a primary mechanism through which access to housing reproduces inequality, but Schmidt’s analysis reveals how the process begins even when renters have stable housing. Negotiating neglect to avoid eviction takes immense emotional labor and sacrifice from renters just trying to keep a roof over their heads. Not only does this compound the chronic stress associated with substandard living conditions, but it also entrenches the inequality inherent in a commoditized housing system.
friendship therapy
Whether to confront past traumas or work through relationship issues, going to therapy has become a central part of “doing the work” required to become a better person. So much so that, in recent years, cultural critics and online discourse have observed the emergence of a “therapy culture” in which people increasingly apply therapeutic language and practices to all aspects of daily life. A new article published in Cultural Sociology argues that this has come with consequences.
Using data collected through 20 interviews with residents of an Atlantic Canadian city, authors Laura Eramian, Peter Mallory, and Morgan Herbert find that the extension of therapy culture from romantic and familial relationships to our friendships has created a double bind. On the one hand, therapy culture encourages people to seek out close and intimate friends who support and understand them. On the other hand, it urges people to establish clear boundaries to protect themselves from taking on friends’ traumas. The tension comes in attempting to both allow ourselves to be vulnerable with friends and insulate ourselves from friends’ attempts at vulnerability.
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Extending therapy culture to friendships creates a double bind.
At a time when loneliness and social isolation are on the rise, we might assume therapy culture is a much-needed balm. The findings of this study suggest, however, that extending therapy culture to friendly and casual relationships may lead to tensions and distance instead of intimacy and respite.
seeking help, seeking dignity
How do social service recipients manage the stigma of assistance? As sociologist Dan Bolger shows through his research in two majority-Black low-income neighborhoods in Houston, Texas, recipients rely on both “getting out” and “giving back” to mitigate against negative perceptions.
Similar in many ways, the two neighborhoods in this Social Forces study were marked by one important difference: one had a high density of social service organizations, such as food banks and job training offices, and the other did not. Informed by 15 months of ethnographic observation and interviews with 44 social service recipients, Bolger sought to understand how individuals made decisions about where to access services. Surprisingly, he found that residents of both neighborhoods described traveling long distances to access the supports they required. While this seems intuitive for the neighborhood lacking services, the other is a puzzle. The key piece to solving the mystery for Bolger turned out to be residents’ desire for dignity—respondents sought out places where they would feel respected and be more anonymous, and they were willing to spend a lot of time in transit to do so. This “getting out” strategy was paired with a second strategy, “giving back.” Similarly aiming to preserve dignity and mitigate stigma, social service users often volunteered at the same places they received help.
iStockPhoto // Jacob Wackerhausen
A new study uncovers strategies used by social service recipients hoping to preserve dignity and minimize stigma.
These strategies were employed most frequently by those who perceived their dignity to be most threatened by receiving assistance—Black women, who confronted the prevalent and harmful “Welfare Queen” stereotype. Overall, the findings illuminate how people seek to meet both material needs and social ones even when the goals seem at odds.