theory

Yesterday the Telegraph (UK) ran a story about Malcolm Gladwell, famous author of ‘The Tipping Point’ and ‘Blink,’ and pop sociologist extraordinaire. The article was based upon an informal interview with Gladwell to discuss his latest book ‘Outliers: The Story of Success,’ which has received critical acclaim here and abroad. Telegraph (UK) reporter Bob Williams writes about meeting Gladwell in his Greenwich Village apartment, and the pleasure of being greeted with a properly-prepared cup of tea — which is later criticized for its weakness.

Williams writes:

As with his previous books, Gladwell glides effortlessly across every subject imaginable to back up his theories with statistics – from the tendencies of Korean airline pilots to crash and of sportsmen born in January to do well, to why so many top lawyers are Jewish. I wouldn’t be surprised if he had a theory about why he likes watery tea, as he has seems to have one for everything else. It would, by definition, be elegantly framed, somewhat left-field, but guaranteed – when snappily packaged as, say, The Pouring Point – to capture the zeitgeist instantly.

About the book itself:

Exceptional people – or “outliers” as [Gladwell] calls them – excel for rather more prosaic reasons. Geniuses are made, not born, benefiting from very specific advantages in their environment and putting in at least 10,000 hours of practice first. The premise is not exactly counter-intuitive. Indeed, some have carped that it is obvious.

“Hopefully it will be an anti-anxiety book,” says the author. “The route to success is ordinary – it’s not based on extravagant, innate gifts. I want to demystify.” He wants to “humble the successful and strip them of their illusions of their own virtue”.

Read the full story, here.

The November issue of The Atlantic has an article by psychologist Paul Bloom called, ‘First Person Plural.’ In the piece Bloom explores a number of new ideas about ‘the self.’ He writes, “An evolving approach to the science of pleasure suggests that each of us contains multiple selves—all with different desires, and all fighting for control. If this is right, the pursuit of happiness becomes even trickier. Can one self bind another self if the two want different things? Are you always better off when a Good Self wins? And should outsiders, such as employers and policy makers, get into the fray?”

In the piece Bloom draws upon work by sociologist Sherry Turkle about online avatars:

Sometimes we get pleasure from sampling alternative selves. Again, you can see the phenomenon in young children, who get a kick out of temporarily adopting the identity of a soldier or a lion. Adults get the same sort of kick; exploring alternative identities seems to be what the Internet was invented for. The sociologist Sherry Turkle has found that people commonly create avatars so as to explore their options in a relatively safe environment. She describes how one 16-year-old girl with an abusive father tried out multiple characters online—a 16-year-old boy, a stronger, more assertive girl—to try to work out what to do in the real world. But often the shift in identity is purely for pleasure. A man can have an alternate identity as a woman; a heterosexual can explore homosexuality; a shy person can try being the life of the party.

Read the full story.

The Washington Post is running a story on common misperceptions about how American voters base their decisions on moral values. 

The myths: (1)”Moral values” determine who wins elections. (2) Americans have broadly rejected “traditional values.” (3) Americans are polarized and fighting a culture war over values. (4) Traditional values are “family values” or “moral values.” (5) Basic values, properly understood, are compatible and harmonious.

In support of myth #2, the Post draws upon the work of sociologist Wayne Baker. MYTH #2: “Americans have broadly rejected ‘traditional values.’ — Actually, Americans retain our traditional values more than just about any other developed country in the world.”

That’s what University of Michigan sociologist Wayne Baker found in his 2005 book, “America’s Crisis of Values: Reality and Perception.” Baker uses the World Values Surveys to look at American values from a broad, global perspective. He describes human values on two planes. The first is a scale of values from traditional to secular-rationalist. Societies with more traditional values emphasize the importance of God and religion, family and parenting, national identity and pride and absolute standards of morality, not relative ones. Secular-rationalist values are pretty much the opposite: nonreligious, open to abortion and euthanasia, skeptical of national pride or patriotism and evolving away from family, duty and authority.

The second range of values runs from survival values to self-expression ones. In less developed and safe societies, survival values reign. Procuring physical security and meeting basic material needs dominate; foreigners and ethnic diversity are seen as threatening; intolerance is exaggerated. Self-expression values concern creativity, self-fulfillment and lifestyle.

Fascinating. Read more about the other myths here.

Today the New Republic published a review of the new book, “The Politics of Truth: Selected Writings from C. Wright Mills,” edited by John Summers. 

An exerpt from the New Republic article:

C.Wright Mills published his sociological trilogy during the 1950s: White Collar in 1951,The Power Elite in 1956, The Sociological Imagination in 1959. Those were years of Republican ascendancy, and while the president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, was a moderate, the vice president, Richard Nixon, and a number of key senators, including Joe McCarthy, belonged to the conservative wing of the party. By decade’s end, the country was tiring of Republican rule and its accompanying scandals and foreign policy failures, and was harkening to the appeals of a young, ambitious, brash, Catholic politician who called for change. The times were perfect for a radical such as Mills to make his mark.

Almost a half-century later, the United States once again faces a choice between an incumbent conservative party with little public appeal and a young, dynamic politician whose race, rather than his religion, sets him apart from the usual run of presidential contenders. This time, though, there is no single social critic publishing books documenting the hold that powerful military and economic forces have over the country’s destiny, and lamenting the decline of a vibrant public sphere, and urging intellectuals to dissent as loudly as they can from the prevailing complacency. Lacking a Mills of our own, we may turn back to the original. Oxford University Press has recently re-published Mills’s trilogy, and The New Men of Power, Mills’s book on labor leaders, which appeared in 1948, has been reissued by the University of Illinois Press. And now John Summers, an intellectual historian who has written widely on Mills–including a devastating essay in theMinnesota Review documenting the extent to which another sociologist, Irving Louis Horowitz, now something of a neoconservative but then more radical, mistakenly recounted the facts of Mills’s life and prevented others from gaining access to the Mills papers that Horowitz kept over the objections of Mills’s widow–has brought together a collection of Mills’s essays, which he calls The Politics of Truth.

Fascinating… Read the full review here.

New York Times Op-Ed columnist David Brooks recently wrote about individualism and decision-making in a piece entitled ‘The Social Animal.’ In his analysis, Brooks discusses scholarly work that reveals the interconnectedness which informs our decision-making processes, even broadly highlighting the work of sociologists. Brooks’ piece is centered around political decision-making and the potential for both parties to learn from this knowledge about the influences on our individual behavior.

Brooks writes:

Geneticists have shown that our behavior is influenced by our ancestors and the exigencies of the past. Behavioral economists have shown the limits of the classical economic model, which assumes that individuals are efficient, rational, utility-maximizing creatures.

Psychologists have shown that we are organized by our attachments. Sociologists have shown the power of social networks to affect individual behavior.

What emerges is not a picture of self-creating individuals gloriously free from one another, but of autonomous creatures deeply interconnected with one another. Recent Republican Party doctrine has emphasized the power of the individual, but underestimates the importance of connections, relationships, institutions and social filaments that organize personal choices and make individuals what they are.

This may seem like an airy-fairy thing. But it is the main impediment to Republican modernization. Over the past few weeks, Republicans have talked a lot about change, modernization and reform. Despite the talk, many of the old policy pillars are the same. We’re living in an age of fast-changing economic, information and social networks, but Republicans are still impeded by Goldwater’s mental guard-rails.

Read more.

This past Sunday’s New York Times book review examined ‘Credit and Blame,’ a new book from the late Charles Tilly. Alexander Star of the Times writes:

Two years ago, the sociologist Charles Tilly, who died this spring at the age of 78, published “Why?,” a slim volume examining our compulsive drive to give reasons for what we do. Explaining, he stressed, is a social art; what counts as a good reason always depends on the relationship between who’s giving the reason and who’s taking it. If you spill a glass of wine on a stranger, you might shrug it off with a conventional remark like “I’m a klutz.” If you spill a glass of wine on your wife, you are more apt to tell a story: “I was feeling nervous because of the bills.” It’s one thing to give someone a bad explanation. It’s even worse to give the wrong kind of explanation. If you expect your doctor to give you a technical account of your illness and you receive a cliché instead, you feel you are not being taken seriously.

In “Credit and Blame,” Tilly looks just as closely at our most ethically freighted explanations. When something happens that alters our environment for the better or for the worse, we are rarely content simply to say, “Oh well, those are the breaks,” or “I suppose I got lucky this time.” Instead, we leap at the chance to deem someone — anyone — responsible. We blame our parents when we are unhappy, and credit them for their sacrifices when they die. Thanking friends and family at the Academy Awards ceremony may be, as another sociologist has written, “the ultimate American fantasy” of giving credit, while winning a lawsuit against a local polluter may be the ultimate fantasy of affixing blame.

WARNING: Spoiler Alert

As a sociologist, Tilly was more interested in how we assign credit and blame than when it’s right to do so. Should we care that when a chief executive attributes his company’s success to his own intelligence or decisiveness, he’s probably wrong? Why do we put more blame on someone who drives through a stop sign at night and kills a child than on the countless others who drive through stop signs and kill no one? Tilly does not answer such questions, but his analysis suggests that for all the bad judgments we may make about the supposed malfeasance of terrorism-neglecting bureaucrats or the homeless, our habits are not easily reformed. Blaming, he argues, is not a vice or an aberration but an essential habit that allows us to maintain and repair our relationships with others. Our justice detectors are not fundamentally defective. They are suited to the task of setting things right — approximately.

The full review. 

The latest issue of Newsweek surveys a number of recent economic studies which suggest that economic growth may have a great deal to do with attitudes of a nation’s people. Newsweek writer Stefan Theil writes,

Much of the worldwide economic and political debate these days circle around ensuring continued growth—which, it’s hoped, will help various countries escape the global downturn, create more jobs and finance the rising cost of social services. What the conversation overlooks is that it turns out some countries might not want to grow.

These recent studies have been best summarized by Meinhard Miegel, of the think tank Denwerk Zukunft, who found that “while two thirds of Germans favor economic growth in principle, only about a sixth of them are willing to work for it. The rest value leisure, safety and early retirement over work and achievement. Given these attitudes, says Miegel, the popular idea that a low-birthrate country like Germany can grow its way out of the rising costs associated with an aging population ‘is reckless and built on sand.'”

But where does Weber come in? Theil continues…

Miegel might be unduly pessimistic, but he is part of a growing movement of experts who argue that economic growth is actually dependent on a state of mind. In fact, the idea goes back to Max Weber, the German sociologist who argued more than a century ago that England’s Protestant work ethic gave rise to modern capitalism. Today’s Weberians aren’t sociologists wielding historical arguments, however, but economists, pollsters and biologists working with actual numbers and data sets. Their interest in how personal attitudes might affect growth is part of the broader reinvention of economics, in which the classical view—that people make rational choices in a world of perfect information—is coming under increased scrutiny. The movement also reflects rising concern over whether growth can be increased—especially now with the ugly specter of stagflation in large parts of the globe.

Economists now claim Weber as their own…sociologists don’t work with ‘actual numbers and data sets?’

Read on.

The Washington Post reports, “the question of whether the country is happier today than it was in, say, 1970 turns out to have a surprisingly good empirical answer. For nearly four decades, researchers have regularly asked a large sample of Americans a simple question: ‘Taken all together, how would you say things are these days — would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy or not too happy?'”

This new article includes the addition of commentary from sociologist Ruut Veenhoven who disputes a widely accepted theory from USC economist Richard Easterlin, known as the ‘Easterlin Paradox,’ which highlights the paradoxical disconnect between a nation’s economic growth and the growth of its happiness. This theory has traditionally been confined to rich, Western countries.

Easterlin attributes the phenomenon of happiness levels not keeping pace with economic gains to the fact that people’s desires and expectations change along with their material fortunes. Where an American in 1970 may have once dreamed about owning a house, he or she might now dream of owning two. Where people once dreamed of buying a new car, they now dream of buying a luxury model.

“People are wedded to the idea that more money will bring them more happiness,” Easterlin said. “When they think of the effects of more money, they are failing to factor in the fact that when they get more money they are going to want even more money. When they get more money, they are going to want a bigger house. They never have enough money, but what they do is sacrifice their family life and health to get more money.”

Sociologist Ruut Veenhoven counters:

Not everyone agrees with Easterlin and his economic-growth-is-not-the-way-to-happiness theory. Ruut Veenhoven, a sociologist in the Netherlands and the director of the World Database of Happiness, argues that wealth is actually a very reliable predictor of happiness. If you take a snapshot of people in different countries, he argues, the data shows that people in Denmark, Switzerland and Austria report being happier than people in the Philippines, India and Iran, and the people in those nations report being happier than those in Armenia, Ukraine and Zimbabwe.

Veenhoven has even come up with a measure similar to one used by public health officials to measure the burden of disease — how many years of happiness a person might enjoy in different countries. The Swiss apparently have the highest number of “happy life years” — 63.9 — while Zimbabweans have the least — 11.5. People in the United States have an average happiness of 57 happy life years.

Read more.

In a Minneapolis Star-Tribune op-ed on political rookies seeking high offices, political scientist Lawrence Jacobs invokes sociologist Max Weber’s (1919) Politics as a Vocation:

The legendary German sociologist Max Weber explained that the “vocation of politics” requires an aptitude to engage in the “strong and slow boring of hard boards.” Successful apprenticeships in politics can instill a healthy skepticism about searching out quick fixes and simulating representation in place of genuine community engagement.

The hard work of fashioning government policy in a process designed to invite conflict among divergent perspectives requires the skills of a specialized craft — the ability to search out compromises that achieve mutual gains, the patience to pursue gradual but meaningful progress, and sustained and strong bonds with constituents.