MetaFilter posts tagged with Sociology

If you wouldn't like living that way (in the lowest status slot in the pecking order), you're doing it wrong.

The Whelk — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 08:47:48 -0800

Metafilter's Own Charlie Stross asks the question; " You, and a quarter of a million other folks, have embarked on a 1000-year voyage aboard a hollowed-out asteroid. What sort of governance and society do you think would be most comfortable, not to mention likely to survive the trip without civil war, famine, and reigns of terror?" engrossing commentary follows. (via)

The Gervais Principle

East Manitoba Regional Junior Kabaddi Champion '94 — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 09:47:36 -0800

The Gervais Principle, Or The Office According to “The Office”. Warning: link may evoke baleful despair!

Fear of Cycling

parudox — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 20:25:24 -0800

Fear of Cycling, an essay in five parts: introduction, constructing fear of cycling, helmet promotion campaigns, new cycling spaces, making cycling strange.

Culture Jamming and Reality Hacking

netbros — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 15:07:43 -0800

The Art of the Prank offers insights, information, news and discussions about pranks, hoaxes, culture jamming and reality hacking around the world. Includes topics such as The History of Pranks, The Prank As Art, and the Sociology and Psychology of Pranks. Get pranking. Recent posts include: Mexico 17 Brazil 0 soccer match, The Pynchon Hoax, and a Microsoft Viral stunt.

Health Service Sociology

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 01:19:17 -0800

An article of an american sociologist about being sick in Europe.

"Thanks for ruining the game for me. Really."

waraw — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 11:28:17 -0800

MMORPG Griefing ... for Science! Twixt fought his fellow players in City Of Heroes to win. But he used methods that, despite being legal within the rules of the game, the rest of the community hated. Then the player behind the hero unmasked as Loyola University media professor David Myers, author of "The Sad & Curious Tale of Twixt" (.doc), a sociological study of the unwritten rules in MMORPG's. Not entirely unlike the epic tale of Fansy The Famous Bard.

Transformations of the world

Abiezer — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 01:08:49 -0800

Giovanni Arrighi, the renowned authority in the fields of world systems analysis and historical sociology, died earlier this month. A retrospective interview on his intellectual trajectory was published in the March/April 2009 issue of New Left Review. A major international conference was held in his honour in late May in Madrid, featuring several top scholars in an exploration of the insights of Arrighi’s work.

Why you're probably not named Tricia

escabeche — Tue, 05 May 2009 20:54:23 -0800

What leads cultural tastes and practices to be abandoned? (.pdf) A new PNAS paper by marketing professor Jonah Berger and organizational psychologist Gael Le Mens argues that the faster a trend rises, the faster it's likely to fall, at least as regards longitudinal data of first names given to American children. (Via the Baby Names Blog.) Berger has written before on the drive to non-conform; a 2007 joint paper with Emily Pronin and Sarah Molouki (.pdf) shows that "people see others as more conforming than themselves.... placing more weight on introspective evidence of conformity (relative to behavioral evidence) when judging their own susceptibility to social influence as opposed to someone else's."

Austrian school do it better

Sat, 18 Apr 2009 21:04:38 -0800

The Austrian school of economics try to explain what's wrong with our money.

Sociology papers online

lunit — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 06:38:04 -0800

Harvard Sociologist Robert Samson, known for his work challenging the Broken Window hypothesis (previously on Metafilter), has a number of publications on neighborhoods, race and immigration, crime, and spatial dynamics posted publicly online. Here are just a few recent publications (all pdfs):

*Moving to Inequality: Neighborhood Effects and Experiences Meet Social Structure
*Durable effects of concentrated disadvantage on verbal ability of African American children
*Rethinking crime and immigration
*Neighborhood Selection and the Social Reproduction of Concentrated Racial Inequality
*"After School" Chicago: Space and the City

"Boys Build Houses. Girls Keep Houses. Boys Invent Things. Girls Use What they Invent. Boys Can Eat. Girls Can Cook."

crazyray — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 21:11:04 -0800

A snapshot from a sexist 1970's children's book for your perusal. Many have seen this and insisted it must be a hoax. But is it? Sociological Images says not so fast.

Animal behaviour: Grape expectations

kliuless — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 07:10:32 -0800

Revealing how we are just a bunch of monkeys... (via) Franz de Waals and Sarah Brosnan

...trained brown capuchin monkeys to give them pebbles in exchange for cucumbers. Almost overnight, a capuchin economy developed, with hungry monkeys harvesting small stones. But the marketplace was disrupted when the scientists got mischievous: instead of giving every monkey a cucumber in exchange for pebbles, they started giving some monkeys a tasty grape instead. (Monkeys prefer grapes to cucumbers.) After witnessing this injustice, the monkeys earning cucumbers went on strike. Some started throwing their cucumbers at the scientists; the vast majority just stopped collecting pebbles. The capuchin economy ground to a halt. The monkeys were willing to forfeit cheap food simply to register their anger at the arbitrary pay scale.

in other words, it could be up to our kids to replenish our trust networks... BONUS GRAPES

How Do We Know What We Know?

netbros — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 07:18:30 -0800

For most of us, science arrives in our lives packaged neatly as fact. But how did it get that way? Science is an active process of observation and investigation. Evidence: How Do We Know What We Know? [HTML version, Flash version also available] examines that process, revealing the ways in which ideas and information become knowledge and understanding. In this case study in human origins, the folks from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology explore how scientific evidence is being used to shape our current understanding of ourselves: What makes us human—and how did we get this way?

Sociological Images

cashman — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 05:35:14 -0800

Sociological Images. A branch of the journal Contexts from the American Sociological Association. What does "organic" look like? What happens after the oil boom dries up in a town? There are many discussions about the way bodies are shown. Privilege and Poverty in Vogue India. They also go behind your back and add content to previous posts. Prohibition posters, African people as props, there is lots of interesting content.

The linguistics of color-blind racism

lunit — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 07:16:20 -0800

As the Jim Crow overt style of maintaining white supremacy was replaced with “now you see it, now you don’t” practices that were subtle, apparently non-racial, and institutionalized, an ideology fitting to this era emerged... -The Linguistics of Color-Blind Racism.

above us only sky

plexi — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 09:05:10 -0800

The end of white America is a cultural and demographic inevitability. "At the moment, we can call this the triumph of multiculturalism, or post-racialism. But just as whiteness has no inherent meaning—it is a vessel we fill with our hopes and anxieties—these terms may prove equally empty in the long run. Does being post-racial mean that we are past race completely, or merely that race is no longer essential to how we identify ourselves?"

Paris: Invisible City

nasreddin — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 01:19:47 -0800

Paris: Ville Invisible. "This work seeks to show how real cities resemble the 'invisible cities' of Italo Calvino. As cluttered, saturated, and asphyxiating as it is, one can breathe more freely in Paris, the invisible city." The renowned French sociologist Bruno Latour presents a "virtual sociological book" that explores the limits of social theory for the understanding of urban life. The Flash interface is somewhat rickety, but there is a text-only PDF of the English version. (via)

Workplace Mobbing

parudox — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 13:03:22 -0800

Sometimes, especially in winter, Kenneth Westhues can hear a flock of crows tormenting a great horned owl outside his study in Waterloo, Ontario. It is a fitting soundtrack for his work. Mr. Westhues has made a career out of the study of mobbing. Since the late 1990s, he has written or edited five volumes on the topic. However, the mobbers that most captivate him are not sparrows, fieldfares, or jackdaws. They are modern-day college professors. Mobbing can be understood as the stressor to beat all stressors. It is an impassioned, collective campaign by co-workers to exclude, punish, and humiliate a targeted worker. Initiated most often by a person in a position of power or influence, mobbing is a desperate urge to crush and eliminate the target. The urge travels through the workplace like a virus, infecting one person after another. The target comes to be viewed as absolutely abhorrent, with no redeeming qualities, outside the circle of acceptance and respectability, deserving only of contempt. As the campaign proceeds, a steadily larger range of hostile ploys and communications comes to be seen as legitimate. Mobbing: Emotional Abuse in the American Workplace Mobbing and the Virginia Tech Massacre Thirty-two academic mobbing cases since 2005. See also the transcript of the chat that went along with that Chronicle article. "Third and probably most important, stand with mobbing targets. In most healthy, productive, well-functioning departments and faculties, one can identify individuals who do not let colleagues get mobbed. Such individuals have the guts to say at crucial moments, 'Cut it out.' They are what researchers call 'guardians' of prospective targets. They are willing to be seen with a mobbing target and to speak up for him or her when that is a risky, unpopular thing to do." And, in case you were wondering: Westhues has indeed been mobbed himself.

Do you like this post? a)Yes b)Of course c)How could I not? d)Maybe

Gyan — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 03:26:24 -0800

Rethinking Public Opinion - the immense importance of public opinion polling in American politics, and the under-reported problems at the heart of the enterprise, combine to call for a serious critique of the polling industry, its assumptions, and its method

Culture Clash

hadjiboy — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 02:34:09 -0800

Blogs about India (from an expats perspective): Welcome to India! Namaste, Namaste... please come in and enjoy yourselves... you must've heard a lot about us, but you ain't seen nothing yet. Don't be afraid--the hawker down the road is not going to fleece you (without good reason that is: he must have a family to feed with a couple of hungry mouths back at home so even if you do lose a few dollars--it's hopefully for a good cause); the armies of street children won't accost you and demand that they get paid, although just the other day two girls swooped down on my cousin brother and his newly married wife to grab the ice-cream cones right out of their hands... kids these days! And the men, well, what can I say about the men that hasn't already been said before... peeing on the roads, spitting paan on the side-walks, and of course harassing women whenever the need arises (sure, we have those types too, but if you've ever made a male friend here in India--he would go to the ends of the earth to do anything for you--just as I'm sure guys all around the world). Welcome to India.

Venus and Mars - not what we thought

desjardins — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 16:20:09 -0800

Why aren't men and women becoming more alike? A husband and a stay-at-home wife in a patriarchal Botswanan clan seem to be more alike than a working couple in Denmark or France. The more Venus and Mars have equal rights and similar jobs, the more their personalities seem to diverge. International Sexuality Description Project findings.

People who live without TV

stbalbach — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 08:52:57 -0800

Out There: People Who Live Without TV. About one to two percent of Americans do not watch television, which it turns out, is a common ground for the very liberal and the very conservative. Marina Krcmar's study is further explored in her book Living Without the Screen: Causes and Consequences of Life without Television (2008).

Now you see the violence inherent in the system

lysdexic — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 23:22:30 -0800

Working Hard, Drinking Hard is a book about structural violence in Honduras by Adrienne Pine. In it, she "explores the daily relationships and routines of urban Hondurans in light of globalizing forces and extreme social inequalities." In this interview, (longer version here) she says she hopes that her book will raise awareness of inequality in Honduras. She also points out the similarities (and differences) between Ricardo Maduro's and Rudolph Giuliani's Zero Tolerance policies and their consequences. In the interview, she says "I have spoken with people from all over the political spectrum, which is my aim. I don't see the issue of structural violence as belonging to conservatives, liberals, deists, atheists, or any other group. It is something we should all be concerned with, and which I hope we can come together to change. But we have to start with a dialogue, with understanding."

What's nu?

Asparagirl — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 20:21:42 -0800

A linguist and a sociologist at Hebrew Union College have teamed up to track the inroads made into American English by words and idioms from traditionally Jewish languages, including Yiddish, Judeo-Arabic, Ladino (Judeo-Spanish), and Hebrew. They've created an online survey and are looking for people from all religious and ethnic backgrounds to answer a few questions about their word choices, phrasing, and pronunciation. They're also trying to determine whether certain linguistic quirks usually attributed to Yiddish's influence are actually carried over from Jewish ancestors' speech patterns and accents, or whether they're merely an artifact from growing up in or near New York City. [via]

What's the problem with Yale?

roomthreeseventeen — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 10:28:51 -0800

William Deresiewicz examines the pitfalls of an Ivy League education Apparently, the Ivies prepare you for... mediocrity.