In 10th grade, Adia Harvey Wingfield took her first sociology course. “It changed my life,” she says. “It really spoke to me and had a real impact on how I thought about a lot of things.” She also was interested in the dynamics of race that she saw playing out as she grew up in 1980s post–civil rights North Carolina.
Moms get—better than anyone—that we can’t have everything running smoothly all at once. But in the U.S., where working mothers have some of the most inadequate support systems in the world, we still feel guilty when we can’t do it all. Professor Caitlyn Collins sayas that the United States has the most family-hostile public policy of any country in the developed world
Professor Jake Rosenfeld on New York Times: similar to a provision in the Massachusetts new law, California recently passed legislation that prohibits employers from penalizing workers who discuss wages and salaries.
THE white working-class men who are planning to vote for Donald J. Trump this November have been called many things: xenophobic, racist, misogynist, dangerously naïve. But even if those descriptions are true, it doesn’t mean these men were fated to be Trump supporters. Professor Jake Rosenfeld's report is quoted in this issue.
One of the biggest policy battles between Democratic presidential contenders Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders has been about the minimum wage -- not whether to raise it, but how high it should go. Professor Steven Fazzari would likely support a $15 minimum wage.
Companies are becoming adept at identifying wealthy customers and marketing to them, creating a money-based caste system. Professor Steven Fazzari comments on this.
A new study suggest that the stated aspirations of companies to become more diverse haven’t changed how they go about hiring, and that minority candidates responding to job openings that welcome diverse backgrounds might find their prospects of being hired just as limited as before. Professor Adia Harvey Wingfield says the study’s results aren’t surprising.
Donald Trump’s recent refusal on CNN’s “State of the Union” to disavow Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke has reignited debates over the Klan’s role in national politics. That’s not surprising. Its long history has been marked by spectacular rises and falls, from its terrorist origins in the aftermath of the Civil War to its massive revival as a nativist movement in the 1920s and its refashioning as a brutal anti-civil-rights vigilante squad in the 1960s.
Sociologist Mark Rank, with his co-author Thomas Hirschl, have developed an on-line poverty risk calculator. You can enter information about your personal situation and learn what social science data tell you about the risk of poverty you face over different future horizons.
Technology is often tough on labor, whether it’s automation eating jobs or “gig economy” platforms undermining the traditional social contract between employer and employee. Now, some workers are trying to leverage social media and other online networks to their own ends. Professor Jake Rosenfeld comments on this issue.
As the #BlackLivesMatter campus protests have swept across some 60 colleges nationwide, American students, especially the most liberal ones, are being criticized for their intolerance of free speech. Recent data show that 43% of incoming freshmen in 2015 thought it should be a college’s right to ban extreme speakers; 71% supported prohibitions against racist and sexist speech.
Mark Rank, PhD, the Herbert S. Hadley Professor of Social Welfare at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis, has received the 2016 Society for Social Work and Research Book Award for his book “Chasing the American Dream: Understanding What Shapes Our Fortunes.”