Search results for great books

“Great Books in Sociology” is a new course I’ve proposed for our graduate curriculum here at Minnesota. I’m not sure I’ll get to teach it or not, but I’m having lots of fun thinking of the books I might include. Here’s my initial list.

1. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Max Weber)

2. Black Reconstruction (W.E.B. DuBois)

3. Stigma (Erving Goffman)

4. The Managed Heart (Arlie Hochschild)

5. The Culture of Public Problems (Joe Gusfield)

6. Weight of the World (Pierre Bourdieu)

7. Sidewalk (Mitch Duneier)

8. Ghostly Matters (Avery Gordon)

9. Religion in Human Evolution (Robert Bellah)

Reactions? Thoughts? Anything obvious I’ve missed?  The main criteria or principles I’ve been using so far are: it has to be a real book not a collection; the author has to be a sociologist; and it has to be a work that is actually worth reading, not just something that you should read or that represents some larger point or principle.

Also, if it is not obvious: I’m trying to think of the list as a whole set as well. My larger idea and goal is that this kind of list/course should help us not only think more about book-length writing and research projects, but also about what sociology itself is as an intellectual tradition and scholarly pursuit. Anyway, comments and suggestions–for books, authors, or topics–appreciated. This should be fun.

Hello, everyone, and happy summer! Things have been heating up at TSP headquarters, and we’re back with a look at the latest in social science research. Our team is also gearing up for ASA 2016 next month, and we hope to see many of you there!

Discoveries

“Faith in Fellow Citizens” by Evan Stewart. New research from Daniel Olson and Miao Li finds the relationship between religiosity and trust across nations isn’t quite what we would expect.

White Papers

Clippings

“Counseling Callbacks Skewed by Race, Class, and Gender” by Neeraj Rajasekar. Heather Kugelmass talks to The Atlantic about inequality in therapy.

“Swipe Right for Sociology” by Kat Albrecht. Jessica Carbino talks Tinder and the sociology behind the swipes for Los Angeles Magazine.

“The ‘Model Minority’ Is a Harmful Stereotype, Too” by Neeraj Rajasekar. Adia Harvey Wingfield explains how excellence can isolate in The Atlantic.

There’s Research on That!

“Affirmative Action, College Admissions, and the Debunked ‘Mismatch’ Hypothesis” by Neeraj Rajasekar. In light of the Supreme Court’s decision in Fisher v. University of Texas-Austin, research shows Affirmative Action helps, not hurts, racial minority groups.

“The Point of Unicorns” by Neeraj Rajasekar. Remember that prehistoric “Siberian Unicorn” discovered earlier this year? While archeologists comb the fossil record, sociologists are unpacking all our other paranormal beliefs.

From Our Partners:

Scholars Strategy Network

How To Break America’s Logjam on Guns and Gun Violence by Philip J. Cook and Kristin Goss

Challenges and Opportunities for Efforts To Build Academic Ties Between the United States and Mexico by Beverly Barrett

How the Reproductive Justice Movement Benefits Latinas by Rocio Garcia

Why Regulation Is Necessary and Proper for a Well-Functioning Democracy and Market Economy by Michael Lipsky

Stabilization and Equity—Responses to Urban Fiscal Crisis In Flint, Michigan, and Beyond by Ashley E. Nickels

Why the Time Is Right To Expand the National School Lunch Program To Higher Education by Sara Goldrick-Rab, Katharine Broton, and Emily Brunjes Colo

Why There Are No Quick Economic Fixes for Women in Developing Countries by Barbara J. Risman and William J. Scarborough

Contexts

Letta Page and Syed Ali review Modern Romance by Aziz Ansari and Eric Klinenberg

Sarah Halpern-Meekin, Laura Tach, Kathryn Edin, and Jennifer Sykes explain how the Earned Income Tax Credit is a hand up for lower-income families

Paula England and Eliza Brown ask who has how many sexual partners and whether those patterns vary by sexual orientation

Welcome back! Wait, many of you never went anywhere. You’ve been reading TSP all summer. You guys have been great. It was me who’s been on hiatus, buried in book writing among other things. (One of those manuscripts, on migration with Syed Ali, is done; another, my long-suffering study of midnight basketball, is close… very close.) Anyway, with the start of a new academic year, I always feel a little like Mr. Kotter.

I am excited about the year ahead. On the teaching front, I’ll be offering—for the first time—a new graduate seminar on “great books” in sociology, a course that grew out of a few posts I did wrote winter, right here on The Society Pages. In terms of the website, we’ve got a great new graduate student board shaping up and we are just about ready to unveil a facelift for TSP (we think it’s pretty sweet).

One of our goals for The Society Pages this year, both online and in our social media, is to do a better job of covering the field of sociology taken as a whole. That’s no easy task. Some of this will involve bringing in more content on topics where there is a lot of great sociological research and writing, but that hasn’t been represented well on our site to date: for example, education, health and medicine, population studies. But doing a better job of covering the field also includes bringing in types of research that are also difficult to find on the web, but needed more than ever: basic social facts, emerging demographic trends, and empirical evaluations of public policy and conventional wisdom. For reasons that aren’t too hard to figure, there’s a lot of opinion and editorializing online, but not nearly so much accumulation and reporting of social facts and useful empirical information.

As fate would have it, our local newspaper ran two big pieces on the OpinionExchange page this very morning that seem to underscore these points and goals. One was about “the situation” in Ferguson, the other about the proliferation of flawed studies—what the author calls “pop-sociology and pop-psychology” in the news and in our social media streams. The former argued the need for more information before taking stands on Mike Brown’s death and its aftermath (though it didn’t have much to say about the broader social contexts and public policies sociologists have focused on in recent weeks). The latter was about how scholars in certain fields still seem to misunderstand the difference between correlation and causation. Specifics aside, both ran under the subtitle: “We need more facts.” We here at TSP couldn’t agree more—and will do our best to help provide those in the weeks and months ahead.

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A few resources for the interested reader hoping for a little social science around that “Ferguson situation”:

“Reflecting on Ferguson? There’s Research on That!”

“Social Fact: The Homicide Divide.”

“Social Fact: Death—Not the Great Equalizer?”

“Explaining and Eliminating Racial Profiling.”

The Chronicle of Higher Education: “How Professors in St. Louis are Teaching the Lessons of Ferguson’s Unrest.”

The Washington Post Wonkblog: “How Decades of Criminal Records Hold Back Towns Like Ferguson.”

“The Average White American’s Social Network is 1% Black.”

“What Are Rappers Really Saying About the Police?”

“The Role of Empathy in Crime, Policing, and Justice.”

“Failing to Understand When Non-White People Distrust the Police.”

“How Targeted Deterrence Helps Police Reduce Gun Deaths.”

“Who Would You Shoot?”

“Roundtable: Social Scientists Studying Social Movements.”

“Roundtable: The Revolutions Will Not Be Globalized?”

“Reading the Camouflage: ‘You Are Now Enemy Combatants’.“

Arlie Hochschild’s The Managed Heart was the focus of my “Great Books” graduate seminar last Friday. It is a beautifully written, painstakingly conceived, and imaginatively argued volume–one of the three books I knew for sure had to be on the syllabus as soon as this course got approved. The core of the book is Hochschild’s research of the work of flight attendants–how they are trained by the airlines to manage their emotions and those of their passengers. It is what she calls “emotional labor.” That provocative phrase signals one of Hochschild’s major contributions to the field: making emotions and feelings central to the study of social interaction and work and social life more generally. And there are other  field-shaping insights as well. For example, she makes a powerful, gendered argument about the disproportionate weight of feeling work falling to women in contemporary society. And in an audacious and under-appreciated final chapter Hochschild suggests that the quest for authenticity through purity of emotional expression and experience is a unique facet of contemporary, late modern social life.

Anyway, I was so taken with the book I began looking around for news stories or current events that would provide an excuse to blog about the book. I didn’t have to look far. I quickly stumbled onto a New York Times profile of Arturo Bejar, Facebook’s “Mr. Nice.”

Bejar is the head–Director of Engineering, appears to be his official title–of Facebook’s “Protect and Care” team, an 80 person department whose job it is to ensure that Facebook users “play nice.” A lot of their work, according to the profile, seems to be to get users to edit or retract comments that cause or appear to cause harm to other users of the site. But an even more basic and challenging part of the job is to develop techniques–questions, prompts, check-off-boxes–that allow the team to figure out whose feelings have been hurt in the first place “let people know someone had hurt their feelings.”  Teenagers, according to the story, are the care team’s focus. This is not just because they are more likely to be victims of cyber-mistreatment, but because they “sometimes lack the emotional maturity to handle negative posts.”  Researchers working with the Facebook team have helped the group find more “pathways” and “options” for “voicing their feelings” online. They are encouraged to talk about “what’s happening in a post, how they feel about it, and how sad they are.” They are also presented with text boxes with polite, pre-written responses that can be sent to friends who hurt their feelings.”

In other words, the work of Bejar’s team is all about the management of their users feelings and emotions. Talk about emotional labor and the management of feeling, and in high-tech, ultra-modern corporate environment to boot! Do you feel it? The connection that links flight attendants to Facebook, I mean?

Renee Zellweger received a ton of attention last week, not all of it wanted. The core of the story, if you haven’t been following along, is that the “work” (most insist her strikingly different new look must be the result of extensive plastic surgery) that Zellweger had done was so extensive that her fans and many others could no longer recognize the 45-year-old movie star. “She looked,” as the Washington Post quoted one fan, “different. Maybe not bad. Just not at all like herself.” Coincidentally, the reading for my “great books in sociology seminar” last week was Erving Goffman’s classic treatment of stigma.

Much of Stigma is about how people deal with various deformities and social blemishes in their daily lives (“the management of a spoiled identity” in Goffman’s dry, sardonic subtitle). That is, it’s actually not that pertinent to the Zellweger story. But there is this section about how variously famous and infamous people—actors or athletes, for example, or well-known criminals—try to disguise themselves so that they aren’t recognized in public. Goffman’s point is that publicly known and recognizable people must sometimes change their look so as not to be recognized as themselves—they must alter their appearance to transform their (public) identity and pass as someone else. Zellweger’s case, it seems to me, is kind of the inverse—she has changed her look,  the equivalent of her public self, to such an extent that she is no longer easily or entirely recognizable as the person the public knows as “Renee Zellweger.” She is, as the fan said, “not at all like herself.”

Another recent example is the actress Jennifer Grey—the young star of the original “Dirty Dancing” movie whose rhinoplasty removed her most distinctive feature. As she put it, “I went into the operating room a celebrity and came out anonymous.” Grey’s life—or at least her career—was never the same. (Though it did involve a short-lived sitcom where she played, essentially, herself: a movie star who was no longer a star because no one knew who she was anymore.) Zellweger’s new look, surgical or not, is a public identity and recognizability problem.

I say this because there have been many other, different lessons and reflections on the Zellweger story. Some have seen it as an example of plastic surgery run amok. Indeed, the Washington Post story went on to point out that there were some 11 million such procedures in 2013—which was 12% more than in 2012 and six times the number of procedures performed in 1997. Others have seen Zellweger’s refresh (she says any change in her appearance is simply due to being well-rested, happy, and no longer working crazy film schedules) as an example of our obsession with looks and appearances. There is, obviously, a role and function for these analyses and interpretations. However, I think they easily miss the issues of identity and presentation of self and interactions with others that are at stake and in play here.

A lot of times we imagine our identities—and others’—to be fairly fixed and concrete. But Goffman’s larger oeuvre is full of ideas about impression management, the presentation of self, and interaction rituals that insist that all of us construct and remake our identities each and every day in our interactions with others. Thus, we are more plastic and malleable than we often care to realize. One of Goffman’s most famous explications is a chapter called “On Face-Work.” Goffman begins, “Every person lives in a world of social encounters, involving him [or her] either in face-to-face or mediated contact with other participants. In each of these contacts, he tends to act out what is sometimes called a line—that is, a pattern of verbal and non-verbal acts by which he expresses his view of the situation and… himself.”

Goffman then introduces the notion of “face:” the positive social value a person effectively claims for himself by the line other assume he has taken during a particular contact.” We all work to present a particular persona or “face”  that fits the notion of ourselves we are trying to project and the image others have of us in any particular instance or encounter. But this face-work doesn’t always work the way we want. Sometimes we don’t present ourselves properly in/through our faces, other times our presentations are not accepted or, as in a case of misrecognition or plastic survey, not recognized at all. It can be awkward and unsettling to be reminded of all that, whether in our own daily lives or in our mediated interactions with celebrities and public figures like Renee Zellweger.Goffman’s larger oeuvre is full of ideas about impression management, the presentation of self, and interaction rituals that insist that all of us construct and remake our identities each and every day in our interactions with others. Thus, we are more plastic and malleable than we often care to realize.

For what it is worth, Zellweger, at least in her public presentation of self, appears to be handling all of this face-work commentary and controversy quite well. As she told People, “Perhaps I look different. Who doesn’t as they get older? Ha. But I am different. I’m happy.” When Zellweger uses the term “different” the second time, I think, she is referring to a new look that better fits her own sense of self. Her look may be unsettling to her fans and the general public, but it is either the result of her happiness or something that makes her happy. These are the paradoxes and peculiarities of faces and identities in both public and private. It’s face-work in action.

Another quintessential Philip Cohen take-down appeared this weekend. Cohen’s target this time was Pulitzer-prize winning New York Times reporter Matt Richtel’s new book, A Deadly Wandering: A Tale of Tragedy and Redemption in the Age of Attention. Cohen hasn’t even read the whole book yet, but what set him off was Richtel’s promotional tweet claiming that texting causes “more than 3000” teen deaths a year (more than alcohol). That number, according to Cohen, is not only not accurate, it isn’t even plausible. Cohen explains: “In fact, only 2,823 teens teens died in motor vehicle accidents in 2012 (only 2,228 of whom were vehicle occupants). So, I get 7.7 teens per day dying in motor vehicle accidents. I’m no Pulitzer-prize winning New York Times journalist, but I reckon that makes this giant factoid on Richtel’s website wrong, which doesn’t bode well for the book.” No, it does not.

As those of us who read him regularly well-know, this kind of fear-mongering with bad statistics is the bane of Cohen’s existence. But at least in this case, Cohen is more interested in is how the attention to texting and distracting driving (accurate or inaccurate as the  data and debate may be) actually distracts us from the deeper, more basic danger of driving itself–or as he puts it, “our addiction to private vehicles itself costs thousands of lives a year (not including the environmental effects).” Indeed, this is the real focus of the analysis and data he develops in the rest of the post.

Judging by the comments that have appeared so far, I’m not sure that everyone really understands or is ready for Cohen’s attempt to refocus attention to our modern reliance on driving for transportation. They continue to want to debate the dangers of texting or drinking or whatever. Or they find Cohen’s attention to mere driving as uninformative, disingenious, or even tautological. The typically dry, ironic way Cohen frames his argument probably doesn’t help . (The “shocking truth,” Cohen suggests, is that “the most important cause of traffic fatalities is …driving.”) But the bigger problem, I think, is that so many of us take driving so much for granted, that we can’t see it as a problem. We can’t see driving as a factor that can be causal, or a variable that could be manipulated and changed.

This whole situation reminds me of a thought experiment Joseph Gusfield posed in his brilliant, if under-appreciated 1981 book on drinking driving and the culture of public problems (a book, not incidentally, I have chosen for my “great books” graduate seminar this fall). Gusfield asks his readers to imagine that some all-powerful god has come to America and offers to give us a new technology that will make our lives immeasurably better by allowing us to go wherever we want, whenever we want, faster than we have ever gone before. The only catch? The god demands that we as a society sacrifice 5000 of our citizens every year for the privilege of this great technological innovation. Do we take that bargain? Would you? With our reliance on the automobile, Gusfield says, we already have. In rejecting the conventional wisdom and moralistic outrage about texting and bringing new data to bear on the dangers of just being in traffic on the roads, I think Cohen is just trying to force us to grapple with this consequences of this collective decision more honestly and directly.

Oh hi. Between the start of the semester, sickness, and the mustering of a new grad board, the poor Roundup has gone un-rounded! Time to remedy that, with a Roundup of epic scale. There’s something for everyone, so let that sociological imagination run wild! And don’t forget, if you’re an educator or a student, to let us know how you’re using TSP in your classrooms. It always helps us find new directions!

Features:

“The Feel of Faith,” by Daniel Winchester. Examining the physical artifacts of Eastern Orthodox worship.

Office Hours:

“Ken Kolb on Moral Wages,” with Matt Gunther. A podcast on why public servants persevere, even when they don’t profit.

There’s Research on That!:

“Crime and Scandal in the NFL,” by Ryan Larson. There isn’t a higher incidence of crime among NFL players, but there is a higher incidence of domestic violence; public outrage rises when punishments don’t seem to align with crimes; and how organizations handle scandal.

“Homelessness at the VMAs,” by Jacqui Frost. Framing social problems and the “deserving” needy. more...

This week saw outrage over personal loans offered to Nevada teachers just to buy classroom supplies (for their public school rooms!), a flurry of suggested “great books in sociology” reading lists, 40 years of the War on Poverty, another fight in the toy aisle, and, of course, Canada’s gift to the U.S., the Polar Vortex (we’re particularly sorry for the South… at least we Minnesota types have some snowpants we can dig out of the basement). Enjoy! more...

As a follow-up to my post about great books in sociology last week, I called for readers to send in their own Top 10 lists. It has been fun to see those starting to come in. Here’s one from TSP blogger, Monte Bute, the self-styled “backstage sociologist.” Replete with an introductory explanation and annotations for each proposed volume, Bute suggesetd the title “A Populist’s Top Ten Sociology Books.” I tend to think of it as a classic, old-school list. Take it away, Monte.

Wayne Booth once argued that every composition strikes a “rhetoric stance”—an author, a subject, and an audience. Usually these elements are implicit; in this essay, I give you the “Full Monte.”

What is my persona? I am a populist sociologist, an outsider with a hardscrabble perspective. Lacking what Tillie Olsen called “the soil of easy growth,” I acquired my taste for great books not in seminar rooms but on the streets. Never disciplined by a sociology graduate program, I forged my chops experientially—as a deviant, dissident, and organizer.

What is my subject? It is a case for the ten best sociology books. But what do I mean by “best”? I sought books that allow the reader to achieve, in the words of C. Wright Mills, “a quality of mind that will help them to use information and to develop reason in order to achieve lucid summations of what is going on in the world and of what may be happening within themselves.” (By the way, The Sociological Imagination came in 11th on my list.) more...

Happy New Year!

Most of our authors and students have been taking much-deserved breaks this week, but here’s a little taste of what we, along with our bloggers, have cooked up since the last Roundup.

The Editors’ Desk:

“What’s On Your List?” by Doug Hartmann. The follow-up to…

“Great Books in Sociology,” by Doug Hartmann. Doug dreams of a class based around the classics and commenters chime in with their own must-read soc books. more...