Echoes of Everett Hughes on NPR

August 16, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

You probably didn’t hear Everett Hughes on “Fresh Air” recently. I did.

Hughes himself, regrettably, was not Terry Gross’s guest. That was Melissa Febos, ex-dominatrix, now English professor. Neither she nor Terry Gross mentioned Hughes by name. But Febos was talking about her work as a dominatrix – a four-year stint she did in her early twenties. (The paperback of her memoir Whip Smart has just been released, and this was a rebroadcast of an interview originally aired when the book first came out.) Much of the show sounded like material for Hughes's course on the sociology of work and professions.

In 1951, Hughes wrote that if you want to study the world of work, you can “learn about doctors by studying plumbers, and about prostitutes by studying psychiatrists.”

Sixty years later, Terry Gross said to her ex-dominatrix guest,

This is one of those jobs . . . probably a lot of people in the medical industry have this kind of experience, or maybe even people in sports, too. But you work very, very closely with human bodies in a way that most people don't.

A bit later in the interview there was this exchange:

GROSS: You know, I was thinking for some of the clients, it was probably not unlike going to a doctor or a therapist, in a way, because you've got this secret life, this secret part of you that you can't share with anybody. So you go to a paid professional and reveal it to them, whether that secret thing - I mean, in a doctor's office, that secret thing might be a, you know, a growth or, you know, something happening in a private part of your body.
. . . .
FEBOS: I was actually surprised, after I started working, at how sort of perfunctory a lot of people were about it. It was like their weekly checkup or their weekly session with their therapist, and it was just a built-in part of these men's lives. And to a lot of them, it was just as essential as a checkup with a doctor, or a session with a therapist.

(The full transcript is here.)

As Gross and Febos were talking, I was also hearing Everett Hughes and that bit of wisdom from the opening sentence of “Mistakes at Work.” That topic (mistakes) did not come up in the interview. Too bad.

Class in Canada

August 14, 2011


I know far too little about Canada – not much more than the information in the Histeria! version of the national anthem, which begins

O Canada
You’re really good at hockey. . .

(Full lyric here. Histeria left out the part about universal affordable health care.)

Here’s another possible difference with the US. It’s from a Paris Review blog post by Misha Glouberman (here).

If you go to Harvard and then you live in New York, no matter what you do, the fact remains that you will have old college friends who are in the top positions in whatever field of endeavor you’re concerned with. If you’re twenty-five, you’ll know people who are getting their first pieces published in The New Yorker. If you’re forty, you’ll know people who are editors of The New Yorker. You will know people who are affiliated with every level of government. And across the board, just everywhere, you will know some people at the top of everything.

But in Canada, if you went to Harvard, it’s just a weird novelty, a strange fact about you, like that you’re a member of Mensa or you have an extra thumb. There’s no Harvard community here. There are equivalent upper-class communities to some degree, like maybe people who went to Upper Canada College prep school, but it’s not even remotely the same thing. I mean, partly there just aren’t the same heights to aspire to. There’s no equivalent to being the editor of The New Yorker in Canada, or being an American movie producer or anything like that. Partly, the advantages of class aren’t as unevenly distributed in general.

I wonder if Glouberman’s perceptions are congruent with more systematic accounts of class in Canada.

(My earlier post on the Harvard brand is here.)

Riots and Social Class

August 12, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Just a couple of thoughts about Faye’s post and the largely predictable response.

1. The old college try. A comment on Faye’s post about the London riots asked, “Can you show me a pattern or history of middle class or rich people rioting and looting?”

Well, yes.

I am old enough to remember hearing about the riot at the July 1960 Newport Jazz festival. The rioters were white, middle-class people – mostly college students. Probably, some of them wealthy. (Wealthy people do send their kids to college.)

Newport may have been one of the largest riots by college students (n = 12,000), but it was certainly not an isolated or unusual occurrence. The pattern of spring break riots has been so commonplace that vacation towns have had to weigh the lure of the student generated revenue against the costs and risk of riot. Here’s the LA Times in 1986 reporting on Palm Springs (a town not easily confused with Tottenham):

While Mayor Sonny Bono and other proponents of this year's crackdown pronounced the break the most orderly and successful in years, T-shirt merchants and others catering to the young crowds declared the week a disaster.

Sport too, especially football, has often brought out the inner rioter of college students.

Fierce fighting on the football field and in the streets of this town for two hours was the result this afternoon of the game. Members and followers of both teams were cut by blows from clubs, bricks, canes, and any other weapons that were handy, townsfolk and students joining in the melee.

That’s from the New York Times, November of 1903. But the history of these middle-class and rich people rioting pour le sport has carried on to the present. In the first decade of the current century, we’ve had fairly large riots after games at Tennessee, UMass, The Ohio State, Oregon, Minnesota (hockey), and perhaps others, and smaller ones at other schools.

In other countries, college student riots have an explicitly political agenda, but this is still a pattern, and the rioter-students, even more so than students in the US, are middle-class or rich.

2. Social class and mixed motives. Riots combine practical goal-attainment and irrational exuberance.

Urban riots, as opposed to college riots, are much more likely to start in poor or working-class neighborhoods. These riots usually begin as a collective expression of emotion, usually anger. In London, as in many of the urban riots of the 60s in the US, the immediate cause was the police shooting a person from the neighborhood. But for the youth in these neighborhood, that shooting is only one incident in a long history of unpleasant encounters with the police.

Such shootings do not happen in middle-class or wealthy neighborhoods, and in any case, people in those neighborhoods are less likely to have a history of what they feel is ill treatment by the police or a general dissatisfaction with their lot in life.

The comment also asks, “If the rich and middle class were rioting; wouldn't it make sense for them to tear up, burn down and steal in their own neighborhoods?” No. Regardless of your financial position, burning down your own neighborhood does not make sense. It is irrational. The burning and destruction are part of the expressive, emotional side of rioting (anger, excitement, exuberance, etc.).

But riots also have a practical, rational side – getting stuff for nothing. The lure of an easy bargain appeals to middle-class shoppers as well as to the poor. The middle-class might not have the numbers (or the nerve) to start looting in their own neighborhoods. But if the lootable shops – i.e., the ones that other rioters have already broken into – are not too far away, some middle-class people, especially adventurous youth, might well take their chances. Apparently, that’s what happened in London, though, as Faye says, we don’t know (and may never know) the true extent of middle-class representation among the looters. Middle-class people did not, as a comment on Faye’s post suggested they would, announce their financial position by driving their Bentleys into the middle of a riot where cars are being smashed and burned. The toffs may be greedy to the point of lawbreaking, but they’re not a damn fool. (In the 1960s riots in the US, there are documented instances of people driving to the riot zone from other neighborhoods, even the suburbs, to get a good deal on a television or other merchandise.)

The London Riots – How Do We Really See Class?

August 12, 2011
Posted by Faye Allard

[Note the byline and welcome Faye Allard, my colleague at Montclair and first-time contributor to the SocioBlog. JL]

(Cross-posted at Sociological Images.)

I am a Londoner. A proud East Londoner, hailing from the working class. And this past week has been one of the most difficult I’ve encountered since I moved to the US nearly ten years ago. This weekend my hometown was attacked by rioters, just minutes away from my family’s homes and businesses, my high school and a million childhood and teenage memories. I don’t think I can do justice describing the feeling of watching this unfold from so far away. Needless to say, I wouldn’t wish the experience on anyone. Thankfully, it would appear that most of the violence has subsided. In its place: a myriad of social commentaries on why this happened. Not only from journalists, but from the everyman benefiting from the very same social media that helped rioters coordinate. Indeed, many sociologists have aired their ideas on Facebook, blogs and even op-eds.

But perhaps in our rush to explain and apportion blame, we all missed asking some important questions. Why did we assume that the rioters are poor? How do we really know the class background of the rioters? Why did the media depict the rioters as underprivileged? And why did we accept this depiction unquestioningly?

The sociologist in me fantasizes of a post-riot 10-question survey to be distributed to all rioters immediately after completion of law-breaking activities with questions including: what is your average household income, what is your and your parent’s highest level of education, what is your occupation, on a scale of one to ten just how angry with the government are you at this moment, ten being really jolly pissed off?

Short of such a research tool, how did we come up with such sweeping generalizations of a group of people we really know little about, except for the fact that they all rioted?

As someone who has lived in both nations, I feel class is certainly a nuanced thing in Britain, much more so than in the US. But even with the subtleties of the British system you cannot simply see class. And for the most part, all the information we initially had about rioters is what we saw on TV and in still photographs. Case in point:

Spot the posh people?

In this picture we just cannot tell. If you thought you could tell, you’d be guessing, and you’d be basing your decision on ideas you have about the poor. Some might argue that those wearing hoodies are poor, as the wearing of hoodies has become synonymous in the British press with certain low-income groups. But people of all class groups own hoodies. We also cannot surmise that the rioters were from the area they attacked and attempt to extrapolate social class from that location. Police reports indicate that in some cases there was organized traveling to targeted areas. So how do we ascertain the social class of the rioters? Their behavior?

Did we see violence, looting and vandalism, assume that this could only be the work of poor people, and passively accept the media’s categorization of the perpetrators as such? Or are we so blinded by our ideological beliefs – romanticizing the riots to be exactly what Marx warned us of – that we bought this generalization? Or do we want so desperately to blame deep governmental cuts against the poor that we ignore the lack of solid evidence as to who these rioters really are?

I don’t have the answer to these questions, but I know that being from a proud working class background, I am angry that so many of us have jumped to this prejudicial conclusion.

As I write this, on Friday 12th August, long after many of the commentaries have been published and opinions have been shared, news outlets are beginning to report the demographic information of the rioters who have appeared in court (for example, here)

Among those rioters who fit the stereotype – alienated, poor youth – are those who do not fit this type at all. They have already been the subject of several headlines: teachers, an Olympic ambassador, a graphic designer, college graduates and a “millionaire’s daughter.” The very fact that these “unusual suspects” have been singled out by the press demonstrates the power of this prejudice; we are shocked when it isn’t poor people rioting. But why? Maybe it’s because deep down we believe that the poor are capable of violence, but the rich aren’t.

At this point, we are far from really knowing the class backgrounds of the rioters, especially since many people have not, and probably will not, be caught for their actions. We are still without reliable data to draw conclusions, just as we were earlier in the week when so many of us rushed to attribute this rioting to disenfranchised youth. It may well be that these riots were mostly poor people, but my point is, we cannot say with certainty at this point that this is the case. And as an East End girl, I ask: what does it say about us, especially sociologists, that we were so willing to believe this about the poor without any solid data?