Category Archives: Work, Occupations and Organizations

Research Q&A: Dr. Penny Green and Austin Americana

A "picking circle" in Luckenbach, TX
A “picking circle” in Luckenbach, TX

                 Recently, faculty member Dr. Penny Green embarked on a research project looking at Austin’s unique music community.  We sent our intrepid blog editor to find out more in this edition of “Research Q&A.”

What’s your project about?

My project looks at the Central Texas Americana music community and how it has changed since the mid 1970s when Austin declared itself the “Live Music Capitol of the World”.  I’m focusing largely, though not exclusively, on these musicians’ economic positioning and quality of life, and how these have changed over time.

How did you get interested in this project?

Although I’ve enjoyed the “Austin Sound” since I was in grad school here in the 1970s and 1980s, I got interested in the Centex Americana music scene in about May of 2009.  I got to know some musicians who introduced me to other musicians, and I kept hearing the same thing over and over.  I kept hearing that the pay was staying the same as it had been for years and that it was getting more and more difficult to live in the Austin area.  So I figured it was time to find out whether I just happened to be talking to a small handful of disgruntled musicians or if there’s a pattern.

How does this compare to other cities?  I know that here in Austin, we’ve got some things like HAAM to try and help struggling musicians, but I can’t imagine that being enough.

I can’t presently answer that question in any definitive manner; it’s one of the things I’ll be looking at in the research.   But there was at least one musician who told me that he and his family moved to Lafayette, LA because they get paid better for the gigs and the cost of living is considerably lower.  He frequently plays in the Austin area, but Lafayette is now his home base.

Wow, that’s not good for the aforementioned “Live Music Capitol of the World” tagline.  Why is that going on?

That’s what I’m trying to find out in the research.

Do you have any hypotheses?

I’m thinking that perhaps more of the bars and other venues are no longer owned by local people; perhaps they’ve gone under corporate control.  There are also other things happening.  Americana musicians and their audiences seem to be predominantly white; at IMG_0873 (2)least that’s what I’ve observed.  As the region becomes more racially and ethnically diverse, it’s possible they’re being marginalized as the Austin music scene grows more diverse.  There’s also an age issue.  When I go to Americana live gigs, most the people there are in their mid-thirties, or older.  If you go to the Kerrville Folk Festival, for example, you’ll see a lot of gray hair.  If the population of Austin is getting younger, then that could be contributing to the marginalization process.   By the same token, we know that Austin, and perhaps much of Central Texas, is a beacon for retiring Baby Boomers; the size of the 65+ population has definitely increased over the last 10 years.  I haven’t had a chance to systematically analyze the numbers to see what’s happening to the age structure of the population.  And don’t forget about widening income inequality.  One of its most problematic consequences is an increase in the cost of living, especially the cost of housing; widening inequality is inflationary.  That’s definitely hitting musicians hard.  Another component of widening inequality is wage stagnation for most people, except those at the very top.  What appears to be happening to Americana musicians may be a special case of this more general phenomenon.

For someone who’s not familiar with the genre, how would you define Americana?

Well, that’s one of the questions we’re asking the musicians.  [laughs]  But my understanding is that Americana is a mixture of bluegrass, country western, blues, some jazz, and gospel….there’s a heavy emphasis in Americana on lyrics.  This is not “ear candy”.  It seems to appeal to an older, more mature audience.  It’s a more serious kind of music.

IMG_1141 (2)So it’s kind of building off that folk tradition of political and social activism in the lyrics?

You can definitely pick up an undercurrent of activist themes in some of the music, but not all.

What places in Austin can you still find this music?

In Austin, you can find Americana at the Cactus Café and Threadgill’s.  You can find it at the Continental Club and the Broken Spoke.  You can find it at Waterloo Icehouse.  Looking at Central Texas more broadly, you can find it at Poodie’s IMG_0726 (2)Roadhouse out Highway 71 west, Hondo’s in Fredericksburg, River City Bar and Grill in Marble Falls, and the Badu House in Llano.  There are Americana venues in San Marcos and New Braunfels.  And, of course, you can hear it in Luckenbach.   Americana musicians also play a lot of house concerts.

And if we think back 20 years ago, we would find more of this kind of music happening within Austin at places like the Armadillo World Headquarters or Threadgill’s…

The late, great Armadillo World Headquarters.  Photo courtesy of Steve Hopson Photography
The late, great Armadillo World Headquarters. Photo courtesy of Steve Hopson Photography

The Armadillo and Threadgill’s on North Lamar are two key venues where the “Austin Sound” was born in the early to mid-1970s.  Unfortunately, the Armadillo was torn down and replaced by a city building, I think in the early 1980s.  But as I mentioned previously, you can still hear really good Americana at Threadgill’s, both north and south.

But a lot of the downtown, central Austin action has been taken over by other music whether that be for business, cultural, or demographic reasons, as you said earlier.

That’s what I suspect, but I don’t know for sure yet.

And how are you going to know “for sure”?  What’s your methodological strategy?

Sociology Undergraduate Advisor Debbie Rothschild (left) strumming the guitar fantastic.
Sociology Undergraduate Advisor Debbie Rothschild (left) strumming the guitar fantastic.

I’ll be doing a number of things.  First of all, I’m conducting interviews with Central Texas Americana musicians, using snowball sampling.  I’m also looking at demographic changes that have occurred in an 11-13 county region around Austin, as well as income inequality data for those counties.  I want to see how the distribution of income and cost of living have changed over time.  I also want to interview other members of the music business: producers, maybe some members of the Austin Music Commission and probably some venue owners.  But I haven’t gotten that far yet.

I see that you have a guitar here in your office.  Do you play as well?

Dr. Penny Green
Dr. Penny Green

I played as a kid; and now I’m taking lessons from Tommy Byrd, a very talented singer-songwriter here in Austin.  Debbie Rothschild, who is a very talented Americana singer/musician, has also been helping me. I’m thoroughly enjoying myself.  I’m also trying my hand at songwriting.  I want to immerse myself, as much as time permits (laugh), into the community that I’m studying.  One thing I’ve already learned is that, when you hold a full time job, as many musicians do, it’s real hard to find time to work on your music.  I look forward to continuing my work on this project.

Excellent! 

Cati Connell – “Queer, Qualitative, and on the Market”

by Brandon Robinson

Cati Connell

Cati Connell, an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Boston University, gave a talk this Monday, October 14, 2013, about her experiences as a queer, qualitative researcher on the academic job market. She received her PhD in Sociology from the University of Texas at Austin in 2010, sharing her job market experiences from three years ago with current graduate students. Her job market tips, tricks, and terrors were personal accounts that many can learn from.

Cati Connell and Christine Williams

In the first part of her talk “On Being Qualitative,” Cati realized that one of her main strategies in being a great qualitative researcher was to publish. She set a goal to publish just as much as the quantitative members in her cohort, which meant early and often. Cati advised co-authoring with faculty or other graduate student colleagues in order build one’s publication record, even before obtaining a Master’s degree. She also emphasized the importance of finding good mentors who have strong social capital (for her, Christine Williams). These mentors can be very beneficial in helping you become a productive graduate student and in navigating the market more successfully. Qualitative researchers should aim high early, so they can set themselves up for success on the job market later in their careers. Once on the market, Cati recommended applying broadly and reading job advertisements very closely, to see how one could be a fit for a certain job. Do not waste time applying for jobs that are not a good fit. A common example would be if a job specifically seeks a quantitative scholar, do not apply if all you do is qualitative work. Being oneself in the job application process is as important to hiring committees as the type of scholar you are based on your CV.

One thing all should remember is that the job market is not a meritocracy. There is real discrimination on the job market, and search committees can be racist, sexist, homophobic, and trans phobic. However, Cati told us that we should focus on the success stories of people who study marginalized sub-disciplines (like sexuality and gender) in order to not be discouraged. Scholars like Cati, who is at Boston University, Kristen Schilt at the University of Chicago, and Tey Meadow, who was a fellow at Princeton and will now be a faculty member at Harvard, are leading by example. While the academic job market is still hard for people who study marginalized subfields, the field on the whole is also changing, so focusing on success stories can help in making the market less daunting.

Cati also talked about “Being Queer” on the job market. She recognized that her own embodiment as white and gender conforming probably helped sooth the fears of hiring committees. It is also important to take into account one’s family and community needs while looking for a job. If having a vibrant LGBTQ community is important or having a pool of potential queer dating prospects is important, one should take these factors into account when applying for jobs. Be careful about applying for jobs in cities where you are not willing to move, though you should remain open-minded about non-urban opportunities, not assuming they have no LGBTQ people/communities. Navigating conversations about one’s personal life during the job interviews and dinner outings can be stressful, but you can generally choose to be as open as is comfortable. Nonetheless, Cati left us with great advice that anyone can use for their job talk, “Be confident in who you are and what you bring, and don’t apologize for it.”

Job Market Resources

Blogs:
Conditionally Accepted: A Space for Scholars on the Margins of Academia
http://conditionallyaccepted.com/

The Professor Is In: Getting You Through Graduate School, The Job Market, and Tenure
http://theprofessorisin.com/

Get a Life, PhD: Succeed in Academia and Have a Life, Too
http://getalifephd.blogspot.com/

Social Inqueery: A Publicly Accessible Queer Social Science Blog
http://socialinqueery.com/

Sociology on the Margins
http://sociologyonthemargins.com/

ASA Section on Race and Ethnic Minorities Mentoring Blog
http://srem-mentoring.blogspot.com/

Queer Black Feminist (Andreana Clay)
http://queerblackfeminist.blogspot.com/

Crip Confessions: Rants of a Crip Sexologist
http://cripconfessions.com/

How To Leave Academia: Peer to Peer Post academic Support
http://howtoleaveacademia.com/

Books:

The Black Academics Guide to Winning Tenure – Without Losing Your Soul, Kerry Ann Rockquemore
Professors as Writers: A Self-Help Guide to Productive Writing, Robert Boice
Presumed Incompetent: The Intersections of Race and Class for Women in Academia Paperback, edited by Gabriella Gutierrez y Muhs and Yolanda Flores Niemann
The Academic Job Search Handbook, Julia Miller Vick

Bureaucracies & Backpacks in the Big City

By Dan Jaster

Bureaucracies surround us every day. They help make things smoother, or irritate us to no end with their meticulous demand for control over even the finest details. As Max Weber noted in his famous essay “Bureaucracy,” it is this duality that makes bureaucratic systems so interesting: in their quest for control they help put social processes on autopilot, but this is not without consequence. Often we become dependent on them, and disrupting their rationalistic logics makes life more difficult. We reify bureaucracies (and they reify themselves) through our very dependence on the system once it is in place.

While this view may be frightening, we should also take solace in the very irrationalities that these hyper-rational systems produce, particularly when faced with real-world complexities outside of their influence. I was recently in New York for a Rural Sociology conference. I don’t want the multi-faceted irony of this conference to slip by the reader: we met to discuss rural people in one of the most urban areas of the country; the theme was also focused on “land-grabs” by corporations against small-scale farmers, and these outraged sociologists discussed how to help farmers resist such actions mere blocks away from the heart of the financial sector that was fueling these land-grabs. Of course, that assumes that large-scale financing even has a heart; I like to imagine big-bankers’ lives resembling Edward Hopper’s depictions. During my off-hours, I played the tourist; it was during one of these trips that I experienced the difference between an institutional rationality and an everyday rationality.

“Land is such a good investment opportunity. I can’t believe people want to live and work on it.” Office in a Small City, Edward Hopper
“Land is such a good investment opportunity. I can’t believe people want to live and work on it.” Office in a Small City, Edward Hopper

One must-see during my stay in New York was the Metropolitan Museum of Art (i.e., the Met). As I presented that morning, I had my backpack and laptop with me. While in line, I ran into my first bureaucratic jeu. The Met has a $25 suggested admission price, but you can go lower if you like; it also has a $12 student price. Being a grad student, I asked for a student ticket. Bureaucracies like to track and record as many things as possible, so I figured I should help them accurately understand who was visiting the museum. The teller dolefully told me that the price was $12, but I could pay less if I liked. He probably thought I was being cheap: I looked sharp for my presentation, and I was staying in Queens, meaning I didn’t have time to change before arriving at the Met. Knowing that the admission price is suggested, I suggested $0; New York is expensive, and grad students don’t make a lot of money. The teller then informed me that $0 was not an option. I ran into the first built-in contradiction in the system: the price of admission was suggested, but suggestible doesn’t mean you can suggest anything.

A reasonable depiction of how I looked that day.
A reasonable depiction of how I looked that day.

With my ticket in hand (I opted for $10), I started towards the galleries. As I entered, I was informed that my backpack was too large. I had to check it in at the coat-check. Once I got to the coat check, I was informed that they would not check in my bag if it had my laptop in it. I was struck by the irony. The only reason I had my backpack was to carry my laptop (which I needed for my presentation). However, they wouldn’t let me enter the gallery with my backpack, and they wouldn’t check in my bag with my laptop inside it; I thus had to carry the laptop in my hands, which was the circumstance I had hoped to avoid by bringing my backpack in the first place.

By themselves, these rules make sense: big backpacks take up space and are a source of potential thievery within the museum, and keeping electronics out of the coat-check area not only keeps the museum from dealing with possible theft but also helps them avoid the potential for damaged personal property complaints. However, the beauty and bane of bureaucracies is that each rational rule does not exist independent of the others in the system: sometimes they interact and contradict or problematize each other, particularly when confronted with the complexities of the world outside the system. These interactions are the sources of our hassles (or amusing anecdotes) with bureaucracies. I laughed, and told the coat-check clerk about the irony. He didn’t laugh. Those on the lower levels of the hierarchy have less power and agency, so they can only follow the rules; he likely has heard that complaint before from people who failed to see the humor. With my laptop in my hands, and backpack in the coat-check, I toured the Met. But, hey, at least the bureaucracy was able to maintain its rationality at the expense of my own.

Sources Cited:

Weber, Max. 1946. “Bureaucracy.” In From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, edited by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford University Press.

For the moral implications of bureaucracies, see:

Sjoberg, Gideon, Ted R. Vaughan, and Norma Williams. 1984. “Bureaucracy as a Moral Issue.” Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 20:441-453.

Out of My Habitus – Why my education and manners get in the way of doing research

By Juan Portillo 

Linda Tuhiwai Smith writes in Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples that Western academia has historically engaged in a process of legitimizing “what counts as knowledge, as language, as literature, as curriculum and as the role of intellectuals” (Smith, 1999, p. 65). This process happens in an environment that envisions

Graduate student Juan Portillo
Graduate student Juan Portillo

researchers, data and the research process as cultureless and bodiless, “floating brains” if you will. The danger of doing research without thinking where our bodies and experiences fit in the process (with all of our privileges and disadvantages) is that our biases as humans will make it into our final conclusions, reproducing an intellectually stagnant body of knowledge that at best is very limited in its creativity and explanation, and at worst it has the potential of marginalizing the people we are writing about.

One way to address our limitations and acknowledge our humanity is to really think about our social location and our role as researchers. Pierre Bourdieu’s habitus is an excellent concept that can help to explain this dynamic and can prevent us from completely divorcing our bodies and biases from the research process. As researchers, we are embedded in a social landscape that has provided us with dispositions that help us make sense of the world around us. Our habitus also provides us with the manners through which we express ourselves, inevitably reproducing

Influential French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002)
Influential French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002)

our class, gender, sexuality, ability, race/ethnic identity, etc. However, we don’t always pay attention to how our disposition and manners affect the way we interact with and learn from the data we collect or the people we interview and observe. I am starting this blog series in an effort to provide a tool for researchers at UT Austin to practice reflexivity and improve their interpretations of their research as well as their interactions with research participants.

While it is hard to really analyze ourselves and identify our class, gender, racial and other biases, sometimes situations arise that give us a chance to put ourselves under the microscope. We may enter a classroom, a restaurant, an interview or a lab where suddenly something feels off and we are forced to respond through limited improvisations that reveal our social location as well as that of others. These are the times, particularly in an academic or research setting, where we can truly examine our approach to knowledge, learning, and conducting research. Ultimately, this information about ourselves can potentially help us compensate for our limitations due to our privileges, or turn our feelings of marginality into sites for theorizing.

This first post will contain one example of a time I have felt “out of my habitus” and forced to deal with my discomfort and conduct myself in a way that helped me grow instead of responding in a way that legitimized only my “expert” version of the social world. Recently, I attended the National Association of Chicano/Chicana Studies regional conference at UT Pan American in Edinburg, Texas. During this conference, I attended a workshop that Labeltaught us to link the knowledge we have gained from our parents and grandparents to the way we approach education in our current position. Most of the over 20 people participating in the workshop were first generation college students, all of them were Chicana/o, and most of them were female. All had immigrated to the United States while they were still young and the ones who had been here for a few generations had been marginalized because of their race, gender and class while attending school. Many had parents who were farm workers or low-wage workers. As I filled in the questions that were part of the exercise, I realized I am probably a 5th generation college graduate, I attended private school in San Salvador (El Salvador), and came to the United States over 9 years ago to pursue higher education.

I was definitely “out of my habitus” during this exercise, and I felt irked. I had a hard time really making sense of why I felt out of place, or why I felt bothered. However, this discomfort was an opportunity for me to engage with my privileges and be very mindful of my manners (including the way I looked/dressed, my language, my accent, my responses, my body language, etc.). After hearing someone talk about how they felt like their family was jealous or angry because she was pursuing a higher education (calling her white-washed and insinuating that she looked down on them), I thought about the costs to entering higher education, as a student and as a researcher. The costs for the people in this workshop (true of me as well) involve entering a new habitus and learning or adopting new mannerisms and dispositions to survive a competitive, middle-class, heteronormative and in many ways white supremacist (colonizing) environment. These mannerisms shine through in our way of speaking and writing, in the way we relate to others, in the way we assign importance to academic matters, and in the way we distance ourselves from whatever image of “bad” student we have.

In a country where students tend to be labeled as “bad” when they don’t give school as much importance as we do, where having an accent or not speaking the right version of English marks people as deviant students, and where the students who are marked the most often as “bad” students embody a particular look and mannerisms (Urrieta Jr., 2009; Valenzuela, 1999; Yosso, 2005; Yosso, Smith, Ceja, & Solorzano, 2009), then adopting the manners and dispositions of “good” students inevitably results in coming off as pretentious (as Bourdieu describes the petit bourgeoisie). Moreover, being successful in education demands that we participate in a process that distinguishes between the “good” and the “bad” students, a process of hierarchization characterized in some ways by our behavior (which I have heard undergrads at UT talk about it as “white-washing,” telling girls they’re acting too much like men, Mexican Americans telling other Mexican Americans that they’re acting “too Mexican,” or labeling certain students as disingenuous or pretentious).

Thus, being out of my habitus made me be mindful of how I was coming across to the people in that workshop. While I was irked, I decided to really listen to what was going on, and this allowed me to make a connection between the process of schooling and how my position as a researcher is mired with pretentions and manners that can be and often are marginalizing to others. Similar to (though not fully alike) the way one of the participants expressed discomfort with the way her family and friends thought she was pretentious because she was getting a college degree, my “credentials” and manners can result in research participants feeling marginalized or looked down on. Being conscious of this is one way to: (a) not blame the people I interact with for being hostile or unsupportive in my research projects; and (b) find ways to prevent myself as much as I can from marginalizing research participants and other people around me.

 References:

Smith, L. T. (1999). Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. New York, NY: Zed Books.

Urrieta Jr., L. (2009). Working from Within: Chicana and Chicano Activist Educators in Whitestream Schools. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press.

Valenzuela, A. (1999). Subtractive Schooling: U.S. Mexican Youth and the Politics of Caring. Albany, NY: State Univ of New York Press.

Yosso, T. J. (2005). Whose culture has capital? A critical race theory discussion of community cultural wealth. Race Ethnicity and Education, 8(1), 69–91. doi:10.1080/1361332052000341006

Yosso, T. J., Smith, W. A., Ceja, M., & Solorzano, D. G. (2009). Critical Race Theory, Racial Microaggressions, and Campus Racial Climate for Latina/o Undergraduates. Harvard Educational Review, 79(4), 659–690.

Juan was born and raised in San Salvador, El Salvador. He has a BBA in marketing from UT Austin, and a Master’s in Women’s and Gender Studies from UT Austin. His research interests include Chicana feminisms, anti-colonial methodologies, Mexican American / Latina college students’ experiences, and Latinas and the media.

Christine Williams featured on KEYE

Wal-Mart Employees Prepare To Walk Out On Black Friday

As Wal-Mart gears up for its Black Friday sale, some employees are preparing to walk out. But other employees we spoke with in the Austin area fear they could lose their jobs for speaking their mind. The protests are organized by “Our Wal-Mart” a national group representing Wal-Mart employees.The group has the support of The United Food and Commercial Workers International Union.

Wal-Mart employee Topaz Chambers is scheduled to work on Thanksgiving, but she wants people to know that working the holiday isn’t the only reason people are protesting. She makes $8.25 an hour and says it’s difficult to make ends meet. “I have to get personal loans just to pay my bills, so right now I’m kind of in debt, so I’m trying to pay those back. It’s really hard working here,” she says.

Christine Williams is the chair of the Sociology Department at the University of Texas and author of Inside Toy Land, a study of low wage retail work. She says many see the walk out as another attempt to unionize Wal-Mart workers. Williams says, “While there are tons of workers that are employed by Wal-Mart that would love to see a union, it’ll still be an uphill battle.”

Williams is skeptical because of Wal-Mart’s ability to fight against the formation of unions, but she does think the protests will help improve conditions. “I think by taking this job action, the workers at Wal-Mart will get more public sympathy and will get some concession so they can live a decent life on the jobs that they have,” she says.

As for Wal-Mart executives, they say they have a strict anti-retaliation policy and add that if any associates have concerns they want to hear about them and will take action. But employees like Topaz Chambers say they don’t want to take any chances and has deciding not to walk out. She says, “Eventually they’re going to find something to fire you about. I wish I had the mojo to actually do it but I’m kind of scared.”

By Lydia Pantazes

Better Know A Sociologist: 10 Questions with Christine Williams

Here at the UT Sociology Blog, we strive to find new and interesting ways to expose the people and research in our department.  To that end, we present to you “Better Know A Sociologist,” where we ask 10 general questions to one of our illustrious faculty members.  Given that this is our inaugural post, we thought, “why not start at the top?”  Thus we present to you 10 questions with Dr. Christine Williams, chair of the UT Sociology Department. 

1.  What first attracted you to sociology?

I don’t know how I first got interested in sociology.  I’d always developed this narrative that I discovered sociology in college after going through different majors like political economy and art history.  But then, somebody – I think my sister -pulled out my high school yearbook – I went to a pretty small high school in South America, so each senior had their own page and their own quote – and in my quote, I talk about wanting to be a sociologist!  So I was 16 years old when I graduated from high school so obviously I knew what it was and I said I wanted to be one, so who knows?  I don’t know where that came from in my 16 year old self, but I do remember actually making the switch to being a sociology major and I think it had a lot to do with the fact that it was the place where I learned about social justice and social inequality and that’s where feminism was located in the academy, so I think that that’s what drew me to the major.  I’ve always been interested in class and gender.

2. What did you do your dissertation on?

My dissertation was a study of men in nursing and women in the Marine Corps.  It was published as the book “Gender Differences at Work.”   There’s this book by Rosabeth Moss Kanter that’s very famous called “Men and Women of the Corporation.”  It’s a bit old, but people still talk about it.  Kanter says in the book that it’s all about being a numerical minority, that is, the token phenomenon that results in basically labor force discrimination. I thought I would compare men’s and women’s experiences as tokens, but my original case study design was women in the Marine Corps and men in ballet because I had this title in my mind : “Men and Women of the Corps.”  Like the Corps de Ballet and the Marine Corps, and I thought it would be this great hook because it was ultimately a critique of Kanter but I went to talk to an adviser in anthropology – who ended up not being one of my advisers – but he said that it was a stupid comparison and I got all, “Waaah, no!”  I eventually figured out that he was right, but he was way too gruff in his manner and so I changed my case to nursing.

And so doing those studies, was that sort of what got you thinking towards doing the research that would eventually result in “Still A Man’s World”?

Yeah, after I had published “Gender Differences at Work,” one of my reviewers – it was actually Arlene Kaplan Daniels, who recently passed away.  She mentored the whole generation of scholars that are my age.  She was really really important and is missed – she gave it a very positive review and said that she was especially interested in the case of men because sociologists of gender have basically ignored men up until then and that the case of men in nursing was just fascinating and new and so that’s when I decided to expand my second book to look at more than one occupation that was female dominated.

3.  Why did you decide to work here at the University of Texas?

Because they offered me a job! [laughs]  Nobody picks where they work, this is where you end up. It was very funny because my first job was at the University of Oklahoma and that’s where I was an undergraduate.  I was two years into being there and I was pretty miserable.  I was the token qualitative person and the token theory person and it was just miserable, so I went back on the job market and applied everywhere.  I almost didn’t apply here because I thought, “Oh UT, that’s going to be exactly the same as Oklahoma and I just want to get out of this part of the world.”  But I came down here for my interview and I was just blown away.  It was pretty and it had hills and people were really nice and excited about my work.  I had just come from an environment where as an assistant professor I was constantly being criticized.  Here everyone thought I was great and I thought they were great so it was a good match.

So when you got here, did you see this as a place you wanted to stay, or did you see this as just another part of your journey?

I had my career ups and downs here.  I was pretty unhappy at one point because I thought they would count my two years [at OU] towards tenure and they didn’t – they would do such a thing now, but back then they had more stringent rules about time and rank – so they didn’t let me go up early and I was pretty unhappy about that and threatened to leave but never did.  You know, I’ve been here for almost 25 years and I can’t – I often think about where I’d rather be other than here and I can’t think of any place.  I can’t think of any place that would be as good as this.  Of course I have this great lifestyle where I go away in the summer and get to live in the Bay area, so that kind of gives me the best of both worlds.

Definitely.  Avoid the Texas summers if you can.

I know! But I still get to have the big ranch house and an easy bike commute and fantastic students and a great department.

4.  What’s your overall experience of Austin then?  What do you like about this place?

I like that it’s very relaxed and informal, although I understand that’s less so these days downtown.  I just don’t go there.  I think I, like a lot of people, live in a very small part of Austin.  I basically live in a three mile radius of my home and I think it’s great.  I don’t know what you’d want more than this.  Of course, I spent a lot of my childhood traveling, so having a place that where I’m actually going to live for a long time is something attractive and very different for me.

5.  If you could teach one sociological concept to the world, what would it be?

Mmm.  Well it wouldn’t be the glass escalator, because I already did that and now I’m backtracking on that.  There are flash cards with the glass escalator, it’s in hundreds of textbooks: kids all over the country are being given multiple choice questions on “what is the glass escalator?”  So it’s happened.

So talk about that.  It sounds like you’re a bit conflicted.  How do you feel about having that sort of legacy or this concept that you created out in the world and you don’t really have as much ownership over how it’s being discussed and taught?

Well, it’s a good feeling.  You know, I didn’t actually invent the term, [my partner] did. [laughs]  I was sitting there working on the article because I had published two books already and my senior colleagues told me that if I wanted to get tenure at Texas I had to publish articles too.  So I was working on this article that became the glass escalator article and I was looking at my analysis and saying “It’s like these guys keep on getting moved up even though they don’t even necessarily want to move up.  It’s like they’re on some kind of elevator or something!”  And he goes, “no, it’s an escalator, because they have to work to stay in place.”  And I said, “That’s it!”  I remember it very vividly, that conversation.  So it’s very gratifying to know that – and I think it’s a good concept because people know intuitively what it means because it has a counterpart with the glass ceiling, and I do think that’s partially the secret to success is to come up with some catchy term.  I mean, Arlie Hochschild really refined that with “the second shift” and “the time bind.”  She keeps coming up with these great – like “the global care chain,” that’s another one.

Or emotion work.

Emotion work!  I mean, all of these ideas, people can intuitively grasp what they’re about and it’s very cool.   No, I’m backing away from it not because I think I was wrong but because I think that the world of work has changed so that there are many, many careers today that have no career ladder.  You can’t have a glass escalator unless there is the opportunity for promotion.  I think it’s a concept that’s grounded in an earlier form of work and we need new concepts.

It’s almost like a treadmill now.

Yeah, or a trap door is another one that we’re thinking about.  So we’re thinking about the limitations of the glass escalator concept and we’ve got an article forthcoming in Gender & Society next year.

6.  What’s the most rewarding part of your job?

This.  Graduate students.  Talking about ideas.

Why is that?

What other field do you get to be around a bunch of brilliant young people who are basically creatively thinking about society?  There’s nothing else that comes close to it.

7.  Who is one person in the department besides yourself that you think is doing really interesting work and what is it?

Well, it’s really funny, most of us don’t know what each other does, and I do because I’m chair.  The thing that just boggles my mind is how much amazing work is being done here.  When you asked that question, I was like, “Holy cow, what am I going to say?”  I mean, is it going to be Sharmila’s [Rudrappa] work on surrogacy, Deborah’s [Umberson] work on gay marriage, Ron’s [Angel] work on post Katrina…  It’s just endless.  My colleagues over in the Population Research Center are also doing really interesting and innovative work, so I couldn’t pick.  I mean, Michael Young’s work on immigrant rights, Ari’s [Adut] work on the French Revolution – I get to read all of this stuff – Gloria’s [Gonzalez-Lopez] work on incest, it just goes on and on.

It’s an embarrassment of riches.

It is, and it helps us to understand why we’re so highly ranked but it also has to do with our ability to interact with and mentor excellent students.   Just having that intellectual stimulation – we didn’t always used to have that here and I think it’s something that we’ve cultivated and grown. Virtually everyone in the department is doing interesting work now.  I mean, Joe Potter’s work on contraceptive health and health policy, it’s just, it’s first-rate and it’s so interesting.

8. What are your current research interests?  What are you looking at these days?

Well, the short answer is women geoscientists in the oil and gas industry, but I think my heart lies in understanding work transformation and deindustrialization.  What’s really interesting to me is how a lot of policies meant to promote gender equality have been designed with professional women in mind and I think that policies that aid them may actually diminish poor women.  So I think there’s a real need to understand how social policies have a class basis to them.  Especially poor women, but also men, because a lot of the time they’ll say, “OK, there’s a gender wage gap”.  Yeah, she’s earning $7.50/hr, he’s earning $7.80/hr, so both of them are struggling, OK?  It’s like it’s almost the wrong issue.  And the focus sometimes on gender disparities at the bottom of the wage scale I think prevents worker solidarity.  This is the stuff that I’ve been teaching to you since I first met you, sort of combining the gender and sexuality with the labor markets.

Exactly.  And sort of the effect of neoliberalism towards putting men and women in a race to the bottom in terms of wages.

Right.  And we can still detect gender disparities but are they the issue when people are not earning living wage?  No, they’re not.  On the high end, it’s “OK we’re going to get women into the CEO suite,” but it’s going be a pyrrhic victory if they’re just going to continue to impose these neoliberal reforms and slash any kind of benefits and wages.  No thank you!  That’s not my feminist movement.

9. What’s one book you’ve read in the past year that you’ve really enjoyed and why?

Well, the book I’m reading now is just amazing.  It’s Sinikka Elliott’s book – which was her dissertation here at UT – and I’ve assigned it to my undergraduates.  There’s just so many wonderful feelings involved in seeing this work from its inception.  It’s called “Not My Kid,” and it’s about what parents believe about the sex lives of their teenagers.  They all think that their kids are good and innocent and other people’s kids are hormone driven sex maniacs and this belief, she argues, reproduces social inequality but it also prevents teenagers from getting any kind of thoughtful, useful information about sexuality and relationships.

10. What do you enjoy doing in your free time?

I enjoy bike riding and reading.  Especially novels.  I also enjoying swimming and yoga and drinking beer.

 

Minority Reports: Asian Americans in Class and at Work

Sharp-eyed readers will recognize a well-known character from an acclaimed NBC 2006-10 drama in this TIME cover photo taken in 1987.

ASA
Regular Session on Asians and Asian Americans: Economic and Educational Processes. ‘Discrimination and Psychological Distress among Asian Americans: Exploring the Moderating Effect of Education’ (Wei Zhang, University of Hawaii; PhD, UT-Austin, 2008); ‘Are Asian American Women Advantaged? Labor Market Performances of College Educated Female Workers’ (ChangHwan Kim, University of Kansas; PhD, UT-Austin, 2006).

Zhang and Kim, respectively, revealed surprising findings about correlations between education level and psychological distress from discrimination, and between nationality and workplace inequality, among Asians and Asian Americans.

Zhang discovered that Asian Americans with higher levels of education experience more psychological distress from racial discrimination than those with lower levels of education. In addition, Asian Americans who received their education outside the US experience more distress from discrimination than those who received their education Stateside. One possible explanation is the disparity between others’ perception of the individual and the individual’s self-perception or expectation is exacerbated when the individual’s education level contributes negatively to his or her cognitive stress.

Wei Zhang (University of Hawaii; PhD 2008, UT-Austin) presenting during session.

Studying Asian and Asian American women in the workplace, Kim found that Asian American women do not hold an advantage over Asian-born women working Stateside in terms of employment, compensation and professional upward mobility, and both fare worse than white women in these aspects.

These results show the real discriminations and inequalities that Asians and Asian Americans face are often overlooked in favor of a model-minority stereotype that emphasizes only the positivity of educational attainment and cultural assimilation while ignoring their stress effects in context with other psychological and economic factors, and that, perhaps, it is still a ways to a racial and socioeconomic utopia realized.

‘The Problem of Democracy Today’ – Cornelius Castoriadis

An interesting speech given in Athens in 1989, six months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, by Cornelius Castoriadis, founder of Socialisme ou Barbarie (1948-65). Mention of sociologist Lewis Mumford. Some tidbits:

‘We must return to the original meaning of the word “democracy.” Democracy does not mean human rights, does not mean lack of censorship, does not mean elections of any kind. All this is very nice, but it’s just second- or third-degree consequences of democracy.’

‘There is a famous phrase of Plato, in the Laws, if I remember correctly, where he is discussing the ideal dimensions of a city and says that the ideal dimensions as regards population (not territory) is the number of people who, gathered in one place, are able to hear an orator speaking.’

‘If factories and public services manage to function, it’s because employees violate to a large extent the regulations in order to be able to do their jobs. This is proven by the fact that one of the most effective forms of strike is what is called in French ‘zeal strike’: the employees begin to apply the regulations to the letter, and this can make everything collapse in an hour.’

‘…[I]n ancient democracy, as people had nothing else to do…they had this political passion, while ourselves…all we seek from the state is to consolidate our delights.’

Read more here.

Dr. Christine Williams on the realities of the retail labor market

Sinikka Elliott, Christine Williams, Angela Stroud, Cati Connell and Dana Britton at ASA


Dr. Williams was honored with the Distinguished Feminist Lecturer Award in 2011 at the American Sociological Association Annual Meeting in Las Vegas

Christine Williams blogs about challenges facing retail workers in this months section of ASA Organizations, Occupations, and Work: “Upgrading Jobs in the Retail Industry”. You can read more about her research in an article Dr. Williams and UT Austin Alumna, Dr. Catherine Connell co authored “Looking Good and Sounding Right: Aesthetic Labor and Social Inequality in the Retail Industry,” in the Journal of Work and Occupations.

2011-12 Brownbag Series off to a fine start

On Monday, October 3, 2011 Marcos Perez, Pamela Neumann and Katie Sobering discussed their summer field research in Argentina and Peru. Thanks to faculty and students who engaged the panelists in a lively conversation, prompting the expansion of brownbag format to allow for an hour or more of discussion after presentations. Read more

Vivian Shaw, Christine Wheatley and Ori Swed discussed their summer fieldwork in Japan, Mexico and Israel yesterday at a brownbag luncheon, initiating our Graduate Student Panel and Presentation series for Fall 2011 Read more