Movin’ on up and Movin’ on Home: Millennials Returning Home

On By econnellIn Angelique Harris, Behind the Headlines, Class and Stratification2 Comments

12_01446By Angelique Harris

Graduation season has just passed, and many new graduates are faced with a series of important life changing decisions. In addition to starting new careers and/or continuing on with their education, most also have to figure out where they are going to live.

Very few new high school and college graduates are in the position to, or even want to, move out on their own. Some return home to their families, while others have simply never left home. Young adults make the decision to return home for a variety of reasons, typically either financial (as they want to save some money), cultural (as some groups expect adult children to live at home until they are married), or to provide some sort of help or support to family members who might be ill.

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The Future of Gender?

On By econnellIn Sally Raskoff, Sex and Gender6 Comments

By Sally Raskoff

In my Sociology of Gender class, we’ve been discussing what gender might look like in the future, should we achieve true gender inclusion and gender equality. As we learn more scientifically based information about gender and we do better with accepting gender-fluid and non-binary gender categories into our culture and society, what will it look like when we’ve achieved a more equal society, in terms of gender?

Some say we’ll have a gender-less society, as the extremes of binary sex, “masculine men” and “feminine women,” are made obsolete due to an increased understanding of the ways people define themselves and live their lives. Without society dictating you have to be either a “man “or a “woman,” and all that means for how you live your life, the standards of masculinity and femininity and the gender regime might disappear (eventually).

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Villains, Victims, and Verstehen

On By econnellIn Behind the Headlines, Karen Sternheimer, Social Problems, Politics, and Social Change, Theory3 Comments

Headshot 3.13 cropcompressBy Karen Sternheimer

I studied drama as an undergraduate, and in one class I remember learning about playing villains. No one sees him or herself as a villain, we learned, and the person portraying such a character should figure out their motivation. Does the character feel like they have been wronged and are thus justified in seeking revenge? Do they feel passionate about a cause that the other characters view differently? Every character—and most people—views themselves as good, maybe even heroic sometimes, and this is no different for roles that appear to be obvious villains.

Likewise, social scientists are very interested in learning more about people’s perceptions of the world around them. Max Weber, one of the key thinkers in sociology, noted the importance of verstehen, or understanding the people we study.

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Small Worlds, Degrees of Separation, and Social Network Analysis

On By econnellIn Peter Kaufman, Social Institutions: Work, Education, and Medicine, Statistics and Methods, Theory4 Comments

Peter kaufman 2014By Peter Kaufman

A few weeks ago, I noticed a student in one of my classes was wearing a shirt from a business in the town where I went to high school. I told him that I went to school there and he said that his father did too. I asked him how old his father is and when I found out we are the same age I suddenly remembered his father. It turns out we were classmates.

On the one hand, it’s not too surprising that I have this connection with my former classmate. After all, I teach at a State University of New York (SUNY) college where many of the students who attend happen to come from the area (Long Island) where I grew up. But on the other hand, SUNY is the largest system of higher education in the United States, New York is one of the most populous states, and Long Island has over 7 million people. In addition, my high school was relatively small. Given all of this, the odds of me having the child of a former classmate seem pretty remote.

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Careers and Side Hustles in Creative Work

On By econnellIn Jonathan Wynn, Popular Culture and Consumption, Social Institutions: Work, Education, and MedicineLeave a comment

Jonathan Wynn (1)By Jonathan Wynn

In an article titled “Institutional Office and the Person” one of the great mid-century sociologists, Everett C. Hughes, wrote that a career is “the moving perspective in which the person sees his life as a whole and interprets the meaning of his various attributes, actions, and things which happen to him” and that any self-appraisal was dependent on how that person moves through an organization, as a kind of sequence of roles. What if we don’t really work in institutions anymore?

Careers, particularly in the creative world, don’t match Hughes’ model. People are not moving through any one organization, or even any one career, but several and, at times, concurrently. When you graduate you might not have one career, but two or three. (It is likely, in fact, that the average graduate will have three or four career changes, and four job changes by age 32.) Millennial workers will likely have to work more than one job to make ends meet. You will, quite possibly, have to make ends meet with what are called “boundaryless” jobs and careers.

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Social Change and Your Next Step

On By econnellIn Behind the Headlines, Immigration, Population, Aging, and Demography, Karen Sternheimer, Social Problems, Politics, and Social Change5 Comments

By Karen Sternheimer

Graduation is always an exciting time for students and their families. It can also be a stressful time, as graduates sometimes struggle to figure out what’s next. Commencement speeches provide soaring rhetoric about “following your dreams” and how you are the leaders of the future.

As a young graduate, I found these kinds of speeches to be pretty pointless (and sometimes boring). For someone trying to figure out “what they want to be when they grow up,” these motivational speeches—and often graduation gifts in the form of motivational books for the graduate—offer little useful advice.

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The Most Important Sociological Lessons

On By econnellIn Class and Stratification, Peter Kaufman, Social Institutions: Work, Education, and Medicine, Statistics and Methods, Theory4 Comments

Peter kaufman 2014By Peter Kaufman

As a reader of this blog you must have some idea about the major themes that sociologists study. You also know that sociologists write about a lot of topics. If you were asked to identify the most important lessons that one can learn from sociology what would they be? What themes, concepts, theories, perspectives, ways of thinking, or even skills do you think are the most significant?

I recently posed this question to a group of undergraduate sociology students in their final semester of college. I was curious to find out what these students deemed to be the most important lessons they learned from their many years of studying sociology. I engaged the students in a collective brainstorming and writing exercise to see if they could identify and then explain the five most essential principles of their sociology education.

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Hobbies, Ghost Work, and Identity

On By econnellIn Jonathan Wynn, Popular Culture and Consumption, Social Institutions: Work, Education, and Medicine2 Comments

Jonathan Wynn (1)By Jonathan Wynn

Work and occupations occupy a dominant position in our lives and, perhaps correspondingly, in our sociological scholarship. For good reason, of course. Work is a central component of our lives. Work fills our days (or nights) and pays the bills.

Work is also a resource for who we are, as what we do is often a central part of our identities. Although you may still be a college student, and if so, you’re probably only working a part time job. (70% of students work while in school and 25% of students work full time.) Eventually, however, you will graduate and have a job doing something. And at some point not too far down the road, you’ll be at a party and someone will ask you: “So, what do you do for a living?” Is it a lazy question, or should our work provide a key insight into who we are?

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Learning to Perform Emotional Labor

On By econnellIn Karen Sternheimer, Social Institutions: Work, Education, and Medicine, Social Psychology1 Comment

Headshot 3.13 cropcompressBy Karen Sternheimer

Think about all of the things you learn as students that have nothing to do with the actual content of your classes: you learn to meet deadlines, proper classroom decorum, how to navigate a large bureaucracy, and create social ties with peers, among other things. Sociologists call this education’s hidden curriculum, or unintended lessons, many of which are quite valuable to your future career—and to your life overall.

Learning to perform emotional labor is part of the hidden curriculum. What exactly is emotional labor? It happens when we work to control our emotions in order to fit the requirements of a job. Emotional labor is part of any job that involves interacting with others, and is important to consider when pondering your own current or future career choices.

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Intersectionality for Beginners

On By econnellIn Class and Stratification, Race and Ethnicity, Sex and Gender, Theory6 Comments

By Peter Kaufman

Intersectionality is one of those terms that we use a lot in sociology but we don’t always do a good job of explaining. I know I’m guilty of this. Sometimes I’ll be talking with students in class or trying to explain something to someone and I may casually use the words intersectional or intersectionality without stopping to define what these terms mean.

Much like the word structure, intersectionality has become one of those common, go-to concepts that we tend to invoke so frequently in sociology we assume everyone knows what we mean by it. It’s both troubling and ironic that we make these assumptions because these concepts are usually crucial to the point we are trying to make; in fact, sometimes these concepts are the point. If the people we are talking with do not understand these terms then they will certainly not understand what we are trying to say.

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