academia

New & Noteworthy

Daniel Cueto-Villalobos‘s latest Discovery on research by Ioana Sendroiu on how small business during COVID-19 navigated the balance between keeping their doors open, and protecting the public. The study found that many small business owners prioritized public health and employee well-being over profits, navigating moral dilemmas beyond partisan divides.

This week’s Clippings of sociology in the news includes Melissa Milkie and Kei Nomaguchi in The New York Times on the mental health impacts of intensive parenting, Amanda Miller on 21 Alive News discussing the effects of police-action shootings, Laura K. Nelson and Alexandra Brewer in The Economic Times on how women receive less clear feedback at work, and Neil Gross in The New York Times on the debate over “viewpoint diversity” in academia.

From the Archives

Discussions on women’s health and morality have intensified, especially around pregnancy. Sociologists point to how cultural ideals of motherhood put women – especially poor women of color – under increased scrutiny. Learn more in this TROT by Allison Nobles.

The US recently ranked last among 10 developed nations in healthcare. Check out this Discovery by Amy August from ~10 years ago on where things were then.

Last week, Yale, Princeton, and Duke were quested over the decline in Asian Students. Read our recent Discovery by Shania Kuo on research about Asian Student’s views towards affirmative action.

More from our Partners & Community Pages

Council on Contemporary Families:

• Did the global pandemic of COVID-19 change the division of labor at home? by F. Kubra Aytac, highlighting how the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted persistent gender disparities in household and childcare responsibilities, with mothers bearing a disproportionate share, particularly in collectivistic cultures like Turkey.

First Publics:

• Toward a Better Vision of Classical Sociological Theory by Seth Abrutyn writes about how soc theory should be taught through a fresh, practical approach that links classical ideas with contemporary research, making it more relevant, engaging, and connected to students’ lived experiences and sociological inquiry – providing 2 approaches.

Nicholas Kristof called out professors today, saying we’ve “fostered a culture that glorifies arcane unintelligibility while disdaining impact and audience.” While the snarkmeister in me is tempted to return serve — couldn’t one say the same thing about the Times? — I actually concur with Mr. Kristof on several key points.

To paraphrase, he cites dreadful writing, a lack of political and ideological diversity, a dearth of public intellectuals, obstructionist professional associations, little social media presence, “hidden-away” journals, and a reward structure that privileges technique and abstraction over relevance, clear thinking, and broad dissemination.  In truth, we at TSP make largely the same claims in pitching our li’l project to authors, readers, and potential partners. We use different words, of course, but the whole point of TSP is to help bring social science to broader visibility and influence. This mission drives all the choices we’ve made: to stay open-access, to put our resources into a best-in-the-business professional editor and site designer, and to partner with other groups who “get” our mission and vision — like WW Norton, the Scholars Strategy Network, and Contexts magazine.

While many academics feel marginalized by mainstream media and society, Mr. Kristof points out that we’re also self-marginalizing. As a scholar, an editor, and an academic administrator, I’d agree that at least some of our injuries are self-inflicted.  For example, I was gratified when Attorney General Holder used some of my felon voting research last Monday. We’d undertaken the project with both science and policy in mind, in hopes of doing good sociology that would also encourage the sort of  national conversation now taking place. When the Times wrote a characteristically smart op-ed on Tuesday, friends asked why they linked to an old working paper rather than the polished journal article. This is likely because the article remains “hidden away” behind a paywall. I suppose they could have secured permissions from the authors, the journals, and the professional association that owns the journals, but we all tend to work on timelines that are a wee bit more protracted than the speech-on-Monday/op-ed-on-Tuesday news cycle.

While we can’t solve all of the problems of academic self-marginalization, we can at least offer Nicholas Kristof a free subscription to TheSocietyPages.org. And we’ll continue to extend the same offer to every one of the million-plus readers stopping by every month.

The life and work of a sociology professor was a topic of conversation in my senior capstone course this week. It started when I asked students to estimate what percent of my time was allocated to teaching, research, service, and public outreach/engagement—and then told them about how formal tenure requirements and departmental expectations compared with my actual hours worked on any given week. I was trying to illustrate competing pressures and demands, and I couldn’t help but laugh when one student sent along this cartoon (with no comment or analysis).

Perhaps I’d gone overboard  stressing the disconnections? I really do love my job.

But back to class: one of the biggest topics of inquiry and conversation involved the question of where outreach and engagement fit in the world of higher education? My students this semester have been fascinated with and actually kind of inspired by what we call“public sociology,” while also puzzled by its lack of recognition and reward in the big scheme of academia, especially in the context of a public land grant institution like we have here at the University of Minnesota.

Parking was the ostensible focus of a fascinating, revealing exchange on our Community Page Cyborgology last week. In it, Tim McCormick—a research consultant (at Stanford Media X) who works in scholarly communication, new media, and publishing—took one of our most regular and prolific TSP bloggers, Nate Jurgenson, to task for his critique of “smart parking.”

In his original post, Jurgenson suggests that, in stark contrast to its laudable intentions, smarter parking could actually create more parking problems by encouraging people to drive around even more, since the annoyance of parking won’t be quite the disincentive it is currently. Jurgenson bases his critique on what he calls the “Robert Moses Mistake”—the unintended consequences of creating more and better freeways. McCormick, in turn, argues that Jurgenson doesn’t really know much about the impetus and ideas behind smart parking, its realities as a social policy innovation, or the actual research on parking and driving among urban planners and policy makers.

We love Jurgenson’s sociologically-inspired, counter-intuitive critique of smart parking, as well as McCormick’s careful point-by-point, empirical rejoinder. Without taking sides or giving away the details, let’s just say it was a great exchange, typical of the best of sociological research and thought. more...