Postmodern Methods in Louis Theroux Documentaries

Louis Theroux documentaries are a great example of ‘postmodern’ research methods.

I say this for the following reasons:

  • Firstly, these documentaries select unusual, deviant case studies to focus on, which is especially true of the latest series – ‘Dark States’ which consists of three episodes about heroin users, sex trafficking and murder.
  • Secondly, they tend to have a narrative style, focusing on people’s stories.
  • Thirdly, there’s a lack of structure about the documentaries… Theroux makes a connection with people and sees where that leads.
  • Fourthly – there’s no real attempt to be critical, or provide any analyses of the role of economic and political structures which lie behind these stories. In short, they are not properly sociological!
  • Finally, these documentaries seem to be produced for entertainment purposes only – they simply invite us to marvel or gawp at the ‘messed up’ individuals before us, without offering any real solutions as to how they might sort their lives out, or how society should deal with them.

A brief analysis of two episodes of ‘Dark States’ demonstrates the postmodern nature of these documentaries:

In the first episode in the series, H****n Town, Theroux looks at how the over-prescription of painkillers has unleashed a heroin epidemic. Theroux says that he largely steered clear of the pharmaceutical companies, regulators and politicians who permitted the disaster…. Instead, he hung out on streets where heroin and opioid addiction is “off the scale, unlike anything I’d ever seen before” and made addicts the stars, giving them space to express themselves and showing how many are beguiled by the romance of being outlaws.

The third episode, on Sex Trafficking in Houston, focuses on the relationships between sex workers and pimps, also shows the ‘postmodern documentary method – in which Theroux deliberately avoided making any value judgments:

Theroux says that he avoided the term “sex slave”: “If you overdo the abusive dimension, you strip the women of agency – it’s oddly disempowering and kind of neo-Victorian. The women are getting a kind of emotional fulfilment in their relationship with the pimps, even though it is poisonous and often damaging.” The pimps tended to be stylish, eloquent and intelligent. “These guys are, in their own way, deeply damaged, often the children of prostitutes, who may have had dads or family friends who were pimps. The closest analogy I have is that they are living in semi-apocalyptic conditions where the police are just not an option.”

Of course there are both strengths and limitations of these postmodern methods… I guess the biggest strength is that they allow the respondents to speak for themselves, and it’s down to the viewer to interpret the information as they will, and analyse deeper if they feel the need!

Sources:

The Guardian

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What is the difference between Functionalism and Marxism

Functionalists have a very general analysis of the role of education in society, simply looking at how it contributes to the maintenance of social order, whereas Marxists analyse the role of education by focusing on how it performs different functions for different social classes.

As I see it, Marxists offer a ‘deeper layer’ of analysis compared to Functionalists, although critics of Marxism may say they seeing class divisions where there are none.

Below is a basic comparison of Functionalist and Marxist perspectives on the role of education in society:

Functionalism: Education serves the needs of an industrial society by providing it with an advanced, specialised division of labour

Marxism: Education part of the ideological state apparatus, and works for the Bourgeois

Functionalism: Education serves the needs of the social system by socialising new generations into shared norms and values which provide harmony and stability

Marxism: Teaches us the ‘myth of meritocracy’ – we believe we fail because it’s our own fault, thus put up with inequality

Functionalism: The formal and hidden curriculums helpsprepare children for service to society

Marxism: Correspondence Theory – Hidden Curriculum makes us accept authority without question

Functionalism: Education provides the means for upward mobility for those prepared to work hard

Marxism: Education reproduces class inequality – middle class kids more likely to succeed and get good jobs

Outline three functions which education might perform for society (6)

This is an  example of a relatively straight forward 6 mark question which might appear on the AQA’s A level paper 1 (7192/1).

  • If you require a more detailed breakdown of paper 1 please click here.

The basic approach to answering 6 mark ‘outline’ questions is to think of them as 1+1 questions – in this case identify a function (for 1 mark) and then explain how education performs that function (for +1). Repeat this 3 times, and you have 3*(1+1) = 6/6 marks.

You should spend no more than 9 minutes on this question (a minute and a half per mark).

A ‘function’ of education is something education (mainly schools) does; a purpose it fulfills, or a goal it contributes towards achieving.

Below are some (1+1) suggestions as to how you might successfully answer this question.

Outline three functions which the education might perform for society (6)

  • Getting students ready for work – school does this by starting off teaching basic reading and writing, which most jobs require, and later on by giving students specific job related skills – such as biology gets you ready for a career in medicine.
  • Education creates social solidarity which is where we all feel as if we are part of something bigger, working towards the collective good – school does this by teaching everyone the same history and literature, which helps to forge a sense of national identity.
  • Education maintains social order, performing a social control function – it does this through requiring that all students attend and through surveillance, any student who does not conform is subject to disciplinary procedures, thus learning to stick to the rules in later life.

Related Posts

I’ve basically taken the above from the Functionalist Perspective on the role of education in society.

Is There a Crisis in Youth Mental Ill Health?

  • Girls are more than twice as likely to report mental health problems as boys
  • Poor girls are nearly twice as likely to report mental health problems than rich girls.

One in four teenage girls believe they are suffering from depression, according to a major study by University College London the children’s charity the National Children’s Bureau (NCB).

The research which tracked more than 10,000 teenagers found widespread emotional problems among today’s youth, with misery, loneliness and self-hate rife.

24 per cent of 14-year-old girls and 9% of 17-year-old boys reported high levels of depressive symptoms compared to only 9% of boys.

However, when parents were asked about their perceptions of mental-health problems in their children, only 9% of parents reported that their 14 year old girls had any mental health issue, compared to 12% of boys. (Possibly because boys manifest in more overt ways, or because boys are simply under-reporting)

Anna Feuchtwang, NCB chief executive said: “This study of thousands of children gives us the most compelling evidence available about the extent of mental ill health among children in the UK, and Lead author of the study Dr Praveetha Patalay said the mental health difficulties faced by girls had reached “worryingly high” proportions.

Ms Feuchtwang said: “Worryingly there is evidence that parents may be underestimating their daughters’ mental health needs.

Dr Marc Bush, chief policy adviser at the charity YoungMinds, said: “We know that teenage girls face a huge range of pressures, including stress at school, body image issues, bullying and the pressure created by social media.

The above data is based on more than 10,000 children born in 2000/01 who are taking part in the Millennium Cohort Study.

Parents were questioned about their children’s mental health when their youngsters were aged three, five, seven, 11 and 14. When the participants were 14, the children were themselves asked questions about mental health difficulties.

The research showed that girls and boys had similar levels of mental ill-health throughout childhood, but stark differences were seen between gender by adolescence, when problems became more prevalent in girls.

Variations by class and ethnicity 

Among 14-year-old girls, those from mixed race (28.6%) and white (25.2%) backgrounds were most likely to be depressed, with those from black African (9.7%) and Bangladeshi (15.4%) families the least likely to suffer from it.

Girls that age from the second lowest fifth of the population, based on family income, were most likely to be depressed (29.4%), while those from the highest quintile were the least likely (19.8%).

The research also showed that children from richer families were less likely to report depression compared to poorer peers.

Links to Sociology 

What you make of this data very much depends on how much you trust it – if you take it at face value, then it seems that poor white girls are suffering a real crisis in mental health, which suggests we need urgent research into why this is… and possibly some extra cash to help deal with it.

Again, if you accept the data, possibly the most interesting question here is why do black African girls have such low rates of depression compared to white girls?

Of course you also need to be skeptical about this data – it’s possible that boys are under-reporting, given the whole ‘masculinity thing’.

On the question of what we do about all of this, many of the articles point to guess what sector….. the education sector to sort out the differences. So once again, it’s down to schools to sort out the mess caused by living in a frantic post-modern society, on top of, oh yeah, educating!

Finally, there’s an obvious critical link to Toxic Childhood – this shows you that the elements of toxic childhood are not evenly distributed – poor white girls get it much worse than rich white girls, African British girls, and boys.

Sources and a note on media bias 

You might want to read through the two articles below – note how the stats on class and ethnicity feature much more prominently in the left wing Guardian and yet how the right wing Telegraph doesn’t even mention ethnicity and drops in one sentence about class at the the end of the article without mentioning the stats. 

Telegraph Article

Guardian Article

Explaining South Korea’s Development #1

Korea was a Japanese Colony from 1910 to 1945, providing food and fuel for the ‘motherland’.

Following the fall of the Japanese Empire at the end of World War II, Korea was divided along the 38th parallel into North and South Korea, North Korea controlled by communist Russia, and South Korea governed by the United States, pitching Communist and Capitalist modes of development against each other.

Following the brutal Korean War of 1950 to 1953 (which was the first war of the ‘cold war’ and was brutal enough to result in 4 million deaths) both North and South Korea lay decimated: plundered by 50 years of colonial rule and then a decade of fighting their infrastructures lay in ruins.

South Korea’s economy stagnated in the decade following the Korean war, but then grew rapidly, and today South Korea is one of the world’s leading economies, whereas North Korea stagnated under hard-line communist rule.

Given the fact that the two countries share common histories up until the end of WW2, and given that they share similar cultures and climates, these things cannot explain their divergent experiences in development since 1950 – and thus South Korea’s development (and North Korea’s lack of it) can only be explain by the social and economic development strategies (and their consequences) adopted by the South Korean government since the 1950s.

Following the war South Korea received some support for reconstruction from the US. As a percentage of gross national income South Korea received a very similar level of support to Kenya in the 1960s. But International Development Assistance was not the answer to Korean poverty. USAID reported that Korea was a ‘bottomless pit’ that could not be helped by development funding.

In 1961, when General Park Chung-Hee came to power in a military coup, South Korea’s yearly income was just $82 per person (for comparison Ghana’s was $179 at the time). In 1962 Park turned civilian and went on to win three elections before seizing the presidency for life. His rule was strict and South Korea was a highly disciplined society.

Park surrounded himself with able colleagues and made some astute political moves: During the Vietnam war, South Korea sent troops to support US efforts and was richly rewarded. In the mid 1960s, revenues from the Americans for Korean troops in Vietnam were the larges single source of foreign-exchange earnings.

Park was authoritarian and stifled liberties, but he put in place policies which effectively modernized South Korea.

Five year plans for economic development were at the heart of his strategy. Growth was steady during the 1960s as new factories producing basic goods were built, and in 1973 Park launched the ‘Heavy and Chemical industrialization programme’ which estalished the first steel mills and car manufacturing plants, which formed the backbone for industrial development and moved South Korea away from reliance on agricultural products.

As a result of Park’s economic policies, Per Capita income grew by more than 5 times between 1972 and 1979, reaching $1000 per capita by 1977, and all of this with very little reliance on aid.

Growth depended on Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI), which mean reducing dependence on imports and replacing them with domestically produced products. In practice this meant protecting basic goods such as clothing, hand tools and processed food.

Citizens were also heavily disciplined: they were mobilized like soldiers into factories and consumption was also tightly controlled: for example, foreign cigarettes were band, and citizens were encouraged to report anyone smoking imported tobacco products.

Every spare cent of foreign exchange earned from exports was used to import new machine imports to further industrialization and over many years South Korea’s manufacturing processes evolved to become more and more technologically sophisticated and eventually the nation transitioned to producing manufactured goods for export to foreign markets.

The history of the Samsung Corporation illustrates the successful development of the South Korean economy.

Samsung began selling dried fish, fruit and vegetables to China in 1938, before moving into flour milling and confectionery manufacturing, then textile weaving. In the early 1970s it invested in heavy, chemical and petrochemical industries and produced the first black and white television for domestic sale in South Korea in 1972. In the second half the 1970s Samsung moved into producing home electronics for export, and today is one of the world’s leading technology companies.

The result of all of this is that South Korea has seen one of the fastest rates of economic growth since WW2 – it’s GDP was over $28 000 in 2016.

However, South Korea’s development did come at a cost: political freedoms were limited (although Korea is now a democracy) working hours were very long, and gender inequality high. Today, South Korea has one of the highest suicide rates in the world and widespread alcohol dependency.

Sources:

Summarized from Brooks (2017) The End of Development.

 

 

 

The Scale of the World’s Largest Corporations

I thought it’d be useful to do a little post on the sheer scale of global corporations, so below I simply list the top 10 by revenue and then in italics next to them I’ve put the countries who rank immediately below them by nominal GDP* at 2016 figures.

The Fortune 500 magazine publishes the list of the top 500 global corporations by revenue annually.

wal-mart.jpg

The Fortune Global 500 top 10 list by annual revenue (published 2017) are:

  1. WalMart Stores (US)  – $485.8bn (Poland – $467 bn, GDP rank 35 )
  2. State Grid (China) – $315.1bn (Denmark – $306 bn, GDP rank 24 )
  3. Sinopec (China) – $267.5bn
  4. China Natural Petroleum (China) – $262.6bn (Chile – $247 bn, GDP rank 44)
  5. Toyota Motor (Japan) – $254.7bn (Finland – $246 billion, GDP rank 45)
  6. Volkswagen (Germany) – $240.2bn
  7. Royal Dutch Shell (Netherlands) – $240bn
  8. Berkshire Hathaway (US) – $223.6bn
  9. Apple (US) – $215.6bn
  10. Exxon Mobil (US) – $205bn (Portugal, $204 billion, GDP rank 47)
  11. (The 10 poorest countries in Africa – approx combined GDP = $190bn)

The top 10 companies in the list above consists almost entirely of Chinese and American firms – just three are from different countries: Germany, Japan and The Netherlands. The largest British firm on the list by revenue – BP – comes in at number 12.

More than a fifth of those on the latest list – 109 companies – call China home, up from only 29 companies a decade ago.”

Banking was the industry with the most number of companies on the list, at 55, followed by automakers/parts suppliers with 34, and petroleum refiners with 28.

In terms of countries, all of the very large population countries are way more economically powerful than any of the TNCs, and nearly every relatively large population Western European countries are richer than those TNCs.

However, there are plenty of European powers which are mixing it in with these corporations and only TWO African countries which mix it with the top ten TNCs – Nigeria and South Africa.

POLA0001
Walmart – had a higher 206 Revenue than Poland’s 2016 GDP

*I know there are problems comparing GDP and Revenue! I covered that in a previous post…

Just for contrast… the Top 10 Largest UK companies by revenue are:

  1. BP – $186,606m
  2. Legal and General Group – $105,235m
  3. Prudential – $96,965m
  4. HSBC Holdings – $75,329m
  5. Aviva – $74,628m
  6. Tesco – $74,393m
  7. Lloyds Banking Group – $65,208m
  8. Vodafone Group – $58,611m
  9. Unilever – $58,292m
  10. SSE – $37,813m

It’s probably worth noting that 5 out of 10 on the above list are finance related companies (banking or insurance), while the rest really just provide ‘basic’ products – energy, communications and retail products. So the top end of the UK economy consists of a wierd combination of companies producing ‘the basics’ and ‘the evil dark arts of finance’. Thus you might say that our economy is 50% tangible or real.

Are Corporations more Powerful than Nation States?

This is all very well and good, but what does all this tell us about the power of TNCs compared to countries? Are TNCs actually more powerful, or is using revenue and GDP misleading? While they do both provide a measure of money flowing into a Corporation or a country on a yearly basis, they don’t take into account the nation state’s power of taxation and its (supposed) monopoly on certain forms violence…

Of course if we take the countries which rank above the top 10 companies – the USA, China and so on, it seems sensible to suggest that these two entities work hand in hand (Rex Tillerson being just the most obvious example), but when it comes to African nations, who barely register among the big boys, do they have any chance of standing up to such huge TNC entities?

Or is all of this moot with the rise of alternative economies, given that all of the above is measured in dollars?!?

 

 

Criticisms of the World Bank #2

Just a few updates of some relatively recent case studies which suggest the World Bank is not effectively promoting development in poor countries.

 

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (2015) argues that the World Bank Projects leave trail of misery around the globe

The Ground Truth Project (an independent US media company) is documenting how World Bank financed commercial agricultural projects are resulting in the displacement of indigenous peoples in Tanzania, and Kenya, East Africa.

This 2015 Huffington Post Article – How the World Bank is financing Environmental Destruction – Outlines how a broader range of World Bank projects are leading to environmental decline.

This Oxfam article (2016) points to a complex way in which TNCs may benefit from World Bank loans – The World Bank lends money to poor countries who then pay TNCs to do development work for them, but the TNCs are registered in Tax Havens, which means the developing countries benefit less from taxing the profits of TNCs working in those countries.

A something of a counter argument to ‘the World Bank is evil’ line of evidence… This (2016) Guardian article argues that the proportion of the global population has fallen now below 10%, and so the World Bank has hanged its focus so that it now shifted its focus away from ‘Structural Adjustment programmes and more towards tackling global issues such as dealing with refugee crisees or combating disease outbreaks such as Ebola, rather than focusing on pushing through massive development projects in poor countries.

Further criticisms of the World Bank

Assessing the view that TNCs harm developing countries.

It’s fairly standard practice in A level sociology to teach that transnational corporations are basically evil and harm developing countries. I subverted this a little bit today and got students to make presentations assessing this view.

The instructions were quite simple:

  1. Outline four case studies of corporations harming developing countries.
  2. Outline three to four imitations of the above evidence/ criticisms of the view that Corporations harm developing countries.
  3. Suggest what strategies might be adopted to make TNCs more effective agencies of development.

Here are some of the posters they knocked up… there’s some excellent work here!

20171004_1626271.jpg20171004_162647.jpg

Transnational Corporations

You just CANNOT go wrong with a poster session!

Dependency Theory – Revision Notes

Dependency Theory claims that Colonialism had a negative impact on the satellite territories in Africa, Asia and Latin America; that neocolonialism keeps the ex colonial master rich and the ex colonies poor, and that in order to develop the ex colonies need to isolate themselves from the capitalist system, protect themselves from the ‘free market’ and develop internally, through socialism for example.

Colonialism made rich countries rich and poor countries poor

  1. Stealing land and resources which decimated local populations through slavery, disease and displacement of local populations.
  2. Increasing ethnic conflict by selecting one ‘pro-European group’ to govern over all other ethnic groups in the territories.
  3. Turning the colonies into mono-crop plantation systems, dependent on low value agricultural exports, which hampered their development post-independence.
  4. MOST IMPORTANTLY (and most difficult to understand and evaluate) – colonialism established a world capitalist system which locked poorer countries into unequal power relations with richer countries – if poor countries wished to develop within the system, they required expensive imports from the industrialised European powers. For this reason, poor countries will always remain poor within this system.

Neo-Colonalism keeps poor countries poor because:

  1. Unfair terms of Trade and unfair trade rules lock poor countries into unequal relationships with the west
  2. Transnational Corporations play a major role in exploiting countries today, not just rich countries
  3. Aid through the World Bank is used by rich countries to promote ‘neoliberal’ policies which make rich countries easier to exploit.

To develop, developing countries need to isolate themselves from the capitalist system (protectionism)

Dependency Theory argued  that developing countries should seek to break away from the world capitalist system and find their own path way to development – mainly through socialism – development through socialism means countries focus on their own development, seeking to produce everything for themselves rather than integrating into a global trade system.